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00:00With just days to go before snap parliamentary elections here in France,
00:04President Emmanuel Macron has warned that the policies of his far-right and
00:08hard-left rivals could lead to civil war.
00:11Polls published over the weekend suggest that Macron's centrist will finish in third place
00:16behind both Marine Le Pen's National Rally Party and a hastily assembled left-wing alliance.
00:21Macron called the election after the far-right secured a landslide in European elections,
00:26a shock move that's increasingly likely to see him forced to share power
00:30with a Prime Minister from an opposing party.
00:37The UK is heading to the polls in just nine days' time,
00:40an election that looks poised to deliver the opposition Labour Party out of power for 15 years,
00:45the second-largest majority in Parliament since the end of World War II.
00:50To discuss those UK elections, we can bring in Tim Bale,
00:53Professor of Politics at Queen Mary University, London.
00:56Thank you very much indeed for being with us here on France 24 today.
00:59Now, the latest polls suggest that the ruling Conservatives are polling at just 20%,
01:03with Labour at around 40%.
01:06Are we looking at a decimation of the Tory party as we know it?
01:11Decimation might not be a bad word.
01:13Certainly, if we look at the balance of the polls,
01:16it looks as if the Conservatives will end up with nearer to 100 seats than 200 seats,
01:21and even 200 seats would be a bad defeat.
01:23So, yes, it's looking very, very dark for them.
01:27Now, a number of the polls we saw this week suggest that the Conservatives
01:30are now in a close battle with Reform UK, headed up by Nigel Farage, for second place.
01:38To what extent has Reform stolen support from the Conservatives here?
01:43Well, inasmuch as Reform has really risen in the polls,
01:47since Nigel Farage declared that he was coming back to lead it,
01:50that rise does seem to be accounted for mainly by people who voted Conservative back in 2019.
01:57So, I'm absolutely sure that, but for Reform,
02:01the Conservatives would probably be nearer, perhaps, 25% than 20%,
02:05but even 25% would be a pretty terrible result.
02:09It's important, of course, that people remember that Reform may win a fairly large vote share.
02:15Who knows? It may even beat the Conservatives, although I doubt that.
02:18But it won't win many seats. Because of our first-past-the-post system,
02:21it's likely only to win a handful of seats, even if it touches near to 20% on election day.
02:28And do we have any idea about the extent to which Reform has stolen votes from Labour?
02:33Yes, we do. Inasmuch as you can poll that,
02:37it looks as if it's maybe nibbled at the Labour vote at the edges,
02:41but any decline in the Labour vote has actually not been due to Reform,
02:45but has been due to the Liberal Democrats, this third party, the more centrist party.
02:50But that actually isn't that much of a problem for Labour,
02:53because it suggests that there's going to be a lot of tactical anti-Tory voting.
02:57So, where Labour supporters live in places that Labour can't hope to win in,
03:02they're switching across to the Liberal Democrats in order to get rid of the Conservatives.
03:06So, that's no comfort for the Conservatives either.
03:09Now, a poll published in the Financial Times, I think it's today or yesterday,
03:14indicated that the Conservatives have lost or may have lost up to a third of voters
03:18who'd planned to go back to the party just four months ago.
03:22What went so wrong in just four months?
03:25Well, this is the campaign in which everything that could go wrong
03:28has gone wrong, really, for Rishi Sunak.
03:31He's made all sorts of gaffes.
03:33He's obviously coping at the moment with this scandal
03:35about people betting on the announcement of the election.
03:39It's also, to be honest, a problem of the fundamentals.
03:43The economy has not recovered in the way that he promised it would.
03:47Growth is there, but it's not very impressive.
03:50The National Health Service is still in crisis.
03:53Small boats are still coming across the Channel.
03:56So, all the pledges that he made when he first became Prime Minister
04:00really haven't been fulfilled.
04:01So, although the campaign has obviously got something to do with it,
04:04it's actually those long-term problems, I think, that have done for the government.
04:08You touched on it just there, this betting scandal,
04:11whereby several party officials and candidates, even,
04:13are being investigated for allegedly betting on the date
04:16of the UK general election before it was announced.
04:19Just how damaging is that particular scandal?
04:22Well, very.
04:23There's been some very interesting polling, actually, on that,
04:25and it shows that it really has cut through to people.
04:29There are three things in this campaign that do seem to have cut through
04:32that have hurt the government.
04:33The first was Rishi Sunak leaving the D-Day commemorations early.
04:39The second was his admission in an interview that he'd had
04:46a deprived childhood by not being able to get digital or cable TV.
