Future Outlook and Cost of Living

The devolved and local elections which took place in Britain on May seventh, Thursday of last week, were a disaster for Labour. In Wales it has almost completely vanished as an electoral force, replaced as the major party in the Senate by Plyde Cymru. That is an astonishing up-ending for a party once so completely identified with progressive politics in Wales. In Scotland, it failed to profit from the scandals and dissatisfactions which have plagued the SNP over the past few years, and though the SNP retained office, their victory was greatly diminished. In England, Labour lost votes every way. Councils slipped out of its control as reforms swept through northern towns and suburbs, and the Greens made truly significant gains in major cities. Meanwhile, the Liberal Democrats, who exist, confirmed their position as the electoral destination for the kind of affluent moderate vote which might once have gone conservative, and the Conservatives themselves were brutally reduced to a fringe party, but seem oddly and perhaps delusionally happy about it. If you ask Nigel Farage, though, and much of the press, it was Reform's night. Certainly the party posted impressive gains in all of the elections. Neither the Enoch Powell fans in his ranks nor the maladministration of various reform councils over the last year seem to have much damaged his chances. Farage has certainly been talking very confidently about his party's success and the end of the left-right system. But when we look a little closer, it's not totally obvious that he's right. Reform didn't produce the victory it once talked of in Wales. It didn't eat up the Unionist vote entirely in Scotland. The calculation of projected national share, essentially what the vote would look like in a national context, put them on about twenty-six percent or so. So clearly ahead of the rest of the pack, but less so. But their mood and the mood of the press as a whole is not of a party that has stalled and combined with first past the post that could easily be enough of a lead for success at the next general election. So for the past year, we've always known this would be the crunch point for Keir Starmer. It's hard to read the elections as anything other than a wholesale rejection of his politics on a national level. Yet he's already declared that he refuses to walk away from the job. That might not be his decision, as plots to remove him are heating up very quickly indeed. Today we're recording on the early afternoon of Monday, the 11th of May, important in moments like this, because things can change very quickly. He's delivered a speech that's very long on values and various cliches, uh, warning that the country will go down a very dark path if the party doesn't get it together, and declaring that incremental change won't cut it, uh then announcing a series of incremental changes such as nationalising British steel, setting a new direction with the EU and attacking Nigel Farage directly. Can it really be enough? Uh you're listening to On Politics on the L IB podcast I, am James Butler, a contributing editor here at the London Review of Books, and joining me are Richard King, who has a piece on Labour in Wales in the most recent issue. Rory Scothorne, who's written frequently on Scottish politics for the paper, and I know has a piece on Scottish Labour forthcoming. And with me here in the studio is Andy Beckett, Guardian Columnist Author, and another prolific LRB contributor, especially on the turbulent history of the Labour Party and wider Labour movement. I should say I also wrote about the local elections in England and their political consequences for the new issue of the paper. It's up online already, and you can find a link to that in the description of the episode or just by navigating to the LRB website. So the dust is settled after the week end. How do these results look? What's the story? Uh I want to start with Wales. So Richard, I'm gonna come to you. In some ways that seems like the most devastating uh result for for the Labour Party. Is that right? I think so. They were briefing on the day of the election that they may be reduced to ten uh members of the Senate. They ended up with nine. When they briefed that it might be 10 I think. there was a sharp intake of breath that that was absolutely within the realms of the worst possible outcome for them. There have been suggestions that this was quite a long time coming. In the 2014 general election, the Labour vote share in Wales fell uh by 4% . While it went up in the rest of the country, it fell in Wales. I think you can possibly even track this back to the Brexit vote in Wales. The the Wales Governance Centre has done a lot of work on people voting by identity in Wales, whether they vote along the lines of Brit ishness or Welshness. And the vote for Britishness is declining, but uh voted for leave and has now voted for reform and the vote for Welshness is younger and is increasing and is voting for Plyde. For a while Labour was able to at least give the impression of embodying a Welsh Britishness, the Welsh Britishness identity no longer obtains. I think the vote suggests that Wales still believes itself to be a centre-left , quasi -social democratic country, it's now chosen Plyde as the as the vehicle to try and establish that. Where the Plyde will succeed is I think a very difficult question to answer given the limitations of devolved government. But certainly, Labour's record really since the pandemic has led to a huge amount of frustration. The pandemic was a double-edged sword for Labour because I think for the first time many people realized quite the extent of devolution, including health and education, but particularly health. And actually there was a renewed , or actually not renewed, but a new found sense of accountability with the Senna that hadn't been there prior to the pandemic. So Labour was has been held to account for the last six years in a way perhaps it hadn't been previously, particularly with a Labour government in Westminster. That really contributed to this very widespread disillusion with Labour's record in office. Uh Rory, is it the same story in Scotland? Is is the same dynamic in in play? A lot of the dynamics between Wales and Scotland are shared. Uh especially that story of the the pandemic uh really turbocharging public perceptions of what devolution was, although it it kind of went in the other direction. If you look at the last Holyrood election in 202 1, it was the highest ever tur nout in a a Hollywood election by quite a long way. It was like sixty three percent. And that benefited the SNP because the SNP were seen as having done a good job. And support for independence also went up during the pandemic. at And the time, this was seen as essentially people were seeing for the first time what devolution could do, or or in a positive sense, the kind of firepower, the sense of a government taking a very distinctive approach that had a direct effect on people's lives from the British government and one that they approved of. I mean obviously the comparison was between Nicholas Sturgeon and Boris Johnson. That's not a difficult comparison to win. Since then it's gone in a drastically opposite direction. It's almost like those very inflated expectations that came out of the pandemic have been seriously disappointed. Um so uh opinions of the direction in which Scotland is going, uh positive or bad, if you look at things like the Scottish election survey are downwards uh even amongst the SNP's vote and even amongst supporters of independence, they've taken a a a pretty steep decline. Um so pe people are not generally particularly happy with the direction of travel in Scotland, which is obviously a a threat for the SP. But if you look at the election where the SP held on, pretty easily. got They 58 seats, which is