462. Starmer Hits Rock Bottom: Will He Break His Manifesto to Survive?

27:11Number one, be willing to break their manifesto commitments, which they have to do. And number two, do it in a way that reassures more pro-market, pro-business people. Second thing, he talks about industrial strategy. And here again, I'd be interested in your view. He says, there must be flagship industrial strategies for each of the following four types of town. Each could be assigned an industry of the future, like software design or green power. Now, I agree with him on industrial policy, but it's completely the wrong way to do industrial policy. It shouldn't be some genius in Whitehall assigning, you know, you're now doing green power, you're now doing software.

27:48It's got to be about devolution. And that's what we found with the Andy Burnham interview that they're doing so well. It's what I felt in Cumbria, that actually the problem is that London doesn't instinctively understand how these economies work. And it's much more likely to get a good industrial strategy if you give the budget and the power down to the local area and let them drive it rather than some wise person say, here are four industries, you get this one. Yeah, I like to stuff about, you know, we need to develop a vision for the future of high streets. I actually do believe he's right to say that we need to continue to be progressive on clean energy and that is another big political fight engage in that big political fight stop being defensive but to be fair to Ed Miliband I don't think he is defensive about it and the other thing you said earlier about you've got to be careful not to alienate the centrists the market people the business community etc but I've been saying for so long now and this I think is what's borne out by what happened in Caerphilly, by the general sense of where Labour are right now, is that, yes, there is a real issue with immigration.

28:53We'll come on to talk about that. Yes, small boats drive people crazy. Yes, the asylum hotels drive people crazy. And you've got to fix those. But what you cannot do is allow your entire government to give the sense that that is what you're about, because they are losing way more support to the left of centre than they are to the right of centre. And that is what has helped Plaid win that by-election. And the thing is, if you're doing something, say big on tax, this budget is going to be so important. If it just feels like, as Chris Clarke says, that they're making a few small changes here and small changes there to fill this black hole, that is not a vision for the country.

29:35and what the country needs right now they've got the political fight in place and kirsten was set that at the party conference reform is now the main political enemy and that is the fight that goes on politically economically i think it's got to be related to that big bold really big stuff for the future i love this thing about you know the institutions like the big new labor institutions gb energy you know he put them all the the sort of you know there's some of these mental health hubs they can developing these things and then he said you know wrap around mental health care social care stuff that is going to cost money if you're going to do big tax raising stuff in a budget you've got to say and this is what we're going to do with it and it's got to it's got to really kind of fire people up well i'm i think it's so good that he's written this because he's in just the right territory and asking just the right questions if i had one more anxiety I think Labour's going to have to be realistic about its green policy.

30:34I think there may need to be a bit more pragmatism. I think that Ed Miliband may be leading them in a direction that's going too far, and they may need to get some compromises going there. Not give up on their belief in addressing climate, not give up on their push on renewable energy, but there's a lot of the way in which it's being done, which really risks alienating people and driving up costs of living. So I think they've got to look at that. But also, Rui, we are recording this with virtually every news bulletin around the world reporting breathlessly on this Hurricane Melissa that is about to take out part of Jamaica.

31:11What's happened, the progressives have lost their confidence in some of these big debates, and one of them is on climate, and I think we've got to win it. And what Chris Clark's basically saying on these four areas, on communication, he says, The Ming vase has got to be dropped because we've now got to go for a warts and all approach, leveling with voters. On the electoral strategy, it's got to be about a positive sense of what you stand for rather than just how bad the others are. On policy, he says putting down the vase means going beyond current choices. And on migration policy, again, I thought there was something very clever he said and sensible he said there.

31:53somebody who is angered about small boats and asylum hotels is not going to be impressed because you say that you're going to cut down on the number of family members coming with university professors the numbers game is making no difference net migration has fallen the debate has not changed you've got to fix the things that are problems but then don't ruin the future of the economy by saying and we're going to cut here and cut there and cut there yeah okay i mean you you You slightly provoke me there into something that's going to be a longer conversation, which is on the climate stuff. I think there is a problem here.

