When will Labour’s communication catastrophe end?

0:13This is Political Coancy with Ed Balls and George Osborne.

0:25so we are in the studio in hoxton it is december advent is underway christmas is coming i can't wait yes i went to the nutcracker last night with thea and it was a great production at the opera house massive night out big christmas tree on stage feeling very christmasy i'm going to the messiah tonightst george's hanover square the handled society slightly more refined but you know to be expected yeah and we're not feeling we're missing out i mean i did wake up this morning and hear that the prime minister was up you know in the north coast of scotland with the royal navy and it reminded me of a time when i was winched down in a helicopter to a trident submarine that came out of the water to meet me and good job it came out the water and now i'm just with you in a in a studio in hoxton and it's raining outside but you know i'm handling my midlife crisis and talking about yours centrist dad is sold out for its next gig centrist dad water rats our christmas gig for crisis at christmas there's a wait list i mean you know this year there's not midlife crisis at christmas this is this is the charity i think it's actually a later a better course a much better course midlife crisis at christmas now we're having the midlife crisis for crisis at christmas and you know i think next year we're gonna have to book the o2 i think so of course um or at least a side what this this podcast or the band or both oh my god we could do it in that moment combined um because look at your fan base there might be an overlap with ours have have any podcasts ever even done the o2 none that i've heard of not that i've heard of now listen what are we going to talk about on the show well we're going to talk about the budget one week on because it's been a pretty tumultuous few days for the opposite budget responsibility, but also big rounds between the opposition and the government.

2:07And we're going to stand back. Last week, we talked about the narrative. Today, we're going to talk about the politics. How has this landed? And what does this mean for next year and the year after? And if that wasn't enough politics for this week, we've had the pretty extraordinary announcement by the Justice Secretary, David Lammy, that a Labour government is going to remove the right to a jury trial from around three quarters of the cases that currently come before our courts and get prison sentences. It's a dramatic reduction in ancient British liberty, but is it what's required to clear that backlog in our courts that causes a lot of misery for the people caught up in it?

2:44And then finally, we're going to look at what's been happening over the channel, on the continent, in France and in Germany in particular, where we are seeing the onward march of right of centre, a far right of centre parties, National Front in France and AFD in Germany. Both of them now, in the latest opinion polls, surging ahead. And we're going to talk about what that tells us about what's happening to politics there, but also the read-across to what's happening here in the UK with talks of a reform Conservative Party pact, which both the Conservatives and Nigel Farage on Reform have been pouring cold water over in the last couple of days.

3:24But what is going on European politics and what is the read across to here? And by the way, it's on the day when we hear that there's a£9 million donation to reform, which I think is like the biggest single donation from a living person as opposed to a legacy to a political party in the modern era. Who's the donor? He is Mr Christopher Harbin. He's an aviation entrepreneur and a crypto investor. He was born in Britain, but he currently lives in Thailand. But let us start with the budget and start with tumult at the Office of Budget Responsibility because of course last Thursday we were still digesting the fact that the OBR document was mistakenly pre-released to the financial markets and to journalists half an hour before the Chancellor even stood up.

4:10We were saying last week that Richard Hughes in a very honourable way called for an immediate inquiry into what had gone on, the chair of the OBR and he said that he would stand aside if that was the verdict of the report. And if he didn't have the confidence of the Chancellor and the Chair of the Treasury Select Committee, and it ended up on Monday, I mean, after a speech from Keir Starmer in the morning, where Keir Starmer notably didn't offer support to Richard Hughes, the head of the OBR. Then in the afternoon, a statement from the Chief Secretary of the Treasury, James Murray, where he notably didn't offer support to the head of the OBR.

4:46And then it turned out the head of the OBR, Richard Hughes, had resigned and lost his job. We had both said a week ago that that would be a bad outcome, but he honourably fell on his sword, although I think there was noticeably a lack of support from those politicians, I would expect from the Chancellor and the Treasury as well, not least because in parallel to that leak, the OBR produced a letter, which it turned out that Richard Hughes had had signed off by the permanent secretary to the treasury setting out in detail the timetable of OBR forecasts because of the row we were reflecting a week ago about did the forecast change after the Chancellor of the Exchequer's rather unusual press conference in Downing Street or had the forecast actually not changed it was the political decision about policy and strategy which changed and we had on Tuesday absent Richard Hughes no longer there two other officials from the OBR, Tom Josephson, Professor David Miles.

5:45David Miles explained how on that particular issue of the OBR forecast, the suggestion that the OBR changed its forecast and that is why the government changed their policy on breaking the manifesto or not on taxation. He explained they needed to put the record straight. Here's what he said. I think we felt that there was a need in that letter to set the record straight on the process by which the forecasts were created. at the OBR, in particular to remove some misconceptions about them that we saw circulating in the media. We know that this committee has a strong, legitimate interest in our processes and how they're done.

6:24And so you deserve to know things. And we were planning to wait until immediately after the budget to release the letter that came to you. David Miles there, probably not expecting to play a starring role, but did on Tuesday at the Treasury Committee. I mean, I make a couple of observations. I mean, first of all, the OBR made a catastrophic mistake in pre-releasing the budget, essentially. And they're worse for 15 years. And, you know, in the context of budgets that can move markets, in the context of budgets where chancellors have big surprises at the end, big political surprises, you know, that kind of thing could have been extremely damaging.

