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[00:00:00] The Why Curve, with Phil Dobbie and Roger Hearing.
[00:00:04] Pillars, missions, milestones, foundations.
[00:00:08] Keir Starmer has delivered plenty of corporate jargon, but not so far a lot of actual change.
[00:00:14] In the first six months of the Labour government, his ratings have dropped through the floor.
[00:00:18] By common consent, across the political spectrum, there's not been a great success.
[00:00:23] A budget that seemed to anger everyone, lengthening NHS waiting lists, soaring immigration numbers.
[00:00:29] Blaming the last 14 years of Tory rule for all of this is beginning to wear a bit thin.
[00:00:34] So how did it all go so wrong? And what can Labour do to get back on track?
[00:00:39] The Why Curve
[00:00:41] So I wonder whether we're giving him a hard time actually.
[00:00:44] I mean, he's had however many months he's been in power now, but it's not a quick job.
[00:00:50] And okay, he's not the most charismatic person.
[00:00:53] But they are doing some stuff, aren't they?
[00:00:56] Well they are, but I think you have to say that it's been,
[00:00:59] it's been underwhelming.
[00:01:00] It's just been, you know, maybe expectations are very high,
[00:01:03] because God knows the last Tory administrations were pretty hopeless in various ways.
[00:01:07] And people thought, oh, you know, competence come in.
[00:01:09] But it just feels as if maybe we over-expected.
[00:01:12] Maybe they're just not very good at governing.
[00:01:14] I mean, they haven't been in government any other way.
[00:01:15] But I mean, some of the things are, like fixing a housing problem,
[00:01:18] you're not going to stick houses up in six months, are you?
[00:01:20] If you're going to sort out the National Health Service, you're not going to get all of that sorted out,
[00:01:25] because it's such a, you know, the history is so long.
[00:01:29] I mean, it's...
[00:01:30] It doesn't even feel that it's on the way there, though.
[00:01:32] That's the problem.
[00:01:32] It feels like they've done...
[00:01:33] They've done not much more than treading water and annoyed lots of people.
[00:01:37] That's how it feels.
[00:01:38] So, how are they annoying people?
[00:01:39] What is it that they do?
[00:01:39] Well, the budget was the classic, wasn't it?
[00:01:41] Yeah.
[00:01:41] But also, you know, there was the one-child policy.
[00:01:43] There was the two-child-child policy with families and support.
[00:01:48] There was the business with the pensioners taking away the fuel, the energy support.
[00:01:53] I mean, lots of things, battles they probably did.
[00:01:56] They need to find some big deal.
[00:01:57] And they didn't argue the case very well with any of these, did they?
[00:01:59] No.
[00:01:59] So, for example, I never heard, except when we talked about it on our podcast,
[00:02:03] the whole reasoning behind the farming tax or the inheritance tax on farms, on large farms,
[00:02:10] was to stop people like Nigel Farage, allegedly, buying a farm so that they could avoid paying their inheritance tax
[00:02:18] based on because it's a great way to park money.
[00:02:20] They didn't explain that particularly well.
[00:02:22] The messaging was a big issue.
[00:02:24] And if we look back to the parallel, I suppose, with the Blair administration,
[00:02:28] messaging was very much front and centre of what they're doing.
[00:02:30] Yeah.
[00:02:30] But let's talk to someone who's looked at all this and assessed it and see what could come in 2025
[00:02:35] and whether it'll improve.
[00:02:36] Yeah.
[00:02:36] Rowan McWilliam, Professor of Modern British History at Anglia Ruskin University.
[00:02:40] He's also Director of the Labour History Research Unit, and he joins us now.
[00:02:43] So, Rowan, I wonder what your thoughts are on, I made the observation just before you came on,
[00:02:48] that, you know, have we got too much of an expectation?
[00:02:50] Is the press and the public as well giving Keir Starmer and his government a bit of a hard time
[00:02:55] when really it's a big ship to turn around and they haven't had very long to do it?
[00:02:59] Well, let's face it. It was never going to be plain sailing for a number of different reasons.
[00:03:04] The first being that you have a government which is made up of ministers, including the Prime Minister,
[00:03:09] who haven't actually served in government.
[00:03:11] Most government ministers have not actually known what it means to actually sit on the government benches.
[00:03:22] Labour's been out of power since 2010.
[00:03:25] And so some of this perhaps was inevitable adjusting to power.
[00:03:29] OK, so that's one problem.
[00:03:30] The other problem, of course, is that if you look globally and certainly in Europe,
[00:03:35] centrist governments are struggling.
[00:03:38] Emmanuel Macron's government is definitely struggling.
[00:03:41] Schultz's government is almost certainly going to get turfed out before too long.
[00:03:46] So in a sense, the problems that the Starmer government has run into are really part of a larger pattern.
[00:03:54] How do you do social democracy in the current climate?
[00:03:58] It is simply very difficult.
[00:04:00] But they've got a huge advantage there, Rowan, because they, you know, you talk about France,
[00:04:03] talk about Germany.
[00:04:04] Those are political problems in the sense that they don't have majorities.
[00:04:07] Keir Starmer's got a thumping majority.
[00:04:09] Yes, absolutely.
