396. Question Time: It's over for Kemi Badenoch

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1:28Welcome to the rest of the poll, this question time with me, Alistair Kamal. And with me, Maurice Stewart. And first question for you from one of our very favourite countries, which is Australia. Tom says, what on earth is going on on the Australian election? And Alistair in particular, are your predictions on Dutton's faltering performance being vindicated? Well, of course, you're the master of election predictions, Roy. You know, you put a large sum of money on Kamal Harris. I'm not a betting person, but if I were a betting person, I would put my money on Albanese right now, because I don't think Dutton is fighting a good campaign.

2:07And by the way, we should tell listeners that all being well, our next guest on leading will be Mr Albanese. Mr Albanese, the Prime Minister for Australia. Unbelievable, congratulations. That's amazing to get the Australian Prime Minister right in the middle of an election campaign. Yeah, but I think we have a lot of listeners out there. He wouldn't be doing it for the good of his health. I think he's fighting a pretty good campaign. I listened to an interview he did with Latika Burke, who's somebody who knows Britain or Australia very, very well. And as you heard, the first question was, you seem a lot more confident than you were last time in the last campaign.

2:43And I wonder if that is because he's sort of feeling the Dutton balloon slightly, slightly bursting. So what is it that Dutton's done wrong? So we've seen people saying that his anti -work drive hasn't worked out. There's been a certain amount on his pitch, somehow being out of date that he's sounding too Trumpian. What's your basic take on what he's doing wrong? I mean, possibly a bit unfairly. He's being allied very closely to Trump and he's trying to get away. And the more he tries to get away, the harder it's gay. He wasn't held by one of his candidates talking about making Australia great again.

3:22And he was standing in the backroom, and wincing as she said it. But also this working from home thing, I think he just thought that as part of the sort of Trumpian and anti -work, so -called agenda, saying there'd be a bit crackdown on working from home would go down really well. It went down really, really badly. There's a new thing has developed today. The big story today is about Russia doing some sort of defense deal with Indonesia, which Dutton is trying to get up as a sort of labor, weak on security, but it felt a bit desperate, to be honest. The next debate is happening, I think, on Wednesday.

3:56But it's feeling, it's looking a long way to go, but it's feeling that Dutton's just not really cutting through in the way that he probably wanted to. And I think some of his MPs are starting, and candidates are starting to say there wasn't really a very strong plan. One of the problems seems to be that he had some strong plans, you know, like the stuff from working from home, but that he dropped them. And do quick things that this is a guy called Koss Samaras, who I follow a bit on polling in Australia, who said that the big difference is emerging in housing policy, and that labor is targeting individuals who struggle to save for a deposit, middle urban areas, regional Australia, but the weakness is that this is an electorate that doesn't believe that the government will build the promise terms, and in contrast, the coalition is focusing on outer suburban communities.

4:43Particularly resonate with the Indian Australian diaspora, and people who favor new home ownership in those areas, but may not resonate with the bulk of renters. Anyway, that was a sort of kind of detail around housing policy, but it's sort of a bigger question for you, which I think relates to a question that we've just got from Will, which is, is Kimmy Vednock right not to have any policies, and maybe a bit unfair to Kimmy Vednock, but it sort of relates to this Dutton point, which is that in the modern world, there seems to be a real problem with announcing too many policies, because as soon as you announce a policy, people attack you and you frequently feel inclined to backtrack on it.

5:23You could argue that labor, to some extent, won the British election without putting out too many policies and without seeming largely relying on, I don't know, the Conservatives just seeming hopeless and useless, and everybody wanted to get rid of them. The reason the question to Kimmy I wanted to pose is she's presumably between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, she could think, okay, I don't want to put out too many policies, because I'm going to be attacked for them. On the other hand, if she doesn't say anything, she's going to lose momentum. Reform is going to develop, labor will develop, and she'll become almost invisible.

5:59Have you won that? Yeah, I mean, I think it's a bit hard to expect her to have be putting out policy in the same level as somebody like Dutton, who's right in the middle of an election campaign and wants to be Prime Minister, Kimmy the fourth. She's got a while to go if she gets there. I think a her stage in opposition. You need policy, but more than that, you need policy argument, and you need a story that you're telling the country, about yourself, about your party, and about the country. And my sense of her is that the story that she's telling is very locked in that sort of right wing media eco sphere.

