Keir Starmer’s small boats gamble

This is an audio transcript of the Political Fix podcast episode: Keir Starmer’s small boats gamble

Stephen Bush
Look, the Conservative approach on small boats hasn’t worked and is not going to work.

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Lucy Fisher
Hello. It’s Lucy Fisher here and welcome to Political Fix, your essential insider guide to Westminster from the Financial Times. You heard there the FT’s Stephen Bush talking about immigration. And Stephen’s here with me in the studio. Hi, Stephen.

Stephen Bush
Hello, Lucy.

Lucy Fisher
And also, we’re joined by the FT’s Miranda Green. Hi, Miranda.

Miranda Green
Hello, Lucy.

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Lucy Fisher
So I think it’s been quite a meaty week of stories this week. And there are three areas I want to focus on. The first is the spy drama gripping Westminster. We’ll come on to that in a bit. We’ve also got George Parker, the FT’s political editor, coming on to the show later. He did a fascinating interview with Tony Blair on the mess the country’s in and how technology can potentially be the saviour. But first up, let’s start with a story that I think is a really big moment actually ahead of the next election, which is Labour finally coming out of the traps with its own policy to tackle the small boats crisis. Now the main points of this, as we know, are Starmer wants to use serious crime prevention orders to tackle the people smugglers that facilitate this trade. And another key part is that he wants an EU-wide returns agreement, a new legal route for divvying up asylum seekers with the rest of the EU. So lots to unpick there, Stephen. What’s your take?

Stephen Bush
So the big sort of gamble here, right, is that the Labour party has a plan that would increase the total number of people who came to the UK as refugees but would decrease the number of people who come to the UK on small boats. Now there is a very live debate about whether or not what is really an upsetting bases about the small boats is that the government is not in control of the issue or if what people don’t like is the fact of refugees coming to the United Kingdom full stop. And the Labour party’s gamble is it now has a position which says we’re tackling the boat. But the Conservative party’s great hope is it gives them, having completely nuked their own credibility on this issue, a new lease of life by being able to say a Labour government means 100,000 more refugees. And then this revivifies the Conservative lead on migration.

Lucy Fisher
Because it’s not just migration, right? I mean, I can understand, Miranda, what Starmer’s trying to do here in presentational terms, bringing attention to the criminal justice aspect, talking tough, saying I’m gonna smash the gangs. That draws attention in a favourable way to his past as a former director of public prosecutions. But it does leave him open, doesn’t it, to the attack line that this is Labour wanting to cosy up to the EU again. You know, Labour aren’t necessarily safe with Brexit, the Tories will say.

Miranda Green
So I think you both have a point. Certainly it’s a gamble. You know that famous maxim: never interrupt your enemy when they’re making a mistake and doing something stupid. There would have been a case for Labour just holding back and watching Sunak increasingly fall behind his own pledge to stop the boats. But there’s a sort of feeling around that Labour has to stop coming up with some examples of where it will govern differently and how. I just think that the risk they’re taking is deciding that it’s this issue on which they should start to become really clear about what their alternative plan is.

It’s very interesting that there was a recent Ipsos Mori poll about 10 days ago, I think, which went through every single policy issue. On every single issue except defence, where the Conservative party retains a lead, Labour are now ahead, and that includes immigration, even though immigration is traditionally somewhere where Labour’s a bit vulnerable because it’s definitely the case that once you get into an election campaign, attacks on a sort of open-border, traditional Labour attitude to immigration don’t tend to land well with Tory voters. And of course the Labour party needs to bring over a lot of those voters who flirted with the Tory party in 2019 and re-elected Johnson with a hefty majority, but who would quite like to go back to Labour. So I do think there is a risk there for them. But as you say though, it does demonstrate competence and some sort of determination to have a policy solution when the government clearly doesn’t really have one.

Stephen Bush
The two things that are shaping their thinking on this are one, Deborah Mattinson, their head of strategy has been doing a lot of work in their focus groups, basically about how they get over this problem, that people basically think Conservatives are awful, they’ve made a mess of the country, but could anyone do better? And one of the things which has come out, they think in their research, is in a way that you convince people that you will keep your promises is if some of your promises I think people don’t like. The thing they found worked with the greenbelt going for growth policy, as you say, we want the highest growth in the G7 and people go, yeah, I mean, cool off. I’d like to marry Florence Pugh. It doesn’t mean it’s gonna happen. (Miranda laughs) But then when you say, and we’ll do this by doing this thing you don’t like, ie building on the greenbelt, people are, they’re more likely to believe it. So you can see that once again shaping their thinking.

