Anushka Asthana
Appearances
Pod Save the UK
How ruthless is Keir Starmer willing to be? w/ Anushka Asthana and Josh Babarinde MP
But there were also places like in Peterborough where the community did look and feel really different and it had happened at speed. And some of the people were saying, well, This has just kind of blown our minds and we're kind of not ready for this speed of change. And the local GP was saying, look, I can't deny that this has put pressure on us.
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How ruthless is Keir Starmer willing to be? w/ Anushka Asthana and Josh Babarinde MP
So I suppose it's like, how do you disentangle all these different arguments?
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How ruthless is Keir Starmer willing to be? w/ Anushka Asthana and Josh Babarinde MP
Yeah, but where do you get the money from? So in one of those places I was talking about in 2016, I was in Lee in Greater Manchester and there were like three people screaming at me about immigration whilst we were making this film. That sounds stressful. Interestingly. It was stressful. And interestingly, one of them was black. One of them was Polish.
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How ruthless is Keir Starmer willing to be? w/ Anushka Asthana and Josh Babarinde MP
I mean, it was quite an eye-opening moment for me. But there was this, you know, young black mum who was basically shouting about immigrants. But when I talked to her about it, what I realised was her daughter didn't have a school place. And that was the problem. And if you fixed the problem, then...
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How ruthless is Keir Starmer willing to be? w/ Anushka Asthana and Josh Babarinde MP
Maybe she wouldn't be so worried about immigration, which I have to say, I do think the 2010 example in Barking and Dagenham was about that. They were like, if you fix the eyesore gardens, then people will stop blaming the Africans. And so you can deal with the myths. Now, whether or not they carry that now into a national government, it's hard to know and hard to see. And the problems are vast.
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How ruthless is Keir Starmer willing to be? w/ Anushka Asthana and Josh Babarinde MP
To be honest, there was already people moaning to me at the time about, for example, contracts across government, which was one of the things that really did for Sue Gray in a way. Yeah. But it was all played down. It wasn't her fault. So I didn't go wildly into it. But you know what? I've got a paper back. You're going to get the full first year in detail next year.
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How ruthless is Keir Starmer willing to be? w/ Anushka Asthana and Josh Babarinde MP
And like I say, where do you get the money from? I mean, it's a difficult time.
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How ruthless is Keir Starmer willing to be? w/ Anushka Asthana and Josh Babarinde MP
No, of course not. I mean, there's huge arguments in all directions when it comes to immigration. You know, the reality is that lots of immigrants are working people who pay tax as well as, you know, using things from the state. But it also is the case that people are worried about levels of immigration. And they can be worried about it without being racist.
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How ruthless is Keir Starmer willing to be? w/ Anushka Asthana and Josh Babarinde MP
And I think it's just disentangling that and then working out what the policy response to it is.
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How ruthless is Keir Starmer willing to be? w/ Anushka Asthana and Josh Babarinde MP
I mean, they've definitely left themselves with wiggle room around capital gains, inheritance tax and so on. But in terms of the ones that they said they weren't going to raise, which is... Income tax, VAT, national insurance and corporation tax. The big row is going to be over the fact that they now want to raise employer national insurance contributions. Was that what the manifesto said or not?
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How ruthless is Keir Starmer willing to be? w/ Anushka Asthana and Josh Babarinde MP
They argue that half the sentence mentioned working people. So therefore, it's OK to whack the tax on employers. I mean, I'm going to be on the Peston programme later today and we're going to be looking through the statistics about really, if you increase national insurance on employers, there's still a chance that it feeds through to employees in terms of lower wage increase over time.
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How ruthless is Keir Starmer willing to be? w/ Anushka Asthana and Josh Babarinde MP
So I think the Tories are going to absolutely hammer them that they're breaking a manifesto promise. On the other taxes, what they said, and we said this was dishonest during the election campaign repeatedly. And in fact, the Institute for Fiscal Studies said there was a conspiracy of silence.
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How ruthless is Keir Starmer willing to be? w/ Anushka Asthana and Josh Babarinde MP
Yeah, so basically what they said was, and we don't need any other tax rises apart from the ones we're ruling out in order to pay for our manifesto promises. As if going into government, you think that all you're going to have to spend is what's in your manifesto. Everybody knew, for example...
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How ruthless is Keir Starmer willing to be? w/ Anushka Asthana and Josh Babarinde MP
that we were going to have COVID inquiry responses that are going to require money, a Grenfell inquiry, a post office inquiry that we haven't got yet. Everybody knew that the NHS was in more trouble than we thought. Everyone knew that we were going to have to spend more on public sector pay in order to solve strikes.
