Future of the Labour Party

This is the Guardian Did you have the numbers? Did you have the numberswise? Absolutely. But you had more than eighty MPs. Yes, I did. I do think it's inevitable that Keir has to go . Is that a criticism of Andy Burnham? Andy Burnham doesn't live rent-free in my head. This is the problem with the freedom to speak, is that freedom to speak liberally, I'll try and be shorter, sharper. I'm Pippa Carrera and this is Politics Weekly for The Guardian . We're bringing you a special interview with Wes Streeting, the former Health Secretary, who quit the cabinet last week. We're going to be finding out what he really thinks about some of the big issues facing the country now. He's no longer in the cabinet. What he would do if there was a Labour leadership contest against Syand B urnham and what he's really up to right now . Whereas you quit as Health Secretary just a week ago, we're sitting here on Thursday morning . How does it feel ? Hmm . Uh it's been a weird week. This is the first time for six week so sorry, six years that I haven't been on the front bench of the Labour Part y and bound by collective responsibility. And it's been the first time, I think since I became shadow health secret ary four and a half years ago, that my days haven't been regimente d and kind of laid out and running from thing to thing to thing. I I so I've I've regained lots of freedom. Freedom to spe ak, freedom to think. That sort of feels liberating in a way. But there's also a a sense of bereavement. Um I absolutely loved being the health and social care secretary and leaving that team behind and leaving a job that I absolutely loved with all my heart has been a wrench. And it meant a lot to me for I think two reasons , over and above all the others. One is we're really making a difference on the NHS, and despite the challenges the NHS faces, we'd actually hit a target on waiting times that we'd set an ambitious target that no one thought we would hit, even before strikes were happening, and we we hit it . The second thing is every day when I get ready in the morning I kind of see the scars that I still carry from my cancer surgery. And the reason I loved being health secretary over and above everything else was the NHS saved my life. And going into work every day carrying both yes, the massive responsibility of being the health secretary for turning around the biggest crisis in the NHS's history, but also with that privilege of being able to to serve in that way, leaving that has been very, very hard. Now we've had a very chaotic couple of weeks at Westminster, particularly so at the top of the Labour Party. And part of that was because of you know Izzy To be honest, I think the the chaos began a fortnight ago today when Labour crashed down to a set of catastrophic defeats across the country that have put nationalists in power in every corner of the United Kingdom for the first time in our history. You know, we are the party of Wales. We have been in power in Wales since devolution began now, and it's always hard to to kind of carry on when you've been in government for that long. And no doubt Welsh Labour will be reflecting on their defeat. But to crash down as far as we did, weighed down by the unpopularity of the UK Lab or government, I think has been a bitter pill for Welsh Labour to swallow. And if incumbency was the reason for Welsh Labour's defeat, how does that explain that an unpopular government in Scotland, that's objectively failing on so many fronts with the SNP, was on the brink of majority government there. Again, Scottish Labour, with the best leader we've had since devolution began and Anasarwa, weighed down by the unpopularity of the UK Labour government. And then this is for me the breaking point fundamentally . What Nigel Farage and reform represent is something that I think strikes at the very heart of everything that makes this country great, the values that make this country great, and everything that we believe in in the Labour Party. And I genuinely think and I say this with sorrow more than an ger, but I genuinely think that if we carry on as we are, with the leader that we have, we will hand the keys of Downing Street to Nigel Farage . And I do not want that on my conscience, and I don't want that stain on the reputation of the Labour Party. A lot of people say about you that it's actually about unbridled ambition. Are they wrong? Yes, because when I walked through the door of the Department of Health and Social Care a couple of years ago . My ambition actually was to see through a whole term as the health and social care secretary. I actually started to think, okay, here's where we want to be by the end of this parliament. We've got our 10-year plan for health. I wonder if I can outstrip Jeremy Hunt as the longest. You've always wanted to be Prime Minister. I mean, there's videos going round of you from 10, 15, 20 years ago saying that you thought you might end up in number 10 once. Yeah, some some of that's tongue-in-cheek and and sometimes my my humour kind of lets me down but um uh I don't think there's anything wrong with being ambitious and I've always said that especially I spend a lot of my time locally here going around schools, talking