This episode of The Rest Is Politics Question Time opens with a long look at the fractured state of the British right, weighing Reform UK, the Conservatives and Rupert Lowe's Restore Britain against each other through recent polling and by-election results, including the Conservatives' poor showing in the Greater Manchester mayoral contest. The hosts discuss Kemi Badenoch's strategy of moving closer to Reform rather than courting centrist floating voters, drawing on research about Britain's centre-ground electorate, and touch on the personal feuds and online hostility among figures such as Nigel Farage, Rupert Lowe and Zia Yousef. They then turn to the prisons crisis facing Andy Burnham, discussing early release policy, rising sentence lengths despite falling crime, reoffending rates, and the practical and political difficulties of expanding prison capacity.
Later segments cover the Michigan Democratic primary win of Abdul El-Sayed, the tight electoral arithmetic behind that seat, and debate over whether his platform helps or hinders the Democratic Party's prospects. The hosts also discuss dangerously low water levels on the Rhine and other German rivers, linking the disruption to melting Alpine glaciers and estimating the economic hit to Germany, before closing with a lighter discussion of diplomatic gift-giving, including a much-discussed melon exchange between Australia's and Japan's leaders.
Prisons
Key points from the discussion
The points they raised, and the official data behind them.
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The hosts cited Reform UK polling at around 22% nationally.
~04:19Context
Opinion polling from various UK pollsters through 2025 tracked voting intention for Reform UK, the Conservative Party and Rupert Lowe's Restore Britain party as they competed for right-of-centre voters.
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The hosts put Conservative support at roughly 20% in current polling, only marginally moving despite Kemi Badenoch's leadership.
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Adding Reform, the Conservatives and Restore together, the hosts calculated a combined right-of-centre voter pool of about 47% of the British public.
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The hosts pointed out that the Conservatives came fifth in the Greater Manchester mayoral election with just 7.7% of the vote.
~10:08Context
The Greater Manchester mayoral by-election tested party support in one of England's largest conurbations, an area the Conservatives once contested seriously under George Osborne's 'northern powerhouse' agenda.
The hosts cited research finding that almost a third of British voters sit in a floating centre ground, roughly equal to the shares who reliably vote left or right.
~21:33Floating voters are those not firmly committed to voting for one party and open to changing their vote.
Context
The hosts referred to research by sociologist Sam Friedman, published as a Substack article, analysing the demographic and attitudinal profile of Britain's political centre ground compared with committed left and right-wing voters.
The hosts said the prison population has doubled over the past thirty years even though crime has been falling.
~27:33Official figure
86,09820 Jul 2026 · Ministry of Justice / HMPPS · Prison Population StatisticsExplore the board →Charted aboveContext
The prison population in England and Wales has grown substantially since the 1990s even as recorded crime has fallen, a trend widely attributed to longer average sentence lengths driven by sentencing policy changes.