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James Matthewson joined me this week for Across the Pond under circumstances that only he could pull off. He had just completed 39 hours of straight election coverage, driving back from Glasgow after doing BBC coverage overnight, and rather than call it off, he pulled his Land Rover Defender into the Pentland Hills outside Edinburgh and did the pod from the car. That kind of dedication tells you everything you need to know about how much this moment matters, and the conversation matched the energy.
The UK local elections delivered exactly the damage we predicted last week. Labour lost 1,400 council seats in England. Reform UK surged. The Greens and Lib Dems gained ground. And Keir Starmer is now what James called him on Sky News Australia at four in the morning: a zombie prime minister. We got into who Reform actually elected, what some of those councilors have said publicly, the three-way leadership question of Streeting versus Rayner versus Burnham, and the argument for what Labor’s best path forward actually looks like.
We also got into the bigger structural comparisons. The Starmer-Biden parallel. The written versus unwritten constitution question. And James’s argument, the one that I think deserves the most attention, that Nigel Farage and Reform in power could be more dangerous than Trump, not less, because Farage is smarter, more disciplined, and more strategic about where he draws the line.
Before we get into it, a quick orientation for anyone new to UK politics. Think of Labour as center-left, the Lib Dems as more centrist, the Greens as further left, the Tories as center-right, and Reform as what would happen if MAGA became its own party and ate the Republican Party from the inside. That is essentially what has happened. Reform has absorbed the Tory base, the two effective parties in Britain are now Labour and Reform, and Labour is bleeding from both sides, splintering the country into a multi-party system.
If you were watching live, thank you for being part of it. If you’re catching up now, the full conversation is above, and the key takeaways are below.
The Zombie Prime Minister
The election results confirmed what we expected and then some. Labour did not just lose ground. It lost the argument about whether Keir Starmer can lead the party into the next general election.
Labour lost 1,400 council seats in England, with losses in Scotland and Wales too. James had been awake for nearly 40 hours covering it and came into this conversation with the clarity of someone who has processed the full picture. The results were not a protest. They were a verdict. Around 90 Labour MPs are now calling for Starmer to step down, while just over 100 have signed a letter of support. You need 81 MPs to mount a proper leadership challenge.
Starmer went into a Cabinet meeting the morning after and refused to acknowledge reality. James described the Cabinet meeting: rather than opening the floor to an honest conversation about his position, Starmer told the room he was not going anywhere and that anyone who wanted to challenge him was welcome to try. Then he moved on to talk about Iran. James called it the bunker mentality, the belief that every critical voice is an attack rather than a warning.
In Scotland and Wales, the biggest winners were the pro-independence parties. Plaid Cymru in Wales and the SNP in Scotland both gained ground. James made the point that this raises the real, if not imminent, prospect of the UK breaking up as a country, with Reform rising in England at the same time as the devolved nations pull toward independence. That is the full scope of the crisis Starmer is presiding over.
The Leadership Question: Streeting, Rayner, or Burnham?
Three names are circulating as potential replacements for Starmer. James had a clear view on all three, and the picture is more complicated than it looks.
Wes Streeting would be more of the same, and James thinks he would be worse when dealing with Trump. Streeting is the Health Secretary, young, ambitious, and has been likened to Pete Buttigieg, a comparison James pushed back on hard. As I noted, Buttigieg would not throw trans people under the bus. James’s read is that Streeting is an opportunist without clear values who has already alienated LGBT communities despite being a gay man himself by undermining trans healthcare. He expects Streeting to resign and mount a challenge, but thinks if it comes down to just Streeting versus Starmer, Starmer wins and the challenge fails, leaving Labour in a worse position than before.
Andy Burnham is the right answer, but is currently blocked from Parliament. James’s preferred candidate is the Mayor of Manchester, a broadly left but not hard-left figure who has rebranded himself around the city’s cultural identity and has real cross-spectrum appeal. The problem is that to become Labour leader you have to be an MP, and Starmer’s team blocked Burnham from standing in a by-election earlier this year through the NEC, the party’s governing body. Labour then lost that seat to the Greens. Two MPs have said they would resign and let Burnham take their seat, but there is no guarantee he would win it. There are no safe Labour seats anymore.
The best strategy may be for Starmer to create a pathway for Burnham himself. This was the argument I made in the conversation, and James outlined it in more detail. Rather than a chaotic leadership challenge that probably fails, the better outcome would be Starmer acknowledging the writing on the wall, committing to step down at the Labour Party conference in September, and using the time between now and then to clear a route for Burnham to get into Parliament. Two MPs have already offered to stand aside. If Starmer endorsed that plan and backed Burnham publicly, it would give Labour a genuine transition rather than a messy civil war.
Angela Rayner may be the most compelling candidate nobody is talking about enough. James made the case for her at length, and it is worth repeating here. Rayner was pregnant at 16, left school, became a carer for her disabled and bipolar mother, had a drinking problem, got into the trade union movement, rose through the ranks, became Deputy Prime Minister, never went to university. James said nobody has had a political journey like hers. She wears goth boots, keeps a vape in her mouth, and the political establishment refuses to take her seriously because of her accent and her class. James texted her the day before to say he wanted to be at the front of the queue if she runs. His read: she would not stand for Trump’s nonsense for a single second.
The Starmer-Biden Parallel
To better contextualize Starmer’s predicament for a US audience, I made the argument that where Starmer sits right now maps closely onto where Biden was in 2022, with one critical difference: the warning signs are louder for Starmer given his party got wiped out in a way Biden’s didn’t in the midterms, and there is still time to act on them.
