Is this the biggest challenge for any Prime Minister?

This article was first published in e-n.

At the time of writing, that post is still held by Sir Keir Starmer. For how much longer remains to be seen. If he resigns any time soon, his successor will be the United Kingdom’s seventh premier in just ten years.

This glut of Prime Ministers is a symptom of what has now become a structural feature of British political life: we are an intensely divided country, and more so by the day. Is it possible to effectively lead a country like that?

The recent local election results which threatened to unseat Starmer are yet another symptom of that division. The two-party status quo of Labour and the Conservatives is over. Our first-past-the-post system makes it likely that another two-party binary will emerge, but for now a realignment is taking place and the political map is a rainbow.

The local results continued the Tories’ downward trajectory from their wipeout at the 2024 general election. Despite a strong majority in that same election, Labour too are in decline, obliterated at the local level in English councils as well as in the devolved parliaments of Scotland and Wales. Labour’s 411 seat majority in 2024 was deceptive: many seats were won on razor thin margins, and the election was a Tory loss rather than a Labour win.

The chief beneficiary of all this has been Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, who have hoovered up votes to the right of both main parties. But to the left, 2026 has also seen the breakthrough of the Greens as a major political force under Zack Polanski. The left-wing nationalists in both the Scottish National Party and Plaid Cymru have also made significant gains from Labour, especially the latter.

Vision

“Without vision, the people perish”—thus does the KJV translate the first half of Proverbs 29v18. Often, this is applied to poor leaders who lack conviction and the ability to inspire people. Even the most generous observers are likely to conclude that this characterises Keir Starmer, statistically the most unpopular Prime Minister ever. People may not have liked “Blairism” or “Thatcherism”, but at least they knew what they were. Not so with “Starmerism”, if such a thing ever existed.

Yet perhaps the most sympathetic appraisal of Starmer, when his time does come, will be that he was elected to govern a population which is so divided that any nationally shared vision is next to impossible anyway. Could anyone really unite a nation now willing to vote in such disparate directions as we saw last week? If they can, it will need the kinds of radical reform which Starmer was never the man to deliver.

What are these unruly divisions? One is immigration, routinely one of voters’ biggest concerns. Many Brits want both legal migration and illegal migration down. To them, the 2016 Brexit vote and 2019 general election were attempts to achieve that via the established two-party system, but the opposite has happened: non-EU immigration skyrocketed, peaking in the “Boriswave” of 2021-22 when net migration hit nearly one million. The ongoing small boats crisis, which has brought with it a wave of high profile violent sexual assaults by illegal migrants in provincial towns, has added rocket fuel to these frustrations, and voters have flocked to Reform UK with a profound sense that the state refuses to punish wrongdoers (Romans 13v4).

Others want Britain to open its borders wider, both as a matter of principled tolerance and for the sake of the economy. These voters see even Labour as too right-wing and are drifting to the far left. So too Britain’s increasingly large enclaves of unintegrated migrants, predominantly from Pakistan and Bangladesh. Government figures show that over 1 million people in the UK cannot speak English at all or well, including 25% of Bangladeshis and just under 20% of Pakistanis. The same groups have intermarriage rates far below those of other migrants. In Leicester, which is 60% ethnic minority, predominantly South Asian, 24% of people do not identify with British nationality, according to the ONS. These voters remain detached from British culture and history, reliably voting along ethnic and sectarian lines, a point proven in multiple studies including a 2015 Electoral Commission report into Pakistani and Bangladeshi electoral fraud. Once reliably Labour voters, these groups have shifted into an unlikely coalition with the Greens. Little accord can be reached between these pro- and anti-migration camps.

Economics

Another division is economics. Younger generations in Britain, principally Millennials and Gen Z, are downwardly mobile, with house prices many times more expensive than the average salary compared to the 1990s. We also have some of the highest household energy prices in the developed world. Working adults find less and less left at the end of each month as they bear the highest tax burden since WW2 in order to fund ever-ballooning welfare costs. Business owners, meanwhile, are straining under ever-increasing regulation and increased National Insurance contributions.

Meanwhile, a quarter of pensioners are millionaires, and benefit from numerous protected benefits such as winter fuel allowances, free travel, and the triple locked state pension. British welfare spending in 2025-26 (excluding pensions) is around £155 billion and rising; sickness claims have gone from 2.1 million in 2019 to 3.8 million today. The younger, working age population is increasingly at odds with those who benefit from their tax receipts in the form of pensions and welfare, feeling that they are long past the point of rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar’s (Matthew 22v21) and are being asked to feed those who will not work (2 Thessalonians 3v10).

Many in the media insist that “division” in Britain is purely the result of rhetoric—of people “fanning the flames” and “spreading hate”. But this simply obscures the concrete reality of a growing number of irreconcilable interests among the British electorate. No one is served by pretending otherwise. It is hard to govern a people if one cannot achieve the barest level of consensus on who the people are and what their interests might be. That is surely the biggest challenge facing whoever holds the weighty office of Prime Minister.