Are Farage and Polanski already yesterday's men?

0:02This is a global production. Andy Burnham has been setting out his latest policies, this time to help publicans and club owners. Kemi Badenoch has been on the attack. I can just see this summer when we get to September and it's going to be dogged by paedophiles being released early and by rapists being released early and by violent offenders being released early. Every day, Andy Burnham seems to float a new expensive idea, a national care service that costs 18 billion pounds, building as many council houses in the 1970s, costing 13 billion pounds. On Monday, he said he was thinking about increasing the personal allowance.

0:43On Tuesday, he was against it. On Wednesday, he was for it again. Does anyone know what he's thinking today? Because I don't. he doesn't actually know what he wants to do. He is thinking out loud. All we know is that it is going to cost a lot of money. So I want to be very clear. Andy Burnham needs to rule out tax rises to pay for his spending spree. That is Kemi Badenok clearly sharpening her attack on Andy Burnham into his fourth day as Prime Minister. She's doing it well, but so too is Andy Burnham. Whisper it, but Andy Burnham, the leader of the Labour Party, and Kemi Badenok, the leader of the Conservative Party, are now, according to the latest polling, the most popular political leaders in the country.

1:34Is it just possible that we are witnessing the strange return of two-party politics? Welcome to the News Agents.

1:47The News Agents.

2:1524 general election that is why he is there so even more than usual midterm these polls these early polls will be being poured over by Labour MPs people within the Labour Party and across of course the wider political spectrum more in common polling out today has Labour the closest to reform since April 2025 with reform on 26 % and Labour on 24 % the Conservatives around the same as well and intriguingly and this is where the big transformation has taken place because that's not such a big difference to the headline voting intention that we saw under Keir Starmer but the but Burnham's personal approval approval rating has jumped to plus 13 now bear in mind that Starmer's personal approval rating was way way into negative territory I mean seriously he at one point he was about as popular as Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor according to the polling I mean, seriously, Starmer's post-election high even was plus 11 back in early to mid 2024, July 2024.

3:16So Burnham is now more popular personally than Starmer was at the height of his election success. So for the first time as well, intriguingly, we've both got the prime minister and the leader of the opposition in positive net approval territory with Kemi Bay knock at plus three. Meanwhile, Ed Davey, the leader of the Lib Dems, is minus five. And Nigel Farage and Zach Polanski, the great insurgents of British politics, are down, skimming the bottom at minus 22. So one swallow a spring does not make. We're not getting carried away with these polls. But it is interesting that a narrative that we have had since the, you know, July 2024 general election, when the two main parties sort of commanded, what was it, 55 % of the national share of the vote.

4:07And people are thinking, God, is that it? Is two-party politics dead now? Is it really kind of over? And are we now looking at multi-party politics in a system that was designed for two parties? And it just feels as though that over the past few weeks, Kemi Baden-Ock's performance in the Commons has improved massively. Some of the messaging is becoming much clearer about the economy, about lower taxation, about the need to cut welfare spending, increased defence. All of those things. She seems to be much more clear about where she's taking the Conservative Party. At the same time, you've got Andy Burnham, who is clearly enjoying a bounce compared to where Keir Starmer was.

4:46And this kind of overriding sense that Keir Starmer was hopeless. He had to go. There had to be someone new in place. at the same time as you have had Nigel Farage and Zach Polanski really struggling out there for differing reasons, but both struggling. Yeah. And look, obviously, so many caveats with this. I mean, Burnham isn't even there for a week and he has to weather his first crisis, his first big mistake. That will come. It's absolutely inevitable. Both things are inevitable and there'll be loads of mistakes that will come. They've done a good job early on. I suppose, therefore, it seems to me that there are two big questions about a potential return to a Labour conservative duopoly or something closer to it than we've been experiencing.

5:32One is that whether Burnham can sustain, that can overcome those crises that will come, or will he experience what Starmer did, which is, you know, these things come, you're not seen to respond to them terribly well. you're not really being seen to arrest the problems of the country and you just go one long dip and that's obviously going to be a big problem for the Labour Party the more intriguing possibility as well it seems to me is can let's imagine for a moment that Burnham and Badenock do manage to maintain their personal popularity at least for a while and yeah there's reasonable there's reasonable grounds to believe that could be the case Badenock's been in an intriguing position that she has been much more popular than the Conservative Party for some time now and yet it hasn't affected terribly the Conservative Party's overall polling position.

