This is an audio transcript of the Political Fix podcast episode: ‘Is a Labour win over the Conservatives inevitable in 2024?’

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Stephen Bush
Welcome to the Political Fix, your essential guide to Westminster from the Financial Times, with me, Stephen Bush. And what a week it’s been. Just as we are about to publish this week’s pod, Dominic Raab, the deputy prime minister, announced he was resigning. The prime minister will now be forced to bring forward a cabinet reshuffle, which many had expected to take place after May’s local elections. We’ll look at the fallout of Raab’s resignation in coming editions of Political Fix.

But for now, we’ve got something different on the menu — an extended edition recorded as an FT Live webinar and hosted by my colleague Miranda Green. We asked, is a Labour victory over the Conservatives expected next year inevitable? On the panel with Miranda and me were Jane Green, professor of political science and British politics at Nuffield College, Oxford, and Peter Foster, the FT’s public policy editor. Viewers sent in dozens of questions during the live event. First up, Miranda put a viewers’ question to Peter Foster. How much of an issue will Brexit remain in the coming general election?

Peter Foster
So I think it’s genuinely an interesting question, because I think Brexit is everywhere but nowhere in the election. Neither political party really wants to get into a Brexit discussion. Certainly not the Labour party. And if you look at opinion polling on Brexit, the public mood has soured on Brexit, certainly on the economics of Brexit. And so beyond the kind of top-level commitment to getting the opportunities of Brexit and boosts through freeports, most of which is a sort of really just a political chimera, I don’t see there’s much meat in Brexit.

On the other hand, the divisions that Brexit represents that, you know, in terms of densities of new politics, are absolutely there. You know, Rob Ford in Manchester did some quite interesting stuff looking at how those people who have moved over to approve of Rishi Sunak, whose obviously approval rating is higher than the Tory party, are often actually kind of Remain-identifying voters because they like Rishi, drinks Diet Coke, he reads his brief, he’s a sensible fellow, unlike the last lot. But for those people who identify still as Brexiters, Sunak doesn’t feel like a Brexiter. He feels like a managerial list. He feels rich, he feels distant. And I think . . . 

Miranda Green
Even though he was an early champion of Brexit?

Peter Foster
Even though he was an early champion. And actually in lots of ways he’s in some of the kind of, the more kind of deregulatory kind of hardcore Brexit where he’s actually more of a Brexiter than people give him credit for, funnily enough. But I don’t think that will come through on the doorsteps. And so in terms of the other issues, well, you know, it’s possible with these new customs controls coming in, we might see some shortages, you know, over Christmas, we might see some more travel delays when the new EU ETIAS biometric checks at the border comes in. We might see the Stormont assembly comes back, but no one really cares about that. So I don’t see Brexit being an issue on the trail itself.

And then after the election, well, it’s an interesting question, though. It begs the question, if the Labour party haven’t really talked about what they want to do with the EU after Brexit ’cause they don’t wanna get into the weeds on Brexit ’cause they’re worried about those people who felt that they, you know, tried to stop getting Brexit done, what mandate do they have after the election to really get stuck in and try and rebuild the relationship? And do they want to do that particularly if they have a small majority? I don’t think that’s a done deal either. I think people hear what they want to hear on that, but actually it’s not clear to me talking to Labour politicians that they really want to risk another big argument about Brexit to get quite incremental economic gains that you might get from repairing the TCA. We’ll see.

Miranda Green
Jane, can I bring you in here . . . 

Jane Green
Yeah.

Miranda Green
In terms of the evidence, as a political scientist, what do we know about how far the British voting public have sort of left that Brexit divide behind them . . . 

Jane Green
Mm-hmm.

Miranda Green
And are maybe perhaps ready to go back to more traditional voting patterns or voting on issues that are more what we call bread and butter?

Jane Green
Mm-hmm.

Miranda Green
But how much, as Peter said, are those, you know, those loyalties and those deep divisions that affected politics post-Brexit is still there?

Jane Green
The evidence is quite paradoxical in a way.

Miranda Green
Yeah.

Jane Green
So what you see is that there’s sort of salience, so what people say is the most important issue has absolutely changed. And so people who were saying Brexit was the most important issue clearly now, then it was Covid, and now it’s the economy. But that doesn’t mean the structure of support has changed very much at all. In fact, the structure of support — so Leavers being more likely to identify as Conservatives, Remainers being more likely to support the Labour party — that’s hardly changed since the last election. Now that makes lots of sense when you think about just how big a shift that was. So in the kind of big long-term history of electoral politics, you know, we think about how voters are aligned to different political parties and what are the kind of factors, what really causes those alignments. Now for those alignments to really change in a very substantial way as happened after 2016, it takes something really dramatic. You know, Brexit . . . 

Miranda Green
Something of the scale of Brexit.

Jane Green
Exactly, exactly. And so what we saw after 2016 was a very substantial realignment. So that was kind of expressed in older voters, voters with lower levels of education being much more likely to support the Conservatives and the reverse being true for the Labour party. And you saw also the two parties’ share being higher in terms of, you know, voters looking at the two parties, this very high-stakes election. There’s British election study data where we’ve been tracking the same people over time and we have very large surveys, 30,000 people, sometimes once a year, sometimes twice a year. What we see is the pattern has just been very stable since 2016. And so the paradoxical part is that kind of Brexit may seem unimportant but still really defined the way that we’re voting, not necessarily because the issue is now doing all of the work, but that those kind of patterns of support just are very sticky and other things also helping those to continue and stay constant, partly because the Conservatives are still appealing to those Leave voters. They might not be doing it on Brexit, but they are still seeking to appeal to those older voters, those voters who have low levels of education on different issues.

