ACFM - ACFM Microdose: Election ’24 Vibecheck

Episode Date: July 9, 2024

The ACFM crew offer their first reactions to Labour’s landslide election win. Can Starmer’s government rescue the public sector? Where will the money come from? And can they make it to a second term? Sign up to the ACFM newsletter: https://novaramedia.com/newsletters Produced and edited by Matt Huxley and Chal Ravens. Help us build people-powered media: […]

This is Acid Man Hello and welcome to ACFM, the home of the weird left. This is our instant reaction vibe check microdose, responding to the UK general election 2024, which took place technically two days ago, but the results came out very early morning yesterday, basically. We don't have a lot of time today, and we're trying to do as quick a reaction as possible. So we're dispensing with a lot of the usual pleasantries, but not with this one. I'm joined as usual by my good friend Nadia Idol.

Hello. And Kea Milbin. Hello. So guys, how are you feeling? I feel quite good, actually. Let's just to check the vibes. On Thursday, I didn't stay up all night. I saw the exit polls, and I felt very deflated and pretty worried.

The exit polls showed reform on like 13 or 15 seats. Can't quite remember now. 14, I think, yeah. And I was like, oh, that is very, very bad news. And then the first sort of results started to come in from like Sunderland and so forth. And like the reform had a very good vote. and they were talking about Barnsley, the two seats, Barnsley, North and South going to reform,

and that would be, like, really disastrous. And I basically stayed up and watched Navarra's coverage, which was actually very good for a little bit, and then I went to bed. And then in the morning, I woke up at 6 o'clock, and I thought, I could have a look at the actual results, couldn't have it? But if I did that and reform have, like, 20 seats,

I basically wouldn't be able to go back to sleep. So I managed to put off getting up and checking my phone for another hour, which I'm very grateful. for. And then I checked my phone and like, oh, it's a much, much better result, actually, a much better set of results, probably about as best as could be hoped for. So from that point on, I started thinking, oh, actually, yeah, this, this is a result in which there's lots of possibilities. There's lots of things to play for here. So I feel quite positive at the moment. How about you, Nadia? Wow. You feel positive. Okay, well, I'm going to be the,

I'm going to be the cynical party pooper then on this reaction. To explain how I, I feel, I think it depends on how I was feeling before. I mean, I feel better and more hopeful today, mostly because the last thing that I did before we came on to record is I looked through the list of now, the cabinet. And there's plenty of northern women. That makes me happy. So several people, you know, like with backgrounds, obviously most of those who were in the shadow cabinet, where I thought, okay, there is some space for possibility. here. But I think the background to how I'm feeling about it is just that I was, I've been completely alienated by this entire election. Like, I did try at several points to whip up some

internal emotion towards at least the fact that it looked like, and we did, like about, we were about to lose that cabal of, you know, Tory fuckwits who have completely run this country into the ground and basically killed thousands of people while making loads of money. And I wanted to at least be, you know, even not thinking about Starmer and his politics, which will get onto, which I have big issue, which I take big issue with, you know, I haven't even been able to do that, which is a massive contrast to how I felt in the last election when, you know, when the exit polls came out, I was working, you know, I was on the momentum payroll. I was working in the momentum office.

It's a very, very different position for me to be at. And I had to sit and analyze that. And it's not because I'm some kind of like sectarian dogmatic kind of lefty. I've always been a kind of broad-based worker. And I can see the, I mean, strategist in the sense of like how I like to work politically. And I could always see the potential in there being a labor government, even if they were way further to the right to where I stood. But that all has seemed to have affected the history.

of how I was involved in 2017 and 2019 and what the Labour Party has done to the left has seemed to overshadow my ability to be happy to get rid of these Tories, which I myself surprised about. So I would say that I feel okay about it, but I wouldn't say I feel thrilled. What about you, Jeremy? Well, I think I'm the opposite, actually. I think I expected to feel a lot worse than I do and less optimistic because for myself I really can't help doing what a lot of people have been doing is comparing this experience to the experience of the 97 election and I was interviewed at length on Michael Walker's podcast about exactly that issue and you know related this story according to which as I always tell it it was basically

only me and my friend Mark Perryman out of the people who I spoke to regularly about anything at that time who weren't all excited and happy when Blair got his landslide because it just felt clear at that moment that there was just no way forward for the political left and I anticipated sadly correctly

that political left was basically finished for a generation as a consequence of that circumstance and I didn't don't feel that way at all in response to this result maybe for me that's what I'm contrasting it with I think it's quite clear from this election result. The left has not been put back in his seal, too. They have not been able to contain the left as a political force,

intellectually. So let's be clear with people about the result. What's happened is the Labour Party has won a historic landslide within Britain's unbelievably skewed electoral system, but it actually did not significantly advance its national vote yet at all. So, like, for people using American terminology, This is like you've won a landslide in the Electoral College, but you haven't actually increased your support in the popular vote at all.

I mean, at all, and let's be clear, this is after, for the past five years, we've been told relentlessly that Labor's 2019 election result was the worst one in its history. They'll sometimes say, which no historian would verify. The worst ones is the 1930s because of the very poor number of seats. one. And it is definitely true that the vote share wasn't great at the 2019 election and the vote was distributed very, very inefficiently, very badly for Labour and very well for the Conservatives. So the Conservatives got a huge majority. But in terms of actual vote share, it's not just that it's only gone up to like 38, 39, low 40s like people were expecting from the sort of 33% that it was

at in 2019. It hasn't gone up at all. Labor vote's gone up in Scotland because the support for the SMP has collapsed but it's gone up statistically negligibly in the rest of the country so on the one hand I would say there's a whole story to be told which I'm probably not going to do today because people can hear me banging on about this on another podcast and probably on other episodes of this I'm sort of tired of hearing the sound of my own voice about it there's a whole story to be told about how the whole Corbyn project had this millinarian

