Pod Save the UK
The Tories lose their minds (again) - can Starmer hold against the far right?
Thu, 10 Oct 2024
The Tory party have once again chosen violence against themselves, as Keir Starmer’s Labour party are languishing in the polls after 90-something days of a lack of action. Nish and Coco burst the bubble on the news that Starmer’s Chief of Staff has been replaced by his election guru, joined by political journalist Ian Dunt to find out just how big a deal this backroom reshuffle is for the machinations of government. Ian also unravels the ideology of centrism - explaining why it was a huge part of the Labour Party’s success at the general election and why it might not be enough to keep the electorate happy without some actual policy to back it up. Later, Labour MP Nadia Whittome calls in from Portcullis House to talk about why she’s still hopeful for what the new government can deliver, before the biggest WTF moment since Rishi Sunak walked out in the rain - the Tory Party eliminating centrist candidate James Cleverly from the leadership. Guests: Ian Dunt Nadia Whittome MP Audio Credits: LBC Pod Save the UK is a Reduced Listening production for Crooked Media.Contact us via email: [email protected]: 07494 933 444 (UK) or + 44 7494 933 444 (internationally)Insta: https://instagram.com/podsavetheukTwitter: https://twitter.com/podsavetheukTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@podsavetheukFacebook: https://facebook.com/podsavetheukYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/podsavetheworld
Hi, this is Pod Save the UK and I'm Coco Kahn.
And I'm Nish Kumar. On today's show, we're nearly at 100 days of the new government. What exactly have we got to show for it? It feels somewhat unclear. We'll be getting into that with political journalist Ian Dunne.
And later, we promise there will be some hope as Labour MP Nadia Whittam joins us to tell us about what she's working on, the things we can look forward to now that Parliament is finally back in action.
Future Coto just popping in here to say don't miss our discussion of the latest mad, bad and dangerous antics from the Conservative Party leadership race. We'll be discussing the shock exit of James Cleverley from the race later in the show.
Mr Speaker, tomorrow the Government will publish their anticipated changes to employment law. Given the weekend's events, when did the Prime Minister first become a convert to fire and rehire?
That's Rishi Sunak, former prime minister and leader of the opposition, shooting at an open goal.
He shanked it. You sort of forget how thunderingly uncharismatic he is. Like that was an open goal that he somehow managed to hit the bar with and the ball rebounded and hit him directly in the genitals. Like I've got, honestly, I am amazed.
The hand mole man of politics.
Yeah, he is just, he is, yes, he's very bad. At the time of recording, we're 97 days into the new government and things haven't exactly been going down too well with the public.
According to a more in common poll this week, the government holds only a single point lead against the opposition, despite the Tories being, as you can hear from that clip, essentially leaderless or they're led by a man whose head is very much in California based on his performance and PMQs and having nothing to say after 14 years in government.
Shockingly, according to YouGov, Keir Starmer is now less popular than Nigel Farage.
That is so bananas. Such a large majority, arguably squandered. So what is going on here? Well, there's obviously no one single reason, but there's been a story that has been leading the Westminster press that may cast some sort of light on it.
Well, yes, the big news in the last week from the Labour Party is that Sue Gray has resigned as Keir Starmer's Chief of Staff and is going to be replaced with this head of political strategy, Morgan McSweeney. This is sort of about as Westminster bubbly a story as it's possible to get. But here's a quick catch up on how this happened and why we should care.
So before joining Star Wars as Chief of Staff last year, you will all no doubt remember Sue Gray as the longtime civil servant who spent the majority of her career working in the Cabinet Office, which means she has a grasp of the lay of the land of government operations. But she became a household name following her inquiry into Boris Johnson's Partygate scandal.
So Sue Gray has now been replaced by someone called Morgan McSweeney. He was formerly the executive director of Labour Together, and that's the Labour-aligned think tank that has kind of been credited for bringing Labour to power. It's also been credited with the shift more to the right.
Labour Together was created following Ed Miliband's defeat in 2015 and is generally considered to be centre-right in the Labour Party.
So Graham McSweeney are our two main players and there's been sort of constant stories of a rift that's existed between them since Labour came into power. There was a story at one point that Sue Gray was insisting that Morgan McSweeney's desk be moved physically further away from Keir Starmer. I have no idea what What am I going to do with that? There was a torrent of briefings against Grey.
