The State of It: Reform shake Labour to its core
The Story
The Times
3.9 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 8 May 2026
⏱️ 27 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
For now, the Prime Minister Keir Starmer vows to stay as the Reform leader Nigel Farage calls this a “truly historic shift in British politics”.
Steven and Lara caught up at the Times office in Westminster just after 4pm to unpack the results from England’s local council and mayoral elections, alongside national contests in Scotland and Wales, as Reform and the Greens surge and Labour suffer huge losses.
Hosts:
- Steven Swinford, political editor, The Times
- Lara Spirit, deputy political editor, The Sunday Times
Producers: Euan Dawtrey, Harry Kitson
Picture credit: Getty Images
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | From the Times and the Sunday Times, this is the story. I'm Manvine Rana. |
| 0:09.7 | Yesterday saw the most consequential local elections in a generation, as voters across England, |
| 0:16.7 | Wales and Scotland went to the polls. Ahead of the elections, we travelled across the UK, speaking to voters in what used to be |
| 0:25.2 | the Labour heartlands in Wales and Scotland. |
| 0:28.9 | And everywhere we went, we heard one overwhelming response, disillusionment with the Labour Party. |
| 0:37.3 | With the results now trickling in, we thought |
| 0:40.0 | you'd want an update. So here is an emergency episode of our sister podcast, The State of It. |
| 0:46.6 | The Times Politicos have been hard at work all day, taking in the results and making sense |
| 0:51.2 | of what they might mean for Starmes government and those vying to |
| 0:55.2 | take his place. Here they are, the state of it. |
| 1:05.9 | Let me be clear, these are really tough results. I'm not going to sugarcoat it. And the voters |
| 1:10.7 | have sent a message about the pace of change, how they want their lives improved. |
| 1:15.6 | They was elected to meet those challenges and I'm not going to walk away. |
| 1:21.6 | I think overall what's happened is a truly historic shift in British politics. |
| 1:30.2 | It's very clear that the new politics is the Green Party versus reform. I said that the Green |
| 1:35.4 | Party were going to replace Labour. That's exactly what we did in Gorton and Denton. It's what |
| 1:39.4 | we've done in Hackney and we're seeing that right across the country. What did we say? We said conservatives are coming |
| 1:46.1 | back and here we are. Welcome to an election special edition of the state of it, the political |
| 1:56.1 | podcast from the Times and the Sunday Times. I'm Stephen Swinford, the Politicletter of the Times. |
| 2:00.5 | I'm Laura Spiritt. I'm the deputy political creditor of the Sunday Times. I'm Stephen Swinford, the Politclosure of the Times. I'm Laura Spurt. I'm the deputy, the literature of the Sunday Times. Look, we haven't got Patrick McGuire with us today. The reason being that he's currently on a helicopter with Nigel Farge heading. I think we think to St Helens and then criss-crossing back down for Farage's victory speech, which is going to be in Essex. But it is, Lara, pretty much |
| 2:19.0 | as we expected. It is a tectonic day in British politics. We are looking at the death of two-party |
| 2:24.8 | politics. It's gone. It's over at the ballot box. And we are currently seeing a kind of reform |
... |
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