- today
#KeirStarmer
#UKPolitics
#BBCNews
Today, Laura and Paddy ask who is in charge of the UK as the Prime Minister's authority is again in question.
From backbenchers, to ministers to the markets - who is actually driving this government? Laura and Paddy look to find the answers.
Subscribe here: http://bit.ly/1rbfUog
For more news, analysis and features visit: www.bbc.com/news
#KeirStarmer #UKPolitics #BBCNews
#UKPolitics
#BBCNews
Today, Laura and Paddy ask who is in charge of the UK as the Prime Minister's authority is again in question.
From backbenchers, to ministers to the markets - who is actually driving this government? Laura and Paddy look to find the answers.
Subscribe here: http://bit.ly/1rbfUog
For more news, analysis and features visit: www.bbc.com/news
#KeirStarmer #UKPolitics #BBCNews
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00Who is in charge? Now, why, why, why, Paddy, would this be the question that we want to ask at this moment in time, do you think?
00:07Well, it's to do with the fact that the Labour government is booting out MPs, which is surprising everybody.
00:15And it's surprising everybody because they've got such a massive majority.
00:19And so this theory goes, if you has a massive majority, as one Whitehall insider, a senior figure said to me, this government should be walking on water.
00:27There should be nothing they can't do. And why, therefore, should they bother about a bit of grumbling from the back benches?
00:33Does it look a bit small? Does it look a bit petty to feel that they have to chuck people out?
00:38And, of course, when you speak to one of them, as I did, Rachel Maskell, it's clear that there's a differential by how they're all being treated.
00:48It's like the government whips have been looking for the ringleaders, the people who are organising dissent.
00:54I don't know if this is something that you've picked up. That's certainly what I was getting in conversations leading up to the PM programme with Rachel Maskell.
01:03I know what I was told, and that was because I spoke out for the poor on their social security.
01:09The word that was briefed to journalists was you were engaged and the four of you were engaged in knobheadery.
01:15Well, I have to ask if that is appropriate conduct, because I certainly think speaking for the poor is, but that isn't.
01:22And yet I end up suspended in this process.
01:25And given that Labour has four years and given that you want to change, are you saying Labour has to change?
01:32Completely. I do believe that's the way forward. The country called for change.
01:37They've seen what they've got. The opinion polls aren't working in our favour, which is saying Labour has to change.
01:43And I think that is not about the retail offer, the policies, because we've got some great policies out there.
01:49But it is about the culture as well as obviously making sure that we do what the Labour Party was created to do, to stand up for the people that need our voice.
01:57Rachel Maskell, the MP who's been booted out of Labour for now, cleverly, laudably failing to take your bait when you cheaply used the word knobheadery,
02:08which was used by party sources to explain why she and others had been kicked out.
02:12But also they're referring to the opinion polls and the latest YouGov voting attention suggests reform is on 27 percent, Labour on 22.
02:21The Tories significantly behind reform on 17 and the Greens at 12.
02:26It's interesting, isn't it? Because as she said, and as you said, that distinction between what Rachel Maskell was accused of doing alongside Brian Leishman,
02:35Neil Duncan-Jordan and Chris Hinchcliffe, the other three MPs who've had the whip taken off them for now, is they're accused of organising.
02:44And that is the distinction when you talk to people in government about what they were doing.
02:47You know, why does Keir Starmer, who's got a huge majority, need to worry about noises off from a tiny clutch of MPs?
02:53Because organising resistance was essentially what was described to me.
02:57And a senior government figure said, you can have as big as majority as you want, but if you've got no discipline, you end up with chaos.
03:04And the country can't have chaos when the government's trying to, you know, fix all the things that they came in to try to do.
03:10But I think it does still look quite small, if you like.
03:15You know, somebody reminded me this week, Tony Blair didn't kick anybody out when many, many of his MPs rebelled and voted against the war in Iraq.
03:23And it is rare, very rare, for a prime minister to act like this.
03:29Yes, it looks a lot to me, who's not the expert, that they were surprised because they went a long way down the line with the welfare plans.
