Mr Hope and Mr Sensible step into the danger zone

0:00This week on the Times Tech Podcast, Bill Gates. This is ultra different than any technology that's come before. How do you persuade the tech companies that are developing it to sort of pursue good over profit? It's not the role of the industry to self-regulate or understand the whole of society impact. This is a technology that tends to concentrate power. The rest of the world is not used to having a vacuum of U.S. leadership. Listen to that special episode with Bill Gates on the Times Tech Podcast.

1:00podcast marketplace. Choose the right shows, the right audiences, the right format. Then watch the data tell you it worked. You're not buying impressions. You're buying influence. Learn more by visiting acast.com slash advertise.

1:17We are being trust, as one senior labor figure said to me, in slow motion. Boring costs went like that under Liz Trust. What we've seen recently is it's been going up and up and up and up. The Treasury are saying all of these things. These lights are flashing red, you need to cut here, you need to cut there. Welcome to The State of It, the political podcast from The Times and The Sunday Times. I'm Stephen Swinford, the political editor of The Times. I'm Lara Spirit, the deputy political editor of The Sunday Times. I'm Patrick Maguire, chief political commentator for The Times. I'm Ben Riley-Smith, the political editor of The Sunday Times.

1:49And look, we've got an action-packed, scoop-packed episode for you this week. We're going to be talking about the economy and why things are suddenly much worse than the government thought they were going to be. We're going to be talking about reform's mega donation and what that was like, particularly for you guys at the Sunday Times to report on £72 million, Labour doing everything in its power this week to stop that. And we're also going to throw ahead a little bit to conference, which is just coming down the line for Labour and then the Tories afterwards. But look, let's talk about the economy.

2:17Why are we talking about the economy? OK, we are in what I'm going to describe as the danger zone. So every Chancellor gets this period And it is the period where the official forecaster, which is called the Office for Budget Responsibility, looks at the state of the economy. And it takes a 10-day window. And this is really nerve-wracking, this period. I've talked to Jeremy Hunt about it in the past. And he says, you go to bed, look at your Bloomberg table. You get up, you look at your Bloomberg data, see where things are. And the reason why that is significant and is such a problem for the Treasury is it's really not good out there at the moment.

2:51The cost of government borrowing is really, really high. And that means that the money that the government has to spend in this budget, its headroom, its cushion against future events, is just being gobbled up. It's being gobbled up by the higher cost of government borrowing. And all of that means that a budget they wanted to be really simple and really straightforward looks like it's going to have to have some pretty significant tax rises or spending cuts. And knowing how hard Labour finds it to cut spending, it's probably more likely the tax rises to come. Yeah, this is the conversation I'd say I'm having most often with people.

3:26It's the sort of message I get several times a week, either from people in government, people who've been through government, been chewed up and spat out by government and look at it with a jaundiced eye, or people in business. all of them say intermittently look at the 10-year guilt i.e. how much a government bond how much interest a government bond is paying we are being trust as one senior labor figure said to me in slow motion the bond yield went like that borrowing costs went like that under Liz trust what we've seen recently is it's been going up and up and up and up not just in the UK but the UK is getting it probably worse than any comparable economy up and up and up and as you say Steve It's showing no signs of abating.

4:08You're seeing the situation in the Middle East, not just in Iran, but in the Red Sea getting worse and worse. So if you're sat in the Treasury now, and the striking thing is John Healy has spent the last month or so sounding an awful lot like Rachel Reeves trying to say to the markets, listen, you know, don't necessarily listen to what Andy's saying. Listen to me. I'm Mr. Sensible. What changes to tax he has briefed out have been all about let's try and stimulate growth in the economy by loosening the tax obligations on small business. But despite that, we are in, as you say, that nightmare scenario.

4:40And I don't necessarily think, you know, I was with Labour MPs on the terrace last night and one of them said to me, for the first time in living memory, I'd say 90 % of us are happy. It's not entirely clear that the Labour Party at large has woken up to this really, really grim economic and fiscal reality they're going to be dealing with. And we've had different messaging from number 10 and number 11 on this. Andy, Mr. Hope and John Healy playing a very different role. Yeah, well, the kind of worsening financial position is putting strain on this rift. In retro composition that we're already seeing pretty publicly.

