82. Wes Streeting: Labour, privatisation, and the NHS

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1:37Welcome to The Restless Apologies Leading with me, Anastar Campbell. And with me, Rory Stewart. Joined by Wes Streeting, who, if the polls are right and Labour win the general election, will be Secretary of State for Health and Social Care. and a bit like some of our earlier Labour interviewees with a very interesting backstory but probably the only one aged 41 who has already written a memoir title One Boy, Two Bills and a Fry-Up about his rather extraordinary childhood. I think he will definitely be the only member of parliament whose mother was born whilst her mother was chained to a hospital bed because she was on release from prison where she shared a cell with none other than christine keeler who will be well known to older it's the star of the profumo affair profumo scandal yeah along with mandy rice davis yeah it's amazing how those two women their names kind of resonate through the years and they will and what was the great catch line they produced uh he would say that wouldn't he he'd say that yeah yeah let's say we don't have too many he would say that it wouldn't be moments uh the thing about wes that you have to understand is relentlessly political uh very working class background went to cambridge university became very politically active there president of the national union of students then a counselor bit of work in the private sector but pretty much has been a politician and political all his life and will be is one of the most important labor figures in the campaign and will be one of the most important figures in the government if there is one so wes thank you for being here Thank you very, very much for joining us.

3:16Thank you for having me. Can I start then with your memoir and your book and do give us a bit of a sense of the different dimensions of your childhood. Father's family, mother's family, how you grew up, what those different traditions were, how they fed into who you are today. Yeah, it's captured in the title. So the one boy is obviously me. The two Bills are my two granddads, both of them called Bill, who I think epitomise two very stereotypical East End families, but wildly different stereotypes. And which part of the East End were you from? Stepney. So Stepney Whitechapel, Stepney Green, that's my stomping ground.

3:54And on my dad's side of the family, he had Bill Streeting, served king and country in the Second World War in the Royal Navy, as his father had in the First World War. He was very big on law and order, very much a monarchist, loved the Queen, worked all of his life. And, yep, he was what I would call a sort of pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps working-class, thatcherite Tory. In fact, the only time he ever voted something other than conservative was Liberal in Tower Hamlets to keep Labour out. So he was a staunch Tory, an Anglican, and probably the most influential person in my life and the closest relationship.

4:33Would he have been a Brexit voter? Would that have been the way he probably would have gone? I bet he would have done, yeah. I think he probably would have voted to leave the European Union. Interestingly, my dad, who's also been a lifelong conservative, he voted remain narrowly on economic grounds. Right. As my dad works in the car, he's a car salesman. But you said that was the most important relationship. Yeah. Your granddad, your mother or your father? We were so close. He was like my best friend growing up. And when there was a lot of turbulence and chaos and instability at home, you know, when I'd go to stay with my granddad, that would be, those would be the best moments of the week.

5:07And give us a sense of him. What was he like physically? What made him somebody that, was he good at dealing with young people? Was he fun to be around? He was, despite his politics and traditions, he was definitely a soft touch as a granddad. He was the one I'd go to if I wanted to borrow chocolate. My dad said no. He used to do these crazy things for me, like on a Saturday morning, I'd ask what I'd want for breakfast and I'd say beef burgers and potato waffles and he'd make them. I think this is kind of crazy, by the way. Did he enjoy playing with a child? He read to me all the time. He would indulge any interest I had.

5:39He would pretend the sweets I made out of pure icing sugar were delicious. I was a granddad's boy. it and um but you know he's he's also very traditional like i don't think he ever owned a pair of jeans in his entire life whenever he picked me up from school um on a friday he'd arrive early to join us at church and he'd be suited and booted but he'd be suited and booted to go to the square market on roman road on a saturday he might not wear a tie on a saturday but he would be there with his big laundry bags full of shopping um sort of carrying them down the road he used to occasionally have a string vest on um if he was in you know at home casually but other than that, he was very well turned out.

