Sam Freedman
Understanding the General Election

Sam Freedman | Understanding the General Election | 07.01.24

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- Good evening, everyone. And just want to introduce Sam Freedman to Lockdown. So Sam Friedman is a senior fellow at the Institute for Government. He writes regularly on politics and policy for numerous outlets, as well as his newsletter, Comment is Freed, which has over 50,000 subscribers and is the most popular UK politics Substack. His first book, “Failed State: Why Nothing Works and How We Fix It,” has just been published. He also hosts The Power Test podcast. Previously, he was an executive director at Teach First and worked at the Department for Education as a senior policy advisor. Sam is also a senior advisor to the education charity ARC, vice chair of Ambition Institute, and a trustee of the Holocaust Educational Trust. Today, Sam will be talking to us about understanding the general election. So over to you, Sam.

• Thank you very much. And hello, everybody. First time I’ve done this, so hopefully I’ll get the format roughly right. I think the idea is I’m going to talk for about 40 minutes or so. You can stick your questions in the Q&A function, and then we can get to those. We’ll have 15, 20 minutes at the end, maybe a bit longer, to have a look at some of those questions. So please do keep those coming in as I talk, and we will get to as many of those as we can at the end. So what I want to do today is sort of try and explain what’s about to happen on Thursday this week, a very topical conversation, and also what might happen afterwards. So what it tells us more broadly about what’s happening to politics in the UK and some of the challenges that all parties are going to face in the future that this election kind of highlights. So I want to start with, let me go to my first slide. This is where we are at the moment. If you sort of believe the polls, this is what the Parliament is going to look like on Friday morning. This is taken from one particular organisation, one particular polling company, JLP. They did a particularly sophisticated modelling exercise a few days ago.

So this is a very up-to-date one, which is why I’ve picked it. But actually what they’ve come up with in terms of their predictions, 450 Labour seats, 105 Torie, 55 Lib Dems, 15 SNP, is kind of pretty much in line with the general expectations that you will get if you ask experts to give predictions. So John Curtis, who’s the BBC expert, he said his prediction was about the same as this. Lots of other people are sort of saying that this is kind of where they’re at at the moment. My prediction would be about this as well. Now, I think it’s important to say that when I do talks on this topic, when I talk about the election, people often say, “But, you know, the polls can be wrong. Maybe Labour could still lose.” And that’s the kind of message that Labour is still putting out this week. They could still lose the election, that it’s still really important to go out and vote. The polls have been wrong in the past. So yes, there’s a range here. The polls could be wrong, but there’s two points to make.

First is that even if they were wrong by the most they’ve ever been wrong by before, which was in 1992, Labour would still get a very, very substantial majority. And polling has got a lot more sophisticated since 1992, so I don’t think they will be. But even if they were, because polls can be wrong, it would still be a big Labour majority. And also, that polling error can work both ways. So yes, we could get a polling error that makes the Conservative position slightly better. We could also get one that makes the Conservatives’ position slightly worse. And also, there’s a range within the polling. So this is kind of the average. This is kind of the midpoint of the range at the moment. But, you know, if you look at the most extreme scenarios that we’re getting in the data for the Conservatives, they might be down as low as 30, 40, 50 seats. You look at the best scenarios for them, they’re up at 160, 170, 180 seats. So this is kind of the middle of quite a big range, but it’s a range in which everything is a very bad Conservative defeat. It’s just that the best possible option for them now is something that looks a bit like 1997, in terms of similar results we saw in ‘97, similar majority for Labour.

The worst result for them is one in which they are almost wiped out, to the point where, you know, they might only have 40, 50 MPs. And the Liberal Democrats at that point would become the opposition party, which would be a sort of extraordinary moment in British politics and I think open up an awful lot of questions about how Parliament would actually work in a situation where quite a lot of people had voted for right-wing parties, but we ended up with a government and an opposition who are both kind of center-left, centre. So there are some sort of quite extraordinary possibilities that are open to us on Friday morning. The midpoint itself, this sort of 100 seats for the Conservatives, would easily be their worst performance ever and would be quite a dramatic event in itself. You would see a lot of well-known MPs lose their seats, a lot of cabinet ministers lose their seats, like Grant Shapps, probably Penny Mordaunt, Alex Chalk in Cheltenham. Lots of cabinet ministers would lose their seat. You could even see some very sort of big names like Liz Truss or people like that lose their seat. Jacob Rees-Mogg almost certainly will lose his seat.

There’s a very slight outside chance that Rishi Sunak could lose his seat and become the first prime minister to do so since, well, never. It’s never happened before. He’d be the first prime minister ever to lose his seat. So lots of dramatic potential for Thursday, even if the campaign hasn’t been always the most thrilling. So I kind of want to talk a bit about how we’ve ended up in this position. How have we ended up in a situation where the Conservatives are in so much danger of almost disappearing completely, and certainly having one of the worst results they’ve ever had, even if it goes relatively well for them compared to what the data says? And I think there are sort five factors that make up the position that they’re in at the moment. I’ll talk about the first two, then the next two, then the last one. So if we look. So this is just to illustrate, again, the sort of extent of what we’re looking at in terms of the extraordinary nature of this potential result. If we get a swing in line with what the polls are suggesting, in terms of the average polls, it would be easily the biggest swing we’ve had in an election with universal suffrage.

