This is an audio transcript of the Political Fix podcast episode: ‘Will Labour’s green U-turn weaken Starmer?’
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Miranda Green
How damaged is Labour by its £28bn U-turn? Hello, I’m Miranda Green and welcome to Political Fix from the Financial Times. Lucy is taking a well-earned break, so I’m in the hot seat this week, delighted to be joined in the studio by my FT colleagues, chief political commentator Robert Shrimsley.
Robert Shrimsley
Hi, Miranda.
Miranda Green
Hello. And the FT’s deputy political editor, Jim Pickard. Hello, Jim.
Jim Pickard
Hi.
Miranda Green
So after weeks and, Jim, months even of wobbles, Labour has finally ditched its £28bn green investment plan, a move widely anticipated not least on this podcast and in your own reporting. It’s down to £4.7bn, Jim, from that huge 28, a large cut, is it really a shaving off of the ambitions? And also, we’re really interested to hear from you why now? You’ve joked about the need to update the list of Keir Starmer’s U-turns as leader of the Labour party. But actually, this is quite serious, isn’t it?
Jim Pickard
There have been an awful lot of U-turns. When the Conservatives call him Mr Flip-Flop or Sir Flip-Flop or whatever it is, they have a point because there are all sorts of things he used to say particularly when he was running for leadership which were very left-wing which he no longer says. The importance of this is that it was the biggest single Labour policy by a country mile in its financial scope, in its ambition, it was ginormous. And now it’s not ginormous. It is a much more modest policy.
And I think the sort of sense of exhaustion in Westminster about this is that, you know, the rumours began probably in November. I remember talking to Labour’s press people in mid-December saying I’d specifically heard they were talking about getting rid of the 28 figure, and they categorically denied it and they called it nonsense when the Sun said it, they said it was rubbish when the Guardian said it. They’ve done a lot of lying to the press over this because there has been internal debate, I suppose, to be fair, and they would say they didn’t fully make up their minds until quite recently. But, you know, the contradictions on this in public, Keir Starmer saying in early January if the Conservatives wanna have a fight about investing for growth and the £28bn, it’s a fight I’m prepared to have. But he’s not prepared to have quite such a significant fight anymore.
Miranda Green
We can get to the details. What I’m really interested in as well, though is this because Starmer himself didn’t know his own mind on the issue, or has there been a kind of battle of wills inside the shadow cabinet and one side has one, ie Rachel Reeves and the hardline fiscal discipline team over Ed Miliband, who’s the green champion? Or is something else been going on?
Jim Pickard
This is the ascendancy of the Blairites. You know, we’ve seen it time and time again where the Blairites in Loto, the leader of the opposition’s office, and the Blairites in the shadow cabinet win the debates with the more kind of soft left elements of Keir Starmer’s leadership, of which there are still significantly many. But this again is the biggest one of those things where you choose a cautious, kind of bland approach to sounding all changey and radical.
And, you know, specific people on one side of the camp — Pat McFadden, who’s currently Cabinet Office shadow minister and is also the election co-ordinator — he was one of the people pushing to reduce this. I think Morgan McSweeney as well, who’s the campaign chief. And then on the other side you have people like Ed Miliband, of course, energy spokesman, former leader; people like Louise Hague, shadow transport secretary, who were trying to cling on to this figure because they saw it as one of the things that would still keep leftwingers and young people on board and stop them drifting off to, for example, the Green party.
Miranda Green
OK. Really interesting. Robert, how much damage is this going to do then, do you think, in the sense that it was the most memorable, high-profile part of Starmer’s plan for government? Or do you think, actually, it’s so far to the election and that, you know, the things that we obsess about won’t affect the electorate in general?
Robert Shrimsley
I mean, it’s quite hard to be certain. I do think. I mean, political professionals talk sometimes about scraping the barnacles off the boat, where you get rid of those policies which are problematic for you at the (inaudible). I mean, they sort of scraped the boat off the boat with this one because it was, you know, the single most identifiable, as Jim said, economic, industrial, environmental policy they had. It was launched with enormous fanfare, including by Rachel Reeves, who’s now come out against it.