5:15So Andy Burnham came in, Mr. What was their conference? The greatest change. Hope again. Hope again. The greatest change in 40 years. End of neoliberalism. Yeah, kind of I will be this force of radicalism to spread the proceeds of growth across the country much better. essentially thumbs up, it's all going to be good and I'm going to spend some money and everything's going to be great. John Healy, his chancellor, is giving a very different message. He gave a speech last week where it was all about, look, we need to be, you know, where growth has come from, but also we need to be careful about the current financial situation.

5:47And whenever you talk to anybody in the Treasury, they are saying, look, John Healy is talking about the need for a buffer from events. And you can translate that as we need to maintain this fiscal headroom. That's the question. That is the key question. What do you do with the headroom? Well, if you explain to people what it is, so headroom is the billion pounds in a given year that they have to hit their fiscal rules. So controlling, keeping down debt. It's like your rainy day fund, isn't it? Yeah, and Rachel Rees have left 10 billion in her first budget and then that got wiped out. She restored it to 10 billion.

6:21Then that got wiped out because markets are moving, economic forecast change, financial situation changes. And then Xi went much higher to$24 billion because they determined this endless chopping and changing fed all this speculation about what taxes would increase. The question that the Chancellor has is, does he want to keep that$24 billion? So the kind of changes in forecasts that you're talking about, as a rule of thumb, economists are saying it's halved to 12. There's even reports that it's down to the middle single figures now. It's between 5 and 10. So what that means in reality is you need to find 15, 20 billion pounds if you want to get back up to that fiscal headroom point.

7:00So one big question is whether the Chancellor really wants to restore and maintain that whole fiscal headroom map. What are you picking up, Laura? Well, I think Patrick's point about Labour MPs perhaps not fully having woken up to this is really interesting because I just don't think that it's the thing that they mention more than anything else at the moment. I do think that they're keenly aware of the fact that defence spending is a challenge that they have. I think I was very surprised by last week watching Kemi Badenock obviously go on defence spending at Prime Minister's questions and hearing Andy Burnham make that comment, which he did, about not wanting to cut social benefits in order to spend defence spending, which the Tories took as a massive gift, thought it was a massive gaffe by Labour that it was spoken unintentionally.

7:42Actually, I think Labour MPs felt that it was quite a helpful reassertion of an ideological fault line, which was essentially what quite a lot of Labour MPs think about this defence spending question, which is quietly and privately, they don't want to see benefits for vulnerable people cut in order to fund defence spending. Even if they pay lip service to the idea that actually they understand we're in a less secure world and they do want to see defence spending rise, I do think that that is a very difficult decision that obviously they have to make. And I'm not totally sure that Labour MPs have fully grasped how difficult that is.

8:10And now that we're in that window, they probably will now. And it, I think, will be interesting to watch how Burnham responds to this over the next few weeks. Because like you say, there has been something of a divergence between Andy Burnham and John Healy's pronouncements on this point. Andy Burnham, a much more kind of positive, optimistic political character. These coming headwinds are not going to suit his mood. I mean, they're not going to suit his kind of posture over summer, which was a return of vibes and a kind of sunnier outlook on British politics. And just in blunt terms, they're going to force him to make lots of invidious decisions.

8:42This question of the rift, as you put it, Ben, or the gap, or the question of who is actually in charge of economic policy, I think is a really big one. And I think it's going to come out in the wash of this budget process. I remember when I was with Andy Burnham about three, four weeks ago on a train back from Wolverhampton, and we were chatting. And he said to me, look, there's one thing I really want to get across to you today. It's that number 10 North, read number 10, get rid of the North stuff, is in charge of growth policy. You know, Harold Wilson tried to split the Treasury. I'm paraphrasing, but only lightly.

9:13Harold Wilson tried to do this, but I'm going to make it work, right? And then the front page of the Times next day was number 10 North takes over growth policy. And the reaction of some people in government, and clearly I was subsequently told number 10 was like, hang on, why has he said that? Does he actually really mean it? And we are about to see whether Andy Burnham's desire to lead on economic policy, particularly that big macroeconomic policy, can survive a budget process where the Treasury are saying all of these things. The OBR are saying all these things we've been talking about, like these lights are flashing red.

9:42You need to cut here. You need to cut there. And the other question is, there's another very important minister with lots of thoughts on the economy, lots of thoughts on how to not change the fiscal rules, but how to exploit flexibility in the fiscal rules as it currently exists. And we've heard that phrase a lot. Louise Hay, First Secretary of State in the Cabinet Office, knows lots of serious economic thinkers, has lots of ideas on this. We're about to see all those ideas stress tests, because when you talk about additional borrowing capacity, When you say, you know, I had this conversation with someone last week, they say, oh, they want to, you know, talking about different borrowing instruments, all the ideas that have been kicked around, like, okay, what if regional investment banks borrow or something like that?

