Having hair on your toes is perfectly normal, and just how much you have often depends on genetic factors.

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Blood flow issues can cause a loss of toe hair

If you do want to remove the hair, keep a few things in mind

A supporter of Britain’s departure from the European Union, at right, holds a placard up in front of supporters of remaining in the EU, including Stop Brexit Man, Steve Bray, with his foghorn, outside Parliament in London, Wednesday, Feb. 27, 2019.

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Business Secretary Peter Kyle said he had a “thoughtful conversation” with the Prime Minister on Friday in which Starmer asked for his view on what his next steps should be.

Speaking on Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg this morning, Kyle also said that he was not going to be “delusional” about the situation Starmer is in, admitting that he did not know “full fact” what the next few days would bring. 

Kyle said that the conversation he had had with the PM on Friday was “very thoughtful” and “professional”: “[Starmer] led through a conversation about the challenges our country faces, about the political issues which are unfolding at the moment, and asked my views.”

The cabinet minister did not deny that Starmer could agree to stand down.

Asked by Kuenssberg if it was still the case that Starmer would fight any leadership challenge, as he insisted on Friday, Kyle said the PM was “fighting for our country”.

“He’s also making time this weekend to try and reflect on the political challenges that he faces, our country faces, our party faces.

Asked again if the PM would fight a leadership challenge, Kyle said: “These are decisions for Keir to make, and that’s why I said that he is taking the time, as well as dealing with all the issues that a Prime Minister deals with over a weekend, a very busy weekend, he’s also taking the time to think through what the political realities are today compared to last week, the week before.”

The Observer has reported that Starmer will announce a resignation plan on Monday amid growing pressure from Labour MPs.

The PM has repeatedly insisted he would fight any challenge against his leadership.

However, Andy Burnham’s landslide victory in the Makerfield by-election on Thursday has put greater pressure on Starmer’s position, with large numbers of Labour MPs pushing for Burnham to take over.

Sky News reported this morning that Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper had told Starmer to stand down. Several cabinet ministers, including former Labour leader Ed Miliband, are also reported to have encouraged Starmer to set out a resignation timetable.

Former minister Jess Phillips told Kuenssberg that it felt like “we have come to the end of the road”.

However, while some in Labour would like to see Burnham become leader unchallenged, PoliticsHome reported on Friday that there are some who remain loyal to Starmer who would put forward their own candidate and trigger a leadership contest if that PM did not stand. 

Burnham, who must resign as Manchester mayor now that he is an MP, will arrive in Westminster on Monday and is expected to meet with Labour MPs as part of his push for No 10.

Former defence secretary and Labour peer Lord Hutton told Kuenssberg that it would be important for Starmer’s successor to have a proper plan in place, warning that “personality politics will get you to the end of the day but not to the end of a five-year government.”

Hutton said that Burnham needed to “map out” clearly how he would tackle the issues facing the country, as “the challenges would be the same”.

He also admitted that it would be “a challenge” for Burnham to replace Starmer without going to the polls for a general election.

 

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Governments rarely increase their vote share in by-elections. Turnout is usually well below that of a general election, and the stakes are lower. The Makerfield by-election was by all metrics unusual. Commentators speak of voters ‘sending a message’ to an incumbent government through the by-election ballot box. In Makerfield, the message they wished to send seems to be that they were happy to have Andy Burnham not only as their representative, but to effect change in the country’s leadership.

In local elections held in the Makerfield area just a few weeks ago, Reform had won half of the votes cast, and the seat would be high on any target list for the party at a general election (Makerfield is 29th on a list of the most marginal seats where Reform was in second place in 2024). But on Thursday, the party managed only a small increase on its 2024 share – a disappointing result when Reform’s national polling has doubled in the intervening period.

Reform was quick to suggest that the Burnham campaign had capitalised precisely on the ‘anti-Starmer’ sentiment that it had mobilised effectively in the local elections. Polling from Convergent Opinion for Persuasion UK suggests that Reform retained most of its 2024 voters and also won over around 1 in 10 2024 Labour voters.

But it faced two issues that resulted in its performance being below expectations.

Firstly, for the first time, Reform faced a significant challenge on its ‘right’. The newly formed Restore Britain, led by ex-Reform MP Rupert Lowe and whose key policy is the deportation of immigrants, contested its first election outside of Lowe’s home turf in Great Yarmouth.

It was able to secure almost 7 per cent of the vote, drawn almost exclusively from those who had previously voted for Reform. Not sufficient in this instance to cast them as ‘spoilers’, the combined Reform plus Restore vote would still be 10 percentage points short of that won by Labour, but a sign that it could cause problems for Reform where the margins are tighter.

That they [Tory voters] might be willing to vote for Labour in some circumstances is an important yet overlooked factor in an evolving party system

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A second – and possibly more important – factor for the prospects of Reform at a general election is that it was unable to gobble up the Conservative vote in its entirety.

Polling suggests around half of the 2024 Conservative vote went to Reform on Thursday, but a small group of Conservative voters were willing to vote for Labour. Data from the British Election Study immediately after the 2024 election showed that around 15 per cent of those who had voted Tory would ‘vote against’ Reform. That they might be willing to vote for Labour in some circumstances is an important yet overlooked factor in an evolving party system.

Analyses of contests at all levels since 2024 have highlighted a ‘block’ structure to voting: Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Green Party forming a ‘left’ block, and the Conservatives and Reform on the ‘right’.

Those in the ‘left’ block, veterans of tactical voting campaigns, have been comfortable moving between these parties to deny Reform high-profile victories in key by-elections such as Caerphilly and Gorton & Denton. This was again evident in Makerfield, with both the Lib Dem and Green shares of the vote collapsing and costing the parties their deposit.