And so Labour has lost an awful lot of definition, and it didn’t have very much before. And I think the questions to ask is, OK, if you were starting from scratch, you would never put a headline figure on this policy in the first place. It’s always a mistake. And it got people talking about the number rather than the actual things they were going to do. But there was a number. It was there. And so the question was, which is more damaging for Labour — persisting with this policy in straitened economic times when the Tories are attacking you really hard that you’re going to have to raise taxes or borrow to do this, and it could damage your reputation, you know, for fiscal prudence, or sticking with something that you try to defend on the grounds that it’s what you’re really about and what you really want to do?
And clearly, the argument’s been won by those who say it’s better to get rid of this and not take the potential hits on tax. I don’t know which is the right decision. I could make quite a strong argument for either. The one thing I think it is fair to say is that it’s been handled desperately badly because it’s been dragging on for weeks. They’ve looked weak. Keir Starmer has been going out defending the policy, as Jim said, saying I’d fight for it. And it turns out that he’s not going to fight for it. He scaled it back drastically. And I find myself wondering, you know, if you think about the way Tony Blair might have handled this, he would probably have leaned into it and said yes, we’re absolutely committed to this. This is core to our mission to green the country, to improve the economy, to change the way we work. So it just looks, I think, a bit feeble.
Miranda Green
Jim, that is true, isn’t it, this (inaudible) exercise of bomb-proofing the Labour manifesto. You know, it’s sort of blown up in their face on this particular policy.
Jim Pickard
So I’m going to pick up on something Robert said. And at the risk of sounding argumentative I’m gonna be argumentative.
Miranda Green
Please do.
Jim Pickard
You said it was announced with great fanfare at the autumn conference of 2021. Actually, if you look back at the coverage at the time, it was not the policy and Rachel Reeves that they practically briefed. They briefed a load of stuff about fiscal discipline. They gave the story about the green plan for the Guardian . . .
Robert Shrimsley
Just the way you wrote it, Jim. (Jim laughs) You just missed the story.
Jim Pickard
Yeah, I know. I genuinely think that the media didn’t do enough on this story at the time. We made up for it in the FT when we did a big series on Starmer’s Labour last summer where we made that the focus of our reporting, because I felt and colleagues felt that it was massively under-reported. People weren’t talking about it. I don’t think Keir Starmer had registered in his mind that it was this kind of huge policy among smaller policies. I think he just thought like a lot of people were, well, you can borrow at zero interest rates. And then of course, as interest rates went up and up, the price of it became more expensive. There were four different occasions last year where they reined it back — you know, making it later and making it smaller and netting off existing government spending.
But I think what they realised is that the Conservative attacks from this wouldn’t just be you are borrowing £28bn and therefore, you know, your interest costs are gonna go up by a little bit. The Tories were gonna get very, very dirty on this and basically claim that the entire £28bn would be funded by extra taxes. And Jeremy Hunt this week talking about a 4p increase in income tax, obviously baloney because we know how Labour planned to fund it, which was via borrowing. But you could just see them realising belatedly what a political open (inaudible) this was (inaudible).
Miranda Green
So that makes it sound very much like a defensive move. Jim, can you just sort of concisely tell us what survives? What of the plan is gonna be in this new £4.7bn rather than £28bn?
Jim Pickard
Exactly. So the big numbers to think about in the original incarnation before last year’s cuts, it was £140bn in spending over a five-year period. And now it’s much closer to about £23bn, £23.7bn. And what they have done is they’ve kept two things. They’ve kept the state-owned energy company called GB Energy for £8bn. They’ve kept a national wealth fund, which is all about decarbonising industry, and that’s £7bn. There was a £6bn a year insulation programme, which has been slashed to only £1bn a year. And then basically all the rest of the £28bn, you realise when you stop to think about it didn’t exist, they hadn’t allocated it. And when I said to Keir Starmer at a briefing with journalists, you know, you don’t need to allocate maybe a third of it, what were you gonna do with this other up to £100bn or whatever it was of spending? He couldn’t really answer me. And I think that was their mistake to set the figure two-and-a-half years ago before they had the faintest idea what they’d spend it on.
Robert Shrimsley
I do think it’s astonishing. I mean, I totally agree with you about that last bit. I did think it’s astonishing they’ve cut back on the insulation point because one of . . .
Miranda Green
The one bit that would actually benefit consumers, you know.
Robert Shrimsley
One other thing was, you know, this is gonna help you have lower energy bills. And we cut this back. I find that completely baffling. Is there an explanation for why this is the one that takes the hit?
