Name: What happened in British politics in 2025? | BBC Newscast
Uploaded: 2025-12-21T17:12:35.000Z
Duration: 34 min 5 s
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Here we are going to spend the next little while talking about the politics of 2025 and the politics of, yes, you guessed it, 2026 on this edition of Newscast.

Hello, it's Chris in the newscast studio whilst Adam is away for a few days.

So let's chew over the political year we've just had and then the one to come.

In the newscast studio we have got Alvara, who's the political editor of the New Statesman, and Tim Shipman, who's the political editor of the Spectator.

I mean, I know there's a certain genre to these things at this time of year, isn't there?

I think probably the government nearly losing that welfare vote, that extraordinary moment when Stephen Tims had to just quietly read out that basically they were gutting all of of their welfare reforms.

It didn't look like much in Parliament, but it meant that the government came within a whisker of losing a big vote on an important policy only, you know, basically less than a year into government after winning a big landslide.

This is the thing with a big majority government, you're not meant to have tight votes.

And they were doing this sort of slow motion kind of shredding of their own policy.

Look, I'm going to cheat and say I think there were three for the government.

And I totally agree that that was possibly the most important.

That's when the left of the Labour Party reasserted itself and started pushing number 10 around.

The other two, I think, were significant from a government point of view were Rachel Reeves crying in the chamber, which was, on the one hand, a great sort of personal crisis.

Slight example of the Prime Minister being oblivious of what was going on around him.

But then the market reaction that effectively said, if Rachel Reeves goes, we think almost everything else is going to be worse.

And, you know, the economic environment has been shaped by the fact that Starmer and Reeves have just about convinced the markets that they're okay.

And lots of other noises off in the Labour Party the markets don't trust, including Andy Burnham, who made a fool of himself at party conference by saying, let's ignore the bond markets.

And I think the third one, the other big issue of the year, has been migration.

And I think when the Home Secretary, Shaban Mahmoud, stood up in the Commons and pushed all these sort of this crackdown on asylum.

I think, you know, the reaction from her own party was disquiet.

And then one of the Lib Dems effectively said, you know, you're speaking intemperately, you're pushing all this.

And she basically said, I think you're underestimating the damage this has caused and what the public thinks of it.

And it was a very kind of visceral moment.

I have to say to the honourable Gentleman, I wish I had the privilege of walking around this country and not seeing the division that the issue of migration and asylum is system is creating across this country.

Unlike him, unfortunately, I am the one that is regularly called a F and told to go back home.

It is I who knows through my personal experience and that of my constituents just how divisive the issue of asylum has become in our country.

I think it was one, if you look at the polls, 70% of Labour voters support what she's doing.

57% of Lib Dem voters are pushing, half of Green voters.

And all the leaderships of the sort of left faction of Labour, of the Greens, of Lib Dems, very uneasy about all this, but their voters actually want it.

And I think that was a sort of indelible moment where the Home Secretary showed she was firmly where the public is.

How surprised should we be, or are you about where we find ourselves at the end of this year?

I guess it's to tease away a bit of what you were talking about there around welfare and other things, that the government, despite this colossal majority, despite the fact that we're only 18 months in, Keir Starmer is under threat.

You know, it's an open question as to whether he's Prime Minister in 12 months time.

I wonder how surprised you are now versus where we were 12 months ago about the political predicament the government's in.

Oh, I guess I am surprised, but I shouldn't really be, you know, because I started a new job in the past couple of months at the New Statesman, so I've ended up reading a lot of what previous people in the job have done and people and Tim's staff at the Spectator and you're predestined.

What you do for covers, what you do for columns and reading some of the stuff in both magazines about Rishi Sunak and the conservatives from 2023, 2024.

It's all exactly the same, you know, all these things about, about parliamentary parties becoming really unhappy, seeing that they're doing terribly in the Polls thinking seriously about changing Prime Minister.

I was reading one about Rishi Sunak this morning.

I think maybe there's something in our politics.

It's not being driven, despite what maybe some listeners think.

It's not being driven by us, it's not being driven by the journalists.

It is the MPs, it's their frustration with their polling position, their frustration with the leadership, but it just keeps happening.

So in a way, it shouldn't maybe be a surprise that it's happened to Keir Starmer, and yet it is, because they won this huge big landslide majority and they ran on this platform of we will be different, we won't be chaotic like the Conservatives.

A big part of their promise was stability and now it's looking like they actually aren't able to deliver on that.

I think some of it's specific to the people, but a lot of it is systemic to what's been going on in British politics probably for two decades.

On the specifics, I think a lot of people on the left thought that the Tories were wicked and useless and that just coming in and being Labour was going to be enough.

And I think there were probably some people around Keir Starmer who thought that as well, and that hasn't proved to be the case.

I think the example that Alva gives with Rishi Sunak is spot on.

I would put Theresa May, Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer all in the same basket of people who think that having a sort of mission for public service, turning up to work, being sensible and moderate and just trying to govern calmly is going to be enough.

And in the current environment, I don't think it is.

And I think what's been going on basically, since the financial crash in 2007, 8 is the British public has been looking for big solutions to seismic problems.

They voted for Brexit because they hoped that would do it.

They voted for Boris Johnson in 2019, hoping that would do the trick.

And I think a lot of the public has already given up on this Labour government run by Starmer, which is why Labour MPs are beginning to think about an alternative.

But you can keep changing the leader all you want, as the Conservatives discovered, unless you have something that's got a bit more sort of understanding of where the public is, what's going on, and has some bold big solutions and is prepared to go for it, then I think any government is going to struggle in that context.

And MPs who got elected for the Conservatives in 2019, they weren't experienced just the same as a lot of people who popped out for a cup of sugar last year and suddenly found themselves as Labour MPs.

They're not used to whipping party, disag discipline.

And when the going gets tough, they're not sort of.

They're not hardwired for party unity, they're hardwired for covering their own behinds and looking good to their local constituents, little realizing that what actually kind of gets them re elected is a functioning government that does things successfully.

If they think they've got a personal vote, there's a lot of people who've lost their seats over the last three decades that I can send them to have a word with, because personal votes don't count for a great deal in this.

No one has yet come up with the big, bold solution.

And that is why people are looking at reform and Nigel Farage and thinking, we've tried all the others, we might as well try this now.

That could implode on itself at some point.

But if not, if reform were to prosper again next year and in the years ahead, it's because the big questions that the lack of wage rises, government apparently unable to get to grips with, migration, all of these kind of issues, an economy that is basically just sort of rumbling along rather than soaring ahead.

Without any of that, any government is going to suffer, any leader is going to suffer.

But I think May Sunak and Starmer in particular were very unanchored in politics and in winning arguments and in telling a story to the country.

You know, Boris Johnson, David Cameron, Tony Blair, they were all better at it than those three.

And I think there's a lot of similarities there.

And that's why if you open a copy of my magazine from two or three years ago, it reads very similar to what Alpha and I writing this week.

And I guess Alva, picking up on Tim's analysis, into, into that space this year has stepped reform and Nigel Farage and.

And they have become the prism through which, well, a lot of the political conversation has been happening and where every other political party has had to react to what they're doing.

Yeah, I mean, we had this moment, I think that was this year rather than last year, that Keir Starmer just came out and said, reform is our main, main opponent.