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The leader of the UK's opposition Labour Party, Keir Starmer, said he will try to bring about a national election using a vote of confidence in Prime Minister Boris Johnson next week unless Conservative lawmakers act to remove him earlier.
Johnson has said he will only leave Downing Street when a new Conservative Party leader is selected, despite pressure from senior figures like former Conservative Prime Minister John Major, who said he should go immediately.
More details on the timetable for electing a new party leader are to be laid out next week by the Conservative Party's 1922 Committee, but Starmer said Tory lawmakers should eject Johnson now.
"If they don't, we will step up with a vote of no confidence," he told a news conference.
Johnson was forced to announce his resignation on Thursday following a string of scandals, including parties he attended in Downing Street in contravention of his own pandemic lockdown laws, for which he was fined by London's police.
Starmer was today cleared by a regional force in northern England, which had been examining claims he broke the same rules by drinking at a work meeting.
The Labour leader had pledged to resign if he had been fined, like Johnson, who notably refused to step down, despite becoming the first recorded Prime Minister in British history to commit an offence while in office.
Starmer told journalists if he won an election he wouldn't enter into an alliance or coalition with the Scottish National Party (SNP) but was less definitive on arrangements with the centrist Liberal Democrats.
The SNP dominance of Scottish seats in Westminster since 2015, a former Labour heartland, has made the route to a majority for Labour more difficult. Conservatives argue Labour would need to do a deal with the SNP and possibly risk the break-up of the UK, as the nationalist party want an independence vote for Scotland.
Starmer said that aside from any electoral calculus, he wanted to be a prime minister for the whole United Kingdom.
"There will be no deal going into a general election and no deal coming out of a general election," he said. "There is no basis - no basis - for an alliance with a party who wants to break up the United Kingdom."
(REUTERS)
