Sir John Curtice on What the Polls Tell Us About Brexit
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1 hour and 6 minutes
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Summary
Sir John Curtis is a political scientist at the University of Strathclyde and a regular on BBC Radio 4's Election Night Programmes. In this episode, he talks about how he got into politics, how he became a polling expert, and what it's like being the public face of the BBC on election night.
Transcript
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Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kissinger. And this is
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a show for you if you're bored of watching people having arguments on the internet over
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subjects they know nothing about. At Trigonometry, we don't pretend to be the experts, we ask the
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experts. Our fantastic guest this week is a polling expert and one of this country's
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leading political scientists. Sir John Curtis, welcome to Trigonometry.
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For anyone who doesn't know who you are, which is not many people, given that you're on TV all the time,
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tell us a little bit about how are you, where you are, what's been your journey through life and what do you do now?
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Well, I guess I am best known for these days for being the public face for the BBC on election night programs.
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Probably somewhat less known is actually I've been doing election night programs since 1979.
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But I spent a lot of time working on the production side of television, helping to crunch the numbers, etc., without necessarily being in front of camera.
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So the front of camera stuff, at least on election night, has been rather more recent.
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But basically, the person who was my graduate supervisor when I was doing a PhD was David Butler now.
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So David Butler, who was the doyen of election television in the 1950s and 1960s.
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he needed somebody in the 1979 election to sit behind him with a programmable calculator.
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This is kind of the early days of computing, because he didn't quite want to rely on the BBC
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computer. And he needed somebody behind him who could calculate the swing very quickly for him
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when a result came in, if indeed the BBC computer were to fail. Well, the BBC computer actually
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didn't fail on the night, but I still got to sit in behind it. And then after that, actually,
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somebody else who was also involved in the BBC operation called Clive Payne, persuaded the BBC,
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this is now 1981, very, very early days of PC computing. And he said, look, if we turn up with
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what in those days was called a Research Machines 380Z, which you had to program yourself in basic,
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I mean, you know, none of this kind of software stuff all sitting on your Apple or your PC or
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whatever. So this is pre-PC days, but very early small computers. And we turned up and persuaded
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the BBC that if they gave us the results for the then Greater London Council election
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in 1981, we could put them through our sausage machine and we could tell them about the swings,
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And then out of that grew up and we persuaded the BBC that actually we could start doing
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an instant on the night analysis, which then their commentators could use.
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But then beyond that, there's obviously another backstory.
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My professional job is an academic political scientist, but I'm primarily interested in
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voting, paying for electoral systems, but also more generally social and political attitudes.
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I ended up at Strathclyde basically because that was one of the two institutions in the UK,
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which in the early days of what in political science we call the behavioral revolution,
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which is the idea, if you're going to study politics, it isn't just about what politicians
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do or what constitutions say. But actually, it's about trying to understand how people behave
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politically. And that also means the focus moves away from just what happens in Parliament or in
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governments or whatever, but also to looking at the general public. And Strathclyde, and that
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involves, by the way, therefore doing surveys and numbers, etc. Strathclyde, together with Essex,
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one of the two places that really embraced this early on. So when I was approached by Strathclyde
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and remember being allowed to say that this is what the age of 10 by my or 11 by my parents
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to watch the beginning at least of the 1964 election night resorts program so by this point
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somehow or another at least I got interested in the horse race and the fact there were different
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political parties there was a degree of political involvement in my family and later my mother
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indeed did become a local councillor um but certainly not active party politics yes they
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used to i mean they used to argue i mean my mother and at least one of her brothers and her father
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would argue about politics they were all different views what was the split within the well well i
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my my my father my grandfather was one of the early activists inside the labor party
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uh in cornwall and and his and i think my mother's brother was there my mother was much more
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uh liberal party um inclined um but you know but you know they would they but anyway but to be
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honest there isn't enough there to explain so somehow or another i was always interested in
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this and you know then went to university and then went on to do a graduate studies in this area so
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that's that's the kind of that's the ultimate well fantastic and talking about polling and numbers
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in the last two or three years they've been i can think of one or two incidents where pollsters
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I think Trump and Brexit might be good examples of that.
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is an unalloyed disappointment for the polling industry
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because not only did on average all the polls essentially point towards Conservative and Labour
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being neck and neck with each other, but actually they all did so. And there was very little
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difference between them. And in the end, the Conservatives were five, six, seven, eight points
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ahead. So that was clearly a wrong call. I'll come back to the reasons why in a moment.
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The other examples that people cite are less obvious.
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Well, actually, bear in mind that on average, the polls of how people were going to vote
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in the US presidential election had Hillary Clinton three points ahead.
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So don't blame the polls for the errors of, if that's the correct word,
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Okay. Trump won despite not winning the popular vote. Yes, we can then argue about the performance
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of the polls in certain individual Midwestern states. But I can actually point you to a piece
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I wrote on polling day itself. I tried to keep out of American politics, but eventually somebody
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persuaded to write something and said, look, actually, if you look at the polls carefully
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enough, yeah, it looks as though Hillary Clinton's got about 250 electoral college votes in the back,
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but she hasn't got 270. She could lose. Come back to Brexit. Another one you cited.
