The British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has called an early general election in the UK, surprising many.
We'll explore why he made this decision, the main themes of the election, and who could be the next Prime Minister.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:12] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about the UK General Election.
[00:00:27] On May 22nd, Rishi Sunak surprised the nation by announcing that there will be a general election in the UK.
[00:00:36] It will take place on July the 4th, and by the end of the day the people of the United Kingdom may know that they will have a different Prime Minister.
[00:00:46] So, in this episode we are going to talk about why there is an election earlier than expected, what some of the key themes of the election may be, how the British political system works, what political pundits and polls are saying, and who the next British Prime Minister is likely to be.
[00:01:05] OK then, let’s get right into it and talk about the next general election.
[00:01:14] There is a great British tradition of standing outside in the rain without an umbrella or a raincoat, and trying to pretend that everything is ok.
[00:01:25] And that was exactly what the British Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, did on the afternoon of Wednesday the 22nd of May.
[00:01:35] He stood outside 10 Downing Street, the home of the Prime Minister, and announced to a group of journalists that the next general election would be held in just over a month’s time.
[00:01:48] The rain poured down, his hair and jacket growing wetter by the minute.
[00:01:55] Sunak didn’t mention the rain, he carried on as if everything was normal, in the great British tradition.
[00:02:04] But everything was not ok.
[00:02:07] The weather was not ok, that much was clear, but Sunak’s popularity, and that of his political party, the Conservatives, was at rock bottom.
[00:02:18] He was not a popular man, and it was surprising to onlookers that he had decided that then was the time to pull the trigger and call an earlier-than-expected election.
[00:02:32] Now, let me give you a brief reminder about the state of British politics before we move on to the question of the election itself.
[00:02:42] The UK has been governed by the same political party, the Conservatives, since 2010, for 14 years.
[00:02:51] During that time, the Conservatives have gone through 4 different leaders; David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, and Liz Truss.
[00:03:02] Rishi Sunak is the fifth.
[00:03:05] His predecessor, Liz Truss, lasted for a mere 44 days, and Sunak has done slightly better, having led the country since October of 2022.
[00:03:17] If you are a seasoned listener to this show with an exceptional memory, you will remember that we ended episode number 327, on the ill-fated 44-days of Liz Truss, like this:
[00:03:30] Sunak has until January of 2025 to call a general election, he has two years to rebuild trust and patch up the damage from the most chaotic period of recent British political history.
[00:03:44] It’s a monumental task that he has ahead of him, and all that remains to be said is let’s check in again in a couple of years and see whether he manages it.
[00:03:55] It's kind of weird hearing your voice from a few years ago, but that was from an episode in December of 2022.
[00:04:03] Anyway, here we are, I’m recording this at the end of May in 2024, and we have an election coming up, a time for the British public to have its say on whether Rishi Sunak has managed to turn the ship around, and be able to secure victory for the Conservatives.
[00:04:24] Almost all of the surveys, polls, and political pundits are in agreement about this: no.
[00:04:31] Or rather, it seems incredibly unlikely that the Conservatives will win, and it would be the most monumental upset if they did manage to win. Rishi Sunak has seen his popularity drop further and further as time has passed.
[00:04:49] There is nothing particularly unusual about that–it happens to most British Prime Ministers–but the extent of his unpopularity is unusual.
[00:04:59] In April of this year, one polling company revealed that its most recent poll made Sunak the least popular British Prime Minister in history, with only 16% of the population approving of the job that he was doing, and only 19% of the country saying that it was planning to vote for The Conservatives, Sunak’s political party.
[00:05:24] From his perceived weakness as a politician through to a mismanaged economy, there are numerous reasons that he has found himself more unpopular than any prime minister before.
[00:05:35] So, if he was and still is so unpopular, why did he call an election?
[00:05:43] The last election was in December of 2019, so theoretically he had until January of 2025, another 6 months, to call another election, as the terms are for 5 years.
[00:05:57] Most political commentators believed that he would call an election sometime in the autumn, after there was the chance for some more positive news about the economy, but he didn’t wait.
[00:06:10] So, why did he call an election now instead of in a few months time?
[00:06:17] According to political commentators, there are a few reasons.
[00:06:21] Firstly, he recently announced lower inflation and lower migration numbers, and he can tell people that his government is now steering the country in the right direction.
[00:06:33] Secondly, there might be progress before July in terms of sending asylum seekers to Rwanda, which will be popular with a particular set of British voters. And if he waits until the end of the year and there still hasn’t been any progress on that front, it will underline his inability to get anything done.