So 1994, 1945, the sort of extraordinary election after the Second World War, when Clem Attlee came to power after a very long period of Conservative rule. And it was a very extended Parliament because of the Second World War. That was a 12% swing. Blair got just over a 10% swing in 1997. So we’re looking at, you know, a swing that is far bigger than even those two massive Labour wins, and certainly bigger by a long distance than anything else we’ve seen recently. So it really is quite an extraordinary situation. So how have we got to this position? So the first thing to say is that, you know, we have an incredibly and unusually unpopular government. That may seem like an obvious point, that the government is unpopular, and that would be why they’re about to do badly in an election, but I think it’s probably not quite understood quite how historically badly this government is doing in terms of their approval. If you look back at the polling we have on every election going back to 1950, this is the most unpopular government going into an election ever. It was actually pretty unpopular in 2019, but they benefited in 2019 from having a Labour Party that was also extremely unpopular, which is not the case this time.

But if you look back at any kind of previous point, go back to 1997, obviously, an unpopular Conservative government lost to Tony Blair. But they were still, their net approval rating was minus 46, whereas now you’ve got a net approval rating of minus 69. So, you know, even compared to John Major’s government, this one is much more unpopular. You sort of ask yourself why that’s the case, and I think it’s sort of fairly obvious that they haven’t got any achievements to their name. The one thing that they have achieved during the course of this government is Brexit, is leaving the European Union, which is what they ran on last time. Get Brexit done. We have left the European Union. But that now is seen as a very tarnished accomplishment. It’s very unpopular, even with people who voted leave. So they can’t really run on that. Public services are a mess. The economy has underperformed. This Parliament will be the first Parliament ever in which the standard of living at the end of that period is worse than it was at the beginning. During peacetime, anyway. So, you know, if you look back in 1997, yes, you had a very unpopular government, but they did have an economic record to run on. They were seen as being stronger on the economy, actually, than the Labour Party in 1997. Ken Clarke was seen as being a good chancellor.

So while they were seen as very tired, torn apart over Europe, public services was seen as failing, nevertheless, they still were able to run quite strongly on the economy in 1997. You know, fast-forward to 2010, one of the most unpopular Labour governments we’ve had when they finished in 2010, when they came into that election, yes, the economy was in trouble after the financial crash. Yes, again, they were a tired government after 13 years, seen there as being split and riven, but they had a very strong record on welfare, child poverty, pensioner poverty, public services. So even when you’ve had unpopular governments before, they’ve had something to run on. This one has struggled to find anything to run on, anything to push. So that’s why, you know, as a first point, they’re just so much more unpopular than any government we’ve seen before, going into an election. Relatedly, we’ve also got a leader, the prime minister, who is the most unpopular party leader ever going into an election. And again, I think probably people are aware that Rishi Sunak is not particularly popular and has struggled as leader and has struggled during the campaign. But one of the reasons he struggled so much during the campaign, one reason why the sort of gaffs over D-Day or his talking about Sky TV have landed so strongly with so many people in the electorate is because he came into the election as the most unpopular party leader, not just prime minister, but party leader, we’ve ever had going into an election.

And, you know, you can go back to some of the people who were sort of known as being particularly unpopular. Michael Foot in 1983 had a net minus 39% approval rating going into the 1983 election. He was pretty historically unpopular. John Major going into the 1997 election had a minus 27% popularity. William Hague in 2001, minus 29%. Now Jeremy Corbyn in the last election, minus 44%. So we’ve had unpopular leaders. But Rishi Sunak is at minus 55%. 72% of the population came into this election thinking he was doing a bad job. So again, you’ve got these really kind of unprecedentedly unpopular government and unprecedentedly unpopular party leader. And so even though Keir Starmer is not particularly popular, certainly less popular than Blair was in 1997, he is nevertheless vastly more popular than Rishi Sunak. Which, again, is why you’re sort of seeing this position that we are in now. And I think it’s probably worth saying that, you know, you could argue that Rishi Sunak had a very difficult inheritance. You can argue that, you know, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss both did a very bad job and left him with a Conservative Party that was much less popular than it had been before, with a difficult economic inheritance, without much in a way of legacy to hand over to him.

All of which is true, but I still think he has taken a bad hand and then played it very badly. You know, he probably had a moment early on when he became prime minister when his own numbers were actually a lot better than the Conservative Party’s numbers. He was much more popular than the Conservative Party when he became prime minister. If he had done more to differentiate himself from Liz Truss and Boris Johnson, and hadn’t done things like appointing Suella Braverman as home secretary straight away, if he’d signalled more of a difference at that point, he could have been a different kind of prime minister. But ultimately, he has, you know, he’s failed to differentiate himself from what came before. He’s failed to find a clear narrative for what he stands for, failed to find a clear agenda to put forward to leave much of a legacy of his own. So it’s not really surprising that his own ratings have then dropped massively, particularly over the last year, as voters who were initially prepared to give him a bit of a chance have soured on him quite a lot. So first point, you know, perhaps the most obvious point, but it’s still one worth reiterating, that, you know, you have a government and a prime minister coming into this election more unpopular than ever before.