6:43And I'm just not sure the public are listening to it. So like, I'd be very hard pressed, and I'm somebody like you follows this stuff fairly closely. I can't really think of anything that she has said or done that has made a lasting positive impression upon me. I could look at Dutton, who I don't think is having a good campaign, but I have seen him. For example, I've seen him sometimes in the Australian parliament being really strong and really quite powerful in the way that he speaks. And I've seen him say stuff about defense and foreign policy. And I've thought, oh, he's kind of thought about this.

7:18I really don't quite get where she's going. And of course, she's up against for us who gets away with murder, partly because of the media. I see he was on the Law of Kuhn's Berg show again. The doubt has been on question time next week. He sort of gets an easier ride from the media, but he also gets an easier ride from his opponents. You know, Labour and the Tories don't seem to me to have worked out what is the best way to attack reform. And that means that he just sort of floats from one talking point to the next. So I don't think it's about policy for her. I think it's about overall big picture strategy and what's the story she's trying to tell about the country.

7:54For I just have a story about the country, basically, says it's wrecked and it's terrible and everything's awful and put me in charge, it will be fine. That's his basic story. And he's allowed to get away with it. OK, so I said just to try to get our heads around because this is, I guess, central to what Baydox is going to be thinking about, but politicians all around the world think about, which is you could have a sort of completely novel economic analysis of how you transform British grace. But nobody's got that, right? There's no economist that anyone's got in their back pocket who has some brilliant new analysis to country.

8:30You could be a really strong House of Commons performer. And I guess you also, we keep coming back to New Labour and what you guys did in opposition and how you got yourselves in a position by 97 to win. Part of that is that Tony Blair was a very good House of Commons performer. So presumably, unlike Kenby Baydox, he was getting quite a lot of good press for how he was performing at Prime Minister's questions. We're always so tall, but maybe this is ridiculous that these big speech on tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime was an example of how he managed to find a way of seizing the national narrative.

9:06I mean, can you just make the case for if you were looking at New Labour coming in and applying to Baydox? What sort of things were you doing, in 1947 that Baydox should be thinking about doing now and she isn't doing? Analyzing where they've gone wrong. I think we did a lot of that. Working out how she can insert herself into the national conversation in a way that's interesting, rather than predictable. I'd say when I see her at question time, and I agree with you, I think when you're the leader of the opposition question time is incredibly important because it's not the millions of people watch it, but it somehow feeds into the national conversation about whether you're doing well, whether you're doing badly.

9:51And generally Tony, most weeks people thought he was pretty good. I think with her, she's predictable in that the subjects that she goes on or the subjects you might expect to, but they often, it feels to me, don't speak to a big narrative that she's trying to develop. I just have no idea about what she's trying to say about the country. So when you say tough on the crime, tough on the causes of crime, that was a message about an issue that people really cared about and it was a framing. It was a framing. What has she, what argument is she framed? And then if I look at what she, you know, the thing we didn't have in our day of the whole social media thing, I look at her social media and the conservative social media.

10:37And again, I don't understand what they're trying to do with it. They're just attacking labor all the time. Now, what's funny? You've got to attack the opposition with the government. But I just, I just don't know what the story is. Well, so final thing, you, you're being surprisingly polite, but let me ask you more bluntly and to be more outspoken. Do you think she's going to be here at the time of next election? No, I don't, I don't. I think the conservatives will, they're, they're conservatives. I don't know a lot of the, I suppose the ones I know have kind of gone. They vanished, but they conservative party general is pretty ruthless and brutal about its leaders.

11:11And I was talking to her, a laborer, through the other day, who said it's really interesting watching the Tories during PMQs. They, they started off thinking here wouldn't be very good at it. And he's got better. And they say that when she's on her feet, they look just a little bit soulless and lost. Now, she will feel that if she's got any empathy at all, which I think sure she has, she will feel that she won't survive unless she finds a compelling narrative about who she is, how she relates to the party she leads and how that relates to the country. Till she gets that, she's not going to break through at all.

11:50Very good. Okay, now we have a question on labor and the trade unions. How the trade union movement? Mel, Alistair, you often mention labor's role in the trade union movement. Can you tell us a bit more about it and how you see the relationship evolving today? And I guess also Captain Goodson, given the Birmingham bin strikers that rejects another offer, is a government override to end a strike? Some complaints from Birmingham that we were not serious enough about what this bin thing means. Can we just explain to listeners, particularly international listeners, just how bad many people in Birmingham feel things have gone?