6:16So it is possible that you might end up having two parties being led by quite popular political figures but their respective brands are still very poor. Labour and Conservative brands, party brands. How long does it take before one sort of affects the other? And then the other question of course is as well is I mean if we're talking about Polanski and Farage one of the reasons it feels to me that that has happened is that there has been a pretty concerted media effort to go for both men and both parties over the past six months or so i mean polanski would never enjoyed much favorable press but managed to seem to overcome it via social media activity burnham and the labor party being much better on that than they used to be certainly under kia starma and polanski therefore sort of falls back not entirely sure how to deal with it and farage meanwhile one of the intriguing things about recent politics has been the extent to which the conservative press which were really toying with farage in the sense of flirting with the idea of backing him giving him really favorable coverage one of the things that has undoubtedly happened over the last three months is the extent to which the murdoch press in particular and the wider right-wing press have started to uh go for coverage and go for stories not least around his finances which have not been favorable to him and it's had an impact i think that's the wrong way of looking at it i think that what's happened the first time well i think that what's happened is that you've got a story which you just look at and think oh bloody hell why you got a five million pound present from somebody that is epic and i don't think you you would be really struggling either to say you know one that's not a story nothing to see here let's move on but if you are going to say it's a story and you've listened to the explanations that have been forthcoming I mean, Nigel Farage, who I have said umpteen times on this podcast, is a brilliant communicator, has been absolutely woeful in seeking to explain where that's come from.

8:11And so, surprise, surprise, you've got a guy who could be the next prime minister of this country whenever the general election comes, and the scrutiny is coming his way as befits any future prime minister. And I think it's the newspapers responding to events rather than just the kind of abstract decision, okay let's let's give farage a bit of a kicking yeah i agree look there's no doubt farage has um reformed political strategy in all sorts of ways over the past 12 months has been poor they've talked about it before but they've leaned way too hard into kind of their sort of online political life they focused on eccentric esoteric weird things uh they've been too concerned about their right flank they've not appealed enough to exactly those sorts of slightly more kind of moderate conservative voters you know all sorts of things and the way that farage has responded to these questions has been baleful like genuinely appallingly bad i mean i can't actually think for a guy who has such political flair and such political acting yeah you know the the unbelievably thin-skinned nature of it for a guy who says he wants to be prime minister genuinely apparently completely pissed off that anybody might dare to ask him a question you know you're in the wrong job pal you know you just really are if that's if that's what you want to be you want to be prime minister you don't like questions about your personal life tough luck right you don't have to be prime minister but i do think it's nonetheless interesting you know i both know john that sometimes where stories appear in the media that the papers that they're in does tell us something about the shifting political sands right and you know we could have i mean this is a as emily often talks about you know peek behind the curtain let's imagine we'd done the story about farage and the five million which we had wish i had that story great story initially from the guardian it was initially a guardian story right got a lot of traction we did it not a lot of other people were talking about it took some time for this stuff to percolate through and then it appears nor stuff on the front page of the sunday times different story but sort of connected brilliant work by gabriel pogran and the insight team but it is interesting nonetheless that those papers and not just the papers but if you look at their columnists their editorials the times the sunday times the telegraph even the express to some extent the mail where they're carrying those stories, where they're putting them, often on the front page, the tone in which they're talking about it.

10:25You and I both know that, yeah, sometimes these things might appear and the way that they talk about it and where they put them on the papers does reflect where their heads are at about their particular story. And I think if this had happened six, nine months ago, they would have handled it in a somewhat different way. And I think it is reflective of, and we kind of know this from some reporting that's out there, things that, you know, we hear and so on. I think what is definitely clear is that among the more traditional conservative supporting press, there has been a swing back to the Conservative Party and much more interest in Kemi Badenok as a political, potential political leader and prime minister than there was six to 12 months ago, when all of the mood music and all of the coverage around her was, she won't even survive.

