Amelia Hadfield heads the department of Politics at the University of Surrey and is Founding Director of its Centre for Britain and Europe. She joins CGTN Europe with analysis.
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00:00 Let's talk to Amelia Hadfield who heads the Department of Politics at the University of Surrey and is the founding director of its Centre for
00:07 Britain and Europe. Amelia, welcome back. Lovely to see you. The Prime Minister didn't have to call an election in July.
00:13 What do you make of the timing of the election announcement? Why did he do it?
00:19 You're right, and it's baffled a lot of observers and pundits.
00:23 I think the idea was simply he felt he had to bring the uncertainty to an end.
00:28 He wanted to bet the house, as it's now been called, on a snap election.
00:32 I think probably there's a numbers story to be told here. The Bank of England's 2% target was released yesterday, the inflation figures.
00:41 It was smaller than expected. It was actually 2.3.
00:44 But I think the Prime Minister felt that that was good enough to claim that things were slowly returning back to normal.
00:51 That was very much the phrase of the day. He also cited
00:54 net student migration
00:57 beginning to decrease. A couple of months earlier, he unveiled this large defence spending.
01:03 So all of this, for me, spells the sort of struts, if you like, of an election platform. I think also the sense that a
01:10 summer devoted to waiting and waiting and waiting
01:13 would not make effective use of time. He faced probably a growing risk of a leadership challenge
01:20 and the risk that something else could go much, much worse.
01:24 So I think he made a decision at the tail end of last week, from what we can tell.
01:28 He's not massively supported by everybody in the Cabinet.
01:30 My sense is that there was a pretty clear split between people who felt they just wanted it to get over with
01:35 and others who felt that maybe some of the improving economic news should take time to bed in so people would feel it
01:42 and possibly change their minds and vote Conservative.
01:45 Political journalists and political experts, I'm sure, get enormously excited about election campaigns.
01:51 Ordinary mortals perhaps groan. Do election campaigns
01:55 really make that much difference? Haven't voters made up their minds already a long time ago?
02:02 That's such a fascinating question.
02:04 I think in many senses, this is hard for me as an academic to admit, but maybe campaigns don't matter all that much.
02:11 And certainly some of the studies suggest that, as you say, people are fairly set in their ways
02:15 long before, you know, an election has been called. And that's because
02:19 of the issues that count to them and whether they're feeling looked after and listened to and supported.
02:23 This can take place in the form of local elections, which we've just had here in the United Kingdom.
02:28 But more importantly, I think at the national election level as well, if people feel, you know, that they've got a
02:35 clear sense of where they want to vote, that's unlikely to change.
02:39 There are a couple of examples where this has gone awry. 2017, Theresa May,
02:44 you know, called a general election deciding she was going to consolidate what she thought was a win, a winning position.
02:49 But actually it narrowed dramatically and she only just held on. That's because people changed their minds during the campaign.
02:55 They felt actually she wasn't a credible bet. She didn't have a secure grasp.
02:59 But at this point, I doubt it. Labour have such a commanding lead in the polls between 20 and 22 percent.
03:06 So all they really have to do is just hold on to it.
03:09 What do you think will be the defining issue for this UK election?
03:14 I think there's going to be a whole host of them.
03:17 I mean, I think at the top, cost of living and inflation that continues to dominate.
03:22 While we've seen a bit of a drop in inflation, I think in real terms,
03:25 people's bills, their household bills, energy bills, food prices,
03:30 even larger costs like housing affordability, those are still pressing very, very hard.
03:35 And I think people don't feel that the Conservatives have necessarily managed the economy,
03:39 particularly after the farrago of the Prime Minister Trust's mini-budget,
03:44 that people are really still paying for in many, many ways.
03:47 Health care hasn't been sorted out.
03:49 You know, this will rumble on with every election, but this seems to have
03:52 tailed off particularly badly in the past four to five years.
03:55 And in a sense, where is the country going, this sort of more existential question of the economic recovery and jobs?
04:02 It's easy, perhaps two or three years now to look back at Covid and say, well, we're in a post pandemic era.
04:07 But in many ways, actually, job creation and support for small and medium sized businesses hasn't bounced back.
04:14 So there will be questions as to which of the governing parties, you know, is a better bet in terms of helping that resuscitation.
04:21 And then finally, you've got big ticket items like climate change.
04:24 You've got immigration and borders.
04:26 From my perspective, perhaps, you know, European foreign and security policy, Britain's role in the world.
04:31 It just kind of depends on which of the which of those levers, which of those issue buttons, if you like,
04:36 the the parties are going to press as they campaign up and down the country for the next six weeks.
04:41 Amelia, we shall no doubt talk much more about this over the coming weeks.
04:44 For the moment, thank you for that.
04:45 Amelia Hadfield from the Department of Politics at the University of Surrey.