Hi everyone, welcome to this latest episode of the UK in a Changing Europe podcast.

And today I'm chuffed to be joined by Jane Green, who is Professor of.

She just told me what she's Professor of, and I'm about to get it wrong.

But here we go.

Professor of Political Science and British Politics.

Is that right, Jane?

Full marks.

Yes, that's correct. Jane, of course, is not only a political scientist, she's a sophologist, and she runs the British Elections Study. So we're going to talk a little bit today about elections, about polling. And the obvious place to start, I suppose, Jane, even though they don't feel that recent, are the recent local and devolved elections.

And I mean, if you just want to kick us off by just telling us that what are your key takeaways

from what were quite a remarkable set of elections, weren't they?

Yeah, they were remarkable, but they weren't surprising.

And so what they confirmed was that Labor had been really struggling with a strategy of, you know,

essentially overweighting reform vote losses, which were small in comparison to vote losses on the left. And these were the

elections because so many of the elections were happening in places where also left parties,

i.e. the Greens in this instance in England, but also the nationalist parties, certainly in Wales,

in particular, were able to demonstrate that, you know, this vote strategy that Labor, I mean,

whether or not, you know, insofar as they'd been only pursuing this, but that this was hugely

risky and hugely therefore damaging in May when we saw Labour's dominance in Wales

finally come to a sort of very bitter end. And the race becoming one between plied and the reform.

And that was a story which really magnified, I think, our understanding work that I've done with

Martin Miore here at Nuffield College

that really underlined our understanding of the kind of ideological sides in British politics

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