In 2020 the American activist and anthropologist David Graeber made a prediction: ‘The Labour Party under Keir Starmer will abandon its core idealism and principles and won’t even gain tactical advantage. It will be a party which gives no one a reason to vote for it – and no one will, in fact, vote for it’ (1). Graeber died shortly after uttering these words, but his warning proved prophetic.
On 7 May, at the local and devolved elections held across the United Kingdom, Starmer’s incumbent Labour Party suffered an almighty battering at the hands of the British electorate. In Scotland, Labour posted its worst performance since the creation of the devolved Holyrood parliament 27 years ago, finishing a distant second behind the pro-independence Scottish National Party (SNP). In Wales, it was beaten by the progressive nationalists Plaid Cymru, with Welsh Labour leader Eluned Morgan losing her seat in the Senedd alongside 21 of her colleagues.
In England, Labour shed nearly 1,500 council seats and forfeited control of 38 municipal councils, its base splintering between Zack Polanski’s eco-populist Greens on the left, Ed Davey’s Liberal Democrats in the centre, and Nigel Farage’s MAGA-lite Reform UK on the far right. Swathes of urban England, including southeast London and central Manchester, turned green, while Reform’s vote rose fastest in those parts of the country – Sunderland, Barnsley, Newcastle-under-Lyme – that backed Brexit in 2016.
In the lead-up to the elections, Labour, conscious of the prime minister’s historic unpopularity, braced itself for a bruising set of results. The polls had been steady for months and setbacks were expected. Yet the immense scale of the losses – before May, Labour had won every major election in Wales since 1922 – took even battle-hardened insiders by surprise. ‘There’s blood and guts splattered everywhere,’ one party source briefed the Observer, anonymously, on 10 May. ‘The anger is visceral’ (2).
In the hours after the vote, calls went up both inside and outside the Labour Party for Starmer to resign. But Starmer, a former Director of Public Prosecutions, full of bureaucratic stubbornness, resisted. On 11 May he delivered a set-piece speech in front of the British media. Downing Street billed it as a thunderous reassertion of the prime minister’s authority, an opportunity for Starmer to pitch in the clearest possible terms his latest galvanising vision for the country. Instead, the Labour leader reeled off a list of platitudes and injunctions – analysis matters but argument matters more, ‘stories beat spreadsheets’ – before announcing, ‘subject to public interest’, the renationalisation of British Steel. Commentators were confused. Hadn’t Starmer already renationalised British Steel when his government seized control of the Scunthorpe steelworks from its Chinese owners last spring? Was this meek soliloquy really the sum total of Starmer’s career-salvaging reset?
Either way, it didn’t work. By the next morning, junior ministers in Starmer’s government had started to quit and the bond markets were growing jittery. In the City of London, UK borrowing costs hit an 18-year high. On 13 May 11 Labour-affiliated trade unions issued a joint statement saying ‘at some stage’ Starmer would have to go (3). On 14 May Starmer’s high-profile health secretary, Wes Streeting, resigned. Within hours, Andy Burnham, the widely popular Labour mayor of Greater Manchester, announced his intention to stand for a seat in the House of Commons.
Starmer’s failure could be a case study in the collapse of European centrism. Over the past two decades almost every aspect of life in the UK has got worse
The message was clear: Starmer’s time was up. On 18 June Burnham will fight a by-election in Makerfield, a working-class constituency within Greater Manchester. Assuming he wins – nothing is guaranteed; support for Reform in the area is strong – Burnham is highly likely to replace Starmer as leader of the Labour Party and the UK would have a new prime minister by the end of the summer, the country’s seventh in ten years.
Starmer’s failure, so crisply anticipated by Graeber, could be a case study in the collapse of European centrism. Over the past two decades, as austerity and privatisation have oxidised the country’s infrastructure, almost every aspect of life in the UK has got worse. The National Health Service has buckled and the number of years the average British citizen can expect to spend in good health has fallen, from 63 in 2016 to 61 in 2026. Housing costs have soared, leaving young people, laden with university debt, locked out of the property market. Social mobility has been squeezed as working-class wages have flatlined.
Meanwhile, large parts of Britain have grown poorer relative to other European states. Today, residents of the former rust-belt town of Gliwice, in Poland’s southern Silesia region, are some 45% better off than their counterparts in Darlington, a city in the English northeast, once living costs and purchasing power are factored in.
The gutting of Britain’s social services has been accompanied by a parallel decline in public confidence. Last year, a poll of more than 20,000 people carried out by the campaign group More in Common found that 87% of Brits expressed either ‘not very much trust’ in the Westminster political class or ‘none at all’. Revealingly, a sizeable minority of poll respondents identified with the phrase: ‘When I think about our political and social institutions, I cannot help thinking “just let them all burn”.’ More in Common was founded in 2016 to foster better community relations across the UK following the murder of Labour MP Jo Cox by a far-right activist named Thomas Mair. Nine years after Cox’s killing, the group seemed demoralised by the survey’s findings. ‘In many ways, Britain in 2025 feels shattered,’ it concluded.
