2017 General Election Panel Event Briefings

It's been an extraordinary year for British politics and helping us to

get underneath the skin of that is our panel this morning. So in order

of speaking, I'm delighted to introduce Dr Chris Crosser from th

University of Manchester and the British election study who is look

at voting atty Tuesday. -- voting atty Tuesday. Professor Henderson

who will talk us through the view on Scotland an Professor Tim Bale from

Queen university London. Without further ado, I'll hand over to Chris

to kick us off. I want to talk about three things. I want to put the

current election into long-term context looking at how voters have

changed the way they behave over a long period and also comparing

attitudes towards the parties and leaders to the last couple of

elections. Anyone who asks the question is this the Brexit

election, that is the big question on everyone's minds, then I want to

touch on the role of leadership. I'm joined by the Internet panel which

interviews 30,000 people per wave and we have been running the current

one since 2013 but it's been going for much longer, the British

election study has run since 1964. The most recent wave was in December

of last year and ideally we would have had slightly more recent data

but the Prime Minister didn't give us quite enough notice unfortunately

to get that out in time. So one of the interesting things

about this election is whether it marks a return to a two-party

system. So Ukip look like they're collapsing, the Lib Dems are

struggling to regain their previous levels of support and with the

exception of Scotland, as I'm sure we'll be reminded later, it looks

like a one-horse race and a maybe a one-and-a-half horse race in

England. If the polls are right, this is what the shared two party

vote is over the years. It's declined massively over a long

period of time since the 50s when the Conservatives and Labour got

more than 90% of the vote to the most recent election where they only

got 70%. If it twos back up to the sort of level expected by the polls,

it marks a return not quite to the levels of two-party competition that

we saw in the 50s and 60s, but at least maybe to the 80s and 90s. I

want to say that even if this is apparent return to the previous

model of British politics, the sort of things underlying politics

haven't changed in the same direction. So I don't think we are

really going to see a long-term shift back to the way politics used

to be. This graph shows the percentage of voters who switch

parties between elections and we know this because we take interviews

from people at one election and ask if they are ready and reinterview

years later and ask who they voted for. This number's gone up seasonth

substantially. We have this second election that we can choose from,

for the first time, only 13% of respondents changed parties between

electionses. So just over one in ten. Whereas in 2015 which marks the

high watermark of switching, 43% of the electorate voted for someone

different than who they voted for five years previously in 2010. The

reasons for this are long and complicated and I don't have time to

begin to to them, but basically -- time to go into them, but basically

the breakdown of strong class hierarchies and Trade Unions and

that sort of thing which pinned people into the two party system

have eroded over a long period. This is unlikely to reverse. Even if if

election looks like a return to the way things used to be, the things

underpinning it that have led to the fragmentation of British politics

are unlikely to go away. Now I want to look at how things have changed

since 2010 and 2015. If you look at the polls, things have changed

dramatically since 2010 and 2015, but if you ask people the slightly

different question, not who they are going to vote for but how they feel

about the parties, actually the changed are much more muted. So this

is the average level of liking of parties at each election and you can

see that OK the Conservatives are slightly more popular than they were

last time but they're not really much popular than they were in 2010

and OK Labour is slightly less popular than in 2015 but only by a

tiny bit and actually they are much more popular than they were in 2010.

If you compare this to the really big changes in British politics like

the change in how people felt about the Lib Dems after 2010 or about the

SNP in Scotland after the reference double, the shifts in feelings about

the Conservative Labour are really quite small. But if you look at how

people feel about the leaders of the parties, there's a little bit more

change. You can see Theresa May is well-liked, more so than David

Cameron was either before he came Prime Minister or in 2015. Jeremy

Corbyn is slightly less well liked than Ed Miliband but the notable

thing is that it's not that much different from how people felt about

Ed Miliband. There's something I want to come back to later on, but

the thing to remember about leadership, it's much more volatile

than how people feel about the parties. The current election, the

Tories are doing particularly well because Theresa May is so popular,

but people's attitudes about leaders tend to change rapidly more so than

parties, so if something went wrong with Brexit or if Labour managed to

elect a more popular leader, we could see a quick reversal of

fortunes in the polls. Now the big question is, is this the Brexit

election. One question we asked people in the surveys is what is the

most important issue facing the country. The easy way to visualise

the responses is to do a word cloud which weights the size of words

according to how frequently they are mentioned in people's responses.