10:18And if you speak to people in the city about that, they'll say, borrowing is borrowing, right? You know, if they actually think this is the plan, they're about to get a rude awakening from their lenders. So this really interesting three-corner relationship, you've got Andy Burnham with a very clear political vision and a political narrative. You've got Louise Haig, who's been thinking laterally and creatively and seriously about these things for a long time. And you've also got John Healy, who, if you speak to some of his cabinet colleagues, you get a sort of quite dismissive, he's already been swallowed by the Treasury.

10:49He's reverted to what he was in the early noughties, which is a junior Treasury minister, you know, singing from the same songbook as officials. we will see but it will tell us a lot about the political character of this government and I think you're right Laura how much latitude it has to do anything within the envelope of this manifesto although the fiscal situation and the market situation is so dire what would a new manifesto change can I ask a question on the manifesto yeah someone put it to me this morning like previous prime ministers have broken manifesto commitments is it plausible because I think everybody always assumes okay well Andy Byrne will either stick for the manifesto or he'll call an early election.

11:27But is there actually latitude for him to break the manifesto? I think he's not like other prime ministers because his entire legitimacy is founded on that manifesto, which he didn't write, but he's inherited a majority that's entirely based on the public voting for that. So if he then rips up massive bits of it and they say, well, hang on, your prime minister, you didn't even have a vote of MPs, let alone members, let alone the country. And he had to go back on his own word as well. Two things, I think. One specific to Andy Burnham and one more general. The more general thing is, I think, you know, if you break the manifesto pledge on nationalising the paperclip industry, you say, actually, I know that was a big manifesto pledge, we're not going to do it.

12:02Like, who cares? But it's the George H.W. Bush, read my lips, no new taxes thing. That is such a live rail of politics. Any politician who goes into an election saying we will not raise your taxes. I mean, people forget this about the 2022 Tory leadership election, Ben, as you will well know from your, as a historian of this period. What was the thing that really wound Tory MPs up? And what was the thing everyone was banging on about? And what actually did for Rishi Sunak in that leadership election, it was health and social care levy. It's Boris Johnson gone into that 2019 election saying we're not going to raise national insurance.

12:31Then he did it. That really enraged Tory MPs. So that is just completely toxic. And more specifically about Andy Burnham, his whole thing is about trusting politics. He's like, you know, I've had this conversation with a lot. Yeah. I, Patrick, when I say I'm going to do something, I'm going to do it, aren't I? That sort of thing. Right. And I don't think Andy Burnham is, I don't think he would, I think he would much rather go to the country and say, look, I've reached the end of the road with this. I've always said I'd be straight with you, et cetera, et cetera. But maybe that's a slightly Panglossian view of Andy Burnham, but I think that's sort of, that's the Andy Burnham, that's the image of Andy Burnham.

13:03That's the Andy Burnham you know. It is. Some of the manifesto stuff gets quite interesting when it's open to interpretation. So he has publicly said with the fiscal rules, look, I think there is some flexibility there. Going back to what you were saying, Patre, I think that is a fascinating area. More flexibility with the fiscal rules means Andy Burnham in his mind is thinking about borrowing billions of pounds more than we're currently borrowing. I sense that's an area where you're already seeing some tension with the Treasury. Last week, I was looking at this idea that they were possibly going to use one of those instruments to put a lot more in council housing.

13:32And in the end, the Treasury hosed it down. And the implication was that, look, is this really the time that we're going to do a lot more borrowing? But Andy Burnham, and it sounds like Lou Haig as well, Andy Burnham has certainly been out there publicly saying over the summer, I think there's more flexibility there. The striking thing, I think, is that this budget was supposed to be the easy bit. It's obviously proven hugely challenging, but it is as nothing to what is coming next year. So in January, we're going to have a story today. We think the energy bills in January, the price cap could go up by 450 quid.

14:04And they're obviously drawing up this package to help people on benefits to reduce those bills. That's one thing. You said earlier, Laura, all of the big decisions are now delayed until next March, which is the spending review. That's when they've suddenly got to find a huge increase in defence spending, equivalent to around£10 billion a year. Social care will suddenly be on the agenda. So weirdly, this was supposed to be the easier bit. They tried to remove all the poison and put it into next year. And now we've got this mammoth spending review, which I presume they're going to need another budget for as well.

