462. Starmer Hits Rock Bottom: Will He Break His Manifesto to Survive?

Speaker 1 Thanks for listening to The Restis Politics.

Speaker 1 Sign up to The Restis Politics Plus to enjoy ad-free listening, receive a weekly newsletter, join our members' chat room and gain early access to live show tickets. Just go to the restispolitics.com.

Speaker 1 That's the restispolitics.com.

Speaker 1 It seems to me there's a real risk for Labour here on the back of this by-election.

Speaker 2 Labour's vote absolutely collapsed. Kia Stama, the Prime Minister, now finds himself with net popularity ratings of minus 51%.

Speaker 1 He may not be the greatest Prime Minister who's ever walked the earth, but the collapse of his ratings is unprecedented and totally disproportionate.

Speaker 2 We ended up with something that now looks like a five-party system and a two-party system.

Speaker 1 The government needs to understand you cannot take the left of you for granted.

Speaker 2 They have to be big, they have to break the manifesto and they have to have a positive story.

Speaker 1 This episode is powered by Fuse Energy. Now more and more drivers are moving to electric as the economic and environmental arguments get much harder to ignore.

Speaker 2 And the real benefit of an electric car comes when you can charge affordably at home.

Speaker 2 Saves time, saves money, difference between a late-night queue on the motorway and stepping outside in the morning to a car that's already full.

Speaker 1 And Fuse makes that shift very, very simple. It's already the fastest growing energy provider in the UK.

Speaker 1 They go further, installing affordable smart EV chargers and linking them directly to their smart EV tariff.

Speaker 2 Which means the charger in your driveway is synced to the cheapest hours of the day, so every charge costs less. Think of it as having an economist in the garage, but one who finally earns their keep.

Speaker 1 Fuse is not just supplying power, they're setting you up properly, charger installed, tariff aligned, everything in place.

Speaker 2 Switch to Fuse today. Make driving electric cheaper.
Find out more at fuseenergy.com slash politics.

Speaker 3 This podcast is brought to you by Carvana. Carvana makes car selling fast and easy from start to finish.
Enter your license plate or VIN and get a real offer in seconds, down to the penny.

Speaker 3 If you accept, Carvana will come pick pick up your car from your driveway, or you can drop it off at one of our car vending machines. Either way, you get paid instantly.

Speaker 3 It's fast, transparent, and 100% online. Car selling that saves your time.
That's Carvana.

Speaker 3 Carvana. Pickup fees may apply.

Speaker 4 This episode is brought to you by Spotify Portal for Backstage.

Speaker 3 But you're wondering, what's Portal?

Speaker 4 Well, it's an internal developer portal built to improve developer experience and boost productivity. All software components are centralized.
Documentation is automated and easy to maintain.

Speaker 4 New projects and components? Just a few clicks. With your best practices already built in.
Think less friction, more innovation. Ready to double your productivity?

Speaker 4 Try Spotify portal at backstage.spotify.com.

Speaker 2 Welcome to the Rest of this Politics with me, Rory Stewart, and me, Alistair Campbell.

Speaker 1 And Rory, we had a lot of overseas policy stuff in recent weeks and months.

Speaker 1 Let's really try to stick to British politics for the first half of the main episode and in particular the travails of the Labour Party and the Labour government.

Speaker 1 Second half, as you know, I was in Poland over the weekend and we did an interview with the Deputy Prime Minister, but it was a really, really fascinating few days.

Speaker 1 So let's talk about Poland and Russia and Ukraine. And if we've got time, we'll squeeze in a bit of a new and very interesting Irish president.
So where do you want want to start with Labour?

Speaker 2 Let's start just to bring international listeners into the story. Quick, quick reminder.

Speaker 2 So there was an election 2024, and it was the most incredible election that's ever happened in British politics.

Speaker 2 These two main parties, Labour and Conservative, that historically sometimes got 90% of the vote, ended up with their lowest vote share since the Second World War.

Speaker 2 Labour got this very big majority on a very, very low vote share.

Speaker 2 And for the first time, these other parties performed brilliantly. The Lib Dems outperformed, the Greens outperformed, Reform outperformed on the percentage of the vote.

Speaker 2 And we ended up with something that now looks much more like a five-party system than a two-party system.

Speaker 2 And Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, now finds himself with net popularity ratings in the latest UGAF poll of minus 51%,

Speaker 2 which means that over 70% of the British public view him unfavourably, and only 20% of the British public view him favourably.

Speaker 2 And this then took us to the thing that we discussed last week, which was a by-election in what was once one of the safest Labour seats in Britain, in Wales, real traditional, proper Welsh Labour seat, where Reform and Plaid Cymru were leading in the polls.

Speaker 2 The result was that Plaid Cymru won, but Reform did well and Labour's vote absolutely collapsed. Over to you.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and Plaid won by 11.4%.

Speaker 1 And that

Speaker 1 majority was bigger than the entire Labour vote. So it it was an absolute collapse, very high turnout for a Senate, that's the Welsh Parliament, by-election.

Speaker 1 Even the national elections have never passed 50% and this one was above that. The thing is, and look, I do think it's

Speaker 1 potentially seminal.

Speaker 1 I've been saying for some time that, you know, none of the main parties in Britain have a divine right to exist.

Speaker 1 We talk about the Conservative Party as this party that's dominated British government and British politics for well over a century. Labour, other strong party.

Speaker 1 But part of me keeps thinking about France, where the main parties have effectively gone and new parties have had to emerge, or the extremes have come in.

Speaker 1 And West Streeting, the Health Secretary, was referring to this as the Hartlepool moment.

Speaker 1 This is a previous by-election when Kierstama was leader of the opposition, where he actually came close to quitting because Labour did so badly in a by-election there.

Speaker 1 So it may have to lead, I think, to some sort of change.

Speaker 1 You see, I think what's been happening

Speaker 1 through the last few years is that elections, it seems to me, and campaigns are being fought according to what somebody is not.

Speaker 1 So, Labour won the election, frankly, by not being the Tories. Kierstama became leader in a way and then strengthened his leadership by being against Jeremy Corbyn, by not being Jeremy Corbyn.

