Starmer and Reeves's reverse Midas touch

0:00I'm not coming back with more borrowing or more taxes. That is why at this budget we did wipe the slate clean to put public finances and public services on a firm footing and as a result we won't have to do a budget like this ever again. In any future budgets lessons will be learned not to indulge in the constant what's called I think technically pitch rolling of all these different ideas being inflated and then withdrawn and then tried again and it's been really confusing to businesses and it's unnecessary. Every day for a long time now, I've read a lot of things in the news and being reported, which is then put to me and I'm then asked to say if it's true or false.

0:46When the government finds out who's been fuelling this speculation, they're going to be pretty mad, I would imagine. Welcome to this week's episode of The State of It, the politics podcast from The Times and The Sunday Times. I'm Stephen Swinford, the political editor at The Times. I'm Patrick Maguire, Chief Political Commentator at The Times. I'm Gabriel Pogrand, Whitehall Editor at The Sunday Times. Now this week we have an action-packed episode. Steve Swinford is largely responsible for many of the revelations which politicians were bemoaning in that introduction, but he's got some more on the eve of the budget on what will be inside Rachel Reeves' red box.

1:23I've got some inside information on your party's inaugural conference at the end of this week. And I've got an additional scoop, by the way, important to mention that Caroline Wheeler, our co-host, will be back next week. But we're going to kick off with Patrick, who was playing darts last night with Angela Rayner. And he'll tell us where the Kirsten Armour's face was on the board. And we'll also learn a little more about his entanglement with the childhood hero of his. Yeah, I was on the terrace of the House of Commons last night for the Westminster Darts Championship. I was actually being violently sick on Monday morning, but I forced myself in on the promise of meeting the two Lukes who dominate British darts and world darts, Luke Humphreys and Luke Littler, who were there.

2:11It was a charity bash held for Prostate Cancer UK. But anyway, I went, I walked in just as Angela Rayner was stepping up to the hockey. She professed never to have played darts before. there was no picture of Keir Starmer on the ball but maybe well maybe she was visualising both because she with I think her third dart through straight into the 25 almost hit the bullseye directly OK Angela next three darts let's get all of them on the ball this time shall we here we go

2:44so you have paid darts before I thought if Angela Rayner can do it on this big stage as Steve knows I spend a lot of time at the dartboard in the Times Parliamentary Office, so I thought, I'm going to wipe the floor with these people. Anyway, I was paired with Luke Humphreys, the 2024 world champion. Very nice man. And then I proceeded to throw 36 with six darts. Now, if anyone who is listening to this isn't necessarily familiar with dart scoring, that's not very good. And indeed, the announcer, PDC referee, Kirk Bevins, another hero of mine, Went as far as to say that's the lowest score we've had all night.

3:26So it was quite humiliating to do that in front of an audience, including less than sympathetic spectators, including Reform UK's Lee Anderson and several members of the Parliamentary Labour Party who have not necessarily enjoyed my coverage of politics in recent months. But then I met, as you said, a hero of mine, Luke Littler, and he was being harassed for selfies all night, including by our colleague Aubrey Allegretti. and I went up to him and I thought, you know, I'm not going to do the thing of asking for a selfie. So I said accurately, I was at school with a very good friend of yours, to which he said, yep.

4:01And then I said the name of the former Lancashire County dance player. Luke Littler played in the youth set up with, even gave this guy's darting nickname. Luke Littler, emphasising the point, said, yep. And then got out his phone and went back to his Instagram reels. And I didn't ask for a selfie, but I do have a very good picture of me and Luke Humphrey. So it wasn't entirely unsuccessful. But yeah, I'm not going to be. Does he listen to the state of it? Maybe that's maybe he might have been sarsap. Well, as a minister said to me afterwards, he said, don't worry, he's just not a funnier column.

4:34You know, he was saying to me, Patrick Maguire, he's gone off the boil. So if you're listening, Luke, I will try harder in the coming weeks. Right. Let's get on to the budget. We are on the eve of budget. And I've got a possibly controversial opinion, which is I think this budget could actually go down quite well with Labour MPs, who are one of the key constituencies. So last night, Rachel Reeves was addressing the parliamentary Labour Party. And our team had their ears literally to the door in one of their cases to catch every word that she said. She was defiant. She said, I will beat them. I will beat my critics.