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The truth is, if you actually look at all of the opinion polls that were conducted during
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the official four weeks of the campaign, there were slightly more that had Leave ahead than
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What is true is that in the last few polls, there was something of a movement back towards
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Remain, although even amongst the final polls, there were two out of the six or seven or
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But what was going on there, remember, is that there was a widespread expectation that
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They would get it wrong because we all know, don't we, that what happens in big constitutional
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referendums is that the public drawback at the last minute from voting from what seems
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So when the polls, virtually all the polls the week before the Brexit referendum had
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people say, all right, we know what's happening. It's obvious that people are swinging back to
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Remain and Remain are okay. Well, they didn't swing back any further. And actually the polls
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were a little bit out. But particularly if you had tracked what the polls that had been done
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online were saying ever since September 2015, from the moment when we knew what was going to
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be the question on the ballot paper, the polls that had been done online called it 50-50 from
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the beginning. It remained 50-50 all the way through. And anybody who thought that it was
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clear that Remain was going to win were betting against the polls. They were not reflecting what
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the polls were saying. 2017, a bit more complicated. 2017, again, here, having underestimated the
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Conservative performance in 2015, the polls on average overestimate the Conservative performance
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in 2017, but not all of them do. YouGov had more than one excise, but one of their excises
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actually slightly underestimated how well the Conservatives are going to do. Servation had a
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poll which, again, slightly underestimated the Conservative lead, but they weren't all the same
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count. Now, 2015 and 2017 are related. Now, one of the things is, the simplest story about 2015 is
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this, is that the headline figures you get out of opinion polls aren't just simply the number of
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Conservative Labour voters, et cetera, that the polls have interviewed. Pollsters appreciate
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that trying to interview a relatively adequate number of people in a short period of time
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is an exercise where at the end of the day, you are going to struggle to get a wholly representative
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sample population. So what do they do? Well, there are two things they're doing. One is they're
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going and saying, well, look, you know, we think, you know, we can see that as compared with what we
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know about the population in general, this poll is too light on X. And one obvious thing you can
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do is say, look, hang on, for the purpose of argument, only 30% of our people say they voted
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Labour in the last election. I know the real figure was 34. I need to upweight the number of
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Labour voters in our poll, perhaps. So one of the things that they're going on is that they're
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weighting their data demographically to try and make sure that it's right. The other thing they're
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doing is say, well, hang on. Some of my people I've interviewed are going to vote. Some of them
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are not. I've got to try to work out who is and who isn't. So they also try to take into account
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the possibility of differential turnout. So in other words, the headline figures you get aren't
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just simply the unalloyed numbers. They're also then the numbers you get after the data have been
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processed? Well, the polls did a lot of processing in 2015. But not only was it the case that the
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headline number in the polls was Conservative Labour, even Stevens, if you went back to the
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original raw data, i.e. before they'd done any weighting and filtering or whatever, it was also
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a dead heat. So the truth is, at the end of the day, all the terms they had for weighting and
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didn't do anything. What was clear was therefore that the samples were too pro-Labour. Now why
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might this be the case? I think this is where life has got more difficult for polls to. This at least
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is part of the explanation. One of the things that's long been true is that younger people
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are less likely to turn out and vote. This is almost an iron law of politics. But one of the
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things that's changed is that whereas even 10 years ago, certainly 15, 20 years ago, how old
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you were was, for the most part, only weakly related to your probability of voting Conservative
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or Labour. In 2015, this was no longer the case. It was already the case, this is pre-Corbyn,
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that the Labour Party was gaining ground amongst younger voters and losing ground,
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roughly speaking amongst older voters. So in other words, the relationship between age and
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how people were voting was becoming more important. This therefore meant that estimating
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correctly, the age difference in turnout had become more important. But what you can see
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from looking at the 2015 polls is that actually they were all underestimating the age difference
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in turnout. Because one of the problems the polls have, if you're trying to do a poll in two or
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three days is, you know, and you ring somebody up or you send somebody an email saying, can you
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please do my poll? If you're interested in politics, you go, oh, gee whiz, fantastic, I'll fill in that
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poll. If on the other hand, you're an ordinary sane person and not terribly interested in politics,
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you go, you know what, that's an offer I could refuse. So therefore, they tend to get more of
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the people who are politically interested. Now, that's fine in the sense that what you want to
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going to get people to go to the polls. But if along the way, the young people in particular
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that you interview are markedly more interested in politics than other young people, and there's
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then a relationship between how people vote and age, you're going to have trouble. So essentially,
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one of the reasons, at least why the samples were too pro-Labour, is that yes, the young people
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whom they interviewed in 2015 turned out to vote, and they voted Labour. The trouble is they weren't
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typical of all young people. There were lots of other young people who didn't turn out to vote,
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although perhaps they were labor inclined. And so therefore, they're overestimating
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labor success. So that's part of the story. Now, 2017 is this classic case of be careful of trying
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to fight the last battle. Because ironically, if we now redo the same exercise, I said to remember
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in 2015, look at the raw unweighted data, the polls are wrong. After waiting, the polls are
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just as wrong. The same is not true in 2017. If in 2017, you look at the raw unweighted data,
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in most cases, it has the Conservatives, you know, moderately ahead, but only moderately ahead.
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The problem, but no more than that, the problem is that in 2017, the pollsters were doing all
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sorts of things to their data to say, look, actually, I now know that those young voters
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are not going to turn out and vote. I now know I'm at risk of getting too many Labour voters.
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So they engage in various strategies, which ends up, you know, increasing that, coming up with a
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bigger estimate of the age gap in turnout, of downweighting their Labour voters, and over-aging
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the pudding. So they end up, as a result, underestimating Labour performance, not because
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that's what their rule data was telling them, but because in trying to correct for that
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overestimate of Labour support in 2015, they basically overcompensated for the problems
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And ironically, you know, the company that in terms of using an ordinary poll that got
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closest to the result reservation is the one company that decided not to fiddle from what
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So that's an example of, you know, I mean, polling has got more difficult for a whole variety of reasons.
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And there is no doubt that this relationship between age and how people vote and the fact that that then interacts with turnout has made it more difficult.
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But certainly it's a case of demonstrating how it is difficult to get the polling numbers right.
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Because, again, the only thing you have to remember is this, and I'll stop.
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But if you were commissioning me as a pollster and you said, look, I've got this, you're a comedian, you said, I've got this new comedy show.
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And you were to do a two minute example of what you're going to do.
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And you say, you know, go out amongst the public and tell me, you know, what proportion of the comedy market I would get if I were to run a comedy show like this.
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Can you get a negative proportion of the comedy market?
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But anyway, so let's say for the purpose of I would say, look, you know what?
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If you were to run comedy shows like that, maybe it's a new genre.
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Let's say you've created a new genre of comedy show.
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And you were to say, if I were to create this genre and I were to trademark it and market it,
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what proportion of the comedy industry would I have?
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And I said to you, 30% on the basis of my market research.
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and two years later you come back and you say apart from counting all the money you've got
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i've got 25 percent in the market you probably say that was a pretty good job right you say actually
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you told me i had a marketable product here you told me how to sell it gee whiz it worked but
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if i told you that you were going to get 30 percent of the vote and you only got 25 you'd
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be deeply deeply disappointed because we have an electoral system in the uk that means that
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relatively small errors get magnified when it comes to the outcome outside the House of Commons.
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And breathe. But no, but that was genuinely illuminating when you're explaining all the
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data. And I feel deeply, deeply sorry for pollsters because isn't this the most difficult time ever to
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be a pollster where you have two parties, Conservative and Labour at the moment, and
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they're hemorrhaging MPs, therefore hemorrhaging support, you could argue they're not really
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representing whole swathes of the population. Well, there are two things to say that. One,
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of course, is to say we've been here before. For those of us who are old enough to remember the
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1980s, the fact that a new party has been created raises exactly the same polling issues that were
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raised when the Social Democratic Party was first formed in 91. There was a raging debate inside the
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powering industry. So how do we best measure support for this new party? Should we just
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include it in the list of parties that people can choose among? Or do we say to people,
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oh, look, by the way, you know, there's been this new party formed, blah, blah, blah, right? Now,
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how do you think you might vote in the next election? So in other words, do you or do you
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not prompt? The danger with not prompting is that people forget that this new party has been formed
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because it's not yet really in their consciousness
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But the risk with prompting is you basically say,
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oh, by the way, you know, there's this new party,
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you know, I mean, I'm sure you're not going to vote for it, right?