11:13And it feels to me that the Murdochs of the world, the Rodham Ears of the world you know daily mail and so on telegraph as well are much more interested in the idea of a conservative revivification than they were 12 months ago which is affecting how they attack these stories and how farage is coming across because you and i both know all that stuff matters not just about those papers but about how the bbc broadcasters cover it because if something's on the front page of the sunday times or the times it's treated very seriously in a way that perhaps say for example if we'd done that story not that they shouldn't be taking us seriously but you know if we done that story or the Guardian did that story or wherever New Statesman did it, it wouldn't be received in the same way.

11:51I think we tend to look at politics, probably rightly for the most part, as a zero-sum game. If one is up, the other must be down and that you can't have win-wins in politics. I'm just to think we are sort of entering a territory now where it's a win-win for Burnham and it's a win for uh Kemi Baden-Ock as well in the sense that they are kind of looking like the grown-ups in the room and they're attacking each other respectfully and setting out their own visions but it's leaving behind the Greens and leaving behind reform in this conversation and I always thought that there was a degree to which when you know Labour were attacking the Tories when they were in government over you know did someone take a private helicopter did Rishi Sunak get on a private helicopter?

12:39I thought it was pathetic that Labour were attacking that. And then I hear the Tories attacking Labour over, did Keir Starmer do something in first class or whatever? And you think, oh, bloody hell, he's the frigging prime minister. This is pathetic stuff. Stop the silly attacks. You're just, you know, you are playing into the hands of parties on the populist right and the populist left who say, look at how terrible the Labour and Conservatives are. I think we're into a period of slightly more grown up politics, which I think is a win for Kemi Baden-Walk and I think is a win for Andy Burnham. Well, I think that, look, this could all, we've been living through, the received wisdom in the commentary and in British politics has been that two-party politics is dead and that we're heading into a multi-party democracy in a way that we haven't seen for a long time or ever before.

13:22And that may still be true, you know, it may still be true. And it's certainly, you know, recent electoral results, local elections and so on would definitely point in that direction. But there have always been, I think there still are, reasons to be sceptical about that idea. One is, is that first past the post still ultimately the logic of first past the post does draw you inevitably, inexorably the voter and indeed the parties themselves towards either cooperation or killing the other or the voters to just decide and pick the lesser of two evils, the one that is guaranteed or more likely to win in the seat that you're in.

13:57And even if you don't like them, you sort of hold your nose and do it. And I think that is a big structural thing. It's one of the things that's kept Labour and Tory as hegemonic as they have been for a century. And it's still there. It's still there. And all and the reason why this polling is increasingly important is that it feels like we are on the verge of a crossover. Right. Certainly on the right. But, you know, it is totally credible to see that maybe in a month or so, if this trend continues and reform. Remember, they were used to be, you know, this time last year, they were up at 30 and it's been like one gradual.

14:28gradual there's been a little bit of up and down but the trend has been cleared down to the low 20s basically where Labour and and Tories are and as if the Tories can show in a sustained way that there's crossover and that suddenly they are polling ahead of reform then the first past the post logic benefits them it goes back to them the parcel goes back to them because they can say well a vote for them is a wasted vote in every constituency which is the argument reform has been able to deploy up to now so there's that logic to it and Labour will obviously be able to do the same thing with the Greens with in a general election but also like it's always been a bit we're in our discourse at the moment right we're so used to the idea of precedents always being smashed and history being upended and everything being new but history does have a weird way of just saying no actually come back this way you know there's a real gravity to history and and history in this sense means that like you know whether we like them or loathe them the Labour and Tory parties have got bloody deep roots in this country.

15:26I always thought, you know, when we were talking in the run up to the 24 election, it's like, is the Tory party going to die? I think I said at the time, always very sceptical of that idea. You know, they have got deep, like Labour too, deep, deep roots that these new challenges just do not have. And that's both their virtue, but it's also their vice because it allows them to be nimble. It allows them to come along. It allows them to be really exciting, but it also allows, it does also mean that when that gust of, when the wind changes direction and it starts blowing at you you don't have the forbearance and the strength and those routes that those routes provide to the other two parties so there is there is a reason why you know in the last 100 years 120 years of modern british democracy one of the main parties has only been killed off and replaced once yeah and i think you're picking up a degree of rediscovered self-confidence on the labour benches they've commanded the conversation this week and and And, you know, I know we're only four days into the, you know, the Burnham premiership.

