Politics
Starmer vows to fight on after Labour punished in polls across Britain
- Starmer vows to fight on to deliver ‘change’.
- Voters punish Starmer’s party across Britain.
- Farage hails ‘historic shift’ in British politics.
LONDON: British Prime Minister Keir Starmer vowed on Friday to stay in office to “deliver change” after his Labour Party suffered heavy losses in English local elections and parliamentary votes in Scotland and Wales, deepening doubts over his ability to govern.
Just under two years after winning a landslide national election, Starmer saw voters punish his Labour government, with support evaporating even in its traditional strongholds in London, former industrial regions in central and northern England, and in Wales.
The main beneficiary was the populist Reform UK party of Brexit campaigner Nigel Farage, which gained more than 1,000 council seats in England, and will likely form the main opposition in Scotland and Wales to the pro-independence Scottish National Party and Plaid Cymru.
Early results underscored the fracturing of Britain’s traditional two-party system, with the once-dominant Labour and Conservative parties losing votes not only to Reform, but to the left-wing Green Party at the other end of the political spectrum, and to nationalists in Scotland and Wales.
I am not going to walk away, says Starmer
Despite the losses, Starmer’s allies signalled their support for a man whose popularity ratings have sunk to among the worst for any British leader.
“I am not going to walk away,” Starmer told reporters in Ealing, west London, a rare bright spot where Labour retained control of the council.
To Labour activists, he showed a moment of contrition when he said he took full responsibility for the losses and admitted his government had made some “unnecessary mistakes” including failing to offer hope to Britain when the party took power.
But he argued voters were more frustrated with the pace of change than with his government, and vowed to set out “the steps that we will take to deliver the change that they want and that they deserve”.
In what seemed to be a nod to the latest government reset, Starmer said he would double down on efforts to tackle a cost-of-living crisis compounded by conflicts in Ukraine and Iran.
That message seemed to cheer investors. Sterling strengthened against the US dollar and British government borrowing costs fell – outperforming against US and German debt.
But even for Starmer, there was no denying the scale of the terrible losses for Labour in elections for 136 local councils in England, and the devolved parliaments in Scotland and Wales – the most significant test of public opinion before the next general election due in 2029.
While an immediate challenge to his leadership looked unlikely, more than 20 Labour lawmakers publicly and privately called on Starmer to consider his position and set out a timetable for his departure.
“The prime minister cannot take our party into the next election,” Simon Opher, a Labour lawmaker from southwest England said in a statement.
Defence minister John Healey rejected this, saying the last thing voters wanted was “the potential chaos of a leadership election”.
“He’s not going to go, and he’s not going to set a timetable,” Technology Secretary Liz Kendall told BBC News.
Insurgent parties fracture two-party system
Starmer may struggle to turn things around after Labour lost control of a swathe of councils, responsible for services ranging from adult social care to rubbish collection, and prospective nationalist governments in Scotland and Wales.
The party lost power in Tameside in Greater Manchester in northern England for the first time in almost 50 years and in nearby Wigan, which it has controlled for more than 50 years, Labour lost all of its 20 seats to Reform.
Reform also took control of a London borough for the first time, winning in Havering in the east of Britain’s capital, while the Greens won the mayoralty of traditionally Labour-supporting Hackney in east London.
In the town of Romford in Havering, retiree Gary Orford summed up the mood of many, by saying he wanted to give Farage a chance after being fed what he called a “pack of lies” by other politicians. “You can only give him a chance,” he said.
While incumbent governments often struggle in midterm elections, pollsters forecast that Labour could lose the most council seats since 1995.
The Reform UK party had added 1,151 council seats in England by Friday evening. Labour had lost 1,015 seats and the official opposition Conservative Party was down 466 seats. Plaid won the most seats for the Welsh Senedd assembly, followed by Reform, and the SNP was well ahead in the Scottish parliament election.
The results showed how far the British political system had changed since as recently as 2017, when the two traditionally dominant parties – Labour and the Conservatives – gained a combined 82% of the vote in a general election.
They also showed how quickly voters have turned against Starmer. Since 2024, his time in office has been marked by several attempts to reset his agenda, policy U-turns, a rotating cast of advisers and scandal over the appointment of Peter Mandelson as Britain’s ambassador to the United States.
- Ceasefire will remain effective from May 9 to 11.
- Swap of 1000 prisoners part of ceasefire: Trump.
- Trump appreciates Putin, Zelensky over agreement.
US President Donald Trump on Friday announced on social media that there would be a three-day ceasefire in the war between Russia and Ukraine from May 9 until May 11 to mark the end of World War Two for the Russians.