6:16He'd be horrified that I sometimes use one of those shiny sponges to shine my shoes rather than a proper navy boot polish. And given that he was in many ways quite an old-fashioned conservative person, did you have a chance to discuss being gay with him? How did he deal with that? No, he sadly died when I was 11, which was without doubt the worst day of my life. so I wonder I always wonder how how he would react I think his reaction would have been the same as my dad's which was taking a bit of time to get used to it but unconditional love so I feel I feel fairly confident about that we'll talk about the other bill the more colorful bill yeah I can put it like that in a minute uh the one who hung out with the craze and stuff but you see your grandfather was important to you and clearly I think I think I'm right I've heard you say this, I think to me before, that he was very important in the development of your Christian faith, but doesn't seem to have influenced your politics in the same way.

7:12To an extent he has, albeit, you know, when I was growing up and I used to talk to my granddad about politics, even at that young age, not least because there was very left-wing firebrand politics on my mum's side at the family. I've always had a strong commitment to social justice, and particularly given my childhood and upbringing, I might not have described it as that when I was growing up, But that basic fairness always kind of had ingrained. Where I've kind of got to over time is a frustration that when I talked to my dad or my granddad about why they were conservative, and it would be things like trusted with the economy, law and order, national security.

7:50As I've grown up and as I've looked back on Labour history, you know, I loved history growing up, read history at university. I don't think that those are or at least should be conservative issues but the Labour Party is too often surrendered that ground to the conservatives and I think we've under Keir's leadership and I promise I'm not going to do loads of lines to take throughout this conversation but I do think that one of the reasons for where we are today is when you look back at Lee, Wilson, Blair they all answered the three questions that stop Labour winning power. We always have to answer those three questions.

8:26And if we answer any of them with a no, we lose. So can we trust you with our money? Can we trust you on law and order? Can we trust you on national security? And your grandfather and father would answer no to that for Labour? Yeah. Although my dad's vote is hanging in the air at this general election. What, even this one? This could be the first time my dad votes Labour at the general election. He doesn't live in my constituency. He's always voted for me. But my dad, when I stood for a council by-election in 2010 and I was still living with my dad, he said uh he said i'm voting streeting i'm not voting labor but dad's moved i mean he voted labor in the london elections for the first time ever without streeting being on the ballot paper okay that's good so his votes are he's leaning labor for the general election so let's just just before we move on to uh more politics give us the sense of your your mother's side yeah it's completely different family my granddad granddad pops bill crowley um he didn't serve king and country but he did serve at her majesty's pleasure he was in and out of prison throughout his life in fact his early experiences of the criminal justice system were in ball stalls approved schools um from a very young age and he grew up in the east end as well yes well south london originally then they moved to the east end and he had a string of convictions for armed robbery and was that basically his job yeah um apart from i mean he had a couple of other jobs he can never help himself even when he was doing kind of straight jobs he would come home that was He was a delivery driver.

9:51He'd come home with huge pallets of fresh fish that would then fill the freezers of every house in the family. Some really thick, high-quality doormats that then adorn the doors across the East End. I like thick, high-quality doormats. Absolutely. Very posh for the East End. One of the stories I tell in the book was when he was doing work as an official receiver. He couldn't believe his luck because as far as he was concerned, he was being paid to legitimately steal from people and he would turn up to all these people in debt and he didn't mind doing businesses but it was when he was knocking on doors looking into the eyes of and it was usually women who answered the door and having to take what little they had he would just sort of say it's all right you weren't in I didn't see you and walk off and and he would and it's a bit like his work as an armed robber you know he wouldn't steal from his own as it were.

10:44In the end, he quit that job because he said being an armed robber was more honest work than being a bailiff. To be a little serious for a moment. He's your grandfather and you have a deep affection for him. He obviously had many virtues. You just give an example of him being generous and compassionate to people. Armed robbery is a terrifying, violent, horrible imposition on the victims. I guess your other grandfather who believes in law and order would be like, you do not minimise what the hell it means to be an armed robber, however glamorous that sounds. Yeah. And actually one of the issues I address in the book is this issue of the glamorisation.

