This is an audio transcript of the Political Fix podcast episode: ‘The ‘bin fires’ setting Labour’s in-tray alight’
Lucy Fisher
Is there anything that has surprised you since the election in the new regime?
Jennifer Wiliams
Oh my God, I hate to say no. (Laughter)
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Lucy Fisher
Welcome to Political Fix from the Financial Times with me, Lucy Fisher. Coming up, the government is planning a devolution revolution, handing more power to local council leaders and mayors. But that still leaves Westminster grappling with Sue Gray’s sh*t list — overcrowded prisons, public sector pay pressure, universities on the brink and the potential collapse of Thames Water. It ain’t pretty. Joining me in studio to discuss it all are my FT colleagues Jim Pickard. Hi, Jim.
Jim Pickard
Hello.
Lucy Fisher
And Rafe Uddin. Hi, Rafe.
Rafe Uddin
Hi, Lucy.
Lucy Fishe
And down the line is FT’s Northern England correspondent, Jen Williams. Hi, Jen.
Jennifer Wiliams
Hi.
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So let’s kick off talking about devolution, which Keir Starmer has put at the heart of his programme for government, a big part of his mission to drive economic growth. Jen, give us the background here. What is the government planning and what informed Starmer’s views on devolution?
Jennifer Wiliams
So, I mean, during the campaign and also in the manifesto, Labour did talk a lot about continuing down this road of mayoral devolution. And it feels as though the government is tying this quite closely to its sort of central goal, which is around growth. So I think they view this as a mechanism potentially to deliver on some of their growth aims. And they’re hoping that, particularly in the places that have got established metro mayors, that they will be able to map out essentially what that actually look like within their own economies, and that the government can effectively use them as a bit of a delivery mechanism.
In terms of the kind of outward signalling, one of the very, very first things that Keir Starmer did was have the mayors into Downing Street. All of them came into Number 10, and it was very much a kind of signal that, like, we are taking you seriously, we do want to have a good relationship with you and we do want to work in partnership with you. So in terms of the politics of it, they definitely got off on that foot saying, like, we definitely want to be at the heart of our delivery agenda.
Lucy Fisher
I think you bring out really well that there are sort of two sides to this. One is the political, you know, talking a good game — Keir Starmer on I think his second day in office at that press conference in Downing Street about travelling to all four corners of the United Kingdom and getting the meetings in with the mayors before doing anything else, and making that show of being very non-tribal by inviting Ben Houchen, the Tory mayor of Tees Valley. And then, of course, there’s the economic side of it, trying to drive economic growth and end the underperformance of many of Britain’s cities compared to their European counterparts.
Jim, tell us about what we saw in the King’s Speech. Anything else we know about what they’re gonna bring to bear in the first year or so? What is the scale of Starmer’s ambition?
Jim Pickard
So they’ve dubbed it a take back control line, which is, of course, a deliberate reference to the whole Brexit message from eight years ago. And it’s basically setting a presumption towards devolution for local communities. And the legislation will give mayors responsibility for transport, skills, adult education, job support, energy and planning. And they’re basically talking about what they call devolution deserts, which is the 40 per cent of England which doesn’t yet have a devolution deal.
I mean, the thing to remind listeners of here is that this was a journey that the Conservative government was already very much on, and this was already a process that was in train.
I think on a separate note, one thing that’s really interesting about this is that we’ve obviously had Conservative hegemony for 14 years, but we’ve had in terms of the metro mayors we’ve had Labour dominance. And a lot of those metro mayors have defined themselves against the Conservative governments. Of course, you had Sadiq Khan in London who had those big battles over funding for transport during the Covid pandemic. If you look at Andy Burnham as well, he was posturing against the Tory government. It’s gonna be really interesting to see how those relationships develop when they’re supposedly all on the same side and yet they’re gonna want more money from the central government that they might not get.
Jennifer Wiliams
I think that’s right. And also, it’s interesting to see the way that Andy Burnham has in particular has framed this conversation with government, because what Labour have kind of done in a very vague way, as Jim just said, is kind of list a series of areas where we would look to give more powers to mayors, but at the same time, they’re wanting something from mayors, right? They’re wanting the mayors to help them deliver on their growth agenda.
And Burnham has very much framed this as, I am making an offer to you. I will deliver on your growth agenda. I will deliver more than my sort of proportional national share in housing. But in return, I will want X, Y and Z, whatever that might be. So it’s likely to be more flexibility over the spending of Whitehall and, for example, perhaps more grant funding. He wants Right to Buy, the ability to buy your council house, suspended in Greater Manchester, so that you stop the drain of social housing out of the system. And I’ve no doubt there will be other things that he wants as well. He wants control over some of his local suburban railway lines, for example.
