You're listening to the London Review of Books podcast. I'm Thomas Jones. Today I'm joined by James Butler, one of the founders of Navarra Media, are now a contributing editor at the

LRB. His most recent piece for the paper was on the UK's care crisis, and we'll be talking

about that a bit. They're also surveying the very sorry states of British politics more broadly.

Hello, James, and thank you for talking with me. Hi Tom, it's a pleasure to be here.

So there's a month to go until local elections in 230 councils across England.

Most of the seats in play were last contested in 2019.

When the Conservatives lost more than a thousand council seats, Labour lost a dozen

Lib Dems, Liberal Democrats, and Greens and others made gains.

What's likely to happen this time?

Well, I mean, there aren't an enormous number of polls specifically on the local elections,

but the ones that have been conducted suggest to us that Labor's going to do really fairly well,

that it has, I think the polling I saw had Labour with a 20-point lead in the areas that are being re-elected.

And as you say, that's not all local authorities.

It's mostly the ones that are mostly district councils.

So it's more or less as you'd expect, I think.

And in particular, you know, Labor is going to do well.

Other than that, it looks like a pretty sorry state.

I mean, from my perspective, this is one of those elections where people are probably going to draw more conclusions from it than it probably warrants.

Like all local elections, reading across international politics is very difficult.

I think there are certain features of these elections which are interesting.

I think as people have started to realize as their postal votes have arrived,

these are the first elections in which photo ID is now required in all cases.

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