Vote 2011 which aired on Radio 5Live, can be heard in its entirety here following the results of Thursday's voting in the local council elections and on the controversial AV referendum. Among Richard Bacon's guests was Sir Robert Worcester, founder of opinion pollsters Mori (now Ipsos Mori) and author of the fantastic (not that we’re biased or anything) new book, Explaining Cameron's Coalition.
Among the topics discussed was the historic victory for the SNP in Thursday’s voting. Through supposed “adroit electioneering” and “strategic campaigning”, Alex Salmond secured an electoral breakthrough for his party, leading to speculation that this will result in a Scottish independence referendum. Sir Robert, however, rather dismisses these suggestions, likening the idea to the AV referendum. Agreeing that there would certainly be initial public support for the idea of change, Sir Robert suggests once the public look into the proposals in detail, it’ll become, as with AV, much less appealing. To quote him, it’ll “go down in flames”, which as we know happens!
In their book, Explaining Cameron's Coalition, the authors Robert Worcester, Roger Mortimore, Paul Baines and Mark Gill take a step back and look at the British electorate's views on the 2010 British general election and what really happened. As discussed in Vote 2011, some of the authors’ discoveries won’t come as a surprise to the reader - the poor performance of the Labour government in the years following the 2005 elections is hardly a secret. However, slightly more unexpected was Sir Robert’s proposal that Tony Blair is as much to blame for Labour’s failure in the 2010 general election as Gordon Brown.
For a full insight into the events leading to the first hung parliament since 1974, Explaining Cameron’s Coalition is now available, priced £25.