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- [00:00]
A
Hello, welcome to the Hot Seat. I'm Martin Rogers here with Tony Travers to discuss conference season and the recent by elections. Welcome, Tony.
- [00:07]
B
Good afternoon.
- [00:09]
A
First of all, is this the most interesting party conference season for decades?
- [00:15]
B
It's the most interesting party conference season for decades. It's revelatory, which isn't quite the same thing. I don't think there were spectacular and wonderful speeches and a sudden shift of direction from one or other of the political parties, but what there was was a distinct feeling from all of them. In the case of Labour, a rather subdued party conference, despite the fact that polls still suggest that Labour will probably win the general election. From the Conservatives, who equally and oppositely are not currently seen as doing that well in the polls. So they've been doing a bit better recently. A sense of sort of optimism and cheer. And then from the Liberal Democrats who unusually this year had the last of the party conferences from their point of view, a sense of moving on to try to re establish themselves and say, well, we're saying something different from all the other parties having the advantage of coming third. So I'm not sure it will be remembered as a radical change of direction by one or all of these parties, but certainly mood setting, I think. Yeah.
- [01:19]
A
Did the mood change from the before conference season to afterwards? Have they had an effect on the political weather?
- [01:29]
B
I think two interventions in particular were seen in the short term at least, and these are short term effects within the short term as being important. One was Ed Miliband's speech at the Labour Party conference which became famous for his unfortunate neglect of two key sections of his speech, one about the deficit, one about immigration, and that was seen as somehow, certainly by his opponents, as totemic of a problem. And I think that's how it got portrayed in the media. And of course the media, once they go with an idea, just go on and on and on with it. And then from the Conservatives there, David Cameron, apart from referring back to Ed Miliband's speech by reading from an auto queue and standing at a lectern, made this announcement about a promised tax cut if there were another Conservative or Conservative influence government. I think those at least temporarily set the music for the next few weeks. Now, of course these are short term impacts and there is some evidence that whatever polling impact there was immediately may be falling away again. But they did have an impact in the short term. Yeah.
- [02:41]
A
Now there's two things I'd like to explore the impact a little bit more in terms of competence. Whereas Slave was perhaps, well, certainly behind in the polls on economic competence was seen as not being able to run a conference particularly competently, whereas the Conservatives have gone big on competence, economic competence, and ran a fairly, a relatively dull, unspectacular, perhaps, conference to chime with the political message that they're trying to make. So has that had an effect with either reinforcing or challenging people's perceptions?
- [03:21]
B
I mean, the opinion polls are very clear about this. The Conservatives have a huge lead over Labour in terms of economic competence, and I think the conference season further reinforced that, if anything. So it sort of took something that was already there and extended it. Having said that, I mean, another major element of the conference season was the fact that the Conservatives and Labour and the Liberal Democrats all majored on the nhs, either protecting it or offering it a little bit more money. And, of course, that is Labour's key area of advantage and a highly salient political topic. So, although the Conservatives are well ahead on the economy, Labour still has this big lead in terms of the nhs, and that proved salient throughout the political conferences. All three parties acknowledge that the NHS will be important as well as the economy.
- [04:15]
A
Have we seen a slight political break from the past in terms of all the four parties, if we choose to include Ukip, or three, if we don't have to some extent focused on a core vote strategy for their conferences? Labour going big on the nhs, Tory talk of tax cuts, Lib Dem talk of differentiation and Pro Europe. So have we seen a slight move back towards the core vote? A shoring up of the core vote at the expense of reaching out to the centre ground from the main parties?
- [04:50]
B
I think by common consent, the Labour conference, and indeed much of what Labour's been saying looks like a core vote strategy, that is to try to get 34 or 35% of the electorate to vote Labour, hoping that that would be just enough to get a majority, as on most calculations it probably would, or at least traditionally it would. From the Conservatives point of view, they've been pushed to a sort of an analogous position, but in a different way. I mean, David Cameron has been trying to make his party look more mainstream. On the other hand, he's been dragged towards the Ukip right by many of his own, certainly a subsection of his own backbenchers, and of course by Ukip itself, which challenges the Conservatives in the southern and eastern parts of the country.