7:02As it was, it was just very unsettling because a loss of the budget was already known. And little noticed is the fact that the permanent secretary of the Treasury, James Bowler, has also launched a leak inquiry into how other information about the budget got into the public domain before. And I think they're particularly focused on that story in the FT a couple of weeks ago that the government had abandoned plans to increase the rate of income tax. So in other words, there's an inquiry into how the government leaked information as well as the OBR. And I think there are a couple of lessons for the OBR.

7:33I mean, the first is brought out in the report by Kieran Martin, who conducted the inquiry, which is it's sort of like a kind of adolescent proving that they want to be independent. And the OBR set up its own tech rather than relying on the government's tech. This is a decade ago because they wanted to show that absolutely independent. As a result, they had the tech of a, as the report said, of a sort of small to medium sized business rather than a state. And I think it's a classic sort of thing when you're a newly independent institution, you're trying to prove your independence. I think the early independent Bank of England was a bit like this.

8:04And then it kind of settles into a rhythm of being confident in its independence and it doesn't have to do things like that. And I actually am not entirely sure it was right either for the OBR to get into a debate with the Treasury Committee in Parliament about what it did with the forecast before the budget. I would just say, you know, now there's a moment to pause and reflect about everything. Personally, I can see as a chancellor, it's extremely irritating to have a running commentary after you get in the budget of what you knew before. And that's for the politicians to delve into. If I was the OBR, I would maintain a kind of purdah now of like what we talk to the Treasury about before budget day is a matter of confidence between us and the Treasury.

8:44Because otherwise it will, you know, if the Treasury start to think that every iteration they have with the OBR before the budget is going to be released immediately after the budget, that is going to destroy what has actually until now under many chancellors It's been a pretty good relationship. And so that would be sort of two cautionary notes. I don't know whether you agree with that or not. Well, clearly, Richard Hughes and David Miles felt very strongly that they were being misrepresented and wanted to set the record straight. And you may be right. It was unwise of them to make public that correction.

9:16But there was also a question as to why they felt misrepresented. And I think from our point of view, in the podcasts we've done over the last two or three weeks, we felt that it was all a bit odd and strange and confusing. And I think that was a view shared quite widely across the media in reporting this. If you go back to first... And the cabinet. Because the cabinet have been pretty free with their views, at least in private and an unattributable basis to the lobby. They have. And Rachel Reeves and Keir Starmer have said, yeah, but it was nothing to do with them because we don't discuss these things with the cabinet.

9:49But the cabinet were reading what was going on in the newspapers as well. If you go back, first of all, to the chancellor's press conference, that breakfast press conference, as Kim Bainock said, over the Cheerios, it was strange. This is all a couple of weeks before the budget. That's right. It was unusual. As we said a few weeks ago, yes, chancellors normally prepare the ground through a speech or a contribution which gets expectations in the right place. but to do so in such a huge scale breakfast tv public way was quite unusual and there's no doubt we took from that and many people did that there was a big problem there was a big hole in the finances rachel reeves was setting up lots of different reasons why there was a hole in the finances lots of different backward looking things she was looking to blame and so undoubtedly we took the view, there was a big problem.

10:43Now, it turns out she'd already had a forecast from the Office of Budget Responsibility, which said that, in fact, the public finances had improved since the spring rather than got worse. They'd got worse because of a downgrade of the growth numbers, but got better because of the tax forecast. And to the extent that there was a challenge for her rebuilding the margin, well, that was changing her policy decision or uprating pensions or abolishing the two-child limit. Those were policy decisions. It wasn't the case. And this was certainly the impression I had from that press conference that there was a big forecast hole in the finances.

11:18Now, some people have been very critical of her. It certainly felt as though it was confusing. I took a different impression from what the Chancellor now says she intended to convey. But then you move forward, secondly, as you said, to that Financial Times Bloomberg story 10 days later, in which suddenly, having prepared the ground to raise income tax, that was the briefing from the Treasury, breaking the manifesto pledge, Keir Starmer said that was what they were thinking of. They said, no, we don't need to do it anymore because of a change in the OBR forecast. And on this podcast at the time, we said, very surprising to see such big moves in the OBR forecast like that so late, the underlying forecast.

12:01But it turned out there wasn't a change in the OBR forecast. In fact, the OBR forecast didn't do a new forecast at all after the Chancellor's statement, other than small changes driven by policy decisions the government made. There is no doubt that we, the wider media, politicians of left and right, whether in the cabinet or in the shadow cabinet, all took from that, that somehow the OBR got it wrong or changed its view. And therefore, there is now no need to break the manifesto. Although very many people thought, well, actually, this is about the politics of those days and trouble they'd gotten into with that West Street briefing.

12:40It turns out that wasn't correct. That was incorrect. That is, I think, why the media feel so angry. And that is clearly why the OBR felt they wanted to correct the record. And the consequence of that means you have a budget, a moment, the biggest moment of the year for the government to set its policy and political direction, which then gets entirely overshadowed by rows about, yes, the OBR leak on the day, but also the OBR forecast, the OBR letter, whether the Chancellor had misled Parliament or the Cabinet in the two weeks before. I mean, it has been another big communications mess. Look, it's utterly bizarre.