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And certainly we've already seen very dramatic differences
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We've had polls putting them at five or six, not prompted.
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others putting them at 14 or 18 prompted truth might be somewhere in between so this is a to
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that extent at least that you know this is an old problem which is when new parties get formed
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and particularly very early on and frankly you know most voters are not following the
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soap opera of westminster that closely may not even be following your program that
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it's going to take a while before actually frankly
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and they've made some sense of it one way or the other.
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The second point you make is definitely about our political parties.
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Well, I mean, again, I could give you another long lecture here,
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I mean, what is undoubtedly true is that Brexit has proven deeply disruptive
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because the division between Conservative and Labour in our country
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and the division that these two parties are basically orientated towards discussing
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and are relatively comfortable discussing is the division between left and right.
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So those on the left are those essentially are people who think that society is too unequal
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and that the government should be doing something about it.
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Those on the right are those who say, look, at the end of the day,
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if we're all going to be better off, we need to create the incentives for people to take risks.
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And that therefore means that at the end of the day,
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some people who successfully take risks have to be well paid.
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So, you know, that's a continuing argument in our society about what's the best way to advance.
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That's essentially the difference between left and right.
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And that is the division that, for the most part, at election time, you know, if you are right wing, you're more likely to vote Conservative.
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If you're left wing, you're more likely to vote Labour.
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However, Brexit is not about left versus right.
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that that is for you to decide john before you go on this is what happens every time
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both francis and i voted remain but we're both quite concerned about you know democracy being
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thwarted and all the rest of it but just to annoy a lot of our audience every time we mention the
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fact that i mentioned the fact that we voted remain francis says because we're good people
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and then we get a massive wall of youtube comments having a go at us for saying that
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and it's not become a joke we're not trying to pin you down but you're inflicted on yourself
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we now have people saying when are you going to start selling t-shirts which say which say i
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voted remain because i'm a good person so we'll get there anyway well well goodness goodness is
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in the eye i'm really glad i'm really glad you started talking about it because i was going to
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asking about left and right. It's not a crucial thing, and it's widely misunderstood. Brexit was
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not about left versus right. We weren't arguing in the EU referendum about the role of the state
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in the economy and how do we best in equality. We were talking about immigration, about sovereignty,
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and what our relations should be towards an institutional phenomenon that can be regarded
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as an example of the wider process of globalization, right? And whether or not,
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if I ask you a series of questions about your attitudes towards inequality and incentives on
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the rest of it, and I do that, it does not enable me at all to predict whether you voted remain or
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leave. Left-wingers were as likely to vote leave as were right-wingers, okay? The division in the
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EU referendum was between social liberals and social conservatives. And this is an argument
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about what kind of society you are comfortable living in and what kind of society you think
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Britain should be. So a social liberal is somebody who says, look, I don't care what your religion
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is. Your sexual practices are up to you. What moral code you follow is ultimately up to you.
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What language you speak is up to you. Whether or not you salute the Union Jack or what symbols
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you decide to adhere to or respect is up to you. And by the way, I love living in London. It's a
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fantastic, diverse city. So these are people who are comfortable, indeed embrace the idea of social
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diversity. They're essentially people, at the end of the day, say, look, it's up to individuals to
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decide social and moral code and the religious code, et cetera, they live in. But at the other
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end of the spectrum, there's an argument we might call a social conservative that says, no, look,
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at the end of the day, if a society is going to have at least an adequate degree of social cohesion,
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then actually society does need, to some degree at least, need to be able to enforce
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a common moral code. It's a good idea that actually if we do all have some sense of common
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adherence to a set of national symbols, it is a good idea certainly that we all speak the same
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language. And of course also what tends to be true that people with this disposition therefore tend
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to be rather uncomfortable with a diverse environment. These are the people who would
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echo Nigel Farage's comment that they are uncomfortable when they cannot hear English
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being spoken on a bus. These are people, of course, who tend to live outside of London,
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because if you live in London and you hear English being spoken on a bus, it comes as
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something of a surprise. But this is an important argument about what is the best way of organizing
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society. Now, social liberals voted Remain, overwhelmingly. Social conservatives voted
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for Leave. Now, this has always been an element of our politics. It won't surprise you to hear
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because the secret is in the name. Liberal Democrats have always done relatively well
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amongst social liberals. They by no means get all the social liberals, but those who vote
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Liberal Democrat are disproportionately social liberal. And Liberal Democrats are more clearly
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demarcated by their social liberalism than being on the left or the right. Indeed, the Liberal
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Democrat Party tends to swither a bit on the left-right spectrum, you know, sometimes swings
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to the left and then swings back to the right and then swings back to left again and tends to call
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itself centrist. UKIP. UKIP voters, by the way, are not right-wing or those when the UKIP was
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were not right-wing. UKIP voters don't like inequality, right? The bit where they will
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sometimes depart from others is they're not quite sure they trust the state to do anything about it.
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But remember, UKIPers are people who don't like the way that Britain is going in a whole variety
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of ways. And it isn't just about immigration. It's also about economic inequality. So UKIPers
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where you expect the Remainers to go to the Liberal Democrats
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the coalition okay so the two parties whom you would expect and indeed during um uh you know
00:26:40.080
much previous period have been articulating that social liberal social conservative divide were
00:26:45.400
relatively weak so what happened the conservatives lost ground amongst remainers and gained ground
00:26:50.780
amongst um leavers their vote therefore because it was always a bit socially conservative but
00:26:57.740
their vote becomes more clearly socially conservative. On the Labour side, yes, the Labour
00:27:03.060
party does gain a ground amongst leaders, but he gains more ground amongst remainers. One of the
00:27:07.040
things, by the way, that I suspect might now upset many of your audience, in my view, in many ways,
00:27:13.460
Jeremy Corbyn in 2017 achieved what Tony Blair had been trying to deliver for years, which was to
00:27:20.740
deliver a middle-class, social-liberal, university graduate vote.
00:27:25.960
Corbyn's electorate is much more obviously Blairite
00:27:29.060
than either the Blairites or the Corbynistas would like to believe,
00:27:33.020
because Corbyn was not particularly successful,
00:27:35.760
or no more successful than Ed Milibar had been in getting left-wing voters in.
00:27:41.280
Now, but then the crucial, so therefore, what we're then getting,
00:27:43.560
we're getting Conservative and Labour not only now having to articulate
00:27:48.160
the left-right divide with which they are comfortable,
00:27:49.960
But they're now finding themselves articulating this social-liberal, social-conservative divide.