5:10She said that she detects misogyny behind the attacks on her in public life. and then she had this analogy about sweets and she said look this isn't like a bag of pick and mix you can't have the coca-cola bottles and not the fruit salads you have to eat all of them but she said you're going to like 95 of the things in my budget which got us thinking what are they going to like and this is our first scoop on the podcast today she is going to freeze fuel duty again so there was discussion on this in the treasury we talked about it a couple of weeks back they've taken the decision to freeze it that is not a small decision that will cost three billion pounds she's going to keep the 5p cut in fuel duty and that is a cost of living measure and when you stand back from this budget and you look at the different measures in the round she has now got that she's going to increase the national living wage to something like 12 pounds 70 which is a four percent rise in the national living wage and there's going to be this big cut on energy bills Well, she's freezing train fares as well.

6:11Freezing train fares. 600 million. Benefits uprated in line with inflation. So there is a lot of stuff for Labour MPs, as she told them last night, to get out there and sell a lot of positives. And I think that if you look at the kind of political positioning, and we will come on to the tax rises in a second, there is an argument that she has won round and will win round Labour MPs. So that reduces the likelihood of a challenge. But of course, it's going to be another story for voters and the markets. Yeah, absolutely. and there are contradictions in the politics of this. So we're talking about fuel duty, for instance.

6:43If you drive an electric car, you are going to face, for the first time, a pay-per-mile tax. Now, given that successive governments have incentivised people via the tax system to buy an electric car, to have that advantageous treatment, I don't think that's going to go down particularly well. Indeed, Gabriel and I had a conversation with someone to this effect a little while ago, and they were talking about the last budget, and Labour ran a very extensive polling and research operation, basically a Champions League of tax rises. You know, this tax had played, that tax, and they had a really firm idea of what taxes people liked.

7:19The answer was, actually, nobody likes taxes. But some people in number 10, number 11, expected an electric vehicle tax to go down quite well. But actually, people thought it was unfair because people had bought electric cars under the assumption of advantageous tax treatment and then found it taken away from them. So I suspect that might be one of the things that at the moment we're not talking about, but there might be a big backlash. The other thing, of course, is you mentioned benefits upraised in line with inflation. The state pension is going to go up by 4.8 % in line with the increase in average earnings.

7:53The two-child cap is going to go. There are lots of Labour MPs, perhaps not a majority of them, but a big chunk of Labour MPs, particularly those more inclined to the right of the party, the blue Labour tenancy in the party, who think the politics of that is going to be utterly disastrous because essentially Rachel Reeves is going to say, I know you're struggling with your cost of living if you're a working family. I know that I'm going to have to do all of these things to cut your energy bills etc etc but I'm essentially writing a blank cheque to larger families including those who aren't in work now for lots of labour people that is a matter of principle gordon brown has made very eloquent arguments about why eliminating child poverty is the party's moral mission but you've got to wonder actually whether there will be a backlash to that you know i remember i think i mentioned it on this podcast getting a text from a labour mp a couple of weeks ago who said we're the party of graduates migrants and benefits claimants and if that is the sort of message that you're going to hear from Labour MPs, hear from voters, hear from Nigel Farage perhaps in the days after the budget, that might be a tricky wicket for Rachel Reeves to defend.

9:01And funnily enough, I mean just to lift the veil a little bit on the way Sunday journalism works, our Deputy Political Editor Harry York last week brought in an op-ed from Rachel Reeves and I thought it was sort of really politically fascinating that her core message was wholly unrelated to the text of the budget she told harry and we published our op-ed that she would in due course fulfill her stated objective of reforming welfare i thought that's fascinating you know you're moments away from this great spectacle of a budget where you as chancellor have this singular ability to shape the ways and means and tax and spending of this country but the thing you wish to say is at a later point i will engage in unspecified reforms to the welfare bill which i think it was her attempt to sort of preempt that off and preempt that criticism and i think it's really interesting that in the end reeves is sort of so often spoken about you know disavowing labor's past and upending what one might expect of a labor government but in this instance you're looking at preservation of the welfare bill, better off if you're anybody other than, you know, middle earners or high earners.

