Tomorrow voters in three English constituencies will head to the polls. Will the good news on inflation and car plants help Rishi Sunak? Will the backlash over child benefits harm Keir Starmer? 
Or will none of it make any difference? Has the county already found an inflection point where it's looking for change? We hear from the pollster Lord Andrew Cooper.
And we talk to Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo about Barbie and her fall from paradise.

This is a Global Player original podcast.

It was the last PMQs, Prime Minister's Questions, of the summer today.

But the zinger didn't come from the Prime Minister or from the Labour leader.

It came from Stephen Flynn, who is the leader of the SMP in Westminster, and he tried to hit Labour where it hurts.

Speaker, voters in Scotland are used to child poverty under the Tories.

But what they don't expect is child poverty support from the Labour Party.

And if we look very closely right now, there is a shiver running along the Labour front bench looking for a spike.

In some ways, this hasn't been a bad week so far for Rishi Sunak.

Good, relatively good news on inflation, on big international investment.

Starmer having troubles within his own party about that two-child policy.

There are 3 by-elections coming tomorrow and Rishi Sunak could be the first Prime Minister since Harold Wilson in 1968 to lose 3 by-elections on a single day.

Today we'll be taking you through them and asking what impact they're going to have on our politics as we head to the summer.

And John is, I think I'm right in saying, at the zoo.

Yeah, that's what he does on a Wednesday.

Yeah, he does have that interesting line of being a zookeeper, doesn't he?

He likes to keep it quiet, but what can I say, he's a man who loves flamingos?

So Stephen Flynn, as I said, had a zinger of a line because he normally would aim his ire at Rishi Sunak, at the Prime Minister in what is, after all, Prime Minister's questions.

And it gives you a sense of how he's now looking to the political future.

This time he was reminding Scottish voters that Labour is agreeing on a key core child benefit policy with the austerity Conservative Party that introduced it.

We should say that up in Scotland the SNP is not having quite such a good day because the police inquiry has widened after what they're calling potential embezzlement claims.

This is the whole question into party finances and missing donated money that the police inquiry has now just widened.

But here, I think very much now we're looking at 2 halves of a week, arguably 1 that started badly for Keir Starmer, but could end technically a lot better if the by-elections go his way tomorrow.

And a week that's actually been quite positive for Rishi Sunak, which could yet end in tears.

So, I mean, look, the positive side of the ledger for Sunak this week has particularly come in the last 24 hours, which has been relatively good inflation news and it is relatively.

I.e., we've talked month after month on this show about inflation being stickier than anyone had thought, which is leading to higher interest rates, which is leading to higher mortgage costs for people.

This was a month where inflation actually fell faster than people thought.

It's about where the Bank of England thought it would be, but they haven't been exactly stellar in predicting this stuff.

So, it's now just under 8%, which is, as I say, a bit lower than many analysts thought.

It's already reducing the expectation of where most analysts think interest rates are going to rise to.

Sterling is falling, which might not sound like a good thing, but again, it's reflective of that expectation that interest rates won't go as high.

It'll probably already yield into a small reduction in government borrowing costs.

The flip side to that, of course, is that inflation is still just under 8%, which is still 4 times higher than target.

And politically, although of course the government is saying, well, this is great because it's taking us closer to where 1 of the Prime Minister's principal targets, which is to get inflation to about 5%, about half of where it was at the start of the year.

Of course, that still means that if you had your average shopping basket a year ago and it cost £100, it now costs £108.

And not least, actually, there's really interesting polling which says that people, quite a lot of people, voters, when they hear that inflation has fallen to 8%, they think that prices have fallen by 8%.

It just means that the rate at which the price of the increases in prices happening has slowed.

I think you can't not put it in the context of other countries as well.

And Joe Biden, who actually is incredibly unpopular on his own personal polling ratings at the moment, has had a real turnaround on inflation in the US, which is now down to 3%, right?

So in other words, just 1% above what is our sort of target.

And the eurozone countries are averaging about

And 8%, as you said, is still 4 times what it should be.

And we're only just down less than 1%, right?

They won't be cracking out the champagne just yet in number 10.

But I suppose they've had so little such meagre good news over the last few months, particularly on the economic front, that they will of course welcome it.

The other bit of positive news for Sunac today was this investment from Tata, this big, big company.

They are going to, and they're the owners of Jaguar Land Rover, and they have announced that they are choosing Britain to be the site of this new mega battery plant, electronic battery plant, which is going to make Britain far more competitive in the production of batteries for electric vehicles.

And it has been felt as what's been going on in America with the inflation reduction app, but also what's been happening in Europe as well with the production and construction of these new so-called gigafactories and infrastructure for electric vehicles.

