Defence spending and strategy

The Prime Minister has been making the speech of his life today. After a disastrous week for Labour at the polls, his job is on the line. This is political fix from the Financial Times with me, Lucy Fisher. Welcome to the show. It's a slightly different format today, another of our QA specials, where I'm putting to the panel the burning questions that you, our listeners, have sent in. With me on the show are the FT 's Chief Political Commentator Robert Shimsley. Hello Robert. Hello Lucy. Deputy Opinion Editor Miranda Green. Hi Miranda. Hello Lucy. And political editor George Parker. Hi George. Hello, Lucy. Well first up, I know we wanted this to focus on some of the questions in the ether that we don't always turn to, but we can't escape the news agenda. It's a huge week. So let's digest what we've heard from the PM on Monday morning. George, heralded as the speech of his life, quite low on policy substance, higher on rhetoric, was it enough? It's a good question. Certainly the speech have been built up in advance, and I think there's a question about how realistic it is for any speech by any politician to really change the political weather. It's hard. What can we think of? David Cameron's speech to the Tory leadership back in two thousand five. I'm going to think about this actually because I think that was maybe George Osborne's speech at the Tory conference where he announced the inheritance tax changes that persuaded Gordon Brown not to stand. And I actually asked a few people on Blue Sky about this. One that came back was Theresa May's red lines speech in the Brexit debate as changing it. There's not many in recent times. It makes you think slightly that somebody's setting him up to fail, to build the speech up to such an extent. Is it make or break? Well it's gonna be break. Exactly. Now that's exactly the point I was going I was going to make. That's this speaking to some of his allies who were being briefed on the speech on Sunday as it was being prepared, frantically being rewritten, it started off being very Keir-ish, and they were trying to beef it up because they were worried that his opponents would build it up as a make or break speech. And as he was being set up to fail. In the end, I don't think the speech was a disaster. I thought the optics were quite good. We were discussing this earlier, Lucy, weren't we? The idea that he had supporters there whooping and cheering a bit. I think that at least created a slightly better ambience. He seemed pumped up He did. There was some stuff about how he wanted to show that they actually understood and cared about the lives of working people, which he said that sometimes people think that he didn't believe in. And also unite the party behind a common enemy, reform UK, who he said could lead the party down a the country down a very dark path. And finally Europe was the other part. The thing that the left and the right of the Labour Party can agree on closer ties with Europe, but fundamentally still no shifting away from those famous red lines and not going anywhere near as quickly or as decisively enough for some Labour MPs in f in terms of rejoining the single market of the customs union. Well uh Lloyd ninety nine has said on the website uh in response to the news story that's up already, as a younger person who was unable to vote in the Brexit referendum due to being too young at the time, I have the utmost respect for Starmer for standing and not throwing in the towel. Miranda, that was part of the message today from Starmer, wasn't it? I'm not going anywhere. He repeated that vow, I'm not going to walk away, but I think helpfully for us, he was asked the direct question : if there is a leadership contest, will you stand? And he said yes. Yes, but all of that's true, and he clearly feels that it's important for their watchword of stability for the UK in a dangerous world, that he makes that absolutely clear. I personally thought, particularly in the QA after the speech, that it tipped over into slightly too much psychologically revealing stuff about what he thinks about his own predicament. I've proved people wrong before. I'll prove them wrong again. I don't know, you know, if you really genuinely think, as he said in the speech, that this is the most dangerous is the world is more dangerous than any time in my life, the country is in danger of going down a very dark path if we don't prevail. Is how you feel about your own capability to confound your critics the most important consideration? It started to sound a bit too much like that to me. Robert, one minister I spoke to after the speech was happy to hear Starmer take off the gloves as they described it on reform and talk about the country potentially going down a dark path if Labour doesn't save its faltering administration . What do you make of that? Could that potentially put off MPs whose voters are reform curious and like what they're offering? I think the problem is that it's a question of who's listening. I mean I I strongly agree with Miranda . For me, the most important part of the speech was actually the signal that if you want me out, you're gonna have to get me out, I'm not gonna walk away. And I think there's been quite a few Labour MPs and positioning people over the last weeks who are trying to suggest that we can just nudge him out and he'll walk and he's saying that's not going to happen. You're gonna have to pony up to to play. I felt the issue for him is the one about who's listening. So he's got two audiences. He's got the country and he's got the party, the party being the more pressing one at the moment, because they can get rid of him. The problem is the country's not listening to him, and that's really abundantly clear. Not only is the country not listening to him, I heard the polster Luke Trill saying, actually, when he says something that the country agrees with, they disagree with it because he's saying it. So he's in that place and nobody is persuaded that he can get out of it. And so although the party are hearing things they like, if they're not hearing something that says they're gonna start listening to us again, then I don't think it gets anywhere. And the problem with where Labour is, in my opinion, is that it's got to place. It's losing seats to Nigel Farage that it may now not be able to get back. That habit of voting Labour may be broken. And voters need a reason, a permission to go back and look at Labour again. And I think a lot of the MPs have simply concluded that the only permission they can provide them with is a different leader. Well well here's a flavour from other uh FT subscribers. Cleat says useless work Starmer didn't drop the red lines, all he offered on Europe were words. That's it, George, isn't it? He could have been older, potentially on the EU? Would that have galvanized the party, the MPs, as Robert said, who are the most pressing audience he needs to get back on side? Potentially. I think it just falls into the category of all of Keir Starmer's speeches, basically, where he's great at diagnosing the problem and coming up with some quite grandiose rhetoric