British Prime Minister Keir Starmer pledged to revive his government Saturday after local and regional elections delivered a stinging rebuke to his center-left Labour Party, stripping it of more than 1,100 council seats across England and ending its 27-year hold on power in Wales. Speaking in London, Starmer said he would not “plunge the country into chaos” by resigning and insisted the right course was to “rebuild and show the path forward.” But the scale of the losses — and the breadth of the anti-incumbent vote — left his leadership under acute pressure from within his own party.
The elections, held Thursday with final results tallied Saturday, amounted to an unofficial referendum on Starmer less than two years after Labour ended 14 years of Conservative rule. Reform UK, the latest hard-right party led by veteran nationalist Nigel Farage, was the biggest beneficiary of the backlash, gaining more than 1,300 council seats and making significant inroads in legislative elections in Scotland and Wales. Farage said the outcome reflected “a historic change in British politics” and argued that voters who had swung to Reform were not lodging a short-term protest but registering a durable realignment.
Labour’s losses were concentrated in post-industrial and coastal communities in England’s north — places like Sunderland that had been Labour strongholds for decades — where Reform UK’s anti-establishment, anti-immigration message resonated with working-class voters. The party also lost ground to the centrist Liberal Democrats in some parts of southern England, while the Green Party, under self-described “eco populist” leader Zack Polanski, won hundreds of council seats from Labour in urban centers and university towns and took control of several local authorities.
In Scotland, the Scottish National Party won another term but fell short of a majority, leaving the prospect of an independence referendum remote. Labour and Reform tied in a distant second place. In Wales, Plaid Cymru won the most seats in the Cardiff-based Senedd and was positioned to form the next government, while Labour fell to a distant third — an extraordinary reversal in what had been one of its most reliable heartlands. Outgoing First Minister Eluned Morgan lost her seat.
The cost-of-living crisis and a sluggish economy, compounded by the wars in Ukraine and Iran, lay at the root of Labour’s troubles. Starmer’s attempts to cut welfare spending provoked revolts within his own party, and anger among supporters was deepened by scandals including his decision to appoint Peter Mandelson — a figure tarnished by his association with Jeffrey Epstein — as Britain’s ambassador to Washington. Some Labour figures pointed to achievements such as new protections for renters and a higher minimum wage, but many acknowledged those measures had failed to cut through the economic anxiety that dominated the campaign.
A growing number of Labour lawmakers publicly urged Starmer to set a timetable for his departure before the end of the year. “There has to be a timetable,” legislator Clive Betts told the BBC. Tony Vaughan, another Labour MP, called for an “orderly transition of leadership.” Catherine West said she would run for party leader if the Cabinet had not removed Starmer by Monday, though she acknowledged she lacked the support of the 81 colleagues required to force a contest. Starmer’s senior Cabinet colleagues — Health Secretary Wes Streeting, former Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner, and Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham — kept quiet.
In an effort to project stability, Starmer on Saturday brought back two figures from past Labour governments, naming former Prime Minister Gordon Brown as a special envoy on global finance and appointing the party’s ex-deputy leader Harriet Harman as an adviser on women and girls. He was due to deliver a speech on Monday and the government was set to outline its legislative plans Wednesday in a King’s Speech delivered by King Charles III at the State Opening of Parliament.
The elections pointed to a broader fracturing of the two-party system that has defined British politics for generations. The Conservatives also suffered heavy losses, and the results left both major parties weakened. Tony Travers, professor of government at the London School of Economics, said the outcome suggested that the next national election, due by 2029, would not produce a majority for any single party. “Then you’re in the world of, after the election, two or three big minority parties trying to work out how they would govern,” Travers said — an arrangement he described as traditionally “very un-British.” Stephen Houghton, the outgoing Labour leader of Barnsley council in northern England, where the party lost to Reform, said the problem “goes deeper than the prime minister. This has been coming for 30 years around the country, in post-industrial communities, coastal communities, that have been left behind. You can change prime ministers all day long. If you don’t change policy, it’s not going to change.”