Ian Dunt
Appearances
Pod Save the UK
The Tories lose their minds (again) - can Starmer hold against the far right?
And over and over again in the story, you see people confront that reality. They're like, I believe in compromise, but I won't compromise on that. So like, for instance, John Stuart Mill was like kind of a core part of the centrism story. Again, he wouldn't call himself that, obviously, but you know, he was. There's two, like on one issue, Women's liberation.
Pod Save the UK
The Tories lose their minds (again) - can Starmer hold against the far right?
He was just like maybe like 150 years ahead of his time. I mean, in a way, like him and his wife, Harriet Taylor, were like the start of the female suffrage movement in this country. He was so far ahead that reading him at the time on feminism must have just been like reading some alien from a distant planet. When it comes to colonialism, I mean, he used to work for the East India Company.
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The Tories lose their minds (again) - can Starmer hold against the far right?
So he would sit there and he was a kind of centrist on colonialism. He was like, look, we can't just leave instantly, but we should leave eventually. He's called it government by leading strings. The job of colonialism was to try and raise the country to the level where it could self-govern. which at the time would have seemed like a moderate opinion, now obviously seems completely toxic.
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The Tories lose their minds (again) - can Starmer hold against the far right?
And in that, in where he compromised and where he didn't, you get a sense of like the dangers of centrism where it ends up. But can I just add one thing to that, which is basically like, that is not just their problem. That is all of our problem. Because we all want to compromise. None of us think like it's a great quality to never compromise, right?
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The Tories lose their minds (again) - can Starmer hold against the far right?
Like we all know that's a disaster that we turn into lunatics if we behave that way. But none of us can quite figure out when is the right time to compromise and when isn't. We might feel it at a given moment, and that might be emotional and social as much as it is intellectual or moral. But none of us really know the answers to these questions.
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The Tories lose their minds (again) - can Starmer hold against the far right?
It's just that by virtue of being like a kind of a system of thought that's based on compromise, unlike socialism, unlike liberalism, unlike conservatism, they highlight that problem in like a really acute way.
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The Tories lose their minds (again) - can Starmer hold against the far right?
And for that, they're kind of useful to read because they sort of help to teach you about maybe there's like some contradictions and some messy wiring in your own thought process about politics.
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The Tories lose their minds (again) - can Starmer hold against the far right?
These are annoyingly good questions. Okay, can I do the last one? Yes.
Pod Save the UK
The Tories lose their minds (again) - can Starmer hold against the far right?
as part of this book series like me and Dorian Linsky did do a book on fascism as well which by the way is also really hard to pin down and like sort of say what it is but there are it's not so much that there's good because fascism isn't really ideas it's quite it's just sort of like violence really like the aesthetics of violence the potency of it you know especially for young traumatized men
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The Tories lose their minds (again) - can Starmer hold against the far right?
But even there, like their sense of belonging and identity, there's something to learn from it. It's not like, oh, didn't Hitler have some great ideas? You know, but it's more like we can learn something from that. And I think especially on the left, like lots of the work after the war, you look at stuff by George Orwell or by Isaiah Berlin, was basically like, okay,
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The Tories lose their minds (again) - can Starmer hold against the far right?
What is there for the left to take from that shit that happened over there? Because we don't want to leave it to those guys anymore. You know, what do we have to say about belonging and identity and nationhood that cleanses it of some of that toxic bit? So, yeah, so basically nothing's off limits.
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The Tories lose their minds (again) - can Starmer hold against the far right?
Nothing's off limits. Yeah. But of course, again, all centrists are ultimately liberal Democrats. Small L, small D, right? Like, so none of them, if you say like, oh, but fascism is just a legitimate, they're all going to be like, well, no, up with that. I will not put. And then you trigger that problem with compromise.
Pod Save the UK
The Tories lose their minds (again) - can Starmer hold against the far right?
I can't remember what your question was.
Pod Save the UK
The Tories lose their minds (again) - can Starmer hold against the far right?
See, I think that one of the reasons you can do that is because he's a really weird form of centrist. Like... All of the centrists are centrists on like the classic left-right split, state and market. You know what I mean? What's most efficient? What should you be relying on? They're all somewhere in the middle on that question.
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The Tories lose their minds (again) - can Starmer hold against the far right?
