Conservative Party Realignment and ECHR

Real power is held not by the elected government but by the permanent civil service, especially the cabinet Seretcary and the sprawling incoherent bureaucracy of the Cabinet Office. That's the view of Reform UK's Danny Kruger, who this week launched his party's plans for reforming the civil service. So, beyond the rhetoric, what is in these plans and will they hel p? I'm Hannah White, and this is Inside Briefing, the podcast from the Institute for Government. Reform UK say that plans to underpin the role of the civil service in legislation are an example of top officials using the weakness of the current government as an opportunity to extend their power. Kruger says he will restore the authority of the Prime Minister by abolishing the Cabinet Office and the role of the Cabinet Secretary. So how, does the party's diagnosis of the problems facing the civil service stack up? And what would their solutions mean for government? And after an election in 2024 when no one wanted to talk about Brexit, Keir Starmer has put c loser relations with the EU at the heart of his latest attempted reset, and former Health Secretary Wes Streeting lobbed the possibility of rejoining into the battle to replace him. Meanwhile, the UK seems to be still bogged down in finalising deals with the EU reached at the summit a year ago. Weeks away from the 10th anniversary of the referendum, we'll look at where things are with the reset and where they might go. Joining me throughout, still annoyed that the rest of the RFG wouldn't let him open the windows in a heat wave, is Executive Director Alex Thomas. Hi Alex, what have you got against blinds? Well, um no, I'm in danger of litigating this all of this again. I would just suggest that if there's a breeze outside and there are lots of people in a room and lots of computers, it's worth opening the windows. I entirely accept the advice of our friends who focus on adaptation that closing the windows when it's hotter outside is a reasonable thing to do, but I just don't think it pertains in the office environment in which we exist at the Institute for Government. You can cut that if you want, Hannah. Tempting as it is to discuss this for the rest of the podcast I am also joined by senior fellow Jill Rutter. Hi Joe. How you're not the cricket today or perhaps you are later? There's cricket on later, so we'll have to see whether we whether we go to that. But there are other competing things to do. Now the weherat it's finally turned summary. And I am very pleased that we are also joined by Henry Hill, political editor at The Critic, and now also a senior fellow here at IFG. Hello. Thank you for having me. Okay, so according to Danny Kruger of Reform UK, the country is faced by a bloated, paralyzed centre of government and a mutinous bureaucracy. His party's plans for reforming the centre of government and Whitehall more generally have now been published. Alex, can you talk us through what Reform UK are suggesting? Well a really interesting application from Danny Kruger, who is uh responsible for Reform UK's preparations for government. He put something out over the bank holiday weekend that particularly looked at the centre of government. It's part of a series of policy papers that he's putting out. And he's suggesting lots of changes to the centre, quite a lot of which are based on recommendations that that we've made in our commission on the centre and uh other work on the uh civil service. He's suggesting that reform would break apart the cabinet office, abolish it and create a department of the prime minister and separate out the civil service functions into a department for the civil service, which uh you know we've recommended as as well. He also wants to get rid of the post of cabinet secretary, split that into three, a political chief of staff, a political sort of head of policy that would uh lead the secretariats and the uh prime minister facing bit of what is currently the cabinet office, and then a head of the civil service that would be a civil servant, although possibly drawn from an outside the civil service. Also, he's suggesting further ex tending the ability of ministers to hire and fire civil servants and to entrench that more in the current system than is than is the case. Wants to do uh some sensible things around tackling churn in the civil service and uh promoting specialist expertise, bringing in more people from outside government and uh make the civil service more porous in the in the jargon. Also stuff around performance management and pay, things we've talked about a lot on the podcast at all, reducing the size of civil So lots in there for uh anybody who's interested in in the sorts of things we talk about on this podcast. And what do we make of these solutions? I think a lot of them are either on the right track or we would absolutely agree with and reflect recommendations that that we've made in various pieces of work. I think the thing where I depart from what Kruger has said is he sees he sees dragons everywhere. He's approaching this set of problems as if the civil service is a kind of power-hungry, uh accruing of power machine. And I think that leads him in his diagnosis a little bit astray because he's looking, you know, a colleague put it this way, you know, he's looked behind the door, you know, behind the door of number 10 and the Prime Minister and seen that there isn't power there. He's looked elsewhere in the system and seen there isn't power there and sort of thought, well it must be, it must therefore be res iding with the permanent civil service and it's the permanent civil service that has the power and that's what we need to kind of harness and improve the political oversight of. Now there's some there may be some truth to that, but I think I think the answer is almost it's far worse than that, in that the power doesn't exist. You know, if the empire if the power was sitting behind Cabinet Secretary Antonio Romeo's door, then an incoming government could come in and say, All right, yeah, we'll have that and uh and then exercise the levers. The real problem is that the system that we over time have created is one where that power is diffused across the system and the civil service doesn't hold that authority any more than anybody else does. So my fear is if Kruger came into government and Farage and Reform UK expecting that they could make these and other changes and that would just sort the system. They're not really focused on where the actual problem is. There's also a little bit of a strain, and he won't like the comparison, but of you know we will be better and certainly the the the you say the comparison you won't like is with Labour ministers coming in before the twenty twenty four election, there was a sense of, you know, well we will just run this thing better because we uh are more effective people. And there's quite a lot in the Kruger stuff around uh, you know, Nigel Farage will have clear priorities and set clear priorities for secretaries of state. You know, reform ministers will know what they're doing. They'll be able to grip the system and lead it. And we've learnt, you know, from successive cycles of um conservative and labour ministers that just a sort of a sense that magically you will be able to do it better uh is not enough. Well being good is necessary but not sufficient. Henry, what did you