Reflecting On Starmer's Political Legacy

Sky News, the full story first Seaki St Aarmmer has announced he will be gone from Dining Street within weeks This is wine Thisest july fourth at Lowe's, get up to forty five percent off select major appliances. Plus, save eighty dollars on a select Charboyal Performance Series gas Grill. now two hundred ninety nine doll. Our best lineup is here at Lowe's Hellos, We help you save Valid through seven eight, while supplies last, selection varies by location, Silos. com for more details. Visit your nearby Lowe's on Tonenell Avenue in North Bergen How does a banana trigger a CIA backed coup? Do airPods herald the arrival of a new global order? What do LED lights say about the future of humanity i I'm Et Conway, and in each episode of my new podcast, Stuff Matters, I take an object, crack it open, and reveal the world shaping forces hidden inside. This is economics told through the things we think we understand. Search Stuff Matters on your podcast app to listen and follow He said he was going nowhere that he'd faced down any challenge to his leadership But in the end, it was obvious to everyone in government from Larry the Cat Oh The Prime Minister no longer had the confidence of his own party The question my party is asking now is whether I am best placed to lead us into the next general election I have heard the answer of my Parliamentary party to that question And I accept that answer with good grace. Now, I will say I did think it was a pretty dignified statesman like performance. But in that moment, when he was behind the electn and in front of the cameras, you got just a glimpse of the personal cost of this resignation. And when I leave the biggest job in the country I shall spend more time on the most important job being the best husband I can to my fantastic wife Vick, who has been a rock by my side through good times and bad And being the best dad I can, to my beautiful children who are my pride and my joy. For now, the stormmers are staying in Downing Street. This is the beginning of a transition to Britain's seventh prrime Minister in ten years, most likely Andy Burnham But when the removal vans turn up at number ten to take the bags the short distance to Islington, what will Ker Starmer be remembered for? Rob Powell is our political correspondent. Rob Lke, what changed? I left this office on Friday with Kir Starmer's words ringing in my ears, I'm going nowhere, if there's a leadership challenge, I am going to fight it. Today, I arrive in the office to see Kir Starmer crying on the steps of number ten. So what changed? Look, I think to an extent the position of I will stay and fight. he has to say that, right? For as long as you are a prime Mister and until you resign you sort of have to say that you're staying because the minute you start to say you're actually going to reflect on things, the minute everyone shuffles you out the door and it stops being your decision. So to an extent, I would query whether even on Friday when Stalmer stood in front of cameras and said, you know I'll stay and fight, whether deep down, he meant it quite frankly. That said, I was talking to someone over the weekend who had spoken to him privately on Friday and they said he was telling people exactly what he was saying in public and he seemed like he meant it. I think maybe what changed is that he had a series of quiet conversations with cabinet mininisters with allies, and they basically laid out the blunt reality of the situation. We heard that the Chief Whit basically said you've lost the parliamentary party, you had People like Avette Cooper who are not prone to sort of acts of political impulse, if you like tellelling him that he should probably set out a timetable now. People like Heidi Alexander as well, who yes has links back to Andy Berham but it's not exactly a kind of faux round the cabinet table for Kistama saying the same thing and making it plain through their allies anyway that they were saying this to Stahmer as well. I think what happened was bit of Kir Starmer that was sort of still in there, that bit that when you think back to when they lost the Hartleypool by election in opposition, and he said, if someone else can do a better job then for the good of the country, I'll go. What I've been asking myself for weeks, if not months now is whether that bit of him was sort of still in there or whether the kind of this almost fights that he seems to have got in the last few months and whether the trappings of power had kind of dialed it down. I think that bit inside him probably came back up He realized the game was up that he was going to have to leave as Prime Minister He still had some choice about how he did it, and he could either do it going down in a ball of flames with cabinet resignations or he could do it as he did this morning. Let's look back on what I believe is the shortest tenure by a labour prime minister and examine where it actually went wrong because we do tend to forget He won a thumping majority, a landslide majority and in circumstances like that, you'd expect his government to hit the ground running rather than as actually happened, hit the ground face first. You can probably trace back where some of the sort of seeds of failure were sown even before they got into government, The fact that there very clearly wasn't a thought through political plan, a project to come in kind of grip the levers of power and orientate them in the direction that the Labour government wanted to go. The whole point of Sugreay coming in was apparently that that was going to be her job, but it clearly didn't happen. Rem us who Sougre is. She was very senior civil servant, famously ran the inquirred Boris Johnson over Partygate, left the civil service and joined Labour while they were