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1:04

New Statesman. Hello

1:09

I'm Hannah Barnes, associate editor at The

1:11

New Statesman and you're listening to The

1:13

New Statesman podcast. During this

1:15

general election campaign we are bringing

1:17

you new episodes every weekday with

1:19

updates on party policy announcements, reaction

1:21

from around the UK and

1:24

the best polling analysis with

1:26

our experts. Joining me

1:28

today is The New Statesman's associate

1:30

political editor Rachel Cunliffe and down

1:32

the line from Manchester where he's

1:35

been watching the Labour Party manifesto

1:37

launch is our senior editor

1:39

George Eaton. Hello both.

1:41

Hello. Hello. Right we are going to

1:43

round off manifesto launch week today then

1:45

with Labour and Clyde Cymru. We'll come

1:48

to Wales a little bit later on

1:50

in the episode so let's start off

1:53

with Labour and in the words of

1:55

Abba George and Keir Starmer, money money

1:57

money, the Labour

1:59

leader and now announced this morning

2:01

in Manchester that wealth creation was

2:03

the number one priority for the

2:05

party. Before you

2:07

take us through the actual policies, you're

2:09

still there, George. What was the atmosphere

2:12

like this morning in the room? I think

2:14

it was a very confident,

2:17

hopeful mood in the sense

2:19

that labor hasn't been in

2:21

power for 14

2:24

years, and I think this election

2:26

campaign has probably gone better

2:28

than they could have dreamt in the

2:30

sense that at times all they've had

2:32

to do is stand back and

2:35

watch the Conservatives and Rishi

2:37

Sunak humiliate themselves. Then

2:40

I think at launches like this,

2:42

I think there's always also a degree of

2:44

nervousness around potential protesters

2:46

and interruptions which have become a

2:49

feature. There was one protester, but

2:51

otherwise it largely went off without

2:54

incident. Important question. Did they

2:56

feed you? Were there

2:58

biscuits? Yes. There were

3:00

biscuits, there were pastries in

3:02

the green room for journalists.