make of these proposals? Is this an opportunity for politicians to take back control? So I think headline, I agree with what a lot of what Alex said in terms of a lot of this stuff when you look at it individually is difficult to quibble with, right? It reflects a particular view of how government should work, but it's not an illegitimate view of how government should work. I think that in terms of reform UK specifically, the problem is that it's basically like a really frenetic session of highlighting your revision timet able. Because they have no idea what they want to actually do. The challenge with th that you're supposedly trying to solve with this is that okay, we've got the civil service machine. The civil service machine doesn't work I'm not this is the not my argument, but the argument, yeah, it doesn't work when you pull the levers, da da da da. And it's like, okay, but what are you trying to direct this machine to do? Right? And if you started there, if you had a the Farage ism as a program, then you could actually treat it as a much more practical matter. It's like, okay, which departments are really critical to this? Okay, what do we need to do to change those departments to make them more effective? And instead what you've got is you've got this sort of holistic, we're going to fix everything, we're going to do stuff about the department for the Prime Minister and everything else. And it's fairly directionless because they don't have an idea yet, if they ever get one, of which bits of the civil service are going to be the most important to the supposedly transformational government program that they're trying to do. And I suppose I'm also a little bit jaded about this kind of thing because having covered the Conservatives for so long, there were elements of like problematic elements in the civil service under the Conservatives, primarily of Ronus and the Home Office and to a lesser extent in Diffid. But for the most part, Tory ministers complaining about the civil service were just rubbish. It was effectively that they didn't have either the will or the political will or the authority from the Prime Minister to make the system work. And then they just kind of blame this sort of sort of like political animism, you know, the sort of spirit that sees that sees angry gods in storms, right? It's like, okay, well there must be some malevolent force out there in the civil service that's stopping us from doing anything. It's like, well did you really try? No. They didn't. And so I I I I suspect that again there's a there's an element of that which is that they'll be looking for scapegoats. They'll be looking for things to blame when things don't work, and ultimately in the British Constitution, a majority in the House of Commons can pass any law it likes. Right? There really aren't that many places to hide if you're a Prime Minister with a government with an overall majority. But I suspect that that's my worry, having seen how the right has handled the civil service in the past, is that while there are legitimate complaints to be made about parts of it, an awful lot of it is just blame shifting. Joel, what do you think the civil service will have made of this set of proposals? I think the civil service will probably be interesting the view that the Cabinet Office is all powerful. I think it probably probably the civil service will agree with the bit where it says bloated. I think the idea it's this sort of power thing as opposed to this sprawling organisation that's lost quite a lot of sense of purpose will be difficult. I think they probably won't like the idea that the cabinet secretary job goes and it's not clear who gives leadership to the civil service, assuming the civil service remains in some form in this vision, because they're very clear that the person in a non-ministerial department of the Department for Civil Service, which is quite weird, I think, anyway, why would you make that a non-ministerial department, sort of least accountable organisation known to mankind in many ways? That that would be a sort of businessman from outside who might have spent a bit of time in the civil service, but you know, not from the existing cadre of people. So who is actually going to lead the remaining civil service, I think, would be quite a big question in that. The current cabinet secretary presumably will be finding ways of ensuring that actually the civil service could reinsert itself into this system. The interesting thing I think is one of the things that seems to have animated Danny Kruger very much is his sort of rage at a lecture giv en last year, I think by Ben Yong at UCL, where he suggested that the civil service, you know, isn't just there, the sort of arms isn't just there to purely be the creature of the government of the day, but has a separate duty to serve the crown, you know, capital C, whatever that means. And of course the sort of threat by some unions that they won't work for reform, which I think isn't doing the civil service any good at all in terms of protecting its position. I think that's extraordinarily unhelpful development for civil servants to be toying with. But I do think civil service does have some functions and duties that do perhaps extend beyond just serving the government of the day, which are about maintaining capability in the system , maybe about doing contingency planning for contingencies that the government doesn't want to think about under its own authority. We're actually coming up to the 10th anniversary of the referendum. We're going to talk about that a bit later. We know that David Cameron didn't want to admit that the referendum could be lost and therefore told the civil service not to do any contingency planning. For that, I think Jeremy Haywood should have been able to authorise contingency planning under his own authority, nothing to do with David Cameron, you know, in a sort of minor way. And I think this higher and fire model, yes, great, you can get rid of people, and I think an awful lot of civil service say if we could find finally a way of ridding the civil service of lots of poor performers, that would make all our lives much, much better. But if it gets to a stage where if for a moment your loyalty is in doubt by offering up what might be regarded as, you know, out of the circumstances constructive criticism, basic means you're shown the door, it's going to mean worse government, not better government. Henry, what do you make of of Jill's argument there that that the civil service, as well as of course primary duty being to deliver the programme of the government of the day, should also have some of these other stewardship functions around contingency planning and so on. Well the first thought that came into my head there as a journalist would be just the absolute feast of finding out that there was some civil service committee that was doing blue sky thinking about the Civil Contingencies Act without ministers knowing. Because that's one of the most exciting pieces of legislation on the on the statute books, and you can do all sorts of things with it. Um I th I think the issue with with with that is I am deeply skeptical of that sort of attitude. I do understand it, but I think that the problem is always how do you stop this metastasizing over time? Because it's very easy when you're starting out to be like, no, no, no, this is just a very, very