That’s reason one why we’re looking at the result, this extraordinary result on Thursday night. The next point is slightly more complicated, so it’s worth spending a bit of time on. We think of polling as being a kind of national thing. You know, Labour have been about 20% ahead in the polls for quite a long time. But it’s not been uniform nationally. They have done much better, their position has improved much more in some parts of the country than others. So if you look at the kind of regional split of the swing we are likely to get on Thursday night, it’s going to look very different somewhere like London or somewhere like Wales to somewhere like the Southeast or the Midlands. Labour are going to do much less well in terms of boosting their position in London than they are in the wider Southeast or in the Midlands. And you may find that a bit surprising because, you know, Labour have actually done much better in urban areas, you know, over the last few cycles. Certainly since Brexit, what we’ve seen is a kind of polarisation between the parties, where Labour have become the party that is more representing younger, urban, professional, more highly qualified people, and the Conservative Party has shifted to representing much older, less well-qualified people who voted for leave.

That split, you know, really we saw this big, big polarisation after the Brexit referendum and into the 2017 and 29 referendums, and into the elections. And that is still the case, that Labour are very much still a party where most people who are going to vote for Labour on Thursday voted for remain. They do skew more towards younger, more professional, better-qualified people. That will still be true. But what’s happened to the Conservative vote is that it has absolutely collapsed amongst their newer, if you like, older leave voters, who they won from Labour. Often those people went Labour, UKIP, Conservative. But older Labour voters who had shifted over to the Tories because of Brexit and because they saw them as the more socially conservative option, it’s amongst that group that the Conservative Party support has cratered. It has to be amongst that group because they didn’t have many remain, sort of younger, professional remain voters to start with. So they chose, in a way, to sacrifice that group of voters, younger, aspirational, professional, urban voters, who perhaps in the past had voted for them. You know, even as recently as 2010.

The Conservatives actually won the 18 to 34-year-old age group. They chose to abandon those voters in preference for older leave-voting voters. But they’ve now lost a big chunk of those voters, which has left them in this really, really difficult position where they’ve lost perhaps, you know, one group, and they’re also now losing another group, and it’s kind of crushed them between two poles. And a lot of those voters have gone to Reform rather than… Some of them have gone to Labour, but a lot of them have gone to Reform. The consequence of that, though, has been you’re seeing a much bigger swing to Labour in seats where the Conservative vote is splitting between Conservative and Reform in that way. So somewhere like London, which was already voting heavily for Labour in 2019, you’re not seeing much change. The results will look quite similar, particularly in Inner London, in very, very heavy Labour-voting seats. Inner London. They’ll look pretty similar to how they did last time. In Wales, the results will look fairly similar to how they looked last time. The Tories will drop a bit, but Labour won’t improve their position very much. Scotland is a very different battle altogether. But in the Midlands and the South, you’ll see these very, very big swings. And that’s where most of the seats that the Conservatives hold are. In the Midlands and the South.

So you are going to see these swathes of seats going Labour on a much bigger swing than the national swing. Because in the regions where Labour really, really need the votes, they’re going to get them. And what you call this in political science is that you’re going to see an incredibly efficient Labour vote. You know, they will actually get a fairly similar proportion of the vote, share of the vote, that they got in 2017. About 40%. But they will win vastly more seats off that 40% because of where those votes are and the fact that the right is split between the Conservatives and Reform. So it’s a function of our voting system that if you can get your vote very, very efficient, as Labour are going to do in this election, you can win lots of seats. And conversely, the Torie vote is going to get incredibly inefficient because they’re going to be splitting their vote in lots and lots of seats with Reform. And there are going to be almost no seats where they have a very substantial, but they’re going to get about 20 to 25% across most of the country, which won’t be enough to win nearly all the seats. In that model I showed you earlier, which said they’d get 105 seats, the top score they get in any seat in the country is 42%.

There is not one seat in the country where they have the majority of the vote. So they’ve got this incredibly inefficient vote that is going to mean that they really struggle, because we’ve seen this very proportional swing, this very regional swing, which is a result of what happened, I think, during that Brexit polarisation, and almost an unwinding of some of that Brexit polarisation, or a change in that polarisation. So Reform are now getting a lot of the leave vote rather than the Conservatives. And that’s what’s killing them in terms of the areas where they were previously strongest, like the South and the Midlands. So that’s the next factor. That’s why we’re going to get such an extreme result. Then the final two factors I think are both visible in this chart. Just shows what’s happened to the poll average over the last three years, basically. So you can see, up until sort of middle of 2021, the Conservatives were in the lead. That was just after this vaccine bounce, if you remember that. Boris Johnson got a big surge in support after the vaccine came out, and it looked like we were finally going to get through COVID.

Labour had a very bad period then. They lost a by-election in Hartlepool to the Conservatives. They did very badly in the local elections. People were sort of saying Keir Starmer wouldn’t last. You know, he’s going to have to resign. And then very quickly we saw a drop in the Torie vote because Boris Johnson got embroiled in a number of scandals, most notably Partygate. And we saw that sort of continue into the middle of 2022. Then he resigned, was sort of forced out by his party. Then you’ve got Truss, which is that big dip, 'cause obviously, the Truss premiership was a disaster. Sunak comes in, and you get then a fairly sort of steady period for a while. And then you start to get a drop-off more recently. And what’s happened is you can see the Reform, the lighter blue line of Reform, that’s what’s grown over the last year. So the Reform vote has just eaten up the Conservative vote. And it’s coming almost entirely from the Conservatives. So when UKIP did very well in 2015, they did take most of their votes from the Conservatives, but they also took an awful lot of votes from Labour. So it didn’t harm the Conservatives in quite the same way, because although UKIP got lots of votes in 2015, they were taking off both parties.

