Hello and welcome to the podcast of the Lotus Eaters, episode 1,414 for Friday the 8th of May, 2026.

And what a great day it is, ladies and gentlemen.

I'm joined today by Brother Stelios and Brother Nick.

And today we're going to be talking to you all about, of course, the recent local election results that are now rolling in today as we

still speak, it's still ongoing, so we won't have all of the information, but we will certainly

enjoy a good helping of salt mining and no doubt, you know, just assess the political lay of the land

as it's now falling. We're then going to be talking about Sweden, retiring the term

Islamophobia, and why this might be a little bit more of a shrewd move than the, just sort

of like the blanket good it might seem on the surface. And then I thought, seeing as we're rolling

into the weekend, we'd finish with a nice, wholesome segment segment celebrating the life of Sir David Attenborough

on what is is 100th birthday. So with that all said, Nick, what happened last night?

All right, well, what happened? And what is happening? What is happening is the death of the

Uniparty, massive change in the country. It's over for Labour and the Tories, and we're in a new

world, a brave new world, and it's still going on. And because we have quite a few American viewers and things like that, I will explain briefly what local elections even are, because I've seen to be asking me online. Essentially, on one level, it's who does your bins? It's your very small local area. You might even know who the person is. You get to the booth. You can vote for three people sometimes two or one and you just say okay this is my local counselor but on one

level it's about local issues or another it's a protest vote against the government that's quite

often what they are they're seen as a bit like midterms but now with all the changes in the country

they're actually even more than that and they're indicative of this new change and this complete rejection of the Uniparty, particularly of Labor. So that's really what they are. And so they're more significant, really, than they've ever been. And that's a sort of overview of what low collections are. And they're still rolling in. I've got here, the BBC, these are just sort of live results. At the moment, reform is on 439, and you see Labor 261,

they've lost 287 reform of gain 437. You see the way it's going. Yeah, Jeff.

That's a massive gain. From two, they went to 439.

Yes, because they were on two because they're new. And then you see greens are gaining as well

as we expected, conservatives losing Lib Dems up a little bit.

To be honest, I'd expect the Greens to be a little higher.

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