to describe the scale of the problem, the fact that the Iran war was going to define a generation, how we responded would define a generation. He's you know, he's talks a lot about how much damage Brexit has done to the country. But then you say, what are you going to do about it? He said in his speech, incremental change is not good enough anymore. Well that's exactly somehow. That's literally exactly what he's talking about when it comes to the European Union. Not going back in the single market, not going back into the customs union. What he's talking about is incremental attempts to join bits of the single market, which the EU will probably describe as cherry picking and say no any to anyway. Now uh one listener is the business secretary, Peter Kyle. Uh should say he's not the only member of the cabinet who's uh a loyal listener of political fix. But I bumped into him en route here and he has a question for you, which I said I'd put to you. Which of Labour's red lines would you like to see us bump up against? Miranda. So since they've decided to go with a kind of flow across the Western democracies, because of supply chain difficulties, all the rest of it, to say we have to look again at becoming more self-sufficient in terms of manufacturing and being a manufacturing power. The sort of economic thing we've fallen back on in this country saying, well, it's now a services economy and we're great at that. Probably not enough. So I thought it was interesting that he emphasised steel in the speech for that reason as well as the kind of Labour Heartlands reason. But I think that therefore trying to do something on the customs union would actually be quite good because it would make sense for the sectors that are really hurting, which tend to be physical export sectors, you know, agriculture and all the rest of it. So I think they should try and do something on the red lines on customs union. Robert? And also then that doesn't get you into the freedom of movement problem, which is a real political b battle. The customs union, as Moran says, is the easiest of the red lines to push at. It's probably the part that the public think about and understand the least, and therefore you can blur it with complexity if you want. I'm not convinced it really moves the needle very much on the state of the British economy, obviously it would also cause problems for some of the trade deals potentially that already been done. My problem's always been with the whole argument is that in the end , if you're not in the EU, then everything you're doing is what the EU tells you to do And that fundamentally the only logical position was ever in or out, not half out. I know you can make a case for the single market. Things would be easier for the economy, but you would be taking rules all the time and you would have the freedom of movement issue. So I mean I I'm not saying I think it's practical for them to do this now, but I don't see any point in trying to argue for half in. I think if you want to make this case, you make the case. Look, I mean the only realistic red line you can push against, I agree with Robert, is the the whole going the whole hog and saying at some at some point down the line we're going to negotiate to go back in. And that's what Sadiq Khan wants to do, it's something that Andy Burnham wants to do as well. I don't think that's on the card s for quite a long time. I think it's a generational thing. I think we discussed this the other day that Nick Clegg suggested twenty thirty six as a potential target date. I said generational thing and I agree with Robert and Miranda you can't really be half in or half out and as long as we are out, we'll keep chipping away at things on the EU's terms. But and we haven't even mentioned the fact that reform is still breathing down their neck in a lot of those areas that voted Brexit in twenty sixteen. So I think people on the pro European wing of the Labour Party will continue to be frustrated. I do think this is a fundamental problem that this is not a p situation you can change overnight. You have to make the political arguments. Yeah, that's so tru one look at what Nigel Farage was twenty years making the argument for Brexit. You have to actually start pushing and pushing. You can't just sit and say, we're gonna wait for the right moment and then spring it on the public. There is clearly a mood in the country that Brexit was a mistake that is not necessarily translating into we'd really like to revisit everything again. Or that we want us to join the single currency, we want free movement. But you do actually have to start arguing. Yeah. I remember one it was Barroso, the former Commission president, saying I he he said to me once on an article , you can't argue against Europe you know Monday through Saturday and then say vote for it on Sunday. And it's the same in reverse. Of a government under as much pressure as Starmer, isn't it? Um put upon lawyer, says can't they find some people It's a great handle . Can't they find some people with their futures in front of them? With some oomph, splendid though Brown and Harmon were slash R . So George, that's obviously referring to over the weekend Gordon Brown being unveiled as special envoy for global finance, Harriet Harmon as the advisor to Keir Starmer on women and girls, it actually ended up annoying possibly more Labour MPs than it impressed, didn't it? Yeah, it did. It looked like a totally inadequate response to what had just happened, bringing back a couple of septuagenarians to actors or advisors. I mean it illustrated a few things. One, that he was too weak to carry out a traditional ministerial reshuffle. So bringing a couple of people from yesteryear back in as advisors was an easier way to show you were changing your personnel. I think the thing about Gordon Brown's appointment, which is interesting in as much as it tells you anything at all about what the government's looking at, is Starmer has become, I'm told, increasingly frustrated with the Treasury, the Treasury orthodoxy when it comes to things like funding the defen se investment programme, which is stuck on Keir Star mer's desk. And he does want someone inside number 10 who has the economic heft to be able to go to the Treasury and make quite detailed arguments, not just because Starmer , economics is not Starmer's thing as we know. He brought in Manush Shafiq as his chief economic advisor, former deputy governor of the Bank of England. That hasn't really worked out very well. So it's a bit of a sense that Keir Starmer wants a bit more economic we ight in there. Uh and my sense is that this is not something that Rachel Reeves would necessarily have been advocating. I thought it was significant that in that cringy video that they made of Gordon coming into number ten to accept his new role. Rachel Reeves looks like she was presiding at a wedding between between Gordon and Keir Starmer. It's all very odd. I mean what they can do next is go to Hampstead Churchyard and dig up Hugh Gates school. But I did find myself thinking, you knew this weekend was coming, you knew exactly what's going to happen in these