Yesterday they were fulfilled ten years since the british voters resolved, by a narrow margin of 51.9 percent to 48.1 percent, that their country withdraw from the European Union. This Monday, the eve of the anniversary, and after resisting the idea for several weeks, the prime minister Keir Starmer63 years old, threw in the towelless than two years after his party, Labor, won the parliamentary elections by a wide margin, securing 411 of the 650 seats in the House of Commons, and elevated him to office.
“Every decision I have made sought to put the country I love first, and that is why I will resign as leader of the Labor Party,” he said, with his voice breaking, in a brief speech in front of the door of the legendary number 10 Downing Street, the official residence of the Prime Minister. By leaving the leadership of his community, the obvious consequence is his resignation from office as head of governmentand its very safe replacement by Andrew Burnham56 years old, Mayor of Greater Manchester and who has just won a seat in parliament, for the Makerfield electoral district.
Starmer is the sixth prime minister to resign since the vote of Brexit a decade ago, a instability record unknown to the British. Before him, David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak did it. Over the previous 37 years, there were only five chief executives: Margaret Thatcher (11 years), John Major (7 years), Tony Blair (10), Gordon Brown (three years) and Cameron (6). The severely weakened economy due to Brexit, the violence that many voters associate with immigration and the incendiary opposition led by Nigel Faragehead of the radical populist right-wing ‘Reform UK’ party, allow us to anticipate that Burnham, Starmer’s almost certain successor, will have a hard time staying in office.
Marches in favor of the reintegration of the United Kingdom into the European Union. Photo:AFP
As the analyst Pablo Pardo, London correspondent of the Spanish newspaper, explained this Monday The World“it is not a very different panorama from that of other large EU States (…), but in the British case, the symbolism is very special, because it shows that the isolationism not only has not solved any problem preexisting; rather, has aggravated them and has created new ones”.
The Brexit promotersincluding former prime minister Boris Johnson and Farage himselfthey convinced the voters to vote mostly for the exit from the EUbased on promises like contain illegal immigration and how save you more than US$23 billion annually to the State which, according to the Brexit discourse, were resources that London gave to Brussels (seat of the EU government).
It soon became clear that these were empty promises. Instead of savings, the British economy and treasury faced hard blows resulting from the break with Brussels. When Starmer came to power two years ago, he found a hole in the public finances of more than $160 billion. At the end of 2025, and as a consequence of Brexit, the United Kingdom economy had lost between 6% and 8% of GDP, compared to what could have happened if it remained in the EU.
The hardest hit have been the microentrepreneurs, who lived off their tariff-free exports to continental Europe. Between 2019, when Brexit came into full operation, and 2024, the number of small exporters to the EU fell 31%: many of them closed their companies and laid off their staff. The Brexiters launched the ‘Global Britain’ strategy to replace European markets with others, especially the United States. But that didn’t work either. In these years, only four small trade agreements were signed, with an impact of only 0.32% on GDP. Meanwhile, Brussels signed major free trade agreements with Mercosur, India, Indonesia and Australia, which have boosted its exports.
Marches in favor of the reintegration of the United Kingdom into the European Union. Photo:AFP
To pay the bill
He Brexit blow has been very hardand not just for small business owners. Nails 440 financial companies large companies moved at least one of their core activities from London to EU capitals, and 900 billion pounds of assets left Britain. A good part of these assets were installed in New York, and the rest were dispersed among other European and Asian capitals.
The outlook was already quite dark when Starmer arrived at 10 Downing Street in 2024. It soon became evident that this lawyer, an expert in human rights, and who only in 2015 – when he was already 52 years old – fully entered politics and obtained a position in the House of Commons for the district of Holborn and Saint-Pancras, did not have the right profile for a task that demanded the pulse and skill of a seasoned politician, and the knowledge from a seasoned economist.
