Transcription
[Applause]
Hi there. Um, I think it'd be more interesting to, to, to do more questions. So I'm going to try and talk only for about 10, 15 minutes or so and just give a kind of overview of the, of the campaign, what the main features of it were, uh, and therefore have more time for people to, to, to ask about it.
Summer 2015, I was sitting at home, happily unemployed, in the garden, having a beer, uh, reading, um, and I started to get phone calls. The election that just happened a couple of days earlier, Cameron had unexpectedly won. Uh, and I started to get phone calls from a combination of a few MPs and some campaigners and a few, uh, Tory party donor billionaires, um, saying, essentially, uh, "Well, this referendum is now going to happen, but no one has actually prepared anything for it. No one's built anything. There is no campaign. Uh, what are you doing? Can you come and help? Can you try and create something that could actually fight it?"
I hummed and hawed. I wasn't massively keen to get involved with it. I have 15 years earlier, I was campaign director of The Campaign to Stop Britain Joining the Euro, uh, when Blair was almighty, and I had to deal a lot with MPs and the Eurosceptic world then, and I wasn't very keen on going back and dealing, dealing with it again. But I also thought, opportunities like this come along quite rarely, precisely because the British system is so dysfunctional. Maybe there's a small chance of, uh, of managing to, um, to pull something off and really change how the whole system works. So I thought, "Okay, um, let's give it a try."
But at that point, there was no organization. There was no money. Uh, there were sort of dozens and dozens of tiny little groups of one or two-man bands who hated each other more than they hated the EU. Uh, and there was, of course, UKIP, where you had Farage, very popular with a very small number of people, and, uh, unpopular and a turn-off to the, to the majority of people. Uh, and essentially, bad blood, uh, throughout, uh, the people on our side.
And so the campaign started with literally, basically, me and a bike and an iPhone. And I started biking around London, uh, trying to get about half a dozen very good people to quit their jobs and take a high-risk chance of doing this startup with me. Uh, and so for about eight weeks, that's basically what the campaign was. I biked around, um, and met up with people and said, "Quit your job and come and do this."
Meanwhile, uh, Cameron is back in Downing Street, uh, and of course, he's, they've got all of the big structural advantages. He's Prime Minister. He's got Whitehall behind him. Uh, they control the renegotiation. They control the timing. Uh, they control the rules. Uh, they have the whole Tory Party machine, the Whitehall machine, the CBI, the City, you, you name it.
So while I was biking around trying to get people, I also started to do some market research to, to figure out what, what does the country actually think about this issue? Because I knew from doing the Euro campaign that how London thinks and how the media think and how the world of communication professionals thinks is not necessarily at all how the public think.
And essentially, I found that, uh, the situation was, in all, in most ways, um, in all kind of detail ways, basically unchanged 15 years after doing the Euro thing. People knew nothing more about the EU, uh, in summer '15 than they did, than they did 15 years earlier.
Uh, but three big things had changed in the world over that time. Uh, the first was obviously immigration. H, and the scale of immigration, and the fact that the EU was now blamed for, uh, immigration problems in a way that had not been the case before. And at the same time, people could see on TV the fact of this historic movement of people from out of North Africa and out of Central Asia. Uh, and very visibly, uh, neither national governments nor the EU seemed to know what on earth to do about it. That was one big thing.
Other big thing was the financial crisis in 2008. Um, and I think the, what's happened in the last 24 hours with the election and in the Tory party campaign is another good example of how hard it has been for the bubble in SW1 to actually get to grips with what the effects of the financial crisis in 2008, uh, were. Um, but it undermined confidence, really, in, in govern, in Whitehall, in big business, in, in the banks, um, and, uh, and also in the European Union.
The third big factor was the Euro. Uh, 15 years earlier, when the Euro started, it was theoretical. A bunch of people like me made predictions about why it would not work out very well. People like Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson made their predictions, uh, about why they thought that we were all wrong. But 15 years later, people could see the results of it, and they could see Greece literally on fire on TV screens. And the combination of these three big things in the real world, uh, really was more important than everything, uh, that all the MPs did. If you took the total tonnage of everything that Blair said, every prime minister, every cabinet minister, every MP, it weighs up to, uh, really almost nothing compared to the effect of these three big fundamental forces on public opinion. And they all pushed things, bas, pretty much in our direction.