He's way to the left, like I said earlier, of Tony Blair on that question. You just look at the basics. You look at the kind of changes to the fiscal rules that we think Rachel Reeves is going to bring in. they are way to the left of Tony Blair.
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The Tories lose their minds (again) - can Starmer hold against the far right?
I mean, 1997 comes at the end of a period of, you know, triumphant Thatcherism and Reaganism, the end of the Cold War, you know, Francis Fukuyama in the end, you know, just this feeling of like capitalism wins. Now, where are we? It's like, well, right, so financial crash pretty much bottomed out our entire sort of world economy. During COVID, who were you looking out for to help you then?
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The Tories lose their minds (again) - can Starmer hold against the far right?
Was it the markets? You know, what's the IEA's response to who helps you during COVID? Because it's going to be the state in the end.
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The Tories lose their minds (again) - can Starmer hold against the far right?
Even Brexit, in a way, it was weirdly economically pushed to the left. Like when you look at the way that conservatives started speaking about, well, actually, no, we cannot mess with trade arrangements. We can do things that are economically not beneficial to the country if we decide that it has meaning. If the right can do it, then the left can do it too. So the whole narrative shifts.
Pod Save the UK
The Tories lose their minds (again) - can Starmer hold against the far right?
However, there's another side to politics, right? Which isn't about left. And right, it's about up and down, which is usually like liberal versus authoritarian. But in recent years, we typically talk about open versus closed. Are you open to immigration? Are you open to trade? Are you open to international institutions?
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The Tories lose their minds (again) - can Starmer hold against the far right?
That's the kind of populist, anti-populist sort of thing, whether it's Brexit, whether it's Trump or whatever. Now, some centrists like Macron position themselves on one side of that binary. Like Macron is just like, I am open. Like, I mean, admittedly, it's all gone wrong now because he's being forced into a, you know, basically being controlled by his enemy, Le Pen.
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The Tories lose their minds (again) - can Starmer hold against the far right?
But nevertheless, in terms of how he talks, he's like, I am the enemy of the nativists. I'm pro-open. Starmer is not like that at all. He is centrist on the up-down as well as the left-right. He's basically like, no, that shit, that culture war shit, destroys a left-wing electoral coalition.
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The Tories lose their minds (again) - can Starmer hold against the far right?
It separates out our blue-collar voters, primarily in towns, from our white-collar, university-educated, much more liberal voters, predominantly in cities. It is the death knell of the left, if you allow that takeover. So what do we do? We do not fight the culture war. We don't fight on the up-down, like Macron used to do. Instead, we kill it as an issue. We just bury it as an issue.
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The Tories lose their minds (again) - can Starmer hold against the far right?
We suck the emotions out. We find stuff from various elements to appease some of your concerns, but not to do too much damage over here. That is clearly the approach that he's going to take. Whether it works or not, fuck knows.
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The Tories lose their minds (again) - can Starmer hold against the far right?
So also, can I just say the part of that is the flaw in the whole project. If I have to sit down right now and summarise to you conservatism, liberalism or socialism in one sentence, I can do that, right? It's a one sentence definition. There's loads of variation within that and loads of stuff to argue about, whatever. But you can do it. You can just describe it. You cannot do that with tension.
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The Tories lose their minds (again) - can Starmer hold against the far right?
And that usually is a sign that I think you have a significant problem in your conceptual framework, basically. If you have to spend like a 45-minute very pleasant podcast sort of going... And at the end of it, someone's like, still not sure. There's a problem with the whole idea. And I totally get that. It's not...
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The Tories lose their minds (again) - can Starmer hold against the far right?
It's not like Blair would sometimes claim it has as proud a heritage, you know, as the people, you know, as the socialists and the blah, blah, blah. It does not, right? It is not on that standing. Does that mean that it's like completely without value? No, I think like really not.
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The Tories lose their minds (again) - can Starmer hold against the far right?
So I agree with you, right? And also, by the way, and I think in political people, like whether they're in broadcasting or whether they listen to sort of political podcasts or whether they're in politics, they tend to hate centrism specifically because they're usually people who have a very strong opinion either way, right? Voters don't feel that way.
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The Tories lose their minds (again) - can Starmer hold against the far right?
