British Prime Minister and Labour leader Keir Starmer speaks to supporters at Kingsdown Methodist Church in London on Friday. His party sustained serious losses in this week's local elections.Leon Neal/Getty Images
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer is facing renewed calls to resign after his Labour Party was soundly trounced in a series of local elections largely at the hands of a pair of political upstarts that are reshaping the country’s politics.
Labour’s vote collapsed in virtually every region of the country, including former strongholds around Birmingham, Manchester and London. The party is on track to lose hundreds of council seats in England when the final ballots are counted on Saturday.
It’s also expected to finish well back in the Scottish and Welsh parliamentary elections. The result in Wales is a particularly harsh blow for Mr. Starmer; previously, Labour had won every election for more than a century but is on course to finish third.
Most of Labour’s losses came at the hands of Reform UK and the Green Party, signalling a historic shift away from the country’s two traditional parties – Labour and the Conservatives. With the addition of the Liberal Democrats, which saw its seat total increase slightly from the last local elections, Britain’s political landscape now consists of five parties in England and six in Scotland and Wales where the pro-independence Scottish Nationalists and Plaid Cymru were expected to win the most seats.
At the national level, “none of the parties are very big, let’s make that clear,” polling expert John Curtice told BBC. “Even Reform are probably not quite at 30 per cent of the vote, so the fracturing of British politics is underlined by these results and confirmed by them.”
The results could not have been much worse for Mr. Starmer, whose fortunes have plummeted since he led Labour to a massive victory in the general election in July, 2024. He’d already been confronting questions about his political future because of the sluggish state of the British economy and his handling of the appointment of Peter Mandelson as ambassador to the United States despite his ties to Jeffrey Epstein.
Thursday’s results ratcheted up the pressure.
“It’s curtains for Keir,” said veteran Labour MP Jon Trickett. “What I would say about the Prime Minister is he has been a problem for us.”
Anas Sarwar, Labour’s Leader in Scotland, said the election “became about a national mood, and a national dissatisfaction. And that was a mood that we were not able to overcome.” He called for Mr. Starmer to resign in February and stood by those comments on Friday.
The head of Britain’s largest trade union, Unison, was also blunt in her assessment.
“Labour faces oblivion because it is not delivering for the vast majority of people. What must change is not just the leader but the entire approach: Only a Labour government which always puts the interests of workers before the wealthy can succeed,” said Andrea Egan, the general secretary of Unison, which is a major financial contributor to Labour.
Mr. Starmer took responsibility for the party’s poor showing but rejected calls to step aside. Voters “sent a message that the change that we promised isn’t being delivered in a way they can feel. And also, frankly, they’re fed up with years of the status quo. But we were elected to deal with those challenges, and I’m not going to walk away from that,” he said Friday.
The results also weren’t helpful to a pair of potential leadership contenders: Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham and former deputy leader of Labour Angela Rayner.
Mr. Burnham would have to be elected an MP in a by-election to run for the leadership but Thursday’s results show there are few safe Labour seats. And Ms. Rayner, who is an MP, is still feeling the fallout from a scandal involving failure to pay the full tax on a house she bought, which forced her to resign from cabinet.
“Keir Starmer is in a kind of lame duck political position – very few people think the Prime Minister will lead Labour into the next general election,” said Karl Pike, a senior lecturer in public policy at Queen Mary, University of London. “But much of the discussion around a change of leadership seems to involve a political high-wire act. This is why, for some time now, Labour MPs have been unhappy – but unsure of what to do about it.”
The emergence of a multiparty system has benefited Reform UK, a populist party launched five years ago and led by anti-immigration campaigner Nigel Farage. Reform finished well ahead of every other party across England in Thursday’s election and came a close second in Wales. It has also topped nearly every national opinion poll for months.
“I think overall what has happened is a truly historic shift in British politics,” Mr. Farage said. “We’ve been so used to thinking about politics in terms of left and right, and yet what Reform are able to do is to win in areas that have always been Conservative. But equally, we’re proving in a big way we can win in areas that Labour have dominated, frankly, since the end of World War One.”
The Green Party also saw its vote total surge, especially in London where the Green candidate won election as mayor of the borough of Hackney, a first for the party.
“Two-party politics is not just dying, it is dead and it is buried,” said party leader Zack Polanski.