de-minimist, like, you know, just and then somebody just interprets it a bit more widely and a bit more widely and a bit more widely. And I think that one of the points I try and make on the right when I'm talking to Conservatives is that with the exception of Diffid and Bits of the Home Office, the conspiracy theory version of the civil service doesn't really exist. And I would be wary of anything that might facilitate it coming into existence in advertently. There's the extent to which in a democratic system you have to have garbage in, garbage out as a principle, right? If you have ministers who are hellbent on pursuing what you consider to be poor policy, that is their prerogative in our system, right? And the people who are ultimately responsible for disposing of that government is the electorate of the ballot box. And the alternative system is where you end up with that, oh, well, obviously we have to meet, we have to moderate it and mediate it and make everything sort of sensible. And and then you get into, I think, potentially quite a dangerous place where the people with the bad ideas can legitimately say they've never got to try them, and therefore can always say that they might have worked, right? And it puts you in a position where you can never resolve anything. Whereas I think actually sometimes if you really just give them their head for a few years and every and they fall flat on their face and you've been the picture of usefulness, right? You've not you've not uh uh blocked anything. You've you've made you've everything it it's suddenly very hard for them to blame the civil service for that. It's not that hard Henry. Honestly Henry, it's not that hard. It gets it's a bit isn't that a bit black and white? Because that would presupposes there are good ideas and bad ideas. And actually the reality is there might often be good ideas or a good policy objective, but the idea of how to get there is wrong and the role of the civil service is to say, Well look, maybe not that way, but this way. Well yeah, but I don't think I've suggested for a moment that the civil service shouldn't have that sort of advisory function, but that's not a safeguarding function. The safeguarding function is if the minister says no, right? The minister says, I want to do it my way, because this is with what I've dreamed up in opposition. That's the question is do you have any kind of ability to prevent that from happening? I think if you don't, then you're talking about the classical conception of the civil service, which is you advise uh but you but you're fundamentally servant to the minister. If you have any sort of function that involves the ability to impede the minister, if the minister is hell bent on making what you consider to be a wrong decision But we do have that now in the sense that we already have that, in the sense that with accounting officer responsibilities , if I think you as my minister are coming in and are going to waste quite a lot of public money. Uh, an act of commission. I think there's a really interesting thing about the lack of accounting officer functions about acts of omission, which I think is a sort of bit of a gap in our system, frankly. But I think, you know, you want to waste some public money. I say I don't think there's a case for doing that, and we've seen quite a few of that given, and that's fine. I explicitly say that you then take political authority and say, okay, I've noted that. I think we do it anyway. We've seen it in a whole range of cases, you know, support for failing industries, eat out to help out, where they said, you know, didn't know, you know, we get quite a lot in crises where there's just no sort of evidence base for doing things. Ministers then take political responsibility for that. It's not clear to me whether reforms plans would even allow for that sort of challenge. I do think that there is a bit where you should be going further because frankly, ministers aren't all over everything and don't, and there are a lot of things that you can see coming down the line that a minister focused with a short-term election cycle isn't going to pay any attention to . And I think it's a very, very limited set of activities and you'd only allow sort of very limited amounts. But I do think you do want a civil service that has some capacity to think about things that the current set of ministers and they change quite often, the current sets of ministers aren't focusing on at that time. And I think we'd better cover if we have that. That says we ask the Minister's permission to set up working group X to consider X, Y, and Z and then they just sign it and then you can just do whatever you want. Well I think maybe. Where I come out on this is a you know, it is a variant of where kind of Joe was heading towards there and the you know extending the accounting officer responsibilities. Because I think I think yeah, in a democratic country, in a democratic system, it's absolutely right that the civil service is in the control of ministers. But of course, the world is more complicated than that. I do think I mean I disagree with Jill on the EU preparations of a contingency, uh the contingency planning, because I don't think there was much more that the question is, but I think it's not a good thing. really interesting way into this because it's never going to be top of ministers' views, it's never going to be uh you know, or very rarely going to be where they want to put a lot of resource. But I think there is an incumbent on the permanent bit of the state to say, hang on, this is really, really important. And if you don't want to put what we consider to be the right resource into here, let's surface that. And who is accountable ultimately for that? I do think just before Henry Henry comes back in. I mean I wrote it down. There was a really interesting phrase in the Kruger paper, which was the civil service simply provides staff for politicians to inform and then implement their decisions. Now, one sense, yes, it does, but the moment you actually think, this goes maybe this is a bit to the bit of paper at the bottom of the third box point, the moment you actually think about how decisions are made and implemented in government, you do get to a much sort of thicker conception of what the role of a civil servant is, because it is about advice and it's about having the expertise and it's about saying, okay, we understand you want to go to destination X and so here are different ways that you might get there. And you there's my my concern with some of the Kruger stuff is it relies on quite a simplistic understanding of the set of relationships, which I think he'd have a stronger set of proposals if he opened up that box of what the role of the civil servant really is. That's true. I think that would be longer and much more complicated and therefore less sort of snappy proposal. I mean I think I think the thing that I want to come back to on the contingency planning point is that it's one of those things which like an awful lot of how this stuff starts, it sounds perfectly sensible. But actually, contingency planning and the assumptions that go into contingency planning are political and can have enormous political consequences, right? Now, we can both agree that David Cameron simply refusing to commission contingency planning for if any of his referendums didn't go the right way in the hope that that