 There are so many elections tomorrow, we just won't have time to cover them all on tonight's show. And that means that if you have a particular interest in who will become the police and crime commissioner for West Mercia or mayor of Cambridgeshire in Peterborough, I have to apologize in advance. However, we will be previewing all the big competitive elections that matter most. And given this is Keir Starmer's first big electoral test as Labour leader, we'll be focusing on those contests which might give us a key insight into where he's taken the party since gaining power. They are, of course, also the first big elections we've had since both Brexit was done and the COVID pandemic. So lots up in the air right now. I'm, of course, delighted to be joined by Dalia Gabriel. Dalia, do you have your popcorn ready for the electoral showdown we're about to witness tomorrow? I mean, I feel like I routinely forgetting that there are elections on tomorrow which tell how different from a year ago or two years ago where I would be following every single candidate, every single move, every single account. But it just goes to show that there's nothing to really inspire voting this time round. I have to say I was looking through all the different elections that were happening. I'd kind of forgotten that I am a voter and that I'm going to vote tomorrow. I was talking about it all seems sort of, you know, quite far-fetched and like something other people are doing. We're also joined by Owen Jones who is potentially, are you more excited about voting than either of us are? So tomorrow I've got to vote and I've got a dentist appointment so I'm going to get the painful experience out of the way and then go to the dentist. Owen Jones, if you watch his brilliant YouTube channel, you know, has recently been in Hartley Paul filming an excellent documentary which you should watch straight after this show but not before. We want you till the end. So we are going to be asking Owen about Hartley Paul as well as all the other elections in England and we're going to talk about Scotland towards the end of the show. I've got a great guest for that segment. My apologies in advance because whilst the Welsh elections really do matter, we haven't got a guest on that tonight. We definitely will on either Friday or Monday so that we can go into the nitty gritty of the results even if my preview is going to be briefer and that I'd probably like it to be this evening. As ever, please do let us know your thoughts by tweeting on the hashtag Tisgy Sour. Now, as our particular interest on tonight's show is what these elections will mean for Keir Starmer, we're going to start with the one election to Westminster taking place tomorrow. That's the by-election in Hartley Paul. Now, this is a seat in the so-called red wall. So those seats that voted Brexit but traditionally voted Labour. Now, it was held by Labour in 2017 and 2019 as it has been since the seats creation in the 1970s. Let's take a look at the election results in 2019. So we know what we're comparing tomorrow's results to. So in 2019, Labour won with 37% of the votes. It was a bit of a freeway marginal. You can see that they're both the Conservatives and the Brexit party did reasonably well. Now, given Starmer's key pitch to become Labour leader was that he was more electable than Corbyn and his key strategy since becoming leader has seemed to be to try to appeal to socially conservative voters in the red wall so that he can win back those seats lost in 2019. We might think this is a real bellweather for Starmer's leadership. This is showing us whether or not his strategy is working the polls at the moment suggest it's not. They suggest that Labour might be in for a very rough ride. So the latest polling from Survation has the Conservatives on 50% with Labour on 33%. Felmer Walker from the Northern Independence Party here is on 6%. Now that figure there in Survation or from Survation is actually down nine points from when Survation last pulled the constituency three weeks before. That was a CWU poll. We talked about that on the show as well. I must say Labour are down nine points since last pulled three weeks earlier. Now, the Tories have remained relatively steady. They've just moved at one percentage point since that poll three weeks before. Owen, I wanna go to you on this because you've just been there on the ground. What was the impression you got? Obviously, I mean, everyone always says constituency polls aren't particularly reliable because it's harder to properly wait everyone. Did you get the sense that the Tories were gonna stomp home to victory? I think it's looking pretty good for them. I mean, I think there's a few things at play because I think there is this kind of often Southern, that's my cat, let's go in a safari round the North and it's grim up North. These are left behind post and just your towns. It's more complicated than that which is getting both out of the way because what's I think happening is? There's the fact that this was a town which heavily voted as we know for leave. It was one of the most pro-league areas of the country. The Tories have a clear message there. We got Brexit done. But they also have a clear message of strategic investment. The T side mayor is Ben Houchen who is extremely popular. I met people who, frankly, people are gonna vote Labour in the by-election and he voted for him to be mayor. And you can see how he sums up the new Tory that exists which is not the Osborne, Cameron Tories that a lot of us, a lot of people came into politics on the new left, the young left in this country, the just slash and burn austerity economics of Osborne and Cameron. This was a guy who campaigned on bringing the local airport into public ownership and who boasts that his relationship with the Conservative government means that he can get the taps to be turned on. So the Conservative message is vote for us and we'll turn the taps on in your area. And that's a very effective message, particularly when Labour doesn't seem to be in the runnings to form a government for a very long time. But also the fact is that's a vision which is we're gonna turn on the taps for your town through our, through Conservative mayors and Conservative MPs in their relationship with government. Brexit and Labour just don't have a vision. There's no vision, no one privately within the Labour Party however they voted in the leaders' collection believes in any good faith that Labour has a clear vision. I interviewed the local candidate Dr. Paul Williams and to be kind to him, because I know a lot of people on social media have been ridiculing the interview I did with him because I tried to ask him what Labour's vision was and I didn't get a clear answer and that's not his fault. It's the fault of a party nationally which has no coherent vision with any cut through. So how do you mobilise people within that context when the choice have a very clear message even though their candidate is very bad, a poor candidate not local, spent a lot of time out in the Cayman Islands which is a tax haven though we don't know about our own tax dealings. And Labour just don't have a clear cut through vision that can mobilise people to come out and vote. So what I did me was people with that kind of life long residual, well not residual there's a strong Labour loyalty that exists in lots of these communities that are voted for Labour and they'll say to you, ah, Labour stands for the working man, the working person that kind of class conscious connection to the Labour Party still exists in a lot of these communities but it's been heavily eroded. And the other factor is home ownership is actually very high in these areas compared to a lot of urban areas and it's older homeowners often from working class backgrounds whilst younger people who are now caught the core vote of the Labour Party are emptying out of places like Hartlepool because of regional inequality. They take their Labour votes younger people from Hartlepool are voting for Labour in high numbers than they've ever done but they're taking them out often to save for Labour seats which is why you end up with Labour in the last election getting more votes than 2015 or 2010 that weigh less seats because a lot of those votes from younger people and places like Hartlepool are taken out because there aren't the jobs there for them. So I think it's all of those factors at play but we have to remember and it's very important you made this point in 2015 Labour had a lower share of the vote than they got in 2019 and the UKIP in 2015 had a higher share of the vote than the Brexit party got in 2019. Hartlepool was a more marginal seat than in 2019 and in 2017 Labour share of the vote was over 50% the highest majority in vote share since 2001. So when we talk about this long-term decline it was complicated because in 2017 even though often Labour's majorities went up in these seats there was still a swing against them because the Tory share also went up but in Hartlepool it's not a fatalistic trend that automatically Hartlepool and those communities just turn against the Labour party because in 2017 Labour won over those lead voters and the reason Labour lacks a very convincing excuse this time round is in a by-election oppositions do better than general elections. That's the rule because you're not thinking about who forms the government, you've got, you know, you're voting on other grounds. Labour has a very good get out of the vote campaign compared to the Tories traditionally the pandemic complicates that. So the fact, you know, that a by-election has only been lost by the opposition twice in the last 50 years to the