America should take a lesson from UK PM Keir Starmer’s humiliating slide

UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer speaking at London South Bank Technical College on May 12, 2026. Toby Melville/Pool Photo via AP

I have two words for any of my American cousins thinking of voting for the Democrats in the midterm elections later this year: Keir Starmer.

To see where the wet-left politics of welfarism, broken borders and Net Zero can lead, just picture Sir Keir.

There he is skulking around his bunker at 10 Downing Street, hiding from the judgment of his own people.

The reason he’s gone to ground: His Labour Party has just suffered a spectacular ballot-box revolt.

In elections across England, Scotland and Wales, working people delivered an emphatic “No” to Labour’s lunatic agenda.

Now even some in his own party are telling Starmer to resign.

Yet like a mad old monarch, he stomps around his little palace in Westminster, convinced he must force through the very policies the people just rejected.

You couldn’t ask for firmer proof of how unpopular — and unworkable — the left’s politics are.

It turns out people don’t want constant illegal immigration, a bloated welfare bill, snotty business-bashing and the dismantling of industry in the BS name of “saving the planet.”

We flirted with these barking-mad ideas, America — please don’t make the same mistake.

Starmer’s electoral drubbing was a bloodbath.

In local elections held across England last Thursday, voters picked councilors to run our towns.

Labour councilors were booted out all over the country: More than 1,000 of them were sent packing.

Labour’s thrashing was most delicious in working-class areas.

These are the parts of Britain that voted Labour for decades, almost out of habit.

Yet this time they took a punt on Reform UK instead — Nigel Farage’s upstart party.

Imagine a shorter version of Donald Trump in a Savile Row suit quaffing a pint of warm ale, and you’re picturing Farage.

He’s a populist who promises to deport illegal immigrants, properly police our borders and clamp down on the anti-British, anti-Western agitation of mad Islamists and their simps on the left.

Ordinary Brits clearly want a restoration of common sense and national pride.

In Wales and Scotland too, Labour was trounced in local parliament elections.

Its loss in Wales was astonishing; this is a country Labour has dominated for more than a century.

Yet last week its vote share fell by three-quarters in a sweeping, shaming defeat.

Here’s what happened in the UK last week: Ordinary people rose up against a leftist bureaucracy that feels nothing but contempt for them, their country and their flag.

Starmer’s failures are legion.

He promised to get a handle on illegal immigration, yet hundreds of men still arrive in small boats every single week.

This influx of fighting-age men from distant, regressive lands has been catastrophic.

Especially for women.

The number of sexual crimes committed by foreign nationals soared by 62% over the past four years.

Foreigners now account for a staggering one-in-seven convictions for such crimes in the UK. 

Starmer has also overseen the ballooning of our welfare bill.

This year, for the first time ever, the amount Britain spends on welfare will exceed the amount we raise from income tax.

Starmer’s clapped-out government is predicted to blow $451 billion on welfare, while raising $448 billion in income-tax revenues.

Any country that spends more on the workless than it raises from the working is an economic basket case.

Starmer’s devotion to the cult of Net Zero has been disastrous, too.

His Luddite refusal to drill for oil and gas means Britain — birthplace of the Industrial Revolution — is no longer an energy-independent nation.

This has left us dangerously vulnerable to energy price shocks, like the one unleashed by the crisis in the Strait of Hormuz.

Starmer’s cynical attempt to blame the shock we suffered on “Trump’s war in Iran” clearly didn’t wash with voters.

We know it was his own slavish bowing to the eco-cult that caused our energy troubles.

Then there’s his haughty contempt for ordinary Brits.

He has branded people “far right” for raising concerns about immigration or calling for an inquiry into England’s rape gangs — those groups of Muslim men who preyed on vulnerable white girls in towns across England.

Labeling good people as fascists sealed his fate: Brits do not take kindly to being smeared by their rulers.

So, American friends, to see the pitfalls of Dem-style lunacy, just look across the pond.

Nothing good comes from politicians abandoning the nation’s borders, sacrificing industry to the god of eco-doom and writing off decent, hard-working people as racist trash.

Don’t pursue the same suicidal policies.

Listen and learn from England’s roar against Sir Keir.

Brendan O’Neill is chief political writer for the British online magazine spiked.