elections. You presumably thought about having a really concrete plan for how you were going to manage the next five days. And what we end up with is essentially a photo opportunity with a couple of has-bins and a speech. This that's it. This was gonna take something big to get you out of this hole, and this is what you've got. But th this goes to the key point about this terrible set of election results, doesn't it? Which is that lots of people were saying, well, it's inevitable, it's priced in. It's never priced in. You know, terrible existential electoral disasters are never priced in. And whatever their plan was for the supposed reshuffle, forget it. Yeah. Out the window. Miranda, um uh you know I'm interested now that we've had forty plus Labour MPs come over the parapet and outright call for Starmer to go or set out a timetable or be very critical of him and signalling that it is the outcome they want. In addition, uh George, you just talked about Rachel Reeves there. Is that becoming a theme? You've been speaking to Sadiq Khan recently, did a fantastic interview with him that's on the website and we'll put in the show notes. But on Monday, he's also come out of the woodwork to call Rachel Reeves a roadblock on some of the greater powers for London. Is that potentially a safety valve now for Starmer and his administration, sort of channeling some of the focus and heat on her? What to give ground a bit on some of what the soft left are demanding or just to try and divert fire to number eleven down extra and you know this this idea of a reshuffle, you know, people going back and forth on whether he's strong enough. We've discussed is there anyone he could afford to sack? It does feel like who's your Chancellor, right? The pr it's a huge deal. And the whole two years that they've been in power, it's been a question of how close this duopoly of Starmer and Reeves, if he were to say, okay, well, I'm gonna sacrifice the Chancellor. That is a really dangerous last throw of the dice, not least because of all of the problems that the UK is experiencing with the markets and the fact that the only people person they seem to understand is Rachel Reeves at the Treasury as this bloc. So, you know, you've got this real problem. The Labour Party sees Rachel Reeves as a block and the wider world, particularly the bond markets, see Rachel Reeves as a very valuable block on what the Labour Party wants to do. So it's an unsolvable dilemma in that respect, I think. I think also in terms of other sort of senior Labour figures coming out of the woodwork and asking for everything that they want, now's a great time because the government looks incredibly vulnerable and maybe they'll give them something. It also massively undercuts his argument, which is this is not a time to be taking risks with the country and the economy. I'll do it myself, just get rid of the shots of going down. Well let's go to another question that throws ahead to some of the other contenders in this process. This is via email from Anna. There's been a lot of conversation on Westminster social media about the UK being ungovernable. This seems a bit of a cop-out to me. I don't think we've tried a PM who has been any good at it in years. What's going wrong in the party leader selection process? And is there anyone among the Labour runners and riders who has what it takes to turn the country around? George. I think it's become harder to run the country over the in the over the many years that we've all been writing about politics. It's become harder for a number of reasons. The economy' stospped growing, money's run out. We've hit by a number of crises. The debt burden has risen from thirty-five percent or whatever it was under when Gordon Brown was prime minister to over to nearly a hundred percent. So the absence of money, the absence of growth has made it much harder to be a leader because in the old days if you ran into a problem so you could chuck a bit of money at at it, that option is no longer available. I think that's underpriced. I think social media has made things harder as well, speeded everything up. People expect results straight away. So I think it's become harder to be a prime minister. However, you know, we've talked about it on the pod many times. This prime minister has many self-inflicted problems, right? And he came into office with a big majority. We had no plan whatsoever on what to do. And as he's admitted in the last few days, made a number of unnecessary mistakes, as he put it, although not always the mistakes I think that we would have identified that he's made. Is there anyone else waiting in the wings who would do a better job. Looking around the potential runners and rid ers, I'm not entirely sure. I think West Streeting has a certain amount of charisma and would be an interesting leader. Andy Burnham has established himself as a leader of a Merrill Sea in Manchester . Whether that would translate to him being a strong leader at Westminster, not entirely so sure. Robert, well I think two points. There's one other factor which I think has materially affected the choice of Prime Minister. It's not a new one, which is the fact they're now chosen by the party activists rather than by the MPs. And it makes a material difference because you're getting leaders who seek to appeal to activists. And activists, as we know, in all parties are not normal people. They are always further to whatever extreme they're on than the country. So that's a real problem. You certainly the most obvious example of that was Liz Truss when she won the Tory leadership. So that's become a problem. As far as people being better, I don't know. I mean I think in each of the candidates there's something about them that's better. I mean I think Andy Burnham has an obvious charisma and personality which the lay party could use , but there's stuff in this policy platform that's just really Willy and you question the economics of it. Where Streeting has some of these smarts it's not been amazing yet at the Department of Health, and the question of whether he could carry a party which wants to pull more leftwards than maybe he does. I mean Ed Miliband, patently an effective cabinet minister, patently understands leadership, but is that the direction you want to go as a country? And also can you really Proven loser, as some of uh uh Streeting's supporters are describing him. Um Miranda, with Streeting, it is now sort of orthodoxy that the party wouldn't vote for him because he will be the Blairite wing of the party's candidate up against someone from the soft left, maybe more than one candidate, but likely either Burnham or Miliband or Rayner, say. Some of street Ting's supporters say, look, you know, we've already kind of done polling that show that up against Nigel Farage, he is the most likely of these candidates to win. Do you think that there is an argument that that could be made to the activist base if, there is a contest and if streetings in it, that he could win, or do you think that the orthodoxy is right? It just won't go his way? So those of us have a certain vintage, if we cast our minds back to nineteen