Speaker 1 Both of the main parties have sort of defined themselves overly, in my view, as not revisiting Brexit.

Speaker 1 So it's all this kind of negative stuff.

Speaker 1 And it seems to me there's a real risk for Labour here on the back of this by-election, which is that they think that, okay, tactical voting came in, because there was a lot of tactical voting in Wales.

Speaker 1 People who did not want Farage and did not want reform, they voted tactically and they thought Plyde is the one that looks like most likely to win. We'll vote for them.

Speaker 1 There's a real risk that that leads Labour to think it says against reform and we can organise forces so there's lots and lots of tactical voting. They've got to have a positive, powerful, strong,

Speaker 1 passionate, big policy agenda that they start to deliver through the first term and then they put to the country for the second term. And I think that the time of sort of not being something is over.

Speaker 2 Part of this, and there's a great article by Chris Clark that you shared with me, which I thought did this very, very well.

Speaker 2 But he begins with the big story, which I suppose is the story around populism. And what is this populist moment, whether you're talking about Trump or Europe or Britain?

Speaker 2 And he defines it as populists being willing to offend people, take negative publicity, preach to the converted, have hostages to fortune.

Speaker 2 And he says that mainstream politicians absolutely hate this new political environment. It makes them freeze.

Speaker 2 Partly because, as parties of government, they can't really afford, they feel, to alienate people, court negative publicity. So he gives examples.

Speaker 2 You know, you can't, as an incumbent government, set about deliberately alienating business. You can't set about, you know, making these huge promises you can't deliver.

Speaker 2 And the result is that they get into a defensive crouch.

Speaker 2 And the defensive crouch, broadly speaking, is the one that we've seen Starmer take from the beginning, which Chris Clark says, getting in behind what you were saying for the election, is a kind of exaggerated version of the Ming Vas strategy.

Speaker 2 Your Ming Vas strategy was, you know, be very cautious before the election to get across the election, but he's pointed out they've kept behaving since the election as though they've got a Ming Vas, and they think that they're going to be able to get by by saying, we're professional, we're grown up, we do delivery, we're grown up,

Speaker 2 and that this just isn't enough. in an age of charismatic populist politicians, whether actually it's Nigel Farage or in fact Zach Polanski who were about to interview the leader of the Green Party.

Speaker 1 And also, of course, Trump and now Millais, who has had this spectacular success in the midterms in Argentina, they show that on the populist side, they believe they can carry on being populist and doing all these things and offending people and taking difficult positions and so forth.

Speaker 1 Just before we go on, I mean, I'm glad you liked the piece by Chris Clark. It was actually his dad who sent it to me, Charles Clark, the former cabinet minister.

Speaker 1 And Chris, who I've known literally since he was a very small child. He is a researcher, he's a writer, but he's done hundreds of focus groups for and on the Labour Party.

Speaker 1 So he kind of knows what he's talking about with Labour and public opinion. But I don't know if you were struck by that graph, Rory.

Speaker 1 I'll just hold it up and we'll put it, we'll put this all in the new in the newsletter for people as well.

Speaker 1 This is a graph that averages out the satisfaction, dissatisfaction ratings of all the party leaders and combines them.

Speaker 1 So it points out that, for example, when John Major was unpopular, Tony Blair was popular. So the average was kept floating, you know, along a sort of a fairly straight line.

Speaker 1 And what you've seen, and I think the break in this is possibly MPs' expenses, and I think it might be a bit of Brexit as well. But basically, the line is fairly static.

Speaker 1 Tony Blair kind of outperforms it for most of the time that he's in there. But since then, it's just steadily gone down and down and down and down and down.

Speaker 1 Which basically says, because I find the thing with Keir Starmer,

Speaker 1 he may not be the greatest Prime Minister who's ever walked the earth, but Chris points out that the collapse of his ratings is what he calls unprecedented and totally disproportionate. And it is.

Speaker 1 And so there's something deeper going on that is anti-politics.

Speaker 2 I think a lot of this is social media.

Speaker 2 But if we just dig into those figures for a second, I thought it was a great graph.

Speaker 2 But Thatcher, when she was unpopular, when she came in, was at about minus two net popularity, got up to plus eight in 1984 and when she got to minus 15 was the moment she left yeah major plus 12 and leaves on about minus 10.

Speaker 2 blair gets up to plus 22 leaves on about minus 8 cameron leaves on about minus 20 rishi about the same

Speaker 2 starma goes from minus 25 down to as i say today minus 52.

Speaker 2 yeah and i absolutely agree with you i got a bit of pushback actually recently from some very very senior figures who've known all these prime ministers when I was, I'm afraid, doing a slightly cheap jibe at Starma kind of lacking charisma, lacking drive.

Speaker 2 And one of them said to me, Rory,

Speaker 2 don't be unfair, this guy is a really decent guy. He's highly professional.
He's highly serious and said to me, you know, be careful what you wish for.

Speaker 2 It's all very well, you sitting there being cynical and grumbly. Let me assure you, almost all the other candidates are going to be much, much worse for the country than Kierstama.

Speaker 1 Well, you say that the word serious, there's a big profile

Speaker 1 in the spirit of the Times. I don't think you've seen today's New York Times, there's a big profile of Nigel Farage.

Speaker 1 And the headline is something like, is this deeply unserious man seriously going to be the next Prime Minister of the United Kingdom? And the thing about Keir that I find really interesting,

Speaker 1 I think partly at my instigation, because I did that Radio 3 programme, Private Passions, which is like sort of classical music, Desert Island Discs.

Speaker 1 I did it a while back, and talking to Michael Berkeley, the interviewer, I said, you know, Keir Starmer's really into classical music and plays lots of different instruments and so forth.

Speaker 1 You should try to get him on. Anyway, they got him on and it was on at the weekend.
And people should listen to it because the thing about it is you feel like Keir is just being himself.

Speaker 1 And I think a lot of what people feel when they see Keir Starmer in public is they're not sure that he is being himself because he does have that slightly stilted even yesterday doing this huge deal with Turkey on typhoons, a massive deal.

Speaker 1 And yet, you know, you can imagine Donald Trump projecting that, saying, this is one of the biggest deals we've ever done. And I love, you know, me and Erner when they're.

