Paula Surridge

Well, I think there was a further erosion of trust in politics.

Remain voters no longer trusted the system to deliver the outcomes they wanted, their preferred outcomes, while Leave voters saw Parliament making all these moves to try and force another referendum or even just the length of time the process took.

And I think that eroded both sides' trust in politics even further.

I don't think they're as strong as identities as they were in the immediate aftermath, but they gave people labels for a whole package of things that Rob's already described there.

So I think one of the key things that Brexit did in that sense was to give this slightly disparate bunch of attitudes, values and groups a label that they could kind of unite behind.

But that happened at the same time that the old divides were still there, which is to some extent why we start to see much more significant fragmentation, because these new divides come along, but the old divides are still there to some extent.

So you do still see some people on the left of the old divides who supported leave and people on the right of the old divides who supported remain.

And that's feeding into the fragmentation that we're seeing now.

Yeah, absolutely.

And I just wanted to add to what Rob was saying there.

We actually saw quite a lot of weakening in those Red Wall seats, increases in the Conservative vote and a weakening of the Labour vote in the 2017 election.

So a lot of credit is given to Boris Johnson and Get Brexit Done in 2019, but many of those trends really started in 2017 as well.

But this weakening of identity is what allows people to move around and

And it's what contributes to the kind of volatility we can see, you know, big shifts in vote shares between elections, between the 2024 general election and local elections, for example.

And that can only happen because voters are unanchored from parties.

They may have...

turned away from Labour in 2017, 2019, but they didn't become Conservative Party identifiers.

They became more loosely connected to politics.

And that leads to the kind of fragmentation and movement that we see in elections now.

And it makes it very hard to predict what will come next.