Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hey guys, it's Mark.
Chapter 2: What does Labour's election defeat mean for Keir Starmer's future?
The UK Labour Party is dealing with an election hangover and not the good kind. This week's massive defeat raises a lot of questions about the UK political system, like what does this mean for the future of Prime Minister Keir Starmer? What's to become of the Conservatives? And does Reform UK's big win signal a permanent shake-up to British two-party politics? It is a lot to take in.
Chapter 3: How did Reform UK emerge as a significant player in the elections?
Luckily, our friends over at the FT's Political Fix podcast have dug into the details and have an excellent conversation on it. We're going to play that for you now. Enjoy.
Hello. It's lunchtime on Friday. Results are still coming in, but Labour have taken a hammering, Reform are on the march, the Greens are up, and the Tories have suffered heavy council losses but clinched several wins in London. I'm Lucy Fisher, and this is Political Fix from the Financial Times. Let's get straight to it with our panel. Jim Pickard, who's been up since 4am. Hi, Jim.
Lucy, how dare you? It was 3am.
How dare I minimise your sacrifice of sleep? Stephen Bush, who eclipses you, Jim. He's been up all night, haven't you, Stephen?
I have, yep. So I might start to sundown during the pod. Halfway through.
And down the line from Manchester, it's Jen Williams. Hi, Jen. Did you get much sleep?
I worked through for midnight and then I did try and get to sleep. Then the doorbell rang after about an hour. So yeah, I don't know what that was, but it didn't make me very happy and I'm not very awake.
Okay, well, you're all slightly showing me up. I feel a bit embarrassed because I had 40 winks and I woke up at 7am to check in on all the results, dash to the office and get on it. So I wish I could pretend I'm as frazzled and over-caffeinated as I presume you guys are. As I mentioned, vote counts are happening as we speak, but there are some clear themes emerging.
Jim, give us a snapshot of where we stand.
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Chapter 4: What were the early results and trends from the council elections?
somewhere over 250. And the Greens have got modest gains, but then the Greens are still waiting for the inner city London seats to come through. And the Lib Dems have had a sort of okay-ish performance.
But what this basically is, it is the reality on the ground and local government catching up with opinion polls, which have been telling us for over a year that reform is relatively much more popular than than the other political parties. And therefore, it's come from almost nowhere. Remember, Nigel Farage only set the party up five years ago. It's coming from nowhere.
It's going to end the week, I suspect, a couple of thousand seats up. Now, the only glimmer of hopes for the Labour Party, and of course, the tension is already turning to what is the mood in the parliamentary Labour Party? Are they going to try and depose Sir Keir Starmer? Have they got the foggiest idea inside number 10 and outside number 10 where they should be going?
The two glimmers of hope they've got is that, firstly, the expectation management on this from academia was quite positive from Labour's perspective because you had very respected political professors saying that the Labour Party could lose 1,800, 1,900 seats. And now, as the results are coming through, they're suggesting that it might be closer to 1200, 1300. We obviously don't know.
And then the second glimmer of hope is that if the result lands in that area, it would be very similar to 1999. We're going to hear that 1999 repeated over and over, which is when Tony Blair, two years into his first premiership, lost 1100 seats and then went on to win the 2001 general election.
Jen, let's come to you. Not all council seats in England have been up for election, but huge swathes of the North and Midlands we've seen turn from red to turquoise. Give us the lowdown of the key results so far.
Well, I think one thing that makes a little bit more complicated to hear through the noise of these election results is that so many of these councils are elected on thirds, which means that only a third of councillors are up for election in any given year.
And that then means that although you can see the direction of travel, it doesn't necessarily result immediately in a Labour administration losing its majority because that might take two or three rounds of elections for that to happen. But you can absolutely see the direction of travel in some of the, particularly the sort of former Red Wall type councils in the North and Midlands.
So in Wigan, for example, which is significant for a few reasons. For Labour, it's got kind of deep, long-standing emotional connections to the party and to trade unionism. Andy Burnham's seat of Lee is in Wigan. Lisa Nandy's seat is Wigan. So it's a chunk of the borough. All of the councillors that Labour... were fielding this time lost to reform.
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Chapter 5: What does Labour's performance indicate about their electoral strategy?
Which, if your argument is, look, in local elections, people know that they can kick the boss, particularly in large chunks of the north, whereas Jen says they elect in thirds, so it does not matter at all, right? Your Labour council's not going to change at all. One of the things they tried to do in lots of their leaflets...
across Greater Manchester was to do a kind of like, hey, remember to keep Andy on the front page, basically like re-elect this guy because the combined authority means and the local authorities really do matter.
It does appear thus far with the important disclaimer that most of the London councils haven't declared yet, that in London, which are all up and where therefore it's not just an expressive vote, you are actually going to change your council.
Labour have done a better job holding off the Greens and the Conservatives have done a better job holding off reform than they both have in places which are demographically similar but are not all up.
So I guess what you could say is this does show that people are less likely to abandon one of the big two parties when it's an actual question of who runs something, which of course will be the thing that Labour will tell itself and it will be different in 29 because that will be about who runs the country rather than kicking Keir Starmer.