This is a free text to an open-ended response. People are worried about

Brexit and other issues like the NHS, immigration. They are slightly

misleading though because they reward pluralities and punish people

who disagree, much like our electoral system, it's actually the

majority of people didn't say Brexit, only 43% of the sample said

Brexit was the most important issue. It's high for a question of this

type. Brexit seems to be at the forefront of people's mind but the

effect it's having on the way people cast their votes is very confused

and noisy and it's not clear at all that we are going to get the same

realignment that we have in Scotland after the Scottish independence

referendum. So these graphs show the flow of the vote between 2015 and

our last survey in 2016. So December 2016, so post-referendum. So the two

things to note I think really are one how much movement there is in

all directions, so yes, you know, there are people moving from Labour

to the Lib Dems on the remain side, people moving from Labour to the

Tories on the leave side. Actually, there are people moving all over the

place and there's a lot of people who're unsure about who they're

going to vote for. So it looks like, although some people are being

shifted by Brexit, mostly it's causing volatility and uncertainty

in the election rather than reforming the lines of party

competition in a clear way. If it's not Brexit, what is it? The

obvious answer is it's about leadership and competence. I showed

you the like figures before I showed you that Jeremy Corbyn was less well

liked than Theresa May. Probably more important is the final set of

bars which asked people how competent they thought Corbyn and

May were. So although Corbyn is always lagging behind May on whether

they are liked or have integrity, it's this competence one that picks

out the difference between them. Another way of visualising this is

to think about how the returns on liking a leader translate into

thinking that they will be the best Prime Minister. This graph plots

responses from these questions. So along the bottom is how people felt

about each leader, so how you felt about Corbyn and how you felt about

May and then going up is the proportion of those people in each

of the categories for each leader who thought that that person would

be the best Prime Minister. You can see that even when people

don't like May they think she would be a better Prime Minister than

people who think the same way about Corbyn. Only about one in ten think

that Corbyn would be the best Prime Minister but four in ten think May

would be the best Prime Minister. When you go up to seven which is

quite high, and remember the average is between 4-5, so someone that

likes Corbyn a seven on this scale is twice as positive about Corbyn as

the average voter in Britain. But even there: only four in ten of

those people think he would be the best Prime Minister compared to 85%

of the people who think that way about May. So I think that is why

the election is going the way it is. Some people think Corbyn looks like

a nice guy, might have nice valleys, they might agree with his policies,

but they don't think he has what it takes to be Prime Minister. On a

final note, I would caution against separating out Brexit and leadership

entirely. Here I've broken down how people feel about May and Corbyn by

their vote in 2015 and their vote in the EU referendums. You can see that

for the Conservatives, May is definitely more popular but she's

more popular amongst leavers than remainders. The really interesting

one is labour. Corbyn is more popular amongst remainers and May is

more well liked amongst leave voters than Corbyn is. These things are

interacting in a way that is advantage in the Conservatives and

the issues of leadership and Brexit are very much entangled in the

election. Thank you. Can I handover to Jennifer. I'm going to talk about

two different topics today. The first is around the selection of

women in the 2017 campaign, and that is a bit about what voters 's

emotional responses are towards the campaign and the party leaders.

