Why does Keir Starmer keep agreeing with Nigel Farage?

0:02This is a Global Player original podcast.

0:05Jon Sopel:It is a new parliamentary term and Keir Starmer has pressed the reset button. A new beginning for a Labour government that's already been in power for 14 months. But will it make any difference? I think here a year on in, what I would say is we spent the first year sort of fixing the foundations, if you like, doing the hard yards. But we now enter into sort of phase two of the government, which is where we focus on delivery, delivery, delivery and start to show what a difference the Labour government really makes. A new team, a new message and the promise of delivery. But delivering what? Do they know the story they're trying to tell yet?

0:48Welcome to the News Agents.

0:55The News Agents.

0:56Jon Sopel:It's John. It's Emily. And she returns finally after her long sojourn away. We thought you'd lost your passport, but you haven't. My pass. And it's very nice. Your passport and your pass, obviously both very important. It's good to have you back. I just wonder, a month away, I know you've been consuming the news while you've been away. Does Britain feel different, look different? Do you see it from a different perspective from having been out the country? I'll leave you alone for five minutes. I thought you'd kill Donald Trump. We are, I promise you, going to come to Donald Trump and whether we've killed him off later in the podcast.

1:27Jon Sopel:But does Britain look different? Very. Yeah, very. It's odd, isn't it? Just seeing it from afar and sort of wondering where the country's spine has got to, actually. Well, look, we have a sort of reorganisation to welcome you back at the top of the government. It's very nice of the PM to do that. to give us a decent story when we've been scrambling around in the undergrowth for weeks now waiting for something good to happen. And it looks like there is an attempt at a reset in the terms of Darren Jones being appointed to this kind of new title in Downing Street as Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister, no longer Chief Secretary of the Treasury, but Secretary to the Prime Minister.

2:09Jon Sopel:And Darren Jones, Junior Cabinet Minister, has now got a very much more enhanced role right at the centre of government to deliver on Starmer's pledges. Yeah, you've got this new phalanx, it seems, who are all surrounding Starmer now. David Dinsmore has been brought in from the sun. Tim Allen, a bit older, but a former Blairite, seemed to be very good in his job some 20 years ago. Good mate of yours, I know. You've got Darren Jones, who may or may not be moving into a role that feels a little bit more like a deputy PM role, but they're insisting it isn't. And I guess it's part of a beefing up the team around Starmer to tell his story for him better than he can.

2:54Jon Sopel:So what we discussed on the podcast last week when you were still on holiday with Lewis was that, you know, but what is the story he is trying to tell? What are the clear messages? What is the driving kind of force, the narrative of this government? What is it that Keir Starmer wants to have achieved at the end of five years? And that has always sort of been rather hard to get your hands on, to touch, to make feel real. I suppose we've had a hint of that today where Starmer has sort of set out three objectives. They're going to be the signs of whether success has been reached or not. And one is about you genuinely feel better off than you did before.

3:32Jon Sopel:You feel the effects of economic growth. Two is getting a grip on the migration crisis. Three, the health service working for you. Yeah, I was speaking to somebody very close to Starmer this morning and they put it to me like this. They said the Labour strategy over the summer has basically been Farage is right, don't vote for him. Farage is right, don't vote for him. In other words, they've been following in the shoes, even in the rhetoric, even in the sort of places that he's been trying to take the Labour Party, and then turning around and saying, but we're doing it better. And it just doesn't hold water.

4:09And actually, Labour is clearly trying to find a place where it can be more courageous, a place where it can take risks. And I think the debate now is what that actually means. Does it mean standing up to Farage or does it mean implementing reform policies more quickly than he can? And I think that is the definitive place that they've got to start choosing because, you know, this Labour insider said to me, what has been missing over the summer, maybe even longer, is the values chat. That is what has been missing. So when Faraj starts talking about deporting people back to the Taliban, sorry, we can't care about all of that.

4:51Sorry, we don't care if there's Afghan women that have been escaping that. Sorry, we don't care if there's people who've been helping our armed services and, you know, working on behalf of the military when we were actually at war with the Taliban in Afghanistan. We're going to deport them anyway. There's been no real pushback from the Labour part. They've been very technocratic about this. They've been very technocratic about numbers or about what they need to do or about how they need to move people around the asylum hotels. But you haven't heard anyone say this is not who we are. And I guess, you know, your friend Tim Allen, who worked very closely with Tony Blair, there are people now who are sort of saying, remember how Tony Blair responded to Farage.

