Early returns from the UK Elections on Friday pointed to a brutal night for Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Labour Party, with Nigel Farage’s Reform UK racking up major gains nationwide.
With votes still being counted, the trend was already clear: Labour is getting hammered just two years after its 2024 landslide, and Reform is making serious inroads in areas long considered safely Labour.
“The results are tough, they are very tough, and there’s no sugarcoating it,” Starmer said Friday.
Despite the blowback, Starmer brushed off calls to resign.
“Tough days like this don’t weaken my resolve to deliver the change that I promised,” he said, while conceding voters are frustrated with “the pace of change.” He added he is “not going to walk away from those challenges and plunge the country into chaos.”
The scale of the losses appears steep. Reform picked up hundreds of local council seats, especially across working-class communities in northern England. In places like Hartlepool, once a Labour stronghold, the party was effectively wiped out.
Confirmed council results as of this morning
Farage hailed the results as a turning point.
“It is a truly historic shift in British politics,” he said, adding that Labour is being “wiped out by Reform in many of their traditional areas.”
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The elections did not include a direct vote for prime minister, but they are widely viewed as a referendum on Starmer’s leadership. Voters cast ballots in more than 5,000 local contests across England, along with several mayoral races and parliamentary votes in Wales and Scotland.
Even with incomplete results, the outcome signals a major shake-up in British politics, with both establishment parties losing ground.
The Conservative Party, now led by Kemi Badenoch, also continued to bleed support after its defeat in 2024. Still, Badenoch tried to strike an optimistic tone, saying there were “signs of renewal everywhere that we are standing.”
Reform, meanwhile, emerged as one of the biggest winners of the UK Elections, building a broad base of local power and eyeing strong performances in Scotland and Wales.
In Wales, early indications suggested Labour could fail to finish first in a nationwide vote for the first time in more than a century, underscoring just how dramatically the political map may be shifting.
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