The Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Keir Starmer, was given a thumping in the recent local elections across the United Kingdom where voters turned out en masse to turf out their Labour councillors and send a strong message to the government that they are extremely unpopular. The Labour Party lost 1,498 council seats whilst the Reform Party gained 1,452 council seats. The establishment has received yet another message that they have used the state to do nothing but harm our people but their reply is to send for the “King in the North” to save their skins.

The starting gun has blown for the Labour Party leadership and thereby the premiership too. Keir Starmer has not delivered on his promise to get the United Kingdom growing again, whilst also delivering unpopular policies he never promised at all. So far, two candidates have emerged to be Starmer’s replacement, both laced with establishment stoogery. Such is the nature of the British political system whereby the people demonstrate huge undercurrents of distrust and dislike of the individuals in power and the system they operate within, so the establishment’s solution is to not change the system at all. Instead, they swap out the head of the snake to convince the lemmings that real change abounds.

The two candidates are Wes Streeting, the former health secretary who resigned from Starmer’s government after the local election catastrophe, and Andy Burnham, who has been Mayor of Manchester since 2017 and has been styled the “King in the North” due to his immense popularity in the northern England.

The clear favourite is Burnham, but he is not a member of Parliament. The mad dash to get him elected began with Josh Simons, a former government minister who had to resign over a scandal involving spying on opposition media, and now subsequently his Makerfield parliamentary seat in the north of England to give way for Burnham to win the premiership. However, in the recent local elections, the areas of Makerfield that were up for election overwhelmingly voted for the Reform Party. When Josh Simons won his seat in 2024, Reform was biting at his heels as he only secured a 6,000-vote majority. Since Reform has improved leaps and bounds the past two years, this further suggests that this isn’t a done deal for Burnham, whose supporters must believe that his personal popularity can carry him over the line in the Makerfield by-election. This sets up the incredibly juicy outcome where Burnham loses his race for Parliament and thus becoming prime minister, whilst simultaneously having resigned his mayoralty and possibly handing it to the Reform Party too, leaving the “King in the North” with no office at all. Establishment stooges deserve nothing less than utter humiliation through the rituals of their own design.

Andy Burnham is running on the notion that he is outside the Westminster bubble and brings fresh thinking upon a state which has let the people down for decades. The only hiccup for Burnham is that he served in Parliament and as a government minister during a sixteen-year stint inside that same Westminster bubble he criticizes from 2001 to 2017. Burnham voted for the Iraq War in 2003 and expanded the crony capitalist, private finance initiatives that kept huge public infrastructure bills off the books in the short term but saddled the taxpayer with excessive debts in the long term.

Having been superficially successful with Manchester, Burnham is running on “Manchesterism,” which he styles as an idea in opposition to the last four decades of “privatization” of public services, hence why he makes a fuss about the government-owned bus network established in Manchester. Burnham is exactly how you imagine a politician to be: slick, fast on his feet, slimy, and duplicitous. Months ago, Burnham criticized the government for being in hoc to the bond markets—in other words, the people and organizations the government borrows money from. At the time, the suggestion was that government spending needed to increase without worrying about the reaction of the bond markets. Now that he has a very realistic chance at becoming prime minister, he has rolled back those comments, stating that he balanced the books in Manchester as mayor. Burnham fails to mention that it is a statutory obligation for the books to be balanced, so it is impossible for any mayor to run an unbalanced budget without legal penalization.

Burnham is a political chameleon. He was a center-left Blairite for almost two decades and has since had a come to Jesus moment, causing a sharp lurch to the left by promising to bring water, utilities, railways, and buses under national government ownership. The similarities are astounding to Keir Starmer, who promised the exact same things in his own leadership election after the Marxist Jeremy Corbyn lost his place as leader of the Labour Party in 2019. Burnham has already demonstrated his ability to take part in utterly absurd and cruel policies that will harm both domestic and foreign citizens. If hope makes people careless, the Labour left is desperate, and desperate people are all too eager to invite false saviors.

Wes Streeting also announced his leadership bid, representing the right of the Labour Party. Streeting has been a close ally of Keir Starmer until it was evident the wheels were falling off; he served as Health Secretary but resigned to put the sharpened knife to good use. Streeting is the perfect encapsulation of the political establishment: no career in the private sector before joining politics, a hubris and arrogance that only inexperience and an inflated sense of moral superiority can give you, and a deeply held desire for power.

One of the first commitments that Streeting made in his leadership bid was to rejoin the European Union. There is a wide and deeply held belief in the liberal Westminster establishment that the United Kingdom was galloping into prosperity before 2016 and then as soon as we voted to leave the EU, it all fell apart. According to this worldview, economic growth collapsed, inflation surged, our bond with our European neighbors immediately ceased, and living standards have flatlined never to recover. Except, it is a complete myth.

European countries as a rule performed poorly from 2016 till today. One should expect this when they pursue statism at an accelerated rate, with most performing worse or similar to the United Kingdom, including such powerhouses as Germany. The Westminster establishment never agreed with the decision to leave the European Union and has fought it at every turn, resulting in an exit from the EU in name only. There has been mass retainment of its regulations, directives, and standards that were supposed to be incinerated to make our country more competitive in global markets and grab the opportunities of Brexit with both hands. The result has been almost the perfect outcome for the “Rejoiners.” They can claim that Brexit has been awful for the United Kingdom and the opportunities were mirages sold by snake oil salesmen. Thus, we should rejoin to put the pep back in the step of the liberal world order. However, if you’re a cynic, you may believe that Streeting pushed this conversation to the forefront because Burnham is running in a seat that voted heavily to leave the European Union, meaning Streeting is attempting to scupper his rival’s chances by turning his electorate against him and denying him a place in Westminster.

The Labour Party fundamentally does not understand the undercurrent that is sweeping the United Kingdom. The political establishment has spent decades degrading British culture beyond comprehension and with the power in their hands have sought to ensure that this degradation seeps into every area of life. Competent people are denied jobs due to ideological reasons, life goals like buying a house or starting a family are endlessly put off as a standard of living crisis eats at the opportunities of young people, all while morally corrupt people can obtain high office and continue to infect British society with their own depravations.

The Labour Party believes they can thrust a figurehead into government who has more personality and appeal, who espouses more left-wing positions to persuade the electorate that this time real change beckons. The problem is that the electorate has already experienced this with the Conservative Party, and Labour is at risk of suffering similar consequences if they act the same way. At its core, the Labour Party does not respect the British people. They have demonstrated they are more than willing to hang onto the liberal world order that has corrupted British society for decades rather than listen to what the public demands and reverse this endless, slow death spiral the United Kingdom finds itself in. It is death by a thousand cuts for the people of the British isle and no replacement for Keir Starmer will change that.