Miranda Green
And because it’s very necessary to them to do that, to hold on to the coalition, which won them a significant majority in 2019.

Jane Green
I mean, I think that’s kind of a really tricky question in a way, though, ’cause it is . . . because on the surface of it you’d say, well, yes, I mean, they have a very clear incentive to try to win the election on the basis of how they won the election last time. What’s changed, of course, is the level of support for the Conservatives have dropped. And it’s also the case that people’s Brexit attitudes have softened. So there are fewer people now who would say they would vote to leave in a second referendum. People’s immigration attitudes have softened over that time period. So could they actually get as much support from that same kind of electoral commission? I think evidence suggests probably not right now.

Miranda Green
Right. That’s really interesting. Stephen, what do you think about this? Because we’ve also had a sort of allied question in, which picks up Peter’s point, which is, “Is Starmer at risk of playing too safe?” I suppose the issue Peter was talking about where they want to actually avoid the Brexit conversation because of those reasons that Jane’s outlined is part of that. We’ve had quite a lot of questions in which I’ve actually said, you know, talked about the lack of recognition for Keir Starmer’s leadership. What are his kind of USPs? What are Labour’s USPs? But also this question of, it’s Labour timidity I suppose, on policy, particularly controversial policy. I know you’ve been out and about in the run-up to the local elections. What’s going on the doorstep, do you think?

Stephen Bush
Yeah, I mean, I think Labour’s timidity, despite the fact that you can make a great sort of strategic argument for, on each individual issue is a bit of a risk for them for precisely this reason, right? So I’m a great believer that political columnists should go out and knock on doors because there’s a reason why political parties do it. You learn an awful lot. And the thing I’m really struck by is you have understandably . . . So I was in High Peak, which I like to visit every election campaign partly ’cause it’s very beautiful, partly ’cause it classical marginal, where you have a lot of people . . . 

Miranda Green
Labour-Tory marginal.

Stephen Bush
Labour-Tory marginal, right. It’s essentially, I mean, although it’s semi-rural, it’s essentially a series of affluent commuter suburbs to Manchester and to Sheffield. So in some ways you have a classic example of the realignment because these are voters who we would have expected in, you know, the kind of people who Tony Blair was having to reassure, “Look, the Labour party will help you be prosperous.” But the people who would say, oh, I’ve just got a mortgage, I’m looking for the best thing . . . They were the sort of the most in the tank for the Labour party. Whereas one of the reasons why Brexit is not going to be an election issue is the voter who both parties are concerned about for different reasons is someone, you know, they’ve been successful maybe, you know, in a manual occupation and they don’t have a degree. They’re socially conservative, they voted Labour maybe in 2005, 2010, maybe all the way up until 2017, but they did not in 2019. And because the Labour party doesn’t want to upset that voter on migration, they’re not gonna talk about Brexit because they don’t want to upset their new voters and Leave voters in general about tax. They feel very nervous about committing on tax and spending. I only spoke to one Conservative voter on all of the doors I knocked in, but the general thing . . . 

Miranda Green
That’s interesting.

Stephen Bush
 . . . would be some kind of variation on, you know, the country’s on its back or they often used a word that I’m not gonna use on this programme. We clearly need a change, but I’m not really certain what it is the Labour party is going to do to change it. And I think at some point, we kind of saw it in the argument they had over crime, right, where the Labour party on the one hand wants to fight an election saying Conservative record is bad on crime, but on the other hand, they don’t want to say, and we will spend more on this issue and less on that issue. So I think they are at some point going to have to prioritise and pick things. Otherwise, you know, there is, you know, Rishi has freshened up the Conservative party a bit despite the fact that no one I spoke to had made that journey yet. There is, I think, definitely a willingness to give the Conservatives another look.

Miranda Green
Hmmm, that’s interesting. You’ve raised crime. The Labour party’s attempt to focus the conversation on law and order in recent weeks, and the government’s been doing similar things with the sort of quite tough-on-crime message. Is this something to do with the particular target voters that both parties are going to be scrapping over? Or is this just because it’s the sort of perennial that you reach for in the run-up to election time? We have quite a lot of questions in on this law and order push because it’s been so noticeable.

Stephen Bush
The way one Conservative strategist once explained it to me — and this is still someone who’s, you know, very senior in the party — it’ll be instrumental in shaping their campaign. Well look, basically, what matters in elections is the people you can reach out and touch. Obviously, this may change because there’s nothing ordained about the gender breakdown I’m about to talk about. But broadly speaking, women voters are more likely to have caregiving responsibilities, both for older relatives and for younger children. So that is the way that government policy can reach out and touch that chunk of marginal voters. Whereas broadly speaking, if you don’t have caregiving responsibilities, crime and potholes are the big things that the government actually does for you.

So it is partly, of course that, you know, that voter who used to vote Labour did vote to leave the European Union, does favour quite punitive responses on crime. But actually, the thing about the UK is that although we’re more socially liberal in the European average, the average British voter is incredibly authoritarian on crime. So in some ways it’s just an all purpose. Broadly speaking, you are talking to 90 per cent of British voters by having a strong message on crime, but also in terms of things government actually does for people. I mean, for a large chunk of the people I speak to in High Peak, the only two things the government has done for them is, Liz Truss has made their mortgage more expensive, which they’re understandably furious about. The local authority increasingly does not fix potholes because they don’t have any money, which they’re furious about. And then when, like they’ve either in Manchester or Sheffield for a weekend and someone, like, steals something from them, the police don’t investigate it. So that’s why crime is gonna be such a big thing because of those three policy areas. Crime is probably the one and if you’re the Conservatives you’re most able to fix before the election. And if you’re Labour, you have a lead on crime at the moment, but you think, well, they could try and fix this so I wanna consolidate it.