ninety-five, there was this extraordinary phenomenon of when they put all the potential people who might become leader of the Labour Party to a kind of what was then to be a focus group as we now understand them much better. The ratings for Tony Blair were just insane. You know, the kind of worm that you get along the book it just went whoop right up to the top of the scream and stayed there for the whole thing. It's really hard to find somebody with a kind of skill set and that popular appeal and the policy now and economic literacy as George has importantly talked about. You have to settle for the parts of the skill set that answer the moment, and you have to try and find somebody who doesn't suffer really badly from the Dunning Kruger effect, which is the thing where when you're not very good at something you don't even know you're very not very good at it and so you don't compensate. I think that with a candidate like we're streeting, perhaps they would have the sort of strength of character because he doesn't seem backward in coming forward as it were or lacking in self-confidence to know that there are bits to where he has to compensate and infill on the policy stuff, right? And I think that's actually what they need now. If for example Andy Burnham realized , as Robert has pointed out, that there are bits of his policy programme that are way too woolly. So long as he actually reinforces his leadership by making sure he compensates for that with the right people and listens to them, that might not be such a problem. You know, he should probably not talk about economics so much as it seems to me. There's ridiculous stuff about being in hopped to the bond market. But you know what I mean? So you there's no ideal candidate and there sort of never has been, or certainly not for a jet whole generation. So if you lack those talents and skill sets, you need to form a team around you. And you have to have a plan. And that's the kind of original sin of this government, is they just didn't have the plan coming in. And that's sufficient to the r the the problem they've got now is that let's say you they go for it, they change the leader, they get someone else in. The public will look at them, but the window for that is quite small. And so you'll have a few weeks, maybe a month or two, to say to the public, Look, Labour's got it back together again. And then they're gonna switch off because people don't spend their whole life obsessing about politics. And then it's gone and you've done it and you've played your big card three years out from the election. So the point of if you put someone in, they've got to actually have a real plan and real momentum from day one. And that's the other thing. You look at the potential candidates, you go, have you got that? I'm not sure. Is let's have a scenario where there's a contest, most of the votes, as Robert was pointing out earlier, the membership is out to the left are where the mainstream of the public are. You have a bidding war for votes on the left of the party. As the contest develops, the bond markets go a bit haywire, borrowing cut government borrowing costs go up. You get a new leader in who's made a whole series of promises to get elected. Suddenly finds they've got to find a whole load of more money Can't deliver, the public switch off, nothing changes, and it's entirely possible, isn't it? As per the Tor ies not very long ago, you end up with another Labour leadership contest between now and the election Mm. You talk to Tories m from that last government. There's quite a few of them now say, Well maybe we should have just stuck it out with Boris. He was elected by the country, there were big problems, but maybe we'd have been better off sticking with him and trying to push through the reason better the devil you know argument. Well, here's another question emailed in from Ben, who has just stepped down as a councillor in a London borough. He asks, Did reform actually want to win big this May? Winning an election is a relatively simple task compared to governing, and huge swathes of the country going to reform might blow their credibility to govern effectively before the twenty twenty nine general election. Miranda. Well it's very interesting this this, isn't it? So some people , dowdy types like myself, go and vote in local council elections on the basis of the local council and who's going to be in charge of it. And quite a lot of other people vote on kind of the national mood and who they're more irritated by and with the tactical message of who who it will send a more punishing message. And I think there's clearly a sense in which some of the reform vote is part of this wider story of anyone but Starmer's Labour. But some of it is an actual positive attraction to reform. And obviously, as journalists, for two years now, as reform has been on the rise, we've been looking carefully at the things that might trip them up, the things that might place a ceiling on their popularity. And if you look at some of the places that they've run since last year, where they did win big, it's not been plain sailing, let's put it politely. The question is how much that will actually matter. I think you know, local local council elections in England it's a lot of it's done by thirds, so there'll be more elections at this time next year for local councils again, to see whether the electorate in certain areas choose them again when they've actually been running the council will actually be really interesting. Because then you'll be able to draw some conclusion about reform's competence or otherwise. At the moment, I think a lot of their vote is nothing to do with what they would do in charge, either locally or nationally. I'm just g addonna another question on reform into the mix and I will also smuggle in here in the middle an apology to all of you who tried to email in and got a bounce back email. We've had a bit of technical issues from some domains emailing in and to those of you who persevered by emailing me personally or messaging me on social media um to let me know this has happened and sending in your question anyway, thank you. It's now fixed for the next Q<unk>A special. This won't happen. Here is a question from uh Victor who says in the wards where reform did well in solid northern seats, turnout appears to have been significantly up compared to twenty twenty four. This presumably tells us that there is a significant level of enthusiasm amongst reforms voters. Has Nigel Farage perhaps managed to achieve something similar to Trump in America and engage hard-to-reach low-propensity voters? Will this inform Reform's approach to the general election I I have two thoughts on that. First of all, I just wanted to come back on the first part of that question that Miranda answered. I think it's incredibly important to reform that they do well. Really, really wanted to do well in these elections for the simple reason that to go from where they were at the last general election, which is essentially nowhere, to winning would be the most extraordinary thing. And the only way that's possible is for a a sense of inevitability to