Can someone give me a TL;DR version of what is going on in UK ? Why are they asking PM Starmer to resign ? I assume it is due to UK's domestic issues and not related to Iran or the US (yes I am a US Citizen and wondering what is going on across the Atlantic out of curiosity )
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/uk-keir-starmer-rejects-calls-resign-prime-minister/
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Terrible election results last Thursday where the Labour party lost 1300 local representatives with the Reform party and the Green party gaining many areas from Labour. The Labour party also lost power in Wales for the first time in 100 years. Wales has its own Parliament and government.
People are asking him to resign because the victory Labour had in the last general election was an illusionary one. They actually got less votes than they did under Corbyn which was the worst result for them in living memory.
They won by sheer technicality of the first past the post system, because so many people hated the Tories. So they got a sort of very thin democratic mandate where they technically won a lot of MPs and hold a massive majority in terms of members of parliament. But those MPs all have hair thin majorities at the election. Many of them only winning by a fraction of a percent. Meaning those MPs are not in a strong position electorally, they would lose their seats from a single bad headline in an election season.
So. The Labour Party is incredibly fragile. With all the MPs in a state of permanent panic.
Add in to this, Kier Starmer is the single most unpopular Prime Minister according to polling, in the entire history of the United Kingdom. He has a reverse Midas touch, where everything he goes near turns to shit.
Political journalists joke that it Starmer wanted to legislate giving every British citizen £5000 cash as a gift, the public would instantly despise the idea of it and refuse the money. An example of this is digital IDs, which polled very popular as an idea in the UK for many years, showed a lot of support. Then Starmer announced it and suddenly it was seen as 1984 coming to Britain.
So where we are now? There were elections all over the UK last week. Local council elections across England and then elections in Wales and Scotland.
Labour lost. Massively. They lost over a thousand councillors, and lost them in seats that have always voted Labour. They lost Wales which has voted exclusively for Labour for a hundred years, and they continued their record of losing even more in Scotland which used to be a Labour stronghold.
The situation politically now, is there is one man who a large part of the Labour Party wants to lead. He’s called Andy Burnham. His nickname is “The King in the North”, and he’s the mayor of Manchester.
Unfortunately for him, he can’t run in a leadership election because he’s not an MP. So he’s trying to get one of the MPs in Manchester to quit, so it triggers a by-election where he will be the candidate. Win. Become a member of parliament, and then will be able to challenge Starmer for leadership and become Prime Minister.
(You should note that Burnham is I think at last polling, the most popular politician in the entire UK and has massive support across Labour because he’s a soft left candidate who works well with the entire left of Labour, while being a Northerner and working class so he gets on well with the Labour red wall heartlands across the North).
There’s another possible frontrunner to challenge Starner. Called Wes Streeting. But so far he appears to be too scared to pull the trigger on a leadership challenge. And he’s sort of missing his chance, because as soon as Burnham is in a position to start his own Bid, Wes Streeting has 0 possibility of beating him.
So that’s the political situation at the moment. The Prime Minister is keeping his job, because everyone is holding their breath waiting for Burnham to be ready. All the factions that want Kier Starmer to stand down, are waiting for that before they make their move. The only one who isn’t in the Burnham faction of relevance is as I say, Wes Streeting. And he’s seemingly terrified to make a move, and he’s losing his momentum and opportunity.
The other key players to watch are Angela Rayner, the Kingmaker. She is waiting for Burnham too. Ed Milliband who is quietly watching it all like a hawk, and wouldn’t surprise anybody if he made a bid for leadership.
So no OP, the TLDR is that this has absolutely nothing to do with Iran or the USA. The energy crisis does not help, but this is entirely domestic and it’s a result of decades of resentment that has been building up in the British public about successive governments mishandling things. And it’s about the last general election where Labour only won on a technicality and the scale of their victory is as thin as a hair.