One that really cut through over the summer was that she was receiving a higher salary than the Prime Minister himself, which was sort of artfully leaked for maximum damage at the height of the freebies row, the Garm drama.
it's also been reported that Sue Gray was restricting access to the prime minister, holding back on contracts for special advisors, and crucial to her downfall that she was responsible for the grid, which is the plan of government briefings to media and what exactly they've been up to, which, as we know, hasn't exactly gone down well.
See, this is my concern, right? It's that we all know that just because it's leading the Westminster pages doesn't mean it actually is the biggest issue in politics. We know that. We call it the bubble, don't we? For a reason. Who's in? Who's out? Who's up? Who's down? It's all a bit gossipy. And so there is a part of me that feels like, are we sure we're just not using Sue Gray as a scapegoat?
This idea that like, the reason the polling is so bad is because Sue Gray didn't send out press releases about the good stuff that Labour's doing. Doesn't that make it seem like, oh, Labour's been doing loads of great stuff that we don't hear about and it's Sue Gray's fault? Are we sure that's the case? I don't know how I feel about this story.
I mean, it's less about people caring about these sort of internal staffing at Labour HQ or in the kind of immediate team around Kit Starmer, and more just to do with the fact that what you would want the Labour Party to be in a position to do at this stage is to say, look, you can be focused on this if you want to be, but we're more focused on delivering, and here are three areas in which we've delivered, X, Y and Z. The problem is...
It's been a bit of a struggle to identify what X, Y and Z are.
And I think as well, you know, certainly a factor in why people are worried is that we still don't really know who Keir Starmer is. You know, what does he represent? What could we expect? What is Starmerism? But luckily for us, our next guest is someone who has a bit of an inkling.
So the bubble has burst in Westminster this week and the fallout has left the centre-right faction of the Labour Party stronger than ever before. But what does centrism even mean? Joining us now on Pod Save the UK is political journalist Ian Dunn and co-author of Centrism, The Story of an Idea. Ian, thanks for joining us. Not at all.
we were just discussing before we went on air about the ethics of swearing. And the joys. And the joys of swearing. And Coco continued her position of, it's neither big nor clever.
Just think, the English language is a very beautiful thing. There's so many other ways to describe stuff. Wouldn't you agree, darling?
Yeah, well, Ian and I were offering a vigorous counter-answer. Listen, let's talk about the book. Let's talk about centrism. But let's start with... a sort of weird old summer for the government. If I may quote a journalist's tweet about Sue Gray's resignation, and again, getting straight into obscene language, for fuck's sake, why in God's name did they make this decision?
Now that, the journalistic question is, of course, you, Ian.
Oh shit, was that me? I didn't even know what you were saying.
I was like, that sounds like a really sensible analysis. I haven't heard any. All right. Have you come to any conclusions on why, in whatever deity's name you believe in, they come to this decision?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Can you just give us a quick summary on Morgan McSweeney? He's, He's sort of widely credited with being the sort of mastermind behind the Starmer election campaign. But his background is in politics and not in government.
Yeah, and everyone always compares him to Malcolm Tucker. But how many Malcolm Tuckers can there be? I constantly hear this.
It's so boring.
It's so boring.
It's so boring.
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.
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,
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.
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.
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.
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.
So, but what's your concern here? The gap between winning an election and actually governing a country.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think as well, Morgan McSweeney occupies a particular space. We'd say the centre-right of the Labour Party. I think it's fair to say we're not on the centre-right of our own politics. Do you think that this signifies a change in what we can expect? Because also, I would say, I don't know what to expect from Keir Starmer. What is Starmerism?
Part of the election tactic was, you know, essentially to campaign off the back of conservative malfunction, which made a lot of sense. And obviously it worked very well. But now it's sort of a point now where we've got to define terms a little bit and define what this Labour government is going to be about.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
That's so interesting because obviously your new book is about centrism. And I was under the impression that Keir Starmer is a centrist. Have I got that wrong?
I think the things that I say can be fitted in a form of centrism. But there's different kinds, right?
Well, actually, yeah, let's talk about centrism. What is it?
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?