If you looked at the polls, you therefore saw a slight odd picture because the In campaign was ahead in summer '15, quite comfortably, if you looked at the average of the polls. Um, and around the world, status quo campaigns almost always win in, in referendums. And generally speaking, what happens in referendums around the world is that from the day that the official campaign begins, the status quo option tends to gain support, and the change option, option tends to, to lose support.
So that was obviously not a good signal. But if you look behind that, there was another way of looking at the population, which was that fundamentally, there was a third of the public that said, "The EU is rubbish and I want out, and I'm not bothered about, I'm not frightened of the consequences." There was another third of the population which said, "The EU is a positive force and, uh, I definitely like it and I definitely want to be in, and I'm definitely going to vote to stay in." And there was about a fifth of the public that said, "The EU is rubbish, I would like to be out of it, but getting out is scary, and I'll probably end up voting to stay in." And that was the kind of, that was a, the crucial element of the population that, that, that we really had to aim for.
So we had to motivate that third of people actually to turn out to vote. We had to try and demotivate the third who wanted to stay in. And we had to try and persuade enough of that fraction of the, of the, of the fifth, um, not to be frightened and to, and to vote with us. That was the, that was the essential challenge of it.
So we worked out, uh, essentially what I call message would be. And it had, it was very simple. Had arguably, say, five elements to it. The first was the theme of "Take Back Control." Not the word "back," triggering, um, loss aversion, the feeling that something has been lost and we can regain what, what we've lost, which I think was interesting. Um, and it worked on different levels. It wasn't, it was most obvious level was, we've got to take back control from Brussels. But it was also, and I think David Cameron and George Osborne didn't quite appreciate this, it was also about taking back control from, of, of the, of the system itself. It was for a lot of people, "Take Back Control" made them think, "Yeah, these are the guys who screwed up the economy, who drove off a cliff in 2008, whose mates are all the Goldman Sachs bankers and the hedge funders on massive bonuses. Us mugs on P, pae are the ones paying, paying the bills for this. We'll show those guys. We'll take back control from, ulot in London." Um, and I think that was a, that was a powerful, um, feeling.
Second was, was the, um, £350 million in the, uh, in the NHS. We send the, well, we formulated it in different ways. Sometimes we said, "Our official bill for the EU is £350 million pounds a week, and we should spend that money on our own priorities." Some, as we said, "We send £350 million pounds a week to, to, to the European Union." The reason why we sometimes said "send" was because we want to try and provoke the rage of the In campaign into getting into a fight about the whole thing. And happily for us, um, that's what they did. In the, they tried to resist it, but in the end, they got so cross about it that they, um, they launched a huge campaign, including trying to persuade the BBC to take our bus off the TV. They argued, um, to the head of news at BBC that the bus should not be allowed on TV, it should be banned. Um, BBC thought that that would probably not put them in a good place. So, so they didn't listen to the Prime Minister about that.
Um, but that was an incredibly important thing because it, that message, M, fundamentally neutralized amongst enough, just enough people, all of the talk from Cameron, Osborne about the economic consequences. Now, on our side, all the MPs wanted to talk about complex issues about trade, the single market, and all these things. But the reality is, not even, I don't know a single MP who actually understands the single market. I know barely an MP who can define what the single market is. The issues around international trade, the single market are actually very complicated. I would be gobsmacked if there's five people in this room who understand it properly. In fact, I'd be pretty surprised if there's one person in this room who understands it, who understands it properly. It's a very complicated, abstruse subject. The MPs wanted to talk about it because they've been talking about it on and off for decades, um, but it had no purchase on public psychology. No one had a clue what they were talking about. Uh, and, uh, therefore, David Cameron and George Osborne kept going on TV and saying, "We're going to be outside the single market, outside the single market," and most people didn't know what they even meant. Our response was, "We'll have a free trade deal. People around the world have free trade deals with the EU. We'll have a free trade deal. Nothing to worry about." Um, uh, the third aspect was to try and make staying in riskier. And therefore, um, we talked about the next wave of accession countries, about Turkey, uh, and all of the other countries that are about to join next, um, which astonishingly, Downing Street didn't, were surprised by. And we got text messages when we started doing it from people saying, "This is unfair. We know we don't understand how you can, how, how you can do this." So they didn't anticipate that argument coming up.
Um, we also pushed the general theme that it's riskier to stay in this thing than it is to, to, to, to leave. And that whole issue about risk and safety was really fundamental, psychologically.