[00:06:55] And thirdly there is the fact that he doesn’t want to be seen to have waited until the very last minute. As you may know, Rishi Sunak was not elected by the British public; he was elected by the members of the Conservative party after Liz Truss resigned. That’s just what happens when a Prime Minister resigns - there isn’t another general election, rather the new Prime Minister is the head of the governing party.
[00:07:21] So, according to one theory, he thinks that if he calls an election “early” he can more genuinely claim that he is giving the British public the chance to have its say about who it wants as its leader.
[00:07:35] These theories could all be true, to a certain extent, if you believe that he believes that calling the election now is about increasing the probability of the Conservatives winning it.
[00:07:48] There is another category of theories which is that he has called the election this early so that he can lose the election with as little damage as possible, both to himself and the Conservative party.
[00:08:02] Firstly, there is the question of damage to Sunak himself.
[00:08:07] If he feels like he will lose the election by a lower margin in July than he would in December, well this helps his future career prospects, it helps him in his life after being Prime Minister.
[00:08:21] Now, he isn’t going to be strapped for cash, in need of money, as between himself and his wife he has a fortune of almost a billion Euros, but it is more a case of damage limitation, and allowing him to move on and get on with whatever his future plans might be without too much personal embarrassment.
[00:08:42] And talking about damage limitation to the Conservative party, there is also the theory that he has been pushed into calling an early election by members of his own political party.
[00:08:54] These are men and women who know that Sunak is very likely to lose the election, but believe that the longer he delays it, the fewer votes the Conservatives will receive, and the fewer MPs will be elected.
[00:09:09] In both cases, whether he truly believes that he can win the election or whether he only wants to lose it as quickly and painlessly as possible, clearly he feels like this is more likely to happen in July rather than in December or January.
[00:09:25] Now, this is probably a good point to talk about the practicalities of the UK electoral system, because it probably is different to the one in your country.
[00:09:37] The UK operates a system called “first past the post”.
[00:09:42] How this works is that the country is divided into what are called constituencies, 650 in total.
[00:09:51] Anyone can put themselves forward to be the elected official in a constituency. You can be an independent candidate, but most candidates are aligned to a political party.
[00:10:03] Then, every eligible adult votes for the person they want in their constituency, in their geographical area.
[00:10:12] The person who gets the most votes becomes the elected official for that area, the member of parliament, or “MP” for short.
[00:10:22] The person who comes second gets nothing, so let’s say one candidate gets 50,000 votes and another candidate gets 50,001, the second candidate is elected and becomes an MP, and the first gets nothing, they go home empty handed.
[00:10:43] All 650 areas do this, and then the winning candidates become MPs.
[00:10:50] Now, almost all of these MPs are part of a political party, so the party with the most MPs forms a government.
[00:11:01] The most popular political party doesn’t always have a majority, it doesn't always have more than half of the MPs, so they have to form a coalition, but this first past the post system favours larger parties, so having coalition governments is less common than it is in countries with different voting systems, like Germany or Italy, for example.
[00:11:28] To reiterate how this is different from a proportional voting system, in a proportional voting system, if a party gets, let’s say, 30% of the vote, they will have 30% of the representatives. In a first-past-the-post system, like in the United Kingdom, it is possible for a party that receives 30% of the vote to end up with 0% or even 100% of the representatives.
[00:12:01] Right, that’s the administrative bit out of the way, the bit about how the political system works.
[00:12:08] Who are the other candidates then, who is going to be the next British Prime Minister if it isn’t Rishi.
[00:12:15] Well, there is really only one viable alternative.
[00:12:19] There are two dominant political parties in British politics: The Conservatives, which is traditionally right of centre, and Labour, which is traditionally left of centre.
[00:12:31] You might have heard of the Liberal Democrats, the Scottish National Party, the Green party, or even UKIP. But these parties typically never get more than 20% of the MPs between them, so really it's a question of whether it will be a Labour or Conservative Party victory.
[00:12:51] And the leader of the Labour Party, the leader of the opposition, is a man called Keir Starmer.
[00:12:59] He has been the leader since 2020, and his strategy ever since he was elected can probably be best described as “sit in the sidelines and let the Conservatives make the mistakes”.
[00:13:13] Throughout his time as the leader of the opposition he has been relatively coy, quite quiet, about what his policies would be were he Prime Minister.
[00:13:23] Instead, he has been very good at pointing out the mistakes of the Conservative government, and holding them to account.
[00:13:31] His critics say that he hasn’t offered solutions, and it isn’t really clear what he stands for, but he has played a very canny political game by being relatively quiet and letting his opponents make the mistakes.
[00:13:47] And he hasn’t had to wait long. Since only 2020, when he took over from Jeremy Corbyn, the Conservatives have had three leaders, they have grossly mishandled the pandemic, there has been serious economic mismanagement, and there have been numerous public embarrassments.