10:17And I think that that sort of helps her with the PLP, but whether it helps her with the markets or long-term as its own separator. And the other thing, of course, is in her remarks to Labour MPs last night, she was talking about NHS funding. Now, obviously, West Streeting was one of the big, big winners of last year's fiscal events. NHS got 20 plus billion quid. Last night she went as far as to say that, or strongly suggest, that the NHS was going to get more, that they were going to keep and protect the funding to bring down waiting lists, and in her words, go further. It's no wonder when we write that Reeves is looking left, there's no rebuttal from the Treasury on that point, because that's clearly how they want it to be seen by the Parliamentary Labour Party.

11:02I think that there is a bigger debate on that, right? is does Labour know who its voters are? So we were talking to YouGov about this and actually they were pointing out that Labour's core vote is increasingly wealthy, graduates, people with actually quite a bit of money that a lot of the lower income people have already left for reform. They're already gone. So you're left with actually a party that is doing a lot of tax rises on its own voters. And let's just talk about those briefly. You've got this big stealth tax and freezing the income tax thresholds, which is going to hit people to a tune of thousands of pounds and that's going to raise 10 billion and then you've got this amazing smorgasbord it's like 13 different tax rises or something like that so you've got the stealth tax you've got a tax rate on pension savings you've got a tourism tax you've got a gambling tax you've got a cycle to work tax you've got a mansion tax which isn't actually a mansion tax it's a property tax as we should properly call it the list goes on and on and this is the problem with this budget that you could end up pissing an extraordinary number of people off because you've gone so broad and there are so many small taxes we've heard about milkshake tax which they're announcing today so you name it they appear to be taxing it and that is the product of not going ahead with the one big tax rise on income tax you end up with lots of smaller ones well it's interesting i was having a conversation with a labour strategist close to several cabinet ministers and people in number 10 last week and they said something that initially I thought was a joke but it became quite clear it wasn't a joke they said the prime minister and chancellor have a reverse milus touch by which they meant that Keir Starmer can announce something that the public love in theory that polling says the public love so for instance Keir Starmer could say tomorrow I'm going to give everyone a free puppy and by the following day nobody would want a free puppy you know this happened with digital ID it from two-thirds support among the public to a third support among the public.

12:58They argue that Rachel Reason Keir Starmer standing among the public is so bad that in theory, if they started talking about saving the NHS, it wouldn't be that implausible to see people turning against the idea of the NHS. Now, maybe that's an exaggeration, but I think the fundamental point is an important one for us to consider as we look ahead to how this is all going to go down. Because yes, the PLP was satisfied. Yes, Keir Starmer will still be Prime Minister by Christmas. probably but you cannot overstate the level of their unpopularity and that matters when you're trying to sell not just one unpopular tax rise as steve is saying but about 15 and i guess there's just a broader question of survival so we've been reporting a lot the issues haven't gone away but we do think that she's probably and keir starmer by connection probably safe till may but we still think there's immense unhappiness in the cabinet there are people briefing that west streeting should get a coronation at the end of this that starmer should go now they're not in that headspace but it's not going away this kind of drumbeat of stuff about the leadership and about the decisions that rachel reeves has made and kia starmer continues to make and the errors they continue to make yeah and i think uh our colleagues or brianna gretti and stephan boscia had that story from allies of west streeting who are quickly disavowed by a spokesperson for west streeting but we all know how these things work um talking about how the time had come to crown west probably in the wake of the local elections and reading that story you got a measure of two things one just how angry a lot of labor mps continue to be with the prime minister but two the thing that may keep keir starmer in office longer than we think which is the sheer incoherence of the case his parliamentary colleagues are making because in that story we had in the times every single quote contradicted the next you know mps don't know what they want beyond getting rid of keir starmer you know one person says we need an ideologue like wes the next person says wes believes the same as keir starmer somebody says wes is a great communicator another person says you know it's all about the ideas so you know there is no clear as we've said many times in podcast there's no clear ask or diagnosis for the next leader to fix something the person who has one by the way shabana mahoud who as we said last week set out a very clear vision of what the labour party should be and what its priorities should be and who it should be for in polling over the weekend by labour list the bible of party activists her favorability has fallen by 32 points they also did a range of hypothetical leadership contests.