13:19Utterly, utterly bizarre. If you think in a kind of corporate context, in a business context, if a company is announcing better than expected results, that's a good day for the company and the share price goes up. If a budget comes along and a chancellor says things are better than we expected, and there's been budgets like that over the last 20 years, that is a good moment for the government. I really, really don't understand what on earth they were thinking in the run-up to this. Once they knew that the OBR forecast was better than people were expecting, better than it had been trailed over the summer, that in fact they had more room against their fiscal rules than everyone was expected, that there wasn't a black hole.

13:59The budget I would have delivered and would have been extremely hard to respond to, because I've also done budget responses or pre-budget responses. The budget you deliver is this. We set out a plan. Since then, the international economic environment has got much harder. People understandably are concerned that we are no longer going to meet our fiscal rules. But we've told you those fiscal rules are non-negotiable. And I can today report to the House that despite that difficult international situation, the British public finances are in a better state. We have got more room against our fiscal rules than we expected.

14:37We do not have to take measures to fill a hole. In short, I can report to the House that our plan is working. Bang, right? And you throw the opposition, you're all set to do a different kind of response. And you start repeating this mantra that the plan is working, the plan is working. And you've got the hard evidence of it. You've got an improvement in the forecast, which people were not expecting. I say improvement in the forecast. We should say that the debt and the deficit numbers were weaker, but the tax receipts were more money rich because of things like inflation. It was a long way of saying actually against the fiscal rules, things were better.

15:11And it's utterly bizarre. They knew that for weeks. I mean, that budget writes itself. And then, by the way, for people here, you know, listening to this program saying, yes, but, you know, it's a Labour Chancellor who wanted to get rid of George Osborne's two-child policy. Fine. You can say, by the way, this also gives us an opportunity to create a fairer society. That's not my words. There's a, you know, what a Labour Chancellor might say. I am putting additional council tax bans on the houses of multi-millionaires in order to give more money to some of the poorest children in society because we're a Labour government.

15:43And that is the budget. That's the budget speech. You know, and I just have no, I can't understand how they got themselves into this situation where they told everyone there was a black hole, told everyone they were going to increase income tax. As you say, this is not speculation because Keir Starmer has publicly now said he was thinking about it. And you end up with like the permanent secretaries doing an inquiry into the leaks of the budget. The chancellor's been referred by the opposition to the Financial Conduct Authority because billions of pounds of money was taken out of people's pensions, worried about what was going to be in the budget.

16:14And the head of the OBR resigns. And the best Downing Street can say is, that's good because that's a distraction. They're not talking about us at the moment. Without missing the wider point, which is it looks utterly shambolic. I mean, the irony, as we said in our hot take on the day of the budget, is that while the OBR was bailing them out, it turned out by being a bit more optimistic right now about the tax revenues coming in. If anything, the challenge for the government in the later years, they're meeting their fiscal rules by being quite optimistic about whether they can really get those tax rises in at election time and about the kind of cuts in public spending which are programmed in.

16:52But, you know, what were they thinking? As you said, this is not the first time that this government, with the opportunity to do something well, ends up in a communications disaster. And the same thing is true about reshuffles and immigration, white papers, and whether we are islands of strangers or not. It's not the first time the comms have gone wrong. There must be something more to it than that. They clearly needed to move on tax if they were going to rebuild margins. But you could play that. Gordon Brown would have said, prudence comes first. We take no risks with our fiscal rules. I'm announcing tough decisions.

17:25There's a way of saying the plan's working and I'm doubling down on the plan. And they needed to find the money to pay for the two-child policy. But it was a small number of billions rather than a large number. Actually, the wider pensions uprating and benefits uprating was costing more than the two-child. As we said last week, what they could have done is said savings on the welfare side being released to pay for that. That would have been a better piece of communication. But for some reason, they got into their minds. we need to break the manifesto, even though it's not clear that they did. I think they may have thought, or the Treasury may have thought, the markets will only really give us the credit for being tough and sorting out the public finances if we don't do complex bitty tax rises, the smorgasbord.

18:08Apparently I said smorgasbord, but I mean smorgasbord a couple of weeks ago. They had to break the manifesto, but in order to justify that, they had to claim in a misleading way that things were worse than they were, changed their minds because of a political panic. They went into this saying, stick with us because we're the ones who will keep the markets on the side and have ended up having a destabilising period where the markets have just been confused as everybody has been over the last few weeks by all of this. I guess my question to you is where does it leave Rachel Reeves and the government?

18:39Well, I think if you look at the briefing you've seen over the last few days, government people saying, well, you know, is this really breaking through to the public? do they really notice do they care and you know a little bit of kind of government ministers going out there we had you know it's a bit like this from Darren Jones earlier in the week when he came on Good Morning Britain you know that you know it was obvious he's your mate running down yeah and it was obvious and it wasn't misleading surely you could see look if you and I were misled and if Chris Mason at the BBC and Robert Peston at ITV are feeling confused I think it was confusing and if we were confused you could see why the public are confused because the public out there are feeling, and this is reflected in the polling we've now seen a week on, they're feeling, well, you made manifesto promises not to increase taxes on working people.

19:25And a year ago, you said you weren't going to freeze personal allowances because that would hit working people. But now you've done it anyway. And we thought you were doing it because there was some big hole in the public finances you had to sort out in the national interest. And it turns out there wasn't a big hole in the public finances. So why have you done it? Which just plays into So that easy Tory argument, we've raised taxes in order to spend all that money on welfare benefits, which, you know, as we've discussed, we've disagreed about whether the two-child policy was the right thing or the wrong thing.

