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Chapter 1: Why are public services a top priority in the UK elections?
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Motivation included. Yeah, I'd like to sit down in these nice and cool places of the Plus Review when I'm somewhere on the edge of an oil mine. I'll have a cup of coffee and, hey, I'm always a good inventor. Welcome to the Plus Review. Save time or come when you want. Plus.fi
Hello, we've got another episode of ElectionCast for you, which means it's another outing for Remoter Voter. This is where we hear from you why you cannot vote in person in either England, Scotland or Wales on the 7th of May. Eleanor in Scotland says, I've got an entry for Remoter Voter. It's the most boring reason possible. Let's see. But rural voters need representation in this.
And we've had this one from somebody who has not shared their name. They say my remoter voter submission is this. I will be in Greece with a group of around 100 quizzers for an annual event known as Greek Geek Week. We will be spending a week or so playing various quiz formats such as buzzer quizzing, written papers and the 3K quiz run where you have to do penalty runs for wrong answers.
All of this will be in lovely sunny surroundings, mixing in some sightseeing and beach time too, I am sure. Where is my invitation to Greek Geek Week? Although I suppose you knew that I'd be busy because it's elections. So actually, maybe that's why you didn't invite me. I am available to participate virtually, though. And I'll be participating in full in this episode of ElectionCast. Newscast.
Newscast from the BBC.
Humanity's next great voyage begins.
We are in the midst of a rupture. Nostalgia will not bring back the old order. Six-seven.
Six-eight.
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Chapter 2: What impact will nationalist parties have on Westminster?
Yeah, it's supposed to be me as a doctor. Daddy has also a special connotation.
Ooh la la. Thinking about it like a panto helped.
Do we play music now or what do we do?
Hello, it's Adam in the newscast slash election cast studio.
And it's Alex in the makeshift home election cast studio.
And it's James in the lovely newscast Glasgow studio.
And it's Felicity in the Cardiff newsroom.
standing up in the middle of your office, whereas we were all in our very bespoke studios. Right, I've got one more remote voter for you all. Mark says, hello, newscast. I'm not a current remote voter, but five years ago, I was taken into hospital a week before the election for emergency heart surgery.
It was planned surgery, but it kept getting delayed because of COVID and the lack of intensive care beds. The surgery was very long. I ended up having a stroke and was unable to walk or speak. I had no visitors because of COVID. On the sixth day in intensive care, I FaceTimed my husband and whispered, get me a proxy vote.
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Chapter 3: How is Keir Starmer's leadership affecting Labour's campaign?
There are other issues that they will have at the top of their own agenda as well. Cost of living, NHS, public services, all those things that we've talked about. So I think, you know, as well as Labour MPs and Keir Starmer and cabinet ministers recognising that this has been a damaging episode, what it has also been is massive distraction from the issues that a lot of people really care about.
Oh, and Alex, that mention of Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, is a useful reminder that even though there are some mayors up for election in England this time round, it's not the metro mayors or the mayor of London that's up for grabs.
No, that's right. That's right. So they're in a couple of years time. So they're not standing for election this time. There's just a handful of other mayoralties that are up as well as all the council elections that are up in England. But obviously you're going to get figures out on the campaign trail like Sadiq Khan.
It's worth saying while I'm talking about what Sadiq Khan said, I should say that he also said in that interview with the FT, he didn't think Keir Starmer should go, but he was like highly critical of the impact all of this has had in his experience and what he's finding out there on the doorstep.
But James, somebody who did say that Keir Starmer should go was Anna Sarwar, Labour's leader in Scotland. And that sort of was designed to be a bit of an insurance policy during this campaign. Has the insurance policy paid out?
Well, that is obviously in the hands of the voters in the end. But I think I can answer it to a certain extent, Adam. Is Sir Keir Starmer's very high unpopularity in polls a drag on Scottish Labour's prospects in this election? Yes, of course it is.
And we were talking about a party that went from one seat to 39 in the general election two years ago, while the Scottish National Party fell from 48 seats to nine. So there was clearly a huge swell of, if not good, necessarily confidence in Sir Keir as a prospective Prime Minister, an opportunity for him to convince voters that he could be a good Prime Minister.
There's clearly enough people in Scotland saying, we will give you a shot. Polls since then suggest that people have been disappointed in him. And has that been a drag on Anas Sarwar? Yes. Did Anas Sarwar take a significant risk when he called for the Prime Minister to go? Yes. But one former Director of Communications for the party...
Alan Roden, I heard him on Radio Scotland Breakfast yesterday or the day before. I thought he made quite a good point, Adam, which is he was saying, look, what Anas Sarwar has done here is stop this campaign being, just what you and Alex were talking about there, being entirely focused on the Prime Minister and the state of the UK government. Because
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Chapter 4: What role do local issues like potholes play in elections?
So, you know, he's a bit of a ball and chain around the ankle as well. What one Labour source said, quite interestingly actually, a few days ago, was that Donald Trump is the name that they're finding getting brought up spontaneously the most. Keir Starmer is getting mentioned. A lot of people who mention him don't particularly like him.