5:32You know, 20 years ago, 2005, in the European Parliament, he just cut through with a message that sort of appealed to what British people think of themselves, which is like, we get the numbers are too big, we get immigration is a much bigger problem than it ever was pre-Brexit. But this is not who we are. Just a reminder of what he said then. Just tell you, sir, and your colleagues, you sit with our country's flag, you do not represent our country's interests.

6:14This is the year 2005. This is the year 2005, not 1945. We're not fighting each other anymore. These are our partners, they're our colleagues and our future lies in Europe. And that, I think, is what's been missing. There's been no attempt to sort of say, do you like what this country is sounding like now? Do you like what Farage is making you feel like right now? Because we've lost that sense of who we are.

6:43Jon Sopel:So I think that it's quite interesting. I mean, you talk about my mate, Tim Allen. I'm going to reveal that last weekend I spent the whole weekend with him at his place on the East Coast. And I came back without the story that he was rejoining Downey Street. Well done. Top work. Tim, I don't blame you. I wouldn't have trusted me with that story anyway if I had to keep it secret. But he knew, you think? I think he probably did know. But there were things he was saying. Look, he was very critical about a lot of how the government was communicating. So there's a job of work to do there. But I am struck when you talk about 2005 that you have got Tim Allen, who was deputy to Alistair Campbell at the start of the Labour government, back in at number 10.

7:26Jon Sopel:You've got Jonathan Powell as the National Security Advisor. and some would say the real foreign secretary. Peter Mandelson as our ambassador in Washington. You've got Liz Lloyd, who was deputy chief of staff under Blair, back in, all you need to do, frankly, is put Blair in the House of Lords and he could become honorary prime minister. And there is an element of that. And so you've got all these people who were part of the Blair project now back in seats of power. And it's like Keir Starmer has tried for a year to get things sorted and is actually going back to the old guard who did things rather well.

7:57Jon Sopel:And maybe the communications will be better. but you know Tony Blair back in 2005 it was a different world we were living in he didn't have a mobile phone yeah I don't know what Tim Allen is like on TikTok but you know they're not digital natives they haven't come into a world where everything was about you know the visuals before it was even about the policy now presumably you know there will be people around them there will be kind of younger people around them who know exactly how to get this sort of stuff sold and I'm not trying to reduce, you know, the whole of the workings of government or even its communication strategy to a TikTok meme.

8:32But you do have to think that they've got to be really careful that they're not trying to recreate something.

8:40Jon Sopel:Recreate a band that broke up years ago when musical tastes have changed. I mean, that is the problem. I think that that's a really real question. I mean, you know, David Dinsmore was an editor of The Sun. The sun circulation years ago is nothing like what the sun circulation is today. Tim set up a really successful communications company, Portland Communications, which, you know, he sold a little while ago. The world has changed because of social media and a way you communicate on TikTok, on Insta, on all the other platforms where you have to be seen all the time and create original content in a way that I don't know who I would point to on the Labour benches.

9:19Jon Sopel:Jenrick's doing it well for the Conservatives Farage is doing it well for reform but who is the Labour person who is out there making us sit up and getting millions and millions of clicks? The only thing I'd say though is that this is about something bigger than that it is about a story and it's about a voice at the heart of this I think which has kind of been forgotten and there are many places where Labour could have really kicked back and didn't. I mean, when we look at the immigration numbers, you know, Labour just has to say they were at 200 ,000 before Brexit. They've quadrupled in the last 10 years, right?

10:01The Boris wave, Boris Johnson sent immigration sky high. Now, arguably, it was because he saw that post Brexit, there weren't enough Brits that were willing to do the jobs and he wanted to open up the jobs for other people to come in and do them. Nevertheless, that is a Boris wave. Have they pinned that onto him and onto his strategy? Had they pinned onto Farage the enormous economic suffering that came as a result of his last policy? Even he will not admit that Brexit's been a success. He just says, oh, it was somebody else's fault. Always somebody else's fault. And it does seem to me that when we start looking at, for example, the ECHR, and we're going to be hearing more from Yvette Cooper about the changes that they're considering, sort of opening places to push back on some of the judgments, fine.

