534. Is Wes Streeting Trying to Sabotage Andy Burnham?

21:53Rory Stewart:You no longer need to get 45 % of the vote to win a majority. Keir Starmer's just proved that actually you could probably be the largest party with 28, 29 % of the vote in the five-party system. And there is a huge vote bank of progressive, educated, more diverse, younger, pro-EU Remain voters. West Streeting was smart, allowed the conservatives in reform to duke it out, chasing the traditional reform voter. He has a huge space where he can get moderate conservatives, Lib Dems, Greens, and excite a loss of the progressive Labour base. And I think he could lead Labour in, he could be the biggest party, he could make a good coalition, he could get us back European Union.

22:38There you go. God almighty, you're becoming a Labour Party spin doctor. You did the case for Burnham last week, you did the case for West Street, and we'll get you on Al Carnes soon. I've got to say, I'll show you this little graphic, which the main Rory in my life dug up from somewhere. It's a graphic, 10 years of elections in Wigan. And this is relevant because Makerfield is Wigan, where it's in the Wigan area. Correct. Yeah, the borough of Wigan. And what you'll see, Labour has been the biggest in all them. But the dark red is the three mayoral elections. So what that says is Andy Burnham pretty substantially outperforming the Labour Party at the time.

23:16Rory Stewart:By a huge amount every time. By a big amount. Yeah, so a lot is depending on that. And there's been a lot of reporting from Akerfield saying whatever the national figures are, he's genuinely popular. Many of them are using buses that they credit him with providing as mayor of Manchester. Again, we talk a lot about reform voter. One of the things that comes across is that it's easy to talk about a reform voter or a white working class older voter, but it's a very different story if you're talking about those voters in Nigel Farage's seat, these east of England coastal constituencies, and what was happening in places like Norfolk where they were taking a lot of Tory votes away.

23:57Rory Stewart:That's very different from the story up in the North. Even in the North, I think there are two different stories, aren't there? There's the difference between maybe a community like Easington Colliery, which is in a very, very extreme type of deprivation and economic challenge, and somewhere like Makefield, which is actually on the edge of rising prosperous areas like Manchester, where in fact, if you look at the data around unemployment benefits, it's not as deprived as some of the other areas of the country. Just to dig into the population to make it feel it would be 105 ,000 people. 96 % were born in the UK.

24:38Rory Stewart:Yeah, compared to about 85 % of the national picture. Yeah, correct. But it's often in communities which don't necessarily have huge immigrant population that feel most strongly about immigration as an issue. and one thing for sure it's already started because west treating has put brexit and possible re-entry into the european union center stage in the labor leadership debate andy burnham when he was asked i think it was i don't think he knew that west treating had done this when he was asked by dan hewitt in the interview on itv he said i he was played back his words i hope in my lifetime to get back in the european union and his response to that was i'm not advocating that in this by election.

25:22In other words, he knows that reform will really go for that. Now, I actually think if the Labour Party had not, since 2016, essentially conceded so much ground in this debate, that actually that wouldn't be a bad place to be. Because the one thing, one of Farage's, we've interviewed Rahm Emanuel on leading this week, the American possible contender for the Democratic nomination. And he said, we asked him about him and the three presidents he worked for, and he said, you know, everybody's strength is often their weakness and vice versa. I am convinced that if the Labour Party had, over the last few years, attacked Farage over his role in making every single person in this country weaker and poorer because of Brexit, we wouldn't be in the state that we're in now.

26:08But for Andy Burnham, that is a big risk to do at this time in this biolation. So we're back to the point about the clash of those. And we're back to the point

26:15Rory Stewart:that all these parties, Labour and Conservative and Reform, are all fishing in the same pool. They're all trying to get the same pro-Brexit, working class, older white vote. And it's partly because of the electoral mathematics. I guess if you were brutal, for Labour, where they have huge majorities in summer like London or central Manchester, there's not much point in them adding a couple of votes there because of our first-past-the-post system. But it's very weird. it means that the whole of British politics is being distorted towards perhaps 20 % of the population who are not very representative of the population as a whole, who are more conservative, more anti-immigration, more anti-EU.

26:56Rory Stewart:But the problem is that is exactly the battlefield that Burnham's chosen to fight by election. Yeah. Andy Burnham has achieved something today, which is a very rare thing. He's managed to get the Daily Star to lead on the Labour leadership election with Burnham calls to scrap VAR. What do you think of that, Rory? Well, there we are. There we are. Listen, listen, and this is the controversial video football thing, right? The video football thing is exactly what it is. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Would you support getting rid of VAR? I think I probably would. Is that because you're just a massive populist and that's just the thing to say if you want to Shall I tell you another fact?