government and we're even talking about it whether or not it happens in Hartlepool, not good. I mean, you've talked about, I suppose some of the excuses people are putting forward preempted some of how I'm going to debunk them but we are going to show you some of the graphics and the clips as well. Let's have a look at Keir Starmer who is most certainly trying to dampen expectations basically trying to lower expectations about the result here and I think quite frankly rewrite history. Here he is speaking to Sky. I am clear that my job as leader of Labour Party is to rebuild the Labour Party from where we were in December 2019 with the worst result since 1935 into a position where we can win the next general election. That is a mountain to climb. We are climbing that mountain. My job is to make it clear that the priorities of the Labour Party under my leadership are the priorities of the British people and that we will face the... Forgive me for jumping in. I know we're really tight for time but if you say you're taking responsibility what does that mean if it doesn't work out the way you want by Friday morning? We are fighting for every vote into this election on Thursday earning every vote. That's why I'm out pretty well every hour of daylight fighting for those votes alongside the team that we've got. We'll go into Thursday with a very positive message about the change that we want to make for our country for the better and indicating that this is the first step towards that change. The job of rebuilding the Labour Party was never going to be completed in a year or so. I don't think anybody realistically thought that but these are a very, very important set of elections for us. What's ridiculous about that, as Owen said, is he's talking about rebuilding the Labour Party when this is a seat that Labour won in the last general election. If we lose this, this is going backwards. I want to take a look at a tweet from John Rental who is an arch-blair, right? Chief Political Commentator at The Independent and he, I think, best summarised the Stammerite argument as to why it's no big deal if Labour do lose Hartlepool. He tweeted the results from 2019, which, as I've shown you already, shows that Labour win, but the opposition is... The Conservatives and the Brexit Party both do quite well. It's a freeway marginal and he's suggesting that, given the Brexit Party have collapsed at this general election, it's no surprise that the Labour Party are going to lose because he's assuming that all those Brexit Party votes will go to the Conservative Party. So he's essentially saying, without the Brexit Party, Labour would have lost in 2019 anyway. Now, that would be a reasonable argument. It's not a ridiculous thing to say but it is completely ahistorical because it does ignore 2015 and 2017, as Owen said before. In 2015, this was also a freeway marginal. We can get you up the results here. So then Labour got 35%, UKIP got 28% and the Conservatives got 20%. Now, John Rental could have easily tweeted in 2017, how could anyone possibly think Labour would hold this given that the UKIP votes collapsed? What did happen? The UKIP vote collapsed and Labour increased their vote share by a lot more than the Conservatives. Labour increased their vote share by 16% when UKIP collapsed. So the idea that Labour can't win UKIP voters is, or this time around, Brexit Party voters is ridiculous. That's not necessarily a long-term secular trend. That's about the political decisions that have been made in the party. I, to be honest, think that's as much about backing a second referendum in 2019 as I do think it's about the flaws of Keir Starmer, any local candidate. But it's clearly the fault of political strategies, which, I mean, in both of those cases, have a lot to do with Keir Starmer. Dalia, I want to bring you in on this question and specifically to speak about this phenomenon that we're seeing from centrist where they're trying to have it both ways, where they say if Starmer wins, brilliant, he's a hero, he's making the Labour Party electable again. And if Starmer loses seats with Jeremy Corbyn won, then that's just the shadow of Corbyn still haunting the Labour Party and forcing them to lose seats that he won. I mean, it doesn't make any sense, but they're still saying it. I mean, I think this constant blaming of these poor results on the last leadership is going to really great on the public because it just sounds like an excuse. It sounds like excuses for lack of work, for lack of passion, for lack of vision, especially because, you know, the Labour Party was already in crisis, in decline, before Corbyn ever came anywhere near the leadership or any of Corbyn's allies came anywhere near the leadership. You know, the party was not successful under Gordon Brown and under Ed Miliband. In fact, 2017 almost bucked that trend, right? It was a one moment where we saw an actual breath of life in this thing that looked like it was dead. And instead of trying to understand, you know, okay, how did that happen? Why was that the case? And you know, what was different in 2017 compared to elections before and after 2017 and scale upwards? We're instead seeing the current leadership being much more invested in attacking its base and, you know, then actually working for its base and creating new bases, which I think is actually a really important part of Labour strategy going forward or what should be Labour strategy going forward. And you know, working to win being a party that looks like it has a vision to govern with. And we know that that has to involve things like a real alternative vision. It has to involve deep community, organizing, care provision, political education, a cohesive media strategy that reckons with the fact that our media is dominated by Murdoch press and we need to have a strategy of how to deal with that. It has to involve the energizing of new bases, bases that have been excluded from politics and whose exclusion from politics is entrenched by this very political culture focus grouping that we see represented by Keir Starmer. And I think that this is especially true because one of the reasons I think we're seeing this backlash and you know, there are many reasons. I think there's many overlapping intersecting things that have come together in this particular moment to see what feels like an unstoppable decline in these kind of stronghold seats. But one thing that I think we can all say is definitely true, is that since the idea that you know, of a red war even became solidified, we have seen this taking for granted of these seats in the North and in the Midlands, of MPs that have nothing to do with the community, being parachuted in as personal favours, or you know, as just mere stepping stones to something to a bigger position in the party. And frankly, MPs just not pulling their weight, you know, as local MPs. And then you have the position on the second referendum, which I think in the last election was for many voters a kind of nail in the coffin when it comes to feeling that you know, the Labour Party does not, the Labour Party takes them for granted and doesn't listen to them. But you know, that explanation also has its limitations because I think we see really similar dynamics in London, you know, of ineffective local MPs at the Central Labour Party that has often conceded on things that really matter to Labour voters in London, young multi-racial Labour voters in London. And we haven't seen this shift. I wonder if you know, that's because there hasn't been a competitor. I wonder if, you know, a young people's party in London galvanised around a particular issue, similarly to Brexit, you know, like, I don't know, universal basic income or universal housing would have a similar effect in London. But I think that one thing that is really important here is also that the left needs to take accountability here. I think, you know, we can point to the failures of the Central Labour Party that is absolutely true and they are accountable for this poor performance. But we also need to have a really serious thing because the left, how we collectively exercise power to mitigate the harms of a Conservative government and how we can win in light of the fact that the Labour Party leadership has no interest in listening to us. You know, I don't know if that looks like revisiting our strategy within the party. I don't know if it involves setting up a new party, building union, community movements that can exercise power on specific issues. But I think it's really poor form that despite all of these institutions that were built under Corbynism, we as, you know, lefty voters don't have a cohesive strategy of how we're going to demonstrate our power in this election. Like I don't actually care who I vote for. I don't care if I vote Green or if I vote just for specific Labour Party people who are on our side or what it looks like. I just care that we have this collective exercising of power so that we can point to the results and say, this is what we as a collective did and this is the demonstration of our electoral power and why we are forced to be reckoned with. And I think that's really important as well to think about how in the wake of no longer having the Labour Party, where is our site of discipline and our site of accountability for really knowing, for really knowing how we want to exercise that power in this particular moment. So I think that, you know, these excuses are just going to feed into the idea that people have that Keir Starmer is a man without a vision, he's a man without commitment, that he just sort of says what he needs to say to get by in the moment. So it's not going to do