still in opposition and was Kir Stal's first chief of staff but basically gotten a power struggle with the guy that succeeded her, Morgan McSweeney, lost out and was sacked. But the idea was that was this was someone who knew their way around Whitehall and Westminster knew how to bend the sort of instrument of state to the will of Downing Street, but there didn't seem to be any plan to hit the ground running. So I think that was one problem the lack of plan as they went in. The second problem which again you can trace back into opposition was the constraints that they put on themselves through the manifesto. The biggest one probably being the lock on income tax, national insurance, now sensible political promise to make, given that the incoming from the Tories were labor going to put up your taxes, spoiler or, they did put up taxes, just not those ones ruling out those big boys of tax raising measures, the really big revenue raisers They had to just scramble around for lots of little ones which It didn't really get them to where they needed to be for the money, but really, really harm them politically still. And it's that promise the promise not to put up those taxes that landed them in the position of going after winter fuel, employer NI, inheritance tax on farmers. So it put them in such a tight position that they had no room for manoeuvre that they had to go to these other measures that were politically incredibly unpopular on several fronts The political event that sticks most keenly in my mind in the early stages of the K Starmer preremiership and of course, with his Chancellor Rachel Reeves next door, was the winter fuel stuff. And that to me just seemed like a complete own goal. Why would you make one of the first things you did as a government going after pensioners? I think you can from time in office, the original sin, the moment when K Starmer's popularity started to go through the floor think you can trace back to winter fuel. absolutely. notot so much because of decision to do it. although obviously, that was catastrophic. You know you can make a policy argument that perfectly logical thing to do to try and me test a kind of arbitrary payment that is going to a group of people who overall there is less poverty in that group of people compared to working age adults, certainly compared to the crisis in young adults. So it's not so much the sort of policy of it. it's more of They just launched it on the country and the party with absolutely no political preparation for it. And then rather than making an argument about why they were doing it, they tried to say that they're being forced to do it. because of the situation the Cervatives put themselves in. So I think the original sin you can see in there is what brought Starmer down time and time and time again Thinking that the politics of a decision is unimportant, thinking that the sort of selling it to MPs and selling it to the country, having arguments about why you're doing things neeglecting and relegating that part of politics and just thinking all you need to do is make a sort of cold rational argument about something and people will buy it. But you're right, I think that's the moment where it all started to really go wrong. and I think you can see from polling, that is the moment where people just started to think these guys are just like the rest of them. And it was compounded, wasn't it by what appeared to be an entirely tone deaf, number eleven and number ten Downing Street when it came to growth and assisting business. I mean, you can look at the measures that they brought in there, changes to the minimum wage, changes to employment rights, changes to employer national insurance contributions. All of those things made doing business more expensive in this country whilst on the other hand, they were saying, we're all about growth. It's all about growth. We've got to get the country growing. Yeah, and they spent the first year of their time in office as well, painting a very, very bleak picture of the current situation and where they're going. And we know from talking to businesses that that had an impact on business confidence as well. But the flip of that is that whilst they introdued this stuff like employment rights reforms When you talk to those labor rank and file members and campaigners, they were frustrated that they were bringing stuff in, but they're not really vocalizing it, not really campaigning on it. They ended up with the worst of both worlds, quite frankly. They brought in stuff that had tangible impacts on business, but then they didn't even try and make an argument to gather in the political upside of bringing that in Maybe because they were too afraid of doing it. They thought that business would not like that So they just ended up in this sort of squidgy middle ground where they were getting the worst of both worlds. They were getting none of the political upside but sort of all of the policy downside. Rob, you know that I think you are the seed of sears when it comes to Westminster. But I am going challenge you slightly. Your point earlier that labour arrived in government without a plan. I see what you're saying, but didn't labour arrive in government with lots of little plans? Beause if you look at the domestic policy agenda They have done a significant amount of things. I'm thinking about NHS waiting list, the nationalization all the railways. I mean, these are big things. Is it not the case that perhaps rather than having plan whatsoever. they just didn't have an overarching strategy. I guess you can argue there have been lots of plans. There have been the priorities, the pledges that have been laid out over time. There's been the talk about mission based government and things like that. Maybe when I talk about a lack of plan