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Intro: [00:00:00] You are listening to Parliament Matters, a Hansard Society production supported by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust. Learn more at hansardsociety.org.uk/pm.

Ruth Fox: Welcome to Parliament Matters, the podcast about the institution at the heart of our democracy, Parliament itself. I'm Ruth Fox.

Mark D'Arcy: And I'm Mark D'Arcy.

And coming up this week.

Ruth Fox: The budget ramifications continue to ramificate, as the boss of the budget watchdog departs.

Mark D'Arcy: The lowliness of the ex-MP, why the casualties of last year's general election keep showing up in other political parties.

Ruth Fox: And we've got a new book out. No, not Mark and I, but the Hansard Society, looking back at the 2024 electoral earthquake, just in time for Christmas. The ideal gift for the election nerd in your family.

Mark D'Arcy: And Ruth, we've gotta start really with the scandal that's still rolling forward. A week on from last week's budget, the departure of [00:01:00] the head of the Office for Budget Responsibility. The budget watchdog that's supposed to keep the Chancellor's statistics properly kosher, has not ended all the controversy around the pre leaking of the OBR's assessment of Rachel Reeves' latest production.

Ruth Fox: No. So, Richard Hughes decided to do the honourable thing and step down, but he was just about to appear before the Treasury Select committee and didn't appear. So two other representatives from the Office of Budget Responsibility had to answer the questions.

And I suppose an interesting question, did he feel he had to go because appearing before that committee, he hadn't got much of a defence. The inquiry that's taken place, a very quick inquiry, looking at all the reasons for why this happened, how the leak happened, seems to have concluded that, it was really the internal security and website operations of the OBR were not up to scratch.

So did he feel that the Treasury Committee perhaps were not gonna have confidence in him? We'll probably never know.

Mark D'Arcy: But one of the things that's worth pointing out [00:02:00] about Richard Hughes is that he occupies, or anyway occupied a position unique in Britain's quangocracy, because he's literally the only figure in one of these quangos who has to go through an actual confirmation hearing by a parliamentary committee, the Treasury Committee, and can only be sacked with their permission.

Yeah, so it puts him in a completely different position to say members of the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England, or the Chief Inspectors of schools or prisons, or any of the other great quangocrats, you know, the industry regulators and people like that who have fantastic power across whole swathes of British life.

But this is the only person whose appointment and removal requires the consent of a parliamentary committee. Other committees can hold pre-appointment hearings with the quangocrat of their choice. Sounds like a sort of citrus fruit, doesn't it? But other committees can hold pre-appointment hearings and say, oh, we don't like the cut of this person's jib.

But actually ministers can ignore that.

Ruth Fox: Which, of course they've [00:03:00] recently done in relation to the Equalities and Human Rights Commission chair. The Women and Equalities Committee did not support her appointment and the Government's gone ahead with it.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah. And, reaching back into the midst of time, Ed Balls as Secretary of State for Children and Families, I think appointed, I think it was a children's commissioner or something like that in the teeth of the disapproval of the then Education, Children and Families Committee and just stuck to his guns and said, well I've listened to your objections, but I'm still gonna appoint this person.

Ruth Fox: This is a little bit more like an almost us sort of Senate confirmation hearing, isn't it? But that means that a particularly influential role now for the Treasury Select Committee, because it is they, that will be the ones that have to give their consent and therefore, presumably a lot of power and influence at this moment residing in the hands of the chair of that committee, Dame Meg Hillier as to who will be appointed.

Mark D'Arcy: Absolutely. So for a start, since the government can't appoint without the consent of the Treasury Committee, they, if they've got any sense, will be running the names of their prospective nominees past Dame Meg and maybe other members of the [00:04:00] Treasury Select Committee as well before making them public. And it's quite possible that there may be behind the scenes some kind of veto exercise that without person we will not put says Dame Meg.

And then it becomes a bit troublesome to try and appoint them. The whole idea of this is the person who validates the Chancellor's economic statistics. And this all came about in 2010 when the Conservative Liberal Coalition came to power because the accusation had been made against Gordon Brown as Chancellor of the Exchequer, was that he had to some extent chosen his budget statistics and budget projections to validate his policies rather than them being independently vetted.

And the whole purpose of the Office for Budget Responsibility is to provide an independent assessment of whether a government's economic policies and projections actually make sense and work in the real world, rather than being just a sort of best case scenario that in the best of all possible worlds, this will work out fine, therefore the Chancellor could borrow X billion. And the other point that's worth highlighting here is you do wonder if Richard Hughes's departure [00:05:00] owed something not just to the shadow of a prospective appearance before the Treasury Committee to explain how the details of the budget had accidentally been let out into the wild, but also maybe he felt he'd lost the confidence of the committee and if the government wanted him to go, they wouldn't have sprung to his defence.

It's an interesting question. I haven't been able to get anyone in the Treasury Committee to say whether that is indeed the case, but it's an interesting thought. There's a very rare example of direct influence being wielded by a parliamentary select committee.

Ruth Fox: It's just worth saying they didn't say anything beforehand to suggest that they wanted his head.

And it would've been an interesting question if they had thought actually he should stay. You might have had that public division. But anyway.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah, daggers were wielded in private, if at all.

Ruth Fox: Yes. I mean, I thought Rachel Reeves' letter of response was quite short and sweet. So it's clearly not a lot of love lost at the moment between the chancellor and the OBR, but the other thing of course that's happened this week is we've had the votes on the budget resolutions, on the Ways and Means motions, all 101 of them. Needless to say, they've all passed as you'd expect given the [00:06:00] government size of its majority.

But there was a mini rebellion of sorts. A one Labour MP Markus Campbell-Savours. He has now lost the whip because he voted against one of the motions and that was on the plan to extend inheritance tax to farmers or the tractor tax as it has become known.

Mark D'Arcy: Markus Campbell-Savours MP for the Penrith seat in Cumbria, but more interestingly, in some ways, son of famous Labour awkward squad MP Dale Campbell-Savours, who's now in the House of Lords.

And you can imagine him leaning back in the bishop's bar and thinking, that's my boy. He's defied the government, he's defied his leaders. I imagine there's a little beam of paternal pride shining through back towards the Commons there.

Ruth Fox: We'll see how long he is without the whip, because of course, so when this has happened previously, the Whip has been restored to many of the Labour MPs who've lost it over their voting habits.

But there was also quite a large number of MPs who didn't take part in the vote. So whether it was just a question of they had alternative commitments or whether they were actually [00:07:00] actively abstaining by not taking part, there were 319 Labour MPs voted in the division of, they've got 404 MPs.

So there was certainly some suggestion from the journalist lobby that quite a number of MPs planning to abstain on some of those motions.