and the election so far around the and the election so far around the

selection of women, and the great strides that have taken place not

just in 2017 but since 1997. One argument we've made is the

centralised election process, as a result of the snap election, gave

the party leadership and opportunity to push and equality agenda if they

chose to. What we've seen is the result is that with women to win on

the conservative side, there has been a dramatic increase in the

percentage of women selected to contest the election. This isn't

just about that kind of effort. Lots of women candidates ask citing the

Theresa May factor, there a bit more confidence about their ability to

stand as candidates. There is also a shift in local selectors, that if a

woman is good enough to be Prime Minister she should be good enough

to be a candidate as well. Lots of noise around equality and that has

resulted in a higher percentage of women selected. Overall for all

candidates, we know that women constitute just under 30%, so 29%,

and that is up 3% from 2015. In 2015 26% of candidates were women and in

2017 is now 29%. When we break that down by parties, you can see that

for Conservative, Labour and Lib Dems, their percentage of women

candidates has gone up from 2015. 29% of candidates are women

candidates for the Conservative Party, 41 for Labour and 29 for the

Lib Dems. For Ukip, and SNP this has gone down slightly. In some cases,

particularly for Ukip and the Greens, they aren't fielding as many

candidates and I think the effort around selection for women for those

parties has reduced. We've taken this information and Chris and

colleagues at UEA have done one of their early forecasts in terms of

what would the outcome look like in terms of total number of MPs, but

also what would that do for the gender balance of the new

Parliament. Our estimates for the forecast of all MPs would be 410 for

the Conservatives, 150 acre labour, eight for Lib Dem and 74 for the

other parties. When we look at that for the impact on what that will

have, so how does that selection of women translate into representation

in the Commons, we project 98 for the Conservatives, 73 for Labour,

and just one for the Lib Dems. 22 for other parties. This presents an

interesting change in the Commons and an interesting change around the

dynamics of gender. When we moved to compare that to 2015, there are

three points we can take away. First is that 2017 isn't going to be the

step change in gender representation we saw in 2015. In 2015 we finished

with 191 women MPs elected, and we aren't going to see that kind of

percentage change increase. Our projection is will see a total of

194 women MPs, which is obviously three better than 2015, but it's

actually down on the number at dissolution. There were 196 at the

time of dissolution. From where we were in early May and will actually

be slightly lower than that. There are two other points that I think

are interesting. The first is that the Conservatives will take over as

the party who are leading an women MPs. They will have just short of

100 women MPs, they will have more women MPs than any other party in

Parliament. However, their percentage of women MPs is still

significantly lower than Labour. It is still a man's party in terms of

representation in the Commons. For the Conservatives, just 24% of MPs,

and this is a projection, will be women. When we compare that to the

Labour Party, almost 50% of the Labour Party MPs will be women. In

terms of their Parliamentary party it's a significant difference in

terms of what we see the balance of representation. In terms of that

more subtle shift in terms of who owns and is leading the dialogue

around women's representation, the efforts by Theresa May, by Baroness

Jenkin, have really shifted the perception of the role of women

within the Conservative Party. Switching gears, we wanted to have a

think about the campaign. We've heard lots about strong and stable,

but we've also heard a bit about it being dull. The reason we think this

might matter is because the dollar the election, that may have an

impact on turnout. If people aren't excited, will they get out to the

polls. This is data from just last week and we asked the British

public, can you tell us which of the following range of feelings you

think about the campaign is happening? There were four options.

These are situated where you've got some motivating and positive

feelings which are the happy and excited, those other things we think

would get people to turnout, with got some passive but positive

feelings which we might call content and relaxed, then we've got some

passive negative, bored and depressed, and activating negative

emotions which are angry and emotions which are angry and

disgusted. What you can see is that, let's take those who haven't decided

how they are going to vote. The undecideds are the least emotive

about this election of all the groups we are looking at. Looking at

voting intention and how they say they are going to vote on June the

8th. Those undecided are the least animated and the least invested.