dimension. But by any time people like me or lots of other people try to have a conversation with them about the fact, well, you've got to have some strategy to deal with the fact that the Corbyn project is really, really popular in places that Labour already wins and has always won. And it's not very popular in the kind of marginal constituencies and it's not very popular with a swing vote. So what do we do about that? There were various possible answers to the question, what do you do about that? But the answer you would get, frankly, from the people who ultimately made the decisions in Corby's office, I was, well, we don't, we're not talking about that. That's like, that's like loser thinking. And it was this kind of millinerian belief on some

level that, you know, that was sort of, you know, that was old school thinking. And we're not even really a party. We're a social movement. So we're just going to sweep to power by getting everybody to support us. And the result was, we got basically the same vote share nationally in 2019 and in 2024. And in 2019, we got electorally wiped out. In 2024, Labor's one of the biggest number of seats in its history, I think. Can I just comment on one thing? Because I think it's actually significant, Jeremy. So it's useful that you have said.

I'm just still trying to stay on the plane of like how I feel about it. Because I also, you know, I have things to say about the statistics. But I think because I'm 10 years younger and, you know, I was a young teenager and living in Egypt when Blair's win happened. Like it's not something that I experienced. And I'm now a member of a political party that is in power. I've never been in that situation before, you know, and I don't have previous things to compare it to, like the Labour Party, previously Tony Blair's Labour Party was the party of the Iraq War.

So I don't have that history to compare myself to, which might be a little bit why I don't have that sense of perspective or why I went into this election just feeling like completely alienated from the entire thing. Could I clarify as well? my feeling of positivity is not a late last minute power hungry conversions to star marism. It is for the reasons that Gem mentioned. And so just to carry on, Gem's story about what actually happened in this is that the difference between when I went to bed on the Thursday and when I woke up on the Friday is that it was obvious that the Greens had done much better than the exit polls had recognized.

They got all four of the seats that they were going to, so I went from one seat to four seats and also moved into second place and something like 40 seats. Then these independents, so Jeremy Corbyn, got a huge thumping majority, etc. And there were four other sort of pro-Gaza candidates. Let's call it Palestine, so which we don't get into the Israeli, non-to-stan, making different parts of Palestine. Let's call it Palestine. Yeah, I tripped myself up because I was trying to say anti-Israel's war on Gaza or pro-Palestan,

and I got myself a trip there. But you're quite right, yeah. And those are really, really significant, I think, to have four independents elected and of a very major labour figure such as Wes Streeting getting within, he got within 500 seats of being defeated. That's a shame. What a shame. Yeah, he's quite tempted it because he's going to be a very, very right wing at pro-privatisation House Secretary. So it would have been an incredible scalp to get. Anyway, so that's the sort of general pictures, like all of a sudden you think, well, hang on, reform, they only had four seats when I woke up. They've now got five. They've got 15% of the vote, which is bad, and we should talk about that, perhaps. But the electoral breakthrough they had was much more limited, basically. And this is, you know, this is when the conservatives are at their least, their lowest, etc. We don't know exactly how that's going to play out on the right. But all of a sudden, it seems like basically what happened was Labour's strategy of acting and talking right in order to capture. these swing voters, these sort of middle-aged homeowners in what were marginal constituencies.

A lot of them are still more marginal constituencies. Well, no, I mean, yes, but there are a hell of a lot more marginal constituencies now. You know, it's nearly all marginals from now on, which may or may not change things. And the electorate is obviously much more volatile and obviously much less attached to old party allegiances, basically. And so one of the things we've definitely seen is that young urban cohort who, form the bedrock of Corbynism have, like, they've voted tactically for the Greens or for somebody, if they've broken away from Labour, basically.

Also, there's also another bit of information that's useful there. And I mean, this might be anecdotal, but so many people I know who are from what I would call the kind of libertarian left, you know, our sort of politics space, I was surprised have piled their energies into fighting campaigns for independence. There's this whole networks of independence around the country, who are like been having conversations with each other. And there's a lot of people who are campaigning for them. And I find that interesting. I know a lot of people locally in the suburbs who have like over like Gaza or other issues, you know, have tried to take down the majorities of Labour MPs. And they have succeeded in that. And they've run these

campaigns. And I thought that was interesting because I would have thought I would have been one of those people, but I wasn't. I felt completely alienated from the whole thing. What's happened is that Labor have managed to, their strategy, basically, plus they're just bloody-minded sectarianism of the faction, which has got control of the party machinery, right? Those two things together, their strategy of like targeting to the right, plus they're just basically incompetence. It means that they've opened up a left flank, a sizable left flank, electoral left flank, electoral left flank basically, which is very likely to be joined by a non-electoral left flank exercising power as well, which makes things incredibly much more complicated for the Stama government

because they also have a right flank with reform as the second party in many sort of like northern post-industrial seats such as Barnsley, etc. So it's just an incredibly complex situation, but it seems like plenty of spaces where you could exercise some leverage, basically, even though Labour have got a very large majority. And James Canagasorium, the guy who came up with the red wall sort of metaphor as a one. I'm reaching a word. I'm reaching for. He came up of another very good metaphor. He said, what we're looking at is a sandcastle majorities. It's very, very broad, very thin. But like when the tides change just a little bit, it could be swept away very easily, basically. Well, this is, I think, a really interesting point

to talk about. And again, you know, there might be differences of opinion here. When I was watching, I also didn't stay up for it. I watched the exit pole and went to bed. And I thought to myself, I hope this is not a super majority. I hope it's a landslide, but not a supermajority. Can we just clarify? Can we clarify there's no such thing as a supermajority? It's an American term, which refers to the fact that according to the American Constitution, if you have a two-thirds majority in both houses of Congress,

you can bring forward amendments to the Constitution. There isn't any such thing that having more seat in a bigger majority than one doesn't give you any extra power in the British Constitution. Anyway, go on. Yeah. So, okay, regardless of the first. fact of, you know, whether it's properly a super majority or not. That's the term that I'm using because that was the term that was being used in the media on the night. So what I'm referring to