Speaker 1 He'd do it in a kind of Trumpian way. Kiers sort of stands in front of the camera and he says, this is good for the economy and it's good for jobs.
And this is going to be better.

Speaker 1 And he immediately goes into a way that he doesn't really speak like when he's being...

Speaker 1 himself. And you're right that politicians freeze.

Speaker 1 But what I liked about Chris Clarke's piece, and I think it was originally a substack, but we'll put it in in the newsletter what I liked about it was that he was being he was trying to come up with ideas for improvement and I've got to say let's just go through the four areas that he chose because the first one communications I agree with them all number one admit what we don't know or can't do and the example he gives which you and I said at the time when they did the u-turn on the winter fuel payment they kind of tried to pretend that that was what they planned all along instead of which far better to say you know we balls this up shouldn't have been our first big fight but we're going to put it right, okay?

Speaker 1 The next one, I like this, show your workings.

Speaker 1 And he says, for example, Rachel Reeves, instead of sort of being out on the defensive saying this, that, and the other, do really interesting video explainers. What is the fiscal rule?

Speaker 1 What are these fiscal rules? What will actually happen if I break them? Third point was about authenticity of MPs and ministers not talking like robots.

Speaker 1 Number four, stop blaming the mess we inherited. I'm a bit 50-50 on that one.
Number five, this is really interesting. End the search for a killer attack on reform.

Speaker 1 The only way to beat them is by building up sufficient clarity and momentum, back to my point about the positive agenda, that they can be brushed aside as armchair critics.

Speaker 1 And I think that's powerful. Minimize growth in the messaging.
Acknowledge as often as possible that Brexit failed and could never have worked. I totally agree with that.

Speaker 1 I've been saying that for months. Make fairness the governing principle.
And I like this one: Retire the term working people.

Speaker 1 You know, constructive ideas in there.

Speaker 2 Really lovely.

Speaker 2 A couple of things.

Speaker 2 One is that, and I'd love to get into this a little bit with you, because of course he's trying to say that we've got to move off a particular version of political communication, which you've been blamed for.

Speaker 2 I mean, a sort of version of this was what Cameron did and Linton Crosby, the Australian strategist, tried as drivers to do, which was all about lines to take.

Speaker 2 I mean, my most painful examples of this were people like Pretty Patel and Liz Truss, who would just go out on television and repeat again and again and again lines like, the long-term economic plan is working.

Speaker 2 And regardless of what the question was. I mean, I think there's one clip where I think Pretty Patel does that sort of 15 times or something.
So the journalist is kind of weeping.

Speaker 2 And Linton Crosby is saying, ah, this is terrific. It's only when it's actually making you physically sick that you know that the message is really getting through.

Speaker 2 So there was this sort of idea.

Speaker 2 And there's another thing that he refers to in this, and I'm now on the more of the sort of mechanics of this, is he's very interested in your friend Peter Hyman's piece, which says the grid doesn't work anymore.

Speaker 2 So that was quite an interesting substack again, which we can share. And of course the grid, very much associated with you, was the idea that you would decide what the big story of the week is.

Speaker 2 And this week would be about our new investment in cutting waiting lists. And next week would be about starts for children in schools, etc.

Speaker 2 And Hyman's saying, no, no, we need to go away from a grid to more of a kind of playlist agenda where each department knows what its big themes are, but is given the freedom to return to it week in, week out, because you can no longer rely on what you had, which was a relatively hierarchical media environment.

Speaker 2 You were still operating in a world in which many, many people read the newspaper, many people watched the evening news, social media hadn't really got off the ground, and therefore you could, to some extent, land the big story every week.

Speaker 2 Now we've we've gone from a world in which I think in 10 years

Speaker 2 the figure is something like we've gone from 11% of people not accessing any conventional media to nearly 33% of people not touching it ever in their lives.

Speaker 2 Anyway, just on those two things, this movement away from the sort of lines to take

Speaker 2 and a movement away from the grid. And what do you think about how you'd articulate that?

Speaker 1 Yeah, one of the things I've been saying for years is I think that a lot of modern politics is trapped, because we were deemed to be successful I think a lot of politics is trapped in that old way of thinking.

Speaker 1 I've been arguing for you know on the similar lines to Peter Hyman for Jonks about we need to change and adapt to this new media landscape.

Speaker 1 So for you know on the grid the grid by the way I completely agree with him you you need to know far important now of course you have to have a diary, you have to know what's coming when, but you need to know as an individual minister or as a member of the government or as a backbench MP what am I meant to be communicating in the most general sense about this particular policy this particular argument and then you have to do it in your own way I actually think that one of the things that's turning people right off politics is this robotic lines to take thing a line to take for me was an argument it wasn't I think I told you before about I once

Speaker 1 castigated a minister because I I phoned her up after she'd done an interview because she literally said the same thing in every answer. And she said, But you told us to say the same thing.

Speaker 1 So, no, communicate the same message. It's not say the same, literally, say the same words.
So, that sense of authenticity.

Speaker 1 And by the way, I was with a guy yesterday who works in kind of strategy and advertising and messaging and that sort of thing. And he was really interesting because

Speaker 1 he listens to a lot of people. He actually was talking about an interview I'd heard with Steve Reid, the housing guy, yesterday.

Speaker 1 And he said, I've got to say, when you listen to them, he mentioned Steve Reid, West Streeting, Peter Kyle, Douglas Alexander, Lisa Nandi.

Speaker 1 He went through a whole load of them. He said, they're actually, they're good to listen to.
I enjoy listening to them. And it was interesting.

Speaker 1 I think he was picking on the ones who don't sound quite so they're delivering the line. So I completely agree with that change.
I also think this is something you alluded to earlier.

Speaker 1 When Chris Clark's paper goes on to electoral strategy, the first point he makes is be willing to challenge public opinion. And again, this is something that Trump does well.

Speaker 2 I'm always kind of obsessed with this, me being very pretentious, that Aristotle has this great distinction between a communication morality and the kind of policy content, which he calls pathos, ethos, logos.

Speaker 2 The interesting thing is that what he's talking about, I think, and what you're talking about in communications, is also partly about ethics.