Jim Pickard
I think the very simple answer to this is simply that on an annualised basis, this was by far the biggest thing, because over five years that was £60bn, you know, it was four or five times the other two schemes. And they just thought retreat, retreat. They spread the funding over five years instead of 10 years. The other thing we haven’t talked about as well just slips in here is that rather than doing the whole thing of borrowing, they are now funding half of it through the pre-existing tax on North Sea oil and gas, which, you know, they’d allocated it last year for some kind of council tax rebate, council tax freeze. Now they’re gonna allocate it for half of the green prosperity plan.
Miranda Green
OK. Great. Robert, in reaction to this U-turn from the Labour leadership, the voice of none other than Barry Gardiner, a blast from the Corbynite past, was popping up and I think rather gleefully accusing the Labour leadership of lack of chutzpah in sticking to an ambitious plan. Isn’t this also a bit of a danger, that the restive elements in the Labour party will think, well, what is our ambition here? You know, it’s all a defensive, crouching posture in fear of Tory attacks and therefore we’re not actually writing our own programme boldly, as the Labour party should be.
Robert Shrimsley
That will be the criticism, I think, frankly, if it’s just people like Barry Gardiner, Keir Starmer will not lose too much sleep over it. They’d be interesting to see who else comes out of the woodwork in the next few days to criticise it, but I mean, it is a defensive position. It’s 100 per cent a defensive policy. It’s saying we are 20 points ahead in the polls. We are not going to give the Tories anything to attack us with that we don’t have to. And then when we’re in government we’ll do what we want to do.
I spoke to somebody quite senior in the party the other day and he was saying there are people in the Labour party who say, look, we’re 20 points ahead, we can afford one or two unpopular policies. And the defensive side said, well, then actually, let’s just stay 20 points ahead, let’s get the win, and then we’ll see what we’re able to achieve in government. We’ve got these missions, and these missions allow us to go for a clean energy approach. So, you know, we have our right to do this once we’re there and we know what the money looks like. But no, you’re absolutely right. It’s all about being a small target for attack.
Jim Pickard
But that logic is predicated on the idea that this was an unpopular policy. I think polling on it have basically suggested the public quite liked it. I guess, though we don’t know whether at the moment the whole Conservative . . .
Robert Shrimsley
That’s because they probably didn’t know the policy was other than we’re spending a lot of money on the environment. And, you know, clearly the decision was taken that once you started saying to people it’s gonna cost you a lot more money, then it would be less popular. So, you know, it was popular while it was vague.
Miranda Green
And I guess, Jim, the only question is just wouldn’t the logical thing have been to do to wait till the Budget, which is in a matter of weeks? And that’d be the point to say, well, actually, look at the mess that the Tory party is leaving us on the economy. Sadly, some of our most ambitious plans will no longer be affordable. Why now?
Jim Pickard
Yeah. I mean, we have reports in the FT that that was when they were gonna drop the £28bn. They were gonna wait for the Budget and say for these tax cuts the Conservatives are implementing. The problem with doing that on the one hand is that would leave just weeks and weeks of this bizarre kind of Schrödinger’s cat policy fails . . .
Miranda Green
Rolling story of fails, yeah.
Jim Pickard
Dead and alive at the same time and they’d almost become a laughingstock. I wonder whether also that it had occurred to them that actually if they say, look at these Tories salting the earth by giving you workers loads of tax cuts, a lot of people might listen to that and say, well, actually, we quite like tax cuts. What have you got against tax cuts? And maybe they shied away from it for that reason as well.
Miranda Green
OK. Great. Thanks, Jim. We can rely on you to harry them on the details of what they might do.
Jim Pickard
I’m sure there’ll be more U-turns to come.
Miranda Green
New, smaller, more U-turns to come. You’ll have to update that list.
Robert Shrimsley
I have to say, Jim is so excited by this story. He’s been sticking his hands up to speak. Like you could talk about this the whole podcast, couldn’t you?
Jim Pickard
Or I could do three or four hours of this (inaudible). Don’t you worry. (Robert laughs)
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Miranda Green
So this week in fact kicked off with a different story. Rishi Sunak was in Northern Ireland to mark the devolved government starting work again in Stormont with a Sinn Féin first minister, the first ever nationalist or republican to hold that post, Michelle O’Neill. And the big question is with unionists having to digest this historic change, maybe even accept the way history is moving away from them, will this deal hold? And we’re now joined by the FT’s Ireland correspondent Jude Webber, on the line from Dublin. Hello, Jude.
