As Keir Starmer announced his resignation, teary-eyed, protesters in nearby Whitehall played Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’, the EU anthem, outside the official home at 10 Downing Street. No one lost time. Starmer stepped down on June 22, almost ten years after Britain voted to leave the European Union.
Starmer’s party opposed Britain’s exit from the EU at the time, but had to work around it once it happened. It remains a central theme of how popular sentiment and the consequences of Brexit have placed UK politics in a precarious position.
starmer is Sixth Prime Minister to step down in a decade Since the referendum of June 23, 2016, the rate of political turnover has been reported to be the highest in almost two centuries of British history.
Former Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham, who won a parliamentary by-election last week and was sworn in as an MP hours after Starmer announced his exit, is now poised to become the seventh.
‘Bregret’ is broad, but spread out
Most Britons now regret Brexit, as a recent Ipsos poll found that 52% want to rejoin the EU, while 33% want to stick to ‘leaving’, reports news agency AP. Yet neither Starmer nor his potential successor Burnham wants to undo Brexit.
Because the “Bregrate” majority is spread throughout the country, the AP noted. Areas of the working class committed to remaining out of the EU used to be Labor or left-wing bastions, and are now seen as vulnerable to a move to the right. Insecurities center on immigration of cheap workers from poor countries..
a decade of instability
Britain has ousted six prime ministers since the Brexit votes were counted, starting with the Conservative Party’s David Cameron, who called the referendum and resigned the morning after losing it in 2016. This was followed by Theresa May, who stepped down in 2019 after failing to get her Brexit deal, which would finalize the terms of exit, through Parliament.
Boris Johnson, a flamboyant camera magnet, was ousted by his own party in 2022 amid ethics scandals. Liz Truss crashed financial markets for 49 days after her Budget as Brexit was one of the issues that affected the economy; His tenure is the shortest in British history.
Rishi Sunak came in and then lost the 2024 general election to Labor, returning the left-liberals to power after almost two decades.
And now about labor Starmer is gone In less than two years.
“If Andy Burnham fails as prime minister, the outlook for Britain is bleak,” Anthony Seldon, a historian who has written extensively on British prime ministers, told news agency Reuters. He said the country was in a “very deep hole”.
Academic Chris Gray, who has studied the consequences of Britain’s separation from the European Union, told the AP that the “subterranean scar of Brexit” still runs through Britain’s increasingly unruly politics. But according to Jill Rutter, a former Finance Ministry official and senior fellow at the Institute for Government, a think tank, the instability was not triggered by Brexit alone. He told Reuters that it started with the 2008 global financial crisis.
“There has been a general perception that we don’t see our lives getting better and we don’t see our children’s lives getting better,” he said. “And every government since then seems unable to change it.”
What Brexit promised, what it delivered
Brexit was sold to British voters in 2016 on three main promises – control over laws, control over immigration, and economic freedom to make better trade deals outside the EU.
Ten years later, the UK’s own fiscal watchdog, the Office for Budget Responsibility, estimates that there would be a productivity loss of about 4% compared to remaining in the EU, equivalent to about £100 billion per year. The National Bureau of Economic Research, using data from almost a decade after the referendum, estimated the damage at 6–8% of GDP. It said business investment was down between 12% and 18%, employment was down 3-4%, and productivity was down 3-4%.
immigration paradox
Immigration was the most powerful issue for the ‘Leave (EU)’ vote in 2016. Under EU membership, citizens of all 27 member states had an automatic right to live and work in Britain, and at the time of the referendum EU immigration to the country stood at more than 200,000 per year.
Brexit ended that. But net migration did not decline; It rose and now it is falling.
Official figures show immigration to the UK reached almost 944,000 by March 2023, a record high, driven by a wave of arrivals from non-EU countries for work and study. The number has fallen sharply to 171,000 for the year ending December 2025, the lowest since the start of 2021, following successive rounds of visa tightening by both Conservative and Labor governments.
This policy shift has been largely driven by popular sentiment against immigration, which has also contributed to the rise of right-wing parties such as Nigel Farage’s Reform UK and far-right activist Tommy Robinson. But the analysis shows that since arrivals are now mostly non-EU, essentially non-white and from developing countries, the politics of racism have increased.
The Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford notes that “the composition is now quite different”. This means that non-EU net migration is still much larger than before Brexit, and a large proportion of migrants are coming through the asylum system.
It is this asylum route – the most politically visible, for example those used by people from Asia or Africa – that has not declined.
According to Oxford analysis, this has directly contributed to the rise of Reform UK, which built its electoral surge on the argument that the post-Brexit immigration system failed to deliver the control it had promised. Reform UK, based on this logic, won around 1,500 council seats in the May 2026 local elections, many of which were in former Labor strongholds, AFP reports.
What did Starmer inherit and what broke him?
Starmer came to power in July 2024 following Labour’s landslide election victory, the party’s first victory in 14 years. He inherited borrowing that stood at 5% of GDP, a debt pile close to 100% of national output, a waiting list in the National Health Service (NHS) of a record 7.8 million people, and public services in poor condition. Much of this was the cumulative result of austerity measures in the wake of slow growth following the 2008 crisis, the Covid pandemic and the post-Brexit economic hit.
AFP reported that Starmer’s first budget raised £40 billion through taxation, with £25 billion coming from higher rates of employers’ National Insurance. This taxation discouraged businesses and contributed to increased inflation.
Then a scandal broke over the appointment of Peter Mandelson as Britain’s ambassador to Washington, despite knowledge of Mandelson’s relationship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Record-low approval ratings followed. Political analyst John Harris argued that Starmer’s main failure was “a painful lack of clarity… about who he was and what he stood for”.
What did Burnham inherit?
Burnham, 56, won the Makerfield by-election last week with almost 55% of the vote. He defeated the Reform UK candidate in a seat in northwest England that was being targeted by the right-wing party. The majority of the white and working-class population there may see immigration as a threat to their jobs – a Trumpian trend seen in many parts of the world – but they still voted for the Labor Party, not Reform UK.
The seat was vacated by Labor MP Josh Simmons specifically to allow Burnham to return to Parliament.
Wes Streeting, a potential opponent who stood aside for her, said that Burnham could win “the fight of our lives against the forces of nationalism”. The “nationalism” of Reform UK and other right-wingers is largely about three things – hostility to immigration, opposition to closer EU ties (thus still being adamant on Brexit), and a populist “anti-establishment” stance that pits “the people” against a “uniparty” meaning all mainstream politicians.
Labor officially campaigned for Remain in the 2016 referendum. And the party is far more pro-EU than the Conservatives. Under Jeremy Corbyn, who has since been ousted, it also called for a second referendum in 2019. Starmer himself supported that position for the possibility of returning to the EU.
What next on Brexit and its consequences?
But after the massive defeat in the 2019 general elections, Labor and Starmer Emphasis was placed on considering Brexit as complete. Labour’s 2024 manifesto explicitly rejected rejoining the single EU market or freedom of movement between member states.
Burnham, likely to be the next prime minister, was once critical of Brexit, but her stance has narrowed, the AP noted in its report. He has moved away from calls to nationalize industries and rejoin the European Union and toward a more restrictive centre-right stance. And since then he has also ruled out any imminent return to the EU.
In simple terms, the Labor Party moved from opposing Brexit to accepting it for the sake of electoral survival; And Burnham is a symbol of that journey.
Olivia O’Sullivan of the Chatham House think tank told the AP that Burnham is now the frontrunner because Labor sees her as best placed to defeat Reform UK, a rising right-wing party. But, he added, “This is not the same as offering a completely different set of policies or even a particularly clear policy program.”
This means popular sentiment from mainstream parties or politicians could help improve the UK – the kind of sentiment Donald Trump channeled for his more inward-looking ‘America First’ pitch that got him elected.
Hannah White, director of the Institute for Government, told the AP that the deep structural problems facing any incoming prime minister will remain unchanged.
“We don’t have politicians who will talk openly with the public about the fact that when they come to power, they will not increase taxes, will not increase the debt, and in the same breath will not deliver better public services. And so people are frustrated,” White said.
nomination to succeed Starmer will open on 9 July and close on 16 July, with any competitions being decided by 1 September. If Burnham stands unopposed, he could become PM by 17 July.