03:38And then there was that flurry of activity when they were being told that they were going to face a very big rebellion, even though people on the inside, including Nick Watt on Newsnight and many of the times you were briefing us, people were saying there is a lot of resistance on the back benches to removing the PIP payments from thousands of people.
03:58And it was the government's own figures that said that was going to make people worse off.
04:03So it was very difficult after a while to understand why they didn't see all that coming.
04:07So, look, the sequencing is again in question here because when they came in, they allowed the narrative to be about winter fuel payments.
04:14They've had the rebellion, they did the U-turn, and now they're dumping people.
04:19That's right. And it's begged the question around Keir Starmer's authority this week because booting people out does raise this question of did they really understand what was going on on the back benches?
04:28Is where's the balance of power between back benches and Downing Street?
04:34And as someone said to me this week, look, number 10 was completely spooked, to use their word, by what happened over welfare.
04:41But they went on to say, I don't think back benches are running it, but they do have a taste for power.
04:47And I think what's happened in the last few weeks and even in the last 24 hours, where one of the people who was booted out has had a flavour of what he was calling for on planning reform now accepted by the government, which the Tories are branding another U-turn by the prime minister.
05:02I think the balance between Downing Street and the back benches has shifted in the last couple of weeks.
05:08And there's just a bit of a, if you like, I wouldn't say the skids have been put under the relationship, but there certainly is a bit of kind of unease around it.
05:17Backbenchers who have now largely, not completely, but many of them have already sort of packed up for the holidays.
05:22Some of them will be in Westminster a few days next week.
05:25They've now got six weeks to go off.
05:27Clearly, the party managers hope that they won't be, you know, chit-chatting with each other and plotting and resisting, looking ahead to making life difficult for Keir Starmer at the party conference when we come back after the summer.
05:37But there is just something not going as smoothly as you might like.
05:43And inside number 10, the sort of acknowledgement that they felt they had to lay the law down.
05:51But some commentators have interpreted that as them looking like they're a bit thin-skinned or maybe a bit insecure.
05:57And should they be able to just flex their muscles and not worry about it?
06:00Because that's why you began our podcast by saying who's in charge with the question, who's in charge?
06:05A decision just before they rise for their holidays to kick four of them out, the troublemakers out, accused in briefings of knobheadery.
06:15Who's behind that decision, do you think?
06:17And do you think it's the timing?
06:18Do you think it's because they're rising in a couple of days, rising being the political jargon for going on holiday?
06:26Do you think it's the timing?
06:27And who came into a room and said, Biffam?
06:31Well, first point, any MPs listening, anybody in Parliament listening, they will all be screaming at their earbuds, saying they'll be working hard in their constituencies and government ministers will be working hard in their departments.
06:43So I will put that, therefore, on the record.
06:45They don't all disappear and do nothing but sit on the lounger for six weeks.
06:49However, how it was explained to me is that Keir Starmer was, I was told, clear from the beginning of this fiasco over welfare.
06:57He was, supposedly, I was briefed, clear that there would be repercussions for people who were repeatedly causing trouble.
07:05Not people who just quietly voted against because they had unease or didn't agree with the policy, but people who were trying to foment discontent and make life difficult for the government.
07:17And even, you know, a senior MP said to me, well, if you think of one of them, and I won't name them, they had never behaved like a Labour MP at all since they'd been elected.
07:26They'd always been shooting their mouth off and trying to make life hard.
07:30I'm then told that the whips essentially drew up a list of people who had been organising resistance against some of the things that Downing Street wanted to do.
07:42And then that list was then presented to Downing Street and they decided to take action.
07:49So I think clearly over welfare, there was a malfunction between the whips and Number 10.
07:54The whips had been warning Number 10 for ages that there was trouble ahead.
07:57Number 10 didn't want to ditch the policy.
07:59Ministers were all told out to go out and defend it.
08:02I kind of wonder if after the welfare debacle, there was a bit of the whips saying, look, well, we kind of, we were trying to tell you.
08:09We told you so. You've got to do something here.
08:11You've got to make a point.
08:13And therefore, voila, here is the repercussion.
08:16Here is the moment where actions have consequences.