Mark D'Arcy: I think that the Labour whips can afford to be relatively permissive about abstention, given the size of Labour's majority, and where a vote would get you into terrible trouble in your constituency, which you are working very hard to keep hold of, maybe they'll wink at Labour MPs not turning up to vote for the government. Oh, terribly sorry, I had a dental appointment that day. It's quite another thing to vote against. The slight difficulty with that, of course, is that a lot of MPs who voted against other Labour policies in the past have suddenly found that the policies they voted against have also then been rejected by the government. So suddenly their objections have become official policy. Naming no particular two child social security limit, for example. I wonder if Markus Campbell-Savours may [00:08:00] find himself in that position, or more possibly, maybe he gets accepted back through the pearly gates into the Parliamentary Labour Party, and then the Conservatives, when the Finance Bill comes up, lay an amendment to try and get rid of the provisions about inheritance tax on farms, and he's forced into the position of having to perhaps vote against it again.

Ruth Fox: Well, the Finance Bill is gonna be coming thick and fast, but just before we get there, the academic researcher, Philip Cowley, who we've had on the podcast before, I mean, he's done some interesting research about whether or not actually voting against something because you've got this sort of perceived constituency interest and you feel obliged to vote against a measure against your own government doesn't actually result in any sort of electoral benefit for you.

So actually the difference between abstaining or voting against may actually be quite minimal though in the moment in terms of handling the communications with your electorate and the media. It's obviously useful given that Markus Campbell-Savours has obviously got a very rural constituency. But on the Finance Bill, Mark, we now know what's happening. The Second Reading of the [00:09:00] bill will be taking place on the 16th of December. So just before the Christmas recess.

Mark D'Arcy: Minced pies will be served.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, so we'll be looking at the committee stage in the new year, and in fact, we now know that there will be two bills resulting from the budget because the government's also announced that they need a National Insurance Contributions (Employer Pension Contributions) Bill, and that will have its Second Reading the day after 17th of December.

That's because this deals with the salary sacrifice, some pensions issue, in the budget. And that's because, well, basically you can't legislate through the Finance Bill for national insurance contributions and matters of national insurance. So whilst most of the issues in the budget are enacted through a Finance Bill, they make provision for spending an expenditure for central government as a whole.

And not for particular items or purposes. And basically the money that here we're talking about in terms of employer pension contributions have to be dealt with separately because they can't be spent for wider government [00:10:00] purposes. So we will have two bills adding to the scale of the government legislative program.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah. So January will be dominated by hot budgetary action.

Ruth Fox: Possibly not that hot.

Mark D'Arcy: It still remains the case. As we were saying last week after the budget, that I can't really see any great flash points thus far in the Finance Bill legislation. There's nothing there that's gonna provoke some massive rebellion.

Ruth Fox: So they've introduced the income tax charge motion, so rather than the amendments of the law motion, so they've restricted the, to, come back to this, so they've restricted, essentially the scope for potential amendments of the bill.

A point that, David Davis, the Conservative back bencher, bless him, raised with the deputy speaker in the budget debate, and he referenced our letter to the chief whip about this. Alas, we don't have a response yet.

Mark D'Arcy: I'm shocked. Shocked, I say.

Ruth Fox: And talking of defections. Mark, you wanted to talk about ex MPs going to other parties?

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah, I mean there's been a little bit of toing [00:11:00] and froing by former MPs. MPs mostly who lost their seats at the last general election from one party to another. On the Labour side, Lloyd Russell Moyle, who was the MP for Brighton Kemptown and who found himself unable to stand as the Labour candidate in the run up to the 2024 general election because of internal allegations that were later dismissed and dealt with.

But he was barred from standing as a candidate and I think feels possibly not unreasonably to have been rather hard done by. Well, he's now switched his allegiance to the Greens and it must be noted that his former constituency of Brighton Kemptown must be one of the Greens' top target seats for the next election.

It's right next door to Brighton Pavilion, which they've held since 2010 when it was won by Dr. Caroline Lucas. And the kind of Lucas effect or the Green effect, if you like, uh, may yet greenwash Brighton Kemptown as well. So if Lloyd Russell Moyle is selected by the Greens as their candidate, badabim, he may be back in his old [00:12:00] seat, but in new colours.

And the other interesting point about this is where he's chosen to go. I mean, Lloyd Russell Moyle was someone who got in on the Jeremy Corbyn wave in 2017 and I think can safely been said to have been on the left of the Labour Party, but he hasn't joined the Jeremy Corbyn operation. Now, calling itself Your Party.

Ruth Fox: Is it a party? I'm not sure.

Mark D'Arcy: I think it's an operation, it's just symptomatic I think of the fact that Your Party has faffed about, while the Greens have seized essentially the left of Labour agenda, Zack Polanski's out there doing his podcasts and hitting the headlines and hitting social media, and Your Party seems to be consumed with internal infighting, not even able to agree to have a single leader and deciding to have a collective leadership instead.

And you wonder frankly, if they've now been consumed pretty effectively by Zack Polanski and co, who are out there facing the general public talking about actual issues rather than being consumed by internal infighting.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. [00:13:00] And there's also news that several former Conservative MPs in the last Parliament have defected to Reform.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah. I do find this interesting. There's nothing so ex as an ex MP to be sure, but it's quite interesting that people like Jonathan Gullis, for example, who is a Stoke on Trent Conservative MP in the period after 2019, was briefly an education minister, have decided that Reform's now the place for them.

Often some of these people have had quite aggressive tweets attacking Reform in their fairly recent social media history, but all the same. They're now switching to Reform.

Does this represent a kind of considered judgment that their policies, their principles, now accord more closely to Reform? Does it reflect a judgment that actually Reform gives them a better chance of getting back into Parliament than the Conservative Party does? Is it a bit of both? All that suggests that at least a chunk of the former Conservative parliamentary party now seem to regard Reform as a more congenial home, both in terms of their own personal chances [00:14:00] and maybe also in terms of policy.

Ruth Fox: Hmm. Well, if I can put it gently, I don't think they're perhaps regarded as much of a catch, even by the Conservative Party.

I mean, in terms of Reform, of course then we've seen Zia Yusuf really trying quite strongly to make clear to other Reform members that these people coming into the party from the Conservatives won't get priority on seat selection. You know, desperately trying to ensure that these emigres from the Conservatives are not gonna get any kind of priority.

That's the danger for a Reform. Of course, if they have too many of them, they're gonna just look like their Conservative lite.

Mark D'Arcy: They certainly don't want to look like a rest home for recovering Conservatives. And that's

Ruth Fox: Such a better way of putting it than I managed Mark.

Mark D'Arcy: That's certainly one aspect of it, but the other aspect is also it does throw a bit of a light on, if you like, the changing tides within the Conservative Party. I mean, all the people who might be Reform curious, Reform friendly in the Conservative ranks already drifting over that way and the people who are left are perhaps not so likely [00:15:00] to surrender to the siren song of Nigel Farage.

It's an interesting question, but there's a set or subset of Conservative MPs, people like Ben Obese-Jecty, who are engaged in really quite sarcastic, unpleasant dialogues with various Reform people. He's been having a bit of a Twitter dialogue with Aaron Banks, one of the Reform's big backers, which has really turned quite nasty.