But of course, the second bit in shaping their thinking is, broadly speaking, in election campaigns you wanna talk about the issues you’re strong on, minimise the issues you’re weak on, and then there will be some issues which neither party really wants to talk about all that much, which sometimes the third and smaller parties will want to hop on. Because of Rishi Sunak’s stop the boats pledge, immigration is going to be a feature of the election campaign, right? They can’t escape that. So their calculation is we’ve got to have something to say. Well, as you mentioned, Miranda, on your “Sketchy politics” video with Robert on the FT website, broadly speaking, the big known unknown in terms of Keir Starmer’s path to power over the next year is he’s going to have to set out the positions that he would actually hold in government. Those positions might attract more people to the Labour party or they might repel people.

Miranda Green
I mean, clearly, you know, Sunak’s got a massive problem on this issue ‘cause he’s combining lack of grip with empty sloganising, which never goes over well. So Labour is in a sense, right to sort of go for the attack because the government looks so vulnerable. But do you think it’s also maybe something to do with Labour deciding to time it now? You know, they’ve, coming up with an answer to this immigration problem now so they don’t have to talk about it that much.

Lucy Fisher
Yeah.

Miranda Green
When we get into, to the really, close to the election period next year.

Lucy Fisher
Well, I think it’s a bit of both. I think that they have done a good job of drawing attention to the flaws and pitfalls in the Rwanda deportation scheme. They’ve advanced at every juncture their three-pronged argument against it, that it is inhumane — that goes down well with the left; that it is ineffective and bad value for money. I think it was for me getting to the point where as much as they were criticising it, they were having to sort of that lacuna of their own policy was beginning to be felt. And again, heading into Labour conference and having to start thinking about the sort of the policy positions that are gonna be in the manifesto, it does feel to me like the right time. I just don’t think Labour can have a choice about it. I think the Conservatives have decided that immigration is a wedge issue that they want to make one of the key dividing lines of the election.

One thing I will say for Starmer is I do think it’s a real boon to him that he’s out in The Hague this week. He’s going to meet Macron. It really lends momentum to this sense that Labour is a government in waiting, and I don’t think that it cuts through with the public at large, but I think it has a real influence on opinion formers, on the media. And it just feels to me like something’s . . . 

Miranda Green
Gravitas and credibility.

Lucy Fisher
Gravitas, credibility and this sense of momentum that they are, you know, shuttling into power. And I think once the dam breaks with people just deciding that that’s going to happen, then you get everyone from influential columnists like you guys beginning to feel a lot less restrained in attacking the government as well. So it has lots of kind of effects that rebound from it.

Stephen Bush
Yes.

Miranda Green
It’s also really interesting, too, isn’t it, that it also draws attention to the geographical reality of our continued proximity to the European continent, which, you know, considering how chary they are of even mentioning the B-word, Brexit, the fact they’ve actually come up with a policy solution which involves much greater co-operation with Europe might tempt some of those, you know, discontented pro-Europeans on the centre-left to be a bit happier about the direction perhaps.

Stephen Bush
Yeah, I think. And the other thing is, right, look, the Conservative approach on small boats hasn’t worked and is not going to work. But I think you’re exactly right, Lucy, on this. The big thing he’s done this week is look like he’s the prime minister already. Like that’s just what the visual of this visit looks like. And then at that point, you know, nothing succeeds like success.

Lucy Fisher
And can I just jump in to say Downing Street were rattled. The press secretary, the PM’s press secretary, after prime minister’s questions on Wednesday was asked about this, you know, was she happy that it was the leader of the opposition going off to meet the French president and she snapped, well, look, there is precedent. Miliband went off to meet Hollande back ahead of the 2015 election and look how that worked out for him. But you could tell it did great.

Miranda Green
Well, it’s taking the initiative, isn’t it, when the government’s on the back foot.