08:19But I just wonder, actually, I know some Labour MPs don't see this as a kind of thing that is going to make them more likely to fall in line.
08:26Some of them just think this is a thing that has made them a bit cross and feel a bit patronised.
08:30And one senior MP who was one of the initial welfare rebels said to me about it, look, actually, the point here is they've got to respect backbenchers because we're the people hearing from the public.
08:42The flip side is on the inside of the government.
08:45They say, look, people in the parliamentary Labour Party who want us to spend more money have to understand, and I'm paraphrasing, have to understand that if you want to spend more money, it's got to come from somewhere.
08:57You can't just keep saying yes to everything.
09:01And that's another part of your who's in charge question is that are the markets in charge?
09:05Because they appeared to get a giant stick and poke it at the British government when Liz Truss was in charge.
09:11That seemed to be a big market reminder.
09:13The bond markets terrify elected politicians.
09:16And I will say that a lot of newscasters might think they don't really want to be run by the bond markets.
09:21They would like to be run by the politicians that have been elected under our system.
09:26So it's actually always been a source, ever since I was a student of politics, of real anger that the markets can push elected governments around.
09:34But here's a fact, the markets can push elected governments around.
09:38So one of the things we've got to discuss before we go away, not on our holiday, but on our working discussions in other rooms, is what role the markets have.
09:46And I know you've written about this, but I just wanted to add something that I got from the chatter around Rachel Maskell when I was in York, which is her constituency.
09:55I was told by people close to her that in the street, people have started honking at her and saying, good on you, Rachel.
10:06It's not happening all the time.
10:08And I didn't go out on the street with her.
10:10But I was told that that's been a change since she's been an MP in the last couple of weeks because she's tackled this issue.
10:17She's she's getting the public to pay attention to the difference between her position and the Labour government's position.
10:25Isn't that interesting? And that's a real world consequence for her in her constituency.
10:29Perhaps it has bought her more support.
10:32And it's also worth knowing, you know, for newscasters, Rachel Maskell is not the kind of politician who has who is goes looks for a cheap headline.
10:42She's not somebody who's sort of, you know, huge on social media.
10:45She's not somebody who has overtly done anything other than diligently over many years speak up for the things that she believes in.
10:55You know, there is always tension between backbenchers and government ministers.
11:00That's how the system is built. There's no nothing unusual about that.
11:05That's why this is so interesting is that Keir Starmer has decided to take this kind of action when having rebels on your back back benches is the occupational hazard of being the prime minister.
11:16And, you know, he would hate the comparison.
11:19But the only prime minister who did the same kind of thing as Keir Starmer has done not once but now twice was Boris Johnson when he booted out more than 20 MPs for defying him during the Brexit saga.
11:30Which is a reminder of how the parliamentary system works.
11:33He's it's a party post the leader.
11:37The leader is then called to be the prime minister if they can command the most of the MPs in the House.
11:43So it's a reminder of what the Labour Party means to the Labour government.
11:47And of course, they haven't had to feel that fire for 15 years.
11:51And it does it does seem to reinforce a year after the general election the oft repeated criticism that they they campaigned ferociously, but that something about government has surprised them.
12:02And as we get to this one year on, what we're really talking about is the way that they are still being quite surprised by pulling on these leaves of government.
12:10And, you know, that's one of the reasons why I think we have to do talk about the markets, because Labour backbenchers seeing this massive majority may think that's rather luxurious.
12:20But actually, when the government then faces the adding up with its build, getting its abacus out, once you take away those projected savings for reasons of principle, once you take them away, that that money, the seven billion or whatever it is, has to be found from somewhere else.
12:36That's right. And that either means a cut or it means an extra tax or it means, I don't know, checking down the back of the sofa.
12:42But it's interesting. And I think there is frustration at the top of government that not everybody in the parliamentary party understands, as they would believe it, the constraint that the financial markets put on them.
12:58And as a senior source said to me, the markets are more in charge the more we borrow.
13:03So people who want more parliamentary sovereignty, IEMPs being able to choose anything they like, should not be advocating for things that require more borrowing.
13:12Markets are not in charge, but people who lend you money expect it to be paid back.