15:38Keir Starmer was beaten by everyone. Ed Miliband, Wes Streeting, Andy Burnham. Who was the only person Keir Starmer beat in that leadership race? Shabana Mahmood. Keir Starmer, you know, the guy who is essentially a dead man walking, still beats his Home Secretary. So that's another thing we have to consider among all of this. How is this going down among, not just with the bond markets, not just with the PLP, not just with the electorate, but with the Labour Party membership. Watch this space. You'll be able to hear the budget live on Times Radio and then analysis all through the afternoon with Joe Coburn, Andrew Neil and then John Pienaar.

16:13And we'll release a special budget episode on Friday, a recording of our live budget event in Westminster, where you can catch me and Patrick Maguire and Fraser Nelson and Maureen Kahn talking about the political and economic repercussions. You can still get tickets if you search Times events. we're going to head to the interval and when we come back we're going to be talking about the left with your party and the greens and then we're going to talk about the right with Nigel Farage so back shortly welcome back we want to talk to you about the event of the weekend which is your party's inaugural conference in Liverpool and Gabriel it's fair to say it's looking pretty messy first and probably last conference yeah absolutely and we were contemplating going but I think i might go i've got to say my press accreditation hasn't been um approved yet and it may not be approved because of what i'm about to reveal which is that the great question mark hovering over your party since its inception has been who will lead it and and and who actually uh holds the whip hand over who within uh within the left which is sort of want to engage in acts of bewilderingly petty factionalism and it transpires that corbyn and sultana's war of words and their personality clash is at its lowest ebb if that was even possible not least because sultana who as steven martin described her as the firebrand mp for coventry south she's got a rally on friday which is her attempt to sort of claim the mantle of the leadership ahead of an election at some point in time to determine who runs this party but there was one person who was mysteriously NFI'd not invited to this jamboree and it happens to be Jeremy Corbyn himself.

18:00Now this is rather curious because yesterday Sultana actually posted saying that she remained as committed as ever to the notion of co-leading the party with Corbyn himself. So committed she didn't think to ask him to attend her rally which of course is happening on the same weekend as Corbyn's own separate rally but it was conveyed by allies of corbyn to team sultana that jezza the islam to north mp was rather irritated by the slight of not having been invited and i'm told that intermediary i don't quite have their identity forgive me listeners but but not did corbyn but not did somebody not known to jeremy corbyn then contacted him to say if you did wish to attend the door is always open Jeremy and we'd be happy for you to come now I'm told that the two of them are not on speaking terms not speaking that's how dysfunctional this is they don't speak which actually I mean I apparently specialize in these interpersonal uh spats but obviously I reported a few weeks ago on the fact that streeting and McSweeney hadn't spoken for some time so I appear to spend my weeks now just ask people when they last spoke I don't know when Soltana and Corbyn yes exactly of the British left but um what i can also say is that there are many people that believe that sultana's resurrection of the co-leadership idea and she has been posting about it over the last 24 hours is part of an attempt to bounce corbyn into openly saying he wouldn't do this he doesn't wish to lead the party with her thereby enabling her to say it gives me no pleasure to say this but I'm now making the difficult decision to run on my own as the sole leader of this new leftist, anti-Zionist, anti-imperialist party.

19:52It's clear that this entire process has really just soured the well of what could have been a pretty vibrant, dynamic force in British politics. We spoke last week about how Zak Polanski has eaten your party's lunch as it's eaten itself, but another thing that's happened is Adnan Hussein the independent MP for Blackburn Iqbal Mohammed the independent MP for Dewsbury nearly half of the independent alliance of Gaza independent MPs indeed there were four Gaza independents and Jeremy Corbyn they formed this thing called the independent alliance they were meant to be starting your party but they've become so alienated by the ways rsultana has been carrying on that they've left they've said we're not interested we're going to continue as independents and for some people in your party they look at that despairing saying actually jeremy and these guys had almost by accident tapped into something that was happening in britain's inner cities and in the former mill towns of yorkshire and the west midlands they had found an electoral coalition that wanted something to the left of the Labour Party, a very particular brand and style of politics.

