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The UK goes to the polls this week, and most Americans should be paying attention. James Matthewson, BBC and Sky News contributor, former Labour Party spokesman, and my weekly co-host on Across the Pond, joined me to break down the UK’s local elections, what the results will mean for Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s leadership, and why the right-wing Reform UK Party’s rise should feel familiar to anyone who lived through 2016 in this country.
Over 5,000 council seats are up in England, with national elections running simultaneously in Scotland and Wales. Labour is projected to take a serious beating. But the story underneath the numbers is about whether Keir Starmer’s government has enough political standing to survive, whether Reform UK’s polling reflects real electoral strength, and whether the fractured pro-democracy coalition on the British left can hold together long enough to stop a movement running Donald Trump’s exact playbook on British soil.
James came in sharp. He spent 15 years inside Labour politics, worked in Parliament as a party adviser, and has been watching this moment build from Edinburgh with the kind of clarity you only get from someone who was on the inside. The same deindustrialized communities are getting targeted by the same scapegoating. The same punitive politics that says if you didn’t vote for me, I will make you pay. The same fake populists are enriching themselves while branding themselves as anti-establishment voices of the people.
We also spent real time on something I keep coming back to. The left keeps losing the confidence game to people who are openly, demonstrably lying. And the people who actually have the facts keep hedging, over-qualifying, and reading off a mental script. James put the closing argument plainly: fortune favors the bold. That framing ran through everything we covered, and it matters well beyond this week’s UK results.
This was a super engaging and informative conversation. If you were among the hundreds who watched live, thank you so much for participating! You enriched the conversation. If you’re just catching it now, feel free to comment with your thoughts or questions. James and I always try to reply to everyone.
You can watch our full conversation above and read key takeaways below.
Why Americans Should Be Watching The UK Elections
This week’s elections are the first real measure of where Britain sits politically since Labour swept to power. Reform UK’s performance will tell us how close Nigel Farage actually is to forming a national government, and the answer coming out of these results should concern anyone tracking the global right.
I opened by laying out the party map for anyone who doesn’t follow UK politics: Labour is center-left, the Tories are center-right, the Greens are left-wing, and Reform is the far-right. James added useful texture, noting that “Tory” derives from an Irish word meaning thief, coined by their political opponents centuries ago. He also walked through devolution for the American audience: Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland each have their own parliaments governing domestic policy, while defense, taxation, and immigration remain reserved for Westminster. Reform has made immigration the centerpiece of their campaign everywhere, including in elections where winning candidates will have zero power over immigration policy.
James framed the electoral stakes plainly: all current polling shows that if a general election were held tomorrow, Reform would form a government. He called it terrifying. This week is the first real test of whether that polling translates into actual votes, and Labour is expected to lose over a thousand council seats in England alone.
James explained what makes the Scotland and Wales results significant beyond the English local elections. These are devolved parliaments with real governing authority over health, education, and domestic programs. How the left-of-center vote fragments across those parliaments, between Labor, the Greens, and the Lib Dems, will shape what kind of coalition is even possible ahead of the next general election.
Reform’s Playbook Mirrors Trump’s
Nigel Farage is running a coordinated, transatlantic far-right strategy. The tactics being deployed in these elections are lifted almost directly from what we have already watched play out in the United States.
James described a video from Zia Yusuf, Reform’s party chairman and home office spokesman, a private millionaire with no elected office. He is walking along the beach in Brighton, which James described as the UK’s closest equivalent to Portland, Oregon: progressive, heavily LGBTQ+, and politically liberal. In the video, Yusuf makes a direct threat: if you vote for a progressive party, Reform will build immigrant detention centers in your community. James called it punitive politics, a governing philosophy built around punishment for not voting the right way.
I drew the parallel to Greg Abbott and Ron DeSantis busing and flying migrants to Martha’s Vineyard, New York, and other blue cities. The goal was never a coherent policy. The goal was to manufacture anti-immigrant sentiment in places that hadn’t been exposed to the manufactured crisis, and it worked. Republican candidates won on the back of it in the 2022 New York midterms. Reform is attempting the same move. James confirmed it as a deliberate strategic echo, calling it the Trump playbook, and said it makes him sick.
James made a point worth holding onto: anyone who crosses the English Channel and claims asylum has not broken the law. The UK has no land border with any country. The sea crossing is the only route available, because every other route has been closed by previous governments. Reform calls these people “illegals” anyway, and the legal reality does not penetrate the messaging. I connected that directly to what Trump did here: he criminalized the legal process of asylum, deported people who were following the rules and showing up to their court appearances, and courts have given him far too much runway to do it.
James flagged something worth tracking. Farage recently received a five-million-pound personal donation from a tech billionaire running a cryptocurrency company. His framing: recognize that anywhere? A demagogue financially enriching himself through crypto while selling himself as a champion of the working class. The playbook does not change.
The Biden Of Downing Street?
The comparison circulating in UK media, Rory Stewart comparing Keir Starmer to Joe Biden, came up early, and James thought it was fair, with an important addition.
The Biden-Keir comparison is this: Good man, decent record, but increasingly a symbol of institutional preservation in a moment when people want structural change. Some extraneous factors working against him, including the fallout from Trump's global economic disruption and how to navigate that relationship. And a growing chorus inside his own party asking whether he needs to go now, before the damage becomes irreversible, the same conversation Democrats were having about Biden through 2024. I raised the comparison with James to get his read from inside the party.
