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Britain

UK’s Starmer challenged by former Labour minister after tough local election results while Moslems voters unite on the issue of supporting ~~Palestine~~ Hamas

2026-05-10

[IsraelTimes] Catherine West says cabinet must work out plan to replace the prime minister or she’ll make a leadership bid herself, and warns others may do the same

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, reeling from a crushing local election defeat, faced a new setback to his leadership on Saturday when a former minister said she would challenge him for the top job if no one else stepped forward.

Starmer’s Labour Party recorded the worst losses of a governing party in municipal polls since 1995, prompting a growing number of his own politicians to call on him to quit.

To try to shore up his position in the party earlier on Saturday, he named two influential Labour grandees as advisers, former Prime Minister

Gordon Brown
... the gormless former British PM ...
and former deputy Labour leader Harriet Harman.

But just hours later, Labour politician Catherine West, a former minister, told BBC Radio that she wanted the cabinet to work out a plan to replace Starmer by Monday, or she would challenge him for the position herself.

"If...there are no leadership hopefuls who come forward tomorrow, then Monday morning I will put my name forward to stand for the Leader of the Labour Party," she said.

LEADERSHIP CHALLENGE WOULD NOT BE STRAIGHTFORWARD
As the extent of the defeat emerged, more than 20 politicians publicly and privately called on Starmer to set out a timetable for his departure. Asked whether he would stand down he told British media that was not the right thing to do.

"I’m not going to walk away from this," he said earlier on Saturday.

A number of Cabinet ministers said on Friday that they continued to support Starmer, who just under two years ago led Labour to a landslide national election victory, and an immediate challenge from the potential leadership rivals does not look straightforward.

Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham does not have the seat in parliament he needs to mount a challenge, and former deputy prime minister Angela Rayner has yet to fully resolve the tax issues that prompted her resignation from office last year.

Wes Streeting, currently health minister, is, like Starmer, tainted by the appointment of Peter Mandelson as Britannia’s ambassador to the United States. Streeting was close to Mandelson, who was sacked over his ties to the late sex offender Jeffrey Want Some Candy, Little Girl? Epstein
...A ~~high class pimp~~ financier who was alleged to maintain a stable of underage ~~whores~~ sex slaves who were paid big bucks to entertain the rich and/or famous. He was really surprised when he commited suiciede in jail...
'I will put my name forward to stand for the leader of the Labour party'

Any candidate wishing to make a challenge would need to secure the public support of 20% of Labour members of parliament. With Labour currently holding 403 seats, that equates to 81 backers.

West said she had 10 names behind her so far but her preferred option was that another candidate put themselves forward.

"I think there are several people who would like to do it who have been planning for months," she said.

CALLING IN THE OLD GUARD AS PRESSURE MOUNTS
Aiming to reset his leadership and win back party support, Starmer’s office announced Brown, 75, and Harman, also 75, would join his team.

"They’re vital to how we strengthen our country and take it forward and provide the opportunities that give people that hope for a better future," he said when asked whether figures from the past could help with his plan for the future to improve people’s lives.

Brown will seek to drive new defense and security investment and hone relations with the European Union

...the successor to the Holy Roman Empire, only without the Hapsburgs and the nifty uniforms and the dancing...
, to try to boost economic performance and win back votes, while Harman will focus on tackling misogyny and violence against women and girls, creating economic opportunities.

Vote count as of Saturday morning:

🗳️ The change in seats as of 9am in the #LocalElections

🔹REFORM +1,276
🟡LIB DEM +142
🔵CON -427
🔴LAB -1,051
🟢GREEN +306

129/136 English councils have declared pic.twitter.com/RFfDpFIO6Q
— The Telegraph (@Telegraph) May 9, 2026

🚨 More than 100 Labour councillors and former candidates have signed an open letter demanding that Sir Keir Starmer set out a timetable for an “orderly transition” of power

Read the letter in full below ⤵️https://t.co/Wl7PjkmHbG pic.twitter.com/Cah3xhw0Vt
— The Telegraph (@Telegraph) May 9, 2026

🔴 Catherine West may not be well known outside Westminster, but her name is causing Sir Keir Starmer a serious headache.

The Labour MP said that she would attempt to trigger a leadership contest to force the Prime Minister to resign if no Cabinet ministers were to put… pic.twitter.com/AGNyji3Q8i
— The Telegraph (@Telegraph) May 9, 2026

The election that entrenched sectarian politics in Britain.

Me and @edcumming for @Telegraph. (Link below) pic.twitter.com/kjrLF0g5gw
— Michael Murphy (@michaelmurph_y) May 9, 2026

Muslim voters and the statement of the bleedin’ obvious

Written just before the election.

[ConservativeWoman] THE Henry Jackson Society is one of today’s more worthy British institutions, defending as it does liberal democracy and what it terms ‘real’ human rights. It’s no surprise then that one of HSJ’s latest studies focuses on ‘Forecasting the Muslim Sectarian Wave’. It’s particularly topical as the nation heads to the polling booths today. Or not, in too many cases.

