Britain’s ruling Labour party faces bruising losses in local polls

LONDON - British voters head to the polls on May 7 for local elections set to pile more misery on unpopular Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer and cement the rise of right- and left-wing populists.

Millions of people are eligible to cast ballots across Scotland, England and Wales, in Mr Starmer’s biggest ballot-box test since winning the July 2024 general election by a landslide.

Surveys predict dire results for Labour, which is likely to accelerate talk of a leadership challenge against Mr Starmer, although no obvious successor exists.

The hard-right Reform UK party and the left-wing Greens are expected to make gains as voters turn away from Britain’s establishment parties.

“It’s partly to do with the government making some unpopular decisions early on in its term and its leader, a hopeless communicator, failing to convey a sufficient sense of change,” said political scientist Tim Bale.

“And it’s partly to do with an electorate that simply has less patience and less party loyalty than ever,” the professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London told AFP.

Surveys suggest Labour will lose control of the devolved Welsh government in Cardiff for the first time since the country of three million people got its own parliament 27 years ago.

A YouGov poll published earlier in May showed Reform neck-and-neck with pro-independence Plaid Cymru.

Losing power in Wales would be “disastrous” for Mr Starmer’s party, according to Professor Laura McAllister, a politics professor at Cardiff University.

“I think it will take quite some renewal for Labour to get over that,” she told AFP.

Britain’s ruling party is also fearful of a humiliating result in Scotland, where voters will elect members of the 129-seat devolved Scottish parliament.

When Mr Starmer entered Downing Street on a wave of enthusiasm in 2024, Labour was confident it could regain power north of the border for the first time since 2007.

‘Least-worst option’

But surveys now suggest the Scottish National Party (SNP) will extend its 19-year grip on the administration in Edinburgh, with a YouGov poll suggesting Reform could beat Labour to second place.

In England, pollster Robert Hayward has predicted Labour could lose about 1,850 of the roughly 2,550 local authority seats it is defending.

Some 5,000 council seats are up for grabs across the country.

Mr Hayward has tipped Reform to gain some 1,550 seats from Labour and Ms Kemi Badenoch’s right-wing Conservatives, mostly in white, working-class areas.

The Greens, with a pro-Gaza message, are expected to gain hundreds of councillors at Labour’s expense, particularly in London.

Mr Starmer has swerved from one policy misstep to another since ending 14 years of consecutive Tory rule, and is currently engulfed in a scandal over sacked US envoy Peter Mandelson.

He has failed to spur economic growth as British residents continue to feel the effects of a years-long cost-of-living pinch, but has been praised for resisting US President Donald Trump over Iran.

The Green party and Reform “are proposing eye-catching, even if some would say simplistic, solutions to problems that Labour and the Conservatives have struggled to resolve”, said Prof Bale.

The media is awash with rumours that former Cabinet ministers might try to oust Mr Starmer if the results are bad, but any challenger would need to be nominated by 20 per cent of the party’s MPs.

“I’m betting he will stumble on as the current least-worst option but it’s not a pretty sight,” Professor Steven Fielding, a Labour expert at Nottingham University, told AFP.

The Times newspaper reported on May 5 that several Labour lawmakers were planning to publish an open letter demanding that Mr Starmer set a date for his resignation if the results were bad.

But government minister Steve Reed told Times Radio it was “absolute nonsense” to suggest Labour would imitate the Tories, who cycled through four leaders between 2019 and 2022.

Labour MPs are “sick and tired of all this psychodrama”, he said. AFP