By Andrew MacAskill
LONDON, May 8 (Reuters) – British Prime Minister Keir Starmer suffered heavy early losses in elections on Friday, showing the depth of voter anger with his government and raising fresh doubts about his future just two years after a landslide general election victory.
Starmer’s Labour Party haemorrhaged support in areas reporting results overnight, including traditional strongholds in former industrial regions of central and northern England, along with some parts of London.
The main beneficiary was the anti-immigration populist Reform UK of Brexit campaigner Nigel Farage, which gained more than 200 council seats in England, and could form the main opposition in Scotland and Wales to the pro-independence Scottish National Party and Plaid Cymru.
“The picture has been pretty much as bad as anyone expected for Labour, or worse,” said John Curtice, Britain’s most respected pollster.
The elections for 136 local councils in England, alongside the devolved parliaments in Scotland and Wales, represent the most significant test of public opinion before the next general election due in 2029.
Lawmakers in the governing Labour Party said if the party performs poorly in Scotland, loses power in Wales, and fails to hold many of the roughly 2,500 council seats it is defending in England then Starmer will face renewed pressure to quit or set out a timetable for his departure.
INSURGENT PARTIES FRACTURE TWO-PARTY SYSTEM
The early results showed the continued fracturing of Britain’s traditional two-party system into a multi-party democracy, in what analysts say represents one of the biggest transformations in British politics in the last century.
The once-dominant Labour and Conservative parties were losing votes to Reform, and at the other end of the political spectrum to the left-wing pro-environment Green Party, while nationalist parties were expected to win the elections in Scotland and Wales.
Farage said the results so far were “way exceeding” his expectations and represented a “historic change in British politics”.
Labour was wiped out in some of the most closely watched early results.
The party lost control of the council of Tameside in Greater Manchester for the first time in almost 50 years after Reform picked up all 14 seats Labour was defending.
In nearby Wigan, a former mining community it has controlled for more than 50 years, Labour also lost every one of the 20 seats it was defending to Reform, and in Salford, the party only held three of the 16 seats it was defending.
The results were “soul-destroying”, said Rebecca Long-Bailey, a Labour member of parliament for Salford.
While incumbent governments often struggle in mid-term elections, pollsters forecast that Labour could lose the most council seats in local elections since former Prime Minister John Major lost more than 2,000 in 1995, when his government was mired in endless corruption scandals.
The Reform UK party added 253 council seats in England with results in more than 4,200 seats still to be counted. The Labour party lost 185 seats and the Conservative party was down 93 seats.
Most of the election results — including the seats in the Scottish and Welsh elections — are due to be declared on Friday afternoon and evening.
U-TURNS AND SCANDALS ERODE STARMER’S AUTHORITY
Starmer, a former lawyer, was elected in 2024 with one of the largest parliamentary majorities in modern British history on the premise that he would bring stability, rather than charisma, after years of political chaos.
But his time in office has been marked by numerous policy U-turns, a rotating cast of advisers and the disastrous appointment of Peter Mandelson as Britain’s ambassador to the United States who was fired nine months into job over his links to the late convicted U.S. sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Starmer insists he will lead Labour into the next election, and the party has never successfully removed an incumbent prime minister in its 125-year history.
The prime minister is helped by the fact that two frontrunners to succeed him if he goes – Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham and former Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner – are not yet in positions to mount leadership bids, and other potential rivals seem unwilling to move against him for now.
The energy minister Ed Miliband denied on Thursday a report in the Times newspaper that he had advised Starmer to consider setting out a timetable for his departure from Downing Street.
(Reporting by Andrew MacAskill; Editing by Clarence Fernandez)
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