But because of that Brexit polarisation that I’ve been talking about, now all of those voters are going from Conservative to Reform. You’re getting a very small number going Labour to Reform. But nearly all of them are going Torie to Reform. So that big increase in the Reform vote over the last year has been almost entirely at the expense of the Tories and has become sort of a factor in this sort fraying of this new alignment that we had post Brexit. Then in the campaign itself, you’ve seen another big drop in the Conservative vote and another big rise in the Reform vote, which is a result of Nigel Farage taking over the leadership of Reform. And I’ve been writing for a couple of years. I wrote I think my first article two years ago, saying, if Farage came back, he could kill the Conservatives. Because you could see in the data that they were so unpopular with the group of voters. You know, strong leave, strong social conservative, older voters. You could see Sunak was very unpopular with that group. You could see the Conservatives were getting more unpopular with that group. And it only needed Nigel Farage to come back, who is the face of UKIP, the face of the Brexit party, the only one who has any real name recognition or prominence to come back to really kill the Conservatives.

You can see Reform were doing better before he came back, but then they’ve had this surge in the last month since Farage came back. And that has really, you know, destroyed the Conservative campaign, which was predicated on winning back the Reform voters they’ve lost. They’ve actually lost even more. It’s gone the other way. They’ve lost even more to Reform. So that’s kind of killed them during the campaign and, again, another reason why we’re going to get such an extreme result. But there’s another factor in here that I wanted to point out, the kind of final factor as to why we’re going to get this sort of extreme result. And why you may even, you know, there’s probably a 20% chance, if you believe the betting odds, that the Lib Dems might become the opposition party, the main opposition party. So it’s not quite as sharp an increase as the Reform increase, but you can see during the campaign, the Lib Dems have increased as well. And the Labour vote has dropped. And again, it’s not exactly like-for-like, but what we’ve seen here really, at the crude level, is that a bunch of the Labour vote has gone Lib Dem. And if you dig into the data as to why that’s happened, it looks very much like that’s tactical voting.

So even though the Labour vote has dropped, it’s not dropped in a way that’s going to hurt them. It’s dropped in a way that’s going to hurt the Conservatives. Because it’s gone to the Liberal Democrats, and it’s gone to the Liberal Democrats in areas where they are strongest. And they are challenging the Conservatives, particularly in the Southeast and the Southwest. So there’s a band of seats across the home counties, Oxfordshire and Surrey in particular, where the Lib Dems are challenging very strongly, and where it looks like a lot of Labour voters have gone over to the Lib Dems during the campaign in order to vote tactically, and will throw, I think, a lot of those seats to the Liberal Democrats. So, you know, they could even do better than some 50-seat projections that we’re seeing if you see what looks like tactical voting happening on the night. And this is quite similar to what happened in 1997. Just during the campaign and in the last few days of the campaign, the Labour vote dropped quite a lot in 1997. But again, the same thing happened. It went to the Lib Dems, and it was a function of tactical voting. And there was a lot of tactical voting in 1997, and it did hurt the Conservatives a lot. And I think, you know, for the first time since 1997 and 2001, we’re going to see a very large amount of tactical voting.

Because actually, Labour and the Lib Dems are now aligned again in a way they were back in 1997 and 2001, but haven’t been since. Because after 2001 we got Iraq, and Lib Dems and Labour were very opposed to each other on the question of Iraq. And the Lib Dems moved quite strongly to the left. Then you had the coalition, and the Lib Dems moved to being part, you know, a coalition with the Conservative Party, which again split them off from Labour. Then you had Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, which meant that Lib Dem voters were not so willing to vote tactically, and Labour voters were not so willing to vote for Lib Dems. They were much more oppositional. It’s only now you’ve got Keir Starmer and Ed Davey, who are quite similar characters in many ways and have a lot of the same views, that you have this sort of ability for Labour and Lib Dem voters to be more comfortable in switching tactically, which is why we’ve seen the same phenomenon we saw in 1997 happen again this time. So you combine these five factors. You’ve had the most unpopular government that we’ve ever had. You have the most unpopular prime minister coming into an election that we’ve ever had.

You have this incredibly proportional vote, this sort of Labour doing well where they need to do well, with Tories doing badly where it’s going to hurt them the most. You have Reform doing really well and particularly surging during the campaign. And you have what looks like a big tactical vote shift happening at the last minute as well. All of those factors are going to combine to mean we get one of the most sort of extraordinary results that we’ve ever had on Friday morning. If I’m right. But as I say, you know, there is still a range. You could see something that looks a bit more like 1997, which would still be a pretty extraordinary result, or it could be really much more extreme. So that’s kind of where we are and why we’re there. But before I sort of finish and go to questions, I wanted to sort of say a bit more about what this says I think about politics going forward and the nature of politics going forward. Because what we’re seeing in this election is actually kind of, it’s almost like going back to where we were before Brexit. But it now looks like the Brexit period is a real anomaly in British politics.