So, you know, not every Conservative MP is someone who they would regard as a worthwhile catch, shall we say. Some of them are, as Aaron Banks might describe it, crypto liberal democrats.

Ruth Fox: Yes. And some Conservative MPs would regard going to Reform as heading over to the dark side. Given that some of the issues that are being raised about not least, I think in that particular MP's case about race.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah. One thing, again, there's a certain sort of Darth Vader-y voice, give yourself to the dark side of the force.

Ruth Fox: Certain unpleasant quality to a lot of it. And talking of an unpleasant quality. One thing that has united all the political parties against the Labour government this morning as we are recording Mark, is the news that reaches us, that the government is essentially [00:16:00] delaying the mayoral elections in half a dozen areas. These new unitary areas for mayors that were due to take place in May, but they're now gonna be delayed effectively for two years. And this has led to accusations from across the political spectrum, from Reform to the Liberal Democrats basically accusing the government of canceling democracy.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah, this is a very, very interesting one. I happen to live in one of the areas concerned in Sussex, and the plan here was that they were going to, as it were, de-layer local government in East and West Sussex, there's going to be a Sussex wide metro mayor figure who had be in charge of sort of big planning questions and boosting economic growth.

And the councils, the existing county councils and district councils would be scrapped and merged into a series of unitary authorities. So there'd be one council for a given area rather than a district providing some services, emptying the bins and so forth. And a county council on top providing social care, highway services and things like that. So that's a process that's still [00:17:00] underway. The interesting political question in it is that, as you said, elections have already been postponed once, they should have been taking place last May They're not now going to be taking place in the coming May.

So when are local voters in these areas actually gonna get a vote on who runs their local services? Judging by what was said in the urgent question about this, that happened shortly before we recorded this conversation, nobody seems to know. The minister certainly wasn't saying.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, I mean, that's what I found very strange.

So the mayoral elections, which will be the first one, so they were referred to as inaugural elections, fine, they won't take place in May as planned. They'll be delayed for two years. But then the question is, okay, so if the unitary authority is not sufficiently established in order to move ahead with those elections, is the plan therefore to continue to hold what would've been the district and council elections in those areas in May instead. And this was explicitly put to the [00:18:00] minister by the chair of the select committee covering local government, Flo Eshalomi. And she didn't get a straight answer. And frustratingly no other MP followed up.

And even reading the written statement, it's not clear to me whether that is the plan or not. So potentially. And we'll have to see what happens. But potentially those not inconsiderable areas of the country, Greater Essex, Norfolk and Suffolk, Hampshire and the Sussex and Brighton might not have any elections for another couple of years if that were the case.

Mark D'Arcy: And apparently, and there was some Labour discontent on this as well. Jim McMahon, who was the local government minister until the last government reshuffle and was a council leader before he entered Parliament, was pretty scathing about what a breach of faith he considered this to be.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, I mean his exact words were Labour, the government, needed to be better than this. And he described it as a moral and legal obligation to honour its side of the bargain. And interestingly, just a month ago, the government was answering parliamentary questions [00:19:00] on these issues and appeared to be saying that everything was moving ahead fine.

And that there were no plans to delay anything. The minister appeared before the relevant select committee, I think, Housing Communities and Local Government select committee on the 11th of November. So that's barely what, three weeks ago? And said that they were going ahead and now all of a sudden, three weeks later, they're not.

What's happened? Where are we? Well, some of the parties have already selected their candidates. They've been through a candidate.

Mark D'Arcy: I'm getting campaign literature through my door.

Ruth Fox: Costs have been incurred. I imagine the local returning officers have been preparing for this administratively, again, preparing materials and so on.

So it's all a bit odd. I can understand if they're not ready, then fine, but it is quite late in the day and it begs the question, a couple of councils have already asked for a delay and that was granted for a delay for next year. I think one of them is Cheshire and Warrington and Cumbria. So they already knew that there was a problem in [00:20:00] some areas.

Apparently there's 18 councils elsewhere have asked for a delay at the local elections to complete the reorganisation. So it is all a little bit messy. And frankly, the answers from the government minister were not really that clear.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah. The politics of this, I suppose is, is that both the government and maybe also the Conservative Party are looking in a rather worried way at what may well happen in these elections, because in an awful lot of places, Reform could expect to win on the polling figures. In my own county of West Sussex, for example, Reform would be in a potentially three-way battle, but it was well ahead of the other parties and could perhaps expect to win. Now maybe one of the things that the government may have in mind, at least for mayors, is bringing back some form of PR. Who knows? It's also worth speculating incidentally, if those elections had happened as scheduled last year. I think they might have been very bad news for Kemi Badenoch, because the Conservative Party was in a dreadful state then, and Conservatives might have taken a hell of a beating.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, well there was an acknowledgement in the, I forget which MP, it was a Conservative MP who acknowledged that [00:21:00] actually there are some Conservative councils that are supporting the government in this and indeed feel that they're not ready.

But we'll have to keep an eye on this and see what happens.

Mark D'Arcy: Giving me a little bit of a flashback to the mid 1980s when Margaret Thatcher's government was trying to abolish the Greater London Council, then headed by Ken Livingston and was sort of judicially reviewed to a standstill as they tried to do the process and ended up having to legislate to keep Ken Livingston in office for a further year because the elections were due for the Greater London Council, their plan was to cancel them in good time, they weren't able to do so, so they ended up having to issue a sort of continuance until the council could finally be abolished. Those were the days.

Ruth Fox: Those were the days. Before we take a break Mark, just one quick update I think just to, to cover. We've obviously looked at the assisted dying bill in great depth over the course of the last year on the pod and there's been news in the last 24 hours.

That, the Guardian journalist Jessica Elgot has got her hands on a document that Labour produced in opposition, which basically set out a [00:22:00] sort of a roadmap for introducing an assisted dying bill via the private members bill system, and that this document says that it would allow heavy influence for the government in the process.

And this has kicked off, needless to say, the pro and the anti campaigners about whether or not this is actually a government bill in disguise. Whether the government's been, shall we say frank and open and deployed candour in relation to this issue and whether or not it should have taken and could have taken an alternative approach?

I mean, the policy document, we haven't seen it, so we've only got that guardian journalist's take on it, but it apparently suggests that there were other routes considered, for example, some kind of commission or committee, which I've always thought would've been a better first start to this legislation.

Some kind of pre-legislative scrutiny to get it through. But it has upset a lot of people opposed to the bill, as you can imagine.

Mark D'Arcy: I think that we'll need to be a little bit careful around this. Historically, this kind of thing has been done through [00:23:00] private members bills. So when they legalise abortion, when they legalise gay sex, these were things that were done through private members legislation.

But I think people deciding that that's the way to go, possibly didn't understand the limitations of the process when they did it. I do get the impression that an awful lot of the people who stand behind this in the government didn't really think through the implications of trying to use this legislative route rather than doing some other kind of preparatory work.