be built up. And the elections each year are the big thing for them. So they have to build up this sense of we're the guys, we're the guys, the Tories are nowhere, it's us, it's really happening. So these elections are everything, and Nigel Farage put a four phenomenal amount of money into it. On the point about harnessing people, I think there's no question that both the Greens and Reform, but especially Reform, managed to mobilize voters, mobilise their voters. That was where the enthusiasm was, and at the same time, there was a drop-off in support, people bothering to turn out for Labour in particular, and possibly the Tories. So I think they are reaching people and they are enthusing them to go out and vote. And I think this raises an interesting question for them over the next couple of years, because after sort of several months of being a bit more sensible and a bit more Tory like, and we've brought in all these Tories and we're a bit like we're the better new Conservative Party. In the campaign, they rather reverted to old reform and being a bit more sensational, saying things to wind people up, being the new and radical party. And it's the new and radical part that I think energizes people. So I think it will be interesting to see if the lesson they take away from this contest is be more like the reform we were two years ago than the new Conservative Party. Well it seems to me another thing that's helpful to reform having done very well and got by far and away the largest vote share in the national vote in the English council elections, is that they are the preeminent party on the right. And in a first past the post system, obviously that's helpful as they try to squeeze the Conservative vote further. We actually had quite a lot of questions on the political voting system in the UK, or I should say probably Westminster elections and and English Council elections. Here's one from Robert from Honerton in Devon . George, he asks, will Sakir Starmer push to change the voting system to proportional representation, PR? It would prevent a reform government and will show that he has ideas which don't cost money. He could be viewed as a strategic politician who calls the shots. If so, how would reform react? Interesting question. Well it sounds like an Andy Burnham question because it's exactly what Andy Burnham would like to see. He's the biggest proponent in the Labour Party for changing the voting system. I think it'll be a risky strategy for any Prime Minister to look like they're rigging the voting system in their favour before an election. So I think he's unlikely to do it. I think also it might be slightly counterproductive, actually , because if you listen to Keir Starmer's speech, his fight back speech, a big part of it was positioning himself and the Labour Party as a bulwark against reform. And in the first part of the post-system, it's a way of actually persuading people , look, you may not like us very much, but do you really want to let the other guy in? And actually getting people in individual seats to come and cross and back a Labour candidate. I think actually you can make the first past the post system work. And don't forget they won a massive landslide major ity under the current system with what was it? Thirty three, thirty four percent of the votes. So I don't think there's any massive incentive for Keir Starmer to do it, and I don't think he will. I'm not sure he can actually, in time for the next election, because if you were changing to anything other than maybe the alternative vote, which the country rejected at a referendum, you'd have to change the boundaries of the constituencies. That would require boundary reform. That would require a much more complicated piece of legislation. I'm not sure he could actually get that through Parliament in time, even if he wanted to. And it would just look like gerrymandering the system, wouldn't it? Particularly if you then start messing with the boundaries when they've only just been reset for the twenty twenty-four general election. Basically the problem with this whole argument is that any government that wins under first past the post then goes off the whole idea of thing of changing the voting system. And even in a co under a coalition of the Tories and the Lib Dems, the Tories gave the Lib Dems an unwinnable referendum on a something that's not even PR anyway. I mean we we sort of go round the houses on this. I think the thing that has fundamentally changed though, and Robert wrote about this only a couple of days ago, was the fact that the electorate has fragmented to such an extent that it looks as if the voting system is ill-suited to people expressing their new preferences in a new way. But your argument, Robert, was that actually once you come to a general election. People tend to coalesce anywhere around two polls. Well left and right. Yeah. And also actually one of the interesting things about this is whether it's parties of the left often talk about changing the voting system, particularly the Liberal Democrats. But actually at the last election, the Liberal Democrat actually worked the sist the current first path suppose system really well and got broadly the same number of seats as their electoral share suggested, because they've targeted their efforts. So if you're a party on the left and you look at the Labour winning amountside with 33 or 34% of the vote, and the Lib Dems winning 72 seats off the back of what was it, 13%, 14%, something like that? Less than 13%. Maybe less than went down. Was a level of 12%. You can see why there's not even in a self-interested way, not much of a point of doing this. But I think there is what is true is that we are in an unsustainable position. And this is the point I was making that you can either have this fragmentation of politics go on a long time, in which case you are going to have to change the voting system at some point because first past the post will deliver huge majorities to a party with thirty percent of the vote. That's no good. Or you don't change the voting system and first pass the post ex exerts the gravitational pull that it always does in forcing parties to to take over greater areas of space, to rebuild that bigger coalition. So one of the thing one of these two things is going to have to give, but I don't think there's any guarantee that it's a change to the voting system.. No And of course one of the key arguments in favour of First Past the Post is that it produces stable governments or a stable system, rather. And we've not found that, have we? We've had more Prime Ministers in Italy in the past fifteen odd years. Here's a question from Greg Rosen, Chair of the Labour History Group and author of Old Labour to New. He asks if Labour's 2024 election win reflects a mandate to use an enabling state to fix broken Britain. How far is the UK state actually equipped for the task and what should Labour ask the new cabinet secretary, Antonio Romeo, to do to fix it? Like one of our other correspondents today, I find this whole Britain's just become ungovernable thing kind of annoying. I think it's a bit of a get out clause