Estás usando un navegador desactualizado. Es posible que no muestre este u otros sitios web correctamente. Deberías actualizar o usar un navegador alternativo.
UKUnloved Starmer quits as UK PM after just two years
🔧 Site instability resolved. You can report double-posts and broken attachments. For bigger issues, use the Technical Grievances thread.
🇵🇦 Nuestro primer dominio localizado está en español en kiwifarms.pa. Our first localized domain is on Spanish on kiwifarms.pa.
Want to keep track of this thread?
Accounts can bookmark posts, watch threads for updates, and jump back to where you stopped reading. Create account
By Elizabeth Piper June 22, 20264:50 AM EDTUpdated 36 mins ago
Summary
Labour falls out of love with Starmer's pragmatism
Starmer faltered on policy, lacked a big idea
Increasingly turned to his wife for advice
Burnham seen as a 'Reform slayer'
LONDON, June 22 (Reuters) - Keir Starmer was once hailed as the leader who would bring pragmatism and stability to Britain after years of political chaos. When he quit as prime minister on Monday, the very lack of ideology that propelled him to power drove his downfall.
After guiding the Labour Party into power in 2024 with the biggest parliamentary majority in Britain's modern history, Starmer focused on what he believed was possible to achieve, rather than setting out a clear vision of a future Britain.
He soon came to be seen by many voters and members of his party as lacking conviction and a clear direction, more than 20 party insiders said. He had no big idea.
Without what one senior Labour lawmaker called "a guiding light", the former lawyer was buffeted by competing Labour factions, lobbied by vested interests and misunderstood by wary voters, many of whom came to hate what they saw as his indecision and his robotic performances.
TURNED TO HIS WIFE FOR COUNSEL
His policies often unravelled, resignations and sackings from his team followed, and the remaining trusted aides around him struggled to help him offer the country a clear narrative of what his government wanted to do to "change Britain".
Starmer, 63, increasingly turned to his wife Victoria for reliable advice. On May 12, five days after disastrous local election results for Labour prompted calls for him to quit, he had a long lunch with her and emerged determined to fight on.
But it was a weekend away at the prime minister's country residence in Chequers with his wife that appeared to have persuaded him to change course, bend to the inevitable and resign.
On the doorstep of his Downing Street office and residence, he said he would do everything to allow an orderly transfer of power to the next Labour leader, expected to be his rival Andy Burnham, the former Greater Manchester mayor.
"The question my party is asking now is whether I am best placed to lead us into the next general election," he said in an emotional speech when his voice broke when he thanked his family foir their support.
"I have heard the answer from my parliamentary party to that question and I accept that answer with good grace."
By the end, deeply unpopular among voters for broken promises and policy U-turns, Starmer saw support drain away from him. Even some of his most loyal allies in his top cabinet team of ministers privately urged him to allow an orderly transition of power rather than a damaging leadership contest.
His pledges to fight to save his premiership quickly evaporated after most in the party decided they could not enter a national election due in 2029 with him at the helm.
After decisively winning an election for a parliamentary seat in northwestern England, Burnham was now seen as the "Reform slayer", the politician who had a chance of keeping the populist party of veteran Brexit campaigner Nigel Farage at bay.
FEAR OF FARAGE DROVE CAMPAIGN TO OUST STARMER
"I would do anything to stop Farage," said lawmaker Catherine West, who broke cover over the May 9-10 weekend to try to force others to mount a challenge against the prime minister.
It was never meant to be this way.
After becoming a Labour lawmaker in 2015 at the age of 52, Starmer was elected leader just five years later inheriting the party after its worst election showing since 1935 under his predecessor, veteran left-winger Jeremy Corbyn, beset by accusations of antisemitism and a fudged Brexit policy.
He used his experience of running the Crown Prosecution Service, an independent body which advises police and prosecutes criminal cases in court, to try to modernise the Labour Party, and ultimately make it more electable.
As when he was Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) - essentially Britain's top prosecutor, he attacked the problem strategically - first getting rid of alleged antisemitism and tackling factionalism; putting the organisation back on its feet financially; bringing the best Labour lawmakers into his top team; and finally adopting policies to address Britain's needs.
"Everything we offer will be built on a bedrock of economic stability and a plan for growth," his spokesperson said at the time.
Initially it worked. His newly re-fashioned Labour won a large majority in Britain's 650-seat parliament, but analysts were quick to point out that the party's victory was fragile - Labour actually secured one of its lowest vote shares ever and the win was highly dependent on tactical voting.
After 14 years of infighting, Brexit battles and five prime ministers in eight years, the Conservatives had all but blown themselves up as a party.
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer speaks as he announces the timeline for his resignation, outside 10 Downing Street, in London, Britain, June 22, 2026. REUTERS/Jaimi Joy
John Curtice, Britain's best known pollster, said: "All in all this looks more like an election the Conservatives lost than one Labour won."
FRUSTRATION SET IN OVER ACHIEVEMENTS
Starting from a fragile base was not helped by the Starmer government's cautious approach to policy during campaigning and an already growing narrative that all of Britain's many problems from housing to anaemic economic growth would take time to fix.
Once in power, Starmer's government struggled first to define its policy agenda and then to implement it - focusing on growth that never really came, on reducing illegal migrant arrivals that kept on coming and on fixing a health system that kept on throwing up more challenges.
One person in his top team in opposition said Labour was just not prepared for government, describing a time when they had tried to formulate policy but were told to "stop" so as not to "frighten people in advance of the general election".