[00:04:10] I think one of the problems, of course, for Starmer is that you almost wouldn't know that.
[00:04:16] A lot of his approach within the run up to the election and indeed since has been predicated almost on trying to get a majority
[00:04:23] of what was thought to be of quite a small working majority.
[00:04:27] But he's now got this huge stonking majority.
[00:04:30] And one of the problems then is why is he not using it?
[00:04:34] Because if you have that kind of majority, you have to honour it.
[00:04:38] Even though I know the share of the popular vote wasn't huge.
[00:04:42] You have to honour that and you have to be ready with radical reforms because that's what people want.
[00:04:48] The fact that Starmer has been incredibly cautious all the way through,
[00:04:53] and certainly since getting into power, is one reason, I think, why he is having trouble now.
[00:05:01] His government seems to lack definition.
[00:05:03] I'm sure we'll talk about why that is the case, but he is not using the levers that are at his disposal.
[00:05:12] So he's looking for political consensus that he doesn't need to look for is what you're saying.
[00:05:16] So, yes, I think I think I think that's right. I think people are expecting bold moves from the government.
[00:05:23] And yet if you look at the recent relaunch of the government, I know we're not going to call it a relaunch, but it is.
[00:05:30] Let's face it. He's again, not really providing kind of bold initiatives which are going to seize the imagination.
[00:05:40] I think one huge problem is that it's not very clear what kind of country Starmer wants to create.
[00:05:49] He's never really said that. I'm not talking about some bold utopia, but what what would what kind of country is Starmer going to deliver after five years?
[00:06:02] What is that a problem of communication more than anything? Because picking up what you're saying about the relaunch a few weeks back, the everybody said that it was full of pillars and and, you know, head headlines and, you know, things corporate jargon, really.
[00:06:16] And he comes over as a kind of middle manager rather than someone with vision in every way.
[00:06:22] He looks like he looks like he talks like he acts like a middle manager, doesn't he?
[00:06:26] And yet when he was, you know, jockeying for for the job as leader of the opposition as head of the Labour Party, his own manifesto was much bolder.
[00:06:36] It had those sorts of things that just all of a sudden he seems to have dropped one by one as though he's upset about upsetting the the right wing of the Labour Party or he's he's worried about the press going against him.
[00:06:48] He does. He just doesn't want to be left wing, basically.
[00:06:50] Yeah. Well, of course, when he was attempting to become leader, of course, he was taking over from Jeremy Corbyn and he had to take a lot of those momentum supporters with him, which he did.
[00:07:00] I remember that very actually extremely effectively.
[00:07:03] Some of the some of those supporters now feel that he has betrayed them over the over what he was promising.
[00:07:09] I mean, essentially his shtick back in 2020 was that he would be a kind of more responsible version of Jeremy Corbyn.
[00:07:20] But nobody would say that now. I mean, you know, he has moved the party in very much.
[00:07:26] Well, certainly towards the centre. Therefore, he's obviously moved it towards the right.
[00:07:30] But but but that's but what that what is lacking at the moment is OK, his vision.
[00:07:37] But also, can I just say this?
[00:07:40] But I've been very struck over the last four or five years with the lack of any kind of real theorising of what starmerism is meant to be about.
[00:07:51] Now, you would expect me as an academic to say this. I'm sure that's true.
[00:07:54] But if you think about it, Labour in the 1960s and 1970s was very much founded on Tony Crossland's The Future of Socialism published in 1956.
[00:08:03] Or if you think about Tony Blair in 1997, you think about the input of figures like Anthony Giddens writing about the third way.
[00:08:11] It was a real attempt to rethink what politics was all about for the modern age.
[00:08:16] Now, who is the Tony Crossland of starmerism? You know, there isn't one as far as I can say.
[00:08:23] Well, I find it amusing that you even using the word starmerism, which sort of like because he stands for nothing.
[00:08:28] How can you have a word for it?
[00:08:29] Yes, that's right. Well, what is starmerism?
[00:08:31] It's interesting that no one is talking in those terms.
[00:08:35] And so that so that I think is the problem.
[00:08:37] Now, whilst some I'm sure some listeners will think, well, do we really care about intellectuals we've never heard of?
[00:08:44] I understand that point.
[00:08:45] But I do think that a certain amount of theorising about where you are, where you need to go is actually important in terms of providing the kind of goalposts of politics of what you can actually do.
[00:08:59] There needs to be a real sense of what is politics about in the 2020s.
[00:09:04] And again, I don't see that.
[00:09:07] Is it the managerialism issue, which was talked about at the end of the Blair period, that that's what it was?
[00:09:13] You just you just run the ship more efficiently.
[00:09:15] Well, of course, you know, that was, again, the pitch of Labour in July.
[00:09:20] And I think it was a very good pitch in many ways, because what I think people wanted to hear, it was saying we're not ideologues, but we just know how to run things.
[00:09:33] And that was always the pitch of Starmer.
[00:09:35] Of course, what gave him authority, of course, was that he had previously had a major job as director of public prosecutions.
[00:09:42] So in a way, one of the problems with Jeremy Corbyn was you never believed he could actually run things simply because he never had done.
[00:09:48] He'd always been an activist, essentially.
