From the BBC live feed, the first junior minister has resigned; Starmer is saying there’s no challenge and he’s not resigning:
Keir Starmer latest: First government minister resigns and urges Starmer to set timetable to quit - BBC News
The LDP are more right wing, nearer the tories in economic policy, the
Greens are far more left wing and have “the environment” as their main
selling point.
There’s not that much to discuss yet, it’s still speculation.
All the right wing parties and press are just jumping at any chance to stir
up trouble for the Labour party. It’s what they do.
As an American trying to follow this topic:
What is the net result of these failings? Is the primary issue that the UK has a tough economy and he hasn’t articulated a plan to improve it? That he keeps pushing for small tweaks, sometimes contradictory, and it’s unclear how these tweaks will help? I’ve seen reference to his style being “manager-led incrementalism”.
I think I’ve also seen that he pushed through higher taxes, which he said he wouldn’t do. Then to top it off, it’s unclear how these will help. Am I getting that right?
So the net effect is that he seems to be turning knobs randomly and hoping something good happens?
Aside from that, I’ve seen the election results, the Mandelson scandal, etc.
The UK’s leadership under the latter part of the Conservatives decades-long rule was either dismal or non-existent. There was therefore, I think, a desire for someone with a strong vision, almost regardless of what the vision might be, both economically and socially. Keir Starmer does not have that. His version of centrism seems to be taking policy planks from completely separate sides of the political spectrum, duct taping them together, and insisting that makes him a pragmatist. In so doing, rather than building a broad tent, he has instead made himself hated by people with a wide swathe of political views.
Anti-trans, anti-immigration, anti-free speech (provided that speech is pro-Palestinian)? Good for the right, but say goodbye to the left.
Anti-free speech and putting in ineffective internet age-verification laws? Say goodbye to any quasi-libertarians or anti-big government voters.
Raising taxes, reforming the UK rental system, and nationalizing the steel industry? Supported by the left, despised by the right.
Then tack on his tepid, almost non-existent stance on Iran which makes nobody feel particularly good, and his very poor handling of the Mandelson affair. He’s just utterly failed at explaining an overall strategy, or appealing to any particular political group.
Yeah, this is the problem (although I think Rayner’s tax issues have been exaggerated). If there were any strong candidates in the Labour Party they’d have already come to the fore. Streeting will just be Starmer Part 2, and even if Burnham is handed a seat he won’t yet have a solid base in Westminster to move any time soon.
Personally I wouldn’t mind giving Jess Phillips a go as PM on the basis that she’s more likely to tell Farage and Badenoch to just fuck off. That’s not really an endorsement of her leadership skills but it would at least be refreshingly honest.
That’s teh essence of it - the only thing I’d add to @keeganst94 and @Gyrate’s answers is that as well as doing things in a incoherent and haphazard way, he’s also got a track record of just no t doing things. E.g. you can say that in the modern world, we need to invest much more in defence; or you can say that in the modern world we can’t afford to invest more in defence. What you can’t do is announce more investment then follow that up with announcing a 6 month delay for no reason other than hoping something will turn up. And this generalises across lots of things - Jess Phillips’ resignation letter has concrete examples of him just failing to do stuff because it would mean disappointing one side of an argument.
Jess Phillips: Safeguarding minister’s resignation letter in full - BBC News
On the tax thing - Starmer’s big electoral pledge was that Labour wouldn’t increase the “big three taxes” - income tax, VAT (sales tax) or National Insurance (sort of another form of income tax). This was unbelievably dumb, because he also pledged to improve public services and with no headroom to borrow, tax rises are what’s needed to arrest decay. So he then found lots of tinkering ways to raise tax, thus pissing people off but also not giving himself the financial firepower to do actually make the kind of changes needed. Also, he absolutely didn’t need to make that promise, he was going to win the election anyhow.
A politician who doesn’t do politics. Having spent most of his working life in the law and becoming reasonably successful in that career, he thought he’d give politics a go instead without any experience of it.
In US vernacular that’s a Post turtle - Wikipedia.
They were very much a minority, not entirely single-issue, but not really tested on a wide range of policy issues, seen as a home for left-leaning protest votes. In the last couple of years, and particularly since they swopped their job-share collective leadership for a younger, seemingly more dynamic man, their membership and support went up, absorbing a lot of the Corbynite hard left that Starmer and his allies squeezed out of Labour. In that rapid expansion they also picked up some assorted fruitcakes and the kind of leftists whose support for Palestine too easily shades into lazy anti-Semitic tropes (as brought Corbyn down, among his other faults).
Greens started life as the Ecology Party in the 1970s. Since then they have moved from purely Ecology to a broader range of mostly leftwing issues.
The Economist will be having a video podcast (vidcast?) on the UK leadership crisis in the next day or so. An email teaser I received included this thought-provoking intro:
So, yesterday we had, ludicrously, a King’s Speech setting out a programme for government. Normally this would be the big political news - it’s literally what the government are planning to do with power, it’s quite a big deal - but of course it’s been overshadowed by the leadership crisis which, to be fair, is about whether and how the government can actually use its power.