32:29And the problem is that the British voter knows that in the end, addressing global climate change is about global issues, that Britain on its own is a pretty small contributor. And if the cost of living goes up and the cost of our energy goes up very significantly for us chasing reducing our emissions when other people in the world isn't, that's going to be not just a political problem, It's going to be a very practical problem for people. And they're going to say, what the hell do you think you're doing? Right. We're going to be talking about Putin in the second half. And you also know that these are not just domestic issues, but they're international issues that have a domestic effect.

33:03Anyway, I think it's a, I'm glad you enjoyed that paper. I did as well. And I think we need more of that kind of thinking as well. The big thing that I love most, I really love the high street stuff, regenerate high street, really loved the focus on adult social care. But of course, to get it done, it's going to have to be cross party, not just a Labour issue. But the thing I liked most of all was his absolute insistence that Labour should be proud of remaining part of the ECHR and should not remotely be tempted to leave the European Convention on Human Rights. Now, Lucy Powell, new deputy leader of the Labour Party, very low turnout, fewer than one in five actually voted.

33:40I actually thought, if I'm being absolutely frank, I thought she was going to win by more because I think that just as the public has been wanting to give a bit of a kicking to the Labour leadership and the establishment, I thought the party was as well. Just on the turnout, by the way, you've got to understand the way the Labour party works. A lot of people get a vote through association membership of organisations who may not even know that they had a vote. And also, usually, a deputy leadership contest will take place alongside a leadership contest where the voting is likely to be higher. But again, I think it's just another sign that the government needs to understand you cannot take the left of you for granted.

34:20You've got to be just sort of, you know, you've got to be focused on governing well, campaigning well. But ultimately, I think what both of these things are saying, both the Kefili and the Lucy Powell thing, they're basically saying we want more emotional connection. We want more of a sense of what the national narrative, what the national story is. And I think that the Morgan McSweeney strategy for the election was very, very effective. It was all about, you know, where you're targeting the votes and so forth. That's not going to work second time around. You need this big, bold, positive agenda.

34:55And, you know, and I said, I thought Keir Starmer's party conference speech, he started to get the framing for it. But then, you know, I keep mentioning this thing about apprenticeships. I've still heard next to nothing about this was the big thing in the speech. This is the point about, you know, that's not a grid point. That's like, this is meant to be one of our big things announced in the leader's speech at the party conference. Why are we not hearing about it all the time? I think that was a great first half. We really got into some stuff there. I think we'll take a break and then we'll come back and I want to hear about Poland, where you've just been.

35:30So see you after the break. Great. See you then.

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38:49Welcome back to The Rest is Politics. I'm me, Alistair Campbell. And with me, Rory Stewart. Rory, we did a lot of references to things that we're going to put in the newsletter. So to those who don't get the newsletter, we should tell them you get it by going to therestispolitics.com. And that's where you also, if you're interested, can subscribe, be a member, and listen to things like the series that we're almost through. I think we're up to part four on the series of Rupert Murdoch. You can also get early access to the part two of our interview with Michael Gove that you referenced in the earlier discussion, which is a fascinating listener.

39:25But my friend Jim in the swimming pool said this morning, said, what a clever guy. What a tragic waste of talent. And then the final thing you can check out on the rest is politics dot com is the very, very small numbers now. and we're almost sold out at all the venues, I think, but there are a few tickets left for our tour going to Manchester, Glasgow, Bournemouth and London. Very briefly, Rory, before we get on to Poland, maybe just worth clocking the new president of Ireland, Catherine Connolly. And I think this speaks to what we're speaking in the first half. Independent, left-wing, got the backing of Sinn Féin, the Labour Party, the left-leaning parties, very kind of authentic form of communication, running around playing basketball with kids.

