Burnham By-Election Win Paves Way For Starmer Ouster

Yeah, I mean, I wish I knew what the number were, Tom. But look, Polly Market says there's a 90% chance he's replaced by Andy Burnham by the end of this year. It's not difficult to get more clear cut than that.

Um, the difficulty, the reason why I say that. Because as a journalist, you really shouldn't say the Prime minister stays a number unless you know what you're talking about is because Andy Burnham, the mayor of Greater Manchester, has just won this by election, the special election here

in the UK, by such a big margin and such a surprise victory that the Prime Minister, who is very unpopular in the country, his own MPs, his own lawmakers now wonder why they're keeping him around. So what has caused, uh, this challenge for Mr.

Starmer? What's gone wrong? It's a great question. Um, you can answer a number of ways, depending on your politics.

You could say the economics have been very difficult. The UK's growth is flatlining. You could say that you might be personally not a fan of Starmer. He's very, very unpopular.

It's been the fastest slide in the polls of any prime minister in modern History. Or you could say that his policies aren't right. Now, the thing about this is, is that Andy Burnham has an answer to all of those.

He says that he would make things run like Manchester, where he comes from, which he says is the fastest growth in the UK. He's far more personally liked than Starmer, and also he's seen as bringing in this kind of new wave of

left wing Labour voices. Now the question is, is has he got the gumption to actually challenge the Prime Minister, and are there other people in the mix like it's not a done deal, but where we stand this morning, um, I have to

say the scale of this byelection victory is massive. I mean, and change the sort of I think it was on Twitter's wonderful, detailed YouGov thing that says there's a lot of regret about Brexit. So the conservatives are basically dead, except south of Aberdeen,

the Reform Party, Farage is there. There's a group to the far right of the reform, the Reform Party. I get all that. But is it just basically a nation with great regret

over Brexit. Is that the back story? Not quite. I mean, it's interesting you point out like that because what has been fascinating about this election, we've been talking

over here about the end of two party politics, like this idea of who was saying that Labour in the conservatives, the traditional two parties, uh, no longer uh, the sort of main parties UK policy, but there were five there reformed the Greens, Liberal Democrats as well.

What is interesting is both Brexit voting blocs stay the same. If you go to make a field and you compare which is where this election was, and you compare the voting blocs then to who just voted to Labour and

who just voted to reform, now they are near identical. And all that is happening is they are reforming around different names. So although we have polls showing there is some regret about Brexit and the moods are slightly shifting when it

comes to electoral politics, the split that Brexit drove the UK society is still still ten years on, showing up in behind what parties they're backing.