to kids about my background, my upbringing. A lot of those kids, like me, are growing up in poverty and some pretty hard conditions, and they feel like everything is in their way. And I spend a lot of time telling those kids that you should be ambitious, that you should aim high, that you should go as far as your talents will take you. So I I I don't kind of have a problem with being ambitious and telling other people to be ambitious. But I knew when I left government last week that and I had lots of people in my ear, people who care about me, people who support me, people who want to see me leading the Labour Party now or in the future, a lot of people saying, don't do this now. Um, you know, Labour Party members won't like it, it might hurt you, it might set you back. And you know, that's that old kind of adage, isn't there, of you know, he who wields the knife doesn't wear the crown, all that stuff. And I just thought that whatever my own personal self-interest or might be last week, that the most important thing was to do the right thing . And if that sets me back, and if that holds me back, if it means I've left behind a job that I love and miss very, very much, uh , but it's in pursuit of the right thing, then it's the right thing to do. And I j and I just feel to be honest, Pippa, I feel like when I talk to a lot of my colleagues in the cabinet, in the parliamentary Labour Party, and even among Labour activists, like people know. People know that this isn't good enough. But there's almost inertia in politics that is basically conceding there's a problem. You agree with me that where we need direction, we've got drift, but you're saying let's go on for just another couple of years of inertia and then change close the election. Well, firstly, that didn't work out very well for Joe Biden and the Democrats. And secondly, the Labour Party 's been in existence now for 126 years. We've been in power for 35 of those. And we want to waste the precious opportunity we've been given because we've calculated that that would be better for us. I I don't think so. I I think that we carry on like that, that is how we surrender this country to Farage and reform and that's that is the future that I want to avoid more than anything else. Well we'll come back to that and whether you are in fact the right person to transform the Labour Party and the country. But I wanted to come back to what you were talking about children in your constituency, and um your own backstory is of somebody that was brought up in a council home in a working class family and made it through to become a senior cabinet minister and now potentially if things go right for you, running to be Labour leader and Prime Minister. But so much of what people are experiencing outside of Westminster on the ground in constituencies like yours is very different from the sort of opportunities that led to you to your position now. And at the root of a lot of that is housing. People live in overcrowded homes, often in temporary accommodation. They're often unaffordable accommodation, they can't manage their rent, they certainly can't manage to get on the property ladder. Were you to be Prime Minister and have control over the the levers of power, to be actually able to do something about that urgently. What would you do? So I think you just hit on the thing that drives me over and above everything else in politics, which is how do I make sure that working class kids from backgrounds like mine have the same choices and chances, security and opportunity as those from the most privileged backgrounds. And the tragedy is : if I think back 30 years, when I was growing up on a council estate not far from here in Stepney in East London , I used to want to escape that council flat. I knew from some of the kids I went to school with that we were a lot worse off Our council flat wasn't always a nice place to live. A lot of the rooms didn't have carpet. Some of the rooms were scraped off wallpaper that hadn't been replaced . Um we had problems with cockroaches from the next door neighbour. I remember the times when the electric will have run out in the meter but so my mum's money and you put the key in to put the emergency supply on, and then you realise actually mum's already done that, we've just lost the emergency. So I remember all of that very, very vividly. And I remember dis remember very, very clearly wanting to grow up and wanting to escape and wanting to have a better future that didn't involve me or my mum living in those sorts of conditions. And now 30 years on living a bit further east, following the well-trodden path from the east end out towards Essex, the kids that I represent today , on the London-Essex border, they aspire to live in a council flat like that because they're not in a council flat, they're in temporary bed and breakfast accommodation. And the shocking thing for me is we've got about 85,000 families in that situation now, about 175,000 children. And in the two years that Labor's been in power, that number has risen by 10% . The only way we're going to deal with this crisis is to build more homes. And I think Labour's got in government the right diagnosis of the problem. But when it comes to writing the