With Starmer on the ropes, can Kemi land a knockout blow?

0:02The Telegraph.

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1:11Camilla: Welfare, Tim. It's so big it's almost unfathomable. We are currently spending over£300 billion a year. And, newsflash, that bill will still get even bigger by the end of this Parliament, regardless of any cuts Labour has announced. Still backbenchers, however, are threatening a rebellion when the benefits bill comes before Parliament next week. Well, the Deputy Prime Minister, Angela Rayner, has said that the vote will go ahead. But after a year in office, Labour now looks really vulnerable for the first time. If they lose the vote, it not only would weaken Keir Starmer, but it would throw the government's spending plans into disarray.

1:50But how should Kemi Badenoch react to this? Should she back it or oppose it?

1:54Camilla: We'll also be finding out what the voters really think about these issues, welfare and indeed the NHS, with polling guru Professor Sir John Curtis. Welcome to The Daily Tea with me, Camilla Tomini. And me, Tim Stanley.

2:15Tim,

2:19Camilla: you've just come back from Parliament. I have. I'm exhausted. I just ran all the way. What was Angela Rayner versus Mel Stride like? I thought both were at the top of their game, actually. Lots of jokes about the fact that Angela's been doing this for the second week running. And Mel Stride said in that very panto, end of the pier kind of way, and I'm sure there are many MPs on her side who would like that to be a permanent arrangement. Yes, exactly. She's more popular than the Prime Minister, which I think we can both agree, actually. But the political subtext to all of this is if this welfare rebellion goes ahead, If the government is severely damaged, then Angela Rayner is thought to be the person most likely to benefit because she's the one who really wants the top job.

2:58And being vaguely soft left, she might be the person backbenchers turn to.

3:01Camilla: So when you left the office earlier, you said, or I think we looked, there was a newsflash saying, oh, hang on a minute. The government might actually pull this bill. Let's just give it its full name. The Universal Credit and Personal Independence Payment Bill. They might actually pull it because of this rebellion and how embarrassing it's all looking. so you then hot-footed it to the Commons. Yes, where people were saying that, there was a mood that it might get pulled, but the question was put directly to her by Mel Stride and she said... Speaker, I don't know if he sort of listened to what I said because I was reading off the script, but what I can tell him, and I don't need the script, we will go ahead on Tuesday.

3:39Camilla: So there's Angela Rayner confirming that they will put that bill before the Commons. How can it be kibosh then? Can we just work out the electoral maths on this? An amendment has been tabled trying to kill the bill itself. Yeah. Due to be debated on Tuesday, Labour rebels are supporting an amendment which, if it is selected by the Speaker, and in our strange system, the Speaker has a lot of power here and he could choose not to select it, but presuming Lindsay Hoyle recognises the strength of the House and its opinion and he selects it, that amendment would essentially ruin the bill and say it can't go ahead.

4:17and it specifically points to lack of consultation with disabled people and their calculation that 250 ,000 people could be thrown into poverty. So if the amendment is selected, it is predicted that something in the region of 122 Labour MPs might vote for the amendment and that number is going up all the time. So if you take the government's working majority and if you take off the 122, plus if you were to add the independents at 15 all the Lib Dems who also in this deputy PMQ said they would oppose the bill. And if you then added Tory votes as well, then you very probably could defeat it.

4:53Camilla: Yes. And what's ironic about all this is that backbenchers on the left, the Corbynistas like Richard Bergen and Rachel Maskell and others, are jumping up and down about this bill, saying it's extremely cruel and it goes too far and all the rest of it. Can we just remind ourselves that the bill for welfare has gone up by 86 billion in the past decade? According to the ONS and others, it will continue to increase over the course of the next parliament, regardless of what this bill does. And this bill really only, I kind of, tinkers around the edges. It takes five billion off. I mean, we can have a debate about how it's targeting who should lose their benefits.

5:35Camilla: And if it's targeting the disabled, I would suggest there are other places to look for more easy savings. For instance, people claiming PIP payments for mild depression, or even, as we have reported on this newspaper, conditions like autism and ADHD. Yes. Remember the mistake made with winter fuel allowance, where they should have means tested it, but instead they just tried to kick loads of people off it. The rebels are essentially arguing the same has been done here, rather than a sophisticated approach, which involves talking to disabled groups to ask what would actually help them. The government's just trying to stop the growth, although it won't, as you've said.