[00:14:07] And on a deeper and more important level, since the Conservatives first took office in 2010, the UK has not grown and prospered economically in a way that every single Conservative Prime Minister has said it would.
[00:14:23] According to one report from last year, the average worker in the UK is £11,000 a year worse off than they were before the Conservatives, so that’s almost €15,000 a year worse off. Wages have increased in nominal terms, but these increases have been eaten away by inflation, meaning that the average British worker hasn't had a real pay rise since the Conservatives took power.
[00:14:54] Of course, inflation is a subject that has affected countries all over the world, and the Conservatives repeatedly remind people of this, pointing out that the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the COVID pandemic were the chief causes.
[00:15:09] But a stumbling economy and low wage growth were both things that Brits felt before either of these.
[00:15:17] This, combined with increasing waiting times at the NHS–the national healthcare system–increasing cuts to social services, and the sad reality that 4 million British children live in poverty, this is all ammunition that Keir Starmer has and undoubtedly will continue to use in his campaign.
[00:15:39] The country has had enough, it is time for “change”. And indeed, when Keir Starmer gave his first speech after the announcement of the election, he stood in front of a podium with one word plastered in big capital letters: Change.
[00:15:57] Rishi Sunak and the Conservatives continue to tell us that things are getting better, that you just need to trust us to turn the economy around, but they have been saying this for 14 years.
[00:16:10] Enough is enough, so the theory goes. People are ready for a change, and although Keir Starmer might not have the X factor in terms of charisma or making grand speeches, the British people have had enough of the Conservatives.
[00:16:26] That is certainly what Keir Starmer is hoping for at least.
[00:16:31] The Conservatives’ key message in the campaign will be about trust, that Labour cannot be trusted with the keys to the British economy, that Labour has no plan.
[00:16:44] A phrase that Rishi Sunak has already been repeating again and again is “going back to square one”, meaning going back right to the start. Rishi and the Conservatives have a plan, he says, it is starting to work, as people can see by inflation coming down and the situation starting to look slightly less grim.
[00:17:06] A vote for Labour is a vote to rip up the Conservatives’ plan, to return to square one, and what’s more, square one without a plan about how to move forward.
[00:17:18] Now, I told you at the start of the episode that Rishi Sunak made the announcement of the general election standing in the pouring rain, and it was all a bit embarrassing.
[00:17:30] That wasn’t the only embarrassment.
[00:17:33] A group of mischievous Labour supporters had found out about the announcement beforehand, and had congregated outside the gates to Downing Street. They brought a loudspeaker with them, and were playing the song “Things can only get better”, which was used by the Labour leader Tony Blair when he won the election in 1997.
[00:17:57] To his credit, Rishi Sunak managed to not be too put off, but he was almost drowned out by the noise of the song, you could barely hear him over the noise.
[00:18:23] It was not an auspicious start to the campaign, but the song was a fitting message.
[00:18:29] Things can only get better.
[00:18:33] One imagines that Rishi might have thought that it’s not as if they could get much worse.
[00:18:41] OK then, that is it for today's episode on the UK general election.
[00:18:46] I hope it's been an interesting one, and that this has given you some background on how things might develop over the next few weeks.
[00:18:54] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:18:59] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:12] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about the UK General Election.
[00:00:27] On May 22nd, Rishi Sunak surprised the nation by announcing that there will be a general election in the UK.
[00:00:36] It will take place on July the 4th, and by the end of the day the people of the United Kingdom may know that they will have a different Prime Minister.
[00:00:46] So, in this episode we are going to talk about why there is an election earlier than expected, what some of the key themes of the election may be, how the British political system works, what political pundits and polls are saying, and who the next British Prime Minister is likely to be.
[00:01:05] OK then, let’s get right into it and talk about the next general election.
[00:01:14] There is a great British tradition of standing outside in the rain without an umbrella or a raincoat, and trying to pretend that everything is ok.
[00:01:25] And that was exactly what the British Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, did on the afternoon of Wednesday the 22nd of May.
[00:01:35] He stood outside 10 Downing Street, the home of the Prime Minister, and announced to a group of journalists that the next general election would be held in just over a month’s time.
[00:01:48] The rain poured down, his hair and jacket growing wetter by the minute.
[00:01:55] Sunak didn’t mention the rain, he carried on as if everything was normal, in the great British tradition.
[00:02:04] But everything was not ok.
[00:02:07] The weather was not ok, that much was clear, but Sunak’s popularity, and that of his political party, the Conservatives, was at rock bottom.
[00:02:18] He was not a popular man, and it was surprising to onlookers that he had decided that then was the time to pull the trigger and call an earlier-than-expected election.
