Ousted Newcastle Labour councillor says Keir Starmer ‘time is up’

Adam Walker, who lost his seat on Newcastle City Council last week, says the Prime Minister’s “time is up” after the party suffered humiliation at the ballot box.

Having run Newcastle for 15 years, Labour was reduced from 34 to just two councillors last Friday.

It also lost control of Sunderland, Gateshead, and South Tyneside councils.

A set of historic defeats across areas that have largely been Labour heartlands for decades has left many MPs and other figures furious.

Mr Walker, who was the city council’s cabinet member for health and social care, told the Local Democracy Reporting Service on Monday that the scale of his party’s collapse on Tyneside had been even worse than expected despite low expectations going into polling day.

He said: “It was so hard to combat the national negativity. Lots of people on the doors said that they like their Labour councillors but they could not vote Labour. 

“I remember campaigning in the Corbyn years and it was hard, but people were able to make the distinction [between local and national politics]. This time it has not happened.

“It was all about sending a message [to the government]. 

“We [the council] were not perfect, we have got some things wrong. There were some places we have neglected over the years for trying to maintain the council finances properly. 

“But people generally understood that adult social care and children’s services are expensive and we would try to do everything we could to protect frontline services.

“But this time around people were just not happy with the Labour government.”

Mr Walker added: “They need to change course massively. The fiscal rules are causing more aggro than they are benefit.

“We have done some positive things but they can’t seem to get the message out. The communication from the government and the party is dreadful, we have been telling them that for a year. 

“We knew we would lose the council, we just didn’t expect it would be quite as terrible as it was.”

Reform UK won all three seats in the Throckley, Walbottle, and Newburn where Mr Walker was seeking re-election.

The council was left in no overall control – with the Lib Dems on 25 seats, and Reform UK and the Greens each claiming 24 wins.

With Kenton’s Ged Bell and Stephen Lambert now representing the entirety of the council’s Labour group after a rare all out election in which all 78 seats in the city were up for grabs, Mr Walker fears that it will be a very long road back for his party.

He said: “It is not just the rise of one populist party, it is two with Reform and the Greens. The only way it comes any quicker is if they implode, but it is five to 10 years [to recover from last week’s results].

“Last time we lost the council in 2004, it took seven years to win it back and we were not at as low a point as we currently are. I think we can win seats back, but to even get back to being the main opposition party will take five to six years minimum. We need to rebuild nationally and regionally.”

He said that the 2025 local elections, in which Labour’s vote plummeted in places like County Durham, should have acted as a warning sign and led the Government to change its messaging to “something positive” .

But he said Sir Keir was  “not a personable person” and the party needs someone who can “communicate with the electorate in a way that is normal”.

The former councillor, who says he will remain an active part of Newcastle Labour, added: “I don’t think he is on borrowed time, I think his time is up. He is not popular. I always wanted someone who was perhaps a bit boring but would do the job. But you also need to be good at politics and know how to talk to the media, to voters, to the public, and to build a narrative.”

A growing number of MPs have been calling on the Prime Minister to go, though he insisted on Monday that he would prove his doubters wrong.

In a speech in London, Sir Keir said he took “responsibility” for the loss of almost 1,500 councillors in England but insisted he would fight on.

He added: “I’m not going to shy away from the fact that I’ve got some doubters, including in my own party.

“I’m not going to shy away from the fact that I have to prove them wrong, and I will.”

The Prime Minister announced plans to nationalise British Steel and hinted at a closer relationship with the European Union.

He said:  “This is nothing less than a battle for the soul of our nation and I want to be crystal clear about how we will win it because we cannot win as a weaker version of Reform or the Greens.

“We can only win as a stronger version of Labour, a mainstream party of power, not protest.”