The King’s Speech is nevertheless quite a useful indicator of what is wrong with Starmer’s government.
- It’s not easy to see a consistent political programme tying together all the bills, it’s more of a random selection of policies.
- A lot of it is just tinkering - some of it welcome tinkering but it does leave a sense of “Is this it?”.
- You can see clearly that the effective Ministers are ones who can drive a policy through without Starmer dithering about it - boht Miliband and Mahmood have got bills in there that do have clear policy goals and make decisions about what will and won’t be done. E.g. Miliband’s energy bill sticks with banning licences for further North Sea exploration and promotes the building of energy infrastructure; Mahmood gets to tighten the rules on asylum claims and to reorganise the structure of policing.
- Other than those, there’s a very clear absence of promised welfare reform, and some administrative changes which will have some kind of impact but won’t be much noticed.
- The obvious sop from Starmer to the soft left is the nationalising of the (now pretty small) steel industry, which has been much discussed and dithered on heretofore.
But you know, that doens’t necessarily mean much, because we’ll likely have a new leader pretty soon. Runners and riders:
Andy Burnham still doesn’t have a seat to run in, and even if one did open up it would likely be too late. There has been a slightly amusing fugue on the theme of his team saying: “This consituency will be available shortly and Andy will be running” and the sitting Labour MP saying in return “I beg your very pardon? I haven’t even spoken to Burnham in years”.
Streeting has been on the verge of declaring his challenge for about 48 hours and still hasn’t. He had a 20 min meeting iwth Starmer yesterday, after which he did not declare a challenge but did announce he would soonish. His team have been briefing he has the numbers to do it, others have been briefing he hasn’t - it’ll probably happen today but the vibe is not confident. Notably, Streeting doesn’t have much going in the King’s Speech, nor a particuarly noteworthy record in his current Health Secretary job.
Ed Miliband has long says he doesn’t want it and won’t run, even though (see above) he actually has a policy view and the ability to get things done; however, he has apparently said he will run against Streeting (because fuck that one guy in particular, I guess).
And just to add another dimension Rayner has announced this morning that HMRC have cleared her of any wrongdoing or carelessness over her failure to pay the right stamp duty (on an admittedly complex transaction), thus strongly suggesting she is at liberty to take a crack at it herself.
Starmer is saying he will fight, and it is not impossible the Labour party will somehow contrive to let him stay by failing to coalesce around a challenger.
Saw someone suggesting that London Mayor Sadiq Khan should send Burnham one of these TfL badges as a joke:
The brevity of the meeting at Number 10 between Starmer and Streeting is being interpreted as a bad sign for Streeting, in a “Guess who just got yelled at?” way. He was in and out of the building in under 20 minutes.
Pretty much.
I did say. Although I suspect she won’t take on Streeting directly, rather waiting for the next leadership contest to throw her hat in. Which likely won’t be long.
Yep. There is still no one in the party the public are clamouring for or even give a shit about.
Streeting has now resigned, surely the actual leadership challenge is coming imminently.
Wes Streeting has resigned as health secretary, amid speculation that he could launch a bid for the Labour leadership.
Here is a run down of the key lines in his resignation letter -
Streeting says in his letter to the prime minister that he has “lost confidence” in Keir Starmer’s leadership, so it would be “dishonourable and unprincipled” to remain in post.
He calls last week’s election results “unprecedented” both in terms of the scale of the defeat and the consequences of the failure, adding that progressives across the UK are “increasingly losing faith” in the Labour Party’s responsibility of offering hope that Britain’s best days lie ahead.
The former health secretary also calls out specific reasons for the “unpopularity” of the current government including the decision to cut the winter fuel allowance and the “island of strangers” speech made by Starmer in May 2025.
He tells Starmer: “You also need to listen to your colleagues, including backbenchers, and the heavy-handed approach to dissenting voices diminishes our politics.”
Streeting says it is now clear Starmer will not lead the Labour Party into the next general election, and that the debate about what comes next needs “the best possible field of candidates”.
He adds that serving as health secretary was “the greatest joy of my life”, saying that the NHS is “on the road to recovery,” but that there is “so much more to do”.
How do you think someone from 2023 would react to this being an actual coalition?
Really fascinating chart here that shows precisely how both Green and Reform have eaten into Labour constituencies from both sides:
It’s a great chart, really shows how the political landscape is shifting.
(Some of the outlying wards are, by definition, weird - where is the lowest left hand corner one, and why doesn’t it ahve any over 50s or middle-class folk?)
What is also shows is just how squeezed the Tories are - despite Kemi’s/the party’s claims that the results were good for them, they’ve lost a lot of real estate.
That is quite the rainbow - where is this, and what’s happened with the Labour councillors?
Worcestershire Council. It may be a short lived coalition as word is, it was not approved by the top Conservative brass, but only by local members.
Josh Simons announces he’s going to step down to allow Andy Burnham to run. But the district actually has a non-trivial chance of going to Reform in this climate so it may be a risky bet.