Lucy Fisher
Absolutely.

Miranda Green
And then there was that wonderful line at PMQs, “inaction man”, which is really quite bad for Sunak, I think. Don’t know who came up with that, but you know, top-dollar joke writing in the Labour team.

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Lucy Fisher
Labour’s longest-serving prime minister, Tony Blair, thinks the UK is in a mess. And we know this because George Parker, the FT’s political editor, sat down for an interview with Sir Tony this past week. And George is here with us now. Hi, George.

George Parker
Hi, Lucy.

Lucy Fisher
So, George, the timing of your interview was great because the Telegraph has been running this line that if Starmer wins the next election, it will really be Blair the puppeteer running the show.

George Parker
Well, that was, of course, was one of the points I wanted to raise with him. And he made it clear, as you’d expect, that he wasn’t going to be a backseat driver, But I think he wanted to talk about at a much broader range of things, the things that really interest him. And sort of the point that he was making over and over again was that the situation that Keir Starmer would inherit if he wins the election next year will be far worse than the situation he inherited from the Conservative government back in 1997. And we talked a bit about Brexit, of course, but the economic situation being far more difficult and how the whole government, the civil service and the way politicians do business will have to be changed from top to bottom. And one of the main points he wants to make was that technology and the technological revolution is upon us. Politicians can’t stop it. They can regulate it but it’s gonna change everything about the way that governments operate.

Tony Blair
One essential part of this journey is to stop equating radical with just taxing and spending.

George Parker
Mmm.

Tony Blair
And the reasons for that are one, that that’s not really a very sensible way to define radical, because radical should be about the changes you’re making that improve people’s lives. But secondly, I mean, the Conservative government is tax and spend to the point (laughter) where we’re in economic crisis, right? So there isn’t, for the Labour party is, why Keir is absolutely right to be cautious about all of this. It’s going to inherit a situation in which, if you define the radical things that government is doing simply by tax and spending, well there’s not a lot you’re gonna be able to do. But that’s precisely why you shouldn’t define it. That’s not what the radical agenda is. The radical agenda today, in my view, is all about understanding, mastering, harnessing the technology revolution. Everything else is secondary to that.

Lucy Fisher
Well, George, that was just a teaser of what was a really interesting interview, and I’m keen to touch on some of the wider points you made. To start with, there was a line, I thought, some very mischievous questioning from you in the best tradition. He criticised the civil service as a great institution if one is trying to maintain the status quo. And you pointed out that he seemed to have something in common with Dominic Cummings there.

George Parker
You could have been talking to Dominic Cummings at that point. He was making a criticism of the immobility of the civil service. The fact was stuffed with generalists and how he ought to bring in technological experts, people who could understand how to change organisations. And I said to him, you know, you could be Dominic Cummings sitting there. And he said, well, some of the things that Dominic Cummings says is sensible. Not that I agree, but that was really interesting, I thought, because there were some things that he was saying that Rishi Sunak of course could agree with, because Rishi Sunak’s a great believer in technological change as well. And Blair said, well, that’s good as well, because frankly, if Keir Starmer’s gonna win the next election, if you’ve got a bit of consensus about what needs to be done, that helps because you know it’s all very well talking about the technological revolution, but of course it raises all kinds of ethical issues, difficult questions about personal data, use of AI in the health service, for example. And Blair recognised that, and he drew the parallel I thought was very interesting with the industrial revolution. He said you can’t stop it. It’s going to happen. But just as in the 19th century, or whenever it was, we had the factory act and then we introduced health and safety laws. That’s the way you deal with the technological revolution. It’s gonna come, and we just have to manage it.

Lucy Fisher
I think that’s a good point. Just to give a plug to a magazine piece we’ve written for this weekend on Sunak that touches on his technocratic leanings and how he’ll be pitched against Starmer, another technocrat. But just sticking with Blair. I mean, what do you make of this answer to public service reform in an era of tight public finances that AI or more broadly, technology is the way to do reform? It sounds good rhetorically, but how realistic is it?

