Open Letter to Labour MPs: Remove Starmer, or the Ballot Box Will Remove You

A message from the betrayed, the forgotten, and the no-longer-silent majority

After just ten months in power, the verdict is in. The public hasn’t just spoken, it has roared. The message is loud and clear, whether you’re ready to hear it or not.

Dump Starmer or Face Electoral Oblivion…

The Catastrophe You Cannot Spin Away

Labour didn’t just lose a few council seats. You were routed. You suffered the worst local election defeat in your party’s 124-year history, losing two-thirds of your councillors in a single night. You failed to gain control of a single council anywhere in the country. Not one.

In Runcorn and Helsby, a former Labour stronghold, you lost to Reform UK by six votes, with a 17-point swing against you , despite holding a 14,000+ majority in the last general election.

Starmer didn’t even show up. He didn’t campaign. He didn’t care. And the voters noticed. There’s a certain amount of arrogance in that, or was it cowardice? Either way, it speaks volumes about a leader who demands loyalty but offers none in return.

Reform UK, yes, Reform, the party you dismissed as irrelevant, ended up winning more seats than any other party. They now control 10 councils outright. They took Doncaster, for God’s sake! That historic bastion of Labour solidarity, the town that once embodied the beating heart of the Labour movement, fell to Reform. They won new mayoralties in Greater Lincolnshire and Hull & East Yorkshire, and picked up representation across all 23 councils contested.

Working-class communities that stood with Labour through Thatcher, through austerity, through fourteen years of Tory rule, have now abandoned you entirely, a devastating reflection of every promise, pledge, and policy you broke.

The Rise of the Right Is on Your Hands

You Built This Collapse. The right-wing surge is not a mystery. It’s the result of your betrayal. Labour’s identity has been gutted. You let the party be turned into a husk, a corporate billboard wearing a red rosette.

The consequences of your capitulation are now impossible to deny. Reform UK won more council seats than any other party, 677 out of 1,650 contested. They now control 10 councils outright. Their candidates Andrea Jenkyns and Jonathan Bibb captured the mayoralties in Greater Lincolnshire and Hull & East Yorkshire. They have representation across all 23 councils that held elections.

Even polling expert Sir John Curtice, hardly a radical voice has declared what is now obvious: Britain’s two-party system has collapsed. While Reform surged from the right, the Liberal Democrats and Greens advanced from the left, with the latter doubling their councillor count.

And Labour? Labour was crushed between these forces, rendered hollow and purposeless by a leadership that has abandoned everything the Party once stood for.

Starmer and his acolytes have refused to listen to the people, preferring instead the soft tones of corporate lobbyists and private equity donors, taking the cold hand of Larry Fink and BlackRock while rejecting the people. They have endorsed the genocide in Gaza, defending Israel’s war crimes while ignoring the horror of over 40,000 Palestinian deaths. They have diverted billions in public funds to Biden’s abandoned proxy war in Ukraine, while working-class families here struggle to heat their homes and feed their kids.

Starmer has abandoned the people and embraced neoliberalism in an unholy alliance that will kill the Labour Party dead, and he’s dragging you down with him.

Your Complicity Will Be Your Undoing

You, the Parliamentary Labour Party, have let this happen. You’ve let the party be hollowed out, turned into a branding exercise for middle managers and PR consultants. You’ve driven away the poor, the young, the old, the trade unionists, the tenants, the nurses, the teachers, the farmers, the bin men, women, the proverbial man on the street and now you act surprised when the votes don’t come in.

Collectively under Sir Keir Starmer’s leadership you have transformed Labour from a Party of the working class into a hollow vessel for corporate interests, billionaire donors, and American foreign policy. The Party of Keir Hardie, Aneurin Bevan, and Tony Benn now exists only to manage capitalism’s decline, not challenge its injustices.

This doesn’t end with councillors. Next, it’s your seats. Your jobs. Your legacy. Unless you act now.

Your Moment of Choice

After the votes were counted and the sting of defeat reached the ivory tower, Starmer emerged to say: “I get it.” His takeaway? That Labour must “deliver change even more quickly” and “go even further.” But the statement itself proves he doesn’t get it at all. It’s not a lack of speed, it’s the direction. He’s been serving up Tory policies in a red wrapper, and now the public has spat them out. The fruit of that strategy is bitter, and the people have rejected it, just as they rejected the Tories.

You face a stark choice: act now or face electoral annihilation.

History shows Starmer never hesitated to wield the knife. He signed the vote of no confidence against Jeremy Corbyn, not after an electoral defeat, but simply for being leader during the Brexit fallout. He demanded Corbyn’s head on a plate. If that warranted rebellion, what on earth are you waiting for now? Labour has just suffered its worst local election defeat in 124 years, and yet you stay silent? Now Starmer expects your loyalty after delivering catastrophe. The hypocrisy is breathtaking. And it’s going to cost you your job.

The writing isn’t just on the wall, it’s carved in stone. Unless you change course immediately, the next general election will be a bloodbath that makes this week look like a minor setback. Constituencies with five-figure majorities will fall. Careers will end. A generation of progress will be undone.

Here is what you must do:

1. Table an immediate vote of no confidence in Keir Starmer and his failed leadership team. The longer you wait, the more seats you’ll lose.
2. Restore Labour’s fundamental purpose: to represent working-class people and defend the public good.
3. Reject war, austerity, censorship, and globalists rule and return to democratic, accountable politics.
4. Oppose the surveillance state that Starmer is building, including Orwellian powers to spy on bank accounts, monitor social media, and criminalise dissent.
5. Return democracy to the party where members have real power, local constituencies select their own candidates, and policy isn’t dictated by focus groups and corporate donors.
6. Stop your attacks on the working poor, the disabled, the pensioners…
7. Stop the plunder of our resources. Nationalise water and energy. bring back public ownership

The Clock Is Ticking

This is not a request. It is not a suggestion. It is the final warning from the communities you claim to represent.

Either you remove Starmer, or the voters will remove you. It’s that simple.

The historic defeats this week are just the beginning. Reform is eating into your base from the right. The Greens and Lib Dems are taking your progressive voters from the left. Without immediate action, your party faces extinction. You will go the way of the Tories…

The choice is yours. But remember: the longer you wait, the fewer of you will survive the reckoning to come.

Change direction – or lose everything.

– The People You Abandoned

Paul Knaggs