00:27:55.140
Around 70% of the conservative vote is socially conservative and is Remainer.
00:27:59.220
Around 70% of the Labour vote is social-liberal and the conservative vote is Leaver.
00:28:07.660
And given that, there is virtually no statistical link.
00:28:13.520
So the probability that you are on the left in the way that I have defined it is more or less
00:28:19.980
unrelated to whether you're a social liberal or social conservative, right? So we've now got these
00:28:24.340
two dimensions. Now, if you think about it, you've got two dimensions, all right, and you're going to
00:28:27.800
articulate those two dimensions and they're orthogonal to each other at right angles to each
00:28:32.100
other. You really need four parties. Yes. Yeah. But it's being articulated by two. So Conservative
00:28:37.300
and Labour are both being deeply disrupted because they are now finding themselves tackling an issue
00:28:44.980
It's an issue that taps a different set of values,
00:28:58.240
And therefore, they are struggling to deal with the issue,
00:29:02.300
as well as the fact they're also deeply polarized about Brexit.
00:29:07.280
So the irony is that the success of the party...
00:29:09.820
Now, 2017 was this election in which, ironically,
00:29:12.640
The level of support for Conservative and Labour combined was higher than there had been in elections since 1970.
00:29:17.400
But underneath that edifice was the fact that the base of their vote created both parties really serious problems.
00:29:27.560
And, you know, the most obvious way it comes out is this.
00:29:30.700
At the end, we tend to think of the Conservative Party as being a party that promotes the interests of big business.
00:29:38.220
but the electorate that the conservative party has gained is a protectionist electorate it's
00:29:46.340
an electorate that is looking for some shelter from the winds of globalization the very globalization
00:29:53.360
process that big business thinks is helping it to uh to to you know achieve better things and
00:30:00.440
so there's now so the problem for this other conservative party is this tension
00:30:05.320
between its traditional backers and the nature of his lecture.
00:30:10.820
And you see, you know, you now get concerned about how is it that my party is doing these
00:30:18.140
The tension on the Labour side is, although the Labour Party these days is pretty much
00:30:25.160
is almost as popular amongst university graduates as it is amongst those in working class occupations,
00:30:31.680
the Labour Party still thinks of itself as a party that represents the working class and of course
00:30:38.420
it's more working class and it's more of its vote that tended to vote leave so you've therefore got
00:30:45.200
this attachment to the more working class end of its vote because that's part of its historical
00:30:52.680
mission it's the people who they think that they represent and therefore there perhaps is a greater
00:30:59.240
concern about the consequences of upsetting that section of his vote, even though it's very clearly
00:31:04.600
a minority of his vote, than would otherwise be the case. So you can see how the Brexit divide
00:31:10.720
cuts across the party's traditional conceptions of themselves and who they think of as being
00:31:17.720
their traditional allies. And Corbyn and the Labour Party have sort of turned their back almost
00:31:23.060
on the leavers who voted for them by saying that they're going to embrace, I think,
00:31:26.420
Is it a second referendum that they were talking about?
00:31:28.520
Oh, that's a much, that's far too simple an articulation of whether they were talking about it.
00:31:32.460
Your turn to get destroyed, mate. Fantastic. Let's go.
00:31:35.860
The Labour Party position is essentially that if, and only if, Theresa May can get her deal
0.88
00:31:44.560
through the House of Commons and the House of Lords, she then has to pass a second hurdle,
00:31:50.860
which is it needs to win a referendum where Remain would be the option.
00:31:54.620
The Labour Party has not committed itself to being in favour of a referendum should we get precipitated into an early general election. It's still reserved its position on that. And it also isn't saying that we are therefore willing to allow Theresa May's deal to go through the House of Commons.
00:32:19.760
It's a move that certainly, indeed, the party has felt it had to make because, you know,
00:32:24.060
about 60% of Labour voters are in favour of a second EU referendum.
00:32:27.420
And that, at the end of the day, is the bigger end of its constituency.
00:32:31.900
But it's not gone so far as to come out in an unlawed fashion.
00:32:37.160
And there's particularly a crucial difference between what the Labour Party is proposing
00:32:40.780
and what Peter Karl and his colleague Wilson were proposing.
00:32:46.920
So there, I think, was a very adroit attempt to move the debate on.
00:32:51.900
So the Karl-Wilson amendment, at least as originally drafted,
00:32:55.420
we'll wait and see what comes out next week, was, you know what?
00:32:58.920
We'll let Theresa May's deal go through the House of Commons
00:33:01.500
so that she can have the chance to put her vote, her deal, to the public.
00:33:10.120
I mean, I'm pretty critical of the people's vote campaign because the people's vote campaign has
00:33:15.660
been so much framed in terms of the people were lied to, all these false claims. They now know
00:33:23.720
much more about what it's about. Oh, and by the way, the opinion polls tell us that the
00:33:28.520
remain are now ahead. Ergo, therefore, we should have a referendum. It's not an argument that is
00:33:34.040
ever going to persuade Leave voters that perhaps we should have another referendum. Whereas once
00:33:39.420
the Carl Wilson referendum, I think, proposal is much more politically adjoined. It's saying to
00:33:46.000
Leave voters, yeah, she's struggling to get it through the House of Commons. Yeah, you don't
0.99
00:33:51.340
trust the House of Commons, do you? But this is the establishment ganging up on the Leave programme.
00:33:57.640
We are willing to put it back to you. You decide. And I think weeks ago, the moment that it was
00:34:05.160
clear that Theresa May's deal was in trouble. The People's Vote campaign should have moved on
00:34:10.280
and they should have tried to reach out to those on the Leave side. But the trouble is,
00:34:15.440
those involved in the People's Vote campaign, I think, are so much the committed remainers that I
00:34:20.920
think their ideological vision has blinkered to them to what would have been the politically
00:34:25.700
astute move. I mean, not least because at the end of the day, if you're going to get a second
00:34:30.600
referendum, persuading Labour was one of the steps, but almost undoubtedly not a sufficient
00:34:36.460
step. Above all, you need to persuade sections of the Conservative Party. You need particularly
00:34:40.200
to persuade that middle rump of the Conservative Party, which will vote for Theresa May's deal,
00:34:46.260
but certainly won't vote for no deal. And I'm desperate for us to get out of all of this.
00:34:50.980
And this is the way out, but you're not going to persuade them by a set of proposals that just
00:35:00.000
looked like an attempt to reverse brexit so um that's you know you use words like reach out and
00:35:08.220
persuade yeah we don't seem to be doing much of that these days it seems to me like it's more
00:35:13.220
that we've split into extremes and what worries me and we talked about it before we started the
00:35:19.100
show was what happens in several eventualities that are possible we have the no deal which is
00:35:26.120
we leave on WTO terms, we have Theresa's May deal, let's say that goes through, or we have
00:35:32.160
essentially Brexit thwarted and doesn't happen. Or an extension. Or potential extension. And then
00:35:39.040
we go back to the original, doesn't happen, happens, happens under some kind of deal.
