Will this be Starmer’s toughest term yet?

0:00Hello, Ed Conway here. Here is what might sound like a slightly random question. What do AirPods, bananas and a pair of shoddily made running trainers from the 1970s have in common? On the surface, not very much. But on my podcast, Stuff Matters, I will uncover the deeper stories behind each of them. You will see how together they tell a fascinating new story about the world we live in. The first full series of Stuff Matters is out now. Just search for it on your podcast app and follow.

0:32Hello there and we're back. Welcome to Politics at Samadans, the podcast that gives you everything you need to know ahead of a brand new term in British politics. That's right. Parliament's been on pause. We've been on pause, but politics has not. So while I've been on the planes and the yak farms of Mongolia and on the bullet trains across China, what's been going on here back home has continued to trundle on. Did you manage a little bit more of a break and a relax from the early mornings? Oh, I most certainly did. I've been on a boat between Greece and Turkey, so staying at the front line of foreign affairs, I like to think.

1:11Sam, you did the adventure version and I disported myself on the upper deck in the style of Kate Winslet that you've come to expect from me. Well, I hope, Anne, that your glass was always half full. Back home, it's been the usual political summer variety show, Angela Rayner's third home in Hove, homed interview. Her dry robe and her wine glass size made the papers and stories about whether David Lammy would be or wouldn't be escaping a fishing fine after hanging out with J.D. Vance with a rod but not a licence. We've had ministerial resignations in the form of Roshanara Ali, the Minister for Homelessness, over giving her tenants notice that she was raising their rent by£700 a month.

1:56She was then accused of staggering hypocrisy by opponents because her own department will soon make such conduct illegal for landlords. And just like you and me, different political parties approached the summer season with different levels of enthusiasm and vigour. Some political parties went up a gear. Reform UK managed weekly press conferences. Keir Starmer was back in his happy place, which is abroad, with a one-day dash to the White House from his holiday in Scotland. and some, and I hope they don't think this is too rude, felt like they went down a gear. Kemi Badenoch didn't even quite have time to see the US Vice President when he was over and staying in the Cotswolds.

2:37And I would phrase it as didn't have opportunity to see J.D. Vance. I love that his press secretary then issued a statement insisting that the Vice President had really wanted to meet the Conservative leader. Specifically, he had tried to see her, a friend of his. It wasn't possible due to conflicting schedules. There you go. Very clear indeed. Anyway, luckily for Kemi, her friend Robert Jenrick was able to answer Joel Joss-Borne's invitation and head west of London. So all is well. What else has been happening? The Ukraine crisis reached another peak with a let's sort it out meeting of European leaders.

3:14Keir Starmer was included there. And spoiler alert, Sam, he didn't sort out anything at all on how to end the war, nor on any terms of a peace deal that both sides could countenance. But at least it was a show of force there by the European leaders in support of Vladimir Zelensky. And in this, the final edition of our summer box set, the last one for August, we're going to fully arm you for what might happen next. If you're a sucker for punishment and want even more revision, then sitting already in your politics at Sam and Anne's feeds, wherever to get your podcast, are five short deep dive episodes on education, health, the economy, foreign affairs and home affairs.

3:52So fill your boots. This should give you absolutely everything you need. Let's get on with the most pressing stuff since from Monday, September the 1st, it's going to hit us all pretty hard. To give you a sense of the opening weeks back, everyone will be asking, what does that number 10 reset look like on day one? And having denied a junior ranks reshuffle? Do they just do one anyway? Are they drafting more people into number 10 beyond the ex-IPPR boss and friend of Morgan McSweeney, Tom Cabassi, who is initially there on a short-term basis? But there is a lot of scuttlebutt about what that means, Sam, for the internal pecking order.

4:33And who is really setting strategy and what that means for communicating the government's message. Because there's uncertainty at time of speaking, at time of podding about what's going to happen, number 10, this is filling the thoughts of people who work in government because they don't know who's going to be setting the marching orders and who they need to follow and who is shortly to be consigned to the bin. If anybody, nobody's sure if Keir Starmer even feels he needs to have a dramatic reset. Perhaps one person suggested he decides to defer that until later in his premiership because you can't do that too many more times given he's already for instance got rid of Sue Gray which he did almost a year ago.