There wasn't sort of practical physical roadmap for, say the first hundred days. What we are actually going to do, the levers we're going to pull around Westminster and Whitehall to start to aect change. What you're getting at is that the flip side of This hasn't just been two years of nothing. There has been a fair bit that has been done. We've already talked about things like workers' rights. I think renters rights as well. Those are two areas that I think actually, if it is to be Andy Burnham coming in you know he will change the sort of vibes and the language around those two policy areas and you'll probably much to the anger of stAarm supporters find that you've got people going, Well, Andy Burnham's brought in this stuff that means that I can stay at my rental flat that I can't be kicked out any easily, because he's good at that sort of communication side of things. I think on the day to day managing of big tensions within government, you're right to an extent, I think, about the health service, but I would say part of the reason why they've made some in roads on things like waiting times is they have thrown a heck of a lot of cash at the NHS. That has been prioritized in budgets and in spending reviews for a lot of money. So to an extent you might expect there to be progress. One area where I think you can tangibly say at least over the last year or so, we have seen Theyre kind of political vision for what they want to do turned into something practical and that actually being implemented is at the Home offffice, the notoriously difficult department where often nothing gets done. I think since you've had Shabana Mahmouuda ass home seecretary, you have seen that happen both in policy terms, but you've seen her engage in the politics of it as well. She isn't afraid to have the argument both inside the party and with voters about what she's doing. to an extent you're seeing some initial signs that that may be working. So yeah, I think he can he can point to some things that he has started to do. and maybe when people accuse him of not bringing the change that they were promised Half of me wonders whether the change that people want is achievable under any government at the moment. You know When you talk to people about cost of living, think lookook back at a time when everything was far more affordable and cheaper. L we ain't going back to that place. So I wonder whether anyone can achieve that. Maybe it was hopeless from the start, but given that, he needed good politics to push through and he didn't have it. I really need to clarify what you were just saying there, Rob. Are you genuinely saying that this was not secure Starmer's fault? that instead the political and economic difficulties that this country face bigger than any majority that labour could hope for. I think what I'm saying is that the political and economic conditions facing this government mean that in two years, I find it really hard to know what the sort of tangible change people would have wanted and how it could have been delivered in just two years. So that's on one side, but the way you square that circle and you get through it is through politics is through seelling the stuff that you are doing and figuring out a story you can tell about why you should stick with me and why these things will happen in the coming years. You have to tell the story, but you also have to avoid gaining a reputation for U turns. You have to avoid gaining a reputation for being pretty brutal with members of your own team Both of which Secure Starar achieved a reputation for Very, very quickly. This is the sort of analysis you hear of him as Prime Minister. you know, a decent man that just wasn't up to the job. That's the sort of Allies version of events critical version of events when they point at certain sort of characteristics certain ruthless characteristics that Kissm had is that no he's not a decent man at all. What I would say is that somewhere in between There's a sort of passivity about Kist armor, I think. And I think in certain situations It's too easy to think that that kind of passive character isn't a choice and doesn't have moral ramifications. So when ministers were being sacked and reshuffled out to make way for sort of new blood as Downing Street were calling it Kist Tama wasn't calling people to tell them that So I don't know whether in his head he thinks, well, why does that matter? But I think in that sort of passivity of not doing things, that becomes a moral choice as well. Is it possible that he's just not very good at politics? I think it is eminently possible he's not good at politics. I would go as far as to say it's definitely true that he's not very good at politics. But he said that, right? He sort of has made no secret. When you ask him about what' stararism? he said there isn't starmarism and there never will be. This is the problem is that It's a bit like Theresa May in a way, that I think they would make quite good secretaries of state or even permanent secretaries. But there's this sort of mindset almost that and I don't know whether it comes from his legal background that politics is the sort of mucky stuff that other people do Rather than it being right at the center of how you do these things, another massive U turn on his watch, the welfare rebellion. what we are seeing now as a way to basically end up in a place where the welfare bill can be brought down is some very smart policy, but also smart politics in the Department of Work and Pensions with Pat McFadden and Alan Milburn, the ex health seecretary. because what you are seeing is yes, an attempt to actually investigate what the big problems are that are causing young people to sort of slide out of education and go straight on benefit But what you are also seeing is a political