21:06And this torturous, internecine, petty process and the way people have carried on has led the people who have tapped into that electoral coalition to say, you know what, forget it. If there's no place for our politics, particularly the socially conservative aspects of that politics, which has been a big, big source of tension between some activists on the left and those MPs, be our guest. Now, without those guys, without that sort of inroad into British Muslim communities, what's the point of your party? I mean, Zoris El-Tan has tried to explain this a few times, saying, you know, attacking the Greens' records on councils or saying they're not properly anti-imperialist or anti-Zionist.

21:51you know i'd say that there's maybe a slightly limited electoral appetite for that sort of politics if the version of your party is just going to be post-labor jeremy corbyn who can win nizzlington north we know that or it's going to be zara sultana and a sort of slightly ragtag group of people who have been to the left of the labor party for a long time with no electoral success it's a tough sell let's move on to nigel farage who is this week a man under pressure so he has spent a lot of the summer and into the autumn trying to kind of fend off the attacks from labor and fend off the attacks from tories on particularly issues around security ukraine and his positions on that and also the economy and they've done a reasonable job of trying to defend those things he's got a real problem on his hands with the publication of allegations that he made some deeply anti-Semitic comments, which reform denies, but he doesn't quite deny in an interview with the BBC.

22:50Yeah, and Farage's stance on this, so these allegations, we should say, bitterly contested and denied by Nigel Farage, are all about his time at Dulwich College as a schoolboy. Nigel Farage says in interviews, you know, it's 49 years ago and published in a series of articles in The Guardian over the past week or so. and it strikes at the core of who Nigel Farage believes himself to be. What he says his political record shows, which is he is not an extremist. Indeed, he is the man yelling at extremism, saying stop and making sure that the BNP didn't become the dominant party to the right of the Tory party and all of this.

23:32And a bit like Jeremy Corbyn, actually, that sort of idea that he is not a racist is the very core of his political sense of self. But as you say, Steve, these stories are the only thing he's been asked about in the past week. And is it tricky for him? Well, I actually got a text coming in here to the studio from, I guess you'd call them an influential Labour figure, bemoaning their colleagues, tweeting about this, and Anna Turley, the Labour chairwoman, banging on about it all the time, saying a guy made some ill-advised jokes at school. is this really the best we have to combat the rise of reform UK?

24:11But it is clearly a distraction for reform. Any minute Nigel Farage is spending talking about the idea that some people on the left of British politics think he has a history of unsavory views is a minute wasted. And especially after a long period of reform, very practically saying, you think he's got a problem on Russia? He's going to say shoot down Russian jets. Indeed, this week he actually said the Trump peace plan agreed with the Russians does not go far enough. It does not protect Ukraine. You think we're profligate? You think we're economically reckless? I'm going to give a big speech on how, actually, I'm going to take painful decisions on the economy.

24:47I'm not going to offer the voters jam tomorrow. It is going to be a really serious government. And you can see, actually, Nigel Farage's response is he is irritated by this, you know, and he does feel it's unfair to be asked about comments he allegedly made 49 years ago. and his response is as was the case with Michael Crick's very good biography of Nigel Farage look I may have said some things at school but point to anything in my political record that says I would racially abuse people that I am an extremist you know I joined the Tory party in 1978 when I was a school boy wasn't a member of the National Front etc etc but the existence of this conversation on this podcast and in other media outlets is clearly less than ideal for a leader who wants to be taken seriously I'm surprised by how difficult Farage has found it to rebut this particular line of questioning.

25:39The whole thing about Farage is that he can bat away scrutiny in ways that Starmer, for instance, can't. And, you know, he has an ease and a familiarity that he can deploy to navigate his way out of difficult situations. You know, when he's been challenged, for instance, on his record on Putin in the past, You can almost see the contempt on his face, the wariness of, you know, I said this or that, but, you know, whatever. But this he seems to be struggling with. And I do wonder whether that is possibly because he feels like it's a hostage to fortune to commit to a specific formulation when there could be people waiting in the wings to rebut and deny his core contention.

26:21Exactly, Gabriel. That is what stands out from his first comments on it. It was the non-denial. He said there may have been banter. He said I never intended to directly offend anyone, mixed with a little bit of contrition. And that is what the other political parties will be picking up on. They will smell the weakness of that line, and they will, quite frankly, smell blood. So I expect them to go for that pretty hard in coming days. And this is a time when Farage would want to be majoring on the budget, the tax rises. This should be a really straightforward week for him, for the guy at the top of the polls.