James’s version of the comparison had an added layer: imagine Biden, but the Democratic Party had also split. That is closer to what Starmer is actually navigating. He is getting hammered by Reform on the right and by the Greens and Lib Dems on the left, and his response has been to hold the center. James’s read is that the center is where you win elections, but holding it while standing for nothing visible is where you lose your government. If voters cannot answer in five words what a leader stands for, James said, you are in trouble.
James was candid about Starmer as a person. He is a human rights barrister who fought for people persecuted after the Iraq War and represented Guantanamo Bay detainees. James respects the man. But Starmer went into government wanting to operate on the world stage, Ukraine, Gaza, the international relationships, and dropped the ball domestically. That is where the Biden parallel cuts deepest, and James thinks it may cost him the leadership.
On whether Starmer survives: James said he might not make it to September. His view is that if the results are as bad as expected, the pressure for a leadership change will become hard to resist, but Starmer is stubborn and likely to fight it out rather than read the room. James named Angela Rayner and Andy Burnham as the names to watch if Labour moves toward a change.
The End of Two-Party Britain
This was one of the most important stretches of the conversation. James made the argument plainly: two-party politics in the UK is finished.
James traced how Labour’s traditional working-class base, the deindustrialized communities of the northeast, the former coal mining towns, the places that voted Labour for generations the way Southern Democrats did here, shifted first toward Brexit and then into Boris Johnson’s Tory coalition.
Reform has now consolidated most of the right-wing vote that used to split between the Tories and other factions. The effective two parties in Britain are now Labour and Reform. Labour is fracturing while Reform is consolidating, and the Greens and Lib Dems are drawing enough progressive votes to prevent Labour from building any majority coalition on its own.
James made the case for proportional representation as the likely structural endpoint. Under the current system, 650 constituencies each elect an MP, and whoever holds the most MPs forms a government. Under PR, the national vote share gets translated directly into seats. He acknowledged the risk, that some percentage of the population will always vote for genuine extremists and PR seats them, but argued the far right has already broken the old system. The question is whether the left can learn to govern through coalitions the way Scandinavian and continental European governments routinely do.
The Same Right-Wing Trick, Over and Over
James used an image I want to keep using: watching the UK right now is like looking at America through a telescope from light-years away and seeing 2016 play out in real time. The timeline shifts, but the mechanics are identical.
James said it plainly: if your life is bad and someone offers you status quo versus change, you roll the dice on change. You do not sit down and analyze the data. You go with your gut. That is what happened with Brexit, and Farage never owned the central lie of that campaign, the promise on the side of a red bus that leaving the EU would deliver 320 million pounds a week to the NHS. He still will not own it. And the people who voted Leave cannot admit they got it wrong, because the admission is embarrassing, and Farage has never given them the moment of accountability that would make it unavoidable.
I laid out the American version of the same cycle. Republicans inherit strong economies, damage them, and Democrats get elected to clean up the wreckage. Then Americans develop collective amnesia about who caused the damage and re-elect the people who caused it. Obama had to dig the country out of the Bush recession. Biden had to manage the COVID catastrophe that Trump made worse through sheer belligerence, eased inflation, and still got blamed for the cost-of-living pain that the recession caused. Trump inherited a strong economy and is now destroying it. The cycle keeps running.
James made the point that the people who voted for Brexit cannot acknowledge the damage because the reality of what happens when a country goes inward is only now fully landing. The tariffs, the fuel crises, the blocked straits, the isolation. People are starting to see the conclusions of isolationist politics, and Farage is still out there promising more of it.
The Wrong People Have Imposter Syndrome
This is where the conversation landed, and it is the argument worth carrying forward from this episode.
The wrong people have imposter syndrome. The grifters, the liars, the people operating entirely on bravado and bad faith, they do not question themselves. They move. The people on the left who actually have the facts, the receipts, the moral clarity, they are the ones hedging and over-qualifying and treating confidence as something that needs to be earned before it can be displayed. That asymmetry is costing elections and costing the narrative.
I made the point that this is not abstract. I have been on panels with Scott Jennings. My friend Adam Mockler just got cussed at while debating him on CNN. These people move with maximum confidence when they have nothing but lies on their side. Matching their confidence while telling the truth is the answer.
James closed with something that might sound like a platitude but landed with real weight in this conversation: fortune favors the bold. He wrote it in a piece published the same day. Boldness is what Trump has, what Farage has, and, he noted, what Zohran Mamdani has. The left needs to stop tearing itself apart over niche ideological disagreements, stop waiting for a single messiah to arrive with all the answers, and start uniting with the same discipline the right deploys constantly. Conservatives from center-right to far-right are uniting. The pro-democracy coalition on the left needs to do the same, and it needs to do it with confidence. James put it simply: it starts with uplifting each other rather than holding each other back.
Bottom Line
The UK elections this week are a test of Keir Starmer’s leadership. Farage is running Trump’s script almost line by line, from the immigrant scapegoating to the detention center threats to the crypto billionaire donor operating in the background. And the pro-democracy coalition in the UK is fracturing at exactly the wrong moment.
James and I do this show because the transatlantic view matters. What happens in Britain does not stay in Britain. The same communities, the same economic grievances, the same manipulation, the same abusive cycle of voters rolling the dice on the people who keep making their lives worse. The answer is coalition-building, discipline, and the confidence to tell the truth loudly. We have the facts. Time to act like it.
James is out there in Edinburgh fighting this fight. I am here in Brooklyn doing the same. Support independent journalism and analysis that fearlessly tells the truth. Subscribe to James Matthewson. If you have not yet become a paid subscriber to Ahmed Baba News, you can do that below. And if you’re already a paid subscriber, thank you! It truly means a lot. Independent media runs on the people who back it.