But Jim, we've heard Nigel Farage come out, call this a historic election. That's fair for reform, isn't it? It does feel like this is the death knell for the two-party system and that a fragmented multi-party landscape is now here to stay in England. And of course, that's something we've already seen take place north of the border and to some extent in Wales too.
Yeah, I think Nigel Farage has every right to sound and feel triumphalist right now, because who wouldn't be impressed by a party that's gone from basically nothing to being ahead in the polls, taking a couple of thousand council seats. We haven't got the Welsh results yet, but they'll probably become first or second in Wales. They're probably going to displace Labour in Scotland.
Let's not forget those votes are happening as well. And so, of course, he has every right to be feeling extremely happy about The big but, as Stephen alluded to earlier, is that people vote differently in local elections to how they vote in national elections.
And the fracturing of the old duopoly, the Labour and Conservatives, is definitely something we can see happening right in front of our eyes. But we've also seen reform was polling at 31% last September. They're now polling at, I think, 26% if you look at the aggregate of all the polls.
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Chapter 6: How did the Conservatives fare in the recent elections?
But that is a huge defeat for unionism in what ought to have been a golden opportunity for some kind of Scottish Labour revival.
And I think one of the subplots, which is going to be lost in the tsunami of news over a couple of days, is that the Conservatives in the Welsh Senate, in the last Parliament there, had 13 out of 60 seats. They were actually level pegging with Plaid Cymru, who only had 13 seats.
And yet we're going to see Plaid more than double their presence and the Conservatives almost vaporised, which is fascinating.
Yeah.
Whichever word on the Lib Dems and Ned Davey too, is he in trouble at all?
So there has been for a long time rumbling in the Liberal Democrat Party among the MPs this feeling of, oh, you know, he hasn't adjusted to a life where he has to manage a team of 72, not of 12. And where most of the 12 were his immediate neighbours in the West London area. And we're not getting the cut through we should. We're not using the team well enough.
Now, it looks like they've had some exceptionally good results, including in Sutton, where if you were to pick somewhere where something might have gone wrong, it's a very levy outer London borough where reform might have expected to emerge as a stronger challenger to them.
But they've lost their majority in Hull, where they're still the largest party, but they'll probably have to do some kind of deal with Labour. I think those grumblings and rumblings in the Liberal Democrats are going to continue. I don't think we're yet at the stage of we need a change. Some of the most recent changes have made the parliamentary party feel a bit more included.
But I think that feeling of why are we getting so little attention for our 72? Why aren't we making the running? And also, broadly speaking, we have very normal European style politics now, right? Like far right party, far left party politics. Struggling centre-right party, struggling centre-left party. What we don't have, which lots of other places have, is a resurgent centre party.
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Chapter 7: What implications do these election results have for the Greens?
And I think that is what we're waiting through Friday into Saturday to get a sense of. And whether or not there are more people like Dave Watts, and whether bigger figures, more household names than Dave Watts, and also the sheer numbers of people who turn around and say, enough's enough, we need Andy Burnham.
That's right, isn't it, Jim? I mean, there are many moving parts and Downing Street's got to be alive to Feld's council leaders and prominent figures from local government calling for his resignation. So far, we've had Darren Hale, the leader of the Labour group on Hull, who lost his seat saying that Starmer needs to go.
Beyond that, there's obviously the cabinet, there are other Labour MPs and the trade unions who report suggest are having a key call at 5pm today to discuss what happens. It seems to me so far we've had people who've already been critical of Starmer and called for his head, using this moment to reiterate that.
The Hartlepool MP Jonathan Brash, Hartlepool's just fallen from Labour to Reform, so perhaps unsurprising he's spoken out. The General Secretary of the TSSA Transport Union, Mariam Eslam-Dust, has also repeated her call. What's your sense of whether the pressure is going to bubble up today or whether it might be the weekend next week or further down the line this year, if at all?
I think there's been a sense of despondency within the PLP and across the Labour Party for quite some time, but there's never been a common agreement about what the solution for the party's plight is. Now, we've been talking about individuals, we've been talking about Burnham, we've not been talking about policy.
And there's a policy question there, which is, should the Labour Party stop trying to chase defectors to reform? And should it start worrying about defectors to the Green Party instead? Now, the problem with the results as they've come in overnight is that they don't show a clear trend of Labour losing voters to one party or another. There was a very interesting study.
Data I saw from More in Common suggesting that basically the vote is scattering to the four winds, which makes it so much harder for the Labour Party to search inside its soul and say, should we be more left wing? Should we be chasing more blue collar, northern white voters or not? So they're in a bit of a pickle that they don't really know which direction to go in.
And therefore they ask the question of, Well, maybe Keir Starmer isn't getting it wrong in policy terms, but we just need someone with more charisma. And they think, well, Angela Rayner has more charisma, but there are issues with her as well, such as she seems to be very unpopular with a lot of the public. Do we go back to Ed Miliband? There are issues with that, i.e.
he's already lost the general election. Do we go for Wes Streeting, the health secretary? Well, the Labour membership don't particularly like him. him, or at least they think he's a little bit too Blairite. And then the question comes back to Burnham. He's popular in Manchester. He has a doe-eyed look that some people seem to like.
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Chapter 8: What challenges does Andy Burnham face in returning to Parliament?
Cheryl Brumley is the FT's global head of audio. See you on Monday.