Labour’s Woes
IN 2024 Labour secured what has been described as a ‘loveless landslide’, a massive Commons majority built entirely on Tory collapse. While gaining only 19 per cent of the potential vote and 33 per cent of the actual vote, the party secured 411 seats and a 174-seat majority. The result massively outstripped Labour’s popularity (33 per cent of the vote, 63 per cent of the seats).
That low popularity has crashed in just two years. According to Ipsos polling figures, Sir Keir Starmer is the most unpopular Prime Minister in history (it should be noted that methodology dates back to 1977, and it becomes more difficult to compare with pre-modern figures). Ipsos gave Starmer a net satisfaction rating of minus 66 in late 2025, with only 13 per cent of people satisfied with his performance. While some metrics and pollsters have shown lower figures in specific areas for other recent leaders, none have had the consistently very low results of Starmer in the last two years.
In the 2025 local elections Labour won just 20 per cent of the vote and a pitiful 6 per cent of the seats contested. In last week’s council elections, the Labour Party vote share declined to 15 per cent (behind both Reform and the Conservatives), losing 1,496 councillors and control of 36 councils. Nationally, the party is polling between 18-19 per cent (at least 14 per cent below their 2024 figure).
These are historic lows for both the party in power and for the sitting Prime Minister.
The odd situation is that a party only two years after a landslide victory and possessed of a huge majority looks set for a crushing defeat and a gigantic decline of seats in any national election.
The Labour Reaction
More than 70 Labour MPs have now called for Starmer to either resign or set a timetable for his departure. Some were blunt in describing the Prime Minister as an electoral liability. Catherine West, a former minister, offered herself as a stalking horse candidate to force his removal. She has since deferred that threat to September. The supporters of Andy Burnham are lobbying for his installation, which would however first require him becoming an MP again. Wes Streeting is clearly suggesting himself as a potential replacement. Other Labour MPs back Angela Rayner.
Besides West, so-called ‘moderates’ pushing for Starmer’s resignation include Debbie Abrahams, Clive Betts, Barry Gardiner and Lorraine Beavers.
Gardiner said: ‘This defeat is Keir Starmer’s responsibility – and that’s why I think he should accept that responsibility and he should stand aside.’ Beavers said: ‘We must have a new leader in place well in advance of next year’s local elections.’ West said: ‘I am hereby giving notice to Number 10 that I am collecting names of Labour MPs to call on the Prime Minister to set a timetable for the election of a new leader in September.’
Labour MPs on the left of the Party have been even more vocal about Starmer’s departure.
Richard Burgon said: ‘It is clear that Keir has fought his last election as Labour leader . . . Keir must go.’ Tahir Ali said: ‘It is clear the current leadership needs a total change in direction . . . The first step is for Keir Starmer to step down.’ Veteran MP Graham Stringer noted that the Prime Minister is ‘detested on the doorstep’ and Ian Lavery said Starmer ‘could end the party forever’.
So far six junior ministers have resigned (Joe Morris, Sally Jameson, Tom Rutland, Miatta Fahnbulleh, Naushabah Khan, Melanie Ward). Of senior ministers, Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood, Deputy Prime Minister David Lammy and Secretary of State for Defence John Healey are all reported to have privately suggested a transition process to the Prime Minister presumably centred on an agreed departure timetable.
Keir Starmer’s Response
On Monday Starmer gave a keynote speech intended to mollify his internal party critics and set out a vision for recovery. The speech was predictable fare for anyone who has grown familiar with the adenoidal, mendacious and lawyerly Prime Minister. It mixed Bidenesque smears about dark forces and evil opponents (who ‘feed on despair’ and offer a ‘dangerous’ and ‘dark path’ to voters – also known as voting for someone else) with the usual emotive slurry of claimed feeling and compassion (‘you are hurting, I am hurting, this hurts’). He attempted to portray himself as a heroic battler beset by gigantic forces that aren’t his fault (‘we are not just facing dangerous times . . . ’).
Throughout, there was a clear underlying desire to portray Nigel Farage, Vladimir Putin, Reform, Kemi Badenoch, Donald Trump, MAGA, and even the hard left Green Party and Zack Polanski as a sort of composite, interchangeable version of what Tony Blair once described as ‘the forces of conservatism’, essentially implying that anyone opposing Labour progressivism and globalism represents fear, bigotry and hate, together with a slightly exasperated irritation that not everyone sees the world this way.
This fare seems enough to have slightly diminished the chorus of internal dissent, but not enough to end the grumbling (West’s postponed but still there threat is a barometer reaction).
In terms of solid content there was very little, but mostly bad. The first key point was a doubling down on the Europhile approach that has lost the Red Wall and the white working-class vote since Brexit (a pledge to be at the heart of Europe surely promising further wealth transfers, like an extra billion a year to the EU cohesion fund and UK participation in the £78billion EU-Ukraine fund, just for starters). The second was a promise to nationalise British Steel (which might be sensible in terms of us having a steel industry at all, but it’s already almost vanished). The third was a jobs promise for kids with a new scheme offering government help to find work. The PM may be unaware of this, but we have these things called ‘job centres’, but they don’t actually list jobs any more or contact employers, they just help with welfare form filling and tell people to do a Google search if they want work.