is the Labour Party having more than, I think it's 180 or 190 seats. And the reason why I'm happy that they got a so-called landslide and not that supermajority is because what I'm worried about in terms of the long game, especially with the exit poll said that reform was going to get so many seats, which obviously they haven't, which is a good thing. Still 15%, which we'll talk about in a bit. But I would be worried that the Tory party would be completely decimated, which ironically would probably not be a good thing seeing the rise of reform as a movement in four years time. I mean, one of the things we don't know is how reform and the conservatives are going to relate to each other, basically, because lots of people were doing that, oh, if you add reform

and the Conservatives, then lots of seats go back to the right sort of thing. We don't know what the Conservatives are going to do. They're going to have to elect a new leader. They've been under their own journey, and the real story of the election was, or one of the real, real stories, the deciding story is the Conservatives fought breaking apart, basically, and reform. emerging to just above the level that UKIP were at in 2015. And so, you know, one of the things we need to think about is whether there is actually a ceiling on reform, basically, of around 15%, or whether that can be put together with a Conservative Party, whatever's left of the Conservative Party, so they can be competitive against the Labour Party again. It's really, really not clear, basically. Yeah. And I do think that in terms of, you know, voter intention, a protest vote is quite different to a tactical vote.

what the results have shown is that there was a lot of tactical voting for, you know, anyone but the Tories, which got the Lib Dems in and a lot of seats, you know, and like, and it's good for the Greens and the independents. But my feeling is, or my analysis is, rather, that reform, again, succeeded as UKIP did, as positioning itself for some kind of protest vote to, like, all those other politicians who were not going to do anything for you, you know, once you start rising into, like, higher percentages than 15% can be quite dangerous. Yeah, it's really trying to understand, I mean, trying to predict, which, I mean,

I don't feel like I can do at this stage, like with a Labour government, like, how is that kind of, and, you know, post-Brexit and post-referendum and all of this stuff, like, how is that protest vote affect going to play out, you know, socially around, whether it's around issues of immigration or sovereignty or other things that reform ran their campaign on the basis of. I'm going to come back to the Greens and say I've been waiting most of my life, like my entire adult life, for the Greens to get themselves together strategically. Like I've often said to people don't get excited about the prospects for the Greens because they will always blow a historic opportunity.

And this is the first time that's ever been disproven. The Greens really have got themselves together strategically by focusing on several winnable seats and building on a base in local government in those places. I think it is really significant. And I think really I'm comparing this again, I'm still comparing this to the late 90s.

I think what we're talking about is a situation, which is very different from that, because what happened at that time is basically everybody who was to the left of Labour, especially young people, just went into what was effectively a kind of millionaire politics, mostly various kind of anarchism, really.

that achieved nothing. It's achieved absolutely nothing, like in terms of any kind of concrete political gains. And there was this complete evacuation of the electoral territory. And what we've been describing as a situation in which the opposite has happened. I mean, people have left the Labour Party and left the Labour Party as an electoral vehicle,

but they've engaged in a range of different kind of electoral tactics regarding the electoral sphere. And it's been really effective. Now there is a fairly clear answer to the question, which there wasn't before, of like what can people to the left of Labor do if they're not just going to go and try and work and continue to defending left positions in the Labour Party

which I still think there's an important place for if you're not going to do that, what are you going to do? It's been really unclear where the answer to that question was. I think now it's pretty clear there's basically two there are two available answers to that question. I mean maybe it's the same question and it's always going to depend on local circumstances but it's to figure out what is the potential electoral coalition

in a given constituency that can threatened labour from the left. And I think the evidence of this election is there probably are going to be quite a lot of opportunities in different places up and down the country where if that's what people focus on, they've got a good chance of having some success and either actually replacing Labour MPs from the left or putting very significant pressure on them to take up more progressive positions. So I'm going to say, I am also relieved at the Tories being gone, more than I thought I would be, actually. Nothing is more guaranteed to get you screamed at on Twitter than saying, well, actually,

it is better to have Rachel Reeves than some neoliberal fanatic from an extreme right think tank. Nothing is more guaranteed to get you screamed at, as if you don't know in everybody reading one's tweets doesn't know, all the problems with Rachel Reeves and the ways in which he is not fundamentally de-aligned with those sorts of people. but also Twitter hates women I mean let's be honest like women in positions of power like people will absolutely pile on them with all sorts of shit now absolutely But also, I'd say younger people and also people who haven't worked in the public sector, basically, haven't been working in the public sector, don't realize quite how historically bad these conservative government has been. I mean, it has just been, they have just been absolutely appalling. And they've been appalling compared to the new Labour government.

And they've also been, they've honestly been appalled compared to at least specific phases of the Fletcher and major governments. I agree, I agree. in terms of the, you know, from the point of view of the public sector, you know, there were still people in the Thatcher governments like Kenneth Clark and Douglas Hurd, who really belonged to that old one nation tradition, that basically took the view that it was a good thing to have a public sector. You know, there are some things, there are some social functions that should be carried out by publicly funded institutions that are universally available to people. They were always fighting a rearguard action to defend them and they didn't fight very hard and they should have left the Conservatives. Party if they were serious about it, but they did exist. Whereas the Conservative Party post Cameron and Osborne has been entirely staffed with people who they literally do not think the public sector should exist. They don't want it to, because they think that only, if the only possible justification for the public sector existing is as a site for rent-seeking on the part of various financial and service-providing companies. And they've pursued that strategy

for decades. They've literally spent 14 years taking all of our money and they're now going to fuck off with it. And we're so tired of it that I'm even willing to accept that. Do you know what I mean? They've ruined people's lives. And that's the manifestation of the politics

that you've just outlined, Jeremy, which is that, like, you couldn't even see the ideology behind it. You know, at least with Thatcher, there was an ideology and you're like, right, I'm against that because. But it had some kind of logic to it, whereas with these guys, it was just like direct corruption. Well, it was naked interest. They were just nakedly serving a set of interests and their attempts to construct an ideological narrative in favour of them, became flimsyer by the year, except in the case, say, of people like Gove and his education reforms, which were incredibly ideological and didn't really serve anyone's interests. They really haven't served any, apart from the interests of people who just don't.