27:36If Andy Burnham does win - Yeah.

27:38Rory Stewart:Are you just saying that to flatter the listeners, the VAR thing? Do you really believe? No, I do. You know the only time that the Daily Star - What would David Dean say if he was listening to you? The only time that the Daily Star led on politics during the 2001 election campaign was Brittany Bax Blair. So get in the Daily Star. They did the lettuce though, didn't they? But let me give you another football fact, Roy. This will absolutely get the geeks. If Andy Burnham does become leader of the party and prime minister, it means that two of the G7 leaders will support the same football team. First time in history.

28:12No. And who will they both support? Mark Carney and Andy Burnham are both huge Everton fans. No. There we are. Well, that's a big news, isn't it? So David Moyes could be Chancellor of the Exchequer in no time at all.

28:22Rory Stewart:That's amazing. Well, look, this is terrific news. Listen, let's just finish up and then we'll go into a break. So to wrap it up again, at the moment, smart money is on Keir Starman not being prime minister by the end of the year. And probably if Andy Burnham manages to leverage his popularity as mayor of Manchester and not be torpedoed, he wins the by-election and he's probably odds-on, I guess, in the betting to be prime minister. But there's a lot of buts there. And we have this very different, I think, rather interesting candidate in Wes Streeting, who's pretty unpopular at the because he's wielded the knife and he's seen as a bit of a snake in the grass.

28:56Rory Stewart:But I'm really liking the shape of his policies. I think it's bold. I think it's radical. And thank goodness there's somebody in this era of nationalism and parochialism who's making the big structural arguments that we need for rejoining the European Union. I had a few exchanges yesterday with Gary Stevenson, sitting doing a bit of reading and researching. He's got a bit cross with me on YouTube recently. Did he? Well, he got a bit cross with both of us on this latest one, because I've got several people sending me messages saying have you seen gary stevenson's thing he's had a bit of a go at you and rory yeah and actually it wasn't that much ago he basically just said we were sort of centrists but also what he was saying he he did make some really i thought really interesting observations there weren't he wasn't specifically talking about the issue of the by-election he was talking about the rise of the far right and how to beat them and his big thing and this is something which i think andy burnham was trying to do in his interview talking about affordability just as Mamdani won on affordability in New York.

29:52He was basically saying that the reason why mainstream parties like Labour and the Tories keep losing and getting hammered is because the big, big, big thing for people is falling standards of living related to inequality. So there are loads of rich, very rich people, but there's so much more poverty. But the other point he made, and this is where he sort of, he basically thinks that you and I talk to people like us. Now, I've not seen the analysis of how many actually reform leaning people listen to us. But where I think he's got a point, and this is what Andy Burnham is definitely trying to do, this is why Andy Burnham was not, he was asked directly, do you understand why people vote reform?

30:31And he said 100%. Whereas, you know, I might be tempted to say, yeah, because they're manipulated and tried to lie and blah, blah, blah.

30:38Rory Stewart:Can I challenge for a second though? It's absolutely true, I think, if you look at all the data, that a lot of people who are furious with Labour and Conservative and attempted to vote reform are motivated by the fact that cost of living is going up, wages have been stagnant since 2008, housing is difficult to afford, services are creaking. What they really are looking for is a government that's going to be pro-business, cut their taxes, cut welfare spending, get the economy going. The voters sound as though they believe that there are market solutions to this, not that they want Gary Stevenson to come in and redistribute and steal the money from the rich and give it to the poor.

31:11No, I guess he would say that in terms of the politics of this that one of the reasons why zach polanski has made such an impact is because he has

31:18Rory Stewart:been pretty clear about wealth tax and so forth but that that's not i think it'd be interesting i mean yeah how much of the vote that is and i mean we get onto that that's a totally different vote market isn't it there's a young green party voters another couple of points he made i don't know there's very few of them in makerfield and also the other thing i mean you've got this debate going on in making the greens are going to stand the candidate whereas caroline lucas yeah former leader of the Greens, she was actually advocating for the Greens not to stand, assuming that those who might be tempted to vote Green would actually vote for Burnham and stop the far right.

31:47But the other, just a couple of other points that Gary Stevens made, that's what were worth thinking about. The first was he had this line where he said, we've got to stop the beef between the left and the centre. And I, yeah.

