Hi, I'm Anouche and I'm Ben.

And on today's episode of the New Statesman podcast, we're doing a special look ahead

to the local elections and you ask us lots of questions about what to look out for in

the results.

And we are going to be talking about the local elections on this podcast, so that means

that we're not looking ahead to the storm on elections, but we will have a lot of analysis

and coverage of those results when they come out.

Because Ben, you on your New Statesman website, all about what the nation is thinking, state

of the nation, you've actually done your local election forecast, I mean, a fool's errand,

a very brave thing to do.

What actually are you forecasting and why?

Yeah, yeah, thanks for having me.

Forecasting local elections is unreliable, it's risky, so I'm going to have a go at doing

it.

Right, so let's just lay the groundwork here.

Last time most of these seats up, particularly in England or last up in 2018, just because

we live through it, we don't realise, recognise the changes that have gone on, 2018 came long

before Labour's collapse in its base, long before seats like Dudley, Grimsby, Bolton,

Heineburn, Burnley, I can go on, like these types of seats moved away from Labour.

So the seats up this time round happened before then, right?

That context is key here because the forecast I'm putting out is a little bit nuanced.

After all, we have the Conservatives losing around 200 seats net.

...