Speaker 2 Because if you're admitting your screw-ups, admitting what you don't know, explaining the context, it's actually about honesty.

Speaker 2 There's actually something that is appealing to the public about it because it's the sense that you're taking responsibility and

Speaker 2 you're being a more honest person. Now, one of the challenges, though, and I think, you know, I'm perhaps more extreme than you in getting irritated by this.

Speaker 2 Listeners will listen to our interview with Michael Gove. And people, you know, often say, you know, I got irritated with Rachel Reeves and Bridget Phillips.

Speaker 2 And I got irritated with Michael Gove for the same reason. There's nothing I hate more than when you're talking to someone and they seem to be doing a sort of party political broadcast at you.

Speaker 2 And that's what I felt, you know, Gove suddenly slotted into talking on his talking points on Israel. I thought, okay, here we go again.
We're not really...

Speaker 1 I see, I don't agree with you there.

Speaker 1 I actually think you were being quite harsh there, because

Speaker 1 I think it's more that you were irritated by what his views are. I'm irritated by his views.
And I don't agree with him, but I thought it was fascinating.

Speaker 1 Because you were irritated by the fact that you said to him, Michael, but you've been saying this for the last 20 years and I was thinking well that's the point he really really believes this um well so I think that's a bad example I think maybe Rachel Reeves I maybe it's maybe it's a bad example but essentially I think I'm not a million miles away from a lot of the public by getting very very wound up

Speaker 2 by the sense that the politician isn't really engaging with the nub of the conversation, but is trying to land a slightly tired line in a slightly defensive or aggressive fashion. I agree with you.

Speaker 2 I think Lee Sanandi does it well. I think World Streeting does it well and the others you've mentioned.

Speaker 2 But I think there is a challenge for some of the Labour front bench in learning how to do this in a really natural, engaged way.

Speaker 2 And some of them, you often say to me that they're much better in private than they are in public. I definitely feel that with Kirstam, right?

Speaker 2 Every time I'm lucky enough to catch him one-on-one, I'm sort of suddenly really struck by how confident he can be, how funny he can be, how relaxed he seems despite the kind of catastrophe surrounding him.

Speaker 2 And that somehow isn't projected.

Speaker 2 Let's use this though, maybe, to do one more move on Chris Clarke's piece before we get on to Bridget Phillipson against Lucy Pell, which was the deputy leadership race.

Speaker 2 So he moves on from the comms to policy. And it's here that I get a little bit more anxious.

Speaker 2 So he and this is where maybe you and I can disagree agreeably, because maybe this is my Toriness coming in. He basically says that Labor needs to tax more.

Speaker 2 I agree, but I think the tax they need to do is the big, broad-based traditional taxes. They need to put up income tax or national insurance or corporation tax.
I think Dan Needle would agree with me.

Speaker 2 I think most of the economists would agree that the stupid thing is that they ruled out the most broad-based, reliable revenue sources.

Speaker 2 And I think it would be a real mistake to start going for endless little gimmicky windfall taxes, wealth taxes, when they could be hitting the basic taxes.

Speaker 2 Tell me about your instincts on wealth taxes against going back to income tax.

Speaker 1 This isn't like a manifesto, it's like a fairly long, thoughtful paper.

Speaker 1 He's not a one-man think tank, but I think he's got some really interesting ideas, not least, by the way,

Speaker 1 Labour should move towards an alternative vote system. That would be a big, bold thing.

Speaker 2 Strong agreement on that.

Speaker 1 I know you agree on that. So he basically, he says on tax,

Speaker 1 the temptation for the exchequer may be to opt for small stealth taxes to get it across the line.

Speaker 1 In the current context, this will create pockets of uproar, as happened with winter fuel, for minimal revenue.

Speaker 1 The exchequer should instead focus on large wealth taxes on land, property, top layer of inheritance, capital gains, etc., which raise significant money beyond that needed for the black hole.

Speaker 1 Now, he then talks about you then have to hypothecate and make it absolutely clear all that's money going.

Speaker 1 Now, I don't know if I agree on that totally, but I'll tell you what I do agree, is where he says the idea that tax rises or welfare cuts are happening to satisfy an accounting shortfall is as uninspiring as it gets.

Speaker 1 And he also says, don't obsess over the manifesto. And what I think he means by that is don't worry in the current populist context about breaking promises.
So I think Labour will

Speaker 1 break a promise on one of the three big taxes.

Speaker 1 But his point, the bigger point for me there is instead of just saying we're doing this because the Tories have left us a black hole, he's basically saying you've got to say, stop talking about growth, he's saying, focus on cost of living.

Speaker 1 We want to build more houses because there's a housing crisis. We want to get the economy growing because the cost of living crisis is real for millions of people.
In other words, root it in that.

Speaker 1 So I'm not sure I agree with every point, but I agree with the way that he's framing it.

Speaker 2 It is, however, going to be a really big division, and I think it will determine whether the Labour Party stays in the centre or migrates to the left and will have a huge impact on Labour's ability to win over centrist

Speaker 2 former Tory voters, the decision that they make on this. If they do what he's saying, saying, which is which wait wait

Speaker 2 this is the big distinction, right? If he does I agree with you on on the fact they have to be big, they have to break the manifesto and they have to have a positive story.

Speaker 2 But the type of tax they do really matters. If we go with his stuff, which is land tax, wealth tax, you are absolutely signaling this is a party going after the rich.
And you won't raise much money.

Speaker 2 I mean, that's another problem. He hasn't looked at the maths on this.
You will massively alienate wealth and you won't raise much money.

Speaker 2 If you go for the broader base taxes, income tax, corporation tax, national insurance, and if you do something really bold, which needs to be done, which is bringing national insurance and income tax together, you could do some really interesting things.

Speaker 2 Then I think you can raise the revenue you need for the big stuff. You can hypothecate it.

Speaker 2 You can say this is for defense, this is for housing, this is for whatever, and do it without actually alienating people who are pro-business.

Speaker 1 Look, and there's no doubt. I mean, I've done a few business events in the last few weeks, and you know, there's a lot of kind of there's a grungy mood.
There's no doubt about that.

