Future of Labour Political Economy

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No, yeah, I mean Tony Blair's it it's an interesting essay, Tony Blair's one, because the first third of it is really angry, it's brimming with he almost goes straight. If I I suspect that his team helped him write a lot of the substantive policy bit, but the first part really feels like his voice, and it's so the first third of it is essentially a I can't believe this is happening. And then the second two th the next two thirds are this is what we should do about it. So I think I would say stylistically it's a bit confused. Uh but it's a fascinating essay. I mean we'll come on to it obviously. Where's street ing's piece I think was uh was a plea to the Labour Party that you know I am really Labour, I know you don't think I am. A bit of that going on. And interesting that he he landed on the inequality gap as it were in Blair essay in the way And the style of Wes and Andy came through in their very different takes with a similar lead concept of inequality being missing in Blair's essays. And Andy's was very much of his personality, I thought. It was, you know, about politics being a human business and um uh the the sort of missing gap in the in the DNA of Westminster and all that sort of thing. So they all all reflected their personalities, I think, in different ways, which was fascinating to see. And actually really refreshing. I know everyone's it's become one of the trite things to say in the last few days, but great to see the debate back in politics. It's absolutely true though, but great to see the character of these individuals manifesting itself in their views of the world, I think, which is great to see. Well maybe the fact that the last of all of them was Keir Starmer, which uh maybe says something. But I mean what do you make of his as well? It had a section in it which I thought was fascinating about the two thousand eight crash being the unheralded pivotal change in British politics. But actually the roots of what came through after 2008 go way back into the last Labour government, the cost of living crisis, that the the kind of bountiful years of you know, roughly speaking , nineteen ninety-two when we crashed out of the ERM, for those older listeners, we were in a thing called the ERM, to about two thousand eight, those sort of sixteen glorious years when things were doing incredibly well. I remember Gordon Brown when he when he first started the Treasury. I think the growth the month before was something like 3.9% and debt was 33% of GDP. That just seems like a different era, and it is a different era. And I think Kear's essay made the point that 2008 is a break point, but that a lot of the crisis of particularly living standards goes way back into those years when it felt okay, but actually the seeds of inequality and people missing out on the on the growth story were were already being set. So I thought that was good. I thought I thought he did a good job of being defensive without sounding chippily defensive, I thought, which I thought was quite stylishly done. This is the man after all who said I've Tony Blair is my political role model. So when Tony Blair says it's which which are critical, it's quite tough to it's quite tough to come back and um put him down without putting down your own role model. I thought he did it pretty pretty elegantly in the end. Yeah, there was a nice line at the start of Keir Starmer's pieces. I'm sure Gordon Brown will love that line. Well we'll wait to see Miliband and Jeremy Corbyn. We're waiting to see what latest essay he'll put in the new statesman. Uh it's nice they're giving a sort of budding student hack uh a sort of chance there. Ted to us through I mean the Tony Blair essay. I mean, what what is he trying to do with this piece, do you think? That's an interesting question. I mean, I I've talked to a few of my Labour friends about it and some of them m more blair ite inclined as it were, say, well at least this shows that he he cares passionately about the Labour Party because he's intervening at some cost to him him he he know s the reaction he'll get amongst usual suspects and amongst a lot of people inside the party. But he's doing it they they think because he cares about Labour. I'm sure that's true, but I think there's something bigger going on in my view. What he really cares about is the centre, Tony. And I'm not saying that in a rude way about his attachment to the Labour Party. I think what really bothers him I think a number of things triggered him. My guess is that the Andy Burning forty years of neoliberalism, that always triggered Tony, you know, putting him in brushing him into the same wastebasket as Boris Johnson and Maggie Thatcher and all that always I think really annoyed him. But I think I think he sees the collapse of the centre, as he said many times in his interviews, that there's a supply problem, not a demand problem. There just aren't the parties there occupying the centre ground anymore. He sees Labour after the locals chasing Green voters that left Labour and he sees Tories chasing reform reform voters that have le ft them and he thinks there's this vacant ground in the middle and that it's a historic mistake. I suspect he thinks for any party to vacate it, not but in particular Labour given that we've got a big majority. So I think that's probably what animated him. I think also he he passionate one of the fascinating things about his essay is this extraordinary mixture of alertness to what's changed about the world compared to 30 years ago with incredibly st ubborn resilience holding on to concepts that he's always believed in for thirty years or more. So the radical centre, you know, that's that's that's classic Blair ninety four, ninety five speak. As though we are still in a world where you have left-right politics and you're in the middle, and the logic is different now because we obviously have a cultural dimension of politics that just wasn't there in the same way before 2008. His weddedness to America , you know, what whoever's in the White House, we have to be close. I mean that is straightforwardly Tony Blair 2001 too, and of course the Blair that went into Iraq as well. And he he sees those things as unchanging, which I find extraordinary, because I mean get John Curtis in a room for ten minutes and he'll tell you the first of those has changed dramatically. But on the on the American side, I mean it's not just Trump, the entire United States has has uh the the United