would make sure that that didn't happen was perhaps slightly naive. But on the other hand, think about the political impact that some of the modelling has, for example, on Brexit, for example, or the climate change or anything else, right? And so if you're a minister and you've embarked on something and suddenly a journalist is like, well, well, minister, according to modelling from your own department, this policy will result in dogs giving birth to snakes and all the stars going out. You do want to be able to control that, right? But you so you you can the argument could maybe be that you you you try and create some kind of responsibility to do contingency planning, but that gets very difficult. But I think that the idea of having an uncontrolled responsibility or right by the civil service to conduct contingency planning r fails to reflect the intrinsic ally political and subjective nature of threat assessment. And of course, ultimately, you know, there is no more political decision than where you put money. And so I was thinking, you know, I would I would put contingency planning in a much less sort of exciting box than you do, which is about, you know, do you have the capacity to respond to a flooding incident or, you know, that's that that that level of stuff. But even then I would accept, which is why it is ultimately on ministers for all the kind of checks that we might put in, because do you spend five hundred million quid on flood defence or do you spend it on something else? Of course it's a political decision and you can't get away from that. I mean the truth is that when you're actually in a crisis, having not done the contingency planning, you will find limits your options as ministers in a way that actually would probably be less limited if you'd done a bit of bit of advanced thinking. But I do think I do think it's very interesting in the Kruger thing that he wants a very unified state which, you know, acts seamlessly and can push through this massive programme. We're told that they're still very keen on some sort of checks and restraints and we have to wait for parts two and three on parliament and judicial reform to see quite what reforms proposals look like there. I find it very hard to believe that they're going to be massive fans of a big role for the judiciary here in restraining government. But you know, we wait to see. We will wait and find out. But I do think that I do think it's interesting. We I've was having a look at after Rachel Reeves's budget at how some other governments went around budgets and did they have anything like the sort of pre-budget speculation that we had in the run up to the November budget? But one of the things that I found out asking people there was actually in other countries, civil services do more under their own authority than we do, and the world doesn't fall to bits. And that's, you know, civil service, you know, not having an equivalent of the OBR taking responsibility for the forecast, not with the sort of it's the chances forecasts as we used to have, but it is the Treasury's forecast or the finance ministry's forecast. We know that you know they put out working papers by civil servants. That probably means you get better quality civil servants and better quality thinking in government and actually more transparent thinking in government, which I think can help also help raise the quality of government. But I'm not sure that's anywhere near Danny Kruger's agenda at the moment. Alex I did want to ask you how these ideas from Danny Kruger compare to other ideas we are seeing in Mm. Yeah, it's interesting. And uh you know, for all interesting discussion that we've been having about the pros and cons of some of Kruber's uh ideas, I think they're more developed and more thought through uh and he's pursuing, you know a good process that Labor might wish it had done in opposition before twenty twenty uh four to think through some of these points. I would say certainly where the Conservatives are is a pretty crude, you know, Mel Stride at the Tory Party conference last autumn was talking about civil service headcount reduction cuts, you know, fine, but we've heard that tune many times before. The current government, as we know, is rewiring the state and the um, you know, cabinet secretary is busy getting on with aspects of that. But insofar as we've actually seen public proposals, they've been kind of fine more recently. There's some good sort of sludge busting stuff that the Attorney General supposedly is is is leading on. But it's all been kind of around the margins. So we're now with the the the Labour Party pinning a lot of hope on those things that that you talked about uh last week in the podcast around the King's speech and proposals for you know reforming the civil service in that way. But they're all they're all sort of in similar areas. I don't think I mean let's see if Andy Burnham happened to come into office or anybody else he might rework the role of the Cabinet Secretary. I don't see the current Cabinet Secretary or the current Prime Minister splitting the job in three and abolishing it anytime soon then. Henry, of course the other thing we've seen this week is a long essay from Tony Blair on what he thinks Labour, including the various leadership wannabes, are doing wrong. And I mean does he fall foul of the critique you just made there of of Danny Kruger's proposals in the sense of he says in that piece, you know, where is the policy? That you know there is too much focus on on approach and and the sort of the technical stuff and a ne subwstantive policy programme, although he doesn't set out an alternative one. No, of course he does. I mean Tony Blair basically sort of suffers even more than everyone else from that era with this great curse that was laid on on New Labour, which is that he is quite able as a as an analyst and a thinker and as a politician. But he's also basically responsible for nearly everything that's gone wrong. And he can't admit this. And so therefore his his his political analysis is continu ally the sort of odd attempt to try and make one and one make three. You know, this is most obvious in Surro , which is where I started out really studying him, which is on devolution, which is where what are the two things about devolution? It hasn't worked and it can't have been wrong. So Ergo, what do you do? You end up in a very strange place. And on here, he says things like, oh well the pensions triple lock is completely unsupportable and you know the government really needs to be really bold in tackling welfare. And it's like, well okay, but who invented the winter fuel allowance and then tripled it and then doubled it. Your government did that, right? And I think that the thing that's the thing that's really that can be really valuable about Tony Blow, which you find in his book, is when he just openly fronts up to when he was wrong and why. So he tal ks about uh freedom of information, right? And he's just like, I really could please God, I wish I hadn't done this. This is why I did it. And that's the kind of thing where I think that most ex-politicians and ex-advisors are at their most valuable when they're explaining their own mistakes. And it's the one thing that Dominic Cummings can't do, as a contrasting example. Dominic Cummings, formidably intelligent, really, really good at thinking structurally about bits of the