The UK Prime Minister has acknowledged catastrophic losses in last week’s local election, but vowed to stay in office.
At least 70 Labour MPs are demanding that Prime Minister Keir Starmer resign, Sky News reported on Monday. This comes after the party came out as the biggest loser in last week’s local elections, relinquishing more than 1,300 council seats across the country.
In addition to dozens of lawmakers calling for Starmer to go, at least three junior members of his government have so far resigned from their positions, Sky News reported.
Under Labour rules, a formal leadership challenge would require backing by at least 81 party MPs, a fifth of the party’s total roster in the House of Commons. Former foreign secretary and Labour MP Catherine West announced that she’s gathering support to kickstart the process and elect a new leader by September.
“The results last Thursday show that the PM has failed to inspire hope,” she wrote on X. “What is best for the party and country now is for an orderly transition.”
In a speech earlier on Monday, Starmer admitted that there was “no sugarcoating” the scale of the defeat suffered by Labour but vowed to stay in office and claw back support. He promised to rebuild the UK’s relationship with the EU and to make Britain “fairer.”
Starmer has sunk in the approval polls since his party’s landslide victory in the 2024 general election. The decline followed deeply unpopular austerity measures, the resurfacing of the historical Pakistani rape gang scandal, and government response to the 2024 anti-immigration protests and riots – which sparked allegations of “two-tier” justice after hundreds of British citizens were arrested for social media posts.
The Labour government has also lost left-wing voters by designating the pro-Palestinian protest group ‘Palestine Action’ a terrorist organization.
Half of Britons want Starmer to step down, while only 29% want him to remain in office, according to a YouGov poll published on Monday that surveyed 4,904 UK adults.
Euroskeptic, anti-immigrant Reform UK has emerged as the biggest winner in the local elections, taking more than 1,200 local council seats across the country. “Betrayed voters have left Labour for good,” party leader Nigel Farage said on X on Monday.