But this source was saying he was getting a little bit of credit, albeit maybe begrudgingly, for the way he's handled Donald Trump and the Iran war situation. But the latest wave of criticism over the Peter Mandelson affair and the vetting situation seems to have wiped out that credit that he was previously getting, that kind of Iran bump, if you like.
So it certainly hasn't done Labour any good yet. here, although it doesn't seem to be dominating the conversation.
And Felicity, we were talking about intra-party tensions between leaders with James and with Keir Starmer and Asarwar. I hear that there's a bit of tension amongst the Lib Dems between Ed Davey and his Welsh counterpart.
Yes, that's right. So Lib Dem social media at the end of last week showed that Ed Davey, the UK Lib Dem leader, had come to Cardiff with the lead candidates for those two constituencies there to do a little bit of a visit, you know, and all that sort of thing, as often happens during an election campaign. The Welsh Lib Dem leader, Jane Dodds, was not there.
And when asked about it, she said, oh, she had other commitments and the Ed Davey visit had been sort of a last minute thing. But there isn't a great deal of love lost between the two of them.
And when Jane Dodds was pressed on, you know, how their relationship was, she said, and I quote, it's a private matter, which is possibly not the thing to say to a journalist because journalists always want to know what the private matters are, of course.
It looks as if all this is rooted in something that happened a few years back, in that before she got into politics, Jane Dodds was a social worker and for a time she worked for the church in England. And a report came out a few years ago that did criticise her handling in a sex abuse scandal in the church. At the time, Jane Dodds admitted that there had been shortcomings.
Now, Ed Davey suggested at that time that Jane Dodds should consider her role as leader of the Welsh Liberal Democrats, interpreted by most people, I think, as a suggestion that she should think about standing down. Jane Dodds said she wasn't going to do that. She was going to stay put and stay put she has. But it doesn't look as if the relationship has recovered from that, really.
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Chapter 5: How is the NHS performing in the context of the elections?
The whole concept of devolution as far back as its founding in 1999 was the idea of making a more collegiate society. Politics, as we've said before, election cast people, election casters, if you will, can decide for themselves whether or not that's happened. But that is the background.
And within that, we've had arguments about whether an Assar war would be able to form what would effectively be a block of pro-union MSPs because... As we know, in Scotland, politics very often comes to this dividing line along the constitution with pro-independence, SNP and the Greens on one hand and pro-union parties on the other.
Despite a lot of people not being happy with that, it often happens. So the question is, can Anas Sarwar... become First Minister with enough votes from other parties who support the union? And would that include Reform UK? Would he take Reform UK votes to become First Minister? I mean, you don't get to choose who votes for you if you're nominated and then whoever votes for you votes for you.
There is definitely a question about, A, arithmetically was one poll suggested that might be a possibility that there could be a pro-union majority in Parliament. No one is talking, least of all Anas Sarwar, about the idea of any sort of formal coalition at all with reform. He says there would be absolutely no deals.
There was a row about this because, you know, Malcolm Offord, the leader of reform in Scotland, had said, oh, you said to me you wanted to work together and to get rid of the SNP. And he'd said that's not true. And they just basically are accusing each other of lying. But the question is, could he get the votes?
But then even if he could get the votes, there is a further question, which is how stable would such a minority government be? Because the Labour Party and Reform UK and the Conservatives don't really agree on a great deal. So is that even a feasible position?
And then the other question that's arisen this week is, could the leader of the Scottish Liberal Democrats, Alex Cole-Hamilton, be the kingmaker in the Parliament? And he was asked, would he support and ask Sarwar as a Labour First Minister... And he effectively indicated that pretty much he probably would.
And asked by my colleague Laura McKeever on Radio Scotland Breakfast, would you support Malcolm Offord? No. Would you support Russell Findlay? No. So clear that if the Lib Dems are leaning in any direction, it would be towards the Labour Party. There have been... Let's not forget the first two terms of Holyrood from 1999 onwards.
There were Labour-Liberal Democrat coalitions before the SNP swept everything before them from 2007 onwards. I say swept everything before them. They won by one vote that year. Well, by one seat that year as a majority have won. But still. The point being, it has happened in the past. Could it happen again in the future at this election?
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Chapter 6: What are the implications of potential coalitions in Scotland?
Alex Salmond and then Nicola Sturgeon. Then, in fairness, the SNP fairly rattled there. rattled through in the last couple of years as well because you've got Nicola Sturgeon and then Humza Yousaf very briefly and now John Swinney trying to settle things down and calm things down.
And then Felicity, the issue of tactical voting actually has been raised directly by Ellen Ed Morgan in a video that she's posted on Instagram that you just sent us.
Yes, that's absolutely right. I mean, we have a new voting system here in Wales, of course, and there are big question marks over the extent to which it makes tactical voting relevant because the idea is that it's supposed to be more proportional than the old system. But having said that, it's not totally proportional.
