Is Starmer finally getting to grips with being PM?

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0:43BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello, it's Amol in the Today Podcast studio, feeling somewhat lonely because Nick is off on his travels, which you can keep up to date with on Instagram, where he's being very, very productive. But we're going to talk about politics, and Nick will be back, no doubt, listening to this on his beach somewhere in India. we're going to talk about Keir Starmer and how he's getting on because after a difficult few months in power, voters seem to be giving Keir Starmer, Sir Keir, a bit of credit for the role that he's been playing on the world stage, bridging the gap between President Trump and Ukraine's European allies.

1:17According to YouGov, his intense round of diplomacy has seen him rewarded with his highest poll ratings in six months, albeit from an alarmingly low point for a relatively new prime minister. But is his performance on the world stage a sign that Keir Starmer is getting better at politics? And can he capitalise on that at home, where many more very difficult decisions are looming? As we head towards the spring statement, the government is looking to make big savings from areas like the welfare budget, which it says it's going to cut despite very strong and indeed growing opposition from Labour MPs.

1:53Ministers have also got their sights on streamlining the civil service. That's going to encounter a few objections, not just from civil servants. And I'm going to be speaking to someone who's really been at the centre of politics in this country for decades and who was there the last time Labour were in power. He was a very consequential education and home and work and pension secretary. And that is David Blunkett, Lord Blunkett. He served in Tony Blair's cabinet. And I'm going to be speaking to David Blunkett about what he thinks Keir Starmer's next act should be and whether it's time for him to define Starmerism.

2:26as we've often discussed on this podcast. Before the end of the episode as well, I've got one hell of a scoop for you. I can't believe I pulled this off. I don't know how we did it, but we've got the first interview with the new Today Programme presenter, Anna Foster. That is going to be a lot of fun. Let's do it.

2:57David, I think this is the first... No, I should say Lord Blunkett. I think this is your first time. No, David's fine. David's fine. This is your first time on the Today podcast, but I fear that we've caught you when you're not in full health. Are you okay? Well, I sound a lot worse than I feel. I've had a chest infection, but I'm ready and willing to go. Fantastic. Well, we're thrilled to have you on the podcast for the first time since this podcast has been going, and it's a very good time because... Well, it's always a good time to talk to you, But there is a huge amount going on with the Labour Party, which you have been a member of now for what?

3:30Coming up for over 60 years, over 60 years. And I could talk to you for hours about your beginnings on Sheffield Council, but we'll save that for another discussion. Let's start with Keir Starmer and what's been happening for him this week. Just before we talk about the last couple of weeks that Sir Keir Starmer has had, what's your honest assessment of how the first eight to nine months of his prime ministership went? I think the first eight months were very difficult. I think his ability shone through when the disturbances, the riots took place, the end of July, beginning of August. And where there's a crisis, where there's a clear focus, you can see the ability of Keir Starmer to master a brief, to be decisive, to move in quickly.

4:17And of course, that's been reflected over the last few weeks in relation to Ukraine and the interventions by Donald Trump. Do you think that he told a sufficiently clear story about what he wanted to do in government? There was often talk about missions. There was talk about Britain being the best place in the world to grow up and grow old. But do you think this sort of story that Keir Starmer told before he came to power and then after coming to number 10 was clear enough about where he wanted to take Britain? Well, for perfectly decent reasons, the build-up to the general election was about what he didn't want to be.

4:55So he was, if you like, placing himself against the chaos and the undermining of confidence and stability, the economic catastrophe of Liz Truss. And so the whole emphasis of winning the general election, which in itself was seen as a miracle, I think people need to just take a step back. And I was one of them. I thought we might scrape home with 20 or 30 majority in the House of Commons on a 10 % lead. We got the 10 % lead, but with over 170 majority. I think the whole concentration was on that campaign and the revelation of how things were so bad that people needed change. What we didn't have was a put together jigsaw.

5:42We had lots of individual policies, but I think they're only just now, if I'm very honest about it, getting the picture so that we're now beginning to paint a picture of where we're going. And now it's time for the missions to kick in for unification between different departments so that they start actually batting together rather than separately. And as you consider that jigsaw, as you consider that sort of more coherent sense of what a Starmer government is for, what do you think Keir Starmer wants to do with Britain? I mean, I hate to ask the cliché question, but let's do it. What do you think Starmerism is?