14:35Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I mean, again, with this early election stuff, you look at the cuts that they have to find, even at the budget. I mean, people do forget this. They've already announced billions of pounds of cuts for the defence investment plan, those that are already funded. And it's massive cuts to capital budgets of departments. We're going to learn at the budget exactly where those fall, right? So serious cuts to transport programmes, for example, that's not comfortable for Andy Burnham. but also to energy programs also you know nhs capital budgets right you're looking at rack rack budgets for schools i mean these are these are really unpalatable cuts already for labour mps then you've got an extra 4.7 billion of cuts and then like you say next year you've got this extra question of can you find 10 billion pounds plus and then if you look at these other cuts coming down the line you've also you've got massively steep cuts around the 20 2029 field as well so i just think it's so hard to see how there's any plausible window where they think okay this is a really easy time for us to go or this do you reckon they might go for an early election before you have to do a lot of that stuff next year well i just but then you'd have to go for like steve says you'd have to go for a really early election and i just think the instinct of number 10 will be to wait for a little bit longer because you're thinking best case scenario you're losing scores of your mps really best case scenario scores of your mps and yes there are a group of labour mps who already know they're not going to win the next election they'd probably like some a few more years left but there are and even there's a bigger group of labour mps who are thinking, okay, in a good scenario, I could maybe hold on to my seat.

15:58What's the win? I don't understand what the win of going early is. You gain time if you were to win that election. I'm going to guess, yeah, you get a mandate for tax rises, right? That's the cynical view. And it's very, very hard to fight an election on tax rises. The public seats and reform gets, you know, six figures. But the point is, at some point, the public on a manifesto with tax rises is going to be pretty hard as well. At some point, you have to go, the right is still very divided. Reform have had this massive donation that we're going to go on to talk about. Yes, they've started to spend it, But it's going to take time for the benefit of that massive windfall to feed into the impact that reform can have.

16:32And the sooner you go, the better you can prejudge. That is one of the theories. I personally think it could be an absolute disaster if they go for an election. I don't know. But I'm just saying these will be the kinds of things that they're thinking about. Does anyone want to say there will be an early election? Anyone want to stick their head above the parapet? No, I personally think they won't. But to spell out the argument for why they're thinking about it, like Farage is down, reform is down. They've dropped from 30 to 25 percent. They're under this rock on donations in a whole variety of ways.

17:04Kemi's personal poll rating has jumped, but the Tories has not. They're still stagnating around 20 percent, I think. And the idea that after two years, the public are ready to sweep them back into office doesn't seem like that's reality. Andy Burnham has had a bump. Although I think, to be honest, everybody talks about this honeymoon poll bump. It's been quite small. It's been five or six points. Look at the YouGov poll we have today, which is, it's all margin of error stuff. It's Labour 23, Reform 23, Tories, I think, on 21 or 20, right? Actually, they're only 10 points away, 15 points away. I mean, the range is like 23 to 28 or so at the moment.

17:37So they should have them on, I think, 28 % for Labour, which is quite high. When Theresa May called her snap election, they were 20 points ahead. Ahead. Only this morning I had a conversation with someone who was quite a senior Tory spout in that period and who said actually the mistake Theresa made wasn't calling that election, it was losing it, which is an interesting distinction, right? You know, the mistake wasn't, you know, if she'd run a better campaign, she would have preserved that 20-point lead. But the other, the interesting thing, a conversation I had with the Labour MP last night actually was that they were worried that the strongest argument for a snap election is fighting an election against Nigel Farage.

18:12They said, paradoxically, because usually you speak to Labour MPs, you know, I had two conversations with Labour MPs in the strangers bar last night. One of them at the bar was Labour MP saying, it's great, you know, reform are over. It's like, OK. And then going out on the terrace, speaking to another Labour MP, he said, actually, the worst thing that could possibly happen is if Nigel Farage tomorrow said, OK, you know, the game is rigged. I'm out because Labour's calculation and we'll see if this is borne out over the campaign it's like actually fighting an election against Nigel Farage is okay you can do an unimaginative sort of called on sanitaire you don't want Nigel Farage to be prime minister do you and hope that enough of the public go as polling suggests they probably would say um I'm actually on balance probably not they were like well what if what if reform didn't have Nigel Farage at the helm like what what's our case against that you know either reform we're fighting a different kind of reform on policy or we're having a a very conventional left-right battle on the economy with the tories and probably reform as well uh and they didn't like that so maybe one argument is make sure you're fighting the election against Nigel Farage if as you are in the Labour Party you're so convinced that you know that's a that's a cheat code I mean you know campaigning against Nigel Farage is not easy at the best Surely you'd rather be up against a reform without Farage than with Farage.

