As calls grow within the Labour Party for Prime Minister Keir Starmer to set out an orderly transition programme whereby he would resign as leader of the Labour Party, following the disastrous Scottish and Welsh national elections and English local election results, the question on many people’s minds is should Labour stick with Starmer or twist and bring in a new leader?
What is the situation for Labour?
In many respects the Labour Party is in a curious position. On the one hand it still has a huge majority of MPs in the House of Commons, as it has had since the general election on 4 July 2024. This should have produced an opportunity for radical and popular Labour policies to bring about the change that they had promised during the general election campaign.
However, as we know that has not happened. Instead the Labour leadership, dominated by the discredited Labour Together faction, lead by people like Peter Mandelson and Morgan McSweeney, have pursued policies which have seen more like a continuation of the austerity and lack of vision that the Tories showed at various times between 2010 and 2024. In so doing Labour have managed to alienate large sections of the population including their own base.
It is true that the large parliamentary majority was also a very shallow one, gained on just under 34% of the vote, but it is still the case that the Labour Party has now fallen to opinion poll levels which have never been seen before, consistently scoring under 20%. They have lost about half of their support from the general election of 2024 and the evidence suggests that the vast majority of it has gone to the Greens or Lib Dems and not to Reform.
Despite this, the Labour government has insisted for nearly two years now on implementing policies aimed at appeasing Reform voters, policies which merely serve to legitimise the kind of policies Reform have been putting forward, while barely winning a single vote back for the Labour Party.
So, we came to the 7 May and the utterly disastrous election results for the Labour Party. In England, by 4:30 on the Saturday afternoon of 9 May Labour had lost 1,113 council seats, while in Scotland they won 17 out of 129 seats in the Holyrood parliament they used to dominate and in Wales, which had been won by Labour in every single major election since 1922, the Labour Party gained a paltry nine seats out of 96 in the Welsh Senedd.
Meanwhile, here in the North East, Labour lost the councils of Gateshead, South Tyneside and Sunderland to Reform, while Labour representation on Newcastle City Council fell to just two seats.
This is the background, to the many calls from Labour MPs and others in the party for Starmer to step aside, including a challenge to the cabinet to act by Monday 11 May from Catherine West MP. These have included numerous North East Labour MPs and the North East Combined Authority Mayor Kim McGuinness was reported as saying that Starmer was living on “borrowed time” and that he had “a very short window to turn this around”.
Why should Starmer go?
It was revealed in the Guardian on Saturday 9 May that a poll of Labour party members do not believe that Keir Starmer can turn the fortunes of the Labour Party around.
45% of those members polled said that the Prime Minister should step down, with the mayor of Greater Manchester Andy Burnham as the clear front runner and first preference for 42% of members. Additionally, more than one-third of Labour Party members polled said that they were now considering resigning from the party.
The poll was undertaken by the think tank Compass. Lena Swedlow, deputy director of Compass commented: “voters made their displeasure with Keir Starmer’s leadership heard on Thursday and now Labour Party members have too. Nearly half want him to stand down and over half don’t think he’s the man for the job.
“In the face of an incredibly serious economic situation at home and abroad, it’s essential that the country and the party have a leader that they can trust. There is a clear desire for change in both the politics and personnel of this government. Making these changes in an orderly, measured, considered way will be crucial for the stability and prosperity of the country.”
What Starmer’s allies say
Meanwhile allies of Keir Starmer spent the weekend after the English local elections and national polls in Scotland and Wales, defending his leadership and still insisting that it was the wrong time for a change of leader. Lucy Powell the deputy leader of the Labour Party showed her loyalty by expressing the kinds of sentiments that a number of allies of Starmer had said, commenting: “What I would say to people is, thinking that setting out some kind of timetable would put to bed the issues of leadership, I think is actually the wrong conclusion here,”.
Interestingly Powell said that any leadership election would be a distraction, but was seemingly unable to suggest any positive reasons why Starmer should stay as Prime Minister.
Starmer himself responded on Saturday 9 May by still insisting that he was going nowhere and bringing back two Labour veterans into the cabinet; Gordon Brown and Harriet Harman.
A bleak future for Labour if Starmer stays
In April Keir Starmer was reported to have an approval rate of -45%, which can be compared to Donald Trump’s latest approval rate which is about -16%. It is very hard to imagine that Keir Starmer can come back from such a disastrous approval rating. This huge unpopularity is also reflected anecdotally by Labour Party members who campaigned for Labour for the local elections going by what they heard on the doorstep.
It is therefore hard, if not impossible to imagine that Keir Starmer will be any kind of asset for the Labour Party at the next general election. The conclusion then can only be drawn that if Starmer remains as Prime Minister, he will be helping to facilitate Nigel Farage gaining the keys to Number Ten.
The response of Starmer to the disastrous results that the Labour Party had on 7 May probably tells us all we need to know about why Starmer should go. The fact that he has seen it necessary to bring back veterans of the Labour government from 20 years ago in Harriet Harman and Gordon Brown points only too clearly to the absolute vacuum of ideas at the centre of his government.
This of course can be contrasted sharply with the thought-out policies linked to what has become known as Manchesterism, which Andy Burnham could offer if he was allowed back into parliament and could then become leader of the Labour Party.
The allies of Starmer say with some justification that the turnover of leaders in the Tory party was one of the reasons for their heavy defeat in the general election of 2024. However, that defeat came after a large number of prime ministers had been tried out, which did indeed make them look chaotic.
It is worth remembering however that in both 1992 and 2019, the Conservative party won general elections having replaced unpopular leaders not long beforehand. The history would seem to suggest that if the Labour Party can replace Keir Starmer in an orderly way and with a genuinely popular leader, then they could still recover before the next general election.
It seems utterly bizarre that such a discredited and unpopular leader should stumble on, when there is a ready-made replacement who has real vision and a plan, waiting in the wings.
The outlook for the Labour Party at the next general election if Keir Starmer remained as Prime Minister would appear to be very bleak indeed.