Jude Webber
Hi, Miranda.
Miranda Green
Thank you so much for joining us today. I guess we’ve all had a few days to reflect on the deal, so I was interested if we could sort of throw this forward. And Michelle O’Neill talked up a decade of opportunity for her republican cause for reunification of Ireland. They’re neck and neck with the two main other parties in the Irish Republic. How do you see it? Is this a great opportunity for them to sort of fight on bread and butter issues in Northern Ireland, but to further their nationalist cause?
Jude Webber
Well, it’s really interesting actually, because I mean, on the one hand, Sinn Féin has to make Northern Ireland work in order for perhaps voters to to really trust them when it comes round to the election, the general election in the Republic of Ireland, which will happen at some time in the next year and probably later on this year in the autumn. So Michelle O’Neill was very conciliatory in her speech. She only talked about working together and making the place work and all these, you know, sort of conciliatory statements. It’s a very unusual situation for a self-professed proud republican to be in, to be saying, you know, Northern Ireland, the place that, you know, they have such anathema to that they can’t really even bring themselves to say the word Northern Ireland. They do not want the name to exist. And yet here they are saying, actually, we’re gonna make it work. I mean, it sounds mad, but there’s a logic to it.
Miranda Green
And do you think that sort of attempt, as you said, to be conciliatory? I mean, she talked about governing for all sides of the community, even the dissenters, which I thought was a nice touch. How’s that going over with the non-nationalist sides in the north?
Jude Webber
Well, it’s early days. I mean, they’ve only been at work for a couple of days, as she said, she put it herself on Monday. They have a list as long as your arm of things to do. And also, I mean, it’s worth noting that this isn’t just like any normal government. This is a power-sharing government. So it’s as if Labour and Conservative were, you know, yoked together and forced to come up with joint policies all the time on everything. I mean, that’s sort of how Northern Ireland works. So you’ve got Sinn Féin in power with the DUP and also with the Alliance party and with the UUP and they all have to have a sort of a collective position. So in the one sense, her coming out and saying, you know, I want to be a first minister for all and we’re going to have consensus on things. Well, actually, that’s her job. It’s almost like a win-win for Sinn Féin in a way because if everything works really well, then they can say, you see Northern Ireland with a nationalist first minister. Look how well it works. Works better than it ever has. And if it all tanks and goes horribly wrong, they can say, well, it just goes to show how it didn’t work, you know, we did our absolute level best. But look, you know, full speed ahead to reunification. So you know, at the moment it’s the sweet spot for them to be in.
Miranda Green
So interesting you put it that way ‘cause I was thinking, you know, is Sinn Féin today’s SNP in that there seem to be a phase where the Scottish nationalists, every single political development they could use to their advantage to further their own arguments. And it seems that Sinn Féin are very skilful, actually, about using domestic policy to prove competence to then, as you say, prove trust. And if they can do that on both sides of the border, you know, it boosts their core mission.
Jude Webber
That’s the theory, right? But in fact, there has been some criticism of the party leader, Mary Lou McDonald, because as soon as the assembly was reinstated, she was already talking about reunification, which was seen as quite a provocation. But quite aside from that, in the Irish Times in Dublin there is a very worrying opinion poll for Sinn Féin. Now Sinn Féin have been, and still are, the most popular party in the south. But this poll shows that their support has gone down six points since September. They’re still on 28 points, still, you know, eight and nine points ahead of the two big political parties in coalition at the moment. But it will make very sobering reading for them.
And as we get closer and closer to the election, obviously the the incumbents, the coalition at the moment, will waste absolutely no opportunity in hammering them. You know, they’ve criticised today, the government’s already criticised their housing policies again and it will just be relentless and so, you know, for Sinn Féin to be, you know, on the back foot now, it’ll be interesting to see how they, you know, how they try and turn this around. Because in fact, reunification is their raison d’être, if you like, but it’s absolutely not the kind of thing that people, it’s not top of the pile of voter concerns at the moment. And perhaps one of the things that they haven’t factored in and that is hurting Sinn Féin a little bit is the whole debate about immigration in Ireland. So Ireland is quite unique in Europe in the sense that it doesn’t have really a mainstream far-right party. But there have been some really ugly incidents in the last few months.
