Rory Stewart

You'd go for compulsory voting.

All of this makes it less likely for extreme parties to come out of nowhere, take donations from people who are living overseas, exploit the social media landscape.

And so let's have a level playing field.

And I think the safest level playing field is to stop all these bloody parties taking money.

That's what I like about Malinowskis' approach, right?

Stop Labour taking it from the unions, stop the Tories taking it from business, and stop reform taking 5 million or 15 million or whatever the whole thing.

And if you're a Labour MP, you'll be getting very, very angry texts and messages from very loyal party members who've been campaigning for you for years out on the doorsteps and all weather with the leaflets.

You've been going to the Labour Party events with them and they've all lost their council seats.

Yeah.

And they will be blaming Keir Starmer, probably.

Not to be mean, but in my experience, when Tory local councillors lost their seats, they blamed David Cameron or Theresa May or whoever it was.

And just, sorry, just for listeners who aren't completely following the micro details.

One of the big things here is there are just so many more Labour seats up than was true last time.

The narrative a year ago was Chris Mason's The Rise and Rise of Reform.

Last year was the moment where reform really seemed to break through and it took the mayoralty in a couple of places and it took six councils and it was a huge explosion.

But

Labour only lost something like 400 seats last time round because there weren't that many seats up.

This time, Labour almost certainly will lose well over 1,000 seats because there are over 2,000 of these Labour seats up for grabs.

Forget about percentages and absolute numbers.

This is going to feel like an unbelievable hammering for the Labour government.