Now, there have been political events around the question of assisted dying. There was a full dress inquiry by an earlier incarnation of the Health Select Committee, for example, that looked in detail of the question. So there had been a little bit of groundwork done, if you like, but you've gotta make policy choices and then you've gotta put the legislative language behind them.

And that's a very difficult thing on a question of this complexity requiring incredibly intricate safeguards. So yeah, as you say, there are other ways they could have gone.

Ruth Fox: There are, and I think one of the things that has upset members of the Labour Party in Parliament [00:24:00] who are opposed to the bill.

Mark D'Arcy: Like the Health Secretary, like the former Justice Secretary, now Home Secretary.

Ruth Fox: I mean, I can't speak for them, Mark, but yes, peers in the House of Lords who were opposed to the bill on the Labour side, feeling quite upset that what this document, if it's accurate, would point to is that there was some kind of shadow process behind the scenes at quite a high level in the party, looking at the policy, making determinations about what the policy should look like, the structure of how assisted dying would be implemented.

You know, this sort of six month, if you've got a terminally ill diagnosis that's in the policy document and some suggestions that in effect there was an awful lot going on behind the scenes, to build the foundations for this. But it wasn't in the manifesto, it wasn't part of any internal policy discussions.

There were no consultations with the membership, with the trade unions, it wasn't part of the policy consultation process, and that as a result, that's not great for internal party democracy. And [00:25:00] it's also may turn out not been great for the direction of travel and progress of the bill.

Mark D'Arcy: Well, I suppose on one level you could say it's perfectly reasonable for a party leadership expecting to be in government to have a look at the big issues that might be coming up and think a bit about how to handle them and what might be an acceptable way for a private member's bill on this subject to be configured.

The slight objection to that is that they didn't seem to do that kind of thinking on pretty much any other policy issue that's come before them. So I'm probably being slightly unfair, but only slightly I think.

Ruth Fox: With that, Mark, shall we take a break and come back and discuss the new book that the Hansard Society's got out?

It's a special edition of our journal Parliamentary Affairs, and it's called Britain Votes 2024. We look back at the general election.

Mark D'Arcy: And all its various aspects. A fascinating read for the election nerd in your life.

Ruth Fox: Just for Christmas. See you in a minute.

Mark D'Arcy: Bye. And we are back. And Ruth, the Parliament that this podcast is dedicated to watching is the product of one of the most unusual [00:26:00] general elections in Britain's democratic history.

And the latest edition of the Hansard Society's Britain Votes publication looks at what made that election so unusual and why it generated the result it generated.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, so we're talking to the three editors of Britain Votes 2024. Alistair Clark, who's professor of political science at Newcastle University, Louise Thompson, senior lecturer in politics at the University of Manchester, and Stuart Wilks-Heeg, who's professor of politics at the University of Liverpool. And we begin by asking Stuart how we ended up with Labour taking such a large slice of the House of Commons on such a small slice of the vote.

Stuart Wilks-Heeg: Well, we got to it through an election which produced an incredibly efficient spread of the vote for Labour.

So they managed to win two thirds of the seats on just one third of the vote, which is incredible. It's unprecedented. It can happen under our electoral system. Variety of reasons they could pull that off at that time to do with the nature of party politics, [00:27:00] the distribution of the vote, tactical voting, and so on.

But it has left Labour in this remarkable situation, as you say, with this huge majority, you know, on par with the first Blair governments, but at the same time with a second party so often just behind Labour in 2024, and we now know obviously Labour facing challenges in terms of leaking its vote potentially all over the place.

So a lot of those second places we've got Reform out there waiting and quite a few we've got the Greens, so it is really an unprecedented situation to record such a large majority on such a low vote share, and to be really only narrowly in first place in so many constituencies.

Mark D'Arcy: And what this so often feels like looking at the election is this was not a huge endorsement of a Labour party led by Keir Starmer.

This was a resounding rejection of the Conservatives as led by Rishi Sunak. And before that Liz Truss. And before that Boris Johnson.

Stuart Wilks-Heeg: This was a classic Get the Rascals Out election. So we've had enough of that lot, we'll replace them with somebody, [00:28:00] but with absolutely no resounding love or enthusiasm for the obvious alternative, which was Keir Starmer and Labour.

So this was not the equivalent of people rushing to New Labour and Tony Blair, which I think at the time was slightly over exaggerated, nothing on that scale. So if we look at, for example, Keir Starmer's personal ratings in the lead up to that election. Yeah, they were better than Rishi Sunak's, they had been better than Liz Truss', had been better than Boris Johnson's, but they were really not very good. I mean, they were basically negative. They were just less negative than the others. So, I mean, I think that really sums it up, and it helps to explain why, you know, there's other reasons, but why this government has struggled from the outset, really.

Ruth Fox: And Alistair, one of the features that you highlight in the introduction to the book is the sheer number of electoral records that were broken at this election. So not just the disproportionality of the vote, but other aspects as well.

Alistair Clark: Undoubtedly. So it's something even now that I'm still quite stunned by the amount [00:29:00] of records that were actually broken in the election, the record result for third parties, both in terms of the number of votes and the number of seats.

We've got the Conservative Party on their lowest ever number of seats since I think the post First World War period. We've seen the biggest swing during this election as well. Importantly, I think we've seen the highest level of net volatility in a general election, and we've had some fairly volatile general elections in the last decade or thereabouts.

Again, this is not really a sign I think of democratic health. I think it's to some degree, just a sense of instability and people fishing around for something that is going to help address their problems. It's kind of like that old analogy about bankruptcy. It happens very gradually and then all at once, the process of change has happened over many, many years, arguably [00:30:00] decades.

But everybody is just starting to notice it because of some of those record breaking factors that we saw in last year's election. It still stuns me the amount of records that were broken. I don't think breaking that amount of electoral records quite simply is a good thing. I think it's a sign of a system that's very much under pressure and indeed to some degree we've got a kind of almost European five party system trying to get out here and we're kind of seeing the birth pangs of that to some degree.

Mark D'Arcy: And you get the sense of the volatility of the electorate of people, as you say, looking perhaps for a saviour. But at the same time, watching that election campaign in 2024, I didn't get that much of a sense of the campaign itself shifting the dial persuading voters to rush in one direction or another.

Alistair Clark: No, I don't think it did. I mean, I think the direction of travel was very much known and indeed, this is, I think, one of the reasons that [00:31:00] turnout ended up at 59.8% because the kind of outcome was expected that Labour would do well. Perhaps not as well as it did, but Labour was going to do well. The Conservatives were on their way out. So I don't really think the campaign changed the national picture. And indeed, I don't really think the campaign inspired at all, to be honest. To the extent that people picked it up where I do think it made a difference were in kinda smaller things. It probably made a difference in particular constituencies.