Speaker 1 I'll tell you the other thing that this may surprise you to hear that I've sort of moved to the view on the whole non-dom thing.

Speaker 1 Even though I don't buy the idea that everybody sort of, you know, has fled to Dubai and fled to Milan, some people have.

Speaker 1 And what I think they should think about is doing a kind of flat tax deal, because that's what the Italians have done.

Speaker 1 They're basically saying, look, you come here, you pay 300,000 euros a year and you can keep the rest, as it were, because we want you to be here.

Speaker 1 I think Labour could get away with saying to them, like, you know, half a million and that's all that you're paying. And you can, so they can do something, you know, quite clever on that.

Speaker 2 They need courage to do that, because that's, that's, I mean, I couldn't agree with you more, but they've got to take a deep breath before this budget. And you're absolutely right.

Speaker 2 You can say, we're getting each one of these people to give us half a million pounds to stay.

Speaker 2 And describe what all that money will do and what it'll, and, but it will still involve a bit of a fight with the left of the Labour Party and this is where the

Speaker 1 the

Speaker 2 the question has to be is Kira and Rachel Reeves are they going to be able to do two things number one be willing to break their manifesto commitments which they have to do and number two do it in a way that reassures

Speaker 2 more pro-market, pro-business people. Second thing, he talks about industrial strategy.
And here again, I'd be interested in your view.

Speaker 2 He says there must be flagship industrial strategies for each of the following four types of town. Each could be assigned an industry of the future, like software design or green power.

Speaker 2 Now, I agree with him on industrial policy, but it's completely the wrong way to do industrial policy.

Speaker 2 It shouldn't be some genius in Whitehall assigning, you know, you're now doing green power, you're now doing software. It's got to be about devolution.

Speaker 2 And that's what we found with the Andy Burnham interview that they're doing so well.

Speaker 2 I'm actually what I felt in Cumbria, that actually the problem is that London doesn't instinctively understand how how these economies work.

Speaker 2 And it's much more likely to get a good industrial strategy if you give the budget and the power down to the local area and let them drive it, rather than some wise person say, here are four industries, you get this one.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I liked his stuff about, you know, we need to develop a vision for the future of high streets. I actually do believe he's right to say that we need to continue to be progressive on clean energy.

Speaker 1 And that is another big political fight. Engage in that big political fight.
Stop being defensive. To be fair to Ed Miliband, I don't think he is defensive about it.

Speaker 1 And the other thing you said earlier about you've got to be careful not to alienate the centrists, the market people, the business community, et cetera.

Speaker 1 But I've been saying for so long now, and this I think is what's borne out by what happened in Kefili, by the general sense of where labor are right now, is that yes, there is a real issue with immigration, and we'll come on to talk about that.

Speaker 1 Yes, small boats drive people crazy. Yes, the asylum hotels drive people crazy, and you've got to fix those.

Speaker 1 But what you cannot do is allow your entire government to give the sense about that that is what you're about, because they are losing way more support to the left of centre than they are to the right of centre.

Speaker 1 And that is what has helped Clyde win that. by-election.
And the thing is, if you're doing something, say, big on tax, this budget is going to be so important.

Speaker 1 If it just feels like, as Chris Clark says, that they're making making a few small changes here and small changes there to fill this black hole, that is not a vision for the country.

Speaker 1 And what the country needs right now, they've got the political fight in place, and Kirstam has said that at the party conference, reform is now the main political enemy, and that is the fight that goes on politically.

Speaker 1 Economically, I think it's got to be related to that. Big, bold, really big stuff for the future.

Speaker 1 I love this thing about, you know, the institutions, the big new labor institutions, GB Energy, you know, he put them all the sort of you know some of these mental health hubs.

Speaker 1 They come developing these things. And then he said, you know, wrap around mental health care, social care, stuff that is going to cost money.

Speaker 1 If you're going to do big tax raising stuff in a budget, you've got to say, and this is what we're going to do with it. And it's got to it's got to really kind of fire people up.

Speaker 2 Well, I'm I think it's so good that he's written this because he's in just the right territory and asking just the right questions.

Speaker 2 If I had one more anxiety, I think Labour's going to have to be realistic about its green policy. I think there may need to be a bit more pragmatism.

Speaker 2 I think that Ed Miliband may be leading them in a direction that's going too far, and they may need to get some compromises going there.

Speaker 2 Not give up on their belief in addressing climate, not give up on their push on renewable energy.

Speaker 2 But there's a lot of the way in which it's being done, which really risks alienating people and driving up cost of living. So I think think they've got to look at that.

Speaker 1 But also, Rui, we are recording this with virtually every news bulletin around the world reporting breathlessly on this Hurricane Melissa that is about to take out part of Jamaica. What's happened?

Speaker 1 The progressives have lost their confidence on some of these big debates, and one of them is on climate. I think we've got to win it.

Speaker 1 And what Chris Clark's basically saying on these four areas on communication, he says the Ming Vas

Speaker 1 has got to be dropped because we now got to go for a Watson and approach, levelling with voters.

Speaker 1 On the electoral strategy, it's got to be about a positive sense of what you stand for rather than just how bad the others are.

Speaker 1 On policy, it's putting down, he says, putting down the vase means going beyond current choices. And on migration policy,

Speaker 1 again, I thought there was something very clever he said and sensible he said there.

Speaker 1 Somebody who is angered about small boats and asylum hotels is not going to be impressed because you say that you're going to cut down on the number of family members coming with university professors.

Speaker 1 The numbers game is making no difference. Net migration has fallen.
The debate has not changed.

Speaker 1 You've got to fix the things that are problems, but then don't ruin the future of the economy by saying, oh, we're going to cut here and cut there and cut there.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Okay.
I mean, you slightly provoke me there into something that's going to be a longer conversation, which is on the climate stuff. I think there is a problem here.

Speaker 2 And the problem is that the British voter knows that in the end, addressing global climate change is about global issues, that Britain on its own is a pretty small contributor.

Speaker 2 And if the cost of living goes up and the cost of our energy goes up very significantly, for us chasing reducing our emissions when other people in the world isn't, that's going to be not just a political problem.