[00:09:51] And so it's always a problem making him a credible prime minister.
[00:09:54] So Starmer was effectively selected, even by the electors of Hoban, to be prime minister because he had that kind of background.
[00:10:02] Whether it's exactly the right background for being a prime minister, however, is another matter.
[00:10:08] Being a great lawyer and seeing things in that way is a bit of a problem.
[00:10:12] But he certainly has the appeal of a manager.
[00:10:15] There's nothing also about Starmer's background.
[00:10:19] If you look at his political career, or his career even before becoming leader of the Labour Party, or indeed an MP,
[00:10:28] there's very little to suggest that he has been terribly ideological, except for a student flirtation with a rather obscure form of Marxism called Pabloism,
[00:10:41] which I don't think even he understood, and I certainly don't.
[00:10:45] But apart from that, Starmer has been essentially a rather consensual sort of...
[00:10:50] Well, I can hear people listening to this, Rowan, saying, look, we've done charisma.
[00:10:54] We had Boris Johnson. Look where that got us.
[00:10:56] We've had a bit of madcap ideology, Liz Truss, for about 30 seconds.
[00:11:02] We have had a dull managerialist, I suppose, in Rishi Sunak,
[00:11:06] but maybe more competent managerialism.
[00:11:10] Rishi Sunak was sort of like junior management, wasn't it?
[00:11:12] Yeah, that's true.
[00:11:13] Trying rather too hard to get into a more senior role, and that showed a little bit.
[00:11:17] But, I mean, he has moved some mountains, hasn't he?
[00:11:20] In that, you know, when Jeremy Corbyn talked about private...
[00:11:24] Nationalising, sorry, nationalising the railways,
[00:11:27] everyone threw their arms in the air and said, well, how can you do that?
[00:11:30] Who's going to pay for it?
[00:11:31] I mean, that's just ridiculous.
[00:11:32] We're going to go back to British Rail, and that was never very good.
[00:11:35] There was enormous opposition to that, and yet Keir Starmer's just pushed ahead with it.
[00:11:39] I mean, our local rail company here switches over to Great British Railways...
[00:11:44] The first one, SWR, yeah.
[00:11:45] Yeah, in May next year.
[00:11:46] So he's pushed ahead with that, and that was a Corbynite principle.
[00:11:51] Yeah, although, of course, and even Corbyn would have done this, actually.
[00:11:55] This is nationalisation by stealth.
[00:11:57] It's not a big bang nationalisation.
[00:12:00] It's not like, you know, the 1945 Labour government.
[00:12:02] This is a, quite rightly, you know, being able to nationalise railway services as contracts expire,
[00:12:09] and that's probably a good way to do it.
[00:12:12] The middle management way of doing it.
[00:12:13] Yeah.
[00:12:14] But also, it is worth saying, when, OK, we're kind of, you know, attacking Starmer.
[00:12:22] Actually, I suspect what he would say is, yeah, but we have moved ahead with nationalisation,
[00:12:28] despite, actually, the resignation of Louise Hay.
[00:12:32] And we have moved ahead with trying to settle public sector pay.
[00:12:37] And so, you know, we have moved ahead with that.
[00:12:39] And also, on the budget, and I'm sure we'll end up talking a lot about Rachel Rees' budget,
[00:12:44] but, of course, it has redirected the Treasury towards investing in education and in health.
[00:12:53] Those kind of standard Labour things.
[00:12:55] And so, you know, there is a different story to be told.
[00:12:58] In fact, one of the issues is, given what's happened, why have we got collapsing business confidence,
[00:13:04] which apparently we do?
[00:13:05] And, you know, and why do we have, why have the Starmer's polls been plummeting,
[00:13:14] which they also have?
[00:13:16] And also, why are we seeing a surge in support for reform?
[00:13:21] I will tell you, gentlemen, the other day I was in the Hoxton Hall at a concert,
[00:13:27] and John Coleshaw, the Impressionist, was up doing his impressions.
[00:13:31] And he did Starmer.
[00:13:34] But it was interesting.
[00:13:35] When he just came up with the name Starmer,
[00:13:39] there was this cry of derision that went through the roof.
[00:13:42] OK, you know, and I thought, well, that is where we are.
[00:13:46] OK, and what is remarkable is that most governments usually expect to have a kind of honeymoon period.
[00:13:52] In fact, it would be reasonable to expect that the government would be in a honeymoon period now,
[00:13:57] you know, a few months after, well, still a few months after they were elected.
[00:14:01] But it's clear that that honeymoon lasted for, I don't know, four weeks.
[00:14:06] So why do you think that is?
[00:14:07] Is that because he's not achieved what he set out to do?
[00:14:10] And in which case, you know, as an opening remark, isn't it a bit early for that?
[00:14:15] Or is it just this, you know, complete lack of charisma that we've been talking about?
[00:14:18] Well, of course, there is still this.
[00:14:20] There are a number of things.
[00:14:21] I mean, of course, it's unreasonable to expect him to have achieved what he set out to do.
[00:14:26] I mean, after Starmer has always, I think rightly said,
[00:14:29] that what Labour is interested in is a 10-year programme to revive the public sector and the public realm.
[00:14:37] OK, that's not something you can deliver.