5:13The one change that they've made was as you mentioned Kibassi arriving. He was the author of the NHS 10-year plan but I can remember pretty clearly there was a disobliging story in the FT about how others needed to be brought in to finish off the 10-year plan after he had started it. So So I think it's fair to say his arrival hasn't landed completely comfortably with some of the people I've been talking to. Another new face, another little tiny bit of the mini reset is the arrival of David Dinsmore. He's a former editor of The Sun and a bigwig in News UK, the Murdoch newspaper group. He's now permanent secretary, director of communications.

5:48So none of the two names have got completely sort of green light from all wings of the labour movement. And what about the Treasury? We know that Rachel Reeves definitely needed a reset after a really tricky end to the last parliamentary term and, of course, what happened on the welfare and disability bill. Now, according to the new statesman, Torsten Bell is moving closer and closer and up that pecking order and will lead on the budget. That's a pretty big decision and an interesting one. given what it says about who Rachel Reeves wants to have around her. She knows really she's fighting for her authority as she goes into the autumn.

6:29So it's quite interesting to me what that really means because it sounds a bit like one of those office reshuffles where you end up wondering at the end of it who's really going to be the Rachel whisperer of note. That will be a question for the political markets as well as people like us who just love a bit of office gossip. Is this just a mid-level kind of reshuffle. It's pretty small souffle all around from the Keir and Rachel kitchens. Yeah, it does feel a bit like the answer from number 10 at the time of speaking to the chaos, and it was chaos before the summer with the loss of that welfare vote and the kind of lack of control of the economic picture, is to target the deputies' deputies.

7:06So speaking to people close to and in government, the presumption, despite early denials, is that while the cabinet rank is fine, So your Lisa Nandies and the David Lammys can sleep safely at night. There may well be changes to the rungs below that, to the Minister of State and below, because the word is there hasn't been enough delivery in the engine room of government. Somebody joked that largely it's going to be replaced by new intake MPs called Josh, because there are several of those, and they look upwards. But it's one in, one out. And for every arrival is a departure, and with every departure is a potential troublemaker in what is going to be a really tricky season ahead?

7:44A flavour of the rest of the month ahead, the Commons back on Monday, as we said. It's Reform UK's conference Friday, the 5th and 6th of September. So they're getting in there early in the cycle of conference season. We might hear the date of the budget next week too. Thoughts and prayers for parents like you, Sam, or parents of children who are affected by what their parents do during the budget. It is a difficult one if it's half term week, once more, childcare and set-piece events. Always your favourite. Oh God, yes, please not repeat of another budget in half-term week. There are children, Rachel, who don't look after themselves.

8:19You are a Labour MP after all. Then it's TUC week from the 7th to the 10th of September. And then the biggie, Donald Trump's state visit, September the 17th, a Wednesday to Friday the 19th. That is just going to be noisy. It's not really in London, but it is going to be noisy. More on that in a second. Changing gear, the Liberal Democrat Party conference is in Bournemouth from Saturday the 20th to Tuesday the 24th. Labour kicks off the following Sunday the 27th in Liverpool. Greens on October the 3rd and the Tories gather on October the 5th in Manchester. The Commons back then after conference seasons on October the 13th, which feels pretty late by usual standards.

8:58By the way, when we get to conference seasons, there's going to be a lot more politics at Sam and Anne. We're going to be coming at you hard through the conference season, so stay tuned for more about that. Yeah, stay braced. But there's no better shorthand for a scene setter of where we are right now, of why the political season is likely to be more rough than you might have otherwise expected this early on in a parliament, than just looking at the polling. So YouGov's Sky polling at the start of this week put Reform UK on 28, Labour on 20, the Tories on 17, Lib Dems on 16 and Green on 11. So Reform pretty way out in front.

9:35The Labour figure is really interesting because it's their lowest so far in this parliament. In fact, it's their lowest since 2019. So all round, I think Tories and Labour are going to go into this political season feeling bruised and feeling like they need to reassert themselves and they need to regain some momentum against the reform threat. Indeed. The biggest challenge for the government is that black hole, somewhere between 20 and 50 billion, depending on your theories of black holes, which has all got somewhat technical and exploratory. But either way, it is there and it faces Rachel Reeves.

10:13And it needs to be filled to some large degree in the autumn budget to keep within her fiscal rules. That wasn't the story, though, that dominated the summer. It felt like barely a day went past when the papers didn't have a different migration and asylum story on the front page. Record numbers coming across the channel. Will it deal with the French work? How can the government clear that asylum backlog? And the High Court then just adding difficulty there for Yvette Cooper and Keir Starman ruling that migrants must be removed from a hotel in Epping in Essex that had been the focus of weeks of protests.

