530. Is Starmer the Next Joe Biden? Rory and Alastair React to Local Elections
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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welcome to the rest is politics it's an emergency podcast on the local elections with me rory stewart and me alistair campbell is the emergency or is it live it's live is it also a live emergency anyway it's not one of our normal things because we're having this amazing local election in britain which just to remind people could be huge change for the way the british electoral system works yeah got a new system very new system in scotland and wales and
And I guess we're recording this, we're doing this one o'clock on the day after the vote. And the main focus so far has been elections in England. Wales, I am reliably informed by Labour people in Wales, is going to be a disaster for Wales. I was talking to somebody who was in at the count at one of Labour's historically safest seats ever. who said that they were going through the boxes and in every single one of them, Labour was coming third behind Plaid and Reform. And it was very neck and neck between Plaid and Reform. In Scotland, I think the SNP are going to win. The question will be whether they get a majority. Some sort of optimists in the Labour camp are saying it's going to be slightly better than we expected.
We shall see.
And then I think the story... Slightly better, I guess, is that John Curtis was looking, the famous Sir John Curtis, the great pollster, seemed to be suggesting that his polls were thinking SNP will do very well in Scotland, but they won't quite get a majority, which won't be enough for them to push for a referendum on independence. But he thought it's possible reform could come second, and Labour and Conservatives neck on neck on about 17 seats. So doing better presumably would mean Labour coming second rather than equal third.
Yeah, I think Labour doing better would mean probably gaining some seats and certainly not falling behind reform, we shall see. And then the votes in England, again, complicated because the places where the Greens and the Lib Dems might expect to do a bit better, many of them still to declare. So the overnight headlines were very much about what the BBC seemed to delight in calling the reform surge. And they're looking to be around about one in four of those who voted. uh voting reform i actually think for those who've i suspect most of our viewers and listeners are kind of not necessarily natural reform voters we do have some but not that many i think to those who are not there is quite a lot of comfort to be taken in that because the turnout is higher than usual but still less than half and but it means that one in three out of four did not vote for reform and
This vote does not say to me that Nigel Farage is the next prime minister.
The one that's interesting also is because broadly across Europe, the parties on the right, so parties like the AFD in Germany, Le Pen, I mean further right than the conventional right-wing parties, tend to be getting between 20% and 30%, don't they?
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–8:51
2
What were the implications of the local election results for Keir Starmer?
8:51–18:27
3
How did the Reform Party perform in the local elections?
18:27–1:00:13
4
What challenges does Keir Starmer face after the election results?
1:00:13–1:02:43
Speakers
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