6:08I mean, that's the extraordinary thing.

6:10Camilla: Quiz question quickly. I just looked this up earlier. How much do you think the welfare bill was in 1985? Oh, I can't imagine. Five pounds? £12 billion. £12 billion. So it's now over£300. And to be fair, when we talk about the welfare bill, it is worth pointing out that that also includes pensioners' payments. So it's a massive sum of money. And actually, the amount of money paid in the pound by the highest earners in the country is bigger on benefits and welfare than it is on the NHS. So that's how this has spiralled. And we know it's spiralled since Covid. But I'm only making the point that you've got this massive rebellion about a bill that isn't going to make any difference to the benefits bill.

6:53Right. And during PMQs, a couple of MPs were placed to stand up and say, and what about the rise in free school meals? Isn't that great? And this is part of the problem is that the government didn't argue for welfare cuts on the basis of, there's a moral question here of people standing on their own two feet and looking after themselves. They didn't actually make a proper philosophical case for it. So on the one hand, it's saying they're going to do some cuts. On the other hand, in order to soften the blow, we're going to raise spending elsewhere. Well, how does that make sense if this is either about people standing on their own two feet or it's about saving money?

7:25I bumped into and spoke to a chief backbench rebel on Tuesday night. They made a couple of interesting points. One is don't forget that at the same time as the government is cutting welfare, in inverted commas, it's also raising defence spending. And that's something that really gets under the skin of the left. That seems to them like the wrong kind of priorities. They're also complaining that the government just lacks a sense of moral crusade. Remember Harold Wilson, labor is nothing if it's not a moral crusade. Well, where is this government's crusade? How is the country going to look different and more equal in a few years' time after what it's doing?

8:00So they're saying, you're just cutting, you're just trying to save money, it's treasury orthodoxy, etc. And the other thing is, at this point in the government, you know who's going to serve in it. So you're pretty much free now with a majority of this size, knowing that you're never going to enter government as a minister, knowing that you're probably going to lose your seat because a lot of people are on very small majorities and reform is chomping at the bit. You may as well rebel. Yes. The whips are going around telling people, you've got to look upon this as a confidence motion. It's interesting that government is saying to everyone, it's not a confidence matter because if it were, that'd be a real problem for Keir Starmer.

8:36But the whips are going around saying, well, think of it as a bit like a confidence matter. This could really damage the government if you support it. And I think the sheer scale of the rebellion is a testament, not just to disagreement over the issue, but also how many backbenchers have decided they don't like the operation in number 10. They think it's right-wing, it's rude, and it's ignoring talent in order to promote its favourites.

8:59Camilla: Well, also, they're the people who have to sell this stuff on the doorstep. How on earth would it have gone down in some northern working-class towns on the council estates to say to people who are on 13 grand in pensions payments a year, you're losing your winter fuel allowance. Yeah. I mean, imagine having to sell that. Also, I know we're going to speak about polling later because you've interviewed Professor Sir John Curtis, but this is interesting from YouGov, isn't it? Just in light of how backbenchers are feeling and why they're so twitchy. Working class voters are abandoning Labour for Reform UK, a major new poll has shown.

9:36Camilla: This is a story on our website. More than half of 2024 Labour voters, that's 52%, who would now back reform live in working class households. The poll was of more than 10 ,000 people. So that is big. And it found that broken or undelivered promises are the main reason for people deserting Sir Keir Starmer's party. Now, that's significant because we've had this weird sort of paradox where two major pieces of legislation that weren't in the manifesto, changes to abortion laws and assisted dying, have ended up being ramraided through Parliament. And then the promises that were made in the manifesto, we will be good to working people, pensioners and others, we will support those with disabilities and health problems, has now been turned on its head.

10:22Yeah, exactly. And again, those MPs who were elected as a one-off and know they're elected as a one-off, they're now looking at the possibility of being defeated by the ultimate class enemy as they see it, reform. Yes. Imagine that as an MP. You've just got elected and you're weighing up the possibility that you could lose your seat to Darren Grimes.

10:41Camilla: But also... You really could. No, I'm acutely aware of that. You are right, and that is quite scary. But the other thing I suppose is, I mean, I've criticised Nigel Farage from a right-wing perspective for his decision to back Labour or indeed back the very same backbenchers who are opposing the cuts to benefits. They're also saying they want to scrap the two-child benefit cap. And from a right-wing perspective, I had argued previously on the Daily Tea, you know, that's just a bit nuts. Reform really should be standing on the side of working-class people who think that too many people are claiming benefits.

