Hi, folks, welcome to another one of our political chats. I'm joined by Dan, and I thought what we would do is a bit of an autopsy on the recent local elections results. Because there are, in fact, I think lessons in them that people aren't taking because the numbers are quite staggering. The swings in the seats and whatnot have been quite staggering. But I think there's information in there that I think is worth teasing out.

Okay.

To properly understand because actually, I don't think this was quite the storming victory that it should have been,

nor was it quite the staggering defeat that it should have been.

Right.

So we'll begin with how the public felt about it.

Now, this was basically the most important thing that was talked about all last week,

which is actually quite unusual for local elections. Local elections have usually about

30% turnout and nobody cares for some reason. On a normal year, the local elections get mentioned on the news as a bit and then it's

over in a day and nobody normal talks about them ever.

Yes.

This was all last week's discussion and also it was the discussion leading up to them as

well because it was like, well, when May the 7th hits and

we get whacked, kissed, Armours out. So they were very present in people's minds. And the

turnout was much higher than usual. The turnout was somewhere north of 40% overall. That's not

far off general election territory. Exactly. The last general election was 59%. Right.

So it's really not terribly

far off, which is very unusual. I mean, sometimes local elections, you get like 20%. It's sometimes

even lower than that. Oh yeah. There are candidates who win on 15%. Mm. You know, like the

unbelievably low turnout, an unbelievably scattered, fragmented landscape. So some of these

councillors will have been elected with literally a thousand votes

in a constituency of, I don't know, 50,000 or how much it was.

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