00:35:45.060
Now, as I look at all three of those scenarios, and then I look at what I perceive to be the mood
00:35:50.020
in the country, which is going to be a lot less accurate than what you perceive. But nonetheless,
00:35:53.820
if we look at all of that, I can see in all three of those scenarios, a very significant group of
00:35:59.360
people who are going to be deeply, deeply unhappy about what's happened. What do you think is the
00:36:06.160
future of this country in those three scenarios and how the different groups? I mean, I think
00:36:11.160
the first thing to say is that I think whatever we do, we are going to upset people. There is no
00:36:18.120
easy way out of where we find ourselves. Because we are essentially polarised. We are polarised
00:36:28.680
between at least somewhere between a half and two thirds of Leave voters would at the end of the day,
00:36:37.380
they either say, leaving without a deal is what I would most like to happen. Or they say, in some
00:36:44.600
cases, that's what I'm willing to do. Around two-thirds of Remainers go, I want another
00:36:54.740
referendum. And around three-quarters of Remainers, whether they want a referendum or not, at least
00:36:59.600
still say, despite all the other choices around, I'm definitely a Remainer. And most of them say
00:37:05.820
that they would vote the same way. So we are deeply polarised. And one of the difficulties
00:37:11.980
about Brexit is that, you know, we often talk about how supposedly what politicians should do
00:37:18.660
is to search for the center ground. The problem with, but that's based on the assumption. It's
00:37:24.680
based on the assumption that basically, to use the jargon, the distribution of attitudes in our
00:37:30.600
society is unimodal, i.e. there are lots of people in the middle, lots of people who are...
00:37:37.680
I'm just about to explain. So there are lots of people. So if we think of it being, you know,
00:37:41.400
just a left-right debate for the moment, that most people are in the middle. They're neither
00:37:46.000
very left-wing nor very right-wing. They're centrist, okay? And there aren't very many
00:37:50.700
people on the extreme left and the extreme right. And the point is that if you are therefore trying
00:37:54.840
to win an election, the argument is you therefore need to go towards the centre because that's where
00:37:59.200
most voters are. You might be at centre-right, centre-left, but you need to be in the centre.
00:38:04.560
The trouble with Brexit is, in my view, is the distribution is completely different. It's
00:38:10.200
U-shaped, right? So there are lots of people on what we might want to call the extreme leave end
00:38:16.460
of the spectrum. There are lots of people on what we might want to call the extreme remain end of
00:38:20.480
the spectrum. And there aren't that many people in the middle. Me and Francis, that's it. And well,
00:38:25.420
wherever you find yourselves, if you're in the middle, you're rather lonely, I'm afraid.
00:38:28.580
And you see this, I mean, so the irony of what's been going on, I think, is that both Theresa May
00:38:35.400
and Jeremy Corbyn, in their ways, have been trying to find a Brexit compromise, not least because of
00:38:40.740
the reasons I've been thinking about how Brexit divides their parties and calls them such tension.
00:38:44.840
You know, Theresa May's compromise, which is what her deal tries to encapsulate, is, well,
0.95
00:38:49.600
look, I've got certain fixed lines. I think we have to get out of freedom movement because of
00:38:53.600
the concerns about immigration. We've got to get out of the European Court of Justice because of
00:38:58.200
the concerns about sovereignty. And we should be able to make our own train deals, which is partly
00:39:02.380
about sovereignty and a part of an argument about whether or not the EU is or isn't a
00:39:06.000
protectionist organisation, which is a very, very long running debate. But then within those red
00:39:11.080
lines, which is the kind of the kernel of the Leave case, however, we then need, I think what
00:39:16.100
was the phrase, as frictionless a relationship with the EU as possible. So then she's buying
00:39:20.800
into the Remain argument that we do still need to have a close trading relationship with the EU
00:39:25.160
because it's still 55% of our external trade. So that's her compromise. Jamie Corbyn's compromise
00:39:30.980
is a softer Brexit than hers. It's, you know, Norway plus mine. Well, it's single market
00:39:38.560
minus, but with customs union added. So it's a kind of variant of Norway. But it's, you know,
00:39:47.220
Corbyn's rhetoric is we need to bring together the 52% who voted Remain and the 42% who voted Leave.
00:39:54.380
And we think this is the way to do it. So we're acknowledging the concerns about freedom,
00:39:57.520
freedom of movement. We certainly have concerns about the limitations on the state aid rules of
00:40:03.320
the European Union. But we need to have a close relationship. So they're both compromises.
00:40:10.900
The trouble is what you discover is that when you ask people to choose either between Mrs. May's
00:40:17.500
deal and remain and no deal, you find that Mrs. May's deal is the least popular of the three
00:40:25.160
options. But it's also the case if you ask people to choose between Remain, what we for the purposes
00:40:30.500
of shorthand call Norway, which is roughly where Labour are at, and no deal, Norway is third.
00:40:41.580
And although it's true that you can argue that around a half of the public would be willing to
00:40:47.700
accept a kind of Labour Party type soft Brexit, and we suspect that there's a majority for that
00:40:53.420
in the House of Commons. The trouble is it's a Remainer project. A soft Brexit of the kind
00:40:58.640
the Labour Party is talking about, although it was designed to try to bridge the divide between
00:41:03.320
Remainer and Leave at the end of the day, is something that Remainers might be willing to
00:41:06.880
buy into because it's a soft Brexit. Leavers are reluctant to buy into it. So it's very,
00:41:13.420
very difficult to find the compromise that will satisfy people. So yes, you're right.
00:41:20.620
If we leave without a deal, a lot of people will be deeply upset, all right?
00:41:26.220
There's already said a substantial body of leave voters will go yippee, but the clear
00:41:30.860
majority of the public, around two, and maybe as much as two-thirds of the public, will
00:41:34.820
be at least unhappy and in some cases will be deeply, deeply upset.
00:41:43.220
Anybody who knew anything about the food industry would have known the 29th of March was the
00:41:48.860
worst time for this country to potentially be cut off from its food supplies. It's the lowest level
00:41:52.980
of food availability from domestic sources. But anyway, but equally, if we go for a second
00:42:00.940
referendum, given at least the nature of the support for, as I have described, that also is
00:42:06.060
going to upset a lot of people. So can one say, can one criticize the idea of a second referendum
00:42:11.080
on the grounds will be deeply divisive? Yes. But can one also criticise the idea of leaving
00:42:19.400
without a deal as being deeply divisive? Also, yes. So both the things which are the two most
00:42:25.360
popular options are potentially deeply divisive. But the difference there is that people voted to
00:42:31.780
leave, right? People didn't vote to have a second referendum. That's the difference between those
00:42:44.220
substantial minority of Leave voters who are opposed
00:42:51.300
public preference. You can see why Theresa May is in trouble.