only a drop of I think six from 2021, and in fact is a substantial recovery in their vote share from the 2024 election. So the SNP really pulled things back. The difference obviously is that Labour were in government in Wales and they were not in government in Scotland. Labour were the main opposite well, Labour and the Tories were the two main opposition parties in Scotland coming into the selection, those are clearly the two parties that have been hit hardest across the UK in this election. And that's been felt in Scotland as well. So the SNP have really benefited. They've been kind of uh pulled up by the downwards momentum of their two main opposing parties in Scotland. Is there a geographical structure to this kind of vote? Does there a a strong difference in votes, say, between the cities, the borders, uh the north. Yes, absolutely. There's um I would say probably a more fragmented geographical spread of the vote than we've seen. There's a clear core to how elections work in Scotland. I mean the engine of of Scottish politics is the central belt. Uh so between the west and east coasts in the lowlands, from Glasgow to Edinburgh, it's where all the coal was, it's where most of the industry was and most of the population. And the the really crucial bit of the central belt is actually outside of the cities or outside of the centre of the cities, so post industrial Scotland essentially, which is not that different from post industrial England and Wales, you know You. know, it's an aging working class vote that's not hyper engaged with politics. This should be good terrain for reform. Uh really. The S P held on across those seats, across post industrial Scotland in particular, they won every single seat except Dumbarton, which is a weird seat because it's got trident, it's where the nuclear weapons are, and Jackie Bailey has held that seat since nineteen ninety nine for Labour . The rest of the post-industrial Scotland went, stayed with the SP. The SP did lose a lot of votes there. They lost between 8 and 15% of their vote share across most of those seats. Uh they didn't win less than a third of the vote in any of those seats, so they've they've h they've held on easily. Um those seats are I should say um first past the post constituency seats. Um Scotland has a split system, uh half well slightly more than half constituency seats, and then the rest is proportional. Reform did pretty well there. They were beating Labour in some of those seats uh into second. They were I would say getting between about fifteen and twenty-five percent of the vote in some seats, places like uh Glasgow, Shelston, and some of the most deprived parts of Glasgow in particular reform did really well, like a quarter of the vote. Um so they're snapping at Labour's ankles and in some cases get pulling past Labour in those parts. The rest of Scotland's started to split from the SNP. So affluent suburbs meant wins Liberal Democrats. Kind of gentrifying inner city seats like Glasgow Southside, um Edinburgh Central went green for the first time. The Greens have their first constituency and they're very close to the SP in similar seats. And then in the Highlands, the SP really lost out. The Liberal Democrats took two Highland seats on massive swings, over 20% from the SP. there So it's this a really spread picture. The SP are essentially fraying at the edges. The core of their vote turned out in the central belt, but they lost a lot. So you could be seeing that That grip on central belt Scotland starting to loosen, definitely. And Richard, is a similar geographic distribution visible in in the Welsh vote? I mean, I I know it's a little harder. To a degree also the the language cum rag is an element. Just just to pick up on one of Rory's previous points, in the twenty one Senate election, uh Drakeford really did receive a boost from his handling of the pandemic in the way Sturgeon did as well. Labour had their joint most successful return of thirty seats in what was then a sixty seat Senate . But similarly fell foul of the the disillusionment that followed, particularly uh around the introduction of um 20 mile-an-hour speed limits, which started a sort of intra-Wales culture war that uh I think was a huge, huge element in this election. But yes, the the deindustrializing former Labour areas of South Wales at the valleys where Farage campaigned very heavily. In fact in, the twenty four election he he visited Mertha and he's often been in Newport. The the new constituency around Newport was a key target area for reform. Actually Labour did return an MS there, Newport West. So the places where reform did well were were within their target seats within, as in Scotland, an aging, former working class, mainly Brexit voting , poor health outcome set of constituencies. Plaid Cabri has always done well in what is occasionally called Evrokemrag, which is the West ern coastal are as where Kumbraig is mostly spoken, that's where they've always historically returned MPs to Westminster. What was actually startling, and I think one of the most significant shifts in this election was the number of plied MPs voted for in Cardiff. Similarly, Cardiff has now got its first green MS as well. This probably follows along a demographic of younger voters being clustered in these places, but uh Labour really has lost its former not just its heartlands, but as Raison Detre and not just within Wales, but within the Labour imaginary, I'd say, of the UK, uh, you know, Labour and Wales have been so synonymous with the going back to the folk memory of the creation of the NHS and Iron Bevan and his seat being the seat where Michael Foote was MP and that folk memory was what was keeping Labour going, sort of running on running on empty or running on vibes ever since Roger Morygan stood down, he was the one leader of the assembly, as it was, who could actually frame a Welsh Labour identity. You know, Labour renamed itself Welsh Labour. And he was able to kind of articulate a Welsh version of Labour famously in the clear red water speech. That was a long time ago. And as I said, people still want a progressive social democratic government, but they just no longer think Labour are capable of delivering that, and nowhere is that more evident than in Cardiff returning plied M MSs . Andy, let me come to you. Having heard both of those, is is is a similar story visible in England and what does it look like to you? I think in England it's a strange election because despite the kind of propaganda from reform I'm and they're sort of press supporters. You could kind of argue that most of the parties had a disappointing result in England, that reform's vote shrank, the Lib Dems didn't make a breakthrough, the Greens made a breakthrough but not as big as they hoped. Labour it was catastrophic. The Conservatives have lost almost six hundred councillors. So I mean it's a kind of football analogy. It's like this season's Premier League where most of the fans and most of the teams are unhappy simultaneously, but obviously on the surface, because this is politics, some of the parties are claiming it's fantastic. I think it's also quite a strange set of results in England because there are some councils, like where I live in Hackney, which was quite a good Labour council, which has been completely wiped out by a very vibrant local Green Party. But then in other places like in Preston, which had a sort of radical Labour Council, they've lost control, but they've held virtually all their council seats. So sometimes council performan ce kind of saved Labour and sometimes it didn't matter at all. And I think that's a really interesting sort of dynamic. Something that's really struck me is that if you look at how people voted by age, um, and I don't know if this is the whole of the UK or just England, but the data I've seen sh suggests that places with a lot of old