[00:14:41] But there is a kind of confusion, really, about the government's direction of the travel.
[00:14:48] To some extent, I'm afraid this does come from a sort of centrist approach.
[00:14:55] And this is why centrist governments are in trouble.
[00:14:57] Once upon a time, everyone wanted to be a centrist.
[00:15:00] You know, there were the years of consensus politics in the 1950s and 1960s.
[00:15:07] But skillism, wasn't it?
[00:15:09] That's what they called it.
[00:15:09] But skillism.
[00:15:10] Everybody was a centrist of some sort.
[00:15:12] You might be right or centre or left or centre, but that was how it is.
[00:15:14] But the trouble is now that it's become much more difficult to do that because centrist government is essentially based upon trade-offs.
[00:15:25] And you have to trade off to one group and trade off to another.
[00:15:30] And people have become increasingly impatient with that.
[00:15:34] Because, of course, if you do something that helps one group of people, you might hurt another group of people.
[00:15:39] I mean, we're seeing that with Rachel Reeves and the farmers.
[00:15:42] You know, they're trying to make money, you know, get government revenue in.
[00:15:49] But then, in fact, this came clear in your very interesting podcast on the farmers, that you're hitting people who are asset rich but cash poor.
[00:16:03] Now, that's always going to be a problem.
[00:16:05] It's also, by the way, one of the reasons why it's going to be very difficult to do something the government needs to do, which is to reform the council tax.
[00:16:13] Again, you'll end up hitting the kind of people that, you know, in theory are very rich but actually are very poor.
[00:16:19] And then they could have a very tough time.
[00:16:22] But, Rowan, isn't this partly to do with the message?
[00:16:24] Because what you're talking about, I remember the incoming Blair administration, the late 90s,
[00:16:28] they had people like Peter Mandelson, they had people like Alistair Campbell, much abused since.
[00:16:34] But they sold this.
[00:16:35] It was sold in a way.
[00:16:37] You kind of, you thought, well, this is an advance.
[00:16:39] Even when it hurt, people kind of knew what it was going to do.
[00:16:42] But is it also a problem of incrementalism rather than making bold moves?
[00:16:47] So if you say, well, we're going to tweak the edges of council tax rather than saying there's got to be a better way of doing this,
[00:16:54] which may be entirely different to what we're doing now.
[00:16:56] Maybe it's a land tax.
[00:16:57] Maybe we abolish council tax as it currently stands.
[00:16:59] We have a more land-based tax.
[00:17:04] But announce it in a way that people will understand and get behind.
[00:17:07] That's the point.
[00:17:08] I mean, Rowan, this is not a communication government.
[00:17:11] For a Labour government, it should be easy to explain stuff if it makes things fairer.
[00:17:16] If they say this is going to be a fairer system, it's a very different approach, but it's a bold approach.
[00:17:21] But that word bold doesn't seem to be used a great deal, does it?
[00:17:25] It's not being used.
[00:17:26] And what's worrying on some things like the council tax is not clear whether the kind of thinking that needs to be done in opposition about some issues like that has been done.
[00:17:36] And if it has been done, it's certainly not been clear to me.
[00:17:39] And I do follow these things.
[00:17:41] So and on the question of, you know, well, where's the Peter Mandelson figure?
[00:17:46] Where's the Alastair Campbell figure?
[00:17:47] Well, that's well taken because it does seem like they don't have a figure who's really able to go out and sell what the government is doing or who can mastermind the strategy behind the scenes, which is what a lot of the time.
[00:18:02] Well, certainly what Alastair Campbell and Peter Mandelson and people like that were doing.
[00:18:06] Well, I'm sure Alastair Campbell would come back if they asked him.
[00:18:08] Well, indeed, I've seen Alastair Campbell talking about this and giving advice on his podcast about this.
[00:18:13] But but they don't have any.
[00:18:15] I mean, as far as we can tell, the person who's really running things behind the scenes is Morgan Mac Sweeney.
[00:18:21] And and he's and we know, even though he very deliberately, you know, doesn't give interviews very much or, you know, we barely know what he looks like.
[00:18:31] There are a few photographs of him in circulation.
[00:18:34] You know, but he very deliberately keeps behind the scenes.
[00:18:37] We do know what sort of what he's about, because, of course, he masterminded the election strategy and that everything I think in behind the scenes is really about, first of all, delivery, but also particularly about trying to focus on the red wall.
[00:18:50] Yeah. And the so-called sort of left behind voters in the north of England.
[00:18:55] This is why, for example, Labour is not doing the thing that I think a lot of its borders wanted to do, which is to rethink its relationship with Europe and particularly think about joining the single market and the customs union.
[00:19:10] Now, I think the reason why they're not going to do that, well, you know, maybe they ought to, maybe they shouldn't.
[00:19:15] But the reason why they're not going to do that is because it would antagonise voters in the red wall who also at the moment are being very drawn towards the reform UK.
[00:19:26] But they don't need to care about that because they've got such a massive majority.
[00:19:30] That's like treating this. That's like dealing with the symptom rather than looking at the cause, isn't it?
[00:19:35] It's a sticking plaster approach.