Labour any favours but I think we in the left need to really think about what it means for us to exercise power at this moment, whether it is being inside and working within the Labour Party or whether it's taking our votes elsewhere and whatever the decision needs to be collective. That was very well put. Let's have a, I've got a couple more data points. I'm going to go through very quickly for Hartley Paul before we move on to some of the other contests. So first of all is a story in the Guardian. This was leaked internal polling from the Labour Party which showed that only 40% of previous Labour voters pledged to back Paul Williams in the by-election. So the previous Labour voters, what's that's referring to? This is sort of canvassing returns. So when you're canvassing doorsteps for a political party, you have on their written how they voted Labour recently. They're saying when we knock on people who voted Labour recently, only 40% of them say they'll vote Labour this time. So previous Labour voters, they might also not have voted Labour in 2019. Finally, a bit of data from Hartley Paul. This is potentially the most interesting, actually. This is also from Servation and it is showing you the respective popularity of Boris Johnson and Keir Starmer and it's not very good for Labour. So Boris Johnson is 51% of people have a favourable attitude of him in Hartley Paul. I'm 28% unfavourable and for Keir Starmer, only 22% have a favourable attitude of him in Hartley Paul and 40% have an unfavourable attitude which means that Boris Johnson has a net favourability rating of plus 23 and Keir Starmer has a net favourability rating of minus 18. Now, I suppose a brief word of warning, this data came in before the Flapgate controversy blew up. There's been some national polling that suggested this has made a slight dent in Boris Johnson's popularity but those are still quite phenomenal numbers. I mean, we need to move on to the Metro Mayors but I just want to know very quickly from you. Speaking to people in Hartley Paul, I actually want to focus on the popularity of Boris Johnson as much as the unpopularity of Keir Starmer because those are phenomenal figures for someone who has just overseen the deaths of 140,000 people in a pandemic. Where is this enthusiasm coming from? Well, I think Labour failed to pin the pandemic on Boris Johnson and the government has a lot to do with it and I think because what Labour's position during the pandemic was is focus groups of people, particularly who voted conservative in 2019, tellers don't play politics with the pandemic. And I'm sure that's what the Tories were told in focus groups during the financial crash and the Tories could have stuck to what the focus groups told them but they didn't do that. They said, we're in this mess because Labour spent too much money and they didn't fix the reef while the sun was shining and then after several months, focus groups were repeating that back to them. Keir Starmer's team did not do that. They listened to the focus groups, particularly that subset of voters saying don't play politics with the pandemic and therefore they didn't develop a clear narrative of why we ended up with one of the worst handlings of pandemic on Earth. So a lot of people concluded with the government, one would want to be in their shoes or they had a terrible hand. I'm sure they made mistakes but who wouldn't in those circumstances? I don't think Labour would have done much better. They see Labour as opportunistic. The Captain Hindsight thing clearly has cut through and I think that has a lot to do with the fact that as Fraser Nelson, who I don't normally quote, the editor, the right-wing spectator said, Labour strategy has been to work out where the Tories end up and then get there a little bit quicker. So I think that's why his popularity hasn't been dented by the pandemic when it clearly should have done given one in every 433 people have died. And I think Brexit, I think just a basic fact that his personality cuts through in contrast to the Labour leader. I wouldn't downplay that. And I think the fact that, you know, I think it's associated, he's associated with successes as local people see it with Ben Houch and the local Metro Mayor because while councils have been imposing cuts, 50% cuts from central government, many of them Labour councils, Hartlepool council was a Labour council for a long time, the Metro mayors have been given money to splash. And so I think Boris Johnson and the Conservatives are associated now with Ben Houch and success and that's turning on the taps and investing, which is scrubbing away the memory of austerity, which was clearly very unpopular. So I think all of those factors are playing with Boris Johnson in places like Hartlepool. We've got a couple of comments. Chris O'Brien with a fiver says, it is Friday. It's not Friday. My two favorite things, OJ, Navarra media and lists. I suppose you mean Friday came early. So I mean, I'm being overly harsh there. I don't know what you mean by lists though. Are we listing the various constituencies? I'm not sure what the clarification will come in. You what? That was a list. He was doing a list. So he was saying his list. Anyway, it doesn't matter. That was a list of two. Yeah, that was a list. There was three things in his list. Anyway, it doesn't matter. Okay, good. One of them was lists. Right. Nick Gusset with a two-pound donation says, with his haircut, OJ looks six weeks younger. It's a very good haircut, OJ. You do look a lot younger with it. I think it's good. Do you know what I'm doing now? I'm going to get a haircut every five weeks. I'm not going back to that calamity every week. I say. Sal, with a 10 on Michael, can you give a birthday shout out to Carl? I can do. Happy birthday, Carl. Let's go through the Metro Mayors. Very important elections. And I'm going to explain to you what all the regions are because, I mean, before I researched this, it's quite confusing, these Metro Mayors. And we're going to go straight onto them now. So that was the bi-election. The next big test for Stam will be in the various Metro Mayors races happening tomorrow. Now, Metro Mayors are a fairly recent creation. Now, what they are is they're elected, what positions? Majorities to oversee a number of contiguous towns or cities. So they're trying to put together these urban regions, metropolitan regions, which can have some integrated policy, especially on things like investment and transport, which will hopefully bring about development. And that's why they brought in these Metro Mayors across the country, across England. Now, the ones which are going to really matter tomorrow. So first of all, I want to go to Tees Valley. So the Tees Valley Metro region contains Darlington, Hartlepool, Middlesbrough, Red Car and Cleveland, and Stockton on Tees. Now, as Owen was just mentioning, their incumbent is called Ben Houchen. But the results in 2017 were very, very close. So Ben Houchen won by a sliver. In 2017, he beat Sue Jeffery to the seat by 51.1% to 48.9%. So super close, almost as close as you can get. It's also a place that presumably, if Keir Starmer wants to win back the red wall and he wants to improve on how Labour performed in 2017, which were very bad elections actually. That was before Labour regained momentum during the general election campaign. He'd be hoping to overthrow, to overturn such a small margin, in fact, the polling suggests the opposite is happening. So a poll with opinion has Houchen on 63% with Labour on only 37%. So that's a big swing in the direction of the incumbent. Owen, you've mentioned Ben Houchen a fair few times already. Obviously people in Hartlepool, you were speaking to were quite enthusiastic about the guy. I suppose to make this very concrete, what are some of the examples of what he's done? When people were saying, I like this guy because, was there a specific, I like this guy because, I know there's a free, well, they're going to get a free port after Brexit. Did he nationalise an airport? Am I getting this right? That's right, yeah. What has he done that people really like? So he did, I know it sounds old to say, but he did campaign of bringing the local airport into public ownership, which they have done. That he, the free port has, it has cut through. Look, the benefits of free port are woefully overstated as critics write free-protein. Basically they, you get tax reliefs imposed locally to attract jobs, but that just, I mean, it just takes it away from other areas of the country. So it doesn't actually, if you want to level up, that's clearly not the way you do it at all. I think that, and they have secured investment from the government on top of that. I think what I'd say is, if Labour had won that, which they narrowly lost in 2017, I think they'd have a popular incumbency factor now because they would be associated with investment in a way that councils are associated with cuts. So I think if you have years of austerity under a conservative government, which we had, including with local councils, who are then doling out having to choose what to cut back. So then often Labour councils are associated with cuts. If you then get meralties on top of them, who are associated with splashing the cash, then the incumbent does get a popular boost. And the argument that they're able to do in that area is to say, you voted for a conservative. A conservative works better with the government because they're in the same party and therefore they're better placed to get concessions and the Labour government's not on the offering anyway. That's why he's cut through. And that's why, you know, he's not, he's associated with, bizarrely, reversing