19:30I think we're trying dangerously into the other side of the interval. He feels this is very awkward. No, no, I'm pro it, but we're going to talk about it after the interval. We're blurring the lines. We are going to come back. We're going to talk about that. We're going to talk about the mega donation. 76 million pounds. So please, we're going to the interval now, but we'll be back shortly. When everything is moving all at once, your workforce, your tech stack, your business, you don't need more tools. You need one solution. That's why Paylocity built a single platform to connect HR, finance, and IT with AI-driven insights and automated workflows that simplify the complex and power what's next.

20:09Because when everything comes together in one place, growth comes easy. Experience one place for all your HCM needs. Start now at paylocity.com slash one. This week on the Times Tech Podcast, Bill Gates. This is ultra different than any technology that's come before. How do you persuade the tech companies that are developing it to sort of pursue the good over profit? It's not the role of the industry to self-regulate or understand the whole of society impact. This is a technology that tends to concentrate power. The rest of the world is not used to having a vacuum of U.S. leadership. Listen to that special episode with Bill Gates on the Times Tech Podcast.

21:20We let you browse shows, see who's listening, and book host-read sponsorships or run your own ads all from one platform. Transparent pricing, real-time data, complete control. Start advertising on podcasts by visiting acast.com slash advertise.

21:42Welcome back to The State of It, the political podcast from The Times and The Sunday Times, where I've just realized I committed an error. I said that reformers received£76 million worth of donations in a single weekend. In fact, it was£72 million. So I am sorry about the£4 million margin. What do you know that we don't know? Well, it's probably another£4 million on the way. It is an extraordinary sum of money. It was a proper marmalade dropper. I think it was late on Friday night when it dropped, the first of the two of them, the biggest political donation in history, not once but twice dwarfing anything that had gone before.

22:18The thing I wanted to talk about and focus on, which is fascinating to me, is Labour's response to it. Because when this issue first arose, Labour introduced this kind of plans to cap donations from British nationals that live overseas at£100 ,000. And they went out of their way. Steve Reid was doing it at the time, but it was all very carefully couched and trying to not sound too partisan, although it clearly was very partisan. That's gone. Andrew Rayner at the TUC yesterday seemed to refer to Christopher Harbourn and Ben Dello, quite bravely outside the privilege of the Commons, as fascist oligarchs.

22:52And they are not... I was writing the splash intro last night on the story, and I thought, do I need to weigh up whether Labour is trying to block Reform UK's donations here? I'm like, no, no, that is explicitly what they are saying they are doing. It's so partisan. This is not to... Look, there are obviously issues with such big donations from two people with big cryptocurrency donors. And there are questions around that. But the way Labour is also going about this, there are questions about that too. Yeah. And what they're not saying, by the way, presumably because they know that Christopher Harbour and Ben Dilo have very expensive and very able lawyers.

23:31What nobody in the Labour Party is saying is we are concerned that the way they've made their money in crypto is bad or problematic or questionable for these reasons. At most, you see people say crypto is bad. The Labour Party did some sort of meme saying like crypto is Putin's favourite thing the other day. That's the level of actual engagement with the question at hand. And there are obviously questions, there are lots of questions about crypto, right? But no one's actually engaged with them. The issue is the amount of money that's been given. As you say, Steve, this is not something the Labour Party was talking about when people like Gary Lubner, the autoglass billionaire, was giving Labour tens of millions of pounds before the last election.

24:14They weren't saying, oh, actually, I think it's a bit problematic that Gary Lubner, who doesn't want anything, you know, he's just a progressive multimillionaire who wants to give us lots of money. Actually, Gary, you know, is it problematic for you to give us so much money? I think it is just fairly transparently, oh no, reform have 72 million quid. What are we going to do about that? And obviously there were big donations from Harbour and D 'Lo in previous rounds in the high single figure millions, you know, repeated several times. But there is no proper argument against this. You know, Labour has developed a conscience on this issue only after this is happening.