19:54But you don't want your message to be working people are paying more tax to pay for that policy. That isn't the right place. And that's sort of where they've ended up. Yeah, you either want like rich people are paying for it or the economy is doing so well we can afford it. Those are your two options, I think, if you're a kind of centre-left government. not like people who are still not very well off are paying. But as you go into next year now, I mean, the budget wasn't an opportunity for a big relaunch, and it's clearly not worked. Well, that has showed up within the parliamentary Labour Party, hasn't it, the position of Rachel Reeves?

20:28I think that's right. Although what matters is what's happening in the polling, what's happening in the May elections next year, where the confidence is rising, whether the public are feeling better about the economic plan or worrying about living standards and tax rises to come. We had the polling this week from YouGov to say that currently trust in the government's economic policy is lower than trust in Jeremy Corbyn's economic policy and lower than trust in Liz Trust and Kwasi Kwarteng after their budget. So there's clearly a bit of work to do. So look, Rachel Reeves and Keir Starmer, if they're thinking everybody got this wrong, don't they see we're doing well then that would be very dangerous if they're thinking we've got a communications problem and we need to sort that out they would be right and they're going to think quite hard about how they turn that round but if they're thinking they're out of the woods between now and next mate they won't be thinking that because they know the politics of the next few months is as difficult as it was before the margin probably more difficult and they've not taken the budget as a moment to turn things around so um it's tough i think it's fair to say the autumn, which started with a big relaunch by the Prime Minister saying it was going to be an autumn delivery.

21:42It feels like the hole the government's in is a little bit bigger, the political hole, not the fiscal hole. That is right. And, you know, there's always the prospect of the economy strengthening and people feeling better off. And there's always a prospect of the money going to the National Health Service starting to lift people's perceptions of the reality of the NHS. But a bit less optimistic about that with the dogsters strike. They take time. They take time. And so an opportunity not taken. Now, listen, we should turn next to something people I think would never have expected a Labour government led by a distinguished barrister like Keir Starmer to announce, which is the abolition of the jury trial for many, many offences.

22:24And we are going to turn to that somewhat surprising announcement next.

22:39so welcome back i think it's widely accepted across the political parties that there is a serious problem in our court system with a massive backlog of cases and there's a dispute about how the backlog came about some people think the court system was underfunded and my name gets mentioned in that context other people say this is all an after effect of covid and things weren't gripped after that. And others say that our criminal justice system and the legal profession and the like is the last great unreformed public service still operating on rules that existed decades ago. And David Lammy, the new Justice Secretary, I think pradenaed all of those things, frankly, when he made a somewhat surprising announcement.

23:20I mean, it wasn't surprising so much on the day because it had been trailed a little bit, but it certainly wasn't on people's radar, I don't think, a couple of months ago. And that is, he announced that for offences, indictable only offences, where the sentence was likely to be less than three years, there would not be a trial by jury, that a judge would rule in the case on whether someone was guilty or not. It built on a report that Lord Leveson, I remember the Leveson report from my time in office, but that was all about the Murdochs and the like. This is a different Leveson report, same judge.

23:57And he'd made this recommendation, although he had suggested actually fewer offences going to jury trial. So only kind of murder and rape and the like. But it's a bit of a, when Lammy came to make the announcement, there were more offences that would go to jury trial. But Leveson did say that a judge should to sit alongside two magistrates. And that's not been the case in this announcement. So it's a pretty dramatic change. I don't think it's like the most dramatic change since Magna Carta, which is the way some people have been presenting it. And I have to say I'm pretty sympathetic to it. And I'm not as angry about it or offended about it at all.

24:43I don't think my liberties are being fundamentally introduced in the way that many of my former colleagues say they are at the moment. But before we get on to the kind of substance of it, let's tell me, I mean, this just was not on my radar when we were doing this podcast, like at the beginning of this autumn, as like the big thing coming that was going to change our justice system in a pretty marked way. Yeah, it did rather drop out of the blue. If you think of the news stories in this sort of home office crime space over the last couple of days, on the one hand, we've had a big debate from the Justice Department about jury trials.

25:22On the other hand, today, it's a splash in the Daily Telegraph, the issue of facial recognition and its use by the police in tackling criminals. And the suggestion that it may be possible to access the passport database in order to, you know, check people's faces caught on a CCTV camera or whatever against the passport database in order to identify people who've committed a crime. I mean, that's like cameras of people getting off trains at a big railway station will automatically scan every face and pick up. It's the digital age version of the CCTV. But it could also be that somebody came to my front door to break in and they were caught on my doorbell camera.

26:08And the police can then take that image and then check it against the passport database to identify the individual. in the case of the use of facial recognition it's controversial particularly in the civil liberties world um liberties out sort of saying that this is kind of dangerous and we need kind of big safeguards and we don't want to have you know the police state um presumably they would have been against fingerprinting in the 19th century if they'd been around and the same things were said about cctv when it was growing yes do you remember when we when i first became an mp kind of stopped CCTV.

26:40It was quite a big political campaign by people like the Liberal Democrats. And I seem to remember in the various towns I represented in Cheshire, the main thing they wanted was CCTV to stop people nicking things in shops and the like. And these days, if being on a train, being in a station, being in a shop and knowing there's CCTV, I think it's actually rather reassuring for people. But, you know, there are issues here which need to be understood. There need to be safeguards. And in this case, the Home Office, over some months has been putting it out there, starting a debate about the problem.