10:49But, you know, you've got Jack Straw, former Home Office in the Blair years, saying we've got to leave the ECHR. And it does seem to me, sort of kicks off a Brexit muscle memory, you know. And without going too nimble about the whole thing, it's like, first they came for the EU, Brexit. Well, that wasn't enough. Then they're coming for the ECHR. That won't be enough. Then they'll come for the Geneva Convention. That won't be enough. Then they'll come for the right to remain. And before you know it, You get to the Douglas Carswell type tweet, which says it's time to get rid of his words, the Abduls.

11:22And so as soon as you start leaning into this language, as soon as you start thinking, oh, maybe Farage has a point. Oh, maybe they've got to do more. Oh, yes, we must forget how strongly people think about it. Don't they realize that Farage's policies are not about creating a better Britain? They're about destruction. They're about pulling things down because that is how you get into power. Really easy to be in opposition. Everyone wants to be in opposition because you just get to destroy things. You don't then get to have to rebuild them. And that's what he does.

11:54Jon Sopel:Just for people who missed the meteoric and successful career of Douglas Carswell. He was a Conservative MP who then defects to UKIP. Just read the tweet, because I think it gives a context to it, which is it is an extraordinary thing for a former considered thoughtful Conservative politician to say. So the tweet from Douglas Carswell over the weekend, I mean, we should say that he was the MP for Clacton, where Nigel Farage now sits. And he was very much part of the Conservative Party until he wasn't. And he defected to UKIP. and he just tweeted, from Epping to the Sea, let's make England Abdul free.

12:33Now, Douglas Carswell clearly doesn't speak for the Tory party or even for the reform party now. He lives in Mississippi and he runs a kind of think tank in America. But my point is, every time you think you're leaning into a good solution, you're not. It's just going to go further and further and further. And I think it's incredible that we haven't learned that yet.

12:55Jon Sopel:OK, so you say, let's start with Brexit. And the first they came for Brexit and then they came for the ECHR. And then they, you know, and the Niemöller kind of retort about Nazism. Oh, sorry. I mean, I'm not remotely. No, no, no. This is not Godwin's law. I'm not remotely trying to take us to Nazism. No. Just to clarify. Sure, sure, sure, sure, sure. But I do think that the risk of going in the other direction is that you don't recognise that there is a problem. And there is a real fundamental problem in this country with illegal immigration. It is perceived by the population. And unless the politicians start coming up with some kind of serious ideas and smash the gangs and stop the boats have made the situation worse, where there is a political sense that they're talking the rhetoric, they talk the talk, but they cannot walk the walk.

13:42Jon Sopel:Then you are going to have real protests taking place. And I think that the sense of anger about illegal immigration is real. and I think the politicians are right to look at things that they can do. And, you know, the ECHR was a treaty that was built after the Second World War. And is it fit for purpose today, given the problems that we face today? I don't think that is illegitimate to be looking at those sort of questions to see if there is something that can be done about it. And I don't think that for politicians to say, oh, for God's sake, we don't need to talk about this. That is what we got wrong over Brexit.

14:18No, I think the two are not remotely incompatible. And I think to reduce it to that suggests that you have to, you know, do one or the other. I mean, as I said, the problem of immigration, right, has gone from 200 ,000 to nearly a million is a massive, you know, you can see that you can see the numbers are too big. There is nothing that stops Keir Starmer from looking at how he gets that number down. Absolutely fine. But I think this knee jerk, which is, oh, well, Farage is suggesting that if we don't follow that, then we're going to look like the ones that are out of touch, is completely wrong.

14:52I mean, Jeremy Hunt, funnily enough, in his book, when we talked to him a few months ago, he was saying that Starmer should be the one in charge. As a former director of prosecutions, he should be in charge of helping to rewrite the ECHR. I have no problem with that. Absolutely. Right. If there are places where you can tighten, if there are places where you can reexamine, if you do want to say we're no longer in 1952, we're now in 2025. 100%. I don't think that law should be stuck in a sarcophagus for sort of 70 years and not reexamined. My point is that there is a kind of a movement that suggests that if you're, you know, I mean, your question about the protests, right?

15:33We genuinely don't know. We genuinely don't know how strong the public feeling was before Nigel Farage and Jenrick started telling people they should feel angry about them. I'm not saying that there isn't frustration with people in hotels. I'm not saying there isn't frustration with the number of migrants. But yeah, we genuinely don't know. The number of protests in the population is tiny.