"We don't have a plan for what we're going to do when we get in, if we do get in, because it might jinx it," the person remembered.
As the months went by, Starmer tried to talk up his government's achievements - improving working conditions, reducing health service waiting lists and overseeing an economic environment in which interest rates could be cut.
But despite several resets to his approach, the British leader failed to engage a wary public, with a former aide saying Starmer failed to offer "a destination" from which voters could understand or make sense of his decisions.
Instead voters could not see beyond gaffes over donations, policy U-turns and the appointment of Labour veteran Peter Mandelson despite his known connections to the late convicted U.S. sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Starmer's defence that he was not told about the extent of Mandelson's ties to Epstein made many feel he was out of touch at best, and, at worst, not in control of his administration.
"It was a bad appointment," said one former aide, suggesting it had been driven through by only two other former advisers.
BLAME GAME TAINTED THE END OF STARMER ADMINISTRATION
The frustration inside his Downing Street office became more palpable.
Some aides blamed what they called a hostile right-wing media, but after one reset followed another, Starmer ultimately failed to display, as described by one adviser, "his passion for these domestic causes".
He lost some of his closest advisers, including his former chief of staff Morgan McSweeney, over the Mandelson scandal, and after sacking the top official at the foreign office, his relationship with Britain's civil service soured.
Starmer did better on the international front.
On Russia's war against Ukraine, he was praised by some other European leaders for helping to spearhead the 'coalition of the willing' of nations willing to help in the event of a peace deal, and alongside French President Emmanuel Macron, spearheaded talks on reopening the Strait of Hormuz.
The British leader also had some success in winning round U.S. President Donald Trump, often by massaging his ego - offering him a second state visit to Britain and praising his efforts to bring peace in Ukraine and an end to other conflicts.
That soon was replaced by a torrent of jibes against him from the U.S. leader, who said he was no Winston Churchill after Starmer refused to draw Britain into the war on Iran. On Sunday, Trump posted on Truth Social: "Keir Starmer will resign as Prime Minister of The United Kingdom. "He failed badly on two very important subjects- IMMIGRATION AND ENERGY (OPEN NORTH SEA OIL!). I wish him well!"
Perhaps his lasting legacy will be the fracturing of Britain's traditional two-party system.
The local elections in England, and parliamentary ones in Scotland and Wales showed Britain's traditional two-party system had been blown apart with Reform gaining a strong foothold across the nation.
While Labour membership numbers fell, Reform's rose, with more than 270,000 people signed up. It was that threat, Starmer had hoped would seal support for him, telling his Labour Party in February the battle with Reform was the "fight of our lives".
It doesn't matter much who the leader of labour is. The problem for the government is that it was elected with a 33% level of support in the country which has subsequently dropped to under 20%. Its an unpopular government with no real mandate to run the country. Its at best a caretaker sort of thing. The leader will be particularly unpopular because the party will want him to rule as if he has won a sweeping national mandate whereas most of the MPs that form the majority in the house see themselves as inevitably doomed at the next election.
Its easy for someone like Burnham to talk big from the outside. But once in leadership he will discover as Starmer did that everything is in favor of inertia and drift. Can he really push a wide nationalization agenda through? Can he do the wild spending increases he wants to do without damaging the economy? Can he change anything within the labour party on immigration without losing the support of perhaps half the party? Probably not.
The next prime minister (presumably it will be Burnham) will inherit a gamut of serious social and economic issues, many decades in the making, all now heading towards an unavoidable crisis point. To address these problems in any meaningful way would require [Burnham] to act in a manner that is contrary to his left-wing principles and also contrary to the tenets of the Labour Party. All he can really do is try to decelerate the speed at which the hole that he will have to stand in is deepened. There remains the question of his experience. I think both him and his advisers will struggle to square their ideologies with the realities that they face.
Whatever Labour do now, they are laying a foundation for a right wing resurgence, though it may be fractured between the Conservatives, Reform, and Restore.
If I were to be optimistic about this: Burnham is on the centre left of the Labour party, and the Green party has started to take ground from them on being the Islamist/tranny woke alliance party, so there's a chance he could pivot to normal leftists and centrists by doing popular left-wing shit like renationalising the railways and utilities and leave all the crazy shit to the Greens and set himself apart from them and the various right-wing parties.
Translating journo speech: He was not enough of a staunch enough, by-the-book socialist.
They claim that the guy with the nickname "Two Tier Kier" for his open discrimination of the native britons was not leftist enough, and that it was this lack of ideological purity that sealed his doom.
Lol. Lmao even. Probably too much to hope that he gets culturally enriched, or cornered and beaten like a pinata by the fathers of some of those assaulted girls. But a man can dream.
He'll get a £500k per year gig at an anti-racist government think tank. 5 star dinners, reimbursed travel, free holidays in Israel and only 4 hours of work per year. It's not bad work if can find it.
He'll get a £500k per year gig at an anti-racist government think tank. 5 star dinners, reimbursed travel, free holidays in Israel and only 4 hours of work per year. It's not bad work if can find it.
Paki rape gangs literally terrorizing your country's children b-b-but guys we gotta tell Trump to lay off the antisemitism with his Iran embargo that'll teach him. Wtf did his wife ever give him good advice? Yes just stammer like a fucking twat that mean things said on internet won't stand with his administration. Nigel lived rent free in his head. No wonder the top brass in Labour were like holy shit this guy has no game.
