LONDON – Britain’s main opposition Labour Party on May 3 called on Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to call a general election, after seizing another parliamentary seat from the Conservatives and making gains in English local elections.

Labour leader Keir Starmer said its candidate’s win in Blackpool South in north-west England sent a clear message to Mr Sunak, who has until January next year at the latest to call polls.

“That wasn’t just a little message, that wasn’t just a murmur. That was a shout from Blackpool, ‘We want change’,” he said on a visit to congratulate the new MP there, Mr Chris Webb.

“Blackpool speaks for the whole country in saying, ‘We have had enough now, after 14 years of failure, 14 years of decline, we want to turn the page and start afresh with Labour.’”

Labour, out of power since 2010 and trounced by Mr Boris Johnson’s Tories at the last general election in 2019, won Blackpool South with a 26 per cent swing – the third-largest margin from the Tories to Labour at a by-election since World War II.

The vote was triggered by a lobbying scandal that saw the area’s Conservative MP resign. Polling on May 2 coincided with a mix of council, mayoral and other local contests across England.

The polls represent the last major ballot box test before Mr Sunak faces a nationwide vote expected in the second half of the year.

The Tories are defending hundreds of seats they secured the last time local elections were held in 2021, and are tipped to suffer heavy losses.

Early results showed that Labour was making gains in council seats, but all eyes were on key regional and London mayoral races, the outcomes of which are only expected later on May 3 and 4.

Tory party chairman Richard Holden described the results so far as “disappointing”.

Mr Starmer said it shows that Labour, beset by ideological infighting and claims of anti-Semitism under hard-left former leader Jeremy Corbyn, is once again an electoral force.

Labour is now “a fundamentally different party” than four years ago, Mr Starmer told Sky News television.

In London, Labour Mayor Sadiq Khan is expected to win a record third term.

But mayoral contests in the West Midlands and Tees Valley, in north-east England, are predicted to be tight.

A victory for the Labour opposition in either of the regions, home to bellwether constituencies, would be hailed as further evidence voters are ready to return the party to power nationally.

Right-wing upstarts

Speculation is rife in the Parliament at Westminster that a bad showing may lead some restive Tory lawmakers to try to replace Mr Sunak, who has been in charge since October 2022.

Conservative MPs ousted Mr Sunak’s predecessors, Ms Liz Truss and Mr Boris Johnson, and the party has had five prime ministers since the 2016 referendum to leave the European Union.

Wins for the incumbent Tory mayors in the West Midlands and Tees Valley, Mr Andy Street and Mr Ben Houchen, would boost their hopes that their beleaguered leader can still revive their fortunes.

But with the Tories under fire nationally on issues from water pollution to transport and inflation, Mr Street and Mr Houchen have distanced themselves from the party during the campaign.

Pollsters forecast that the Conservatives could lose about half of the nearly 1,000 council seats they are defending in cities, towns and districts across England.

“We are probably looking at certainly one of the worst, if not the worst, Conservative performances in local government elections for the last 40 years,” polling expert John Curtice told BBC radio.

The defeat in Blackpool South was its 11th by-election loss since Mr Johnson won a landslide victory in 2019.

That is the most by any government in a single parliament since the late 1960s. Mr Sunak has been in charge during seven of those by-elections.

Worryingly for him, the Conservatives only scraped into second place in Blackpool South ahead of the fringe Reform UK party, which threatens to squeeze the right-wing vote at the general election.

The party linked to arch-eurosceptic Nigel Farage won 17 per cent of the vote, its best-ever performance in a by-election. AFP