Winning England

Winning England- Transcript

 

Well, good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us and welcome to this webinar from the Centre for English, Identity and Politics at Southampton University. I'm John Denham. I'm the director of the centre and as you know, today's topic is winning England. Why England in part, of course, because England size means that it has a huge influence on the outcome of UK election. But more important, England's politics are different. In 2019, Boris Johnson had a UK majority of 80, but that rested on an England majority, almost twice as big. 156 it was England that wanted the Conservatives, not the rest of the UK. And what's more, when you dig into it. Different social groups, different parts of the electorate, often voted for different parties in each nation. Now today, we're not trying to predict the outcome of the next election. If you want, you can find plenty of opinion polls, MRP projections of constituency results and a discussion of how reliable polls are this far out. All over the Internet, what we really want to do is dig beneath that to look at the underlying factors that will influence different sections of the electorate. And which will ultimately determine the result, as may become clear, there's not a clear consensus on what has happened in. Past looking at recent election analysis, some have emphasised demographics of age, education or home ownership. Others have focused on social and economic values. Others, including myself, have looked at the role of national identity and related ideas of national sovereignty, so there's a lot to try to unpick. In the next hour and a half. Off today's panel is superbly equipped to unpick these complex issues. Lawrence Mackay is a colleague from Southampton University. Matt Goodwin is from the University of Kent, Elsa Henderson from the University of Edinburgh and Paula Surridge from the University of Bristol. They all have also long. And impressive titles that go with other jobs and positions they hold, but I'll leave it there and you can look them up if you want to have more information. I'm going to start with Lawrence, who's been looking at some of the trends over the last 20 years. So Lawrence over to you.Sorry, it's just minimised, I just put my video on OK. Hello everyone. Thanks John for that introduction. I'm is this sharing? Yes, I'm screen sharing and sharing the window. Yeah. OK. Thank you.You need to go on to slide show Lawrence.So this presentation is taking a bit of a long term view on the factors that have driven voters from different identity groups, particularly that that group that sees themselves as more English than they feel British. Using things like the British Social Attitudes Survey and the British Election study, which give us a really good long-term picture of how these groups have have evolved in their voting behaviour and attitudes. So the first thing I just want to show you is graphs. A pair of graphs that John and I made for an unpublished paper on. The simple percentage of the vote share among people who voted from each of these groups towards each party so. The the first thing I want to pick up on here is the among the more English group the Conservatives have gained steadily. So that's that. The circular black dots the Conservatives have gained steadily from around 40% in 2001. Up to nearly 50% in 2015. But then, from 2015 to 2019, we see a real rocketing up of that conservative vote share to where it's about 66% in 2019. Among the more in this group. And I think people hasn't fully been appreciated. How dramatic that that shift has has been and that's one of the key things we want to explore. Also, however, if you look at the more British group you actually see that Labour, even in 2019, which disastrous election of course was still in the lead among the more British group. The Conservatives, conversely, had not gained, even compared to their 2001 vote share among the more British group. And the third thing I want to pick up on her. There is that the more English group, even though they have steadily trended towards the Conservatives over time, they've also shown a a tendency to vote with competitive parties on what we might call the the radical right. So we have UKIP particularly making a strong breakthrough with this party with this section of the electorate. In 2015. I'm not sure why that moved and. And also, although that's not showing this graph, the Brexit Party its vote in 2019 in the European elections where they actually won a plurality of the of the voters, was heavily reliant on that more. English group. So those again are just the trends summarised that I've already discussed. So to look for possible causes of this, the first thing that I turned to heavily influenced by the kinds of work that Paula has been doing on values is the economic and social values which we have in a long term. We have long term trends on this from the British. Institute survey if you're not familiar with these items, it's possible and Paula will discuss them more, but essentially we ask a series of questions which allow us to determine how economically left wing. As opposed to right wing, free market people might be and also how liberal they might be on social issues as opposed to authoritarian. So for example, tough on crime and, for example, things like death penalty would be seen as, say, canonical example of authoritarian offshoots. So the first thing to note here is that. Even though they have been more in the labour camp, the OR sorry, more in the conservative camp, the more the more English are not more economically right wing. They've been very small differences in their economic attitudes over time and that's stayed pretty much. The same for the entirety of this period. Its social attitudes, as you might expect that distinguish these groups a little bit. More that group. That difference did exist even in the early 2000s, but it's become a bit more pronounced, however. The widening of that gap is actually more due to the movement. So all of these groups have moved in a more liberal direction, but. Year 2012 kind of around that point of time. The final thing I want to show you here in terms of the long term trends is attitudes to immigration, which is, you know, has been a defining issue of of British politics has contributed to the Brexit vote, for example, and has been. And the cause of political realignment? The differences that we can observe here, well, we've been plotting 2 things. So one is a measure of how negative they are about immigration, particularly captured through this question, which is the only question that's available over over a long period of time, whether immigration is good for the economy or not, good for the economy. And also whether people see it as the most important issue. So right, a measure of what we call salience. So on the in terms of their underlying attitude right, there has been a a tendency for the more English to be more negative about integration. So for example, in 2001, you can actually see about 90% of the more English saying that. Immigration is not good for the economy. That has steadily ticked down overtime among all groups, but the more British have been a bit more less likely to endorse that attitude in the round 2015. Again, we see quite a big shift, particularly among the more British to be less negative. More positive about immigration. The more English doing the same thing, but at the slower rate. Still about 60% of them saying that they are. They feel immigration is bad for the economy. Also, in terms of the most important issue, there was a steady increase over the 2000s and and peaking in 2015 that particularly those more English voters saw immigration as the most important issue and that has declined quite a bit since 20. 2015 but the the gap is still evident. Also, we have some information. This is also gathered from John's own polling with the Centre for English identity and. Politics, which shows. Essentially, the attitudes to governance by different identity groups because, you know, I kind of the the theory we're moving to thinking that well, perhaps values doesn't explain everything because the values gaps aren't all that big. The immigration gaps are big, but also the salience of it varies a lot overtime. So is it going to? Affect votes the same way overtime attitudes to governance. We see also quite pronounced gaps whereby the English have quite a strong desire to see England represented, so they will say, for example, that it's important that parties stand up for England. About 90% of them will say that that only about 50% of the more British will say that they're also a bit unhappy with some aspects of the devolution. Settlement. Something else is has published a lot of excellent work on and they support some constitutional changes that strengthen England's voice, albeit that they they avoid some more radical ones such as English independence. Even though the Tories gained so much in in 2019, we know that it's the party that is really struggling on the national stage with. Its polling figures. That's down in the low. 20S and it seems that the Tories stand to lose a lot among this block. So we see that even though 66% of the more English voted. Conservative in 2019, we actually see that 13% of them, even though they voted Conservative, actually supports another party and further 16% either had no identification or weren't didn't see themselves as. Innovatives. So that's the reason like this, this vote will not have consolidated around the Conservatives in the way they might have wished post Brexit. And finally the. Last thing I want to point out is, you know, obviously we live in a system where geography matters a lot and where votes are distributed. Is going to be influential to the outcomes of the election in terms of votes to seat. It looks at the the most marginal seats that the Conservatives currently hold and which ones