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How ruthless is Keir Starmer willing to be? w/ Anushka Asthana and Josh Babarinde MP
So the dishonesty was that they were saying we don't need those taxes, even though we're keeping them in our back pocket. Now, my question, and I say this a lot, is did they need to lean that far in? Did they really need to go that far to win the election? Because the problem they've stored up for themselves is that every tax increase will now be seen as a trust issue.
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How ruthless is Keir Starmer willing to be? w/ Anushka Asthana and Josh Babarinde MP
And I personally think the biggest problem in politics right now is trust. People don't trust politicians. And what Keir Starmer needed to do was to come in and be someone who the public could trust. And now he would argue that it's completely unfair, but the freebie row, followed by,
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How ruthless is Keir Starmer willing to be? w/ Anushka Asthana and Josh Babarinde MP
Again, I don't think it's the same as the type of ruthlessness I was talking about. I think it's a sort of political argument that they're trying to make now about the black hole. And look, some of it was stuff they didn't know about. Some of it they should have known about. The reality is it's a political argument that they're trying to make in order to now break manifesto promises.
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How ruthless is Keir Starmer willing to be? w/ Anushka Asthana and Josh Babarinde MP
Really, if they were being responsible... all of them, those national insurance cuts that the Conservatives put in place should never have happened. The public finances could not handle national insurance cuts when they were made, and that has left anyone in a very sticky position now.
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How ruthless is Keir Starmer willing to be? w/ Anushka Asthana and Josh Babarinde MP
I suspect that a full break of the manifesto is impossible, as in they'll try and argue the semantics on national insurance for employers. A full break is impossible. It's worth saying in 1997... Blair came in and basically did the same thing, said we're going to stick by conservative spending plans over the first period.
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How ruthless is Keir Starmer willing to be? w/ Anushka Asthana and Josh Babarinde MP
He then won in 2001 and then they raised income tax by a penny in order to pay for things. And I suspect they're following the same kind of path here. The only thing is, I just wonder if... as I said before, they overshot in terms of what they were saying before. I think the ruthlessness, it's almost like if you're being ruthless about it, you'd almost do the opposite.
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How ruthless is Keir Starmer willing to be? w/ Anushka Asthana and Josh Babarinde MP
If you're going to be ruthless about it, you'd break no manifesto promises and you'd have less money to spend because you would feel like politically there was no room for manoeuvre. But they are giving themselves room on one thing, which I think is quite a big deal, which is they are going to change their fiscal rules. Again, it can look like a Trust issue, it can look like a manifesto break.
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How ruthless is Keir Starmer willing to be? w/ Anushka Asthana and Josh Babarinde MP
I think most economists think it's really, really necessary and will allow her to spend a lot of money on capital projects, including the things that we all need to see improved, schools and hospitals.
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How ruthless is Keir Starmer willing to be? w/ Anushka Asthana and Josh Babarinde MP
It's so interesting, 1997, because I was looking through the data because Blair had two really big crises in his first year. There was the Bernie Eccleston, who was the F1 boss. It turned out he donated loads of money to the Labour Party and then they exempted F1 from a smoking advert ban. It was a huge, huge scandal, like in many ways bigger than the scandals we've got now.
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How ruthless is Keir Starmer willing to be? w/ Anushka Asthana and Josh Babarinde MP
And they took benefits off lone parents. And it was so bad that they did that, that 100 Labour MPs abstained in the vote and 46 voted against, right? So a huge rebellion. But it didn't hit Tony Blair's ratings. anything like this is hitting Keir Starmer's ratings. And I think that is because we are so unforgiving as an electorate now. Like politicians are totally untrusted.
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How ruthless is Keir Starmer willing to be? w/ Anushka Asthana and Josh Babarinde MP
I think something like 9% of people trust politicians to tell the truth, which I think is just such a sad state of affairs. And also the economy is in a bad state while in 1997, it was in a good state. But on top of that, you know, I mentioned that shallow victory that you've talked about, the kind of shape of the Labour victory, 34% of the vote, two thirds of seats.
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How ruthless is Keir Starmer willing to be? w/ Anushka Asthana and Josh Babarinde MP
And actually before any of the scandals had happened, The final thought in the book was Labour could easily not win in 2029. And I just think the reality is that with this volatile electorate, anything could happen. I do think they understand that, though.
