Keir Starmer is under pressure as Reform UK threatens Labour

Crunch time for Keir Starmer: is Reform rising in Runcorn?

Last Updated: October 1, 2025By

England has gone to the polls today (May 1, 2025) – and the date could come to have terrible meaning for Keir Starmer and his Labour Party.

“Mayday” is an international distress signal, from the French “m’aider” (“help!”) – and Starmer may feel he needs it, considering the apparent depth of public feeling against him and his party.

There are mayoral and local council elections across the board, and a by-election in Runcorn and Helsby, which Labour held in 2024 with 22,358 votes – just 31 per cent of the 71,955-strong electorate, but nearly 53 per cent of those who actually turned out and 34 per cent more than anybody else.

Reform UK seem about to turn that upside down:

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Here’s what This Writer takes to be an average response to that poll figure:

This is what Starmer gets for handing control of political discourse to Nigel Farage.

I stated yesterday that Labour’s problem with Reform UK is that it is trying to be Reform UK – Starmer fears losing voters to Farage because those are exactly the people for whom he is governing, rather than Labour’s historical core constituency of socialists.

For nearly a year, Starmer has forced continuity-Tory and Reform-lite policies onto the public in the hope of heading Farage off at the polls – but all he has done is tell the public that Farage is right.

Farage isn’t right. He’s right-wing, that’s all.

But with no clear alternative to his nonsense being put forward in the media – for example, by a BBC that believes “balance” is achieved by platforming the policies of the two most popular political parties, rather than by exposing the fact that there’s little difference between them and spotlighting genuine alternatives – Farage has had a clear run at today’s elections.

This is how Farage, with no real scrutiny, has been allowed to pose as the only ‘real’ alternative — while Starmer mimics him.

If Starmer stumbles badly today, it won’t be much of a handicap for him. He still has another four years in government to straighten out his policies.

There’s just one clear problem:

He doesn’t have the faintest idea how.

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