prescription, sorry, old habits die hard as an ex-health secretary, I'm going to use the medical analogy. When it comes to writing the prescription , instead of doing the major surgery required, um, we end up just bandaging people up. So we're passing lots of laws, but we're not actually building the homes that we need. But the government's announced the spending review is going to invest 40 billion pounds over ten years. I mean, that's a lot of money. So we need to start seeing those homes built, and I think that money matters, but so does the the drive as well. I'm a big fan of devolution. I've come from local government, I was deputy leader of Redbridge Council. And if every council in the country was building and meeting their housing targets in the way that Labour led Milton Keene's council was, then we would not only be hitting our housing targets, building the homes that we need, including the council homes we need, we would be smashing those targets. But we're not . And that's because lots of vested interests at a local level get in the way. And that is why one of the things that I would do if I was Prime Minister, I would grip those councils and instead of letting them do the planning permissions, I would give the respon sibility to the planning inspectorate so we can build more homes. There are other vested interests that I would deal with as well. I love the environment, I love nature, but we are allowing some of those considerations to go above the interests of children. So, you know, the endangered species I'm most worried about in this country at the moment are kids in temporary accommodation. Um, now if we if we think about where our laws are versus other countries that are doing much better and more fair and equal, you know, you now have to do an environmental assessment on every housing development that involves 150 homes or more. In the Netherlands , it's two thousand. So let's shift that goalpost because kids deserve homes not hostels. I also wanted to ask you about um part of your old job. You were health secretary, yes, but you're also Secretary of State for Social Care . Should there be a national care service? So when I was in opposition, I did lots of work with Unison and the Fabian Society, a programme of work towards a national care service where we looked at a range of options around how social care could be funded, what it would involve, the standards. And we were working intensively with them. When it came to the launch of that publication, I was gagged, told that I shouldn't be speaking at the launch that it would be seen as Labour Party policy. I remember it. We covered it at the time. And honestly, my heart sank at that moment. And that was the moment I decided that we needed a Royal Commission or a Commission on social care, because I thought, unless I create a vehicle, in this case a bulldozer, driven by Louise Casey, we are going to end up in the same place as every other government that's come before us on social care. Yes, and that's the generational challenge. So And driving through that change is really hard and you've set up you set up that Commission as Health and Social Care Secretary, but you still not told me what your answer would be. What would be your prescription? Would it be um a levy on estates like Andy Burnham suggested in 2009, which then got dismissed as a death tax by the proposition? Or would it be Theresa May's proposals from 2017? Should people be able to secure their own properties and and not end up having to sell them to pay for social care. Yeah, so those examples you cite, yeah, Andy and Gordon Brown being savaged for a death tax,esa Ther May being savaged by Corbyn with her social care proposals, Boris Johnson talking a good game, then buggering off. That's what I want to avoid. I do think that part of what I was trying to achieve, and we still can achieve with the Casey Commission, was building good politics and national consensus, not just among parties but with the public, that will enable us to break out of this cycle of political failure. Should people be selling their homes to pay for their social care? No, they shouldn't. And I think with social care, where I want us to get to is a place in this country where we socialize the risk and the cost and, we end this perni cious unfairness and lottery where how much you pay and the extent to which this is a wearable or catastrophic cost depends on whether you are fortunate enough to live later into life without dementia, or whether you are fortunate enough to get through life without a major disability. So in the same way that we have socialized the risk and the cost with health, I think we need to think about how we socialise the risk and the cost with social care. Now, that's that's not going to end up being, I think, a universal free at the point of use for everything for everyone in social care. That's a stretch, but I definitely think that there are things that we can and should Should it be centralized as well, rather than being responsibility of councils? Because obviously it's social adult social care is one of the things pushing them to the brink of bankruptcy. Well I think we need consistent national standards. Let's come back to immigration for a minute. I mean