11:14Camilla: If you have children, that you should be able to bloody well afford it. I'm going out to work every day. I don't agree with people, inadvertent commas, taking too much from the state. But then I suppose from this whole I'm going to park my tanks on Labour's lawn perspective, maybe it's quite attractive to people to see Nigel Farage aping these sorts of socialist policies. I think he's doing it because he believes in it. I'm not being all wide-eyed and idealistic. As he keeps insisting, it doesn't poll well. Welfare cuts and saving money through the benefits bill polls really well. Reform is taking a position which actually a lot of swing voters probably wouldn't agree with.

11:50And I think they're doing it because it's a natalist thing. Also, he's argued it. We don't have enough babies in this country and they think we should skew the welfare system towards encouraging people to have families.

11:59Camilla: Also, he's trying to make the correlation with this whole kind of very J.D. Vance-ian faith and family and country. He's been arguing it from the perspective of we're actually doing this because we want to help working parents. We want to incentivise working parents to have more children, continue working. If there are working parents, then usually they have working children. And that is a good and positive cycle to encourage rather than encouraging a different cycle, which is parents on benefits, children on benefits, no one being in the workplace. So Mel strides through Deputy Prime Minister's questions.

12:34Camilla: I would question the wisdom of Kemi Bainock sitting this one out. I know it's parliamentary convention. It is, yes. If the PM deputises, then the opposition needs to also put in a deputy rather than the actual leader. She did very well on grooming gangs last week. She was like thumping the dispatch box and having a right go at Yvette Cooper. She's trying to make a splash with her suggestion that she will support the bill if it has a series of other amendments in it. If it gets tougher. Yes. Which it's not going to do. Because, of course, if the government were to make it tougher, then the Backbench Rebellion would grow.

13:09So she's demanding something that's not going to happen.

13:13Camilla: Is this clever politics or is she being a bit too cute by half? I think she's playing 3D chess, which is to... OK, so if she were to come out right now and say, I will oppose the bill, then Labour can say, well, you don't have any serious plans for government. So this way she can say she's going to support it if they make these amendments, which they're never going to make, which means that she leaves open the space for her at the last minute to say, and sadly, therefore, we cannot support this bill. So this way she wins both ways. She has looked like she has a credible alternative in a series about welfare, but she can also at the end stick the boot in and help to defeat the government.

13:46I kind of agree with you. I would like to have seen her participate regardless of convention, because I think this is her one opportunity every week to get noticed by the public. And I don't think she can walk away from it, although Stride was pretty good.

13:58Camilla: Well, Stride knows about benefits and welfare because he was at the Department of Work and Pensions before the Tories imploded. The other interesting aspect of this, of all people, I'm doing this series of podcasts with Jeremy Hunt about his new book, which is celebrating all things British and saying that we can take a leading role in the world. And he, of all people, he's considered a wet in the Conservative Party. And certainly as health secretary, he never suggested this. Now he's saying that that welfare bill should be slashed not by five billion, but 50. Yeah. He is arguing while I was health secretary, it was a great thing that we had this parity of esteem between physical and mental health problems.

14:35Camilla: But it created a benefits explosion because people were claiming it for conditions like mild depression. It was ironically mad. Well, it was ironically mad. I think if you've got such crushing clinical depression that you can't leave the house and you can't work, I mean, of course, you should be able to claim benefits. if you are literally incapacitated either physically or mentally then that is one thing but the idea of people claiming for adhd and autism strikes me as bonkers it just seems to me to be similar to food banks gosh this is right wing in the sense that the more people went to them and the more we talked about people having to rely on them the more the numbers seem to grow and likewise with mental health the more that governments talked about how it must be treated seriously, the more people came down with mental health conditions and the more money we had to spend on it.

15:25And we couldn't possibly keep up. So if you actually talk to anyone who's trying to access NHS mental health services, they'll always say you can't get an appointment. It's one of the hardest things.

15:33Camilla: Well, that's because we're spending too much money on benefits. I mean, you know, this is the alternative argument. Somebody was saying about PIP payments going to alcoholics. My mother was a chronic alcoholic. If a PIP payment went to my mother, she would take it straight down to the off-licence and buy booze. It might have been better if you were going to pay my mother, God rest her soul, PIP, to say, no, actually, we'll take that money and we'll put it into a treatment programme for you at your local clinic. Right. That would have been more valuable. And then we're back to undeserving poor arguments, which is at the very heart of the welfare system.