have particularly strong English identity. And the thing that pops out here is this is essentially a list of Red Bull seats that only recently. Felt the conservatives and could well. Trend back to labour. Given some factors such as demographics, so you know you see Barrow and Furness there you see Bolsover Dennis Skinner's seat or old seat. Lee. Andy Burnham's old seat. There's so many such examples of seats where the conservatives are vulnerable, if indeed they are losing out. Among these more English voters. So thank you very much for listening, I. Look forward to any questions.Lawrence, thank you very much indeed. That's a great introduction and I'm going to move straight on to Matt for for his take Matt Goodwin.Thank you, John. Thanks for organising the conference. And just to stay at say, at the outset, I've learned I've learned a great deal from John's writing over the years on, on Englishness and English identity. And Laurence, thanks for your presentation. I learned a lot. During that what I wanted. To do in eight minutes or so. Essentially, summarise an argument that I'm trying to make in a in a new book which is coming out in three weeks called values, voice and virtue, which basically speaks very loudly to the debates over Englishness. Some of the things Lawrence has just mentioned, and I'm sure some of the things that Elsa and. Paula going to talk about and it sort of hinges on this question of what caused this political realignment over the last decade, which I think was really shaped by three big revolts, the rise of national populism, the vote for Brexit, and then Boris Johnson. Persons election victory in 2019 and obviously the consensus today is very much along the lines of of that, that, that post Brexit realignment has essentially come to an end or that the economic cleavage in politics is reasserting itself at the expense of the cultural cleavage in politics. I'm less. Convinced by that, for reasons I'll talk about. But what the book really tries to do is bring brings together a lot of research on what I'm arguing. Are the new drivers in politics and and really the first which Lawrence has already alluded to, is the continuing salience of the value. You divide in British politics, which is rooted in in education based polarisation more than anything, that we still have this growing drift between a university educated minority and a non graduate majority and that that rift is especially acute when you drill down and look at Elite. Graduates versus non graduates on cultural questions that you know we've all spent a lot of our time looking at not just the issue of Brexit, but also how the, the, the remain, leave divide now maps onto a whole range of other issues. How we feel about diversity. How we feel about immigration, how we feel about the pace of social change and how we feel about national identity, Britishness and Englishness within it. And if you. Look at how this value divide maps onto things like Britishness. It's quite clear that actually we still have some very deep rooted. Differences in how people conceive of their national identity, and as Lawrence has just mentioned, those who identify foremost with Englishness are more concern. And about migration and its effects on the country, do you want to slow down the pace of social change? Do you hold a more ethno traditional conception of who they are? They're much more likely to stress things like the importance of shared culture, shared traditions of ancestry, to some extent, but certainly. More ascribed characteristics within their national identity, and none of that is really likely to go away anytime soon. There's certainly a long term trend that's taking place, but, but I would argue many people exaggerate the pace of that. That change, and in short, we still have large numbers of voters today who feel that their values, they're more culturally conservative values, are not represented in the political system or by the elite graduates who tend to dominate most of the institutions within British society. And we can see this also in some recent. Polling we've just done looking at the degree to which people support particular policies and the degree to which they feel neither left nor right represents them on those policy issues and the three most popular policies. Well, firstly, the belief that political correctness has gone too far. Secondly, the belief that immigration should be tighter view, by the way, still held by more than half of the country. And thirdly, that British Britain's distinctive identity, culture and history should be promoted more than it is currently. Being promoted now had I reframed that question in terms of English identity, culture and history being promoted, I dare say we would. We would have found. The the exact same thing, and this matches very neatly onto work that was done by YouGov quite recently, who found indeed the same three police. Well, three very similar policies were still still had considerable public demand but were not adequately in the eyes of voters being represented. The justice system is not harsh. Enough immigration restrictions should be tighter. And thirdly, Britain should not be militarily intervening in other countries and so on. That sort of upper right quadrant, we can still see considerable support for values that people feel are not represented. And I think, secondly, what what, what's closely linked to that? And again, I think Lawrence and John have alluded to this is is a sense among many voters, especially English identifiers that they don't really have much of a voice and not only within our political system, which to be frank. Is dominated by new middle class graduates who tend to share the same set of values, but that they don't really have a voice in many other institutions and society, which also tend to be dominated by the very same groups from media to creative industries to cultural institutions. And so on and so on and. So you know the the potential support for populism for the post Brexit realignment that we've all that we've all been living through is is by no means diminishing in a considerable way, I would argue, rather it is in abeyance. It is simply, you know, in essence, waiting to be mobilised. And you can see that clearly in. The polling if. You look and if you look at who's abandoned the conservatives over the last three years, actually only about one in 10 of Boris Johnson's voters, maybe one in eight have switched to the Labour Party, a much larger number, about 1/3. Have drifted into apathy are undecided, and those voters we've been doing some work on those voters recently very concerned about cultural questions, very concerned about migration, very distrustful of politics, a little bit more likely, as Lawrence pointed to, to be identifying as English rather than British. And so as we. Come round the corner into the next general election campaign where I dare say cultural questions will remain highly salient. Contrary to some of the narratives that are out there, I think actually this this concern over a loss of voice in politics. The extent to which certain voices have been excluded from our national conversation, we'll come back quite prominently. And lastly, I do think in our politics, and Geoff Evans at grant, Justin Guess and others have been doing some really good work on this, which I've found very influential. Lastly, I think this divide over. Perceptions of virtue, perceptions of moral superiority or inferiority is going to become more prominent in our politics, and you can see that most clearly in the politics of the United States and the rise of a much more aggressive. Identitarian politics and John has talked about this in his essays on Englishness. But more in particular, I think we are seeing the rise of a new moral hierarchy in politics, a new way in which members of the elite are trying to derive their sense of status, not simply from material goods, but rather from. What Rob Henderson at Cambridge has called their luxury beliefs a a radical progressivism, which is much more focused. On differentiating different groups and the value of those groups along the lines of race, ethnicity, and in some cases, as we see in the debate over Englishness, national identity, there is a a very visible asymmetry in how we talk about national identity within the UK. There is a tendency which English. Voters sometimes for good. Have picked up on which which views Englishness and English identity as being in some ways morally inferior to other forms of national identity within the UK. And indeed, Jeff Evans and I hope you won't mind me saying this, cause I was so impressed with the paper he's done with Zach Grant has shown this that a perception. Especially among Labour voters especially. In England, a. Perception that labour is no longer interested in representing the white working class relative to other groups and society has indeed been a significant driver of their defection away from the Labour Party. Justin Guest has found very similar findings with regard to similar groups in other Western democracies. And I found much the same in in my work with Roger Eatwell. So this sense of some groups in British society being seen to be virtuous, being seen to be morally righteous. And other groups, especially English, working class voters, cultural conservatives, those who do not have a voice within the institutions being seen to be morally inferior and not being seen to be virtuous relative to other groups in society will also, I think, remain a dominant feature in our politics. So these divides over values, voice and virtue. In my mind, are the devices that are going to carry us through the remainder of the twenty 20s and beyond. It won't just be about inflation and and the cost of living, it won't just be about redistribution and public service. If you look across most Western democracies. If not all of them. The cultural dimension is likely to remain as pressing as