10:52Where do you think that's left us and what we're looking forward to? I remember talking to Tory Home Office advisors who used to dread August because they knew that there would be pictures of people floating over the channel in small boats that would dominate the conversation and that would turn into a treadmill of news stories that was felt inescapable in August. You mentioned the French scheme. Well, at the moment, that has to be ramped up. It's just started. We've got the first people at time of speaking detained, but haven't yet gone back to France. It'll be one in, one out eventually, but one out for every 17 in initially.

11:29So a slow start to that. But the reason that people haven't gone back, as the Home Office anticipated, is because the people who are likely to be deported are going to challenge the deportations in the courts. So the story for September, October, when it comes to the French deal, is one around the judiciary. But nevertheless, until actually people see people being returned, I'm not sure that the French deal is worth a great deal. Here's a little-known detail that came out in August, Anne. For every migrant that comes over the channel, the UK must inform France in 14 days and then France must respond itself in 28 days.

12:07And if the French simply ignore the request to deport the person from Britain, the person can't be sent. So this scheme that's been signed by Keir Starmer requires very active complicity of the French. And if they just take their after ball, it gums up completely. As you say, it's exactly the sort of thing that is never put anywhere near the announcements of these things. one in, one out. How simple does that sound? A lot of people are then just sceptical about, well, does it really mean? Or is it not very many? But as you point out, even if it is to work, it relies on the two systems being very clearly meshed.

12:40Absolutely. Look, we could be teetering on the brink of a collapse of the French government, and that's because of high debt that ministers, the prime ministers there think needs to be tackled. But in a British context, that means that promises by this French government to pass maritime laws that will allow the French police to intercept small boats further out into the channel, well, they might just not end up being passed. So there's a knock on consequence there. So you have to look at whether or not the French government survives to find out whether or not Keir Starmer's deal with the French survives in its entirety.

13:11Another thing to look at, well, Yvette Cooper was briefing at the start of the summer to the Sunday Times that she was reviewing Article 8 of the European Convention of Human Rights, the right to a family life, in order to try and curb the ability of people to challenge some of these cases, some of these deportation cases in the courts. So all of that is in one in-tray of Yvette Cooper. And then in another was the decision, the consequences and the ramifications of the decision by the High Court to rule that migrants must be removed from a hotel in Epping in Essex. There have been protests for weeks outside this asylum hotel.

13:49Epping Forest District Council was granted a temporary injunction to prevent the Bell Hotel from housing asylum seekers because the council argued that it was feeding ground for unrest. This is nothing short of a disaster for the government who now has to firefight in the courts all over the country against similar cases being brought with Kemi Badenok trying to galvanise councils and help councils to do that. There are 106 ,000 asylum seekers in receipt of taxpayer-funded support and 32 ,000 of them are in hotels, all costing somewhere around£8 million a day. It doesn't feel like this is a net win and the government is having to go to court to keep asylum seekers in hotels when their policy by the end of the parliament is to get them out of hotels.

14:33The story is moving ahead of the kind of pace that the government wanted to put on it and I think they can be criticised for that in many ways the sequencing of this is something that could be got round to after a year in office has simply turned out to be wrong. It should have been there absolutely at the forefront when they came into office. That's probably enough on Home Affairs for now. The biggest challenge for this government, as we've been saying, is the black hole. But I do wonder whether this government is going to get substantively onto solving it this month, because so much of the bandwidth, Anne, is going to be given to the state visit by Donald Trump and all the issues that he's also focusing on to make sure they don't trip him up and we end up in some dreadful row.

15:19And on one level, a second state visit is a sign of success and how Keir Starmer has managed to hug Donald Trump close. You remember the pictures of that letter being handed over. But on the other hand, it's a diplomatic nightmare because there are issues, key issues that we disagree with him on. And this is coming in a very, very busy political season. Absolutely. Because for one thing, the whole idea of this, I always call it the golden coach strategy where you just do whatever it takes. You put as much guilt and golden glory and pizzazz around a Donald Trump visit as possible in order to curry favour so that you get a better trade deal than your rivals in Europe, et cetera, et cetera.