16:04When it was set up in the 1910s, you know, it was limited so that it couldn't go to drunks, so it couldn't go to alcoholics, et cetera. You can say that. It was designed to avoid that. And then over time, the argument developed, no, but that's cruel because those people still can't look after themselves. So you're just going to end up leaving them to starve.

16:20Camilla: It takes a brave political leader to turn around to the public and say 50 billion needs to be slashed on the benefits bill. It does. And then it gives the Tories money to play with. Because in an era in which we know there is no money, if you can magic 50 billion out of the current spend and say, there, that's what we're going to use for tax cuts or that's what we're going to use for infrastructure, etc., then it's quite a clever wheeze. Final thought. Kemi's absent. Lesser spotted Starmer. Where is this man? He's at the NATO summit, to be fair. Is he studiously avoiding parliament? I'm getting that impression.

16:53I always like to refer to Angela Rayner as his ambassador to the United Kingdom. It is ridiculous, isn't it? He pretty much avoided the Casey stuff last week. I mean, I get the argument that there are diary clashes and there are certain things he has to do. And OK, G7, NATO. All right. OK. but it is starting to look like he is uncomfortable with speaking to Parliament and uncomfortable with facing the music.

17:19Camilla: Also, I was at the, sorry to name drop, but I was at the Independence Party, the July the 4th, slightly early party that was hosted at Winfield House by the US ambassador to the UK. It was all very star-spangled, as you can imagine. And of course, the talk of the night was Donald Trump dropping the F-bomb. Oh, yeah. Israel, as soon as we made the deal, they came out and they dropped a load of bombs, the likes of which I've never seen before. The biggest load that we've seen. I'm not happy with Israel. You know, when I say, OK, now you have 12 hours, you don't go out in the first hour and just drop everything you have on them.

17:56So I'm not happy with them. I'm not happy with Iran either. But I'm really unhappy if Israel is going out this morning because the one rocket that didn't land, that were shot, perhaps by mistake, that didn't land. I'm not happy about that. You know what, we basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don't know what the fuck they're doing. Do you understand that?

18:21Camilla: What I think was interesting about it is there were righties there and there were some lefties there and all of them seem to be embracing the leadership of it all. Now, I'm not saying that, you know, if you become sweary, then you're a great leader, but at least it's expressing some emotion and an opinion. And by comparison, you look at Starmer and you think, would you even be able to sort of summon that level of passion about anything that you're doing in your entire political life? He doesn't care enough. Yes. And if he did, you know it would be scripted. This is the thing is if you script an F-bomb, then I really don't approve of that.

18:56You should mind your P's and Q's, you're a statesman, don't do that, kids are listening, etc. If you let one drop because you're just really furious, and you're furious with two states that are winding everyone up right now, Israel and Iran, then that actually indicates to us, it reassures us. I mean, it's odd because you think it sounded like things are blowing up, but actually it reassures me to know that the president is angry with those two and is trying to get them to calm down. I find that kind of display of emotion actually reassuring because it reminds me that there is a human being with an ounce of common sense in charge, whereas the android robotic style that European leaders tends to adopt actually doesn't reassure me because it makes me think, are you actually aware of how high the stakes are in this situation?

19:39Camilla: Coming up next, our satisfaction with the NHS has nosedived and reform is capitalising on our changing social attitudes. That's according to a new survey. Tim, you're going to be speaking to one of the authors next.

20:18can help keep budgets balanced and lines moving. Call 1-800-GRAINGER, click grainger.com, or just stop by. Grainger, for the ones who get it done. Cooking up a storm, dressing to impress, staying fit and healthy. Whatever interests you, you'll find it in The Telegraph's newsletters. Explore the complete collection. From recipes with Diana Henry to fashion and beauty with me, Lisa Armstrong. Get the best of our journalism delivered to your inbox. Visit telegraph.co.uk slash newsletters today.

21:04Labour has been in power for almost a year. I know it feels like a century, but it's just almost a year. So how do people think it's doing? What do the voters think of its project to revive the economy and to rebuild our public services? Well, the British Social Attitude Survey is one way of finding out, an annual assessment of the mood of the nation on issues such as security, health and trust in government. The survey for 2025 is published today, and I am joined by the Venerable Sir John Curtis, Senior Research Fellow at the National Centre for Social Research, who authored the chapter on attitudes towards the economy, tax and public services.