Also, the Labour party knows that in Rishi Sunak they have an opponent who’s very popular among liberal voters, who has a problem among authoritarian votes of his own. And they are, although I think they, I don’t think they found the way of doing damage on that channel . . . 

Miranda Green
Right.

Stephen Bush
 . . . yet, in some way it’s the political equivalent of noticing them, you know, central defenders not playing very well and say, oh, what if we play the ball like this? What if we play it like this? And they’re gonna keep looking for ways that they can exploit that vulnerability.

Miranda Green
Peter, I wanted to come to you actually on a sort of allied issue, which is immigration policy, which obviously matters in two ways at election time. One, because it’s been a huge issue with the voting public since Brexit, although as Jane pointed out, those opinions may have softened in recent years. Big play on small boats. But of course, immigration plays into lots of really important areas of business policy to do with really tight labour market, skills shortages, all the rest of it. How much do you think those pro-immigration arguments will complicate the immigration conversation as the election nears, or will they in fact not?

Peter Foster
When people talk about immigration as a political issue, they kind of mean small boats, I think basically, right? Which is not really immigration, right? Immigration is . . . 

Miranda Green
It’s asylum and refugee policy actually.

Peter Foster
Right, it’s asylum and refugee policy.

Miranda Green
Yeah.

Peter Foster
And then, so then you get into a discussion about immigration and that’s about “Can I get a taxi? Well, there’s no taxi drivers”, you know. So some people might be very hardcore on, they are on crime, on control of borders and on small boats, which is why Sunak’s done this performative business with Rwandans invested so much and threatened to leave the European Court of Human Rights, even though that underpins the Good Friday Agreement and the trade and security chapters of the TCA and we’re never gonna do it. I think, you know, it’s an economic argument, you know. Can you get a taxi driver? Are there enough people waiting in the restaurants? Can I grow my business? And I think and actually, if you look at the numbers, the government quietly, by introducing its point-based immigration system, it’s the same for both EU and non-EU. If you look at the numbers, we have had very high levels of immigration. For one prediction actually of all the Brexit predictions that have surprised all the profs in the OECD et cetera, that actually we would have such high levels of skilled and actually the threshold 25,680 is a much lower threshold for skilled migration, inverted commas, than you have in the EU. That said, the UK labour market remains very tight. You know, the great retirement, the 500,000 that retired during the Covid pandemic, is a huge problem.

Miranda Green
 . . . and adds the inflation crisis.

Peter Foster
And adds the inflation. And it creates, I mean, one of the things about investment, you know is, skills are lied to investment. You don’t invest if you can’t get skills.

Miranda Green
Yeah.

Peter Foster
And that does get into a discussion which won’t be part of the election about mobility and about the access to talent. You know, can business get access to talent to grow its business as well as to staff its restaurant, drive its trucks? I mean, back in, was it ‘21, wasn’t it, the great truck crisis that became a very big political issue. I think the government is now smart enough to get ahead of it in a way that it didn’t then. I mean, I was writing stories in May saying that the Road Haulage Association has warned the government, if you don’t do something about skilled occupation, that there’ll be a truck show. And then by Tory conference, I think there were no trucks and there was no beds in supermarkets. And I think they’re probably smart enough to get ahead of that. So then in that sense, probably won’t be an issue.

Miranda Green
Political early warning systems are pretty useful if you can get them right. I want to take us to a slightly different area of territory, Jane. Because we’ve had quite a few questions in about the generational divide in voting and how the parties are handling that. There are a couple of questions on this very controversial new requirement to have photo ID at the polling station, which I might ask you about in a second, Stephen. But we have a question here from Jonathan Black: because I imagine both major parties ignore the Gen Z, millennials . . . Gen Z and millennials because they don’t vote as much as older age groups, although so many are feeling disillusioned with their prospects. And of course, as Jonathan points out, you know, some of the fundamental policy questions in the UK, such as housing, actually disproportionately affect . . . 

Jane Green
Yeah.

Miranda Green
 . . . younger generations negatively. What’s going on? Is there any attempt whatsoever, as we near a new general election to speak to those younger groups of voters who, of course, don’t turn out on the day in such numbers?

Jane Green
Oh, it is so interesting, isn’t it? Because it was the Jeremy Corbyn kind of election where people said, well, this will be the one, this will be the one that brings loads of younger voters in . . . 

Miranda Green
2017.

Jane Green
Into the election, yeah. And actually what happened instead was that there was just a very large age divide in electoral choice, but it didn’t really show a vast kind of dramatic surge in mobilisation. And so you have the kind of question of, well, OK, is that persistent? So it’s always an assumption that younger voters aren’t gonna vote, that’s an open question. But also, is it the case that governments, not just in this country, but in other countries as well, are more responsive to people who are just turning out to vote? Is it true that there’s a gerontocracy, as some people call it? And you can cherry-pick if you like, lots of different policies where the government has just invested in the triple lock, for example . . . 

Miranda Green
Right.

Jane Green
You know, areas like that where you can see that there’s clearly a lot of responsiveness to the older part of the electorate. I don’t know if it’s true over the kind of the whole course of policymaking that this is happening, right, but I just don’t know if that’s true. And I think you can also go, we can . . . I’m sure that if we had somebody from the government now, they would be defending this record and saying, no, this is, this or the other is happening. I think what’s really interesting is understanding, kind of, the future electorates. What does a party or a government do? It takes such a short-term view and ignores the fact that voters, either younger voters or middle-aged voters, certainly really important electoral group, the working age sort of non-graduate voters. A party that ignores those voters is ignoring what’s coming down the track. And we think about when Brexit happened — and actually it’s quite a long time ago now and quite a lot has changed. And there are voters in the electorate who’ve come into the electorate now who didn’t have an opportunity to vote in the referendum, who haven’t had the opportunity to vote in the last election.

