447. Is Starmer Sleepwalking Britain into Farage’s Hands?

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0:32That has got to be sorted. This is a guy who is so far beyond the kind of Britain we want. This is somebody who wants to trash institutions, break international law, expel 600 ,000 people in contravention of all our international treaties. We're on some terrible, inexorable march towards the UK becoming another right wing populist, government country, which I think will be a disaster. This episode is powered by Fuse Energy. It's one of the fastest growing energy suppliers in the UK. Fuse are making a difference that you can measure. At a time when almost everything else feels uncertain, an each bill can often feel heavier than the last.

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3:05Welcome to the rest of this politics with me, Rory Stewart. And me, Anastakamble, and Roryam afraid the tube strike is somewhat defeated me. I tried all sorts of ways, but in the end it was walking and I was going to be late. So I'm at home and you're in the studio. It is amazing for those who weren't out and about in London today as most of our listeners, I guess, not London -based. It was pretty amazing. There are so many bicycles. And buscues. Huge buscues. Huge buscues. I produce the tells us that bikes have overtaken cars to become the most common vehicle in central London. It literally looked like my memory of China in the early 1980s, as I was coming through Buckingham Palace, which was hundreds of bicycles and very few cars.

3:43It was in the sunshine. So on a good day, it's a pretty encouraging thing, but you can't get a limelike, which is one of those kind of borrous bike equivalents at the moment. Yeah, I'm not really a limelike kind of guy. And I'm doing the awards at UCLH Hospital tonight. And some of you are telling me there's now a thing in A &E called the limelike break, which is a particular type of... Yeah, because they're so... They're quite heavy, aren't they? They're quite heavy and people sort of think they're on a nice, sort of light, pinarillo, bloody blood. Anyway, Rory, this is not getting to the point about what we're going to talk about, is it?

4:15So... Well, I think we've got a good segue there, haven't we? Because we can go from the nice subject of tube strikes, which is tube drivers requesting fewer hours and requesting that they manage to get much reduced travel for vacation with their families on trains. to the subject of labor reform and what's going on in British politics the moment and I'm just going to set up the thing just to remind people where we are. So latest Ipsos poll shows reform now at 34%. Labor, this is June 2025, was at 25%. But now many polls are showing labor down at 20 % was potentially Corbin taking 5 % bringing down to 15 % and the conservatives down at 15%.

4:57So So we are in a very, very different world, a completely erratically different world from, obviously 2019, where Boris Johnson and the Conservatives won this extraordinary majority, very different world from last year, where Labour won this big majority, into a world where the Conservatives certainly seem on the verge of extinction, and Labour seems to put it mildly in trouble over the... There's no doubt about that. I mean, you know, I think you and I are both of the view that for Arge's reform is a classic right wing populist party wouldn't be serious as government but the fact that we're even talking about it shows that something quite strange is going on.

5:33The fact that they've only literally only got four MPs and yet nobody talks about Kemi -Badenock remotely having a chance of getting to number 10. And of course then throw into the mix Angela Rainer's resignation which we talked about in the the podcast we did immediate on the back of our resignation on Friday. A deputy leadership contest, which is now shaping up, where you sense that the party machine is kind of hoping that there's not going to be too many candidates who get above the ATMP in a couple of affiliates and trade unions threshold. I see Philip's name is the latest being put into the mix.

6:10And meanwhile, a sense in politics, not just in the UK, but right around Europe, we're going to talk about next big regional election that's coming up there in just under a year. And so this is kind of big, big political turn. Just drop into the fact we had the Norwegian Prime Minister on recently on leading. He actually upped his vote. No doubt it was our podcast that sort of just got him up to that level, Roy. But so it's not all kind of one way, but of course, Norway is a very, very different country because it's so wealthy. And I think what we're seeing is a consequence of the post -COVID, energy prices, post -Ukraine, and basically anybody in government right now is finding it very, very, very tough.