15:59But everything, and you've been onto this since the get-go, I have to say, it's not always clear when you get down the line by a couple of weeks and the golden coach has rolled in and rolled out of town and the invite has been accepted. and that will sort of what comes out of the machine at the end of it. The danger is the more you annoy him, the more you don't give him what he wants, you know, you can discover things are unpicked at a second's notice. And there is, Anne, one very big thing about which the UK and the US are diametrically and quite hostilely opposed to one another, which is that Keir Starmer said in the last week of July that the UK in September would recognise Palestine at the United Nations unless it deals with the famine conditions in Gaza and agrees to a ceasefire and makes a commitment to a two-state solution, which I think will surprise nobody to say hasn't happened.

16:50And in fact, there's a renewed offensive in Gaza going on and just beginning at time of recording. Officials that I talk to around government think that now Keir Starmer will recognise Palestinian state. The French have committed to do that. President Macron has agreed to do that towards the end of September at the UN General Assembly. So it now feels inevitable that Keir Starmer will do it as well. Although, interestingly, he may leave it to Angela Rayner to go to the UN General Assembly. It's not quite clear that Keir himself will go. That is something that Donald Trump is opposed to. Yeah, picking words very, very carefully there, I think, and the reasoning, if you like, behind a switch that Keir Starmer has clearly made towards recognition will be very, very important because what you don't want to do is then trigger a very hostile and hot response from Donald Trump.

17:37Now, in fairness to whatever one thinks of the decision about recognition, and it is a very big step, and I think it has a lot of trailing wires, which will not be as easy as many proponents think. A lot of governments, you could see as broadly aligned in their worldview with the UK, have decided that enough is enough, and they want to do something more decisive on Israel. So the UK is not alone there. One other thing that I'm sure will come up with Donald Trump, There was what looked like a detailed and well-sourced report by CBS News that Tulsi Gabbard, who is the US Director of National Intelligence, had decided to stop sharing data about Ukraine with the Five Eyes partnership.

18:16Now, CBS claimed to have got hold of a memo that talks on Ukraine were to be classed as, now it's known as noforn, N-O-F-O-R-N, which basically means no foreigners, no foreign dissemination, which includes, unusually, dissemination to the UK, Canada, Australia, other members of the Five Eyes partnership. Are we taking a step backwards when it comes to Ukraine and the US, Anne? I feel we might well be doing so. I think when the Europeans went in, they're mob-handed to support Volodymyr Zelensky. It was a good sign, if you like, for future cooperation on European security. It sent the signal, and you even hear it grudgingly.

18:58Donald Trump was out and about talking this week about the Europeans' job lot. Job lot Europeans, they felt strongly about this kind of thing. And grudgingly, I think he accepts that when everyone turned up, that was a moment he was able to spin nicely for him. that sat in rows in front of him, including the NATO General Secretary and all the big European leaders, that that looked respectful to him. But really what came out of it was nothing but a step back in terms of Ukraine hanging on to the positions that it has, waiting there for weapons to build up, which will be supplied now more by the Europeans in deals with the Americans.

19:35Nothing materially is going to come more from the US itself on those grounds. There's no ceasefire idea that's on the table at the moment. And crucially, from my point of view, as you know, my holidays or not, I do keep reading the Kremlin websites and I cannot stay away from Vladimir Putin's very long speeches. There's no pressure on him. He is simply being told that if he feels like getting around to a ceasefire, that would be a jolly good thing. But Alaska, I think, was pretty much a win for him in his terms. Nothing moved. He got to sit around with Donald Trump. It took, if you like, from his perspective, the way the Russian media is putting it across, It took, you know, whatever it was, eight, nine, ten Europeans to make one of him.

20:13You know, that would be the way if you're all these clever, shrewd, cynical characters like Peshkov, who shapes the message, you could say, this goes to show even all of these Europeans together cannot end the war in Ukraine because it's a good war. It's the right war. And I think that is a very difficult position that we're still in there in the longer term. Yes, I think we've all got the memo that we need to amp up our security, but I don't see this being particularly good for Ukraine. and I think the fighting has intensified and the drone attacks have intensified since. I was with Keir Starmer in Washington and Danny Street seemed to be quite excited about the talk of security guarantees that had emerged out of the Alaska summit.