don't really think working class people should be educated. I know amongst like sort of liberal Tories that I know, there's this fond belief that are actually the go, that actually educational standards have gone up because if you look in certain lead tables as to like how good 12 year olds are at reading or something, I think we've improved our position a little bit compared to 15 years ago, I can say in response to that, not one person who works in education like as an academic field, like studying education, take seriously the metrics which are applied by the UK government to measure those sorts of outcomes. And no one, no one working in a university today

thinks that students are leaving school, coming into universities, as well equipped for academic work of any kind or academic learning of any kind as they were 15 years ago. Nobody thinks that. And this is not because teachers, teachers today, no question, do a fantastic job.

They do a heroic job. Now, my own kids' teachers have been absolutely fantastic all through school, but they do it with one hand tied behind their back, at all times. Because of the absurd emphasis on standardized testing, on narrowing the curriculum, they're always having to fight against that. They're always having to use their ingenuity to try to deliver something like actual education to kids in the face of a regime which has tried to take it away from them. And I'm sorry, as a university teacher, you absolutely see

the results in the seminar room. The students are just not coming into universities with any real conception of what it means to go read a book and write about it. And that's not only because of things happening in schools, it's also because the intersection between platform media and hypercapitalism is destroying people's brains. Exactly. Yeah, I was just going to say it's all sorts of factors, because I've witnessed exactly the same thing with the cohort that I was teaching recently. I mean, it's not their fault that you can see with these kids, they're not students, they're not stupid. They're not stupid. They just haven't been, they, and the people teaching them are not stupid. They just haven't been allowed, like, to have the, to teach them.

And that is all, that is what the, I mean, the Tories did that. You can, you can compare that incredibly unfavorably to the outcomes of the, even the Thatcher and major government and their impact on schools, which broadly speaking were still partially shaped by, sort of consensus positions amongst the education profession. You know, even, even the major government, kind of try to move away from the overemphasis on exams, for example, at the end of, to bring in more coursework to secondary school. And that carried on under new labour. And then it was to go just in one stroke of the pen, got rid of like 30 years of progress on that issue. He said, right, no, all students are only going to be great assessed on the basis of exams now.

Just to interrupt that narrative, though, I mean, we don't quite know what's going to happen with education. No, no, it might well be, it might be bad. We're going to have to push hard if we want a shift. Who's got portfolio for education, actually? Bridget Philipson. Yeah. Oh, God. Oh, God.

And the paragraph on higher education in the manifesto. I think it was a paragraph. Perhaps it was two lines. It said absolutely nothing. It's like, fuck, it's a really, like, universes are going bankrupt now. There's an absolute catastrophe in the sector. And there's nothing, basically. Well, it said the situation is completely broken, Will Finn.

fix it. I think James, James bought the summed it up as do know, hope something turns up though. That was the H.E. policy. But, you know, I agree. It's not, look, however bad it is, there will be a huge gulf between what

we're likely to get out of this government on the basis of schools and education as an university policy, compared to what we would like. But it is not going to be as bad as what the Tories have left. There's no question. I want to just carry along with that that thing, because basically, like,

new labour were very, very into, like, introducing metrics and doing that whole new public management stuff where you introduce metrics and, like, introduce competitive tables and all this sort of stuff. But, like, the difference with, like, the conservative party of recent years has been, they were using a cultural war framing. Some of the Tories were wanting universities to go bankrupt, or at least saying that, because we'd thin it out and we wouldn't have all of these, you know, Mickey Mouse degrees, like media studies and sociology, etc. And so, and I think that one of the other things that you saw with late-stage Toryism or, you know, the culture war sort of like end of authoritarianism was like packing people

out inequalities, posts, et cetera, who were consciously in egalitarian and wanted to fuck it up. I think we probably will move away from such a, from that sort of culture war framing. I'm not 100% sure that we will totally move away from it. But I just wanted to raise one really surprising appointment, which is at the appointment of James Timpson as the Minister for Prisons. You know, he says like, a third of the people in prison should be in prison. A third, well, they probably should be getting their mental health problem. They should be getting some other support.

And a third should just never be there. They should be back in the community. So we explain who Timpson is. He's a very interesting guy. So he's a strange guy. He's a member of this family firm, Timpsons, which is a, a national chain of basically shoe repairers and key cutters. They've been famous for this policy for years and years of employing ex-offenders,

employing people who've been in prison. And they've won a lot of respect, like, within the sort of probation service, the social work profession, like for being very genuine. They're very well regarded to being very, very sincere about this sort of social mission. And it is like, well, what if capitalism was done in the way that, you know, liberal Tories think capitalism is done most of the time? It's like it's a massive, massive family firm that has a huge, like, sort of paternalist social mission. But yeah, the guy, the guy who's like our age, he has a really, he does have very, very liberal views on prison reform in accordance with all this.

And he's going to be appointed to the House of Lord so he can be made the minister in charge of reforms. Now, this is the sort of stunt that New Labour, and especially in its later phases, the Gordon Brown government loved. They loved this sort of stunt. Oh, let's get some corporate guy who's not even a politician. and put him in charge of some area of policy to show how friendly we are to business and how we're not just all career politicians. But in this case, you've got to say

this is much more old school. This is the sort of person you imagine the Harold Wilson government sort of appointing in that role. It's much more old school. It's much more, it's like a good appointment. I saw Richard Seymour saying, actually, this is a good thing.

This seems like a good guy. If Richard can't think of a reason to show why this is a symptom of our further impending doom, then no one can. It's, yeah, it's pretty, you know, it's encouraging. It is encouraging.