for the politicians who fail to fix the problems. And similarly I find the whole well, I pull a lever, nothing happens. I find that really irritating as well. But I mean George would be much better pla y us whether there are actually changes in Eukamberic could make that would make it Starmold. Rhetorically I find that irritating a whole lot of it. Well Starmer was asked the question at his press conference, wasn't he? Whether Britain is now ungovernable. And to be fair, he dismissed it and he said no, he didn't think that was that was true. He didn't lean into that theme. Yeah, I th well I think that's probably a wise thing for him to say because speaking to one minister, I thought it was a really good point that a lot of voters last weekend in general feel they've got no control in their life. They're lacking power, they're lacking agency to use the jargon. And one of the reasons they they''rere drawn to strong politicians is because they exude power and an ability to do things. That's why Donald Trump's successful. And the really one of the things that really irritates voters, this minister was suggesting about Starmer is that a load of powerless people gave him authority and he doesn't seem to be able to wield it on their behalf. And for him to go around blaming everyone else about his appointment of Peter Mans on or moaning about civil servants wallowing in the taking bath of mediocrity Just sounds like a load of blame shifting. So I'm glad he didn't say that Britain was ungovernable. There's a whole load of civil servants who do a really good job and just want a bit of leadership from the top. And there's no point in blaming the system if you come into office with no idea of how you're gonna what you're gonna do or how you're going to do it. They want a steer from the top. I think Antonio Romeo has made a quite a good start, according to a lot of people. She seems to have galvanized things. She's told civil servants that she will hold them responsible. But the system is in a bad way. It's been demoralized. It's significant, I think that Keir Starmer had to write yet another letter to the civil service last week apologizing for having trashed them again. But you know, look, we do have a load of very capable civil servants, but they need leadership . Well here's a question Millie has sent in as a voice note. I worked incredibly hard to earn a degree from a top university. I borrowed forty five thousand two hundred and seventy two pounds from the student loans company and have since repaid eighty thousand six hundred and thirty over the past decade, nearly double my original loan value. Yet I still owe twenty thousand five hundred and ninety six pounds . When I was still in school and considering higher education, we attended an in person talk from student finance advising us that student loans were the best option and the monthly repayments would be comparable to that of a phone bill. However, the reality is my monthly repayment is now almost 20 times that. This has led me to making deliberate career choices to move into lower paying roles on two separate occasions. There's simply no financial incentive to earn more . My question is, are we sitting on a ticking time bomb for an entire generation of young graduates, including essential public services like doctors and lawyers, where the system actively punishes ambition and hard work? Well I think it's an interesting question because on the figures that you give, Millie must have actually come out of university and got quite a good job if she's paid that much money back already. So in one sense, the system worked for her for quite a long time and she's now looking at it and going, but this is ridiculous. I could do without this. There are others who've not even had the success that she's would appear to have enjoyed at the start. But up to half of the amount that's being loaned to students is never going to be repaid, it will be written off. So that's a major problem. And I think the question simply is like it goes back a bit to the question you had a moment ago about whether the country is ungovernable. It becomes less governable if you don't tell people the truth, if you don't level with them about the the scale of problems you have and what you want. And we're beginning to see a bit of this with students, with ministers saying, well, maybe a degree isn't the right path for you. Maybe you should be looking at apprenticeships. And I think students themselves are beginning to come to that question, but the job market itself looks so complicated. It's very hard to say what is the right call for you to make at eighteen to d to determine the rest of your career. What I do think is true is that it's deeply unfair to students, and part of the appeal, particularly of the Greens, is that they're saying, Well, we'll do something about it. Now, the problem is once you start saying you're going to do something about it, that's a lot of money that you've got to either take away from universities or find, and that becomes extremely difficult. But it is a massive mess. Miranda, you're furiously scribbling, and we know you know tons about this subject. Well, so here's the thing: when the student loan system was first introduced, it was actually very well designed. And there was, for example, a deliberate policy choice made as to who would end up never repaying and who therefore the state would subsidize. And that was people on a relatively low earnings after they graduated, quite a lot of them working in the public services in healthcare jobs, for example, or as teaching assistants. So that was like a policy choice that the Treasury would end up paying. So you if you're going to say, well, the state ends up paying anyway because people sort of default on a lot of the loan, if it's the right people, that doesn't actually matter because that was why it was designed in that way. What's happened over the years is that in successive incoming governments, particularly during the coalition years, have changed the way the system operates to such an extent that it has ended up penalising a lot of the wrong people, including those from poorer homes, who originally weren't paying, 30% of poorer homes, we' notre paying it to start with. And replacing maintenance grants with loans means if you're from a poorer background, you end up actually coming out in a much worse position than some of those who emerged to a really good salary, like the young woman who's written in. But there is this huge sense of unfairness, particularly for those people on the Schedule II loans, where they end up really badly penalised. And it's ended up as a mess with a huge amount of political discontent, which Robert quite rightly says is now reaching a generation of voters and indeed some of the new intake of MPs who've actually decided that this whole system is too onerous. And I think really it needs redesigning, but I think it needs redesigning from the point of view of sharing the burden fairly between graduates who still do turn to earn more and the taxpayer, because it's worth subsidising some degrees and it's worth expanding higher education. So I