Have Burnham & Badenoch restored two-party politics?

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2:02Ed Balls: The fact is, the Green Party has been taken over by single-issue fanatics.

2:07George Osborne: Now she's opened up a totally different argument about reform, which is these people are crooks. These people are bad people. And she's saying... Corrupt and racist. I think it's a pretty effective strategy against reform, or more effective than the one they were pursuing.

2:20Ed Balls: The truth is, this is a huge blessing in disguise for Andy Burnham.

2:24George Osborne: Kemi Badenow, you know, let's be clear, pretty explicitly modelling herself on a young Margaret Thatcher.

2:35Ed Balls: So we are in Hoxton, live and direct on YouTube and also on our normal audio platforms. And a busy, busy weekend this week. But first of all, how's your week been?

2:47George Osborne: Well, I've been gripped by traitors, of course, which you put me onto, celebrity traitors. You know, last year you said I had to watch it and I've been religiously watching it now. Religiously, because lots of the scenes are set in churches and graveyards and the like.

3:00Ed Balls: Look, can I just say, I have had a challenge all week on Good Morning Britain because I was actually in America last Thursday and Friday. I've still not seen episode one and two. And there may be many of our listeners who are yet to see it. So if you, like me, don't want to listen to what George is about to say, cover your ears or cover your eyes. I don't want to know. But tell me, George, what's happened?

3:24George Osborne: I'm not going to spoil it for people. I don't want to reveal that Amal Rajan is the first person to be voted out or that Richard E. Grant is hiding in plain sight. Anyway.

3:34Ed Balls: That just makes me want to watch it more.

3:36George Osborne: I'm a bit worried because Amal did an interview with us this summer where we asked him about traitors. And he did keep a straight face. He didn't reveal he was the first out, which I know would have been very disappointing.

3:46Ed Balls: I thought winning traitors was key to his launch strategy for his new YouTube channel.

3:51George Osborne: Well, maybe he's got just as much attention, almost as much attention by being the first out. To be fair, you know, it wasn't exactly his fault. It was Richard E. Grant made such a mess of things. But I'm a bit worried that you've imported the, you know, strict, strictly curse to the political currency curse. Come on here and fail the traitors.

4:12Ed Balls: I mean, understandably, because we're not treacherous people. George, can we discuss the Strictly Curse?

4:17George Osborne: Yeah.

4:17Ed Balls: The Strictly Curse is not that you get eliminated. The Strictly Curse is that you have an affair with your partner, which destroys your relationship. Although, as Yvette always said to me, the thing she was encouraged by was that she concluded there was an age cutoff and I was over the age and therefore it was all fine. The Strictly Curse tends to hit a younger celebrity. I think that is true.

4:41George Osborne: What have you been up to since you haven't been watching award-winning television?

4:44Ed Balls: Well, yeah, but I am going to. I'm really looking forward to it. I've been on GMB. It was in the States at the end of last week. Yesterday, I went to, it was actually amazing. It was at Westminster Abbey, live broadcast on Radio 3, the 100th year anniversary of the beginning of Choral Evensong. And this is the longest running outside broadcast anywhere in the world. Sam Jackson, the controller of Radio 3, was there. and I met John Rutter for the first time, the amazing composer.

5:13George Osborne: Don't look at me like I'm supposed to know.

5:15Ed Balls: And they sang Herbert Howells, The Gloucester Service, which was a brilliant director of the choir. I mean, honestly, it was absolutely stellar. If you've not had a chance to hear it, go to Wednesday Call Evensong, 3 o 'clock. And I listen to them every week. I absolutely love it. So that was yesterday. Or if you've got a busy life, do some other things. We don't want to put people off this podcast. you know do we well in that case look i'm now going to appeal for a second to your predilections right because um tomorrow i'm doing a big civil service conference online big interview talking about um kind of regional growth and stuff but i'm going to talk about a paper which i have coming out today harvard king's paper and i said it was up your street is this called a plug it is it's called in the in the business in the show in showbiz this is a plug and we'll put the link in the show notes, Exploring the Role and Limitations of Generative AI in Policymaking by Niasa Weinberg, Dylan Evans and me, two co-authors of mine.

6:18Ed Balls: What we do is we use ChatGPT. To write the paper. No, exactly right. Exactly right. To go into, to ask it to solve, to write policy papers on regional growth,

6:30George Osborne: on productivity in the NHS, on barriers to housing construction.

6:35Ed Balls: and it's actually really interesting because from those we draw conclusions about what works and what doesn't. And what is, I mean, it's really interesting. AI is good at some things, but the human input, and in particular the underlying evidence base is really important. But just to say there are some quite big limitations for AI in its ability to deal with political challenges, to properly analyse delivery challenges. And part of the problem, which is if you think about it obvious, If you put in all the government documents, what AI always concludes is the policy is on track and it's going to work because that's what the government documents always say.

7:13Ed Balls: And it has this sort of delivery bias. Because in the real world, governments don't write that down. You can't talk up their record.

7:20George Osborne: Exactly. And in practice, things are failing.

7:22Ed Balls: So unless you import kind of all the challenging independent opinions and make the AI look at that, it's slightly inclined to always take the government's word for it. So I'm going to be talking about that. The good thing from the civil servants point of view, and this is why I think lots of permanent secretaries will be interested, is that if you want to persuade your staff that their jobs are important, AI can really help them do their jobs well, but it's not going to substitute for the human input into writing policy advice for ministers.

7:51George Osborne: Maybe you just need better prompt engineering. I'll explain what that is.

7:55Ed Balls: That is the next stage of the work. And we've been talking to the government a lot about the next stage. We're kind of working with them. So interesting, academic work helping in the policy world.

8:08George Osborne: Well, we're all for that. Did you find that more interesting than Corlea Evenson? No, not really. Anyway, all I can say is what we're about to do for the next hour or so is all human-generated. We have not used AI to mimic our voices or to come up with our script.

8:26Ed Balls: Oh, I used AI.

8:27George Osborne: No. In fact, you're not even here. I'm just talking to my phone.

8:30Ed Balls: No, I'm here. But, I mean, AI is really useful to kind of to make you think about things, to challenge you. Of course. I've definitely used AI for a couple of items in this show. But, you know, George. We'll see if I can support them.

8:41George Osborne: I'm a user. Yes, you are. I'm an early adopter. So we are going to talk today. It's the day of the Hoban and St Pancras by-election. This is the by-election caused by Keir Starmer's resignation from Parliament. Although people are out voting, we are going to do a bit of speculation on the result, what it means for the Green Party in particular, because the leader of the Green Party is the Green Party's candidate in the by-election.

9:05Ed Balls: Then we're going to turn to the Tory conference. They started their week with a brilliant spoof of the Bayeux tapestry, which we'll talk about. I'm sure you enjoyed that. I think it'd be fair to say after all these conferences, there's two speeches people will be talking about for the next three months Andy Burnham's speech and Kemi Badenock's speech and we're going to talk about whether she delivered this week for the conference but also where it leaves the Conservative Party politically going into what's going to be a tough few weeks for the government with the budget coming up in less than four weeks time

9:39George Osborne: And then we're going to turn to a new book that Camilla Cavendish has written Camilla was the policy director in Number 10 when I was in government She, I think, has worked with you in Harvard. She also is an FT columnist. She's written a really interesting book about declining fertility across the world, how basically we are having fewer children collectively, and that is leading to a quite precipitous drop potentially in the population. And what does that mean? What's caused it? What can we do about it? It's a really fascinating debate, and we're going to take a look at that.