I wanted to talk about Rachel Reeves' policy, Securonomics and these sorts of things, because I think that's the key to her to what they think is going to go on. They're going to try and get growth. If you can get growth, then you don't have to raise taxes, basically. is the idea. You can increase your tax take, but without increasing taxes. Without growth or

politics is immediately a zero-sum game of distribution, basically. Somebody wins, somebody else has to lose. And they don't want to do that, obviously. And it fits with this thing about the Tories have just funneled money in a corrupt manner, you know, to themselves and their friends, etc., which is very, very definitely one possible outcome of this Securinomics. It's basically a form of Bidenomics or de-risking, where the state uses money, they de-risk private investment, and they want to de-risk private investment in infrastructure. The way it looks like it's set up now, what Rachel Reeves wants to do is they want the big asset management firms. There are three big asset management firms in the world who own 20% of your average firm in the American stock market,

basically. So they're huge, absolutely incredible. I think they've got like $10 trillion worth of capital invested in various things. And they want to move. into infrastructure and owning homes, basically, that sort of stuff. So Rachel Reeves set up a National Infrastructure Council. And if you look at who sat on that, and they're going to give advice about how you can have these partnerships between the public and the private. If you look at who's on them, you've got companies such as BlackRock, one of these big three asset management firms, really rapacious.

The way that they govern assets is incredibly aggressive, real focus on knocking down costs, etc all of the things that we associate with like the disaster of the public finance initiative which is the new labor version of this is it's a different this way this time because it's public de-risking private investment and if you carry along that you you end up in a very serious situation that like there's going to be a lot of new infrastructure built partly because if there's been done built for so long and that you know the whole public sphere is in that absolute chaos but also because we're in a situation where you need to decarbonize the economy, which involves a huge, huge build out of new infrastructure, basically. In the US, this is associated with the

inflation reduction act and like Biden's sort of like very large sums, like almost bottomless memosas people talk about, you know, the way it's constructed, there is no limit, there's no upper limit to the amount of state money that could be mobilized in this way. Rachel Reeves, somebody's called it homeopathic bydenomics, basically, they're tiny little sums, but they could grow. And so, like, there's a Rachel Reeves and Pat McFadden version of this. Pat McFadden was the campaigns coordinator for the Labour election, or just the Labour Party campaigns coordinator, I think.

Their version of this is we want to mobilize the big asset firms, and they're the ones who will basically end up owning and controlling the key infrastructure, and then they'll just be able to decide, how it runs and they'll be able to rinse us forever. And so it's a very serious situation in which you have this, you're looking at a really big redistribution of public wealth upwards and like an increased financialization or asceticization of the economy so that there's that thing of money just keeps getting funneled up.

They can extract rents for a long, long, long, long time. But there's another version of that within the Labour Party around G.B. Energy. So there's a massive battle going on. you can see already around what GB Energy is. So GB Energy was set, it's been sold as like publicly owned energy company. Pat McFadden was doing an interview the other day in which he was saying, well, yeah, no, we're not going to produce any energy. This is just going to be a derisking vehicle.

We're going to get a load of sums and we're going to say, here we are BP, why don't you build this bit of renewable energy infrastructure here? We'll give you so many millions and you have to put in, for every one pound we put in, you have to put in three pounds. They're not going to get that. That's not how it works. But that's what they're aiming to do, which would be disastrous. And then there's a sort of Ed Miliband version, which is no, actually, it's going to be an energy producing company.

And what they might actually end up doing is to try to de-risk a huge load of co-ops, a massive rollout of energy co-ops, locally owned and controlled energy co-ops. So one of those is very good. One of those is very bad. I went into depth on that because I think it's going to be a key battle. But also, just because it shows us, like, at the moment, the balance of forces are black rock are going to walk in right you have to build up a counterbalance to that otherwise the macfaddens of the labour party are going to get what they want basically you

know you've got to build a counterpower somehow right so i mean with all with all of this what i'm trying to see or trying to understand as we talk about these issues is is the project of the left putting pressure on the labour party to make the the right kind of decisions, i either left wing the, you know, the correct decisions, the decisions that we want, the policies that we want, is there a Venn diagram between that and the sort of policies or even the optics of the policies that will make any change possible in the next five years? That's the key question for me. Like what is the Labour Party going to be able, not even, you know, whether they want to or not, what are they able to do that are going to make

people's quality of life a little bit better, you know, over the next year or five years even? And that's the thing that I don't know what that is in terms of just their capacity to because of what's happened for the last 14 years. That's going to protect us from a far right win in four years time, which, I mean, I admit, this is the thing that I'm obsessed with. Well, their reply to both you and Keir would be to say, we have to do this big PFI scheme because there's no political way we can raise the money

to be able to build up public sector infrastructure on a scale that people will notice within four or five years otherwise. I mean, that is what they said in the 90s, and that's what they'll say. That is what they would say again. I don't think it's true. I do think it's true that probably the only other way to do it, on the scale that would be required for enough people to notice to really neutralise the threat

of the far right would be, you know, basically Labour's 2017 manifesto. I mean, there might be some sort of in-between area. There might be some range of measures they could take. They would raise enough money, but I don't know. I mean, that's what they would say. So I think it's important to take note of that. I'm not in, I'm not justifying the PFI. I know Keir knows.