27:12This is now the beginning of a multi-week consultation on what safeguards we should have. Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp has been saying we need more facial recognition, so the opposition is on board. Because you're preparing the ground. And if you wanted to move to a restriction on jury trials, you needed to have had a longer period in advance, as opposed to pretty much no period in advance, where you're having a big debate about why are the courts facing these big backlogs? What are the choices we've got as to how we speed up justice? And very many people will think people waiting five years for a case to come to court is ridiculous.

27:50We need to speed things up. Maybe this is the right thing to do, but you have to prepare the ground. But it wouldn't let me say, hold on, I got, you know, maybe it was his predecessor, of Shabana Mahmood, who commissioned this, you know, and we got this guy, Brian Leveson, to do his report. Yeah, but you said, George, and you follow these things pretty carefully and you are quite informed. And you said this week, this came totally out of the blue for you. That suggests to me that the government has not been doing the kind of pitch rolling they'd needed to do over months on this issue. And if you look at the kind of political response, it is kind of quite wild.

28:25You would think that every case currently goes to a jury. and therefore this fundamental right has been taken away. If you look in civil cases, it's less than 2 % of cases go to a jury. Even in criminal cases across magistrates and the Crown Courts, it's only 13 % of cases go to a jury. That's because of cases which are lower tariff going to the magistrates or where people plead guilty. It is true that 65 % of court time in the criminal system is taken up with jury trials, but most cases don't go to a jury so it's not like you know it is um some kind of massive change and david lammy is right to say the magna carta also says you know that justice delayed is justice denied i mean at that time is both about the fairness of the process but also at it being timely so he has got an argument here his problem is i actually remember in a budget giving some money to celebrate the anniversary of the Magna Carta, mainly so I could make a joke about Ed Miliband and the barons, the union barons.

29:29The problem, David, the problem is David Lammy has some form here. This again is why he needed to do more ground preparation. First of all, at the time of COVID, when the shadow justice secretary was David Lammy and the justice secretary was Robert Buckland there was you know a debate about do we handle the pandemic and the problems in our courts at the time not being able to sit in person the delays which were going to build up by moving away from jury trials and David Lammy slammed this as a an affront you know he basically says that criminal trials without juries is a really bad thing so there's some explaining he needs to do there there's also I think a very powerful argument which he made back in 2017 he He was commissioned to do a review into the way in which unfairness and ethnicity and justice interact by David Cameron, the prime minister.

30:27And in the review he did into prejudice in the criminal justice system, he reported that jury trials were really important because he called them a filter for prejudice. He said that when a jury retires to make a decision, its members consider the evidence, they discuss the case, and that debate and deliberation acts as a filter for prejudice to persuade other jurors people must first justify their decision. Power is never concentrated in the hands of one individual. So I'm quite sympathetic to David Lammy's argument that he's got a massive problem in the court system. And I think very many, for example, viewers of Good Morning Britain will think we need to get on with this.

31:08And saying that you have to have a jury trial in every criminal case may not make sense if that means people are waiting five years. But I think he needed a process which allowed him to reflect upon what he'd said in the past and show that there was kind of safeguards and an understanding of those difficulties. And because it happened in such a rushed way, he's ended up being more on the defensive than he needed to be. And here's the shadow justice secretary, Robert Jenrick, pointing out David Lammy's track record in a way which is challenging. His past is catching up with him because the best opponent of the justice secretary's plans to curb jury trials is the justice secretary himself.

31:49In 2020, he said criminal trials without juries are a bad idea. You don't fix the backlog with trials that are widely perceived as unfair. In 2017, in his report into prejudice in the criminal justice system, he found juries and I quote, act as a filter for prejudice. But now he's become Justice Secretary. He's scrapping the very institution he wants lauded. Which is it? Will the real David Lammy please stand up? Yeah, Robert Jenner, by the way, being a pretty effective opposition politician, as we know he is becoming. But I think it is. But the clue's there in opposition. I mean, isn't this one of those classic cases where governments have to do difficult things?

32:41and frankly the right to a jury trial has been restricted over the last couple of hundred years on many occasions and more and more cases have been heard by magistrates courts and the like and indeed those statistics you gave earlier shows that's the case and what happens is you know the government makes this kind of hard decision and the opposition and the kind of civil liberties lobbies get on their high horses about it you know i remember when i was an opposition mp some of the most kind of heated moments as an opposition was when Michael Howard, our leader, who, by the way, had been a pretty authoritarian Home Secretary, was kind of leading the case against the illiberal legislation of Tony Blair and David Blunkett.

33:22And David Davis, who, to be fair to him, has become a kind of, has the zeal of the convert and has retained that zealotry for many years since. But, you know, he was the shadow home secretary who kind of made common cause with Shammy Chakrabarty, who was running liberty at the time. And, you know, this again against the Blair government. I mean, that's what oppositions do. And that's presumably what David Lammy was doing when he was shadow justice secretary. By the way, a reminder of anyone who's paying attention to these things, the fact that David Cameron got David Lammy to do a report, good example of big tent politics.