1.00
00:43:05.880
Lib... Well, not Lib Dems. They're irrelevant anyway. And then bring them all into the fold.
00:43:11.120
No, it's toys. I mean, a part of the history... Again, one of the reasons why Theresa May's
00:43:17.020
deal is unpopular is that particularly starting with the Chequers Agreement of last summer,
00:43:23.300
support for her and her deal fell particularly heavily amongst Leave voters. So her problem now
00:43:29.200
is that Leave voters were almost as likely to oppose their deal as Remain voters. But she lost
0.99
00:43:33.740
the confidence of Leave voters during the course of the Brexit negotiations, Chequers was a crucial
00:43:38.520
moment. And then the unveiling of the deal itself in mid-November saw support for her position fall
00:43:44.580
even further amongst Leave voters. So, you know, that's the problem that she finds herself in,
00:43:51.800
which is it isn't obvious that those who voted Leave actually back the idea that she's in favour
00:44:01.120
off. But I mean, the only thing to bear in mind is this, you know, let's say how deal goes. So
00:44:06.100
we could therefore say, we can say, well, no deal divisive, EU referendum divisive. Well,
00:44:12.940
let's take the least worst option of the thing that's on the table. And let's just let the deal
00:44:17.080
through. Bear in mind, that's not going to stop the argument. We have barely started the argument,
00:44:26.400
because all we will do if we were to let the deal go through is to mean that the withdrawal
00:44:35.360
treaty becomes legal force. What does the withdrawal treaty do? It protects the rights
00:44:40.280
of EU citizens. It commits the UK to paying roughly 39 billion quid for the next two or
00:44:44.700
three years into EU coffers. And it's got the provisions about the so-called Northern Ireland
00:44:49.620
backstop to try to avoid any risk of there having to be a border between the North and the South
00:44:54.580
of Ireland. Nothing else. We've not talked about whether, I mean, the political declaration
00:44:59.680
says the UK doesn't want to be in freedom of movement, and we recognise that. But the political
00:45:05.160
declaration essentially says, look, how close a relationship the UK has will depend on what
00:45:13.360
rules the UK is willing to follow. Now, if it's not willing to do freedom of movement, it won't
00:45:18.060
be able to be in the single market. And if it's not willing to follow ECJ rules, it'll be in the
00:45:21.780
Cubs and Union. And certainly, sorry, that will also limit its options. But beyond that,
00:45:27.480
it doesn't say anything. It doesn't settle those basic things like European health cards,
00:45:32.640
mobile phone calls, what actually would be what relationship with the single market we have,
00:45:38.620
what regulations we're going to follow, etc, etc. And we're going to carry on arguing for at least
00:45:44.320
another two years until the end of the transition period may well be longer. And for example,
00:46:18.300
the new proposed treaty on our relationship with the European Union. We could go through the whole
00:46:23.560
of this cycle again, because at that point, we will be defining many of the things about our
00:46:30.720
future relationship that at the moment people are worried about. So why are people concerned
00:46:34.920
about the Northern Ireland backstop? Well, the essential reason, I think, is because it
00:46:38.700
potentially constrains the free trade deal that we can have. It pushes us towards having a closer
00:46:44.540
relationship than some Brexiteers would like. But we've not had this argument. So look forward
00:46:51.500
to more and more. So frankly, even if Mrs. May's deal goes through, well, A, it's going to go
00:46:57.440
through grudgingly, but it'll still be divisive because we're still going to be arguing about
00:47:02.400
whether or not we should be coming out of freedom movement, what are the consequences, etc, etc.
00:47:07.740
This is going to be a very long running story. There is no avoidance of division on Brexit
00:47:13.300
because resolving Brexit is a very, very difficult issue.
00:47:27.580
Put it like this, it was, I mean, I will say two things.
00:47:32.220
it's very difficult to sustain a set of political arrangements,
00:47:38.240
which basically by which I mean giving people authority to make the law of the land all right
00:47:48.140
it's very difficult so this is a question about whether it's very difficult to continue to
00:47:53.420
maintain a set of arrangements that says institution x has the authority to determine
00:48:00.180
the law for this bit of territory it's very difficult to do that and continue those arrangements
00:48:05.820
if the people to whom the law applies do not regard that institution as being a legitimate
00:48:14.980
source of authority. You know, we had this debate in Scotland in 2014 about whether or not it was
00:48:21.460
legitimate for the United Kingdom to be able to make the law for Scotland or not. And again,
00:48:27.140
the argument here at the end of the day is, you know, is it legitimate for the European Union
00:48:32.800
to be able to make some of the law for the United Kingdom, because we are sharing our sovereignty.
00:48:40.360
And the fundamental failure of the European project in this country, in my view,
00:48:45.420
is that it failed to instill in the UK population the sense that we are European. And at the end of
00:48:53.020
the day, what tends to underpin a willingness to share a set of political institutions is a common
00:49:00.160
sense of identity. So why, you know, albeit with some considerable fraying at the edges in Scotland
00:49:06.580
and Northern Ireland, for the most part, the majority of the population in the UK accept the
00:49:12.220
authority of parliament and government, etc. Well, because in part, we feel British. So we're all us.
00:49:19.160
Okay. The problem for the European project in this country is that only around one in eight of us or
00:49:25.280
so feel European. Europe is other. And therefore, it was always been possible for basically to use
00:49:33.560
the simple colloquial lingua, why are Brussels bossing us about? Because Brussels is not us.
00:49:41.220
It's that funny place on the other side of the English Channel of which we do not feel part.
00:49:47.560
They are the Europeans. We are the Brits. So that's the fundamental issue of identity.
00:49:52.340
Now, you can look at the European Union's own Eurobarometer data, and we are the only
00:49:56.900
country together with Greece where a majority of the population at the moment deny, deny
00:50:02.980
So the truth is, we've never been more than so many tax members of the European Union.
00:50:07.760
We've been in it for what we could get out of it.
00:50:11.580
When during the last 10 or 20 years, we have experienced by our own historical standards,
00:50:18.600
And the brutal truth is that with freedom of movement, you cannot control immigration.
0.82
00:50:22.880
This presented a potential problem of legitimacy.
00:50:27.960
Now, there's the small answer to you, which is whether David Cameron got his tactics wrong.
00:50:34.900
I mean, insofar as what David Cameron was trying to do was to kill the issue in two senses.