Speaker 2 It's going to be a very practical problem for people. And they're going to say, what the hell do you think you're doing?

Speaker 1 Right. We're going to be talking about Putin in the second half.
And you also know that these are not just domestic issues, but they're international issues that have a domestic effect.

Speaker 1 Anyway, I think it's a uh I'm glad you enjoyed that that paper. I did as well and I think we need more of that kind of thinking as well.

Speaker 2 The big thing that I love most, I I really love the high street stuff, Regenerate High Street, really loved the focus on adult social care.

Speaker 2 But of course, to get it done, it's going to have to be cross-party, not just a Labours' view.

Speaker 2 But the thing I liked most of all was his absolute insistence that Labour should be proud of remaining part of the ECHR and should not remotely be tempted to leave the European Convention on Human Rights.

Speaker 1 Now, Lucy Powell, new deputy leader of the Labour Party, very low turnout. Fewer than one in five actually voted.

Speaker 1 I actually thought, if I'm being absolutely frank, I thought she was going to win by more because I think that just as the public has been wanting to give a bit of a kicking to the Labour leadership and the establishment, I thought the party was as well.

Speaker 1 Just on the turnout, by the way, you've got to understand the way the Labour Party works.

Speaker 1 A lot of people get a vote through association membership of organisations may not even know that they had a vote.

Speaker 1 And also, usually a deputy leadership contest will take place alongside a leadership contest where the voting is likely to be higher.

Speaker 1 But again, I think it's just another sign that the government needs to understand you cannot take the left of you for granted.

Speaker 1 You've got to be just sort of, you know, you've got to be focused on governing well, campaigning well.

Speaker 1 But ultimately, I think what both of these things are saying, both the the Cafilli and the Lucy Powell thing they're basically saying we want more emotional connection we want more of a sense of what the national narrative what the national story is and I think that the Morgan McSweeney strategy for the for the election was very very effective it was all about you know where you're targeting the votes and so forth that's not going to work second time around you need this big bold positive agenda and you know and i said i thought at kiersthman's party conference speech you started to get the framing for it.

Speaker 1 But then, you know, I keep mentioning this thing about apprenticeships. I've still heard next to nothing about.
This was the big thing in the speech.

Speaker 1 This is the point about, you know, that's not a grid point.

Speaker 1 That's like,

Speaker 1 this is meant to be one of our big things announced in the leader's speech at the party conference. Why are we not hearing about it all the time?

Speaker 2 I think that was a great first half. We already got into some stuff there.
I think we'll take a break and then we'll come back. And I want to hear about Poland, where you've just been.

Speaker 2 So see you after the break.

Speaker 1 Great. See you then.

Speaker 2 This episode is brought to you by Revolute Business, the all-in-one account to manage your finances.

Speaker 1 Now politics has its share of bad deals, trade summits, late-night negotiations. Often somebody walks away with the short straw.

Speaker 2 And we've seen enough botched negotiations in Westminster to know what happens when numbers don't add up. Business is no different.
Nothing empties your pockets faster than hidden exchange rates.

Speaker 1 Revolute business changes though. Over 25 currencies exchange at the same interbank rates that banks use during market hours within Plan Allowance.

Speaker 1 With automatic orders and price alerts, the guesswork disappears.

Speaker 2 Breaking into new markets feels possible, not perilous.

Speaker 2 Whether you're paying salaries in Dublin or suppliers in Sydney, your money reaches over 150 global destinations fast without the fine print hangover.

Speaker 1 Business across borders kept simple.

Speaker 2 For all the entrepreneurs and business owners out there, if you're ready to simplify your business finances and exchange like an expert, now is the time to open a Revolut business account.

Speaker 2 Plus, you'll unlock a £200 welcome bonus or the equivalent in your local currency if you sign up and add money to your account by the end of 2025. Just use the link in the description.

Speaker 2 Fees and terms and conditions apply.

Speaker 1 This episode is brought to you by our old friend Nord VPN.

Speaker 2 November, the month of deals, discounts, digital danger. As you hunt for bargains, someone else might be hunting your data.
And NordVPN keeps your browsing serene.

Speaker 2 As prices fall and firewalls fail, your data stays secure.

Speaker 1 One tap and everything is encrypted.

Speaker 1 Whether you're using public Wi-Fi with a password from the coalition years like Clegg 2010 or a cafe whose cybersecurity amounts to an illegible word on a blackboard, Nord's threat protection probe blocks malicious links and scans downloads.

Speaker 2 And it's not just privacy. Nord keeps things honest.

Speaker 2 Airliners and retailers quietly change costs based on your location, but with NordVPN, your shopping in the real world is not one shaped by algorithms.

Speaker 1 And one account... protects up to 10 devices.
That's your phones, your laptops, even your smart TV and your family thrown in. Or install it on your router so the whole house is covered automatically.

Speaker 2 To get the best discount on your Nord VPN plan, head to NordVPN.com slash restispolitics. You'll also get four extra months free on the two-year plan plus a 30-day money-back guarantee.

Speaker 2 The links in the episode description.

Speaker 5 Black Friday savings are here at the Home Depot, which means it's time to add new cordless power to your collection.

Speaker 5 Right now when you buy a select battery kit from one of our top brands like Ryobi or Milwaukee, you'll get a select tool from that same brand for free.

Speaker 5 Click into one of our best deals of the season and stock up on tools for all your upcoming projects. Get Black Friday savings happening now at The Home Depot.
Limit one per transaction.

Speaker 5 Exclusion Supply Full Eligible Tool List in store and online.

Speaker 1 Welcome back to The Rest's Politics.

Speaker 2 Me, Alistair Campbell. And with me, Rory Stewart.

Speaker 1 Rory, we did a lot of

Speaker 1 references to things that we're going to put in the newsletter. So to those who don't get the newsletter, we should tell them you get it by going to therestispolitics.com.

Speaker 1 And that's where you also, if you're interested, can subscribe to be a member and listen to things like the series that we're almost through.

Speaker 1 I think we're up to part four on the series in Rupert Murdoch. You can also get early access to the part two of our interview with Michael Gove that you referenced in the earlier discussion, which is

Speaker 1 a fascinating list of what my friend Jim in the swimming pool said this morning:

Speaker 1 what a clever guy, what a tragic waste of talent.