States electorate is moving away. Demographically they demographically they turn to Asia, the the the the abandonment of collective security. Uh trade I mean the free trade, interesting, completely absolutely was such an important part of the new Labour story about tr free trade. Not a word about WTO. China doing WTO. And Blair knows these things, but he just is passionate, he just believes that Britain has to be the the the the sort of sidekick, and I don't disparagingly, but has to be at the side of the US, whether it makes bad decisions or or or good decisions, irrespective of what the American electorate and the American political direction is going. I think that's fascinating. On AI, he's completely you know a zeal the zeal of the convert on America. He's you know nine I think he thinks we can pull it back to that. I don't think he's stupid about the fact that things have changed. I just think he thinks that the fundamental ties will pull us back towards a benevolent American engagement in the world. And I just I think the other thing which is interesting is coming from a kind of centre right perspective where so much of the current debate on the rights and reform in the Conservatives is oh we have this Blair right constitutional settlement, we have these um you know lawyers, these actu state, as Tim Chipman calls it. Precisely interesting in these essays what people do talk about, such as the Radical Centre, and what they don't talk about. And I think that what is so telling is what Blair does include and what the others don't include. So I would make the critique that, you know, animal spirit see gets mentioned in his essay, but not in the others, and sort of how you create a more pro-business environment. I think that brings us on potentially nicely to the streeting versus Burnham and the subtleties and He's done some flirtation with pro business things in the past. There was nothing of that kind of that wider depth, that hinterland that we know West Streeting does have. Yes, but West Streeting you're right about that. I think that it was was one dimensional. It was it had a single theme and it was, you know, hammering it a lot. Um but you you've got to remember that West Street and Andy Burnham are in different places, not just in the party, but in the kind of challenge that they face. I mean, look, they both want to be leader of the Labour Party and Prime Minister, pretty clearly. West Streeting he finds himself in a party that is probably s I mean he's he's the best communicator in the cabinet in my view, West Streeting. Or not in the cabinet now, but yes. Sorry. He was in the cabinet. No longer, yeah. The best communicator outside the cabinet now. But he is he you know, he's he's on the right wing, the Labour Party, you would hate it if I said that to his face. But he that's where people perceive him. He knows that's how people perceive him. That's why he came out with his capital gains tax, wealth tax stuff. He wants to correct that positioning of him. And I think he saw the opportunity to land I mean my I did a ridiculously long thread on the Blair speech myself, and it doesn't take a genius to work out there is an inequality problem in the Blair analysis. I'm sure he's got a good answer to it because he's got good answers to lots of things, but he didn't talk about it and and that's particularly interesting given the political moment we're in and what's driving reform vote in particular. And and Wes spotted that. And that was his chance to show I think that he was squarely in the mainstream of the future electorate of the Labour leader. Andy Burnham, I think, had a different, slightly different, of course, he landed on inequality as well. But Andy Burnham wants to, I think, say something broader about the character of politics in this country not getting something about not just the difference between living in a maker field versus living in Westminster, but that anger about elites is a dri ver of political participation and and political position now. And I think he t so he he didn't inequality in an abstract sense, he talked about a sort of culture gap between those who have in the elite of politics and the elite of business. And I do f I mean if I was working for Tony Blair, uh the one thing I would worry about in this speech, a lot of his fights hit that he picked were deliberate. But if you honestly believe that the political elite are in the pocket of the tech elite who and basically think that the country's in crisis purely because their way is not getting done by by um the voters are not supporting the way that they think the future should look. This just confirms that. I mean it it confirms Blair as a member of a super elite for those who think there is such a thing as a super elite. And he doesn't even challenge that conception in the essay. He doesn't s look like he even has a antennae about that being an issue. And I think that 's something he walked into that I suspect he wouldn't have wanted to walk into, unlike the fight about AI and deregulation and everything else, if you see what I mean. And I think Andy's sort of spotted that and the way he wrote his piece, which is very human and very much about the way that politics is done from the ground, looking from the ground up, was spotting that problem of the Blair essay. Yeah, I think it's interesting. You can certainly tell a lot about the men by the essays they've written, and that sense that Tony Blair does like a scrap and certainly has the the had masochism strategy towards the end of his time in parliament and sort of going there and telling home truths, but he almost seems to become divorced, and the more he more he sort of shouts these points, he does become the sort of Cassandra of the Labour Party. Burnham obviously very close to the politics of commun ity, someone who has that brilliant emotional connection with Manchester. And then you know, West Streeting almost a sort of a prophet without honour in the party he has been a member of for many, many years and what do you think these SAS about where the Labor Party goes next? Um quite striking that I think three of them, uh certainly you know, Streeting, Burnham and uh Starmer all acknowledged two thousand eight as the pivot point. But I suppose where do we go next? Almost coming up to twenty years of that. It it does seem that it's sort of fundamentally difficult for for our political leaders to break out that kind of rut where we've seen sort of one percent economic growth and uh kind of two decades of lost growth. Yes, I