11:23And I enjoyed some of those kind of gangster films as much as anyone else. But when I sort of take a step back and you think, is this really right that we hold people up in this way and we sort of particularly glamorise the craze and My granddad's often appeared in newspaper headlines as an associate of the Krays. Actually, he wasn't particularly. He knew them, but he wasn't an associate. He was with the Richardsons and one or two others. I'll tell some colourful, not suitable for work jokes in the book about some of his gangster associates. But there was a serious point. I mean, there's one story my mum told me, which he burst in one evening crying with laughter, just saying, only a woman, only a woman, only a woman over again.

12:13And my mum was saying, what's going on? And he'd gone into, I think it was a shop or a post office. He'd held a shotgun up in the face of the person behind the counter, the woman behind the counter. And she'd gone to press the panic button. And he said, you press that button, I'll shoot you. And she just looked him deadpan in the eye, pressed the button and said, go on then. And he burst, because he was never going to shoot her, burst out laughing, ran off and said, only a woman would have done that. and it's sort of and me and my mum talked about this saying well I think one thing I can be pretty sure of is that she didn't go home laughing that day and who knows what impact that might have had on her for years to come it's completely terrifying did she even go back to her I mean it sounds like she was hard as nails but there's a you know there are no crimes without victims the courage to look down the barrel of a gun gun and say go on then and I would also count my own family among his victims because his relationship with my nan was a very abusive one.

13:07I mean, my nan herself was incredibly strong, but my mum grew up in an environment with violence where my granddad was at home and not home. It was a very unstable childhood. It affected my mum's education and her life chances. You mentioned my nan giving birth in prison. She was only in prison because she got caught up with my granddad's work. And yet my nan was this warrior for social justice. She was very active in the Tenants Association in the East End, campaigned against Murdoch when he moved to News International. Sometimes when I'm going into work to do an interview with the Sun, I sort of look up and say, I'm really sorry, Nam, but we've got to talk to everyone.

13:46I think she could have been a great Labour councillor or even a Labour MP. In fact, she was asked to be a Labour councillor and she said no because she was ashamed of her criminal record and she didn't want to bring herself, the family or the Labour party into disrepute. So it had a big consequence for my mum, for her brothers and sisters, for my nan and what she was able to do. Where do you think your kind of moral compass comes from then? Did your mum and your grandmother on that side of the family, on the labour criminal side of the family, did they sit you down and talk about right or wrong?

14:17Did the other bill sit you down and talk about right or wrong? I mean, how have you got a kind of that sense of what's right and what's wrong and the moral compass that it gives you? I think from both sides of the family. I mean, my mum's never justified my granddad's criminality. I mean, in the book, I explain it in that it was only not long before he died when he finally revealed to my mum and my aunt that he'd been both physically and sexually abused by his father growing up. And suddenly it all made sense. It doesn't excuse, but it does explain. And you can then see, well, despite having a really loving mum and a brilliant relationship with his sisters, you can understand why Ball Store or Approved School might feel like a safer place and why the institutions of prison and that routine felt like a safer place.

15:06And of course, he had status in prison as an armed robber and as a getaway driver. He had friends. And so life was actually better for him in prison, which I think is a huge tragedy. Did you know him well as a child? What was he like to deal with as a grandson? Well, that's the sadness for me. When I was very young, I remember him being in and out of prison. I went to visit him once in prison and I didn't want to go back. Which prison was it? I think that would have been Wandsworth. I remember getting on a train down to South London and I didn't like seeing him there. I said to my mum, I didn't want to go back afterwards, which upset my granddad, but I just didn't want to go back.