exercise to guide elements of the Labour Party to a place where they feel they can vote for something that will decrease the welfare bill. And it's no surprise that these are sort of two old hands in politics that have sat on top of it. Whas before it was just thought, well, you know the figure is too high and we need to bring it down This july fourth at Lowe's, get up to forty five percent off select major appliances. Plus, save eighty dollars on a select Charboyal Performance Series gas grill, now two hundred ninety nine doll. Our best lineup is here at Lowe's Loos, we help you save Valid through seven eight, while supplies last, selection varies by locations. Silos. com for more details Visit your nearby Low's on Tonnell Avenue in North Bergen How does a banana trigger a CIA backed coup Do airPods herald the arrival of a new global order? What do LED lights say about the future of humanity? I'm Ed Conway, and in each episode of my new podcast, Stuff Matters, I take an object, crack it open, and reveal the world shaping forces hidden inside This is economics told through the things we think we understand. Search Stuff Matters on your podcast app to listen and follow I love the idea of an effective politician being one who isn't afraid to get his hands dirty that actually it's in the muck that the running of the country happens. becausecause actually the one bit of the job that Starart A seemed to be good at and B seemed to enjoy was the international stuff, the statesman stuff. And arguably, you know, on one of the big geopolitical issues of our time, two of them in fact Iran war, Ukraine, he seems to have got it right. I think sort of internationally, I don't think he has really made too many slip ups at all. You know he did well with Donald Trump initially anyway, but even actually when that started to get hairy, I think he did pretty well there as well. It felt like he sort of started standing up to Trump at the point where it was probably quite a well judged moment, whereas right in the beginning, I know everyone sort of felt it it was a bit fawning and a little bit sort of sloppy what he was doing when he presented the letter in the White House and things like that, But ultimately it ended up with us getting an all right trade arrangement and a carve out from some of the tariffs I think that was played smart. and then I think the other achievement that people notch up the Kistarmer is sort of restoring credibility on the world stage. I query that a little bit because I think that actually started under Rishi Sunak. It was under Rishi Sunak that you saw things like the Windsor Framework update to the Brexit deal happen. that sort of warmer relations between the UK and the EU. So I think Rishi Sunak started putting the UK back on maybe slightly more of a stable footing internationally, but Kistamba has certainly carried that on But I think maybe that's just because He feels more comfortable in the sort of the summits and the sort of diplomatic receptions that you go to when you're on the world stage like that. And it's also maybe for someone like Kistarmer, it's easy for him to kind of gauge who he's up against, how he takes them on and how he approaches them rather than necessarily trying to deal with the kind of knotghtty weedy tribal politics of the Labour Party, but also you a wider electorate now that are being pushed and battered in various directions by the kind of angsty social media climate that we live in and also the kind of hell raising anger whipper uppers of People like Nigel Farage and Zach Polansky as well. I think he just struggled to wrap his head around how to do that. But he sort of had the measure of the international diplomatic society. He could get them. he could understand it and he could understand how to navigate it better. We were talking before we started recording and over the past few years, you and I have covered more than a few prrime ministerial resignations haven't we? And I just wonder if it is a measure of the lack of impact that this man has made in political terms, in personal terms, on the body politic as a whole, that it doesn't feel like a massive day in politics. when Ster Gier Starmer stood outside in front of the lectter and announced that he was going in a matter of weeks. It didn't feel like a massive moment in politics. And I just wondered if that is in part because Eone and I include the media in this had already made their peace with his departure a long time ago. Yeah, I think you're right. There has been a long build up to this and what we are almost waiting for wasn't so much the moment where we decided Ked Amour was going to go, but maybe the moment where it became obvious the person who was going to take over from him, it maybe felt in a funny sort of way that was what Kissed Amour was waiting for as well that that announcement has come today and not a week, two weeks a month ago. But how will he be remembered And I kind of hesitate to say that to an extent because there is an argument that any old labour leader could have potentially defeated the Tories in twenty twenty four because it's just where the country was. They were sick and tired of The consonservatives, they've been in power for fourteen years and they just wanted anyone but them I think that would be to underestimate the change that went on within the Labour Party over those five years. I went to most of the Jeremy Corbyn Labour conferences And then remmember sitting in one of the Kstarma Labor Cerences in opposition where I think it must have been after the queen had died where everyone sat for the national anthem and there wasn't a peep coming out of anyone. That does show you a substantial change that happened within labour to pull them back to a place where actually people did feel that they