we're sitting here on a day where net migration figures have halved and yet it still seems to be a very difficult issue for the Labour Party. You were in the cabinet that backed Shabana Mahmood's immigration plans. Some of your colleagues said that it was out of the Trump playbook. Can you see why they might think that? Or do you think that those things are essential in order to have a firmer grip and more control over immigration? So the first thing I'd say, because I think there's been a quite a bit of friendly slash unfriendly fire at Shibana personally . That kind of character assassination. She is a good person with a big heart who is herself a representation of Britain's Ireland's story and a family that you know, her family who came to this country, made Britain their home, and set down roots, give them back, and produ ced someone who has gone on to be now the most senior Muslim in government and the home secretary. So I don't like any of that character assassination. No, I know you're not, but I think, you know, when when people say things like out of the Trump playbook, I I I s I see what Trump is and what he stands for, and the rhetoric he uses, that's not our home secretary. So on on the specifics of her plans for indefinite leave to remain and temporary status for refugees, if you were Prime Minister, would you keep them? Yeah, so I think the the challenge on those things, because the challenge, and I think on the refugee status , I think we just the difficulty we've we've got to address there. I think we've got to speed up the decision-making process to give people certainty. What she's trying to deal with are some of the pull factors to to the UK which is a big driver of access, you know, through small boats and the other. So you would so that sounds like you're saying you would keep that aspect of it. Well of of those of those on on on ILR, I think there is an earned route to ILR. I think we need a specific social care route. I think that is morally the right thing to do. On refugee status, I think we need to look at that a bit more carefully. I don't want people who have escaped war and conflict and with all of the unimaginable uh disaster and disruption and instability and uncertainty in their lives to be replicated with a fear that any day now you might be removed from this country where you feel safe. So last month you suggested that in order to fund the defence spending that this country needs at the moment, the welfare budget could be looked at again. If you were Prime Minister, would you back cuts to the welfare budget? We got our fingers badly burdened as a government very early on by making cuts to the budget, the objective, rather than reform to the system and better outcomes. Let's not make that mistake again. So, what you wouldn't see me doing is setting arbitrary targets to cut the welfare bill in order to switch to spending elsewhere. A more, but what we would get is a more thoughtful approach that can reduce the welfare bill by improving access to employment, uh making sure we're cutting unemployment, and dealing with some of the underlying causes of people being off work, off sick, um, and ultimately out of work longer term. To be able to do anything, you need to be able to make sure that uh you have the economy in a good shape. Would you stick to Rachel Reviews' fiscal rules? Yes, because when you've got a country that is as um highly indebted as this one, where our debt to GDP ratio is running at over a hundred percent, you start paying playing fast and loose with your fiscal rules, your costs of borrowing shoot up. That means less money to invest in public services or less money to put back in people's pockets. Like that is a total dead end. But But I would say two things though. One, you've got flexibility within those fiscal rules about the choices you make. So more borrowing? So well the no the the first the first um policy that I've announced in my campaign is for a wealth tax that works. We've seen this gap in wealth um expand dramatically in our country. There's a fairness argument here that we need to address. We've seen a gap between earned income and unearned income. And so I've proposed equalizing capital gains tax with income tax , with some generous reliefs for entrepreneurs' allowance, investment, and reinvestment allowances, so that we have a wealth tax that generates up to 12 billion pounds worth of tax revenues that we can invest in kids and invest in the next generation. But you'd also be incentiv ising people, investors, wealth creators, to invest in the startups to scale-ups that help Britain to grow. What about the risk of capital flight? So I think if you design it in the right way , um , that's not what you'll end up with. You end up with people actually investing their capital in the productive parts of the economy, the growth generating parts of the economy. And these are the sorts of policies that you can expect to get from me, which are pro-fairness, pro-social justice, but also pro-enterprise and pro-growth. Because this is the heart of social democracy, Pippa, and what it means to be on the on the left in this country I'm Kai right Sherman and we are here to tell you about our new show which is rooted in this