04:50And the third one is this, what people are calling betting gate,
04:55or gamble gate.
04:57It really does seem to have cut through to the public.
04:59I think it's one of those stories that's actually quite easy to understand.
05:02It plays into this narrative that, for the government anyway,
05:06and for the Conservatives, it's one rule for them
05:08and one rule for the rest of us.
05:10And, of course, that was what hurt them during party gate as well.
05:13Nigel Farage, the leader, of course, of Britain's anti-immigration reform party,
05:17over the weekend faced very strong criticism in the press
05:21and also from his political rivals for saying that the West
05:24had provoked Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
05:27Any sign that those comments have dented his popularity?
05:32Well, it might be too early for polling to pick that up.
05:35We might see that in the next few days.
05:37But certainly it's something that the Conservatives are really pressing him on,
05:40quite understandably.
05:42And he's not just getting pressure, actually, from Conservative sources.
05:46It's also military sources and, if you like, the foreign policy
05:49and security establishment in the UK,
05:52who have absolutely no doubt that those remarks are, in some ways,
05:56ridiculous and perhaps give comfort to Vladimir Putin.
05:59And you'd have to say that, of course, Nigel Farage has got form on this.
06:04He's long been an admirer, as he says, of Putin as an operator,
06:09even if he says, and I find it quite hard not to laugh here,
06:12he doesn't think much of him personally.
06:15So I do think that those remarks may put some voters off
06:20because there is a very, very strong support in the UK
06:25for Ukraine's battle against Russia.
06:28And Putin is certainly not someone who many Brits admire.
06:32Sir Keir Starmer, the leader of the Labour Party,
06:35does very much look poised to become the country's next prime minister.
06:38The electorate seemingly getting over Starmer's somewhat detached demeanour,
06:43or has that rather cool exterior possibly worked in his favour here?
06:48I think it may have done.
06:50I mean, we have to remember that certainly since 2016
06:53we've been through a lot of political turmoil in this country.
06:58We've been through so many prime ministers.
07:012016 has been a real rollercoaster,
07:03and there may be an appetite for a rather calmer
07:06and some would even say slightly more boring regime under Keir Starmer,
07:10who is definitely, as you say, more of a kind of safe pair of hands politician
07:14than he is an inspiring or charismatic one.
07:17So it could be that cometh the hour, cometh the man.
07:20Now we are, of course, just days away from the UK's general election.
07:24What do you think it would have to take for the Tories
07:27to secure more than one in five votes,
07:31as is currently the picture on the ground?
07:36To be honest, I think we would have to see Keir Starmer
07:40being indicted for a criminal offence at this stage.
07:43I mean, I think really it's probably all over for the Conservatives now.
07:48I think we're talking really about the extent of their defeat
07:51rather than whether there will be a defeat.
07:54So I think it's unlikely, given the fundamentals,
07:58given how people regard Rishi Sunak,
08:00and given, as we've already talked about,
08:03reform eating into the Conservatives' vote,
08:06that actually the Conservatives are really heading for a pretty bad defeat.
08:10And if indeed we do see, as you term it, a pretty bad defeat,
08:14which I think is possibly putting it lightly,
08:17when you take into consideration what we're seeing in the polls,
08:20what does the future look like for the Conservative Party?
08:25Well, this is the question that everybody is debating now.
08:28I mean, if you look back at 1997,
08:31which was also a bad defeat for the Conservatives,
08:34what they tend to do is go into denial mode and go into double down mode.
08:39So instead of really stepping back and taking a good, hard, long look
08:43at what went wrong for them,
08:45they will almost certainly go straight into a leadership election.
08:49They will almost certainly, given the character of the membership,
08:52which has the final say on that leadership selection,
08:56pick someone who is similarly, if you like, Thatcherite to Rishi Sunak,
09:00but even more of a culture warrior, and go down that route.
09:04And I'm afraid in part because they worry about Nigel Farage
09:08and the impact that he's had on their vote.
09:11I'm just not sure whether that is the right route for a Conservative Party
09:14in a country that is becoming increasingly socially liberal over time.
09:18And to be honest, now feels that perhaps the state needs to be doing
09:22a little bit more rather than a little bit less for people.
09:25Of course, it depends partly on the performance of the Labour government
09:29and whether the Labour government can deliver to some of the expectations
09:33that it's created.
09:35But if 1997 to 2005 is anything to go by,
09:39the Conservatives are out of power perhaps for quite some time.
09:43Tim Bale, thank you so much for taking the time to speak to us
09:46here on France 24 today.
09:48Tim Bale, Professor of Politics at Queen Mary University of London.
09:51Thank you.