So in the case of Burnham, he’s probably, you know, may well perhaps consider himself to be first among equals within this kind of scenario. He’s not going to the table in a kind of supplicant sense. He’s going to the table kind of saying like, that’s fine. You want me to help you out, but I’m gonna want a load of stuff in return.
I think there’s a related issue here, which is that if you are saying to these places, go away and draw up a kind of delivery growth plan for us so that we can help to get there. If you’re Greater Manchester, which has had a substantial kind of devolution deal and a substantial infrastructure in that regard for a long time, since arguably pre-dating when it had a mayor, so, you know, going back before 2017, you will have the kind of capacity and the ability; in fact, you will already have an economic growth strategy. Greater Manchester does. So actually what you do is you take it out the drawer, you tailor it to the government’s current interests and priorities, you give it a different name and you submit it and say, there you go. This is what I’m planning to do on economic growth.
If you’re going from a standing start and you don’t have that capacity, you’re in a very different place. And all these places are expected to kind of get their growth plans together pretty quickly and in. And I suspect what the government will find is that the ability to deliver and the ability to plan and the ability to be strategic is going to be quite variable from place to place.
Lucy Fisher
Really interesting. And Rafe, are there other sort of negatives to devolution potentially? I mean, think of Keir Starmer. He has this great line that local leaders have skin in the game. They have a kind of, you know, staked interest in their areas kind of doing well. And of course they have all this local knowledge rather than, you know, taskmasters in Westminster telling them what to do from on high. That all sounds great, but there are often question marks, aren’t there, about transparency and value for money, waste, corruption, how that’s all policed when it comes to devolution.
Rafe Uddin
When you’ve got a government which now is sort of moving in the same direction as its regional mayors and some of its devolved nation leaders as well, it’s going to be about delivery. And if there are tensions, if there are problems within one part of the sort of network of regional mayors, you know — let’s say there’s a corruption scandal in Greater Manchester, for example, it will draw right back to Westminster. The cameras and the focus will shift right back to Keir Starmer. And the point will be made that this is one of your leaders in a part of the country where you’ve devolved powers, and look at how they’re managing it.
Lucy Fisher
Do you think there could be blowback to central government if they devolve more powers and it goes wrong? I mean, Jim, you know, I know, I will not fall foul of Jim by saying that local regional journalism is dead. Far from it. There are lots of brilliant local and regional journalists around doing great work, but we have seen huge cuts, including to kind of local BBC services, the funding models fit for local press. And that used to be a kind of a key constraint on power and to kind of keep the scrutiny on local leaders. We just don’t have that to the same degree any more, do we?
Jim Pickard
Yeah, I mean, absolutely, that’s a really fair point. I started my journalistic career in the Western Daily Press, which is down in Bristol, and, you know, like most of these publications, completely hollowed out now, just a skeleton staff. And yet the more you devolve power to local areas, the more you would hope to have that kind of journalistic scrutiny. And that is a legitimate concern that it would not be quite so strong any more.
Lucy Fisher
Jen, what do you think are any other sort of potential demerits to the devolution agenda, or are you kind of pro it in overall?
Jennifer Wiliams
I think it’s a work in progress. And I think, you know, to the point about what would happen if and when something goes wrong in one of these mayoralties, which doubtless it will at some point, that will to some extent be the litmus test for whether or not both politically the government, but also Whitehall, then kind of gets rattled and says, OK, actually, maybe this isn’t going very well.
I think the point with the Tees Valley is an interesting case in point, because in opposition, Labour made a great fuss about sending in the National Audit Office to have a look at what Ben Houchen had been doing with his Teesworks project, and they were pretty explicit about that actually, during the mayoral campaign. Since then, the language has been much more muted, and obviously Ben Houchen has been invited into Downing Street. So what will they do? Don’t know. Do they want to set up a fight with a metro mayor on day one when they also have this huge kind of devolution agenda coming down the line? That very much remains to be seen and I’ll be watching that with interest.
I think the other thing is the way that the devolution system has been set up outside of London relies on an underpinning local government capacity, relies on local government underneath it. You don’t just have Andy Burnham in Greater Manchester unilaterally deciding what to do. He oversees a group of 10 local authorities. And that’s true of all of these metro mayors. So if your underpinning local government infrastructure isn’t functioning properly, then that provides an inbuilt kind of weakness, potentially, to whether or not these metro mayoralties are able to deliver.
And I think the final thing, I’ve been talking to people quite a lot about the situation in local government over the last couple of weeks. Fundamentally, I’m not sure that the government has got a decent oversight of what’s happening across the piece. There’s no kind of clear picture financially or in terms of accountability of what’s happening across that landscape. Everybody kind of does things slightly differently. The mayors are not subject to the National Audit Office. We know that the kind of existing local audit regime is kind of broken as it was kind of set up under the previous administrations.