It probably made a difference the fact that Rishi Sunak decided to call the election when he did, for the simple reason that Nigel Farage then felt that he had to become party leader, whereas if it had been held in October, he may have been off in the United States campaigning for Trump and things of that sort.

So I think at the margins there were consequential issues around the campaign. But at the national level, no.

Ruth Fox: One of the things that's bothered me about the post-election [00:32:00] analysis, and you pick it up in the book, is this question about turnout. I mean, I do wonder if partly linked to the fact that the election campaign was frankly a bit of a boon.

The actual sort of result on turnout was that it was 59.8%, which was the second lowest since 1945, bested only just by the result in 2001. I dunno about you, but thinking back to that general election, the political response to that level of low turnout was enormous. I mean, the Hansard Society was a beneficiary of it because we were asked to get involved in lots of projects and activity with, with the government and civil society organisations.

It was in the aftermath of that 2001 election that we started our audit of political engagement to track political participation and interest and knowledge and so on. And yet this election, despite that pretty dire outcome in terms of turnout, the political parties have pretty much said very little at all.

It was, I think Mark and I were discussing it earlier and he sort of said, meh. [00:33:00]

Mark D'Arcy: Shrug.

Ruth Fox: Shrug. Yeah. Big shrug.

Alistair Clark: Quite simply, there was a response in 2001, there has been no response really remotely equivalent. This time there's an elections bill coming where we're going to get an extension of the vote to 16 and and 17 year olds.

But when you have 40% plus deciding to stay at home in a general election, then dealing with 16 and 17 year olds and giving them the franchise is really a Reform that's not up to the task that's required. They may well need to be enfranchised. And I think that's a broader debate, but there's also a much bigger debate about the amount of people who are deciding to stay at home.

And no one that I'm aware of wants to have this debate this time out and that to me is actually quite shocking when you have 40% deciding to stay at home, yet clearly, I think are fairly unhappy about the state that politics is in. Again, this is not [00:34:00] a sign of a healthy democracy, unfortunately.

Louise Thompson: I'm reluctant to talk about the 2001 general election turnout because I don't think I really knew what politics was back in 2001. I can't say have a memory of that one, but, as political scientists, we all want everybody to go and vote, don't we? And it picks up on one of the bigger trends in the book, doesn't it?

That politics itself is changing and it's not just the party system, but it's the way that people want to participate is changing as well. And if anything, it might be an opportunity for Reform to kind of capitalise on some of that. They're sort of the undercurrent of the rest of the book as well, isn't it?

Mark D'Arcy: Is there a sense that people now want a wider range of political options? I mean, in a sense, the old two party system is a bit like the days when you had a choice between the BBC and ITV on television and it was quite a thing when you got a third channel and then a fourth channel. Now maybe modern consumers want the option of several different kinds of political party with several different kinds of priorities to choose from, and they don't like the idea of being forced into one of two camps.

Louise Thompson: Yeah, I guess it is, but [00:35:00] it's in some ways you can look at this Parliament and say, this is the least two party Parliament we've ever had, can't you? And the least two party general election we've ever had. But the signs of that have been a long time coming, haven't they? It's not that this election is a complete anomaly.

We've had that sort of building trend of the number of votes for parties that are not the Conservatives or Labour has increased at every general election, I think since 2015, or 2017. So it's kind of the continuation of a longer term trend. But yeah, I think we'll probably see going through this Parliament and into the next election that the sort of predictions of multi parties and are gonna be much stronger, aren't they?

Ruth Fox: Just going back to the campaign itself, and we said that the campaign didn't change things, didn't move the dial, but in terms of the nature of the campaign, one of the features that we have been looking out for is this idea that digital campaigning will come into its own and will dominate and will move the dial in an election.

But the finding from the book is, in essence, it [00:36:00] didn't this time. There was certainly more digital campaigning, a lot of money spent, but it didn't really affect things. Stuart, do you wanna come in on that?

Stuart Wilks-Heeg: You're absolutely right. The authors that were writing on that in the book were very clear. This seemed to be one where the digital campaign was the dog that didn't bark really.

And we've got very used to this idea that digital is crucially important. Obviously the Brexit referendum really kind of opened that box. I mean, it was already there at the 2015 general election as well, but certainly, yeah, with, the chapter in the book about the Liberal Democrats suggests that they went very much paper first actually, which I think is very interesting.

In 2024, and there is just a wide skepticism really, that digital campaigning really cuts through. And there were novelties in that campaign. I had a very amusing class just after the election where I asked my students what memes they could remember from the election and they were trotting them all out one after another.

And you know, there were teenage kids and even [00:37:00] young kids watching political content on TikTok and all the rest of it and laughing about it. But there is really not much evidence that that cut through to voters. So I think that's an interesting moment. You know, maybe parties are gonna start to think about whether they've over invested in social media and digital campaigning. Maybe they need to change.

We thought this might be an election where AI would feature prominently, and it kind of did, but with obvious fakes that weren't gonna fool anybody. Next time around, I think that could be very, very different. So I think we shouldn't conclude digital campaigning is over by any stretch of the imagination, but we need to be realistic about really what effect it really can have, how deep that effect is, and keep our eye out for how it's gonna change by the time in the next election, which I think could be substantial.

Mark D'Arcy: Stuart, you mentioned the Liberal Democrats and I sometimes think that they don't get enough credit for having returned their biggest contingent of MPs since Asquith, but at the same time, I wonder if they give us a clue to what campaigning in a multi-party environment might be [00:38:00] like in the future in the sense that they very rigorously targeted a certain number of seats, I happen to live in one of them, Horsham in West Sussex, which has been Conservative since roughly the Cretaceous period and suddenly has a Liberal Democrat MP. Is this the way that other parties will go? The Greens rigorously targeted a handful of seats and won four of them. Is this perhaps a clue to how even the Conservatives might have to conduct themselves next time if their backs are still against the electoral wall, for example, might they have to look very carefully at where they're prepared to expend resources?

Stuart Wilks-Heeg: Well, that's an intriguing thought, isn't it? But, absolutely right to raise it.

So this was classic Lib Dem campaigning, and for a very long time, of course, they had to go highly localised. They had to really focus on where they thought they could win, and they thought they could win in a lot more places this time, and they pulled it off. I mean, for years really, we've been talking about other parties following the Lib Dem copy book, doing exactly what the Lib Dems have been doing since the 1970s, pavement politics and so on.

Now, it's [00:39:00] remarkable for the Lib Dems at this election, their vote share is virtually equivalent to their seat share, which is absolutely unheard of. So it kind of is, peak Lib Dem really, I think they would struggle to go beyond that at the next.

Mark D'Arcy: The glass ceiling above them is quite low. There may be nine or 10 other seats where on the current electoral figures, they look as if they're within range.

But unless they can open some kind of second front electorally, it doesn't look like they've got much higher that they can go.

