00:00Yeah, I mean, I wish I knew what the number were, Tom, but the Polymarket says there's a 90%
00:05chance he's replaced by Andy Burnham by the end of this year.
00:09It's not difficult to get more clear cut than that.
00:12The difficult, the reason why I say that, because as a journalist, you really shouldn't say the Prime Minister's Day
00:16is a number unless you know what you're talking about,
00:18is because Andy Burnham, the mayor of Greater Manchester, has just won this by-election, this special election here in
00:24the UK by such a big margin and such a surprise victory
00:28that the Prime Minister, who is very unpopular in the country, his own MPs, his own lawmakers now wonder why
00:36they're keeping him around.
00:39So what has caused this challenge for Mr. Starmer? What's gone wrong?
00:45That's a great question. You could answer a number of ways, depending on your politics.
00:50You could say the economics have been very difficult. The UK's growth is flatlining.
00:55You could say that you might be personally on a fan of Starmer. He's very, very unpopular.
00:59It's been the fastest slide in the polls of any Prime Minister in modern UK history.
01:03Or you could say that his policies aren't right.
01:07Now, the thing about this is, is that Andy Burnham has an answer to all of those.
01:11He says that he would make things run like Manchester, where he comes from, which he says is the fastest
01:15growth in the UK.
01:16He's far more personally liked than Starmer.
01:19And also he's seen as bringing in this kind of new wave of left-wing Labour voices.
01:24Now, the question is, is has he got the gumption to actually challenge the Prime Minister?
01:28And are there other people in the mix?
01:30Like, it's not a done deal.
01:33But where we stand this morning, I have to say the scale of this by-election victory is massive.
01:38I mean, and James, I saw it on, I think it was on Twitter.
01:41It's a wonderful detailed YouGovs thing that says there's a lot of regret about Brexit.
01:47So the Conservatives are basically dead, except south of Aberdeen.
01:51The Reform Party Farage is there.
01:54There's a group to the far right of the Reform Party.
01:58I get all that.
01:59But is it just basically a nation with great regret over Brexit?
02:05Is that the backstory?
02:08Not quite.
02:09I mean, it's interesting you point it out like that, because what has been fascinating about
02:12this election is we've been talking over here about the end of two-party politics.
02:16Like this idea, if you were saying that Labour and the Conservatives, the traditional two
02:20parties, are no longer the sort of main parties of UK politics.
02:25There are five, there are Reform, the Greens, Liberal Democrats as well.
02:30What is interesting is those Brexit voting blocs stay the same.
02:34If you go to Makerfield and you compare, which is where this election was, and you compare
02:39the voting blocs then to who just voted for Labour and who just voted for Reform now, they
02:44are near identical.
02:45And all that is happening is they are reforming around different names.
02:50So although we have polls showing there is some regret about Brexit and that moods are
02:56slightly shifting, when it comes to electoral politics, the split that Brexit drove through
03:02UK society is still, still 10 years on, showing up in behind what parties they're backing.
03:08We are going to show you what it depends on the positions of the government.
03:08So we have the minutes to draw for rest, I think.
03:08I am going to give you a couple different things.
Comments