Miranda Green
Robert, we’ve had a conversation on the British mainland, and Scottish separatism’s kind of been a constant conversation since the 2014 indie referendum north of the border. You can see this week, I mean, I’m sure Jude is right that this is a kind of initial sort of excess high spirits, in a way, from Sinn Féin on their reunification agenda.
But there are some jumpy unionists in this Conservative party watching what’s happening both sides of the border in Ireland and wondering whether we should, you know, turn our attention to Northern Ireland as the place that might leave the UK’s union before Scotland. What do you think about that?
Robert Shrimsley
Well, I mean, there are, I mean, unionists are sort of constitutionally jumpy.
Miranda Green
Jumpy and paranoiac kind of mindset.
Robert Shrimsley
Part of the reason for their jumpiness is a Brexit settlement that they supported. I mean, I think actually we’re miles away from a serious reunification push. The opinion polls show that there’s just . . . The support for is nowhere near. And you can’t translate the nationalist community into a simple . . . Well, that’s the vote for reunification.
Ironically, I think both Sinn Féin and the DUP have a vested interest in downplaying all this. DUP for obvious reasons — they don’t want reunification. But Sinn Féin just need to show they can be sober, serious guardians of the province. Run it well so that the people who might be jumpy about Irish unification get less jumpy.
The DUP need a period of stable government because actually the best defence against reunification is showing that Northern Ireland works, which it hasn’t been doing for the last couple of years. So actually, for all the rhetoric, I think we’re a long way off from this.
Jim Pickard
I think my question for Jude would be, I mean, I don’t think I’d fully realised the number of times that Stormont has been suspended in the last 20 years. And therefore the question is, you know, given that they’re already moaning about £3bn not being enough and begging for more, could money be the thing that leads them to basically collapsing Stormont once again in the coming months?
Miranda Green
This was the settlement that was kind of the reward for getting devolved government back up and running.
Jude Webber
Oh, they are definitely asking for more. They are already. It’s really, really hard to predict whether it will stay up. I mean, lesser things than safeguarding the union have brought down the Northern Ireland Assembly in the past. At the moment, there’s really a sense that there’s a kind of a resignation, a weariness, you know, a feeling that this is, this might be the last chance saloon so really, they have got to keep it up, make it work.
You know, for all the reasons that we said before, it’s in Sinn Féin’s interests. For all the reasons Robert said it’s absolutely in unionists’ interests. If they mess this up now then, you know, demographically, culturally, everything’s going against them. So I think it’s gonna be very interesting at the moment. You know, Ireland is saying, for example, oh yes, yes, probably we do need to talk about reform, but how could this mean not yet. Let’s get this thing up and running. I think that’s going to be very, very strongly the feeling in London as well.
I think Rishi Sunak’s probably done with Northern Ireland now. And there’s a sense in Northern Ireland that, you know, we’re not quite sure exactly what Labour stands for. No massive change, obviously, to the union, but also the sort of sense that the Legacy Act, which was very controversial. It’s the British government’s attempt to draw a line underneath the Troubles that, you know, even though Labour have said that they will repeal that, it’s not entirely sure if they will or not.
Miranda Green
OK. Jude, thank you very much for catching us up.
Jude Webber
No problem.
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Miranda Green
So back in London, Rishi Sunak faces threats from inside his party as well as outside. Stick with me, Jim, because actually it’s Robert who’s been the one on the political frontline this week, witnessing the launch of yet another Tory splinter group — should we call it Ginger Group, maybe? — to add to the “five families” of the right. Is this billed as a sixth? I’m not sure. We’re talking, of course, about the Liz Truss initiative, the Popular Conservatives. Robert, you saw them in action on the platform. Are they either of those things?
Robert Shrimsley
That’s a very good question. I certainly don’t think they’re popular. I’m not even sure they were that popular within the Conservative party because it was striking that the launch was in a much smaller venue than I initially thought it was going to be in. At least two of the sort of supposed big names who were going to be going weren’t there. One, Simon Clarke was disinvited after he called for Rishi Sunak to go. Another decided to sort of step away at the last minute.
The first thing that the chief executive of this movement, Mark Littlewood, said was it’s absolutely not about toppling Rishi Sunak; it’s about re-establishing the intellectual argument. And you look at this, you think this is really not about the leadership. It’s not even about the manifesto. It’s about the future of the Conservative party after they’ve lost an election.
Miranda Green
But more in a sort of ideological sense.
Robert Shrimsley
Very much so.
Miranda Green
Than a leadership, even after a defeat, because they don’t have a candidate, do they?