20:52But nobody ultimately, including Keir Starmer when I interviewed him, was able to define what these security guarantees, what these promises look like or amounted to. Nobody put any flesh of the bone in until at least the very bare minimum that happens. I don't think that we're going to get any further forward. So we started the summer talking about a 20 to 30 billion pound black hole for Rachel Reeves to contend with. It seems across the summer to become a bigger black hole where even less sunlight can get in. It's become a 20 to 50 billion hole, which is inflation on the next level. The truth is that we, and perhaps more importantly, the government don't really know what that means or what the size of that is.

21:35But either way, there is a huge gap in public finances to fill. Are we any closer to knowing how Rachel Reeves might go about this? I just want to give you a couple of quotes, Anne, that arguably make the Chancellor's life even harder. The first is from August the 1st. And Rachel Reeves is responding to a story by my colleague Beth Rigby who'd interviewed Annalisa Dodds who one time sat around the cabinet table but she resigned over aid cuts but she said there should be a wealth tax and Rachel Reeves swooped in and basically said no and pointed out that in the budget last year we got rid of the non-dom tax status in the tax system so that people who make Britain their home have to pay their way we increased private taxes on private jets and on second homes increased capital gains tax and here's the key bit.

22:23So I think we've got the balance right in terms of how we tax those with the broadest shoulders, right? Four weeks ago, we've got the balance right in terms of those, how we tax those with the broadest shoulders, right? Bookmark that. It was on PA. Second quote is actually from before the election. It's from Keir Starmer. And my goodness, it's even more specific. Now, in the election campaign, the Tories had raised the idea that maybe you could get rid of the exemption of capital gains tax on people's first homes, and that maybe Labour would do that. And Keir Starmer responded to the rumours that he would make this tax change by saying he could absolutely, and that's in quotes, guarantee that he would not.

23:05Here's a quote. This is just a desperate story by the Tories in relation to capital gains tax on primary residences. And then he added that there was never a policy, so it didn't need ruling out, but let's rule it out in case anybody pretends it was. And the Labour spokesman doubled down, confirming that Labour would not put CGT on primary residences and said, it's a bad idea. Right. Rachel Reeves says, we've got the balance right for those with the broadest shoulders. Keir Starmer says, no way Jose to capital gains tax on primary residences. Right. Bookmark those quotes. Because in the middle of August, Rachel Reeves was reported in the Times to be drawing up plans to hit the owners of high value properties with capital gains tax when they sell their homes.

23:49as part of her plans to fill the black hole. So the question, Anne, is how far does this Treasury and this Prime Minister feel it can go back on its words? Does it think some words matter more than others? So for instance, the promises made in the manifesto clearly will matter more than those outside. But is it the case that Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves went around saying things willy-nilly before the election, and even four weeks ago, just completely saying anything to get through a media round that now they were giving promises that they would have to break in order to fill the scale of that black hole.

24:22But my goodness, we've talked so many times about this government boxing itself in. How do you fill a black hole if you don't allow yourself to have any of these options? And even if they did raise taxes, is there anything remotely resembling a mandate for it? Wow. Well, you certainly laid out the scale of the challenge there. I never fail to be surprised by things that the government appears to rule out very strongly. And as you said there, bookmark it, bookmark it. It's not like we picked up a few words here that Prime Minister or Chancellor said when they were under pressure. There seem to be things that are said as a communications push for people to be reassured that there are not going to be wealth taxed.

25:05They're not going to go back to doing what people think. In the end, a lot of people who are suspicious of Labour think that is in their DNA. They're going to do it, so we'd better tell them we're not going to do it. And then you find that the situation cannot be alleviated other than by raising taxes in some form. And I think it's become the kind of easy thing to say that there's no alternative. Right. We are not a one-party state. We've talked a lot about the government. There are other parties available. Kemi Badenot will be delighted to know that she is somebody who deserves some scrutiny as well.

25:34She's facing a pretty critical autumn. It'll be her first conference speech as leader. Anne, what do you think the challenge is for the Tory leader in the coming weeks. The challenge is there in the numbers, isn't it? It's simply she's going into this conference on around 17%, according to recent polls. Let's see where that settles as everybody gets back and comes to a view about whether they've changed their mind about the parties and their leaders. You look at Kemi Bader and say, OK, well, where are you in this? Just tell me what you stand for. What's your position here? And she's really jammed between saying, on things like the ECHR and issues where they're hot-button topics, to the right of politics, free speech, and the way that that has manifested quite angry arguments.