Miranda Green
So that’s a really good point. There’s a whole new post-Brexit cohort of voters.

Jane Green
Exactly.

Miranda Green
Right.

Jane Green
Part of that is the explanation for why Brexit attitudes are softening because the electorate is changing and there’s a generational change, a generational shift. So anyway, the point is, is it true? I don’t know if it’s true that the government is particularly responsive to this group. It certainly looks like it sometimes. Is it true that young people aren’t always gonna vote in as high numbers? Well, we don’t know that. That’s contingent on what the opportunities, what the parties are saying and how well younger voters feel represented in election time.

I think the real risk, as I say, is kind of assuming everything’s static and that how the electorate was in the last election or the one before that is how it’s gonna be in the next one. And also, ignoring those younger groups of voters, especially as I say, these non-graduate voters who are the people if you’re the Conservative party that you’d need to appeal to. Because you’re not gonna keep on winning elections just by appealing to the older group of voters who, you know, who are changing their attitude, somewhat who are moving away from the Conservatives. They need to think about the future. And if they’re not doing that, then it’s a it’s a huge mistake.

Miranda Green
Stephen, what do you think about this, that parties have a tendency to fight the last war electorally, but as Jane says, the electorate might be changing and the whole new cohort coming in? It does feel as if policy-wise things are very much still skewed towards the older.

Stephen Bush
Yeah, I think one party . . . Yeah. Parties try and fight the last war because one of them has fond memories of it and the other one will always be constantly scarred by the experience. But I think broadly speaking, the thing that has gone wrong for the Conservative party since 2016 — it’s half a Brexit thing but it’s half about other changes in the party — is that yes, David Cameron/George Osborne’s coalition was also quite lopsided in terms of its position on the age distribution, but they had a very clear idea of the kind of working-age voter they wanted to target. They were only getting about 30 per cent of that vote, but 30 per cent is still quite a lot of people. You know, they had Help to Buy, they had various . . . but crucially that underpinned our economic model. And the difficulty that both parties have now is that broadly speaking, if you want to have a fairly generous welfare state for voters over a certain age, you need to have a flourishing economy for working-age voters regardless of whether or not those, you know, are above or below the state pension age.

So the slightly strange thing about the next election, right, is that you’re gonna have two parties which will be talking about their growth strategies, which are, by definition, policies for people in the working-age population, with quite a lot of goodies, including on crime, that for obvious reasons, because of what the state does, right, are always going to be concentrated on the very young and the very old. But I think it’s not so much that they should worry about the static picture. The reason why the Conservative party no longer has an economic model is it had a long period when it was targeting basically Waitrose liberals such as myself. It’s now decided it doesn’t really like that group of voters, but it doesn’t really have a new focus. That was, I think, one of the things Liz Truss was correct about. One thing she wanted to move the party towards was trying to target a new group of working-age voters. Obviously, that ended in disaster. But I think it’s not yet clear who is a Conservative person in their minds.

Miranda Green
It’s very interesting, particularly around this generational divide, how the parties will respond to that. I think it also plays in a bit to the early conversation about Labour’s timidity and whether they’re actually prepared to be a bit outspoken on some issues. Can we move on to this question of the geography of the UK and the coming general election? Because of course so much has happened in Scotland since the last election. It’s an extraordinary story, for want of a better word, since we’re sitting in a newspaper office today. The decline of the SNP from an all-powerful, electorally dominant government north of the border to now in considerable difficulty. Jane, it’s often said that a path to a Labour majority at any general election has to run through Scotland and has to involve some sort of major recovery in Labour fortunes in Scotland. How much do you think that sort of calculus has changed in the last couple of months about what Labour can achieve in Scotland and therefore, whether Keir Starmer can find himself in Number 10 Downing Street?

Jane Green
If you think about, you know, what did the Labour party need? They needed, you know, a big competence kind of message for the government, which happened last year. It needed, you know, they needed, it sounds awful, but, you know, the economic crisis that we’re in, that’s not obviously something that I imagine that many people are celebrating, of course. But, you know, if you think about those two contexts, those are hugely important, electorally speaking. Now, then you look to Scotland and, you know, you look to the SNP’s huge dominance electorally in Scotland. And when Nicola Sturgeon resigned, yeah, there’s still a little bit of me that was kind of a little undecided about what impact this was gonna have. I mean, clearly they were just on a high. They only had one direction to go in. I mean, there was no, they couldn’t get any more support. You know, they were likely to lose support after that peak. But we also know that the independence referendum in Scotland had very much solidified support of kind of, yes, independence voters behind the SNP, and that this was also a kind of identity politics in Scotland. You were talking about identity politics and Brexit.

Miranda Green
I’m not generational (inaudible) as well

Jane Green
And so, you know, so there’s a little bit of me that thought, well, there’s some sort of stickiness there too, that we might see because those kinds of events remain very, very important, as I was explaining in the Brexit case as well. Now, of course, everything that’s happened since is just starting to look disastrous for the SNP. And right now we’re not in the point of the cycle where we’re actually facing a general election. So obviously they’re gonna hope that some of this quietens down and doesn’t continue to rumble. Labour doesn’t have to win this kind of support that they want in Scotland, but it’s very difficult for them to get a majority without it.

The other really important thing just on geography, just outside of Scotland, is two things. One is, of course, the red wall and these kinds of seats. And one of the things that was really important in the last two general elections and particularly in 2019 was the sort of the way the leave vote was really condensed in areas, right? So it was unified behind the Conservatives and Leave voters were very kind of geographically concentrated in certain areas. That was very important for the Johnson majority, was very much part of the explanation for that election. So that’s important when we think about geography; it’s just, you know, whether or not that starts to fragment for the Conservatives.