It's felt like Britain has really been left behind.

So this is good news in the sense that they sell, create thousands of jobs, not just at the plant, but also the supply chain be worth about 4 billion to the economy.

Obviously, this won't benefit Sunak's government before the next election, so it will take time.

The interesting thing about this, though, is how much it's going to cost us taxpayers, i.e.

The reason that the company has chosen to invest in Britain.

Of course, partly because Britain is a good investment destination, it remains.

But it's also because the government has thrown a load of money at it, a load of subsidy, which we don't even know how much it's

We've got a good idea because Tata, we know, asked for around £500 million of financial assistance.

And when you say, oh, this good news arrived today for the Prime Minister, maybe we should be looking at it in a slightly different way, which is he might have had the news any time in the last few days, but the Wednesday before a by-election is a pretty good day to announce it.

But I think that is the core of this, that if 1 company is asking for, you know, let's say it's not 100% accurate, but in the vicinity of 500 million pounds for 1 bit of infrastructure, then what happens next time, right?

We don't just need 1 company to be interested.

We need to have a plurality of these factories.

We need to have something that feels like they are investing in us.

It's 1, rather than us investing in them.

And if we're really paying somebody 500 million to set up a factory, then what happens next time?

Do we have to keep paying 500 million pounds for the next person who comes along and say, oh, you know, I'd like to bring some workers here, but I'm not sure I can.

And I think that's where Labour will be at the moment.

If you're looking at a subsidy package that was required to secure this decision, then what happens for other car companies across the UK?

Because we're going to run out of 500 million pounds pretty quickly.

Well, I think this is actually really a big moment in our industrial policy in this country and our economic policy more widely.

Because obviously for the last 40 years, certainly since Thatcher, since the end of the 1970s, British governments of every colour have preached the gospel that we don't pick winners anymore.

Yes, what government is about is about creating the overall economic conditions and infrastructure and so on to allow businesses to thrive on their own.

This looks like and is a classic piece of economic interventionism of picking winners of governments doing that.

And the thing is, the British government has not done this especially willingly.

This is a reflection of the wider economic trends in the world.

If we were this beacon of economic hope right now, if growth was good and productivity was up and the playing field was the right 1 to want people to invest, they wouldn't be asking for those kinds of sums.

I mean, I don't know what is a normal sum to ask for, but 500 million seems shall we say on the steep side.

You would be saying, yeah, we will do this deal because it works for us and it works for you.

Not, please can we pay you to come to our country?

And the thing is, it is reflective of the fact that the British government is having to respond to global economic trends in the sense that they know, and everyone knows, they've seen what the United States is doing.

And Biden's done with the Inflation Reduction Act, pouring hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars, far more, billions of dollars into green subsidy, trying to get companies to onshore and so on.

The EU is going to be doing similar things.

There has been a move from free market laissez-faire, which has dominated Western economic thinking over the last 40 years or so, to more interventionism, to picking winners, to onshoring and having more secure supply chains.

So this is a reflect of the fact, I don't think the British government particularly wants to do this, I suspect Sunak in lots of ways is comfortable with it, but they can see where the economic winds are blowing and they can see that Britain cannot afford to be left behind in the race for all of these new industries, which are going to dominate our politics and our economies right up into the middle of this century.

We do have to start pivoting to where the new jobs are going to be and how we're going to create them.

I guess the question is just how much comes out of our pocket to start doing that.

But I suppose we should put this in the context of 3 by-elections.

I mean, beautifully geographically spaced out.

1, Selby and Ainslie in North Yorkshire, 1 right on our doorstep here in Uxbridge and the other in Somerset, Somerset and Froome.

going to say, it sort of cuts through a whole slice of cake where you can ask different questions.

They've all got their own, you know, specific local issues.

And yet we might start to see a pattern emerge.

Did you like my description of by election eve as no 1 else has ever called it ever?

Well this is by election eve, it's like Christmas eve.

Now you keep drilling it into my brain like that.

It's quite unusual to have so many by-elections the same day.

Back in the day, they must have had such fun because in the 60s and 70s when you had MPs dying all the time.

Not that I want that to happen, but they often had like half a dozen or even 10 on the same day, which would have been nice.

If you look back in the sort of 40s and 50s and 60s even, so many MPs would die in the course of a Parliament, usually Labour MPs, because they were all minors, you know, they all had a terrible lung disease and all sorts of things.

So you would just have the attrition rate was really high.

They get out, exactly, and they retire early.

Or they have to retire for not becoming Lords.

Which is where we are with the Selby and Amesty.