10:13Ed Balls: But shall we start with the by-election? We are talking this morning in central London while people in central London are currently going to the polls. And I think if this by-election had been happening six months ago in this seat, I think the Greens would have thought they were absolutely on to a winner. But it's been a tough six months for Zach Polanski and a very difficult weekend for the Green Party. We'll come to that in a moment. And on the basis of the betting markets, Labour is 1 to 16 to win. Greens are 16 to 1 to win.

10:48George Osborne: So to explain to people, if you put£16 on Labour winning, which of course you might lose if they don't, you only get£1 if they do back. So you've made£1 on top of the 16 you originally staked. And if you put£1 on the Greens winning today, you would make£16 from that. So basically the betting markets are saying it's an absolute shoo-in for Labour.

11:09Ed Balls: And all the internal feedback I'm hearing is that on the ground, that is where we are. The Andy Burnham bounce translating into support in what is a Labour constituency. Keir Starmer won a decent majority at the last election. Also, what Ed Miliband did around sanctions against Israel will have helped very good local candidate, leader of the council. We won't mention their names because the voting is all underway. But also the Greens...

11:38George Osborne: Can we not mention that George Galloway is fighting this election while in South Africa? He's actually not even in the country. Well, in that case. I think he's 200 to 1 to win.

11:51Ed Balls: Well, if we're mentioning George Galloway and Zach Polanski, we're also going to have to say that Segal Abdiwali is the Labour candidate and the Labour candidate. She's the leader of the local council. But it has been a torrid few days for the Greens. Look, I mean, if against all expectations, Zach Polanski wins this seat, we're going to have to have a long conversation about this next week. Because that is kind of would be a kind of big overturning of the current political mood about Greens and Labour at the moment.

12:18George Osborne: It would be a big, big blow to Andy Burnham, wouldn't it? Because it would suggest that he is not actually sort of reset relations, you know, on the left. He hasn't united the left, which is the general impression. It would be a very big surprise.

12:31Ed Balls: And as you say, lots of people would lose a lot of money. That doesn't feel where things are at the moment. Because, you know, the events of last weekend, the Greens have over 200 ,000 members, but less than 2 ,000 of them at the Green conference voted for a motion which basically said that it's racist to be Zionist, that Israel should be eradicated and replaced by a single Palestinian state. and managed to unite all the Green MPs in Parliament, condemning the motion being passed by this rather small number of people at their party conference, while Zach Polanski tried to sit on the fence and at the end of last week was saying, actually, as written down, he agreed with what the motion said about Zionism, tried to put two amendments which weren't supported in the conference, didn't turn up to vote, ended up, I think, doing a written statement a few days later.

13:32Ed Balls: But I mean, the Greens are in total turmoil. Shall we just have a listen to Ellie Chown, a Green MP, telling us what she thinks about this motion? I opposed this motion. I opposed this motion. I spoke out against it in the conference debate. I'm deeply saddened that it's gone through. And while it has become official party policy, because it has been voted on by conference, it is important to note that that was a vote involving just over a thousand members voted for it it passed by a majority of 200 and that's in a party of 240 000 members so less than one percent of our members even took part in this

14:10George Osborne: vote so i think it's significant isn't it for two reasons the the first is you know the history of this this is the first time that a party that has got members of parliament you know that in opinion polls still says it commands, you know, the votes of hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of people. It has come out against the state of the existence of the state of Israel. This is not to do with settlers or illegal settlements in the West Bank or the rights of the Palestinians to have their own state. This is the rights of Jewish Israelis to have their, the Israeli state, you know, is is not legitimate.

14:49George Osborne: And that, of course, actually undoes a United Nations resolution. So the Greens are against the UN at this point with this statement. And I think that's worth noting, not just because of the historical kind of resonance, but also this is the week of the third anniversary of also those horrific Hamas attacks in Israel. And I think it's also significant for a different reason, which is, I don't think this is the reason why the Greens aren't going to win the Hoban and St Pancras by-election. I think if this hadn't happened, they still were on course to lose. But I think if you look back a year ago, it looked like the Greens were becoming a big mainstream political force in Britain.

15:32George Osborne: And they were winning in by-elections like the by-election in Manchester. And they were presenting themselves in a more kind of grown-up, serious mainstream way. They had mainstream appeal. They were getting mainstream television coverage. And it feels to me, whether it's a combination kind of push from Andy Burnham, or pull from the kind of green activists who have run away with things, that the Greens are now retreating back onto the fringe. That doesn't mean they're not going to be around. But they're no longer going to be a sort of serious party that people who've previously voted for other parties may, well, actually, I want to give the Greens a chance.

16:10George Osborne: And historically, that has always been the Greens' problem. Every time they kind of get close, and those with long memories, we'll remember they actually did very well in a European election, back when we had European elections over 20 years ago. Every time it looks like they're about to kind of enter the mainstream in the way that some European Green parties have, in for example Germany, it kind of all goes wrong for them. And it feels to me, it's back to the fringe.

16:35Ed Balls: That's right. I think it's actually a big opportunity for the Liberal Democrats and Ed Davey if they get onto this ground. Because the truth is, They ought to be saying, they're the Green Party, they ought to be saying, we're going to keep this government honest on climate change. The government's going too slowly. They say nothing about green.

16:51George Osborne: I mean, that's the whole conference is about Israel or whatever and costs of living.

16:58Ed Balls: And the by-election. We're going to keep them honest on Gaza. Now, Honest on Gaza was slightly more complicated for them when Ed Miliband was upping the rhetoric around Israel and carrying on the sanctions work, which had already begun in the Keir Starmer period. But when suddenly it becomes opposing the existence of the state of Israel, that changes the dynamic about being honest on Gaza. The fact is the Green Party has been taken over by single issue fanatics. fanatics. It's in the end what becomes gross anti-Semitism. And Zach Polanski has not had the leadership strength to stand up to that.

17:37Ed Balls: And looks like he's going along with that. And that ends up just being hugely damaging. He's not going to lose from the fact that Israel has banned him from visiting Israel. That's not going to be his problem. And there's still going to be people who are going to want to campaign for the government to go further on Gaza and the Middle East. But extremism of this.

17:59George Osborne: Is this a successful... I mean, what Polanski said at his party conference was that we have changed the Labour Party. You know, it was only because we were campaigning on issues like Gaza that Ed Miliband came out and said what he did. It's only because we put pressure on the Labour Party around cost of living and the like that they got rid of Keir Starmer. You know, we've been an agent of change. All of which I think has some truth to it. There's no doubt one of the reasons why Labour ditched its leader was because they felt very vulnerable on the left to the rise of the Green Party. But it sort of leaves the Greens without a message.