In a matter of weeks, your popularity plummeted both for the economic crisis that he wanted to confront with necessary but unpopular fiscal rigor measuresas for the rise in violencepart of it related to the immigrants. “Since the summer of 2024, the matter started badly,” Arnaud de la Grange recalled on Monday, in the Parisian newspaper The Figaro. “In August, the country was shaken by the terrible knife murder of three girls in Southport, committed by a young man of Rwandan origin, and erupted anti-immigration riots in numerous places,” he narrated.
Keir Starmer speaking during the session in the House of Commons of the UK Parliament. Photo:AFP
“The repression of those protests was so rapid as well as severewith long prison sentences in some cases, even for acts committed on social networks. This unusual harshness introduced a part of public opinion to the idea of a police force and a ‘two speed’ justice (…) the nationalist rioters, mostly white, would be treated with greater severity than other minority rioters,” according to that perception, De la Grange concluded.
The reality is that Starmer was forced, from the beginning of his administration, to pay the bill for the false expectations created by Brexit, and related to an economy depressed by the costly break with the EU, and a problem of illegal immigration that, far from lessening with Brexit, worsened: once ties with Brussels were broken, it was much more difficult to cooperate in the implementation of a policy to contain the arrival of undocumented foreigners.
A month after moving to Downing Street, the Support for Starmer’s management had fallen into negative territory. A YouGov poll, in August 2024, showed that only 36% of Britons thought he was doing a good job as prime minister, against 43% who thought the opposite. Those numbers only got worse as the months went by. By September of last year, it was already the most unpopular prime minister since surveys have existed: a languid 13% approved its management, against 79% who disapprovedaccording to an Ipsos survey. Since then, there has been no improvement.
bad omen
“Keir Starmer’s resignation is the latest symptom of the chronic instability into which Brexit plunged the United Kingdom a decade ago,” wrote yesterday the editorial writer of The World from Madrid. “The divorce bill with Europe is an environment of fragile governance and increasingly dominated by the management of internal crises, the most serious of which is migration,” he concluded. As it is, what is coming for Andy Burnham, Starmer’s very sure successor, is very unflattering.
Andy Burnham. Photo:Archive EL TIEMPO / Agencies
He has in his favor that, unlike the outgoing head of government, Burnham gained experience after nine years as successful mayor of Greater Manchesterthe second largest urban congregation in the country, after London. Before it had been cabinet member in the Labor government of Gordon Brown, in which he served as Secretary of State for the Treasury, then for Culture and Sport, and then for Health.
However, he does not have parliamentary experience because just a few days ago he won the election to occupy a seat in Westminster. Burnham defines himself as “a pro-business socialist,” and identifies with the moderate left wing of Labor. Beyond those rather vague definitions today, it faces a complicated political environment, in which Labor, which today has a large majority in the Commons, would suffer a heavy defeat if there were new elections.
According to a YouGov poll, conducted a few weeks ago, 24 percent of voters would support the Right-wing Farage’s Reform UK19 percent to the Conservatives, and just 16 percent to the Labor Party, who appear tied with the Green party. It is curious that, despite the huge economic cost of Brexitits promoters they are not being punished by the electorate and, on the contrary, the Farage’s party leads the polls.
As with other nationalist movements of the radical and populist right in Europe, its anti-immigration discourse attracts many voters. Of course, that can change in the course of a campaign where the party that aspires to govern has to win elections in more than 325 individual districts (half of the 650), something in which the Conservatives and Labor have much more experience and organizational capacity.
That’s without taking into account that the outrage against Brexit It is going to be used by those two traditional parties against Farage. This weekend, in a huge pasture with some cows, a rancher hit by the United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the EU, cut the grass close to form the letters of a gigantic sign, photographed by a drone, that reads: “Brexit broke Britain”, the Brexit broke Britain. But this could eventually punish Farage does not mean thaton the opposite bank, the Labor Party Will Burnham survive? as prime minister, better than his short-lived predecessors.