We should say Nadine might actually end up being the last MP standing in this whole Parliament.

But Selby and Amesty, interesting seat with a young man fighting it called Keir, who is I think 25 and...

Well, we don't know if he's a lesser 1, but he's definitely a younger 1.

So there's been a sort of, you know, a good story to write on that 1.

A local guy, an Oxford graduate, who I think is trying to take the reins from this heavily conservative big majority there.

You know, in a part of the world that is a safely Tory, safely blue.

Somerset and Froome, very much Lib Dems in play here.

Labour really don't do anything in the South West apart from

a couple of Cornish seats and the competitive Bristol.

Yeah, Somerset and Froome anyway, very much a race between the Tories and the Lib Dems.

And Uxbridge, of course, ta-da, totemic Boris Johnson.

So they are a beautifully arranged set of by-elections, not just geographically, because as Emily said, both in terms of the parties at play, but also the sort of majorities they need to overturn.

So I mean, Uxbridge is the 1 that obviously has received a lot of attention because it was Boris Johnson's seat.

It's got a pretty small majority, 5 and a half thousand or so.

It's been Conservative basically forever, but it's the sort of seat like all the London seats really, or most of them, has been trending towards Labour over time.

The outer London seats in particular and the outer London boroughs have been changing demographically quite substantially.

I mean just London as a whole is much harder for the Conservatives to win right now.

I mean if you go back to the late 70s or Thatcher, London was a conservative majority city.

Most of the seats in London were conservative.

So you get into the mid-90s, early 90s, late 90s, that starts to change and now is dominated by the Labour Party.

There is 1 slight fly in the ointment for Labour, which is this ULEZ issue.

It's something that's been introduced by Sadiq Khan, although as he says, it's in some ways a central government requirement to try and cut air pollution.

And the idea is it's already been introduced in the inner London boroughs.

It introduces a charge on the most polluting vehicles in an effort to improve air quality.

He is now expanding it to the outer London boroughs which of course includes Uxbridge in the London borough of Hillington and the Conservatives have basically been trying to make this a one-issue campaign to send a signal to Sadiq Khan to stop the expansion.

And Keir Starmer has actually tried to distance himself from this policy.

It is very much the Mayor of London's policy, not Keir Starmer's policy as he will keep reminding you.

Yeah, he's been dancing a delicate dance.

He's not condemned it or tried to, but he's certainly not been singing his praises from the rooftops of it.

I was talking to a Labour person the other day who was saying, I promise you, I'm not expectation management, but we're quite worried about Uxbridge.

If they don't take it, they can sort of blame Uless.

But given where it is on the national polling, the majority they should win it with should be lower than they might otherwise expect.

But nonetheless, given the size of the national polling, given the size of the Conservative majority being quite small, they should take it handily.

Selby and Ainslie is complete contrast, again, not just geographically, but in terms of the majority.

Majority, as you're saying, Emily, is huge.

And actually, given Nigel Adams, the Conservative MP, basically just went off in a...

There must be some bad blood, I would have thought.

With the people of Selby and Ainslie to see your MP, I'm going to say flounce off because he couldn't become a Lord.

Yeah, I'm not sure that sets the tone for the next 1 to come in.

So he basically decides not to finish his parliamentary term and trouble his constituents to have a by-election because he's just annoyed not to get a peerage.

But the majority that's required there, that requires an 18-point swing from the Conservatives to Labour.

That is beyond both the national 12-point swing the party needs for an overall majority of the next general election, which will, by the way, be an enormous swing, and the 16-point swing suggested by recent polls.

So despite the fact that Labour is far ahead in the polls, very far ahead in the moment, that on the basis of the current polling would still not be enough to win the seat.

So if they manage to win this seat, it would be the biggest...

But this is your daily reminder that all by-elections are local and they involve local candidates and local issues and we should not read across to the size of majority.

This would therefore yield Labour in this hypothetical election.

Having said that, we're going to introduce 1 of our favourite pollsters, Andrew Cooper.

Do you think that there is anything this week that is shifting the sands, whether it's the Tatar announcement on the car battery plant, whether it's the inflation figures.

I can't think of anything the Lib Dems have sort of announced this week.

I think they're keeping their heads down.

Very few of these individual moments ever really cut through at all.

And I think if you're a voter living in these constituencies, you will have been bombarded with campaigning.

You will almost certainly have made up your mind.

And I think you're making up your mind much more about the general vibe about the country and the vibe about the parties than you are about anything specific.

Now, it's clearly inflation moving in a positive direction, the sense that at least 1 of the 5 promises that SEDAC made might be on track to be met, and the fact that inflation is coming down, but that doesn't actually assuage people's feeling that the cost of a living crisis feels immensely debilitating and worrying for so many people.

