An Epic Collapse for Britain's Labour Party

[Celerity]

Today on TAP: Britain’s centrist Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer crashes while Spain’s Socialist Pedro Sánchez shows how to lead from the left. Could there be a lesson here?

https://prospect.org/2026/05/08/britains-labour-party-keir-starmer-spain-pedro-sanchez/


British Prime Minister Keir Starmer departs 10 Downing Street in June 2025. Credit: Wiktor Szymanowicz/NurPhoto via AP Photo

The governing British Labour Party got clobbered in yesterday’s local elections, pretty much as expected. The final votes are still being counted, but as of this writing Labour is on track to lose as many as 2,000 municipal council seats out of about 5,000, an all-time record defeat, and lose its governing majority in at least 20 councils. The big winners were the far-right Reform Party, with at least 600 pick-ups, and the left-populist Greens. And the Scottish Nationalists look to win a large governing majority in the Scottish parliament, rekindling a drive for secession. The action now shifts to an intra-party struggle over whether Labour’s feckless leader, Prime Minister Keir Starmer, can keep his job. This morning, the Scottish Labour Party leader, Anas Sarwar, facing a wipeout, called for Starmer to resign as party leader and prime minister.

If pressure for Starmer’s ouster mounts, the most plausible successor is Manchester’s popular and effective mayor, Andy Burnham. He’d need to find a seat in Parliament, but that could be easily arranged. The problem is not just Starmer’s leaden personality, but his lame program. Starmer has sought to reassure Britain’s financial capitalists with fiscal conservatism rather than supplanting them with a bold program of reinvestment. He has also ducked what to do about Brexit. Thanks to the fluke of the last general election, where Labour won only 33.7 percent of the popular vote but gained 411 out of 650 seats in the House of Commons, Labour has the power to enact a far-reaching progressive program—but lacks the will. And thanks to Britain’s electoral system, the government doesn’t need to call another election until August 2029, giving Labour plenty of time to recover. In short, Labour has everything going for it except leadership, vision, and nerve.

The contrast with Spain, Europe’s best-performing economy and the only other large European country with a left government, is stunning—and instructive. Unlike Starmer, Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, had just about nothing going for him, except leadership and conviction. Sánchez’s governing Socialist Party lacks a majority in Spain’s parliament, the Cortes. The Socialists are not even the largest party. That would be the center-right Partido Popular (PP). But while Sánchez is a bold and effective leader, the PP is led by Alberto Núñez Feijóo, whose feeble leadership style has a lot in common with Britain’s Starmer. Sánchez has led three governments since 2018, governing in coalition with smaller left parties. Podemos, a populist party to Sánchez’s left, was part of one such coalition, but Podemos fractured and collapsed.

Its successor as Sánchez’s governing coalition, Sumar (Unite in English), is a weak sub-coalition of left splinter parties grateful to be included in Sánchez’s cabinet. Sánchez has had to do a deft balancing act to keep the Catalan separatists on board, giving them more autonomy but stopping short of supporting Catalan secession. This is no mean feat. Compared to the Catalans, the Scots are model United Kingdom patriots. And Sánchez’s popular program is the only serious left governing program in Europe. The British Labour Party is sorely divided on the immigration issue, which has helped the far-right Reform Party gain ground in the absence of a bold Labour economic program. By contrast, Sánchez welcomes immigrants, and immigrants have helped spur Spain’s stunning economic growth rate of just under 4 percent per year between 2021 and 2025, by far the best in Europe. During the same period, Spain has admitted an average of about 665,000 immigrants per year.

snip