prominent as it has been during the twenty 10s. But I'll leave it there. I've hit my 8 minutes. I'm sure we can go go into discussion and. Debate about some of that.Matt, thank you very much indeed. You've opened up a whole series of other issues to build and what Lawrence has said just before I bring Ailsa in just to say to the audience, there is a Q&A function which you should be able to see on your screen. Do please put questions in there to put to the panel. I will. Pose the questions as the chair because it's just simpler and quicker that way, but please do use the quick question and answer function. There's also a chat thing. If people want to have a a discussion or commentary as we go through the speakers. But now moving on. Next speaker is Elsa. I hope we have your. Slides ready to go? Yeah.Yep, Natasha's got them. Perfect.Can we get go to slide show?It was working on my end. Give me just a second norisha.OK.I'll just start talking. It's fine. And then it's like there's lights can follow along.You started the. The slides will catch you.I'm going to talk about England vote choice and the Union, and so I thought I'd I'd focus on one aspect of of vote choice, how it relates to attitudes to the Union, all the data that I'm going to talk about are from the future of England survey, the most recent one. In that should say autumn 2022 and the previous year, autumn 2021. If this interests you, there's our Englishness book, which draws very heavily on the future of England survey. And also we've got a new report coming out with the UK and a changing Europe folks in the next month or so. That's called the ambivalent. Union. So in terms of what I'm going to talk about, let's move to the second slide if we can. It's OK. We'll just, we can just keep. It up in the. Uhm, in the desk view. And oh gosh, there we are, right? Second one on then. Perfect. OK, so I've spent the last 10 years of my academic career arguing that we need to pay attention to England as England, so it might not make sense what I'm about to do. But but we wanted to know how voters in England would vote if they could cast a ballot in devolved elections, and we were particularly interested. In the behaviour. Of those who could support parties with the same name, if that was an option available to them. So we asked 1/3 of the sample, how would you vote if you were able to vote in Scottish elections? We asked how they'd cast their ballot in a constituency contest. We asked 1/3 about the Welsh Senate elections and we asked 1/3 about Northern Ireland. I'm interested in the first instance in those who could cast a ballot for an identical part or not an identical party, but a party with the same name. So I'm interested in Scotland and Wales in the first instance. Now. Why? Why is this not a colossal waste of time? Given that we can't move the English electorate from one part of the state to the other, I think it's an an interesting exercise. First of all, cause it helps us to understand partisanship through a different lens that we normally understand. And it in a highly partisan system, it wouldn't really matter whether you were living in England or Scotland or Wales if you were a labour voter and you had a strong sense of partisan identification, you would vote for the Labour Party regardless of where you lived. And so it helps us to understand how partisan the system is across across the piece. It also helps us to understand whose partisanship travels and whose doesn't. So it helps us to understand partisanship, and it also helps us to identify fault lines within parties at the moment, but also possible future fault lines in parties. So who moves and who doesn't? And how are they different? So in Scotland what we can see conservatives hold on to about 43% of their vote, they lose a little bit to other parties. The balance, however, is a large portion of proportion of people saying they don't know how they would vote if they could cast a ballot. In Scotland, Labour holds on to fewer of its votes among English voters if they were to relocate to Scotland. They hold on to about a third of their vote and one in five English labour voters say that they would cast a vote for the SNP if they lived in Scotland. And I'll come back to that. If we look at Wales 1/3 of the conservative English voters say they would continue to vote for the Conservative Party if they moved to Wales, but one in 10 English conservative voters say that they would cast a ballot for plight labour holds on to more of its vote. It has a majority there, if barely 51% say they would continue to vote. Labour so for thinking back to the issue about partisanship, it's clear that the Conservative Party travels less well than labourers on average. But Labour's travels much more unevenly than does the Conservative Party. If we're looking at fault lines and we look at distinguishing between those who stay and those who switch Natasha, can you move on to the next little bit of text that's supposed to appear on that slide? If you press there we go. Perfect. We can look at the proportion of people who hold a British identity and look at those across the different groups so we can look at English labour voters who would stay with Scottish Labour and English labour voters who would switch to the SNP and what we find is that people who say that they would switch to the SNP are more British than those who say they would stay with labour. And also if we look at conservatives, we can see that 25% describe themselves as British. If you're looking at English conservative voters who say they would still vote for the Conservative Party if they moved to Wales. But if we look at the conservative supplied switchers, then we're up at 56% British. So we have a we we talk a lot about how. Well, Britishness means different things in different parts of the state with reference to how it relates to leave and and remain votes. But it's also clear that British identifiers in different parts of the state have very different visions of the state. British identifiers in Scotland and Wales are the least likely to vote for Plaid. And the SNP. And yet for English voters, the opposite is true. So I that's a way of looking at England that tells us a little bit about what's going on in the state. If we can move to the next slides. Out of the realm of fantasy politics and into vote and tension in still hypothetical elections, we we know that voting preferences have changed from 2019. We can see that Labour are managing to hold on to more of their voters on the Conservative Party, about 73% to 43% for conservative voters. There is some movement. The other parties, about 10% to labour, 12% to reform, 7% say they would not vote in a sizable proportion. And say that they don't know. Now a lot of what explains these movements is can be rooted in evaluations of competence, evaluations of economic policy or core values, and many of the issues that John mentioned in the. Blurb for this. Event, but I think it's worth exploring whether these different types of voters, these conservative to reform conservative loyalists, conservative to labour and labour loyalists, whether these four different groups have different visions of the Union's next slide. So I've got three slides here. The first of them is on national identity. These are based on the Marino questions. So English includes those who describe themselves as English, not British, and more English than British, and the obvious. The opposite is true for the British identifiers, and we can see a clear linear relationship there as we move from conservative to reform. Switchers all the way over to Labour, to Labour loyalists, with Labour loyalists, the most British in the electorate and conservative to perform switchers the most English. In the electorate, so conservative voters who say that they would leave the party have different identity profiles than those who say that they will stay next slide. Next, we can look at issues of solidarity. We can distinguish between economic solidarity and social solidarity. Economic solidarity is used is measured using a question that asks taxes raised in England should be kept in England to help fund English public. Prices or taxes raised in England should be shared with Scotland to help fund Scottish public services. That's the economic solidarity measure. The social solidarity measure we have a series of questions asking about whether people support policy uniformity across the state, or whether policies should be allowed to vary. If different governments want different. Options. This is an index of all six items, and it's the percentage of people saying that they think policy should be uniform across every single policy field that we give to. People on social solidarity, we can see that there is, first of all, we've got stronger support across any of the conservative groups. So conservative to reform conservative, loyal, loyalist and conservative to labour and lower levels of support for policy uniformity. Among among Labour loyalists, so those switching to labour are slightly more like the labour profile but still notice notably conservative in their outlook on economic solidarity. It's higher among Labour voters. And it is among conservatives and those switching to labour retain very much a conservative outlook in their approaches to economic solidarity, whereas if we're looking for those who are switching from conservative to the Reform Party, they are the least likely to say that they wish to share resources with Scotland. So in these two elements. Both in identity and in terms of economic solidarity, those switching from conservative to reform very much have the identity and attitudinal profile of of a bit like Ukip's of old and last slide. We can also look at attitudes to unionism. I'm talking here about two different forms of unionism ambivalent unionism. We measure this as a question asking I want independence from my own part or the Union as it is as a