A massive round of local elections in the United Kingdom threatens to reshuffle Parliament and undercut the already unsteady Prime Minister Keir Starmer.
Starmer is not up for election this week, and his office should be secure until 2029, but he will be watching the results of the Thursday election roll in with dire concern as the nation’s hard-right and hard-left seek to eat up voters fleeing the mainstream parties.
“Today, choose progress over the politics of anger,” the prime minister urged his citizens. “Vote Labour.”
Over 5,000 English councilors are up for election across 136 councils, including all of London’s boroughs. Additionally, there are six mayoral elections: Croydon, Hackney, Lewisham, Newham, Tower Hamlets, and Watford.
Separately, all 129 seats in the Scottish parliament are up for election. The parliament of Wales, known as the Senedd, is also completely up for grabs. The Senedd is expanding by 16 seats, raising the total number of members to 96.
Results are expected to begin trickling in on Friday but the final count will most likely not be confirmed until Saturday.
Public polling heading into the election showed Reform UK, the populist party led by archconservative Nigel Farage, far and ahead as the most popular party in the country with 25% support.
“We’re gonna get rid of Keir Starmer when we win, and we are the only party you can vote for if you want real change in a country that is going downhill rapidly,” Farage told his supporters in a video message on election day.
The Reform leader has recently been embroiled in a scandal over a multimillion-dollar gift from crypto tycoon Christopher Harborne.
Reform UK, which positions itself as a tougher and more nationalist alternative to the establishment Conservative Party, has enjoyed an unprecedented wave of success as it capitalizes on the British government’s inaction on mass migration.
The Conservatives, the oldest extant political party in the world, held power for 14 years before Starmer led Labour to a landslide victory in 2024. Now, the Tories are polling in distant second place with 18% and have little chance of scooping up many seats.
The Tories are tied with the surging Green Party, which has gone from single-digit results to a genuine threat to Labour’s control of the British left-wing. The Greens have embraced a radical mix of leftist politics and pro-Palestinian activism — sprinkled with just a dash of their titular environmentalism.
Green Party candidate Hannah Spencer secured an upset victory in the constituency of Gorton and Denton, a Labour stronghold, in a by-election in February. She accomplished this feat via a confederation of special interest groups beyond their usual environmentalist contingency — in particular, the approximately 30% of voters in the constituency who are Muslim.
Two Green Party candidates were arrested recently on suspicion of fostering racial hatred after police say they posted images to social media praising Hamas militants.
Labour, which dog-walked the opposition with almost 34% of votes in the 2024 general election, is now left desperately fighting to mobilize a mere 17% of voters who still back them.
The party remains plagued by negative press over Starmer’s appointment of Ambassador Peter Mandelson, who was revealed to have extensive connections to sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
The prime minister has made more enemies with a perceived reluctance to fight against radical Islamism growing in urban areas. A stabbing attack against two Jewish men in Golders Green last proved to be a breaking point for many British Jews who began labelling the premier “Keir Starmer, Jew Harmer.”
It is all just further fuel on the fire as Labour voters report frustration with his weakness in foreign affairs, inaction against kitchen-table issues such as stagnant wages and unwillingness to confront wildly unpopular migration policies.
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Starmer is not compelled to call another general election until 2029, when his term expires. But figures within the Labour Party have increasingly leaked to the press considerations of forcing the premier out and giving someone else a shot.
The whisper campaign to replace Starmer has gotten so intense that Tom Watson, the former Labour deputy leader who committed the last intraparty backstabbing when he helped oust Tony Blair in 2006, felt it necessary to issue a warning to the party.
“Voters will see a party talking to itself while the country is shouting at it,” he warned in a newsletter. “If Labour has lost support to Reform, the Greens, the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives, the solution cannot simply be a different name on the door.”
Multiple Cabinet ministers told the Guardian this week that even as they warn their MPs against any attempts to oust their leader, they are not confident that the prime minister can survive until the next general election.