33:58It always works, bringing in people from the outside to do things for you. You know, that's what the shadows do. And then the real people, the people doing the actual job have to deal with the truth, which has got this big backlog in the courts. And, you know, I think it's one of those things which, frankly, it happens to be a Labour government making this announcement. It could easily be a Conservative government making this announcement. You're quite right to ask questions about, you know, how you might have gone about preparing the ground for it. But on the substance, I think there'll be a lot of support.

34:27And fundamentally, you know the justice system is a complete mess without getting into a debate about its origins you have got people caught up for years not just victims you've got people who are accused of crimes who either can't serve their sentence and get on with their life or can't be acquitted and you know when I look I mean I remember as chancellor looking at the criminal justice system having long conversations actually with the lord chief justice at the time and actually providing financial support for the modernization of courts and digitalization. But, you know, if you look at all elements of this, look at the legal profession compared to other professions in our country, it's still very, very old fashioned and the separation between the barrister and the solicitor.

35:10You look at the courts and how they sit and the fact that they can sit empty and, you know, people don't turn up and then the whole thing's suspended for a day and everyone sits around doing nothing. You know, you look at the probation service, you look at the prison service. We've had debates on this podcast about prisons being released and how that process works. I mean, the whole thing is ripe for reform. I'm in favor of this jury announcement, but I would definitely have put it together with a big package of reform for the court system. If you want to address the austerity argument, which there'll be some people shouting at this thing going, well, all right, you're money, George Osborne.

35:46Okay, you can give them a big dollar per cash as well, but make it aligned to reform. Don't make the mistake that was made with the doctors of not asking for reform in terms of along with money. And yeah, and look, again, it's one of those things where actually a barrister who's a prime minister, Keir Starmer could be the person who leads a government that reforms our court system, which is long overdue. But in exactly the same way, as you say, the opposition is going to make a big storm about this, and they are, in exactly the same way for the government. The problem is, and this is true for David Lammy, but it was true for past justice secretaries under the conservatives and probably true for justice secretaries under the previous Labour government as well the easy solutions you know the judges are saying why are you doing this reducing juries just give us more money and the problem is that this justice system has been underfunded very many years and the squeeze on justice budgets is continuing now so very good blog by um the secret barrister i was reading abolishing trial by jury why is the government overlooking the obvious and it goes through all the things they should be doing instead more sitting days better it infrastructure improve the crown prosecution service the rot sit in when sakir starmer was dpp and the cps lost nearly a third of its workforce more police we've lost experience in the but it's not just about money a lot of this is about yeah but it's all come on there are also cases where you know a defendant doesn't turn up or there's a last minute uh you know appeal and then the court sits there empty i thought i read a very good piece in the paper this week about how you know judges still insist on all doing all the scheduling themselves they won't they won't have court buildings are collapsing fixing them will cost money um one of the common cause of delay is the examination of digital devices there's a year-long wait for those examinations and we just i'm not saying we just had a conversation about the budget it's not and the billions that was available because they raised taxes went on welfare right well didn't go on courts buildings and you know computers in course and whatever i know but you're taking this into an argument between you and me and i'm not and what i actually said was of course the opposition complains david labby did so does robert jenrich governments consistently have not funded this well if you simply funded this by giving more money to judges and there's been quite a lot more money in the last year to try and speed things up without reform, you are definitely right.

38:06You don't get progress. Why is it taking over a year for a mobile phone to be checked for the evidence on that phone to then be used in a court case? That is partly about resources. It may not only be about resources. Yeah, but that's also about, by the way, in courts, defence barristers saying, we need to see absolutely everything on this phone, which these days, you know, is way bigger than the British Library in terms of the amount of information people have on their phones. It is about more than resources, but it is about resources. Yeah, but hold on. Governments have not been prepared to confront the legal profession, to confront some of the vested interests and the kind of outdated practices that have just simply not caught up with them on nature.

38:49So you didn't confront them. You cut the budgets. And I have a feeling that that may have been done by the previous Labour government and by the current Labour government. Actually, first of all, the backlog of cases was falling quite rapidly by 2016. And I had a good deal with the very good Lord Chief Justice at the time, which was, we'll put some more money into digitalization of these courts. Because in those days, you know, a lot of everything was still paper hound. But it was about an attempt to get reform. But, yeah, it was towards the end of my time. And I just think it's a kind of moment.

39:17Anyway, look, I have quite a lot of sympathy for David Lammy because he's got this back along. The one thing I don't understand is why it needs to be a permanent reform. I mean, why has he said that this is, you know, a long term reform? Why can't it be something that he has to do to restrict jury trials for a period? You mean you do it as like, for the next three years, we're going to be restricting jury trials? And by the way, at the end of the three years, no one would want to reintroduce them, would they? You could say, well, for the next X years, three years, five years, we're going to do this.

39:43It will save us money. We'll have a clear evaluation process alongside that. At the end of that, we'll decide whether we think justice has got worse or not. I think that would have actually been a better way to go about this. And look, he'll have to make concessions. Although I think in the end, Parliament is going to pass this. because I don't think Labour and Conservative MPs will in the end want to vote for slowing down the justice system. And they'll be arousing the Lords and the lawyers won't like it that much. But if you make sensible concessions, this will go through. Yes, I think so. But I imagine the opposition and particularly your friends, the Liberal Democrats, will love wanging on about this.