31:58Rory Stewart:Well, he said he's got to stop the beef. Yeah, I know. We. No, but I tell you what, I actually reminded me of how we did actually tried to sort of build new labor, which was, yes, we're appealing to the center, but we don't want to lose. We don't want to lose people that sort of - You don't want to rub the left's face. Correct. So, and I think this is something that, and he actually said the center needs the left and the left needs the center. And that is true. And I think that, and then the final point, he made nine pretty big points. The other one where he absolutely is right. He was an hour long.

32:27Well, I did watch. He was interesting. It was interesting. He mentioned us about four times, none of them very flattering, but let's just park that. It doesn't matter. But the other thing he said, and he's absolutely right about this.

32:36Rory Stewart:Incidentally, he wrote a very good book. He wrote a very, very good book. He did write a good book. You had your name on the cover. Yeah, it's a good book. And you even read it. Yeah, he wrote a good book. Names on covers is always the case. He's a very good writer. He is a good writer. Rory trying to get back in with Gary Stevenson. But the other point he made was that this isn't just in the UK, but around the world. And this is true. And I saw this in Germany, which we'll talk about after the break. The right wing parties, these populist right wing parties are so much better. at social media.

33:05And I've been watching, looking at Andy Burnham's stuff, and it's fine. It's fine, but it's on a different level. What the right do is on a different level. And the other thing he talked about was funding. He was making the point that when these sort of upstart, right-wing influence start up, they suddenly get money getting given big donations to build them up. And then suddenly they end up on Joe Rogan because there's this international network. And so I thought there was a lot in there that the Labour Party needs to get its head around, because the truth is, on social media, both of the two main parties, Labour and the Tories, they're still, to my mind, pretty lame.

33:40You know, I'm lame because it's not my thing, right? I'd like to think the podcast is better, thanks to the team that we have doing it. But that is, so the point he was making to me, he actually said, he said, you, me, you're like a general sitting above and you sort of think you're ordering troops, but out there, the troops are all fighting in a different way they're not reading they're not listening to the bbc they're not listening to newspapers they're sharing anger making videos about muslims and they're all that's why rich people and rich people exactly so i do think that we've and my argument to him is i don't want to i don't want to get into the same means of fighting for the lying and the disinformation all the other stuff and bear in mind faraj is going to chuck so much money at this violation and they've got a lot of money to chuck but i just thought you should watch his uh yeah he did it yesterday but came out yesterday

34:29Rory Stewart:it was interesting good okay we'll do let's take a quick break and then back for more chronic migraine is 15 or more headache days a month each lasting four hours or more botox on a botulinum toxin a prevents headaches in adults with chronic migraine before they start it's not for those with 14 or fewer headache days a month it prevents on average eight to nine headache days a month versus six to seven for placebo prescription botox is injected by your doctor. Effects of Botox may spread hours to weeks after injection, causing serious symptoms. Allerge your doctor right away as difficulty swallowing, speaking, breathing, eye problems, or muscle weakness can be signs of a life-threatening condition.

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36:07Rory Stewart:Welcome back to The Rest of This Politics. I'm me, Rory Stewart. And me, Alistair Campbell. Now, Alistair, I would love to hear what you picked up in Germany. You've been in Germany for the last week or so. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, go on. So German politics, really interesting. How's Mertz doing? How's the greatest economy in Europe doing? How's the FD doing? Are we going to be able to have the middle powers led by Germany recreating the global order? How's Germany-Trump relations going? Germany. If people can remember those questions in order, badly, badly, too well, and I don't think so. Okay. So, Mertz is doing very badly.

36:43His ratings are now just absolutely tanking. We went up to the very, very north. In fact, it was rather starting to arrive at the hotel in this gigantic portrait of Angela Merkel, right up on the Baltic coast. In former East Germany. Former East Germany in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern is the land of the state. Am I right? This is like AFD territory? Well, interestingly, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and below us Saxony-Anhalt. These two states, the reason why I was particularly interested to go into this area, they are the two states that have elections in September. As things stand, the AFD are going to do well.

37:25Okay. How does it look? Well, so if you start in Saxony and Halt, the current minister president, which is their kind of prime minister, is called Sven Schulze. And he only took over in January because his predecessor was in real political difficulty. So he stepped down to improve in their prospects. In the result, in the last election was 2021, the Christian Democrats, the Nazi's party, got 37.1%. The AfD got 20.8%, which was down from their previous vote. And then the Linker got 11 and the Social Democrats got 8. So the Social Democrats are not very big there. Latest poll last week, AFD 41.4, CDU 24.9, Linker 12, SPD 6.

