Speaking to the press early on Friday morning, the chairman of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, David Bull, described the incoming results — delivering a sweeping victory for his party — as a “referendum on the Labour Party.” Farage concurred, adding that the unprecedented collapse of Labour majorities across the country represented a “truly historic shift.”

As the dust settles, it’s hard to disagree. In Wales, First Minister Eluned Morgan became the first leader of a British administration to lose her seat while in office. Welsh Labour fought a lackluster campaign under her leadership after her Starmerite predecessor resigned following revelations that he had lobbied environmental regulators to ease restrictions on a company owned by a businessman convicted of dumping waste into Welsh waters — from whom he also happened to have accepted £200,000.

A similar disaster unfolded in Scotland, where Labour leader Anas Sarwar returned the party’s worst result since the creation of the Scottish Parliament in 1999. In northern England, Labour fared little better. In Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy’s Wigan, twenty-four of twenty-five seats went to Reform UK. Elsewhere the Reform insurgency cost Labour control of Tameside, Redditch, and Halton. In Hartlepool, too, Reform became the largest party, while extreme fragmentation between the Greens and Reform in Newcastle left Labour with just two seats.