So I'd be very surprised if those events make any difference to what happens on Thursday in those constituencies.

What's your thinking about the pattern of the results?

I mean, on the basis, it's always very difficult to know.

And constituency polling is very difficult.

And you'd probably have to say that as things stand, you'd imagine the Conservatives would lose at least 2, possibly a third.

I mean, if you look at the national polls, you would say that this government has got to a stage which some governments do when they're headed for heavy defeats, which is that basically there isn't a single seat in the country that they would hold in a by-election.

Now, it's a bit different because there are 3 resources that are split.

Obviously, there are some particular local issues at play, especially in Uxbridge and South Ryslip.

In a sense, I mean, you could say that's the seat which Labour should be able to bank, because it's the most marginal.

It's the 1 they would definitely, of the 3, you know, they wouldn't have expected to win, some of them free of anyway, of the 3, in a general election, they would have expected to win Uxbridge anyway.

So not winning it in a by-election, you could argue, is a setback.

But I think you would, the particular circumstance, I would think, would make most Tories draw little comfort from it.

Selby and Ainslie I think is the really totemic 1.

The history of by-elections in which MPs needlessly stand down for self-indulgent reasons or to get different jobs or whatever, generally speaking the incumbent parties get punished more in those kind of by-elections, which is the case here.

Now the sitting Tory MP basically went off on a strop because he didn't get the peer as he'd been promised.

Somebody who's shocked to discover that Boris Johnson doesn't live on his promises.

But that's a seat where the Tories got over

If Selby and Ainslie goes, there are literally 250 Tory MPs with smaller majorities than that.

So your fellow peer Danny Finkelstein was writing today or advising in a way Rishi Sunak to go early to the polls because he says it might not be a win but it's a damage limitation exercise.

I worked alongside with Danny, he referenced in that piece 1997 and we all concluded in 1997, actually before the election not just after it, that 1 of the few things you could have done given the mood for change in that Parliament to limit the scale of the defeat was to have had the election much, much earlier and the strategy essentially became just macabre and we'll just hang on for as long as we can and hope that something turns up and it didn't and then had an ultra long campaign and it just got worse and worse.

So it's very rational advice to say, and I think it's probably right, that the scale of the defeat will probably be rather less if you had an election sooner.

But expecting a prime minister voluntarily to call an election they know they're going to lose, particularly when he's only been prime minister for 8 or 9 months.

But that's the thing, isn't it, Andrew, is that it may well be rational advice, and this is sort of whispered about increasingly loudly, this idea of going to the country early to minimize the damage.

It may be rational advice for the party, but ultimately, as a prime minister, Sunak, who ultimately would much prefer to be prime minister for 2 years than for a year or for, you know, 16 months or whatever, he's the 1 who's got to decide it.

And that instinct, which we saw play out in 97 with Major and also Brown leading up to 2010, it's a compelling 1.

You just hope and hope, and particularly with how volatile politics is these days in particular, you just hope that something turns up.

Also, I think Rishi Sunak is a shrewd guy.

He will have factored into his decision to go for it in the first place.

The fact that at the point he was taking over from the Liz Trust catastrophe, it was pretty obvious at that stage, the great likelihood is that we're going to lose the next election.

So I'm probably only be Prime Minister for 2 or 3 years.

Would I rather do that than not be Prime Minister?

Do you think, you alluded to this idea that we're now at that stage maybe where there basically isn't a seat that an incumbent government could win in a by-election.

Do you think we're also potentially, well not just potentially, do you think definitely that we are now at that stage, which again, happened in the late 70s under Callaghan, happened in the late 90s under Major, happened with Brown after 2008, where it just feels as if there is nothing that can be done.

In Westminster, we constantly obsess about sort of narratives and who's up and who's down.

And maybe there's a sort of counterattack, but actually, the public opinion has decisively moved.

In the sense that we now know, the Conservatives have not been ahead in a poll since 2021.

And that is just the overwhelming structural factor of our polling and our politics right now.

The poll number I would allot on to draw that out is if you ask people, do you think it is time for a change from a conservative government?

That's very close to the numbers that you had in the late 70s and in the late 90s.

When you ask the other question, which is do you think it's time for a change to a Labour government, it's a much lower number.

And that's where I think you get the doubt about the potential scale of the majority and the softness or hardness of Labour's lead.

But I think the country has made up its mind that it is time for a change for the Conservatives, that they need a spell in opposition, they need to recharge their batteries, they need...

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Three by-elections and a Barbie movie