[00:19:36] Yeah. But it was even true of New Labour that almost the moment they got into power in 1997, they were already thinking about what are we going to say at the next election?
[00:19:45] I think you do see that with the Starmer government as well.
[00:19:49] Yes, I know. I quite agree.
[00:19:52] The kind of prudence is we'll not see them through.
[00:19:55] I mean, they do need to be able to show that they can actually deliver.
[00:20:02] And at the moment, I think, and I got the feeling this is how Starmer thinks, actually bad polling doesn't matter.
[00:20:09] You know, when you're four and a half years away from an election, bad polling doesn't particularly matter.
[00:20:15] It's also, by the way, not unusual for governments to get in and then become rather unpopular.
[00:20:20] You know, there are historical patterns of that.
[00:20:21] So to some extent, you know, what's happening with Starmer is not unusual.
[00:20:26] Nobody loves you when you're in government.
[00:20:28] There's a bit of truth in that.
[00:20:30] There is, but to govern is to choose and they can choose.
[00:20:34] Yeah.
[00:20:34] But they don't seem to be choosing.
[00:20:36] I mean, you talk about Morgan McSweeney running things behind the scenes.
[00:20:40] Mostly they seem to be choosing to fight each other.
[00:20:42] This whole Sue Gray debacle rather than something on the horizon to look to.
[00:20:46] It's part of the problem that the English or the British public.
[00:20:49] Oops. Sorry, people in Scotland and Wales and Northern Ireland as well.
[00:20:53] They voted as well.
[00:20:53] Yeah.
[00:20:54] Or anybody else anywhere in the world listening.
[00:20:56] But it's part of the problem that we just are taken as not being smart enough.
[00:21:01] So because every issue, the answer isn't straightforward, is it?
[00:21:04] So let's look at housing, for example.
[00:21:06] The issue isn't necessarily about how many houses there are in the country, because actually, if you look at it on an international scale, we've got heaps.
[00:21:14] So average household size actually here is smaller than most other G7 countries.
[00:21:18] So we've got fewer people per house, more houses relative to the population.
[00:21:22] And if you look at the average house price, it's not too bad here as an average.
[00:21:28] Obviously, London's the problem.
[00:21:29] It's $285,000 a year, $310,000.
[00:21:32] This is in US dollars.
[00:21:33] $310,000 in France, $325,000 in Germany.
[00:21:36] Over $400,000 in the United States.
[00:21:40] So getting on to, you know, actually, I think it's about $490,000.
[00:21:43] So almost, you know, not quite twice, but getting towards twice the average house price that we've got here.
[00:21:49] But the issue is that it's highly concentrated here.
[00:21:52] So the solution to that is not to say, oh, we need to build more houses in the southeast.
[00:21:55] Perhaps it is that we need to spread the commerce more around the country.
[00:22:00] But that's a longer term thing.
[00:22:01] It's a longer term thing, but you're not going to fix having a shortage of houses in a year, are you?
[00:22:06] So that's a long term policy.
[00:22:07] But we're not hearing those articulated and we're not, you know, and the reasoning behind it is never a straightforward conversation.
[00:22:12] It can't be answered in that 30-second soundbite that you hear on TV.
[00:22:16] Quite so.
[00:22:16] But there is another dimension to housing, which is that it's a way, if you deliver more houses,
[00:22:22] it's a way of dealing with the concerns about mass immigration that we have.
[00:22:27] In fact, a lot of the concerns about immigration actually boil down to housing.
[00:22:32] People who are here claiming they can't get houses and then resenting people from elsewhere in the world coming here and apparently being given housing.
[00:22:45] So I think, you know, housing does underpin a lot of social policy as well.
[00:22:49] And again, if Labour wants to seal for reform, it's going to have to be not just deliver some housing, but be seen to do these things.
[00:22:58] But also be seen to sort out migration.
[00:23:00] But those reform voters are just going to say, oh, you're building more houses so you can have more migrants is going to be their argument.
[00:23:06] So you're never going to beat the argument against reform until they actually see that life is getting better.
[00:23:12] You've got to deliver results for them rather than, again, the sticking plaster approach.
[00:23:15] Well, that's right.
[00:23:16] And of course, here, the omens, I'm afraid, are not good, I think, if we're going to be looking forward.
[00:23:24] If we're now a month away from a Trump government and less than that, but yeah.
[00:23:32] And possibly almost certainly a protectionist government.
[00:23:37] And that's going to hit Britain.
[00:23:40] If Trump goes ahead with his threatened 60% tariff on China, there'll be a global trade war.
[00:23:49] It won't be just about US versus China.
[00:23:51] This is going to have ramifications across the globe.
[00:23:54] Well, he said 20%, hasn't he, against everywhere else.
[00:23:57] So Europe will be included in that.
[00:23:59] So we will be pulled into this.
[00:24:01] So, of course, I think all governments around the world are now in braced position, waiting for the consequences of this.
[00:24:08] We will have to see.
[00:24:09] But it does mean that just looking ahead, business confidence is already low.
[00:24:14] We've got the possibility of a trade war.
[00:24:18] So therefore, trying to deliver higher disposable income for each household, which is what Starmer is promising to do,
[00:24:25] that's just got a lot more difficult than a few weeks ago.