38:09So that's Sachsen-Hanelton.

38:11Rory Stewart:Okay, just to explain again to people, remind people, AFD, strong links to fascism, real question about whether the German Constitutional Court should actually be certainly launching investigations into some of the AFD leadership. If they win this lander, if they win the state, they actually will end up with a president there who is in charge of the police, who's in charge of a lot of local operators. Very, very disturbing if you end up with them actually having proper executive power. And this guy is called Ulrich Siegmund, and this is the AFT candidate. His manifesto was as out there as it gets and big on what they call remigration.

38:53Rory Stewart:Right. And remigration, again, to remind people, this is an idea that's beginning to get into British politics. And the idea is that effectively, lots of people who live in your country are booted out. So reform is talking about millions of people. So not just people who are asylum seekers, but people who lack indefinite leave to remain. But some of the AFD adjacent figures are talking even about German citizens with German citizenship being removed from the country, and largely Muslims. And just to give you a flavour of the rhetoric, this is what he said at the launch, let's take back our country.

39:27In other words, it relates to take back control, make America great again, etc. Big clampdown on immigration, as you say, huge support for large families. And a family means a man and a woman and lots of children. Pushing back on all sides of that. The stuff that really worried me, there's one of the slogans that they run is we have to stop recognizing Ukrainians as war refugees. They are broadly pro-Russian. It was interesting how I watched a documentary while I was there about why they were doing so well in this area. Quite a lot of people, elderly people in particular, saying, you know, why are we giving all this money to Ukraine when we've got so many of our problems here?

40:07Rory Stewart:So to what extent is this similar to reform voters? And to what extent it's different? Similarity, I guess, they both are very, very focused on the question of immigration and control of immigration. Different is that this isn't connected, as it would be in Britain, with Brexit, instead of which it's connected with the strange relationship between East Germany and West Germany. And is there a sort of different feeling to this area of Germany to what you'd expect to see in a classic reform voting part of Britain? Does it feel different? It does. Yeah. I mean, we were driving around and the place, I said to Fiona at one point that we were going through all these kind of quite small towns and villages.

40:50they all feel very clean whereas a lot of the you know this the left behind communicators in britain you always feel very yeah you know i didn't see the whole shuttered up shops phenomenon

41:01Rory Stewart:you have here so you wouldn't necessarily have complaints that public services are collapsing high streets are shutting no not in the same way not in the same way and the other thing i've got to say particularly in mecklenburg for pomeran apart from one waiter in one restaurant we didn't see a single non-white face. And yet this is the place where, so at the last election in Mecklenburg for Pomeran, this is Merkel's constituency, populations smaller than Saxony and out is about 1.6 million or something. The last election, the governing coalition in 2021 before the election was Social Democrat CDU.

41:38After this election, after the 2020 election, the Social Democrats got 40 % and they went into coalition with Dilinka, the left party. You look now and the AFD, which got roughly 17%, I think, last time, they've more than doubled it.

41:57Rory Stewart:So they're now ahead. So one of the themes that we're seeing, and maybe this is a good transition to Hungary, is party loyalties collapsing all the way across Europe. So France, Germany, increasingly Britain, the fact that your parents, grandparents voted for a particular party doesn't seem to make any difference. Between one election and another, vote shares can double, millions more people vote. The other thing though that you're picking up, particularly in Saxony-Anhalt, is the sense it's a very, very strong right-wing vote. That's an interesting thing as we move to Hungary, because there too, the left is getting very, very little vote, even if there's a split between the far right and the right.

42:35Yeah. Then of course, the other thing this gives rise to, so let's just say for example, this guy Seekman in Saxony-Anhalt, let's just say he does get over 40%. The angst that is running through the main parties at the moment is whether they can keep to this thing about the so-called Brandtmauer, the firewall. So none of the other parties will go into government with them.

42:55Rory Stewart:And to be fair, Merz is holding that line, but there will be people in his party, which is the equivalent of Kami Bain-Knot's conservatives, who will be thinking, no, no, no, no, we need to go into coalition with them. Not least because, for example, in Thuringia, another of the German lender, the CDU are in coalition with the Bundness-Zahra-Wagenknecht. Which is the far left. Breakaway far left. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's like, I mean, I suppose it's like, yeah, it'd be like Kemi Badenot going into her party, going into coalition with Jeremy Corbyn. Yeah, yeah, yeah. In your party. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

43:28The new Jeremy Corbyn. The new Jeremy Corbyn away from the Labour Party, to the left of the Labour Party. So that's sort of getting up there. So it was, look, on the one hand, We were swimming in beautiful water. We were seeing lots of nice, happy-looking German people having lots of interesting conversations. But the politics are, I would argue, in a really bad state. And Mertz, he's starting to look really kind of troubled by it. He's got this thing of answering questions very directly, which you and I both support, but you do have to be a bit careful. So basically, he's just about got over the row with Trump about saying, you know, you completely screwed up in Iran.