feeling that at least I have, I know you have, where, you know, it's kind of like when you wake up in the morning and you pick up your phone and you're just hit in the face with a fire hose of news, right? Like there's war, there's authoritarianism, our planet is learning. I could go on and on and on and. On and on and on, but like we're trying to figure out how to manage it, right? Like how do you manage it? I manage it by leaning in and trying to learn more and trying to figure out okay, how can I be smarter about this particular topic? And who can I talk to that's going to make me feel better about it? And who can tell me who's responsible for the mess that I'm reading about. So that's our mission. That's the show. Welcome to Stateside with Kai and Carter. We're a new show from The Guardian. We're talking to big thinkers and the best journalists, just trying to understand the world through smart conversation and honest reporting. We don't have billionaires telling us what to say. Stateside with Kyon Carter will come out three times a week: Monday, Wednesday, and Friday starting May 13th. Follow on Apple Podcasts or catch us wherever you watch or listen. In an attempt to inject some nuance into the debate, I'm gonna ask you two quick fire questions about tax. Inheritance tax. Keep it or scrap it . I think you can look at reforming it. You've got to this is like the third rail of British politics, so I think you've got to tread carefully on inherit ance tax. And that's that's my nuanced answer to your binary question. Another binary one for you. Corporation tax or not binary, because there's three options. Up, the same or down. You've got to keep it competitive, is my nu anced answer to your trinary question. Is that what 's trinary? So who so stay the same or or cut it? Uh you've got to keep it, you've got to keep it competitive. There's a binary choice that's being presented as if bond markets, the choice is between helplessness, you're just in hock to them, or recklessness, you say stuff them. And neither of those things are true. What do bond markets want to know? More than anything else, they want to know you've got a plan , that you've got fiscal discipline, and you've got a growth plan that helps you to keep your costs of borrowing under control. That means more money going into public services or into people's pockets rather than being siphoned off to someone else somewhere else because we couldn't show the discipline required or we couldn't avoid shooting our mouths off. Is that a criticism of Andy Burnham? Um Andy Burnham doesn't live rent-free in my head. He's our candidate in Merakfield, and I'm like 100% behind him. I've got a lot of um love for Andy and respect. He's my immediate Labour predecessor as health secretary, and he's been really good to me um over the last four and a half years, giving advice. We've worked well together. And I'm glad that he is the candidate in the maker field by-election. It's not going to be an easy by-election. There's all sorts of risk with the bi by election being called and Andy's taken a risk in standing and I'm with him a hundred percent. Now we've all focused a lot in the last couple of years on what's been going on in the Middle East, the Iran conflict now, but also the situation in Israel and Gaza. Now you're somebody who uh was a member of Labour Friends of Israel, you've been supportive of Israel. Do you think that Western nations now should do more to hold Israel back from some of its actions in Gaza? Yes , and I mean I've also been a supporter of Labour Friends of Palestine and I have always sought to in in what is one of the most intractable conflicts in the world , approach that conflict with consistency and fairness. So when we talk about Israel's right to exist and defend itself and a safe and secure Israel, we also need to support the Palestinians' statehood and their right to live with safety and security as well in a state of their own. It's why I pushed so hard in opposition and inside government for recognition of a Palestinian state, which was not inevitable and had to be fought for. When you look at what happened on October the 7th, that undescribable evil that Hamas was so proud of, they videoed it and shared it. You know, of course, in those circumstances, Israel has a responsibility to defend its citizens, to defend itself. What we've seen in terms of the loss of life in Gaza goes well beyond self-defense, and I think is unjustifiable. And we should say so. Well you see it's unjustifiable in the past you've talked about war crimes, criticized Israel for those, while acknowledging everything that happened when Hamas um attacked Israel. Scholars and others have described what's happened in Gaza as genocide. Do you agree? Um I certainly am worried about war crimes and when I've spoken about war crimes, it's been informed through the first hand testimony, an eyewitness testimony I've had from British doctors who've gone out to Gaza and have seen the types of industri uh injuries and and patterns of industry event of injuries um which um look deliberate and targeted and um if proven would themselves potentially constitute war crimes . I think we should be careful about using terms like genocide lightly. I think