Impatience for change was the core message of the May 7 election results – but voters remain sharply divided about who might deliver it.
Prime minister Sir Keir Starmer sought to acknowledge public frustration with his government and his own leadership, by pledging to deliver bigger change, with greater urgency, if given the chance to keep calm and carry on in dangerous times. But his speech on Monday (11) failed to stem public calls from an increasing number of his backbench MPs – backed up, privately, by some cabinet colleagues – for Starmer to offer a timetable for a leadership change.
That reflected the scale of Labour’s heavy losses to four different opponents on every front of Britain’s multinational political map. Labour was eclipsed in Wales by Plaid Cymru, failed to mount a serious challenge to the Scottish National Party government in Scotland, suffered heavy losses to Reform UK in council seats across northern England, while seeing the Green Party make significant gains in major cities, including London.
So the prime minister’s fragile grip on Downing Street appeared to be under growing and, probably, irresistible pressure. Yet, nobody is sure about who might replace him. Andy Burnham believes that his experience as Greater Manchester mayor could enable him to become the northern force to shake-up Westminster. Burnham has now emerged as the frontrunner in both the opinion polling on hypothetical prime ministers, and the betting odds too. Yet Burnham will not be eligible to run for the Labour party leadership until he is an MP again – so his participation in any future leadership depends on whether he can find a path to parliament in time.
The 2026 elections have reinforced Reform UK’s conviction that its leader, Nigel Farage, is surging towards power. Reform UK made the most gains in council seats in England, and even tied with Labour as the second largest party in the Scottish parliament.
“Britain voted Reform” read the placards held up by Farage’s new councillors in Havering as the party leader. Havering had itself voted for Reform UK – giving the party control of its first London council. Yet that victory in a borough that tends to identify as much with Essex as the rest of the national capital was not repeated elsewhere in London. The party failed in Bexley, where Reform’s shaky reputation as political novices, having swept the seats in neighbouring Kent County Council last year, saw the Conservatives re-elected.
Reform’s 26 per cent of the vote in the local elections in England was six points behind last year’s total.
Reform did best of all in Wales, where they won 29 per cent of the national vote, compared to 16 per cent in Scotland. Yet the prominence of Reform helped to make Plaid Cymru - who have never led a government - seem like the safer choice. So Welsh voters ended a century of Labour political dominance by creating a new two-party battle, between Plaid Cymru and Reform UK this time.
The Welsh result illustrates a wider story: that the rise of Reform makes it the most polarising force in British politics. Its candidates and supporters see it as the new voice of the “silent majority” – about to restore common sense to the political classes. But many others are fearful of its rapid rise, within and beyond Britain’s ethnic minority communities, who are about half as likely to support the party as white British voters.
Home affairs spokesman Zia Yusuf, making Reform’s case for mass deportations on an unprecedented scale, does has some reach, however. Around a sixth of British Asians say they are open to Reform – while two-thirds rule it out. South Asian Muslim support is closer to one in ten. Reform has had to expel councillors revealed to hold overtly racist views, with the frequency of vetting failures reinforcing doubts about the party’s mainstream credentials.
One laudable aim of Starmer’s political project – in the era of Brexit – was to seek to bridge the cultural divides in British politics and society, rather to polarise and reinforce them. Its landslide victory – on just a third of the vote – made it a party of just about everywhere, with MPs representing inner cities to small towns and the coast. But it was a fragile landslide. Repeating the pattern with just a sixth of the vote risks making Labour the party of nowhere at all, if it cannot recover.
England’s second city of Birmingham has all five UK-wide political parties represented on a hung city council, along with a group of independent councillors, too. No two political parties together come anywhere close to a majority of the seats. The second city’s patchwork political map could stand as a broader metaphor for British politics in 2026: a society where every political tribe is a now minority – though some sound more aware of that than others.