21:42So, John, thank you for joining us. Thank you for having me. First off, the government says that the economy is doing well, that growth is steady and inflation is under control. But how do voters actually feel? Well, the truth is that one can still very clearly see the legacy of the 2019 to 2024 Parliament, which of course is one in which there was very little economic growth, living standards didn't really improve, and where there was a cost of living crisis. So one question we've asked now pretty regularly, really ever since the financial crash, ask people, look, how are you doing on your income?

22:20Are you living comfortably? Are you getting by? Or are you struggling? And we've got 26 % of people who now say they are struggling. That is the same as it was in the previous survey in 2023. But both those figures are a record high. It used to be not much more than around one in five. Meanwhile, the proportion of people who are saying they're living comfortably, which used to be over 40%, it's now down to 34%. So one can see very clearly that as a society, we are, more of us at least, are struggling. Few of us are thinking that we are financially well cushioned. And then you can also see, as you might anticipate, when we ask people, well, do you think your income has been keeping up with prices over the course of the last 12 months?

23:08Two thirds of people say, no, it hasn't done. And so again, clearly the impact of the cost of living crisis in particular is there. So certainly as compared with the last decade or so, we are feeling financially less secure. We are finding the cost of living more of a problem. And that is certainly one of the problems that Labour is trying to address. And insofar that that is one of their priorities, they're clearly focusing in the right policy space. So that collapse in confidence is linked to the pandemic, not necessarily to domestic politics, but can you draw a correlation between COVID and the lockdown and people's changing attitudes towards their personal finances?

23:52Yeah, sure. I mean, certainly the cost of living crisis and the legacy of that, which, of course, is partly a consequence of the pandemic and the impact on supply chains, and partly, not least, the impact of the Russian-Ukraine war on the price of energy, already relatively high in the UK, now even higher. But one can see during the pandemic that people's perceptions of how they were dealing with their financial circumstances were becoming more pessimistic. So it's one of those things that the public are hoping that the new government were going to deal with. It's not necessarily something that as yet they necessarily blame Labour for, although, I mean, opinion-piling evidence certainly suggests that people so far are not convinced that the new government have made much progress.

24:39But, yeah, the reasons why they feel the way they do lie before the 2024 election. Has something similar happened when it comes to satisfaction with the NHS? Is there a similar story there? There is an even more striking story when it comes to the NHS, which of course is the area where the government is proposed to spend more, where it's trying to focus on getting rateless downs. And again, it diagnosed the problem the public wants to reach very well. Satisfaction with the health service is now down at a record low. We have only got just over one in five of us are satisfied with the health service.

25:17It was running at 60 % in 2019 before the pandemic hit. It's not just the health service. It's also, by the way, social care. We've only got 13 % of people who are satisfied with social care. It was 37 % in 2019. That, of course, is something on which the government has focused much less, but is definitely still also a public concern. And we are seeing just over two-thirds of people saying, despite the fact we are already spending a lot more on the health service than we were before the pandemic. We've still got just over two thirds of people saying we're not spending enough, which is probably a cry for, could we please make it better?

25:58There isn't much sign as yet that the high level of dissatisfaction with the health service is leading people to question the way in which we run it and the way in which we fund it. There's a little bit, but there's now just under one in five who are saying, well, maybe it shouldn't all be funded through taxes and that's particularly noticeable amongst an element of those who are dissatisfied but it's still very, very much minority view. I just want to repeat one of those statistics because I think it's so striking which is that in 2019, 60 % of us were satisfied with the NHS and now it's down to 21%.

26:32That suggests that actually the Tories had improved the NHS by 2019 such that most of the public really were happy with it by that point. No, the truth is that satisfaction with the health service rose quite remarkably during the years of New Labour, who spent a lot more money on it, and they got the waiting times down. What is true, however, to acknowledge the point that you're not reasonably making, is that satisfaction with the health service having risen to record highs in the latter years of new labor, the claims that the government was imposing austerity and that this was adversely affecting the health service, that didn't really have much purchase on the public.

