Labor wins in key UK mayoral polls deal another blow to Sunak

• Labor victories could fuel fresh calls for Sunak to step down.
  
• The polls are predicting a Labor victory in the national election.
• Sunak’s Conservatives 20% behind Labour.
  

LONDON: Britain’s Labor Party won mayoral elections in London and central England on Saturday, crushing defeats for Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s unpopular Conservatives ahead of national elections later this year.

While the re-election of Labor politician Sadiq Khan as London mayor was widely expected, Labor also grabbed a surprise, narrow victory in the central West Midlands region, home to Britain’s second largest city, Birmingham.

The victories are the latest for Labor in Thursday’s local council and mayoral elections and could fuel fresh calls for Sunak to step down.

Opinion polls predicted Labor would win the next national election, pushing Keir Starmer to power and ending 14 years of Conservative government in Britain. Sunak said he plans to call for a vote in the second half of the year.

Conservative West Midlands mayor Andy Street lost to Labor rival Richard Parker. Street’s 37.5% of the vote was eclipsed by Parker’s 37.8%, a narrow margin that translates to 1,508 votes.

Street, who has served as mayor since 2017, ran a campaign emphasizing his personal record on investment while downplaying his relationship with the Conservatives. He publicly challenged Sunak’s decision to scrap the HS2 high-speed rail link from Birmingham to Manchester last year.

Parker had tried to connect him with the unpopular national government. “I believe a Labor mayor working with a Labor government will help take back Britain’s future,” Parker said in a speech after the result.

Starmer said the result was beyond Labour’s expectations. “People across the country have had enough of Tory chaos and decline and voted for change with Labour,” he said in a statement.

Sunak was counting on an electoral boost from recent defense spending announcements and the progress of his divisive plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda.

Khan’s victory in London, his third in a row, came despite public anger over knife crime and the ultra-low emission zone which charges drivers of older, more polluting vehicles a daily charge.

“It’s been a tough few months, we’ve faced a campaign of non-stop negativity,” Kahn said in a speech after results showed he had won 43.8% of the vote to 33% for Conservative candidate Susan Hall.

“For the past eight years, London has been swimming against the tide of a Tory (Conservative) government and now with a Labor Party poised to govern again under Keir Starmer, it’s time for Rishi Sunak to give the public a choice” .

Khan, 53, became the British capital’s first Muslim mayor in 2016.

Hall had made scrapping the ULEZ a centerpiece of her campaign, but the 69-year-old Donald Trump fan made a series of gaffes and faced accusations of racism after she was found to have engaged in far-right content online.

In a bright spot for the Conservatives, Ben Houchen won re-election as mayor of the Tees Valley in northern England on Friday.

Poor showing from the Conservatives

Sunak’s Conservatives are about 20% behind Labor in most opinion polls ahead of the national election, which Sunak has said he plans to call in the second half of the year.

Labor said anger over its stance on Gaza, where more than 34,500 people have been killed in Israel’s military offensive, had dampened some of the council’s results, but the victories showed the public was backing Labour.

“This is the eve of a general election … The mood is that it’s time for a change,” said Labour’s national campaign co-ordinator Pat McFadden.