Voters in two districts in England delivered new blows to beleaguered Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, electing opposition-party lawmakers in seats that Sunak’s Conservatives had held for years.

Labour Party candidate Damien Egan won the House of Commons seats of Kingswood in southwest England, and Labour’s Gen Kitchen took Wellingborough in the country’s center, results announced Friday showed. The Conservatives won both by large margins at the last national election in 2019 but saw support collapse in Thursday’s special elections.

The hard-right Reform party — formerly known as the Brexit Party — came third, putting more pressure on the Conservatives.

Labour leader Keir Starmer said the results “show people want change.”

The results will likely worsen fears among Conservatives that, after 14 years in power, the party is heading for defeat when a national election is held in less than a year. The Tories consistently lag between 10 and 20 points behind the left-of-center Labour in opinion polls.

Thursday’s elections replaced two lawmakers who left suddenly, one in protest, the other under a cloud.

Lawmaker Chris Skidmore quit the Kingswood seat last month to protest Sunak’s lack of commitment to green energy. Long-serving Wellingborough legislator Peter Bone was ousted over allegations of bullying and sexual misconduct.

The Conservatives have now lost 10 by-elections since the last general election, more than any administration since the 1960s. That includes six defeats — and one win — since Sunak took office in October 2022. He replaced Liz Truss, who rocked the economy with a plan for unfunded tax cuts and lasted just seven weeks in office.

Sunak, the fifth Conservative leader since 2016, has restored a measure of stability but failed to revive the governing party’s popularity.

The Conservatives have been in power nationally since 2010, years that saw austerity following the world banking crisis, Britain’s divisive decision to leave the European Union, a global pandemic and a European war that triggered the worst cost-of-living crisis in decades.

Polls show the Conservatives are losing support across the country, from affluent southern voters turned off by Brexit to working-class northern voters who switched from Labour for the 2019 election, when then-prime minister Boris Johnson promised to spread prosperity to long-neglected areas.

Those promises remain largely unmet, and Britain’s economic growth has come to a virtual standstill, with the country slipping into recession at the end of 2023 for the first time since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic.

The Conservatives pointed to the low turnout — less than 40 percent of eligible voters cast ballots — as a sign that British electors are not enthusiastic about Labour.

But University of Strathclyde polling expert John Curtice said the results confirmed that the Conservatives are in “very, very considerable electoral trouble.”

“The Conservatives are going to have to defeat the historical record to come back from where they are,” he told the BBC.

While leading in the polls, Starmer has also also working to root out the antisemitism that tainted Labour under previous leader Jeremy Corbyn.

The party on Monday disowned Azhar Ali, a candidate in the special election for the House of Commons seat representing Rochdale, after Ali claimed that Israel allowed Hamas’s October 7 massacre to happen as a pretext for invading the Gaza Strip.

The massacre saw some 3,000 terrorists infiltrate Israel, killing about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and taking 253 hostages to Gaza.

While it is too late for Labour to replace Ali with another candidate, his being disowned means that he no longer has the party’s endorsement and would be considered an independent if he wins the by-election on February 29th.

On Wednesday, Labour also suspended Graham Jones, who is running to keep his seat in Hyndburn, because of leaked remarks of his against Israel.

The move came after the Guido Fawkes website published a recording from a meeting of Labour activists in the northern England county of Lancashire during which Jones said: “I’m sure when [world leaders] go home, like me, pardon my French [they say] ‘fucking Israel’ again.”

According to the outlet, Jones repeatedly used the term about Israel and also incorrectly asserted that British people who serve in the Israel Defense Forces are breaking the law.

Since October 7, antisemitic incidents have been occurring in the UK at the highest rate ever recorded.

The number of antisemitic incidents across the country has reached 4,103, more than twice the figure in 2022, amid a surge of threats, hate speech, violence and damage to Jewish institutions and property, the Community Security Trust, a Jewish advisory board, said Thursday.