Voters, almost every time you ask them, what do you want from a political budget? I want them to be quite centrist. I think of myself as quite centrist. And then you're like, really, what are your views on capital punishment? Love it. You know, whatever. People would like, they like the word.
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The Tories lose their minds (again) - can Starmer hold against the far right?
Yes, exactly. That's exactly what it is. However, let me say what the danger is in the alternative. Like, people would often say, someone who just has the same principles their entire life, they'd be like, oh, they're so consistent. You know, like, I really value them. They're so consistent. I always think... Are they? Or are they just not thinking? You know what I mean?
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The Tories lose their minds (again) - can Starmer hold against the far right?
Are they just kind of like, just, they're unchallenged on whatever political views they developed at like, you know, 20 in university or whatever. And then they just go through life, you know, just not allowing any new evidence or arguments to change them. Most of the time when I see, you see it in the Conservative Party right now, you saw it, you know, you see it in Labour periodically.
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The Tories lose their minds (again) - can Starmer hold against the far right?
When they're defeated at the ballot box, it's all gone wrong. It's not like all those Tory leadership candidates that are there are being like, shit, what's really happened here? How do we… They retreat into this kind of ideological bunker and be like, you know what we didn't do? Enough conservatism.
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The Tories lose their minds (again) - can Starmer hold against the far right?
That to me is even scarier than someone who goes, you know what, I just always need to be open to the evidence. I want to reject ideology. I accept the fact that I can't be certain. And I accept that sometimes that means people are going to have a hard time pinning me down and I can't always tell you what I do and do not want to compromise on.
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The Tories lose their minds (again) - can Starmer hold against the far right?
But these are like the two kind of twin dangers that you find in life. And to be honest, if I personally had to be vulnerable to one of those dangers, I'd rather be vulnerable to the one that the centrists do rather than becoming an ideological robot, as you often see on the binary side.
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The Tories lose their minds (again) - can Starmer hold against the far right?
Well, it's like that John Major back to basics thing. John Major's back to basics and then suddenly every MP who's caught in a threesome or whatever it is is a major problem for you because that's not considered basic. So, I mean, with the Starmer thing, I think you're basically right. I mean, you do have to own it.
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The Tories lose their minds (again) - can Starmer hold against the far right?
There comes a point, you know, Boris Johnson, to give him full credit, which is not a sentence that I like saying or something I even like thinking. He never claimed to be some kind of moral saint, right? So, I mean, when it was like, oh, the wallpaper and the blah, blah, blah. Yeah. He's like, why are you worrying about the wallpaper? I literally don't even know how many children I have.
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The Tories lose their minds (again) - can Starmer hold against the far right?
You know, you can get away with that stuff. Whereas if you say, well, this is all about service, then it's going to be much tougher. And it should be tougher for him to deal with. So I do think these are teething errors. I suspect that we won't remember them in two years' time, let alone in five. But you're definitely not wrong to say, like, you need to be doing much better than this.
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The Tories lose their minds (again) - can Starmer hold against the far right?
You should be doing much better than this. This is not acceptable and it needs to improve very quickly.
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The Tories lose their minds (again) - can Starmer hold against the far right?
I'm still a bit discombobulated by the Sue Gray thing. I am pleased that there are a lot of people with civil service experience in senior positions of the Labour Party anyway, including Keir Starmer. I mean, when you're in charge of the DPP, that's basically what you are. You're essentially a permanent secretary. I am concerned about, can they make shit work?
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The Tories lose their minds (again) - can Starmer hold against the far right?
And I think that the ultimate... We will talk a lot, and there'll be lots of noise and rah for the next five years. When it goes back to the country, the question they're going to ask is... How is it when I call an ambulance? You know, have I just heard that my next door neighbor's dad, you know, died from a heart attack because an ambulance never came? You know, what's going on with the river?
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The Tories lose their minds (again) - can Starmer hold against the far right?
So these are the judgments that people will make. And if you can demonstrate improvement, you can win, certainly against this conservative party, certainly on the basis of the number of seats that they have. So it's all about doing that. I think they're serious minded people. I think they can do it.
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The Tories lose their minds (again) - can Starmer hold against the far right?
I'm just a bit concerned that the person who was at the top of that project has now gone and there's very little chatter about how that project will now continue. So cautious optimism, which in a way is kind of the centrist way. I know.
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The Tories lose their minds (again) - can Starmer hold against the far right?