15:58Jon Sopel:But we've seen the opinion polls of the rise and rise and rise of reform. This is my point. But that's because of the failure of conventional politics, the Tories and Labour, to deal with the scale of the problem. Or that's the cleverness of reform. Reform points to the things that he thinks that people should be feeling really angry about. And then before you know it, people feel angry about it. You can say it is grievance politics, but you can't just say that the voters don't have a right to feel aggrieved. No. And I think that that is the kind of crux of the issue, that if you just dismiss...

16:31It's not about dismissing. I've told you, you know, I can totally see the numbers. The numbers speak for themselves. But when you say there are these huge protests... Now, OK, let's be honest about the protests, because, you know, many of these asylum hotels have been used for the past four years, right? We haven't seen protests outside the asylum hotels for four years. So is it about having people in your midst? Most people, you know, we live near to... Exactly. We live near to shared social housing, which has got asylum seekers in it. But most people don't know, right? They know as soon as Jenrick or Grease Mogg or Farage stands outside a hotel and says, why aren't you feeling angry?

17:09Right?

17:09Jon Sopel:That's my point. But the Epping Forest protests outside the Bell Hotel, for example, started organically. They were not. I mean, there was someone accused of sexual assault. Exactly, which is a totally different case, right? If you are worried about people in your community being sexually harassed or worse by people inside, of course, of course that's understandable. But that is not the same as pretending that the whole world is protesting about this. They're not. Well, I want to circle back to sort of where we started the conversation, which is about the shake-up in government and how you communicate this stuff.

17:39Jon Sopel:because I just want to play a clip of a junior Labour minister, Education Minister. Stephen Morgan was on Sky TV this morning and he was being asked about some hideous graffiti. Racist, you know, graffiti put outside a Chinese takeaway in York. And this is the exchange. A takeaway that's completely covered with graffiti and telling people to go home and, you know, people who are shouting at each other in the streets. This is Britain in 2025, and for years governments have talked about the strength of multiculturalism, but now that is under threat. People want to see real action now, not only to deal with migration, but also to deal with the psyche of the nation in parts.

18:24What can you say you will do today, tomorrow and next week that will deliver concrete change? Well, I'm proud to be part of a government that is a mission-driven government that wants to bring about change in our country. On my brief, I've set out some of the things that we're doing to ease the pressures on parents and deliver meaningful change for children, young people across our country. The Prime Minister wants us to go further and faster. That's what we're delivering to make sure we fix the foundations of our economy and restore public services and drive growth in our country. And that's what we're going to be doing as Parliament returns today.

18:54It's really interesting that it's been termed graffiti. You know, we heard the Sky News and call it graffiti. It's actually, and I'm looking at the picture now, it's three St George's flags. it says England and then it says cat and dog and geet up I don't know what geet up means get up, I don't know but it's quite interesting that in this context the St George's flag is seen as unmistakably hostile you know, the flag that everyone's been saying oh, we love, you know, we love our sports we love our flag, we love our country when you've done it on the Dragon House you know, a restaurant in York the intention is clear.

19:34It means go home.

19:35Jon Sopel:Yeah, but why can't the Labour minister engage with the question? And also, frankly, if I hear anyone say we are part of a mission-driven government, honestly, give me the whiskey and the pearl-handled revolver, I'm going to blow my brains out. It's just not talking to people. It's not communicating with what people's concerns But I think this goes back to the conversation that we're having. If that minister is in a place where he doesn't know whether to say this is not who we are, because half the people in the cabinet want to say, reassert our values, tell people who we are. I mean, right now, there are more voters leaving Labour, according to the polls, in August the 26th polls, going to more progressive parties than there are to the right.

20:26Just imagine a world in which Jeremy Corbyn and Zahra Sultana come along and they say they make a big speech to launch their party and they say, this is not who we are. We have values. We understand people's concerns about immigration, but we're not going to talk like that. This is not who we are. Then what does Keir Starmer do? Then what does Stephen Morgan do? He's completely caught. I don't know Keir Starmer, but I'm imagining that he is more of the spirit of this is not who we are than, yes, we've got to move faster and get people out of the hotels even quicker than Nigel Farage. And I think somebody like Stephen Morgan is reflecting not just how difficult they find the comms, but on the fact that there isn't a clear message from the top that has told the Labour story.

21:10If it was Blair, we know there'd be a story. We know that he would have found a way of explaining to everyone in the party that you can fight things that aren't fair and protect the values of the party you stand for. And that hasn't been done yet.