Aditya Chakrabortty

And they've been looking for ways to protest at a ballot box for a long time, whether that's over Brexit or over 2019 and that election or whether it's against Keir Starmer now.

So whoever's in power at any particular time, right, they will give them a punch on the nose.

But then there are a whole variety of other people who, within that reform coalition, who, you know, research, extensive research from Hope Not Hate and others show are basically there because they feel like their living standards are either going backwards or frozen.

So things aren't getting better for them.

You know, they wake up each morning and they know that today will not be better than yesterday.

That is such a corrosive thing within politics.

There's a material base there.

And...

We've talked a lot so far about why everyone hates Keir.

But if you stand back, for years now, support for the two main parties has been ebbing away.

And in these local elections that have just gone, two out of every three voters voted against the two main parties, which is to say they vote against the party government or His Majesty's official opposition.

So they voted for what you used to call the fringes.

And that we would have called in previous decades, we'd call that a protest vote.

Like there's a lot to protest about.

We know from official data that a child born today will have fewer years in good, healthy life than they would have expected a few years ago.

We know that living standards have barely budged since 2008.

We're coming up to the 20th anniversary of the banking crash.

And this country has not moved forward since then.

We also know in the cities in particular, if you're young, that it's really hard to get your life going because you can't think about moving the house.

You can't think about all the family decisions that go around.