16:21But there is there's they've been pretty adroit at little messages every day that shows which side they're on and where their priorities are. You've got Kemi Baden-Ock out there because Nigel Farage can't be out there because he's a parliamentary candidate at the moment. And so he's keeping quiet and God knows where Zach Polanski is. And so you do feel that the conversation is back between Labour and Conservative. And that is a reversion to the mean that we hadn't anticipated after the 2024 election when people are saying, oh, my God, this is it. You know, the old ways are done. Well, I think that one of the things that Burnham has been very keen to do and I'm listening to him, reading his stuff and interviews and so on.

17:05and even when we've interviewed him in in the past i think one of the things he has been keenest to impress and he and one of the things that he thinks has gone wrong with labor politics is that he's keen to show that the state and government can still do stuff yeah and it can make a difference and do it quickly and we've sort of seen a bit of that this week okay relatively small things but you know good retail politics stuff and he's never even as we've just been sat here as part of that kind of like churn of activity he's just announced or number 10 have announced that no new prisoners will be let out as part of the early release scheme until an urgent review is carried out saying that keeping the public safe will always be my top priority i'm working closely with the new justice secretary i'm instructing my team to put a pause on the changes that were due to start in september two things i think to say about that one is like i just say i think he is keen in these early weeks to just keep showing the difference and the change and the fact that he's on it and secondly i suspect i mean look he's going to cause all sorts of problems potentially with those what's going to happen in terms of where these prisoners go because you know the taurus did leave such a terror the prison estate in a terrible condition but i suppose he's also just thinking his political sense is just his antenna are just tingling and just thinking i can just see this summer we get to september and it's going to be dogged by pedophiles being released early and by rapists being released early and by violent offenders being released early and that could just dog me in those early days so another interesting move Well, I think it just shows that the political antennae that we used to talk about with Starmer as being absent, how could they do that?

18:36How could they be so tone deaf? Why aren't they listening to the public? Now, you can't just respond to one day's headline of something and just change government policy like that, because then you are just blowing in the wind endlessly. but to have a popular sense of where the mood of the people are and how a government can respond to it effectively it again it just looks like there is a certain surety of touch that has been missing for these past two years well after this we will be getting the thoughts of a labour backbencher about this first week of burnham

19:24We are joined in the studio by Chris Curtis, Labour MP for Milton Keynes North, former chair of the Labour Growth Group, supported West Streeting to take over from Keir Starmer. And it's good to have you with us, Chris. How's week one been? I think it's good. I think it's positive. I'm really quite happy with a lot of the appointments to governments going in as AI in the cabinet I think is fantastic Matt being able to continue the work he's doing in housing really important we get as many homes built as we possibly can is really important and also some of these policies it's not the be all and end all we're going to have to really push harder on growth policies in the medium term and long term but those small policies that we've come up with in the first week in order to start giving people a bit of breathing space on bus fares on energy bills in particular I think is a good positive step and when I've spoken a little bit to voters on the doorstep up in Milton Keynes it's noticeable how there's a bit more of a positive vibe towards the government.

20:22You've sensed that already? Yeah towards the government and the Labour Party and you've seen in the polls as well. I mean I notice very much that you are using the the talking point language of you know it's a bit of breathing space which will get you a tick I'm sure in Downing Street. Do you think it will make a difference? I mean is it is it more about the symbolic this is direction of travel well it's not nothing is it it's still some money off people's energy bills and it's a bit cheaper for people to get around on the buses if you look at the alan milburn review for example on the challenges with young people not being able to get to work and training he says cost of transport is a big reason for that so it has these other positive effects as well but is it the be all and end all no of course it's not we still need to do much much more to focus on getting the british economy growing again after nearly two decades of stagnation and while there's little things we can do in the meantime it's only by solving that growth problem that we can start to get significantly more money into people's pockets really fix the challenges the economic challenges that this country faces chris you've been one of the um i'd say that the few uh labor mps or the few mps over the course of the last two years who i think has really seriously thought about growth and of course you'll the others have us well well the report that you wrote an honest day um with mark but i think that was you know one of the pieces of work which has been done to actually really sort of think about that do you think that burnham and this new government is it growth that is driving them or is it actually a sense of equity fairness equality because these these opening things cost of a focus on cost of living is not necessarily a focus on growth they're not necessarily the same thing that's an interesting I think my frame of the question, actually.