The other thing is, of course, electoral bias. So all things being equal, at the moment, it would take a 12-point percentage point swing towards Labour just to get a majority of two. Now, that’s larger than the swing that Tony Blair enjoyed. And so those kind of three factors all have to . . . some won’t be undone for the Labour party to be in the large majority kind of potential that you would if you just looked at the opinion polls, you would say, well of course Labour’s gonna have a landslide majority. Those three things — what happens in Scotland, what happens with electoral bias, and to what degree does the kind of geography of where people are voting and how does that translate into seats — that was very important in 2019 and some of those things, we’re only gonna know how that’s gonna pan out after it’s happened. Unfortunately, it’s really difficult to predict.

Miranda Green
And Peter, if I can come to you. So this question that we had in from Graeme Ireland about the impact of the collapse of the SNP, we’ve looked at, but we’ve also had quite a few questions on the impact of English devolution actually, in the English mayoralties, where of course some of these mayoralties now have considerable power over policy in their local area and spending power, etc. John Hammond, for example, says, “How much of the mayoral elections in major cities next May likely to influence a UK general election?” But I guess we should probably widen that to talk about the more established mayoralties. Because it’s not just Scotland, is it, sort of devolution impact all over, and Wales.

Peter Foster
If you read the Michael Gove levelling up white paper, you know it’s all about devolution, it’s all about creating combined authorities and mayoral authorities. To go back to what Stephen said, I think one of the problems for the Tories is that is the country is on its derrière. Am I allowed to say derrière?

Miranda Green
I think you are. I’ll let you.

Peter Foster
The country is on its derrière and Stephen mentioned local government spending cuts. So yes, you have mayors, but actually there’s not that much fiscal devolution, not nearly as much fiscal devolution as is made out. Local government cuts 25 per cent-plus effective cuts. You know, I live in Brighton, for example. They’re closing all the public toilets. The parks are in a mess. You know, the roads are in potholes. There’s no cover teachers in the schools. And we haven’t talked about the NHS yet. People feel the country is on its ass. Let’s say it, right? And so I think that is a really pervasive thing. And I don’t think, from my conversations when I’m out and about, no, I don’t feel that people feel that the mayoral settlements sort of change that.

Miranda Green
Right.

Peter Foster
Right. Because there isn’t real fiscal devolution and where the government has been dishing out through all its various pots, its levelling up fund, it’s actually done that in a really atomised way, which is all about placemaking, etc. But what it’s done is done it in a very non-strategic way, right? Say what you like about European Union structural funds, but they were structural. So what they’ve done by making the funding geographies, as they call it, and why we’re making them all local councils. There’s millions of little pots of money. They’re really bureaucratic applied for. They’re all signed off in Whitehall. And they literally designed — there was a piece in the Times the other day where there was MPs complaining, what am I gonna have to put on my leaflet? You know, that’s all very well. I mean, I get you know, I’m not apolitical, but I get that politicians want something to put on their leaflet, right? But if you look at what ails the country in terms of infrastructure delivered . . . 

Miranda Green
What should be delivered. Yeah.

Peter Foster
In terms of identifying cities, in terms of clusters, in terms of, you know, the absolute flat business investment. Keir Starmer wants us to be the fastest-growing economy in the G7. He doesn’t wanna talk about the fact that UK exports were 8 per cent below 2019 levels back in quarter of 2022. That’s extraordinary, right? Business investment is flat since 2016. Nobody wants to talk about that stuff. But, you know, there’s a famous thing about my GDP. But actually, all that GDP is what, you know, generates the wealth that you need in order to fix some of these things. To create the investment, you need to create the (inaudible).

Miranda Green
Jane, you wanted to come in there.

Jane Green
Yeah, just I mean, just that we were talking earlier, weren’t we, about why the parties are talking about crime. And what, when I was thinking at the time was they can choose who they like. But what really matters to people is this much bigger issue. I’m reminded of a really election way back, and it kind of ages me. So in 2001, there was a criticism, wasn’t there?

Miranda Green
I remember it (inaudible).

(Laughter)

Jane Green
So someone who’s obsessed about British elections for quite a lot of us, but that election was characterised by the Conservatives then picking some issues where they weren’t as behind as much. And the criticism then was, well, you’re not talking about the things that really matter. So what happens if parties say, well on crime, we think we can say something or on ex whatever issue it is, some low, some relatively low salience issue. I know crime isn’t low salience for everybody but if they pick issues and that’s not addressing the elephant in the room, this huge state of affairs, the NHS, public services, people’s everyday experiences in the country, then it’s just not gonna wash.

Miranda Green
Stephen, It’s really interesting. This isn’t, uh, I want to bring to you. It used to be said that Labour was the party that was obsessed with structures and changing structures, but actually, if you think about what Peter and Jane have said, it almost looks as if the Tories in power in recent years have become obsessed with structures that don’t necessarily address what’s on voters minds. And if creating the mayoralty was supposed to give another person locally to blame, maybe that’s not working.