40:13Very, very, very outspoken on Gaza and what she calls the genocide in Gaza. Again, reasonably low turnout. It's a ceremonial position, but it's an important one because, you know, the Irish presidency can shape something. So, but I think it's part of that. But listen, should we talk about Poland? Yeah. On Saturday, we were interviewing Radek Sikorsky, the Polish deputy prime minister, foreign minister, and you were in Poland. And you were in Poland for a few days. I was. And let me sort of begin with the sort of big thing that sort of interests me about Poland. So if you go back to 1989, and you were trying to choose which countries in Central and Eastern Europe would start flirting with populism, you probably wouldn't have selected Poland, because Poland in many ways is the real big success story of the post-89 period.

41:03after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Poland actually sorted out its economy surprisingly quickly, currency stabilised, debt came down, growth took off. It went from being one of the poorest countries in Europe to rapidly on its path to becoming one of the wealthiest. And it did so with a pretty pro-Western Catholic population that was never very into communism or anything it represented. So I would have bet if I was just sort of looking at it, that it wouldn't be Poland it would be instead someone like Romania or someone like Bulgaria or Slovakia or even Croatia or Latvia that would have found themselves going down the populist route, instead of which it was the great European success story Poland that in 2015 embarked with the Law and Justice Party on 10 years of populism and has just brought a president back in despite the victory of Donald Tusk on the less popular side.

41:55Over to you. Yeah, of course, that definitely complicates politics. And, you know, when we were talking to Radek Sikorsky, we were asking about how difficult this is, the fact that Donald Trump invited their opponent for the presidential election, who eventually won, and fairly narrowly. So, you know, did Trump kind of push the votes over? I don't know. It's hard to tell. But it was a fascinating time to be there. I was speaking at the same conference as Sikorsky and a man who was getting bigger crowds of the pair of us put together, George Clooney, who was rather randomly there as well. But what was two really interesting things?

42:37The first is that simultaneously Donald Tusk was heading a party convention where they were changing the name of his party because their coalition had lost one member and they were bringing two new ones in. And he spoke in really stark terms about, he talked about politics being a fight between good and evil, quoted the Pope in those terms, referred to Brexit as an example of where, you know, he's saying the Russian bots were involved, Russian money was involved, it was the Russians who were celebrating. He said in an interview over the weekend that he referred to the suggestions, which I think are more than suggestions, that these attacks on Keir Starmer's house, the firebomb and attacks on his cars that he'd owned, and that this was the work of Russian intelligence.

43:27Now, I imagine that Donald Tusk either knows that or has been told that, probably by some of the same people that have mentioned that to me. And I think the British government, I don't know, but my sense is they maybe took a decision not to go too public on that. I'm not sure that was the right decision. I actually think the public need to know this sort of stuff's going on. And of course, there is a court case that I think has been ongoing involving some of the people involved. But Tusk basically said to have a situation where your prime minister is under what amounts to an attack, because that's where members of his family were living, from Russian intelligence, and to have your media basically cover this like it was a football match between Liverpool and Arsenal, you know, oh, well, they did this and they did that.

44:12And he says this and he says that. It was very, very strange. I think one of the problems we'll keep facing is, and it's particularly true in this new environment of fake news and crazy TikTok videos, is that the reason, of course, the media is cautious about covering it is it sounds like mad conspiracy theory. You know, what is Russian intelligence doing setting fire to Keir Starmer's house? So I guess part of the government's problem is how do you mount the evidence? I mean, I think the British press would go bananas. I mean, I think Tusk is wrong about this. If the British press didn't think this was sort of conspiracy theory, fake news, but that there was genuine evidence that the SVR, the Foreign Intelligence Service, had attacked Keir Starmer's own house, we would be hearing about nothing else.

44:55I think the problem is that we don't really know in this world of fake news whether this is true, how true it is, and what evidence to put forward. Well, I think there's also a sense, this goes back to what we talked about earlier, is that there's such a sort of media-driven mood of negativity about Keir Starwood that maybe they don't like things that might feel sympathetic towards him. But by the way, Rory, just last week, in a British court, five men were sentenced for an arson attack in Britain that authorities say was masterminded by Russian intelligence. So what we know, and this is what the Poles were saying, what Sikorsky was saying, what Tusk was saying, what everybody in Poland was saying to me, is that this disruption, sabotage, they were talking, for example, about they are prepared any moment for their transport systems and health systems to be brought down.