22:00I think growth is definitely on their mind. And look, it is hard to look at any graph of the British economy over the next 20 years and for it not to be keeping you up at night. And I'm sure it is keeping Andy up the same. Regardless of what his key driver is, I do strongly believe, particularly on devolution, which we can talk about in a bit, it is one of those things that will help us achieve growth. And when it comes to fixing some of our problems with the economic geography of this country, I think that one of the reasons we're getting held back on growth is because we are too dependent on London in particular and how can we ensure that we maximise the potentials of all of the bits of the country.

22:36So I don't want to deep dive into Andy Burnham's psychology, but regardless of it, I think a lot of his... I'm not Patrick Maguire, nor would I ever want to be. Nor ever could I be. He added quickly. A talented member of the lobby that is Patrick. He says trying to win brownie points with Patrick Maguire as well important in the Labour Party. But I think a lot of the policy things he's pushing on, I believe, will start to achieve economic growth. And you spoke very kindly about our report. A lot of that stuff was in there as well. But is devolution necessarily, doesn't necessarily lead to growth, does it?

23:11I mean, it's not a growth plan in itself. I mean, Scotland has had devolution for 30 years. Wales has had devolution for 30 years. There's no particular strong evidence to suggest that their economic growth or productivity has been boosted by the fact that they've got devolved governments. And you can make a separate argument, can't you? Which is to say that sometimes, and if we'd been having this conversation 30, 40 years ago, your median Labour MP would have thought the way you get growth is a strong central state which can do stuff very quickly. Well, I think it's strong moral authorities that can do stuff.

23:35The doing stuff is important. I believe that it's by creating these authorities that you create the capacity to do stuff. I wrote a substack recently, which people are more than welcome to subscribe to if they Google my substack. It's great. But I wrote this substack recently where I touched on some of these points. My diagnosis and the diagnosis in our report of why the British economy has been struggling is effectively the state has made it too difficult for businesses, for people, for communities, for people right across the country to do things. And the analogy I use in that is to do with Parliament.

24:12So there's a tour that the Restoration and Renewal Team Parliament, these are the people that want us to spend billions of pounds doing up Parliament. They take you on a tour around Parliament. You go down to the basement and what they show you is wires on top of wires on top of wires with cables and plumbing. All of it's been put in over the hundreds and hundreds of years of Parliament's history. And they basically go, we don't really know what we can unplug or plug in because we just don't necessarily know what it all does anymore. And I think that's quite a good analogy for the British state because ultimately we haven't had a revolution or lost a war in ages.

24:41So all of the British state, Bank of England's the oldest regulator in the world. A lot of the British state is just putting all of those infrastructure on top of infrastructure. And it's created this mess, which is quite complicated for the government in order to be able to do things effectively. Now, one of the hacks, I think, for that is the way devolution can start to create these new institutions that can solve these problems. And I'd say if we look at Greater Manchester, for example, we've now seen evidence of where that happened. You say, I mean, which seems right to me, which is that devolution in your superb sub-stack, if you'd like to mention it again, devolution cannot simply mean adding another layer of wires and pipes on top of the system we already have.

25:14If we're going to push responsibility down, we also need to push down the freedom to act. I mean, which is another way of saying that devolution in and of itself is neither an unallowed good or certainly does not guarantee growth. If you do it badly, then actually you could make growth worse because you're just entering another layer of bureaucracy. I think that's true. I think getting devolution right is the challenge. The point that you made there that I originally made is correct. And I think the other thing as well is thinking about incentives. I only ever repeat your points, to be honest.

25:40Why don't you two stop flirting with each other, for God's sake. It's what makes you the most listened to political podcast listeners. Correct. um the the let's keep floating the um the the other element of this as well is about incentives and this is why fiscal devolution is important and there is there is there is evidence behind this the central cities has plotted this the if on your x-axis on the bottom you can look at the percentage of tax revenue that's gathered at sub-national level on your y-axis you look at average wages and there's a correlation so the more tax revenue that's raised at local level rather than just buy central government, the higher wages are in a country.