it's for international courts ultimately to determine through evidence whether Israel's action constitutes war crimes and genocide. I've chosen my words deliberately, carefully, diplomatically, and as I often say to people in my own constituency, we've had lots of debates about this, there is a difference between the language of the diplomats and the politicians and the language of the protesters necessarily. And that's because we have a responsibility as political leaders to try and influence, to try and exert pressure to see a better outcome for both Palestinians and Israelis. Now you talked a lot at the weekend about the European Union in your address to progress. So I don't think we need to go over the same ground again. But I was interested as to why you brought it up now when Labour is fighting a by-election in what was a Brexit y seat. Were you deliberately trying to stir things up for Andy Burnham? Absolutely not. No, I want Andy Burnham to win that by-election. And I'll tell you something else about the where the Brexit debate has gone to in this country. You look at conservative voters, reform voters, and you ask them about Brexit, there's a significant proportion, a minority of those voters, but a significant proportion of those voters who do think that Brexit was a mistake and has been bad for this country. So I sometimes feel like the leave voters have got to a point where they're more able and capable and confident in talking about what they think 's gone wrong, then remain politicians. I think Brexit has been a catastrophic mistake for this country. I think Farage has got a lot to answer for, and we should fight him on it. He sold this country a dud. It has cost us dearly in terms of jobs, the economy, our security, Britain's influence in the world that is now increasingly dominated by an unpredictable superpower in the United States and a rising superpower in China, and of course we've got that failed superpower in Russia as well. And in that context, we would have been better off leading Europe than leaving the European Union. So I will confidently make the pro-European case for stronger cooperation within our manifesto and the red lines, because we've got to keep our promise, going as maximalist to those red lines as we possibly can. And I hope one day, and I did emphasize the weekend one day, because it's not not like a light switch. You can't turn it on and off. You can't do the hokey kokey. But one day I'd like to see us back in the European Union. Okay, and just to finish off, because I said we 'd come back to where we started, which was the politics . As things stand, there isn't a vacancy. You talk about your campaign, Keir Starmersil in Downing Street. Is it an inevitability that he goes . And secondly, Andy Burnham seems to be the popular choice amongst Labour MPs and members, if you believe polling that has happened and anecdotally as well . Are you in this just to get a job in an Andy Burnham cabinet? Or are you intent, even if he wins the maker field by election, are you intent on a contest? If all I cared about was a job in the cabinet, I wouldn't have left one last week. Um that's that's not I mean that's not what motivates and drives me at all. I do think it's inevitable that Keir has to go. I think he's lost the support of much of his cabinet, lost the support of much of the parliamentary party. And as we saw a fortnight ago, he's certainly lost the support of the country. I say that with sadness. I don't dislike the guy. I have I have r respect for him on many levels, and I'm I'm sad in terms of our personal relationship. I'm sad about where we've ended up. But um as to um the the contest that lies ahead, the reason I didn't trigger last week, I knew Andy Burnham was about to make a comeback through a by-election. I felt that if I had rushed ahead with a contest, people would have said he's just done this to pull a fast one on Burnham . And we would never have been able to do the thing that ultimately we need to do beyond a leadership contest, which is to pull together, to unite the different tribes and traditions of the Labour Party, to unite progressives across the country and beat reform at the next general election. That's what we've got to do. I'm in that contest to win it. I absolutely accept that I start it as the underdog. Did you have the numbers? Did you have the numbers ways? Absolutely. You had you had more than 80 MP. Yes I did. Yes I did, including ministers. And but I just say, Pippa, I s I know that I start the race as the underdog. Uh but I've been the underdog all my life. All my life I've had to beat the odds. I beat the odds at every single step along the way from the fact that I ended up in parliament rather than prison, like my grandad, that I ended up going from some of the toughest state schools in London to one of the best universities in the country. Like all my life I've had to clear hurdles and overcome them. And so I'm going to follow the same advice that I give to kids in schools in my constituency from backgrounds like mine, which is go as far as as you can, stand up for what you believe in . Don't let people tell you you can't. I'm I'm gonna set out my stool, I'm gonna lay out my arguments. It's got to be a