the tide of austerity in the area. I mean, there is also the national factors because most of those constituent parts of Tees Valley, they switched to the conservatives in the 2019 general election, heavily Brexit voting areas so that the Tories have risen in stature and the Labour Party have declined. So potentially that alongside the incumbency factor you're talking about has been pretty significant there. Also, it seems it's been significant in the West Midlands. The West Midlands Majoralty, that includes Birmingham, Coventry, Dudley, Sandwell, Solihull, Walsall and Wolverhampton, the results in 2017 were even closer than they were in Tees Valley. So they're the conservatives one with Andy Street by 50.4% to 49.6% for Labour's Sean Simon. So super, super close. And there were suggestions within the Starmer team that this is the kind of seat they did want to win back. So Sebastian Payne in the FT had some interesting commentary on why this should be seen as a pretty crucial race. This was an article this morning, I think. So Sebastian Payne wrote, the West Midlands is Britain's closest region to a US swing state electoral dominance has gone between Labour and the Tories depending on whose national fortunes are up. Street squeaked in as mayor in 2017 thanks to his business record and moderate centre-right politics. We say this is a big swing seat, is what you'd call in America a purple state. Here it tends to go to whichever party is going to win the general election that year. Later in the piece he writes, when Keir Starmer was elected Labour leader last year, one of his close allies told me the West Midlands would be our first step back to electability and proof that Labour can win elections again. And he writes if Street wins on Thursday, it will be proof that the pandemic has done little to dent the Tories standing and will suggest that Labour's troubles are deeper than just the unpopularity of its last leader and stance on Brexit. I'm not actually sure why he's saying if they lose it's, it must be more than their stance on Brexit because if they lose, you could also say that compounds the fact that the stance on Brexit is what lost to this. Again, a heavily leave voting region. And I mean, again, this is looking bad for Labour if you believe opinion. So opinion suggests that in fact, this time around, the Conservatives could win in the first round, with 54% in the first round to Labour's 37% and 59% in the second round to Labour's 41%. Now remember, this was essentially 50-50 four years ago. So this is a big improvement for the Conservatives. Again, could be the incumbency effect, could be that Labour are more associated with Remain than they were in 2017 since they went on to back that second referendum, which was so catastrophic in 2019, at least in those particular regions. Let's go straight on to some of those Metro Mayor regions where there's going to be good news for Labour, we can presume, unless there's a massive upset. We expect Labour to comfortably hold London. And the YouGov polling for London suggests the latest actually, this is a bit down on what it was. Previously we were wondering if Sadiq Khan was going to win on the first round. Obviously that's still possible. These are all polls. But the current polling is suggesting that in the first round he'll get 43% to the Tories, 31% that's Sean Bailey as their candidate. We can look very quickly actually at what the results were in 2016. So you have something to compare this to. In 2016, Sadiq Khan won on the second round with 56.8% compared to the Tories, 43.2%. You'll remember that Zach Goldsmith ran a pretty horrible Islamophobic campaign. I do want to go very quickly to Owen on this just because I know that Owen interviewed Sadiq Khan very recently. I'm not exactly sure when he did interview him, but I know you put out the interview on your YouTube today. It's been very prolific over the last couple of days. Sadiq Khan, in my mind, has been a little bit disappointing as mayor, but I mean, he doesn't need to worry when it comes to electorate, does it? No, I mean, I think their camp is slightly concerned about the issue of turnout. I mean, they can't be worried in any meaningful way because they're going to win. So that's not a message they want people to hear because I think they'd quite like to win on the first round. They got a huge margin in 2016, but they didn't actually quite win on the first round of the vote. And I think they're worried about people think it's in the bag because people, because Sean Bailey is a joke candidate. I mean, let's just be honest. He's ludicrous. He's run a textbook example of how not to run a campaign. I mean, he's got enough baggage to sink an ocean liner. But so I think they think people will think, well, it's in the bag. They may well also, they haven't said this, worry about the lack of general popularity of the Labour Party will discourage people from voting, that there will be younger people in particular, more likely to vote for the Greens in protest at the national Labour leadership. All of that is possible, but they're going to clearly win it, probably by a bigger margin than they did back in 2016. But there is, for example, one reason they might not win on the first round is a YouTube prankster who pranked me last week by beginning the interview with the doppelganger. Turned out not to be him. And he's got 5% of the vote, particularly from younger people. So one of the reasons that he can't may not win the first round is because of a YouTube prankster rather than Sean Bailey. So I suppose we could tell a story where that's because of deep sociological trends in London. I don't think we won't weave that story right now. When it comes to the prankster, I mean, obviously the story as to why CD Khan is doing very well, that is deeply sociological. Labour is now London, sorry, is now a red city. Lots of renters also didn't vote for Brexit. Of course, Manchester and Liverpool Metro in mayoralities are also having elections tomorrow. We're not going to discuss those in too much detail because they are even more certain to remain in Labour hands than Londoners. They are not competitive races. One more Metro mayorate region which should go well for Labour is newly created. Didn't exist, well, until tomorrow. Doesn't exist until tomorrow. That's the West Yorkshire mayoralty. So this is a Metro region that, as I say, was just created. It includes Leeds as the biggest population centre that's part of it, then Bradford, Calderdale, Kirkleys and Wakefield. Now this is expected to go to Labour's Tracey Braben, former TV star. Labour won by six points in the region in 2019. So this is one of those parts of the country where even though on aggregate it was Brexit voting, Labour does still have a lead. Obviously, lots of big cities there with lots of renters, ethnic minorities and young people. So that's still Labour territory. Some of those, the smaller, less densely populated parts of that region went Tory in 2019, including Wakefield. One final Metro mayoralty region. We're going to go through them super quickly now. We're going to go to the west of England. This is the one that people think could be a swing one. This is the only one I've really seen where people think this could really be in play. And Labour here are hoping to take the seat from the Conservatives. In 2017, this seat, which includes Bath, and the North East Somerset, Bristol and South, Gloucestershire was won by the Conservatives on the second round with 51.6%. Labour had 48.4% in this election. Now, these elections will be held at the same time as Bristol City mayor, quite confusing. You have a mayor for the region that Bristol is in and for Bristol City. Bristol City mayor, Marvin Rees, quite popular and also generally considered to be more important than this Metro mayor. They, Labour are hoping that turnout for that election will boost Labour over the edge when it comes to the west of England Metro region. Marvin Rees is, that's not going to be a particularly competitive race. No one's suggesting he could lose. To wrap up the story in England, 143 councillors in England have seats up for election. And that's going to be around 4,500 councillors. There's also 35 police and crime commissioners in England and four in Wales. And then there's the London Assembly. And we're going to talk about Scotland and Wales later in the show. I want to talk about some broader issues when it comes to the Labour Party now and why, I mean, the narrative basically now is about, oh, we're expecting a disappointment. Obviously, we can't predict what's going to happen tomorrow, but if you're looking at the way politicians are talking about this, the way kids' darmers talking about this, they're like, prepare for a disappointment. And the narrative right now is that the national elections that are happening on Thursday will be a disappointing set of elections for Labour. Now, Keir Starmer has been pretty clear when he's appeared on television. The fault is the ghost of Jeremy Corbyn principally. He's saying he's bringing down the Labour vote even in seats that Jeremy Corbyn won. And he's saying it's because the vaccine rollout was successful. That's the official story. But increasing numbers of people both on the left and now some on the centre are saying that failure, so the failure to do particularly well in those elections if it happens will have a different cause. And that's the lack of any clear vision for the party and any vision for the country. So to start off this conversation, we're going to give you an example of a Labour candidate really failing to express a vision for the country or the party. This is