26:15And that is because those local areas then have an incentive to think about how they can grow their local economies, get new businesses, get new investments in, because then they get to keep some of that revenue. And that is one of the things that we need to push on. What about the role that regulation plays in economic growth? Because you seem to be arguing in your even more brilliant substack than Lewis has already acknowledged. Chris Curtis's substack, you can Google it. Yeah, thank you. We're becoming a world leader in pilot schemes for technology that other countries are already putting into everyday use.

26:42We can build a drone capable of delivering emergency medicine across the country, but we're still developing the rules that allow it to fly beyond the end of the operator's garden. I mean, are we over-regulated in the sense that that is actually, whether it be in house building, whether it be in anything, that there are so many ways to block economic growth by saying, well, let's go to judicial review over this and let's have this, you know, held up by something else. I think over-regulation is sort of quite a simplistic way of putting it but our regulations and our regulators don't work for that sort of parliamentary wire analogy that i just used we put all of these these regulatory wires in place and then we've set up these regulators and we basically told them to be as risk averse as possible and we've created a legal system that will take them to court if they're not risk averse and that has just made it too difficult to do things i think devolution is part of the answer to that but as i say we've also got to ensure that we're giving these new bodies freedom to act and not getting it caught up in this sort of difficult regulatory environment that we have.

27:41And when you look at some of the other things that are being spoken about, and Andy Burnham has been commendably candid in, you know, some of what he's thinking, you know, whether there needs to be a wealth tax, whether there needs to be a 50 pence top rate tax. Do you think that that is the sort of areas where there is support? And do you think that Labour can do this sort of thing without having a general election? Well, part of the answer on taxes, less of it should be our decision. I always feel Dan Tomlinson, he's just got back in, brilliant government minister who's responsible for tax policy.

28:12I think he's sitting there in an office trying to write up tax policies on business rates that decide how much a warehouse in Milton Keynes and a pub in John I Groats gets taxed at the same time. Part of the answer to this question is moving those powers downwards and giving local area is a bit more of a decision about how they set and interpret and put in place these tax rates. But there is clearly a wider tax reform question, which I believe the government should grapple with at some point. It is bonkers that a small house in Andy Burnham's constituency in Makefield, where most people in the Labour Party have been knocking a lot of doors recently, is paying more in council tax than Buckingham Palace.

28:53So reforming things like council tax and stamp duty and those property taxes, thinking about how we can tax wealth more and tax income a bit less. I think they're important questions. We need to think about how we do that. Would you support a wealth tax? They're all pro-growth. Not in a sort of Gary Stevenson style, but I think there's a more important question, which is how can we shift that burden more towards taxing wealth and away from taxing income? But let's not pretend that this is cost-free and it has to be well thought through. But we can get obsessed with these tax questions. The more important thing is growth.

29:26Because you can shift your tax rates here a little bit. You can shift your tax rates there a little bit. All of this needs to be in the service of economic growth because that is really the only way we're going to get out of this kind of fiscally challenging situation that Britain currently finds itself in. Post-reshuffle, how would you say the mood of the PLP is? I think it's positive. Yeah, I think it's really positive. Look, I obviously... Bet it's not if you're Steve Reid. I think obviously I was in favour of changing prime ministers. I think it was a necessarily important thing to do. Even if I didn't quite get my first choice, I'm still happy with where we've ended up.

30:05It really worried me going through that process and coming to that decision, thinking about whether you could get back to a Labour Party that could hold itself together at the other end. And I think we can and I think we will. obviously there'll be some people that are upset for a variety of reasons but I think the vast majority of people in the Labour Party want to get behind Andy are getting behind Andy and really understand the size of the challenge the country, the government faces and wants to get on board with helping to fix it. Do you think there's any legitimacy in the criticism that the reshuffle rewarded disloyalty and was too factional?

30:42This was supposed to be the end of factionism in the Labour Party, probably doesn't feel like that. I guess people in the cabinet from uh you know right across the right across the criticism is it's just andy's mates i don't think i don't think it is just andy's mates i mean i don't know what andy's relationship was like with kanushka necessarily i you know there's a new 2024 mp that's gone into the cabinet there's there's people from right across the political spectrum in the cabinet but also in those junior ministerial ranks it's not about rewarding disloyalty it's about bringing the best talents from right across the west streetings in the cabinet bringing the best talents right across the Labour Party in to make sure that we fix the pretty big challenges this country faces.