- [05:38]
A
So.
- [05:38]
B
So I think that in a sense, David Cameron's had to sound a bit harsher than he probably would like to, and Ed Miliband a bit more left wing. Than otherwise the Labour Party has recently been. And in that sense there is a bit of a polarization, but it's a bit. I mean, it's not a kind of radical direction change. And if you listen to the way Nigel Farage and Ukip kind of influence all the parties, or at least the Conservatives and Labour, to be fair to the Lib Dems, in talking about immigration, you can see that Ukip has had an influence certainly on Labour and the Conservatives recently.
- [06:16]
A
Now we've just had two by elections. Recently Ukip has had its first member of Parliament elected as a standing as a member of Ukip and Labour's crushing and devastating victory. So what have we learned about Ukip as an electoral force this close to a general election from the two recent by elections?
- [06:42]
B
Well, the Clacton by election had been heavily signaled and we'd seen opinion polling showing that it was very likely that Douglas Carswell, who was an interesting sort of UKIP candidate in the sense that he's quite a libertarian conservative and perhaps some way away, you might think, from the mainstream of, of many UKIP voters, but he was popular locally and won this by election very easily. Now, you might say, and I'm sure this is what the Conservatives will privately be trying to comfort themselves with that. Well, you know, the Conservatives are in office. Parties in office often lose by elections. It's not good, but it's not the end of the world. It might become the end of the world or nearer that if more Conservatives were to defect in the weeks and months ahead. But from Labour's point of view, the fact that they almost lost the Hayward by election just on the outskirts of Manchester is in some ways worse because although they won that by election, they're the party, the main party of opposition. And at this point of a parliament, the main party of opposition ought to be surging ahead, not just increasing their vote share by 1 percentage point. So although they Labour will say, well, of course what happened is that there was a coalition of Conservative and Lib Dem and non voters round the Ukip standard. Truth is that by election in Hayward will worry Labour strategists not just in the short term in terms of the general election, but in the medium term. Were Labour to win a general election and then be in government, because it suggests UKIP would eat their votes very, very rapidly in the urban north.
- [08:21]
A
So are we seeing UKIP become embedded as the. The opposition to the Conservatives in the south, the opposition to Labour in the north, and a truly national party of opposition?
- [08:37]
B
There's no doubt that for the moment, UKIP have become the party of protest and opposition to, as it were, the Conservatives and the Lib Dems in government and to Labour in opposition. It's pretty unusual to have all three of your major or traditional major parties unpopular at the same time, but that's where we seem to have got to. I mean, whether UKIP will survive in the long term, only time will tell. I mean, what we have seen in this Parliament is that the Liberal Democrats vote as the party of protest role, I should say, as the party of protest has just disappeared and they have in many ways suffered more than the Conservatives for being in government. Ukip are a widespread political party of protest at the moment, might take votes from Labour if Labour are in office, certainly taking votes from the Conservatives now, but where they'll be in five or ten years, who knows? They've come and gone before. And what we're really seeing here is a long term decline in the Labour and Conservative vote and a fragmentation of the non Conservative and Labour vote. Where that leads, nobody in British politics knows.
- [09:48]
A
Have these recent events changed in any way the likelihood of any outcome in the general election?
- [09:59]
B
Well, I think more than ever, we're now in the position of saying that there's a sort of 25% chance of a majority Labour government, a 25% chance of a minority Labour government, a 25% of a minority Conservative government, possibly in either of these middle cases, with or without Lib Dem support, and even a 25% chance of a Conservative government. I mean, this is the most difficult election to predict, I would have thought, in modern times.
- [10:31]
A
Great, thank you very much. Tony, you're off the hot seat.
- [10:33]
B
Thank you.