Stephen Bush
Yeah, I mean, one of the arguments for the mayors, which has sort of come to fruition, is we know that next month in a local elections, a lot of Conservative councillors, including some very good councils, will lose their jobs because the National Party is unpopular. And the beauty of the mayoral model is visibly the mayors are better at being insulated. Again, they can build their own record and you actually do reward effective mayoralty, even if in some cases what they appear to be effective at is, you know, securing pork and perhaps some things which we would prefer them not to be quite so good at. The interesting thing, though, is they don’t appear to have any benefit to people what we call in the states down ticket. So in 2021, Andy Burnham won every single ward in the Greater Manchester area. Well, the Labour party did not win every single ward. That didn’t help any of the councillors, none. So I suspect if the next election does take place in May of next year and some in Downing Street very much do want it to take place in May next year because they say even if things haven’t improved, if we get Kane into local elections, the party will freak out. That’s not gonna be a great run into an October election. But I think even if they were on the same day, Andy’s street popularity is not, I think, going to help conservatives in Solihull and the Greater Birmingham conurbation. And I don’t think Andy Burnham’s popularity is going to hurt conservatives in places like Hazel Grove. I always get my Bolton marginals confused, but you know, it’s not going to be that much of a factor. But where it has, I think, really mattered. It is useful that Andy Street and Andy Burnham are being re-elected on their records rather than having this constant chopping and changing where good councils get thrown out just because they happen to be in government nationally.

Miranda Green
So we’ve had quite a lot of questions in, I have to say, which are hard for me to read out about the Labour party in its policy direction. But if I can summarise more politely the questions you’ve been sending in, that does seem to be a question mark over the substance of Labour’s policy offer in that terrible now that we use in political circles. How fair is this, Stephen? Vagueness, you know, constructive ambiguity around what Labour is actually proposing if it wins power. We’ve talked a bit about that, but it’s coming up again and again in the questions we’re being sent.

Stephen Bush
Yeah, I mean, I think it is fair to say, so although it is true, to say that Labour have a lot of policies. Robert Shrimsley wrote a very good column about the very real policy differences between the two parties a couple of weeks ago. What Labour do not have is that tangible kind of sense of OK right, what are they prioritising, really that sort of big vision thing. And I think a good way of thinking about that is broadly speaking, although you can’t point to a speech that Tony Blair gave where he said, guys, my analysis is Thatcherism works, we wanna keep it. We just wanna have more state spending on top. That was the big-picture vision of Blairism and the big-picture vision of Cameronism was, OK, yeah, we hear you, you like the social liberalism. You don’t like the Tories being mean and cruel, we’re going to do less of that. Now, partisans for both parties in the audience will be going, I don’t actually think Tony Blair kept that promise, so I don’t think David Cameron kept that promise. But broadly speaking, you can’t dispute that was the sort of central vision thing they had that is wholly absent from the Labour party. What instead you have is this kind of thing where it’s like they almost think, oh well, if we announce another policy about the labour market or another policy about green investment zones, then at some point a kind of sense of what this party is about and what it prioritises will kind of happen almost by magic. And I think unless you have that big picture sense of what does this party think about stuff, people are going to continue to feel like the Labour party just kind of drifts, just complains a lot. That may be enough because there’s Janan Ganesh to admit the very good column this week that ultimately Keir Starmer has achieved the important qualification of being hireable in the minds of most voters. And one thing I will say, having knocked on doors in High Peak in every single election that I’ve covered in the whole time, the Conservatives being in office, this is the first time I would say that the majority of people in High Peak did feel that the Labour party had a leader who’s hireable. So that is a big shift, but they still don’t think they really know what Keir Starmer is about.

Miranda Green
I want to ask you a slightly related question on this, which is some people are asking, and I think it’s a very good question. Are we actually potentially headed for a more low-turnout election? Because there’s perhaps a lack of enthusiasm for the alternative, but disaffection for the governing party. And also, if these years of Brexit tumult are slightly behind us. I mean, honestly, the Brexit turnout was 70 per cent extraordinarily high. You know, the Scottish referendum turnout even higher up in the eighties.

Jane Green
Yeah.

Miranda Green
Could we be sliding back towards a sort of disengaged electorate?

Jane Green
So one of the things I think is really important to bear in mind is that whenever we look at the polling, we look at the lead, right? So we look at like this, the Conservatives are now behind and Labour is in the lead. If you go and dig under the surface, what you see is lows and those people who haven’t made up their minds yet. And so you see.

Miranda Green
You don’t know that they’re doing well.

Jane Green
Yeah, that’s exactly. So those people are undecided. And, you know, part of that is because people don’t understand what Labour party stands for. Part of that, I think, is that many of those people who are undecided were conservatives. And so they’re feeling torn. Right? They’ve seen the Conservative party under Boris Johnson. They’ve seen the Conservative party under Liz Truss, and now Rishi Sunak, and Brexit might have been their core issue and might have been one of the reasons they really got mobilised behind the Conservatives. So many of those people remain undecided. So that’s important. But the thing to, of course, you know, bear in mind is that there’s a there’s actually a long time still in the big scheme of things before an election and election campaigns and also that period between now and whenever the election’s going to be could be a very clarifying moment. So you see in every election cycle, say between every election, you see more people kind of undecided, they’re not engaging as much, they’re not paying as much attention. And then around the election, you see people’s preferences match up more to their party choice. You know, you sort of, in all sorts of ways, that we look at this in the electoral politics in the British election study, you see these kinds of patterns. And so what I’d expect is a lot of clarification before an election. It might also be a very interesting election campaign. So some campaigns really shift the dial and some campaigns don’t. And the majority of times in British elections, it’s been that the campaigns haven’t made a massive difference if you look at just the aggregate change. 2017 was different because you got leaders that people didn’t know about but Jeremy Corbyn. People were making up their minds by him in that particular election. And I think this election is also gonna be interesting because neither Rishi Sunak nor Keir Starmer have yet had the opportunity to run the election campaign. And one presumes by that time the Labour party will have a message or these will try to kind of overcome this problem that Stephen articulated.

Miranda Green
That’s fascinating. Peter, can I bring you in there?