And the fifth element was anti-establishment, touching on what I said before about the financial crash. Um, and so I know we talked about things like CEO pay, the ratio of CEO pay and how it's changed over 30 years. Um, uh, one of the best events we did in the whole campaign was Boris standing in a market town talking about this subject, and it was sort of live on the news. And Downing Street was so panicky, it's when they sent, uh, Michael Gove off to start, to attack Boris personally on TV in order to try and get it off the headlines.
And if you think about those five, the basic structure of our message, it's, I think an important aspect of it is that you can't define it as left or right. And politics in Westminster is absolutely always, and you'll see it in all the pundits who've been wrong about this election, will over the next week spin a whole set of theories which are also completely wrong. And it will all be predicated on this idea that the population is distributed in this line of people, and here's extreme left, and here's extreme right, and here's these people in this quote "center." And this is a dominant, or arguably the dominant, mental model that people in Westminster have about politics. And it is empirically false.
Um, now I had argued this for 15 years. Fortunately for me, Cameron, Osborne, um, never listened and preferred to listen to all the pundits. And therefore, they brought into this picture. Um, but in fact, the public, in lots of ways, have, if you talk to average swing voter, they are both more left-wing and more right-wing than, uh, most people in politics understand. So they would say simultaneously, "Confiscate property from people, put more money into the NHS," and have the kind of anti-terrorism and anti-me policies that, um, that the vast majority of MPs in the Conservative Party would not support.
But, uh, for all kinds of complex reasons, Westminster can't, can't get this into its collective, um, psyche. But the message that we constructed was done in such a way as to avoid this left-right thing. And therefore, we had people from, from all different parties and with lots of different political beliefs able to unite behind this.
But we, because of the structural disadvantages that I talked about, um, it was very hard for us to get a message across. David Cameron's Prime Minister, the BBC and everyone obviously follows his news agenda. Until February, we didn't have any, um, cabinet ministers. The media is totally obsessed with names, not arguments and issues. Doesn't care about arguments or issues, he cares about names in, inside baseball. And we didn't have any big names at that point because of, because of that chicken and egg problem of everyone thinking we're going to lose. Uh, the Farage problem, no cabinet ministers speaking out, etcetera, etcetera. It meant that it was very hard for us to get big business people on our side.
So we had to do things in, we had to take risks and we had to do things, uh, in a slightly new way. So one of the basic things that, that I did was I brought in a team of physicists, who essentially looked at campaigning from complete first principles. And what they did was they went, they simply scanned around the world and they said, "What studies have been done on issues of turnout and persuasion that actually have good maths behind them to support and have been replicated and we can actually have confidence in?" And they basically filtered all, went through, filtered them all out and came back to me and the team and said, "Here is a small selection of, of actually high-quality or reasonable quality work which you can rely upon. And here are the principles that you can see in these studies that have been replicated with randomized control trials and whatnot in the state."
Um, we basically created a checklist of what these things were, and we built the communications team around trying to exploit each of these elements which the, which the, um, which the physicists found. They also constructed models to help direct resources on the, for the ground campaign. So where do you actually send your activists and the digital campaign? How do you actually do that in, in a scientific way? And essentially, you had, uh, uh, streams of data coming in from all sorts of different ways: the website, email, on the ground canvassing, social media, blah, blah, blah, all of this stuff, traditional polling, all of this stuff coming in. And you had the data science people sitting at the heart of the operation and essentially taking our core messages and just running experimentally, um, a whole bunch of different things on Facebook and elsewhere and then figuring out what, what things work and what things don't work. And we started off with relatively small amounts of money just to run this experimental process.
Uh, another thing which, which I'll, I'll go into a little bit of detail because it's, um, perhaps of interest regarding the selection is, um, uh, we did a new kind of polling. So I'm sure all of you know the polling methodology used, uh, throughout, um, the world is essentially the same system that was invented in the late 1930s. And the idea of it is, you, you take roughly speaking a thousand-person sample, and if it's random and representative, then you can rely on the mathematics of the normal distribution, famous bell curve, and that should give you a pretty accurate picture of, of what people think. For various reasons, that is becoming harder and harder to do. Happy to answer questions about why that is.
