Editorial: If Labour is to avoid catastrophe in the May local elections, the prime minister and his cabinet need to pull together and deliver both action and good news

Over the holiday period, the Guardian leader column is looking ahead at the themes of 2026. Today we look at the impact of devolution on growing volatility of party political allegiance

Next year will be pivotal in British politics, and 7 May will be the point around which things pivot. Elections to local councils, the Scottish parliament and the Welsh Senedd will give millions of voters across the UK a chance to express party preferences. Their verdicts could imperil Labour and Conservative leaders. In Wales, Labour might be sent into opposition for the first time since devolution. Plaid Cymru and Reform UK are set to make substantial gains. At Holyrood, the Scottish National party (SNP) is on course for a majority. That would be an extraordinary defiance of political gravity for a party weighed down by nearly two decades of incumbency.

In England, both Labour and the Tories risk losing scores of councillors as their vote shares are gobbled up by the Liberal Democrats, Reform UK and the Greens. Those results will be taken as evidence that Sir Keir Starmer and Kemi Badenoch are failing as leaders. But it would be a mistake to filter the results only through that lens. The fragmentation of national allegiances began much longer ago.

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Editorial: Our readers have generously donated £165,000 in our Christmas appeal, so Missing People is now well on its way to launching SafeCall to give a supportive ear to a young person in distress

Editorial: By supporting SafeCall, the mother of Madeleine McCann, who went missing in 2007, hopes her experience will be a light in the dark for the 72,000 children who disappear every year

The fracturing multilateral order has led to a new age of insecurity. But acts of courage and solidarity can point the way to a better future

In one of his last sermons, the great Christian theologian and philosopher Paul Tillich asked: “Do we have a right to hope?” As an army chaplain to German forces during the first world war and a refugee from Nazi Germany, Tillich had witnessed first-hand some of the horrors of the 20th century. But his answer to the question he posed in 1965 was yes. Nobody could live without hope, Tillich told his Harvard audience, even if it led “through the narrows of a painful and courageous ‘in-spite-of’”.

Sixty years on, a similar spirit of defiant optimism is needed to navigate our own era of conflict and anxiety. The fourth anniversary of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is approaching, and dark political forces menace the social fabric of western liberal democracies. More widely, a fracturing multilateral order is delivering a more unstable and threatening world.

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