Guramit Singh
speaker
1,009 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 24 Jun
Guramit Singh’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 2.
Appearances
Norway voted 52 to 48 to stay out of the EU once upon a time and then they had a big cross-party negotiation to decide what that meant, bridging both sides, whereas we filled it straight into our binary parliament system and it just became full-fat leave and no input from the Remainers at all.
But I think it probably had a bigger impact long run on the Leave side.
Leave voters were already more prone to distrust politics as usual, to distrust the political establishment, to believe that their will would in some way be frustrated or watered down or ignored.
So when they started seeing evidence that that might be happening...
they got quite annoyed about it quite quickly.
And so in some respects, it may well have laid the groundwork for this reappearance of Nigel Farage and the radical right and Reform UK in an even stronger form, because these voters have not forgotten that their will was being frustrated in that period.
Well, it was important, but I think that importance does need to be set in a bit of context because there were a number of moving parts there.
If you take these Red Wall seats, which we've all discussed for so long ever since, Labour's vote was actually declining in a lot of those places for a long time.
Indeed, if you can go all the way back to 2001, you'll see really big slumps in turnout in those places in the second new Labour election, 20 years before Boris Johnson mobilised people in those places.
partisan attachments to Labour were fading for a long time in those places.
But what there still was, which is where the term Red Bull came from, incidentally, was a term coined by a conservative strategist, James Kanagasorian, to describe places that looked demographically and attitudinally like they ought to be voting conservative.
So if you took the same kind of voter, the same kind of job and the same kind of background, the same kind of attitudes and plonked him in Basildon in Essex,
he'd definitely be Tory.
You put him up in Bolton, he's not Tory.
So that was the paradox.
And what the Johnson effect was, was to break down that last barrier.
So it was a breakthrough, but it was a breakthrough that the walls had been weakening for a long time before they finally came down.
It wasn't just a Brexit-specific sentiment.
It was one of the smart moves, one of the effective moves of the Brexit Leave campaign that they managed to harness and mobilise that sentiment.
But that sentiment had been there for a long time.
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