24:50And I think what Nigel Farage said on this, if reform get into government or the Tories get into government and this has happened, because this will hit the Tories as well, by the way. banning big donations from individuals. And it will obviously hit an effective Labour Party because when the Labour Party is high in the polls, rich people like to give the Labour Party money. Nigel Farage was right. He just said, well, the next right-leaning government will just ban union donations. And then, as he said, the entire political system will collapse. Then we're into, okay, do we want state funding of political parties?

25:18No. So we're absolutely stuck. But this is obviously very transparently, and Labour backbenchers speak even more openly about this and Angela Rayner, an attempt to say, we don't like reform having lots of money. We can't really prove there's anything wrong with the money specifically. So the price tag is bad. It's American. Let's stop it. Now, there are lots of reasoned arguments to have and questions to ask, but we're not in that space. It is just a fairly naked partisan route. It does shine a light on this weird bit of the political system that I'm not sure I fully appreciated until quite recently, there is zero cap on the total that one individual can give a political party.

25:56So you could give a million, 10 million, 100 million, a billion, 10 billion. There is no upper limit. There is a limit on how much a party can spend in the year run up to an election. So that inherently caps the amount that political parties tend to go for. But that is a slightly curious thing. And that's actually a lot of the debate right now has been on this overseas element. So as we understand that these two individuals were both overseas for a period and now in some form, whether it's voter registration or where they're domiciled, are kind of back in the UK. And the debate about whether you can claw back the money by changing the law retrospectively is all about that overseas element.

26:34But there's nothing, once they're back in the UK, there is nothing currently on the statute books or being proposed by Labour that would stop them in a year or two's time giving more, more, more. So I think the debate will shift to overall donor cap and whether you can elongate the spending limits. Exactly. And this is the question. Incidentally, a Labour MP said to me last night, there should be a limit on every year how much someone can spend on political activity, be that owning media outlets with an ideological thing, donating, anything political activity. I mean, that'd be a nightmare to define, they themselves admit it, but it's interesting.

27:03But you know, this is the thing, right? There's no cap. Say JK Rowling tomorrow said, I'm really concerned about the stuff I'm reading about reform donations. I've decided to set up a£1 billion trust that will be invested and it's going to fund every progressive party in the country for perpetuity do you think the Labour Party at that point say oh actually on principle we can't take JK Rowling's billion pounds I mean it's the the people on one side having a pop up the people on the other I sort of feel like I ought to say the other side of it which is why I mean why there are lots of people that will be concerned about it and I do think personally that for Labour to be acting as brazenly as they are um is a gift to reform I think that they I mean you've already seen it like they're paid they're paid to get as a kind of teeser of assets and moving of the goalposts like the British public are pretty well attuned to when this happens I think be very hard for Labour to argue to the public oh yeah we're just we're doing this because we're really worried about you know a semi-oligarchic claim over our politics and actually we want to keep it super democratic but I do think as we're seeing the case made this week that for many people there is a meaningful difference between people giving money to unions and the unions then giving that to Labour as opposed to individual donors giving record-breaking amounts of money there obviously has been a kind of reflexive discuss from Labour to see this just the amount of money that has been donated here in the self-interested terms I'm sure there's no doubt because they think that this is going to make it much harder for them to win the next election but I but but there is also a there is also a meaningful conversation about regulation of money in British politics and it's a real shame that the reason that we'll be having it is because there's been a really massive donation to one party because it just prevents us from having that discussion in a reasonable way.

28:36So we spent yesterday looking through the legislation which dates back the principal piece to 1985 and it is to call it loosely drafted would be generous it is incredibly loosely drafted and from what we can see you can basically claim that you live in England with your primary home and still spend tons of time abroad there's no actual clear definition of what your primary home is so that means that they can say yeah I've got a property here and I've had that property since before the deadline in the new legislation, March the 25th, and they probably end up keeping the money. And even if that's not the case, what is also put to me is that reform are going to fight this tooth and nail.

29:19So let's say they come for the money, which reform is already spending, by the way, getting out the front door as quickly as it can. Let's say they come for the money. It will end up as a contested case, and it will end up probably with some form of judicial review sometime down the line. And reform say they will just fight it, and this will go on for years. so it may be that for all of the um i mean they're throwing the kitchen sink at it they're even looking at changing the residency rules which is our splash for this morning so that to give money to a political party you'd have to live like for tax law in the uk for 183 days a year which would obviously then mean all of these guys have to pay their taxes in the uk as well so but it there's a real world in which it doesn't actually achieve what labour wants it to because a big noise feeds the grievance on reform and it doesn't succeed.