18:35George Osborne: I mean, if you go, yes, okay, we have successfully changed the Labour Party to move into some of our space, it does kind of beg the question, what are we for? And at the same time, I feel there's been a kind of series of mishaps, you know, scandals is too strong a word, but kind of questions about zach polanski and him whether he pays his taxes and stuff like that and now this capped off with this you know notion this motion that they've passed to their conference against the wishes of their leadership and against you know even people who take a a very dim view of what the israelis are doing in gaza and the west bank and even people who are very upset by the uh you know the failure to help build a palestinian state there are not many people who say let's get rid of the state of Israel and give the Jewish people nowhere to live.

19:25Ed Balls: That jumped to that extreme position. The truth is, this is a huge blessing in disguise for Andy Burnham.

19:36George Osborne: It's not really in disguise, is it? It's a bit like Richard E. Grant on Traitors.

19:43Ed Balls: They're doing it out in the open. Yeah, but I don't think he would have expected it to happen in this way. I think that the challenge for Andy Burnham was always going to be, And think of the parallel to 2015. If you vote Labour, then you may be voting for a Labour-Green coalition in the same way as in 2015. You successfully prosecuted the argument, vote Labour, you'll get the SNP. And Labour 2015, we, Ed Miliband, we were too slow to address that. And big internal arguments about some of us wanting to say we will not have a coalition with the SNP. Ed Villaban didn't want to do that. And essentially, that worked on the doorstep.

20:24Ed Balls: Now, Andy Burnham, because of last weekend, it's not about the by-election and it's not about the last year. Last weekend, Andy Burnham can say with credibility, Labour will not go into a coalition in government with the Greens. And the truth is there is no way they could with the Green Party led by Zach Polanski, if that's where we are by election time. And in that moment, that's actually quite transformatory because it takes away one of the arguments against voting Labour if you are a Conservative or a Liberal Democrat campaigner. And, you know, until this moment, that was a harder argument to make.

21:02Ed Balls: Because you're always vulnerable on both flanks. You're vulnerable to losing votes to the left, but also losing votes on the right as you look like you're flirting with the left. There's no way Labour can do a deal with this Green Party now unless they absolutely reverse ferret. And the truth is to do that is hard because of, you know, the deputy leader, the leader, the things that they've said. Although in practice in a hung parliament were Labour to be, you know, 10 seats short.

21:33George Osborne: Sorry, Labour and the Liberal Democrats, because I think the Liberal Democrats would be the first border call. But if the Labour and Liberal Democrats together are 10 seats short, then there's no doubt that they would rely on green votes, that the green MPs wouldn't put a Tory prime minister in or let alone a reformed prime minister. And so there's still but you're right. You can you can you can credibly say how can I lecture you about about these things?

21:56Ed Balls: Because, you know, all about it. I mean, there are there are advantages to having vote by vote cooperation. but there's also quite big disadvantages to that or to, you know, kind of an arrangement. And therefore, the more stabilising thing to do, as you decided in 2010, was to form a coalition, an agreement, a plan, a joint document, a Rose Garden press conference. All I'm saying is that is off the table with this in a way that it wouldn't have been before. And of course, we'll come to talk about this in a moment. What is Kemi Bainock's biggest risk? You said this last week on the podcast, the fear that if you vote for the Conservatives, you're going to be getting a reform Conservative government.

22:36Ed Balls: And what Kemi needs is people to vote Conservative or to vote for other parties. Even if you're a Labour supporter or a Liberal Democrat, she needs people in a Conservative reform fight to vote Conservative to stop reform. And the question is, how credible is that argument?

22:55George Osborne: She wants the tactical voting to be working in favour of voting Conservative in a seat where the alternative is a reformer. Which means she has to credibly say, I will not do a deal with reform,

23:07Ed Balls: which she said loud and clear this week. The question is always, how much do you believe it? And I would say in the case of Andy Burnham and the Greens, it is now categorical. There couldn't be a deal. The question we'll come to in a moment when we talk about the Conservatives is has she succeeded in getting to that same degree of categoricalness when it comes to the reformed conservative?

23:30George Osborne: I guess just to sort of cap this off as we turn to the Tory conference, if you think of this by-election and the Makerfield by-election, again, assuming Labour win today, it'll have kind of meant a return to the politics of the mainstream because reform have not had a great few months. and lost Makefield when people thought they might have had a chance of winning it at the beginning of that campaign. And the Greens have definitely not had a good few months and will have lost their own leader standing in a by-election in a central London constituency with lots of university students and so on. And the fact, as you said, the two speeches that have note this autumn were the Tory party leader's speech and the Labour party leader's speech, does suggest to some degree that the mainstream parties have managed to reassert themselves over the summer.

24:22But we will turn to the Tories next.

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26:38Ed Balls: so welcome back the controversy around the greens uh dominated the start of the week but then kemi badenocker took over she was very confident in her interviews on tuesday and then her speech on wednesday before we get to analyzing her speech what do you think um was the overall sense of the conservatives this week i think what what i thought i mean we should start by saying this, I thought their spoof Bayo tapestry was an utterly brilliant idea. And the reason why it was so good, it will make no difference to voters. Most voters will never look at it. But it was so well done. It was so brilliantly conceived.

27:17Ed Balls: Having all of those identifiable journalists on the tapestry.

27:23George Osborne: Kate Ferguson, Tim Shipman.

27:26Ed Balls: As well as Andy Verner and Angela Rayner. They all had to look at it and report it and feel slightly flattered. What it was. Slightly flattered. Very flattered. It was a sign of a confident party feeling like, you know, we are going in the right direction. And you can feel at conferences that confidence and that sense of purpose and mission. And I thought the Bay of Tapestry thing said to me, these guys think they're on the up.

27:52George Osborne: Yes. What it demonstrates is a kind of cleverness, a cleverness of thinking, of campaigning, of kind of stunts at the conference. and a confidence that it's not all going to be rubbish. Because when you're on your uppers and, you know, things aren't going well for you, you get into a sort of spiral where you won't take any risks and you won't do anything funny and you don't want to do anything too stuntish. So, yes, you know, it's interesting because when the tapestry opened, you know, Kemi Badenowicz's office were clear that she really wanted to come and see it. and we had lots of exchanges about when she might be able to make it and I showed her around the tapestry about a week after it opened or the official opening and now I realise, I'm sure she wanted to see it anyway but of course I'm going, oh, duh, that's why she wanted to come so that she can, you know, they were already planning this thing at the conference.

28:49George Osborne: Anyway, we're very happy at the British Museum, all publicity, etc.

28:52Ed Balls: It's culturally flattering I mean, culturally flattering for the British Museum to be leading the Conservative debate. Although maybe we have to kind of give the first credit to the tapestry weavers of a thousand years ago. I mean, they were the ones really, weren't they? But even so, you are setting the cultural agenda and the political agenda of the autumn.

29:11George Osborne: No, no. The Specsaver ads on the tube are very good at the moment as well. But on the conference, we'll come to the speech, as you say, in a minute. I would say always in politics, think of the alternative. Think of a world that might have been. And if you look at this, this is the third Tory conference since they lost the election, biggest election defeat in Tory history. This conference could have been a disaster. There could have been massive questions over the leadership of Kemi Baden-Ock.

29:41Ed Balls: More defections to come.

29:42George Osborne: Right. The conference could have started with a defection or several to reform, as happened a year ago. You could have had crises at the event and, you know, noises off, people saying things in the fringe meetings about the direction of the Tory party. You know, all the things that could have happened and did happen, frankly, to Labour and Tory conferences in opposition in the past did not happen this week.

