LONDON — Early results Friday fromnationwide elections in Britainsuggested a historic drubbing for Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Labour Party and sweepinggains for hard-right Reform U.K., led by Trump ally Nigel Farage.
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Though many results were still coming in Friday morning, the overall picture will heap pressure on Starmer, an unpopular leader beset by speculation his colleagues may move against him.
“The results are tough, they are very tough, and there’s no sugarcoating it,” Starmer said Friday.
But he dismissed calls for him to stand down.
“Tough days like this don’t weaken my resolve to deliver the change that I promised,” he said, though he acknowledged that voters were clearly unhappy about “the pace of change” that Labour had delivered. He vowed he was “not going to walk away from those challenges and plunge the country into chaos.”
Labour losses and Reform gains were no surprise; polls had long telegraphed the direction of travel just two years after Starmer led Labour to power in a 2024 landslide. However with votes still being counted, the scale of Labour’s losses appeared epic.
Reform won hundreds of local council seats in working-class areas in England’s north, wiping the ruling party out in places like Hartlepool that were once solid Labour turf.
Farage called it “a truly historic shift in British politics” and that Labour was being “wiped out by Reform in many of their traditional areas.”
Though seen as a barometer of public anger, the prime minister’s name itself was not on the ballot.
Source: Drudge Report
