London: In a major blow to PM Rishi Sunak Britain’s Labour Party won Mayoral Polls in London and Central England on Saturday, which bought crushing defeats for conservatives ahead of the national election due this year.
While Labour politician Sadiq Khan’s re-election as mayor was widely expected, Labour also snatched a surprise narrow victory in the Central West Midlands region which is home to Britain’s second largest city of Birmingham. These victories, which mark Labour’s most recent in Thursday’s local elections for mayors and councils, may encourage more calls for Sunak to resign as prime minister of the United Kingdom.
As per the opinion polls prediction the Labour party would win the next national election, propelling Keir Starmer to power and ending 14 years of Conservative Government in Britain. PM Sunak has said that he intends to call a vote in the second half of the year.
Andy Street, the Conservative Mayor of the West Midlands, was defeated by Labour opponent Richard Parker. Parker garnered 1,508 votes, or 37.8% of the vote, narrowly defeating Street’s 37.5%. Street became mayor in 2017 and has held the position since. He played down his affiliation in the Conservative Party during his candidacy, emphasizing instead his track record of investment. He publicly disapproved of Sunak’s choice to shelve the high-speed HS2 train link that was supposed to connect Birmingham and Manchester last year.
Parker tried to pin him down to the unpopular national administration. In a speech after the outcome, Parker stated, “I think a Labour mayor working with a Labour government will help get Britain’s future back.” Starmer claimed that Labour had not anticipated the outcome. “People across the country have had enough of Conservative chaos and decline and voted for change with Labour,” he added in a press release.
With his disputed plan to transfer asylum seekers to Rwanda moving forward and recent pronouncements on defense expenditure, Sunak had been betting on an election boost. Despite some public concern over knife crime and the Ultra Low Emission Zone, which imposes a daily tax on drivers of older, more polluting automobiles, Khan won his third consecutive election in London.
“It’s been a difficult few months, we faced a campaign of non-stop negativity,” Khan said in a speech after the results showed he had won 43.8% of the vote against 33% for the Conservatives’ candidate, Susan Hall. “For the last eight years, London has been swimming against the tide of a Tory (Conservative) government and now with a Labour Party that’s ready to govern again under Keir Starmer, it’s time for Rishi Sunak to give the public a choice.”
In 2016, Khan, then 53, was elected as the first Muslim mayor of the nation’s capital. Hall, a 69-year-old Donald Trump supporter, had made abandoning ULEZ the focal point of her campaign, but after it was discovered that she had interacted with far-right content online, she committed a number of mistakes and was accused of racism. Ben Houchen, the mayor of northern England’s Tees Valley, was re-elected on Friday, which was a positive development for the Conservatives.