think the rhetoric can be a bit frustrating on this topic. We've got too many people going to university. Well, no, you know, that actually helps has helped a lot of people in the generation since these loans were introduced, but the system has become a dis incentive for many. It's a glorious political moment, isn't it? You create a situation where you say, We're creating millions and millions of graduates and they're all going to be furious. So who knows what a great political situation And they'll all they'll all live in Adam has a question about defence. He asks defense spending isn't going away as a topic, so what would each of you do if you were Keir Starmer? He also goes on to ask why do we spend more than most European countries to get the same, sometimes worse, outcome? George. I think we'll have to come back to you on this, Lucy, because you are you've written loads about the government's defense conundrums. Look, we are gonna have to spend more on defence. We've been free riding on the Americans for far too long. I think everybody agrees with that. The Treasury hates giving money to the Ministry of Defence for obvious reasons, and you've written an in abundance about the disastrous Ajax fighting vehicle that makes soldiers go deaf if they sit in it, and all the other ludicrous procurement decisions that have been made over the years, including the two aircraft carriers, which seems to serve no apparent purpose in modern warfare as, far as I can see, anyway. So there's a real problem. We're gonna have to find more money from somewhere. Gordon Brown has been asked to find some imaginative multinational mechanisms which might do it. But in the end, we're probably gonna have to borrow more money, or we're gonna have to find savings elsewhere in the budget. And you will always have to keep coming back to the fact that we've got an unaffordable welfare state. And if we want to make make ourselves more secure internationally, then we're gonna have to roll back the security, social security system in the UK. Have we done a slightly bad job on the PR on our defence spending, I wonder? Because of course France has got a lot of good headlines for talking about extending the use of its nuclear deterrent to the rest of the continent. Well, of course the UK is always committed trident to NATO. It does take up a huge part of the defense budgets, about twenty percent at present, going to rise to twenty-five percent. And yet there's a lot of headlines about our shrinking size of our conventional forces. Robert, do we make enough of how much we contribute to NATO with this huge strateg ic weapon? That changes the dial when the strategists in the Kremlin are thinking about their next move. Unlike, say, an extra hundred thousand troops. Well I'd defer to you a bit on this, Lucy. I suppose one of the problems that the UK has that France doesn't is its dependence on the US for its independent nuclear deterrent. The French deterrent is different. It can be put forward as a European solution. Britain can't exactly do that in quite the same way. But I think part of the problem is when you're trying to talk to the country about the things you need, we're not actually saying well,, don't worry, we've got the nukes, we can go straight to them. You actually want to persuade people that you can defend the country without destroying the planet. And so you actually want to make sure you have the right drone technology, you have the right anti-missile technology, you have the troops. I don't know all the things that you know more about than I do, but it seems to me that that's where Britain's not got a particularly good story to tell. And historically I'm as a history student, I remember being told in the eighteen hundreds, Bismarck used to say that if Britain sends this army to Germany, I'll arrest them with my police force. Actually, we've never been particularly strong on that. And we're a maritime nation and we've been poor on our on our navy. It's shaky. The thing about the nuclear deterrent, you can't really see it, can you, apart from when it turns up in Fazlane to be refitted. Whereas we what we can see is the sorry state of the Royal Navy and the fact that they're now deploying the famous HMS Red Dragon. Are they not somewhere to near the Straits for means one destroyer and it took two weeks to get it out of port. And even then it uh the government I thought this was a slightly silly move. They sent it on its way, hoping to get all the pictures of it leaving port and good headlines. But then people who can easily track these things from space now saw that it just went round and round in circles while they carried on doing the repairs for another few days before it actually made its way to the eastern Mediterranean. I do think defence needs needs more money. Um I don't envy those having to make the choice, but for a range of reasons, including that some of the major international programs like our sixth generation fighter jet program GCAP, the global combat aircraft program that we're doing with Italy and Japan, and AUKUS, the submarines, and lots of exciting new technology like hypersonics that we're developing with the US and Australia. The true costs of those were very difficult to factor in. On top of that, you've had huge inflation and in uh dollar uh terms we've been badly hit in some of our equipment programs. The armed forces have also had two above inflation pay rises. So there are reasons why things are costing more than were initially billed. And on top of that, I actually have sympathy with John Healy's argument that the world has got more dangerous in ways we couldn't necessarily have predicted. The UK is wanting to take a leadership role in Ukraine with a post-conflict peace force with France in the Strait of Hormuz with an international protection force. I don't think anyone really predicted the Iran war was going to kick off in the way it had. So there are reasons why the MOD needs additional funds for these operational reasons beyond the traditional, well, the MOD is a basket case and always wastes money. It's also very difficult, isn't it? Because as George Sings says, there's lots of concepts wrapped up with defending the nation, which are not visible. It's a bit like within the even within the health budget, people will say we've got to shift to preventative health. But that's always going to feel less urgent than treating the people who are already ill. And somehow a lot of this argument for defence is about deterrence. It is about deterrence, and you into making that concrete is so hard. And I'm sure that's why the government emphasises jobs and manufacturing when they talk about defence as much as well, because at least that's tangible. And particularly over the Labour government, more left-leaning voters, or many of them, don't want to see money spent on armaments and and the military rather than Unless it's a local employer. That's very true. Final question for this QA special, but we will do a few of these throughout the rest of the year. Matthew asks: Does the defeat of Orban in Hungary show that the populist rights ascendancy is not inevitable