30:10Ed Balls: If anything, the defectors are asking if they can come back. Right. And Kimi Bainon saying no.

30:15George Osborne: And she's making fun of, you know, she actually made fun in her speech of like an export boom of defectors. And her position is, you know, I mean, obviously, Andy Burnham's position is now very secure, but she is in a very, very secure position as leader of the Conservative Party and her own personal ratings, you know, have basically returned to where they were when she got chosen. chosen. So they took a big dip and she's built back and she's definitely becoming a kind of central character of British politics, which is not, in fact, a given of a leader of the opposition. I guess the question which you need to address in the speech is, well, that's all very well, but your poll rating is still below what you had at the general election, which was itself a disaster.

30:58George Osborne: And although she talks a lot about team in the speech, I think the other question would be, did the rest of the shadow cabinet shine or is it still the chemi show? Now, if you're the leader of the party, you definitely, if you're given the option, you know, of either the party's more popular than you or you're more popular than the party, choose the latter. But is it becoming a kind of one woman band? Perhaps we should listen to the highlights of the speech. I think we should.

31:25Ed Balls: And look, she can't solve that problem in her speech. She can't make the rest of her shadow cabinet shine in her speech. What she can do is deal with the reform question and then suggest she's got an alternative vision to the government. And those are, I think, probably the two tests. You're right, we should have a listen. I don't want to live in a country run by people who threaten journalists, who call veterans traitors and debate whether my mixed race children are English. I don't want to explain to my son when we're watching our brilliant England team play football that some people don't think our black players are English.

32:02I don't know whether you've noticed, but I am black. I am British. I am proud of my country. I'm proud of our history. All that we have done and all that we will do in the world, our best days are not behind us. And we will not let this country go backwards. You will scrap every job-killing measure in Labour's Employment Rights Act. James Cartlidge announced our plan for a new national missile and drone defence system, Britannia Shield. My ambition is to abolish inheritance tax altogether, as soon as we can afford it.

32:40Ed Balls: So first of all, on the Tory reform relationship, you said last week she's going to knock that on the head. And I was saying earlier, I thought Andy Burnham can now do that with the Greens. Has she done enough? I mean, it's a moral case she's making. Is it clear and categorical enough? Does it persuade people that in a hung parliament, she would genuinely want another general election rather than a deal with reform?

33:05George Osborne: I think this conference unveiled a big shift in Tory strategy and a big shift in Tory strategy towards reform and a shift in strategy towards Labour. And on reform, if you think of recent years, to some degree, I don't know whether it was ever quite articulated like this, the Tory party was trying to stop people defecting to reform. They said, look, you know, we we get all the reforms concerns around immigration and small boats and the cultural wars and we're anti woke and, you know, all of that. Don't go for them because we're we think the same way. now she's opened up a totally different argument about reform, which is these people are crooks.

33:49George Osborne: These people are bad people. Forget about their policies, not the voters. She's also very careful to say we want reform voters back. They're our people, she literally says. But the politicians, she's going straight on essentially an ethical challenge. And she's saying we are... Corrupt and racist, she's saying. It's in fact a return to the things years ago that Michael Howard and then David Cameron used to say in private about UKIP, as it then was, which is their fruitcakes and closet racists and loons. Now, they'll never, you know, Kemi Benoit would disagree with me saying that in public. But that's the strategy.

34:27George Osborne: The strategy is you don't want to touch these people.

34:29Ed Balls: David Cameron got into trouble when it was reported that was his view, where she actually is saying that in terms, in public. It's actually braver.

34:36George Osborne: Yes. Well, she's also got more evidence, hasn't she, because of all the funding scandals. She said, you know, they used to be measuring up the curtains in Downing Street. Now they're measuring up the curtains in their prison cells, literally, in the speech. And that is kind of saying, she's trying to establish that it's going to be not sort of socially acceptable to vote reform, that it's going to be a bit whiffy. It's going to have a stink to it. and she you know goes out of her way to say we are we are we are going to demonstrate character and conduct and standards and it's i think she's attempting a kind of ethical reset which i always thought the tory party should have attempted after the boris johnson premiership and rishi sunak should have done and be as with a moral we're an ethically we we hold ourselves to higher ethical standards and she's doing it against reform but it's also by implication if you listen to where she says, you know, we've made mistakes in government, we've learned from them, we've got to help.

35:34George Osborne: She's also resetting herself against the sort of recent Tory record in government. I mean, it is the only thing I'd say is, of course, you are setting yourself up for a fall if there are going to be, you know, if members of her shadow cabinet end up caught up in some funding scandal, or there's some Tory donation problem. If you if you if you say, we are an ethical, high standards party, you are definitely in opposition, at least, risking. Remember the Tony Blair, whiter than white, purer than pure, and then you get the kind of Eccleston funding scandal earlier. It's just a risk if you go down that route, if you moralise about your kind of readiness for government.

36:17George Osborne: But I think it's a pretty effective strategy against reform, or more effective than the one they were pursuing.

36:22Ed Balls: Although, see, that example is very revealing. You said earlier her problem was, does she have enough depth around her in the Shadow Cabinet? The truth is, if there's a Shadow Cabinet member who gets into trouble ethically, she does get rid of them.

36:32George Osborne: Yeah, who cares?

36:33Ed Balls: The Tony Blair problem was it was about him. Yes. And I think, I mean, so you're totally right. If she now fails her own test as herself, she's got a problem. But the thing which is striking to me was how much, how confidently she was putting herself and her identity, her family, who she is, in taking on Swell of Braverman on Englishness, on saying, don't say to my kids, half black, half white, that they aren't English. She was owning things. And, you know, in the summer when I spoke to her, and I started off by talking to her about her upbringing and asking her the question, would Kemi Badenok, who came to our country, was born here, but then, you know, came here as a teenager from Nigeria, from a Nigerian family, would she be welcome today and the way in which she was back then, is our society open?

37:24Ed Balls: I mean, I've sensed, you know, a caution and a reluctance. It wasn't really what she wanted to talk about. There's other things she wanted to talk about. I think she's now decided that she is putting herself centre stage and her being, her personhood, you know, what she stands for, as the symbol of why reform is racist and beyond the pale. And that is, I think, a very strong thing for her to do.

37:50George Osborne: So I think this is pretty much the first time, certainly in anything like as big a platform as the party conference, she has sort of talked confidently and, you know, without sort of hesitation about being a black woman.

38:05Ed Balls: I asked her about this on Good Morning Britain on Monday. I played to her the Suella Bravoman words about not being English and asked about the English football team question. And I was wondering in my mind, thinking of the summer, is that is she going to be discomforted? And actually, she addressed it with relish. She said, that's Farage's problem and not mine. I know who we are. I know who I am. And I think there's been a big turning point in her decision about how to fight politically. She's not going to shy away from who she is.

38:36George Osborne: Yeah, and it's a self-confidence and a confidence in the kind of leadership team of the Tory party. And I think it's often the case with Conservative politicians from ethnic minorities, also female conservative politicians, that they don't want to sort of play what they would see as sort of Labour identity politics. They don't want to say, I'm the first black woman to lead a political party or, you know, Rishi Sunak didn't really want to say, I'm the first person of an ethnic minority to become British Prime Minister. In the same way that Labour would say, we've got the first female chance to ex-check out, for example.