Like, you've got no values. If you're a centrist, then you're defining yourself by wherever the extremes are. And if the extremes... land in a particular place, it feels like it could be, you know, at its worst, a sort of apologia for fascism. Like, you know, that's the concern around it. But over the course of writing this book, have you moved away from that idea of the thinking?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Does that mean that centrism, because my thought about it was that it's constantly relative. It's always moving depending on what's going on. You found that not to be right. It is absolute in that it has certain principles.
This is the mad thing, right? This is the problem that they get themselves into.
Yes.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
In terms of like looking at Keir Starmer through this idea of, you know, cherry picking interesting ideas and whether we consider Starmer a centrist or not, it's like almost a whole separate conversation. But at the minute, you know, just looking at the 97 days or wherever we're at today, his attempts to sort of cherry pick from both the left or right.
For example, on the one hand, he's met with Georgia Maloney, who, you know, by chance, Anyone's estimate sits very far to the right of the political spectrum and the political tradition. He's met with George Maloney and said that he's trying to pick up immigration tips. On the other hand, he is talking good game about giving pay rises to public sector workers and also improving workers' rights.
Will those kind of compromises eventually get you into trouble? Will you sort of be pulled apart almost by trying to pick from those two political traditions?
And also just to add on to that, are there like out of bounds areas? You know, you were talking about the centrism of the whole and you pick from everything to get the best of everything. It's hard to stomach that like a fascist would have good ideas. But is that central to the system of centrism?
These are annoyingly good questions. Okay, can I do the last one? Yes.
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
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,
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.
Nothing's off limits.
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.
Got you, got you.
I can't remember what your question was.
I was talking about Starmer cherry-picking ideas. Can you reconcile borrowing ideas on immigration from George Maloney whilst also, you know, handing out public sector pay rises and improving workers' rights?
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.
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.
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?
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.
Well, and then the private interventions that did happen in COVID. have seen historic sums of public money essentially disappear into wherever we don't, we still don't even know where it is.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
I keep going back to the thing of what is it? This is still this nebulous concept. You know, James Cleverley calls himself a centrist. Okay, Starmer doesn't call himself a centrist, but as we've discussed here, probably is a centrist. Is everybody a centrist?
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.
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...
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.
It just scares me when you don't know what it is. Do you know what I mean? The point of principles is that it is a barometer in which you can use it to assess things. When something is so slippery... You know, I find it unnerving in a personal way.
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.
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.
Or the alternative, I think we should tax the richest people and give that money to public services.
It's the old Goldilocks, right? Not too hot, not too cold, just 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Something you said at the start of the conversation, if Salma's pitch is dignity, one of the ways that he talks about dignity is dignity manifesting itself in public service and public office, that it does sort of, it sort of presents a problem for him insofar as any kind of indiscretion is likely to reflect poorly on somebody that is supposed to conduct themselves like the proverbial grown-up.
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.
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.
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.
You should be doing much better than this. This is not acceptable and it needs to improve very quickly.
So can I infer from this that you're optimistic about, you know, the next four years?
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?
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?
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.
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.
I love it when it comes full circle.
I don't feel great about that. Thank you very much for joining us. Thank you.
Thank you. Wow, what a fascinating conversation.
It is interesting to come away from, I guess, as Ian has done, writing a book about centrism and then not necessarily feel closer to defining what it is. But I guess by definition, if you're talking about cherry picking lots of different ideas with no fixed ideology, that is going to be quite a hard thing to pin down.
Yeah, no, absolutely. And I mean... My instinct is I still don't trust it. Don't trust it. But it's been interesting to sort of hear about even just the long legacy of it and how people who would not consider themselves centrists are centrists and those who claim to be centrists don't necessarily exhibit the qualities of it.
Yeah, but in terms of where elections are won from, this is a huge election year across the world. And obviously... Looming into view is the American election. But with so much focus on an election and domestic issues around the election, foreign policy can definitely feel overwhelming. Luckily, Pod Save the World is here to help.
Each week, Ben Rhodes and Tommy Vitor break down global news, share insider stories from their time in the White House, and bring on experts to explain what really matters.
From conflict to climate, they've got you covered, bringing you the latest on global affairs without the homework.
New episodes drop every Wednesday in the Pod Save the World feed or on YouTube. And for extra election deep dives, catch Ben's special series every Saturday until November 5th, where he's breaking down what's at stake for foreign policy between US presidential nominees Kamala Harris and Donald Trump.