6:21I think it's about decency. I think it's about a country that has confidence in itself in terms of its place internationally and its way in which it can liberate people in the domestic agenda to be able to live their lives to the full. and they may not seem terribly ambitious, visionary approaches, but actually after the years we've had, I think Keir Starmer sees that as the kind of stability and certainty and foundation that people need for the future. What he said recently I've really warmed to, which is that we can't, I paraphrase, we can't just tinker. we've got to have really quite radical structural change and I want him to drive that, if I'm honest, through all the departments so that every cabinet minister and junior minister understands that they're not just taking a brief from the civil service, they're actually on a mission.

7:27They're on a mission to change Britain and if we don't do that radically and we don't need to do it in the way that Trump and Musk and co are doing in the States but to really shake things up, then I'm afraid the far right will actually offer a simple solution to very complex problems. What's your sense of how the last few weeks have transformed Keir Starmer and whether or not we're beginning to see through his dealings on the international stage, the very thing that you're pining for, that leadership, that sense of mission? Well, you can't learn to be a statesman, to develop statescraft in opposition.

8:05So you're doing it in government. And this is true of my friends Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. And what Keir Starmer has been able to demonstrate over recent weeks is to grasp that opportunity of demonstrating statesmanship, building his own confidence, I think, which is now really shining through, presenting, as he did to the parliamentary Labour Party, I was present on Monday, a coherence about what he's trying to do internationally, having a readover to what he wants to do domestically. So he was talking about the security of the world and the way in which we need to play a part. I mean, we are only 66 million people off the coast of Europe, but to punch above our weight, and then to translate that into security at home, security in terms of dealing with antisocial behaviour, and people's, if you like, patient willingness to get across their lives in their homes and their streets and to be able to see how, for instance, spending on defence can help regenerate the economy across the country.

9:19They're difficult issues to get across, but I think he's managing to do it. And one of the biggest issues that he is facing and which is going to be very much in focus over the coming weeks before Rachel Reeves delivers a statement to Parliament is welfare. And in preparation for this interview, I had the very, very great pleasure of listening to an interview you gave to Pete Hennessy, Lord Hennessy, who has a wonderful programme called Reflections. He speaks to people who've been in politics for a long time. And with Lord Hennessy, you reflected on your amazing childhood in Sheffield and you talked about your passion for young people and work at great length.

9:59We have a situation in this country right now where you have close to a million people who are very young, 16 to 24, who are not in work. And we have a very fast rising welfare bill. What's your assessment of the situation? Before we get to some of the solutions, what's your assessment of the situation where we do have this sharp rise in overall welfare and specifically young people who are not in education, employment or training? I think we have a crisis. things have worsened dramatically since I talked to Peter Hennessy. We've had 110 ,000 increase in 16 to 24-year-olds, not in education, employment or training, just over the last year, according to the most recent Labour Force survey.

10:43We've really got to grips with this. I was very fortunate in 1997 because I came in as Education Employment Secretary with two of Labour's five pledges, the famous pledge card of the late John Prescott. One of them was class sizes and the other was to get 250 ,000 young people into a job or a training place or a socially worthwhile voluntary placement. and we managed it because we engaged with business. We had a very clear idea of what we needed to do. Now, we were fortunate because Gordon Brown had levied on the former privatized utilities quite a big sum of money on their profits. We don't have that at the moment, but somehow we've got to find the resource to invest in those young people because this is a lost generation and it's not just economically bad for the country, it's not even morally bad for the individual, it's also a major corrosive impact on our social well-being, on the fabric of our society.

11:54Can you imagine almost a million young people who at one moment in time are not in anything, they're not getting up for any purpose in the morning. So even at this stage of my life, I'm on a campaign to say we've got to really take this seriously and it needs a bombshell, not a bit of tinkering at the edges. Why do you think it's happening? Why do you think it is the case that people who physically at least should be the prime of their lives, young, fit, healthy, driven, perhaps free of the responsibilities of parenthood, able to enter the workplace, able to maybe start a business, a family, if their dream is fulfilled, buy a home.