12:27Yeah, although there were two Birmingham people on the radio at this point, you say they were fed up of everybody saying that everywhere you go, Burby always sees rubbish because actually it's been one of the interviews. Actually, he said the bags have been piled up very nicely. Come to Birmingham, the bags are piled up nicely. No, this is a strike over changes to working conditions, job descriptions, which the unions say means that some of their members are going to be thousands of pounds worse off over a year. They've had another ballot and they've voted to continue the strike. The government wants the ones they want the bins off the clear up.

13:06So it's a pretty grim situation. I mean, labor in the unions is a really interesting story there. So I actually wonder if at some point we shouldn't we keep promising these, these mini series and we're going to do we're going to be doing one hopefully not too long on JD Vance, but I wonder whether at some point there isn't one to be done on on labor in the unions, because it's a story that's more interesting than the than the caricature. I mean, the labor party essentially was formed and funded in part by the trade union movement, brown back in a 1900 and membership. So today there are something like six and a half million trade union members or that was 2023 last sort of reliable figures.

13:47The peak, you won't be surprised the year that trade union membership peaked. It was 1979, 13 .2 million. So that was the year that Margaret Fatcher was elected. And the decline since then, interestingly, most of the decline has been in the private sector. Public sector union membership is still pretty high. And the other thing is that partly because of Fatcher and because of the power of the Fatcher myth, which I think a lot of it is, and also the fact that she did, there's no doubt she did bring the trade unions down. And also the fact that most of our media framing about the trade unions is very negative.

14:25It's still very negative. But it overlooks the fact that historically, and particularly I would argue during the Second World War, the unions were very, very popular. Union membership soared during the war. And I think a lot of the reason for that was we all know about Neibbevan, who created the National Health Service, but Ernest Bevin, who was this amazing guy born in the early 1880s, orphaned eight, next to no formal education, started work at 11. And by 1922, so he would have been in his, what's 1922, he'd been about 30 odd. So by 1922, he'd basically created and was running the transport and general workers union, which became the biggest union in the country.

15:16And which is connected to the Birmingham Bin Strikes, right? This is the Birmingham Bin Strikes. Well, this is Unite. Which is the descendant? Exactly. So the TNG no longer exists. Yeah. It's the child of any Bevin's union. I think he disorted it by now. But the big thing was that during the interwar years, even though he was not in Parliament, he was a big figure in the Labour Party. In fact, there is an argument that he was responsible for ATLIC, because he made this amazing speech at the Labour Party conference that led to essentially led to ATLIC replacing George Lanzbury as leader of the Labour Party.

15:50But then come the war, Churchill clearly recognised something very, very special in Ernie Bevin. And he put him in the cabinet, essentially in charge of turning Britain into war economy. And he did it very, very well. And so, and that's when trading your membership doubled. So you had a union leader, the leader of the TNG in the cabinet, big part of the industrial war effort. This leads us to the disagreement that we had as fractious disagreement last week, about the composition of Parliament. And I was trying to use Ernie Bevin as a classic example of this incredible foreign secretary who came in.

16:28I older, actually, you've just pointed out older than I realised at the time. I'm here with 70 when he's coming into that job, and proved to be this incredible foreign secretary replacing the sort of moustache twirling, Antony Eden, and demonstrating that he was incredibly good at managing the Russians, managing the American threat. And I was setting up this story that in the good old days, instead of having a bunch of people whose parents were politicians and a bunch of political professionals, we had these amazing trade union legends that gave labour this incredible confidence and presence in the House of Commons was lacking.

17:03And you then came back to me to say this was all complete nonsense and all your friends who are labour MPs have been rioting since. They weren't rioting, but... No, because I coincidentally, I was asked to go and talk to lots of people who work for labour MPs, young researchers and what have you. And so I was asking lots of them about the background. And somebody's done a thing using AI, which says that something like 22 % of labour MPs have what he defines as very political parents. I don't know what a very political parent means, but the ones that I taught who very few were children of MPs. Some were children of counsellors.

17:44But I think yours was a bit of a caricature. Yeah, Samuel Colvin, who's one of our members, in response to the rest of his politics discussion, politicians, political parents, sped a couple of hours using pedantic AI to extract political relatives from Wikipedia pages for UK MPs. 23 % of UK MPs have political parents, 66 % more than the general population. No, I think it means 66 times more. Sorry, 66 times more than the general population. IPPRs also done some really good stuff on this. What they've pointed out is that parliaments become much more diverse in terms of far more women. So I think it's now 35 % of parliament.