Paul Williams, the candidate for Hartlepool, who struggled to tell Owen Jones what Labour stood for. What is Labour's vision for the country now? What does Labour stand for? Don't say fairness and everything being nice and mother had an apple pie. What is it concretely? What is the vision? People in this relation aren't talking, though, about Labour's vision for the country. They're talking about Labour's vision for Hartlepool. Well, it is both. OK, what's Labour's vision for Hartlepool? That's unique and different and distinct. Yeah, so the best companies come to Hartlepool to provide the best jobs because we have the best trained people. They're always disagreeing with that. Because we've invested in people right from the start of life. And you make that difference to children. So by the time they start school, they're not behind their peers. They can read, they can... You then have small class sizes and really good... You know, my kids are at primary school and they say that the class sizes are large. Their headteacher talks to me about cuts in schools and having to reduce teaching assistance. So you help the most vulnerable children, you help children with special educational needs. And when kids aren't coming to school, you send out support workers to find out what's going in the household and you help people to get to a point where they can have really great skills, really great training, and then employers come to you. Not because you've got the lowest taxes, because you've got the best people. There are some direct things. But you don't work. But I'm genuinely interested. Do you know what the labour vision of the country is? Well, you asked me what... No, to the country! The labour vision of the country. Let's replicate that. And you start the best place for a child to be born and the best place to go. I mean, that sounded like he was asking why he was found in the back of a taxi with ketamine on his collar and a dildo in his hand. It seemed like that was a really hard, hostile question. He was really squirming. You asked him quite a basic question, Owen. What was going on? Was that as uncomfortable as it looked? It was quite a long interview, and we didn't include very exceptions where we asked other questions with similar resources. I should say he hasn't been found in the back of a taxi with ketamine on his collar and a dildo in his hand. I think for reasons of libel, we need to clarify that absolutely clearly hasn't happened to him. It was like as if he was answering a question. Yeah, just to avoid a protracted lawsuit in exchange of legal letters. That hasn't happened. I think to be generous to him, as I said earlier, generous to the local Labour candidate, whoever they are, they're going to struggle to articulate what Labour's vision is for a very simple and straightforward reason, which is Labour does not have a vision. They don't have any idea what they want to do with political power whatsoever. The fact is that we do have a clear vision. They have a vision of nationalist populism, which is via their interpretation of Brexit, which is wedded to strategic investment, particularly in areas which are popular as they see it, health, education and police. Those are the three big things they went on in the election and targeted investment in communities that they hold or are seeking to gain. And that vision is cutting through and it is effective, particularly amongst older white homeowners in communities which are often called and lumped together or homogenised as the so-called red wall. And that's the voter coalition that they have sought and are now seeking to cement. The problem Labour have is Stammer's team watched into that operation believing that all that was needed was for the grown-ups, as they see it, to come back in the room of politics, that self-evidently they were more competent and able, I'm explaining their narrative here, by the way, than their predecessors who were self-evidently, as they see it, shambolic, and that they had a candidate, Keir Starmer, who didn't have baggage in the same way, who was a knight of the realm, who had run, who'd been a prosecutor against criminals, and therefore he would attract back socially conservative voters in particular that Labour lost. And that has not worked at all. One of the reasons is a lot of the people around Keir Starmer are basically on safari, they don't understand the communities they're talking about, they didn't grow up in them, they know almost nothing about them, and they're trying to caricature and cosplay the sorts of voters who live there through focus groups where they repeat back the messages that they get without coming up with their own clear or distinct message. And that looks inauthentic to lots of people, the whole Keir Starmer going around, always a full pint, not entirely convincing, plus flags. And that's an attempt, as they think if they tick those boxes, then they will attract those voters back. What they don't have, Labour did have a clear vision in 2017, which was to redistribute wealth and power from the top to everybody else, for the many, not the few. Of course that vision then got worn down very significantly by the Brexit trauma and drama, which is why in 2019 Labour didn't have a clear vision and kept chopping and changing its slogans throughout their election because they didn't know how to deal with how Brexit polarised their voter coalition. But in the aftermath of Brexit, Labour don't have that vision. Now, one of the excuses they have is the pandemic, but actually that would have been a, that national emergency is an opportunity to showcase a vision. Look at World War II, Winston Churchill should have won the 1945 election by a landslide. He was extremely popular Winston Churchill in 1945, but Labour crafted a vision in 1945 of, once we win the war, we've got to win the peace. And we're best placed to secure that peace by addressing the injustices that have been exacerbated and exposed by the war. And that's what they could have done with the pandemic and they didn't. And they didn't pin responsibility on the government who then people now feel resigned as thinking, well, they could have done things better that Labour would not have done a better job because they haven't offered a narrative of what they would have done better that is convincing or compelling. And so what we have is the problem we have now with the Labour leadership and the Labour vision and the Labour strategy is they're not winning back the voters Labour have lost at all. They're becoming cemented in the Tories electoral coalition whilst at the same time, the new core vote of the Labour Party, which is disproportionate, the younger people who rent in precarious and insecure jobs, their reasons for feeling inspired by the Labour Party are being trashed. There is no clear, coherent, inspiring vision that's speaking to them. And I think the other problem is, Keir Starmer stood on those 10 pledges to safeguard the 10, to safeguard core domestic policies of the Corbyn era. They haven't spoken about them or they just violated them as they did by opposing the Tories increasing corporation tax quite literally from the right of the Conservatives and that just looked shifty and dishonest. And I think what's cutting through and it is cutting through in place of that Hartlepool is these guys don't believe in anything. They're not authentic whilst the Tories have a vision and they're turning on the taps. And that's why Labour are failing. They have no clear vision. They don't know what they want with power. And do you know how they're going to respond after this? The only way they know how to respond, punching left. Simon Fletcher, who was the former Chief of Staff to Corbyn who was taken on by Keir Starmer's team during the leadership election to try and assuage the left. He's leaving the operation. The operation will move to the right, I think quite self-evidently. They may do a reshuffle, which brings in people from the right. And they will try and impose a narrative that a lot of their outriders and a lot of the media will cement which is in violation of the facts that this is somehow on the left and they're not defining themselves against the ideas and policies of the left sufficiently. And the problem is they don't have, their cupboard is empty. There's nothing in their intellectual cupboard. There is no project for European social democracy of their political iteration that is relevant to the crisis we live in unlike the 1990s, a period of financialized growth and rising living standards. They don't have the answer to it and I think what we'll see in 2019 after this election is them doubling down shifting to the right and trying to define themselves against the left even further and it will not work but it won't stop them from doing it. So obviously we don't have Keir Starmer here to defend himself. I'd love him to come on the show. He's obviously not particularly interested in doing that. We do have in one moment a clip where he is quite explicitly asked to lay out his vision before we go to that. If you're enjoying the show please do subscribe to the channel. We go live every Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 7pm. We put out videos every day. So hit that subscribe button. Now let's take a look at Keir Starmer having another crack at the vision thing. Here he is in conversation with Caffe Newman on Channel 4 News. Would a Prime Minister Starmer be as radical as the US President Joe Biden with his four and a half trillion dollar plan? Let me tell you what I would do. I would fix the economy. What we've had over the last ten years an economy which is short term and that has led to