That makes us consider whether these are people who are going to shift

and turnout. For what we might call a progressive rock, Liberal

Democrat, SNP, Plaid Cymru and Labour, they are down around bored

and depressed. We'll leave it at that. Coming to Chris's point about

is this the Brexit election, we said, let's think about how people

voted in the referendum. When we look for those people who voted

Remain, they are more likely to say they are depressed and board but

less likely to say they are angry or disgusted. This is really

interesting because it goes to the argument and the data we've been

seeing about the re-lever -- "re-leavers". Those who have

accepted the Brexit decision and are on board. So even for those who said

they wanted to remain, they don't seem particularly animated. But they

are in this bottom quadrant here. There are some here who are actually

saying they are quite angry and disgusted. Finally, we wanted to

focus on people's feelings towards the party leaders. The positions

around the parties hasn't changed very much but what we think is

driving this is people's feelings and peoples evaluations of the party

leaders. Whereas Chris showed you a nice story around competence and

trust, we are looking at a more emotive valuation of how people are

viewing the party leaders. It's that emotional evaluation that influences

whether they go to the polls and how they cast their vote. There are two

things. We've got Jeremy Corbyn and Theresa May. What these spider plots

show us is that supporters like their party leaders but very few

other ones don't. That's not necessarily the surprising takeaway.

If you look at the... They are quite pleased and happy for the most part

around Jeremy Corbyn. That's all so true for Theresa May. I think there

are a couple of interesting things to think about. When people are

describing Theresa May they say they feel hopeful and confident. But it's

not happy and proud, it's not the act motivating emotion is. This is

labour and Liberal Democrats and Ukip. Theresa May invites a more

negative emotional response from non-supporters. Whereas Corbyn get

some in the lead emotionally negative responses, it is and has

intense as those who aren't going to vote for May. Feelings for May are

more intense, she gets more support from supporters, but her

non-supporters are more likely to say they are feeling angry and

afraid. So how this plays out, we think will be largely around people

are generally happy with Theresa May, she is viewed as competent, she

is viewed as a leader and that's what is going to win this election.

It's not going to be a massive shift, unless there is that pivotal

thing in the campaign that happens, this is going to be a very stable

and safe when for the Conservatives. Thank you. I'll talk today a bit

about Scotland. I've got six questions I thought might be helpful

so I'll deal with each quickly in turn and then we can talk about them

in the question and answer afterwards. In terms of how the

Scottish context has changed, there are a couple of things worth noting.

Scots used about four different parties at different electoral

levels. They would be more likely to vote for the SNP in a Holyrood

election and in a Westminster election. But now that is no longer

the case. Voters are voting consistently across Holyrood and

Westminster elections. So over time this is data consistency. We can see

in the most recent election this is the proportion of parties retaining

their voters from having cast a ballot for them in a previous

election at another electoral level. Party preferences are converging

across electoral levels. The other thing that I think it's worth noting

is that not only are they converging, but they are converging

on Holyrood preferences rather than on Westminster preferences. To the

extent voters were inconsistent before, they are now more

consistently backing the party they were typically back in a Holyrood

election. The other thing we know is that when they resolve that

inconsistency the reason they are resolving it is because they are

voting in the direction of their constitutional preferences. We can

look over time at people who are broadly supportive of a no vote or

remaining within the union and people broadly supportive of a yes

vote or a yes party and independence for Scotland. One thing we can see

is that consistency is increasing over time but the other thing is

that unionist voters are more consistent in their preferences than

our pro-independence supporters. When they are resolving that

inconsistency it's another way of proving what I said before, when

people resolve that they want to vote yes but they back a no

supporting party or they like to vote no against independence but

they support the SNP, when voters resolve that inconsistency they

resolve it in the direction of their constitutional preferences. There's

lots of ways of looking at how the 2014 referendum has had an impact on

voter preferences. Our argument is that it stripped out some of the

inconsistency and also affected how people cast ballots in Westminster

elections. The Other thing we know about the

Scottish context is we have seen an increase in parties campaigning on

issues that have nothing to do with the electoral level they are

campaigning for. We saw this most obviously in the local elections

where we had Conservative candidates saying vote for me to sit on

Edinburgh city council if you want to stop a second referendum council,

Edinburgh City Council can't control that. We also saw people saying vote

for me for Edinburgh City Council if you want to stop a high Brexit.

