Election 2024: Lib Dems target London commuter belt ...The Standard podcast

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Sir Ed Davey has appealed to voters in London and the commuter belt to “tear down the Blue Wall” on July 4.

Evening Standard political editor Nicholas Cecil secured an exclusive interview with the Liberal Democrat leader, which took place on the Waterloo to Wimbledon route that’s seen as a key hunting ground for Lib Dems to snatch Conservative votes in south-west London.

Sir Ed’s will also be hoping a boost in visibility with stunts on the campaign trail will translate into crosses on ballot papers.

To discover more, Nic tells Mark Blunden about the Lib Dems’ election strategy for London and the Home Counties.

At the same time, with less than a week before the nation goes to the polls, strategists for all the parties are shifting gear to the final phase of the campaign.

Plus, in part two - it’s the countdown to Glastonbury festival, as revellers arrive at Worthy Farm for the three-day music and arts extravaganza.

This year’s line-up includes Dua Lipa, Coldplay, Sza, Little Simz, Shania Twain, Cyndi Lauper, Avril Lavigne, Janelle Monae and Paul Heaton.

We asked Paul Williams, of music industry trade association the BPI, how Glastonbury’s evolved, the place of festival live music in the streaming world - and the resurgence of retro cassettes.

You can listen to the episode in the player above, find us on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. 

Here’s a fully automated transcript of today’s episode:

From the Evening Standard Newsroom in London, I'm Mark Blunden, and this is The Standard podcast.

Coming up on today's show...

Countdown to the Glastonbury Festival, and the weather looks nice.

But first, Sir Ed Davey has appealed to voters in London, and the commuter belt that he wants to, as he describes it, tear down the blue wall on July the 4th.

That's the Liberal Democrat leader speaking in an exclusive interview with Evening Standard's political editor Nicholas Cecil on the Waterloo to Wimbledon train route that's seen as a key hunting ground for Lib Dem votes in southwest London.

You'll have seen him embracing stunts and fun photo opportunities in a bid to make the party more visible.

Now, can Sir Ed's boost in visibility translate into votes at the same time with less than a week to go before we go to the polls?

Strategists for all the parties are shifting gears to the final phase of the campaign.

To discover more, we're joined by Nic Cecil. What did Sir Ed reveal to you regarding the party's election strategy for London?

The Liberal Democrats are targeting three seats in South West London.

That's Wimbledon, Sutton and Cheam, and Carshalton and Wallington.

Now, when I interviewed Ed Davey, he gave the impression that the Liberal Democrats believe they may do better than expectations and may win some surprise seats in the London region.

The Liberal Democrats in the past have always seemed to got a bit overexcited about how well they do in the elections or how well they will do in elections.

And if you look back at 2015, 2017 and 2019, they've either lost a lot of seats or they failed to win many at all.

So with the Lib Dems, you always take it with a bit of salt about their election expectation management.

What is it about the voter demographics in these seats that make them Lib Dem targets?

Well, lots of the seats they are targeting are, interestingly, on the Southwestern Railway route. And these are often commuters, people commuting into London.

So, they're graduates, people with well-paid jobs in the capital. So that's part of the demographics that they target.

They have another number of seats around the country that they've won in the past as well.

But certainly for them, the key target area for this election is those three seats in Southwest London.

And if they win that, then they double their number of seats in the capital.

We've seen the Lib Dem leader engage in a lot of these pre-election stunts, but is it boosting their numbers?

What's interesting about this is that the Liberal Democrats always struggle to break through and get their message across to the wider country.

They're the third party in Britain, or actually, fourth party at the moment.

And so they don't get so much airtime, so much media coverage.

So if you ask people before the election who is Ed Davey, a large proportion of the population really wouldn't have an opinion on him.

So what Ed Davey has been doing with this campaign, he's been going around doing a series of stunts.

He's been down a water slide. He's fallen off a paddleboard on Lake Windermere. He's been interviewed in the teacups at Thorpe Park, just outside London.

And there's been some polling done by Ipsos for the Evening Standard, which shows that Sir Ed's personal ratings have actually gone up.

So currently 30% of adults in Britain say they're satisfied with the Liberal Democrat leader. That's up seven points from just three weeks ago. And 35% are dissatisfied, which is down six points.

Now that might not sound a great deal to shout about, but it's far less negative scores than for Rishi Sunak and Sir Keir Starmer.

And on the Tories and Labour, do you have any polling info after the final leaders debate?

If you look at a couple of snap polls, it's broadly 50-50. One suggested Sir Keir Starmer had won, but another found it was literally 50-50.

So what is crucial here is that Rishi Sunak, he needed a game changer. He needed somehow to inject some momentum into the Tory campaign. That hasn't happened.

Keir Starmer, he didn't do any gaffes, any blunders. So will this have changed the outcome of the election?

I very much doubt it. These TV debates, even though they're good entertainment, actually very rarely impact election results heavily.

What happens now in the campaign engine rooms for this final week before July the 4th general election day?

There's a shift really from trying to get your message across to voters to trying to get your vote out.

So the Tories will still bang home their message that if there's a Labour government, it will be tax rises, tax rises, tax rises.

But the nation has heard that message now.

And so far, there's not a lot of evidence to suggest that it's impressed with the Tory attack line.