39:08Ed Balls: Or Barack Obama was the first black president.

39:10George Osborne: So it's a kind of Tory reluctance to kind of engage in identity politics.

39:14Ed Balls: Well, a brotherman played it from the other side. I mean, shocking so. I mean, goodness me. You can't be Baynot. You think, thank God she defended.

39:22George Osborne: No, I think, you know, she now mocks the people who've left, the drama queens, as she called them in the speech. So there's a new strategy against reform, which is we're not going to try and... Now, obviously, behind it, there's also still a very controversial policy of leaving the European Convention of Human Rights and other things, which when you get close to an election could well put off kind of middle of the road voters and because of a small L liberal England. But that's not what they're majoring on now. And then the second thing on Labour I thought was interesting is they're now just going for the full frontal, sort of rather old school, a phrase I don't think they would resile from.

40:05George Osborne: There's no modernisation here talk. An old school argument about the economy, how it's best run, why the free market is better than public ownership. I mean, if Andy Burnham has sort of said back to the 70s, Thatcherism was a great mistake, you know, let's renationalise or take back into greater public control the kind of commanding heights of the economy. Kemi Bailock saying, great, let's have an ideological argument again about how to run the economy, which was much harder for the Conservative opposition I was part of when you were up against Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. And, you know, it was quite hard to make the argument they're anti-business or anti-entrepreneurship or, you know, there's some fundamental ideological difference for how to run the economy.

40:52Anti-Burnham has created that flank and Kemi Badenock is running towards it as a kind of, you know, let's be clear, I think pretty explicitly modelling herself on a young Margaret Thatcher.

41:05Ed Balls: I think there is dangers in what she's doing. Let's come to that in a moment, because she's gone to a huge amount of expensive detail. But firstly, on the strategy, I mean, people now know what the Conservative economic story and message is going to be. And she can prosecute that, let's be honest, at a time when it's less clear what the Labour economic strategy and message is. Andy Burnham wants a growth plan, but beyond devolution, what is the growth plan? There's huge fiscal pressures coming up. The Financial Times front page has got the kind of classic three weeks out Treasury briefing. To Chris Giles.

41:49Ed Balls: No, it's actually to these days. Chris Giles is not on the... He's too grand. He's got the commentary column. He's writing a column inside. Iran war blows 12 billion hole in Healy's room for manoeuvre. this is according to ft estimates um which look to me we should explain shouldn't we they may have

42:06George Osborne: been informed by the by the treasury there's always a thing but you know as you advance as you get towards a budget we should let's take a two minute diversion because it's as you get towards the budget you don't want bad news on budget day and you want all the bad news to have

42:19Ed Balls: been kind of already absorbed into the commentary public finances check budget hopes tax rises and spending cuts feared says the the ft right so the so there was always this thing the ft there would I mean, a Treasury press officer rings and says, would you take a dictation, Mr. Parker? No, I don't mean that, because of course George Parker would never take dictation. And I'm sure there are FT estimates. The FT has not written this story unless they believe the Treasury is in the same place.

42:46George Osborne: There is not an FT equivalent of the OBR. The FT will have been steered towards... He said it was Chris Giles. His name is not on the story. It's a bit of a diversion, but it's... Well-sourced. Suffice to say, we're heading into a budget in which the public finances are tight. The headroom against the fiscal rules has been halved. And we don't know whether John Healy is going to try and fill it. But the briefing there is actually he's not going to. But also two other pieces of news over this week.

43:13Ed Balls: It's done during the Conservative Party conference. One, the Alan Milburn proposals about young people and work and welfare reform are apparently, I think it was the front of, I think it was the Times this week, to come after the budget now. So they're pushing the Milburn reforms back because they're worried about how you handle that in the budget. And then the spending review, which people thought was going to come in the summer, to set out how you deal with John Healy's commitment to 3 % for defence spending in 2030, at a time when public spending is going to be falling in other government departments at the end of the period, is now being said that the spending review is going to be pushed back into the autumn.

43:53Ed Balls: It feels as though the difficult bits are being pushed away. And I'm not sure what the John Healy economic message is for this budget at the moment. He wants it to be boring. It's not going to be boring. He wants it to be business as usual. The FTE makes clear it's not going to be business as usual because there's a fiscal funding gap. And if he's going to say to people, you know, this is what we have to do now to get to this bigger goal. Well, it's not quite clear what the goal is because there's no 10 year plan yet either. and Kenbie Badenock says, well, hang on a sec, this is just typical Labour, put up your taxes, throwing money at vested interests, it's sort of back to the 70s.

44:29Ed Balls: That's going to be her argument. And I would say the Treasury and number 10 can't sit around for much longer. You know, I think the budget is a bit too far away. They need to kind of get on the front foot on the economic message, because if not, you know, Kenbie Badenock is going to have a clear run.

44:45George Osborne: Yeah, well, it also speaks volumes that a brand new Chancellor and a brand new Prime Minister want a boring budget, which suggests that they don't have lots of things they want to do. But there is now a much more straightforward left-right argument on the economy. And it's an interesting thing for Labour whether they want to now say, yes, our principal opponents are the Tories. If you think of Burnham's speech, he didn't mention the Conservative Party. He wants it to be, and Labour strategists, including under Starmer, wanted it to be Labour, it's Labour v. reform. The Tories are irrelevant now.

45:17George Osborne: Of course, the Tories are saying, no, no, no, it's like the Tories v. Labour. The old fight is back and the old fight on familiar territory of the size of the state, whether you're pro-business or not, etc. So there's an interesting kind of strategic decision for Labour. Do we now say in the Labour body, OK, the Tories are our main opponents? Or do we go on saying, actually, forget the Tories, reform is the real thing we've got to stop? I thought the other thing was, you know, she will say, oh, well, there was quite a lot in my speech about fiscal responsibility. And I've got this golden rule that half of all the savings I identify is going to go towards debt reduction, which is a strange echo of the David Cameron sharing the proceeds of growth.

46:02George Osborne: Back when he was opposition leader, he was like half of the proceeds, you know, when the economy grows, half the money is going to go on public services and half is going to go on tax cuts. She's now saying sharing the proceeds of cuts, half is going to go on reducing taxation and half is going to go on debt reduction. She would say that's an important part of the speech. I think what people heard and what the headlines in the Tory press were reporting was essentially a kind of upper middle class package. I mean, I mean, up at like the, you know, the better off half of the middle class. It's like if you're owning 100 grand as a family, you know, we're helping you with your child care.

46:42George Osborne: That's no longer going to be withdrawn from you. If you send your kids to private schools, we're going to take the VAT off those fees that Labour introduced. When you sell your house, you don't have to pay stamp duty. Only more expensive houses have stamp duty charges. And, of course, the big announcement, the family home is coming out of inheritance tax. Third time we've heard that at a Tory party conference. I announced two of them before. But if you think of it as a package, I think they're doing a very straightforward thing, which is they think the next 5 % of the vote they can get, they're on 20%.

47:16George Osborne: To get to 25%, they need affluent, economically minded voters who voted Labour and Liberal Democrat at the last election to come back to them. And this package is aimed directly at them.