Robert Shrimsley
They’ll always find one. I mean, I think what struck me about it was, obviously, to be fair to Liz Truss, she has been ideologically consistent all the way through. She is a kind of free-marketing, small-state Conservative who worries that her vision of Conservative party — which actually really is an old-fashioned liberalism rather than the Conservative party vision — is losing to the side of the Conservative party that actually is quite statist and quite interventionist and high-taxing.
And she wants to start laying the kind of intellectual framework groundwork for the fightback, saying, come on, let’s get back to what we were in the days of Thatcher, at least, and we were popular then. So that’s the argument. And I think she sees herself, and I know she sees herself, as a sort of the Barry Goldwater British Conservative.
Miranda Green
You might have to explain that to our listeners.
Robert Shrimsley
A darling of the Republican right who stood against Lyndon Johnson, was absolutely thrashed in the presidential election of 1964, but who went on to become a major ideological figure for the Republican right and a key person in its ultimate success from Richard Nixon onwards. And I think Liz Truss recognises . . .
Miranda Green
So in a sense, he won. And that’s the point.
Robert Shrimsley
In a sense, he won.
Miranda Green
He wants to win . . .
Robert Shrimsley
The argument, yeah.
Miranda Green
In terms of her ideas. Yeah.
Robert Shrimsley
And I think that’s what this is all about. It has a fairly inauspicious start. And one of the problems is the ideological inconsistency within the Conservative party that I mentioned, which is that they want to be liberal and small-stating and low-taxing. They want to do lots of things. So they’ve got a fight on their hands.
Miranda Green
And Jim, isn’t one of the problems that even Truss herself, you know, when she was — all too briefly for her — prime minister, she was actually liberal, for example, on immigration, because it boosts economic growth. But whilst trying to be a ginger group on the right of the Tory party, you’ve got to talk about immigration crackdowns. It’s really hard even to be intellectually consistent, when you’re, you know, being a ginger group at the moment because of the splintering within the right itself.
Jim Pickard
I mean, what’s happening here is you have people who are discussing ideas which, of course, there is a market for. But why have they chosen someone so incredibly discredited to be their figurehead? There was a survey . . .
Robert Shrimsley
Well, she chose herself.
Jim Pickard
Sure, but it just shows a complete lack of self-awareness, you know, when you have Savanta the pollster saying that she is literally the least popular politician in Britain. It’s like having an advert for a bakery and having the person who burnt down London 300 years ago sort of fronting it. People in the general public do not remember Liz Truss very fondly.
Robert Shrimsley
I like the analogy — the Pudding Lane Conservatism. (Overlapping audio)
Miranda Green
It’s good. I think you should go to someone with that idea. Jim, what does the Labour party say to this? Do they just sort of look at this activity on the right of the Tory party and I suppose at the Reform UK popularity, ’cause we should say that in our sort of FT poll of polls at the moment, Reform is up to about 9.7 per cent — which is quite high. So they just think, OK, this all helps us. This is splitting the vote on the right, handing us seats. Or do they actually sort of think, OK, there is a problem here with parts of the electorate who feel unrepresented?
Jim Pickard
So I think this comes in two forms, I think the first answer is that is great for them that the Conservative party seems to have six or seven subgroups just on the right, let alone . . .
Miranda Green
I know five families is now six families, seven families.
Jim Pickard
Six families on the right, one big, happy but ineffectual family on the relative left, the Conservative party that formed the One Nation. And you know, watching these people sort of argue and having discredited people like Liz Truss fronting up is great from a Labour perspective, don’t get me wrong.
I think there are nerves amongst leftwingers, however, that the encouragement of various rightwing ideas on, for example, immigration or for example, on net zero, you know — should they catch hold with the general public, could be very problematic if you have a Labour government.
And of course, Labour is watching from the sidelines as the Tories fail to get to grips with immigration. I don’t think they particularly have a silver bullet for solving that.
And just on the net zero point, a lot of people in the kind of low-carbon-environmental world think, you know, if Reform rightwing Tories, the Daily Telegraph, all these people are attacking the Conservative government for pursuing net zero, you know, the gloves will really be off if there’s a Labour government and things could get really nasty and quite difficult.
Miranda Green
Robert?
