Hello everybody and welcome to another Brexit and beyond podcast from UK and a changing Europe.

Today we are delighted to be able to welcome as our guest Paula Surridge from Bristol University. Many of you may have heard of Paula, because she's actually been in the media quite a lot for her research on social values and the effect that they may or may not have on people's preferences when it comes to Brexit, but also when it comes to voting in general elections.

We're going to be discussing both of those today.

We're also going to be discussing how Paula got into academia, her academic work,

but also how she communicates that academic work to a wider public.

So welcome Paula.

Hello.

Now, Paula, maybe we can start just by talking a little bit about how you got into academia,

because I believe you didn't do political science as your first degree. Tell us about that.

No, I don't tell very many people, and I'm a little bit nervous about telling the world,

but my first degree is actually

in accountancy because I came from a background where nobody had ever been to university

before. We didn't have the first clue what academic life was all about. And I was good at maths.

So that seemed like an obvious thing to do was to go off and study accountancy. And so I did that

and I didn't enjoy it, I have to say. I mean, I struggled my way through it, but it wasn't,

it wasn't something I really enjoyed. And then I went to work at, as a civil servant in the

Scottish office in Edinburgh, modelling how many teachers they needed each year

because they actually make their decisions on training teachers

in a sensible way based on how many teachers they actually need.

And whilst there, the 1992 general election happened,

and some listeners may remember that there was a polling disaster in 1992 and that fascinated me.

I was absolutely fascinated by that big polling miss in 1992 and was lucky enough to get a job with Jack Brand and James Mitchell at Strathclyde working on the

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