12:35Why do you think it is that there has been this sharp rise in the number of young people who are not working for whatever reason? Well, if I had the full answer to that, I might be joint prime minister with Keir Starmer, which I don't think he would like too much. The truth is that there's a multiplicity of issues. Quite obviously, the pandemic dealt a terrible blow. it did so in terms of young people in their schooling and at college and I was in the forefront of I'm not being a Johnny come lately actually I was in the forefront of saying we shouldn't have closed the schools we should have said to the teaching profession we'll do our best to protect you but young people have got to carry on coming in there's got to be a structure to their day they they may learn a little bit at home but it's going to be a catastrophe socially and it has been.

13:31That didn't just apply to schools, but it applied to post-16 colleges and universities as well. And I think we've got the legacy of that. But there's something more fundamental. Something's happened in terms of how young people see themselves and the world of work and their opportunity. And I hear people saying, well, if it's a lousy job, we don't want to take it but I had a lousy job I was paid 12 12 pound a week and I was very fortunate because I was allowed a day a week to go to college and I went to evening class at the same time to get the qualifications to get into university took me a long time to do it but it was worth it and that drive and energy and commitment to learning and working has been diminished and And somehow we've got to put that back into the ether.

14:26In the old days, we called it the work ethic. There's absolutely nothing wrong with advocating the work ethic because it's about the dignity of work. It's about the independence of individual young people. It's about them building their self-respect and self-esteem and confidence. And of course, it's about them then building families of the future. What the hell are we going to do if young women see young men as idlers? What do you say then to the swelling ranks of Labour MPs, many of them relatively new entrants to parliaments, many of them millennial or younger, who are right now, this week, sending, as it were, public warning shots to the Labour leadership to say that they think that welfare is not the budget that needs to be targeted if Rachel Reeves is to meet her fiscal rules?

15:19I have to say to them, look, I'm not preaching to you, although just now I sounded as if I was. And you were for some years a Methodist preacher. I was a lay preacher for a little while until the Methodist leadership locally said, don't you think you'd be better in politics? And they were right. My message is very clear to them. There are many people who are multiply handicapped or have very severe mental health problems who are at this moment in time not able to work and supporting them is a moral imperative. but distinguishing that from people for whom work will be part of the answer, just part of the answer of overcoming the stress, the anxiety, I don't mean this disparagingly, but the belief that they have a mental health problem when actually work would be part of getting them out of that social isolation and that fear of what might be around the corner.

16:25I think that matters. And secondly, I'm not talking as someone who used to be in a really good position. I'm in very comfortable economic surroundings now. When I was growing up, after my dad was killed in a works accident, and my mum was struggling to get compensation, there were times when we literally, literally had bread and dripping to eat. So I need to say to younger colleagues, I know what it's like to be really, really poor. And I don't want anyone to be in that circumstance. But for me, the best form of welfare was always work. In the 80s, I was leader of Sheffield then. The miners' headquarters were in the city.

17:14We were working to help the miners, although we fell out big time with Arthur Scargill. But we had a slogan, didn't we, in those days? And it was coal, not dole. And what it meant was people needed a job not to be on incapacity benefit. And we railed against the three and a half million people who were being put on incapacity benefit under the Margaret Thatcher leadership. Now, we can't possibly think of that 50 years ago. The miners went back to work 50 years this month trying to hold their heads high, wanting a job. We can't look at that history and then say we can allow the welfare budget to rise exponentially.

18:00If you take the most rational anticipation, we're talking raising from 50 billion to 70, just over 70 billion in the next five years. That is totally unthinkable. That money should be spent on investment in what we believe in, in education, in health, in liberating people in the most deprived parts of the country. We can't possibly spend it on propping people up out of work. It's very interesting that you say that because that's something that towards the end of their time in power, Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt were also advancing. And as you say, it's a sort of it's a common sense position rather than necessarily an ideological one that that isn't necessarily the best use of money.