The study is by HSJ’s resident expert in all things Islam, Emma Schubart. It’s a data-driven deep dive into England’s 2024 local election results and is sub-titled ‘Ward-Level Predictors of Electoral Success’. It abounds with explanations, extrapolations and algebraic formulae, but ultimately and hugely unexpectedly (not) it arrives at a few basic and predictable conclusions. They are:

1) The bigger the local ward population of Muslims, the higher likelihood of electing a ‘sectarian Muslim candidate’;

2) The voter turnout from within Muslim communities is significantly higher than other faith/cultural identity groups;

3) As with the previous two categories, the proportion of Muslims aged under 30 who exercise their franchise puts what we might call indigenous voting groups to shame;

4) Outcome? In appealing to their voter base, fixing potholes or arguing for a new playground comes a distant second to supporting causes in Gaza or Kashmir which, frankly, a local councillor doesn’t have much impact on.

Her finding somewhat pales when measured against a breaking poll of British Muslim voters showing 60 per cent of them would back a pro-Palestine Independent in order to oust a Labour candidate.

Ms Schubart’s work is admirably detailed and forensically calculated in terms of identifying what constitutes a Sectarian Muslim, and it’s not all about the good old chants of Allahu Akbar. For instance Green Party leader Zack Polanski would qualify for the label, but former Conservative Home Secretary Sajid Javid wouldn’t.

In finishing the report however I couldn’t help but wonder how much time and money was spent studying all the results from 1,902 local authority wards, of which only 66 met the author’s criteria, when the most important, almost throwaway line, resides at the very end of the paper. The attitudes of Muslim under 30s ‘appears to align with a broader “radicalisation of youth” concern already identified by . . . security and counter-terrorism’.

Really? It’s more than a decade since Dewsbury teens Talha Asmal and Hassan Munshi joined ISIS, Asmal blowing himself up in Iraq. Munshi, whose elder brother Hammad was convicted of terror offences a decade earlier, is presumably back home where their eminent grandfather Sheikh Yakub Munshi ran the Sharia court and was President of the Islamic Research Institute of Gt Britain. I can’t help thinking Ms Schubart might have been better advised to explore why the well-funded Prevent programme rarely gets a public mention except when exposing its latest failures to protect our innocent citizens.

What’s more, her finding somewhat pales when measured against a breaking poll of British Muslim voters showing 60 per cent of them would back a pro-Palestine Independent in order to oust a Labour candidate.

Which is why Sir Kier’s new-old advisors will not help him fix the dilemma he drove the Labour Party into, and why none of those putting themselves forward to replace him will be able to fix it either, short of either surrendering to the Moslem contingent or sending most of the Moslems back to where they or their ancestors came from.

The Policy Exchange survey throws up quite a few eyebrow-raising attitudes that should, but probably won’t, be grave causes for concern. Unless of course you’re a pro-Hamas, violence-supporting, anti-Semitic opponent of free speech.

A clear signal from those 2024 elections was the sharpest of red flags for anyone interested in the street-level Muslim mood swing. Schubart identifies four specific areas where the numbers stood out, viz Blackburn, Bradford, Bristol and Kirklees, the latter being my home patch, specifically the intensely Muslim districts around north Kirklees – Dewsbury, Batley and Heckmondwike – where a Labour Party that would sweep the General Election two months later was dumped on its backside by the new generation of ‘Independents’ in May’s local poll.

Independent from whom, I could only wonder, as the newly formed Dewsbury and Batley Parliamentary seat witnessed the enthronement of political newcomer Iqbal Mohamed, an Independent whose focus on Palestine and building a new international airport in Mirpur clearly enchanted 41 per cent of the locals who bothered to turn out.

Understanding how the Muslim vote works on the ground might have informed Ms Schubart’s readers better, I felt, than stating the bleedin’ obvious. It is all about the demographic, yes, but not on a strictly or simply Muslim basis. And it works differently in a local poll to a national one. In bidding for council seats, it’s very tribal and competitive and for more than 30 years has been a traditional tri-party combat. That’s changing rapidly. But for a General Election? That’s when the diktat from on high holds sway and those erstwhile rivals gather under the one flag.

The Dewsbury West ward, home to the poorer Pakistani-heritage locals, for 30 years hopped back and forth between Lib Dems and Labour. Dewsbury South, the redoubt of the wealthier, more influential Gujarati Muslim community, was entirely Conservative for years until a presumed decree from above delivered vote swings of up to 100 per cent and Labour took over.

As of today? Three of the four Muslim councillors – elected on a Labour ticket, one the recent Mayor – now sit as Independents. The two remaining Labour members will be fearing today’s outcome, unlike over in Batley where the five Muslim Independents will likely prevail, a long-serving white Labour councillor counting down her final hours as an elected member.

These are the cataclysmic changes that signal the rising of Islam as a political force in its own right. For now the Greens may be weaponised as the useful idiots their temporary Muslim benefactors see them as, but only until the numbers game sways, as it inexorably will. It’s a numbers game that experts might be better casting forward, than poring over an already much-changed recent past.

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