6:58Question is, does the reshuffle make any difference? I mean, you and I talked a little bit about that. What's your final, I felt watching the reshuffle as unfolded. We were kind of half, it was just beginning when we were talking to the day. It did remind me a little bit of your book of this sense of those David Lamy has just got on top of the foreign policy brief in a year, and now he's moved on. Peter Kyle strikes me as whatever we think of the decisions he's made, he really kind of knows that world of big tech and he's really got into it. Pat McFadden has really got a grip of the kind of white or machinery, and then they move.

7:33Well exactly how so. So as you say that that's what a lot of politics on the edges is trying to express how strange it is. So you think about what it is to be David Lamy. He was the shadow foreign secretary, so he spent a lot of time getting to know issues, getting to know world leaders, building up his own team of people who shared his foreign policy vision. And he got himself in a situation where he managed to build, for example, a relationship with JD Vance, enough for JD Vance to come and stay with him when he was in the Cotswars, a pretty unique thing. He worked his way slowly towards a position on Gaza and Palestine, a difficult negotiation with the party.

8:08Civil servants coming on board and all of them thinking, okay, this is the guy who may be there to stay and of course Different people around the world developing those relationships particularly important for example in places like the Gulf Where because they're monoclees there's much more continuity? But it's true in Africa too. I was the Africa minister many many of the leaders in Africa have been in there for a very long time I really felt when I was lucky enough to as a foreign office minister to meet someone two or three times, that was completely different from the first time that you met them.

8:38So all of that's baked into what David Lambie had been doing and now he's gone and now a completely new person comes in and takes over the job. And this has been repeated structurally right the way across government because it's, I don't know whether the analogy is with a poker hand, but traditionally you would have thought that you want to be decisive. You either want to fold or you want to raise, in other words, you either want to be making a dynamic decision to promote people you want to fire them. What's actually happened in this reshuffle is it's quite genuinely a re -reshuffle. I mean, all that's happening, or a lot of what's happening is only two cabinet nurses were fired and they were not in keep positions, Lucy Powell and Ian Murray, and Ian Murray's doing quite a good job.

9:21Anyway, for some reason, they went... Ian Murray's now come back though in two different ministerial state jobs. That's right. Come back in a different ministerial state. Okay. So, only Lucy Powell actually lost her job. And so 10 cabinet ministers were kept in the cabinet but just changed their position around the cabinet table, given a different department. And the same with 20 junior ministers. The problem is that civil servants are faced with a problem. A minister comes in and the best of them obviously wants to come in with ideas, with a program, with change. Often the departments they're taking over are in real trouble.

9:59And so they want to communicate to the civil servants. We're going to be radical, we're going to go out and communicate. You know, I'm going to resign unless I get this done or these are the three main objectives or this is where my predecessor was wrong. And the civil servants are going to think now, well, okay, all very well. But if we go right out on a limb here and do something very radical, how long are you going to be around? And we talked about this for the election because of course the fundamental criticism of the conservatives is as you kept pointing out they'd had 14 housing ministers in 12 years, you know, 12 defense ministers in 13 years, you know, whatever it was, 10 prison ministers in 11.

10:33And we said, I think we were hoping Keir Starmer would say before the election, I will make sure that all my ministers are in position for a minimum of two years and less does this candle. And that was the sort of culture of the whole thing and it hasn't happened. Yeah, you see, I think what Underneurina's Resilation did was make Keir Starmer bring for to reshovel, which he then made I think even bigger. But what it doesn't really do is signal much change other than this. I think the thing that he wanted to do, I think he gets that the small boats issue forage on the rampage, immigration much bigger within the debate than maybe it was two years ago.