26:52But look, this is what happens. If you are the frontrunner in British politics, if you are potentially on course to enter Downing Street, you're going to get a lot more scrutiny. Gabriel, we wanted to finish talking about your story. This was the front page of the Sunday Times, which was essentially a story about a ban on some macabre Tel Aviv fans coming to the UK and possible suggestions that police evidence that was used to the base of that ban may have been conflated. And that's got repercussions this week. that's right so i was going to start with something which i'm not sure if i'm permitted to swear on this podcast so this may in due course be edited out but if it isn't the words were i fucking hate this guy doesn't he have something better to do for god's sake and those were the words of the uh leicestershire police press office when last year i did some reporting on uh the extent to which they did or didn't investigate an alleged breach of electoral law in john ashworth's seat um why do i mention that now well i thought it was quite an interesting insight into the extent to which law enforcement very rarely comes under scrutiny and reacts very poorly when it does and we are in a kind of weird situation where not least because of the kind of local and regional press police are often a law unto themselves and no more so it seems was that the case than in connection with the ban on traveling fans attending maccabi televive's away game at Aston Villa at the very beginning of this month.

28:22What West Midlands police said was that they had obtained intelligence that indicated to them that it was not advisable, was high risk for these fans to come to Villa Park. Now Keir Starmer derided the decision. Number 10 said that Israeli fans were being banned for who they are. Shabana Mahmood, who's a Birmingham MP as well as a Home Secretary, said she disagreed with it and Kemi Badenok called it a national disgrace. But the police were, as they so often are, able to say, well, we've got this intelligence. And the intelligence was mostly based on the disorder that broke out last year when Tel Aviv played away at Ajax in Amsterdam, and there was extreme disorder unrest around the city.

29:08But I even got leaked something last week, which was the intelligence itself. And I've got to say, and I have repeatedly been saying this, I definitely don't hold a candle for the Maccabi Tel Aviv Ultras. They are, in some instances, shockingly racist, and there was much of that on show on the streets of Amsterdam last year. But it turns out that the intelligence deployed by West Mid's police about this game in Amsterdam, about the sorts of risks, therefore, that allowing those fans into the West Midlands entailed, was largely made up. So, for instance, they claimed that 200 fans were identified as being linked to the IDF.

29:47It transpires that that was not something that Dutch police recognised. I spoke to their director of communications who also said the claim that Tel Aviv fans were throwing innocent members of the public into the water was also not based. In fact, he didn't recognise the notion that 5 ,000 officers were deployed. It was only 1 ,200. And this is one of those cases where you think, well, what does that mean when you have a major national policing decision being based seemingly on nonsense. Well, Nick Timothy yesterday got an urgent question in the House of Commons. I understand there'll be a debate on this later this week in the Lords.

30:23And it is one of those interesting questions where, quite multi-layered from a political level, Ayyub Khan, the independent MP, was gathering lots of signatures before this game, saying it wouldn't be right for these fans to come into what he described as a predominantly Muslim area. He was sort of it seemed to his critics sort of raising the stakes almost encouraging a backlash so that he could use it as a pretext to ban the game and Mahmood is a constituency neighbor of his but has now ordered this review of the way that these decisions are made and it is I think Steve you mentioned this before we came on just one of those rare cases where you see politics journalism and law enforcement interacting and it often throws up some pretty thorny complicated questions And look, Starmer and Shabana Mahmood feel very, very strongly about this.

31:13It's personal for them. They feel those fans should not have been banned from travelling. So I don't think this is, well, certainly because you're involved, we're not going to hear the last of this. There will be more of it to come. I think that about concludes this week's episode of The State of It. Gabriel, can I ask you to get out your big super red button? My bazooka. Amazing producers who, by the way, we are nominated for Best Newcomer Podcast of the Year and also best comedy moment hey patrick's outstanding singing so um but gary wasn't meant to be funny but there you go the red button yeah well uh extra big thanks this week to moddy guinness and you and daughtry and we'll see you next week yeah and caroline back next week crucially as well so thank you again