people, the reform and the Conservatives did incredibly well. And in places with a lot of young voters, Labour still did pretty well. So most of the kind of young seats , the Greens got about thirty percent and Labour got about thirty percent. So I think that sort of tells us something interesting that that sort of over sixties voting for Boris Johnson and Brexit and so on, that thing still has a real power. And I think a lot of the sort of spin of the election by the media and by parties tries to present these as sort of whole country outcomes, but they're not that at all. You know, that that essentially reform are a party of quite grumpy older people, you know, and that that and's very powerful because a lot of quite grumpy older people, you know, I may be one myself in a decade or whatever. So um and also you know, the turnout in these elections was decent for local elections, but it's still in the forties. So essentially Nigel Farage's kind of national breakthrough is based on about ten percent of the electorate because he got just over a quarter of the forty percent. So it's a strange patchwork of results, and of course we'll get onto this with our electoral system parti,cularly in England, then five, six, seven party politics, if you include independence as well, produces very strange outcomes all over the place. So yeah, I think on a kind of propaganda level, reform can say they did very well and they did okay. But I wonder if und underneath a few of them are a bit anxious, they're thinking, hang on, twenty-six, twenty-seven, we were on thirty last year. If they get twenty-six, twenty-seven in a general election, they'll be the biggest party. But that but they were looking like they might win outright six months ago. So I I think there's a certain amount of crowing that the media are ready to broadcast because it's a good story or because they're sympathetic to reform, but I wonder whether that's genuine. And the reaction within the Labour Party, I mean, i in one sense of course it's been predictable, right? I mean I think we've spent most of the last year expecting these elections to be bad and for this to be the moment at which uh you know, the ev everyone brings out the knives. So in that sense it's been fairly predictable. Uh what did you make of the that speech this morning? Was it i I mean th the classic way to phrase this question is uh it's a make or bake break speech. Is it enough to to make him, is it enough to save him? And I don't think um anyone really thinks that's true. But was there anything surprising about it? Not really. I mean I don't think Keir Star mer is like a massively subtle politician, at least not in public, and and the fact that he came out with his kind of jacket off and his shirt sleeves rolled up was a sort of like not a massively subtle signal. I mean I thought the sort of delivery was a bit crisper than he is sometimes and he was obviously like there was an intensity to it, which I quite liked. But the actual message, which is kind of Britain's very damaged, it needs fundamental change, and here are my very small policies that won't really do that. That's not that's not a message that really works, I think. And it didn't break out of that that problem , I think, that that he will talk about systemic change in a way that someone Blair never would have done. But we're in a much more turbulent era and the policy offer is still really small. And in some ways, the policy offer is more cautious than new Labour in some areas, and on some social issues considerably more right wing. So it didn't feel like it was gonna convince many people who've already got doubts. I mean there is a there is a puzzling thing here, isn't there, about that disjunction between uh you know the the ability to speak big in terms of you know Britain needs more than incremental change, which is why we're going to negotiate a slightly better position with the European Union than we already have. And you think uh okay, well this isn't this isn't working, but it doesn't st rike me that any of the people, you know, in competition to replace him have m a much clearer grasp of what they would do that differently, um, and not find themselves in exactly the same situation. I suppose you know, one way into this question is is, you know, whether you can do the Labour Party in in you know in the politics that we have now, whether you can do those kind of big tent social democratic parties, whether it's possible. Um, you know, one reading of this incredibly fragmented election is that it's much, much, much harder than it used to be. Is that true? I think you're right. I think it is harder because the whole point of Labour when it has some dynamism is it's a broad church and in a way there is still a broad church on the kind of centre left or the centre left to the left, but it's just a lot of it's not in labor anymore. It's like a collection of smaller tents or however you want to think about it. So I'm a bit more positive about some of the alternatives in the sense that I think some of the things that Andy Burnham has said in the last four or five years, you feel like he's got a systemic critique of, you know, you know, mm privatized utilities, you know, me leaving people with no disposable income and things like that. You know, the private sector's doing a bad job of running lots of Britain. Burnham will say that. And then he will at least say, well maybe we might nationalise some more things, or we might have the state being a bit more dynamic, you know, running transport and so on. So I think there's a bit of that from him . And even where streeting, you know, will say things about the far right being kind of completely odious in a way that actually other Labour cabinet ministers will be reluctant to say. Now, he might have said that for his own reasons, but nevertheless, I think those two and Angela Reynolds, all of them are sort of stake out positions a little bit more kind of iconoclastic than Starmer's. But whether that can actually kind of, you know, produce a sort of thirty percent of the vote, which is what Labour need, is is a different question. Rory, how does it look to you from Scotland, this the the reaction in in Labour uh in Westminster? I mean in s in Scotland I think Starmers cooked. Paul Sweeney, who's one of Labour's MSPs who narrowly squeaked in, um, said just after reaction, if if you've lost the Glasgow Grannies, you've lost. Uh he was he was speaking on the on the doorsteps of people who are just furious. I mean the same thing that's happening in England. People l really hate him in in in quite a lot of Scotland, I think, Starmer, which is remarkable because he did so well here um in in twenty twenty four. Um to the to the extent that Anas Sarwar had to call for his his resignation and continued having to sort of do it throughout the election campaign, but more euphemistically, I think wheeling out Gordon Brown is not going to shift much because it it's tried all the time and it doesn't it doesn't really work. I think Labour could recover in Scotland if they were just able to show that they knew what they were doing a bit more. I I think they're kind of right to say that Starmer is a big part of the problem in that sense that they're losers is is self reinforcing. I don't see Starmer salvaging anything . Um unless, you know, the the the idea within labor within kind of whatever's left of Starmerism is if the delivery works, you know, if everything starts to to work again and the policies start to bear fruit, then everything will come back around. I just find that really hard to believe. Um but I I I do think I mean I think Burnham would do a lot better in Scotland um than than Storm would yeah. Richard I mean can I ask you I mean obviously Wales has , you know, this heavy, very strong Brexit vote and there was a you know, th there was a great deal of