47:28Ed Balls: and um the interesting thing is she succeeded in uniting labor and reform i mean both labor and reform had the same attack on the inheritance tax proposal which is that um this goes um to rich people yeah a minority of people who um mainly live in the southeast i mean no i think if you're the conservatives it's rational to start rebuilding your southeast base I guess the argument that she will want to prosecute is that this is aspirational, which goes beyond people who earn more than 80, 90, 100 ,000 pounds a year. I mean, interestingly, I was thinking about this when you listen to Andy Burnham talking about social care.

48:12Ed Balls: One of his arguments about social care reform is how upset he feels about his family and families like him losing their home if they have to pay huge social care fees. And that is the same emotional instinct as people feeling that they're going to have to lose their home to the inheritance to inheritance tax. Or, as you say, at a higher income level. But because you made the parallel with you in 2007, let's go to that. Because I think a small thing and a big thing, small thing, first of all, the depth of talent in the shadow cabinet. I don't know whether you saw Andrew Griffith's speech. Somebody, I mean...

48:55Ed Balls: He's the new shadow child. He's been brought in because Kevin Bainotte clearly feels he's the right person to come up with the ideas and the strategy. But he's also got to be able to make a speech and go on television. He was on GMB with us on Monday and he was fine, but he was very nervous and very uncomfortable. How was he compared to Mel Stride, the person who replaced? Oh, Mel Stride is just far more comfortable in his own skin. But much more, I guess, to be fair. Much more experienced. Much more experienced. Somebody's got to tell Andrew Griffith how to finish a speech. because, I mean, it was, I mean, I've watched it a number of times and it's traumatic every time.

49:29Ed Balls: He finishes his speech, nobody realises, and then he just walked off. Well, because he's embarrassed to be on the stage, isn't he? Look, he is going to have to, he may be the ideas guy, but he's also going to have to come up with, you know, a bit more performance training. I mean, that is...

49:46George Osborne: Can I give him a, the way to do it is at the end you say, conference, thank you very much. very very confident speakers don't do that because they know they're going to get the applause but if you're not barack obama then then you do thank you very much is the way to

50:03Ed Balls: guarantee the applause it's like you know at the end of a symphony if you're not totally confident as a composer you have a massive great timpani crash wake them up and then end it and they all and they clap. You are right. Anyway, there's some technique to work. The bigger thing is this. She has come up with a whole series of big ticket items for tax cuts. National insurance, inheritance tax. I think the inheritance tax one is£6 billion a year. And of course, she's got stamp duty from last year. It's going to be paid for. A national insurance cut for young people. For young people. Employing young people.

50:41Ed Balls: 21 to 24-year-olds.

50:42George Osborne: She would want to say in her defence, it's not just about the rich.

50:46Ed Balls: And she says that it's going to be paid for by welfare reform savings and by cutting the costs of migration. Now, in 2007, when you did your inheritance tax proposal, one, you thought the election was potentially five weeks away. Quite hard for the government to scramble to shoot your fox. And secondly, I think you did non-DOMs.

51:09George Osborne: Yeah, it was even richer people are going to pay for this.

51:10Ed Balls: Even richer people are going to pay for that. Whereas, think about 2004-05, when Oliver Letwood was going to have a tax cut proposal paid for by efficiency savings. We had the Gershon Review ready to come up with huge amounts of efficiency savings. Rachel Reeves had all the money she was spending from abolishing non-DOMs, and then Jeremy Hunt changes the non-DOM regime. Can we bear on it at the moment? One, it looks like, is it funny money? To the extent it's not funny money and there's real savings, if they're smart, But the Treasury ought to be able to nab these savings in the next one or two years to make it very hard for Kemi Badenok to pay for these tax cut proposals.

51:50Ed Balls: She's got three years to get through, two or three years. And will she still have a credible way to pay for multi-billion pound tax cuts by the time you get to the election? And, you know, as you know, if you can't show where the money's coming from, what the public will say, well, you know, they give with one hand and they'll take with the other.

52:09George Osborne: Yeah. No, I think you also have to be, I think quite a lot of the savings I've identified are real savings.

52:15Ed Balls: They weren't savings that the last Conservative cabinet managed to get when Kevin Baydott was in the cabinet.

52:19George Osborne: No. Right. Which is sort of exactly the point, which is, you know, they are things like restrict the local housing allowances and housing benefit, reintroduce the two child limit in, you know, the benefit system. to cut some of the disability allowances. They're quite specific. And some of those things, of course, the Tory government did do. Some the Tory government shied away from. I guess she's gambling on the fact that welfare has become much more controversial. The Welfare Party is a good attack on Labour. And there is no way the Burnham government is going to try and revisit things like disability cuts with the current Parliamentary Labour Party.

53:03George Osborne: So she'll probably think those savings are hard to poach. But there will be some poaching. I mean, remember Rishi Sunak.

53:11Ed Balls: Richard Reeves thought non-doms was hard to poach, and then Jeremy Hunt did it.

53:14George Osborne: Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt abolished non-doms. It wasn't the Labour government that did that. So yes, those are the risks. I think the other risk is...

53:25Ed Balls: We were much more cautious at this stage of opposition. We would have symbolic small things, which is what Andy Burnham is doing in government. but big ticket tax cuts at this time in a parliament. I remember before the financial crisis, you deciding to match Labour's spending plans because you didn't want to open up fiscal differentiation and she's doing the opposite of that at the moment.

53:44George Osborne: And we thought there was about to be an election and we wanted to shut down the argument that we'd been slaughtered on in the two sort of previous generations.

53:50Ed Balls: I remember in 1997, us having three days of torrid coverage because... We were matching Tory spending plans. But yes, but if you remember, the issue was, would Labour privatise air traffic control? And it was only like 200 or 300 million. But if you can't answer the question.

54:11George Osborne: But don't you think that politics, which you and I were schooled in and practitioners of, may have kind of disappeared? That in a world where, you know, none of the sums quite add up, none of the, you know, the government can't fund its national care service.

54:25Ed Balls: But there is a contradiction in you saying that because you said at the beginning what Kevin Bainock is doing is going back to the caricature of Labour in the 70s. So in a way, it's the old playbooks. And so the old playbooks work in being able to set up the Labour-Tory divide.

54:40George Osborne: Do they not work also in whether fiscal responsibility adds up? So I think she will say the sums add up because we're making some very specific proposals on welfare. I think the thing that is more sort of obvious is she is saying, I am going to cut benefits for families with disabled children. And I'm going to use the money to take people's homes out of inheritance tax.

55:04Ed Balls: And I'm comfortable with that argument. And the only people who benefit from that are people who already have an estate over a million if they're a married couple.

55:11George Osborne: Yes, because you're already the first million pounds is already inheritance.

55:14Ed Balls: So the benefit cuts people are not the ones who are going to be benefiting.

55:16George Osborne: But she's comfortable with that. She says, yes, welfare should be smaller. and people who are earning£100 ,000. I thought in some ways the inheritance tax thing was a more obvious announcement. In fact, no one had spotted that about a month ago she was actually talking about inheritance tax as one of the first taxes she wanted to cut. So the trail was laid. I thought the real kind of indicator of where the Tory strategy is now and the change of strategy that I referred to earlier is, you know, they're now going to – people who earn over£100 ,000 or families who have over£100 ,000 are going to be eligible for free childcare.