30:04I mean, one of the things that Labour and peace are so frustrated about, and I think that you've just spoken to, is just a frustration that it's happening now and they didn't act sooner. Because they could have genuinely listened to you there. They could have gone out and said, we actually think that if you want to give large amounts of money to political parties, you should pay your taxes in the UK, for example. And if they'd said that immediately after winning the election, for example, and made it a massive priority to make campaign finance a really big part of their campaign, it wouldn't look like as Ben says the politics of grievance but because they've just dragged their heels in it haven't been certain had sort of especially the last time around this came up and sort of said okay we'll look at this again because the unions are nervous clearly that has put them in a worse place now where it's ruined this issue for them.

30:42Well this is a really interesting and it comes back to my point about when you're up as particularly as Labour Party you're grateful for massive sums of money from rich people. I remember in the book Gabriel Pogren and I wrote about Stonewall's rise to power getting available in paperback in all good bookshops there is there is There is a very telling anecdote about in late 2023, Gordon Brown had a flight book to fly down to London to make a big announcement with Angela Rayner on a new package of policy to clean up democracy. One of which I think was, I think it might have included, it was some kind of ban on foreign donations or a substantial tightening of the rules on foreign donations.

31:20Waheed Ali, who was obviously in charge of Labour's fundraising at the time, got it killed because he was like, this is just going to send a big message to the very rich people I'm spending lots of time with who now wants to donate to Keir Starmer's Change Labour Party. They'll say you're hostile to the donor class. You'll say that you're battering the donor class. So they dropped it. They never revived it. And they could have done it then. They wanted to do it then. But because they themselves were getting money from donors, you know, when you are high on the donor hog, as the Labour Party are intermittently when they're about to win elections, you know, see also the 90s.

31:53The last thing you want to do is look a gift, literally look a gift horse in the mouth. But if they had listened to Gordon Brown at the time and not Waheed Ali, they wouldn't be in this situation because they probably would have dealt with this. And, you know, they wouldn't be looking to retrospectively change the law to screw reform over, which is what they're obviously trying to do. Well, can I raise this other bit of it? I'm interested to see what you guys think about this. Let's say the money is fine and it's not hit retrospectively and they get to spend it and they're not hit by an early election that limits what they can spend.

32:22Actually, how much would it help to spend that 72 million? So I think if I'm right, they've mentioned three things that they're going to do. One is campaign managers at a local level in each seat, I think 400 seats. The second one is a load of policy experts to come up with thousands of pages of draft legislation. And the third one is this kind of online reform TV. I mean, it feels like to me, the second one is not going to have a dramatic electoral impact. If you have 20 or 40 or 60 policy experts writing your laws, you know, Donald Trump just came up with one line, build a wall, give everybody five grand if they vote for me.

32:58I mean, I don't think having a depth of policy experience inherently makes you more electable. I think the local campaign managers, one feels like that would have a proper impact. Because I know, you know, talking to the Tories previously, often they have, you know, they do a kind of hundred target seats, which are the swing ones. And often they only have kind of one campaign manager spread across two or three or four constituencies. So just having the grassroots, that feels to me most effective. But do you think it's going to have it, if they can spend that money, will it have a dramatic impact on their electability?

33:30When I called Zia Youssef about this on Saturday at the Home and First Postperson, because we'd done this interview with him on Friday and then we wanted to see what he thought about how they would spend the money. And one of the things he said on that was just generally speaking, he wants to end the quote unquote idiocracy. And there is just, there is in the policy team, but more widely just this effort to try and recruit the best possible talent for reform. And this has always been something that has been. What is the idiocracy? The idiocracy. Sorry. That's it. Sorry. We got a member of it here.

33:59Indulge. it's uh this theory that zee yousef has which is essentially that he will say and he did say to me on friday and i'm paraphrasing but as patrick would say only lightly that if you look at the class of current labor mps for example and generally generally mps uh i'm sure he would i'm sure he would count tory mps in this as well but he would say look at the class of mps for many of them it's the most senior well-paid job that they've got right it's the apex of their uh of their career and essentially they're not particularly smart they're not actually the best of this country they don't have the experience and they're not going to be the best people that could create great laws and run this country in a good way and he's the example of matt hancock as uh as health secretary during the pandemic as a particular brutal example but he has plenty of others as you can well imagine and essentially they're not going to pay mps more though this with this well no exactly i mean but i guess the question is you have more resources you have the ability to speak to more people try and appeal to more people i don't know what their specific plans on this are But that is one of the areas.