anger towards system politicians, system aligned politicians, elite politicians that was visible during that campaign. Star went into this election uh, you know, begging people to vote for something other than the politics of anger . And as Rory has observed, there's a lot of anger floating around. Is it visible in Wales as well? Is that part of this story? Yes. I think there's also a great deal of frustration in that health spending has increased. Uh it's 10% higher than in England. Education spending is seven percent higher. Um spending's gone up by seventeen percent health, fourteen percent education, and the outcomes have deteriorated. We can argue about how they're measured, but essentially Wales is an aging poor country in very poor health. And that does speak to a frustration with policy and with governance rather than ambition . One of the things I think that's interesting about a putative Burnham or even streeting or Reyner-led government is as Andy intimated they probably sense that the direction of travel has altered and if Labour are ever to be anywhere near power again it will be in some form of coalition or bloc. And as someone who's led a devolved administration, you'd think that Berner might actually see sense in collaborating with the SNP or with Clyde. And actually, I think ironically, one of Plyde's best opportunities for quelling some of that anger and delivering some piecemeal change, for example, getting someone like Burnham to agree to devolve royalties from the Crown Estate, which has happened already in Scotland, but um Starmer knocked back in Wales , or giving some budget from HS2, which was denied Leonard Morgan. There is a world in which a new Labour leader actually helps plied with the with the Welsh economy to get it moving again. That might tip into the realms of fantasy, but I could see a a a Labour politician who could see coalition politics being a factor of survival actually starting to build some of those bridges. Andy, I want to bring you in here because this is a it's a sort of consistent argument of voices on the left of the Labour Party that some kind of progressive coalition politics is going to be the way that Labour succeeds in future. Uh recent sort of studies of of electoral behaviour in Britain often make the argument that there are electoral blocks in which votes uh tend to move, so a left and right block in which, you know, voters who are less kind of historically loyal or or sort of uh sentimentally loyal to parties than they used to be. So So there's much less kind of inherited voter behaviour than there used to be. You know, people don't necessarily vote for the same party that their parents vote or voted for. But those those votes do tend to move within those blocks. One vision of how that impacts uh future politics is having to negotiate within that bloc for hegemony. So either that's by defeating them or perhaps in a changed voting system, having to actually make some kind of alliance with them . Sometimes you see that play out in in devolved administrations. Not always very well. Is that something that the Labour Party is just going to have to face up to the I think it feels like it is. I mean, you know, this is hard to imagine, but if Labour had an absolutely fantastic remaining three years in power, it might get to sort of two hundred and fifty seats at the next election, and that's way short of what you need for a majority. So they're gonna almost certainly, if they're gonna survive or keep reform out, whichever is your priority, gonna have to form a coalition. I mean, really interesting what Rory and and Richard say about this. You know, and the coalition might well involve Clyde and the SNP, and that would be quite an interesting experiment. So yeah, it feels like electorally that's gonna be a necessity, even under our current voting system, let alone under you know you know some reform system . I also think there's something potentially interesting in the sort of areas of policy overlap between people like Ed Miliband, Andy Burnham, Zach Polansky. If you put them in a room together, Perish a thought, the three of them might agree on a surprising number of things about, you know, the current model of capitalism not working very well, about the climate emergency, about the need for a more populist kind of economic policy. That progressive coalition thing, I was always quite sceptical about for years and years 'cause I thought, you know, often these relations are very difficult and, you know, negotiating it is very hard and it's not in the kind of culture of British politics for good or ill. But I think we might be getting to that point now, partly because there is more agreement. I think what's tantalising for people on the left is that it's such a sort of time of despair, but at the same time there's weirdly kind of more hope. Whereas if just say Starmer's programme had been quite successful. If you're to the left of him, you might think we're totally irrelevant. Yes. But essentially the right of the Labour Party have had the train set for two years and they've crashed it and they've destroyed every carriage. And so, you know, the soft left, you know, people slightly more radical than them, plus people who are progressive in you know in Plied and in the S and P and perhaps one or two Lib Dems, certainly some Greens. At least in theory, they can do business, and some of the kind of policy ideas that are floating around from you know, think tanks like Commonwealth are being sort of followed up by several of those parties or these are several of those parties interested simultaneously. So I think making it all work could be really hard, but I think there is a bit more potential there than there was. Um and that kind of compass idea of the progressive coalition, which I always thought sounded nice but you know was not going to happen, feels more realistic now, I think. It's certainly the case that I think the taboo on it is diminishing within the Labour Party. I mean I think probably ten , fifteen years ago the argument was, well of course you could never make a deal with Plyde or the SNP because they'll just demand a referendum and we don't want to give them that. You know, I think that's still a big factor, particularly in Scotland. But the other part of that fantasy is Labour can only make change when it has a majority in Westminster. And when it does that, it can do everything that it wants. Labour has a huge majority in Westminster. It can't seem to get anything it wants done. So it might be time to think a bit differently. Obviously the electoral system uh is the major hurdle here. But how does that question look to you, Rory? Club is is that you can't talk about progressive coalition club until until the election is over . Uh I think um we saw this time and time again, you know, 201 5 there were huge billboards of Ed Miliband in Alex Salmon's pocket. I think it was Nicholas Sturgeon's pocket. I think they did both, just to just to hammer the point home. And I don't I don't see that issue going away. The problem in Scotland, for instance, is that what's left of Labour's vote is now like anti independence. They've lost their pro independence voters . And they're less likely to vote Labour if they think that Labour will then just create an independence referendum. Um so it's not I mean it's obviously a problem in England as well. Although I don't think unionism is as heated amongst English Conservatives as it is amongst Scottish Conservatives, who would take one look at the idea of Labour legislating for an independence referendum and just say , well, we're gonna vote for either reform or I don't know the Lib Dems. Um so you would there would have to be some kind of cross party setting the stage , preparing people, you'd have to get the Lib Dems on board as well. And you'd probably have to say, I mean, what what I