priority for me and I want to remain as it is and the last ambivalent option, which is I don't want independence. But if one or more other parts of the state want to go their own way, then so be it. So the percentage for ambivalent unionism is the percentage indicating that they want that. So be it. Answer in muscular unionism we have a whole battery evaluating muscular unionism and the future of England survey. This is one question from it. It's the question about how many nations there are in the state. People could choose between. There is only one British. There is only one nation, the British nation. There are only nations existing below the level of the state. So in Scotland, Wales and England, or 1/3 option that says nations can exist at the level of the state and below. So you could have a British nation and a Scottish nation, so this is the percentage indicating that there is only one nation. And the British nation on the issue of ambivalence, half of Labour voters seem not all that bothered. If one or more parts of the state go their own way, Labour's level of muscular unionism is particularly low. And because of these two things, you can see a meaningful. Difference between the attitudes of Labour supporters and the attitudes? Of Conservative supporters on the Union. But if you look at conservative defectors, they are less muscular and more ambivalent than those who have stayed with the Conservative Party. So who is less likely to be poached by other parties from the Conservative Party? Those arguably most assertive in their. Unionism. So I think this connects to a bigger. Picture in the in the various reactions to claims that they're that the two parties, the two main parties are fundamentally the same. There's been a lot of evidence saying, well, no, they're actually quite different in terms. Of core values in terms of their attitudes to immigration, in terms of their signs of efficacy, it's not outlined earlier, but to that I would also add that they are very different in terms of their attitudes to the Union. And I'll leave it there.Thank you, Elsa. That's. Great. And another huge set of dimensions to to to think about. Although actually echoing with much more recent data, some of the things that in Lawrence's presentation about ideas of the ideas of the nation. Again, I'll just say to people who are on the call, please do put some questions into the question answer otherwise. You'll have to put up with me putting the questions, and I'm sure yours will be better than mine. Could we go straight on to Paula, please?No, I got all that working. I pressed all the right buttons right order. I've taken a slightly. I'll I'll switch.Hi, Paula.All working.Because it won't do. It that's it. I'll switch that slide. So people can be reading it while I'm talking. I've taken a slightly different approach to the question because I suspected everybody else would be focusing very much on English identity, so I wanted to throw a slightly different perspective in and. I've really focused in on change since the last election, so that's really where where my focus is going to lie. And I've also honed in on these values. Scales that Lawrence talked about at the start, so I've left the items up there so people could have a quick read through them before. Kind of launch into findings using them. One thing I'd like to say cause it's featured a few times and and Matt talked about it as well. A kind of this, this economics or culture kind of framing, and for me, economic attitudes can be values too. So how you want the economy to be organised can also be a set of values. It's not necessarily. About self-interest and so I think of both of these dimensions as value dimensions and not necessarily as in competition with each other, but rather as overlapping and forming distinct groups within the electorate and. To that end, I chopped the electorate into a series of these groups. Now this is. Not not entirely ad hoc. There is a logic behind it which I won't go into for the for the purposes of time, but basically cutting each of the two value dimensions so the economic left, right, and the liberal authoritarian dimension into three groups. And this creates then nine potential positions you can be in the left. And to right on economics and the liberal, moderate, authoritarian in terms of the social dimensions and what I've got in these two charts is is data for England only. So I wanted to hone in on England for obvious reasons. And then data from the British election study that shows how these groups voted in the 2019 election and then the most recent wave of that data is from last year's local election. So it's a little bit dated and I will bring things a bit more up to date at. The end. But what I wanted to show was the groups that are moving the most. So in the 2019 election. It sometimes surprises people to discover that amongst those that were on the left economically but who were socially authoritarian, the Conservatives won the bigger share of the vote in that group than the Labour Party. Those who were on the left on economics. And that's where some really big shifts have taken place. Between the 2019 election and even as early as May last year, the Labour Party were by May last year ahead in all of the groups on the left and were rapidly gaining ground in the centre as well. So that's a really big change and it shows those groups that are moving the groups that are moving are the groups that Matt was talking about to a certain extent that we've been talking about throughout this, this presentation so far, those that have economically left wing views but who perhaps are not as comfortable with the very liberal agenda that they associated with labour. In 2019. And I'm going to go fast because I know you've probably fed up listening to us all talk by now and that's just showing the change in those groups and this this is really a mirror image of what you've got. If you looked at the change between 2019 and 2017 and 2019 in 20 between 2017 and 2019, Labour lost support everywhere but the most support in those left authoritarian. And centre moderate groups. And we're now seeing the reverse of that. The Conservative Party are losing support everywhere, but they're losing it most on amongst those on the economic left. But I wanted to draw your attention to this because although although John said he didn't want us to play Mistick Meg and try and tell you who's gonna win, at least I wanted to throw into the mix a little bit about what might change between now and an election. And Elsa, I think, highlighted that there's quite a lot of indecision. Amongst 2019 Conservative voters, and this is showing how much indecision there is within each values group, so which which of these values groups are most likely to still have some space to shift around to still move between? Parties and we can see it's the ones that have already moved the most. Also have the most indecision there and in terms of what happens next. For for the next general election, it will depend critically on whether the those voters that are undecided, undecided at this point, whether they head off. Back to the Conservatives. Whether they flip in some cases back to Labour because they had been previous Labour voters, or I think particularly critically, for the next election, whether they stay home and sit on their hands, because actually they feel none of the parties quite represent the views that they have. So if I can just take two more slides to cast it into the future. One to show how this polling has changed cause obviously I'm using data from May 2022 and one of the things that's happened since then is that gap between labour and the Conservatives has really widened, and one of the reasons that's widened is because Labour are taking a bigger share of the conservative vote than they were back in May 22. So the trends that I've shown you with the May. 2022 data basically accelerated a little bit since the. Trust. What should we call the trust interlude down. Really, really seem to push voters towards labour in a way that they hadn't been moving quite so much before. And what do I think is likely to happen next? I think we need to look at where people are in terms of the things that really matter to them. And I know Matt spoke about this as well. This is I, I, I I stole a couple of slides from Ipsos because they were kind of pre done and it saved me making charge myself a bit laziness kicking. But the most important issues that people are citing at the moment are not issues that connect to that cultural dimension where Lawrence showed us you get big differences between the British and the English. They are on issues where you don't get those big differences between the British and the English, so top mention this is the January. One perhaps doesn't surprise people. The top mention was the NHS. The crisis in the NHS. We I think we could spend a whole hour talking about the relationship between that crisis and national identity in particular, but then it's about the economy. It's about inflation with immigration. Just matching inflation amongst conservative voters but not coming close to the economy or the NHS. And if we look at it broken down by social grade immigration is not a big issue for either the ABC ones or the C2DE. 