When he was first elected as prime minister in 2024, ending an extended period of scandal-ridden Conservative rule, Starmer appeared to understand the scope of the challenge ahead. ‘Our country has voted decisively … for national renewal,’ he announced from the steps of Downing Street in July that year. ‘Brick by brick, we will rebuild’ (4). However, once in office, it became clear that Starmer’s modus operandi was continuity not renewal, stasis rather than innovation.
Strategic investments
His administration proposed harsh cuts to the welfare system, similar to those pursued by the Conservatives, alongside cuts to state-funded winter fuel payments for pensioners. The ambitious programme of constitutional reform that Starmer had outlined during the early stages of his leadership (5) – he succeeded the socialist Jeremy Corbyn as party leader in April 2020 – was ditched and a bill to improve the rights of British workers diluted. Strategic investments were made, including in defence and steel production. But faced with the kind of expansive state spending needed to fully revive and rebalance the UK economy (northern transport projects, green industrial hubs, regional wealth funds), Starmer’s chancellor of the exchequer, Rachel Reeves, deferred instead to a set of conservative fiscal rules rooted in Treasury orthodoxy.
The consequences have not been good. GDP growth may be gradually returning to the UK but regional inequality remains rife. Financialised urban centres such as Edinburgh and London boom while ex-industrial towns struggle against the effects of depopulation and high-street decay.
Starmer, a human rights lawyer prior to entering politics, bolstered his Blairite social platform with a series of assaults on free speech, in keeping with the UK’s Atlanticist foreign policy
Starmer, a human rights lawyer prior to entering politics, bolstered his Blairite social platform with a series of draconian assaults on free speech, in keeping with the UK’s Atlanticist foreign policy. The pro-Palestinian movement, its ranks swelled by Israel’s genocidal attack on Gaza, became the focal point of his government’s fury. Several of its organisers were rounded up, prosecuted and jailed.
On 29 April 2026 two Jewish men were stabbed on the streets of Golders Green in north London. Starmer responded by raising the UK terror threat level from ‘substantial’ to ‘severe’ and by casting pro-Palestinian marches as expressions of anti-Semitism. That the Golders Green assailant, Essa Suleiman, a 45-year-old British national, had attacked another, non-Jewish, man earlier that day, and had a history of mental health problems, did not factor into Starmer’s thinking.
On the international stage, Starmer also floundered. He flattered Donald Trump only to be scolded by the US president for refusing to dispatch British warships to the Strait of Hormuz. Ironically, Trump’s criticisms of Starmer’s apparent reluctance to get involved in the Iran war were unwarranted. In March and April, dozens of US warplanes landed at RAF Fairford, a military base in Gloucestershire. The planes stopped on British soil, for maintenance and refuelling en route to Iran, with Starmer’s consent.
Starmer’s premiership was damaged by his weakness, his incompetence and his authoritarian drift, but it was undone by his tendency towards controversy and grift. Having pledged to ‘clean up’ British politics following the debasement and corruption of the Boris Johnson years, he proceeded, once in office, to muddy it even further. As global inflation linked to Covid and the Ukraine war bore down on ordinary Brits, Starmer accepted more than £100,000 of free gifts in the form of concert tickets, clothes and accommodation (6). Almost as soon as he became prime minister, senior aides and advisors, including his chief of staff Sue Gray, were sacked or resigned. Flagship policies were rolled out and just as rapidly axed. Such failures exposed the technocratic emptiness of his project. Appearing before a parliamentary committee last year, he spoke of the experience of governing as like ‘pulling levers’ that generated no response. Starmerism, it seemed, was an ideological void.
In February 2025 the BBC reported that Rachel Reeves had been investigated for claiming excess expenses while working in the private sector as a banker between 2006 and 2009. In September 2025 Starmer’s deputy prime minister, Angela Rayner, quit after it emerged she hadn’t paid enough tax on one of her properties. (She was subsequently cleared by HMRC of any wrongdoing.) The appointment and subsequent removal of Peter Mandelson – for years a close personal friend of Jeffrey Epstein’s – as Britain’s ambassador to the US in 2025 shredded what was left of Starmer’s public credibility.
Voters recoiled and the Labour Party sank to unprecedented lows in the polls. On 7 May just 46% of Labour’s 2024 voters remained loyal to the party; 22% defected to the Greens and 6% to Reform. The bleeding of Labour’s base to Polanski’s unapologetically leftwing Green Party was particularly pronounced in cities – Manchester, Sheffield, Leeds, Oxford and Exeter – with youthful, multicultural populations.