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How ruthless is Keir Starmer willing to be? w/ Anushka Asthana and Josh Babarinde MP
I mean, yes, although in a way, things went right for him previously when he was ruthless and things have gone very wrong for him since he became prime minister. But that thread of ruthlessness has been there throughout. And when things have gone wrong for him in the past, he is... quite brutal in a way. So politically brutal.
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How ruthless is Keir Starmer willing to be? w/ Anushka Asthana and Josh Babarinde MP
And I do want to make that distinction because, you know, I spent time talking to one of his really good friends, Parvez Chabar, and he was like, Keir is the opposite of ruthless on a personal level. I mean, one person who used to work for him actually broke down crying when she was speaking to me because he'd been so kind to her when she'd lost a loved one.
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How ruthless is Keir Starmer willing to be? w/ Anushka Asthana and Josh Babarinde MP
He was the first guy on Neil Kinnock's doorstep when he lost his wife. So there's a personal compassion, as I said. But politically, I mean, just look at what he did step by step. So he made a decision to support Jeremy Corbyn when it's very clear that he didn't support that project. in hindsight, in order to win over the leadership.
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How ruthless is Keir Starmer willing to be? w/ Anushka Asthana and Josh Babarinde MP
And the minute he got the leadership, he sacked the General Secretary of the Labour Party, Jenny Formby, who I note in the book had been going through chemotherapy. She had cancer. She was struggling to work. I mean, to him, she was associated with all the things that went wrong for Jeremy Corbyn. Now, Jeremy Corbyn also wanted to sack the General Secretary when he became Labour leader.
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How ruthless is Keir Starmer willing to be? w/ Anushka Asthana and Josh Babarinde MP
It took him three years. Keir Starmer, 20 minutes. And he was on the phone to her. And then when things went really badly wrong in opposition, when they lost the Hartlepool by-election... I mean, again, and there's actually a scene there where Morgan McSweeney is sort of speaking at 100 miles an hour, according to the people around him and coming up with different ideas and writing on a board.
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How ruthless is Keir Starmer willing to be? w/ Anushka Asthana and Josh Babarinde MP
Change labour, change labour. That's what we need to do. But Keir Starmer, again, acted really swiftly. I mean, he did do a reshuffle that went quite badly wrong at the time. And some people think, They want to highlight that a little bit more than maybe I did. The reshuffle was very much botched. But he just did it again.
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How ruthless is Keir Starmer willing to be? w/ Anushka Asthana and Josh Babarinde MP
And so, in a way, and maybe I should have said this in the governing chapter, when I knew already that people were getting frustrated with Sue Gray, perhaps we could have predicted that she wouldn't last 100 days. But most people would give your chief of staff longer than that, wouldn't they?
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How ruthless is Keir Starmer willing to be? w/ Anushka Asthana and Josh Babarinde MP
I mean, it is a funny thing, isn't it? Because I looked at the definition of ruthless. I mean, it means being very cruel, basically. Right. And in the kind of pursuit of what you think needs to happen. I think Keir Starmer... wouldn't complain about being called ruthless. In fact, I asked him once.
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How ruthless is Keir Starmer willing to be? w/ Anushka Asthana and Josh Babarinde MP
I said to him after he'd done this big speech to party conference and it was clear that the Labour Party had changed and was more in his vision.
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How ruthless is Keir Starmer willing to be? w/ Anushka Asthana and Josh Babarinde MP
Yeah, yeah. Basically, I was making a documentary on him and they were like, if you wait here, he'll come out and you can speak to him with his wife, Vic. And I was standing next to a big set of bins in the glamour of TV. Out he came and talked to me and I said to him, you've been really ruthless. And he said yes, without a moment's hesitation, because he felt that he needed to be ruthless.
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How ruthless is Keir Starmer willing to be? w/ Anushka Asthana and Josh Babarinde MP
Now, do you have to be ruthless to be a political leader? One person very close to Rishi Sunak argued that one of the things they thought went wrong for him... And they use the C word, which I would never use and I strongly disapprove of. So I won't use it here.
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How ruthless is Keir Starmer willing to be? w/ Anushka Asthana and Josh Babarinde MP
We're not using that word. No, no, no. Not using that word. I don't approve of that word on so many levels, but that's another podcast. But this person said, basically, to be prime minister, you need to be a bit of a C word. And they thought Rishi Sunak. Was not. I mean, do you? I like to think that you could be kind and generous and, you know, collaborative and still be prime minister.