's the core issues are those which load onto that economic set of values, and because of that. Labour are starting to pull ahead in the groups whose economic values align with the party position, so it's only if there's some kind of new shock. I think that comes along to the system and makes something else a top priority for people that we're going to see that shift. Around and I. I don't believe anybody who's looked at British politics since 2016 would ever say anything is definitely going to happen, but it there doesn't seem to be any obvious thing on the horizon that's going to change those. The NHS crisis isn't going away. Prices might stop rising as quickly, but they're not going to come down. These things aren't going to be quick fixes. Even if we look to an election held right at the very last minute. I hope that was quick enough, so there's some time for discussion.Paula, thank you very much indeed. And that's been I think people will agree a fascinating set of insights. Well, what's interesting to me is, is, is that people, all our speakers, have taken a different view of the evidence, but actually there's a great deal of overlap. Between the way that people have portrayed the way that people feel represented, the issues they're concerned about. But also some consistency and how things have been shifting in politics over the last couple of years. Let me go into the questions. I I want to start. With one which comes from an anonymous attendee. Saying do you believe there are a lot of similarities between Britain now and Britain in the 1970s and from that would have returned to Thatcherite politics, be a sensible policy for the Conservatives to win more votes now I'm not going to ask everybody to answer every question, but I perhaps I could come to Paula. And then. Having looked at the data that you have, if you were constructing a Conservative party that was going to do better than it is today, what would it look like and would it be a Thatcherite Conservative party? Would better say what we mean by Thatcherite because there's Thatcherite social politics and there's Thatcherite economic politics, obviously, but. What would a more successful Conservative party look like? Paula, can I? Come to you first.So I think a more successful Conservative party would look quite similar to the 2019 Conservative manifesto because I think things like the levelling up agenda were making head headways into representing some of the concerns of people who felt that their areas hadn't been. Talked about and and and things like that. But certainly not with Boris Johnson at the helm, because I think the reputation there has just been tarnished too much by everything that's happened since. But I certainly I don't think we could go back to a simple kind of cross reading of Thatcherism because society has changed so much since then. You know, we've got a much bigger graduate population and that's going to be constantly increasing. Society is going to be. Slowly, but constantly liberalising as those more educated generations move through, and we've, you know, we've already done many of the things that that Thatcherism did in terms of changing to a a housing market dominated by ownership, those kind of things. You can't do them again once you've done them once, so I don't think we should just be simply reading across. We need to look at society as it is and it is a different kind of society and political values and more fragmented, and parties need to learn to work out how to stitch. Those fragments together.Well, I was just thinking in a way, we had a a sort of real world natural experiment with Liz Truss, which you know was was as close as perhaps in some ways we could we could get to a. You know, sort of Thatcherite type model. I mean, I remember looking at the data at the time and sort of coming to the view that trust Onomics was a kind of. At maximum 10% position in terms of the electorate, I mean cutting tax. Doubling down on London financial services, very comfortable with immigration as we saw in the free trade deal or the proposed free trade deal with India, it just was not a boat winner at all for the Conservatives and party gate costs. The party about 6 points in the polls. Trust cost them about 11 or 12. I mean, it was a real, real moment for the party. So I think where the Conservatives are trying to get to which you can now see in the internal party dynamics, was that an event last night with MP. There is a very. Clear desire to establish a new dominant faction within the Conservatives. That is perhaps what we might call national conservatism rather than Thatcherite conservatism. There is an acceptance among both, you know, some more liberal conservatives say you know. Who from the Cameron era and 2019 ERS? Who perhaps are? Closer to the sort of. You know Nick Timothy type mould, that actually the future of the party is in areas like the ones that fell to the party in 2019. So that means a stronger emphasis on on national preference, on community on as Paula said, you know, levelling up, coming up with a sort of. A policy. For England, for non London, England and and this has been exacerbated John, I think by the developments in Scotland recently, I think also will have thoughts on this. I think there's a growing realisation in conservative land that this has made their job much harder, made Labour's job much easier and that perhaps not London, England. Is really the that you know is sort of the area they need to focus on and and just keep your eyes on the on the direction of the US Republicans too on this because there is a lot of interest in the Rhonda Santis model of conservatism. You know, being more activist with the state you heard it this morning on Radio 4, you know, conservatives saying. They want to be more comfortable with the state, which of course Thatcher in some ways was. But you know, in, in, in lots of ways. She wasn't, and they want to be more open intervening in, you know, the institutions to level what they see as being, you know, a stacked deck in favour of liberal graduates. But I'll, I'll leave it there and we can we can.Thanks very much. I I go on nice one from Patrick Davis, which I'll put to Elsa to talk to, but talk around Patrick asked whether the sensor shows that. The public are confused between British and English and the change in the ordering of the census question doesn't show that there's anything significant as people don't know what British and English are. Perhaps else would you like to justify? Perhaps not at huge length because you've written a very long book about this, but actually the reality of these categories of British and English and the extent to which. Using that as a framework of analysis is actually reflecting something quite robust.Yeah, I mean it's an, it's an important question because it touches on one thing. We do know, which is that when in, in many ways, Englishness and Britishness are very tangled in people's minds. If you ask people what makes them proudest to be English and proudest to be British, they often mention exactly the same things, so they are tangled and yet we know that English. Identifiers and British identifiers hold very different baskets of values and very different visions of the state. They are also in very different. In terms of economic left, right, so there's two different things going on. One is the elision and the tangling together and the separate is how different groups who prefer one label over another approach approach the state. So the the reason the census. Is troubling is well, first of all, because they've changed the question order when it wasn't changed in the rest of the state, I think it it immediately imperils kind of evaluating trends over time and it it immediately makes more complicated any comparison across the. Across the state, so far as an exercise in social science, it's decision, the decision making behind it still puzzles me. But done in England, it actually exacerbates or it it done in Scotland. It would not have been as bad because people in Scotland would would overlook the whatever identity category was listed first on the list. And would go digging for the Scottish label. Even if it was listed 5th on the list in England, because of the tangling, that's less likely to be the case and you're more likely to get people engaging in a kind of satisfying well, that identity is good enough. Yeah. Englishness, Britishness, whatever. I'll just pick whichever one is on top and that's why the results from this census, but also the results from the last census. Are not reflected in any social science polling on national on national. Entity, can I just say something very quickly about Thatcherism 1 cause one thing that's different is is attitudes in Scotland.Yeah, please.I mean, Thatcher, not necessarily Thatcher herself, but Thatcherism is widely attributed as as as providing the engine behind the vote for devolution in 1997. A second Thatcherism could well be the engine that drives Scotland towards independence. It is seen as so different from the prevailing preferences, policy preferences and values in Scotland. Much of that is a myth. Much of the difference and distinctiveness about the Scottish electorate is a myth we tell ourselves, and it doesn't always bear up to scrutiny. But it's seen as so contrary to Scottish political culture that it would. You know, attitudes to independence are quite sticky at the moment. They're just constantly stuck in and around the 50% mark. But a return to Thatcherism could well be what pushes it pushes it onwards.Thank you, Lawrence. Can I just come to you to take this discussion a bit further about identity and politics? One of the things you showed which, as you said most people hadn't actually realised, was that Labour actually won the 2019 election, or rather, beat the Conservatives in 2019 amongst those people who were more British than English. In England, looking at the other data we've had today, do you get a sense? Obviously Labour is doing better overall than it was back in 2019. That's clear from the opinion polls. But is there a sense of whether Labour is doing better? Just, or rather, whether it's rescuing the balance back towards where it was in 20, oh, one when they being English and British didn't make very much difference. Or is your sense that Labour is doing better amongst all groups, but it's still heavily dependent on those groups who are more British in their in, in their national identity.I think it's I'll split the difference there. I'll say it's it's somewhere between the two. I think it. If I'm going more on because I