Yeah, it's always worth a listen. The most recent episode that's just dropped in the feed is about a year of war in the Middle East and is, as ever, an incredible listen. After the break, we're joined by Labour MP Nadia Whittam to find out more about the mood on the ground and hopefully give us a much needed dose of optimism.
Much needed indeed. I'm looking forward to it. Joining us now is Nadia Whittam, Labour MP for Nottingham East since 2019. She's been outspoken on the cost of living, the climate crisis, care work and LGBTQ plus rights.
Nadia has also just told us she needed to mute the Zoom to blow her nose and also was scrambling around looking for her AirPods. So it's another day in the life of Britain's most relatable MP. Having to mute a Zoom to blow your nose and frantically searching for AirPods is the kind of thing that the average British person can really connect with, I think.
And then finding them in the place that you were looking.
Nadia, last time we spoke to you, you were in opposition and you were still the baby of the house. And now you're in government and you're essentially at this point as a political veteran. How does it feel to have made that transition to being the party in power?
Yeah, I mean, it feels weird to be described as a veteran Gen Z MP when I've just turned 28.
Yeah, that's a lot of seemingly contradictory terms. It's like you and Billie Eilish are the veteran Gen Zs.
It's so nice to be in the same category as Billie Eilish. I think that's incredibly generous.
But yeah, how does it feel? Obviously, it feels very different. For a start, most of the MPs are new MPs. So it's like having to get to know loads of new people, loads of new faces, not knowing whether it's a new Tory MP or a new Labour MP. Obviously, the chances are it will be a new Labour MP. But I hosted a reception in Parliament yesterday and
with school children about decarbonizing education and climate education and we were bringing around with us like this this little book and looking through to see like who the MPs were it's like there are 650 like we need to hurry up
I have to give you my tip, right? So basically, if you're in a situation and you're talking to an MP and you don't know their name, you go, so sorry, what's your name again? And then they'll say, I'm Roger Moore. It's not Roger Moore.
I don't know why I said that. Roger Moore was the first name you could think of.
It was the only thing that came to my mind.
I don't know whether it's just like the power of gaslighting, but I think there might be an MP who's like that.
And so then they say, oh, I'm Roger Moore. And you go, oh, Roger. I mean, of course I knew you were Roger. It was the last name. It was the last name. And then you, you know, you finesse it. Anyway, you can have that for free.
Oh, that's a good one. What I used to do when I first started before was I'd say if I was talking to like a male MP, like, a white male MP, which most of them are.
You'd call him Matt. You'd say John. You'd just guess.
I'd go, it's John, isn't it? And they'd say, oh no, it's not John. It's Robert. And I'd say, oh, Robert, of course. But sometimes it would be John and they'd just say yes.
Oh God, I feel like this could be dangerous.
Listen, I'm very happy to be part of this. I would definitely enjoy you two presenting a sort of life hacks podcast for people who struggle to remember other people's names. Oh God.
Oh, apparently we've had a note from the producer. There's a Robbie Moore, the Conservative MP for Keeley and Ilkley. Then maybe you're thinking of him. Who's that and where's that?
My God. Okay. Well, that's definitely Yorkshire, but I can't help you with who Robbie Moore is.
I don't know who Robbie Moore is. Anyway, I think we revealed something there.
You definitely revealed something there. You think all white men are called Roger Moore.
Some of my best friends are white, actually. And if you go far, far back enough, some of my ancestors are white.
Yes. You tell him.
So, listen, it's been a sort of summer of nonsense on any number of levels. But Parliament's back in session. There's a massive Labour majority. In terms of positive things, as we record on Wednesday, Rachel Reeves has signalled that she will change the government's borrowing rules to allow more investment, but whilst not raising taxes. How are you reacting to that news, Nadia?
Presumably it's something to be celebrated, this idea that she's moving away from those stringent rules about borrowing because it actually means there's going to be able to be some money to be invested into the country.
Yeah, this is absolutely a positive sign. We can't be so strictly wedded to a set of fiscal rules that the government can't make decisions to improve people's lives. It's something that governments have to do, borrow to invest. That makes economic sense.
