Trump ally Nigel Farage deals major blow to Starmer in local UK elections as resignation calls mount

The United Kingdom’s ruling Labour Party is on track to suffer a major defeat in Thursday’s local elections as Nigel Farage’s right-wing Reform UK surges in support, prompting calls for Prime Minister Keir Starmer to resign.

British local elections are widely viewed as a functional referendum on the popularity of the ruling party and its head. With Labour having already suffered a net loss of nearly 500 local council seats with just over half of the councils called, multiple Labour MPs are saying that Starmer must agree to a timeline for his exit from office. 

“Many, many Labour voters that I represent, I guess, in the north of England and elsewhere that the direction the government [has] taken has not delivered the change that they thought they voted for,” Labour MP Jon Trickett said of the results. “They’re angry, they’re upset, they feel let down, they’ve sent us a clear message: The party, the leadership, must change with immediate effect if we want to recover.”

Starmer, for his part, has accepted responsibility for the losses but resisted calls to immediately resign in the wake of the local election results, stating that he was “not going to walk away and plunge the country into chaos.” He has not, however, explicitly ruled out a managed exit.

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Farage, an ally and friend of President Trump, told supporters: “Personally, I’ll be very sad to see the Prime Minister go. I will be very, very sad indeed. He’s the greatest asset we’ve got.”

English local elections span over 5,000 seats across 163 local councils and six mayorships. The semi-autonomous parliaments in Scotland and Wales also held elections on Thursday.

Labour’s losses were driven by defections both to the right and the left.

Reform UK, which has seen a net increase of about 650 seats as of writing, picked up considerable ground in post-industrial parts of northern and central England. Many of those seats are described as part of the country’s “Red Wall,” a mass of constituencies that have historically supported the Labour Party.

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Farage’s party sought to appeal to voters by promising to take a hard-line stance on immigration policy, cut taxes and repeal environmental policies they believed were hampering economic growth.

Labour also saw losses in urban cores and areas near universities to the far-left-wing Green Party and candidates running independent of established parties, many of whom were Muslim. 

Green Party leaders made the center-left Labour government’s approach to the war in Gaza, which they view as too closely aligned with Israel, a focal point in their campaign for local control.

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Zach Polanski, the head of the party, declared on election day that “Palestine is one of the elements on the ballot.”

A poll conducted ahead of Thursday’s elections found that roughly 60% of Muslim voters would consider backing a pro-Palestinian independent candidate to prevent Labour from winning locally. About half said they would consider voting for the Green Party to do so. The same poll found that Muslim voters saw support for Palestinians as more important than the economy when determining who they would vote for.

Independent and Green Party candidates have so far won a net increase of approximately 90 seats.

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The Conservatives, Labour’s historic rival, are also on track to see considerable losses as a result of Thursday’s elections. As of writing, the party has so far suffered a net loss of roughly 300 local seats.

Farage called the results, which academic observers say could mark a shift away from the United Kingdom’s functionally two-party system, a “historic change in British politics.”