I'm a bit more pessimistic about the PFI thing. I think it's, I think, I think our chance to stop that. happening was the 2017 and 2019 elections. I think it's probably going to happen. I think we need to keep exposing how bad it's going to be and that it's a really bad thing. And the next time there's a significant conjunctual opportunity for the left that we need to make a big part of our demand that it stop happening. I think it doesn't mean we don't try to stop it happening. I think we absolutely have to try to stop this big PFI program going forward in that way now. But I also think we have to strategise on the assumption we're probably going to

lose that for it. It's not an easy strategy because you have to make like you have to politicise these procurement decisions, politicising and making a key issue out of procurement decisions. It's not easy, is it basically? But what you're trying to do is like, if those go through, they have to be pinned. You have to be pinned and said, yes, we are, we are doing this. Do you know what I mean? We are doing this. And yes, this is going to involve huge subsidies to like the biggest, most repatriation of capitalist firms. And it's going to involve a huge, well, the distribution upwards, you know, if they've got to be made to own it, do you know what I mean? I agree. I just think all that's too much information to get across to people who don't

already know about it. We basically failed in the early 2000s. The left really failed to actually normalise people like knowing what PFI was and why it's bad. So can we spell out the acronym? Can we spell out the acronym? Private finance initiative. Yeah, it won't be a private finance initiative this time. So private finance initiative is like getting private money to build a hospital, to build a public good and then the state gets that hospital back in 30 years' time

although it's absolutely falling into pieces. This is going to be much more using public money to take away all the risks of investment to try to shape where private money goes

basically and the firms will own that that's like de-risk in a private investment is that way around if you know what I mean. I think it's a useful lens to look at it through that is what they think

they think that's what they can do they can do this in order to make people feel like there's a lot more public sector infrastructure in place in four years' time, so they feel that things have happened. And I think, I mean, we need to push for something different, but something different will be quite radical. And it would require quite a large base of popular support and would require, you know, confrontation, really,

between the government and certain capitalist forces, which they don't want to be engaging. I'm looking at, you know, Labour's first step, those six points that, the election campaign was pushed on. One is this deliver economic stability stuff. We've had a conversation around that, right? The NHS waiting times, this is going to be a big thing for people because people's experience of the NHS has been, you know, has like been decimated. So, you know, all of us can feel it. You know, they're saying they're doing this by cracking down on tax avoidance and non-dom loopholes, etc. Like, is this something that we can, that we may be able to see some kind of experiential change on in the last next four years, I have no idea. I literally have no idea

what West Streeting is going to get up to on that. Well, I've got a pretty good idea where West Street is going to get up to. Basically, he's already said, you know, basically we need to build out private capacity in order to, you know, address so that they can help take the pressure off the NHS, etc. As people constantly point out, you know, private healthcare doesn't have its own assets. There are some private health hospitals, etc., but they're staffed by NHS staff on the whole who are working in their spare time. Do you know what I mean? There isn't the doctors and nurses there that, you know, they don't exist in a separate realm. So that might not work. Yeah, I guess I'm just trying to think about like reading through these

policies. What is the experiential thing that they might be thinking? Because we're not, you know, we're not that close. We might have met a couple of people who are now in the cabinet. cabinet were definitely closer again than we were to like any previous Tory government as well. But I genuinely, I would like to know what they are thinking, because they need to do something at least cosmetic. Well, they are thinking that. I mean, they are thinking that the only way they can do this, basically, again, the only way they can do it is to get the, is to basically get the private sector to build hospitals,

which the NHS will then sort of use in return for some kind of fee, but they won't, but it won't cost them as much as having to build a whole new hospital. Will that happen that quickly? I mean, will that happen? Because even building of hospitals would be revolutionary. I mean, I understand that. I understand our left position about doing it privately, why that's a problem. But any kind of infrastructural project, people would be like, wow, there's something happening in this country. Do you know what I mean? It's very hard to tell Nadia, because like, if you read the Labour Party manifesto,

what it says is that they are going to implement 18 billion pounds worth of cuts in public spending of the next year, and that would be more than Osborne did. That's what their official position is. There's no one in the country believes they're going to do that. They're going to find a fix to find that $20 billion to get rid of that. And the fix is a technical fix between the way the Bank of England and the government account for quantitative ease. Well, I mean, they didn't say in the manifesto, we're going to carry 18 billion months of cuts. They said we're going to stay within spending limits and physical rules, as currently set out. And the generally accepted interpretation of the

government's, the outgoing government's existing spending plans and fiscal rules is that that would necessitate 18 billion pounds of spending cuts. But yeah, there's no question they're going to change some of those rules as well as keeping to them. So, I mean, one of the differences, I would say, made by people who are, according to economists who I do have some respectful, who are relatively sympathetic to Reeves actually, is that you know the Tories chose to interpret fiscal rules all rules are open to interpretation and the

Tories just explicitly chose to interpret certain rules in the most austerean way possible in a way in a way that would legitimate them engaging in massive cuts in the public spending because they were just ideologically committed to making massive cuts to public spending whether there was any good economic argument for it or not in some cases so so that and that is one of the changes I mean the changes is that I don't think, I don't think Rachel Reeves actively wants the public sector to be smaller in five years than it is now. So to the extent that there's any leeway for them to, for example, reinterpret fiscal rules in order to allow for more public spending and investment, and I believe they will. And that will make it possible for them to do some of the

things you're asking, like can they do them? So some of it will. But it's a good, I think it's a good point. And I think it's, it is worth keeping this in mind. And this is something for us to really think about actually in terms of the strategic terrain. I mean, you're right to ask the question. And I would say based on the experience of the Blair government, I mean, basically, it was not the case really by 2001 by the first election the Blair government faced. The things really felt different. Sure start. Sure start. Yeah, but sure start wasn't something people, you know, had massive, there wasn't like loads of people. There weren't loads of Shawstart centres opened by 2001.