But leaving that aside, what the physicists said was, "This is actually not the way that you would invent polling if you were going to invent polling now." Um, the way actually to do it is take massive samples of hundreds of thousands of people, ideally actually, um, millions of people, but say hundreds of thousands of people, and then use machine learning. And you will actually have, uh, a system which is faster, cheaper, more accurate, and another has another great advantage which we exploited, which is that if you do these very large sample surveys, you then have subsamples. You can define the demographics that you, interrogate yourself. And what we did was we basically used the exact same categories in, for the demographics that Facebook uses for its digital advertising platform. So we sucked in data on the ex, precise same basis that Facebook marketing allows. And then we had therefore large subsamples of the overall polling samples which you could actually rely on. And then you could take that data and plug it straight back into Facebook. So we could say, for example, "We will target women between 35 and 45 who live in these particular geographical entities, who don't have a degree or who do have a degree or whatever, etcetera, etcetera." Because you've got very large samples, you can actually get useful information on those kind of relatively small, um, um, breakdowns.
So we did all this, and we, as I said, we essentially ran a whole series of of experiments based on what we found in the conventional polling, in the focus groups, out of the digital world, and then filtered what, what worked. Um, and then we held back almost all of our budget and then we basically dumped the entire budget, or in the last 10 days and really in the last three or four days. Um, and we aimed it at, I can't remember exactly, but I think roughly about 7 million people, saw something like, I think a billion and a half, one and a half billion, um, digital ads, over a relatively short, short period of time.
Um, and in parallel to that, you had the whole ground operation, which were also, to begin with, they were quite skeptical about this. "What the hell is some guy who babbles on about quantum mechanics? What does he have to tell people who, like me, have been going out to leaflet on doorsteps for 30 years?" So people were very skeptical. But the people on the ground, you know, if you're doing that job, you actually respond well to things that work. So very quickly, they came back and said, "Actually, these buffins have sent us to the right place. It's unbelievable. These, these are our people."
So quickly, that kind of trust issue was, was sorted out inside the organiz, inside the organization, and the ground team were happy to go where the data suggested that they, that their efforts would be most useful.
Public switched on, maybe four to six weeks before the actual vote. And that's essentially when, uh, and that's also when a critical thing happened, which is that Gove and Boris, uh, basically decided that they were going to really put the boot in on Cameron, Osborne for complicated reasons. And that meant that they suddenly started hitting them hard on various things, just at the moment when the public was really starting to take, to take interest. And one of the things that we did was, um, uh, precisely because the media was obsessed with process, we turned the whole, we tried to turn the story of the referendum into a story about the alternative government. And the lobby thought this was fascinating, and who's going to be the next leader and blah, blah, blah. So we started to, we presented our, um, campaign messages in the form of, um, briefings to the lobby, which, which spun as, "This is what the alternative government thinks." So suddenly, for a 10-day period, we ended up running, leading the news cycle. And you had, you had a moment where, um, the politicians on TV were saying the same thing as, uh, every, as what was happening on the ground, and what was happening in digital communication, and all the advertising and everything else. And you actually had things, for the first time in the whole nightmare effort, you actually had things starting to come together.
That's when the polls moved. And by the end of the campaign, that third, third, fifth that I talked about had changed. And the third had dropped very slightly, by a few per, not very much. And the third had grown to about 44%. Is, I more people were convinced by the end of the campaign that actually the EU was a basket case and it would be more dangerous to, to, to stay in it. And also crucially, there was differential turnout. The people on our side, who, if you look at the polls at the end, depending on how you do it, but there's ways in which everyone says, "Well, the polls are wrong." If you average it in certain ways, some of the averages of the polls right at the end, we basically 50/50 or extremely close to 50-50. But our voters were more enthusiastic all the way through from the start at summer 2015.
And that's essentially what, why something which the polls missed, ironically, try to correct for that, is one of the reasons why the pollsters have got things wrong in the last, uh, 24 hours.
So essentially, uh, why did this happen? Was it just immigration? No, it wasn't just immigration. Um, if it hadn't been for £350 million, the, and turning the campaign, giving people a chance to vote for the NHS as well as voting against the EU, without that, then the economic scares of the establishment would have been too powerful, and we would have lost.