00:50:43.160
His first aim, with the so-called Bloomberg speech in January 2013, which is what set
00:50:47.980
this whole process in track, his immediate aim was, my gosh, Nigel Farage and UKIP's
00:50:55.900
It was the first time that the conservative end of the coalition had been in political
00:50:59.760
This is the time of omni-shambles, et cetera, et cetera.
00:51:12.260
But he does so in the expectation that he's never going to have to deliver, because he's in coalition with the Liberal Democrats, who certainly aren't willing to have a referendum on our membership at the moment, and who are always blocking any attempts to pass one after Cameron's promise, etc., etc.
00:51:36.380
And Cameron probably did not expect to get an overall majority in 2015.
00:51:42.740
So in the end, it failed to scupper UKIP, in the short run at least, only after the referendum, ironically.
00:51:53.640
He then found himself with a promise he hadn't expected to deliver.
00:52:00.020
I think he then made a third mistake. And the third mistake from his point of view was that he rushed at it too quickly. He was clearly wanting to move on. He had a substantial domestic agenda he wanted to pursue because he's already time limited his premiership as being back 2019, 2020. He told us he wasn't going to go for another term.
00:52:20.620
And he was expecting to be able to do a hard work.
00:52:26.060
I mean, he's doing exactly the same thing Howard Wilson did in 74, 75.
00:52:30.040
Howard Wilson became prime minister on a promise to hold a referendum on a membership of the
00:52:35.260
then common market after he had renegotiated the terms of our membership.
00:52:39.100
Now, Wilson pulled it off, came back from the country in March 1975 and said, I've renegotiated
00:52:46.360
public opinion swung around, and we voted two to one to stay inside the common market.
00:52:51.660
Cameron didn't succeed in pulling off the same trick. He wasn't given enough by the European Union.
00:52:56.620
But what he should have been willing to do is, and he'd done this before to great theatrical effect,
00:53:03.600
he should have been willing to play it much longer. He should have been willing to walk out
00:53:07.700
of a European council and go, they're not giving me what I want. This is not good enough.
00:53:12.160
the negotiations have broken down, and to play long. And the point would have been that if he
00:53:19.960
had made it, if he'd apparently been more determined, apparently more robust with the
00:53:26.800
European Union, he might have been in a better position to turn it around. But then, and then,
00:53:32.880
of course, you know, I mean, then the other, I guess, final mistake he made was, you know,
00:53:38.140
he was the last person to go around saying, if we leave the European Union, the world will
00:53:44.360
collapse tomorrow, because this was somebody whose political record was as a Eurosceptic.
00:53:49.000
He had said that if negotiations didn't go well, he'd be willing to argue in favour of leaving.
00:53:54.120
And he failed to appreciate that once the European Council had not turned public opinion around,
00:53:59.320
and above all, had not turned his party around, that he was no longer Prime Minister. He was
00:54:04.620
leader of the opposition and that he was dependent on the opposition, i.e. the Labour Party,
00:54:08.780
to get himself out of the jam. But did he talk to Lord Mandelson or many another ardent
00:54:15.140
Remainer about how the campaign should be fought? No. They mistakenly misunderstood
00:54:21.180
what they had done in Scotland as being a success of fighting essentially a negative campaign about
00:54:26.300
the economic consequences. It was not a success in Scotland. It was a failure and it did not work
00:54:31.600
this time so there's lots and lots of tactical mistakes and including you know it didn't achieve
00:54:36.100
its original objective it was a promise that you know be careful what you promise
00:54:40.920
because sometimes your promises you have to deliver even though you don't expect to do so
00:54:46.820
and then having found himself hoist on his own petard i think that he did not pay enough attention
00:54:52.440
uh to actually from his perspective playing it in such a way that might have increased his chances
00:54:58.300
of actually getting Remain vote. Those tactical issues aside, though, and we've got time for
00:55:03.520
maybe one or two more questions, those tactical issues aside from what you're saying about our
00:55:07.760
cultural attitudes towards Europe and how we feel about ourselves in this country, it seems almost
00:55:12.840
inevitable that we would come to a point where the issue of our membership of the EU would come
00:55:18.200
to the fore, given that we don't really feel European. And as you say, the levels of immigration
00:55:23.440
than we've seen in this country over the last 20 years.
00:55:29.920
I mean, the issue of our membership of the European Union
00:55:33.580
has kept on being an issue ever since 1975, right?
00:55:37.760
You know, not long after the referendum in 1975,
00:55:42.740
came out in favor of us leaving the European Union.
00:55:45.660
There was then a narrow period in the late 80s and early 90s
00:55:48.960
when both political parties were strongly in favor
00:55:53.440
But then once, you know, post-Maastricht and the fall of Margaret Thatcher, the Euros gets increased inside the Conservative Party.
00:56:02.740
And again, you know, we're sure we've long been uncertain.
00:56:08.580
And yes, I mean, at the end, I mean, the difficulty for the Remains side was, yeah, it's partly about immigration.
00:56:31.000
We gave the citizens of then so-called A8 countries,
00:56:41.720
miserable, dark, cloudy country. You know, it's us who want to go to live by the Mediterranean.
00:56:49.300
Now, of course, they came and the Polish plumber came and et cetera, et cetera.
00:56:54.060
And then, of course, in 2010, Cameron said he was going to get net migration down to
00:56:59.560
less than 100,000. We've never got anywhere near. So there's that sense of failure. So that's one
00:57:04.200
of the problems. The other problem, however, is, of course, is also the fallout from the financial
00:57:08.700
crash and the Eurozone crisis. Back in 1975, it was very, very easy to argue why the UK should
00:57:17.640
remain as it only just recently joined the then Common Market. It was the six original members of
00:57:23.100
the Common Market have enjoyed much higher and much more sustained levels of economic growth
00:57:28.580
than we have. We have been the sick man of Europe. You know, as soon as we turn on the taps
00:57:33.960
of public spending, inflation goes up. As soon as we turn them off again,
00:57:38.500
unemployment goes up. We have this stop-go economy. Well, by 2016, rather than being portrayed as an
00:57:47.700
unalloyed economic success, the European Union's economic credentials were, at least shall we say,
00:57:54.680
more debatable. And the Eurozone and how the crisis had been dealt with raised questions about
00:58:29.080
argument, well, it was never there in 1975. And then you've still then got the continued,
00:58:34.560
those who never ever accepted the idea that she would be in the European in the first place put
00:58:39.320
all that together. And yes, it becomes problematic. And how much do you think that that vote was a
00:58:47.160
rebellion, which is what people have classed it as, as a working class people giving two fingers
00:58:52.140
up to Cameron and the ruling elite, as it were? I think, I mean, it's fair to say that
00:58:59.460
certainly a populist narrative is also part of the mix. You know, the idea, certainly that,
00:59:07.920
you know, that there's an elite out there, which is running things against our interest.