40:21They may do, although victims feel that the court is letting them down. You know, of course, most sympathy is with the victims. But even those who are charged with things, they need this thing dealt with. And if they've got to pay a punishment, they want to pay the punishment and get on with their lives and have a chance of redemption. I hope we're giving David Lemmy helpful support and advice here. Support, advice and challenge. We'll take a break and then we're going to come back and have a look at what's been happening across the channel in France and Germany with the rise of the far right.

40:50Back in a moment.

41:01welcome back so if you look across the channel at our near neighbors in france and germany you are seeing now a consistently strong performance by the far right and of course this has been coming over many years and we talked about it before on this podcast but if you look now at the french polls, and we do have a French presidential election starting to loom in 2027. Jordan Bardella, now he's the kind of number two to Marine Le Pen. He's the young leader of national rally. But Marine Le Pen has been convicted of essentially election fraud and at the moment can't stand to be the presidential candidate because of that conviction, although she's challenging it.

41:44But he, Jordan Bardella, he has a consistent lead over basically all newcomers in the French election. The person who's kind of closest behind him is a conservative politician called Edouard Philippe, who had been one of Macron's prime ministers before. And then you go to Germany, where, you know, last time we kind of properly checked in, Friedrich Mertz, the Christian Democrat, like their equivalent of the British conservatives, had won an election. He didn't win quite as well as he hoped. And he's in one of those funny German alliances with the centre-left, which we've discussed this, I think, on EMQs, whether you could ever have a Tory-Labour alliance in Britain.

42:23Maybe, who knows, but it seems quite unlikely at the moment. But in Germany, it's become pretty commonplace over the last 20 years. But now the AFD, the far-right party in Germany, is ahead of the CDU-led coalition government. So what should we read into this? I mean, you could say it's all a bit still mid-term in both these countries. Germany's quite recently had an election. It's still a couple of years off the French presidential election. We've heard before about Le Pen doing well, both her and indeed her father coming top of the first round of presidential ballots. I mean, are we right to be worried about this or is this the usual noise and then, you know, the centrist dads get their act together?

43:04We will see whether the centrist dads are going to get their act together. But I think it is really interesting. And I think there is a read-across to here as well, because the other aspect of this is that Jordan Bardella, the far-right French leader, has been, to some extent, moving on from the old Le Pen, Reyn and her father kind of positioning. He's been nudging towards the centre ground, talking in a bit more of a business-friendly way, trying to position himself as a sort of French baloney. I mean, we should just explain Georgia Maloney, the Italian prime minister, when she was elected a couple of years ago, people thought she was the far right.

43:45And indeed, some people would say she still is. But she has kind of confounded a lot of people by being a strong, essentially centre-right prime minister and probably the strongest prime minister Italy has had for many decades. That's right. And even in Germany, it's harder for the AFD because they are still seen. They still have a pretty toxic brand. But the leadership of the AFD. The toxic brand that dates back to 1930s. Absolutely. But they launched their youth wing the other day, which got people pretty nervous. That's right. And their leader, a former Goldman Sachs banker, trying to talk a kind of more reasonable talk.

44:22And we've noticed in this podcast in the last few weeks how Nigel Farage and Rafal, kind of in a Richard Tice-encouraged way, have been edging a bit more towards the centre ground, backing off some of their more heavy-handed policies when it came to taxation and to public spending. I think the interesting thing is this. First of all, in Germany and in France in the last couple of years, you had centre-left, centre-right parties who sort of came together to see off the far right. You certainly saw that in the French presidential elections, which is why Macron won again. But, you know, there has been that understanding in German politics.

45:07but the resulting coalitions have been weak growth has been poor in fact poorer than here in the uk public discontent is is rising the coming together of the mainstream establishment to see off the far-right parties is not going down that well and as a consequence the polls say public is becoming a bit more open-minded to maybe you know these right parties may have something to offer in a sort of Trumpian kind of way. Secondly, as I said, that edging towards the centre ground. And then the third thing is, it then poses a big challenge for the mainstream parties. Do they try again to challenge, to see them off?

45:52Will we see an attempt by parties of the left and the centre-left and the centre-right in France to unite, as they did before, to see off Bardella or actually are they going to think you know in the end if these guys are going to get elected maybe we have to sort of try to find a ways to to work with them and you know in Germany for the first time people are starting to say well maybe you need to talk to the AFD and have meetings with them rather than just to oppose and here in Britain we have Nigel Farage saying no to the idea of accommodation with the conservatives and the conservatives saying no to accommodation with Nigel Farage.

46:31But the truth is, there is a much more openness to talking in the same realm. Are we really going to be in position as we get closer to the election or post-election where the Conservative Party, the centre-right, is going to say, sorry, reform is beyond the pale? And so it does feel as though there are, I think, if you were Labour or Conservative, centre-ground politicians worrying signs here. And is there a parallel between what's happening in France and what might happen in Britain two years later? I would say there's potentially actually quite a difference, but it's not necessarily a good thing for the UK.

47:07So the first is, I think we've always said, ah, but our great electoral system, our first past the post system keeps out the extremist parties on the left and the right. And, you know, that is why Britain never had, you know, a serious communist bloc in its parliament, unlike the French and the Italians and others. And we never had a kind of fascist bloc. You know, the last serious sort of fascist threat we had was a bit like you, a former Labour cabinet minister, Oswald Mosley, who, you know, and his black shirt. So I'm not sure I'm fully happy with that. I know. But the, you know, the electoral system worked to keep out the extremes, because there's such a single, in any one constituency, there's such a high hurdle, You have to get 40 to 50 percent of the vote to get elected.