Again Edinburgh City Council can't do much about that. We saw that in

the local elections but also see it in this election where we see Alex

Salmond appearing and being grilled on the SNP's record on education in

the Scottish Parliament. There's a lot of research about the extent to

which voters have different understandings of citizenship,

different senses of trust and efficacy. They reward parties at

different levels in a fairly sophisticated way. The only way that

happens is if they have an understanding of what is reserved

and what is devolved and if parties campaign for reserved elections on

reserved issues and cam main in devolved elections and issues and so

on. What we are seeing here is this multidimensional soup in Scotland.

That isn't the case in Wales. That is how the context has changed

running into the 2017 election. In terms of Scotland now, we are seeing

a different campaign in Scotland, far fewer mentions of Brexit, far

less attention to Brexit in the campaign literature coming across

the doors, far less mentions of it in the press. What we are seeing is

more attention to opposition to an independence referendum. Now that

might change as the manifestos come out and people start to talk about

policy issues, other than Brexit and independence, but what we are seeing

is less on Brexit and Scotland, more on attitudes to independence. Now,

where the party is targeting - well I'll focus predominantly on Labour

and the Conservatives, the SNP obviously hoping to hold on to every

single seat they've got. Labour hold one, they hold Edinburgh south and

they are hoping to keep it. I have yet to see a single prediction that

assumes he will keep it. However, I suppose there is good news in the

fact that some predictions say it will go to the Conservatives and

other predictions say it will go to the SNP. The other possible good

news for Ian Murray is he has a very good reputation as a local MP. But

the other thing about Edinburgh is that yes it was a city that voted no

and so one might think that that would help the Conservatives, but it

was far more a city that voted remain. It was 75% remain. So

Edinburgh people are more annoyed about Brexit than they are about the

prospect of independence and that might well allow him to retain his

seat. Labour say they're targeting place where is they were ahead of

the SNP or within one percentage point of the SNP in the most recent

elections. How credible are the targets? We can look at different

pieces of information and, to cut through everything, the red stuff is

good news. So I've got what happened in 2015, what the lead was of the

SNP over Labour in that election. If welike at the most recent national

poll in Scotland, what can we understand about national swings,

what might that do to the standing of the parties in that constituency.

What do we know about trends and no-voting in 2014 or leave voting in

2016? What happened in the 2016 election and what happened in the

locals in terms of preferences. There is no good news here for

Labour. If you look at just the national swing, it doesn't look like

they are going to pick anything up. You might assume that the stroerning

the support for leave, that might help Labour. But they're in a fight

with the Conservatives in terms of support. In terms of places where

Labour hold the Parliament, Scottish Parliament constituency, there is

some good news in east Lothian. That's Ian Gray's Scottish

Parliamentary seat. Some good news for them there. They had more first

preferences in the local elections in east Lothian. Other than that,

there's not a whole lot of good news for Labour both in terms of the seat

they hold and in terms of their targets. We can talk later on what

on earth is happening in Aberdeen City Council if you would like. In

term to haves Conservatives, obviously they hold DCT -- in terms

of the Conservatives, they hold DCT, less than 800. They have said they

think they can win 15 seats which is leading some to question their

expectation management. If we look at some of their targets, then again

we can do the equivalent thing and look at how they fared in 2015, what

the national swing would mean, so national swing, the SNP are down

nine, the Conservatives are up 13 on their performance in the 2015

election, so if you just subtract nine from how the SNP were doing and

were doing, what does that suggest were doing, what does that suggest

in terms of profiles? We should be cautious, assuming that national

constituency contest. So we can look constituency contest. So we can look

also at local dynamics and how people were voting in 2014, very

high votes for leave, for example, might help a Conservative Party

that's staking its position far out on the opposition to a second

independence referendum. We might assume that greater support for

leave, almost 50% and Murray might help the Conservatives. We can also

look at what was happening in terms of the 2016 Scottish Parliament

elections or in terms of first elections or in terms of first

preferences in the locals. But the general news is, there's far more

good news in terms of the Conservative targets in this

election than there was for Labour in terms of their targets.

I'll skip over the Lib Dems for now. What should we make of the

predictions? These are a range of the predictions that we are seeing

in terms of how the SNP and Conservatives, Lib Dem and Labour

might fare. No-one is predicting Labour will hold a seat in this

election. Conservative predictions bounce around from three to four.

