British Prime Minister Keir Starmer under pressure after heavy election losses

2026-05-09 20:28:00, Kosova & Bota CNA

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer is facing growing pressure to set a date for his departure after elections across much of the country resulted in massive losses for his ruling Labour party.

With most of the results counted after Thursday's vote, the Labour Party had lost more than 1,400 representatives from English councils, the local government structures that provide many neighbourhood services.

Starmer's party also suffered defeat in elections for the devolved Welsh parliament, where it had dominated the country's politics for a century, and suffered a setback in representation in the Scottish parliament.

Adding to the panic within the Labour Party, the party lost to a series of challengers, including the right-wing populist Reform UK party, the left-wing Greens and pro-independence nationalists in Wales and Scotland.

The election, the biggest since Starmer won power in mid-2024, showed how the UK's traditional two-party system of Labour and Conservatives has crumbled, with Reform taking the most votes, and the Greens, Conservatives, Labour and the centrist Liberal Democrats trailing behind.

While Starmer does not have to face elections to the national parliament at Westminster for three years, a growing number of his MPs want him to announce a timetable for his departure, believing he is too politically damaged to change things.

For now, however, Starmer has the support of his senior ministers, at least publicly, including two regularly mentioned as potential challengers: Wes Streeting, the health minister, and Angela Rayner, who was deputy prime minister until last year.

Complicating matters for any conspiracists is that the person many in the Labour Party see as the best possible replacement for Starmer, Andy Burnham, is not in parliament. He is the mayor of Greater Manchester and could only return to the House of Commons if another MP were to stand down and he were to fight an election to replace him.

Starmer has vowed to continue the fight. In an opinion piece for The Guardian on Saturday, the prime minister said he accepted that the results were very difficult and that lessons needed to be learned.

But he rejected the argument from some MPs that to recover, the Labour Party must do more to win back left-leaning voters who have switched their allegiance to the Greens.

He wrote: "While we must respond to the message voters have sent us, that doesn't mean leaning right or left. It means uniting a broad political movement."

There is a consensus, even among his closest allies, that while Starmer has had some policy successes and has dealt skillfully with Donald Trump and the wider international situation, his government has made many missteps.

Overall, many in the Labour Party worry that Starmer is unable to properly challenge either Reform UK, led by Nigel Farage, the politician best known for urging the United Kingdom to vote to leave the European Union in 2016, or the Greens, who have surged in the polls under the leadership of self-proclaimed "eco-populist" Zack Polanski.

However, others in the party argue that changing prime ministers in the middle of a government annoys voters just as much. From 2016 to 2022, the then-ruling Conservatives changed prime ministers four times and were severely punished by the electorate in the next election.

Under their new leader, Kemi Badenoch, the Conservatives fared badly in Thursday's polls, losing more than 500 councillors and losing ground in Scotland and Wales. /Taken from The Guardian.