low pay, low standards, low investment, low productivity and the model is broken. Inequality is baked in and that is morally wrong and it's economically stupid. I would also have the ambition to go beyond the economy. Public services need to be looked at. We need a preventative set of public services and we need public services that cut across each other. I've seen so many examples in my time of people coming through the criminal justice system who for a bit of intervention and support would never have been there and their victims would never have been victims but we also need the ambition to change the culture because for the last ten years, whether it was in America whether it's in the UK or across Europe we have had this utter focus on what divides us but am I up for the radical change that's needed to make our economy work better for everybody? You bet I am. I want to bring you in on this because obviously part of that was just sort of Kia Starmer cringe and it's down to him being a bit of a technocratic politician. One thing I did think watching that though is that I mean it is harder to express a vision as Labour leader now that they're facing a politician as wily as Boris Johnson because Kia Starmer there, I mean some of the lines he was taking weren't that far away from what Kia Starmer was saying he's saying we've suffered from low investment we've suffered from inequality and the problem is that now Boris Johnson or the problem for Labour is that Boris Johnson is now talking about investment and inequality then goes to talk about culture and we want to bring people together because society is so divided. I'm not saying Jeremy Corbyn said but now I mean now that Brexit is in the past it doesn't make that much sense Kia Starmer has to point to America where Donald Trump is like you know it's kind of a critique of an opposition that isn't there. At the same time though I don't necessarily know if the left have their vision of who the opposition are I mean what should Kia Starmer be saying? I mean I think the reason that we saw we have seen the Conservative Party rebuild itself in this way you know let's not forget that under Theresa May we had an incredibly divided Conservative Party we had a party that I always said back then that you know we have two irreconcilable sides of the Conservative Party the pro-European the sort of much more corporatised side and then we have the nativist the more nationalist side right the more little England side one side has to win and I think with the Conservatives they sort of have that discipline and they also have that ability to just to change you know there's not the to hack to a previous time but actually to change and make the changes that are necessary in order to create new bases as well as hold on to their existing one you know I think that this entire conversation about vision is such a learning set of events because not we can have any particular attachment to the Labour Party I don't care what the vehicle is as long as it works but because of the lack of a truly organisational ideological opposition to the Conservatives and I would be saying that even if Labour were doing slightly better because triangulation is becoming embedded in the Labour Party DNA again we're going back to those days of people being able to tell the difference between two parties you know that refrain of oh they're all the same we had many things between 2015 and 2019 but we didn't hear that and I think that was probably one of the strengths and the reason why we saw that kind of boost in 2017 Daliya you're going in and out a little bit I think you were getting close to finishing the point but we're losing you we're losing you a bit too much for my liking I want to throw to Owen what's your take on the alternative that Labour should be offering do you accept my point that I suppose expressing a vision is harder when you're up against a politician quite as wily and quite as flexible as Boris Johnson is I mean Boris Johnson is an extremely wily politician who you know he succeeded partly because he's not seen as another Tory even though you'd think from our perspective he embodies tourism I mean I think just to see where they should get to where they got wrong I think sums it up because back in February they did this big keynote speech which was supposed to be the 21st century vision for the Labour Party which was partly as far as it went it was a diagnosis of inequality but it was going back to the whole you know under Miliband blessing you know our project was often diagnosing what was wrong cost of living crisis promise of Britain where the next generation have a better life than their parents squeezed middle they kept jumping from analysis to analysis without a policy their one signature policy they came up with was the British recovery bond which has never been heard of since and that I think sums it up they're looking desperately around for a vision anything any sort of vision and they're not you would then what you do and you hammer away it relentlessly and they're not doing that and I think they'll get stuck in a cycle of relaunches stagnating polls relaunches they'll brief to the press another Keir Starmer is resetting his leadership with a new speech you're going to hear a lot of that and I think the other problem is this whole Tory sleaze approach attack line I think is very misguided in lots of ways I think part of it is trying to hark back to the 1990s because a lot of them saw that worked for new Labour quite well a lot of that was to do with sex by the way I mean there was the Neil Hamilton stuff where it was about dodgy envelopes but a lot of that was the Tory's launch to back to basics campaign and morality to return to the Victorian age and then lots of Tory ministers were clearly having sex with anything that moved so that that was why sleaze stuck because sleaze is often associated with sexual issues isn't it and I think the problem with their line of attack this time round is people are very cynical about politicians when you already know that all the polling politicians are less trusted than advertising executives according to the polling and I think the danger is with this attack line is it feeds into a sense that all politicians are on the take they're in it for themselves they've got their snaps in the trough that's what you hear over and over and over again repeated debating by voters but actually that's just seen as spread around that's what all politicians are like and the more people think that the more it actually often hurts the left because if you think all politicians are corrupt in it for themselves you don't trust them to come with grand national projects of social reform or you're less likely to and what they should have done is stuck to an anti elite framing PPE contracts is about for example being handed out to their mates is about an elite that looks after themselves the fact that you know tests and trace failed again an elite that looks after themselves handed to their private sector mates who made an actually of the whole thing not locking down quick enough was because again they feared it would hit the profits of business human life was less important and Labour should have done what they did under with World War two which is to go look at what this national tragedy has done we clapped from windows for the key workers who have been undervalued and underpaid for so long and now we're going to give them the wages and terms and conditions the millions of them that they deserve and instead we have our national television you can't even commit so anything more than a two and a half percent pay rise for nurses that the self-employed the millions of self-employed and precarious workers in this country again they've been exposed one pay packet away from insecurity that will change universal credit which millions of people have been sucked into the orbit of inadequate we need to build a new welfare state which is actually suits the needs of the times and the polling has shown that people's attitudes towards the welfare state has completely and utterly changed that we've seen from how test and trace failed private sector mess unlike the vaccine roll out public sector NHS roll out that shows public ownership works so we're going to go down that avenue they could have knitted that together we're going to stand up against an elite that looks after their own by redistributing wealth and power and curing the injustices that were exposed and exacerbated by the national emergency that worked in 1945 they beat bloody Winston Churchill the wartime leader in a landslide it's not the same obviously but there are some similarities but they didn't do that they were too scared to pin responsibility for the pandemic on the government they let them get away with it and now they're going down a line of politicians who are dodgy that's rebounded on them they've got the various new labour ghosts of Christmas pass associated with them and people just go well you've got that problem as well and they're not coming up with that coherent inspiring vision instead of jumping from message to message to message throwing an occasional policy to the ether forgetting about it it never cuts through it never sticks if you do that and that's their failure that's their problem and if they stuck to that clear vision I think it would cut through but they don't have a vision they have any confidence in so all they'll do after this is carry on down the line of I'm not Jeremy Corbyn or Boris Johnson but they won't define who he actually is instead all the leadership and they're looking at continued stagnation and decline this is not going to end well by