[00:02:32] Now, let me give you a brief reminder about the state of British politics before we move on to the question of the election itself.
[00:02:42] The UK has been governed by the same political party, the Conservatives, since 2010, for 14 years.
[00:02:51] During that time, the Conservatives have gone through 4 different leaders; David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, and Liz Truss.
[00:03:02] Rishi Sunak is the fifth.
[00:03:05] His predecessor, Liz Truss, lasted for a mere 44 days, and Sunak has done slightly better, having led the country since October of 2022.
[00:03:17] If you are a seasoned listener to this show with an exceptional memory, you will remember that we ended episode number 327, on the ill-fated 44-days of Liz Truss, like this:
[00:03:30] Sunak has until January of 2025 to call a general election, he has two years to rebuild trust and patch up the damage from the most chaotic period of recent British political history.
[00:03:44] It’s a monumental task that he has ahead of him, and all that remains to be said is let’s check in again in a couple of years and see whether he manages it.
[00:03:55] It's kind of weird hearing your voice from a few years ago, but that was from an episode in December of 2022.
[00:04:03] Anyway, here we are, I’m recording this at the end of May in 2024, and we have an election coming up, a time for the British public to have its say on whether Rishi Sunak has managed to turn the ship around, and be able to secure victory for the Conservatives.
[00:04:24] Almost all of the surveys, polls, and political pundits are in agreement about this: no.
[00:04:31] Or rather, it seems incredibly unlikely that the Conservatives will win, and it would be the most monumental upset if they did manage to win. Rishi Sunak has seen his popularity drop further and further as time has passed.
[00:04:49] There is nothing particularly unusual about that–it happens to most British Prime Ministers–but the extent of his unpopularity is unusual.
[00:04:59] In April of this year, one polling company revealed that its most recent poll made Sunak the least popular British Prime Minister in history, with only 16% of the population approving of the job that he was doing, and only 19% of the country saying that it was planning to vote for The Conservatives, Sunak’s political party.
[00:05:24] From his perceived weakness as a politician through to a mismanaged economy, there are numerous reasons that he has found himself more unpopular than any prime minister before.
[00:05:35] So, if he was and still is so unpopular, why did he call an election?
[00:05:43] The last election was in December of 2019, so theoretically he had until January of 2025, another 6 months, to call another election, as the terms are for 5 years.
[00:05:57] Most political commentators believed that he would call an election sometime in the autumn, after there was the chance for some more positive news about the economy, but he didn’t wait.
[00:06:10] So, why did he call an election now instead of in a few months time?
[00:06:17] According to political commentators, there are a few reasons.
[00:06:21] Firstly, he recently announced lower inflation and lower migration numbers, and he can tell people that his government is now steering the country in the right direction.
[00:06:33] Secondly, there might be progress before July in terms of sending asylum seekers to Rwanda, which will be popular with a particular set of British voters. And if he waits until the end of the year and there still hasn’t been any progress on that front, it will underline his inability to get anything done.
[00:06:55] And thirdly there is the fact that he doesn’t want to be seen to have waited until the very last minute. As you may know, Rishi Sunak was not elected by the British public; he was elected by the members of the Conservative party after Liz Truss resigned. That’s just what happens when a Prime Minister resigns - there isn’t another general election, rather the new Prime Minister is the head of the governing party.
[00:07:21] So, according to one theory, he thinks that if he calls an election “early” he can more genuinely claim that he is giving the British public the chance to have its say about who it wants as its leader.
[00:07:35] These theories could all be true, to a certain extent, if you believe that he believes that calling the election now is about increasing the probability of the Conservatives winning it.
[00:07:48] There is another category of theories which is that he has called the election this early so that he can lose the election with as little damage as possible, both to himself and the Conservative party.
[00:08:02] Firstly, there is the question of damage to Sunak himself.
[00:08:07] If he feels like he will lose the election by a lower margin in July than he would in December, well this helps his future career prospects, it helps him in his life after being Prime Minister.
[00:08:21] Now, he isn’t going to be strapped for cash, in need of money, as between himself and his wife he has a fortune of almost a billion Euros, but it is more a case of damage limitation, and allowing him to move on and get on with whatever his future plans might be without too much personal embarrassment.
[00:08:42] And talking about damage limitation to the Conservative party, there is also the theory that he has been pushed into calling an early election by members of his own political party.
[00:08:54] These are men and women who know that Sunak is very likely to lose the election, but believe that the longer he delays it, the fewer votes the Conservatives will receive, and the fewer MPs will be elected.
[00:09:09] In both cases, whether he truly believes that he can win the election or whether he only wants to lose it as quickly and painlessly as possible, clearly he feels like this is more likely to happen in July rather than in December or January.