haven't done the analysis of or is it the more English that are moving back towards. Labour, for example, since since 2019. But I think you could go off what Paula is showing, for example with the. Re emergence of labour among those with left authoritarian values, who, you know you would heavily identify with a more English than British voter, that is perhaps more likely to be located in the red wall for. Example and you could then. Infer that yes, it probably would be more likely that they're gaining with the more English. UM, slightly more than they would be with the the more British, but it's certainly true that they're gaining across the the board. And so you know whether you want to do anything that upsets the apple cast and plays to any particular group, perhaps at the expense of another group. Would be you know something that would be quite questionable this by the time.Thanks. Can I get an answer? A question from Peter Hayne who asked to what extent will culture war issues like gender recognition feature in the next general election? Can the Tories drive a wage into labour on it? And perhaps we could take that slightly? I'd like you to ask the the specific point, but take it more broadly. Where we have these cultural issues, when do they become politically savient? Paul's evidence was suggesting that they're not the driving factors at the moment. If we look back at Brexit, lots of people before 2016 knew that different parts of the electorate. You're a sceptic and others weren't, but didn't think it mattered because it seemed to be so down on everybody's list of priorities so the could you, any of you, respond on the particular issue about culture wars such as gender recognition, but actually? What is it that makes these cultural divisions actually become the salient issues in an election? And given the overwhelming amount of bad news on the economy and public services, is there any chance of that happening in the short term, Paula?I'll take the the short term point in particular and I think the Conservatives might end up digging themselves into a bit of a hole here. One of the problems Labour has. That was people would keep asking them questions about gender recognition and so on, and voters would go. Why are you talking about this? We don't care about this, and that's likely to happen even more so with the Conservatives. Why is the government talking about this when we can't pay our mortgages when we phone for an ambulance and it doesn't turn up? We want these things fixed. Why are you focusing on these issues? And I think if the Conservatives try to push that agenda at this point as a way of attempting to dig into Labour's lead, they they really risk alienating even more voters in doing so because they're just not voter priorities at the moment. I'll let somebody else take the how do they become voter priorities? Part of that.I'll have a go. Let me. Let me. Let me present the counter.Yeah, Matt.I think when we often when. We talk about issue salience sometimes. We talk about issue salience as though it's it's static lists of issues can't be moved. And if you look at Brexit, if you look at US politics, actually the story around issue salience is often about political entrepreneurship. It's about a politician or a party being willing to exploit that particular issue, and you saw that in Scotland too. I mean, most people ahead of the big debate over gender recognition. Would have said to you this is a low salience question. For me, it's a low salience issue. Indeed, you saw that in much of the polling. Now, if you then ask voters, once they become aware of that issue, how do you feel about this issue? Actually, the Scotland agenda recognition Bill was was not a 5050 issue was an 8020, meaning that only about 20% of voters were supportive. About 80% were opposed. Now the moment Rishi sunak for different reasons mainly linked to the equalities. Decided to politicise that issue. Decided to turn up the volume on that issue. Actually we could see how suddenly voters tuned into it and they were suddenly aware of, oh, hang on a second, somebody wants to do something quite radical involving 16 year olds and legally changing their gender. And it's not to say that went to a top three. Do, but it's exactly the same dynamic that's played out, for example, in schooling and university policy in the US Now putting politics to one side, right? This is not, you know, just put politics to one side. If the Conservatives were clever, there are a number of issues on which they could exploit tensions within the Labour electorate. That cut across left and right in a fairly similar way to Brexit. I'll give you one example from the the BSA data. If you take a question in the BSA and you say to people to what extent do you think equal opportunities have gone too? Or have not gone far enough for minority groups, trans gender people, minority ethnic groups.You will you.Will see a very sharp cultural divide between what we might call, you know, still the remain leave Rift. A similar divide to what we saw over the Brexit question. There are some conservatives in Western democracies that are willing to politicise those issues. And there are some conservatives that are not willing to do so. But I don't buy the argument that if they did, voters would say I'd much rather you talk about the mortgage, because when you actually drill into what voters think about what we're teaching kids in school, what we're what we're doing around sex and gender, how we think about our National History. How we think about who we are, John, and you've written about this. Voters care passionately about these questions and they don't simply say, well, I'm not going to allow let this influence my vote choice because it's not the top three issue in the salience list. It's a question of supply side. Who is going to supply voters. With the arguments on these issues to increase their salience, and I think fortunately for labour at the moment, the Conservatives clearly don't want to do that. But I'll leave it there.Can I just can I just jump in? Yeah.OK, thank you. Yes, Elton.First of all, in terms of when those issues are more likely. To to have cut through it's it's when there is a target audience, when there is an identifiable spokesperson or champion. When it connects to narratives about the nations past, present and and future, and what it is portrayed, possibly as an obstacle to a positive trajectory for the nation, then they have then they have cut through, and particularly among those, it's when they can be connected to undue influence or undue access. To the resort to resources, so to the extent that culture issues can be. Connected to something about the nations trajectory and how it is bending it off where it might be otherwise. Then I think they can have cut through on the specific issue of GRR. I mean, I mentioned the the balance of oppose and support. I think equally relevant are the is the polling on salience when you ask people whether was this an issue that mattered to you and the majority were? No, it wasn't. We remember if the UK Government had intervened to block legislation and it was related to health or it was related to education, I think there would have been a reaction in Scotland, but it's notable that there was an only muted reaction in in Scotland after the Supreme Court. Case about holding an independence referendum. Support for independence. It's went up. It's very we're seeing very little movement. So it was it was one of the few events recently where we've seen a substantial jump in support for independence after the GGR intervention by the UK Government, support for independence actually decreased. And so I think it was one instance where. Certain parts of the electorate, we're seeing a benefit of being in the Union as a result of that, and certain parts of the of the certain, certainly certain, parts of the electorate were reacting negatively to what they perceived as UK Intel. Appearance, but we also know there are segments of the electorate that were reacting positively to the fact that they felt the UK Government in that instance had listened to them. When the Scottish Government had not. So I don't think it's an either or with cultural issues. I think it it very much depends how they're framed.Thank you. I think that's three really good answers on the complexities of how these issues actually enter into politics in the way that matters also. And Lawrence, I'm gonna come back to you on the next one I made, which is Jamie built this question, which in essence is. You know, Labour has been moving arguably towards the right on cultural issues, perhaps to reclaim some of the ground that it had lost back in 2019. But it remains resolutely opposed to talking about England as a nation in its language of politics, and I suppose my question. Question to you, Elsa is is. Is that in your view a strategic mistake or doesn't it matter? And Lawrence, you highlighted in your presentation how this group of voters that labour have lost in the past have quite distinct ideas, particularly about national parliaments and the way that England's interests should be represented. Is your sense and we're talking just about winning England here. We're not talking about the language for winning Scotland or winning Wales, that that Labour would do better to some degree to address those issues. More explicitly. Elsa, can I come to you first, please?Yeah, I mean one. Of the things. We were quite forceful about in the book. Is that a lot of what we're seeing in England and and the the values and attitudes of those who describe themselves as English can be attributed. To a a. Clear sense of a lack of efficacy, a lack of political voice, a lack of English political voice? A. Lack of ability. For voters in England to to identify an English political community that is theirs, there is a sense that they are to some extent without a government of their own. And I think every