any stretch of the imagination and I think I'm afraid to say all too many of them this whole political project of Keir Starmer seems to be founded on a fraud because it was a case of people who voted for Liz Kendall or campaign for her back in 2015 the Blair Eye candidate in 2015 signing up to a soft left agenda because they thought that was the sweet spot of the Labour membership in 2020 and I don't think they believed it I don't think they believed it one bit and now they're going to just throw all of that overboard and go the way of the European sister parties which I'm afraid to say are in a far worse state than Labour Party ended even in 2019 That was a good vision great vision I really like that you brought up that reset speech because the one good part of that speech I thought was him sort of saying or Keir Starmer saying the reason the pandemic was so bad was because we have these gutted public services I thought that was a good angle to go down but since then Keir Starmer hasn't said it again he just says oh sorry the reason I'm not doing that well is actually because the Tories are brilliant at coronavirus that's not a message I'm supposed to be getting across thanks so much for that good evening, good night let's move straight on to Scotland elections to the Scottish Parliament will be the most consequential round of votes anywhere in the UK on Thursday that's because they've been set up by all sides as a barometer for the legitimacy of a second referendum on Scottish independence the SNP are aiming for an absolute majority to then push for a second indie vote it's therefore unsurprising that the final leaders debate on BBC Scotland which was last night was dominated by questions about a so-called indie ref too this is what the SNP's Nicola Sturgeon, Labour's Anna Sawa and the Tories' Douglas Ross had to say on the issue our manifesto is very clear we want the next five years to focus on the national recovery but just on that point about the recovery Nicola Sturgeon has led us through the pandemic and people can make the case about whether she's done that well or not but you can't lead the recovery and also lead half the country at the same time you either lead all the country and take us to the recovery, not half the country you can't lead a referendum campaign and lead the recovery at the same time it's simply not credible they should vote for me on Thursday safe in the knowledge that getting us through this crisis is my priority and then you'll claim their vote as part of the mandate for indie ref too when we come out of this crisis recovery and what we recover to is not some kind of abstract neutral concept we've got to decide ourselves what kind of country do we want to be what are the values we want to underpin that recovery and what do we want the recovery to look like do we want it one built in the image of Boris Johnson and Douglas Ross and their band of Brexiteers or do we want it to be one that put fairness and equality and building a prosperous Scotland if she gets a majority she'll take her eye off the ball for Scotland's recovery for rebuilding this country from this pandemic and seek to hold another independence referendum she will ask for a section 30 order seek to hold is not the same as guaranteeing and I'm just going to come on to it she'll seek a section 30 order if the Prime Minister has said it's absolutely the wrong thing to do right now in the middle of this global pandemic to seek to divide the country all over again and then he would then say absolutely the priority has to be a recovery and Nicola Surgeon would say well we'll go ahead with an legal Wildcat referendum anyway now despite what Douglas Ross said Sturgeon has in fact ruled out an illegal referendum Alacata Lunya so why did Douglas Ross bring it up well it's likely he was trying to cover for this tweet from the Scottish Conservatives which caused a stir on Monday and so the Scottish Conservatives tweeted an SMP majority is a guarantee of another independence referendum and the reason this raised eyebrows is because the Tories have been fairly insistent that even if the SMP win a majority they will not get another independence referendum because it's within Boris Johnson's power to give them permission to and he's made it very clear that whatever the results of this election the Tories have no intention of conceding that a referendum can happen that means that Douglas Ross now has to suggest that what they actually meant was there will definitely be another independence referendum because Nicola Sturgeon will do an illegal one to discuss these issues I'm joined now by writer and campaigner Katie Gilliglay Swan thank you so much for joining us this evening first of all on the big picture is it correct to understand these elections as essentially a referendum on a referendum so a referendum on whether there should be another independence referendum I mean I think that considering the recent of the past few years constitutional disruptions I think that that was always going to be a part of this election but of course you've also got the parties determined to pose this also as an election on economic recovery and recovery more generally from the pandemic I think that Nicola Sturgeon is walking a very fine line because in asking for a majority based on her capacity to sort of be an experienced manager of the country and to deliver a recovery but if they get a majority then you do get the referendum that seems to be saying two things but on the other hand you've got the conservatives pushing their one trick which is be afraid be very afraid of another referendum and that works for them that returns a solid sort of quarter of the vote but it's weighed in very thin and you know Douglas Ross is no Ruth Davidson I want to get up some Douglas Ross is definitely no Ruth Davidson it seems like his campaign is completely tanking which brings second place into play we'll talk about that in one moment first of all I want to go to the poll and this is a poll aggregator from the new statesmen which they've used to project an estimate for what they think could be the seat share when we come out of this election so they have the SMP on in fact exactly the same number of seats they currently have which is 63 and which is too short of a majority whatever happens though there will be a majority for independence because you can have the SMP supported by the Greens and my question for you one thing that's I suppose been confusing me slightly in this election is why have the SMP basically allowed a narrative to form whereby an Indiref 2 is legitimate if they get a majority when actually to have a majority for an Indiref 2 the SMP don't need to get a majority it's definitely going to be the case that either the SMP get an absolute majority or there is a pro-Indy majority because of the Greens so why have they made it so binary either we get an absolute majority and we have an Indiref 2 or we don't and then potentially we don't why has that happened I would say there's a few different reasons the first one is just in terms of external legitimacy and credibility Nicola Sturgeon is now an international figure in her own right and there is a reality that Downing Street are much more likely to sideline the Greens if indeed they are holding that balance of a pro-Indy majority within the Parliament so there's that sort of external PR international recognition that I think is a part of the SMP's game or consideration of this another is the historic precedent they didn't get the majority that they did in the last election and in 2011 they did get that majority which is why part of the reason why David Cameron granted the referendum and then finally I think it's they are in an election they need to mobilize their base and mobilizing their bases both votes SMP we need to bring back as many SMP MSPs as possible and the Greens have played a really good role in the last the last Parliament in pushing the SMP to be for progressive concessions in order to pass SMP budgets and that sort of compromise on the power within the Parliament I think is something that they would be keen to avoid and finally when it comes to who's second place I mean especially in England lots of people are interested in how Labour are going to do because people see that a sort of recovery in Scotland is necessary if they want to get back into Government the polling currently has the Tories still in second but Labour making ground and that's Sarwa he's had quite a good campaign is that the case? Yeah I would agree I mean I think Anna Sarwa's credibility has definitely increased his likability has increased as this election campaign has continued and I think that you know while he sometimes does stray along the line of being a bit more teachery and the sort of calm down guys don't argue like this in the debates I think he has done a really good job in balancing the sort of recognition of you know the respect of the democratic principle but his own clarity of what his position is which is he doesn't support a referendum on the other hand you know I think that the road for recovery for Scottish Labour is going to be very very long the vast losses that they had in the heartlands of Scottish Labour you know I'm not going to recover overnight and the way that you know Scottish politics has worked since the 70s is that there's a predominant party it was Labour you know Labour could be depended on to bring back that majority no matter really what folks were saying and now that's SNP and that took quite a few decades for the SNP to get into that position so I think a Labour resurgence isn't on the cards but I think you know I'd say that much better