India, May 11 -- The results of last week's council elections in the UK point to the decline in popularity of the ruling Labour Party across Britain: It lost 1,400 councillors across England, saw its strength diminished in Scotland, and lost power in Wales.

The big takeaway from these polls, which saw two-thirds of the electorate vote, is that British electoral politics is no longer a duopoly but a hugely fragmented landscape: The influence of the two traditional biggies, Labour and the chief opposition, the Conservatives, is declining, while the Reform UK and, to a small extent, the Greens are gaining ground. The Liberal Democrats, one pole of the UK's original bipolar polity, are still around, though a shadow of their original centrist...