Stuart Wilks-Heeg: Yeah, I think that's absolutely right, and I think the point you raised about other parties now following that formula in a multi-party context, particularly where we know that we've got these incredible geographical concentrations of support particular parties. So Reform, obviously, although the distribution of their vote is getting better and better from their point of view. The Greens, I mean the Greens, that was very aggressive targeting of a small number of seats and people were very skeptical that they could win those four and they did, so again, the Greens will have to do it to pull it off. Plaid have to do it. And I think you [00:40:00] could be absolutely right. We could be down. And maybe we know where they are already, where the really core Conservative seats are, where the Conservative prospects are still strong, if the dial doesn't move for them by the time of the next general election, they might be running a Lib Dem style, highly localised campaign rather than a predominantly national one.

Ruth Fox: And Alistair, when we talk about there's possibly a ceiling on the number of potential Lib Dem seats for expansion at the next election, are we looking at that for the Greens and Reform in the same way because Reform and the Greens as well appear to be generating lots, a lot more members, a lot more money, donors and so on. They're on a bit of a roll through this Parliament. Have they got much greater scope for expansion at the next election given those organisational factors?

Alistair Clark: Well, I mean, I think the Greens had something like 40 plus second places where they're in the second position to Labour, something like almost 90, I think for Reform.

I think given that those are smaller parties, I think the [00:41:00] organisational potential limits to growth are under studied and, and under understood, if that makes sense. I think there needs to be a bit more focus on those kinds of issues because it's not a simple thing to recruit candidates in a constituency and make sure these are potentially electable candidates as we see from Reform at the local level where they have had success running into trouble with a range of councillors.

Now having said that, Reform very clearly are doing well in donations. The Green organisation is clearly growing as well. But there's a difference between growing that and having the organisation in the right place. So the national level figures may be on an up for both parties in terms of money, in terms of the number of members that they have.

What matters, I think is having active members in the right places. Or being able to redistribute those members [00:42:00] as and when they need to campaign. So I think electoral geography matters, but there's gonna be a kind of interaction between those parties organisation, and bear in mind, both of them are starting from a low base. I mean, Reform didn't even exist six years ago. So I think that has the potential to cause both of them problems. And even though they're in second places, not always are they close second places as well. So, having said that, there is a sense that the geography has mattered for the likes of Reform.

For instance, there's been some analysis of the second places that UKIP had back in 2015, where remember they had about 120 or something of that sort. And Reform are strong in those places that UKIP had those second places. So there's very clearly a sense in which those two parties are building a loyal following in particular geographies.

The challenge for them is to [00:43:00] match up their organisation with those geographies.

Mark D'Arcy: So is what we are seeing here, effectively, the death of the traditional national political campaign of the kind where we used to see where essentially it was Labour versus the Conservatives and a few bit players edging in occasionally on the margins. Now we've got a situation where maybe Reform, maybe Labour, can run truly national campaigns, but the other parties may be forced to focus very much on particular areas. What's that going to do to our politics?

Alistair Clark: It is a broad question. I mean, I think they're going to have to get used to operating campaigns on different levels.

At the same time, there are some things in the national campaign that they're going to have to respond to. So for instance, leaders debates and those kinds of things. They're actually going to have to have a presence there. But what we will see is a kind of almost hyper localisation of campaigning and what might be appropriate for, I don't know, let's say the southwest or southeast may not be [00:44:00] appropriate for the northwest or northeast or for eastern and west Midlands, for instance.

So we will see a difference and what I would expect, and this depends how controlling national party organisations are going to be, is some sense of variation between those localities if they go down that hyper-local route and that could lead to problems for them, having explained why candidate X is a different position to candidate Y in another location, for instance.

But they're going to have to get used to dealing with these multi-level campaigns, I think at the national level at the same time as at the local level.

Louise Thompson: I think the next election will be really different. But I think if we look at the history of smaller parties in elections, I mean it is, we talked about in the book about how this election's very volatile.

And if you look at small party performance, that's been very volatile as well, hasn't it? You know, the Lib Dems, the SNP, they're up and down, up and down. I think it's gonna be much harder for each party to carve out a niche for themselves in the election, isn't it? And we saw Ed [00:45:00] Davey in this election carving out a very particular niche to try and get that attention and visibility, and I think each party will have to kind of consider a bit more carefully how they're gonna carve out that visibility in election campaigns?

Stuart Wilks-Heeg: Yeah, I mean, I think one of the things we need to remind ourselves here is that even in countries with proportional representation and a genuine multi-party system, there still tends to be two big blocks. There still tends to be a left right divide, and then people stay within those blocks as voters.

They don't tend to really cross over from parties in the left block to parties in the right block. And I think we are there, actually in the UK now, we've got that kind of multi-party mentality. And people, perhaps if they're fed up with Labour now, they voted for them in the election, but now they're looking elsewhere, only a small number really looking to vote for Reform and hardly, you know, none of it looking to vote for the Conservatives. So it's really the rise of the Greens suddenly that, you know, people are talking about and Labour potentially leaking votes there. Obviously it could leak to the Liberal Democrats and so on.

So I think those [00:46:00] kind of flows within those blocks and how that plays out under first past the post will be absolutely fascinating, very unpredictable. I mean, the evidence is quite clear. I think we had a lot of tactical voting at the last election, but how that would work through in a much more complex party system next time around, if that's where we are, we don't know.

I mean, after some time, assuming we don't change the electoral system, which I think we should, but I'm pretty skeptical that we will, 'cause there's all kinds of reasons that we won't. Eventually it might resettle into a much stronger two party system, but it might take an election or two to get there. So how the parties play that out I think would be fascinating.

Whether they'll be looking to forge pacts, alliances, whether formal or informal, I think all those things start to come into play.

Ruth Fox: And Louise, that's also playing out in Parliament at the moment, isn't it? Because you know, we've got the sort of multi-party system struggling to get out. We're also seeing that in how the sort of smaller political parties are finding life [00:47:00] on the opposition benches in the House of Commons.

Louise Thompson: Yeah, and I think in the very early days of this Parliament, there was a lot of frustration, I think, on the floor of the Commons about actually how Parliament wasn't accommodating the new multi-party system, particularly from the Greens, from Reform. Not just about the disproportionate nature of the electoral system, but about the party rights that they were getting in the House of Commons.

And you only have to look at the very small gap in MPs between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats to see that maybe that distribution of party rights is no longer fair. Is it right that we give so much to the official opposition, when the third party is very, very close behind?

Mark D'Arcy: I wonder if this new environment requires, if you like a new kind of party leader, a bit less Keir Starmer and a bit more Zack Polanski perhaps, you know, will the parties to solidify a block of voters around them need a leader who shoots from the hip, but is hit when they shoots and can cut a good [00:48:00] figure on social media and also be reasonably effective in, say, debates between the leaders.

Louise Thompson: I think it forces them to have that sort of type of party leader when they're in that situation. And if you look at Polanski and you look at Nigel Farage, they're both leaders who, for one reason or another, they have to focus external to Parliament, don't they? They don't do their work in the House of Commons. Farage doesn't get any space in the House of Commons. So he has to concentrate on being that sort of leader who is that external media figure. And you know, that perhaps is, the only route for a party leader in a small party in this situation.