3:05

Our stomachs were

3:07

aligned, so no complaints on that front either. But

3:10

interesting on the protester, Danny

3:12

Finkelstein, Lord Finkelstein, the Conservative

3:15

peer, who's obviously a big

3:17

strategist for the party too,

3:19

actually described both the manifesto

3:21

launch in general, but also

3:23

the reaction to the protester as pitch

3:25

perfect. Because I believe the response from

3:27

Keir Starwell was something like, we've given

3:29

up being the party of protest, we're

3:31

now serious about running the country,

3:33

or something along those lines. Yes. He's

3:36

quite well rehearsed with that line

3:38

now after obviously the glitter interruption

3:41

at the last conference. But no, you had

3:43

the whole shadow cabinets were here. Saw

3:49

Sue Grey in deep conversation

3:51

with Sadiq Khan. Andy

3:53

Burnham was obviously here, the launch being in

3:55

Manchester. So you did have a sense of this is

3:58

literally the last time you've ever seen a

4:00

Labour's national team and

4:02

they were clearly very keen to project the

4:04

image of a government in waiting. Why

4:07

Manchester, George? It's a

4:09

city, I suppose, with strong Labour

4:11

associations and it was at the

4:13

cooperative HQ. So, something

4:16

that's often forgotten is a lot of

4:18

Labour MPs are officially Labour

4:21

and cooperative MPs. So,

4:23

it's really a reference, obviously, to the

4:25

cooperative traditions of the Labour movement

4:28

and the party's affiliates,

4:30

the cooperative party. So, I think it was

4:32

a nod to that. Rachel, you

4:34

were at Silverstone earlier in the week for

4:36

the launch of the Conservative manifesto. High octane,

4:39

we had that advert which was very testosterone

4:41

heavy. I mean, listening to what George

4:44

is saying and obviously watching the Labour

4:46

launch on the television, how would you

4:48

compare the two? It was pretty

4:50

low energy and the reason I asked about

4:52

biscuits is because there weren't any for

4:55

journalists. Although Gillian Keegan, the

4:57

education secretary who introduced SUNAC, told

5:00

Andrew Marr on LBC that

5:03

there were biscuits, just

5:05

the journalists couldn't find them. The reason I'm mentioning

5:07

this is not just because it's very important, it's

5:09

not because I was very hungry, but because

5:11

if you are going to get 100 journalists

5:15

all the way up to Silverstone, which

5:17

was quite difficult to get to,

5:20

there was the coach from Milton Keynes station and then

5:22

going through the security that you'd expected at an event

5:24

where the prime minister is speaking and you're going to

5:26

have them there for basically four, four

5:28

and a half hours, you

5:30

would expect maybe some

5:32

refreshments and the lack thereof,

5:35

I asked why and someone

5:38

suggested that they didn't have the money on the

5:40

campaign to be able to provide new refreshments. Just

5:43

not a particularly slickly well

5:45

organised event and the setting

5:48

of Silverstone racetrack in itself

5:51

was quite an intriguing one

5:53

because obviously it's a place

5:56

that is quite an exciting backdrop they filmed

5:58

an episode of. of The

6:00

Apprentice there a few years ago that didn't go particularly

6:02

well. But there was lots

6:04

of exciting things you could do with that

6:06

as a backdrop, but it was held in

6:09

a conference room that looked exactly the same

6:11

as every other conference room and trying to

6:13

work out why had they tried to do

6:15

something by the track, but then Brad Pitt

6:17

was filming there that day and they couldn't

6:19

do something by the track. So it was-

6:21

Well, that could have been a draw, couldn't

6:23

it? There was a lovely moment when journalists

6:25

were being briefed on the detail of the

6:27

manifesto and then you heard this vroom noise

6:30

as the racing cars went by and everyone just

6:32

immediately got up and rushed to the window to

6:34

see if it was Brad Pitt outside. So

6:36

there was the well-known list of excitement. But

6:39

that was the high-octane moment of excitement

6:41

rather than the manifesto launch itself. And

6:43

George, I assume that Keir Starmer didn't

6:45

rush off from Co-op

6:48

HQ to go to the nearest theme

6:51

park to ride roller coasters, a la a

6:53

daevi. I

6:55

can't think of anything less likely

6:58

for him at the moment. And

7:01

he's actually seems to have

7:03

made something of a habit of avoiding potentially

7:05

risky photo opportunities. So

7:08

no, I think a

7:10

daevi has a monopoly on that, yeah. Right,

7:13

let's go through the key pledges. And I wanna

7:15

start with tax because it's what people

7:17

care about, it's what's making all

7:19

the newspaper headlines. We've

7:22

heard time and time again from Labour

7:24

this campaign that they won't be putting

7:27

up income tax, VAT, or

7:30

national insurance. Did

7:33

we get any surprises today on the tax front? No

7:36

surprises on the tax front. So

7:39

though I think, and this is the theme

7:41

of the manifesto, the language on taxing

7:44

non-doms, taxing private schools, taxing

7:46

private equity executives and oil

7:48

and gas companies is very

7:51

unambiguous. And in a

7:53

sense, when you read through it, what

7:55

strikes you is that it's an

7:57

authentically Labour document, by which I mean the

7:59

language. language is strikingly

8:02

leftist, you could say, relative

8:04

to the messaging that

8:06

Keir Starman and Rachel Reeves use

8:08

when they say, give interviews with

8:11

writing newspapers or they're talking to

8:13

business when they cast themselves

8:15

very much as cautious and moderate. This

8:18

is a document that's been assembled by

8:20

Labour in cooperation with the trade unions

8:22

and other key organisations

8:24

and it reflects that. Am

8:26

I right in thinking that Unite didn't actually sign

8:28

it off though, though the one union that didn't?

8:30

Yes, so Unite have made

8:34

a habit of dissent during the

8:36

Starman leadership, so I don't think that's

8:38

hugely surprising. Unison and the GMB are

8:40

the two big unions close to him.

8:43

It will be interesting to see how

8:45

that relationship develops in government. I think

8:47

Sharon Graham, General Secretary, has taken an

8:50

openly critical line, so that is

8:53

one to watch, your right to flag that. On

8:56

tax, I think as I've written

8:59

in my piece on the

9:01

site today, what's striking is what's not in

9:03

it. In the sense, yes,

9:05

they've ruled out all the taxes you

9:07

mentioned, they haven't ruled out increasing capital

9:09

gains tax, they haven't ruled out new

9:11

council tax bans, they haven't ruled out

9:13

changes to inheritance tax, you've got sin

9:15

taxes, fuel duty, we could go on.