11:09Just after Boris Johnson presided over a record immigration post Brexit. And I think that the change it seems to me within this reshovel that he really wanted to make was to put Shabana Mahmoud as home secretary who's already projecting herself both in rhetoric and some of the policy statements that she's making as if you like being very much on the tough end of the market and she's going to be and that's kind of her reputation in the way that she projects herself and so forth. Now there is a part of me that thinks that that's fine but then same time is that a judgment on Ivette Cooper? If it's a judgment on Ivette Cooper not having done what he wanted to do, not having achieved in the way.

11:48Even though I think he actually did some pretty good things, you talked about some of the changes he's made, some of the relationship she'd made, for example, with the French. Anyway, so he doesn't suck up. He makes her foreign secretary. Brackets, by the way, I think it's the first time in history, all three of the so -called great offices stay to a rock by by women. I've got Rachel Reeves, who is staying, if it Cooper and Shabbar and Mahmoud. And meanwhile, that meant, okay, what I do, David Lamy, me, or David Lamy justice is sort of, you know, difficult job, prison's probation, it's partly his background, it's really going strong.

12:21I interrupt for a second, though, I said, instead of making a vet group of foreigners actually, one option, as you say, would have been to say, I'm going to fire her. Yeah. And the second option would have been just to do a simple swap and say, I'll make a Lord Chancellor's Secretary of State for Justice, I'll just do a job swap with Shabbana Mahmoud and leave everybody else in place. I mean, what's so weird about what you seem to be describing is that the desire to make Shabbana Mahmoud home secretary suddenly leads to reshuffling 10 other people around the cabinet. Yeah. People rather than doing the simpler thing.

12:51But that's how it works. I mean, you know, I've often just reshuff as a nightmare and I've often said they're like sort of like jigsaws where you just move one piece out and if you get the wrong piece in place, then everything else falls apart. So what I wouldn't you do the two other things. So let's just lean into the two other options. Why would he not just fire a vet Cooper presumably? She doesn't have a huge, massive base of people in the Labour Party that are going to go to battle with it. She's a respected figure, but she's not somebody who's going to lead an insurrection against her. No, but I, you know, talking to a few people over the weekend, you know, Kiers not exactly beloved by the PLP.

13:28So he probably is a part of him thinking, I can't have too many enemies out there, but then the thing with Dave Limey, of course, is Dave Limey, then, he's made deputy prime minister as well. Now, that's then going to play into, and I said on the episode that on Friday, if I were here, I would not commit to the deputy leader of the Labour Party, be guppity deputy privateist there. So I think that was him thinking, I've got to have somebody in place who is not going to be running for deputy leadership and they're going to stay as deputy prime minister because the leadership contest seems to me is why they're going to try and keep the debate as short as possible.

14:03You know, it's tricky for them right now because Because there are a lot of people who feel that we've had a year, we're still not really feeling that we're the polls as you say are terrible, keeps ratings are terrible. There's no real sign of where the change that's going to turn things around is coming from. The budget obviously is going to be very difficult. And therefore it's become not a survival game, but I think part of the thinking is just don't make it too difficult. So he's put Shabana in there. She will become a very high profile figure very, very quickly because of the say -lens of the issue and because of the way that she projects herself.

14:39And the other thing that's done though is it means that they really now do have to crack that. That has got to be sorted. And if you talk to any of them, both Tory and Labour who've had to deal with this, the one thing they recognise is it's very, very difficult. And that's why Farage Towneamne said I'll sort it in two weeks, his sort of classic drumpers. This little one on from talking to Francois Neubert and P. some of whom have got ministerial jobs and the reshuffle, some of whom didn't. And I'd love a reality check from you because you know the party much better. So the overview that I was given is firstly astonishing 23 new MPs have now got jobs.

15:14Incredible. And when I was in the Cameron government, not a single one of the new intake got a job for at least two years. We all had to serve our apprenticeship on the back benches. Secondly, a real sense that there's a massive reward for ultra -loyalists, and particularly young ultra -loilers. So the entire whips office with the exception of some of the Christian Wakefield now seems to be manned by new MPs who are considered loyal to Starmer, including Morgan McSweeney's wife. The other thing is that it's quite striking that what's called the soft left but is basically a word for people who are considered a little bit more left wing than Starmer, a little bit more progressive than Starmer, and in particular, people who expressed anxiety about his welfare cuts seem to have been frozen out.

