Less than two years after leading Labour to a decisive general election win that ended 14 years of Conservative rule, Keir Starmer is facing a serious political crisis. A string of poor results in recent local and devolved elections has damaged his popularity and intensified pressure from inside his party.
In local contests across England, Labour lost a large number of council seats, many of them to Reform UK, the right‑wing, anti‑immigration party. Labour also underperformed in devolved elections for the Scottish and Welsh parliaments held the same day. A YouGov poll this month found only 23% of Britons held a positive view of Starmer while 69% had an unfavorable opinion, and his standing among Labour MPs has fallen sharply.
Is Starmer still prime minister?
Yes. Starmer remains prime minister and, under normal circumstances, can stay in office until the next general election, which must be held by August 2029 at the latest. He has publicly ruled out resigning so far. There are only a few routes to remove a sitting prime minister mid‑term: losing a House of Commons vote of no confidence (requiring a simple majority) or being ousted by his own party.
A no‑confidence motion is unlikely because Labour holds a large parliamentary majority — about 403 of the 650 seats. The more realistic threat is an internal Labour leadership challenge. More than 90 Labour MPs have publicly called for Starmer to go and several ministers have resigned, but Labour’s internal rules require support from 20% of Labour MPs — currently 81 MPs — to nominate a challenger and trigger a leadership contest.
Who might replace him?
Several figures have emerged as possible contenders. The leading name is Andy Burnham, the popular mayor of Greater Manchester. Burnham is not an MP, but an MP in the Greater Manchester seat of Makerfield, Josh Simons, has stepped down to force a by‑election Burnham hopes to contest if the party selects him. If Burnham wins a Commons seat and the leadership election, he would become prime minister by convention.
Wes Streeting, who resigned as health secretary, is another potential challenger. He accused the leadership of lacking vision in his resignation letter. Streeting has not yet launched a formal bid; his recent cabinet role could be a political liability in the eyes of some voters.
Angela Rayner, Starmer’s former deputy, has also cleared a key hurdle: she was formally cleared by UK tax authorities of allegations connected to a property purchase that had forced her to step down from the deputy role in 2025. Rayner has said she will not initiate a contest but declined to back Starmer when asked, leaving open the possibility she could play a role.
How are UK prime ministers chosen?
The UK uses a parliamentary system: general elections decide MPs for 650 constituencies and the leader of the party that can command a majority in the Commons becomes prime minister. That leader can change between general elections if the party removes or replaces its leader, as happened during the last two decades with Gordon Brown, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak.
Could Nigel Farage become prime minister?
Reform UK, the party linked to Nigel Farage, has been the main beneficiary of Labour’s recent losses. Reform built on its 2024 showing — when it won a small number of seats but took around 14.3% of the national vote — and has added MPs through defections. Several high‑profile Conservatives, including former cabinet ministers, have switched to Reform, bringing its Commons presence to around eight MPs.
Reform’s platform emphasizes tougher immigration controls — including removing people it describes as “illegal migrants” and stopping small boat crossings — leaving the European Convention on Human Rights, repealing the Human Rights Act, cutting foreign aid and abandoning net zero climate targets. Those positions have resonated with a slice of the electorate.
Farage’s personal profile remains high. He unexpectedly returned to frontline UK politics in 2024, having previously led the Brexit Party and served as an MEP, and won his first Commons seat after a last‑minute decision to contest. He also spent time campaigning abroad, including supporting Donald Trump in the US, before that comeback.
Farage has come under scrutiny for a reported £5 million donation from British crypto billionaire Christopher Harborne, who is based in Thailand. Farage has described the funds variously as for security and as a reward for his Brexit work; the parliamentary standards watchdog is investigating.
What happens next?
A general election is unlikely in the immediate term while Labour remains in government and the party is fractured. Instead the next decisive moments are likely to be internal: whether challengers can secure the 81 nominations needed to trigger a leadership contest, and the outcome of by‑elections such as the planned contest in Makerfield, expected later in 2026 if the timetable holds.
Makerfield is pivotal because it could give Burnham a parliamentary seat. The seat was previously a Labour stronghold — Labour polled 18,202 votes to Reform’s 12,803 there last time — but the dynamics that helped Reform elsewhere mean it will be contested. The Greens have also been expanding: they increased their national seats in 2024 from one to four, grew their council presence and now hold several councils and mayoralties. Under Zack Polanski’s leadership since 2025 the Greens have attracted younger voters and the left‑wing electorate, complicating Labour’s path back to unity.