The parallel holds, but with an important distinction. I noted that Biden actually got a significant amount done, the Inflation Reduction Act, infrastructure investment, real progressive policy, but voters felt he failed on implementation and delivery. Starmer has not even cleared that bar. The comparison of being asked whether you can keep this person at the top of the ticket heading into the next general election is where both leaders ended up, and the answer in both cases appears to be a pretty loud no.
The worst case is Starmer staying too long and then dropping out at the last minute. James identified this as the most likely outcome given Starmer’s bunker mentality. A failed leadership challenge from Streeting that Starmer survives. Continued drift. Then, close to the general election, Starmer finally accepts the reality and steps down. The next leader gets a fraction of the time needed to make a case to voters. Labour goes into the general wounded and fractured. Reform benefits. The US trajectory gets repeated.
The better case requires Starmer to do what Biden ultimately did, read the room before it is too late. Biden’s late exit was painful. A graceful exit with a clear succession plan would have been better. The difference is that Starmer still has time to do it the right way. The Labour conference in September is the logical moment. The route to Burnham exists if Starmer chooses to take it. Whether he has the self-awareness to do that is the open question, and James does not think he does.
Who Reform Actually Elected
Reform’s surge in the council elections was not just a numbers story. The people who actually won seats tell you everything about what this movement is.
One newly elected Reform councilor said the rape of a Sikh woman in Britain was a good thing. James named this directly. Another said that Nigerians should be melted down to fill potholes. A third, elected to Doncaster Council in Yorkshire, immediately submitted a request for the council to write to NASA asking whether UFOs are real. As I noted, some Republicans in the US do not even say things that openly deranged. This is the local government Reform has just populated.
A Reform councilor said “shoot the Pakistanis” and has not been suspended. James confirmed he is under investigation by the party but remains in his seat. The party’s response has been investigation, not removal. That is the standard of accountability Reform is applying to its own elected officials.
These are not political operatives. They are people who had a rant about immigrants at the pub and got nominated. James described it exactly that way. Experienced Labour, Lib Dem, and SNP councilors who had served their communities for ten and fifteen years lost their seats to people with no knowledge of local government whose only qualification was anger about immigration. That is what Reform has built at the local level.
Former Tory Home Secretary Suella Braverman has now defected to Reform. James had her on the media rounds during election night defending the party’s platform, including the detention center threats we covered last week. She held one of the most senior positions in British government. That is how far right the right of British politics has moved.
The Unwritten Constitution
A commenter in the chat asked about the no-confidence mechanism and whether Americans should be envious of it. That opened into one of the most interesting structural conversations we have had on the show.
Britain’s unwritten constitution gives it flexibility that America’s written one does not. James made the point that no one who wrote the American Constitution in the 1700s could have predicted the world it would be applied to now. The right to bear arms, the executive powers interpretations, and the Dick Cheney-era expansions of presidential authority. Britain never froze its constitutional arrangements in the same way, which is why a parliamentary no-confidence mechanism exists and actually functions.
I pushed back gently in defense of the American Constitution. My argument is that the founders actually did anticipate a figure like Trump. The Federalist Papers describe the dangers of demagogues in terms that read like a direct warning about what we are living through. The problem is not the document. The problem is that the guardrails the founders built depend on people willing to enforce them, and we have a Congress that will not.
James acknowledged the trade-off: the parliamentary system limits the talent pool. To become Prime Minister, you have to have been an MP, risen through the party, and served as a minister. That professional political class is exactly what Farage and Trump have exploited by calling everyone in it the establishment. James’s point: the only real elite establishment is money, and Farage and Trump both have it while successfully pretending they don’t.
The Potential For Smarter Authoritarianism In The UK
This was James’s most alarming argument of the conversation, and the one I want to make sure lands with the people reading this.
James’s position: our fascists are smarter than your fascists. He said it directly and meant it not as a boast but as a warning. Farage is more intelligent than Trump, more disciplined, and more strategic about where he draws the public line on his racism. He uses dog whistles where Trump uses a bullhorn. That makes him harder to counter and potentially more dangerous in power.
Farage models himself on Enoch Powell, the author of the Rivers of Blood speech. James explained the reference for the American audience. Powell was a British politician who, in 1968, predicted that if Black immigration continued, Black people would “hold the whip hand over the white man.” That is the political tradition Farage has consciously positioned himself within. James called Powell a racist, a neo-fascist, and a religious maniac. Farage’s admiration for him tells you exactly where Reform’s ideological roots are.
Reform in power would represent a more methodical dismantling of democratic norms than what we have seen from Trump. The combination of Farage’s intelligence, the party’s organizational discipline at the local level despite its chaotic councilors, and the crypto billionaire money flowing in from abroad makes this a serious threat. James said he is genuinely terrified by the prospect, and having covered British politics from the inside for fifteen years, his alarm is not rhetorical.
Bottom Line
Labour lost 1,400 council seats. Reform elected councilors who said things that would end careers even in MAGA America. Keir Starmer is in denial. And the man waiting to take over if Reform wins a general election is smarter, more disciplined, and could be more dangerous than Donald Trump, according to James.
James is out there in Edinburgh doing the work, literally pulling over on the side of a Scottish hill to make sure this conversation happened. I am here in Brooklyn doing the same. We do this every Wednesday at 11:30 am Eastern because the transatlantic view matters and because you deserve analysis that does not pull punches.
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