27:18So satisfaction with the health service largely survived the so-called Cameron Osborne austerity. Right. But you can see there is some irony. But it didn't survive. But it did not survive. But again, the reason is very clear. The reason why we were dissatisfied with the health service in the latter days of the Thatcher major government, it was because of high levels of waiting lists. The reason why satisfaction with the health service improved under New Labour is they got waiting lists down. They hadn't increased that much when the Conservatives returned, but the pandemic has seen weighting this rise to levels that we have never previously seen.

28:00We've talked about spending. Let's talk about how willing the British people are to pay taxes to cover it. Are we a left-wing country when it comes to tax? Are we people who are just desperate to hand our money over to the state? At the moment, we're not desperate to hand over our money to the state, but arguably, we are perhaps keener than historically we might have expected to be. So let me explain. Okay, right. So one of the things that, I mean, again, for a lot of the loose talk about austerity, of course, the legacy of the last parliament was the biggest expansion of the state since 1945.

28:39far. Both taxation and spending rose to record levels, and taxation is still on course to rise to spending levels, despite Labour's commitment not to raising the rates of taxation. And that, of course, was a consequence of the fact that the state intervened into the labour market, paid lots of people's wages, put a lot of money into the health service in the wake of that, was subsidising everybody's energy bills for a while, etc., etc. The state expanded very considerably, and it's still higher now than it was before the pandemic. Now, normally what we would expect when the state expands, we expect the public to start saying, hang on, that's too much.

29:20It's time certainly to be stopping these increases and either holding things where they are actually reducing them. And that is certainly what happened in the wake of new labour. So one of the ironies about new labour, I've already talked about how people got more satisfied with the health service, But that came at a cost. And then eventually people said, well, well done. Thanks very much. The health service is better. The schools are better. Could you now please stop taxing us so much? And that is what we call the trade of thermostatic reaction, that the public have a sense of how big they think the state should be.

29:52And they start to react either to say we've got too much or too little if we move too much away from that. The interesting thing, at least until our most recent survey, is that despite that big increase in the state, we were still getting around 50 % of people saying, we should be spending more, we should be increasing taxes and spending more on things like health and education. It has now begun to fall away. That figure has now fallen down to 40%. But it is still higher than it was in 2010 when Labour were leaving office. Then it was 31%, even though the level of taxation is still higher now than it was then.

30:31So I think the jury is still out as to whether or not the experience of the pandemic with the state rescuing the labor market has meant that our appetite for a bigger state is now perhaps a little bit sharper than it once was. And I don't think we'll know this for another five years or not. I mean, the other kind of point that comes out is we think that basically taxes for people on low incomes are too high. and that is more the case than was the case in 2016, where we're also inclined to that view of people on middle incomes. That said, about 44 % of us think that taxes for those for people on high incomes are too low, and that figure is still higher than it was in 2016.

31:09So, I mean, now we can interpret this various ways. We can say, well, it's the usual thing of the public wanting to have more things, but they want somebody else to pay, and that's not an unreasonable observation. but equally I think the truth is where we're going to end up as a society in terms of the size of our state and what the public feel about that is one of the interesting questions that we'll see during the during the lifetime of this parliament. The government has set about reforming disability benefits do you see any evidence from your research that there is sympathy for that or do people still think that the disabled should get good care?

31:43The answer is yes and no so the yes bit is that we've been asking people on a regular basis again over the last decade or so, actually over longer than that, should benefits for people with disabilities be increased or not? And the proportion of people who say it should be increased is now 45%, which is still quite a big number, but it is a record low. It's the first time it's been below 50%. It used to be around 60%, even 70%. So there is to that extent at least seemingly a recognition by the public that maybe we are now doing better for people with disabilities than was the case 20 years ago.

32:26That said, it is only 11 % of us who say we should actually cut it. And if we then turn to the particular controversy that the government certainly finds itself involved in, which is essentially an argument that says that actually access to these benefits is just too easy, The criteria are not demanding enough. And as a result, we have got people of working age, record numbers, either on long term sickness or on disability. Now, what we discover, however, is that, yes, there are around 29 percent of us who think it's too easy for people to be able to claim disability benefit. but equally there are 29 % of us who think that it's too difficult and to that extent at least the public is evenly divided so you can see why this issue is something which the way in which the government is arguing isn't necessarily something that resonates with public opinion.

