Sir Keir Starmer is facing a backlash within Labour after Reform UK made sweeping gains in local elections.
The Prime Minister has said he would go “further and faster” with his plans in response to the poor result, but Labour figures are urging him to change course.
One Labour MP said the response from Downing Street was “nonsense” while another said the party needs a “change of plan” rather than a “plan for change”.
The South Yorkshire mayor said patience was in “short supply” among voters there.
Both Sir Keir Starmer and Tory leader Kemi Badenoch are facing pressure to reverse their parties’ fortunes after Reform picked up 10 councils and more than 600 seats in Thursday’s poll.
Nigel Farage hailed the results as “the end of two-party politics” and “the death of the Conservative Party”.
Reform UK gained an MP in the Runcorn and Helsby by-election, winning by six votes, and took control of the previously Labour-run Doncaster Council.
Labour backbencher Emma Lewell, who has represented South Shields since 2013, said there, the Government has made unnecessary choices that have cost the party at the ballot box.
“There is a deep disconnect with the public and a growing sense that the two main parties just don’t get it,” she wrote in The Mirror.
“That is why, across the country, people are seeking alternatives. The Labour Party doesn’t need to lurch right or left, we need to do what we say we will do and do it in line with our core values and principles of social justice and fairness.”
She added: “We don’t need to be welded to a plan for change that has been so roundly rejected this week by the public, what we need is a change of plan.”
Clive Efford, Labour MP for Eltham and Chislehurst, said it was “madness” to keep doing the same thing.
“The idea that the public have given us such a kicking because they think we’re not going fast enough and they want more of the same, it’s just nonsense,” he told Times Radio.
South Yorkshire mayor Oliver Coppard warned that his region was the “canary in the coal mine” after Reform UK’s success in Doncaster.
While Doncaster’s Labour mayor Ros Jones was narrowly re-elected, the councillors are now majority Reform.
“Patience here is in short supply. As the government make some big decisions on spending this summer, voters like those here in South Yorkshire must be at the front of their minds,” Mr Coppard wrote in The Mirror.
Labour MP Rachael Maskell suggested that voters shunned her party in local elections because it has failed to live up to the values the public expects from a Labour government.
She said her party has “special responsibilities” to serve the needs of people and should scrap winter fuel and welfare policies that she said are pushing voters away.
Labour needs to be driven by “a framework of values, which is about protecting people,” she told BBC Breakfast.
“I believe that when Labour does not meet that sweet spot, that expectation that people have of a Labour government, then they start to look in less favourable places for where that help comes from.”
Conservative figures have meanwhile sought to deny that the results were “existential” for the party.
Squeezed between Reform and the Liberal Democrats, the Tories lost more than 600 councillors and all 15 of the councils it controlled going into the election, among the worst results in the party’s history.
Lib Dem leader Sir Ed Davey said the Tories were on their “last innings” as he played cricket during a visit to Wiltshire on Saturday.
Mrs Badenoch has apologised to defeated Conservative councillors and pledged to get the party back to being viewed as the “credible alternative to Labour”.
A senior Tory MP said she would “of course” still be leading the party in a year’s time and ruled out a possible pact with Reform UK on a national level to get Sir Keir out at the next general election.
“There won’t be pacts. Nigel Farage has been very clear that he wants to destroy the Conservative Party,” shadow chief Treasury secretary Richard Fuller told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.
He said Reform UK would soon find out there are “no simple answers” to local public finances and have to make “difficult choices”.
“Reform will find out, I think, that there are no simple answers locally to public finances at local government level, they’ll have to make some difficult choices and the local public will … hold them to account for the decisions they make,” he told GB News.