44:03He was asked whether he would advise his children to go to America. And he said, no, not at the moment. Not with everything that's going on there. So that sort of made big headlines in America. Final thing before we go into Hungary.

44:16Rory Stewart:One of the things that's so troubling about your German story is that often, if you were Gary Stevenson or someone, you would say the reason why people are voting for the far right is cost of living, austerity, creaking services, rubbish, NHS, roads not working, councils not working, everything being ground down. But Germany is a lot better than Britain on a lot of those syndicates. Not perfect. I mean, Germans listening to this will grumble, but it would take a hell of an effort for any Labour government to get the standard of public services, street cleaning, local services up to German levels.

44:50Rory Stewart:And even when you get up to German levels, 40 % of people are voting for the AFD. Yeah. One of the things I argued with Gary Stephenson about yesterday, because he was saying that the right-wing parties are the only ones who are giving people a clear answer to how they're dealing with living standards. And I said to him, hold on a minute. What is that? Well, he said, you, people like you and me, you think opposition parties have to come up with thought-through policies. They don't. They just want people to think, because this law hasn't dealt with immigration, the economy's screwed. So he's basically saying, it's not that they've got policy, but they've got an argument, which in this new media landscape is proving to be very, very powerful.

45:31But I'm going to, with the benefit of having now been back a few days, I'm going to write a piece for our newsletter about the German situation, because it is fascinating. If you want to sign up to that, go to the episode link in the description below.

45:44Rory Stewart:And the newsletter actually is definitely, if you haven't signed up, definitely worth signing up for. Getting a lot of high quality journalism out of Alistair, but we're also actually getting some amazing commissioned pieces by independent journalists. It's becoming quite an interesting magazine. And Izzy, our newsletter staffer, I think we call her, is churning it out. Excellent stuff. Yeah, that's a great, great, great thing. Final thing, Hungry. I just think it's interesting. I mean, I saw I sent you a couple of videos. There's Orban in power for forever. And one of the issues that led to him being brought down was the issue of corruption and cronyism and oligarchism.

46:18and Magyar who's taken over he's putting out these fascinating social media posts where he's basically just taking people including the media with him on a tour of the government infrastructure that Orban built so for example going around offices which with these incredibly valuable paintings which ought to be in the National Gallery that are suddenly pitched up in Orbán's residence or his office, taking them to showing them Orbán's house and saying, how, you know, I know what the salary is because that's the salary I'm on now. How's he got all this? He's also said that Orbán changed the arrangement so that when he, if and when he lost office, he would get a very big payoff.

47:02And Magyar has said, no, you're not getting that. I'm going to give it to Ukraine. So he's sort of, now you could say, well, that's a pretty populist move as well. But I think what he's doing is signalling as hard as he can, particularly to the European Union, I am very, very different. The European flag was flying from the parliament the other day because they need the money that Orbán's moves when it was locked up.

47:23Rory Stewart:And I guess that the signal for West Streeting or Andy Burnham might be that. Put the European flag on the building and go after reform on corruption. Go after them on funding, corruption, expense. That's the thing you have to keep pounding. Without sounding too much like Gary Stevenson, I would say that the key argument to make here is these are people who present themselves as speaking for the real people against the corrupt, out of touch, plutocratic elite. And boy, the whole thing is crazy, rolling and millions and millions of pounds coming in from crypto donors from Thailand, whole series of people who've made their money in business steals around the world in ways that are pretty difficult to track.

48:07Rory Stewart:I mean, take a camera around and film some of Nigel Farage's five houses. Yeah.

48:16No, because this five million thing, we still haven't got to the bottom of it. He's changing his story every five minutes. By the way, Rory, I think I'm right. We've got through a whole episode without mentioning the word T. dot P.

48:27Rory Stewart:Yeah, well, we haven't. Don't try, but there might be a bit of a clue on how you might go after him too, because I'm not mentioning the ballroom. On which, let's finish for the day. Do come back, listen tomorrow to Question Time, where we've got some great questions which will allow us to do a deep dive on US-China, on Russia, on Ebola, international aid, and the far right. A lot of things to cover tomorrow. See you soon.