33:28One should also say by the way however, I may refer to social care either, of course another big decision this government made which has caused much less controversy was the decision yet again to kick the can down the road on social care and the idea that there should be a lifetime limit. Actually, we discover that, you know, I already said low levels of satisfaction. So basically, around two thirds of us either think the government should be paying everybody's social care, or there should be the lifetime limit. So it does look as though the idea of there being a lifetime limit on care is something that's relatively popular, still is relatively popular.

34:06It's something that Labour have decided to delay. Again, we've got a commission. But I think we should be aware that this is another area where the public aren't necessarily in tune with what the government have decided. Okay, final question. Looking at all of this data, which party do you think right now is best pitching itself towards this public? The answer to it is that we are looking at a deeply divided public and a public that is now politically divided, not simply between left and right, which is the traditional way of dividing it, but also between social liberals and social conservatives.

34:48These are people who have different views on the so-called culture wars issues, on attitudes towards immigration, transgender, etc. etc. So the party that is succeeding as a result of the rise of that second dimension in our politics is reform. Our data show this, the polling data show this. We're able to show very clearly that the thing that above all demarcates and identifies people who voted reform last year, they are people who are socially concerned. The folk are concerned about immigration. The folk who think we should be proud of empire rather than the history about slavery. And because of the collapse of the brown reputation of the conservatives, essentially what reform have done is to get back from the conservatives that socially conservative pro-Brexit section of our electorate that voted conservative in 2019.

35:44They have basically now virtually all disappeared into the hands of reform. And Nigel Farage will say, well, I gave them to Boris Johnson and now I've got them back. So you can certainly see how reform are doing well in this space. Conversely, you can also see the difficulties that Labour have, because Labour are trying to bridge both divides. They don't want to be too socially liberal. But the trouble you can therefore also see is that actually Labour are at risk of losing votes to the Greens amongst more socioliberals. But equally also, Labour are to some degree, though not to anything like the same extent as the Conservatives, losing some ground to reform.

36:27So the problem for Labour is to avoid being eroded in both directions. In the case of the Conservatives, the problem is simple. They're just losing head over heels to reform. So reform at the moment have managed to organize the socially conservative end of our society. And also their voters, unlike UKIP, do tend to be to the right economically. So they've clearly carved out a space for them. It's a niche market. But in our fragmented politics, 30 % is enough to potentially put you well ahead. What I think isn't as yet clear is who is going to be able to bring together the left and the socially liberal end of our spectrum.

37:11Labour being in government are finding that more difficult. The Greens have made some progress, but nothing like the same kind of progress in reform. And the Liberal Democrats are still bouncing around. So at the moment, the simplest answer to your question is reform. But whether that will remain the case, you know, another four years to the next election. Sir John Curtis, thank you very much. You're welcome.

37:37Camilla: I thought it was interesting that Sir John Curtis points out that people's attitudes towards cutting the benefits bill have softened. It was 60 % opposed 10 years ago. Now people are actually getting increasingly fed up with so much welfare spending. and the observation, again, that we're not quite as emotionally invested in the NHS as we were. And it takes time for attitudes to change. And there's an alignment that happens between politicians and the public. And we're not quite there yet. That's the sense I took away from it, that everyone recognises the state is broken. They're really dissatisfied with it, especially the health service.

38:19But they're still of a mind to say more money should be spent on it right now, broadly. but that the number saying more money should be spent or the state should be relatively large is slowly going down and you can just tell in two or three years of economic decline and the bill's going up and your tax is nudging up Mel Stride. Prime Minister's questions demand her to know would business taxes go up and she wouldn't answer. You just know that in two or three years' time there's going to be an alignment between the public and the centre-right over the issue of the size of the state because ultimately we're not getting quality for the quantity of money that we're putting into it.

38:53Camilla: Also, was there a COVID factor? I felt that he was saying, yes, there's a COVID factor, but actually this massive state not performing well enough for its people issue has been one that's been going on for more than a decade. Yeah, and COVID may well have just accelerated it. Even so, I still think it is the meteorite that hit the earth and everything is post-COVID. And journalists have to recognise that politicians are cleaning up from that mess. Yes, but I still do find that statistic staggering. It's the statistic of the month that I've been much quoting. The more that we've pumped into the NHS, the less efficiency it has been to the extent that it is 24 % less productive than it was 30 years ago.

39:35Camilla: That, if you reflect on it, is crazy. And yet people still want more money to be put into it as the solution. So what is the final amount that works and the public is satisfied with? Good question. One we will try to solve on a future daily tea. We'll be back tomorrow, 5pm.

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