There's one kicking about from eight to 11. Should we trust them? Very

briefly, we should be cautious. The predictions are usually based,

either mathematically worked out or people are just assuming inferring

that certain things will happen. But they are even using the data or

making guesses based on the most recent elections run under STV or on

polls. In terms of STV, I would urge caution. We know that although there

is alignment on partisan preferences acrosshood and Westminster, we don't

know the extent to which this is true on local level. People's

preferences at local level have been significantly different from the two

other electoral levels in part because it operates under a

different third electoral system in Scotland. So it could even in 2007

when the local elections and the Scottish Parliament elections were

held on the same day, we saw voters casting ballots for completely

different parties in different electoral arenas so I would urge

caution there. In terms of the polls, the last national poll in

Scotland was done at the end of April and every poll since then has

been a GV poll that's had tiny samples for Scotland, some under

100. It was YouGov that did the last poll towards the end of April. If

you look at the equivalent YouGov poll for GB as a whole with a

systemple of just over 100 in Scotland, there has 14-point

difference across the performance of the four main parties. You have

estimates for the Conservative Party as low as 10% on some of those polls

where Scotland's a small sample so I would absolutely urge caution in

terms of the use of the polls to understand what's happening in

Scotland. The margins of error are so much larger, Scotland's sample

sub sample is not independently weighted. So in the slides in your

packs, I've just got tracking local performance, how good the local

elections might be perceived to do in terms of predicting performance

in the subsequent Westminster elections and how well the polls

will do. I'll end on Labour. How bad is it? Well, it's pretty bad. I've

skipped over a slide. This is what YouGov asked voters, they said they

cast their ballots a certain way before 2015 and before 2015 they

said how are you going to cast your ballot now. Labour retained half of

the its supporters and it was losing 40% to the SNP and some others to

Labour and the Lib Dems. Everyone else was in a world of hurt. The Lib

Dems own supporters were more likely to vote for another party.

Conservatives retaining just 60% of the previous supporters, the SNP

doing well. This was the situation between 2010 and 2015. Labour losing

half its supporters, 40% to the SNP. Labour only now retains half of the

ones it kept and now losing a third to the other side, lose ago third to

-- losing a third to the Conservative Party. They kept half

in 2015 and lost to the left, lost to the SNP. Both for reasons of

social policy and for constitutional preferences because we know that

people are more consistent. But also lost is now, it's losing on the

other side in part because of left-right issues but also in terms

of constitutional preferences. I'll leave it there. Thank you very much.

I would like to congratulate my colleagues for finding all sorts of

genuinely interesting things about an election that so far anyway

portrayed by the media and some citizens by being fairly dull.

Having said that, what they seem to have done also is to confirm in some

ways what we already know, that is that the Conservatives are likely to

come out of this election with a pretty big win. So as a result, I

thought I would take my cue from Vince Cable, the former minister in

the coalition Government, who said to a journalist earlier this week,

politics after the election may be more interesting than before it.

Therefore have a look at what might happen to the parties on June 8th.

I'll start with the Conservative Party because in some ways, that's

the easiest party to start with. Supposedly, the Conservative Party

from June 9th onwards will be sitting fairly pretty. What I would

say however is that there is perhaps some trouble ahead. The reason I say

that is because a large majority can sometimes be a mixed blessing.

Harold Wilson the Labour Prime Minister in 196 Managed to improve a

majority that you could count tonne fingers of one hand to a majority of

nearly 100. -- 1966. He was practising his putting and a friend

asked him, how is your handicap and he replied, "gone up from three to

97", and that I guess gives you an idea that sometimes large majorities

can be a problem. Now clearly a small majority is more of a headache

for a Prime Minister, simply because it puts him or her at the mercy of

what some people unkindly like to call the head bangers on their back

benches. But a large majority can sometimes be a problem too because

it gives licence to malcontented MPs to exercise their conscience in

votes in Parliament without actually feeling they're in any danger of

messing with their own Government's majority. That kind of rebellion

which my colleague Phil Cowley has researched extensively over the

years can be a problem for parties because it gives the impression to

the electorate, an important impression, of division within the

party. Of course in the Conservative's case it's not

necessarily going to be a misleading impression I think and that's

because there is attention, there's been a perennial attention, if you

like, in the Conservative Party, between on the one hand if you like

its nationalist strain and on the other hand, it support for the

market between, if you like, the free economy and the strong state.

