Keir Starmer has said Labour are on their way to winning a majority at the next General Election after "fantastic" council results in England. The UK Labour leader told supporters they are progressing towards a Westminster majority as the results saw his party win key areas from the Tories.
Labour took Medway in Kent off the Tories and will run the council for the first time since 1998. The party also had victories in Plymouth, Stoke and Middlesbrough. They are also encouraged by the Tories suffering losses across England.
The next General Election must take place by the end of January 2025, with it likely to go ahead at some point next year. Starmer told cheering activists in Kent: “You didn’t just get it over the line, you blew the doors off.”
He said there have been “fantastic results across the country” in “battlegrounds” and “places we need to win”. “And make no no mistake, we are on course for a Labour majority at the next General Election,” he said.
Sir Keir said Labour has made a “positive case” on how it would help people with the cost-of-living crisis as Mr Sunak “said nothing”. He said: “We’ve changed our party. We’ve won the trust, the confidence, of voters, and now we can go on to change our country. Change is possible. A better Britain is possible."
In central London, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak insisted the results were always going to be tough but that the state of play has improved since he took over six months ago after the leaderships of Boris Johnson and Liz Truss. He went on to tell broadcasters it was “hard to draw firm conclusions” from the initial results, with a little over a quarter of councils having declared.
The Prime Minister said: “It’s always disappointing to lose hardworking Conservative councillors; they’re friends, they’re colleagues and I’m so grateful to them for everything they’ve done. But in terms of the results, it’s still early. We’ve just had a quarter of the results in but what I am going to carry on doing is delivering on the people’s priorities.”
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