state, but the one thing he can never do ever is admit that he was wrong about anything. And so you end up with these bizarre sort of theses of his, which which which don't get there. And the Blair thing was a bit too much like that for me. Lots of it was perfectly sensible. Does the government need more about I and technology? Yes, it does. Does the government need to do something about revenue expenditure running away? Of course it does. But what? And I think the that was the weakness of it, which is that the reason that we've got where we are, is it's not just politicians being being useless or cowardly or whatever else. It's simply that we have uh an electorate which really fundamentally does not understand how poor this country is. And so you end up with a general election like the last general election where Labour and the Conservatives ran on more or less the same tax policy, right? And then you have supposedly these two great radical parties, you know, Reform and the Greens, coming to shake the status quo. And it's like, well, no, actually, they're they're proposing to change the personnel. But reform K's suggestion is that they can pay for everything if only you set like a negative foreign aid budget. And the Greens I don't even know what the Green' verssion of that is, right? But there's no there's nothing there that resembles Thatcherism or Clement Atlee's programme. There's nothing that's really kind of a fundamental challenge to where we are at the moment. And Tony Blair couldn't do it either. And I would be really interested to see what the because he is he an's incredibly able politician, like a generational talent, first rank. I'd be really interested to see what Tony Blair at the height of his powers would do if he were given the leadership of the Labour Party now. But that essay didn't tell me that there was a line in the Blair thing I quite liked, although this may turn into something you know quite self regarding, around the IFG, but the um radical people aren't sensible and sensible people aren't radical, which obviously he then used to set up this thing about the kind of the radical centre and a kind of very Blairite way of thinking about it. This is a sort of micro point, but I think it's interesting that Torsten Bell, you know, formerly of ThinkTank World, then went onto social media to do actually quite a detailed critique and takedown of the Tony Blair argument, where he sort of said,, yes, you know you're in a version of what Henry was saying and and and what lay behind your question, Hannah, which is yes, you are a, you know, you you were and are an incredibly able politician. You're able to read the politics of this, but what would you actually do? You know, well well there isn't enough money and the um fiscal position is is very, very tight. And I do think, you know, all sorts of uh exciting and you know scary things around technology and AI, but Torsten Bell was bold enough to say , you know, yeah, but AI isn't uh uh isn't a kind of governing philosophy or a or a policy. And that that does seem to me to be where the where the kind of Blair analysis came down. But it I do tend to agree with the the thought that lay behind that kind of you know the the sensible people aren't radical which is that there is a space for constructive well-thought through radical thinking about government and of course then you get into there's a there's a political dimension to that as well. But I sort of I mean a way I sort of thought that's a bit of a challenge for us and people like us to try and think more creatively about how you address some of these things. Can I just give a very quick shout out to the incipient labour leadership cont est, because at least we've had a bit more of a discussion about some forms of tax reform than we got in the entire general election. With yo, you may or may not like West Streeting coming in on capital gains, and there's a bit of a debate in the tax wonk community about whether this is, as Tony Blair said, an idea that been tried loads of times before and ever rejected as a revenue lose or whether as I think, you know, somebody said that, you know, actually if, you make a proper allowance for non-real gains, then actually it's not the world's most stupid idea. It could actually be quite helpful. We've had Andy Burnham saying land is overtaxed, other people saying no, actually it's quite heavily taxed, but it is r very wrongly taxed. So maybe we're stopping that absolute amurter about tax reform that has characterized both Conservatives, frankly, and Labour over the last thing, so might be something good to come out of the current chaos if we can actually have a discussion about what actually does a fit for workers tax system for as Henry says, a not very well off country that needs a tax system that supports the government's growth objectives rather than gets in the way. Quite a good thing to have if that's one of the outcomes of where we are now . Just over a year ago, Keir Starmer and Ursula von der Leyen shook hands on their common understanding. We were expecting a summit sometime this summer, and both the PM and the Chancellor want to use that to boost their growth agenda by getting closer to the EU. Jill tell us where are things now and have the deals that were sort of agreed this time last year been done yet? Well the government kept on telling us that they'd agreed deals, but actually they hadn't. They'd agreed to start negotiations about deals. The one thing that they did concede was a 12-year extension of Boris Johnson David Frost fishing deal, much to the annoyance of people who I think thought that when that transitional deal lapsed they'd get a bit more fishing quota back. We haven't seen very much since that in all honesty. The UK has signed up to join the EU's Erasmus programme for a year at what looks like quite a hefty price tag of uh just over half a billion. You should think, really? The EU didn't let us join their big safe defence procurement lending programme because they wanted to charge us a very high entry fee, much, much higher proportion ately than the one they decided to charge the Canadians, in what was widely interpreted as a bit of uh maybe incompetence by the Commission and the Germans not noticing this, and a bit of sight of hand by the French, who wanted to protect their defence industries, which probably the see the UK defence industry as quite a big competitor for those EU funds. And for the rest, it's been really quite heavygoing. It took quite some time to get any negotiating mandates over the sanitary and phytosanitary deals. So the arrangements to create a common area in which you could export agri-food products,, uh which was one of the big things we were told was going to come. The other things we've been waiting for are linking emissions trading schemes, the UK ETS and the EU one, and UK participation in the single energy market, single electricity market, which is the sort of surprise that no one really expected last year. The government, I think, is hoping it's going to be able to land those in time for a summit, but there is a bit of a joker in the pack, which is the EU is setting great store by something that Keir Starmer now seems to have warmed to, having been initially extraordinarily cold about it, which is the youth experience scheme, the youth mobility scheme, but the EU still seems to be sticking out for EU students only