And we had this sort of extraordinary moment of polarisation, which ended up with a lot of people voting Conservative and Labour in 2017 and 2019. We had the biggest two-party share of the vote we’ve seen for a long time in those two elections because people were almost seeing them as being leave and remain parties. But before you had the referendum, you were seeing the two-party vote fracturing. And in this election again, we’ve seen the two-party vote fracture and Reform doing very well, the Lib Dems improving. Greens are probably going to get their best ever performance in a general election as well. And of course, you’ve still got the SNP in Scotland who are going to win seats, Plaid Cymru in Wales who are going to win seats. So you’re going to get this much more fragmented Parliament. And there’s going to be a lot of seats where Reform are second to Labour, and a lot of seats where the Green Party is second to Labour, particularly in urban constituencies, in places like London and Bristol. So you’re going to have a much more fragmented political landscape than we are used to, with Labour being the sort of only big party facing opponents from all over the political spectrum. And why is this happening? And I think, you know, it’s happening all over the world.

And a good way to think about it is we used to, you know, if you go back to sort of the period where we had a big two-party vote every time, '50s, the '60s, into the '70s, we had a very clear divide between Conservatives and Labour. You had Labour were the party of the workers, Conservatives were the party of the middle class. There was crossover between the two, but, you know, you had two clear identities. And people often had very strong party identification, with either I’m always Labour, I’m always Conservative. Over time, that’s broken down, and particularly since 1997, as Labour have sort of moved away from being identified with this sort of working-class party. And even more so following Brexit when Labour, you know, since Labour have become a very professional, well-educated party. And the Conservatives have actually now got more working-class voters than Labour do. So you’ve had this sort of strange shift in the party system. And what that’s meant is that we’ve ended up with, rather than having two clear party identities, you’ve got a range of political identities that don’t have a clear party identification. And John Curtis, who does the BBC election night analysis, does the swingometer and all of that, he did a piece for me recently for my site recently where he segmented, he wrote about a big piece of work he’s done where he segmented the voters of the UK into six groups.

These six groups. And it’s almost a better way of thinking about the electorate than party identification, because you don’t really have Labour and Tories anymore. You have groups, these six groups. Not everyone fits into these six groups. We don’t all fit into neat boxes, but broadly speaking. So you have well-off traditionalists who, if you like, are our sort of older, better-off Conservative voters or traditional Conservative voters. So they’ll be the one group the Conservatives do still win in this election. About 12% of the population. Then you’ve got apolitical centrists, which is people who don’t really care about politics at all, who have generally middle-of-the-road views on most things but aren’t particularly engaged. Tend to be a bit better off, tend to be a bit younger, and a sort of a floating voter group. middle Britons who are a bit older, a bit less well off, but similarly are very much in the middle of the electorate. Don’t have particularly strong leanings either way. Tend to be a bit more socially conservative, a bit more left leaning on economics.

Both of those groups are about 20% of the population. Soft-left liberals, of which you’ve got sort of richer, better-off, professional types, who tend to be more likely to vote Lib Dem or Labour, but aren’t particularly left wing and get nervous about very strong, kind of left-wing economic positions, but are supportive more on the socially liberal side. Left-behind patriots who are the sort of core of the Reform vote. These are poorer, more working-class, more older people, particularly in what you might call those left-behind kind of towns that are in post-industrial parts of the country. Sort of East Midlands, South Yorkshire, parts of East Anglia, parts of Wales, North Wales have strong sort of representation amongst that group. And then urban progressives who are sort of more likely to vote Green and are sort of younger, much more left wing, much more economically left wing, much more radical. So you can see how these groups don’t really fit neatly into our traditional two-party system. And Labour are going to win this time because they’re going to build a coalition of some urban progressives, some soft-left liberals, some even left-behind patriots, and quite a lot of apolitical centrists and middle Britons.

They’ll have quite a broad coalition. But it’ll be quite a difficult coalition to hold together, because those groups all have quite different interests and different views. Very easy to imagine that urban progressives are going to get pretty annoyed pretty quickly, and they certainly have very different views to left-behind patriots. It’s very hard to hold voters from both those two parts of their voter coalition and within that voter coalition. So you can easily see how that Labour vote could fragment over the course of the next few years, and we could continue to move away from a two-party system. And that’s, you know, what was happening before, as I said, before Brexit. So if you look at the two-party vote, historic two-party vote, you go all the way back to the war, you know, you get up to 1951. Almost the entire population was either voting Conservative or Labour. It was almost a complete two-party vote. You had a very small Liberal vote. That was it. Over time, you’ve seen that fall. It really started falling in the '70s, which was when you got very severe economic difficulties. The Liberal votes went back up a lot. You sort of saw the rise of Plaid Cymru and the SNP as nationalist parties in their countries. It sort of held steady during the Thatcher years and into New Labour.

Then started dropping again once you got Iraq and the end of the Labour government. Fell to 65% in 2010. You had a big Liberal Democrat vote that year. It was low again into 2015, when you had a big UKIP vote in 2015. Went back up due to Brexit. But I think that’s the anomaly. And I think if you look at the polls, it’s going to probably be the lowest ever this time. Maybe 60, 61% in this election. Be the lowest we’ve ever had of a two-party vote since the war. And that could go down again. I would not be surprised at all if that went down again whenever the next election is. So we’re starting to move towards something that looks more like a proportional representation system in terms of our vote share, but we’re still using a electoral system, first past the post, that is designed for two parties, which is going to throw up increasingly weird results. This result’s going to be quite weird. The next result could be even weirder, in some ways, whilst we still are using a voting system that doesn’t really fit with the way that people think about their political identification anymore. This one just shows how this is happening all over the world.

