Keir Starmer’s resignation is the latest sign of deepening political splintering in a major industrialised economy.
The UK prime minister’s 22 June decision to quit – 23 months after achieving a Labour party triumph with a landslide general election victory – underlines the startling acceleration of leadership changes in the West. But it also emphasises a widening longevity gap with the heads of major emerging market economies which represent an important separate source of intensifying worldwide fragmentation.
The British voted on 23 June 2016 for withdrawal from the European Union: a misfortune that marked an epochal shift – not just for the UK but for the continent as a whole. A 100-strong OMFIF series of articles in the three months before the referendum spelled out many of the likely consequences.
Since 2016, the British have had six prime ministers. Within the next few weeks, they will get a seventh. Andy Burnham, the former mayor of Greater Manchester, won a convincing by-election victory on 18 June and has now arrived back as a member of parliament in Westminster ready to take his seat and, almost certainly, the Labour party leadership.
Since the EU vote, France has had nine prime ministers (under two presidents, François Hollande and, since 2017, Emmanuel Macron, who stands down next year); Italy and Japan have both had five.
Strongmen rule unchanged
The ‘strongmen’ in Türkiye, India, China and Russia have ruled unchanged: Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Narendra Modi (since 2014), Xi Jinping (since 2013) and Vladimir Putin (alternating between prime minister and president, since 1999). It is sometimes forgotten that, when Boris Yeltsin appointed Putin in August 1999 – the fifth time in 17 months that Russia’s president had replaced his prime minister – he was widely seen as another interim figure.
Starmer is a decent man who has won kudos on the foreign policy front. He even managed, for a time, to pacify US President Donald Trump, who accorded the British PM the ultimate Trumpian accolade of declaring his departure on the eve of his announcement. But Starmer failed to marshal political acumen to deal with growing discontent at home over falling living standards, greater competition for jobs and widening inequality.
His ejection from government following a massive Labour party rout in the May 2026 local elections gains historical piquancy on the 10th anniversary of the European referendum.
A growing number of the British electorate believes the decision enacted in 2020 was a mistake. But there is little prospect for rejoining in the next 10-15 years. This is principally because of the EU bloc’s own economic and policy problems. It reflects the abiding toxic divide between the UK’s pro- and anti-EU advocates. Further, the terms for rejoining would be far more onerous than those from which the UK benefitted when it left.
The ‘halfway house’ relationship between the EU and the UK that I postulated 10 years ago has not ensued in the predicted manner. But this is about the best likely to be on offer from Brussels once Burnham and his team start new conversations with the European Commission in the autumn.
The problems facing Burnham will be the same as those confronting Starmer and his industrialised country peers. These are the myriad challenges thrown up by the six Ds: deglobalisation, demographics, decarbonisation, digitalisation, defence and debt.
The overall difficulty was well summarised by Mark Carney, former governor of the Bank of England, now prime minister of Canada, who told me in October 2023: ‘Brexit was launched into a geopolitical environment which influenced the referendum result. The liberalised, globalised framework of the 1980s and 1990s has given way to a very different environment. Globalisation is being restrained, free trade has much less significance, trade deals are harder to conclude. Within this new international framework, the Brexit model was and is unlikely to prosper.’
Omens are not good for Labour
The omens for the Labour party ditching a prime minister in midstream are not good. In 1976, James Callaghan became prime minister after Harold Wilson – victor in four general elections – stepped down as a result of incipient Alzheimer’s disease.
In 2007, Tony Blair gave up the premiership to Gordon Brown, his chancellor of the exchequer and long-time rival, in an orchestrated climbdown which gave Brown the task of weathering the financial crisis.
On both occasions, the new Labour prime minister stumbled on before succumbing at the next general elections (in 1979 and 2010) to Tory administrations that remained in power, respectively, for 18 and 14 years.
Starmer could play a stabilising role by remaining in the cabinet, as foreign secretary, if desired by Burnham and the party’s left-wing. Here too, the record – this time, from the Conservative party – is not propitious. Alec Douglas-Home – foreign secretary in 1960-63 and PM briefly in 1963-64 – returned to the foreign ministry under Edward Heath in 1970-74. David Cameron, who quit 10 years ago after losing the EU vote, came back as foreign secretary in 2023-24 under Starmer’s predecessor Rishi Sunak. In both cases, their mandates ended with a Labour election victory.
But both men helped repair Britain’s tarnished international position after a period of turmoil. If he plays his hand well, and has more luck than he has been given so far, Starmer could yet gain a second chance.
David Marsh is Chairman at OMFIF.
Join OMFIF in London on 8 July to assess Labour’s second year.
Image credits: Number 10
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