Dem
47
GOP
53
Between global warming, population shifts, AI, disinformation campaigns propagated over social media, at least two ongoing wars, the growing wealth gap, topsy-turvy economies, the obsolescence of many jobs, pandemics and a host of other issues, it's a challenging time to be alive. And this has had a worrisome effect in most democracies (and, very possibly, in nations with other government types, though it's most obvious in democracies). In short, you have a faction that thinks the solution to these problems is to move backward, a faction of roughly equal size that thinks the solution to these problems is to push forward, and a "pox on both your houses" faction that pretty much blames everything on whichever faction happens to be in power.
This is a recipe for, well, constant changes in leadership. The U.S. is an obvious example; the presidency has shifted parties in the last three presidential elections, and it will probably happen again in 2028. The U.K. is an even more obvious example—not surprising, since leaders there don't have the same kind of 4-year guarantee that U.S. presidents have. At the moment, the Brits are on their sixth PM in the last 10 years, and there's a chance they will be moving on to their seventh in short order, because PM Sir Keir Starmer is right now in the midst of a budding rebellion.
Of course, we are not experts in British politics. However, we have readers who are. So, we turned to A.B. in Amman, Jordan, previously known as A.B. in Lichfield, England, UK. to give us a breakdown. Readers G.S. in Basingstoke, England, UK, and S.T. in Worcestershire, England, UK, were kind enough to read over the submission, and to offer comments and suggestions. Here is the final result:
When the Keir Starmer-led Labour Party won the 2024 U.K. general election in a landslide, many of us hoped that this would bring to an end the post-Brexit Conservative Party political psychodrama that saw us cycle through four Prime Ministers in 8 years, with none of those leaders lasting more than 3 years and 45 days, and the catastrophic Liz Truss lasting just 50 days (famously being outlasted by a lettuce). It now seems, alas, that we were overly optimistic. We are less than 2 years into Starmer's term, and the Labour Party seems to be descending into similar chaos, with a very real chance that Starmer will be gone by July; he needs to last to July 5 to reach 2 years in office. By the summer, we could well be on to our seventh Prime Minister in 10 years, and the last three (Liz Truss, Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer) may all have lasted less than 2 years each.
The immediate catalysts for the latest instability were Labour's poor performances in the May 7 local elections in England and the elections for the national legislatures of Scotland and Wales on the same day. But before briefly attempting to outline the causes of the current mess, it's worth taking a historical detour to stress just how unusual this period of instability is. The last time we had three consecutive Prime Ministers who each lasted less than 2 years in office was 1922-1924, when Bonar Law, Stanley Baldwin and Ramsey MacDonald each lasted less than a year. But while it is true this was a period of post-First World War instability, it is also the case that Law resigned in 1923 due to terminal throat cancer which killed him before the year was out, so this doesn't quite seem comparable (Baldwin and MacDonald would also go on to have consequential extended returns to office in the immediate future).
So, that then takes us back to 1865-1868, when Lord Russell (some readers are likely more familiar with his grandson Bertrand), the Earl of Derby, and Benjamin Disraeli each had short terms in office. This was a highly unusual situation where Russell chose to resign on a point of principle despite his Liberal party holding a majority in the Commons, and Derby and Disraeli then successively struggled to shepherd a minority Conservative government through a period of office until they were crushed by William Gladstone in the 1868 election. But all three men had or would have consequential longer terms in office, while Derby was the longest-serving Conservative Party leader in history (22 years!), so again the comparison doesn't seem wholly apt. In any case, that I'm having to reach so far back to find examples that are even remotely comparable helps to demonstrate just how unusual the current situation is for British politics.
So, back to those election results from May 7. The reality is that both of the two parties that have dominated our politics since 1945 did very badly. In England, Labour lost almost 1,500 of the 2,196 seats they were defending, while the Conservatives—defending fewer seats due to doing so badly in local elections in the lead-up to their 2024 general election loss—still contrived to lose 563 of the 1,134 seats they were defending. Of our more established parties, only the Liberal Democrats (the smaller centrist party filling, in our traditional-two-party-dominant sandwich) had cause to feel pleased, increasing their seat total by 155, and finishing ahead of the Conservatives on both number of local councillors elected and number of local councils controlled. But the big winners on the night were populist right- and left-wing parties, with ReformUK on the populist right increasing their total of councillors by 1,452, while over on the populist left the Green Party increased their seat total by 441 councillors.
The Scottish Parliament election was more difficult to parse. The governing pro-independence SNP lost six seats, while Labour lost five (still finishing second) and the Conservatives lost 19—more than half their seat total. The Liberal Democrats made modest gains, but again the real winners were arguably ReformUK, who won 17 seats (from a previous big, fat zero) while the Scottish Greens—a pro-independence party wholly separate from their English and Welsh counterparts—almost doubled their seat tally to 15. But as the SNP and Labour remain the two largest parties in Edinburgh, the Reform and Green gains weren't as seismic as they were in England.
The real political earthquake was in Wales, where Labour has been the largest party for more than 100 years, since winning a majority of national Parliament seats in Wales in the 1922 U.K. general election. In the election for the Welsh Senedd—fought under a new proportional system—Labour finished third. Their vote share collapsed to a mere 11%, and they now hold only nine seats in Cardiff. The big winners were the nationalist pro-independence Plaid Cymru and, yes, ReformUK, who won 43 and 34 seats respectively. PC will now lead a minority administration in the Senedd.