In countries that have traditionally had a two-party vote, whether that’s Australia, Canada, Greece, Ireland, New Zealand, every one of those countries is seeing a decline in that two-party vote. And everyone is seeing a sort of similar rise of what looks more like a PR split in their vote that is more familiar to kind of European countries that have PR systems. And you are starting, in fact, to see in some countries like New Zealand, they moved to a PR system, a few, you know, couple of decades ago, more pressure to kind of do that. So I think that I’ll finish on that point in terms of what might happen over the next few years. I think this is going to be a huge victory for Labour. But as another analyst called it, it could be a bit of a monumental sandcastle that looks enormous and then gets blown away pretty quickly. So it’s certainly not one, you know, Labour will enjoy this week, but it’s not necessarily a position they’re going to enjoy for very long. And I don’t necessarily think the Conservatives will be the party that come back and sort of win 40% of the vote next time. I think we might see something that looks a lot more fragmented.

So just before I stop sharing my slides, it was mentioned at the start, but I wanted to just flag, I’ve got a book coming out in a couple of weeks. And this book talks, I think, a lot about why our political parties have got themselves into a position where they’re finding it so difficult to win voter coalitions, and why our political parties have got so untrusted and so unpopular. Because a lot of our institutions that we rely on to make the state work have failed or certainly got a lot worse. So I talk about a lot of those institutions. Whether it’s the way central government works, the destruction of local government, the overreliance on private companies to provide a lot of what the state does, the way Parliament has become a lot less effective, the civil service has become less effective, and how the media and changes to the media have exacerbated all those other trends, as well as some ideas as to how we could fix it and some of the ideas that I’m really hoping that Labour will take up. So I will finish with a little plug for the book. But I’m now going to stop sharing the slides and go have a look at what you’ve been asking in the Q&A and hopefully pick up some of those questions.

Right. So I’m going to have a look at the Q&A and see what we’ve got in there.

Q&A and Comments

Q: How do I think the current undecideds will vote? A: That’s the first question. I think they’ll split fairly evenly. That’s what the current polls are showing. It’s starting to reduce quite a lot now, as it always does in the final week, down to about 5, 10% of voters who are still saying they’re undecided. And if you ask them how they’re leaning, they split fairly evenly. Labour, Torie, quite a big chunk Reform. So I don’t think it’s going to massively change the outcome that we’re going to see.

Q: What is the predicted vote share for the parties? A: So roughly 40% for Labour, early 20s, 21, 22% for the Conservatives, somewhere around 15, 16% for Reform, and around 11, 12% for the Liberal Democrats. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Liberal Democrats did a little bit better than that, just because of this tactical voting effect. But, you know, all the polls, however their methodology works, and we’ve got dozens and dozens of different methodologies, they’re all pointing to something that looks like those voter shares, which is why you’re getting this sort of extraordinary result.

Q: Does the UK have early voting? A: Yep, we do have postal voting. About 20% of people have already voted, roughly. If we assume it’s roughly similar to last time. Might be a bit more than last time. So yeah. So about a fifth of people have already voted. And actually, parties can get a bit of a sense of what’s going on, because those postal votes are opened before… They’re already being opened. You’re not supposed to see, anyway, the actual vote, though sometimes parties can see a few of those votes and get a bit of a sense. But you can see how many postal votes have come in and whether they’re roughly in accordance with the numbers you were expecting. So you can kind of get a sense of is it what we were predicting would happen. And all the parties say that it’s roughly in line with the polls, the early postal voting.

Q: Will this worsen mass migration policy? A: So I don’t think that Labour will increase immigration compared to the Conservatives. We’ve had by far the biggest couple of years of net migration that we’ve ever had over the last two years, for all sorts of complicated reasons. But it is now coming down and will, you know, almost whatever Labour do, continue to come down, because post-pandemic effects means that we’ve now got a lot of students leaving. The Ukraine and Hong Kong schemes have come to an end, more or less, and some people from Ukraine are going back home. So we’re seeing a big drop in migration now. So it’ll go from about 700,000 last year probably to about 250,000, at a sort of flat level. Which is still quite high historically, but much lower than it’s been in the last few years. As for illegal migration or sort of small boat crossings, obviously, nothing the Conservatives done have has stopped that. It’s at its highest ever level this year. Labour are also going to struggle to stop that. Every country has some level of illegal migration in Europe. You know, in fact, nearly every other country has more than we do. It’s very, very, very difficult to stop completely. But I certainly think you could do better than the current government have done keeping numbers lower. In an ideal world, we’d move towards a situation where we had a deal with Europe over it. But that could be a very long way off.

Q: Why was a movement to reverse Brexit not part of the election manifestos of the parties? A: Well, the Conservatives, because that’s their only achievement. They still think it was the right thing to do, and they’re still backing it, albeit with quite a quiet voice these days because it’s not very popular with the population. Reform, obviously big part of their agenda too. And their argument would be that it hasn’t worked because we haven’t done it aggressively enough or strongly enough. Labour haven’t talked about it because they are trying to win people who voted leave, essentially. They basically banked everyone who voted remain. Everyone who voted remain is either voting Liberal Democrat or Labour. So the only votes they can win are people who voted leave. So they don’t want to go into an election where they’re trying to win leave voters by saying, “You were wrong. We’re going to undo your vote in the referendum.” I do think, once they’re in government, although they certainly won’t move immediately on Brexit, I think there will become more and more pressure over time as… Because, you know, most of their backbenchers will have voted for remain, most of their members have voted for remain.

