Labour Faces Left-Right Pinch as Shell Posts $5.69B Profit

The polls opened at 07:00 on May 7 for two parallel elections that share a clear political subject: pressure on Keir Starmer's Labour from both its left and its right. In Scotland, voters are returning all 129 Members of the Scottish Parliament — 73 in constituencies and 56 across eight regional lists — with a record 4,320,981 people registered, almost one in five of them on postal ballots already cast, and no requirement to show photographic identification, unlike in England. For the second consecutive Holyrood election, there will be no overnight count: the Electoral Management Board for Scotland said the count would not start until 09:00 on Friday, framed as a measure to reduce costs and increase public engagement. Estimated declaration times produced by the Press Association run from Airdrie at 12:00 through Skye, Lochaber and Badenoch at 18:30, with Highlands and Islands the final region at around 19:00.

In England, the local elections offered Reform UK its largest electoral test to date. The anti-immigration party led by Nigel Farage, which has topped every national poll for more than a year, is forecast to take between 1,000 and 1,500 of the roughly 5,000 council seats on offer. Farage's stated objective is to demonstrate that Reform has replaced the Conservatives as the natural party of the British right, with the strongest gains projected in the north of England and the Midlands. Reform turquoise is also expected to displace Labour red in some predominantly white, working-class neighbourhoods of London — a structural shift that, if confirmed at scale, would put Reform on the council map of the capital for the first time at this scale.

The other half of Labour's pinch came in research, not at the ballot box. UCL's Policy Lab, drawing on work by veteran US pollster Stan Greenberg, published a report on May 7 warning that Starmer's discomfort with progressive values is pushing left-leaning voters away from Labour. The Lab said voters want a more robust challenge to Donald Trump and a stronger defence of environmentalism than the current frontbench is willing to offer; the timing — on a polling day Labour was already braced to lose council seats on — sharpens the prospect of a leadership challenge if the worst forecasts land.

The energy backdrop kept reminding the country who is benefiting. Shell reported a 19 percent rise in first-quarter net profit to $5.69 billion, driven by oil and gas prices that have been elevated since Iran's closure of the Strait of Hormuz at the start of the US-Israeli war. The company announced a $3 billion share buyback and a 5 percent dividend increase, while slowing quarterly buybacks from $3.5 billion. Shell shares fell 2.3 percent on the FTSE 100 on the day of the announcement as Brent eased on hopes of a US-Iran ceasefire — a swing that captures the bind the political class faces, with the war's profit cycle visible in the Q1 prints just as the diplomatic track makes those prints look like the peak.

Strategic-Falklands politics surfaced in evidence to MPs. Dr Fiona Hill, co-author of the UK's Strategic Defence Review, told the Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy that Trump's recent comments on the Falkland Islands should be taken seriously and engaged with directly. Hill described Trump's stance as a combination of genuine belief and political posturing rooted in his alliance with Argentina's President Milei, and warned that the US administration views European allies as having been "infantilised" by their reliance on American support. Her advice to ministers was initial private diplomatic engagement rather than public dismissal — a recommendation that, on the same day Shell was reporting Iran-war windfall profits, places the UK's position on every major geopolitical question of the moment in the same Washington in-tray.