At this point the usual caveats about local elections in England not necessarily being good guides to general elections apply, alongside the caveats about the next national election still being 3 years away—an eternity in politics. Likewise, the elections for the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Senedd are only indicative for those two nations rather than the entirety of the U.K. At the same time, the election results were met with something approaching panic at Labour Party HQ, with the party already grappling with dismal approval ratings for the Prime Minister and the government. The party is being pulled in two directions, shedding traditional working class voters to ReformUK (in a process similar to the drift of working-class American voters to MAGA), while many educated middle-class progressives are drifting to the Greens. Junior ministers started resigning in the hope of precipitating a leadership election, and speculation mounted over potential replacements for Starmer.
Labour Party rules state that a fifth of sitting MPs (the magic number is 81) have to back an alternative candidate to force a leadership election. It's not enough for the 81 to call for a leadership challenge; they have to back a specific individual. But while the necessary 81 have called for Starmer to resign, they haven't coalesced around a single person. The two leading candidates seem to be MP Wes Streeting and Mayor of Greater Manchester Andy Burnham. But Burnham has to find his way back into the House of Commons before he can be a candidate, as only MPs are eligible to stand for the party leadership. Streeting resigned as Health Secretary in the aftermath of the local elections, the most senior minister to do so, apparently hoping to force a leadership election before Burnham could find a friendly by-election that would allow him to return to Parliament. But if he believed he had the numbers, he was wrong. The challenge fizzled out. They say the first rule of politics is "make sure you know how to count votes." Streeting didn't.
Burnham has meanwhile found a Labour MP willing to resign in order to allow the Manchester mayor to stand in a by-election in the traditional Labour seat of Makerfield, in Northwest England. The election will likely be held in mid-June, and under normal circumstances Burnham would be expected to coast to victory in a seat Labour have usually won comfortably; he won some 66% of the vote in the district in the last Greater Manchester mayoral election. But in the recent local elections, ReformUK won 50% of the vote in the local wards within the Westminster constituency, while the Greens also plan on seriously contesting the seat—meaning Burnham will be facing challenges from both the left and the right (this is not a seat where the LibDems would expect to be competitive, and the Conservatives are drifting into irrelevance). It's going to be a barnburner. If Burnham wins, he would almost certainly then immediately contest the Labour Party leadership with Starmer, and could be Prime Minister by July. If Burnham loses... well, no one knows what will happen if Burnham loses. Either way, June 18 is going to see one of the most consequential by-elections in modern British political history.
So those are the basic facts. But they don't tell this site's readers why British politics are suddenly so unstable. You'll likely find as many opinions on this one as there are British voters, but several factors stand out. The first is that Starmer and the Labour Party were never that popular to begin with. Our first-past-the-post electoral system is increasingly unsuited to our fragmented multi-party politics, with Labour winning 411 seats and a 174-seat majority on just under 34% of the vote. That means that 66% of British voters supported parties other than Labour in the last election; the party's ability to win seats in that election never reflected its actual support in the rest of the country. This has arguably led to a crisis of legitimacy despite the government's huge majority.
Secondly, Keir Starmer seems to be just bad at politics at some very basic level, coming across as a particularly insipid middle manager terrified of causing offense. To put that in American terms, he's very bad at that vision thing—and no, you couldn't picture yourself having a beer with him. You could, however, potentially picture yourself being ordered by Keir Starmer to complete an obscure and ultimately pointless document in triplicate.
And then there is Brexit. Brexit continues to distort our politics, leading to long-term realignments as voters abandon their traditional generational party loyalties on the basis of other political priorities. Meanwhile, the largest parties in the Scottish, Welsh, and Northern Irish legislatures are all in favor of their nation seceding from the U.K. (though at the same time none of those parties hold a majority in Edinburgh, Cardiff, or Stormont). And all of this is happening alongside a cost-of-living crisis that has left many U.K. voters deeply suspicious of a traditional political establishment that seems incapable of coping with the U.K.'s growing list of challenges. Not that populists of the right or the left are necessarily better-placed to cope; but many voters seem increasingly inclined to give them a chance on the basis that they can hardly be any worse. None of this is particularly conducive to political stability, and the past European precedents for populism thriving under broadly similar circumstances are less than encouraging.
As an old school chum of my late father's is known to occasionally sing, you can't always get what you want. The problem right now is that voters increasingly feel they also can't get what they need.
Those Electoral-Vote.com readers who want to know more about the forthcoming by-election at Makerfield, now set for Thursday, June 18, should check out Rob Ford's article "The Makerfield by-election: High Risk, High Return."
Not only is Ford one of the U.K.'s leading psephologists, but he can also claim to have some local knowledge, being Professor of Political Science at nearby Manchester University. The article is both comprehensive and fascinating, covering a profile of the seat, its history both distant and more recent, and the risks and opportunities faced by the two main protagonists, Andy Burnham for Labour and Robert Kenyon for ReformUK. An excellent summary of what may prove to be a pivotal U.K. by-election.
Thanks to the three of you, and especially to A.B.! (Z)