15:57either fired, so losing Janet Darby, Catherine West for her Anderson, or overlooked, for example, Helen Hayes, Ruth Kratbury, and at least Dodds made a bit different because she resigned, who people might have hoped might have been promoted. And that possibly Justin Madder, Lucy Powell, who went out again as sort of seen more on the soft left side. So the story there that I was getting from an MP yesterday is that this is about tightening up the Whip operation, Morgan McSweeney saying we're going to have an almighty battle about welfare. I want to make sure that every minister is happy with us to push through with welfare cuts and anyone who's a bit wobbly.

16:35It's going to be pushed out or not promoted. Is that an overstatement? Yeah, probably not, no, but I think also it's not necessarily a recipe for bringing the PLP together. You know, you get away with a lot if you're number 10. If the PLP and the public think, well, we may not like them very much, but bloody hell, they're good at what they do. That's not the feeling they've got right now. The feeling is that nothing much seems to go the way that we'd really like it to. And I think this is leading to the debate that many in the Labour Party clearly want to have across this deputies' leisure relation about, you know, are we actually going in the right direction?

17:15What is the clarity of direction? So this I think is a very, very tricky moment. I think that if the combination of the Labour conference and the budget are fundamental now to whether the government can actually get back on track or whether we're on some terrible, inexorable march towards the UK becoming another kind of right -wing populist government country, which I think will be a disaster. Yes, absolutely. And that's of course one of the reasons why I keep thinking that it's actually in France's and the use and trust to work to sort out. Swalbates migration because I didn't think it's an EU centrist to have Nigel Farage as the Prime Minister of Britain.

17:52On the Labour Party, what it feels like to me in the worst case scenario is it's beginning to remind me a little bit of what I felt in the conservative party as the conservative party began to collapse. So of course what I saw from the early Cameron days is these figures who are now popping up in reform, so began with Tory MPs, a guy called Douglas Carzwell who defected. We just seen Nadine Doris, who was a cabinet minister on the Boris Johnson's now appeared as a reform on the stage. Adam Holloway, these were all people who in the early days of the Cameron government in through 2015 were sort of disgruntled rebels, who felt that the Prime Minister was bringing in too many bright young things who were sort of part of his Cameron coalition and they weren't respecting traditional conservatives.

18:38So it's a sort of Starmer's bringing bright young things and is ignoring the left -wing heritage of the Labour Party. And the result of that basically is now that reform has absorbed a huge number of those voters and a lot of those people. If you've seen Nadine Doris in the Reform Conference, she begins by saying thank goodness I'm here. At last I feel at ease, at last I'm in a room with people who I feel understand me, which she felt that she wasn't getting in the Conservative Party. I wonder whether that isn't one of the tensions here, which is that either with the deputy leader election might produce somebody more from the soft left as an anti -starm figure, or maybe in six months time or nine months time, Angela Rainer becomes the kind of leader of a sort of soft left opposition towards Starmor from the back benches, and that the direction of that is to split the party.

19:34Now it may not go as far as eventually then popping up on a state to a Jeremy Corbyn, because I think Corbin is not as nimble and operational as Farage, but is it some of the same tension or am I ever doing that? Yeah, I mean, I think that we had, you and I didn't go to the reform conference and my newspaper, The New World, was had all its credentials with draw at the last minute, so much for Free's Beach. But we did have one of our producers, our social media producers, Selene, who from the rest of this politics, yeah. And sent back some very kind of interesting insights. It was clearly very well organized as a sort of show and of course that's sort of what Farage is good at.