Mark D'Arcy: And Ed Davey attracted a lot of mockery for his performance during the general election. All the endless stunts. I'm sure his team must have been terrified to break his leg or something diving into water or whatever he was doing, but you simultaneously have to do things that make you look cool, but don't make you look serious. I'm just wondering how you can make that work as a political leader.

Stuart Wilks-Heeg: I think it's quite clear that the Ed Davey effect worked. It might be a one-off. I'm not sure that can be repeated. So clearly the kind of stunts he engaged in, I mean they got a lot of [00:49:00] media attention. They made him look far more interesting than perhaps people thought before. And it is quite common for Lib Dems that, you know, once they've got that exposure of the election campaign, if they've got a leader that can harness that, we often see Lib Dem support go up during the campaign.

And I think, Davey played it well and he always said, I'm just doing this to get the issues on the agenda. I want to talk about social care. I want to talk about the NHS. I want to talk about the water companies. And I think he did that quite successfully. But whether anybody could pull that off again, I really don't know that it would just seem rather tedious if they tried it again.

I mean, the other thing I was gonna add in this environment is that I think it is important that your party actually has a leader, a single leader, and something that we've swerved completely so far is Your Party and what might be going on there and the implications of it. And I think they're really making mistake there.

If they go along with this leadership by committee or multi leader model or whatever they're going for, they're making a critical error there, which we've seen the Green do before, and the Greens of have pulled out of that. But I mean, Your Party's worth a [00:50:00] watch, and that adds to the complexity of the multi-party environment that we're in.

Mark D'Arcy: Okay, let's take a quick break here.

Ruth Fox: And we're back. And one of the challenges facing all the parties, which really came through at this election, and there are concerns that it may only get worse in the coming years, is the extent to which candidates suffered intimidation in the campaign, and we've obviously talked Mark on the podcast before about the Speakers' Conference that has looked at this.

We've got an interview coming up over the Christmas recess with the chairman of the Electoral Commission where we touch on this subject as well. And a record number of candidates stood at this election. So on the one hand you can sort of say, well, MPs or potential MPs are not deterred from standing, but actually the level of harassment intimidation was considerable.

What do you pick up in terms of this in the book?

Alistair Clark: We don't really talk that much about intimidation of candidates in it. I mean, we make the point in the conclusion that this is [00:51:00] almost becoming an issue of electoral integrity for the UK system because ultimately, if you don't have candidates willing to stand, then you really have a problem in a democratic electoral system.

And I think we all like to complain about the quality of people who are standing for election and so on. But the level of intimidation is such that in essence, we're kind of ending up with people who can take that kind of hassle, that kind of abuse, unfortunately. And that really is a kind of self-selecting group to some degree.

So I think if we're serious about having a good quality electoral process, this is something that we do need to push down on them. And we don't need to point to what's happened to MPs in the last decade, to MPs killed, unfortunately, to see that there is a broader problem with security. But I think it's, it's something that officials are dealing with, you [00:52:00] mentioned the Speaker's commission looking into it. CSPL have looked into it and so on. I think the next step is actually trying to really have something that does make a difference to it. What that may be, I'm not entirely sure, but I think it is becoming an issue of electoral integrity because we do need good quality candidates to be standing in the first place.

Mark D'Arcy: Well, I'm gonna make myself unpopular now. In the introduction to this volume. Well, I'm gonna make myself more unpopular. In the introduction to this volume you talk about, it would've been a very brave prediction to say that Labour would go on to win the next election after the 2019 general election when they were absolutely trounced and low Labour did go on to do that.

Let's just have a few predictions. What do you think the next campaign, I'm assuming something like 2028, what do you think the next general election's gonna be like?

Alistair Clark: Thanks for that. And in the best traditions of social science predictions, [00:53:00] it's very difficult to say. I mean, well, I was asked a similar question by this group that I was talking to last week and my take on this was that back to what we're talking about with blocs, we're going to have sort of a left, right, two separate blocs. Conservatives, Reform on one side, Labour, Lib Dems, Greens on the other side. Now, I think the problem for Labour is currently, at the moment, they're trying to govern from the centre and they're shedding votes in all directions. As a consequence, come the next election, that may not be the case.

There may well be a very clear, sort of left right divide depending on how parties collaborate, what sort of pacts they come up with, those kinds of things. I think we're gonna see a different election. I think we had a kind of harbinger of this back in 2019 when Reform stood down in a number of seats in favour of the Conservatives. I think we're gonna see that kind of [00:54:00] cooperation. What the outcome of that is going to be is is where predictions are never wise. Let's just say a closer result.

Mark D'Arcy: Stuart, you're nodding vigorously there.

Stuart Wilks-Heeg: Yeah, I mean, it would be foolish to try and call it from this point. I mean, if we just go back to the period immediately after the 2019 general election, we had some commentators making these big predictions that, you know, Boris Johnson now completely dominated British politics.

He had realigned the electorate with a permanent Conservative majority. There was an infamous phrase about Boris Johnson squatting across British politics like a giant toad or something, and you know, it just didn't work out that way. We know what's happened since. What I see ahead is just unpredictability, volatility, and so on.

At the same time, however, we do know that elections are largely won and lost on what we call valence issues. So these are the issues that people really care about. Things like, can I get to see a doctor? Is the economy growing? Am I feeling a bit richer? It's where [00:55:00] people aren't dividing for or against.

It's people basically all favour those things and they want them to happen. Now Labour clearly know that. So they've got their long-term goals to fix their health service, to grow the economy and so on. Whether they can pull that off and make people feel that these things are getting better by the time of the next general relationship, I have no idea.

It's a massive, massive set of policy challenges if they can get there, if people do feel that those things are improving, they have transformed the situation for themselves, if they don't get there, and quite frankly, anything is possible, literally anything, and I wouldn't want to call it from here.

Mark D'Arcy: Louise.

Louise Thompson: I feel like I should be brave and be foolish as Stuart says. I would pick up on what Alistair said about a close result, but I would say like a close result between lots more parties. So smaller parties doing better. Labour may be losing some, and that sort of the same dilemma that I read a lot in the run up to the last election about will the Conservatives actually be official opposition or not.

Like they could be much more levelling out [00:56:00] across the small parties and that would make opposition much more fragmented, much more complicated to try and work out practice.

Mark D'Arcy: You raised an interesting point there, the fate of the Conservative Party. Can the Conservatives come back from the shellacking they took in 2024 or is the most successful political party in democratic history now on the way out with competition from its right, from Reform.

Alistair Clark: I think the Conservative Party obviously thinks that its main challenger is Reform. It's shedding votes in bucket loads to the right with Reform. However, I think there's a sense in which it needs to just take a step aside and think very clearly about where the winnable seats actually are.