15:45When he eventually came out and came out for good, I found him to be loving, but also to be living quite a sad and solitary life. I felt sorry for him. When I spent time with him, and it goes back to the suddenly all makes sense point in terms of his childhood. I used to sit there thinking, because we used to have fierce debates about politics, about religion. He was like a Dawkins-style atheist before Richard Dawkins became a big thing. He had read all of the major religious texts, the Bible, the Quran, the Torah. and he was really well read. And I used to think, and he used to be incredibly funny.

16:17He used to raise a sharp wit and he absolutely encouraged me to aim high. I mean, you know, he was so proud when I made it to Cambridge and I used to sit there thinking, how is it that someone this smart, this funny, this well read could have led such a wasted life? You turn up in Cambridge. Were you confident when you were 18? sharing these stories with other people that you were at university with? No. In fact, even when the book came out, it came as a surprise to lots of my friends at university. So how did you, I guess like most of us at 18, we're a little bit self-conscious. How do you think you sort of presented yourself to people when you were 18?

17:01I've always had a... I'm trying to find a better way to describe this because I always describe myself having a bit of a working class chip on my shoulder, but I don't mean that in a resentful or sort of aggravated way. What I mean is that I'd sort of been brought up with this idea, well, you know, anything you can do, I can do. And I've always had this sort of sense of, well, I'm not going to let my background hold me back. So I arrived in Cambridge with a precocious, actually precocious is probably about - So a positive ship. I had a precociousness, yeah. And I arrived, I remember having some arguments with some of my friends from independent schools.

17:36I never met anyone from private school before I went to university, of trying to say, well, you've earned your place here. We've all earned our place here. But I've earned my place more because I've had to clear more hurdles. And the way I describe it now, talking to kids from backgrounds like mine across the East End when I go and talk in schools is, you know, I actually often compare myself to Jacob Rees-Mogg after I was elected to Parliament, which is, look, we are sat here in Parliament. We've got an equal vote, an equal voice, and we're sat around the Treasury Committee, one of the most influential committees.

18:05And Jacob was that opposite me for a good few years. And I used to say, look, Jacob and I do the same job. We've got the same weight, not quite the same voice, but notionally, we've got the right to speak. We've reached the same destination, but I've had to clear hurdles to get ahead. Actually, that's made me the stronger athlete and it's built resilience. I don't look back with it, and it's certainly not a misery memoir I've written. I don't look back with a sense of pity. We mentioned the one boy, the two bills, the grandparents, the fry-up. and this is probably where the maybe maybe the precociousness was born in the womb because my mum was pregnant as as a teenager i think i'm sort of what's technically known as an accident it was not a planned pregnancy and everyone including my dad my granddad my mum my nan my mum's mum all agreed the best thing to do is my mum to have an abortion but she decided in a run-up that she wasn't going to go through with it she knew that my formidable nan might well frog marcher to the hospital to go through it so on the morning of the of the appointment she did the one thing she was explicitly told she couldn't do or the procedure couldn't go ahead which was to have breakfast so the fry up is literally the fry up that saved my life and i think that's where the precociousness was born in the womb i think listen we talk rory and i talk a lot on this podcast about prisons because we both go into prisons and and you know you rightly say they're pretty horrific and you had that experience as a child i think we both are a little bit disappointed that there's no sense of prison reform being on the political agenda right now.

19:35We're just going to live with these terrible prisons. Is that not something you think that a Labour Party ought to be focused on? I think we do have to look at the whole issue of kind of criminal justice in the round. I would argue, for example, that my nan should never have been in prison, that her offences weren't serious enough as a pregnant woman to find herself giving birth with all of the consequences that would involve. Because my mum was separated from my nan for a while at the beginning and we now know so much about those first thousand days. That was a terrible thing to have done and I think there are probably too many women in prison today for offences.

20:14Can I maybe push it one more stage? Both Alistair and I would agree strongly that there are far too many women in prison and most of the women in prison shouldn't be in prison, but it's also true that our prisons are horrible. Filthy, violent, drug-ridden, unsafe, horrible places. None of these parties, I'm afraid, neither Labor nor conservatives nor Lib Dems, are really focusing on this campaign on the most vulnerable. I'd like to see a party say, if we get in, we're going to look after prisoners properly, we're going to look after the homeless properly. We're going to look after the very poorest in society properly.