18:25A female, more diverse, 10 % from minority ethnic backgrounds. Both of those are lower than the general population, but it's getting up there. Big transformation and sexuality. But when it comes to people from working class backgrounds, there have been a couple of different studies. Oliver Heath, 1964, 20 % of parliament was working class, now 5%. And in 64, that was when the general population was 50%. It was 20%. It's now 5 % compared to 25%. We got a lot of pushback on this as well, because what's your definition of working class then and now? So IPPR defines working class as manufacturing or manual backgrounds or unskilled service work, for example, care work, or trade union employees who came from the working parts of the trade union.

19:13And on those metrics, they say that in 1987, 28 % came from working class occupations. Today 13 % come from working class occupations. So the big discrepancy, the way in which parliament doesn't represent the general population is no longer in terms of women, no longer in terms of diversity. It's increasingly in terms of two things. Far fewer people from working class professions and far more university graduates. So in fact, more university graduates than the Labour Party than the Conservative Party. In part, that's because there are more university graduates and also there are a few traditional working class jobs.

19:49But IPPR sets up that. So it compares to the general population. So 34 % of the general population go to university, 89 % of MPs. And when it comes to working class occupations, again, the number of working class occupations to country has come down. But it hasn't come down anything like as steeply as the number of MPs from working class backgrounds. I think it's partly though that class has changed. I think I understand what class means has changed. So for example, you know, if you're a university student working in a bar and then you end up going into the gig economy for a while, we used to have a much clearer sense of what working class was.

20:32And I'm not sure now that, well, I agree with you, more Labour MPs are now educated to degree level than would have been the case in early Bevens time. And I also agree by the way that we could do with a few more early Bevens. But the other point you made last week is there aren't that so many characters then. And now is then. I think people like, you know, it's rare that you get somebody as special as he was and who was clearly so capable. And I think by the way, you can make the case that in part because of Atley as the Deputy Prime Minister in the war cabinet and Bevin doing the job that he did.

21:13I think it was partly because of that and the country getting used to them as figures of government that helped lead to the landslide that they got in 1945, which included then the implementation of the beverage report, which was in the, I think, came out in 1942. So he was a transformational figure. I mean, just to close off the sort of brief history of Labour and the unions, the first really big falling out was when Wilson was Prime Minister and that was over Barbara Castle's famous white paper on industrial relations in place of strife when the unions ultimately forced the government to back down and then the winter of discontent and the social contract, which the Tories, you know, the winter of discontent they still talk about because that was, if you imagine, the bin strike in Birmingham, but that sort of thing happening all over the country.

22:04But what I think is interesting about the way that Bevin did it, he tried, as a wartime leader, tried to bring business and unions together. And Tony, when Tony was Prime Minister, that was his approach, trying to not like the Germans with the kind of, you know, the whole tripart, economic structure, but trying to get better relations between business and unions. And I think when they feel that there are opposite sides of every argument, then I think your economy is likely to be less efficient. But anyway, we should maybe revisit this because I do think there were some fascinating characters and stories going way back.

22:41And of course, you know, when I was growing up, these trade union leaders, they were household names. So just as we go to the break, I mean, Jo Keenan, as someone who looks at becoming a politician but works odd hours and is very much part of the gig economy, do you think part of the problem in entering politics? Is the amount of unpaid work and time that's required the local branches of parties? Absolutely. This is the other thing we don't, we're not honest with the public about. To win a marginal seat now, you basically need to be full time in that seat for two years before the election. That means leaving your job, moving to that constituency, screws up your mortgage.

23:17If you are not employed by your, as a professional, if you're not a spat with your party, if you're not a comms person with your party, or if you don't have a private income and a family -sponning, how on earth are you supposed to do it? How on earth is somebody from a genuinely working class background supposed to find the money to spend two years completely without an income working full time on trying to win a marginal seat? And that's what the trade unions used to do. They used to pay people salaries to help them get into parliament. Yeah, last time round, you had organisations like Labour Together who were supporting certain MPs and the trade unions still do have tried to help MPs.

23:54But you know, that's a fair point, but Joe, don't let it get you down. Do it. Find a way. You can do it. Get stuck in. I'm assuming now that you were kind of modernising Labour person who wants to help the Labour Party. Let's have a break.

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