55:48George Osborne: That's right. you can't pretend that benefits anyone other than people over 100 ,000.

55:53Ed Balls: Because everybody blows it, blow it, gets it.

55:54George Osborne: Yeah. And I think that is a deliberate, because I think maybe one way to think about this, if you get to next year's conference, Kemi Baden-Ock still, you know, doing well, an established personality, confident in her skin, confident in the message she's talking about the Tory party. If you get in a year's time to the next conference and the Tories are still on 20 % of the vote, people go, yeah, but none of this is working. She may be popular. She may be gutsy. You know, she may be quite ideological. She may be a young Thatcher, but it's not working. And so the Tory party has to put on votes in at least the opinion polls.

56:37George Osborne: And I think that they have decided we're not chasing reform votes anymore. The next block of votes we're going after are people who voted Labour and Liberal Democrat. And that is a change of strategy. That is not a unite the right strategy. That is the classic middle ground strategy.

56:54Ed Balls: Although those issues around the ECHR and how you handle the European summit in a few weeks time, as well as the budget, suddenly become more pertinent and difficult. It's going to be an absolutely fascinating autumn with this budget and how the Conservatives respond and what happens with the Nigel Farage investigations, whether the Greens go into a spiral.

57:15George Osborne: I mean, we should say underpinning all of this is also this ongoing conversation about European Union membership, which is in the news today because the French finance minister has said, you know, we'd welcome you back. And Andy Burnham's in Berlin. And I think one of the...

57:30Ed Balls: I'm trying to say this. I listened to him on the Today programme. The headline says, we welcome you back. When you listen to his words, it didn't sound very welcoming. He basically said, you should never have leave. And if you want to come back again, you can on our terms. I mean, I would not say this doesn't seem very sort of accommodating. It sounded all very French to me.

57:52George Osborne: Yeah. But I think the interest to finish on, Kevin, isn't the strategy, can she win back, you know, centrist voters? OK, well, better off centrist voters who almost certainly voted remain. but with the economic package if the european immigration echr type message that's right is quite reformist you know and that um or form like leaning and can but anyway it's a new strategy unveiled at the toy conference watch this space we're going to take a break and then we're going

58:23Ed Balls: to have a quick conversation about a former head of policy to david cameron and george osborne in the number 10 policy unit camilla cavendish's new book about fertility and it's absolutely fascinating. So we'll talk about that next.

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1:00:10George Osborne: Welcome back. So Camilla Cavendish has a new book out called Generation Maybe, and it's about declining fertility and birth rates across the world, not just the West. And my podcast co-host here, Ed, he moonlights as a sound engineer because he was at an event with Camilla at King's College to talk about her new book last night. And he recorded her on his mobile phone. And so we're just going to play a little bit of what she was saying last night.

1:00:41Ed Balls: It took me a while to decide whether this matters or not because the world cannot sustain ever-growing populations. But I realised that on the other side of peak human, we are going to go into a very rapid decline with enormous consequences for welfare states, for economic dynamism and for the futures of the young. And I also have discovered that there's a big heartache gap, that an awful lot of young men and women are not choosing to be childless. There are some people who do, and that's fine. A lot of young men and women are ending up without the children that they wanted, and that's why I think it matters.

1:01:18Ed Balls: I was actually sitting next to her at the top table. She was explaining the book and I was going to comment, And I just said to her, for our podcast, give us a little 30-second intro, which we can then use to introduce it to our listeners. I've known her since I was at Harvard at the same time as her, when I was in 21, 40 years ago. And she's been a journalist at the Times. I think she was actually the person who West Streeting wanted to do the government review into social care. That was his original plan. She's unusual because, of course, you know her from your time when she was in number 10.

1:01:53Ed Balls: She is simultaneously, you know, a thinker, a policy person, but she's also a popular, engaging journalist. And her book manages to, the book is called Generation Maybe, Why We're Having Fewer Children and What It Means for Us All. And it's fascinating to maintain a stable population here in the UK or in any country. you'd have a birth rate of about 2.1 children per family. And that in the UK has now slipped down to 1.3. So our population would decline without migration. It's happened right across the Western world. In some countries in East Asia, it's fallen even further than that. And that includes in China.

1:02:43Ed Balls: I mean, in India, in Africa, population is still growing fast. China the population is declining because of that one child policy and I think that the

1:02:53George Osborne: well they work just to pick up on that one of the surprising things in her you know very very interesting book is in Tamil Nadu which is one of the Indian states the birth rate is actually now below that of Germany which you'd think of as having a declining population and Mexico has a lower birth rate than the United States so I think the old argument which is the western countries or you know the Japans and Koreas as well are all getting you know older but there's lots of younger you know populations in the developing world is certainly true in some places like Nigeria but in lots of places it's also not the case yeah.

1:03:29Ed Balls: That is right and she says it's partly because of you know globalization and the changing of attitudes. I think that the thing which is really good about the book normally when you think about declining population and fertility you think about this being choices people make, rational choices, either because we need fewer children, because as you move from an agricultural economy, they are less part of the working unit of the family, or that having more children is becoming more expensive, or that you have different choices. If you are a woman going out to work, you'd rather be at work than have the third or the fourth child.

1:04:11Ed Balls: And so therefore, the assumption was that this may be challenging for societies because, you know, obviously our populations are ageing. And as our populations age, there's more of a burden on the working population to pay the taxes to support the older population. But the assumption was that these were choices people were making. And what Camilla says in the book is that actually, I mean, there is some of that going on, of course, but also people living longer at home because of high house prices means it's harder to get out of the home and set up a family. women working longer, delaying having children, and then discovering too late often that they can't have the children because fertility declines.

1:04:55Ed Balls: Fertility amongst men and women declines in your 30s. And so she says there's loads of disappointed people in their 40s who thought they would have the children they wanted and don't. And then other fascinating things. I mean, one that could have really struck me, dating apps. The assumption with dating apps is that dating apps are helping you to form relationships. Whereas she says, well, actually, it's the other way around. What the dating apps have got an incentive to deliver is a whole series of failed dates, which mean you need to come back onto the dating aid to have another one. The last thing you want is people to get into long-term relationships because then they don't need Tinder or the dating app.

1:05:32Ed Balls: And one thing I actually read out last night, this is so cool. This was a paper, it came out in June, 2026. It was just a few months ago from some guys at Middlebury College in the United States. looking at the fall in the US fertility rate. Big fall happened at the end of the 2000s, 2007 to 2011. It's the period they look at, which is also the period where the iPhone was introduced. And when it first started in America, only AT &T provided iPhones. It was the only way to get one. So if you had another phone carrier, you didn't get an iPhone. And when they've looked at the places around America where there was more A &T contracts, and they've correlated that with fertility.

