Can Reform Win a General Election? | Novara Debates w/ Ash Sarkar, Michael Walker & Aaron Bastani

Good evening and welcome to a very special live stream here on Navara Media as we analyze the outcomes and implications of last week's local elections results. With me, I couldn't think of anyone better, Michael Walker and Aaron Basani. How are you both? A very balanced panel this evening.

Sky News starfcom regulation. They were already beefing before the cameras went live. Um, and maybe we can we can bring in a little bit of that uh over the course of tonight. So, we're going to be discussing whether reform might be on course to form a government and what are the potential obstacles and banana skins in their way on the road to number 10.

Tomorrow night, we're going to be talking about Labor. Have they uh shedged it? Basically, are they going to be able to turn the ship around by 2029? for our challenger parties from both the left and the right going to make sure that they capsize for good.

Um, before we get started, I want to say like I always do that I believe that media is only as good as the context that it includes. And that's why so much of establishment political media gets caught flatfooted. So Kstarma's surprise tanking in the polls or reform doing well at the local elections or even something like Brexit. It always catches these people by surprise because they don't like to look outside of Westminster.

And I think that that's important for the story that we're covering tonight. The reason why reform's message can cut through is because most of our political journalism is just low information slot. So, if you want something better, something different, please consider giving 1 hour's worth of your wage every month or whatever you can afford by heading to navaradia.com/support or following the link in our bio. So, Michael, I want to I want to start with you.

Um, I was comparing the number of counselors gained by reform to their high watermark for UKIP. So, the best UKIP ever did was about 500 counselors. This was in 2016. The most they gained in one go was 2015 with 176 counselors at one local elections and reform last week got 677.

So that takes their total to 805 local counselors. Um in terms of significance, what do you make of that comparison? Because UKIP on the back of ...