British leader Keir Starmer under pressure after heavy election losses | Keir Starmer
British prime minister Keir Starmer is facing increasing pressure to set a date for his departure after elections across much of the country resulted in huge losses for the ruling Labor Party.
By the time the bulk of the results were counted after Thursday’s vote, Labor had lost more than 1,400 representatives from English councils, which are local government structures that provide many neighborhood services.
Starmer’s party was also defeated in devolved parliamentary elections in Wales, where it dominated the country’s politics for a century, and has fallen behind in terms of representation in the Scottish parliament.
Adding to the panic within Labour, the party was defeated by a number of rivals, including the right-wing populist UK Reform Party, the left-wing Greens and pro-independence nationalists in Wales and Scotland.
The biggest election since Starmer came to power in mid-2024 showed how the UK’s traditional two-party system of Labor and Conservatives has collapsed, with Reform taking the most votes and the Greens, Conservatives, Labor and centrist Liberal Democrats rallying behind them.
While Starmer does not have to face a national parliamentary election at Westminster for three years, a growing number of MPs are calling for him to announce a timetable for his departure, believing he is too politically damaged to turn things around.
Speaking on Saturday morning, Debbie Abrahams MP, who represents a region in the north of England that used to be all Labor but is increasingly leaning towards Reform, said Starmer must “put the country first”.
He said: “We have to realize the dangers we’re in right now, that it doesn’t look good.” Asked how quickly Starmer needed to go, he said: “I think it’s a matter of a few months.”
But for now, Starmer has the support of his senior ministers, at least publicly; This includes two people routinely named as possible rivals: Wes Streeting, the health minister, and Angela Rayner, who was deputy prime minister until last year.
Complicating matters for any conspiracists is the fact that Andy Burnham, seen by many in the Labor Party as the best candidate to replace Starmer, is not in parliament. He is the mayor of Greater Manchester and can only return to the House of Commons if another MP stands down and stands in elections to replace him.
Starmer vowed to keep fighting. In an opinion piece published in the Guardian on Saturday, the prime minister said he accepted the consequences were “very difficult” and lessons had to be learned.
But he rejected claims from some MPs that Labor needed to do more to bring back left-leaning voters who switched their allegiance to the Greens to recover.
He wrote: “While we must respond to the message voters are sending us, that doesn’t mean leaning left or right. It means bringing together a broad political movement.”
There is a consensus even among his closest allies that while Starmer has had some policy successes and has dealt deftly with Donald Trump and the wider international situation, his government has made too many missteps and U-turns.
More broadly, many in the Labor Party worry that Starmer will not be able to properly challenge Reform UK, led by Nigel Farage, the politician who forced the UK to vote to leave the European Union in 2016, or the Greens, who are rising in the polls under the leadership of self-styled “eco-populist” Zack Polanski.
But others in the party argue that the change of prime minister mid-government upsets voters just as much. From 2016 to 2022, the ruling Conservatives changed prime ministers four times and were severely punished by voters at the next election.
The Conservatives, led by their new leader Kemi Badenoch, fared poorly in Thursday’s vote, losing more than 500 councilors and falling behind in Scotland and Wales.