[00:09:25] Now, this is probably a good point to talk about the practicalities of the UK electoral system, because it probably is different to the one in your country.
[00:09:37] The UK operates a system called “first past the post”.
[00:09:42] How this works is that the country is divided into what are called constituencies, 650 in total.
[00:09:51] Anyone can put themselves forward to be the elected official in a constituency. You can be an independent candidate, but most candidates are aligned to a political party.
[00:10:03] Then, every eligible adult votes for the person they want in their constituency, in their geographical area.
[00:10:12] The person who gets the most votes becomes the elected official for that area, the member of parliament, or “MP” for short.
[00:10:22] The person who comes second gets nothing, so let’s say one candidate gets 50,000 votes and another candidate gets 50,001, the second candidate is elected and becomes an MP, and the first gets nothing, they go home empty handed.
[00:10:43] All 650 areas do this, and then the winning candidates become MPs.
[00:10:50] Now, almost all of these MPs are part of a political party, so the party with the most MPs forms a government.
[00:11:01] The most popular political party doesn’t always have a majority, it doesn't always have more than half of the MPs, so they have to form a coalition, but this first past the post system favours larger parties, so having coalition governments is less common than it is in countries with different voting systems, like Germany or Italy, for example.
[00:11:28] To reiterate how this is different from a proportional voting system, in a proportional voting system, if a party gets, let’s say, 30% of the vote, they will have 30% of the representatives. In a first-past-the-post system, like in the United Kingdom, it is possible for a party that receives 30% of the vote to end up with 0% or even 100% of the representatives.
[00:12:01] Right, that’s the administrative bit out of the way, the bit about how the political system works.
[00:12:08] Who are the other candidates then, who is going to be the next British Prime Minister if it isn’t Rishi.
[00:12:15] Well, there is really only one viable alternative.
[00:12:19] There are two dominant political parties in British politics: The Conservatives, which is traditionally right of centre, and Labour, which is traditionally left of centre.
[00:12:31] You might have heard of the Liberal Democrats, the Scottish National Party, the Green party, or even UKIP. But these parties typically never get more than 20% of the MPs between them, so really it's a question of whether it will be a Labour or Conservative Party victory.
[00:12:51] And the leader of the Labour Party, the leader of the opposition, is a man called Keir Starmer.
[00:12:59] He has been the leader since 2020, and his strategy ever since he was elected can probably be best described as “sit in the sidelines and let the Conservatives make the mistakes”.
[00:13:13] Throughout his time as the leader of the opposition he has been relatively coy, quite quiet, about what his policies would be were he Prime Minister.
[00:13:23] Instead, he has been very good at pointing out the mistakes of the Conservative government, and holding them to account.
[00:13:31] His critics say that he hasn’t offered solutions, and it isn’t really clear what he stands for, but he has played a very canny political game by being relatively quiet and letting his opponents make the mistakes.
[00:13:47] And he hasn’t had to wait long. Since only 2020, when he took over from Jeremy Corbyn, the Conservatives have had three leaders, they have grossly mishandled the pandemic, there has been serious economic mismanagement, and there have been numerous public embarrassments.
[00:14:07] And on a deeper and more important level, since the Conservatives first took office in 2010, the UK has not grown and prospered economically in a way that every single Conservative Prime Minister has said it would.
[00:14:23] According to one report from last year, the average worker in the UK is £11,000 a year worse off than they were before the Conservatives, so that’s almost €15,000 a year worse off. Wages have increased in nominal terms, but these increases have been eaten away by inflation, meaning that the average British worker hasn't had a real pay rise since the Conservatives took power.
[00:14:54] Of course, inflation is a subject that has affected countries all over the world, and the Conservatives repeatedly remind people of this, pointing out that the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the COVID pandemic were the chief causes.
[00:15:09] But a stumbling economy and low wage growth were both things that Brits felt before either of these.
[00:15:17] This, combined with increasing waiting times at the NHS–the national healthcare system–increasing cuts to social services, and the sad reality that 4 million British children live in poverty, this is all ammunition that Keir Starmer has and undoubtedly will continue to use in his campaign.
[00:15:39] The country has had enough, it is time for “change”. And indeed, when Keir Starmer gave his first speech after the announcement of the election, he stood in front of a podium with one word plastered in big capital letters: Change.
[00:15:57] Rishi Sunak and the Conservatives continue to tell us that things are getting better, that you just need to trust us to turn the economy around, but they have been saying this for 14 years.
[00:16:10] Enough is enough, so the theory goes. People are ready for a change, and although Keir Starmer might not have the X factor in terms of charisma or making grand speeches, the British people have had enough of the Conservatives.
[00:16:26] That is certainly what Keir Starmer is hoping for at least.