and can be beaten by an energetic, broad-based democ ratic movement. Robert. No, it doesn't show that. It shows several things. It shows that when governments are in power for too long, eventually people get sick of them. It also showed if you look at who beat Orban, it was someone from within his organization originally coming out and putting a different path forward. So I think it's probably dangerous to assume that you can take too many lessons from it. I think incumbency is a problem in government in in politics at the moment, which is which goes back to your ungovernable question. I don't think I'm afraid that there are a great many lessons to be learned apart from the value of courage and strong leadership and the one thing Peter Magyar showed is he had the guts to get out there and fight. Yeah, and I think he also had the guts to argue against foreign influence in terms of Russia and against the kind of wave of disinformation funded by Russia. And all of that's pretty encouraging sign that he triumphed, I would say. I'd be a bit more optimistic from the point of view of turning back the tide of some of these populist parties. It wasn't in Hungary, was it? You had Albanese in Australia, you had Mark Carney in Canada, you've had the the RN in France, not doing quite as well in regional elections as some people thought. And even in our own elections last week. The reform UK projected share of the vote was under thirty percent, spread quite thinly across the whole country. So while I'm I don't think any people who oppose populist parties should be in any way complacent about what happened in Hungary, I think there isn't there's a sign that when it comes down to it, people can sometimes see through some of the sort of more strident types of politics we see manifesting themselves around the world. Well, we've just got time left for political fixed stock picks. Robert, who are you buying or selling? Well, I don't know. You have to come to me first. I really don't know. It's obviously got to be something around the Labour Party. I'm trying to work out if I want to sell or buy we're streeting. Because on the one on the one hand . On the one hand, I think this is his moment. He's actually got to make a decision and take a stand. But the problem is it could go wrong. And if he doesn't make a stand, he will look will be tarred as someone who had his moment and bottled it. I think it's really difficult. So But on that, he's his camp have put forward this argument. He's preparing if it all falls apart, but he won't challenge Starmer, he's not plotting. But he is plott pling. But he isot it's obs obviously plotting. And the problem is i it's it's like wounding but not striking. It it and I think we're getting to that moment where he's really got to make a decision because if this goes long, I think it begins to g run away from him. And so he's got to make a big decision. So I'm gonna buy him this week 'cause he's gonna make a big decision and it'll probably be a disastrous choice by me, but I'll buy him. By the end of the afternoon. Yeah, probably Better get this show out quickly. George, how about you? Um well I was gonna sell Catherine West, who is the stalking horse candidate who seems to be back in her stable now to a certain extent. But actually I will probably I'll probably probably go for Angela Rayner actually, who last week when I looked, was the favourite to be the next Labour leader with the bookmakers. But her chances have been coming off very quickly. And I think it's partly because Labour MPs have looked at the fact that she still hasn't settled her tax dispute with the HMRC. Also looks at her approval ratings. She's one of the least popular politicians in Britain. So will it work out? And to be fair to Angorena, I think she recognises it herself that it's not going to quite work out. And when you hear a talking about Andy Burnham coming back and clearing the way for Andy Burnham, I think it's an acceptance that she thinks Andy Burnham is the most likely candidate on the soft left. And you hear them talking about a project on the soft left. And to cut the quick of that, I think what they have in mind is Andy Burnham as Prime Minister sometime in the autumn in a dream scenario from their point of view. Angela Rayner as Deputy Prime Minister and Chancellor Exchequer. Welcome back to stage every Miranda. Well, I can't remember whether I hold any Andy Burnham stock is the problem. So I'm not gonna defensively buy Andy Burnham late because it just looks s so pathetic. Instead, I'm going to buy all of those swathes of voters that you were talking about earlier, Lucy, who don't normally turn up because I just think they're going to become more and more important, the younger age group, as well as the habitual non-voters , because as we were discussing in the leave vote in the referendum and ever since, they can sur prise us and the political scientists find them almost impossible to measure and predict in terms of their behaviour. So I think we're going to be talking about these groups of people who don't normally vote more than we have done. About you, Lucy? I'm buying Defence Secretary John Healy because I was interested over the weekend speaking to a few Labour MPs who felt quite resentful about what they thought was increasingly a sense of entitlement among Burnham supporters that he ought to be allowed back in and then obviously not even have to suffer the indignity of a contest. There should be a transition, and he should obviously get the crown. And some Labour MPs I spoke to thought, no, that's not right. And a couple mentioned to me Healy and one said I like him because he's not done anything to Canvas support and I think he has been loyal. And this person also pointed out that he had been early to recognise the danger from reform in his South Yorkshire seat. He and Yvette Cooper, I think. And early on, I'm told by this MP, they were dismissed within the Labour Party by others who said, nah, that that's a problem for the Tory party, not for us. And uh I just think that if the contest does get down to the open, people will start looking at more who could appeal and really take on Farage or understands reform. So in that sense, I'm not saying I think Healy could necessarily win, but he's perhaps underpriced at the moment. So I think this is a good point in the market to buy him. Intriguing. Well that's all we've got time for. We will be back later this week for another episode. You're very lucky we spoil you. But for now, my thanks to Miranda, George, and Robert. Thank you, Lucy. Thank you for listening. There are links to subjects discussed in this episode in the show notes. Do check them out. They're articles we've made free for political fix listeners. There's also a link there to Stephen's award-winning Inside Politics newsletter. You'll get 30 days free. Political Fix was presented by me, Lucy Fisher, and produced by Claire Williamson. Manuela Saragosa is the executive producer. Original music and soundine Engering by Breen Turner. The broadcast engineers are Andrew Jordardis and Petros Jumpis. Gerald Bramley is the FT's global head of audio.