00:00:53:23 - 00:01:15:23
But first, Ruth, we’re one week out. We're recording this a week before polling day and I suppose you could say nothing very much has still changed. We were saying that last week. The campaign seems remarkably stable. The polling numbers are uniformly awful for the Conservative Party. I mean, it's got to the point now where a Conservative score in the 20s is greeted with hosannas in some quarters.
00:01:15:23 - 00:01:51:04
So I suppose you've got to have the massive health warning here if the polls are wrong. And a week or so from now, Rishi Sunak is triumphantly returning to Downing Street with cheering and slightly disbelieving crowds before him. I think the polling industry may collectively just go out of business. But if it doesn't, if they're right, we are looking for a quite unusual situation in parliament, a government so utterly dominant, so completely outweighing the opposition, that maybe the whole machinery of scrutinizing the actions of ministers, of scrutinizing the new laws they propose, is going to be dangerously unbalanced.
00:01:51:09 - 00:02:14:00
Yes, and we'll probably come on to that. But the concern I'd have is, yes, they've got a huge majority and can use that to push through whatever legislation they want. But the question is, have they got the democratic mandate for some potentially really difficult issues that they may have to tackle very, very early on in a new administration when some of these big issues have not really been discussed?
00:02:14:04 - 00:02:33:10
Well, there's no doctor's mandate. The things that struck me about this was that this is not the pursuit of power. This is the trivial pursuit of power. We've been talking about betting scandals. We've been talking about Rishi Sunak getting whacked. We've been talking about peripheral issues. But there's a massive cost of living crisis out there. There's a massive climate crisis.
00:02:33:10 - 00:02:54:06
There's a huge crisis in the public finances. The world looks an incredibly dangerous place. More dangerous than it's been for most of my adult life. And those have intruded very little into a campaign that seems mostly centred around who scored the cleverest point and delivered the funniest one liner in a prime ministerial debate. So there's no doctor's mandate.
00:02:54:06 - 00:03:13:05
There's no moment when anyone has turned to the country and said, this is going to hurt, but it's necessary. And that's, I think, is probably the concern here that if the government gets in, they know what the scale of the economic problems are. But what our one of our first interviewees on the podcast, Meg Hillier, the chairman of the Public Accounts Committee, talked about the big nasties.
