Hello my name is David Ronsman and this is Talking Politics. It's the end of the party conference season in the UK.

Theresa May is going to give her speech later this morning. We're going to try and make sense of what we've learned in the past few weeks.

Is Labour really now the centre ground of British politics? And if that were true, what would it mean for the Tories?

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This week I'm joined by Helen Thompson and it's a pleasure to welcome for the first time and I'm sure not the last Mike Kenney who is Professor of Public Policy here in Cambridge.

Mike, among many other things, has been working on a project about Englishness in British politics and English nationalism.

We're going to come onto that because the question of where the centre ground is is complicated by the fact.

It might be different in England than the rest of the UK.

Let's start though with Labour and then we'll come onto the Tories.

I was looking this morning to see what exactly Corbyn said.

He actually said we're now the centre of gravity and I know it's a vice of academics to get hung up on some antics but that's slightly different than being the centre ground.

But also that Labour is now the mainstream which again is not quite the same thing. Helen, do you buy any of that?

Not necessarily in the sense that if you look at the way the parties are at the moment they're pretty much equal with each other.

We have two parties who look like they command more than 40% or around 40% of the vote.

And it hasn't moved much to the election.

If you look at all the woes the Conservatives have had since the election.

Let's just start with the fact that they're a much less united government or at least that they can't control their divisions and publicly in the way which they could before the election.

That's quite astonishing really because you would expect a party displaying this level of internal disunity and basically practical incompetence about a number of matters not to be at 40% in the polls.

So I think to say that Labour is in some essentially dominant position in relation to the Conservatives and is able to set the political agenda in that sense that doesn't make sense.

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