Given Brexit, and given Mrs May's apparent willingness to intervene in

the economy, rather more than some of her colleagues, even some of her

close colleagues, as well as her backbenchers and potential

backbenchers would like, it could be that we see a wedge driven in to

that crack. Having said that, I would still much rather be in the

position of the Conservatives than I would be of Ukip. We have seen the

people's army become in effect the people's platoon after Theresa May

gets into Downing Street. The future for Ukip does I think look pretty

bleak. The cull minute makes of Mrs May, Brexit, the loss of Nigel

Farage, means voters are peeling away -- culmination. Many are going

to the Conservatives. The leader seems fairly or unfairly to be seen

as a laughing stock and there seems to be no obvious successor to Mr

Nuttall if he steps down. The party seems to be haemorrhaging members in

as much as we can know anything about that and it's clearly running

out of cash and indeed credit. By 2018-2019 I think it's a serious

possibility that Ukip may not even be a going concern organisationally,

let alone electorally. There probably is room in the

political market for a xenophobic, is on the phobic English Nationalist

party. It's just that that party may not be Ukip and if it is Ukip they

will always be a small space on the fringes of British politics that

kind of party. Whether Ukip becomes that or whether it's Blitz and

something else emerges we are yet to see. The SNP is the respectable face

of nationalism in the UK and the shine has come off the SNP a little

because it's being judged on its record in government. And as we've

seen the Scottish Conservative Party seems to be coming back from the

dead. But I think it's clear from what we've already heard that the

SNP is still in a powerful position in Scotland. It is likely to govern

that country over the next decade or so. And in some ways a big

Conservative majority down there in Westminster provides the ideal

conditions for an SNP which wants to fight for a second independence

referendum. However, as we have already seen in the briefing

provided in Scotland, that big Tory majority may not be sufficient to

help the SNP win that referendum in part because that referendum is

going to be mixed up now with peoples feeling about rejoining the

European Union. We have to remind ourselves, although people like to

say Scotland is a remain country, rather a lot of voters did vote to

leave. So one must ask if the SNP failed to win a majority for

independence last time around, with that in the mix, can it win a

referendum next time around? I think one of the safest predictions may be

that whatever happens this may be Nicola Sturgeon's last UK election,

but we will see. As for the Greens, they are unlikely to do as well in

2017 as they did in 2015. But they will still of course have an MP in

the Commons, their leader Caroline Lucas. She looks as if she's going

to be a clear winner again. And of course the Greens anyway can

continue to occupy a fairly comfortable niche in British

politics as being the nation's conscience on environmental issues.

What about the Lib Dems? The Lib Dems will probably improve their

vote share. They couldn't not till after what happened in 2015. They

will find it difficult to take back more than a handful of seats from

the Conservatives. That of course might lead after the election to a

leadership contest for the Lib Dems. One of the reasons for the Lib Dems

failure to capitalise on the situation we face now has to deal

with Tim Farren and that leadership contest could even feature Sir Vince

Cable. Having said that, it's important to remember that the Lib

Dems are more than capable of surviving in the wilderness for

quite some time. They have a strong base in local government. They have

financially very useful large membership. The only risk it seems

to me to the Lib Dems is what happens to the last party I will

consider, the Labour Party. For Labour this election is not about

whether it loses, it's about by how much it loses. Reasonable estimates

and we have already seen some provided would say that that the top

end it's likely to get less than 200 seats but at the lower end may be

around 150. That then presents us with two possible scenarios. The

first is that Jeremy Corbyn stays on as leader. If that happens one can

presume he is likely to face a challenge and probably this summer.