As the population changes and as younger voters come into the electorate and older voters die, the voting population will shift more and more in favour of rejoining Europe. So it’s something that will I think be more of an issue in the next Parliament than it has been during the election. The Liberal Democrats do have in their manifesto that they want to rejoin the single market, which is the only thing really any of them have, which is sort of a move back in that direction. But even they have not been very loud about it. They’ve been more focused on Ed Davey bungee jumping than talking about that. The resolution of the Irish issue must be regarded as an achievement. His performance must be judged against the problems he faced, including in his own party. So yeah, I do. As I said, I think, you know, certainly, Sunak had a very difficult inheritance. He does have a very difficult party to manage. He was dealt a bad hand, but he also played it very badly. There are things he did not need to do. He did not need to carry on with the Rwanda policy, which has been a disaster, as many of us predicted it would be, and has in fact highlighted the issue of small votes even more and made it even easier for Reform to take votes off the Conservatives. You know, he could have resolved this junior doctor strike. He could have negotiated with the junior doctors. Chose not to do that, which has meant he missed his NHS waiting list target.

So yes, absolutely, he had a difficult inheritance, but he did make it worse as well. The Windsor Protocol of Northern Ireland was an achievement, certainly. Hasn’t resolved the issue, though. If you look at recent court cases, there is still a big problem with Northern Ireland having a different set of arrangements to the rest of England. And it’s still going to be a problem that Labour are going to have to find ways to deal with, now Supreme Court are going to have to deal with as well. So even that isn’t a sort of complete achievement, if you like.

Q: How does Labour’s foreign policy differ on issues like Ukraine, Russia, and Israel? A: So on Ukraine, it doesn’t differ at all. Ukraine policy is essentially identical to the Conservatives, which is why the sort of stuff that Sunak’s been doing today on sort of saying that Putin wants Starmer to win is just sort of utter rot. There’s no basis whatsoever in that. A lot of the people who’ve been advising the government on Ukraine are also advising the Labour Party. So there won’t be a change of policy there. On Israel, again, in terms of sort of formal policy, I don’t think their formal policy is any different. Both the Conservative position and the Labour position is broadly that they want the fighting to end and, you know, want both parties to take steps towards doing that. Hamas to release remaining hostages, Israel to stop their incursion into Gaza. Labour have a bit of a stronger position on it than the Conservatives do, which they’ve kind of been pushed there by sort of the fact that Palestine is a big issue amongst their own supporters. So they are calling for an immediate ceasefire, which the Conservatives never have quite done. Middle East is an area, obviously, which is trickier for Labour because of this sort of split within their own party. I don’t think you’ll see a dramatically different position on Israel, but I do think you’ll see Starmer and his front bench team coming under quite a lot of pressure on Israel from some MPs, from a minority of MPs, and from people within the party. So it will definitely be a much trickier issue for them to navigate, whereas Ukraine, they can more or less continue with the policy as is.

Q: If when Labour get in, would it be possible likely that Starmer is pushed out by the hard left? A: No is the very simple answer to that one. The hard left is incredibly weak now within the Labour Party. Corbyn’s going to lose his seat probably, in Islington North. Even if he won, he’d be sitting as an independent. You know, you’ve got a small group of older, hard-left MPs like McDonald and Abbott. You’ve got an even smaller group of younger, hard-left MPs like Zarah Sultana, Cat Smith, Rebecca Long-Bailey. It’s a very small number. You know, we’re talking 450 MPs. Maybe 25 are on what you’d call the far left or the hard left. So they have no ability to attack Starmer. I mean, they can rebel as much as they like, but they’re not going to be able to bring Starer down in any way. I think it’s much more likely that Starmer will, when he does fail, as all politicians do in the end, will be brought down on issues of public spending or Europe, which will be much more of a sort of mainstream center-left issues rather than any hard-left issues.

Q: Is France the canary in the coal mine? A: I don’t think it’s the canary in the coal mine. I think we’ve had a lot of evidence over the last couple of decades that the far right is growing in strength in Europe and around the world. Populist parties are doing much better and are starting to empower in a lot of democracies. Obviously, we’ve got Meloni in Italy, we’ve got Orban in Hungary, and other far-right parties doing well in Germany and Portugal. UKIP did very well here. Reform are going to do very well here. Trump obviously won in America, Modi in India. It’s not a new phenomenon that we’re seeing in France. And I think it goes to what I was talking about, in terms of this real fragmentation of political identities, and the fact that you have this group in pretty much every developed nation who feel left out, feel left behind. Often older, often more socially conservative. Feel that society has got away from them. Are very concerned about high levels of immigration. That group is there everywhere. And when you get a situation, as we might be seeing in France, as we saw in Italy, where people who are perhaps more, have typically been more center-right are willing to vote for that more right-wing party in order to keep out a more left-wing party, you know, which in France is represented by Melenchon, that’s when they start to get real power and control in countries. So, you know, as I say, our political system is going to fragment. And certainly, our voting system makes it harder for a party like that to win control. But you could easily see things falling, that they could get a big number of MPs at the next Parliament. And we could see that kind of shift happening in the UK as well. So absolutely, it’s very significant.