Speaker 1 And then the final thing you can check out on the restispolitics.com is the very, very small numbers now. And we're almost sold out of all the venues, I think.

Speaker 1 But there are a few tickets left for our tour going to Manchester, Glasgow, Bournemouth, and London. Very briefly, Rory, before we get on to Poland, maybe just worth...

Speaker 1 clocking the new president of Ireland, Catherine Connolly.

Speaker 1 And I think this speaks to what we were speaking in the first half independent left-wing got the backing of sinn féin the labor party the left-leaning parties very kind of authentic form of communication running around playing basketball with kids very very very outspoken on gaza and what she calls the genocide in in gaza again reasonably low turnout it's a ceremonial position but it's an important one because you know the irish presidency can can shape something so but i think it's part of that.

Speaker 1 But listen, should we talk about Poland?

Speaker 2 Yeah, on Saturday, we were interviewing Radek Sikorski, the Polish deputy prime minister, foreign minister, and you were in Poland. And you were in Poland for a few days.
I was.

Speaker 2 And let me sort of begin with the sort of big thing that sort of interests me about Poland.

Speaker 2 So, if you go back to 1989 and you were trying to choose which countries in Central and Eastern Europe would start flirting with populism, you probably wouldn't have selected Poland because Poland, in many ways, is the real big success story of the post-89 period.

Speaker 2 After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Poland actually sorted out its economy surprisingly quickly. Currency stabilised, debt came down, growth took off.

Speaker 2 It went from being one of the poorest countries in Europe to rapidly on its path to becoming one of the wealthiest.

Speaker 2 And it did so with a pretty pro-Western Catholic population that was never very into communism or anything it represented.

Speaker 2 So I would have bet, if I was just sort of looking at it, that it wouldn't be Poland.

Speaker 2 It would be instead somewhere like Romania or somewhere like Bulgaria or Slovakia or even Croatia or Latvia that would have found themselves going down the populist route.

Speaker 2 Instead of which it was the great European success story, Poland, that in 2015 embarked with the Law and Justice Party on 10 years of populism and has just brought her president back in despite the victory of Donald Tusk on the less popular side.

Speaker 2 Over to you.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and of course that definitely complicates politics.

Speaker 1 And, you know, when we were talking to Radek Sikorsky, we were asking about, you know, how difficult this is, the fact that Donald Trump invited their opponent for the presidential election who eventually won and fairly narrowly.

Speaker 1 So, you know, did Trump kind of push the votes over? I don't know. It's hard to tell.
But it was a fascinating time to be there. I was speaking at the same conference as Sikorsky, and

Speaker 1 a man who was getting bigger crowds than the pair of us put together, George Cloody, who was rather randomly there as well. But what was two really interesting things?

Speaker 1 The first is that simultaneously, Donald Tusk was heading a party convention where they were changing the name of his party because their coalition had lost one member and they were bringing two new ones in.

Speaker 1 And he spoke in really stark terms about he talked about politics being a fight between good and evil, quoted the Pope in those terms, referred to Brexit as an example of where, you know, it's saying the Russian bots were involved, Russian money was involved, it was the Russians who were celebrating.

Speaker 1 So what we know, and this is what the Poles were saying, what Sikorsky was saying, what Tusk was saying, what everybody in Poland was saying to me, is that this disruption sabotage, they were talking, for example, about they are prepared any moment for their transport systems and health systems to be brought down.

Speaker 1 And they can do the same to us. And Tuskov's talking about these hypersonic missiles that can, you know, that can now kind of, you know, land in Britain.

Speaker 1 I don't want to kind of overstate it, but they are shocked by how

Speaker 1 underpowered this debate is in the UK.

Speaker 2 Well, I suppose we're violently agreeing, but the point that I'm making is that one of the tricks of Russian intelligence is the deliberate use of hybrid, ambiguous, deniable attacks.

Speaker 2 What the SVR is very, very clearly doing all the way back to the little green men who popped up in Crimea in 2014 and true of the way they do cyber attacks, which is to contract it to private companies to do it, is they want continually to leave everybody in an ambiguous world of guessing.

Speaker 1 No, and also I was talking to somebody in this world recently who said that, you know, they

Speaker 1 spend some of their time just sort of, you know, wandering around

Speaker 1 the lower end of our court system,

Speaker 1 you know, finding...

Speaker 1 a few thugs or crooks who will do things for them for which they'll get paid a bit of cash. And then they're utterly deniable.
So that now, so I

Speaker 1 the big point they were making, and Schikorsky said this in the interview, is they are now planning on a strategy that this war in Ukraine is going to go on for at least another two or three years.

Speaker 1 And they think Putin can be worn down during that time, that his economy can be targeted, etc.

Speaker 1 But at the same time, I think one of their worries is that the rest of the West, as it were, America, the Western Europe, just lose interest and lose the will.

Speaker 1 So they, I think, are deliberately trying to fire us up to say, hey, guys, you need to take this more seriously than you are.

Speaker 1 I think they think the government is taking it seriously, but they're not convinced that our public opinion is.

Speaker 1 So I think it was those two things: the political changes that he's having to make to adapt to this sort of struggle.

Speaker 1 And it will be interesting to see how things play out because the prime minister has a lot of power.

Speaker 1 The president has a lot of power to kind of make life difficult for the president, for the prime minister. And that's kind of what I think we've got to watch there.

Speaker 1 And the other thing, Rory, you talked about the success.

Speaker 1 It was just really interesting to be in a country that maybe because they do feel this, it felt very, because I was only there a few days, but it felt like a country quite at ease with itself.

Speaker 1 It feels a lot more modern than it did. The transport is good.
It's very, it was really clean. There was a sense of kind of energy about the place that I hadn't maybe expected.

Speaker 1 So, and when we said to Sikorsky, do you have any political trouble in telling people they're going to have to cut some things because you're putting 5%

Speaker 1 of your GDP into defence, he said, the trouble we would get is if we weren't doing that.