45:44And they can do the same to us. And also, Tusk was talking about these hypersonic missiles that can now land in Britain. I don't want to kind of overstate it, but they are shocked by how underpowered this debate is in the UK. Well, I suppose we're violently agreeing. But the point that I'm making is that one of the tricks of Russian intelligence is the deliberate use of hybrid, ambiguous, deniable attacks. What the SVR is very, very clearly doing, all the way back to the little green men who popped up in Crimea in 2014, and true of the way they do cyber attacks, which is to contract it to private companies to do it, is they want continually to leave everybody in an ambiguous world of guessing.

46:27So they're never obviously in a world in which you can fully say 100 % for sure this is an officer in the KGB who just set fire to the house. No, and also, I was talking to somebody in this world recently who said that, you know, they spend some of their time just sort of, you know, wandering around the lower end of our court system, you know, finding a few thugs or crooks who will do things for them, for which they'll get paid a bit of cash. And then they're utterly deniable. So the big point that we're making, and Sikorsky said this in the interview, is they are now planning on a strategy that this war in Ukraine is going to go on for at least another two or three years.

47:09And they think Putin can be worn down during that time, that his economy can be targeted, etc. But at the same time, I think one of their worries is that the rest of the West, as it were, America, the Western Europe, just lose interest and lose the will. So they, I think, are deliberately trying to fire us up to say, hey, guys, you need to take this more seriously than you are. I think they think the government is taking it seriously, but they're not convinced that our public opinion is. So I think it was those two things, the political changes that he's having to make to adapt to this sort of struggle.

47:45And it will be interesting to see how things play out because the prime minister has a lot of power. The president has a lot of power to kind of make life difficult for the president. for the prime minister. And that's kind of what I think we've got to watch there. And the other thing, Rory, you talked about the success. It was just really interesting to be in a country that maybe because they do feel this, it felt very, because I was only there a few days, but it felt like a country quite at ease with itself. It feels a lot more modern than it did. The transport is good. It's very, it was really clean.

48:18There was a sense of kind of energy about the place that I hadn't maybe expected. So, and when we said to Sikorsky, do you have any political trouble in telling people they're going to have to cut some things because you're putting 5 % of your GDP into defence? He said the trouble we would get is if we weren't doing that. There's still something though, which is a paradox, which is that we were all very relieved when the Law and Justice Party, which was a conspiratorial, fake news, populist party that was intimidating the universities, taking over the media, stacking the courts with political appointees, was finally defeated by Donald Tusk in the elections.

48:56And it seemed like a really good moment for a move against populism. But then as you've just pointed out, they're totally paralyzed now because actually the president in Poland is pretty powerful and the populists have now got that presidency still. So Tusk isn't really able to drive through these reforms. And part of this seems to be a very fundamental division between the west of the country and the east of the country, with the west of the country being more pro-West and more anti-populist in the east of the country, much more into these conspiracy theories, populism, authoritarianism, and a real sense for 50-50 balance.

49:29And there's something else that maybe a listener can help me understand. The west of the country, places like Pomerania, were, of course, before the Second World War, very much integrated into Germany. And in fact, the story at the end of the Second World War, is that effectively Russia helped itself to a lot of what used to be Eastern Poland, and Poland pushed further west. And in the process did this basically ethnic cleansing. Five million Germans were pushed out of Poland. Ukrainians were pushed out of Poland. Earlier, of course, the very large Jewish community in Poland had been murdered through the Holocaust, and then many people emigrated.