I think the Conservatives sold us this myth over the last 10, 15 years that government spending was like a household budget and you don't spend what you don't have. But actually, governments have to borrow to invest in our public services. And that not just improves people's lives, most importantly, but it also, if you're talking about economic growth, it grows the economy too.
Is your hope now, presumably, that this idea of no new tax rises, the manifesto commitment, some of the language during the campaign was, I think it's fair to say, like deliberately vague around what the phrase no new tax rises would mean. Presumably, given your interest in a wealth tax, that's something you're going to be actively pushing the government towards.
Absolutely. I mean, we all understand that the new Labour government has inherited a huge economic mess from the Tories and that's resulted in big spending pressures on the new government. But we have to be clear that further cuts will not help fix our broken society. We need more public spending, not less. And actually austerity is not an inevitability. The government does have other choices.
So we have a lot of wealth in this country, but the problem is it's concentrated in the hands of the few. So we've got super rich individuals hoarding extreme amounts of money and assets. I was really shocked when I looked up the statistic that we have 165 billionaires in the UK. And I find it difficult to even comprehend that level of wealth. I think most of us do.
But if you spend a thousand pounds every day, guess how long it would take you to spend a billion pounds?
I'll be dead. Will I be dead?
Oh, long dead. And your grandchildren will be dead and their grandchildren.
Wow.
Okay, wow. And there's 2,740 years it would take you to spend a billion pounds if you spent a thousand pounds every day. So that's just an illustration of what obscene wealth we're talking about. And if the government introduced even very moderate wealth taxes, like, for example, a tax of 2% at a threshold of £10 million a year.
So that would mean you can keep everything that you have up to £10 million. I say you, I obviously don't literally mean you or me or any of us.
I can assure you Nadia, if I'm spending £1,000 a day, I'm dead in a week. Trust me on that.
So if that was a 2% tax on wealth above £10 million, that would only impact about 20,000 of the richest people in the UK. But it would raise an estimated £22 billion a year. Think of what that money could be spent on. It could fund public services, fund building a mass programme of council house building, fund the just transition to net zero, anti-poverty measures.
Also, if you equalise capital gains tax and income tax, which I know is something that you've spoken about before on the podcast. It's not a radical demand. Nigel Lawson, when he was Tory Chancellor, supported this measure. that could raise up to £15 million a year. It's a no-brainer.
I mean, listening to you now, Nadia, it sounds like there's hopeful things, low-hanging fruit that can be won, things can be changed. That sounds great because I'll be honest, sitting here outside of the party, we're coming up to 100 days of this new government. It feels like the notes are quite doomy, a bit sort of expect the worst, things aren't going to get better.
Is that how it feels inside the camp?
I've got to say that the mood is pretty subdued. I think we were all riding on a high after the election, but that honeymoon period hasn't lasted very long. The polling's looking bad. What I'm concerned about is that we were elected on this promise of change, and I'm very worried about what will happen if we don't deliver on that.
We've got the far right, and we saw them mobilising and organising across the country.
over the summer they're waiting in the winds so we have to get this right there is too much at stake if if we fail to deliver we've got to show people how a Labour government can improve people's lives and we've got to say very clearly that the problem for your fallen living standards is not migrants it's not people of colour it's not Muslims it's not refugees It's not trans people.
It's a Tory government, exploitative bosses and landlords. And we are going to take measures to tackle those things and improve people's lives.
You mentioned the far-right riots there, and there were many different things that happened to cause this hellish month of intimidation on the streets. But one thing that was part of it was disinformation on social media. Now, you are one of the most popular politicians on social media. I can imagine that is extremely challenging.
Do you think this reflects where politics should be, that we should have politicians... engaging with social media properly in order to curb the more malignant forces that we see coming through.
Yeah, I think that's a really big question and there are lots of things at play here. I think we need more democracy in the media so that people aren't just hearing from a media that is controlled and owned by a couple of billionaires. That's the diversity that you get in a lot of the right-wing media is that they're owned by different billionaires. Not even that many different billionaires.
Are they all called John?
Some of them are called Rupert.
That's the other one.
Roger, Robert and Rupert. And they say all our names sound the same.
You use TikTok very effectively to communicate around political issues. Do you think that's the future of political campaigning? Or has the summer shown us that it can actually be quite dangerous? You know, I would personally argue that some of Nigel Farage's interventions via social media exacerbated an already pretty horrific situation.