20:53People who don't vote in case prisons aren't even allowed to vote, but that a basic mark of our civilization is to massively improve conditions. Look at Sweden, look at Netherlands, make humane conditions in prisons absolutely central to the manifesto. I don't think it's a surprise that when money is in short supply and when you're fighting an election on the issues that matter to voters and you're trying to kind of hit voters on the nose with the messages that speak to the issues that they care most about that prison and prison reform is not going to be a centrepiece of the election campaign um i didn't think it would cost you votes oddly i mean i i was thinking about it yesterday i mean i agree with you it's not maybe something that's going to excite the daily mail voter but it would be completely on brand for a compassionate labor party it would be something that you could do where people could be like okay i get it you've got a moral compass all right maybe it's not our priority but this is showing your values it's a i think it's something you could do that wouldn't cost you votes and might actually give people certain kind of even as you say that i can hear the tories going soft on crime soft on crime soft on crime and also like you know and then and then there's a question of the money and you know what you know we've got a fierce competition for resources at the moment because they're in short supply and would you start here i do think there's a more fundamental question though about why how we got to this state and why is it that criminal justice and prisons feature so low?

22:19You were a prisons minister. What made your job the most difficult to achieve change? What's interesting to me is that I came into that job and my predecessor, Sam Gimas, said, you've got to be hard on crime. I completely disagreed. I came in and I thought, this is a total disgrace. I said she was inspired by Tessa Jal. Tessa Jal said to me that the big question she asked herself whenever she went into a hospital is, would I put my mother in this hospital? And I thought, would I put a relative in this prison? The answer is absolutely not. Terrifying, disgusting, filthy place. And so everything I did was going out saying, these are complete disgusting disgraces, and we're going to try to make them safe for prisoners, safe for prison officers, safe families.

23:05Paradoxically, I found that actually the public responded very favorably. The newspapers weren't that brutal to me, and all the conventional wisdom, which was, you know, you'll be punished for it, wasn't true. People do have a conscience in Britain and you can awake it. So I feel sad that people aren't leaning into this. I think we're being too cowardly about this. I don't think it's so much a conscience issue, but I do think it's a resources issue. I mean, the prison estate is an absolute mess. But then would you prioritise prisons over our schools and hospitals? I wouldn't. And I don't think that's an immoral choice.

23:38I think I probably would because they are so bad. I mean, so much worse than a school. A bad school is a very depressing thing. But 30 ,000 assaults a year in prison. I mean, prison men, people are getting their heads chopped off in the exercise yards. They're getting, I mean, that's not happening in schools. I mean, this is something hidden from society, which is so much worse than you can imagine. Can I ask you something else about your earlier life? What did you learn, first of all, in student politics? And then as a councillor, that maybe you're trying to apply today as in, I think, what's your first election as a key campaigner, as they're called.

24:16Yeah. Well, politics is fundamentally about change at any level. And I had a wry smile this week because I think Varsity, one of the student newspapers at Cambridge, they run a sort of feature looking back sort of 20 years. And 20 years ago was me. and this week they mentioned a certain West Streeting campaigning successfully to save the university's architecture department from closure. And that wasn't just me, by the way. It was a huge team effort. The architecture society leadership at the time deserved the lion's share of the credit, but that's what politics and political change is really about, the saviour.

25:00If ever it's about the saviour, it is about a collective effort, a team effort to affect change. And we did. And I'm incredibly proud that that architecture department is still there today, still thriving. And I can say, hand on heart, that I was part of that achievement and legacy. And similarly, in local government, I mean, it's made me a committed devolver. I believe that power is better exercised when it's closer to the peoples and communities. It's there to serve. and Andy Burnham has been a trailblazer for the mayoral model and we're seeing others now follow using those levers of power. I might not be happy with the result for lots of reasons, but Ben Houtrin up on Teesside, the fact that he is still there despite the tsunami that swept away other conservatives, says something about the fact that people judged him as a mayor, not simply as the political brand.