time both the Conservative Party and the Labour Party deliberately conflate the behaviour of the UK Government or policy and fail to identify when something applies only to England or when it applies across the whole of the UK, or just to England and Wales. In some instances, I think they do a disservice to the political community and I think they further annoy the English electorate. So I I I think it. I think it's something that should be removed from the issue of strategy from one election to the next. I think it's also about how you govern a state and I think we don't. We won't move on from a kind. Of ad hoc. Approach to how we govern the Union and how we treat the Union until we see serious political parties treating England as as a distinct. Political community.Just before Lawrence comes in, Elsa, could I get you to pick up a related question from Simon Eden, which was, and it also relates to sort of Keir Starmer aligning take back control with devolution within England. Is it actually devolution within England that English identifiers want or devolution? To England in the sense of there being a national English political community.Yeah, it's a. It's an important it's an important point because there's two things going on. There's a demand for subsidiarity, so England is politically very centralised. There is absolutely a demand for subsidiarity for decisions, more, more decisions to be taken at the lowest possible level. We know people's local identities are also important to them. And so some of those policies do address the subsidiarity point. What they fail to address is that there is a second movement, which is a a desire for the ability of an English political community to address itself, to govern itself as an. English political community. So it addresses the subsidiarity point, but not the voice point, and that's you can see what people are doing when they propose, when, when they propose different visions of regional assemblies, for example, it's as if they're killing two birds with one stone. It's bringing decisions closer and it's solving the voice. Point, but those regional solutions in a way address neither the subsidiarity point, because they don't bring the decision making low enough and they don't address the English political voice point either because they. Are below the level. Well, of England. So there's these. There's territorial scale issues and they're not quite pitched at the right level.Thank you, Lawrence.Yes, I mean I I would sort of EE much of that really, I mean it's it's quite a a challenging. One to know because we don't have the, you know, the the. Really, the sort of. The kind of experimental social science work that you want to do to determine like what is the effect of what would be the effect of labour endorsing such and such a policy on its its vote choice, we only have a scenario where they haven't endorsed policy and they voted one way or the other. But. I think, UM, the uh, the. The devolution point is is is important. I mean we've got, yeah, I mean it, it's really intriguing the way that, that Starmer has tried to connect the the take back control argument to the the need for devolution. But actually what we see is that. That will have the most appeal. In terms of devolution to things like regional assemblies that will have more appeal to his voter base than to attracting voters that have been lost to the Conservative Party, what we see is that this relationship between the the more, the more British. Supporting more things such as regional assemblies and the more English preferring solution such as an English parliament for example. Also overall is quite contentious. Exactly how you should word questions in terms of presenting these different options for governments. Overall the the devolution option if you. Or sorry, the sub national devolution option. If you pitch it against the option of enhancing England's democracy via, you know, Parliament, for example, it is actually a fractionally less popular solution with the English electorate as a whole. So I do wonder, you know, fundamentally is Labour on to a winner. Yeah. Is it something that, you know when it when it? To the election time, people start digging into the details of manifestos. Maybe the ordinary voters, but you know, they're publicised more on on the media that we could see that as. A potential vulnerability for labour.Thank you. I I'm gonna pick up a question now from Richard Little, but extend it into a broader question perhaps for all of the panellists. Richard asked. Could a lepen type character get off the ground at the moment and he then goes to ask and say would that help more labour be candidates get past? Post so I, but I suppose my my the issue that comes from that is we've clearly got this group of voters which I don't think there's much disagreement about who don't feel terribly well represented within the political spectrum at. At at. At the moment they may be shifting, but Paul has people who are on the left. Economically, and who are socially authoritarian, Matt talked about them in in a related way. If somebody was going to mobilise those voters, as arguably Johnson did back in 2019, is it likely to come from an external new voice? Rather, as UKIP was back in the early 20s. Or maybe Reform Party aspires to be in that space. At the moment, or is it going to come from within conservatism or is this just the wrong time to try that sort of enterprise? Are are we UKIP in 1992 rather than UKIP in in 2012? Matt, you've obviously given a lot of thought about the potential of this group group to be mobilised. What do you see as the possible scenarios, maybe the next next election? But you talked about the next 10 years maybe in the next 10 years.Well, I think the first point I'd make is if you look across Western democracies and I do think it's always useful to look at these things for a comparatively. Hands you know, when we wrote national populism, we argued that these parties were likely to remain durable players. And that is what's happened. I mean, last year in France, Italy, Sweden, Portugal, Spain, these parties have achieved achieved and Hungary's new record levels of support. I mean, they're entrenched players even as the salience of issues has increased and decreased. Even as immigration, for example, has risen and fallen, now I accept the point that Britain is liberalising a bit quicker than many other European nations, and that might deprive. That kind of party of of political demand, I I certainly am. I'm open to that. But I think there are two things that are going on that are interesting. One is there is clearly a push underway that the Conservative Party to fundamentally change the axis of conservative politics. If you speak to their most Conservative MP, they either assume they're going to lose the next election and that will follow. Be followed by philosophical civil war over. What is conserved? Elitism. And there is an acceptance that going back to David Cameron type, you know, liberal conservativism is not going to be you know the way forward. So. So that's one thing to keep in mind. There is a the possibility of a reshaping of British Conservative politics over the next 5 to 10 years. The second possibility which you you allude to is is some. Kind of in insurgency from outside, but of course that's very, very difficult because in the aftermath of Brexit, we don't have European Parliament elections. So it's first past the post or bust. The only people who have tried to do that in the past, such as Nigel Farage, have very little appetite in trying to do it again, precisely because they've removed the main springboard that they had into getting national visibility, which is those PR style European Parliament elections. So I think it is essentially, you know, watching the internal reconfiguration of the. Conservatives with some interest because, as I say, you look at the repo. Publicans, you look at the Italians, you look at the French. There is a reconfiguration of centre, right politics happening at the moment. And it isn't about Thatcherism, and it isn't about cameronism it is about, I think, these parties gradually accepting that if they want to continue with the realignment and that this realignment, remember, is more. Global that just about Brexit and Corbyn. Then they need to patch together a series of policies that will. Will speak to those to that cross class coalition of voters in a compelling way and and just lastly, John, the one thing I and I think his Starmer personally has done a brilliant job of repositioning the Labour Party.But the.One thing he did last week that made me sit up and take notice is in the five missions that he outlined. He didn't mention immigration at all. Now you could take Paul as you and say, well, that's because it's a low salience issue. Why? Should they mention? It. But as we can see with the small boats and with the changing. Debate about migration and borders, which I think you know this is a prediction that may come back to haunt me. But it is only going to become more salient as we. Go through the next few years. I think Isama may look back at that moment and wish he'd not left, Rishi Sunak with a big open. Goal on that question.Paul or I'm going to go to you and Chuck in a slight extra cause. The one from Charlie Haze essentially is Labour doing well on these issues and on the NHS and the economy because the government is perceived. As doing bad. And that's perhaps part of Matt's suggestion that Labour isn't necessarily constructing a platform that's designed to appeal to the voters who appear, who are alienated on some of these issues at the moment. But what what? Are the prospects for the the underrepresented group of voters becoming more politically significant? As they have done in the past.OK. So there's they're they're two quite distinct questions and I prefer to ask for the first one, so I'll go with. That first of all, and that.Yes, just