People may change their mind closer to the election, but certainly at the moment, the Tories are around 20 points, if not more behind in the polls.

So for Keir Starmer, it will still be steady as she goes. Labour haven't made any major blunders yet.

There'd be some pickups and mistakes, but there'd been nothing on the scale of, for example, Rishi Sunak's D-Day blunder of coming home early from those ceremonies in France to commemorate the 80th anniversary of D-Day.

And the election date betting scandal also rumbles on.

So what is crucial now for all the parties is to find their voters and persuade them to get out.

And the concern for Labour is that a lot of people think Labour go in easily, so can I really be bothered to go and vote?

It might be a bit of a rainy day. I might be at a barbecue instead or something like that. Do I really want to go down and vote or basically let people stay at home?

And then the result is closer than it would have been if people had all gone to vote and we'd got a kind of normal election turnout of say 70%.

Let's go to the ads.

Coming up, it's the evolution of the Glastonbury Festival with Britain's Music Industry Trade Association, the BPI.

Why not hit follow on this podcast in the meantime and give us a rating.

Welcome back.

That's revellers ushering in the 41st Glastonbury Festival at the Somerset site's famous Stone Circle.

Now, as tens of thousands descend on Worthy Farm, what does its enduring popularity say about the health of the British live music scene?

We're joined by Paul Williams of the BPI, which is Britain's music industry trade association.

He's also the former editor of Music Week magazine, and we wanted to know his take on Glastonbury's place in the modern streaming world.

I think Glastonbury has become, in some ways, the Euros, the World Cup and Wimbledon of music combined, certainly in the UK.

I mean, there's nothing in terms of its scale. There's nothing in terms of its impact.

And that's not just the 200,000-odd people who are going to be at Worthy's Farm over the weekend, but millions of people watching on TV, listening on the radio.

So in terms of the music industry, this really, really does matter.

This is the date in the calendar that gets circled more than any because it's the one thing that could have more impact than any other in terms of the success of artists, promotion of artists, and also getting their music streamed or indeed bought.

And what about the financial side?

Certainly, if you look at something like the Glastonbury Festival, the tickets went on sale last November and they sold out within an hour.

And that's before anyone had really any idea who the headliners were going to be. And you obviously need tickets, you know, hundreds of pounds each. So that's quite a significant spend.

And then you look at somebody like Taylor Swift and her recent UK concerts, including at Wembley Stadium and how quickly those sold out and the huge demand that she could have done Wembley Stadium probably 20 times over, that still wouldn't have been enough.

So at that end, things are going really, really well, but you also have to look at the UK festivals market and there was something like 40 festivals this year have been cancelled because the lower end of the scale, there's so much competition.

They're facing rising costs, just as like you and I have to face increasing costs to pay for everything. You're a festival, there are also those costs.

A lot of those unfortunately are suffering to the extent they can't go on anymore because they just can't pay the bills.

What's your take on how we've seen Glastonbury's offering evolve into this diverse lineup today?

That's an interesting case because, I mean, it started in 1970. I think the tickets were something like a pound each and over the next 25-odd years, it did well, but it was too a certain market.

I think the real turning point for Glastonbury was when it first got televised. I mean, initially, that was Channel 4. Then the BBC came on board in 1997.

So suddenly this festival that was being seen by thousands of people each year was suddenly, because it was on TV, being seen by millions.

Now, the BBC coverage has got bigger and bigger each year. And to draw another sporting analogy, I mean, for the BBC, it's kind of on the scale of the way they cover the Olympics. I think this year, they've got something like 90 hours of live coverage on TV, a similar number of hours on the radio.

So they really, really go to town.

And for the music industry, this is manna from heaven, because there isn't that much music that's on TV anymore.

So for these three days, this long weekend, having blanket coverage of music on TV is just amazing.

And it's just the sheer scale. I think there's something like 2,000 acts played at Glastonbury each year. So it's everyone from new and up-and-coming artists that people may never have heard of before.

And if it's on TV, they're discovering them for the first time.

Plus, also getting to see current superstars, heritage artists.

And this really does impact the market, because people see an artist on TV, and then they would go and stream their music. They might even go and buy an album on CD and vinyl.

Could you tell us more about the resurgence of retro music formats?

Well, I think what the interesting thing is, that streaming is now far and away the way that most music is consumed.

I mean, in the UK, it makes up something like 85% to 90% of the market. But at the same time, what we've seen in recent years has been a new interest in physical product, as we call it. So we're talking about vinyl albums, CD, and cassette.

And new generations of music fans are discovering music in this way. And I think probably what it is is partly that streaming is brilliant because pretty much any piece of recorded music is available there.

But it's kind of overwhelming as well, because you're looking at tens of millions of tracks to choose from. And that mentality that some of us of a certain age grew up in terms of building up collections of music, buying it, is now being rediscovered or discovered for the first time by younger music fans.

And what we've seen is a pick up in interest in vinyl LPs, Taylor Swift and Billie Eilish and people like that and do very, very well on that.

CD sales, which continue to drop year after year, have started to stabilize. And even something like the cassette, which became a long forgotten format, although at one time was the biggest selling format in the UK, is also started to become collectible.

There's much more news and features in the Evening Standard newspaper and online at standard.co.uk.

We're back tomorrow at 4pm.