9:18

That really does beg the question, which Keir

9:20

Starman and Rachel Reeves are rightly being asked

9:22

now, what are you really planning? Are you

9:24

going to come into government and say, look,

9:26

surprise, surprise, the books are much worse than

9:29

we thought and we're going to have to

9:31

put up extra taxes. And the

9:33

Conservatives are making hay with that, but

9:35

interesting response from the Institute for Fiscal

9:37

Studies, the independent think tank as well,

9:39

it's director Paul Johnson, he's

9:42

actually said Labour's manifesto offers no indication that

9:44

there's a plan for where the money is

9:47

going to come from for the things they're announcing. I

9:49

mean, it's the same message really applying to both of

9:51

our main parties, isn't it? Yes, I think

9:54

it's fair to say that Labour's

9:56

the spending privileges in the

9:58

manifesto are costed. because

10:00

there actually aren't many of them. And so

10:02

Labour is not promising a huge amount of

10:04

additional spending. They obviously scaled back the 28

10:06

billion green investment

10:09

pledge they had. That was their flagship

10:11

spending commitments. That's now just

10:13

over 4 billion a year. So

10:15

you've already seen some shift on

10:17

that side. But it was

10:19

interesting in his speech, Kistama emphasized there would

10:21

be no return to austerity. He said, I've

10:24

worked in a public service. I worked in

10:26

the Crown Prosecution Service during the austerity years.

10:28

I never want to do public services. What

10:32

happens then? But

10:34

the only way you can deliver that pledge

10:37

is to raise money, just to

10:39

prevent the spending cuts that the

10:41

current government's penciled in. A

10:44

lot of what's in the manifesto,

10:46

we've heard trickle out throughout the

10:48

campaign. So we've had, obviously, setting

10:50

up Great British Energy, the

10:54

hope to recruit 6,500 new teachers, cutting

10:57

NHS waiting times. Is

10:59

there anything in there that we hadn't heard about

11:01

that's a bit of a surprise? That's

11:04

a good question. There

11:06

are very few surprises. And that's quite

11:09

deliberate because Labour have looked back

11:11

at, say, Theresa May's social care

11:14

plan, the so-called dementia tax, or

11:17

John McDonald's pledge of free broadband

11:19

and thought launching big policies in

11:21

the middle of a campaign doesn't

11:23

go well. But what's striking

11:25

is Labour's never actually had a shortage of

11:27

policy. It's a sort of myth that they have no policies.

11:30

They have a lot of policy, which is why it's 25,000

11:32

words long, rather

11:34

than it's a supposedly slim document. So I

11:36

think there are interesting strands

11:38

which perhaps deserve more attention on the constitutional

11:40

side, for instance. They're saying they set up

11:42

a new ethics commission, votes

11:44

at 16. That's been getting some attention. Removal

11:47

of hereditary peers from the House of

11:49

Lords, retirement age of 80. There's

11:52

the new UK EU defence pact.

11:55

So retirement age of 80. Wow!

12:01

No, no, for Piz. This

12:07

is, this is, this

12:09

is... For the

12:11

House of Lords. The retirement age of 80

12:13

will come once they've seen the state of

12:15

the public finances, yeah, that's... For

12:20

those listening, for the rest of us. For those listening,

12:23

rather than watching, you should see how I'm supposed to write that

12:25

one. I know, I've got a rather red as well. I've just...

12:28

We're overcome. But

12:30

no, there are lots of pledges and I think

12:32

rather than people saying, we don't know what a

12:34

Labour government would do, they don't have any policies,

12:36

the real question is, are they going to be

12:38

able to deliver all of this in a single

12:40

term? Does Labour and Whitehall

12:42

have the capacity to do GB

12:45

energy, to do constitutional

12:47

reforms, planning reform and

12:49

so on? That's the real question. I

12:52

mean, briefly, particularly this

12:54

very ambitious target for

12:56

the NHS and cutting waiting times

12:58

with extra appointments, the

13:01

very quick analysis that's been done on

13:03

that already by health experts is really

13:05

laying out how difficult that is going

13:07

to be. I mean, we

13:09

are nowhere near reaching the

13:12

18 week target that Labour's

13:14

hoping to eliminate by the end of the first Parliament,

13:16

are we? No. And on

13:19

the NHS, they've got some

13:21

spending commitments, but they are minimal

13:26

relative to the size of the challenge. But their big

13:28

bet, and West Streeting has been very clear about this,

13:30

is that you can make the

13:32

NHS more efficient and

13:34

that you can increase capacity by drawing on the...

13:38

private sector, for instance. So, similarly,

13:41

that's the message from Rachel Reeves, which

13:43

is that we can't treat

13:45

these problems simply with the

13:49

old method of tax and spend. And

13:52

that's Labour's big bet on

13:55

public services, that you can reform them to get better

13:57

outcomes and on the economy that you can... significantly

14:01

improve growth. And just finally, George,

14:03

before we let you get back to the biscuits and

14:05

the panachokola, it's

14:07

important to acknowledge what isn't in it

14:09

in terms of what many Labour voters would

14:12

like to see. And that I suppose is

14:14

there's no commitment there to scrapping the

14:17

two-child benefit cap. And they have received

14:19

a fair bit of stick around this.