than I was anticipating as they did anyway and the short space of time that he's been in that position OK Iguila Gleis Swan thank you so much for joining us this evening for that preview of the Scottish elections Cheers Michael Cheers, of course we will be covering those results in depth because it will be very very consequential not just for Scotland but for the whole of the UK the final election we're going to bring you up to date with very briefly as I said we're not going to go into too much detail in terms of the Welsh Parliament we'll get a guest on either on Friday or Monday the polling here has Labour ahead expected really by all parties to be able to form a minority government they currently have a minority government they're expected to lose a few seats but not many let's bring up the latest polling so on the constituency vote Labour on 36 the Tories on 29 and the Plaid Cymru on 20 and then on the party list vote 31 for Labour 31% 25% for the Tories and 21% for Plaid Cymru and then when you see the seats Labour on 25 the Conservatives on 17 and Plaid on 14 so yeah we expect a Labour minority government but we'll talk about the nuances and the intricacies about that when the results come in I said that was the final election but we have one more for you but it's not one of the local or national elections happening tomorrow because as well as elections to national parliaments and local councils a key plank of democracy in Britain is election to leadership positions in trade unions and none of those trade union elections are more important than those to the leadership of unison which has 1.4 million members and is therefore the largest trade union in Britain now given their affiliation to Labour it's often the relationship of union leaders to factions within Westminster that garners the most nationwide attention whenever these contests happen and so at the end of last year when the centrist candidate Christina McEnney won election as the union's general secretary so unison's general secretary it was reported as a win for Keir Starmer now this election could be seen and was by many seen as a bit of a disaster for the left the centre put up one candidate the left put up three and that meant that Christina McEnney was able to win with 47.7% of the vote you can see their Paul Holmes who won 33% he was backed by John McDonnell Roger McKenzie with 11% was backed by Jeremy Corbyn and Hugo Pierre with 7.75% was backed by the Socialist Party so all wings of the left were represented but backing different candidates however after that split vote the left and the union have reassembled to contest elections to the party's national executive committee and this time around they have a decent chance of taking control the slate is led by Paul Holmes who was the most successful left candidate in those general secretary elections I spoke to Paul earlier about the campaign and started by asking him whether this bid for the NEC was the left seeking a consolation prize after a disaster in the general secretary race things in them terms in the general secretary election an ordinary member of the union got the highest vote an ordinary member of the got and out of that campaign was a lot of enthusiasm for changing the union and that's what this campaign is about people perhaps 50 odd people who were enthused by that general secretary campaign want to follow the same policies for the national executive elections don't see it as a consolation see it as the main part of the union and this time around I presume you've got a fairly united left slate going into this campaign well there are people who say they're on different slates but there's 56 people standing for the we want real change in unison and I think that we do want real change we've got real times coming after Covid and let's talk about I suppose the significance of this if you guys win obviously the general secretary is held by someone from a different faction in the trade union if you guys have a clean sweep for these NEC elections what would that mean in terms of industrial action would it mean we'd see more strikes over the next four years I think it means we see more fighting I think what we'll see is more coordination what we've got in unison at the moment is branches left on their own to fight alone and what representation the members get in them fights depends what branch they're in and I think A they'll get more coordination they'll be given confidence I think it's a massive thing that every union rep has to have the back of the union and we'll give them the back we'll back them up and presumably you think that hasn't been the case so far I mean have you got any examples of the failures of the union leadership to back grassroots members over the past four years I suppose if you ask any branch secretary who's battling in horrendous conditions at the moment both it from Covid and cuts so that's only going to get worse once the Covid crisis is over if you ask any branch secretary you have to go through a thick of problems to get any support for action and sometimes it's just too late and the membership are frustrated that the legislation might say one thing but when the membership are faced by cuts and redundancies and the new the new fear fire and they won't immediately actually need to give it as quickly as you can he's bad enough with the legislation it's just delayed by unison and finally lots of our audience will be very interested in the effect this election could happen on the Labour Party obviously unison are one of the biggest affiliates to the Labour Party would your union be holding Keir Starmer more to account if you guys win the NEC or is that in the gift of the general secretary anyway how does this relate to Labour politics the policies of the unison are made by the national conference and the job of the NEC is to run the unison between conferences and for us I would say the vast majority of the people standing among that 56 are Labour Party members some are Labour councillors and all we want is for people to have a say in who we nominate and who we support we can't have a situation where the members find out in the press who their union is supporting when we support Jeremy Corbyn twice and all the Labour Party affiliates as to who they wanted to support we didn't do that when we nominated Keir Starmer and I don't see in terms of individuals and personalities I see in terms of the one thing of democracy I don't want a function duty contest where people pick personalities the unions got to be about the terms, conditions and pensions of each members and an integral part of that is our relationship with the Labour Party and it's got to be a relationship where we're saying what we want not they're telling us what they want us to do that they're our representatives in Parliament If you're a unison member you can vote in those elections now to close the show Dahlia I'm going to put you on the spot and I want a brief answer to something you haven't prepared for because it's breaking news which could be incredibly significant this was from AP from Associated Press nine minutes ago the US has announced support for COVID-19 and it's a patent waiver so I mean I've just read that tweet I haven't read the detail but that could be incredibly significant oh wow I mean that's incredible news it's very difficult to get people to care about intellectual property to get people to care about those things that are snuck in to trade agreements that actually feel they feel like very technical minor things but they are have massive impacts and play a massive role like the neocolonial unequal distribution of resources throughout the world and I think that there has been a really really great campaign across the world which you know is getting people using this kind of like using the lens of the vaccine and this kind of very easy to understand example of why these kinds of patents are so unfair and entrench so much global inequality and you know the campaign has been really effective and it might even be successful this is really really important and lays a lot of groundwork for the fact that you know in the fight against climate change a lot of not to make it seem like it's too but these things are all connected but intellectual property agreements and things like this are massive stumbling blocks to actually solving the climate crisis so this is you know really important for the vaccine powering effects down the line so well done to those campaigns that's really really good news and also a double whammy negativity for Bill Gates divorced and got his his like disgusting vaccine protectionism a bit of a knock it's not done yet but it is a significant knock obviously because the US has been a really important proponent and supporter of this mechanism I hadn't thought of that Bill Gates angle that's a very good point of course this is just one tweet from Associated Press so I mean I presume it's based on something but the details could all be in a small print probably something we'll talk about on Friday's show Dali it's been an absolute pleasure being joined by you this Wednesday thank you so much for having me I'm sorry that my internet was a bit I think the storm has messed about my Wi-Fi a little bit we need an infrastructure update don't we yeah so to be honest to remind us Charlie and Thompson tweets on the hashtag Tiskey Sour, Dali and Gabrielle just dropping truth bomb after truth bomb over on Navarra Media's Tiskey Sour so despite the internet connection you heard what you did cross that's it for us for now enjoy voting tomorrow if you are in England, Scotland or Wales for now you've been watching Tiskey Sour on Navarra Media