The bloodbath had been foretold, and it came to pass on May 7. Across the country, Labour has lost over a thousand seats, many of which it had held for decades. It haemorrhaged councils to Reform in its northern heartlands, bled Liberal Democrat gains across the south and watched the Greens eat into its left flank, flipping seats in Labour strongholds like Hackney. The party managed the remarkable feat of being routed from every direction at once. The verdict is unequivocal: Keir Starmer’s Labour Party is not viable.
Labour’s demise is the consequence of two years of purposeless leadership. Dealt a historic mandate in the summer of 2024, Starmer has failed to use it meaningfully. The parliamentary majority he was handed, the largest in a generation, demanded boldness; what Britain got instead was managerialism. He became a paragon of caution without conviction, triangulating endlessly. Voters who lent Labour their votes expecting change watched instead as Starmer picked fights with his own party, retreating from almost every commitment that might have defined his premiership. There is no Starmerism; there is no project; there is no vision. There is only the management of decline, a form of damage control, conducted by a man who seems more comfortable as a technocrat than a leader.
The numbers were a bleak harbinger for Labour. Starmer’s net favourability stood at -45 in April, making him the most unpopular leader in Britain — by far. A majority of the public believe he should resign, compared with just 23% who think he should remain. Most devastating of all: among 2024 Labour voters, opinion is split, with a staggering 37% believing he should step down. His ratings sit in similar territory to Theresa May’s just before her resignation. This is no difficult patch; it is the picture of failure, felt even within his party.
Internally, the party is in shambles. Union chiefs have turned on Starmer; on the backbenches, Labour MPs have indicated that if the party performs poorly across the board, Starmer will face renewed pressure to quit or set out a timetable for his departure; one Labour MP, Jon Trickett, has already publicly called for his resignation. The problem, it seems, is personal. And, thankfully for Labour, Starmer is not inevitable; several credible alternatives have emerged. Andy Burnham, the Greater Manchester Mayor, is the public’s preferred choice with 36% of voters preferring as Prime Minister against 29% for Starmer; 62% of Labour members would back him in a head-to-head. Other potential candidates include Health Secretary Wes Streeting, Angela Rayner and Shabana Mahmood. None of them are perfect. All of them are better than the status quo.
What Labour needs is not merely a different face but a different approach. Whoever succeeds Starmer must offer three things he has failed to provide: a distinct political identity, a willingness to govern boldly, an honest relationship with the public. The EU is the clearest test of all three. Streeting has hinted at a customs union and Burnham has said he hopes Britain will rejoin in his lifetime.
The public supports rapprochement: a majority of voters support rejoining the EU, with that figure reaching 83% among Labour voters. And yet, inexplicably, Labour has spent two years carefully avoiding saying so, getting outflanked on Europe by the Greens and the Liberal Democrats, who, conversely, are willing to say plainly what Labour cannot: that Brexit was a mistake that left Britain’s economy an estimated 4% smaller than it would otherwise have been, weakened Britain diplomatically and worsened the immigration crisis. A new Labour leader who speaks honestly about that damage would also force Farage to defend the disaster he spent decades engineering.
The local elections are an indictment not of Labour’s policies, but of their absence. It is an indictment of purposeless, directionless, lethargic leadership. Parties recover from bad governments; they rarely recover from leaders who have lost the fundamental trust of the people they govern. Starmer has lost that trust and the longer he stays in office, the more damage Labour will suffer. Reform is not waiting. Nor are the Greens. Every day Starmer remains in Downing Street is a day Farage spends consolidating gains that will be very hard to reverse. Labour was elected to govern Britain, and it must fulfill that promise before it is too late.
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