Yeah, he's a much, much bigger threat than either of the other two. But I also think Starmer will do better out of having Cleverley in that position than either of the other two. Like, especially Jenner. You know, but Badenock as well.
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The Tories lose their minds (again) - can Starmer hold against the far right?
I mean, she's all over, like, really, you just, journalists are going to sit, if she's leader, they're just going to sit here, they know, I can just upset you very easily indeed. I can get you really mad. So that's what I'm going to do. That's kind of my job. And she will keep on doing that. She is, I don't know what they're seeing in her, But I don't get it because she's not much cop.
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The Tories lose their minds (again) - can Starmer hold against the far right?
And Jenrick is many times worse than she is on any kind of level, including moral and presentational. So cleverly is the biggest threat. The thing is, I think that's quite helpful. If the Tories... It's basically like, I think, what happened to Labour under Corbyn. The Tories just went completely mad. They just become everything.
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The Tories lose their minds (again) - can Starmer hold against the far right?
They become their own government, their own opposition, the only ecosystem in which they need to reflect. And they just went straight off the reservation. I think you can... Look at how much of an easier time Starmer was having during the Tory party conference than he was during the Labour party conference, right?
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The Tories lose their minds (again) - can Starmer hold against the far right?
Like, as long as the Tories are part of that conversation, as long as they're halfway sensible, you will actually maintain some kind of criticism of their ideas. You have something to define yourself against. You can keep your MPs more on side. It's generally an easier life for him. And to add to that, there is this weird dynamic that the more sensible the candidate you pick electorally is,
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The Tories lose their minds (again) - can Starmer hold against the far right?
the harder time it's going to be. Because if Cleverley's there, you'll probably get a bunch of conservatives decide, you know what, we want to go to reform. I want the full fat version. I want the raw meat version. That's a whole nightmare for you to try and grapple with and deal with. So even in the Tories' best case scenario, they are about to enter a world of pain.
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The Tories lose their minds (again) - can Starmer hold against the far right?
Oh shit, was that me? I didn't even know what you were saying.
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The Tories lose their minds (again) - can Starmer hold against the far right?
Yeah, yeah, because of the absence of politics. I mean, that's clear. So it's odd, right? Like, all we do is when we talk about politics, whether it's sort of Fleet Street journalism, whether it's Westminster itself, we talk about the day-to-day, the clatter noise of things.
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The Tories lose their minds (again) - can Starmer hold against the far right?
This person's out, this person's in, this person left this thing on a train, this person said something that contradicted someone else in cabinet, now they're going to have a row about it, what are they going to do about spending... Day to day, basically empty calories.
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The Tories lose their minds (again) - can Starmer hold against the far right?
The other bit of politics that actually fixes people's lives is the bit that we never talk about, which is like the machinery, the engine room. That is about the civil service. It's about special advisors. It's about competent ministers. And it's about working according to a deliverable timetable on meaningful targets for change.
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The Tories lose their minds (again) - can Starmer hold against the far right?
You know, especially when you look at something really complex like the health service, like education. It's not enough to just go more money. It's not enough to just say the word. You've got to get the engine room functioning. Sue Gray was the engine room bit. You know, Morgan McSweeney, who's now taken her job, was the raw politics bit, right? Raw politics worked for the election.
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The Tories lose their minds (again) - can Starmer hold against the far right?
Her bit was starting to fall apart a bit. Okay, so fine. So you put him there. Now what do we have? We've got all the raw politics, and I think that will improve, and there'll be narratives, and there'll be a grid, a media grid, and, you know, journalists will have less sort of food to feast on in terms of scandal.
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The Tories lose their minds (again) - can Starmer hold against the far right?
But the engine room concerns me because at the end of five years, Starman needs to be able to show that he has addressed the reasons that the last government was thrown out, which was not as I would wish it to be about Brexit or about, you know, anything else. It was about shit isn't working.
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The Tories lose their minds (again) - can Starmer hold against the far right?
So unless there's someone there to make sure that it does start working, not just throwing meat to the tabloids every day, then I think he's going to end up having a big problem.
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The Tories lose their minds (again) - can Starmer hold against the far right?
It's so boring.
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The Tories lose their minds (again) - can Starmer hold against the far right?