Peter Foster
So I just heard we talked about Labour timidity and we’ve talked about sort of lack of policy clarity or lack of the thing that putting their finger on. I find from my conversations, particularly on the Brexit beat, I characterise it slightly differently. I think that they have a lack of confidence that they can make the weather. You know, if you look at where they are in the polls, if you look at where they stand now, they should be kind of pregnant with possibility. But when I speak to them, for example, on Brexit, the underlying assumption in everything they say is that they can’t actually change the status quo. And I don’t know whether that’s because everything’s open focus grouped and, you know, the battle lines are drawn, but you don’t get a sense in which they think they can make the weather, you know.

Miranda Green
You mean make the whether in terms of the debate or when they’re in power?

Peter Foster
I think not. Not when they’re in power. You know, they are bidding for power. They are, according to the polls, you know, they ought to be building castles in the air, right? They ought to have the ability to shape what a labour. If the polls say it is going to be a Labour government, what would Britain look like under Labour and when they when they have that conversation, it’s basically reactive. I mean, Tony Blair is stuck with Tory spending plans, but on Brexit for example, they won’t go near Brexit because they’re terrified that the Tories are going to define it as betrayal as you try to block Brexit. We got Brexit done, right? Now they might do that. So where’s the confidence that actually they could have a different narrative about Brexit? You know, you look at the way Brexit landed in the north east industrial areas, you look what’s done to the car industry, etc. You could make a really cogent case that actually we need to rethink Brexit that’s about investment, it’s about better jobs, higher productivity for the nation, for the good of the nation. It doesn’t mean giving up on Brexit would mean restarting free movement, but they won’t even open the conversation. It’s more akin to, Oh well, you know, company go there because, you know, the Tories have kind of stolen that ground. I just find it very puzzling that they don’t exude confidence.

Miranda Green
So our correspondents today have written in asking, will we potentially join the EEA or something under Labour? You would say, forget it.

Peter Foster
I think when you start to interrogate what joining the EEA means.

Miranda Green
Yeah.

Peter Foster
Right? In terms of . ..

Miranda Green
Those trading links of some sort. So more realignment with the . . . 

Peter Foster
With the danger around of getting into PDP

Miranda Green
Yeah, let’s walk through that.

Peter Foster
We’re not going to rejoin because not going to rejoin the euro. There’s no mandate for that. The trouble is obvious are why did we rejoin the single market? If you look at the level of dictation that Norway takes, for example, if you look at our financial services entry which would be covered under the EEA agreement, the UK Financial Services regulation industry dictated out of the ECB and out of Brussels. I don’t buy that. If you look at the entire Brexit debate about taking dictation from Brussels, the relationship that you find yourself in this way, Brexit is always much more binary than people realise. The relationship you find yourself in, in an EEA environment, I think is politically unsustainable. I think there’s different conversation about the customs union being in a customs union with the EU going back something closer to the Theresa May deal.

Miranda Green
A not the. A cause

Peter Foster
Not the because you have to be a member of the European Union to be part of the customs union, right? But Turkey is in a customs union with the EU. It constrains some of your trading possibilities. I mean a, most people don’t care about this stuff, right? But if you look at what it would do to your exporting industries, what it would do to your ability to end up in integrated European supply chains, I don’t recommend it, but read some of the report that came out of the IOD, the CBI make UK. It’s an absolute mess. Business doesn’t complain about it that much, right? But if you look at the marginal competitive disadvantage, it’s one of the great lies and conceits about the politics of Brexit. Now if you listen to Jeremy Hunt or David Lammy or even Rachel Reeves, they all basically say that, you know, Brexit will kind of go away, but it won’t, right? The marginal disadvantage is permanent. If people are thinking about where are you going to build your factory, you know, those marginal disincentives to build your factory in the UK because of the rules of origin and all the regulatory, the permanent, I mean that’s a permanent hit to UK trade intensity over time and we’re not going to have that discussion. But I think no, I don’t think you should expect to join the EU. I think it’s too complicated.

Miranda Green
And Stephen, can we just sort of take that on to the wider kind of accusation, I suppose, which comes behind what people are saying and a lot of our correspondent saying today, which is this sort of lack of boldness and perhaps specificity. I mean, is Labour in danger of being worried about overpromising and underdelivering and instead sort of finding itself in a position where it is actually under promising the electorate? We’ve got Douglas Williams has written in to say, will there be any meaningful change in the NHS with either party, for example?

Stephen Bush
Yeah, I mean I think on public services, again, to refer back to this great Robert Shrimsley column, there will be quite a big difference because despite how Labour will position itself, they will come in, they will break the spirit, if not the letter of most of their promises on tax. Indeed, just the Conservatives will. But you know, it will be a will where there will be a significant increase in public spending in the public realm. I think crucially on Europe, the way to understand it actually is a very old strain in the Labour party. So in 1974, James Callaghan comes into the Foreign Office knowing that there’s going to be a referendum on our membership of the EEC and he’s introduced to the Permanent Secretary. He says, “They tell me you care a lot about Europe, that’s OK, as long as you understand that I care a lot about the Labour party.” and what hasn’t changed is that the Labour party’s position on the EU, with a handful of exceptions, maybe for people around the shadow cabinet table, which is not true of essentially have a view of not one vote left for Europe. But, if they get into government, there will be quite a big cultural change in civic society, you know. The National Association of Orchestras is not going to feel shy about saying Brexit is hurting us. The video games trading body is not going to feel shy about saying, “Hey, we have a labour market issue.” So I think then that the political culture will shift in quite a soft Brexity direction. And broadly speaking, if you offer the Labour party a closer relationship tomorrow, which you didn’t have to pay votes for, it would take it. But they are never ever going to expend political capital for it. I think more broadly there absolutely is a risk for them then that the fact that almost everyone in the Labour party is traumatised either by 1992 or 2015 or in some cases don’t forget there are some people in the Labour party were surprised by the 2019 general election result because despite what the polls have said, they’d obviously defied the polls in the election before that trauma and that fear of messing it up might mean that they don’t end up with a sufficiently magnetic offer. And so you end up in a situation where lots of people go. Conservatives are clearly tired, not going to vote, not sure about Labour, turnout drops. They obviously need this very big swing to end up and you end up in a David Cameron in 2010 style situation where you’ve clearly won by finishing far ahead of your of the Thai government, but you have not got a majority that allows you to govern. And of course David Cameron had the great good fortune that was a large and briefly quite ideologically aligned Liberal Democrat Party, although actually Keir Starmer and David are fairly close on some issues. I don’t think the Liberal Democrat Party is going to be large enough to get a majority of the size in the Coalition enjoyed here. They might get to 2530, but you’d still be somewhere else. And of course, even though the SNP are in some difficulty, they’re still will be this difficult rump of SNP MPs, whatever happens.

