Visit our website:
http://www.france24.com
Like us on Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/FRANCE24.English
Follow us on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/France24_en
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00 Well, for the very latest, let's cross live now to our London correspondent, Benedict Paveo.
00:05 Benedict, great to have you with us this morning.
00:07 We won't have the final results of these elections until later on Friday evening,
00:13 but it isn't looking too good for the Tories, is it?
00:15 Just talk to us about how things are shaping up at this early stage.
00:20 Well, we're only just getting the first results of these elections,
00:24 council elections and local elections in most of England, not here in London,
00:30 not in Wales, not in Scotland, and Northern Ireland will actually be next week.
00:33 And as you say, it looks like the Conservatives, as predicted, it has to say, are getting a hammering.
00:41 So only about a quarter of the results so far, 64 councils are counting overnight.
00:48 The great majority will actually start counting in a short while, about 166 of them.
00:54 But it does look as if the Conservatives are set to lose one third of their councillors.
01:01 It could be as high as 1000 councillors, it is predicted.
01:07 Labour are doing well.
01:09 They've taken control of Plymouth and Stoke-on-Trent.
01:11 Those were among their top target councils.
01:15 The Conservatives have lost councils like Tamworth, Brentwood, Hertzmere and Leicestershire.
01:20 And it's the Conservatives that aren't just losing to Labour,
01:23 they're also losing to the Liberal Democrats.
01:25 Sir Ed Davey, who's just been on the British media airwave, said that he had the grin of a Cheshire cat,
01:32 and that just as he had entered the studio, Windsor and also Maidenhead had gone,
01:39 actually the control of those councils had gone to the Liberal Democrats.
01:43 And Benedict, what does this mean then for the Conservatives?
01:46 They will of course be looking ahead to the general election.
01:50 They will indeed.
01:52 There has to be a general election by January 2025.
01:56 It's thought it'll either be next spring or in the autumn.
02:00 Of course, we went through three prime ministers last year.
02:03 We went from Boris Johnson to, very briefly, Liz Truss, and then Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.
02:08 And interestingly, Rishi Sunak has just made a statement and said that these results are disappointing,
02:15 but that it's still early, that he does not see a particular trend for Labour.
02:20 But then the main opposition party, the Labour Party, would say, he would say that, wouldn't he?
02:26 Overall, what we see consistently over the last many months is, if there were a general election tomorrow,
02:33 the trend is that the Labour Party is 12 to 14 or even sometimes 16 points ahead of the Conservatives.
02:40 The Conservatives, of course, 13 years into government, and that means that there's a record there.
02:47 And people with 10% inflation, cost of living crisis, are clearly giving a hammering to the Conservatives.