47:54But of course, our electoral system works the other way, as we saw with Labour benefiting enormously, even though it only got 33 percent of the votes at the last election, getting a huge majority. Although in 2019, when there was an accommodation between Conservatives and Labour, it went the other way. Because actually, in that circumstance, Labour was losing in their Red Wall seats because the Conservatives and reform weren't splitting their votes. And that is my question. If it starts to become, well, you know, the current system's not working, maybe we actually ought to give them a chance. Does it lead de facto to deals and PACs?

48:29Well, so the first thing is I think the electoral system in the UK can suddenly be a kind of floodgate if reform get over 30 % and sweep away both conservatives and Labour. And if today's opinion polls were replicated in a general election, that is what would happen. And then second, I think it's very interesting. You see, in Germany, the instinct of the centre-right is to do an electoral alliance with the centre-left, the equivalent of a Tory-Labour pact. right and in France again when it actually comes to the sort of final round of the presidential election centre left and centre right combined to stop the far right and in Britain it's the centre right who is flirting with alliance with what you might call the far right or at least reform and Nigel Farage I think maybe these terms are becoming a little bit outdated but you say that you know the Tories say they don't want to pact with reform and reform says they don't want to pact with the conservatives but you know we had pretty good reporting this week that Nigel Farage in private is saying this.

49:27He's saying it to donors. By the way, we continue to have a stream of former Conservative MPs, Jonathan Gullis being another one this week, who have gone over to reform. And as I said right at the top of this show, we had a huge donation, a£9 million donation to reform this week. And it rather torpedoes a point I was trying to make in Kemi Baden-Koch's favour a couple of weeks ago, which is, you know, actually on the fundraising front, the Tories aren't doing too badly, which remains the case. But now I think you can say reform are doing better. So, you know, there's quite a lot going on here.

50:02But I think it's interesting that in Britain, dealing with reform is seen as actually more acceptable than dealing with the far right is seen as in France or in Germany. The barrier to that for some is Nigel Farage. And of course, Nigel Farage has been embroiled in the last two weeks and therefore not appearing on television because of testimony from a number of pupils he was at school with about some of the very extreme things he is alleged to have said about Hitler was right and hissing as children came out of the Jewish assembly. Of course, in the case of French politics, we would have said three years ago, five years ago, the far right is a one-person or a one-family band, the Le Pen family band, in the same way as people say the Reform Party is a one-person band, Nigel Farage but Jason Bardella has managed to shift away from the Le Pen standing partly helped by that court case he's a new kid on the block I mean is Nigel Farage the key to the success of reform in the next election absolutely or will there be some reform politicians thinking actually given the scale of the movement which we're trying to tap into if Nigel Farage is seen as a guy who increasingly becomes toxic.

51:18Maybe if we follow the Le Pen example, got him out of the way and got somebody else in to be the next generation. Danny Kruger. Well, I'm just wondering. I can tell you what, we wouldn't have to worry about reform if something like that happened. How damaging do you think these testimonies against Nigel Fargell? It's quite striking when you listen to it. Yes, it's very unattractive. When you get revelations about someone, you know, how they behaved when they were young, it either goes, yeah, but we kind of knew that all along, didn't we? I mean, we're not that surprised to hear that, in which case, I don't think it does have much impact.

51:49Or it goes like, oh, my God, that completely changes what I think of this person. And I'm afraid, I mean, I'm not saying this is a good thing, but in speaking of myself, I don't think I'm that surprised. Is he dealing with it right? I mean, he's trying to kind of hope it goes away and dismissing it. Is that the right strategy? Well, what he will find is, you know, if he really is going to be Britain's next prime minister or people think he's going to be next prime minister before an election, he is going to get a ton of scrutiny. A ton of scrutiny. So therefore he needs to deal with this now in a more emphatic way than he's done so far.

52:21Because that's, you know, the nature of, you know, it's all very well being the kind of guy propping up the bar and whatever. I mean, you know, you could argue that had a pretty serious effect in that Britain left the European Union. But, you know, if he becomes the frontrunner to be the Prime Minister, there'll be all guns trained on him and everything he's ever done. That is all for Political Currency this week. Thank you so much for listening, especially if we made it onto your Spotify wrapped. Yes, thanks very much. Yeah, top of my Spotify wrapped was, of course, Centrist Dad. I'm making that up, actually, because is it actually available on Spotify?

52:54No. Top of mine was, you know, in my five was classical first, punk fifth. And I'm in some member of some special band of the most eclectic music listeners in Britain. But you've got to be pretty eclectic to come to Centrist Dad. My Spotify throws up, genuinely, it throws up Peppa Pig, Tractor Ted and Nursery Rhymes at the moment. that is um you know a reflection of your musical taste we'll be back on monday for ex-minister's questions please keep sending us in your christmas theme questions for our special episodes we've got coming up send your questions of course to questions at politicalcurrency.co.uk and you can put the subject line this is pretty original christmas and if you send them in soon we'll do our best to get them answered um for our wonderful golden kitchen cabinet it's a bit like a christmas card there's no point in coming in after christmas well that's yeah get on with it For our wonderful Golden Kitchen Cabinet members, we'll be with you on Friday ad-free with our next newsletter.

53:45Until that point, we will see you then. See you then.

54:01This is Political Currency. With Ed Balls and George Osborne.

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