If Burnham or another rival wins a leadership contest, they would become prime minister without a general election. If no challenger reaches the nomination threshold, Starmer is likely to limp on while making further cabinet changes to try to stabilise his government.
For now, Starmer remains in Downing Street, appointing new ministers and navigating a rocky political landscape while Reform and the Greens both press their gains. The next year of by‑elections, internal manoeuvring and public polling will determine whether his hold on power survives or collapses.
![{“title”:”November 1938 Pogroms Revealed Nazi Brutality”,”content”:”\”I can still clearly remember the morning of November 10,\” W. Michael Blumenthal recalled. \”My father was arrested early in the morning. Amid the commotion and despite the fact that my mother had forbidden me to do so, I went outside without being noticed. I saw the broken shop windows on Kurfürstendamm boulevard and smoke coming out of the synagogue on Fasanenstrasse.\” He was just 12 years old.\n\nThe Fasanenstrasse synagogue in Berlin was set alight on the night of November 9, 1938, and the image of burning synagogues and shattered storefronts quickly became the emblem of a coordinated, nationwide assault on Jews. That night and the days that followed saw roughly 1,300 synagogues and some 7,500 Jewish businesses destroyed; cemeteries, schools and homes were vandalized. Police largely stood aside as Jews were dragged into the streets, beaten and publicly humiliated. Fire brigades often refused to fight blazes in Jewish buildings, focusing instead on protecting \”Aryan\” properties.\n\nThe violence intensified on November 10, when about 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and sent to concentration camps including Dachau, Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald. Blumenthal\u2019s father was among those taken. Blumenthal remembered his mother\u2019s desperate questions as he was marched away: \”What’s going on? What are you doing with him? What has he done? Where is he being taken to?\” Even at 12, he felt the adults’ fear.\n\nBlumenthal’s family escaped to Shanghai in 1939, one of the few destinations then admitting Jewish refugees without visas. He later described his experience in his memoir From Exile to Washington: A Memoir of Leadership in the Twentieth Century.\n\nThe attack did not come from nowhere. Anti-Jewish persecution had been official policy since the Nazis took power in 1933. The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 legally defined Jews and imposed sweeping professional and social bans, and the program of \”Aryanization\” had already dispossessed many Jewish businesses and property. Still, historians mark November 1938 as a decisive break: the era of German Jewry as it had existed effectively ended, and German society was changed irreversibly.\n\nThe immediate pretext for the pogroms was the assassination on November 7, 1938, in Paris of German diplomat Ernst vom Rath by Herschel Grynszpan, a Jewish teenager. Within hours of German radio reporting the killing, anti-Jewish riots erupted in some cities; two days later, after orders from the Nazi leadership, the violence was organized and intensified. At a gathering in Munich for the anniversary of the Beer Hall Putsch, propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels drafted directives that called for the destruction of Jewish businesses and synagogues. Police were told not to intervene, firefighters were instructed to protect only non-Jewish buildings, and looting was officially prohibited even as theft nevertheless occurred.\n\nOfficials’ instructions were carried out across Berlin, Cologne, Hamburg, Frankfurt and hundreds of smaller towns and villages. Many Germans either joined the attacks or watched without intervening. \”The November 1938 pogrom was carried out in plain sight,\” said Raphael Gross, president of the Deutsches Historisches Museum. \”It could be seen by everyone \u2014 the press of the world, foreign diplomats and all citizens.\”\n\nDiplomats in Germany reported scenes of \”cultural barbarism\” and widespread looting; some accounts were especially brutal. Reports collected by Hermann Simon, former director of the Centrum Judaicum, included the Polish consul general in Leipzig describing a woman stripped and nearly raped, the Latvian ambassador likening Kurfurstendamm to a battlefield, and the Finnish envoy noting pervasive shame and condemnation among the German population. Governments received these dispatches, but most took only limited action. A small number of concrete responses did follow: for example, the Kindertransport to England began after November 1938, bringing many children to safety. But by and large international reactions were inadequate.\n\nFew at the time predicted the scope of what would come. In a stark misjudgment, the Italian embassy wrote on November 16, 1938, that it was inconceivable Germany would one day send hundreds of thousands to execution or confine them in massive camps.\n\nHistorians today regard the events of November 9, 1938, as a turning point that revealed the regime’s readiness for widespread, state-condoned violence against Jews. Because the old term \”Kristallnacht\” is now seen as trivializing, the events are more accurately referred to as the Reichspogromnacht or the November Pogroms.\n\nThis piece is a rewritten account of reporting originally published in German and previously adapted in English.”]}](https://fresh-world-news.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/914-17213993_6-440x248.jpg)