debate of ideas rather than personalities or petty factionalism. That's One thing that you've had to overcome is your previous friendship with Peter Madison. You released the messages between you and him. I mean I don't know if there was other ways that you communicated, group chats or emails, but you released the WhatsApp messages to show the relationship wasn't as close as as it was being characterised. Do you think that the Cabinet Office should release the unredacted vetting file, the full documents on Peter Mandelson as part of the humble address process? I'm not going to pretend that I didn't know him and I can't change the fact that you know he campaigned for me in my constituency or like other cabinet ministers of that generation that I asked him for advice and and that sort of thing. I can't change any of that. All we can do from the Peter Mandelson episode and scandal is to learn from it. And I think that the one lesson that really needs to be learned that is not yet being learned, it's it is actually that when a decision was made about who our ambassador should be, the primary consideration was who can deal with Trump, which is why Keir went for Mandelson. But the thing that was not considered and should have been given much more weight was what's this relationship with Epstein over here? What does that mean for Epstein's victims, the women and the girls? And what does it mean for a culture of sexism and misogyny where people are looked the other way and, those issues were not given the weight that they should have been. We all have to learn from that, all of us, myself included, so I don't resile from that. And then on the point of transparency, you've got to go for maximum transparency. Now, on vetting files, it's really important to understand why do we have these vetting files? It's so that people can just lay out the full truth of their lives, knowing that it will never be released, and the security and intelligence services and decision makers can make a judgment on whether that person is open to bribery, corruption, and scandal. But there's a summary document of we think about ten pages, which the ISC has said it's concerned, the Cabinet Office will try and redact. Right, I would trust theelli Ingencet and Security Committee. So this is this is the chef checks and balance. I think the Intelligence and Security Committee, which is a secret committee of senior parliamentarians cross party, they should be able to look at everything and they should be the ones who tell us, Parliament and the public what should and shouldn't be published. It shouldn't be the Prime Minister, it shouldn't be Downing Street, it shouldn't be the civil service. There are too many vested interests there. I think the intelligence and security I trust my colleagues on the intelligence and security committee to make those. This is my last question. Um do you really believe that you can win over the Labour membership should a contest be triggered? And will people believe that you who are seen as somebody who's being on the right of the Labour Party is serious about some of the policy proposals, whether it's wealth tax, whether it's some of the things you said about international affairs, or will they just think that you're pitching left to get the job? Yes, I think I can win. Yes, I think I can persuade people, and as I've shown in Ilford North, in fact, a fortnight a go, where we saw off a threat from reform to our right, from the sort of independent, quite kind of green, progressive posing types to our left. We managed to win here in my constitu ency. I've got Labour councillors in every single ward in my constituency. Constituency we won narrowly at the last election. A constituency we won narrowly when I was first elected eleven years ago. It's always been a marginal seat, and I've shown that I can win to our right and to our left. Um, and here's the thing about where I am on values and politics and ideas. The things that I am talking about in this campaign, a wealth tax at works, getting kids out of temporary accommodation, how we build our public services, how we get growth in this country, how we keep Britain safe. These are things I've talked about throughout my career . You may not always agree with me, but you'll always know where I stand. That's been my position on Ilford North. That is my position now. It used to be the case that we left Britain in a better place for the next generation than the last, and we still can. It used to be the case that we could have a Britain that punched above its weight in the world, we still can. And it used to be the case that people saw the Labour Party as the main force, the progressive force to stop reform. Well, we we still can. And we were elected at the last general election to deliver real change to this country and I think with a change of leadership we still can. We're treating. Thank you for joining us. Thank you for having me . Thanks for listening. Kieran and I will be back next Monday with the latest edition of Politics Weekly. This episode was produced by Frankie Toby, James Tyndale, the executive producer was Maz Evta Hajj, and the music by Axel Picutier. And a special thanks to Lawrence Topham and David Levine. This is the Guardian