[00:16:31] The Conservatives’ key message in the campaign will be about trust, that Labour cannot be trusted with the keys to the British economy, that Labour has no plan.
[00:16:44] A phrase that Rishi Sunak has already been repeating again and again is “going back to square one”, meaning going back right to the start. Rishi and the Conservatives have a plan, he says, it is starting to work, as people can see by inflation coming down and the situation starting to look slightly less grim.
[00:17:06] A vote for Labour is a vote to rip up the Conservatives’ plan, to return to square one, and what’s more, square one without a plan about how to move forward.
[00:17:18] Now, I told you at the start of the episode that Rishi Sunak made the announcement of the general election standing in the pouring rain, and it was all a bit embarrassing.
[00:17:30] That wasn’t the only embarrassment.
[00:17:33] A group of mischievous Labour supporters had found out about the announcement beforehand, and had congregated outside the gates to Downing Street. They brought a loudspeaker with them, and were playing the song “Things can only get better”, which was used by the Labour leader Tony Blair when he won the election in 1997.
[00:17:57] To his credit, Rishi Sunak managed to not be too put off, but he was almost drowned out by the noise of the song, you could barely hear him over the noise.
[00:18:23] It was not an auspicious start to the campaign, but the song was a fitting message.
[00:18:29] Things can only get better.
[00:18:33] One imagines that Rishi might have thought that it’s not as if they could get much worse.
[00:18:41] OK then, that is it for today's episode on the UK general election.
[00:18:46] I hope it's been an interesting one, and that this has given you some background on how things might develop over the next few weeks.
[00:18:54] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:18:59] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:12] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about the UK General Election.
[00:00:27] On May 22nd, Rishi Sunak surprised the nation by announcing that there will be a general election in the UK.
[00:00:36] It will take place on July the 4th, and by the end of the day the people of the United Kingdom may know that they will have a different Prime Minister.
[00:00:46] So, in this episode we are going to talk about why there is an election earlier than expected, what some of the key themes of the election may be, how the British political system works, what political pundits and polls are saying, and who the next British Prime Minister is likely to be.
[00:01:05] OK then, let’s get right into it and talk about the next general election.
[00:01:14] There is a great British tradition of standing outside in the rain without an umbrella or a raincoat, and trying to pretend that everything is ok.
[00:01:25] And that was exactly what the British Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, did on the afternoon of Wednesday the 22nd of May.
[00:01:35] He stood outside 10 Downing Street, the home of the Prime Minister, and announced to a group of journalists that the next general election would be held in just over a month’s time.
[00:01:48] The rain poured down, his hair and jacket growing wetter by the minute.
[00:01:55] Sunak didn’t mention the rain, he carried on as if everything was normal, in the great British tradition.
[00:02:04] But everything was not ok.
[00:02:07] The weather was not ok, that much was clear, but Sunak’s popularity, and that of his political party, the Conservatives, was at rock bottom.
[00:02:18] He was not a popular man, and it was surprising to onlookers that he had decided that then was the time to pull the trigger and call an earlier-than-expected election.
[00:02:32] Now, let me give you a brief reminder about the state of British politics before we move on to the question of the election itself.
[00:02:42] The UK has been governed by the same political party, the Conservatives, since 2010, for 14 years.
[00:02:51] During that time, the Conservatives have gone through 4 different leaders; David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, and Liz Truss.
[00:03:02] Rishi Sunak is the fifth.
[00:03:05] His predecessor, Liz Truss, lasted for a mere 44 days, and Sunak has done slightly better, having led the country since October of 2022.
[00:03:17] If you are a seasoned listener to this show with an exceptional memory, you will remember that we ended episode number 327, on the ill-fated 44-days of Liz Truss, like this:
[00:03:30] Sunak has until January of 2025 to call a general election, he has two years to rebuild trust and patch up the damage from the most chaotic period of recent British political history.
[00:03:44] It’s a monumental task that he has ahead of him, and all that remains to be said is let’s check in again in a couple of years and see whether he manages it.
[00:03:55] It's kind of weird hearing your voice from a few years ago, but that was from an episode in December of 2022.
[00:04:03] Anyway, here we are, I’m recording this at the end of May in 2024, and we have an election coming up, a time for the British public to have its say on whether Rishi Sunak has managed to turn the ship around, and be able to secure victory for the Conservatives.
[00:04:24] Almost all of the surveys, polls, and political pundits are in agreement about this: no.
[00:04:31] Or rather, it seems incredibly unlikely that the Conservatives will win, and it would be the most monumental upset if they did manage to win. Rishi Sunak has seen his popularity drop further and further as time has passed.