think some people in the Scottish Labour Party are talking about now is the best option is to get these parties together and agree on a process by which that depoliticizes the question of an independence referendum that says if support is at this is at this level for this period of time, then we will all agree to hold an independence referendum. What I don't think they can do is saying this is going to be the product of just like cynical political maneuvering to get us into office because it will be um counterproductive for the Labour Party. And I think it's really hard to get past that for them. Richard, I'm really interested in the status of this question in Wales because Renat Bjorweth has been very cautious about um saying anything about independence beyond wanting, I think, in his words to start the conversation. Um So what is the status of the national project within Plyde? The first thing to say was that was a a necessary argument to make because the now major opposition party in Wales reform. It's not entirely clear, but it seems to me they actually want to get rid of devolution. I think that's their policy. So we have an opposition party that doesn't want to exist in the parliament that's just been elected to. So any position Ply took is more about, I think, making the case for a more gen erous pan Welsh form of devolution than we've had so far before we get onto the question of independence. Now, Plyde was set up a centenary go with the intention of an in creating an independent Wales. And there are people who are weary of applied government because there is a sense that's there there may be people within Plyde who are think they're doing the druid's work of five hundred years of uh wish fulfil ment and uh uh fulfilling a de a destiny. I think Rinapir has been very nuanced in resisting that framing of Clyde and one of the things Plyde can do at not too great a cost will be to govern for the whole of Wales rather than governing from Cardiff, which was Labour's very firm position. You know, m many of Clyde would have been educated at the universities of Bangor, Arustus, um, rather than Cardiff. And I think rather than go anywhere near some idea of a vote for independence, there's gonna be more energy put into actually joining up North and South Wales and uh we're gonna hear a lot of the invoc ation of governing for all the communities of the communities of Wales. You're listening to the LRB podcast. Stay with us as we go on a very short commercial break . 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I am James Butler and I am here talking with Richard King, Horisko Thorn and Andy Beckett about those May the seventh elections in Britain. In both of the conversations about Scotland and Wales, there's an identifiably progressive nationalist party in a way that there isn't in England and in obvious ways that happens in Scotland and Wales for a reason that it doesn't happen in England. Reform is in some sense a recognizably English nationalist, British nationalist, it sort of oscillates between the two. Is that an important factor in their success? I think it is. I mean I think people have commented, haven't they, since the results came in that the sort of Brexit voting areas in England reform did particularly well again. And obviously there's a quite a crossover between voting for Brexit and having some quite nationalistic views of Englishness. So I think that's I think that is in the mix for them. Yeah. I mean something else that sort of struck me about reform is that maybe going to a slightly more orthodox sort of Thatcherite economic policy, which they've started to do this year as Nigel Farage has been having lots of dinners with sick people in the city, I wonder whether that's been smart and I wonder whether that's contributed to the erosion of their support a bit, because a lot of their voters are quite left wing on the economy, even if they might be very right wing on other issues. So that's a sign of reform in invertical kind of maturing, allowing someone like Robert Jenrick to set the economic policy. I wonder whether that's smart for them and and that's just I mean maybe that's maybe being too optimistic, but I wonder whether that's damaged them a bit. They're presenting themselves as they've got momentum, but you know, just say next year's local elections, if they go down another two or three percent, then it really will look like, hang on, you are now just one of the five parties kind of jostling. And there is that danger, I think. On the other hand, they do have incredibly favourable media coverage, you know, it's quite startling listening to the Today Programme interview with Zach Polansky last week, which was pretty brutal, and then listening to the one with Nigel Farage the week before. And the contrast between the two was amazing. And and so I think that's tremendously helpful for reform. And reading all the writing papers when I was at a station um at the weekend, you know, there was endless stuff in the Daily Mail about how the Greens are not going to get as many seats as they wanted and everything, and all the framing was way off. You know, the mail said, Oh, the Greens will only get four hundred seats and, that's very disappointing. They got almost 600. You know, the the Daily Mail said, oh, reform are going to get 32%, and they got 26%. You know, so for people who don't follow this stuff closely, the impression of momentum that reform have is incredibly useful, and the media are incredibly helpful, sort of deferential BBC, very right wing, right wing press by historic standards, slightly scared kind of liberal media. So in a way they I think they're sort of papering over the cracks a bit in their performance with Aaron Powell I mean Pol ansky certainly has has faced a a pretty thoroughgoing onslaught, I think, particularly in those couple of weeks uh just leading up to the elections. I think that was probably the first taste the Gre ens really have of what the uh what the British press will do to you if it decides it it wants to to knock you down a peg. I mean there are obviously other issues facing the Greens. I mean Rory maybe I can come to you. I mean, the Greens obviously , you know, Scottish Greens are separate separate parties, the Green Party of England and Wales, but they have significant elected experience in Scotland. Do you think some of the problems they faced in Scotland are likely to be faced by those in England? Yes. It it slightly depends what you mean by the problems they faced in Scotland. It wasn't their choice to be uh kicked out of the government in Scotland. So uh after 201 6 , um despite doing extremely well in the election, Sturgeon decided to bring the Greens into government in a in a not a coalition cooperation agreement where the Greens got two government ministers . And that didn't really last very long. It didn't survive Sturgeon's exit really once Hamza Youssef came in, who was seen as a kind of Sturgeonite, but he was also pretty weak. He was extremely unpopular. And the thing that I think really broke that deal up was that once the Greens were brought into office , you could see the Scottish media turn on the SNP in a way that they hadn't quite done. I mean, they've always been a bit hostile, but it took a different kind of tone after that point that the SP were now abandoning their kind of representative status of the Scottish nation and were starting to be brought into this weirdo fringe. And this was really tied up with the fact that that Scottish politics in particular had been the hotbed, I would say, UK-wide of essentially a a wave of propaganda against trans rights and the Greens were made the figureheads for efforts to liberalize the ability to get a gender recognition stip certificate and things. They were presented as this wild fringe party that was not legitimate to govern Scotland, that was should