Miranda Green
Jane, I was going to save that to the end, but actually it’s very relevant to the discussion we’ve come on to. The FT did a sort of a very unscientific poll before we came on air through our LinkedIn followers with as many people predicting a hung Parliament outcome as a Labour victory. This is among FT followers on LinkedIn, only 20 per cent expecting a conservative clear win, 35 per cent each for Labour and a hung parliament. Do you think that talk of a hung parliament might become louder and louder as next year’s expected election comes closer because of the factors that Stephen has called about?

Jane Green
I don’t know. I mean, if the polls narrow, then that’s a possibility. I think while the polls are still showing a sort of 20 point gap, you’ve really got to get into the sort of safe, logical weeds to kind of to get yourself to a hung parliament. I mean, it’s not I don’t know where I stand on that question. I think about what I would prefer.

Miranda Green It’s just very much too early to say.

Jane Green
And I think that’s part of it. I mean, if you look at what the factors are, we talk about liberal bias. We’re talking about the fact that lots of conservatives still remain undecided. We also know that just sort of historically, parties tend to recover a little bit before an election campaign is not very well understood why that happens. So that might suggest some narrowing. And then I think, you know, you’re into that kind of territory where predictions of hung parliament may indeed become more likely. It’s really interesting to think about, you know, the wisdom of crowds. One of the ways that political science is used to forecast elections. They’ll ask about people’s predictions And these kind of prediction models, often times very, very effective, is a kind of a weird concept. Think that, you know, all these individuals with all of these kind of different expectations once aggregated, actually do quite a good job of predicting. Perhaps that is where we are at the moment. But as I say, in order to do that, you’ve got to kind of ignore the fact that there’s a 20 poll percentage point lead of the Labour party and expect that that’s not going to continue to the next election.

Miranda Green
But actually, Stephen, what’s happened to the SNP in Scotland changes that conversation about a hung Parliament as well.

Stephen Bush
It also changes one of Labour’s major vulnerabilities. So in High Peak in 2015 was the moment when I really started to believe in my bones and David Cameron was going to be re-elected. I was because had just come from the Vale of Glamorgan because I basically only like to go to very attractive marginals, where you go door to door. I knocked on in the Vale, people were, oh, you know, there’s going to be a deal with the SNP and that’s going to be bad for Wales. We’re already done over by the bonnet for me, I’m going to be even more done over by this Labour SNP deal. Then I went to a Yeovil, as I say, Lib Dem marginal, not really a Lib Dem marginal anymore, where again, this real fear of Labour in the SNP and then in High Peak again. And that was when I was like, yeah, this is a real problem for Labour and the Liberal Democrats. I think the idea that the SNP are going to be covered and talked of as a sort of serious force are in some ways actually the talk of the SNP’s demise is slightly overexaggerated, but from the electoral sort of dynamics perspective, the chatter will very much be, oh, the SNP are going to lose seats, they aren’t going to be a factor as well as not helping them numerically because every seat in labour gains in Scotland makes this very long distance they have to cover in England less long. It also helps them in England indirectly, yes, because they aren’t going to have this spectre, which was a real problem in 2015. The spectre of Labour being kind of this conspiracy against England, that that’s not going to be a factor and that will be a benefit to Labour. I think one of the things . . . 

Miranda Green
We all remember the posters.

Stephen Bush
Yeah, we look at

Miranda Green
Ed Miliband in the pocket of Alex Salmond, which was very potent.

Stephen Bush
And I think the thing is, is that we’ve rightly talked a lot about Labour’s vulnerabilities and downsides because basically Labour’s problems are broadly things that they can control, right? They have a balance of risks on tax break back Brexit offering something exciting and we don’t quite know whether or not they will get it right. But we shouldn’t underestimate that there are a bunch of downside risks on the Tory side that are not really in their control, but ultimately they’re the government, so they have a back holder. If we continue to have more persistently high inflation than any of our neighbours there, the bank holder, if we continue to have strikes in schools, the NHS is feeling of the end of the country being behind they all the bank holder and we shouldn’t underprice. And that’s why I think probably our unscientific poll is about right, about the balance of probabilities that some form of Labour government, whether it’s a majority or a Hong Kong with them in the box seat, is I think when all central forecasts should be

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Thanks to FT Live for this Inside Politics event hosted by my colleague Miranda Green. I put a link in the show notes with details about how to subscribe to my award winning Inside Politics newsletter. Don’t Miss Out. It includes a 90 day free trial. And if you’d like this podcast, we’d recommend subscribing to the Political Fix. Find us through all the usual channels to receive episodes as soon as they’re released and do leave a review or a rating. It really helps spread the word.

The FT’s Political Fix was presented by me, Stephen Bush, and is produced by Anna Dedhar. The executive producer is Manuela Saragosa. The sound engineer is Breen Turner, and the FT’s head of audio is Cheryl Brumley. Until next time, thanks for listening.

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