to be charged domestic fees by UK universities. And UK universities are absolutely clear that they cannot afford that and do not want that. So we don't know where that is going to land and we don't know the extent to which other agreements might go forward if that isn't landed. The other thing is we don't have a date for this summit yet. We had thought it was probably going to be in the first week in July, but canny listeners will note that that's a couple of weeks after the date for the Makerfield by-election . And are we all going to gear up for that with a Prime Minister who might not be the same Prime Minister , might be somebody in the middle of an orderly exit, or might be starting to fight a leadership contest. I mean we really don't know. And I think it's really interesting whether everybody decides to leave this all, give the negotiators a bit more time and leave this all to the autumn and there's a bit more clarity about where the next Primeister Min might want to go or where the current one might want to do. We've heard some bits about what the UK floated as possibilities for the next summit. The newspapers over the weekend reported that the EU had rejected an attempt by UK officials to resurrect something that looked like son of the Theresa May Checker's proposition on the UK participating in the single market for goods. We don't know whether that was the serious proposition that the UK wanted to put forward at this summit. And there doesn't seem to be that much else bubbling under in terms of preparations for the next giant leap forward. So it likely to be a few steps that the government had claimed were made already last year and not much f you know, momentum. But we will have to see. Henry, picking up on what Jill was saying there about how this new found willingness to talk about the EU might play back into domestic politics. Were you surprised by Starmer majoring on EU relations and streetings intervention? And how do you think those might play out in the context of the Makefield by election? I wasn't surprised for different reasons. For one, if you're the Prime Minister and you've sort of conceded that you need economic growth, but your party doesn't want to do anything that is normally associated with generating economic growth like deregulation or cutting taxes or or anything else. The one thing that sort of hits the Venn diagram of vaguely growth y and your team like it is the European Union. I think it is a deeply open question to put it mildly, how much growth there really is there. A lot of the analysis about the economic cost of leaving the EU doesn't really tie in with the fact that we had a terrible economy for ten years before we left. Real per capita GDP, real wages, productivity were flat anyway. And basically what seems to have happened is you now have these graphs where if we hadn't left a couple of years after we didn't leave, the lines start going up for reasons which aren't when you really dig down into the report entirely obvious. But nonetheless, it's a nice thing to talk about. And for Westreating, like he's mak justing life incredibly difficult for Andy Burnham in one of the most pro leave seats in the in the country. And the one thing that you can say about Starmer and indeed about a lot of Labour politicians is that they they reserve their A game for the int internal disputes. Right? Right. Like like Starmer went out to fight for his government's life. And he couldn't say anything new. Like he was like, I'm gonna put I'm gonna put Europe at the heart of my policy. I'm not changing any of my red lines. Like nothing. But then give him a chance to shaft Andy Burnham. And he will, right? Or that or that day when we were waiting for West Streeting's resignation and when tw 12 o'clock came and went, you got a statement from Downing Street saying like West Streeting is still the health secretary and the Prime Minister has full confidence in him. You're like, where's this man ? When we need government. So what would Europe do? I think that reforms instincts to hammer Burnham on Europe would in normal circumstances be a mistake, because I think that leave voters are perfectly capable of supporting Leave and yet still deciding that the maker field by election is about something else. And this is where I think I disagree with the sort of Ben Juder analysis, which is like, well, if Andy Burnham can win Makerfield, that means that Brexit stunned and dusty. It's like no, they're just adults who can make discerning judgments about politicians, right? It's still a very, very leave seat. The the thing is the more that Andy Burnham has to talk about Brexit, the worse that is for him, right? Because actually it's quite a low, I think it's quite a low salience issue in that by-election. And if it becomes a high salience issue, because this is the problem with every leadership contest, right, which is that you have the public and then you have the selectorate, and they're different groups of people. And so Andy Burnham is suddenly like he's got West Streeting being like, I'm the most pro-European man who ever did live. And he, Andy Burnham, knows that Labour members, not necessarily or Labour voters, but Labour members skew very heavily pro Europe. So if he suddenly gets dragged into that contest, and the voters of Makerfield can basically see him spending that contest talking to Labour voters over there. Labour members over there appropriate. It's like a reverse primary, isn't it ? Exactly it's so I think that would be very damaging. And I think that in terms of the the Prime Minister has limited room for maneuver on Europe, I think the broadly the thing I've said to Tories on Europe is that the public don't care about most of the technical details, really. They care about the customs union and the single market because we talked about it so often that it became a tribal identifier. But for the most part, if you're like right, we're going to do a a a cytosanitary agreement or we're going to do whatever, no one cares. You can do as many of those as you like, right? Um the exception is things like the youth mobility scheme, which involves potentially freedom of movement and that kind of thing. But other than that, on a technical basis, you can get quite close to Europe. But trying to do anything bigger, you know, the ho like the customs union or the single market or something like that, I mean one, you don't have a you don't have a mand a a mandate for anything like it, right? So you'd probably have to have a general election on it. And for a right that hates each other and doesn't have a posit positive policy programme yet, like the single best thing that could conceivably happen would be a general election fought on the European Union question. Like you could hammer out a seed agreement in about twenty four hours where we were all just like let's murder these people and make sure that this doesn't happen again. So I think that he's essentially in a position where he can do lots of technical deals which one aren't gonna make a transformative amount of difference to a country that's in a lot of trouble. But he can't do any of the really big stuff. I don't think it would work, but that's irrelevant. He can't do it because it would simply consume all the government's political economy. If you were to try and do that, you'd have Labour MPs mutinying, right? You'd have what, you've got eighty-nine