13:19And of course, in a country when the debt interest is more than 100 billion, it's more than we spend on defence.
13:24In fact, I think it's about double what we spend on defence.
13:26It is this huge chunk of the government's spending that they don't have any choice over.
13:33They have to keep servicing the debt.
13:36Of course, they've got a choice about how much extra they have to borrow.
13:39But our economy is not uniquely, but is acutely exposed to changes in how much it costs to borrow.
13:46And if you worry your lenders in the way that if you miss a mortgage payment more than a few times, you spook the bank, you spook the markets, and they can have, as Liz Truss discovered, a terrible, terrible effect on any government.
14:00And that's one of the things that, you know, I think most ministers are very acutely aware of.
14:04Many of them would say, the backbenchers all really get it.
14:07Not so sure.
14:08One of the things we try and do when we meet at the weekend is say the counterintuitive thing.
14:13She's in a lot of trouble, the Chancellor, Rachel Reeves.
14:16But when she wept on the, and it looked as though she was, her position was in doubt, the markets didn't like that.
14:23There was, these market people we keep talking about, it wasn't better for them that Rachel Reeves left in a chaotic fashion, the Labour government, weeping.
14:33That wasn't, according to these market people, that wasn't what success looked like.
14:37Correct.
14:37So it's very intriguing to go around the cabinet table, isn't it?
14:40Because the way that Keir Starmer then had to limpet himself to his Chancellor, he's put her into a position of greater strength.
14:49And I wonder this question, who's in charge?
14:51Are there now tribes, we used to talk about in the Thatcher era about the wets and the dries.
14:56Do you think around the table there is now a sort of Wes Streeting cluster and an Angela Rayner cluster?
15:02How does it look to you?
15:03Oh, yeah, I think there is the sort of Starmer, Reeves, you know, Blairite and Brownite, that doesn't really exist anymore.
15:11What you have, though, I would say people who would say about themselves things like, I'm a hardheaded pragmatist and I believe in ironclad discipline.
15:19Then you would get people who you could probably describe as being sort of soft left.
15:24And one of the questions people have been grappling with in the last couple of weeks is, does Downing Street ditching the welfare reform mean that the soft left have got more authority and more kudos and more in power than this government than they did a few weeks ago?
15:40And that's one of the things that they're all wrestling over, which is why the question of the markets is a very, very important one.
15:47But it's also important when you come to ministers and whether or not after 12 months of being in control, they really are in control.
15:57Like are ministers in charge?
15:59And I had some really intriguing conversations with officials and politicians about this this week.
16:07Our ministers, some of whom had zero experience of doing anything like being in government through no fault of their own, really in charge of what they're doing.
16:17And I've got to say, Paddy, talking to people who are some people are very experienced, been around for a long time and people also, you know, trying to do these jobs.
16:24The picture is very, very mixed.
16:27It's very, very mixed.
16:28I mean, one experienced official said to me, a government is in charge if it has a plan, but if it doesn't, it cedes that.
16:36They still don't really have a governing plan.
16:38So it feels like the PM is in charge, but it's hard for his writ to be made to work.
16:44And I asked one member of the government who's in charge and literally they laughed and said, I can't answer that question.
16:51And you still get this feeling.
16:53And of course, it's different in different bits of government.
16:55But you still get this feeling that grip could be a lot tighter than it is.
17:03And some sources were telling me that, you know, it still sometimes feels chaotic.
17:07They're getting different instructions on the same day, even that can be contradictory.
17:12And it's just a really interesting thing.
17:17You find a lot of people around the place in Westminster and Whitehall who still say the government hasn't really found its groove.
17:23Clearly, they'll say and loyal ministers will say, actually, we've been really effective.
17:27Everybody should stop focusing on the negative.
17:29But there is this kind of unease.
17:34And Whitehall, the senior Whitehall figure said to me, they don't inhabit their power, which I just thought was such an intriguing phrase, almost like they're still kind of waiting for someone else to turn up.
17:47You know, are we really it?
17:48Are we really the grown ups or are we waiting, waiting for your mum and dad to come and pick you up at the end of the night?
17:55Yeah, I mean, it's amazing because just if you take a longer view, that it's you can see that actually the operation number 10 is very thin.