Who will challenge him we don't know. The names include Yvette

Cooper, Dan Jarvis and maybe other candidates. What I would say that is

that Jeremy Corbyn is not absolutely guaranteed to win another leadership

contest. A project on membership will be doing surveys on party

members after the election but what we know after the result when Owen

Smith challenged Jeremy Corbyn at the wrong time in some ways last

year, we still know that large numbers of Labour members did not

vote for Jeremy Corbyn. It won't take that many people to peel away

for there to be a different result this time around. The other scenario

is of course Jeremy Corbyn goes. If that happens it will come about as

the result of MPs in the PLP managing to get another -- enough

nominations for the candidate to get on the ballot for Lent -- then

should contest. We have done some figures on that and I think it is

possible that Jeremy Corbyn's supporters in parliament after the

election could actually get to the magic 15% threshold and be able to

get on the ballot, in which case Jeremy might be given permission by

those around him to resign. If that isn't the case, again we need to be

very careful before thinking the Labour membership will automatically

elect a Jeremy Corbyn clone after June the 9th. The reason being is

the election defeat is going to be psychologically devastating. Of

course some Labour members will retreat into denial of paranoia and

we will get stories about the reason Jeromy lost being the media and

being stabbed in the back by his MPs. But some Labour members will be

shaken by the result. We do have to remember that a large proportion of

Labour grassroots members and not signallers, they do want to be in

power and they don't want the Conservative Party to be in power.

We also have to remember, although they are not as important as they

were before, that some trade union leaders at least will begin to back

off supporting the Jeremy Corbyn wing of the Labour Party. They

cannot carry on forever throwing their members with money after bad.

Having said that, if a left winger winds, be it Jeremy Corbyn or a

successor, then I do think that we do have two at least consider there

being a serious risk of historic and fatal split in the Labour Party. Why

do I say that? It is true of course that Labour MPs will have been

elected under the Labour banner. It is true of course that Labour MPs

have in mind all the time the president of the SDP in the 1980s

which is not a good precedent for a party splintering. It's true of

course that MPs are very aware of the obstacles presented to any new

party by a first past the post system and it is obvious that any

new party would have to be led by someone who can connect with the

electorate. It's all very well to talk about doing the same in France

but there is nobody obvious like him in the Labour Party who can pull

that off. On the other hand I think it is at least possible that large

numbers of Labour MPs, despite the volatility in the electorate, will

regard the prospect of five and probably another ten years out of

power with a degree of horror and they will not necessarily want to go

down with what many of them regard as a sinking ship. They also know I

think and this is very important, that is a crucial difference between

now and the STP scenario in the 1980s. If a critical mass of Labour

MPs is achieved and we're talking probably three figures worth of

Labour MPs, then the breakaway party that is formed could immediately

become the official opposition in this country. To become the official

opposition is it simply needs to be the largest party not in government

in the Commons. It would be as long as a new party were registered, that

party would become the opposition. That is very different than from

what happened to the SDP in the 1980s. Labour MPs also know that

there is probably financial backing up their for some new venture and it

is much easier these days to get finance than it probably was back in

the 1980s. They will know that there are large numbers of voters who may

be disillusioned and looking for a home. They will know that some

Labour members and we're talking tens of thousands, might be up for

something new. And they know some of the staff of the Labour Party may be

as well and for those some of the Lib Dems may be interested as well.

There is a sweet spot in Britain's system and it is when the majority

of British voters are, namely centrist and even slightly

centre-left on the economy but rather traditional authoritarian and

restrictive on issues like immigration and welfare benefits and

crying. At the moment that sweet spot is occupied by Theresa May's

Conservative Party. She has done a lot to ensure that is the case. Just

as before it was occupied by Tony Blair's Labour Party. And until

labour moves back to that sweet spot the Conservatives are going to

continue to rule the country. If Labour proves unable to make that

move in the next few months after the election it is in serious danger

of being replaced, not by an existing party, but by a new

entrant. I think that rather than the substantial victory that Theresa

May is going to get in this election is why this summer like last summer

could be a historic one for British politics. We have a lot of

interesting times ahead.