Labour MPs who have a reform candidate in second place after 2024 on reform's current polling, they could win some seats from third place. It would be an absolute nightmare. So that's broadly where I think Europe is for the Labour Party at least. And I think if you then play that back into where is Europe, which is a bit we always sort of conveniently forget about in this that there are two there, the sort of you know, another slew of small slivers of the single market takes you back into the this is typical UK. They don't want to make any of the big commitments to any of the big institutional structures that everybody else has. So what they want is to go and say, we'll have a bit of chemicals, maybe we'll do a bit of aviation, we'll have a bit of trucking, which I think actually would make quite a lot of sense in current energy circumstances. Or you know, we'll do a bit of alignment over here and we'll get access there, but we don't want any of your big formal structures that come with a set of rights and obligations. Now, maybe we could buy ourselves into some of those, because the one thing we know about the EU is that it is quite cash-strapped at the moment. There's a very big row going on as part of the multi-annual financing framework discussions. We've had the sort of frugals lining up and the cohesion countries lining up against each other, and the UK writing some quite big checks would help with that, but there has been very little appetite beyond sort of energy and the agri food discussions we've had so far. And we, you know, don we't have that many cards to play, then maybe new sectors that can come in. I think yesterday was chairing something someone suggested maybe we'll look at automotive, you know, EVs, you know, we've seen a bit of movement from the French potentially on you know is, the UK part of Europe for Made in Europe, the Industrial Excel Industry Accelerator Act, or is it not part of Europe, which is their initial position, so UK content didn't count. But it's gonna be nothingang game-ching in terms of growth. You know, it's going to be another little slice off maybe helps a sector or something if the EU's up for negotiating that, with probably not that much political interest in it. The area you could go, which is very different, maybe something much bigger on defense cooperation and things like that. That might be a place to go given where the US is, given the Russian threats, etc. We may get something at the next summit on something that they discussed in Armenia a couple of weeks ago when the Prime Minister was there on the UK participating in this big EU support package for Ukraine. But government's in a bit of a cleft, you know, it doesn't want to go to the big things which are the red lines, which might conceivably make a difference on growth, though I don't think you can assume just because you lost a bit of the economy, as most of the estimates suggest, doesn't mean you'll automatically get it back the moment you shift the dial back. Because I think it's quite asymmetric, supply chains have adjusted that would come back slowly over time. So I think the government's you know not in a very easy proposition. We've heard lots of talk about close relations, but no real concrete proposals in public from either the Prime Minister or the Chancellor. Alex can I ask you to pick up on that defence point there. I mean uh Hen Henry and uh Jill have have covered the the economic side, but given where we are in terms of geopolitics at the moment, is there scope for the the government to talk about UK EU defence cooperation could that be beneficial? Yeah well I mean as Jill said I think that's probably one of the more kind of fertile areas for discussion. I suspect that is as much about you know other events, both the kind of external threat and the election in Hungary, uh opening up various conversations that might not have happened previously as it is about kind of UK domestic politics and EU resets and uh and all of that. So that's a sort of much kind of bigger conversation and you know interesting to see in the EU how much energy is focused on, you know, a route to Ukrainian accession rather than kind of defence deals or the other stuff that we're talking about with the with the UK. I suppose in in order to open up that that conversation, it does bring you back to kind of some of the domestic trade offs and decisions that Star mer needs to make or has failed to make, particularly around defence at the uh at the moment. So Jill will uh uh know this more than I do. But if you want to unlock some big deal with the EU, you need to kind of get your ducks in order in terms of how much we're spending on defence and investment that we're making, which uh still seems to be in a kind of strange sort of stasis. I'd also say, and again there's been a bit of discussion of this in recent days, but you can't disentangle yourself from the US in you know even in a matter of years. We've talked about this a lot on the podcast previously. But yes, EU defence cooperation could be a good thing, though not without its challenges. But it's the idea that that will replace kind of the special relationship and the five eyes and the defence cooperation that we have with the US is for the birds. It's sort of completely fanciful. That's the that's a project of decades and generations rather than uh you know one uh UK EU defence agreement. There's also the question of what you're going to do, right? Because the if you're dealing with a smaller defence budget, the defence of the United Kingdom as a territorial unit and the defence of Europe actually are completely different defense challenges that that remember militate towards completely different militaries, right? Britain, historically, for a reason, has had a navy, a powerful air force, and then a small, relatively elite expeditionary army. Whereas if you're a continental country and your main thing is the territ orial defense of part of Eastern Europe against Russia, you need a very large land army. You need the railway trucks to move hundreds of tanks, thousands of kilometers to the border. Like it completely structurally changes all of your defense procedure, right? And I think this is another thing that we haven't really had resolved when it's EU, you know, but lots of people don't like Donald Trump. America is looking like a less reliable ally. It makes sense that instinctively that we reach towards Europe as like, okay, we'll do Europe instead. But actually, America has always been much more willing to endorse and subsidize a version of British defense that was focused on the defense of the British Home Islands as a territorial unit. And actually, it's not obvious that Britain can meaningfully contribute to to a defence posture that requires you to have a hundred thousand men in Ukraine, right? Like there's not the political will or the budget to do that. Henry, can I just take you back quickly to you you talked about where you thought the Labour Party was on the EU and you talked about EU questions, uh policy questions as potentially a unifier for the for the right and politics. But I mean isn't that an issue for the Conservatives in, the sense that their position is quite similar to that of reform at at the moment. And and if they do advocate for leaving the ECHR, that will eventu essentially mean tearing up the trade and corporation agre ement? Do you think that's