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How ruthless is Keir Starmer willing to be? w/ Anushka Asthana and Josh Babarinde MP
I don't think he would say he was going to be ruthless in terms of trying to support people.
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How ruthless is Keir Starmer willing to be? w/ Anushka Asthana and Josh Babarinde MP
I think he believes that if you wanted to win power for the Labour Party, and look, there are people on the left who strongly disagree with this, and I spoke to them for the book as well, but he believed that the only way to put the Labour Party in the service of working people, which is obviously what he always says, and this is the thing that I think Morgan McSweeney is obsessed with, is to be quite ruthless in terms of the party operation.
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How ruthless is Keir Starmer willing to be? w/ Anushka Asthana and Josh Babarinde MP
And so I think he's got to a point where If Downing Street felt dysfunctional, he is ready to act immediately because he thinks that's what it takes to then serve people. Now, on the side of that, they've got themselves into a load of trouble, which I think leads to the depiction or the perception that they're not always thinking about working people.
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How ruthless is Keir Starmer willing to be? w/ Anushka Asthana and Josh Babarinde MP
But I don't think that necessarily is to do with his ruthlessness.
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How ruthless is Keir Starmer willing to be? w/ Anushka Asthana and Josh Babarinde MP
Yeah, and I tried really hard to understand it. And the first thing I wanted to understand was why did they hate the hard left as they would call it so much? And trying to understand that, I think there was a sense, and again, this would be disagreed with by those on the left, that kind of anti-Semitism was baked into the hard left viewpoint of the world. And also that there was a kind of quite
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How ruthless is Keir Starmer willing to be? w/ Anushka Asthana and Josh Babarinde MP
Thank you very much for having me.
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How ruthless is Keir Starmer willing to be? w/ Anushka Asthana and Josh Babarinde MP
I think he would argue basic or kind of like not nuanced enough view of foreign policy. So, for example, the things I think he really didn't like about Jeremy Corbyn were obviously the anti-Semitism crisis, but also some of the views on Russia, for example, or some of the views on certain countries in the Middle East. So there was that on the one hand.
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How ruthless is Keir Starmer willing to be? w/ Anushka Asthana and Josh Babarinde MP
And then the other thing is, well, why is Morgan McSweeney a Labour person? Why has he been in the Labour Party his whole life?
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How ruthless is Keir Starmer willing to be? w/ Anushka Asthana and Josh Babarinde MP
I mean, I'm sure he admires Tony Blair, but I don't actually think he's a Blairite in that I don't think the kind of slightly more, I guess the word, I don't mean this in a derogatory way at all, but the slightly more globalist side of Tony Blair, the slightly more internationalism. I don't get a sense of any like driving passion of that from Morgan McSweeney. I think the best clue is,
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How ruthless is Keir Starmer willing to be? w/ Anushka Asthana and Josh Babarinde MP
to his politics comes from when he goes to Barking and Dagenham in 2010. And with a lot of other people, quite a lot of whom are quite now senior in the Labour Party, they fight the BNP, the British National Party, the far right party. And I was actually a reporter at the time at the Observer. I spent quite a lot of time there. The BNP had done really, really well in previous elections.
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How ruthless is Keir Starmer willing to be? w/ Anushka Asthana and Josh Babarinde MP
They've got 12 councillors, I think. Nick Griffin wanted to win, barking against Margaret Hodge, who was also huge in this fight at the time. And I feel like there's a sort of, almost what used to be blue labour, but an almost like communitarian left-wingness about Morgan McSweeney, which is, this is why I say he's obsessed with the idea about working people.
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How ruthless is Keir Starmer willing to be? w/ Anushka Asthana and Josh Babarinde MP
He thinks that everything should be about trying to service working people. And When he went to East London, in what some people described to me, I think actually John Cruddas, who was the MP in Dagenham at the time, as the canary in the coal mine, it was like the first red wall.
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How ruthless is Keir Starmer willing to be? w/ Anushka Asthana and Josh Babarinde MP
It was the first place in the country where white working class voters were turning away from Labour because they were angry about immigration. And they were upset about the impact that people moving out of East London, particularly Africans, were having in their communities. And I remember walking around and I remember hearing a lot of people talk about it.
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How ruthless is Keir Starmer willing to be? w/ Anushka Asthana and Josh Babarinde MP
And his view was, we need to take that on. We need to go into those communities and we need to try and address their concerns, take their concerns seriously, you know, not dismiss them as racist concerns. And actually, there was something interesting they did there was they just massively focused on local issues.