18:47For every person, you can move from the column that's welfare to the column of work. You transform a life, you improve the economy, you potentially get more tax receipts, but also you make savings that compound. The trouble is, Lord Blunkett, it's proving hard to do. The trend lines are very much for ever more money to be spent on welfare, ever more young people, it seems, to be dropping out of the workforce. And I wonder what lessons you mentioned your experience in 1997, those two pledge cards. What lessons do you have from your time in cabinet that you would give to Keir Starmer now privately or indeed through this podcast publicly about what actually works in terms of moving people off welfare and into work?

19:28How do you do it? Well, I would do something that I don't think Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves are going to take from me. and that is I would loosen the fiscal, self-imposed fiscal rules, firstly on the back of the need to invest in defence and secondly to raise enough for a once-off, and I'm talking as we did with the Winfort levy, a once-off borrowing to invest massively in those young people that we talked about earlier. I would do with the removal of the most restrictive, I'm talking£10 billion in relation to defence spending over and above the drawdown on the wealth fund for this investment in young people and in defence.

20:19I think the financial markets may look at it sceptically, but I don't think given what the Germans are driving now in the European Union, it would affect us greatly. I may be wrong, but I believe that that would be necessary to put a massive booster under everything we need to do to get those young people back into work. Of course, it would involve very urgent recruitment to the support systems in health and education skills. As you know, I'm obsessed with the skills agenda. Don't think you can expect somebody to take a job if you don't equip them for it. So it would be a massive booster. And it may not work, but the alternative of drip, drip, drip with inadequate support won't do.

21:08And the Treasury's history on being cautious to the point of atrophy is not a good one. And Labour governments have fallen into that trap over and over again. So I would like to say, and I have said actually to Keir, if you want this massive radical boost, I'm afraid you're going to have to take a look. and now's the moment, 26th of March, 2025, to say we've examined what's happening in the world, we know what's happening domestically and we're going to adjust modestly, very modestly, our fiscal rules. You mentioned that you've been speaking to Keir Starmer, you've spoken to him occasionally, I don't know how informal or formal that advice is or how regularly you get to speak to him, obviously he's a hugely busy man, but you're the sort of person that he would want to sound out.

22:00I just want to ask you a couple of general questions about the direction of his government. What's your feeling? You're an absolutely fundamental central figure to the new Labour project, that government of Tony Blair after 1997. These are very different circumstances. The zeitgeist is in a different place. It's less optimistic. It's more anxious. Different set of challenges. But what do you think that he should learn from your time in power? I'm tentative to do this because you're right. We're in a completely different era with a very different financial situation. if I was giving advice it would be that reform as well as investment was absolutely fundamental to change that you can do several things at once so we don't need to be purely focused on one issue because this is a moment in time when I call it the Leonardo da Vinci moment where we need to combine a whole range from science to arts and culture to regenerate our country.

23:03And therefore, you see this as something that is a mobiliser for everyone. We did try. We didn't always get it right in terms of mobilising the strength of people in their community or the backing of small and medium-sized businesses to be able to regenerate parts of the country, which are still run down. We didn't get that part right but the intention was to mobilise to being an enabling government rather than a top-down determinist government. At the moment and this was true of me in education we've got to move quickly and therefore we are in my view moving top-down more than bottom-up. We preach devolution but of course on things like planning we actually want to drive through central missions.

23:55And so we've got to get around that contradiction of mobilising people where they live, where they work, making them feel that they're part of this change programme, and at the same time being able to do things nationally that really do bring about rapid and significant and, above all, visible improvement. Because if you live in a small town that's falling apart and reform come along and tell you in a simple way that they're going to transform your life and you see a government that is doing right the right thing on a national level but it's not touching you you'll be vulnerable to being won over so we've got to be able to do the local and the transformational physically and we've got to tell people when we're doing it There's just been an announcement a couple of weeks ago of£1.5 billion into funding of about£20 million per area of the kind of things that the Tories used to call the town fund.

24:58I bet very few people listening to this podcast know about it. I bet they don't know about the£900 million that was announced before Christmas into primary care or even the billion pounds into special educational needs. So probably my best message is that communications have got to be a great deal better. And people used to ridicule Alistair Campbell and still do for the so-called spin. But my God, we used to get the message across. And if you don't and you put your light under a bushel, not surprising that people don't know what you're doing. I'm so glad you mentioned in the context of small towns reform and the populist surge, which is such a defining feature of politics in our time across Europe and indeed America.

