The Current - UK loses another Prime Minister

Episode Date: June 23, 2026

Keir Starmer has announced his resignation, and the UK will get its seventh PM in seven years. Today also marks a decade since the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union. We speak with Patrick Baker, host of Politico's Westminster Insider podcast.

With Google AI, Destination Canada is giving local businesses the insights they need to grow. Together, we're helping boost tourism from coast to coast to coast. Innovation is Canada's story. Let's tell it together. Find out more at g.co slash Canadian innovation. This is a CBC podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is the current podcast. The question my party is asking now is whether I am best placed to live. lead us into the next general election. I have heard the answer of my parliamentary party to that

question. And I accept that answer with good grace. Every decision I've taken has been about putting the country I love first. That is why I will resign as leader of the Labour Party. England will get a new Prime Minister. Again, Kierst Armour announced his resignation yesterday a day before the 10th anniversary of Brexit. In case you have lost track, this makes him the sixth resident of No. 10 Downing Street in the decade since the UK voted to leave the European Union. Patrick Baker is the host of political's Westminster Insider podcast. He's in London, England. Patrick, hello. Hi, Matt. How you doing?

I'm well. Kierst Armer spent the weekend considering his future. and the future means that he is headed for the exit door. Why is he resigning? Well, that is a big question. In the short term, it's because Reform UK did very well at the equivalent of our midterm elections here. And a widespread sense in the Labour Party that Kirstama is not popular enough by any means to win the next election. And politics, as I'm sure you're aware, is a very fickle business. and it's exactly the same here.

And there's a very popular man named Andy Burnham, who is a popular mayor in Manchester, who just won a by-election. He's proven in that by-election to many people that he's the man who can beat reform, you can stave off the threat of Nigel Farage. So all the eggs have gone into the Andy Burnham basket here. It's looking like it's going to be a coronation,

and we could have a new prime minister in place in about three weeks time. I'm old enough to remember 2024, when Kier-Starmer won a landslide election, a majority, a huge majority. So where did it all go wrong? So the thing about Kier-Stama is he isn't really a politician's politician. He was never really able to articulate a positive vision, a positive story. A lot of people who worked with him said he was quite managerial, bureaucratic, but didn't really have that ability to kind of sell a narrative of change and positivity to the electorate.

Add that to some kind of unforced errors that happened early on in his premiership. He started to cut a welfare bill for older people in terms of their winter fuel allowance. These kind of small things, which felt insignificant at the time, just contributed to this sense that actually this Labor government wasn't that different to the last conservative government, which, as you know, rotated through a whole range of prime ministers. And so he's fallen to the same fate, but there are obviously bigger structural problems underpinning all of this. We're seeing so much volatility in our politics, which has got a whole host of factors. A lot of it you could probably trace back to the economic crisis of 2008, the financial crash, Brexit, which didn't help things in terms of the economy.

So the British electorate kind of thrashing around looking for change and no one seems to be delivering it for them. So there will be seven prime ministers. over the course of 10 years, six since Brexit. I was reading something somebody was saying, it's almost as though something seismic happened in the UK 10 years ago. What is the connection between Brexit and the revolving door at number 10? Well, Brexit completely reset our politics. Before Brexit, you could look at it and you could say we had a left and a right,

Tory's labour, but this really carved up parties down the middle. You had leave voters on both sides within political parties. parties, created these new fault lines, these new divisions, and the legacy of that 10 years on is still so profound in our politics. I spoke to people in the constituency in Greater Manchester where Andy Burnham recently won this by-election, and so many people there, even though he did well, were saying we used to vote Labour, but we now feel that the party doesn't listen to us, and this all started around Brexit. It kind of created this sense of the haves and the have-nots in our politics, people who felt they'd been left behind by mainstream politics, who had been

left behind by the Westminster establishment. So like we're seeing all over the world, there's this kind of anti-establishment populist movement. And Brexit really kind of at least turbocharged that, I think it kind of simultaneously gave birth to it, but also reinforced sort of trends that we were seeing since the financial crash. And so you have now just a politics which is unbelievably be volatile. People want change and they want it quickly. And Kirstama, I think, was really a victim of that inability to kind of communicate the sense that you're changing things for the better, fast enough. And so we're so impatient as an electorate now. We want change. We want it fast. So everyone's now hoping that Andy Burnham can deliver it, but he's only got two years to do so.

Can you talk a little bit just about the last 10 years in the UK? The promises of Brexit were take back control, whether that was migration or whether that was the economy, Money would go back into the National Health Service. Free trade deals would be set up. There were all sorts of wild promises as well about super-powered vacuum cleaners and the shape of bananas and what have you. Are people's lives better off now? Are they better off?

