Keir Starmer’s Labour Party lost hundreds of council seats to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK in English local elections on Friday, with the party wiped out in some of its safest strongholds and pressure mounting on the prime minister over his future.
Labour lost control of Tameside in Greater Manchester for the first time in nearly 50 years after Reform took all 14 seats the party had been defending. In Wigan, a former mining community Labour has held for more than half a century, the party lost every one of its 20 defended seats to Reform. In Salford, Labour retained just three of the 16 seats it was defending.
“The picture has been pretty much as bad as anyone expected for Labour, or worse,” said John Curtice, Britain’s most respected pollster.
Reform gained more than 335 council seats in England in early results. Labour was down 247 seats and the Conservatives lost 127.
The early results covered 136 local councils in England alongside devolved parliament elections in Scotland and Wales — the most significant test of public opinion before the next general election, due in 2029. Most results, including those from Scotland and Wales, were expected later on Friday.
FRACTURING OF TWO-PARTY POLITICS
The results underscored what analysts describe as one of the biggest transformations in British politics in a century — the continued break-up of the traditional Labour-Conservative duopoly into a multi-party system. Alongside Reform’s surge on the right, the left-wing Green Party was also picking up votes at Labour’s expense, while nationalist parties were expected to prevail in Scotland and Wales.
Farage said the results represented “a historic change in British politics.” Reform could form the main opposition to pro-independence parties in both the Scottish and Welsh devolved parliaments, according to early projections.
Pollsters forecast that Labour could lose more council seats than any government since Conservative prime minister John Major shed more than 2,000 in 1995, when his administration was engulfed in corruption scandals.
STARMER’S POSITION
Some Labour lawmakers have said that if the party performs poorly in Scotland, loses power in Wales and fails to hold a significant share of the roughly 2,500 English council seats it is defending, Starmer will face renewed calls to resign or set out a timetable for his departure.
Starmer’s allies moved quickly to back him. Defence Minister John Healey said the last thing voters wanted was “the potential chaos of a leadership election,” adding: “I think he can still deliver, he can still turn it round.”
Starmer was elected in 2024 with one of the largest parliamentary majorities in modern British history, promising stability after years of political turmoil. His time in office has since been marked by repeated policy U-turns and the dismissal of ambassador Peter Mandelson over his links to the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
The prime minister has said he will lead Labour into the next election. The party has never successfully removed a sitting prime minister in its 125-year history, and the two figures most often cited as potential successors — Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham and former deputy prime minister Angela Rayner — are not currently positioned to mount leadership bids. Energy minister Ed Miliband’s team on Thursday denied a Times report that he had advised Starmer to consider setting out a departure timetable.
(Reuters)
