Elections ’21: Sheer Hartlepool Attack

Inside Briefing with the Institute for Government

Institute for Government

News, Politics, Government

4.6 • 252 Ratings

🗓️ 7 May 2021

⏱️ 22 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Was the seismic shock of the Conservative victory in Hartlepool down to Brexit, vaccines, pork barrel politics or something more fundamental? What does this shock by-election mean for the endless battle between Starmer and the Corbynites? In the local elections, are the so-called Green and Lib Dem surges real? And what we know so far about the Scottish and Welsh national elections – all in a Friday afternoon interim election special. • “Journalists will be thumbing over this for days – but political scientists will be looking at the causes for years to come.” – Cath Haddon • “The trend towards this has been decades in the making.” – Jess Sargeant Presented by Bronwen Maddox with Cath Haddon, Akash Paun and Jess Sargeant. Audio production by Alex Rees. Inside Briefing is a Podmasters Production for the IfG. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to Inside Briefing, the podcast from the Institute for Government. I'm Bronwyn Maddox.
0:16.4	It's the morning after the night before, except that there are a few more days and nights are counting to go yet. Super Thursday saw elections in Scotland, Wales and all across England.
0:26.1	General elections get all the headlines, usually, but these elections could have a profound
0:30.2	impact on the Union of the United Kingdom itself.
0:33.4	We know some of the results. The Conservatives won the Hartleypool by election in spectacular fashion.
0:38.6	Others are becoming a little clearer even as we record this podcast.
0:42.0	So we've called together an expert IFG team to make sense of where we are.
0:45.8	And what might happen next?
0:47.7	IFG senior fellow, Akash Pound, who leads our work on DeVolution, is with us.
0:51.6	Hi, Akash.
0:52.3	Hi, Rih.
0:53.9	Jess Sargent is a senior researcher on
0:55.9	our devolution and Brexit teams. Hi, Jess. Hello. And Kath Hadden is a senior fellow. Leads our
1:01.8	work on the Constitution. Hi, Kath. Hello, Bronwyn. Kath, I wonder if you could start us off
1:08.1	with Hartley-Paul, where the Conservatives won a seat, which have been labours for more than half a century. Yeah, I mean, this is a seat created in
1:14.9	1974. There's a lot of, you know, talking the run-up to it. The polls were showing a conservative
1:20.6	lead. There was lots of debate about, do those polls mean anything, etc. But the mute music
1:25.4	was very much that this was probably, you know, likely to go to
1:29.2	the Conservatives in a shock. What's been an even bigger shock is the scale of the victory.
1:33.9	It's a nearly 7,000 majority. You know, it's a swing of 16% from Labour to the Conservatives.
1:41.2	So it's really thrown, you know, the cat amongst the pigeons in terms of
1:45.7	debates. And it's for the impartial observer, you can almost put any narrative you want to it.
	...

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