I mean, reform are massive on TikTok. Genuinely massive. It's quite chilling. Yeah. Is it the new frontier?
I absolutely agree with what you said about Farage's interventions. And I think that the popularity of the far right on TikTok, including among young people and especially young men and boys, is extremely worrying, especially when you've got a kind of fertile ground for radicalisation, with people being more isolated, with people's living standards being inadequate.
And that's not because people are more likely to be racist or misogynistic as is the case because that's also some of the far right radicalisation like with Andrew Tate it's not because working class people are more likely to be racist because of their living standards like racism has always come from the top of British society
But far-right groups are exploiting the very real problems of poverty and state and corporate neglect. And they're convincing people that the perpetrator is someone else. And then, as you say, they're bolstered by right-wing politicians and parts of the media who also scapegoat people.
And they do that to deflect responsibility, to distract from their own failings, and crucially to divide people so that they can carry on doing that. so they can carry on making the same political choices that have screwed people over in the first place.
I'm really glad to hear you say that because it's been a big bugbear of mine is this idea that the working class are more racist. That really winds me up. You know, even if you just, just by the crudest measure of like mixed families, you tend to see them more in working class communities. So working class communities are more diverse.
I find it, I think you're absolutely right that like it can, sometimes we can't solve these issues because we wrap it all up in snooty class politics and it's really unfair and it doesn't solve anything and doesn't make anything better. Yeah.
Definitely. And I think that when people are sharing memes saying, oh, these people have no teeth and no GCSEs, I think it's really harmful. And I don't say that from a kind of liberal perspective of not wanting to hurt people's feelings. But it misdiagnoses the problem as being coming from working class communities. That's not to say that racism doesn't exist in working class communities.
Of course it does. But it's always come from the top of British society. And it's always been in the interest of the ruling class to cement it. So yeah, it misdiagnoses the problem. And then if we're not diagnosing the problem properly, how do we solve it?
And how do we build a coalition of people who have the same interests, the same worries of putting food on the table, making their rent, paying their mortgage, paying the bills, if we're dividing people further? Yeah.
Before we let you go, Nadia, I just sort of on a personal level just want to ask you, you know, coming in in 2019, being in opposition for all this time, in government now, are you enjoying yourself?
I'm really bad at lying. It's really obvious in my voice. I wasn't prepared for the question, so I didn't even have time to come up with a, oh yeah, no, I'm having a laugh. No, I'm not particularly enjoying myself. But I do think that there's hope in the new government and there is space for us to collectively put pressure on the government to to make changes that would improve all of our lives.
So alongside some of the good things that the government is doing, like the Renters' Rights Bill, which would massively redress the imbalance in power between landlords and tenants, the New Deal for Working People, which would be the biggest shift in power from bosses towards workers. The rest of the hope is in our collective power and action.
Well, that's a beautiful place to leave it. Thank you so much, Nadia. I'm sorry you're not having a good time, but listen, work is never fun and you're doing the work. So thank you for that.
We don't dream of work.
Thank you for joining us on Podsafe UK.
Thanks, Nadia.
Thank you so much for having me.
And now to close off the show on some lighter topics, and it doesn't get much lighter than the Tory leadership race. Tom Tugendhat was knocked out of the race on Tuesday. Hello, this is Future Nish here. Now, not to give too much away about how we record the show, but we have actually recorded three different versions of who made the final two in the Conservative leadership contest.
With the result having been announced, I just had to record this briefly because it's simply too funny. So James Cleverley, who was positioned as the moderate candidate and was the clear favourite to make the final two, based on Tuesday night's media analysis, was knocked out of the Conservative leadership contest in an absolutely sensational result.
To borrow a phrase from Twitter about 10 years ago, Conservative MPs woke up this morning and chose violence. So the final two is now going to be Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick. Two different bits of the batshittest wing of the Conservative Party. So on Tuesday night after the elimination of Tom Tugendhat, Cleverley was on 39 votes.
Now, it was widely assumed that he would get the bulk of Tugendhat's votes and so would sail through to the final two, leaving us in what we thought was going to be a direct contest between Badenoch and Jenrig. but he went backwards. So Cleverley ended up with 37 votes behind Badenoch and Jenrick, who had 42 and 41 votes, respectively. This has caused an absolute shitshow of a shockwave.
