Hello and welcome to UK-Nchanging Europe's all-seeing all-dancing podcast, Brexit and Beyond. Today we welcome the celebrity power couple of British political science, Maria Soleska, and Rob Ford, both of Manchester University.

They're the authors of a new book, Brexit Land, which tries to take a long-term look at the polarisation of politics of which the Brexit vote is both a symptom and arguably also a cause.

But as usual on Brexit and beyond, we're also gonna talk a little bit about

how they both got into the academic game in the first place,

the kind of stuff they did before this particular project,

and their views on communicating social science research

to the wider public, which is something I know they take very seriously,

and which of course is very much a part of the overall mission of

UK and the changing Europe. So welcome Rob, welcome Maria. Hello. So Maria, can you tell us a little

bit about the work that you've done before this particular project and how in some senses that work

may have kind of led up to this? So my interest in British politics started in the late 1990s when I was a teenager.

And one of the kind of big themes that started emerging around that time was the increasing

influence of ethnic minority vote on British elections.

And I think this was the first time when this was discussed as a mainstream

issue and it's really stayed with me. So when I got asked by Anthony to apply for a PhD in Oxford,

I did write a proposal trying to explain the block vote of ethnic minorities. And so this is how I started. And in many ways,

even working on issues other than ethnic minority voting, I am carrying with me that interest

in ethnicity, race and diversity in politics.

Where do you think that comes from? I mean, it's interesting that it comes from someone from a country where, let's face it,

ethnic diversity is not huge.

It might be a huge issue, but it's not huge.

Yeah, I mean, it is very hard to kind of a post hoc rationalise things like that.

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