![{“title”:”November 1938 Pogroms Revealed Nazi Brutality”,”content”:”\”I can still clearly remember the morning of November 10,\” W. Michael Blumenthal recalled. \”My father was arrested early in the morning. Amid the commotion and despite the fact that my mother had forbidden me to do so, I went outside without being noticed. I saw the broken shop windows on Kurfürstendamm boulevard and smoke coming out of the synagogue on Fasanenstrasse.\” He was just 12 years old.\n\nThe Fasanenstrasse synagogue in Berlin was set alight on the night of November 9, 1938, and the image of burning synagogues and shattered storefronts quickly became the emblem of a coordinated, nationwide assault on Jews. That night and the days that followed saw roughly 1,300 synagogues and some 7,500 Jewish businesses destroyed; cemeteries, schools and homes were vandalized. Police largely stood aside as Jews were dragged into the streets, beaten and publicly humiliated. Fire brigades often refused to fight blazes in Jewish buildings, focusing instead on protecting \”Aryan\” properties.\n\nThe violence intensified on November 10, when about 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and sent to concentration camps including Dachau, Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald. Blumenthal\u2019s father was among those taken. Blumenthal remembered his mother\u2019s desperate questions as he was marched away: \”What’s going on? What are you doing with him? What has he done? Where is he being taken to?\” Even at 12, he felt the adults’ fear.\n\nBlumenthal’s family escaped to Shanghai in 1939, one of the few destinations then admitting Jewish refugees without visas. He later described his experience in his memoir From Exile to Washington: A Memoir of Leadership in the Twentieth Century.\n\nThe attack did not come from nowhere. Anti-Jewish persecution had been official policy since the Nazis took power in 1933. The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 legally defined Jews and imposed sweeping professional and social bans, and the program of \”Aryanization\” had already dispossessed many Jewish businesses and property. Still, historians mark November 1938 as a decisive break: the era of German Jewry as it had existed effectively ended, and German society was changed irreversibly.\n\nThe immediate pretext for the pogroms was the assassination on November 7, 1938, in Paris of German diplomat Ernst vom Rath by Herschel Grynszpan, a Jewish teenager. Within hours of German radio reporting the killing, anti-Jewish riots erupted in some cities; two days later, after orders from the Nazi leadership, the violence was organized and intensified. At a gathering in Munich for the anniversary of the Beer Hall Putsch, propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels drafted directives that called for the destruction of Jewish businesses and synagogues. Police were told not to intervene, firefighters were instructed to protect only non-Jewish buildings, and looting was officially prohibited even as theft nevertheless occurred.\n\nOfficials’ instructions were carried out across Berlin, Cologne, Hamburg, Frankfurt and hundreds of smaller towns and villages. Many Germans either joined the attacks or watched without intervening. \”The November 1938 pogrom was carried out in plain sight,\” said Raphael Gross, president of the Deutsches Historisches Museum. \”It could be seen by everyone \u2014 the press of the world, foreign diplomats and all citizens.\”\n\nDiplomats in Germany reported scenes of \”cultural barbarism\” and widespread looting; some accounts were especially brutal. Reports collected by Hermann Simon, former director of the Centrum Judaicum, included the Polish consul general in Leipzig describing a woman stripped and nearly raped, the Latvian ambassador likening Kurfurstendamm to a battlefield, and the Finnish envoy noting pervasive shame and condemnation among the German population. Governments received these dispatches, but most took only limited action. A small number of concrete responses did follow: for example, the Kindertransport to England began after November 1938, bringing many children to safety. But by and large international reactions were inadequate.\n\nFew at the time predicted the scope of what would come. In a stark misjudgment, the Italian embassy wrote on November 16, 1938, that it was inconceivable Germany would one day send hundreds of thousands to execution or confine them in massive camps.\n\nHistorians today regard the events of November 9, 1938, as a turning point that revealed the regime’s readiness for widespread, state-condoned violence against Jews. Because the old term \”Kristallnacht\” is now seen as trivializing, the events are more accurately referred to as the Reichspogromnacht or the November Pogroms.\n\nThis piece is a rewritten account of reporting originally published in German and previously adapted in English.”]}](https://fresh-world-news.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/914-17213993_6-320x180.jpg)