Reform Gains: Just Take the Bloody Bins Out
The Trawl
Jemma Forte & Marina Purkiss
4.7 • 867 Ratings
🗓️ 13 May 2026
⏱️ 54 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The local election results are in and… bloody hell.
In this Trawl, Jemma and Marina dig into Reform UK’s huge gains, Labour’s mounting panic, and the increasingly chaotic state of British politics. Was this a genuine political realignment, a protest vote, or something much darker bubbling away underneath?
From viral clips and media narratives to Nigel Farage, culture wars, dodgy campaign tactics, and the terrifying power of algorithms, the pair try to answer the question everyone’s asking right now: how seriously should we take Reform?
Plus: why some voters still don’t seem to connect political choices with real-world consequences, why the press scrutiny appears wildly uneven depending on who’s in the firing line, and why some Reform-led councils may become the party’s biggest problem before the next general election.
There are also lighter moments involving Sir David Attenborough, pudding-based dystopias, and outrageous clips.
It’s a long one. But then, there’s an awful lot to talk about.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | One of your new Sunderland councillors, so a man who was elected, suggested melting Nigerians to fill potholes. |
| 0:08.0 | The key point is voters have heard all of this smearing and they voted for more reform. Hello and welcome to the trawl where every week we ask, are people okay? |
| 0:30.4 | And the answer increasingly is, no, no, they're not. I'm Gemma Forte. No, they are not. And I'm Marina Perkis. And here at Traul H.Q, |
| 0:40.3 | we've just about managed to wrench our heads out of our hands post all of that depressing as |
| 0:47.1 | hell local election result stuff, right? It was just, ugh. Anyway, someone else put it better than that. |
| 0:54.5 | Here's Anya Maliano on Saturday Night Live. |
| 0:57.3 | Of course, the rise of reform might seem scary |
| 0:59.6 | if you're an economic migrant or a refugee, or under 80 years old. |
| 1:04.2 | Trans, not privately educated, in any way disabled. |
| 1:08.1 | Someone who uses the NHS, a woman, not white, in a carehood, someone who |
| 1:11.7 | doesn't like being upskirted, but for the remaining one guy who actually lives in Thailand, |
| 1:16.0 | it's going to be great. |
| 1:19.4 | Oh, so good, but so bad. It's so bad that people can't see it. We'll get to that. |
| 1:25.1 | Look, in today's episode, we're going to get into exactly what the results mean. We'll look at the analysis. In tomorrow's episode, we'll look at the fallout. |
| 1:32.8 | What is happening to the Labour Party, just imploding all around us. Yeah. We'll talk about |
| 1:37.8 | if Starm is going to be ousted. Would that be good or bad in terms of preventing Farrarge from |
| 1:42.5 | getting into number 10. |
| 1:49.9 | And then on Friday, we'll have a break from it all and head to stateside to catch up on the king of the cancals. And along the way, we've tried to find some reasons to be cheerful too. |
| 1:55.7 | So it's another three trawl, weak trawlers. How could it not be? |
| 1:59.2 | It is, I know. There's just so much to talk about, |
| 2:02.4 | and I'm excited actually to start getting into it all. But just before we get into the political |
| 2:07.4 | fray, we are going to start with something celebratory. Scotty G.B. posted, Sir David Attenborough |
... |
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