18:02We know that because Tony Blair said it would have been much better for the government if they'd moved out of number 10 and number 11 into the giant conference centre near Westminster Abbey and made it a modern office instead of like a Georgian building with strange little antechambers.
18:18Also, in the pandemic, we saw that the government was very, very thin.
18:22And those people who were there, although there was a psychodrama, Dominic Cummings said it's very difficult for government to do anything.
18:29That was obviously a very, very turbocharged part of conservative politics.
18:33But I'm linking them because Tony Blair wasn't a turbocharged part of British politics.
18:37I'm linking what Blair said to what Cummings said.
18:40And now we can say that power is hard to wield in the British system without a giant sense of, you know, ownership.
18:46And also, when this all started 12 months ago, there was Sue Gray and Morgan McSweeney as chiefs of staff.
18:54So one thing you've told me, because you're about to publish the article, which I was not prepared for, is a review that suggests a whole new government department called Downing Street.
19:05And that does, if you believe in the action and reaction view of human behaviour, does that tell us that at the very top, they admit it's hard to govern?
19:15I think at the very top, they absolutely admit it's hard to govern.
19:18What they would say in their defence is we're much better at it than we were when we walked in.
19:23But they absolutely say that it's difficult to govern.
19:26And they say that it is particularly difficult to govern in what they describe as a low trust environment, basically, when lots of newscasters, many members of the public don't believe very much that any politician says, let alone believe that government can be a force for good.
19:41There's another aspect, of course, to that, which what was described to me as a deep current of instability.
19:47If you think about everything that's happening around the world and having an unpredictable American president and all those sorts of things.
19:53So there's another question about could any modern government actually in a middling sized country with a with an economy that's sort of pootling along, not very impressively, really be in charge and the master of all its surveys.
20:08But if you think of the very kind of micro for a second, the Institute for Government, that's a very well respected think tank, has said actually this week that ministers don't really look like they're living up to their promise of rewiring the state and they and they should do things differently.
20:23Over the summer, there's going to be a report published by the Forum for Future Governance, say that after two martinis.
20:33That's a think tank that has got quite close links to senior figures in Whitehall and the Labour Party.
20:39It's the one that's going to recommend having a department for Downing Street.
20:43So I think you might see a succession of people, actually, as we sort of trot towards the conference season, when these kind of mega nardy debates are likely to take place, where you get quite a lot of experts saying,
20:57Keir Starmer, if you really want to make this an effective government and if you really want to use the time that you have effectively, you really have to shake things up to get government going.
21:08Whether there's appetite for that kind of surgery is a different question.
21:13And I don't pick up that inside government there's huge bandwidth to think about these structural things, but we'll see.
21:19It's an interesting debate for proper nerds like us and hopefully not too dull a one for newscasters.
21:26Well, I think a department for Downing Street is that's not nerdy.
21:29That's very interesting. I don't think that's nerdy.
21:31That's action because there's so much guffery around and everyone doing palace politics.
21:37And you go right back to what voters really care about.
21:40They really want NHS waiting lists to come down.
21:44They really want the cost of living problems to be addressed.
21:48So you had a problem for Rachel Reeves where inflation went up.
21:52You've got a likely predicted outcome in the next months where the Bank of England will put rates down.
21:57There is also another prediction that interest rate, that interest inflation could fall.
22:01So you can, again, in the six month period, you could get waiting lists coming down, inflation coming back down and interest rates coming down.
22:11And there is this other aspect to the Labour woes, which is sort of what Rishi Sunat used to say, which is trust the plan.
22:18So they need to reassure people there is a plan.
22:22They need to find a way to tell Labour backbenchers, the plan won't work if you keep spending the money.
22:28Therefore, we go right back to where you started.
22:30So you crack the whip, you bush four of them out.
22:32They all go away for their working time.
22:34And it's not in the whatever you said.
22:36They're not a holiday.
22:37They're working constantly.
22:38Every hour of every day.
22:40You've planted that seed.
22:41You've planted that seed.
22:42Well, and yeah, and I think we like to at the weekends, don't we, sometimes be the optimist rather than all the doom of the weekly news Monday to Friday.