34:58And getting clever people in HQ. And because in the last election, problems with vetting, problems with the quality of candidates beyond the inner circle was such a big problem for their credibility. This is one of the real areas where they'll want to come back and say, actually, look at our front bench lineup. It's full of genuinely credible people. They are real experts in their field, and they're going to be fantastic members of this government. And so I'm sure that that will be one of the focuses as well. And I think that would make a really big difference because one of the key things when you look at the data on those kind of reform curious people that you get a sense of.

35:26It's just this sense of, are they professional enough? Am I, you know, I actually, I do kind of like the appeal of some of these ideas and policies, but I just want to be sure that I can make the jump with this group of people that they'll be able to run the country well. And if they can show they've got a kind of stronger and more credible lineup, perhaps, come this election than perhaps they did last time, I don't know. A lot of voters obviously didn't think they necessarily did. Is that going to make a better difference? Wasn't he saying they want to produce kind of draft pieces of legislation that backs up that point?

35:51Yes, exactly. And also, So it's not just the kind of policy team they want to double. It's also they will want full-time lawyers working on all of this the entire time. And it is, I mean, that's not just an election thing. They would say, I mean, Zia Yusuf literally did say to me, Morgan McSweeney admitted they didn't have a plan. We want to have a plan. So it is not just winning the election. It is also genuinely, this is what we want to do if we win the election. We want to actually be able to say that we're going to really start very credibly with tons of legislation that actually we've had loads of people going over for a really long time and we're capable of introducing.

36:21Well, and the plan is now part of the campaign. You know, this is the category Morgan McSweeney-Nuller's made. It was, you know, we're going to, we'll do the campaign and Sue's over there, not causing too much trouble. And, you know, then we'll get to number 10 and we can celebrate and Sue will kick the plan to gear. There was no plan. Reform is selling itself on the plan. You know, first hundred days, that was the message of the conference. They believe that, reform strategies believe the big dividing line is now delivery. Andy Burnham, they think, is not going to be able to deliver anything.

36:51Nigel Fraze will say, you want big change? Well, here's my former chief medical officer, five-star general, FTSE 100 chief executive. That's my cabinet. Here's the list of legislation we've got. We're going to do all of this in 100 days. If Richard Tice doesn't do this, he will resign or I'll sack him. Ditto Robert Jemmerich if he hasn't cut your taxes. This is the offer. It's more of the same from the other guys. Our crack team of canvassers have been banging on your door with all the data they've got, et cetera, et cetera. Clacton was a dry run for this in some respects, you know, getting the data, working out where the voters are and planning campaign.

37:29They're actually also, again, inspired by Morgan McSweeney, working on a list of target seats that they're going to target ruthlessly, you know, working out demographically what is their route to a thing. And as Kemi Bainnot said the other day, money can be an accelerant. You know, maybe it can't transform the party standing in the public, the party's reputation back to where it was in 2025 when they were riding really high. But also, you know, it's important to remember that things aren't static in politics. You know, a year ago, you know, when we did our first podcast from Tory conference last year, we were talking about Kemi Badenock getting binned.

38:06Now Kemi Badenock is favorite of the month in Westminster. You know, Andy Burnham is now prime minister. Things can change. You know, not everything is one way traffic. Maybe in some cases it is. Maybe in this case it is maybe Andy Burnham is one way traffic to you know economic oblivion but you can never be sure but you know they've now got a lot of money to spend trying to build an infrastructure that can disprove that consensus so let's see. I think that brings this week's episode to a close god knows where we'll be next week after the weekend we just had but who wants to do the big red button?

38:36Thanks very much as ever to Molly Guinness and Harry Kitson for making the trains of this podcast run on time.

38:51This week on the Times Tech Podcast, Bill Gates. This is ultra different than any technology that's come before. How do you persuade the tech companies that are developing it to sort of pursue the good over profit? It's not the role of the industry to self-regulate or understand the whole of society impact. This is a technology that tends to concentrate power. The rest of the world is not used to having a vacuum of U.S. leadership. Listen to that special episode with Bill Gates on the Times Tech Podcast.

39:42to reach through traditional channels and ready to act when someone they trust makes a recommendation. We're Acast, and we put them right in front of you. Browse thousands of the world's leading podcasts, book host reads or run your own ads, and track every conversion in real time. Same skills you already have, brand new results. Acast, acast.com slash advertise.