And there's also like a macho thing to that, right, as well. Like it's always just like, oh, the backstage shouty, you know, dry treatment, all of that kind of stuff. So take on board that I've never met the guy, so I can't give you any kind of personal assessment. Yeah.
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The Tories lose their minds (again) - can Starmer hold against the far right?
you look at the kind of strategic programs that he put forward, you know, that he was basically formulating during the Corbyn years when he was out in the wilderness. And it was the sort of, you know, multiple stage process of like, what do we do? First of all, we extract Corbynism. And his program for doing that was like really quite,
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The Tories lose their minds (again) - can Starmer hold against the far right?
extraordinary degrees of central control over the candidate selection process, which he did through the National Executive Committee. He just basically said, no one's making any choices about their candidates anymore. We are going to do that. And by the way, the Corbynites would have done the same thing if they'd succeeded in taking control of the National Executive Committee.
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The Tories lose their minds (again) - can Starmer hold against the far right?
It's kind of like the brain of the Labour Party, but they didn't. Srini put forward a plan for doing it. He executed it. They took control. They extracted Corbynism. The second thing was to start functioning like a decent opposition in parliament to make it work that way. And the third was to defeat the Tories on their own territory, which is basically crime, defense, and the economy.
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The Tories lose their minds (again) - can Starmer hold against the far right?
The economy in particular, he said that that was the floor in the Death Star. Now, they got lucky in that the Tories decided they were going to behave like with a degree of biblical incompetence that is impossible to summarize using human language. But nevertheless, like you still say he executed that plan and it delivered the result that he wanted.
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The Tories lose their minds (again) - can Starmer hold against the far right?
So there's no point underestimating this guy when it comes to, you know, how do you win an election? He has proved himself to be a very, very capable man indeed.
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The Tories lose their minds (again) - can Starmer hold against the far right?
Yeah, governing a country is not winning an election. You want that election guy there, right? You want to make sure that what are our narratives? What's the storyline? We've got to tell it every day. That clearly has fallen apart these first hundred days. It's just not been there. But you also need to make sure that you do things right. Let me give you an example.
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The Tories lose their minds (again) - can Starmer hold against the far right?
Blair's first term was kind of wasted. And the third term was just, you know, the Gordon Brown internecine warfare. The second term was really good. Well, we were all talking about Iraq and Afghanistan in September the 11th. None of that. Talking about what was going on in education, what was going on in health, what was going on in transport.
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The Tories lose their minds (again) - can Starmer hold against the far right?
And it was good because predominantly because of a man called Michael Barber working in number 10 in the delivery unit. was coming up with targets that made sense. They used to have 98% of people in A&E would be seen in four hours. Why did that target exist? Not because it felt great in A&E. It existed because if A&E is working, it's because you're getting people off A&E into the wards.
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The Tories lose their minds (again) - can Starmer hold against the far right?
If there's space in the wards, it's because you're getting them off the wards into social care. It was like a litmus test of the health of the health service as a whole. You're working towards sensible evidence-based targets. You need someone doing that job. Maybe it'll be Morgan McSweeney, okay? But at the moment, that doesn't seem to me where his skill set is.
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The Tories lose their minds (again) - can Starmer hold against the far right?
And that was supposed to be what she was doing. So I'm concerned that now she's gone and no one's being very clear about what is the governance function that's being put in place of her.
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The Tories lose their minds (again) - can Starmer hold against the far right?
Yeah, I mean, I think that they should be doing a better job of that because if you guys can't do it, then there's a problem because I'm guessing that you're more hooked in than most people. You know what I mean? But I think that can be done. I think there is a story to tell there.
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The Tories lose their minds (again) - can Starmer hold against the far right?
I think most of the time when you read Starmer talking, you know, whether it's in the book about him, which sort of was almost half ghostwritten, you know, that came out of the Don Baldwin book, or whether it's in his speeches, what's the word that comes up most? It's dignity. Mm-hmm.
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The Tories lose their minds (again) - can Starmer hold against the far right?
And at first I kind of ignored that word dignity because I was just like, that just sounds like some kind of fluffy hallmarks, vacuous, non-political, you know, who's against dignity, right? Everyone likes that. And then I noticed that the way he uses it is kind of, it's in a way that kind of combines liberalism and socialism in a way. It's like, what is dignity at work?
