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- [00:00]
A
Hello. Welcome to the Hot Seat. I'm Martin Rogers, here with Tony Travers to discuss last night's British general election. Welcome, Tony.
- [00:07]
B
Good morning.
- [00:07]
A
So, first of all, I should point out that not all of the results have come in, but what have we learned so far?
- [00:14]
B
Well, we've learned that it's almost certain that the Conservatives will have a majority, a standard majority on their own, which is pretty remarkable against the backdrop of what the polls have been showing for weeks and weeks and weeks and indeed of the very late polling right in the run up to the election. So there's no question it's an extraordinary almost reversion to type for the British political system, a government with a majority.
- [00:42]
A
So, relative to expectations, this is a great victory for the Conservative Party, where they weren't expected, perhaps even to be the largest party, but now they look on course to have a very small majority. Is this a great victory or a poisoned chalice? Given the small nature of their potential majority?
- [01:02]
B
I mean, it's a great victory in the short term against expectation. I mean, I'm not sure if this had been the 1950s or the 60s, it would have been seen as a great victory, but in the context of the long term decline of the two major parties, it's pretty remarkable whether it will be a poisoned chalice. Well, the public finances are pretty difficult, it must be said, and the Conservatives are now committed to, to reducing public spending as a share of GDP to around 36%, which is going to leave with no deficit. That's going to leave Britain with a very much smaller state than we've been used to. That's going to be a big transition. So getting us to that is not going to be easy. And that's partly because the public finances are in the position they're in. And you know, David Cameron said he doesn't want, he's going to want to constrain himself to put any taxes up. So it will be a difficult period. And then of course, there's issues like the EU referendum that will now undoubtedly have to take place and, you know, a host of other things which when you've got a very small majority, allow the MPs on your edges, you know, if they are rebellious to cause trouble.
- [02:14]
A
Make it sound as though the Conservative almost wish they hadn't won this election.
- [02:18]
B
Oh, I'm sure they're very glad they've won the election. I doubt they can believe it actually. And I mean lots of people this morning unable to believe it, including the Labour Party, certainly the Liberal Democrats. So it's A remarkable election with two winners, David Cameron and then Nicholas Sturgeon, both big winners, and then a series of losers who include the Labour Party and Ed Miliband, the Liberal Democrats and Nick Clegg and frankly Ukip, because although Ukip will get a reasonable percentage of the vote, they're probably going to get one seat. So it's, you know, as is often the case with British general elections, cruel change. Watching it just work itself through on the television overnight, you see the brutality of the changes as they affect individuals in a remarkable and swift way.
- [03:08]
A
So let's move on to the role of the SNP in this. Has the Conservative Party improved its position relative to the last election, or has their overall improved position come down to the SNP's sweeping of Scotland and Labour becoming having been now wiped out in Scotland? So where have the Conservative seats come from?
- [03:32]
B
That's going to take some analysis. I mean, there's clearly been movement of votes from one party to another differentially in different parts of the country. I mean, that was always known that was going to happen, but it's clearly happened remarkably so in some places, shifts of votes from the Labour Party to Ukip have probably helped Conservatives win. I suspect that might have happened, for example, in Ed Balls constituency. But elsewhere shifts will have helped the Labour Party, you know, shifts of uk, you know, voters from the Conservatives to Ukip and so on. So it's going to take a lot of deconstructing to work exactly how this all happened. But one thing we now know is that British general elections have to be analyzed regionally and in other, you know, sub. Nationally, we don't know exactly what the vote share by party is going to be, but it looks as if it's going to be something, I guess, in the range of the Conservatives 36, 37 and Labour around 30. So it's really no change on the last election, which for Labour is simply dreadful.
- [04:43]
A
So moving to the regional picture or sub national picture, it looks like England has gone Conservative. Scotland has gone S and P in Wales has stayed largely Labour, although not overwhelming.
- [04:57]
B
The Conservatives won one or two seats in Wales. They're not done too badly. The exception to that otherwise perfectly reasonable rule, I think, is London. Now London has the whole country appears to have been no shift between the Conservatives and Labour. That's what it looks like. Get better figures later. Today in London there has been a swing to Labour, fascinatingly so that trend, that long established trend appears to have continued. So Labour has picked up seats from the Conservatives in London, though not all the ones it expected to are not in the order of marginality. So, for example, they've won Ilford north, which was quite a long way out, but haven't won seats like one in Harrow and particularly Croydon Central, which were much easier to win. So that's interesting. But of course the Conservatives have picked up seats from the Liberal Democrats in London and that means that their vote tallies, their seat tallies only dropped by 1. And of course this adds up to London now being a city with only one Liberal Democrat in it. And it's, you know, in some ways Labour's big prize now, given how badly they've done elsewhere.
- [06:07]
A
Let's move on to Labour then. This is a devastating result for the.