Uh, could we have won without immigration? Absolutely not. So there's a false dichotomy in the, in the, in the post-event debate about it, with two different sides arguing. Some people say it was all about immigration. Other people saying immigration wasn't the crucial thing. The, the reality of it is that those three big forces that I talked about created the conditions in which we could win. But then you had the government making a series of big mistakes, and you had, uh, our team, which, which managed to exploit it. And their mistakes, essentially, were their renegotiation was a disaster. Unlike in 1975, when Wilson pulled the same trick, um, he persuaded people that the relationship had changed, and therefore the polls moved. This time, no one believed what Cameron came back with. And in particular, Cameron never understood the danger for him of coming back and saying, essentially, "Nothing had changed on immigration."
They also, I think, ran a by campaign. They relied on people on MNC Sai and various big advertising agencies who did a fairly rubbish job. And they, and they lived in the bubble. And you can see that in the last 10 days, after the terrible murder, um, they essentially changed, ditched their whole campaign and and stopped talking about economic risks and turned the whole thing just into, "Well, we're the good people, and you're, and you're the bad people." Because that was the self-reinforcing culture that you heard in London, um, and among, you know, most of my friends, most of my wife's friends, probably I would guess 80% of the people in this room, um, thought similarly. And C Osborne was psyched out by that and thought, "Oh, this is what's happening in the rest of the country." Whereas in fact, as soon as you went outside the M25 and did market research, the rest of the country had a totally different reaction to the murder than, uh, than, um, than people, uh, better educated, richer people living in London did.
And our campaign took advantage of it. You know, we operated on, we just on very, very simple, tried and tested rules that work about organizations. We kept the MPs out of all management. No MP had anything to do with the management of the campaign. It was run by about six or 10 people, the oldest of which was me, the youngest of whom was 21. Um, uh, we made the crucial decisions and we managed it. Boris and Michael and Gove, uh, were important, but they came along late in the process and they weren't part of the actual management of the campaign. And all of the normal Eurosceptic T MPs who wanted to run it were completely excluded from from doing that, though some of them did, did do some useful things.
So we kept this team small. They worked extremely hard. They made a lot of sacrifices, and they focused on the public, not on the media, and not on the insider, on the insider game. We innovated, and we were quite happy to, we didn't want jobs, we didn't want to become MPs, so we were very happy to take risks and for everyone to say that we were idiots and we didn't know what we were doing and to risk failure in order to do what we thought was going to, was going to maximize our chances of victory. And I think that was important.
Um, I think in the long run, some of the things that we tried to do, you can see all the parties now are trying to learn from. Less than one minute. All parties are trying to learn from some of the things that we did. I don't think they've done a very good job either of them in the last, in this last campaign. But I think the future will be a combination of what Rory talked about, essentially sort of experimental psychology, and data scientists. The reality is that most communications companies are populated by bullshitting charlatans, and most of them should be fired. And I think that in the next 10 years, a massive chunk of them will be fired. And people in Silicon Valley and others will increasingly take over this industry, the way that they've taken over other industries. And if you've got a not very good degree in English or gender studies or something like that, then you're very rapidly going to get, I think you're going to get fired. And the industry will go through the kind of change that other industries have seen.
Um, I mean, I'll wait for the questions to come up. I mean, one, one thing that did interest me is the concept of control, which I think is, uh, oh, actually, let's take the first question. Do you ever feel guilty about what you've done? No, not in the slightest. Per, I think, for me, I mean, that's a very short way. Fundamentally, like the, pretty much the worst-case scenario for Europe is to return to 1930s protectionism and extremism. And to me, the EU project and the Eurozone project are driving the growth of extremism, which is extremely dangerous. And the single most important reason, really, for why I wanted to get out of the EU is I think that it will draw, it will drain the poison of a lot of political debates. It will kill off. I predicted that if we get out, UKIP and Farage would be finished. That's an early gain for Vote Leave, as you can see that's happened. That whole side of politics in Britain will go. Once there's democratic control of immigration policy, immigration will go back to being a second or third order issue. And that will be a very positive and healthy thing for, for, for the country. You guys are the educated, uh, population, and you are over, uh, overweight being on the opposite side to Farage. You think, "Well, Farage is on that side, therefore I must be on the other side." And that's actually not a very rational way of thinking, but it's actually how most educated people thought about the referendum.
