Max Colchester

But I think what we're seeing from these local election results as they come in, and we have to be clear, they haven't yet all been counted and we don't have the full picture yet.

I think we can see three things coming out of this.

One, the anti-immigration party Reform UK, led by Nigel Farage, which is really running on a message that Britain is broken and that we need to have an anti-establishment political order come in and shake things up and ditch the status quo.

Their message has resonated really very deeply, especially across post-industrial parts of the UK and among working class voters.

The second thing is,

We're seeing that Keir Starmer really now is in a fight to secure his position in Number 10 Downing Street.

And there's already talk of whether he should be pressured by lawmakers into setting out an orderly transition for his departure.

He's already come out and said he won't and that he's going to hang in there.

But what we've seen in recent years in British politics is once that narrative takes hold, it's quite hard to shake.

So it's definitely going to be a very bumpy ride for him in the next few months.

And the last factor is we're seeing really the reordering of a political system here that has been in place for about a century, which was a duopoly, which was the Conservatives and Labour controlling British politics.

And we're seeing that fraying.

We're seeing a bunch of populist parties on the left and the right making inroads into the electorate.

And we're seeing a fracturing of that political order.

And I think that's really what's going to make the weather here in the longer term.

Well, we're definitely seeing a trend of anti-incumbency.

I think voters are frustrated that change isn't happening fast enough.

And we're in an era, especially in Europe, of low growth.

So it's very hard for politicians to come in and actually affect change without difficult trade-offs, which are actually quite hard to sell to the general public.

So that's definitely one factor we're seeing.