Whether or not? Okay. I thought Shorestart was like one of the flagship. Yeah, but it took 14 years. That's after 14 years. Okay. It was launched in some areas in 1999. Okay. So by 2001,

the number of people who'd had kids go to short start centers was not a lot. Difference between 97 and now is that unlike now, Labor did have a massive vote share. It wasn't like 50%. It was like in the mid, it was in the mid 40s, which by historic standards means you're going to be in government for the next 15 years normally. It was really high and the Tories had been sort of really wiped out and there wasn't like a right wing party absorbing all their support in a very effective way. So basically the new Labour government, the

Blair government did have the luxury of it taking sort of eight years before people really noticed. there was also the fact that the global economic circumstances are so different. So the impact of the tech boom was, you know, being felt in the labour market, especially for young people, for school leavers and graduates at that time. So people sort of felt okay. All of those circumstances being very different now mean that the question you've raised, the question of, you know, without engaging in some sort of near-revolutionary project of a dramatic social reconstruction, how are they going to make people feel sufficiently better by 2029 that you don't get a massive wave of support for the far right, then I don't know what the answer to that is. And it does suggest the need

for kind of the left to ready ourselves for that possibility, for the possibility that that's the emergent situation, like two or three years down the line. I mean, there's another more positive way of, like, approaching that just to finish on this question, which is, is there any major, like, Tory initiative or, or, you know, policy that can be stopped that will make people feel like, oh, at least that's not happening anymore? Like, is there something in terms of, especially in terms of like income benefit or whatever? I mean, I don't know the details around these things, but surely there's something where they can at least, in terms of the optics, go, we're not doing this anymore. It's a two child policy

on benefits, which is the, that's the obvious one that I suspect they will address, partly because I think one of the things that seems to be coming out about the independence who won on a sort of like pro-Palestinian platform was the other big thing that was coming up was this two child cap on welfare. I suspect that that will be addressed basically at some point. One of the things I want to get into though is that like what is what is It's a difference between the situation that, like, the Starma government faces compared to the situation that the Blair government faces. And they are really, really, very, very different. Like, there's two interlinked, like, really catastrophic crisis going on.

One of them is economic stagnation, and that's been going on for a long time in the UK. It's, like, incredibly serious. Just a lack of growth, basically. Lack of growth, lack of productivity. And most of... Lack of long-term investment. Yeah. Lack of long-term investment.

And most importantly, like just basically a long-term stagnation in wages. So, like, 18 years of zero wage growth, basically. We've all felt it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. Everyone's poorer, basically. Or feels poorer. I am poorer. I feel way poorer than I was 14 years ago.

You know, in my 20s, I had more money in terms of what I could buy for it. And this is like a global problem, economic stagnation. And like, I've been a long, long running and a global problem, It doesn't mean that it's everywhere in the globe. America is growing relatively faster at the moment, part because of the position it plays in the global economy. But like, you know, this is something that Stama can't just sort out on his own. There's huge headwinds in that direction, if you know what I mean.

And at the same time, the climate crisis is getting incredibly real, basically, and will be crossing over and driving economics. So, you know, it's already like catastrophic sort of like, weather emergencies are having like really big impact on driving inflation. Like olive oil is the one people point to. Olive oil has got incredibly more expensive in the last six months and it's because of droughts in Spain and elsewhere. But that's just repeated over and over again.

Like the impact of climate change will be that. You will just constantly have what used to be extreme weather events happening more and more and more. And that will be that will be having like direct impacts onto your standard of living. Do you know what I mean? So these two crises overlap. And I think one of the ways to think about what's gone on with the Greens is obviously there's been this, the young urban left has basically seemed to have

like strategically and tactically moved over in certain places. But that, you know, the other seats they won were in the countryside in like Suffolk and Norfolk and stuff like that. And so there's something else going on there. Kent ones are interesting as well. A friend of mine, Nick Bure has been like sort of writing. He's saying like, look, this is something big. and something that's been missed is that, like, there is a real sea change there, partly demographic, also because in the countryside, you can see much more immediately the impacts of climate change.

It's much, much more visible than it is in the city. And so it's directly impacting on people's lives. And at the same time, you've had something like XR, which, for all its faults, Extinction Rebellion, which for all its faults, and there were many, it reached into those places, small towns and villages in Suffolk and Norfolk. You know what I mean? And I think that is a cohort of people who'd be mobilised in some sort of way that we sort of missed a little bit. And they're the ones who could be mobilised. They could be like the cohort and they probably are already the co-part who's driving that like green wave in the countryside. And it was XR who were holding a massive banner outside Buckingham Palace as Stormer was driving into that or being driven in, rather, which is interesting.

It's the only banner outside Buckingham Palace. Well, I think there's going to be a lot of working out of relationships over the next couple of years between people who are going to be working through the Green Party and people are going to be working on independent campaigns and people are still working through the Labour Party. I would say we can draw some strategic conclusions from this election, though. I'm going to say, I think we'll talk of some new left party other than the Greens should be dropped. It's ridiculous. The Greens have clearly established themselves now as the vehicle to the left of Labour. if you don't want to go with the Greens, then you can get involved in some sort of

localised campaign. I think people need to be thinking in their local communities about do we have the opportunity, are there sets of issues that we could organise around to put pressure on a, to put pressure on a local MP and local candidates in future elections from the left because the potential to do that has just staggeringly opened up, I think.

I was going to say, actually, another thing that did really cheer me up is, and I don't think we haven't really talked about this. I haven't really seen anyone talk about this. When I recorded a podcast yesterday, Adam Finlayson, I didn't really talk about this. But the scale to which they haven't managed to increase national votes yet at all, I think has taken everyone by surprise. It will have taken the Labour leadership themselves by surprise. Some of those people in the cabinet will be looking at this. And they will be looking at the genius strategy, which has got them all these seats and saying, well, look, it actually didn't, it didn't win us

any more actual vote. That is worrying, and they'll be slightly alarmed. And the cheerleading centrist commentariat has not been able to avoid highlighting to their viewers and readers and listeners, the extent to which, as you said, Kear, it's this Sandcastle majority. You know, the BBC has been leading with Sir John Curtis pointing out to people, the extent to which this massive parliamentary majority just isn't based on an actual voting wave. And And we're seeing the fact that on the one hand, the first past the post system has been pushed to an absolute breaking point is totally broken and is visibly broken to everybody.