[00:04:49] There is nothing particularly unusual about that–it happens to most British Prime Ministers–but the extent of his unpopularity is unusual.
[00:04:59] In April of this year, one polling company revealed that its most recent poll made Sunak the least popular British Prime Minister in history, with only 16% of the population approving of the job that he was doing, and only 19% of the country saying that it was planning to vote for The Conservatives, Sunak’s political party.
[00:05:24] From his perceived weakness as a politician through to a mismanaged economy, there are numerous reasons that he has found himself more unpopular than any prime minister before.
[00:05:35] So, if he was and still is so unpopular, why did he call an election?
[00:05:43] The last election was in December of 2019, so theoretically he had until January of 2025, another 6 months, to call another election, as the terms are for 5 years.
[00:05:57] Most political commentators believed that he would call an election sometime in the autumn, after there was the chance for some more positive news about the economy, but he didn’t wait.
[00:06:10] So, why did he call an election now instead of in a few months time?
[00:06:17] According to political commentators, there are a few reasons.
[00:06:21] Firstly, he recently announced lower inflation and lower migration numbers, and he can tell people that his government is now steering the country in the right direction.
[00:06:33] Secondly, there might be progress before July in terms of sending asylum seekers to Rwanda, which will be popular with a particular set of British voters. And if he waits until the end of the year and there still hasn’t been any progress on that front, it will underline his inability to get anything done.
[00:06:55] And thirdly there is the fact that he doesn’t want to be seen to have waited until the very last minute. As you may know, Rishi Sunak was not elected by the British public; he was elected by the members of the Conservative party after Liz Truss resigned. That’s just what happens when a Prime Minister resigns - there isn’t another general election, rather the new Prime Minister is the head of the governing party.
[00:07:21] So, according to one theory, he thinks that if he calls an election “early” he can more genuinely claim that he is giving the British public the chance to have its say about who it wants as its leader.
[00:07:35] These theories could all be true, to a certain extent, if you believe that he believes that calling the election now is about increasing the probability of the Conservatives winning it.
[00:07:48] There is another category of theories which is that he has called the election this early so that he can lose the election with as little damage as possible, both to himself and the Conservative party.
[00:08:02] Firstly, there is the question of damage to Sunak himself.
[00:08:07] If he feels like he will lose the election by a lower margin in July than he would in December, well this helps his future career prospects, it helps him in his life after being Prime Minister.
[00:08:21] Now, he isn’t going to be strapped for cash, in need of money, as between himself and his wife he has a fortune of almost a billion Euros, but it is more a case of damage limitation, and allowing him to move on and get on with whatever his future plans might be without too much personal embarrassment.
[00:08:42] And talking about damage limitation to the Conservative party, there is also the theory that he has been pushed into calling an early election by members of his own political party.
[00:08:54] These are men and women who know that Sunak is very likely to lose the election, but believe that the longer he delays it, the fewer votes the Conservatives will receive, and the fewer MPs will be elected.
[00:09:09] In both cases, whether he truly believes that he can win the election or whether he only wants to lose it as quickly and painlessly as possible, clearly he feels like this is more likely to happen in July rather than in December or January.
[00:09:25] Now, this is probably a good point to talk about the practicalities of the UK electoral system, because it probably is different to the one in your country.
[00:09:37] The UK operates a system called “first past the post”.
[00:09:42] How this works is that the country is divided into what are called constituencies, 650 in total.
[00:09:51] Anyone can put themselves forward to be the elected official in a constituency. You can be an independent candidate, but most candidates are aligned to a political party.
[00:10:03] Then, every eligible adult votes for the person they want in their constituency, in their geographical area.
[00:10:12] The person who gets the most votes becomes the elected official for that area, the member of parliament, or “MP” for short.
[00:10:22] The person who comes second gets nothing, so let’s say one candidate gets 50,000 votes and another candidate gets 50,001, the second candidate is elected and becomes an MP, and the first gets nothing, they go home empty handed.
[00:10:43] All 650 areas do this, and then the winning candidates become MPs.
[00:10:50] Now, almost all of these MPs are part of a political party, so the party with the most MPs forms a government.
[00:11:01] The most popular political party doesn’t always have a majority, it doesn't always have more than half of the MPs, so they have to form a coalition, but this first past the post system favours larger parties, so having coalition governments is less common than it is in countries with different voting systems, like Germany or Italy, for example.
[00:11:28] To reiterate how this is different from a proportional voting system, in a proportional voting system, if a party gets, let’s say, 30% of the vote, they will have 30% of the representatives. In a first-past-the-post system, like in the United Kingdom, it is possible for a party that receives 30% of the vote to end up with 0% or even 100% of the representatives.
[00:12:01] Right, that’s the administrative bit out of the way, the bit about how the political system works.
