Messy and unpredictable: What I learned from election tour of the UK

Messy and unpredictable: What I learned from election tour of the UK13 minutes agoShareSaveAdd as preferred on GoogleMatt ChorleyPresenter, BBC Radio 5 LiveBBCHitting the road for a trip around the UK's election hot spotsNext month's elections in Scotland, Wales and for local councils in many parts of England will be the biggest test of public opinion since the 2024 general election. Here is what I learned from talking to voters on a whistlestop tour across the UK, from London to Cardiff, then Birmingham, Stockport, Gateshead and Edinburgh.The magnificent seven?It has become fashionable to declare two-party politics dead, to herald a new world where seven parties battle it out: Labour, Conservative, Lib Dem, Reform UK, Green, Plaid Cymru and SNP. It's easy to think that all seven are competitive everywhere, but it is more complicated than that.For instance in Westminster City Council, where I began my journey, Kemi Badenoch's Conservatives are hoping to take control back from Labour, in an old-style battle which looks a lot like politics used to. Over in East London it is the Greens, reinvigorated under Zack Polanksi, who are challenging Labour. Same city, two very different stories.When I got off the train in Cardiff, though, it was Plaid Cymru and Reform UK who were neck and neck in some polls, vying to be the biggest party in the Welsh Senned. A new voting system - with 96 members elected across 16 six-member super-constituencies – makes it hard to model the outcome based on traditional opinion polling. In Birmingham, where Labour's grip on control of Europe's biggest council is slipping, their rivals depend on where you are in the city. In Stockport the Lib Dems, who sometimes drop out of the national conversation, hope to take control. In Gateshead our team struggled so much to find anyone willing to say they would vote Conservative that we had to reach out to Simon, a farmer from Northumberland. In Edinburgh the prospect of anothe...