answer the one that.That was thinking about. Groups of voters that are missing from our political debate who could be mobilised, and the parallels with France, so the group of voters most missing from our political debate, are young people without degrees. OK, we have, what about 50% young people now going into higher education? We assume all young people are liberal and have degrees, but it's not true. It's just the fact that most of those people that without degrees, who are young don't vote the turn out amongst those groups is pitiful. But they could be mobilised, as I believe I'm not. I'm not a comparative specialist. Nor are my French specialist, but I believe that the age gradient for the pen is the reverse of what we would expect. Given our age gradient here, and that's because she was able to bring a leftish economic offer to young people in those kinds of positions, and I think that's a group that could be mobilised, that isn't currently, and I think it's a group that we should know more about and we know very little about them because they don't turn up in all our surveys because we, they just don't. Engage with politics at all, so they're a. Group that we don't know very much. About in terms of the Labour Party doing well, because the government are doing badly, I've literally just written a piece about that this morning and I think it is. It's partly because the government are doing badly, but I think if it was just that if it was just pure anti conservativism that we were seeing, we would expect to see that conservative. 2019 vote kind of fragmenting. We'd expect to see a bit more going to the Lib Dems as a protest bit more going to the Greens as a protest. What seems to be underlying it is not necessarily huge enthusiasm for labour, but huge enthusiasm for a different government and people only see the Labour Party as being able to deliver as a different. Government and and that I think potentially poses problems for labour should they win the next election as to how they then generate enthusiasm to be able to govern beyond a single term. I'm not sure if I answered all the questions, but hopefully.Thank you.You you covered a huge amount of ground brilliantly there, Elsa. What? What? What's? What's your sense? I mean, you you were writing about voters who felt they had no efficacy years ago. Where do you see the potential for them to go in the future?Where do I see the potential for voters who have no efficacy to vote in the future or?Well, yeah, I mean whether? They're likely to to remain. I mean, arguably, obviously lots of them by definition don't vote, but some of them did vote in 2019 in England for the Conservatives, some of them at least, are going to vote for other parties. This time predominantly labour. But it seems from the evidence we've had today that none of these people are really saying I've now found the party that absolutely represents what I stand for socially, culturally and economically. And So what do you think the chances are that somebody will create an outlet or they will find an outlet for their politics?Yeah. No, I I think exit is as likely an option as anything else. Uh. And and that's one of the reasons why we put in that kind of hypothetical question about if you were living somewhere else in the UK. Who would you? For because if you are, if your vote if thinking about as a party, if your vote is rock solid, then your voters will continue to vote for you regardless of where in the. UK they live. But it but the size of the don't know is that we see on those hypothetical situations suggest that partisanship is, is a fickle thing. Or rather is. A weak thing at the moment, and so I think exit is as likely an option as any other. I also think this Conservative Party is a very different thing in different parts of the UK. You know, when you're describing the Conservative Party, what you're describing is the Conservative Party in England.OK.You're not really describing the Conservative party in Scotland, which seems to have found itself a a niche in terms of talking about the Union, that is. Quite remarkable in its in its muscular unionism, they, if if the Conservative Party is pivoting away from muscular unionism, if the UK government is pivoting away from muscular unionism, there are no real signs that the Scottish Conservative Party is doing it. If you look at the views that they hold, the supporters holds, they are less pluralist in their vision of the UK state. Then supporters of the DDU. He Scotland remains the most polarised part of the United Kingdom at the moment on a whole range of issues, many of them connected to to constitutional issues. So what happens to the Conservative Party is in a way, what happens to. The Conservative Party in England, I think the movements we're seeing aren't really happening to the same extent in Scotland.Thank you. And Lawrence if. I could throw in a slightly different twist in your presentation. One of the things you showed was not just that the English identifiers were more socially conservative, albeit becoming more liberal over time than the more British. But there was a sharper divergences amongst the more British in terms of their liberal attitudes. Looking at that how how difficult do you see it for Labour to hold together the coalition that it's now apparently building across the different identities and the different cultural groups, perhaps because of the dominance of of economic and public service issues?OK. Yeah, that's. That's an interesting question, I suppose the. The the key challenges to holding together a coalition perhaps don't come to to bear when you're in opposition. I think they're they're perhaps more likely to come to bear when you're in government and there's a concept of the, you know, the the costs of governing where, you know, obviously governments have to make. Choices and their choices. Success. Success. They may alienate, you know, individual blocks of voters. They can't please everyone when they're in opposition. They can, you know, try to some extent to do these these delicate dances around certain issues. And certainly they can at the moment just. Have had some success in just diverting everything to to economic questions and saying this is fundamentally what voters care about and this is what? We want to talk about. I'm sorry. I'm not sure I caught the whole of the question. So could you just repeat it for me?No, it's it's it's, it's OK. I was I I think you probably answering it. I was really just highlighting something from your your evidence showing that it's not just there are difference in meanings between different national identities, which is the framework that you looked at, but actually some of these they're diverging quite quite markedly in a way which makes it challenging. For, for, for, for different groups of people, but but.Yes, and and and maybe.That that's fine. I mean I I.Maybe it will be maybe.It will be the case that you know if if these trends were to. You continue. You could end up with Labour voters being in a really substantially liberal space, or at least you know in in, in five or or 10 years time, at which point you'd have, you know, a lot of pressure to do things such as, for example. Rejoin the European Union, or at least the the single market. It and at the point where you have to say yes or no to those voters quite definitively, then perhaps that is the source of point where you actually do risk splitting your your carefully constructed coalition. But we don't know exactly what. If those trends will will continue because there's there's it's possible that I suppose one of two things could be true. One could be that it could be thermostatic or sorry, this is some political science jargon coming out here, but a thermostatic response to. Seeing Conservative party policy. Or having the Conservatives in government for extended period of time and people moving against conservative social positions, the other one could be that that. And sorry, the extension of the thermostatic argument being that if Labour gets in. People start to think overtime that things have moved too far to the left or to the liberal direction on social issues as well, and so they respond in in that way. The other possibility could be that it's a response to the increased prominence of the the radical right, at least over the past. At least over the period of UKIP and Brexit people wanted, you know, there were certain people, particularly this, this graduate, younger graduate cardera. That you know particularly define their values strongly against that, and so perhaps became more pro immigration in response to the negative messaging that they may have seen from parties and in the media. And so it's partly depends on you know is there is there. Out group that they want to continue defining themselves against and how strongly do they want to define themselves against that sort of reactionary force in society then then they may have seen us gaining so much prominence during Brexit and Trump.Thank you.OK. Thank you very much. And I'm going to need to draw it to a close here. That's been a very, very rich discussion without reprising it, reprising it it, it's quite clear that beneath the headline polls we see of labour leads of 20% or whatever, there's an awful. Lot going on. And the extent to which different voters really would now feel they had found the home they want to be in varies quite considerably across the electorate. And that in turn means they're the next election or beyond all sorts of factors are still in play about ideas of the nation's politics, economics and so on. And I think we've done. Well, the panel at least has done a fantastic job this afternoon in identifying and showing where the discussion lies in many of those many of those areas. So can I thank everybody for joining us. We will make the recording available on the website as soon as possible and thank you very much indeed everyone. Thank you.