where Baden wants to go? Or do you think the Conservatives will tack into a different position to where reform are now? There were several views inside the party as to what you do about the ECHR . And the day minimis version was actually that you do what the great Tony Blair did, which is that you legislate in contravention of it and you just say that's what you're doing. Because the bill does actually the act does actually allow you to do this, right? And so on that you would simply say, you know, if you did it with prisoner votes, but you would simply pass a law that said um foreign national offenders convicted of sexual offences are not allowed to make um appeals against deportation under section eight of the ECHR. Really, really narrow, right? As narrow as you can make it. Because then basically the, political challenge for your opponents is do they want to fight you not on the airy field of you know Churchill and after the war, but on the very specific question of foreign rapists? If they concede the point, then you've won the point and you can start doing this again. And if they don't you'll fight them and you'll win. And instead they seem to have gone for the slightly more sort of lawyer lawyer brained we should just withdraw, which is challenge more more challenging politically because it makes it it makes it you have to do more to answer to the positives that the ECHR does than if you take a more granular approach. But do you think not differentiating themselves from reform on that is is going to be okay for them? I refuse to criticize them for this because I think that they do it far too little, which is they are actually just thinking about what policy they want and then trying to make the case for it to the voters, which is something that happens too infrequently, right? If it's the same as reform, I do think reform and the Tories do only have a problem in that because neither of them have parti acularly meaningful policy pro program , they really they they have to really dislike each other. Because otherwise the open question is well why are you different parties? I think actually once they'd firmed up what each of them stood for, then it would be much easier to have a sensible grown-up conversation about about some kind of working arrangement. But no, the Tories it's it's not just about reform. The Tories do have a very difficult problem now in that they've basically lost the Red Wall, right? Most of that voting reform now. They've also lost an awful lot of their old twenty fifteen coalition uh uh uh s supporters. And so they now have a very specific part of the Tory uh of the old Tory electoral coalition. And it's not obvious how they expand it particularly because if you take try and take votes in the Lib Dem, so they are in a very tricky spot. But ultimately there's I think they've recognised there's no future for the right, for a right wing party in this country in this climate that is committed to an unreformed ECHR, right? That is that is committed to not being able to deport people. And are they prepared for the challenge that people will say and people will say that that basically this is not a growth policy, it's an anti growth policy because effectively you're tipping the UK back into a no-deal Brexit if the EU then, as it says it would, if you left the ECHR repudiate repudiate the trade and cooperation agreement, you know, question marks of the Good Friday Agreement, etcetera the Conservatives ready for that, or would they say actually you know, reform we've got all those people who are the sort of big leave coalition, maybe we should try and start winning back some of those libdams . Th no, there aren't enough Lib Dems. Uh one and two, the party is a right wing party. I think that there is there is a Lib Dem element to it in the parliamentary party, um that consists of somewhere between thirty and 40 FPs. And frankly, that tendency will not be inside the right wing coalition in 10 to 15 years' time. We are undergoing a realignment on the right. What shape that takes depends a lot on how things work out, whether or not we get a change in the electoral system, how the next general election goes. The way that I tend to frame for people is that it's basically a question of whether we get Canada, New Zealand or Australia as our new right-wing arrangement. In Canada you had the two parties they fought like cats and dogs for ten years and then they merged. In Australia you have basically a permanently established national coalition where the two right wing parties divvy up the seats between them and then in New Zealand they basically they're four they're not formally affiliated, but they everyone knows that they're going to go in together if they if they if they form a government. And so I think that there is an element of the current Conservative Party which is still there but which will leave. Because you simply cannot operate as a party of the right, given where the right and the centre of mass on the right is going in Britain. And I think actually one of the big indictments of the Conservative Party is that in a two-party system, the purpose of each of the big parties is to tack sufficiently with public opinion that you don't leave space on your outward flank for a party to come in and to buff the apple car. And the Tories actually, they said the Tory centrists were too strong, right? And they actually managed to resist doing this to the point where they created this vast yawning void through which through which UKIP has come. I don't think they've necessarily thought through all of the implications of what leaving the ECHR will involve. I'm not going to pretend that that's happened. And I think that they would get some nasty surprises. I do think that the argument effectively would be that they fundamentally disagree with with you on the question the extent to which the European Union is a growth proposition at all. Because their argument would be that effectively from about two thousand and seven per capita G uh per capita GDP, real wages productivity are more or less flat, null point five percent over the period, right? So that's already a good solid ten years. Yeah, but I'm just getting closer to the street No, no, no, no, no, no, I know. I know no no, but I'm saying like but I'm saying that that that was when we were inside with all of the benefits. And so their argument would be essentially most of Britain's economic problems are domestic and therefore a sufficiently vigorous domestic agenda, deregulation, slashing the minimum wage, that kind of stuff, if you've had the stomach to do it, that could offset potentially losses uh on on the EU side. Very interesting. Well, I'm afraid that's the end of this week's inside briefing. Thank you to Alex, Jill, and especially to Henry Hill. Head to our website now for the latest comment we have there from Hannah Keenan on Reform UK's civil service plans. You can also enjoy our latest Ministers Reflect paper, which extracts advice from our archive of interviews with devolved ministers for those entering government after the elections in Cardiff and Holyrood. And we've got an event coming up next week looking at whether private members' bills are a good way for MPs to get into difficult policy areas in the wake of the demise of the Terminally Ill Adults Bill. In the meantime, we're all off to find a cooler room to work in. We'll see you next week.