Keir Starmer‘s Labour government in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is currently on thin ice as many in the party want the Prime Minister gone.
After a landslide mandate in 2024, when Starmer led the Labour Party back to power after 14 years, his popularity was like a wave. Just two years into his term, Starmer seems to be gasping for air as the far-right Reform Party gains popularity and his own MPs cautiously call for a leadership change.
The UK Prime Minister is so far adamant that he would not quit. But according to reports in British media, more than a fifth of the party’s lawmakers in the House of Commons have urged him to stand down. This is especially true after the Labour Party lost the recent local body polls to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK.
The far right also has another emerging leader besides Farage: Tommy Robinson, the anti-immigrant activist who wants to “reclaim the UK” rather than “reform” it, as Reform UK’s leader does.
While the far right has been on the rise in Europe and around the world for some time now, the UK wouldn’t have thought it would be in these crossroads just two years ago.
But what changed in the two years since Keir Starmer brought the Labour Party back into power for the first time since 2010? Quite frankly, everything.
The left vs right tussle in Labour ranks
The Labour Party has traditionally been a left-leaning voice in the UK, with its core values rooted in democratic socialism, wealth redistribution and public ownership. It has been this way for a century, with the opposition being Tory conservatives, who lean right. But Keir Starmer, wary of the rise of the far right in the country, tried to change the party’s core.
He positioned himself as a centre-right voice, who is harsher on immigration than his Labour predecessors would be, almost immediately after taking the PM chair.
Since then, he has faced mounting pressure over his administration’s continued shift toward conservative and centre-right economic and immigration policies. Starmer has defended this approach as necessary to maintain fiscal stability. But Labour’s mostly working-class voting base hasn’t liked the shift.
Only a small fraction of his original voting base continues to approve of his government’s direction, leaving the party vulnerable to surging opposition groups like Reform UK.
The shift
The most popular candidate to replace Keir Starmer as Labour leader and UK Prime Minister is Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham.
Burnham, who was part of Gordon Brown’s last Labour Cabinet, hasn’t been in parliament since 2017. But he is viewed as more left-leaning and closer to party values than Starmer. He is also viewed as an able communicator, while Starmer’s messaging is often described as “dull”. These are the two main factors behind Burnham’s rise in popularity.
There are other candidates as well, like former health secretary Wes Streeting, who resigned from his post on Friday and threw his hat in the ring for any future leadership change. But he is considered centre right like Starmer, so that might play against him.
So Starmer shifted the Labour Party from its traditional left-wing stance to a more centre-right one. Now it seems it’s time to shift back. Many say that is the only way to effectively counter the rise of the far-right.
The resignations
Before health secretary Wes Streeting quit the Keir Starmer government, as many as four junior ministers resigned in a matter of hours.
These were safeguarding minister Jess Phillips, junior housing minister Miatta Fahnbulleh, victims and violence against women and girls minister Alex Davies-Jones, and junior health minister Zubir Ahmed.
In her resignation letter, Phillips tore into Starmer for bringing no real change on the issue of violence against women and girls and the Lord Mandelson-Jeffrey Epstein saga.
“It would be remiss of me not to say that real change and direction in this area usually came from threats made by me in light of catastrophic mistakes. The Mandelson saga, whenever it bubbled up, made Number 10 kick into gear on the subject in order to prove our credentials,” she wrote.