20:14We know that. But I think it was interesting reading some of the Vox Popps that she was doing. There was a very different collection of people who were going there. And I think what both the main parties are struggling with is that they're sort of losing their own sense of identity and that's sort of eating into what sort of people are prepared to back them. I think a lot of this is about the working class. So what we call the working class, traditional white working class people who do seem to be disproportionately amongst the groups that are moving towards reform. I think that's a consequence of them feeling that kind of, yeah, things are probably better under labor, but did my life really change fundamentally, and then there was terrible under the Tories, give it a go.

21:00Let's just blow the whole system up and give it a go. And I don't know if you had time to read it, Roy, but I sent you a report which I think relates to this, which is about it's written within the education department and it's been doing the rounds about the success or lack of, we should say, within the education system, of white working class pupils, who are substantially now behind Chinese pupils, black pupils, both in terms of their exam qualifications, qualifications and also getting to university and so forth. And this paper, it doesn't sort of pull its punches in terms of what it calls performative accountability, sort of sees the off -stead system as basically supporting those schools that are doing well already as opposed to actually looking across the piece.

21:46And also the feeling that white working class kids are genuinely being let down and let behind and that's what reform kind of trapping into. Let's take a second on this and maybe loop back to the reform conference after we've looked at this because you're completely right. They're at the heart of politics in Europe is this question of where working class votes go and what we've seen in France is that the traditional socialist party dipping down below 10 % in Germany, the SPD, again the traditional most successful left -wing party in Europe in a very, very weak position and Labour now hovering at about this, I don't know, 20 % level.

22:27And a lot of these votes in all these countries, in East Germany going to the AFD, in France, going to Le Pen and in Britain going to reform. Your paper is amazing. I think there's two different things. I think there's the description of the problem and then there's the solution that your friend proposes in the paper. So description of the problem, as you say, is that white working class kids on free school meals. are 23 months behind the average when they get to secondary school, whereas children from Chinese ethnicities are 27 months ahead. So 23 months behind against 27 months ahead. Again, people from ethnic Chinese parentage, 72 % of them go on to university, whereas only 33 % of poor white working class kids go on to university.

23:16And in terms of the key achievements, what used to be the A to C in maths and English. White working class kids only 18 .6 % of them are meeting the basic standards in maths and English compared to if you take a white children in general it's sort of up at 75, 76%. So that's the problem. In terms of solutions, look that's really difficult and I think one of the big questions is really understanding how success happened in London. I mean if you'd come back to when you were in office, people were very concerned about London in 2002, 2003, and now London actually is looking much better than coastal communities.

23:56So immigrant communities in London or across the board, including now Bangladesh, she's Somalis are massively outperforming white working kids in coastal communities. Although 20 years ago, we would have thought London had bigger problems because these people had English as a second language. They came from very poor backgrounds, the schools were not performing. That's been to a very significant extent turned around, whereas these coastal communities, white communities, much strongly. I think actually there are lessons to be learned from that because that happened as a result of a very direct targeted strategy on that as a specific problem, London schools.

24:28And I think the Education Department and the various ministers really pushed on that and that sounded conscious. And I think now we've got to do the same for white working class kids in some of these poor areas. And the point that the paper makes about the system and the off -stead regime being essentially not really telling a full picture, is this line that you have seen, we've got 90 % of schools now just to be good or outstanding, but only 45 % of children leaving school with a strong pass in English and maths. And of course the data on this is so important. I mean I've heard you quite often already, I know that the former Tory government used to say, well we've made this massive progress which you can see in the peaser results.

25:10And yet What this paper reveals is that actually England rose in the Pisa Lee tables, but the actual real scores judging the success on maths in English actually fell. Mathematics declined from 504, just 492 and reading fell from 505 to 496. I think that's a bit misleading though, just on that one. It's misleading both ways, isn't it? It's an interesting one, but it's an interesting because what he says is that we went up because we fell less than other countries, but the key point is the dates. This is the COVID dates. So every country in the world fell, and we fell slightly less than other countries.