After the local elections...

The Graun is as puzzled as anyone about the voting patterns in the local elections on Thursday,although that hasn't stopped its pundits (and everyone else's) offering instant analysis of what the voters wanted and what they will do now. The editorial has this:

The Guardian view on local elections: national lessons for Brexit

The failure of Britain’s gridlocked politics has found expression in the rise of smaller parties and large swathes of the country where no one party can run local governments. This will further disrupt our broken politics 

There are hopeful signs that the new moral panic is having an effect:

If any one of the mainstream parties could say they won on Thursday it was the Greens, buoyed by the government’s public acceptance that their arguments about an impending climate emergency had won the day.  

However,on what is still the main issue to bang on and on about:

it would be easy to construct an analysis [ha!] in which the voters had laid the blame at the feet of the two major Westminster parties either for failing to deliver on the results of referendum in 2016 or for failing to find a way to repudiate them. Both the Conservatives’ Theresa May and Labour’s Mr Corbyn recognised that this instant precis of events would be attractive and sought to defuse its allure by saying they will “sort out” Brexit. This is too roughly hewn an argument... Thursday’s turnout is likely to be in step with previous local contests this decade where just a third of voters turned up. This one fact makes impossible a detailed read-through to a national election picture when two-thirds of the electorate cast their ballots. Although this week’s elections were held in 248 English councils, six mayoral districts and all 11 councils in Northern Ireland, none took place in Wales, Scotland and London. The elections on Thursday were a local affair...

Above all, and back to the headline:

Missing from the ballot paper were many of the new insurgents. In socially liberal pro-EU Britain, Liberal Democrats went unchallenged by the upstarts at Change UK. Meanwhile in Brexitland, a lifeless Ukip was the only option open for voters unhappy at the failure of the UK to depart from the EU...Tory leave voters had nowhere to go.

For Labour:

there must be a concern that its coalition of older, less-educated, working-class voters and younger, liberal metropolitan graduates is wilting in the heat of the Brexit argument. Winning wealthy urban seats while losing party heartlands

Overall, coup and conspiracy is still likely:

British politics could fragment ever further, with unpredictable results. With European elections impending, there is a lesson for both Labour and the Tories: they cannot easily profit as the Brexit process drifts on and on, but their insurgent rivals might.