Robert Shrimsley
I mean, I think, you know, it’s very easy to mock some of this five-family stuff and all these ginger groups. But the truth is, what we’re actually watching in real time is the reconstituting of the Conservative party. And since they tend to win elections more often than they lose them, this matters. And what is going on is the effort to try to marry the two energetic strands of the Conservative party — the free market strand and the populist strand, the immigration strand that you were referring to, and an attempt to find a way to say, can they function together? Because they’ve looked at right-of-centre parties across western Europe and in America and seen that there is something there, the energy which brings into paths of nationalism, a sort of nativism, but also an attempt to say we could be low tax, we’re not net zero. So this is an attempt to fashion the next evolution of the Conservative party. And even though it may not have the right figureheads at the moment, I do think we should take it seriously because this is the direction of travel for the Conservatives.
Miranda Green
It’s really interesting, isn’t it? I’ve been looking at this new study out this week from Focaldata. I think it’s the first of its kind of actually who are these voters who are telling pollsters that they might vote for Reform. And although a lot of them, about half, are what we would suspect disgruntled defecting Tory voters, actually, there’s a lot, nearly half, who are actually being pulled in a positive way towards these sort of values that they think Reform UK embodies. And that’s actually a challenge for all of the mainstream British parties.
Robert Shrimsley
It’s a massive question there for the Conservative party, which is that it has built its success by having those two strands, but also a more socially liberal, successful metropolitan strand as well. And the question is . . .
Miranda Green
The Cameronian strand.
Robert Shrimsley
Exactly. The question is, can it still coexist with all three? And if it can’t, if it’s permanently giving up that third strand to the Labour party, is it gonna be able to attract enough people to win a majority? And that’s a really big question.
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Miranda Green
We’ve just got time as we wrap up for our stock picks. Jim, who would you be buying or selling this week? It’s been an eventful one for you, I know.
Jim Pickard
I think I’m probably gonna sell Kemi Badenoch. Not that I’m heavily invested in her, but given that the odds on her being the next Conservative leader are so low and she’s very much the frontrunner, I think her handling of the PMQs this week, where we have Brianna Ghey’s mother in the viewing gallery in the House of Commons, and there was that unedifying reference to trans issues by Rishi Sunak, who perhaps hadn’t listened to the bit where Keir Starmer said who was in the viewing gallery just to give him the benefit of the doubt on that, and then for Kemi Badenoch to sort of weighed in and say that this was all Keir Starmer’s fault, you know, that this argument happened, which is at odds with what Brianna’s father said later that day when he asked the prime minister to apologise. You know, this debate is not about are you pro-trans rights, anti-trans rights? It’s basically there’s a grieving mother in the House of Commons. Are you gonna treat her with respect?
Miranda Green
Robert, how about you?
Robert Shrimsley
OK. So I mean, the easy thing to do, given that the Tories are probably gonna get trounced in two by-elections next week, would be to sell Rishi Sunak, but I can’t sell Rishi Sunak every week. (Miranda laughs) So I’ve decided to go for a classic trader move here and buy Ed Miliband on the grounds that you buy the dip in trading. He’s had a bad setback on the green plan, which was his baby, as it were. But he’s not being sacked. He’s got behind the new position. He will go into the cabinet if Labour win the election and he will be a forceful figure, not least because he’s one of the few who’s been in government. So on that old buy-the-dip basis, I’m gonna buy some Ed Miliband. What about you, Miranda?
Miranda Green
Well, actually, you can buy my Miliband stock if you want because I’m gonna sell him.
Robert Shrimsley
How many cents on the dollar? What are you selling him at?
Miranda Green
I’m just gonna, you know, rid myself of my Ed Miliband holding.
Jim Pickard
Hell, yeah.
Miranda Green
Hell, yeah, as he once said so famously. Robert and Jim, thank you so much for joining us.
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Jim Pickard
Pleasure.
Robert Shrimsley
As always.
Miranda Green
And that’s it for this episode of the FT’s Political Fix. I’ve put links to pieces discussed in this episode in the show notes. Do check them out. They are free for Political Fix listeners. There’s also a link there to Stephen Bush’s award-winning Inside Politics newsletter. You’ll get 30 days free. And don’t forget to subscribe to the show.
Political Fix was presented by me, Miranda Green, and produced by Audrey Tinline. Manuela Saragosa is the executive producer. Original music and sound engineering by Breen Turner. Cheryl Brumley is the FT’s global head of audio. We’ll be back next week with Lucy once again hosting. Thanks to all of you for listening.
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