mean uh so so my view y I'm sure you you sure we don't don't dis you agree with this, James. But my my my view on this is that um two thousand and eight was a massive moment for the left because it destroyed the model of how you successfully run Britain. Because to put it very crudely , the new Labour model was you allow deregul you allow low levels of regulation and relatively low levels of taxes, partly because the economy was in a boom phase after the leaving the ERM in ninety two, and partly what you do is you have a sort of Faustian deal with the productive forces. The pr Faustian deal is we will be lightly regulators. The left will hate us for it, but we'll stick with it to the city of London, to high-end pharma, to all the and um in return for it, you're gonna pay more tax. We'll get more tax because the economy will b will boom and we'll do a lot of redistribution and public investment with the with the proceeds of the growth. And that works absolutely fine as long as the economy is doing as well as it was in the nineties and early noughties. And then when it stops working, that deal doesn't work anymore. And Labour has not really come up with an alternative to that. I worked for Ed Millerband, as you know, for five years after that. We tried to come up with a sort of version of we have to grow the economy in a different way. Obviously, that didn't work from a electoral point of view. Corbyn then had a it very interesting the Corbyn period because it it wasn't intellectually that fertile a time because everyone knew what Corbyn thought. He kept saying I've thought this for 40 years. He hasn't. And it was it was a strange combination of very ideological but not intellectually that interesting a time, I felt. Not reflexible. Yeah. What are the new challenges that need a different response, even if they were a very left response? You know, there wasn't even much of that. And and then we had the Starmer which who won as Patrick Maguire famously calls it, the loveless landslide, right? When when everyone just wanted to get rid of the Tories, even my family are all Tory wanted, to get rid of the Tories. Sorry, mum. So there hasn't really been what you know a kind of labour political economy to use the jargony term. Nothing has really emerged from that. I think the Tories have had a similar problem since two thousand and eight. And they were saved by Brexit because Brexit gave them a cause which was, you know, the Daniel Hannon version of Brexit is a very Tory version of Brexit and in a tradition of Toryism. But it that's sort of gone now, and reform is the sort of you know bastard child that it that it gave birth to. I'm allowed to say that on a s on a podcast. Um using it a technical term. So I think the Tories have that problem now as well, actually, ideologically. So I I think that that that where Labour is now, I think, is still still searching for political economy. And I think if Andy you know might I suspect Andy Burnham will become Prime Minister, I don't know, who knows, right? But we he could lose Makerfield and then w all bets are off. But I think his big challenge will be coming up with a version which is not just a nostalg ic version of the soft left where I sit in the party, but um something which is much more appropriate. A better yesterday as the uh German SPD used to say. And this challenge, by the way, that n no left party has solved this problem, right? No left party has solved this problem, whether it's Germany, Spain, Italy or whether it's Canada, US. Have you read the Tom McTague essay on Manchesterism and Andy Burnham? Uh I just wonder what you think. No. No, but I what do you make of Andy Burnham championing this notion of well yes you can have pro-business policies, look what we've done with Manchester, but we can also have um some form of anti Thatcher measures or a rollback or one . What do you make of that reconciliation? And would it work in Westminster? Well, I don't think he's saying I'll do the same as Manchester in Westminster, but I think there are there are interesting seeds in it. I mean there's a long tradition in Britain of municipal socialism. Been people like Chamberlain in Birmingham in the 19th century, Herbert Morrison in London, right, who take who who is successful at different moments in different particular challenges, and then people at the national stage think there's a there's a lesson to be learned from it. So I don't think he's out of line in that of that of that tradition I mean, I think if you look at what he's done in Manchester, there's actually a a lot more partnership with the private sector than the caricature of Manchester who suspects. I mean, Manchester about six months ago, Manchester announced this the Metro area announced this big twenty billion partnership. I think the Greater Manchester Pension Fund has been a very strong partner of what Andy's tried to do there. They're a very forward looking private pension fund there. And they have a lot of people at CBRE, large companies that have been partners in what they're trying to do. And there's all sorts of criticisms about housing in Manchester, and is it just it luxury housing? And I I and he you know he takes that on board. But the idea that it's just some sort of retro nationalisation experiment is complet So that's one thing. I mean i he's definitely with the bus network. I mean we've heard a lot about buses in Manchester, we'll hear a lot more about than the B network. But the interesting question is whether whether that someone like Andy can find a stronger role for the state at national level short of re-owning stuff. Because when you talk about the state in national politics, if I open my spectator the next day, they'll they'll say Stuart was talking about more taxes, or Stuart was talking about n ationalisation. And the question is, is there a role for a directive state which is not those two things and which is you know strong arming partnership with large private sector players? And he's done a bit of that. And I think to be optimistic about that, if you look around the world, that's exactly the kind of thing that you get with sovereign wealth funds in Singapore and the Middle East. And so I think I think there is a space for a social democratic story which is not falling into the caricature of being just all about renationalis ing stuff or just slamming taxes up. So that I think is the interesting question that Manchesterism sort of raises. I'd like Andy to give a a speech about the state and how you know a almost like a blair