British leader Keir Starmer election backlash facesafter big election losses
Labour party loses more than 1,400 English council seats and crashes out in Welsh and Scottish parliamentary elections
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer faces mounting pressure to name an exit date after elections across large parts of the country delivered big losses for his ruling Labour party.
Labour has lost more than 1,400 councillors from English councils, the local government bodies that provide many neighbourhood services, with most results already declared after Thursday’s vote.
Starmer’s party also lost ground in the election for the devolved parliament of Wales, where it had dominated the country’s politics for a century, and lost seats in the Scottish parliament.
Labour’s concern was compounded by losing to a string of rivals, including the rightwing populist Reform UK party, the leftwing Greens and pro-independence nationalists in Wales and Scotland.
The elections, the biggest since Starmer took control in mid-2024, demonstrated how the UK’s conventional two-party system of Labour and the Conservatives has been broken. Reform gained the most votes, with the Greens, Conservatives, Labour and the moderate Liberal Democrats bunched up behind.
Starmer has three years before an election to the national parliament in Westminster but more and more of his MPs want him to set out a date for his resignation, fearing he is too politically damaged to turn things around.
Starmer must “put the country first” when he speaks on Saturday morning, said Debbie Abrahams, MP for Oldham East and Saddleworth in northern England, which was strongly Labour but has rapidly shifted to Reform.
“We must be aware of the dangers we are in now, that on this trajectory it doesn’t look good,” she remarked. When asked how fast Starmer should go, she said: “I think it is a matter of months.”
For now, though, Starmer has the public support of his senior ministers, including the two who are regularly mentioned as potential challengers: health minister Wes Streeting, and Angela Rayner, who was deputy prime minister until last year.
And compounding the problem for any plotters is the fact that the person seen by many in Labour as the best prospective alternative to Starmer, Andy Burnham, is not in parliament. He is mayor of Greater Manchester and could only return to the House of Commons if another MP stood down and he contested the election to replace them.
Starmer has promised to fight on. In a Guardian editorial piece on Saturday, the prime minister said he understood the results were “very tough” and lessons needed to be learned.
But he rejected the idea from some MPs that Labour needs to do more to win back left-leaning supporters who have switched to the Greens in order to recover. “We must respond to the message voters have sent us,” he added, “but that does not mean veering right or left. “It’s about creating a broad political movement.
There is even consensus among his closest friends that, while Starmer has had certain policy triumphs and has handled Donald Trump and the wider international situation adroitly, his government has made too many blunders and U-turns.
More broadly, many in Labour are concerned that Starmer is not able to mount a serious challenge to either Reform UK, led by Nigel Farage, the politician most famous for driving the UK to vote to leave the EU in 2016, or the Greens, who have seen their poll ratings soar under the leadership of the self-declared “eco-populist” Zack Polanski.
But some in the party say changing prime ministers mid-government bothers people just as much. Between 2016 and 2022 the then governing Conservatives changed their prime ministers four times and were severely punished by the people at the subsequent election.
The Tories performed badly in Thursday’s voting, losing almost 500 councillors and losing ground in Scotland and Wales under their new leader, Kemi Badenoch.