Trump had said after a phone call with Putin on April 29 that a temporary ceasefire was in the works. Putin announced a similar truce last year that lasted three days but was not agreed with Kyiv.
Trump said in a Truth Social post that the pause will include a suspension of all kinetic activity, and also a prison swap of 1,000 prisoners from each country.
“Hopefully, it is the beginning of the end of a very long, deadly, and hard-fought war,” he said, adding that there was constant progress in talks to end the conflict.
Russia announced a ceasefire for May 8 to 9 to coincide with commemorations of the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany in World War II and a military parade in Moscow’s Red Square.
Ukraine announced its own proposal for an open-ended ceasefire that started at midnight on Tuesday (2100 GMT), urging Russia to reciprocate.
Officials said on Thursday that Ukraine’s top negotiator, Rustem Umerov, had arrived in Miami for a series of meetings with US representatives as peace talks on ending Russia’s war in Ukraine have stalled in recent months.
The US-brokered talks are deadlocked over Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region. Moscow demands Kyiv pull troops back from parts of the region it has failed to capture in its four-year full-scale invasion. Ukraine says it will not cede land that it controls.
Moscow and Kyiv have both accused each other of violating ceasefires that each has separately declared.
The spokesperson for Iran’s Foreign Ministry says Tehran’s response to a proposal by the United States to end the war against the Islamic Republic is still under review, paying no heed to the Americans’ deadlines.
“The [US] proposal is still being reviewed, and once we reach a conclusion, we will announce it,” Esmaeil Baghaei told reporters on Friday.
Regarding some reports that the Americans have set a deadline for Iran to respond to the plan, he once again affirmed that the matter is still being examined.
“We are doing our own job and pay no attention to such deadlines,” Baghaei emphasized.
The Iranian spokesperson’s remarks came after US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Friday that Washington expected to receive Iran’s response to a US proposal later in the day.
The US and Israel initiated an unprovoked war of aggression against Iran since February 28 after assassinating Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei and several high-ranking military commanders.
A Pakistani-mediated ceasefire was brokered on April 8, but subsequent talks failed to turn into an agreement due to Washington’s excessive demands.
Iranian officials have repeatedly criticized the United States for its approach to talks as the White House seeks to impose conditions rather than engage in genuine give-and-take.
In a Wednesday post on X, Baghaei elaborated on Tehran’s understanding of what negotiations entail, citing international law.
The concept of talks “needs ‘good faith’, then, meaning that ‘negotiations’ is not ‘disputation’; nor is it ‘dictation’, ‘deception’, ‘extortion’ or ‘coercion’,” he explained.
On the same day, Iran’s Parliament Speaker Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf dismissed certain reports about a supposed impending arrangement between Tehran and Washington, describing them as misleading and part of recurring fake media narratives originating in the United States.
In a post on X, Qalibaf referred to allegations published by the US-based outlet Axios regarding such an arrangement, ironically describing them as “Operation Fauxios.”
He suggested that the circulation of such reports reflected a routine pattern in US media coverage, particularly stories attributed to unnamed sources that Iranian officials have repeatedly rejected as unfounded and have later been proven invariably wrong.
Airlines must not charge customers extra fuel fees after they have already bought tickets, the EU warned on Friday, as the aviation sector feels the pain from high energy prices because of the Middle East war.
“Airlines may adapt their published fares to the situation, but adding a fuel surcharge to a ticket after it has been bought cannot be justified,” EU spokesperson Anna-Kaisa Itkonen told reporters in Brussels.
Any changes post-booking can “raise issues under the EU’s unfair commercial practices”, she added.
In a document published on Friday on the energy crisis affecting the aviation sector, the EU said “any retroactive change of the price is excluded”.
“Airlines may not include terms and conditions which would allow them to increase the price of the ticket above what is advertised at the time of purchase simply because fuel was more expensive than they had accounted for,” the European Commission said.
The only exception is for package holidays if the seller has made it clear in the contract there could be a possibility of fuel-related changes to the costs.
In such cases, an increase of up to 8% is allowed, but if it is higher, the customer can accept or they have the right to cancel their booking.
Spanish low-cost carrier Volotea has been criticised in France where it is under investigation after demanding fuel surcharges from customers because of the energy shock from the war.
Gilles Gosselin, the airline’s France director, has defended the measure.
“The legality of our system has been confirmed by three independent law firms specialising in air transport and consumer law. The measure is transparent, it is temporary, and it works both ways”, up and down, Gosselin told AFP in France.
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