George Parker
I think it’s the kind of rhetoric you use if you’re a politician who’s run out of all other avenues. And that’s, you know, covering politics as we do, you just feel that politicians have realised actually, we’ve run into this massive cul de sac. All the pressure on public spending is upward. And Blair said, look, we always talk about moving the tax rate by 1 per cent of up or 1 per cent down. It’s totally irrelevant. There’s a much bigger picture here. All the demands on public services are getting bigger. You’ve got pressure on defence spending, obviously an ageing population and we’re taxed with the highest level of tax, as everyone knows, since the second world war. Highest level of debt as well — 100 per cent of GDP.

What do you do? And only by as he sees it the aggressive rollout of new technology, whether it’s in the health service or using data to fight crime, you know, only by that can you deliver high-class public service and achieve the savings. At which point you can make the political choice about public spending versus tax cuts. But you’ve got to do that first, because otherwise you’re sort of in a rhetorical cul de sac, really.

Lucy Fisher
And I’ve wondered how toxic or otherwise you think Blair is these days? I mean, I personally feel he’s made quite a canny move in teaming up with William Hague on some issues, which makes both of them look like magnanimous elder statesmen willing to work across the aisle in a bipartisan way to tackle the challenges of the future. And the reason I ask that, of course, is because I wonder if there is gonna be a drag effect, how involved he is and some of his, you know, former third-way New Labour acolytes still floating around the current Starmer operation might be on the electorate.

George Parker
Well, we all know how divisive Tony Blair is, and you only have to look at the comments under the line of that interview to see how many people still regard him as a war criminal who should be banged up in The Hague and so forth. But the mood is changing. Starmer has obviously helped to engineer a change in attitudes in the Labour party to the point where the Blair Institute is gonna be running a whole series of events at the Labour party conference this year. A few years ago they would have been run out of town, or at least they feared they would have been run out of town. He is offering his advice across the party lines. He speaks to Conservative leaders as well.

But, you know, he’s one of these people who is so divisive. Whether people will ever come to terms with his legacy, I’m not sure. The one thing that we discussed and he said it was shocking and it’s true, is that he is the only Labour leader born in the last 100 years who’s ever won a general election. That is an incredible statistic. And he said it was shocking. And he said in the 120 years of the Labour party’s existence, we’ve been in power for about a quarter of that time and a lot of that was the 13 years that came from his winning three elections in a row. So whatever else you think of Tony Blair, you have to accept that he was doing something right. And remember, of course, he did win a general election after the Iraq war as well.

Miranda Green
I also thought what was really interesting about your interview, George, was this sort of white heat of technology theme that Blair was developing, which was a Harold Wilson theme all those years ago. And actually for Labour to win, they have to have a narrative about how they’re gonna rebuild, renew the country. That is literally what the Labour party is for whenever it manages to win an election. And so I do think it really behoves everyone else in politics at the moment to think about what he’s saying because he is focusing on the future challenges and how do we actually make this work. So that message about the future, we have to focus on the future and redefining radicalism for now when the world has changed completely since 1997 is really something that merits a lot deeper thought, I think.

George Parker
Mmm. Yeah, I mean, you spend time with Tony Blair and you’re in the presence of a politician who thinks across the piece in quite a strategic way that frankly, we’re quite unfamiliar with at Westminster these days.

Miranda Green
Who else is talking about the future genuinely at the moment that everyone else has got a sort of timespan of a couple of weeks, a few months?

Lucy Fisher
Well, this is a perfect moment to move on to our next subject, which is China, because we all know the Chinese are very good at long-term thinking in a way that is pretty much unrivalled in the west. And I have been absolutely captivated by claims that arose in the Sunday Times that a British parliamentary researcher was arrested in March on allegations of spying for China. The researcher has denied those allegations through their lawyer, and prosecutors are, of course, yet to decide whether to issue a charge. But it has thrown up all sorts of questions about the UK’s policy. And George, I thought it’d be great to start with you because you recently also interviewed James Cleverly, the foreign secretary, on China. And where do you think the government has sort of landed on this? Do they look weak? Obviously, there is a small but noisy cohort of China hawks on the Tory benches who are pushing Sunak to be more hardline, but he’s resisting that.