Q: What influences the Muslim vote, antisemitic vote there? A: Well, firstly, I would say those things are very different. They’re not the same thing. From all the polling we have on Muslims, most Muslims vote on issues that have nothing to do with Gaza and nothing to do with the Middle East. Most are still voting for Labour, but it’s a reflection of the fact that they have the same interests as everybody else: cost of living, NHS, et cetera. So it’s not a sort of antisemitic vote in any sense. You have got some constituencies where you have, particularly religious Muslim communities, who do care a lot about Gaza and where you will see that reflected in the election. Birmingham Ladywood is one where Labour’s vote will drop a lot. East Tower Hamlets, some seats. Stratford and Bow, you’ll see Labour’s vote drop a lot. Blackburn, Dewsbury, and Batley, places like that. Not many seats. We’re talking 10 seats where that will happen nationally. So it’s not a significant issue nationally, but you will see Labour’s vote drop in those seats. But the vast majority of Muslims now don’t live in those seats. They live in very mixed seats and vote on the same things that everyone else votes on. What are my views and direct thoughts in proportional representation? Well, as I guess I’ve sort of indicated, I think we’re kind of going to have to move to a proportional representation system because that’s the way the electorate are moving. And our voting system just doesn’t reflect it. First past the post works fine when you have two big parties. It is a perfectly sensible system when you have two big parties. When you have five parties, it doesn’t make any sense at all. You get very weird results. You know, we are going to have seats at this election that parties are going to be winning on 25, 26% of the vote that are split five ways. And that doesn’t make any sense. You know, in those kinds of seats, at very least you need to have some kind of ranked voting like you have in Australia or France, where everyone votes the way they want first time and then you have a runoff of some kind in a second round, which can happen. You don’t need to have two separate stages as in France. You can do it all by having to vote a first and second preference choice vote, as we did in London elections until very recently and other mayoral elections until very recently. At very least, we’re going to need to move in that direction, arguably even further towards a more European-style proportional representation system. You know, I think you can argue forever about what’s better as the voting system. It’s just that the electorate are are taking us in that direction. And it is not going to be sustainable to have a first-past-the-post system forever. I don’t think it’s something Labour are going to do very quickly because it suits them right now to have first past the post. But ultimately, it’s not going to be sustainable.

What’s the time? Just a couple more questions, then. What’s the major difference of election results between UK Labour and EU… I’m sorry, I don’t understand that question.

Q: Why are the Conservatives directing all their fire at Labour instead of tackling Reform head on? A: That is a very good question. They made, I think, a big strategic mistake quite a long time ago, which is that they were going to shift to the right to stop voters moving to Reform. Not in terms of what they’ve actually done, but rhetorically they were going to shift to the right. It’s why you had Rwanda being pushed so hard, why you’ve had sort of lots of kind of cultural war stuff from them. They’ve been trying to do all of that stuff to win back the Reform vote. So given that strategy, being rude to Reform was not what they wanted to do. They wanted to say, “We understand why you like Nigel Farage, but, you know, we are the best party for you to vote for still.” And it’s been very, very hard to shift that last minute to attacking Reform. They have tried. They’ve gone quite hard on Farage over his, sort of the comments on Ukraine, on some of the racism stuff over the last week we’ve seen from Reform, but it’s kind of been too late. They made the wrong strategic mistake a long time ago. They should have gone much harder for Reform and said, “We are actually the sensible center-right party who’s good for the economy. You know, we’re not far right, we’re not far left. You know, we are here for the good of the majority.” But they chose to to go down what I would think is the wrong strategy, I think has been proved to be the wrong strategy. I’m trying to go for some questions that we haven’t had versions of before. Question about the US.

Q: You know, given people are very unhappy with Biden and Trump, will we have a shift there away from two-party dominance? A: It’s really, really hard in the States. The States has the hardest model of a two-party voting system anywhere in the world, because it’s so hard for a third party to run, to even get on the ballot paper. So possibly. I actually think if you’d had a very strong, well-known independent candidate this time, they would’ve got maybe 20, 30% of the vote. But we haven’t had one. One hasn’t put their name forward. So you could see a challenge like that if the Republicans and Democrats continue to put up such bad candidates. But it is much, much harder in the States than it is anywhere else because of the nature of the voting system there.

Q: Will Labour get rid of the Rwanda plan? A: Yep, that’s an easy one to answer. They’ve said they will. They’ll definitely get rid of the Rwanda plan.

Q: Why is no one talking about the debt? A: They will be talking about the debt pretty quickly when we have the budget in a couple of months. All the parties have been sort of pretending, putting their fingers in their ears, and saying “La, la, la” when it comes to this current fiscal position that we’re in. But that will be top of the agenda fairly soon. And final question that I will do 'cause we’re just about out of time.

Q: Any parallels to Canada in 1993? A: Yes, Canada in 1993 is the only time really in the modern developed world that we’ve had a first-past-the-post election which has seen a kind of wipe out of this scale for a governing party. And it did happen in quite similar ways. You had a far-right party called Reform emerge and take a lot of Conservative votes away from them. There are differences, big differences. I actually did an interview with Kim Campbell, who was the prime minister who lost that election in 1993, which is on my Substack, which you can have a look at, talking about the similarities and the differences and how it felt to be a prime minister who sees your party kind of collapse on election night.

But I’m out of time. We have done a full hour. Thank you so much for so many great questions. I hope you found that a useful and interesting session. And thank you very much. Hopefully we’ll speak at another one of these events soon.