In Britain, Labor and Keir Starmer take another step towards power, while the Conservatives and Rishi Sunak are in agony

Labour’s landslide victory in last Thursday’s local elections in England confirms Labour’s lead in opinion polls over the Conservatives, who have been in power nationally since 2010.

Starmer’s party added eight new councils and an extra 186 councilors and now has an absolute majority in 51 of England’s 107 elections, while Prime Minister Sunak’s party lost almost half of its councilor seats which he held in the 107 councils – 474 – as well as the absolute majority in 10 councils.

As expected, Labour’s candidate Sadiq Khan won a third mayoral term in London with an 11% lead over his Conservative rival Susan Hall (43.8% to 32.7%), and Starmer’s party won nine out of 11 metropolitan mayoral elections, including Birmingham (where Labor candidate Richard Parker beat former Tory mayor Andy Street by 1,500 out of 600,000 votes), Manchester and Liverpool.

These results confirm the average lead of 20% in opinion polls for the parliamentary elections which must take place no later than January 2025. The Conservative Party’s extremely poor results in the local elections will only increase the panic of many MPs in the ruling party led by Prime Minister Sunak.

Discontent has already been expressed in the right wing of the party, with former home secretary Suella Braverman telling the BBC that Prime Minister Sunak must own up to this stinging failure and change his policies. In what way? To return to the Conservative Party’s traditional policy of tax cuts, take a hard line on immigration and remove the UK from the Council of Europe, denouncing the European Convention on Human Rights which the Conservative MP says prevents more radical measures against illegal immigrants.

The attitude expressed by Braverman has support among many Conservative MPs who see their mandates threatened in the upcoming parliamentary election. In the opinion polls, the Reform Party (ex-Brexit) is rated at 12%, a score which, under the conditions of the uninominal majority vote, will probably not bring it any deputies, but enough to deprive the Conservative Party of dozens of mandates, given the fact that the majority of voters for Richard Tice’s party are disillusioned former Conservative voters.

The pressure to pull the Conservative Party to the right is not given by the desire to win the elections, which many in the party consider lost no matter what happens, but by the desire of some Conservative MPs to save their place in the House of Commons by reducing the attractiveness of the Reform vote.

That is not to say that Labor does not have its own problems on the left flank, where it has lost votes to the Greens and the Labor Party, especially in constituencies where the percentage of Muslim voters is higher, amid Starmer’s moderate stance on the conflict between Israel and Hamas.

But after 14 years of Conservative Party government, very many voters want change nationally, just as they wanted it in 1997 after 18 years of Conservative government and in 2010 after 13 years of Labor government. And Starmer, even if he does not have the charisma of a Tony Blair in 1997 or a David Cameron in 2010, has proven the ability to rectify the party’s line after the leftist excesses of the 2015-2020 period when Jeremy Corbyn was the leader. And as Britain’s political history shows, parliamentary elections are won at the centre, not at the extremes.