Hello and welcome to another edition of Brexit and Beyond podcast from UK in a changing Europe.

Today we're going to be talking to Professor Will Jennings from the University of Southampton.

Will is the author of a number of books.

Two of the most recent include Politics of Competence, which he co-authored

with Jane Green, and another co-authored book, The Good Politician from 2018, which looks at

anti-politics, really from the 1940s onwards in the UK and attempts to diagnose it. Will, welcome.

We're going to talk to you a little bit later

about some work that you've been doing with the help of UK and changing Europe on trust and

Brexit and COVID. Now, obviously, I know you pretty well, but some of our listeners may not. So if you

had to pick three or four sort of take-home messages from the work

that you've done so far in your entire career, Will, a big question. Well, I mean, so I think

if you were to ask me, I mean, I work in a number of areas, which I might pick out a few things

from. I mean, I think the first I'd say is actually I've done a lot of work looking at how the public

respond to government policies and government.

And actually, you know, I think the key number one thing is the public aren't stupid.

You know, the public can recognize failures in government.

They can recognize good and bad performance from government and political

parties. They can recognize when the people are trying to pull the wool over their eyes.

And so I think, you know, one key thing I think is the public's quite good at recognizing

when government's going too far beyond its remit. So I think that would be one thing.

Tell us how do you square that with surveys which show actually the public don't pay a great

deal of attention to politics and indeed have very little knowledge on average of politics?

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