Will the historic local election results lead to a Reform government- as Nigel Farage, and his party, gains momentum with voters?
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00:00What we've got to remember is that the idea of the two-party dominance being over has been predicted before we had it in the 1980s and probably before that, but certainly I remember the SDP, the Social Democrat Party, which was made up of defectors from the Labour Party, and that was going to break the mould. It didn't in subsequent elections, and we sort of got back to what we'd known before.
00:26What we've got to remember is in the election which was held in July last year, where Labour won a big landslide, but with a very small proportion of the votes, is of course that the evidence of Labour not being particularly popular was there.
00:41We know about the Conservatives. They remain deeply unpopular.
00:45So, of course, the environment is very ripe for a disrupter party, of which Nigel Farage luxuriates in.
00:52He delights in this ability to come along and say, I wouldn't say controversial things, but things which of course are going to undermine the established parties.
01:01So what we've got is a situation now where no party is probably going to win the next general election, which is what we're really interested in.
01:09I mean, local elections, which are really, really important. Let me emphasise that in terms of the fact that it's about services.
01:16But nonetheless, it's about the bigger picture and whether in sort of four years time, and I'm predicting sort of the general election will be held in May 2029, whether Nigel Farage will sort of make a big breakthrough.
01:28Certainly on the evidence of last week, he's going to do that. He's going to have a significant number of seats.
01:33But I suspect probably not enough to sort of form a government of his own, because, again, local elections, they predict so much, but it doesn't give you the sort of the whole picture when people go in a sort of national poll.
01:44But for sure, reform, you know, from effectively nowhere, have sort of become a sort of a party to be reckoned with.
01:51And the sort of the two party political leaders are under big pressure to sort of respond.
01:56However, Reform UK's performance wasn't evenly spread across all demographics.
02:02Data clearly shows that the party resonated most with voters in areas where educational attainment levels are lower and traditional working class communities predominate, often the same areas that strongly supported Brexit in 2016.
02:18The reality is that, as has been the sort of case for many, many years, it's very difficult to predict what will happen in sort of six months time, let alone sort of four years time.
02:27We live in very interesting times.