It favours bigger parties and you probably need to get around about 12% or above in any constituency to start winning seats. The other...
interesting thing about it and the thing that makes it very difficult you know when the polls come out they come out with vote share they also come out with seat projections the vote share very interesting the seat projections you have to take with a huge pinch of salt because the fifth and certainly sixth seats in a lot of these constituencies could be decided by a whisker and therefore make seat projections very very difficult to make with any sort of accuracy at the moment now what Eluned Morgan has done in her constituency in West Wales
is try to explain all of this with a row of tinned or canned cocktails, all of them still unopened, from what I can tell. And she's a strawberry daiquiri, by the way, in case you were wondering. I think from memory, the greens are a pina colada. Plied, I think, Plied Cymru are a mojito.
It's making me thirsty.
Yeah, I know. Not quite sure about about what the other ones are. But her message appears to be that she's saying plied her a shoe in in this constituency. She says she thinks they're going to get two seats and possibly three. And she seems to be saying to the voters, look, my best hope of maintaining my seat is to come in in that sixth seat.
And if that's the case, I mean, it just shows really the way that Labour has apparently slid in the polls since the last Senate election back in 2021. And she's basically saying to people, look, you need to get out and make sure you vote for me to make sure that I'm the person, I'm the strawberry daiquiri who gets that sixth seat. So, you know. This could be tactical.
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Chapter 7: How does tactical voting influence the election landscape?
The tactical voting, the prospects for the results in Ellen Edmorgan's constituency or the cocktail chat?
The cocktails, to be honest, Adam.
It hasn't put me off. We're recording this nearly past 5pm. Right, that's enough kind of strategic and tactical voting chat. What about actual issues? Alex, I know there's one in particular you would like to highlight.
Yeah, well, I mean, look, I think... So I've been out and about a fair bit this week. Actually, I've been in Wales and in England just talking to people. And we've talked about it before, but when you go out and you ask the really open question to people on the streets or in the high streets or wherever else you are, you know, what are the things you really care about?
It is overwhelming what comes out top, and it is public services. So it is the NHS, it is the economy, it is the cost of living, it is things like high streets, it is things like roads, etc. And so I've been checking in with all of our brilliant colleagues across England who are covering these elections for BBC local radio and regions and local and regional TV.
And they are so in tune with what's happening on the ground and they've been providing these really valuable insights. And the one thing that could totally unsurprising to me keeps coming up time and time again is potholes, because, you know, I've just got this theory that.
Sometimes these issues can be dismissed by some people, perhaps in Westminster, who think that they are very kind of localised.
But I just think these are the things, these day-to-day frustrations that people have in their local communities, whether it's the high street or the state of the roads and potholes, that they kind of shape how people feel about whether the country is or isn't working to them. And therefore that shapes their politics and their political views.
So that is kind of topping the list, along with those other issues Things to do with the immediate community, the state of public services. And broadly speaking, I think it all comes down to how people feel things are going, you know, in their pockets, in their wallets, in their local communities, in their towns, the high streets, housing, roads and streets.
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Chapter 8: What are the latest developments from the Welsh Liberal Democrats?
Felicity, I feel like I'm hosting a phone-in on local radio now. Is there anything you'd like to... And we've got Felicity in Cardiff. What would you like to complain about?
Well, I'd just like to chip in on this because, interestingly, potholes is something that Eluned Morgan, the Welsh Labour leader, does talk about a lot. And she has this figure, which I can't remember off the top of my head, and she quotes this figure for how many potholes have been filled in thanks to Welsh government funding and all of that.
And the pothole issue, it's very inconvenient for drivers and for cyclists, dangerous for cyclists, of course, but... But not just that. I feel that for a lot of people, when you go out and talk to them, they feel it's emblematic of what they see as a bit of a almost disintegration of the quality of the public realm, really.
And that it's almost emblematic of what they feel might be happening, say, with other arguably more important public services. That this is something that you can see and feel on a daily basis that just reminds you that things are not normal.
how they should be and just on the point about issues around roads and drivers and what not being something that really activates people of course in Wales we have this default 20 mile an hour speed limit and that is something that's been fiercely controversial and fiercely contested
And it's still something that Reform and the Welsh Conservatives refer to again and again and again in this campaign and say that they would get rid of. On the other hand, you have claims from other parties, obviously Labour, Plaid Cymru, the Liberal Democrats and the Greens, who say that it's been an important measure for road safety and so on.
But, you know, that just shows how these issues can become totemic, really, and are almost something behind which some of the deeper issues almost stack up or, in the case of the pothole, fall in.
Very good. The election cast elves say that the Welsh government say that 200,000 potholes have either been fixed or prevented by their action.
There is an issue with that statistic, as I recall, in that there is a question mark over exactly the accuracy of that statistic and it is disputed. But yes, they do claim that they have filled in that many potholes for sure, or at least paid for them to be filled in. I don't think they've personally been out there with the shovels.
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