22:50You know, there is a possibility for the country and for the government's optimists all see that they hope they might be able to start turning lots of things, the economy, people's, how they feel about themselves, how they feel about the country.
23:05They hope that they may be able to, in time, break what pollsters will tell you, and they've told us on this podcast before, is a pretty grim national mood.
23:17And there is a sort of, you know, there is a zone where things get better as well as just, you know, what is easy copy, easy copy for terrible journalists like us to say everything's terrible.
23:30And, of course, in politics, people like moaning about their colleagues or else there'd be nothing in our notebooks.
23:35You can see we're very busy here at the crime conference, a crime festival.
23:39We've got an occasional visitor in the room.
23:41I'm a bit worried somebody's going to come in with the lead piping.
23:44It is a bit like that.
23:46There's a Cluedo feel.
23:47So, given that time is tight for everybody and the whole audience might come into my little vestibule.
23:52We can't leave without saying that into this fascinating British tapestry of politics will shortly be stitched a very primary colour in the sense that Donald Trump's going to Scotland and the Prime Minister will meet him.
24:05Yes, the Prime Minister is going to meet Donald Trump, who is coming to his mother's homeland, my homeland, Scotland, next week.
24:14And talking about a deep current of instability, the sense I got from people in government in the last couple of days is they don't really know what's going to happen.
24:24Obviously, they are fervently trying to figure out what they'll be able to achieve in the talks.
24:31They will have some talks, but this is not the state visit where there'll be golden carriages and big dinners and all those sorts of things.
24:38We think there's going to be an encounter at Turnbury, lovely golf course in the southwest of Scotland in Ayrshire on the beautiful coast, just happens to be owned by Donald Trump's corporation, whatever it's called these days.
24:52There'll also be a visit, we think, to somewhere in Aberdeen after Donald Trump said disobliging things about wind farms and windmills being all over Scotland.
25:01And what I can tell you, and amongst all the uncertainty of what will happen, I was told very definitively that we're not going to see them driving around a golf buggy together and that Keir Starmer will not be picking up a nine iron or wearing some, you know, pressed chinos in a sort of golf polo, a la Rory McIlroy, or a kind of Pringle jumper.
25:22We are not going to see that. Keir Starmer is not a golfer.
25:25Oh, OK. And also, I mean, this is a bit controversial for our newscasters who are golfers.
25:31Yes.
25:31I think it's quite hard to carry off buggy dignity.
25:37I think it's because apart from anything else, if you're in a very slow moving vehicle that looks like it was made for Noddy, the question then becomes who's at the wheel?
25:47So if you're two leaders of two countries and you're not even the one at the wheel of the Noddy car, it's not a very good look.
25:58The only time I've been on a golf buggy in the last few years was with a colleague and we were at an international summit somewhere.
26:04I think it was in Argentina.
26:05And we ended up being driven into the room where some of the leaders were meeting by mistake.
26:10I mean, I owe my student accommodation to a golf course where I worked.
26:17Did you?
26:17So I'm, yeah, I'm not slagging golfers because you remember the time I raised ambiguous questions about cats.
26:24Yeah, don't do it.
26:25So I'm just going to be clear.
26:27Please play golf and please enjoy golf, especially if you can afford it.
26:30It would be terrible to say if you could afford it or that sometimes people suggest that it is a way of ruining a nice walk around a beautiful place.
26:40Don't do that.
26:40Those would both be terrible things to say.
26:43And I'm sure somewhere there's a very, very good podcast about golf.
26:47And actually lots of people are having a lovely time in lovely Portrush.
26:50Fine.
26:51But the private visit, there will be talks.
26:54So we do wait for news between the president and the prime minister.
26:57We do.
26:57And of course, there are lots of very important things that they have to resolve.
26:59Far more important about whether or not they get in a golf buggy.
27:02However, the optics of these things do matter.
27:05And at the moment, it's hard to know actually what any of the concrete things that they will be discussing will be.
27:11Thank you very much indeed for listening to this one.
27:13From me in Harrogate, goodbye.
27:15And from me in London, goodbye.