There's a very interesting thing about control as well, which was I was just going to say, one of the very few occasions I've ever changed my mind completely about something. I gave a talk at a charity conference, and the first person to come and talk to me afterward was from a euthanasia charity. And my wife's an Anglican vicar, and I had natural aversion to sort of assisted suicide. And they told me something which was fascinating, which is that of the people who go through the whole legal pava for arranging assisted suicide, which takes many, many weeks and involves lots and lots of kind of verification, 95% – I was assumed that once they, once the paperwork was signed, they called for the Swiss guy with a big string. No, 95% of them never go through with it. They don't actually want to commit suicide. They just want to know they can. And so control is something which has a value. It may be hard to put an economic value on it, but it has a very, very strong instinctive value. The feeling that we know we can do something, such as restrict immigration, is almost separate to your urge restricted. And you're adding the phrase "back" of course was a masterpiece of, uh, behavioral science.
I, you also did quite a lot of work to keep Farage off the television. We did, exactly. So on, on the, um, on the control front, I mean, I came up with the slogan really. Well, be, when I did the Euro campaign 15 years before, we, we developed the slogan then of "Keep the Pound, Keep Control." And we never could beat that. So M C Sar, all these different big agencies came up with slogans, and they said, "This is better than that." Dominic, and I'd say, "Well, let's see what the public thinks." And we go out and test it. We never came up with anything that beat "Keep the Pound, Keep Control." So when I came to do this, I thought, "Well, let's just rehash that and sort of, let's start with that as a baseline and then see if anyone can come up with something better than 'Let's Take Back Control'." No one ever did. Um, so that's what we, that's what we ended up going with. And end up with the thing being much more powerful than we, than I certainly thought it would be when I, when I started off with it.
I mean, there is an ethical question about the bus. The promise to the NHS, was that a promise you were really warranted to make? So the, the, the, the issue about the bus and the, and the NHS, one of the, one of the myths about that is that this, it was sort of invented by us and we never had any intention of doing it. But what I thought would happen is that if we won, Cameron would be finished, and Osborne would be finished, and there would be a leadership campaign, which I was worried about. Um, I then thought that Boris was a shoe-in to win. Um, and, but then of course, my old friend Michael Gove, I then went off North with my wife and new baby, who'd be just been born, thinking that Boris is obviously going to walk it. Went up, went up to Scotland, and then Michael threw this extraordinary curveball in and sort of, um, took Boris out at the knees. And therefore, Boris didn't end up going in. But we talked, me, Michael, and Boris had talked about this in private before the vote. And actually, on the day of victory, in the Vote Leave office, so when Boris came in on the Friday 24th and punched the air and whatnot, he, and I walked into this little, little room amid sort of beer cans and craziness. And, and I said to him, "The first thing you do is say, 'We are going to meet this promise.'" And he smashed his fist down on the table and said, "Absolutely. No question about it." And if, if Michael had not taken out Boris, and that Boris had run as leader, I am 99.9% sure as I can be about pretty much anything, that Boris would have said, "I will honor the promises that we made in this campaign." Because him and Michael were very aware of what they'd said, and they were aware of the dangers of the, being seen to go back on it.
Um, and also they, all they also had the view that, um, what's one of the core problems of the Tory party brand going back decades? NHS, NHS. And people think, by the way, and I think most people are right, the Tory party is run by people who basically don't care about people like me. Right? That's what most people in the country have thought about the Tory party for decades. I know a lot of Tory MPs, and I'm sad to say, the public is basically correct. Tory MPs largely do not care about, about, about, um, these poor people. They don't care about the NHS. And the public kind of has caught onto that. Boris and Michael realized this and wanted, and I think, um, um, not only from the self-preservation point of view, but also just from a political sm, point of view, they understood the power of actually delivering.
I'll just do one very quick question. Literally one sentence or two sentence answers. If you'd worked on the In campaign, what would you have done differently to what they did? Just, I wouldn't have had the whole thing fronted by Cameron and Osborne, which was just a very narrow thing. I would have built a different kind of coalition and had different faces, um, dominating far more on TV.
And then the final, there was, it was up there a little earlier. If you'd been on the May campaign in the last few weeks, what would you have told them to do? Go, I've been in California for so, I don't really, I haven't seen the campaign. But so I, I can't really say. But I think as far as I can tell, just having just come back and looked at it, I can't see that the Conservative Party were actually offering anything to, to, to anybody. They didn't have, they didn't have anything to say about the NHS other than more austerity. Um, I don't know. Can anyone tell me anything the Tory party was promising of any value? There was no upside at all, as far as I can see.
No, thank you very much indeed. Thank you.
[Applause]