[00:12:08] Who are the other candidates then, who is going to be the next British Prime Minister if it isn’t Rishi.
[00:12:15] Well, there is really only one viable alternative.
[00:12:19] There are two dominant political parties in British politics: The Conservatives, which is traditionally right of centre, and Labour, which is traditionally left of centre.
[00:12:31] You might have heard of the Liberal Democrats, the Scottish National Party, the Green party, or even UKIP. But these parties typically never get more than 20% of the MPs between them, so really it's a question of whether it will be a Labour or Conservative Party victory.
[00:12:51] And the leader of the Labour Party, the leader of the opposition, is a man called Keir Starmer.
[00:12:59] He has been the leader since 2020, and his strategy ever since he was elected can probably be best described as “sit in the sidelines and let the Conservatives make the mistakes”.
[00:13:13] Throughout his time as the leader of the opposition he has been relatively coy, quite quiet, about what his policies would be were he Prime Minister.
[00:13:23] Instead, he has been very good at pointing out the mistakes of the Conservative government, and holding them to account.
[00:13:31] His critics say that he hasn’t offered solutions, and it isn’t really clear what he stands for, but he has played a very canny political game by being relatively quiet and letting his opponents make the mistakes.
[00:13:47] And he hasn’t had to wait long. Since only 2020, when he took over from Jeremy Corbyn, the Conservatives have had three leaders, they have grossly mishandled the pandemic, there has been serious economic mismanagement, and there have been numerous public embarrassments.
[00:14:07] And on a deeper and more important level, since the Conservatives first took office in 2010, the UK has not grown and prospered economically in a way that every single Conservative Prime Minister has said it would.
[00:14:23] According to one report from last year, the average worker in the UK is £11,000 a year worse off than they were before the Conservatives, so that’s almost €15,000 a year worse off. Wages have increased in nominal terms, but these increases have been eaten away by inflation, meaning that the average British worker hasn't had a real pay rise since the Conservatives took power.
[00:14:54] Of course, inflation is a subject that has affected countries all over the world, and the Conservatives repeatedly remind people of this, pointing out that the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the COVID pandemic were the chief causes.
[00:15:09] But a stumbling economy and low wage growth were both things that Brits felt before either of these.
[00:15:17] This, combined with increasing waiting times at the NHS–the national healthcare system–increasing cuts to social services, and the sad reality that 4 million British children live in poverty, this is all ammunition that Keir Starmer has and undoubtedly will continue to use in his campaign.
[00:15:39] The country has had enough, it is time for “change”. And indeed, when Keir Starmer gave his first speech after the announcement of the election, he stood in front of a podium with one word plastered in big capital letters: Change.
[00:15:57] Rishi Sunak and the Conservatives continue to tell us that things are getting better, that you just need to trust us to turn the economy around, but they have been saying this for 14 years.
[00:16:10] Enough is enough, so the theory goes. People are ready for a change, and although Keir Starmer might not have the X factor in terms of charisma or making grand speeches, the British people have had enough of the Conservatives.
[00:16:26] That is certainly what Keir Starmer is hoping for at least.
[00:16:31] The Conservatives’ key message in the campaign will be about trust, that Labour cannot be trusted with the keys to the British economy, that Labour has no plan.
[00:16:44] A phrase that Rishi Sunak has already been repeating again and again is “going back to square one”, meaning going back right to the start. Rishi and the Conservatives have a plan, he says, it is starting to work, as people can see by inflation coming down and the situation starting to look slightly less grim.
[00:17:06] A vote for Labour is a vote to rip up the Conservatives’ plan, to return to square one, and what’s more, square one without a plan about how to move forward.
[00:17:18] Now, I told you at the start of the episode that Rishi Sunak made the announcement of the general election standing in the pouring rain, and it was all a bit embarrassing.
[00:17:30] That wasn’t the only embarrassment.
[00:17:33] A group of mischievous Labour supporters had found out about the announcement beforehand, and had congregated outside the gates to Downing Street. They brought a loudspeaker with them, and were playing the song “Things can only get better”, which was used by the Labour leader Tony Blair when he won the election in 1997.
[00:17:57] To his credit, Rishi Sunak managed to not be too put off, but he was almost drowned out by the noise of the song, you could barely hear him over the noise.
[00:18:23] It was not an auspicious start to the campaign, but the song was a fitting message.
[00:18:29] Things can only get better.
[00:18:33] One imagines that Rishi might have thought that it’s not as if they could get much worse.
[00:18:41] OK then, that is it for today's episode on the UK general election.
[00:18:46] I hope it's been an interesting one, and that this has given you some background on how things might develop over the next few weeks.
[00:18:54] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:18:59] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