stay on the fringe. And their inclusion in government was, I think, quite a shock for a lot of the Scottish press, who suddenly realized, Oh goodness, Nicola Sturgeon's not one of us. Once she was gone, Yusuf couldn't really hold it together. It was his fault that it all fell apart. He kicked them out of government to try and boost his credentials and it failed catastrophically. I think it would be much, much worse in England if the Greens were were brought into government. I mean the same things would happen on stero ids. Um and and so I don't I don't know how ready they are. I do think Polansky knows the kind of hostility he faces. I think he's he's And I I wonder, Richard, if I can come to you on that question of culture war. Um I mean, to what extent is this is this visible within Welsh politics? It's never seemed like particularly pronounced . But between a sort of Brexit and Plied divided Cenev, one feels like particular arguments over language and culture could blow up very, very quickly. Yes, I think it's in Plied's Giff to steer a course away from it. They will be forming a minority government. There are two green MSs, largely based around the Cardiff area, which again speaks to the the wipeout of Labour in its former stronghold. Uh in a speech yesterday, Fri an said he wanted to I mean he wasn't gonna say anything else, but he said he wanted to govern for the whole of Wales and the minority government would try and pass laws with whoever would support it. So there was no sense of him wanting to draw up a battle line with reform , I think the way they have a chance of actually justifying, for example, the increase of the number of members of Sen es from sixty to ninety-six, which is a substantial increase , is to show that that's actually going to create policies and create an energy that would actually be felt in people's lives in terms of health and education and transport. So it's not really in Plyde's interest to go heavy on the language or really do anything that's going to suggest it's governing for only the small percentage of whales that can speak can brake. The culture war I think because reform's performance wasn't as good as anticipated . I think it was hovered around twenty nine, thirty percent of the vote. They their intention was to be the largest party. If that had succeeded, they could have created real problems saying we won, this is a coalition of losers, the situation, even though it's proportional representation, is stitched up against us, and that would have produced the you know the Facebook understanding of Welsh politics that would have been very, very destructive to a minority coalition government. But Plied already signalling that they actually want to govern to deliver priorities . It does give a sense that they're aware of the dangers of falling into the trap traps of identity politics. And really it was Labour that was very good at fueling those kind of culture wars and there's only nine of them now and they've got better things to do like try and survive. Andy if I can ask you uh about the Greens and lots of the commentary both before and after the election has been about the Greens seriousness as a party. Um and seriousness is a uh obviously a mov able um quality in British politics. I think it it you know, there are s a series of sort of right wing positions that it often refers to. But even a charitable thinker might say that the Greens program doesn't necessarily seem to So one of the things, you know, obviously I'm I'm, you know, personally very sympathetic to lots of the things Polansky has to say, but I think one of the things that's visible in his instinctive policy programs are that they are the sort of common sense of, say, the Corbin ite left of probably not 2019, but probably around twenty seventeen. Um those are the positions that come to him sort of naturally, you know, which is partly premised on there being a a fiscal environment in which you can do all sorts of borrowing that that might be rather harder now. That is changing, I think. There are a number of interesting thinkers floating around the greens trying to articulate um this for them. Obviously we've been talking in terms of of national politics and these are local elections in which those questions in some ways take a back seat. But is this a problem for them? I think it is to a degree. I mean it's interesting that either Polansky or one of his people were saying a couple of weeks ago we're going to change our policy making process so it's not quite so slow and decentralized because I can't remember the exact quote, we don't want our policies which the Daily Mail ring us up about every single day. So there's some acknowledgement that they have to ration the kind of radical policies more than they have so far . I think one thing that's interesting that you've sort of touched on is that some people have moved into the kind of Green Party from the left of Labour, like James Meadway, who set up this new think tank Verdant, which is meant to provide ideas for the Greens, and James Meadway can be quite hawkish about state spending. It's almost like he wants the pie to be divided up differently so poor people do better, but he doesn't necessarily think. I mean, forgive forgive me, James, if I'm you know, misinterpreting this, that you know, the state can tax a lot more immediately. So I think there are you know, and some Verdant has published some stuff kind of saying we might have a kind of left wing version of Doge, you know, to root out government waste and everything, and some of that might be slightly kind of performative stuff, but there's a sense that maybe they can't be as free spending as they were saying eighteen months ago and maybe that's that's reality beginning to bite. But I also think without wanting to sound like Andy Burnham, you know, there is probably a fight to be had with the bond markets to some degree, that I would make the argument that the bond markets, you know, have an idea that if the government keeps spending under control, that's better , if for all kinds of reasons. But I think you can make a strong argument to say that constrained spending is just producing catastrophic social outcomes and more political instability. So I think at some point, whoever is on the left in government here, if it ever happens again, is gonna have to have a conversation where they say to some people who are involved in bond trading that you want stability and the way we're gonna get that is actually by spending a bit more so that we don't have people burning down, you know, hotels full of who they see as asylum seekers or whatever. That that fiscal constraint is not producing political or economic stability in a way that's one of the lessons of the Starmer experiment that hasn't worked. And it's a really hard conversation to have because I would argue the political assumptions of the bond traders are very right wing. But on some level those people might be pragmatic. And I think that's a question that other social democracies are gonna have to have or a beginning to have in countries like Spain and Canada to say that if the state remains constrained, then even for capitalism in a kind of really free market sense, this is not necessarily good news in the long term because you will have a very unwell and wild and volatile kind of policy and and so that's looking far ahead. There's almost a qu is an I guess my argument would be almost the Greens maybe need to be more responsible in the short term, but in the longer term, anyone to the left or centre needs to think. We need to expand the envelope a bit and we need to have some arguments with people who say you can't expand it because their way of doing things has not worked for Britain particularly well and it certainly hasn't worked for the centre-left in government in Britain in the last two years. I I think one