On the other hand, one has to assume there's like no chance of a Labour government which has benefited this much from disproportionate allocation of seats going anywhere near implementing PR within this parliament. So we can probably forget about that happening. But what we have seen is that everyone else, like across liberal progressive forces from the liberal Democrats to the Greens to the independent pro-Palestine campaigns, people have figured out how to sort of work the first past the post system and the fact that and the collapse of party loyalty, the collapse of the idea that there

are any constituencies which are now safe seats for anyone, it threatens to make the first past the post system sort of functional for democracy again, like to the extent that it's no longer the case that there are these vast ways of the country where party leaderships can just safely assume that their chosen candidates will necessarily be elected almost anywhere and that that's fantastically encouraging to me and it does it feels a bit like you know the wave felt in 2017 that part of what's going on is that for example you know people are able to use things like social media to make it much much easier to coordinate massive local

campaigns you know that have real real effects you don't need to start off with a budget which would allow you to print like 200,000 leaflets to be able to launch and build one of those campaigns anymore. So there are real openings. And I think that is what is to be done. I think people are going to have to assess their local circumstances, the conditions in their local Labour Party, the local activist community. I think a lot of people, I might be wrong, I hope I'm not wrong.

I think a lot of people, probably a lot of people listening to the show who have left the Labour Party over the past four years who are still in touch with lots of other former labour activists in their area are now going to have to be asking themselves is it time for us to go into the Green Party to bring our organisational energy and experience to building up that project here locally so we can start to put pressure on labour from the left

and I think I will probably remain in the Labour Party where I think there's very important roles to play but I think people should be asking themselves that question in a lot of places where they don't want to do that where that's not going to work, they can be asking themselves, are there other sets of localised issues or ways in which local communities connect to global and national issues that can enable us to build some sort of a coalition locally around a progressive agenda?

So I think there is everything to play for now, and the urge of the threat of the far right four or five years down the line means that there's every reason to play it. Just to link up some of the conversation we're having is that idea that, that you can have localized campaigns and they could take off. I think we could link that up with this discretion of like infrastructure, et cetera, we would have earlier. Partly because one thing we haven't talked about, which is central to Labor's plans,

is to rip up planning laws. And one of the other surprise appointments that seems to be taking place now, I don't know if he's agreed to it, is that Starma wants to appoint Nick Bowles, who was a conservative minister under Cameron as like his planning, Zala. You could really see how this could play out in which opposition to, some like piece of infrastructure owned by Black Rock and this sort of stuff could turn into like the hook upon which you could try to put together a one of these

like local independent sort of very localized focus, but like with the bigger picture sort of campaign. You could see that as being one area where you could exercise some sort of leverage because what what it means when you're ripping at planning laws is that like you're going to remove the possibility of for people to object to them of course. Which is something I care a lot about having been part. of a very successful cross-party local campaign to stop them building towers in our car parks and winning. Yeah.

I mean, the other thing I think people should look out for, and I think people should go Google straight away, is this campaign called Take Back Water. Now, this is coming out. It's a campaign around Thameswater. Thameswater, a lot of the water companies are basically bankrupt. But Thames Water is bankrupt and will basically go out of business in the next six months up to a year. And so something has to be done to. I think it was number two. Was it number one or number two on Sue Gray's shit list of problems that have to be dealt with, which was

released before the election? And so it's emerging out of the Don't Pay UK movement, who did this huge, 2.3 million people said that they would refuse to pay their water bills basically in polling when they were active, not water bills, sorry, electricity bills. And so it was don't pay your electricity bills. Exercise some sort of like fiscal disobedience. They're talking in this sort of language. So that's another way in which you could see sort of like this sort of like politicisation of procurement. What they're demanding is that like it gets that the water companies are not just bailed out. The shareholders are not just bailed out of Thameswater. They're made right by the government. The public money should not be going to go make them right. Instead, you know,

that it should be taken into public ownership of some form or another. We don't know whether that's going to take off. Perhaps it's too early in the Starmer's honeymoon period. But I think that's something to keep a real eye on as well. That campaign, particularly, and other ones like it. I like that. I'm happy you brought it up, Kier, because I feel like, I mean, apart from the fact that the shit list is quite funny, but it's, yeah, there's loads of poignant stuff there. What I like about a campaign on, you know, water is it both, it brings together people who are interested in public service and public utilities with, you know, environmentalists. And I think that's kind of an important alliance going forward.

And wild swimming mums as well. Don't forget wild swimming mums. I'm sure they're a key constituency. Well, and everybody, yeah, but also, I mean, it is just disgusting that we've got to the point where Thameswater is able to behave in the way that they have with sewage, spillage and all the rest of it, you know, and get away with it. I think it's much more grounded area to campaign on then climate change in general. But that's always been my opinion.

and, you know, I find abstract climate change campaign is quite difficult. But I find that I think water is, maybe I'm biased because this is what I did my master's dissertation on, but I think water is a really important one. And I would, you know, it would be great if there was a national campaign around that, which different constituencies put their energy into that, which would put pressure on the Starma government, but also, you know, on companies directly. Nadia, I've got a good way to end the show, actually. Me and Jeremy were both a little bit more positive,

and you were a little bit more deflated at the beginning of the show. And we've been talking through like, oh, well, we could do this and this could happen. And well, this is an interesting thing that could happen. How do you feel at the end? Have we changed your mind? Have we made you a little bit more positive about the situation? I feel a bit more positive. I definitely feel a bit more positive after talking to you guys, as I always do.

Yeah, no, I do feel a bit more positive. I think I remain, I can remain skeptical about what can be done. But I think in terms of what this government will do, because my main concern, The bottom line for me is, will people's quality of life in this country get better? Will there be respite from the absolute, you know, decimation of standards of living? And, you know, just the look on people's faces, you know, in this country, like everyone has had a really, really rough time of it. And that's what matters to me.

And I'm still skeptical about what this government will be able to do over the next four years. But now I feel a bit more hopeful about what our role as, you know, in the broadest sense, you know, social movement activists or people with our politics have on being able to, you know, be part of perhaps that process. Thank you.