25:54And so I'm very committed to devolution. and also again it's about how you affect fundamental change and sometimes really practical change you know i was i was in a rush the other day i was going from one thing to another as you do during the election campaign and i stopped it i was got stopped at these traffic lights around the corner from where i live um on horns road in barking side and i was in a rush and i said to the person driving the car i was like this is my fault i've got these traffic lights installed because we've got the the new development behind me and the school in front of me and we put the crossing in because we were worried about children's road safety and we've probably saved some lives and prevented some injuries so even really practical things like getting in a pedestrian crossing it's quite bold to tell a voter that you've just made his life more difficult well done well you know and it's good and i mean i love my time and and you know the one year i had as deputy leader of the london borough of redbridge for i was elected as as the mp for ilford north I got so much done in that one year and I can point to things around my constituency and around my borough that I delivered as deputy leader of the council in the last nine years as a as most you know a backbencher and then as a member of the shadow cabinet and a member of the front bench I can point to things I achieved that are consequential I saved King George Jackson emergency department that was the A &E department that found my kidney cancer and saved my life I can point to things I've done in Parliament to make a difference, albeit on issues like Islamophobia, where I work with Saeed Avarsi.

27:23We made some impact, but not the fundamental change I really wanted to make. The point you're making is you've got to be in government. Yeah, and that's why this election for me is incredibly exciting, so we might pull it off. It's also, I mean, for listeners to the show, it's a kind of reminder of one of the weirdnesses of being a backbench MP. Because as you say, a lot of what I certainly felt as an MP, that a lot of what our voters want us to do are quite practical local issues. And a lot of that is actually the job of the local council, not the MP. Local MP doesn't actually have a budget, doesn't have legal powers.

27:58So even when we say, And of course, I did this like you. I got the dueling of the A66. I got the lift in Penrith station. And you're saying you saved the hospital. Well, yeah, up to a point. But obviously, you're an opposition backbench MP. So that thing wouldn't have been saved unless, presumably, some conservative minister signed off on it. So the most you're doing as an backbench MP is having some sort of, you hope, some influence on the process. You're not actually in power. You're not doing it yourself. You're asking for something. You're lobbying for something. you're pushing for something, you're making the case for something.

28:33I think that's one of the things that can make politics quite depressing. I felt a lot of my colleagues who'd come out of business or the military or even running local councils when they became backbench and peaceful, struggling to really feel that impact. They never said it to voters because, of course, you've got to keep saying to voters to get them to vote for you. I'm delivering change, I'm delivering change. You never say to them, listen, I'm pretty powerless and this is a bit embarrassing and I'm not actually achieving very much every year. But there is a sense in which that is a bit true.

29:02Maybe that's one of the things that makes you commit to devolution. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of truth in what you say. A few things I'd say, though. Firstly, Parliament really matters and our role as legislators really matters. And there are things that you can achieve even as a backbencher. I mean, that was certainly true in the Brexit parliaments where, I mean, we kind of seized control of the order paper in quite unprecedented But what did you actually achieve? What you actually achieved? Not the outcome we wanted. No, what you achieved was Boris Johnson pushing through an even harder Brexit by destroying Theresa May's deal.

29:33Again, there's some truth in that. I think the role of parliament, though, matters and holding the executive to account matters. Can I push that words for a second, though? Because given the way the whips work, given the way the majorities work, you're basically trooping through the lobbies day in, day out, losing, losing, losing. and it doesn't matter what you say in the debates, the other side isn't really listening. That's the thing I noticed when I became an MP. They're not really debates, are they, to be honest? I mean, you stand up, you ask your question, you get some sort of stupid synthetic answer from the dispatch box.