George Parker
Yes, I mean, obviously this is difficult, very difficult politically for Sunak and for Cleverly in the general government view, which is broadly — and Sunak made this point over and over again in the House of Commons — broadly where our G7 and Five Eyes intelligence allies are as well, which is basically you engage with China, you try to cut out the security risk, but you engage with China. It’s economically imperative that we do that. So obviously this is embarrassing for them. But I think the crucial thing to know is that they were obviously informed back in March when these individuals were arrested. They knew what was going on and they pursued the policy anyway. Cleverly went to China, and he said in the interview with us that it would have been a sign of weakness if he wasn’t there speaking to the Chinese leadership. And of course, if he wasn’t there, Britain wouldn’t be on the stage in Beijing. We had Olaf Scholz there last year. We had a state visit by Emmanuel Macron. Antony Blinken’s been there. It’s all very well for Iain Duncan Smith and the other China hawks in the Tory party to say, right, this guy’s been spying, break off all links with China. The only thing will happen is that we will be put on the naughty step for five years, as we were after David Cameron met the Dalai Lama back in the early 2010s, to no commercial advantage at all. And the other thing I’d say, at the risk of sounding like an asset of Beijing, is that everybody . . . 

Lucy Fisher
(Laughter) Comrade George.

George Parker
Everybody is spying on everybody else.

Miranda Green
Your cover’s pretty deep, George.

George Parker
Thanks very much. But if we weren’t trying to infiltrate the Chinese establishment, then what do our security services do? It’s the game, and you’ve got to be grown up about it.

Lucy Fisher
And, Miranda, I’m struck by, the government’s got its three-pillared policy towards China: protect, engage, align. Labour’s policy, the three Cs, which testing myself now, I think . . . 

Miranda Green
My God, is this a quiz? I can’t play this.

Lucy Fisher
Compete, co-operate and challenge. They’re pretty much the same thing, aren’t they? The government isn’t coming under pressure from Labour, who sounds like they wouldn’t do anything different.

Miranda Green
No, because everybody agrees on the problem, which is how do you walk and chew gum at the same time? How do you engage particularly on trade and exports and not end up, as George says, on the naughty step economically with this huge economic superpower whilst trying to negotiate the part of the relationship which is not only protecting our security against a serious strategic competitor, but also sort of trying to speak out on human rights when you feel you need to. So I think, you know, there’s really this question of how do you do it in practice? How do you both engage and protect security? And the rhetoric, as you quite rightly see, is the same from both sides of the political divide. But how you actually do that in practices seems to be much more sort of ad hoc in terms of the government, hence Cleverly’s decision to go ahead with the visit whilst these problems were sort of being flagged up at home.

Lucy Fisher
And Stephen, since we’ve had a bit of a history lesson this pod, I loved your Inside Politics newsletter this week that went into some amazing episodes of espionage in history, and I wondered if you wanted to share one of those with the listeners.

Stephen Bush
So, well, George is exactly right then. But in some ways, right, the thing which would have been much worse, which has happened in the past, would be if Rishi Sunak had not been told about the arrest. So in 1956, what may, I think, be the most unsuccessful diplomatic visit in British history occurred. Bulganin and Khrushchev visited for a state visit in a top-of-the-line cruiser, which Anthony Eden forbade the security services to go and have a look at. This order was not followed. They sent an ageing World War 2 diver, Buster Crabb, who went out, never came back. Fourteen months later, a headless and handless body, which of course couldn’t be identified by the medical standards at the time, washed up on the beach.

The Russians, not unreasonably, got very angry about espionage. Eden got very angry. But this visit was also a disaster for other less macabre reasons. The Foreign Office’s regular translator fell ill. The replacement was very drunk and spent the whole speech kind of ad libbing things like, you know, he says we’re the same. Well, we don’t have 8,000 people in Siberia, do we, Nikita? (Laughter) He had a meeting with the Labour cabinet in which contemporary reports say that George Brown was very voluble. Historically, given what we know about Labour’s then deputy leader, he was almost certainly drunk. Nikita Khrushchev had brought his 22-year-old son, George Brown goes, do you disagree with your father on anything? He says no. And he says, my daughter is at university. She disagrees with me on everything. That is the difference between your country and mine.