[00:24:30] And then it was hard.
[00:24:31] And maybe if we look back, comparing with the Blair era, what they hit, as has often been said, was an economic upswing.
[00:24:41] It wasn't their creation.
[00:24:42] If it was creation or anything, it was the major government.
[00:24:45] And they were lucky.
[00:24:46] They were able to spend things and build hospitals.
[00:24:48] And Starmer is not in that position.
[00:24:50] But he's also, I mean, that whole thing about, you know, more pair household.
[00:24:53] I mean, if he was smart, if he said, well, OK, it's a left wing government.
[00:24:56] People voted.
[00:24:57] The people who voted for me are the people who aren't doing particularly well.
[00:25:00] So we're not going to make everyone well off.
[00:25:02] We're going to make those people who are struggling better off.
[00:25:05] Those who are well off.
[00:25:05] Well, they can look after themselves.
[00:25:07] They'll get by.
[00:25:07] Squeeze them.
[00:25:08] Although that was true of Blair, actually.
[00:25:10] Of course, where he was kind of successful was trying to actually come up with initiatives on reducing poverty during his administration.
[00:25:20] Now, of course, absolute poverty was reduced, although other people were doing better.
[00:25:25] That meant that inequality went up.
[00:25:27] But on the other hand, poverty went down.
[00:25:29] So he was affected by that.
[00:25:31] Can I just go back to that point you were making about Blair?
[00:25:34] Because I think this is why it's unreasonable to compare Starmer with Tony Blair at the end of the day.
[00:25:40] Because as you just said, Blair had the advantage of a government, of an economy that was growing.
[00:25:47] And a lot of that was down to John Major and Norman Lamont, actually.
[00:25:53] Not a name we've often mentioned on this podcast, I have to say.
[00:25:56] Not often mentioned, but actually they took the decisions, which actually did allow the government, the economy to expand.
[00:26:05] But then, of course, Blair stuck to Tory spending plans for the first two years of his government.
[00:26:13] But the economy was growing.
[00:26:15] Because the economy was growing, that was meant that there was more government revenue coming in.
[00:26:21] That meant that even with that straitjacket, Gordon Brown was able to put more money into public services.
[00:26:29] Because Starmer and Rachel Reeves do not have that asset that they can use.
[00:26:38] So we are in a very different historical moment.
[00:26:42] And I think, again, one of the problems at the moment is to say, well, what is this historical moment?
[00:26:47] It's not just about why is the Starmer doing things so badly.
[00:26:52] It is why has it proved so difficult to govern Britain, as it has done?
[00:26:58] But we're not unique in that, either, are we at this point in time.
[00:27:00] It's very difficult to govern France or Germany.
[00:27:04] Yes, I mean, the points you were making earlier about centre-left, centre-governments generally are having a rough time.
[00:27:10] And this is partly because, of course, we're still, first of all, living with the consequences of the 2008 crash.
[00:27:17] You know, wage growth in Britain is the lowest it's been since the Napoleonic Wars.
[00:27:22] We're also living with the consequences of Brexit.
[00:27:24] We're living with the consequences of Covid.
[00:27:26] And all of those things have proved to be a perfect storm.
[00:27:30] Now, other countries, of course, have to deal with the consequence of the crash.
[00:27:35] And with Covid, of course, Britain's the outlier in that it's got Brexit as well.
[00:27:39] Looking forward, we've kind of been a lot about what has gone wrong.
[00:27:43] Yeah.
[00:27:43] Well, we haven't, I mean, if you were sitting down now, Rowan, with Keir Starmer and, you know, staying awake, I think might be half the issue.
[00:27:51] What would you say that he should look at?
[00:27:54] What would be the changes that would make a difference?
[00:27:57] Either in terms of policy or in terms of how he communicates.
[00:28:00] In 2025, what should he do?
[00:28:02] Well, I think, you know, on communication, first of all, my view is, and just to use the language of the West Wing on television,
[00:28:11] let Starmer be Starmer.
[00:28:12] You know, he's never going to be a kind of Martin Luther King figure or John F. Kennedy figure with soaring rhetoric.
[00:28:21] Or a Tony Blair.
[00:28:22] Yeah, or Tony Blair.
[00:28:23] He's just never going to be able to do that.
[00:28:24] So, you know, that I think is just...
[00:28:29] It's like, I have a dream.
[00:28:31] I've forgotten what it was.
[00:28:33] Let him be himself and therefore have an authenticity in himself.
[00:28:36] A lot of people won't like it.
[00:28:37] They'll feel him boring, which is what people often say.
[00:28:40] But at least it's authentic.
[00:28:43] In terms of policy, I think he needs...
[00:28:47] The pitch of Labour needs to be that we are repairing the public realm.
[00:28:52] Okay?
[00:28:53] And that doesn't just mean welfare.
[00:28:57] Obviously, that's a part of it.
[00:28:58] The National Health Service education.
[00:29:01] Social care.
[00:29:02] Social care.
[00:29:03] And actually, on social care, it's disappointing.
[00:29:05] They have so little to say about one of the big issues of our time.
[00:29:09] But there's also got to be a sense that Labour is not just interested in welfare.
[00:29:15] That's how it's always caricatured.