25:48Your friend and colleague of many years, Gordon Brown, has written various pieces over recent years talking about his time in power. And one of the arguments that he makes is that perhaps he, you, was slow to realize, and Tony Blair I've discussed this with as well, the way in which globalization created losers. and the fear is that globalization, which was good for rich people in the rich world and in the poorer world was good for mostly everyone, it was not so good for the working class communities that you came from, David, and it did lead to de-industrialization, jobs going overseas and other people coming into this country who sometimes, not always, but sometimes took those jobs.

26:32Do you basically concur with Gordon Brown that globalisation has weakened the connection between the Labour Party and its working class roots, and that's one reason that reform are doing well in the polls. Yes, I do. It's part of the picture. One of the twists of political life is that our improvement in the education system and very many more people going to university and having aspirations for different types of job has also been a factor. So yes, I agree entirely with my friend Gordon Brown. The question is what to do about it. Professor Robert Putnam is coming across the welcome from the Royal Society of Arts later this month.

27:21He's a great communitarian and talks about how you need to build solidarity and social, what in the jargon is called social capital. He's a great author of Bowling Alone, I should say. I think in 2001, Robert Putnam, the American sociologist, wrote a seminal work called Bowling Alone, where he talked about the decline in America of membership of clubs, local communities, churches, voluntary associations and so on. Socialisation about people in the big factories in my city who used to socialise at work, but also outside work. Much of what they knew and people they rubbed shoulders with were in the same job with the same experiences.

28:02all of that has broken down completely and is rapidly breaking down still further. It's a bit like what we were talking about with young people on their smartphones or devices, texting rather than talking, thinking that they've got friends online who are nothing of the sort. And this is happening in a physical way in terms of small towns, coastal towns, and rebuilding that sense of community in new ways is going to be a major challenge. And it does involve... I was about to say it does involve people. Of course it does. But what I mean by that is it involves talking with and working with people where they're at, not from a distance.

28:52The project that you're talking about, rebuilding society, reweaving the fabric of society, doing so in very straightened economic circumstances in a more dangerous world through all these technological revolutions. Do you really think that Keir Starmer has the political skill, the character, has what it takes to achieve this in a transformative way? Well, in his role as prime minister, because there's an assumption, and we're in it all the time now, that the individual who holds that job can somehow do this on his own, and he can't. So building around him the solid commitment, not just of this cabinet, but right the way down to junior ministers who say to their civil servants, I'm really sorry.

29:43I'm not putting up with the timescale you've given me for reporting back or I don't need a long report on this. I want you to get off your bum and do it. So this is a collective endeavour led from the top, of course, which is why what Keir Starmer has been saying over the last few weeks is warming my heart, because it does show that with confidence, with the learning curve of the last eight months, he's really got it. and I'm encouraged. I don't need to cuddle up to him. He doesn't need to listen to me. So I can be honest about it and I would be if I thought he was going the wrong way. I think that we've learned quite a lot collectively over the last eight and a half months and we're on a much better trajectory than we were before Christmas.

30:40I wonder if I may, just in the last few moments you've been so generous with your time and I just want to ask you a couple of questions if I may, about your own political life, because we've talked a bit about it implicitly, but it has been the most extraordinary journey. And one person that you mentioned in passing just now himself passed recently, and that's John Prescott. And we had the great privilege on the Today programme the morning that it was announced by his son David that Lord Prescott had died of speaking both to Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. And I read that John Prescott's funeral was a truly extraordinary and very, very, very, very well attended affair.

31:15what was your assessment of the legacy of John Prescott? Well, he was quite remarkable. We didn't always get on, by the way. I know. That's why I'm asking. I mean, while he was born in Wales, he spent a lot of his early life in Rotherham, just up the road from where I was born and brought up. And we were like two stags sometimes locking horns, partly, I think, because of the background that we'd experienced. I was at that ceremony in Hull and it was remarkable. And the eulogies from Tony Gordon and from the reading that Keir Starmer and Angela Rayner did were quite remarkable contributions. I think that John sometimes got patronised by what he would have described as the middle class.