one thing about the Greens' performance in Scotland is that it does suggest they don't necessarily have to get too serious about their policy, especially their fiscal policy, as long as they're not actually threatened with being in government, they've been extremely good in Scotland at off making a retail offer. I mean the Scottish Greens were doing left-wing populism when Zack Polansky was still a member of the Liberal Democrats. They were doing this for for at least the past fifteen years. Um and a key part of that was obviously supporting Scottish independence , which massively helped them because they can they can just peel off bits of the S P vote. But they've also really focused on offering clear economic offers that are connected to environmentalism. So things like their main policy this time was free bus travel for everybody. And they introduced part of this while they were briefly in government. They they um created free bus travel for under-22s and over sixties in Scotland. And they were quite conscious that they had to have a retail offer on the doorstep to stop being just a kind of principled idealistic vote and become a pragmatic vote. And that has definitely worked. There are parts of Scotland that now vote green out of self interest very, very clearly, because they are seen as the party of cheaper public transport, rent controls, lower household bills. This is a clear cost of living populist offer that they don't necessarily have to fund very effectively until they're running the government themselves. They can propose big taxes on the rich, which is what they did this time. And it worked. They massively increased their their seats. Their this is their best ever result, and it's also the best ever result for any radical left party in Scotland since the start of devolution. So I think there's lessons there for Polansky as well. He doesn't need to be too serious for a while at least . Aaron Powell Well the question is about whether there is a a sort of an issue that sort of allows the the English and Welsh Party to position itself. I mean there isn't a kind of independence equivalent for the English left, which makes it much more difficult. The issue that's that's been certainly on my mind in the run-up to this election, I think, you know, it's always hard to know whether to account for sort of immediately proximate factors or longer term structural factors in in people 's votes. But corruption and perceptions of corruption are certainly part of it. Um you know, I don't think the Mandelson affair did anyone in Labour any favours. And, you know, it seems to me that there's there's ample stuff that can be exploited there from the left should it choose to do so. On that subject of corruption in Labour, the the affair around Vaughn Gething, which didn't get much traction outside of Wales was definitely Anyone who's been to any form of conference involving Wales will will know we are the second best country in the world at recycling. Austria is the only country ahead of us, and Gething took a questionable donation from someone who had broken several environmental laws. And this sort of level of hypocrisy really played very badly within Wales and led to his downfall. So that corruption was was in place within Wales and I I can't imagine Mandelson on top of that did them any favours eit I mean the question of consequences for for any of this is always an interesting one in politics, right? I mean before the election there were the stories starting to swell about the big five million donation to Nigel Farage that had been improperly declared or not declared at all in fact. There are all of these stories that that swirl around about um councils, often Labour councils. I think in the longer term, one of the questions about those long established Labour administrations in northern towns is in popular perception. They are sites of graft, they're sites of um you know self-advancement in one way or another, whether fairly or unfairly, and I think it's it's certainly a mixed bag there. Uh Andy, what do you make of that question of corruption? I think you're right. I think in in places particularly in northern England that's really damaged to Labour. I think Mandelson and the whole scandal if we can put that under the kind of corruption banner which it is sort of partly, that was incredibly I mean, for that to be running for two weeks in the run up to the elections, that was incredibly damaging. Um I think it depends. I think some Labour councils that have been in for a long time, some of the ones that have been in for a long time in London, there's maybe less anxiety about corruption . I mean it's interesting how London Labour did catastrophically in these elections in some places and did quite well in others. And there was a stat that I saw earlier that Labour, I think, held two-thirds of their seats in London, whereas they lost two thirds outside London. So some places that have been labour fiefdoms, one party states, whatever you want to call them, voters are still okay with that. So it's kind of complicated. I think the point about reform and there you, know the, money coming in a and so on. I mean a a decent attack operation by the other parties ought to really be able to make hay with that. Because if you're a sort of English nationalist voter, the idea that somebody who hasn't lived here for a while, um or pay tax here for a while is essentially funding the future government quite possibly ought to make you uncomfortable. And I think maybe it's a sign of how Labour have deteriorated in their electioneering that they haven't really made particularly effective use of that. That ought to have been on the front page of the Daily Mirror or whatever every day for two weeks before the election and it wasn't. So I think there's all kinds of corruption stuff for for all the kind of quite established parties that have run things. Um, because Britain has become a place of very long running administrations that are quite entrenched and mixed in with all kinds of corporate donors and corporate interests, and that applies across most of the parties that have been in power, I think. I think uh have a final question which I want to hear from all of you on. It's possible to overinterpret local elections. It's possible to overinterpret any single election. But what they do do is give us perhaps the clearest sense of where issues are and what is salient to people when push comes to shove and they have to put a cross against a name on a ballot paper. It's always hard to predict what things are going to look like a few years ahead. I think if you had asked me whether we would be in these even peripherally involved in in the various wars that we're involved in at the moment, I I might not have predicted it quite so soon. But there are questions about what issues might be on the table the time of the next general election. One of the things I thought w that was interesting about Kirstarmer's speech today is among, you know, this warning of a a darker path that the country may go down. Well some of that is to do with sort of non-established or non-traditional parties , you know, making hay. So he means reform, but I think he probably means the Greens as well. You know, there is a a sort of criticism of populism there that that is maybe a little a little played out. But another way of looking at that is to say that one of the things that he's concerned about, and that arguably many of us should be concerned about, is that in a world in which energy is less predictably available, uh, food and energy supplies are subject to price spikes, the question of cost of living is not going away. Um, that's the sort of thing that obviously historically produces things like bread riots, which are very, very bad for political stability. So it seems to me that if we ask questions about what's going to be on