One thing we've not talked about, we've talked a lot in recent years about the Red Wall, but we've not actually talked about the Blue Wall. Basically where the Liberal Democrats have been supplanting the Conservatives in the south and southeast of England. And I think [00:57:00] this is a fundamental choice for the Conservative Party.

Those are traditionally conservative voting areas where the party has ceased to be seen as addressing their concerns, giving the Liberal Democrats an opportunity. So if the Conservatives continue to chase after Reform and they're clearly minded to at the moment, what that choice will do is mean that there's a bigger opportunity there for the Liberal Democrats to hold what they have, making it more difficult for the Conservatives actually to make gains.

So I think there's a fundamental strategic choice. They seem to be making it looking in the Reform direction at the moment, but that Blue Wall, I think is a harbinger of bigger problems for them. And if they ignore that, then I think they're in very deep trouble in the longer term.

Ruth Fox: One of the features reading your book that struck me was that, the way we talk about politics, the way we [00:58:00] discuss issues, the way we think about the parties and about government now is so much through the prism of the opinion polls, who's up, who's down, the sort of political horse race, even talking about what's happened with the budget. We're not talking about the policy and the political issues. We're talking about the implications of all of this for the political parties in the polls. But a consequence of the party political fragmentation we've been talking about is it's much more difficult for the opinion poll companies to sort of get accurate polls out.

And I was just left thinking, finishing reading the book, is it about time actually that we banned some of the opinion polls during the election campaign?

Stuart Wilks-Heeg: It comes up after every election now, I think really about the impact of opinion polling and whether we should try to reduce it, perhaps eliminate it, as you say, even suggestions that we should ban it.

I mean, I don't think that's realistic. I don't think we can ban opinion polls. However, we do have to deal with the reality [00:59:00] that they are far more frequent than they used to be. There are more polling agencies. It's easier for them to poll. And then of course we've got this thing called MRP, multi-level regression with post stratification, so these often called giant opinion polls, but that's slightly misleading. But they do enable us to predict or estimate the potential outcome in individual constituencies. And of course what we saw then was in this discussion about a potential Conservative wipe out, we've had all these kind of graphics on TV and so on about, will this person lose their seat and will this senior politician lose their seat?

And everybody's talking about what the Portillo moment is going to be in 2024 and so on. And I do think that is becoming quite problematic and destabilising in all honesty. So I don't think we can ban these things. I mean, I don't want to sound all wishy-washy and say we need more education or something, but I think there is some responsibility here on the media to think about how opinion polls are being [01:00:00] reported, how they're being used.

We need to always remind people that they're only ever an estimate, there's always a margin of error that can be quite significant when the election is close, that they are always talking about what the result would be if people voted tomorrow. So the best polls are always the one right before the election, the day before.

So we need people to understand all of that and understand what the function of polling is. But I think, yeah, this does need looking at, I don't know if there's a way we can regulate it. The industry is largely self-regulating, but it's a very different beast now to what it was say 20, 30 years ago.

Ruth Fox: And Stuart talking of electoral geography, you coined an electoral law.

Stuart Wilks-Heeg: Yeah, I did. I mean, maybe this is a bit egotistical, so, you know, I do worry about that. But I mean, over the years I've been teaching about general elections and we've got lots of things named after people like the Butler Swing and the Pederson Index and so on.

And I've always joked to my students I'd like that to be an [01:01:00] index or a law in my name. So I've always been sort of thinking what it is. I've just happened to observe that over time there's this pattern of electoral geography. So for every general election since 1983, if you can walk continuously from the Humber to the Mersey or the other way around without leaving a Labour constituency. So if that walk takes you through continual Labour constituencies, then Labour win a majority in the election. And it works for quite a lot of elections prior to 1983 as well. But the solid record is since then and the reason that I think it's interesting as an observation is it tells us something about the shifting nature of the Labour electoral coalition because originally that route was weaker around the Mersey and stronger around the Humber.

Now it's the other way round. So you know, everybody knows about the People's Republic of Merseyside and all the rest of it, and how solidly Labour it's become. That wasn't always like that. It used to be quite a [01:02:00] strong Conservative representation around the Mersey, whereas the Humber used to be much more, more solidly Labour, and then the various bits in between as well.

You can see how they shift over time. So if Labour can pull it off and create an electoral coalition, which unites people right across. And it is a bit like Wainwright's coast to coast kind of route for the walkers and hikers out there then yeah, that tends to produce a Labour majority. Now, whether that would work at the next general election, who knows because everything's up in the air.

But it's a very strong illustration of that this time. And in fact there are some quite incredible routes that you can now take in the UK without leaving a Labour constituency. So it goes way beyond that one. But, that one is a solid feature of elections right back until 1983.

Ruth Fox: And, regular listeners to this podcast will know that about my obsession, not just with delegated legislation, but with football. So I was particularly taken by the discovery that only one of the 92 teams in the top four levels of English football, Bromley, now plays its home games in a [01:03:00] Conservative held seat. So I think we should have going forward a football law of electoral geography.

Stuart Wilks-Heeg: There is a football law of elections, actually.

Do you know about this one, Alistair? It's actually, that was coined by Roger Mortimer, who was at Ipsos for a long time. It's completely spurious, right? But it's basically, teams who win the FA cup tend to either play in red or blue, or a colour very close to one of those. And basically whoever is the current holder of the FA cup when the election comes around, the shirt color that they play in tells you the outcome of the election. So, if Liverpool win, Labour win the election, if Chelsea win, the Conservatives win the election, and unbelievably, it holds for most general elections. And it's just pure coincidence. So I mean, Roger's, you know, it's just a bit of fun.

Mark D'Arcy: I like to think there's some mystic connection there, but we shall see.

Ruth Fox: We've gotta go back to 1912 since my team won in red the [01:04:00] FA cup.

Mark D'Arcy: So, well, let's just sit with that for a moment. But, Stuart, Alistair, Louise.

Thanks very much indeed for joining us on the pod. This book is a must read for anyone who wants to understand the electoral earthquake, the political cataclysm that took place in 2024. Thanks for joining us.

Ruth Fox: Thanks everyone.

Mark D'Arcy: Well, we've plenty of themes there that I think are gonna pop up again and again in future pods.

Ruth Fox: Indeed. And, listeners, if you want to buy Britain Votes, the 2024 general election, for yourself or for the electoral nerd in your family, you can get it in all good bookshops, all good online bookstores, I won't mention any. And it's published by Oxford University Press and it's a special edition of our journal Parliamentary Affairs.

And just for podcast listeners, if you look in your show notes on your podcast app and you scroll down a little bit, you'll find there a discount code. Use that discount code and you can get 30% off the sale price [01:05:00] on the Oxford University Press website.

Mark D'Arcy: Irresistible.

Ruth Fox: Well with that, Mark, it's time to go. Bye. See you soon.

Outro: Parliament Matters is produced by the Hansard Society and supported by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust. For more information, visit hansardsociety.org.uk/pm or find us on social media at HansardSociety. ← Back to Parliament Matters episode page