00:59:12.980
I wouldn't use the language of class, I would use the language of educational background.
00:59:16.360
But certainly, again, if you listen to Leave Discourse, it's about how the interests of ordinary people are being commandeered, being distorted by the liberal establishment who tend to be university graduates who've had this wonderful liberal education the rest of us have paid for, et cetera, et cetera.
00:59:45.220
So there's the sense of being just being distorted, not only by the state, but also distorted by those in in big business.
00:59:52.540
You know, that's certainly part of the sentiment. But it's then but I would then say, you know, it's that sentiment together with a socially conservative discourse and a concern about sovereignty.
01:00:07.140
But yes, given that we are talking about a situation in which we are having, I think,
01:00:14.480
behind all of this, we are having a debate about the process of globalization.
01:00:20.720
At the end of the day, one of the ways of thinking about it is this.
01:00:26.360
Earlier, I described the argument as being about immigration and about social liberals
01:00:31.500
and social conservatives partly as being a cultural one.
01:00:34.020
But it's also an economic one. At the end of the day, if you are a university graduate where
01:00:40.780
particularly you've got a linguistic qualification or you've got a professional qualification,
01:00:44.980
freedom of movement is an opportunity. If, on the other hand, you are an older person,
01:00:51.720
you have little in the way of labour market skills, immigration is something that happens
1.00
01:00:56.340
to you. People from elsewhere come to your neighbourhood, a neighbourhood which perhaps
01:01:01.120
has not previously had much experience of net inward migration. And what's the advantage to
01:01:08.260
you? So there's that. And then, of course, there's the broader argument about globalization. Well,
01:01:12.340
hang on. Living standards for most people have not been increasing. Indeed, in some cases,
01:01:17.980
they've been declining. Although overall levels of inequality have not necessarily increased,
01:01:22.840
we've certainly not managed to reverse the sharp increase in inequality that occurred in the 1970s
01:01:27.580
and 1980s, and at the very top of the income spectrum, at least, you know, there are arguments
01:01:32.360
to be had. So against the back of all of that, yes, you can see how a focus on this institution
01:01:42.140
whose legitimacy was always questionable, which seems to be promoting the forces of
01:01:49.380
globalisation that don't seem to be doing some of us much good, and from which, frankly,
01:01:54.220
we'd like a bit of protection, both economically and culturally, how that mix does help to bring
0.90
01:01:59.720
about the mood that we have. Well, we have time for one final question, which is the question we
01:02:04.520
always ask, which is what is the one thing that we're not talking about as a society that we
01:02:08.960
ought to be talking about? Well, this is still going to be about Brexit, but we've spent the
01:02:12.840
last hour or so talking about Remainers and about Leavers. But if we were to have another referendum,
01:02:21.320
At the moment, it looks as though the crucial group could be those who did not vote in June 2016.
01:02:28.240
So we do lots of polling data. Remainers think this, Leavers think this.
01:02:30.860
Well, 30% of the population didn't vote in 2016.
01:02:34.940
Some of them, and there are now people who were 16 and 17 in 2016 who now could vote.
01:02:41.160
And insofar as the polling data does suggest that maybe we would get a small majority in favour of Remain
01:02:48.360
a second time around, if there were a second time around. The reason for that is not essentially
01:02:53.420
because those who voted two years ago have changed their minds, but rather that those who didn't vote
01:02:58.740
two years ago now seem to have made up their minds rather late in the day, but they are at least two
01:03:05.200
to one in favour of remains. So the story of those who did not vote two years ago might be perhaps
01:03:13.840
the most important story about the Brexit process. And insofar as we can perhaps critically
01:03:20.020
evaluate the rhetoric about the people who have spoken, therefore they will have to be implemented
01:03:25.500
well, almost in, although the turnout was high by standards of recent general elections, at the end
01:03:32.600
of the day, there was still a substantial body of people who did not vote. And the outcome was close.
01:03:38.600
and inevitably in those circumstances you can always go around and ask well
01:03:43.300
is it still the will of the people now well maybe we will they won't find out
01:03:47.640
certainly the one thing it's easier to say that the will of the people is definitely to leave
01:03:53.320
much clearer thing is the people are divided glad we've solved it then
01:03:58.860
so john cutters thank you very much for coming on the show you mentioned twitter are you on
01:04:04.400
Twitter? Do you use it yourself? I have two institutional accounts. So I have At What UK
01:04:08.500
Thinks, in which I promote and occasionally comment on attitudes towards Brexit. And I also
01:04:16.620
have an account called What Scots Think, which is about public attitudes towards the constitutional
01:04:22.360
debate in Scotland. And they're associated with two websites that follow these two stories.
01:04:26.880
I also saw there's a Twitter account, which is called something like Sir John on TV.
01:04:31.280
Indeed. There is a spoof account. The story behind that is that on the 18th of April 2017,
01:04:40.660
which is the day that Theresa May announced the 2017 general election, I was sitting quietly in
01:04:45.540
an office in Edinburgh where I work one day a week. It was the Tuesday after Easter, thinking,
01:04:49.860
oh yeah, nice quiet day and get on with things. And I get rung up by the news channel, BBC, and
01:04:56.260
they say, the Prime Minister's about to make an announcement. We're not quite sure what
01:05:03.160
it is. We're not sure whether she's ill and she's resigning, but maybe there's going to
01:05:09.300
be an election. So I said, I tell you what, get me a cab. I'll go down to the BBC studio
01:05:16.520
in Edinburgh. And if it's about something else, I'll just quietly go away. And if it
01:05:22.580
is a general election, I'll be there. Well, of course, it's about a general election.
01:05:24.660
you know three hours broadcasting later i managed just about to escape in order to pick up my
01:05:29.760
belongings from where i'd left them come back again do about another or two hours of broadcasting
01:05:33.700
i think there probably was a non-insubstantial body of people or at least somebody on twitter
01:05:37.160
who went why the hell is this guy on a tv all the time well i just happened to be in the wrong place
01:05:43.860
at the wrong time but i think that's when it started and then it's kind of you know it's kind
01:05:47.520
of mushroomed after that but to give you some idea of how researche this group of people can
01:05:55.820
sometimes be i'm certainly aware that on one occasion i think it was just after the 27th
01:06:01.220
i did something for flemish television you know really big audience in this country
01:06:06.320
somebody watched it oh fantastic and we are as always at trigger for the normal social media
01:06:13.060
subscribe to the youtube channel click the bell button next to subscribe button and give
01:06:17.500
us a review on itunes we will see you in a week from now with another brilliant episode thanks