the political agenda for the next few years, and in particular what',s going to move votes at the next general election. Maybe we've started to get, you know, some sight here. The question of cost of living. I think migration isn't going away. And then the question of whether reform managed to sustain themselves, whether they, you know, their experience in local government or in the devolved administrations confronts them with responsibility and they end up screwing it up and that that actually has consequences for them. Or whether they use it as a base to mount a kind of critique of the sort of last redoubt of the duopoly which which might be Westminster. So condensing a very long introduction there. What do things look like for the next general election? Does it does do these tell us anything? What is on your minds looking forward? the SNP should be slightly worried, I think, about the quiet crumbling of their their base. Uh they're obviously losing votes at the edge of their coalition, but they are starting to shake at the heart of it as well. Um they know better than anyone because they've benefited from it how quickly things can turn around. And specifically in the central belt of Scotland, you can just have the floor taken out from under you. And there's hints of that happening here. I I think the thing that they can draw a bit of hope from is the fact that the only threat they are facing to actually being the dominant party in Scotland, I mean the only party that is coming through in the central belt and genuinely threatening them, is either the Labour Party, who do not seem to be on a good run, or it's reform. And the big benefit they have from reform is that while reform's success is undoubtedly connected to British wide political issues. Reform have I would I would really say been wouldn't exist if it wasn't for Nigel Farage being given a huge amount of airtime in the British media. But that has the other effect of reform in Scotland being associated with Nigel Farage. And I think that sets a massive ceiling on how well they can do here. It doesn't mean they can't wreck things for other parties. But the idea that a majority of Scots, or even enough to give them a leading role in the political system, could come around to thinking, yeah, that guy speaks for us, is is pretty hard to believe. Um so I think the same thing will always benefit the S P. They've got such an easy job. Then the Scotch Greens are the only part that's not British and doesn't have to be associated with what is going on down there, doesn't have to be tangled up in what is essentially a different political system that a lot of people in Scotland do not like. So the SNP should be wary, but I think even as things stand, there's a lot of reasons for them to feel that they can hang on for yet another election. And Richard, how does the road to 2029 look in Wales? One of the signals that was misread by Starmer on taking up government was the extent that the asylum hotel riots were going to inform the atmosphere of a lot of places nationally. Within Wales , we have we haven't had quite that level of abrasion across society. People certainly very angry and and there were protests about the 20 mile an hour speed lim it. With reform in opposition and being electron , I wonder to what extent we're going to see some of that energy being imported into Wales because for all we know that is reforms policy to stir up division. And I have a great deal of anxiety about the Sen ed's ability to resist that practically rather than in homily or appeal to community. And Andy. I think as you said a couple of minutes ago, the cost of living is going to be a massive thing because this is going to come in stages, isn't it, from the current crisis in the Middle East, that you know, people will be putting their heating back on again in October. Um, you know, that that all the kinds of food inputs will become much more expensive over the course of at least a year from now. So it's not just like there's gonna be a cost of living crisis for a few months, it's gonna be going on for most of the time between now and the election. And I think a lot of people in Westminster underestimate quite how stretched people's finances are. I was at this discussion a few months ago where we were talking about the budget and a load of people who were sort of labourish people were saying, oh well we can't, you know, go back on our tax promise, that will kind of kill us. And what they were fixated on was we can't break our prom ise. And although I think that would have been very damaging, I kind of had to be the sanctimonious person to kind of say the problem for a lot of people might not be the promise, it might be they can't actually afford to pay more tax, you know, because they have had, you know, stagnant or falling pay for fifteen years. I think a lot of people in the sort of national media in Westminster, you know, they're relatively well paid. They have no idea that, you know, a thousand pounds here, a thousand pounds there is a massive thing. And I think any party that begins to address that kind of huge squeeze on the cost of living is gonna get some traction. And I think that issue's gonna be around. I think another thing that's gonna be around is any party that can sort of work with the sort of acceleration of politics effectively. There was this fascinating exchange on Radio Five earlier today which I heard where a Labour MP was criticizing Starmer and a caller phoned in and said, Why haven't you put a letter in yet to get rid of Starmer? And it was quite clear the caller thought that Labour changed their leader by the mechanisms that the Tory Party actually do. And this Labour MP was a bit baffled and politely just sort of avoided the question. So I think there's some way in which the feverish kind of collapse of the Conservatives in sort of twenty sixteen up to twenty four has sort of poisoned things for Labour as well. And that's where I do have some sympathy for Starmer because people will say, Oh, we can't get rid of you because you know leaders have been changed so often. He's been the leader for six years. So actually Labour have been conducting their politics on the level of who the leader is in a relatively kind of calm way. You might not like his leadership, but it's the other parties, you know, particularly the Conservatives that have been doing this kind of crazy accelerated politics. But a lot of voters and a lot of journalists, at least on a superficial level, really like the accelerated politics because there's instant hits of drama. You get to love someone and then hate them again within six months and so on. So it's any party that can kind of either like temper that acceleration or go with it more effectively is gonna really thrive because the impact of the sort of meltdown of of Truss and Sunak and Johnson and so on and Theresa May, I think that's casting a massive shadow over all the parties now. And it's kind of poisoned the pitch, I think, for democracy generally, how the Conservatives handled those four leaderships. So some party, whether it's reform or Labour or the Greens or the SNP has to find a way to kind of deal with the pace of politics, either live with the faster pace or slow it down, but sit with it more comfortably, I think. The right note for us to end it on as we stare down uh the accelerating future. My thanks to Richard King, Rory Scothorne and Andy Beckett for guiding me through the maelstrom of results uh from May the seventh. And if you've enjoyed this conversation, of course you would probably enjoy reading the London Review of Books, which of course you can find in any good newsagents or newsstands, and online at lrb.co.uk where you can read uh from the most recent issue uh Richard's piece on Labour in Wales, and my piece on those elections from the forthcoming issue. Thanks for listening.