[00:29:17] Well, Labour's got to be interested in production.
[00:29:19] You know, production of goods.
[00:29:21] You know, you know, they're done in different ways, you know, from what it used to be.
[00:29:27] But Labour needs to be a producerist party as well.
[00:29:31] I think one of the big, bold things that has been suggested is that...
[00:29:37] And I hear...
[00:29:38] Actually, the person who suggested this is Andy Street, the former Conservative mayor of Birmingham.
[00:29:46] Maybe there should be an assumption that there should be an equality of living standards across the country.
[00:29:53] That's where we want to get to.
[00:29:55] Now, you know, living standards are very much dependent on where you're born and where you live.
[00:30:03] Life opportunities.
[00:30:05] At the moment, we just heard that Blackpool has the lowest level of life expectancy in this country.
[00:30:12] And so it might be a reasonable thing for a Labour government to say, right, our mission is to actually just equalise that.
[00:30:20] Now, Boris Johnson had a go at that by talking about levelling up.
[00:30:23] But that was so ambiguous.
[00:30:26] And no one believed him.
[00:30:27] Deliberately so.
[00:30:29] But that could mean anything.
[00:30:31] But to actually say that it doesn't matter whether you live in Blackpool or you live in South London,
[00:30:37] that there should be some kind of rough equality of living standards and life opportunities.
[00:30:42] That's an aspiration.
[00:30:44] How do you...
[00:30:44] You know that?
[00:30:45] Well, then you develop policies, don't you?
[00:30:46] Which gets back a bit to the 80s and 70s when you used to have to...
[00:30:51] You know, there's a count and stick measure for setting up businesses or for industry.
[00:30:54] So if you had a larger than a certain size factory,
[00:30:59] then there were incentives for you to invest up north.
[00:31:02] There were disincentives, higher tax or whatever it was,
[00:31:05] for you to set that up in the south.
[00:31:07] So businesses move more out of the southeast through a current stick measure.
[00:31:11] Yeah, absolutely.
[00:31:12] Of course, there's also a problem in talking about that ambition that Starmer has stated,
[00:31:18] that he wanted the largest, the highest growth rate in the G7.
[00:31:23] It's got a way to go.
[00:31:24] But which has now been watered down anyway.
[00:31:29] We just don't want to be last now.
[00:31:30] Yeah, but one of the problems anyway is if you're talking about growth,
[00:31:33] talking about growth rate in the modern age has changed.
[00:31:37] It's not quite what it used to be.
[00:31:39] Once upon a time, growth rate meant how much stuff you're producing,
[00:31:45] manufacturing and that kind of thing.
[00:31:47] But if you're a modern economy, it's largely based on services.
[00:31:50] How do you measure that?
[00:31:51] That's a much more open question.
[00:31:54] So I think that's the problem.
[00:31:56] I think also the Starmer ambition about the highest growth rate was always very dubious anyway,
[00:32:02] because a lot of it would hang on how well the American economy does or the German economy.
[00:32:07] You can't control that.
[00:32:08] I mean, it's – but so actually, in fact, the more watered down version of this,
[00:32:17] a higher disposable income, higher GDP per capita is what Starmer is talking about at the moment.
[00:32:23] That at least is a bit more achievable.
[00:32:29] But, of course, it's still not going to set the pulse racing for a lot of –
[00:32:34] Well, I mean, our growth rate at the moment is half a percent a year.
[00:32:37] Yeah.
[00:32:37] The United States is 2.7 percent growth.
[00:32:40] I mean, it's a quantum difference.
[00:32:41] But, you know, Germany obviously is struggling.
[00:32:43] And France is too.
[00:32:44] It's struggling to be above zero.
[00:32:46] So, I mean, it's – but, I mean, this is just a – again, it gets back to a circumstance of the time, doesn't it?
[00:32:52] It's hard to grow when, you know, the global economy is in this quagmire.
[00:32:57] And, you know, we've been –
[00:32:58] Well, give it up.
[00:32:59] We're stuck in that.
[00:32:59] I mean, what about, you know, the idea – I mean, there are some pretty big beasts in the Labour cabinet.
[00:33:04] There's Wes Streeting.
[00:33:05] There's Rachel Reeves.
[00:33:07] There's Angela Rayner.
[00:33:09] I mean, there's been talk of even, you know, a change at the top.
[00:33:11] You need to put someone with more charisma at the top.
[00:33:13] But are these people – these people can change things.
[00:33:16] They can at least change the message.
[00:33:18] Do you think they will?
[00:33:20] Well, I think that the fulcrum of the government is the relationship between Starmer and Rachel Reeves.
[00:33:30] And everything is based around that.
[00:33:32] So, I don't see that changing.
[00:33:34] I think you probably – and I think those two sink or swim together.
[00:33:37] They'd go together, I think, if they had to go.
[00:33:41] I don't see there being some kind of push any time soon.
[00:33:46] But Rachel Reeves is not going to – unless it's a major character transformation.
[00:33:49] I mean, she could quite happily be in the Tory party, couldn't she?
[00:33:53] There's not going to be –
[00:33:53] Oh, yeah.
[00:33:54] Well, I don't know.