He then starts having a row with Hugh Gaitskell about imprisoned Social Democrats elsewhere in the Soviet Union. The meeting with the Labour party goes so badly that the day after Nikita Khrushchev says, having met British socialism, if I were in the UK, I would vote Conservative. (Laughter) I just think all of British political history is in that anecdote.

Lucy Fisher
Oh, it’s so good.

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Well, there’s just time left to do the Political Fix stock tips. Miranda, who are you buying or selling this week?

Miranda Green
Well, I’m quite light on Conservatives in my portfolio. So actually, despite the problems that we’ve just discussed with James Cleverly trying to negotiate this difficult relationship with China, I’m actually going to buy Cleverly this week because it may have come to everyone’s notice, as our colleague Robert Shrimsley wrote this week, that there’s a lot of attention on who’s gonna be the next leader of the Conservative party and do they go completely crazy or do they manage to stay on sensible territory after a potential election loss? A lot of that will depend on the size of the loss, but a lot of it will depend on who they go for as potentially a sort of caretaker leader after a loss and Cleverly seems to be a name that’s in the frame.

Lucy Fisher
Great. I think you’re joining a few of us with Cleverly in our portfolios.

Miranda Green
Ahh. We’re long on Cleverlys.

Stephen Bush
Yeah, I think Cleverly is a good buy. I’m also going to buy a Conservative for similar reasons. Well actually, I’m buying Suella Braverman this week. Given we don’t know what the shape of the parliamentary party will be, we don’t know how much damage the fact that James Cleverly has taken quite a robust position in opposition to the China hawks will take, but it will have done some. And I think crucially, either Labour’s new move on immigration will backfire, in which case that will strengthen the home secretary. Or it will not backfire, in which case the prime minister has made himself the face of small boats, which is what has destroyed basically every home secretary’s hopes of becoming leader since Theresa May helped bring down Sajid Javid’s hopes, relegated him to a second-tier candidate. It’s why Priti Patel didn’t feel it was even worth standing. But I think that the fact that Braverman is now in the situation where she doesn’t really have any particularly compelling rivals on the right of the party. She’s had some quite popular interventions on banning the American bully XL. So yeah, I’m buying Braverman.

Lucy Fisher
George, how about you?

George Parker
I think this week I’m gonna be buying Michael Gove. Not necessarily because his career is on a sort of massively upward trajectory but just because I think he’s, I think we should watch out for him. I think he’s gonna be really interesting in the coming months. So of course, Michael Gove at the FT Weekend Festival interviewed on this podcast indeed was quite interesting going on about wealth taxes and the desire of bizarrely going on about wealth taxes, so slightly going off the reservation. And then a story we’ve been reporting on is that he is really struggling to get his flagship bill, the renters’ reform bill, into the House of Commons for its second reading. He feels he’s being blocked off by, frankly, Tory MPs who are landlords or people on his team do. And I think he’s getting frustrated by that. And you just get a sense with Michael Gove that he’s gonna be quite interesting in the coming months. So, you know, I’m not suggesting he’s about to become prime minister or anything like that.

Lucy Fisher
Or defect, George. (Laughter)

George Parker
The Labour party’s too rightwing for Michael Gove.

Lucy Fisher
And finally, I’ll finish on a far more facile note. I’m selling, as though his stock are getting lower, Matt Hancock. Admittedly . . . 

Stephen Bush
You have Matt Hancock in you portfolio?

Lucy Fisher
I know, I know.

Stephen Bush
I don’t think my pension is safe with Lucy. But . . . 

Lucy Fisher
A legacy investment, let’s say. I just saw his little wheedling face pop up. He’s on Celebrity SAS: Who Dares Wins and I just, if you thought you couldn’t go off many more after the jungle. I think he’s managed to reach a new nadir.

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Well, that’s it for this episode of the FT’s Political Fix. If you like the podcast, do subscribe. You can find us through all the usual channels to receive episodes as soon as they’re released. We also appreciate positive reviews and ratings. It really helps spread the word. You can find FT articles linked to today’s podcast topics in our show notes. They’re free to read for Political Fix listeners. And don’t forget to sign up to Stephen’s award-winning Inside Politics newsletter. You’ll get 90 days free. Political Fix was presented by me, Lucy Fisher, 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 meet again here, same time, same place next week.