British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has vowed to keep fighting, describing his government as a ’10-year project’ despite growing calls for him to resign following his party’s defeat in local elections on Thursday.
Starmer’s Labor Party suffered the worst local election losses for a governing party in more than three decades, while the populist Reform UK party made significant gains — prompting a growing number of Labor MPs to call for his resignation.
Catherine West, a former minister in the Starmer government, threatened to seek the support of MPs to trigger a leadership contest unless her cabinet took steps to remove him by Monday.
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According to party rules, 20% of the party’s members in Parliament, or 81 parliamentarians, would be needed to trigger a leadership challenge. To date, around 30 Labor members of Parliament have publicly expressed their opposition to his leadership.
Asked by the Observer newspaper in an interview published this Sunday whether he would lead the Labor Party into the next general election and serve a second full term, Starmer replied: ‘Yes, I will.’
He added: ‘I will not walk away from the work I was elected to do in July 2024. I will not plunge the country into chaos.’
If Starmer is removed in the coming weeks, the UK will have its seventh prime minister in the last decade.
‘A REAL BEATING’
So far, Starmer’s cabinet has remained loyal despite Thursday’s losses.
Education Minister Bridget Phillipson said she was confident he could turn things around, telling Sky News on Sunday that Starmer would set a ‘new direction’ for the UK in a speech on Monday.
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‘We took a real beating from voters, there’s no denying it,’ she said. ‘We have to seriously reflect on this.’
West, who served as junior foreign minister until Starmer fired her last year, said she would listen to Starmer’s speech on Monday before making a final decision on whether to launch a leadership challenge.
Asked if she could guarantee the numbers, West told the BBC: ‘We’ll find out.’
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However, some left-wing Labor MPs – often critical of Starmer – urged peers not to support his plan.
John McDonnell, a Labor MP who was the party’s finance chief during Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, suggested that people in the ‘shadows’ were trying to exploit West’s concerns to force an early contest. Another MP, Ian Byrne, warned against a hasty leadership bid, saying she could be ‘manipulated into a coronation by a party clique’.
Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham, seen as a possible left-wing candidate, is not currently an MP and would therefore not be eligible to stand in a contest that is held soon.
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Starmer is expected to call the next national election by 2029.
