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

[highplainsdem]

1. Interesting analysis, but leaves out how incredibly unpopular a pro-AI change Labour was pushing was,

and how much attention that was getting, when only 3% of people of people who responded to a public consultation liked what Labour was proposing:

https://www.democraticunderground.com/10143633537
https://www.thetimes.com/uk/technology-uk/article/labour-ditches-plan-to-let-ai-firms-use-copyrighted-works-xkq7hmhrf

3% support. And Labour didn't drop their incredibly unpopular plan to change copyright law to please the AI bros until two months ago, nearly a year and a half after first encountering great opposition to the plan, including from the UK's most popular artists, with what those artists said often making headlines.

Great way to lose support from those concerned about AI.

[Fiendish Thingy]

2. Those same techbros are buying up Democratic legislators at a steady clip as well. Nt

[muriel_volestrangler]

6. No one has been talking about AI at all for this election.

The article also does not mention things that are local concerns for the local elections, like planning for new houses, potholes, or special needs education. It doesn't mention national concerns that are talked about, such as NHS waiting lists, the elderly winter fuel allowance, or disability payments. It vaguely and briefly notes economic concerns, but no specifics like the employers' National Insurance hike. It doesn't mention the environment, although there are current court cases about pollution of rivers, and climate change is a perennial subject.

But I can guarantee that AI was on the minds of under 0.1% of voters. Since your link is to a story saying Labour was going to drop the unpopular thing (and that 3% figure is in replies to a public consultation, ie only those who care about the subject to compose a submission), then I can't even see why you'd think this was a factor worth writing about.

[highplainsdem]

8. It's a factor because it made headlines for nearly a year and a half, none of them favorable to Labour.

And while Labour had only 3% support for their idiotic plan to change their copyright law in the way that had provoked so much outrage, they were still trying to find some way to pander to US AI companies.

Starmer had originally been pro-regulation of AI:

https://www.politico.eu/article/how-labour-fell-out-love-with-ai-bill-peter-kyle/

In opposition Prime Minister Keir Starmer promised “stronger” AI regulation. His center-left Labour Party committed to “binding regulation” on frontier AI companies in its manifesto for government in 2024, and soon after it won a landslide election that summer it set out plans for AI legislation.

And then Labour dropped that plan and Starmer aligned with Trump.

Instead, U.K. officials adapted to the new world order. In Paris in February 2025, at an international AI Summit series which the U.K. had set up in 2023 to keep existential AI risks at bay, the country joined the U.S. in refusing to sign an international AI declaration.

And his government made that insane proposal on copyright, abandoning the rights of creatives in the UK in favor of giving US AI companies everything they wanted. Labour ended up more pro-AI than either the Green or Reform parties.

Polling by the Ada Lovelace Institute shows Labour’s leadership is out of sync with public views on AI, with 9 in 10 wanting an independent AI regulator with enforcement powers.

-snip-

A separate study by Focal Data found that framing AI as a geopolitical competition also doesn’t resonate with voters. “They don’t want to work more closely with the United States on shared digital and tech goals because of their distrust of its government,” the research found.

Both the consultation and that Lovelace poll showed Labour our of step with 90% of the British public.

And the Focal Data study found that Labour's focus on cooperating with the Trump regime on AI policy, and favoring US AI companies, were very unpopular. Substack article on that:

https://politicalwhiteboard.substack.com/p/what-brits-think-about-digital-sovereignty

US tech companies are pretty well trusted among Brits (56% trust them ‘somewhat’ or ‘a lot’ to act in the UK’s best interests), ranking ahead of both European and Chinese companies. The kicker is that only half as many (28%) trust the US government in the same way.

What we get is an asymmetry: people are generally fine with US tech companies, but they don’t want to work more closely with the United States on shared digital and tech goals because of their distrust of its government. Barely a third of respondents said the UK should ‘work more closely’ with them to set shared rules for the tech sector. Despite US companies being more popular than European ones, Brits would rather align with the EU (43% in favour).

As a consequence, any attempts to frame the debate through the lens of an AI cold war between the US vs China fell on deaf ears. The UK public simply will not accept that kind of framing right now: they a. don’t believe it’s true and b. don’t want it to be true.

-snip-

What the results also revealed was that views on digital sovereignty were a very important factor driving voting behaviour. Limiting foreign ownership of digital infrastructure was the most-popular policy of the 25. For now at least, digital sovereignty looks like a vote winner.

Look under section 3 there for which issues drive votes. Look at how important the ones that are AI-related are.

[muriel_volestrangler]

10. No. You have no idea what is driving politics in the UK.

AI policy did not make significant headlines. Remember, this is a subject that you are very concerned about, so you go looking for relevant headlines. But if you look at what is actually talked about in UK headlines, AI policy is nowhere.

That paper is about "digital sovereignty", not AI, and its basic conclusion is "we don't want foreigners having control over our data". But if you can find a significant argument about one party having a believably better policy on that than another, I would be very surprised. It is just not a topic of political discussion.

[highplainsdem]

12. Believe whatever you want. I think the consultation, poll and study results show AI was a major factor.

[muriel_volestrangler]

13. No, it doesn't. The shows that banning foreigners from controlling British data *could* be a popular decision

if any party decided to use it. But they aren't. The consultation was an invitation to write in with views; it turned out (to no-one's surprise) that the individuals who had views were against taking copyright away from individuals. But most people ignore copyright, and AI, completely.

Ask anyone you know who lives in the UK whether they think AI policy was a factor in these elections. They will all tell you 'no'. I think they will also tell you they could not name a single difference in policy on AI between any of the parties. I'd suspect the Greens are more sceptical of it, from their general principles, but that's about it.

[mr715]

3. Shame on them -- and let me suggest...

The Rt. Honorable Starmer spent a lot of time genuflecting to Trump.

He had a powerful mandate and he squandered it in a system where a minority can't hamstring the minority.

He was not the right man for the time.

[ananda]

9. I know. I never thought Starmer would be..

that big of a disappointment.

[malaise]

14. He'll be out sooner than many think

Eff him.

[moondust]

4. BBC: 200,000 immigrants to UK since 2018.

That seems like a lot for an island nation with limited space. Immigration is probably the main issue helping racist Farage in the UK as well as the hard right in Europe which has the second smallest continental land area but a population larger than North America.

[JCMach1]

5. It's a very noticeable issue. The demographics in the South

Of England have shifted extensively. Additionally, you can see the economic decline since Covid and Brexit.

The two things are NOT related, but it is what the RIGHT in UK is feasting on.

[Kid Berwyn]

7. "Labour has the power...but, lacks the will."

Like a contagion, that.

[malaise]

11. Self inflicted starting with that effin fake

Tony Blair /BLIAR