- [06:11]
B
Labour Party isn't, can only be seen as devastating. I mean, the Labour Party's vote share at the 2005 election was 30, 35%. The 2010 election was 29%. And, you know, we're not absolutely sure yet, but this time it's going to be 29, 30, something like that. And this begs big questions for the Labour Party about how they position the party to fight the Conservatives. You know, Ed Miliband has shifted the party to the left self consciously. Now that didn't work. Some people say, well, we need to go further to the left. Others will say, no, we need to go back to a more Blairite approach. And I think this is going to mean some 2, 3, 4 years for labour of yet again trying to reset the party. And you know, the fact is they're going to be sitting in the House of Commons next to the snp, who are a quarter the size of the Labour Party. And that's going to be a terribly difficult relationship for Labour because although they're going to be on the opposition bench in the House of Commons in Scotland, it will be a permanent war of attrition between the two of them. So as an opposition, it's going to be very complicated for Labour to manage it.
- [07:25]
A
Is that unusual? Isn't every significant defeat leads to a period of left and right trying to pull the party whichever way they Conservatives. Is it unique or unusual in any way?
- [07:42]
B
No, it's not unusual. That's a perfectly good point. I mean, you know, obviously parties have periods of introspection and try to avoid a great big war within themselves. But, you know, they've had a Blairite period quite to the right of the, of the labor part of the political spectrum. They've now shifted to the left and it does beg a question which will be discussed is whether they should go further Left, as I said, or, or tack back towards the centre. Now, interestingly, David Cameron has this morning signaled he wants to be a one nation Conservative, trying to signal he wants to shift back to his an earlier version of himself. So, you know, we'll have to wait and see how this all sorts itself out. It's not going to be done this week or in fact in the next year.
- [08:29]
A
And a pretty devastating result again for the Liberal Democrats, isn't it? They lost any claim to be a national political party.
- [08:39]
B
Now back to their fairness. They do have a city, sorry, they have a seat in the Orkneys, so they're quite well spread out. So they are national still. But it's a dreadful result. I mean they're almost back to the point when people used to make unkind jokes about being able to fit the whole of the Liberal Party as it then was in a mini. It's not quite that bad, but it's not great. And the difficulty is we'll see in local election results that will be declared later today whether they've lost further activists by losing more councillors and you know, they're going to have to rebuild the party which took years from scratch and go right the way back to the pavement politics, building their way up. And it will also mean that the Liberal Democrats for a very long time come think that their only realistic role is to be a medium sized party of protest, but never a party of government. That's going to take years to sort itself out within their psyche.
- [09:44]
A
And one of the interesting points this election is how far the opinion polls have been wrong but how well that exit poll has proved to be to come out. So can you tell us why have the opinion polls been so wrong and how did the exit poll come so close to.
- [10:03]
B
Well, the first thing to do is to congratulate John Curtis and his colleagues with the exit poll, which they've now got it remarkably right twice in particularly difficult circumstances. This was very difficult election to get right and they've got it amazingly right. If anything, they understated the, you know, the Conservative success. So, you know, they've done brilliantly. I mean there'll have to be some kind of review of the opinion polls. You could argue that they're all within the margin of error, but the problem they've got is so many of them converged to the same place at the end of the campaign that you wouldn't have thought there would be much room for a margin of error. So I think that, you know, we're either in the world of shy Tories. But again, the method. After the 1992 election, the pollsters hugely improved their methods to try to avoid this sort of problem or some huge late shift now, you know, but I think in fairness to the pollsters, we need to, you know, it'll have to be reviewed and have to find out what happened and see if they can work out why in the end the exit poll got it. I mean it was a much bigger thing, the exit poll, you know, 20 odd thousand people on the day, it's different from a thousand people or slightly boosted sample here and there before the election. But I think we need to wait in fairness to the pollsters, see what a review which was found to happen. I would have thought what that tells.
- [11:27]
A
Us just finally then, doesn't this election show that what we call the fundamentals still hold as the most important factors in deciding an election?
- [11:38]
B
I think it will be read like that. I mean, you know, up to 9:59pm last night, I thought the first past the post system was, you know, creaking to the point of being impossible to save. And that would mean that everybody would say, well perhaps now is the time to go to a proportional representation voting system. Well, with a Conservative majority, given the Conservatives have always been the party least interested in electoral reform, that's not going to happen. Indeed, it will be interesting to see if with a majority, the Conservatives go back to looking at the review of constituencies that in the end they couldn't get through during the last parliament because of the coalition. So I think that what happened in this election is a slight shift back, as your question implies, to the old status quo. But does this really mean that the long term decline of the Conservative plus Labour vote from 97% in 1955 to perhaps 67% this year, up a couple of percentage points, is this the end of the decline? Probably not, but we'll have to wait till the next election to answer that one.
- [12:51]
A
Great, thank you very much. Tony, you're off the art seat.
- [12:53]
B
Thanks, Martin.