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The Tories lose their minds (again) - can Starmer hold against the far right?
Is it to have autonomy over your life? What is dignity in the way that you're treated when you're in a hospital ward? You know, what is dignity, even in the manner of like being a passenger on a train?
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The Tories lose their minds (again) - can Starmer hold against the far right?
Like, actually, if you just start thinking that the words that the left would use for equality and the words that liberals would use for freedom, he just seems to be using the word dignity for most of these at work, in your life, in health care. I think you start to get a picture of how he works.
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The Tories lose their minds (again) - can Starmer hold against the far right?
Economically, I don't think you put him and Reeves together, Rachel Reeves, and there's actually like a really coherent, interesting program there. Primarily, what fascinates me about it is that it's so much more left-wing than Tony Blair, and yet no one seems to talk about it. Everyone acts like Starmer is just Blair, right? It's just another Blair-y kind of, the Blair-y vibes.
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The Tories lose their minds (again) - can Starmer hold against the far right?
when actually almost everything they say is about market failure. So state intervention in the market to correct for market failure. That's what it is for fixing the labor markets, you know, kind of delivery jobs and whatever. That's what it is when it comes to climate change. It's been the markets and providing the solutions. We're going to have to get in there and do it ourselves.
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The Tories lose their minds (again) - can Starmer hold against the far right?
That's what it comes to providing security in the economy to try and address some of the boom and bust problems that we've had over and over again. I feel like That is a narrative. It's actually a pretty left-wing narrative, more left-wing than anything we've had in this country since before Margaret Thatcher. And yet that storyline just kind of isn't being told.
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The Tories lose their minds (again) - can Starmer hold against the far right?
I think the things that I say can be fitted in a form of centrism. But there's different kinds, right?
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The Tories lose their minds (again) - can Starmer hold against the far right?
What is it? I've got no idea. I don't know. If you don't know, who the fuck knows? I don't think anybody does. I started, like, at the beginning, I was just like, I've always hated that word because I just always thought it sounded really slippery. And I kind of had this impression of, well, if your job is just to sort of stay in the middle of two competing things, what are you, right?
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The Tories lose their minds (again) - can Starmer hold against the far right?
Yeah, yeah. So hardly any centrists really think or behave that way, the middle ground, that's got a long heritage. You could trace that middle ground stuff back to Aristotle, like the medium, basically. The smartest place to be is in between the two extremes. You don't want to be too brave. You don't want to be too cowardly.
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The Tories lose their minds (again) - can Starmer hold against the far right?
But someone who's always cowardly, without someone who's too brave, will die very quickly. You look for the moderate middle. But actually, there's another way of looking at this stuff, which is about the centrism of the whole. And it's basically to say, what are you? You're not looking for the middle ground, but you are non-tribal. You are non-ideological.
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The Tories lose their minds (again) - can Starmer hold against the far right?
You're interested in practical solutions to problems. And you're primarily concerned with thinking that there are good ideas all over the place, scattered around in different political traditions and different individuals at different times. And your job is not to submit to tribalism, to keep on being open to those ideas. That has got quite a proud history to it.
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The Tories lose their minds (again) - can Starmer hold against the far right?
A lot of the people who formed part of that history wouldn't call themselves centrists, to be fair. But then no one does. Even Macron doesn't call himself a centrist. Pretty much the only person that does is Tony Blair. I mean, Starmer doesn't really use that word very much.
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The Tories lose their minds (again) - can Starmer hold against the far right?
This is the mad thing, right? This is the problem that they get themselves into.
Pod Save the UK
The Tories lose their minds (again) - can Starmer hold against the far right?
So they start and they go, well, we don't like ideology and, you know, we don't like uncompromising behavior. We want cooperation and consensus. And then you get to a certain point and they're like, oh, actually, no, no. I mean, you can't do that. Right. Because of course you do. Because where does that end up? Like, if you've got no ideological, it's like, oh, so how do you feel about Nazism?
Pod Save the UK
The Tories lose their minds (again) - can Starmer hold against the far right?
It's that thing of, you know, it's in the antechamber of fascism apology. And of course they don't like that stuff. So then they're like, oh no, well, actually we are opposed to this and imperialism and, you know, all the other stuff that no one likes. So then you're like, oh, so you do have values. So there are things that you won't compromise on.