14:22

Is that fair? Well, I think

14:24

you're right to highlight that

14:27

because that policy has

14:29

increased child poverty by something like

14:31

a million. It's basically done

14:33

what it was intended to do, but it has

14:36

awful consequences for the poorest families. When

14:38

Labour say we can't afford to do

14:40

it, it's a bit of a cop-out

14:42

really, because it wouldn't actually cost

14:44

a huge amount to scrap it relative

14:46

to the size of the state. It's

14:49

a cop-out too, because everything is a choice

14:51

and they have chosen not to do it. I

14:53

think a Labour government would come under big pressure to scrap

14:56

it. The interesting thing is, I think

14:59

you can easily do it on the fiscal

15:01

side, but there's the politics of it. And

15:04

is Labour prepared to have an argument

15:06

with the Conservatives on this? Conservatives will

15:08

say you are saying unlimited benefits for

15:12

large families. They will encourage the view that

15:14

if you're going to have a large family,

15:16

you should be able to support it

15:18

yourself without government support. They

15:21

have to be prepared to have a

15:23

political argument over it. I'm sure they

15:25

could find the money to get rid

15:27

of, but it's really, that's the real

15:29

question. And that's not an argument they

15:31

were prepared to have in an election,

15:33

partly, I think, because they believe Labour

15:35

lost previous elections because it was

15:37

seen as too

15:41

committed to high welfare spending, which

15:43

is a more politically divisive subject

15:45

than, say, taxing private

15:48

schools, taxing non-doms and so on. George,

15:50

thank you so much. After the break,

15:53

we're going to go through the headlines

15:55

from Pleid's manifesto and the latest terrible

15:57

gaffe from the Conservatives. If

15:59

you're subscribed Statesman you can get

16:01

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the f*** are you talking about, you

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16:46

more than 40 gigabytes per month. Mint Unlimited slows. Rachel,

16:53

a much smaller launch, if you like, but we

16:56

had applied to Kumru's manifesto launch today

16:58

run us through some of the main headlines,

17:00

if you would. Okay,

17:02

so unsurprisingly, this is all about

17:04

giving whales a voice and

17:07

more resources. So they believe that

17:10

whales should get four billion extra funding

17:13

from the HS2 project in compensation

17:16

and a wind full tax on

17:18

energy companies. More control over policing

17:20

given to the Senate. Fair funding

17:22

for whales and a fair attack

17:24

system, including a 20 pound a

17:26

week increase in child benefits. And

17:30

what I think is the most interesting message

17:33

is similar to the message that we've

17:35

heard from the Greens,

17:37

from the SMP, occasionally from the Lib

17:39

Dems, although the Lib Dems are running

17:41

a very sort of anti-tory campaign, but

17:44

that the message is don't give Labour

17:46

a free pass. And I think in

17:48

Wales that could prove quite

17:51

successful for them and that we know Labour is

17:53

going to win the election, but you can make

17:55

your voice heard in Wales by voting

17:57

for another party and then fascinating

32:00

in-depth and harrowing piece about.

32:02

Also parental leave, the

32:04

care system because women

32:07

do the bulk of unpaid care work

32:10

and children's education and

32:13

all of these points. And one of the

32:16

points that was flagged is that during

32:19

the pandemic when all the lockdown rules

32:21

were being made it felt at the

32:23

time like a lot of these restrictions

32:25

that had made no exemptions

32:27

or gave no thought

32:29

to child care or who

32:31

was meant to be looking after or educating or

32:33

homeschooling kids while the schools were shut. It felt

32:35

like they'd been made without women in the room

32:38

and then we subsequently found out that they had

32:40

been made without any in the room. So that

32:42

is a electoral

32:44

demographic that I think both parties should

32:46

pay much, much closer attention to. It

32:49

is not just about asking Keir Starmer,

32:51

Roshi Sunak, what's your favourite type of

32:53

biscuit? There are some really serious issues

32:55

there that I don't think are getting

32:57

enough attention. Well, thank you. I obviously

32:59

agree and I think it's worth pointing

33:02

out again, it's not that women are a

33:04

minority here, we're 51% of the population. And

33:07

the majority of undecided voters. Exactly

33:09

and more likely to engage it

33:11

would appear. You can

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33:17

The first two months of a new subscription is just

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33:24

Thank you so much for listening. We're back

33:26

tomorrow to answer your questions about the election.

33:28

You can submit them at newstatesman.com/you

33:31

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33:34

If you are listening on Spotify, just

33:36

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33:40

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33:42

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33:44

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33:46

with me, Hannah Barnes and my colleagues,

33:48

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33:50

George Eaton. This episode was

33:53

produced by Catherine Hughes and the

33:55

video was produced by Grace Redock.

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