In other words if job centres still listed jobs on computers or cards and communicated with employers it would do everything this scheme proposes at a tiny fraction of the additional cost that will no doubt be sunk into it. But it looks as if you are helping the kids, I suppose.
What This Means
The Labour Party had a clear choice. They have haemorrhaged votes to both Reform and to a lesser extent the Greens. They have lost Wales, and lost the Northern former Red Wall. They lost in London to the Greens, and everywhere else to Reform. In one former Labour stronghold they saw 22 Labour seats go, each and every one, to Reform.
These losses don’t just reflect Labour decline. They specifically reflect demography, and who the party appeals to. The white working class have gone to Reform. The middle-class student vote is hard left, and tends most towards the Greens. Labour once had 90 per cent of the Muslim vote through constant pandering, but that has crashed to about 30 per cent because Muslim independents are now bold enough to stand alone (campaigning on Gaza) while the Greens have pandered even more than Labour do.
Do they try to get the white working class and the Blue Labour vote back, or do they double down on the things that have made them very unpopular in most of the country, with a shred of popularity remaining in the migrant-dominated cities? Since most of the MPs elected in 2024 were hard left of the university-educated mould, these control Starmer’s own fate far more than the electorate currently do, and Starmer himself is a sort of bureaucratic, suited extremist who poses as a moderate, they have decided to veer further left, particularly on setting fire to every last scrap of Brexit and fully abandoning the white working-class vote.
Notably absent in the Reset Save His Own Skin speech was any Blue Labour acknowledgement of immigration pressures fuelling the rapid sectarian breakdown of both social order and political voting patterns. This isn’t a party listening to the often excellent commentator Paul Embery, who really needs to jump ship.
It’s quite clear the cities vote one way because of migrant population and the vote is totally different elsewhere because of how the white British (save a leftist indoctrinated primarily middle-class contingent) are now voting. It’s equally clear that Starmer and the Labour Party are as wedded to demographic replacement and wilful blindness regarding the consequences as the more vocally radical Greens are.
The overall public message of the last two years has been massive public disgust at the generally globalist and progressive direction of travel, and the lesson Labour has heard from that is the country should travel in that direction much faster. They are chasing the radicalised left who vote Green and the urban, affluent and youth voters who see no issue with radical demographic change and radical economic leftism . . . but those people if they are primarily servile to the EU have the Lib Dems and if they are primarily servile to the weird Muslim submission/LGBTQ+ combination then they have the Greens as purer expressions of those extremist positions.
The Dark Path They Call Hope
Angela Rayner has suggested how Labour will offer hope again, and it’s even more depressing than Starmer’s rhetoric against the alleged ‘far right’. She suggests the following:
‘Things can be so much better than this. Countries including Spain and Canada have shown that economies can grow and people can thrive when governments stay true to labour and social democratic values and put people first.’
This is the horrific direction I think they will take, a hardening of all their existing crimes, and the people they will put first, even more obviously, are everyone else. European bureaucrats are first, and the British voter is second again. We will resubmit to their authority. Immigrant communities are first, and native white British communities (or small and integrated ones like British Jews) will have to carry on getting used to terror attacks and being called extremists if they protest. As for the economic woes caused by high spending, high tax, high welfarism and leftist economic illiteracy? Blamed on Brexit and continued and accelerated in such places as Spain and Canada.
This isn’t a party ready to understand what the Laffer Curve is.
Spain has had GDP growth, but it’s illusory. Opened borders and increased population can create a very short term GDP jolt (some of those people will work, but there is an illusory jolt of activity in the economy from them spending money the government has borrowed to give them). Spanish unemployment is high, and the EU has pumped in development funds (a reward for taking the migrants). Such funds will never be offered to the UK.
Canada, meanwhile, is a disaster. Unemployment is rising (currently 7 per cent). Some 84,000 jobs were lost in February alone. Productivity is low. Between 2020-2024 real GDP per capita declined by 0.4 per cent every year. There’s a very small GDP growth rate. Again, it’s illusory and again it’s built on population growth from open borders and vast government spending, not real benefits to existing Canadians. Canada has very high household debt rates, very high government debt and spending, and a runaway deficit. Sickened by progressive policies, Canada’s most industrial, resource rich, successful and prosperous province, Alberta, is looking to secede and either go independent or apply to join the US.
This formula (even more immigration to get a temporary GDP jolt while your existing citizens actually have a per capita GDP reduction experience along with alienation, crime, cost of living, energy bills and housing struggles that get worse) is what Labour means by ‘hope’.
The dark path is already here, and Labour MPs are the ones walking it while refusing to turn around.