Speaker 2 There's still something, though, which is a paradox, which is that we were all very relieved when the Law and Justice Party, which was a conspiratorial fake news populist party that was intimidating the universities, taking over the media, stacking the courts with political appointees, was finally defeated by Donald Tusk in the elections, and it seemed like a really good moment for a move against populism.

Speaker 2 But then, as you've just pointed out, they're totally paralyzed now because actually the president in Poland is pretty powerful, and the populists have now got that presidency still.

Speaker 2 So, Tusk isn't really able to drive through these reforms.

Speaker 2 And part of this seems to be a very fundamental division between the west of the country and the east of the country, with the west of the country being more pro-Western, more anti-populist, and the east of the country, much more into these conspiracy theories, populism, authoritarianism, and a real sense for 50-50 balance.

Speaker 2 And there's something else that, you know, maybe a listener can help me understand.

Speaker 2 The west of the country, places like Pomerania, were, of course, before the Second World War, very much integrated into Germany.

Speaker 2 And in fact, the story at the end of the Second World War is that effectively Russia helped itself to a lot of what used to be eastern Poland, and Poland pushed further west and in the process did this basically ethnic cleansing.

Speaker 2 Five million Germans were pushed out of Poland, Ukrainians were pushed out of Poland.

Speaker 2 Earlier, of course, the very large Jewish community in Poland had been murdered through the Holocaust, and then many people emigrated.

Speaker 2 So that many of the people living in western Poland are relatively recent migrants who came from what are now Russian territories. And so it's a totally different.

Speaker 2 This base that Tusk and Sikorsky are relying on is a very interesting area of former multi-ethnic territories, now dominated often by Poles whose grandparents weren't originally in those areas.

Speaker 2 And I'd be interested in whether this question of what happens when millions of people move and settle a new land, how that affects your politics, and whether it's just a coincidence that those are people who are voting anti-populist.

Speaker 1 Yeah, the other thing was, you know, during the whole the build-up to Brexit, there were Polish builders and all that. We had so many Poles.

Speaker 1 I think we've still got about 800,000 Poles in Britain, but a lot of Poles have gone back. And

Speaker 1 several people, including Sikorsky, were very keen to make sure that I left the place knowing that Poland is on track to surpass the UK in terms of

Speaker 1 living standards.

Speaker 1 The other thing that's really interesting, and you know, we got this a little bit talking to people in Denmark, we got it in Cyprus, we got it in other places, the extent to which countries inside the European Union really, really miss the UK.

Speaker 1 And Tusk did an interview in the Sunday Times where he said that he still likes and respects David Cameron, but he confirmed something that I've long suspected.

Speaker 1 Basically, it was a very kind of insightful, revealing interview, but he basically said that he thought Brexit was one of the biggest mistakes in our shared history.

Speaker 1 But he said that Cameron told him not to worry, if it happens, we'll win it because we'll have the economy on our side. And in any event, I probably won't get a majority.

Speaker 1 I'll have to have another coalition with the Lib Dems and they'll block the referendum.

Speaker 1 And he said he couldn't understand how something as historic could be kind of weighed up in that somewhat cavalier fashion. But they were all saying, God, you know, we do miss the UK.

Speaker 2 It's becoming such a superpower, isn't it? Small reference if we're doing stuff for the newsletter. Some great writing, obviously, in Britain about Poland.

Speaker 2 Norman Davis, Adam Zamoyski, and my great favourite, Mark Mazova's Dark Continent, which is the history of Europe in the 20th century. But you're right, it's Poland we are looking to.

Speaker 2 Poland is the new Europe. Poland, of course, huge population, well over 30 million people, nearly 40.

Speaker 2 America's closest allies through all these administrations, massive defence spending, and a very different vision of Europe.

Speaker 2 And the question is, can Poland fill the gap, which sadly seems to exist because of the fractures and fragilities in France, where he doesn't seem to be able to muster a prime minister who stays in for more than a few weeks, Germany, which seems to be very fractured electrically, can Poland step up and provide the engine of Europe?

Speaker 2 Well, they're stepping up.

Speaker 1 They're definitely stepping up on the defence front. I mean I've got a briefing on some of the stuff that's going on close to the borders.

Speaker 1 I mean they're putting a lot of money into it, putting big infrastructure into it. And they're saying they have to because they've they feel this.

Speaker 1 I mean the drones one of them said to me, he said, look, the drones are just this kind of tip of the iceberg. That's just them testing and playing.

Speaker 1 And I think their plea, I think I suspect this is why Donald Tusk doesn't do much foreign media.

Speaker 1 I suspect this is why he did that interview in the Sunday Times, is he wanted British policy makers to see that they feel that yes the UK has been very very both under the Tories now under Labour very very supportive in relation to Ukraine but is the British population is the population in the West of Europe really across just how dangerous this situation is for Europe and my final thought I guess which relates to that is that in Britain we find it very difficult to imagine what it's like to to be conscious of your history and of course Poland very very aware of the fact that there have been very large periods of its history where it has been under domination from other countries.

Speaker 2 I mean, it literally didn't exist as a state from, I think, 1874 to 1918, 1939 to 45, and actually at the end of the 18th century as well. So it's not a sort of theoretical thing for them.

Speaker 2 It's not sort of beyond the realm of imagining that a state like Russia would want to help themselves to it because, of course, they've done it before.

Speaker 1 Shikorsky said that, you know, we have 500 years of history that tells us when the Russians threaten you, you listen.

Speaker 1 So there we go. Anyway, there we go.
He'll be out

Speaker 1 after part two of Michael Gove. That'll be the next interview on Leading.
So I'll see you tomorrow for QA, Rory. We're going to talk about America.

Speaker 1 And as Trump is off on one of his international tours, we're actually going to focus on some of the pretty crazy stuff happening more domestically. We're going to talk about Millet's win in Argentina.

Speaker 1 We're going to talk a bit about mental health. And we're going to review your book, Rory.

Speaker 2 Which is called?

Speaker 1 It's called, oh my God, Middleland.

Speaker 2 Middleland, there we are. Looking forward to it very much.
Maybe that'll bring a bit of the positive news that our listeners are always looking for. I try to make a more positive book this time.

Speaker 2 See you there. See you then.
Bye-bye.