50:07So that many of the people living in Western Poland are relatively recent migrants who came from what are now Russian territories. And so it's a totally different... This base that Tusk and Sikorsky are relying on is a very interesting area of former multi-ethnic territories now dominated often by Poles whose grandparents weren't originally in those areas. And I'd be interested in whether this question of what happens when millions of people move and settle a new land, how that affects your politics, and whether it's just a coincidence that those are people who are voting anti-populist. Yeah. The other thing, because, you know, during the whole, the build up to Brexit, they're all Polish builders and all that.

50:46We had so many polls. I think we've still got about 800 ,000 polls in Britain, but a lot of polls have gone back. And several people, including Sikorsky, were very keen to make sure that I left the place knowing that Poland is on track to surpass the UK in terms of living standards. The other thing that's really interesting, You know, we got this a little bit talking to people in Denmark. We got it in Cyprus. We got it in other places. The extent to which countries inside the European Union really, really miss the UK. And Tusk did an interview in the Sunday Times where he said that he still likes and respects David Cameron.

51:25But he confirmed something that I've long suspected. Basically, it was a very kind of insightful, revealing interview. But he basically said that he thought Brexit was one of the biggest mistakes in our shared history. but he said that Cameron told him not to worry if it happens we'll win it because we'll have the economy on our side and in any event I probably won't get a majority I'll have to have another coalition with the Lib Dems and they'll block the referendum and he said he couldn't understand how something as historic could be kind of weighed up in that somewhat cavalier fashion but they were all saying god you know we do miss the UK it's becoming such a superpower isn't it Yeah.

52:06Small reference if we're doing stuff for the newsletter. Some great writing, obviously, in Britain about Poland. Norman Davis, Adam Zamoyski, and my great favourite, Mark Mazova's Dark Continent, which is the history of Europe in the 20th century. But you're right, it's Poland we're looking to. Poland is the new Europe. Poland, of course, huge population, well over 30 million people, nearly 40. America's closest allies through all these administrations, massive defence spending, and a very different vision of Europe. And the question is, can Poland fill the gap, which sadly seems to exist because of the fractures and fragilities in France, where he doesn't seem to be able to muster a prime minister who stays in for more than a few weeks, Germany, which seems to be very fractured electorally, can Poland step up and provide the engine of Europe?

52:55Well, they're stepping up. They're definitely stepping up on the defence front. I mean, I've got a briefing on some of the stuff that's going on close to the borders. I mean, And they're putting a lot of money into it, putting big infrastructure into it. And they're saying they have to because they feel this. And the drones, one of them said to me, the drones is just kind of tip of the iceberg. That's just them testing and playing. And I think their plea, I suspect this is why Donald Tusk, who doesn't do much foreign media, I suspect this is why he did that interview in the Sunday Times, is he wanted British policymakers to see that they feel that, yes, the UK has been very, very, both under the Tories now and the Labour, very, very supportive in relation to Ukraine.

53:35But is the British population, is the population in the west of Europe really across just how dangerous this situation is for Europe? And my final thought, I guess, which relates to that is that in Britain, we find it very difficult to imagine what it's like to be conscious of your history. And of course, Poland, very, very aware of the fact that there have been very large periods of its history where it has been under domination from other countries. I mean, literally didn't exist as a state from 1874 to 1918, 1979 to 45, and actually at the end of the 18th century as well. So it's not a sort of theoretical thing for them.

54:11It's not sort of beyond the realm of imagining that a state like Russia would want to help themselves to it because of course they've done it before. Srikorsky said that, you know, we have 500 years of history that tells us when the Russians threaten you you listen so there we go anyway there we go he'll be out with that um after part two of michael gove that'll be the next interview on leading so we'll see you tomorrow for q a rory we're going to talk about america and as trump is off on one of his international tours we're actually going to focus on some of the pretty crazy stuff happening more domestically uh we're going to talk about mille's win in argentina we're going to talk about a bit about mental health and we're going to review your book, Rory.

54:50Which is called? It's called, oh my God, Middleland.

54:58Middleland, there we are. Looking forward to it very much. Maybe that'll bring a bit of the positive news that our listeners are always looking for and try to make a more positive book this time. See you then. Bye-bye.