One Election or Many?
TALKING POLITICS
Catherine Carr
4.7 • 2.5K Ratings
🗓️ 14 November 2019
⏱️ 48 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
We have a first look at what's happening in the election campaign by asking whether it's really one election or many. Do national vote shares mean much any more, given all the regional variations? How is the Remain Alliance meant to work? Is this a Brexit election? And is 2015 or 2017 (or neither) a better guide to 2019? Plus we discuss the recent election in Spain and explore parallels between gridlock there and possible gridlock here. With Helen Thompson, Chris Bickerton and Mike Kenny.
Talking Points:
One month out from the election, what do we know?
- Why do commentators still rely on polls and betting markets?
- What is the appropriate unit of analysis for this election? Is it regional? National?
- The rural/urban divide seems to cut across the regional effects.
- But tactical voting pulls things down to a more granular level: you have to look at particular seats.
Many people thought this would be a Brexit election, but it doesn’t really look like that.
- The big theme seems to be spending.
- The anti-Corbyn factor also complicates things. Corbyn has generated both a new base, and a backlash.
- The Lib-Dems tried to capitalize on this. But they’ve backed down on their anti-Corbyn stance in favour of the Remain alliance.
- If you look at polling on the fundamentals, Johnson is outstripping Corbyn.
- Conservative remainers say they won’t vote for Labour.
Will this election be more like 2015 than 2017?
- Wider forces might overcome local variation.
- Lib-Dem voters in the Southwest are generally closer to the Conservatives than Labour.
- The SNP are now proactively in favour of a referendum, and Labour has essentially pulled out of the Unionist position. Who will speak for the Scottish unionists?
There’s little scrutiny of Johnson’s deal.
- Farage won’t be fighting Johnson on this point. And Labour doesn’t want the election to be just about Brexit.
In Spain, instead of breaking the deadlock, voters entrenched it. Could this happen in the UK?
- Catalonian independence also hardened far-right support.
- Could Scotland drive English nationalism or increase support for far right parties?
Mentioned in this Episode:
Further Learning:
And as ever, recommended reading curated by our friends at the LRB can be found here: lrb.co.uk/talking
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello my name is David Runsman and this is Talking Politics. We are one month from |
| 0:11.6 | Poding Day in the UK General Election. The campaign has not been going for long but it's |
| 0:16.5 | starting to take shape. Do we know what kind of election it is yet? |
| 0:26.0 | Talking Politics is brought to you in partnership with the London Review of Books which is celebrating |
| 0:30.6 | its 40th anniversary for the next few months with an unimprovable offer. Get a year's subscription |
| 0:37.1 | and a limited edition LRB tote bag for just £40 by using the URL lrb.me forward slash |
| 0:46.2 | birthday. |
| 0:53.5 | We have a full house today, Helen Thompson, expert in political economy, Chris Bickerton |
| 0:58.7 | who is an expert in European politics and a bit later we are going to come on to a comparison |
| 1:03.1 | with the elections in Spain because there are some quite interesting potential parallels |
| 1:06.9 | there. Mike Kenny, Professor of Public Policy who also among many other things is pretty |
| 1:12.7 | knowledgeable about, I'm going to call it, English nationalism and I think we are going |
| 1:16.8 | to come onto that too whether it's possible to think about this in any sense as an English |
| 1:21.3 | election. We are a week and a half into this campaign, I suppose I should say up front |
| 1:26.0 | two of us have got colds, if they are going to hold elections in winter, us commentators |
| 1:29.6 | we are really going to struggle here. My feeling about this, us commentators is that we |
| 1:35.2 | are all behaving, I am going to speak for myself, classic, addictive behaviour. We know |
| 1:41.6 | that polls are bad for us, we know over the past few years that we have indulged these |
| 1:46.5 | vices that have come back to Bitos and yet we can't stop. Maybe you guys are all looking |
| 1:51.6 | like, you are much more disciplined than me, so my vices are the betting markets. I know, |
| 1:56.3 | I know this, but the last four elections, the betting markets have consistently got them |
| 2:01.0 | wrong and yet each morning I look at Odds Checker to see what the odds are on the one |
... |
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