However, for the time being, the ‘right’ block remains less willing to consolidate around a single party.

And key to the shape of future contests is what happens to the remaining Conservative vote – if it continues to fragment along multiple lines, the smaller fragments (those willing to vote Labour, Lib Dem, Green or simply stay home) will be crucial in shaping the competition between ‘blocks’.

Critically, Reform now faces precisely the same sort of dilemma the Conservatives and Labour have wrestled with in a multi-party system: how to hold on to voters on one flank without losing them on the other. Perhaps an even more thorny problem for a party unable to lean into a unifying position on economic issues.

Often, the significance of a by-election for the direction of politics is only obvious with hindsight. Chesham & Amersham on a similar June day in 2021, revealed key trends in anti-Conservative voting that proved critical to the 2024 election.

While the significance of Makerfield may not need the benefit of hindsight, the lesson to be learned may be that in multi-party politics, there are no easy answers for any political party with ambitions to form a majority government.   

 

Paula Surridge is deputy director at UK in a Changing Europe

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Though embattled Prime Minister Keir Starmer promised “change”, recent events are probably not what he had in mind. With the victory of Andy Burnham in the Makerfield by-election, we face the prospect of a seventh prime minister in 10 years.

We know that British political volatility is partly the result of deeper currents. Across Europe, the grand old parties of right and left cede ground to upstart rivals. In the UK, the tectonic plates of politics have been grinding away at the two-party dominance of Conservatives and Labour for decades. In the last 20 years, we have seen the resultant volcanic eruptions: SNP and Plaid Cymru governments, Brexit, and surges for Reform and the Green Party.

We also know, though, that it takes a lot for either of the two main parties to be replaced in Britain, due not least to the voting system. It is nonetheless a live possibility today because of the bungled responses of the Tories and Labour to these challenges.

Why have they got it so wrong? To misquote Tolstoy, each unhappy political party is unhappy in its own way.

Labour’s problem is that long-term changes in its voting base now sit very awkwardly with its sense of collective identity. The party’s activist and elected official class cling to an entrenched historical mythology of Labour as the political wing of the industrial working class. As the Instagram of Al Carns MP recently declared: “Labour was chiselled out of the mines, hammered out of the shipyards, forged in the factories.”

In their heart of hearts, therefore, many Labour figures would prefer a different electorate to the one they have. “We are in danger of becoming a party of the well-off, not working people,” Angela Rayner recently warned. She’s right to worry: both Reform and the Greens are performing more strongly among economically insecure voters than Labour. Crucially, however, the relatively poor of Britain are not homogenous.

Because of this hangup, Labour has reacted to the loss of voters in post-industrial towns by trying to fend off the Reform challenge. These were ‘hero voters’ for Labour strategists in the 2024 election, an attitude that helps us understand the party’s authoritarian turn on immigration in office. The problem, as political scientists have been screaming at Labour for some time, is that these electors have not voted Labour for ages, if ever in many cases, and showed no evidence (even in 2024) of turning to the party in large numbers.

Meanwhile, and predictably, the upshot of Starmer’s hero voter strategy has been a huge loss of liberal-leaning voters in the left bloc – including, crucially, economically precarious workers in the cities – to the Greens. The solution is not as simple as ‘pivot left’: voters are not that coherent. Still, Labour’s internal political culture suffers from hangovers about who the party is ‘of’ as well as ‘for’, and these have prevented a clear analysis of viable electoral strategies.

To misquote Tolstoy, each unhappy political party is unhappy in its own way

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The Conservatives have their own fetishes from their past. A certain handbag-wielding prime minister looms large. But theirs are quite different. If Labour is the party that struggles with power, the Conservatives were, at least historically, the party of statecraft par excellence. Power, above all, is key for the Tories, and flexibility to obtain power is no bad thing.

The problem, however, is that this strong will to power, when not checked by other impulses, can prove destructive in the long run. Since the 2010s, the Conservatives have pursued Brexit, much lower immigration and culture war politics with increasing vigour. This was partly due to internal party management issues, but also clearly an attempt to retain power by seeing off the threat from Nigel Farage’s Ukip.

This instinct led to several successful elections, particularly 2015 and 2019. But the choices made in the process (a referendum on EU membership, a hard Brexit) have also gradually alienated large parts of the Conservatives’ electorate: the English middle classes.

The Conservatives in the 20th century drew support from a patchwork of social groups, from backwoodsmen to industrialists. The cliché may have been that the Anglican Church was the Tory party at prayer, but Thatcher’s Chancellor Geoffrey Howe used to quip that the Tories were the National Farmers’ Union at prayer.

Still, it was heavily dependent on clerks, senior civil servants, and the traditional professions. It is therefore surprising just how unconcerned Kemi Badenoch’s party appears to be about its catastrophic losses of the comfortable, southern English middle-classes. In the local elections, Richmond-upon-Thames became a one-party state for the Liberal Democrats, the most dramatic example of the risks of adopting short-term tactics that harm long-term political health.

Both parties, then, have distinct pathologies that have hindered their ability to navigate the treacherous ground of fragmented British politics. But there is one failing that they share: quality of government. Liz Truss was only the extreme example of a wider trend. In the decade since the Brexit referendum, the UK has not only cycled between prime ministers but also supposedly era-defining agendas (‘Levelling Up’, ‘Change’) that were manifestly incoherent and collapsed under pressure. Perhaps relatedly, the quality of legislative scrutiny in parliament appears to have declined.

Post-2008 stagnation, the shocks of the pandemic and the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East are the dominant explanations for the wicked policy challenges facing UK politics. But here, too, the once-dominant parties of Britain might want to look in the mirror.

Dr Colm Murphy is a senior lecturer in British politics at Queen Mary University of London