Are people rethinking what life is like in the wake of leaving the European Union? No, they're not better off by any means. I think in terms of if you look at living standards, we've seen a precipitous decline. Brexit was, I think, an attempt to try and reverse that, that trend that we were seeing from the financial crisis onwards. And as you say, bold promises were made about the way that this would free the economy, we would be global Britain, we'd be striking trade deals all around the world. That obviously hasn't happened. Any independent economic expert will tell you that Britain has lost economically due to Brexit. There's no sugarcating it.

obviously people here are still pretty entrenched in their positions in terms of the politics of it. So it's quite hard to find many Brexiters. Politically, you would say it was a mistake. Similarly, on the remains side, a lot of people convinced that this has been disastrous for the UK. I think one thing no one was anticipating was the decline in Britain's relationship with America. So there's been a geopolitical sense that we're now quite isolated on the world stage because obviously Trump's White House is less generous towards the UK than perhaps previous administrations were. So I think in an unpredictable world, there's a lot of people scratching their heads and thinking,

well, where were these long-promised benefits of Brexit? It's very hard to see at this point. So if it hasn't worked out, are politicians, and perhaps the next prime minister and Andy Burnham, if that's who it is, are they seriously suggesting or beginning to suggest that perhaps the UK would get closer to the European Union? So Andy Burnham is already coming under a bit of pressure because earlier on this year or perhaps even towards the end of last year, I believe it was, he hinted the, he said explicitly actually that he would like to see the UK rejoin the EU at some point. But as he's tiptoed closer to power, he's essentially had to resolve from that position and say we don't want to relitigate those arguments. I think that although there is a significant and some polls would suggest a majority for the UK rejoining the EU.

in 10 or people, one of the polls saying that people thought it was a mistake and that they wanted to reconsider? Yeah, I think that's right. But I also think there's a lot of people who think that, but also simultaneously don't want us to re-ask the question again. It was so tortured. It was so difficult. It was so divisive that a lot of people begrudgingly accept that we are where we are and we need to make the best of it. And I think in terms of the kind of voters that Andy Burnham is going to need to win over to make sure that he wins the next election as the Labor Prime Minister, I think opening up that question would be pretty divisive. I mean, who knows it could supercharge a coalition on the left, and that could be one strategy, but every indication is that he is going to try and kick that

question into the long grass. Maybe if he wins a big majority, maybe if he has that authority, then in the next parliamentary term, we could see more moves towards Europe. He definitely deep down is a Europhile, but the politics of this is still pretty, pretty fragile and difficult to navigate right here. I have to let you go, but I just wonder whether there's a cautionary tale for us here in Canada, because we're watching this closely. We have our own separation discussions going on in Alberta, to some degree, in Quebec once again as well. And so as you look back at the last 10 years, just briefly, what do you think Canadians might want to be thinking about? I think wherever you look at these singular questions of sovereignty around voting in or out,

look at Scotland in the UK and independence referendum and the calls for that are kind of growing again. And obviously, as you mentioned, your Canadian example, I think the one thing we've learned is that don't expect that pushing a button marked change in terms of a referendum will give you the results that you want. The real solutions in politics, I think, lie in long-term, strategic, collaborative thinking, not in pushing a button and expecting that a utopia exists on the other side. So that would be something I think everyone in the UK, well, perhaps not everyone, but a lot of people here would say.

But also, if you have that vote, I remember being up in the middle of the night watching the results come in and people being surprised, shocked, stunned at the result. If you have the vote, you don't know actually what is going to happen, right? Yeah, exactly. There's a lot of uncertainty that exists on the other side. And I think one of the lessons from Brexit, even from people who supported it, will tell you now that they regret they didn't have enough of a plan in the immediate aftermath. There was a sense that we voted for something. And then, well, the prime minister, David Cameron resigned and there's this huge vacuum and no one knows exactly what come next. And what did come next was 10 years of endless political volatility and uncertainty.

And that is not, it's showing no sign of stopping. Patrick, good to talk to about this. Thank you very much. Thanks for having me. Patrick Baker is the host of Political's Westminster Inside podcast. He was in London, England. This has been the current podcast. You can hear our show Monday to Friday on CBC Radio 1 at 8.30 a.m. all time zones. You can also listen online at cbc.ca.ca.com or on the CBC Listen app or wherever

you get your podcasts. My name is Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca.ca slash podcasts.