Evening briefing Friday 8th May

0:00This episode of the Times Radio News Briefing is sponsored by PwCWC. Staying competitive means getting ahead, not just keeping up. So how do business leaders cut through the noise and focus on what really matters. PwC takes you further with tech, from optimising the systems that put your data to work, to scaling AI from proof of concept to competitive edge. PwC helps you meet tomorrow's tech demands, so you can compete at a speed that rewrites the rules. Discover more at pwc.co.uk. Welcome to the Times Radio evening briefing on Friday the 8th of May. The First Minister of Wales, Aline Ed Morgan, has lost her seat in the Senate, describing the election results there as catastrophic.

0:46She says they mark the end of a century of Labour winning in Wales and is standing down as Welsh Labour leader. We need to go back to being the party of the working class. We need the Labour government nationally to change course. We need the wealth of this nation to be more equally distributed away from the South East. But I was always clear that this election was about Wales and Keir Starmer was not on the ballot. With all the results declared, Plaid Cymru has taken 43 seats in the Senate and Reform UK 34. Labour has just nine. It means no party has a majority in the 96-seat Assembly. In England, Labour has lost more than 1 ,000 councillors and has lost control of more than 20 local authorities.

1:42The Science and Technology Secretary Liz Kendall has told Times Radio that things cannot go on as normal. The public have spoken loud and clear that we're not good enough and they want us to change. And that isn't going to be about business as usual. we have got to make big changes we need to stop the unnecessary mistakes and we need to show leadership to change this country and lead us into the future and give people hope their lives and their kids lives can be better. Reform UK has made sweeping gains in the local elections in England. It's got more than 1200 extra councillors and has taken control of 10 councils.

2:21Leader Nigel Farage says he's been confident for the last month that reform would do well in traditional Labour heartlands. How do I know that? Well partly it's polling but actually just me arriving and walking down streets over the course of the last nine weeks and getting an amazing reaction and these are these are historic vote shifts. You can see seat after seat where the Labour vote shares down 35 percent and we're up 37 percent. It's a direct switching of Labour votes to reform. And the Greens have gained almost 300 councillors and have taken control of three councils. They've also won the mayoral election in Hackney in north-east London, beating Labour by almost 10 ,000 votes.

3:00Leader Zach Polanski. This is the first time the Green Party have ever won a directly elected mayor. And two-party politics is not just dying, it is dead and it is buried. And actually, whether it's here that Labour have been rejected or whether we're seeing around the country, it's very clear that the new politics is the Green Party versus reform. I said that the Green Party were going to replace Labour. That's exactly what we did in Gorton and Denton. It's what we've done in Hackney, and we're seeing that right across the country. And you can follow The Times Radio News Briefing on Spotify and listen live to Times Radio online.

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