1:06:13Ed Balls: And what they found is that having been in a high AT &T area, therefore using a mobile phone, explains 50 % of the decline in fertility, half of it. And they said basically what this says is that it's consistent with the iPhone reducing in-person interactions, increasing pornography use and reducing sexual frequency. Basically, young people in their late teens and early 20s got iphones and stopped procreating and that's why fertility has gone down and and the other thing which she says is fascinating is there is a contagion effect so you see in communities where some people are choosing to have children later that becomes the norm absolutely fascinating

1:06:57George Osborne: some of the bits in the book about for example if someone at work has a child that leads other people at work to have a child the sort of social the kind of social contagion as she puts it is

1:07:08Ed Balls: really fascinating but it leads to lots of regret and that's the fascinating thing people who wanted

1:07:12George Osborne: kids and find out it's too late so i thought the intro you know it's a really interesting book and of course it turns on its head that argument it used to be the case he wanted to bring the birth rate down that the world had too many people in it that might be true for the whole world but but now the peak point at which the world's population will be the largest it's ever been is going to be in the 2060s they predict and then it's going to decline and that is the first decline in the world's population since the Black Death in the 14th century. So quite a dramatic change from the world I grew up in, which was all about how do you reduce birth rates, get contraception to women, give women more choices, essentially sort of free them from the fertility cycle.

1:07:53George Osborne: This is a very different set of arguments. I guess the question, I spoke to Camilla this morning. I said, okay, well, what do we do about it? She said, well, I had actually a really sort of rather serious chapter in the book about policy prescriptions. And then I just thought, it's going to make it a less interesting read. It's going to be a bit dry when we get to the policy answers. And that's the kind of problem. If a lot of it is to do with the advancement of technology, social norms, it's not just, is it about tax credits? The economic incentives are not going to be enough. And I just wonder whether the fact we're even discussing it, I don't think we would have been comfortable necessarily as sort of mainstream, well, we're not politicians anymore, but mainstream politicians didn't want to talk about birth rates because there was something a bit kind of weird about it.

1:08:47Ed Balls: I still think that's true. And now it's... If you think of Suella Braverman saying she wants to support the lifting of the two-child cap because she wants there to be more children. What she's actually saying is she wants more English children or British children. I mean, that sort of natalist argument has a very sort of kind of nasty underside to it. There is...

1:09:09George Osborne: So what are the... Should government care and should government do anything about it?

1:09:13Ed Balls: The first question is, does it matter?

1:09:15George Osborne: Yeah.

1:09:15Ed Balls: And Adair Turner, who, of course, chaired the Pension Commission and was at the Bank of England, he's written an article saying, we don't have to worry about this. He says, one, the population may get smaller, but that will go along with rising productivity because of AI, because there's more capital to go around. And secondly, you can just get people to work longer.

1:09:38George Osborne: Who needs humans when we've got robots?

1:09:40Ed Balls: The problem is…

1:09:41George Osborne: I have no evidence people are working longer.

1:09:43Ed Balls: Very hard to… well, I mean, people are going to be retiring later.

1:09:49George Osborne: Yeah.

1:09:50Ed Balls: But I think… I see you mean longer, have longer working lives. A longer working life. So the problem is right now, we've got huge defence pressures. You've got huge debt interest pressures. And then you have a society where big costs of ageing with a smaller working population to pay the taxes. How far can you push up the retirement age? The truth is, I think the evidence is starting to show that people are living longer, but having a sicker period towards the end of their life. I'm not sure people are going to be that up for working into their 70s. And in an AI world, it's not totally clear that 70-year-olds using existing technology are going to be the people who will deliver jobs and productivity into the future.

1:10:33Ed Balls: And the OBR estimates basically say even if you bring in migrants, they become old and cost. And even if the birth rate falls, you make an initial saving from fewer school places. But in the end, they grow up and get old. it doesn't relieve any fiscal pressure and growth is lower so this is a problem okay so we could we

1:10:55George Osborne: could talk about this for hours what um maybe we should come back to it so interesting but there's i guess the final question to you is if you were running the british government you were you know either a labor or conservative government it doesn't matter would you start to say we've got to somehow get the birth rate up would that become a kind of explicit policy objective no we're not going to get into like the various instruments you might use but should governments now say

1:11:18Ed Balls: getting the birth rate up is a national priority well if you say reducing migration for reasons of political cohesion is a priority and you want the fiscal sums to add up i think you need to get higher than 1.3 replacement ratio so i think you have to do that by the way the evidence is and we disagree about this there's no evidence that um that tax incentives or benefit incentives make a huge difference. Lifting the child benefit, the child tax credit cap may relieve poverty, but it doesn't really incentivise people to have more children. But there are things you could do in terms of the advice you give to men and women, the way in which we provide fertility support, the way in which we structure the employment relationship, which could make it easier.

1:12:03Ed Balls: I think there's actually one more thing just to say, and this is also in the book. Lots of people, young people, childless couples are choosing not to have children because they're just afraid of the future and they're worried about climate change and they think, do we want to bring kids into this world? Not something I've ever thought about I mean you at your age with young children living a happy life, it never occurred to you that you didn't want to bring children The doomsters about

1:12:29George Osborne: didn't Harry and Meghan say they didn't want to bring more than two children into the world because anyway, we're not going to get into that

1:12:35Ed Balls: But it tells you something important, which is that when Andy Byrdam talks about hope, hope is important. Optimism is important. And living in a society where 20-year-olds don't think they want kids to have the kind of lives they're living is a bad place to be. And that is a political task. So cheer up.

1:12:55George Osborne: Have more sex.

1:12:57Ed Balls: Have more children. Spend less time on your iPhone. Don't scroll.

1:13:00George Osborne: Instead. Be careful of these dating apps. Ed and George giving you some sensible life advice here

1:13:07Ed Balls: That's right Thank you for listening And be aware that men and women have the same challenges with fertility If you get to your mid-30s as a man and as a woman You know Get on with it Get on with it We are so out of our depth in this conversation Thank God Camilla Cavendish has written a book Which we can then quote Because left to our own devices What are we saying? What a nightmare Essential reading, wise, compassionate and non-judgmental. Thank God it's non-judgmental. That is it for this episode of Political Currency.

1:13:39George Osborne: Yeah, stop listening to the podcast and hook up with someone. Join us on Monday for ex-minister's questions. We're going to answer all your biggest political queries and ideas. Of course, you can send us a question via social media, if you're still using your iPhone, and email us at questions at politicalcurrency.co.uk.

1:13:58Ed Balls: Don't forget, if you become a Kitchen Cabinet member, You get a weekly newsletter. You also get a mug. And the very exciting thing, I don't know whether you've seen this, George. Ed Stubbings, a Kitchen Cabinet member from America, has sent us a political currency bio-tapestry mug. Oh, wow. I have not seen that. Thank you, Ed. Isn't that fabulous? Chloe, who's just joined our Kitchen Cabinet, she's going to get a red mug. She's not going to get a bio-tapestry one. But George and I, we've got bio-tapestry political currency.

1:14:26George Osborne: I think this is the one where I get killed in the Brexit referendum, isn't it?

1:14:30Ed Balls: I think we're going to discuss that on EMQs that is coming up on EMQs you'll be able to get that on Friday if you're a Gold or Kitchen Cabinet member or Monday for everybody else now in video and you can always send us questions on social media comments on YouTube email us questions at politicalcurrency.co.uk we always like a voice note and if you want to know whether George and his demise is in this tapestry you'll have to wait for EMQs thank you very much for the mug see you on Monday

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