Bloomberg's Alex Wiccan has suggested that Cleverley's team may have lent Robert Jenrick votes in an attempt to keep Kemi Badenoch off the ballot, but may have lent them too many. It's... And I was not the only person who was shocked. The Guardian's Pippa Greer said that there were audible gasps in the room at the result and suggested that James Cleverley was 18 points ahead yesterday.
And she said that she had spoken to Tory MPs who were voting for their preferred second candidate of the final two, assuming that Cleverley was safe. All of this adds up to the idea that those of us who already had a very low opinion of this iteration of the Conservative Party are finding ourselves completely validated. These people are even stupider than we had assumed.
So it's possible that James Cleverley, in an attempt to keep Kevin Bacon off the final ballot, lent Robert Jenrick so many votes that he has kept himself off the final ballot. it's absolutely unfathomable. And especially at the end of a difficult couple of weeks for the Labour Party, Keir Starmer can't drop a break.
It's unbelievable how fortunate he is as a prime minister and as a leader of the Labour Party that every time he looks like he's fucked up, the Conservative Party sees it as a challenge and says, well, if you think you've made a mess, we're going to absolutely make somehow even bigger a mess.
Earlier in the show, we actually spoke to journalist Ian Dunn about what a more centrist candidate like Cleverley might mean for Starmer. We're going to play it here instead, because I still think it's an interesting conversation and one that's worth hearing. What do you think a James Cleverley-led Conservative Party does to the way that Starmer's government presents itself?
Does it present a problem for Starmer? in a way that potentially Jenrick or Badenoch wouldn't because they would, it's easy for Starmer to go, look at these two. They're absolutely batshit. They're a continuation of sort of trust, Johnsonism, hard right politics. It does cleverly present more of a political problem for Starmer.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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,
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.
So, look, it looks like there's going to be a huge party at 10 Downing Street tonight. Speaking of former residents of that address, Boris Johnson has been out and about embarrassing himself whilst promoting his new, and we must simply assume, absolute bag of shit book. Here he is speaking to LBC's Nick Ferrari.
And then we'll go straight back to the studio and hop back into the rest of the recording.
The whole thing looked a bit like a crack den, to be totally honest. And it needed to be refurbished. For £200,000, Mr Johnson?
I don't recognise that. That's the total bill?
No, it wasn't. It wasn't as much as that. By the way, it wasn't gold wallpaper. It was total rubbish. It didn't cost... It cost a total of £2,260. Well, I can't remember what it cost, but anyway, it wasn't some... Did you like it? Look, anyway, I paid... I'm not a great expert on wallpaper. I paid for it. I paid for it. You're very... I paid for it. Right. I paid for it.
Wow, wow, wow. The person before him to live in that place, presumably the one who left it as a crack den, was Theresa May. I mean... I just don't buy it.
I just... I'm not... I'm not completely convinced Boris Johnson knows what a crack den looks like. I'm not sure that... Boris Johnson, I just think once again, what we've seen is him showing the grasp of detail that he showed all throughout the coronavirus pandemic. It's that sharper mind that was managing the country.
It will never stop being a source of profound national shame that we allowed that man to be our prime minister.
You didn't feel comforted by him saying, I paid for it, but I don't know how much I paid.
I mean...
I think that that man is... That is fiscal responsibility, no, Nish? That's what we want in this country. Oh, my God.
I think he's one of the dumbest fucks we've ever allowed to be anywhere near public office. We should rightly be shamed. We should rightly be shamed in the court of, you know, international opinion of us as a nation. It is... Anyway. And now he's written a stupid fucking book, which I imagine is a pile of shit, but I won't be buying it.
I will be doing what I often do with those books, which is if I see them in a bookshop, putting them under a shelf so people can't find it.
I saw a picture of Theresa May in her flat. It looked absolutely lovely when she was in 10 Downing Street. So this was before Johnson took over. And I had this moment of like, oh, my God, she had some of the same coffee tables as me.
Oh, God.
I know. How chilling is that? I got mine secondhand, to be fair. It's from Habitat.
Did you get them secondhand from Theresa May? Yes.
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