[00:33:55] I mean, her whole approach is fiscal conservatism.
[00:33:59] She's never going to be in the position to say, well, OK, we need five years of rebuilding the basics within this economy.
[00:34:07] And we are – even though we're heavily in debt, we're going to go deeper into debt to try and fix that.
[00:34:10] Because we think without that, we're not going to see the growth.
[00:34:13] You're never going to hear those words about that.
[00:34:14] Right.
[00:34:14] Which is certainly all about stability.
[00:34:16] But, of course, there is a strong case for stability as underpinning progressive policies.
[00:34:23] I mean, she would argue that, for example, the decisions made on public sector pay are certainly not austerity.
[00:34:29] And they're certainly not what a conservative government would have done.
[00:34:32] So I think there is – and actually one of the interesting things now is that Labour is going to put money into health and education.
[00:34:40] Arguably not enough, but it is going to do so.
[00:34:43] And it will be an interesting question how the Conservative Party under Ben-Badenhock actually respond to that.
[00:34:49] If they say they're not going to do it, then I think Labour will have that.
[00:34:55] Have them there.
[00:34:55] So, Ryan, as you bring this to a conclusion, I mean, looking ahead, we've said how badly they've done and perhaps why.
[00:35:01] We've said what they could change.
[00:35:03] Do you think they will change?
[00:35:04] Do you think if we were having this conversation next year, they'll be saying, well, it's the year that they turned it around?
[00:35:09] And do they need to, actually?
[00:35:10] Could we find in a year's time they've delivered so much that actually they're just going through a period because they're doing the doing now?
[00:35:16] And in a year's time, maybe we'll start to see the results.
[00:35:19] No, I actually think they're saying, look, it's the long, hard road to recovery.
[00:35:24] So next year, will there be some sense of recovery?
[00:35:27] Probably not.
[00:35:28] Or even the year afterwards.
[00:35:29] Certainly, by 2029, there needs to be evidence that things are getting better.
[00:35:36] But I think they accept that they're not going to be popular for a very long time, that actually this is a long-term plan.
[00:35:45] Short-term attempts of popularity, in fact, don't really work out very well.
[00:35:49] Have there been governments in the past, though, that have had the benefit of three or four years of things not going well?
[00:35:57] Well, Fletcher, the first Stature administration only turned around really post-Falklands.
[00:36:01] But by then she was incredibly unpopular, but it turned around on that and then it was successful.
[00:36:05] Because of the Falklands?
[00:36:06] Well, partly.
[00:36:07] It was in part because of the Falklands.
[00:36:11] But in fact, actually, the economy had turned itself around to a large extent.
[00:36:15] And I think that did underpin the 1983 election victory.
[00:36:22] But I think they are very much concentrated on the long term.
[00:36:26] Trouble is, what they don't seem to be able to do is go for the kind of ambitious policies that Joe Biden has gone for in the United States.
[00:36:39] And what's alarming, of course, is Joe Biden has produced his infrastructure, legislation on the infrastructure.
[00:36:48] He's kept unemployment very low.
[00:36:50] He's created jobs.
[00:36:50] And the evidence of this recent election in the United States is you get no credit for doing that whatsoever.
[00:36:58] Yes.
[00:37:00] As it's all dismantled, at least there's more to dismantle, I guess.
[00:37:03] So it takes longer to get back to where you were before.
[00:37:05] But, I mean, they are getting the benefit.
[00:37:07] As I said, 2.7% growth.
[00:37:09] The U.S. economy doing far better than anything else.
[00:37:12] The Trump bounce and he'll take credit for it.
[00:37:14] He will.
[00:37:14] It started in anticipation.
[00:37:16] We'll see how it all piles up for Starmer in those lights.
[00:37:19] But, Rowan, thank you so much for taking us through that.
[00:37:22] Yeah, that was fun.
[00:37:23] Great to talk, Rowan.
[00:37:23] Thanks.
[00:37:24] So there we are.
[00:37:24] Labour in 2025.
[00:37:26] We'll seize the high ground again, perhaps, and be OK?
[00:37:29] I don't know.
[00:37:30] Well, let's take a broader outlook.
[00:37:31] Yes.
[00:37:32] Because it's not just Britain's suffering, is it?
[00:37:33] Let's be honest.
[00:37:34] I mean, Europe is in a bit of a state.
[00:37:36] France and Germany both looking, well, economically and politically in a mess.
[00:37:40] And just the economy across the whole of the Eurozone really not growing.
[00:37:43] And that is before Donald Trump comes along and slaps tariffs on it.
[00:37:45] Well, there is that too, yeah.
[00:37:46] So, anyway, next week we'll be talking about what is going on in Paris and Berlin.
[00:37:50] Why?
[00:37:51] And how is it affecting the whole European situation with both of its two big pillars?
[00:37:56] A bit wobbly, to put it mildly.
[00:37:59] Yeah.
[00:37:59] All right.
[00:37:59] Well, we'll examine all of that.
[00:38:01] We'll have to get off politics.
[00:38:02] We're doing a bit too much of it for the start of this year.
[00:38:04] But, yeah, join us next week for another edition of The Y Curve.
[00:38:07] See you then.
[00:38:08] The Y Curve.