Polling expert Sir John Curtice reacts to general election results | LBC

Professor Sir John Curtis who's a polling expert professor of politics at the University of Strath Clyde Peerless in his analysis of numbers privileged to have you on so John when I say and I know labor is a thumping Victory but have Labor won or the conservatives lost what's the reality morning to you the conservatives have lost um support for the conservatives is down 20 to 21 points on 2019 labor are up by just two most of which is the result of the fact the party has done particularly well in Scotland uh doubling its share from 19% last time to 38% this time actually in Wales where of course labor are in the Devol run the devolved government their support was actually down by Four Points um the party that gained and the party that did most immediate damage to the conservatives in terms of votes but not in terms of seats are reform whose vote is up 13 points on what the brexit party achieved in 2019 when of course Mr Fry withdrew uh his then parties's candidates uh from seats that the conservatives were trying to defend so the foundation or the foundations of the conservative party's 2019 vote were eroded by reform but the spoils went primarily to labor because what is true is that voters seem to be so Keen to get rid of the conservatives that if they saw the labor party was second locally they tended to back them but equally if they saw the liberal Democrats were second locally then they switched to them so the signs of people wanting to vote against the government as opposed to anybody else in particular are very very strong so John we've talked about this in recent elections they're getting quite canny the electorate aren't they tactical voting is now a known science to them well it isn't it isn't I mean if you go back to 2019 there wasn't much sign of Tactical vot despite attempts by those on the remain side to try to organize it I think the point is that as was the case the last time when we saw extensive tactical voting which is 1997 that was also an election when the many voters wanted to get rid of the incumbent government and that when you've when voters feel that that's their principal preoccupation and they're not too fuss they're not particularly enthused about one opposition party or the other then they will be willing to back whichever of them uh seems to be best able to do things locally so yes the voter stre canny but they got to have the motivation in the first place to be willing to act cany and the point is they had the they felt they had the motivation in this election to do precisely that SED Davy has been dancing a jig is he right to be so jubilant for the lib Dems well I mean SED Davy bet the farm really about a couple of years ago on the conservative party doing really badly in this election therefore as a result is party would be able to profit in the places where they started off second and that bet has come off but it what is it's still the case that in terms of votes the liberal Democrats are still much weaker than they were when Nick C entered government in 2010 or when the uh former liberal sdp Alliance got 26% of the vote back in 1983 he's only got 13% of the vote and the problem he will have to now confront is that should the conservative party recover perhaps more rapidly than maybe at present seem terribly likely then um all he will find that his parliamentary party is fairly rapidly potentially Under Pressure he he is he is one of the beneficiaries of that collapsing conservative support that collapse at some point is reversed then he will potentially find himself having won a lot of MPS but not necessarily provided a long-term foundation for the uh restoration of the third party's fortunes but to the kinds of levels that they enjoyed under Charles Kennedy and Nick clay uh you mentioned briefly Nigel farage how surprised are you by the share of vote he seems to have taken well it's only slightly below what the opinion polls suggesting the polls on average had them at 177% they've got 15 um somewhat better than ukip managed to do in 2015 uh you know the the the only event in the election campaign that actually seemed to matter was Nigel fr's decision to intervene and uh become reforms leader and we saw support for reform rise in the polls thereafter um the original foundations of the rise of support reform seemed to been back last Autumn when the government started to focus on immigration as one of its policy priorities that really does seem to have backfired rather badly because it looks as though that what it did was to remind some voters who who were concerned about level of immigration about the fact that the government had presided over record levels and that gave them yet a further crucial motivation as to why they should not vote for the conservatives uh again so reform having in the six months running up to the election significantly increased their support then during this election campaign added further to it has given NAA fra platform and three other colleagues will have to wait to see what they do with it it won't necessarily be easy U but they have made the kind of breakthrough at least a bit bit of a breakthrough of the kind that UK failed to make back in 2015