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How ruthless is Keir Starmer willing to be? w/ Anushka Asthana and Josh Babarinde MP
So, for example, one of the issues was that people had loads of crap in their front gardens. I saw gardens, as they called them. So they launched a massive campaign by the council to say to people, either we're going to fine you for the mess in your front garden or we can come and help you clear it up. It was a massively successful campaign.
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How ruthless is Keir Starmer willing to be? w/ Anushka Asthana and Josh Babarinde MP
They also recruited like hairdressers and bookies to try and like be community communicators, as they called them, to try and take on the myths.
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How ruthless is Keir Starmer willing to be? w/ Anushka Asthana and Josh Babarinde MP
So I see him as much more grounded in, I don't know if you remember the kind of Blue Labour movement, which is like, it's slightly more right on the right of the Labour Party, but less to do with things like EU membership or links abroad and a little bit more to do with how do we serve
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How ruthless is Keir Starmer willing to be? w/ Anushka Asthana and Josh Babarinde MP
these communities who perhaps have become a bit more socially conservative, but are also still to the left on issues like economics. And look, if that is a model that they actually try to use to take on reform, UK now, then I think, you know, clearly that could be quite interesting. But how do they do that? They have to serve local people and the things that have gone wrong.
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How ruthless is Keir Starmer willing to be? w/ Anushka Asthana and Josh Babarinde MP
Yeah, it's really tricky. And what I had to do basically was make the book about everything up to that point. So really, it's a book about how they got to the election, how they won the election. I did then attempt to book a chapter on governing and I read it back. It's not that bad.
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How ruthless is Keir Starmer willing to be? w/ Anushka Asthana and Josh Babarinde MP
So they have to fix our hospitals. They have to do something about the absolute funding crisis in councils. So the things that you see around you, like the grass gets cut at the local park, the swimming pool doesn't close down, you know, all the things that we've seen crumble around us visually, they have to tackle that. And I still think that is a massive and very difficult project.
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How ruthless is Keir Starmer willing to be? w/ Anushka Asthana and Josh Babarinde MP
And it's interesting you say that because I read the speech in quite a different way, which was that I think Labour could have been less bold in terms of talking about the riots, the fact that they were basically, you know, violent, far-right thugs who were breaking the law and defending the fact that
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How ruthless is Keir Starmer willing to be? w/ Anushka Asthana and Josh Babarinde MP
you know, we're not going to listen to your concerns about immigration when you're marching on a refugee hotel, for example. And actually, one thing I had heard Morgan McSweeney has said behind the scenes is that whatever they say about any of this, they have this idea that they're never going to punch down on asylum seekers. They're never going to punch down on immigrants and benefit recipients.
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How ruthless is Keir Starmer willing to be? w/ Anushka Asthana and Josh Babarinde MP
And so, for example, they always talk about smashing the gangs when it comes to the boats. They don't talk about the asylum seekers. That said, there are people in the asylum sector who do feel to me that there's a bit of triangulation going on. And even they find the language around just calling people illegal migrants, for example, rather than asylum seekers, a problem.
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How ruthless is Keir Starmer willing to be? w/ Anushka Asthana and Josh Babarinde MP
You know, that said, I was with someone pretty senior in that sector yesterday who, you know, liked the fact that in the same speech you were talking about, Keir Starmer called people refugees rather than illegal migrants, which we didn't hear the language of refugees and asylum seekers as much previously.
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How ruthless is Keir Starmer willing to be? w/ Anushka Asthana and Josh Babarinde MP
I mean, I did argue that in theory, Sue Gray as chief of staff and Morgan McSweeney as chief advisor, as he was then. could be Keir Starmer's superpower because they had different skills, but also made clear that there were already tensions at the time.
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How ruthless is Keir Starmer willing to be? w/ Anushka Asthana and Josh Babarinde MP
political opinion that kind of fringe far right theory I mean I think they understand that some of the things that people were talking about on the street are things that have been legitimised and talked about more broadly the question is how do you deal with it because there is this kind of really knotty situation and I feel like I've been covering this for like 20 years of both really legitimate concerns and racism and how do you untangle that and get to you know the answer like it is legitimate that people are worried about the fact that net migration hit
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How ruthless is Keir Starmer willing to be? w/ Anushka Asthana and Josh Babarinde MP
745,000 and that that has put, you know, pressure on public services. I mean, I went to six parts of the country before the Brexit vote and talked to people about immigration. And there were places where there were hardly any immigrants and people were worried about immigration.