Starmer became an MP in 2015, emerging from the hard centre of the Labour Party and rising to prominence as a ‘moderate’ during the internal turbulence of the Corbyn years. As leader, his goal was to expunge the socialist elements from Labour’s ranks and guide the party back into power. In 2022 Tony Blair praised his ‘strength, determination and intelligence’; he had given Labour a ‘renewed sense of purpose and mission’ (7). In fact, Starmer’s leadership has become existential for Labour. In the aftermath of May’s debacle, party strategists can no longer look at a map of the UK and identify safe seats or historic heartlands.
This process of erosion has been under way for a while. Scotland was Britain’s first ‘red wall’ to fall. The advent of devolution in 1999 gave the SNP, for years a peripheral force in Scottish politics, an electoral foothold. The party replaced Labour in power at Holyrood for the first time in 2007. In the 2014 independence referendum, Scots voted by a ten-point margin against leaving the UK, but anti-Westminster sentiment nonetheless spread further among working-class communities. Brexit in 2016 flipped England’s post-industrial belt, as historically Labour-supporting constituencies in the North backed Farage’s populist push to leave the European Union.
In Wales, the process took a little longer. Initially, Welsh voters were less enthusiastic about devolution than their Scottish counterparts and Welsh Labour’s hegemony more culturally entrenched. However, over time, support for Labour slowly ebbed away. On 7 May it dissipated entirely. Under the leadership of the Welsh-speaking former journalist Rhun ap Iorwerth, Plaid Cymru won 43 of the Senedd’s 96 seats, nine more than Reform and 34 more than Labour. On 12 May ap Iorwerth was sworn in as Wales’s first ever nationalist first minister. ‘Something has stirred in the soul of Wales,’ he said during his acceptance speech in the Senedd chamber at Cardiff Bay, ‘a new confidence … never to be narrowed again by the naysayers with other priorities in other places’ (8).
Covid-19 was a key moment in Welsh politics. Health is a devolved issue. As the virus spread, Welsh politicians imposed lockdowns, distributed vaccines and managed the impact of the outbreak on the country’s health system. There was a sense that the devolved government in Cardiff, then led by Labour’s Mark Drakeford, had handled the crisis more effectively than the Conservative one in London and that Wales would therefore benefit from a further extension of its autonomy. Support for Welsh independence is particularly strong among young voters, who were born or grew up after the creation of the Welsh parliament and view self-government as second nature. As in Scotland, devolution has killed the party that created it. Tony Blair’s Labour government legislated for Welsh home rule in the late 1990s; one poll published last year found that fully 41% of Welsh people would vote for independence given the opportunity.
Real threat to UK union
With pro-independence administrations in place in Cardiff and Edinburgh, and the Irish republican Sinn Féin the largest party in Northern Ireland’s devolved assembly since 2022, the threat to the UK union is now very real. Plaid, eager to establish its governing credentials, won’t push for an independence referendum in its first term, and the SNP, currently led by Nicola Sturgeon’s strategic former deputy John Swinney, will approach the question of Scottish secession with care, eager to avoid a repeat of its 2014 defeat. But the political reality is clear: three of the UK’s four constituent nations are plotting their exit routes, with the support of Polanski’s insurgent Greens. The unionist underpinnings of the British state have never looked so uncertain.
The more immediate spectre hanging over Starmer’s implosion is that of Farage and Reform. Reform won 1,300 council seats in May and took control of 13 English councils, some at Labour’s expense and some at the Tories’. In those parts of the country where Reform held power prior to 7 May, its record in office has been disastrous. Having promised to slash local government levies as part of a DOGE-style drive against waste and excess spending, the Reform-led administration in Worcestershire has raised taxes by 9%. In West Northamptonshire, Reform legislators have presided over an exponential increase in pot-hole related complaints. In Staffordshire, the party has lost two successive council leaders to racism scandals.
At the same time, Farage has been forced to answer questions about an undeclared £5m donation from the Thai-based British crypto-billionaire Christopher Harborne. Farage insists that the money was an ‘unconditional’ personal gift bestowed on him as a reward for his Brexit campaigning. But questions remain and an inquiry, launched by the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner at Westminster, is currently under way.
UK-wide, Reform currently sits at 26% the polls (9). Were a general election held tomorrow, it would almost certainly emerge as the single largest bloc in parliament. Farage was delighted with his party’s performance on 7 May. ‘What’s happened is truly historic,’ he told the BBC as the votes were being tallied. ‘The first and most obvious [thing] is that two-party politics is now finished.’ On this point, he is surely correct.
But his plan for Britain’s future is nonetheless dystopian: mass deportations, ICE-inspired immigration raids, an expansion of the surveillance state (10), and an anti-woke ‘war’ on environmental legislation, beginning just as the ecological crisis starts to accelerate. The UK’s political norms are crumbling. Starmer’s failure puts Farage within touching distance of Downing Street, a prospect that will supercharge the secessionist movements in the Celtic nations. Graeber didn’t just prophesy the death of the Labour Party, but of the United Kingdom itself.