So at the moment, it’s possible that Angela Rayner’s department doesn’t actually have a very clear picture of what’s happening out there on the ground financially. And that comes back to this point about accountability. Does Labour have some kind of plan to come up with something that’s a bit more coherent, so that you’ve got a really clear sense of what’s happening in each of those places? And I don’t just mean does Angela Rayner know? I mean, does the public know? Do we know what exactly it is all these people are doing, what money is being spent, how they’re going to be accountable for it?
And there was the beginnings of something under the last government that basically said, if you want more powers, that’s fine, but you are basically going to have to come and sit in front of some kind of select committee and be asked by MPs what exactly it is you’re doing. Now, whether that now gets rolled out further under Labour to other mayoralties, don’t know. And where do those kind of select committees take place? Do they take place in Westminster? Because if they do, then I guess that’s one way of putting what mayors are doing in front of the national press. But a lot of this stuff I’m not clear on in terms of where Labour is gonna go with it.
Jim Pickard
I think one thing we haven’t addressed yet is the premise of the Labour government in terms of doing more devolution with this idea that it will generate more economic growth. And they explicitly, when they put out a statement ahead of the King’s speech, Angela Rayner said that the strong economic growth in Greater Manchester over the past 20 years — because they had devolution even before they had Andy Burnham — was driven by that devolution. And I think if you stress test that with experts and academics who’ve looked at this, you know, the jury’s still very much out. The Institute for Government looked at this about a year ago and they said when you look at international evidence it’s inconclusive as to whether devolution generates extra economic growth. I mean, what the experts do agree on is that British cities generally have underperformed their counterparts in France and in Germany in recent years, and they’re sort of hoping that this will make up for that.
I mean, on one level I don’t think that economic growth has to be the ultimate test of whether devolution is a good idea. I do think just generally, if you give the decision-making processes to people close to the ground, then they ought to be able to do a better job. You know, it takes skills for example, which is one of the things which is being delegated in the new legislation. Surely local leaders will be able to match skills shortages with companies that have job shortages in a way that they can do it much better than people sat in Whitehall at a desk in a big building. Whether or not that creates, you know, net economic growth, maybe you guys have a different idea.
Lucy Fisher
Rafe, do you think there’s more public appetite now for devolution? Think back to 2004, the referendum on a North East assembly where, I mean, less than 50 per cent of people turned out for it, for a start. But those that did, you know, overwhelmingly voted against that kind of devolution 20 years ago. Now, are people more attuned to the arguments for it?
Rafe Uddin
I think people will struggle to understand a lot of what has been devolved and who’s responsible and accountable for the delivery of services. I mean, we’re going to come on to the sort of various issues that the new government has highlighted as priority areas. Some of those fall within the sort of local government arena and will require quite a hands-on approach, or at least Labour government will need to involve themselves in a hands-on way. And then the question becomes sort of do voters understand who’s responsible for which part of the devolved framework? And if they don’t understand that, then who do they hold accountable at the ballot box? You know, you might find yourself held responsible for something you’ve devolved.
Lucy Fisher
Jen, final word to you. What’s your take on that question?
Jennifer Wiliams
Well, I think that there may well be examples of things that some of these mayors can genuinely do in a more cost-effective and efficient way than central government. But the caveat would be that it’s not a silver bullet for a spending environment in which you aren’t spending money, right? So if you’re a mayor in a northern city, one of your top priorities is going to be lack of decent transport infrastructure. Mayors are likely to be better placed in terms of coming up with a plan that says, this is where we need to run this, this is what we need to connect from here to there. This is where our transport problems lie. This is what we need to do. But that is still going to cost money. It’s not a complete silver bullet when it comes to growth, like, you are still going to need to invest. And I think you know that is the big unanswered question, isn’t it, at the moment in terms of what the government is going to do on spending overall.
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Lucy Fisher
Jim, back in May, you, me and our colleague Anna Gross wrote about Sue Gray’s sh*t list, Sue Gray being the Whitehall veteran, now Starmer’s chief of staff, who knows all too well that once you’re in government, life comes at you fast. And this was a risk register, wasn’t it, of all the possible bin fires that could set the government’s in-tray alight after the next election. We’ve already seen some of these skeletons in the closet, you know, start to haunt Starmer’s administration. Let’s kick off with public sector pay disputes. We’ve had quite a clear signal this week from the chancellor how the government’s looking to defuse the tension there.
Jim Pickard
Yeah, absolutely. And then, of course, we should emphasise that the sh*t list is not necessarily Sue Gray’s description of it. That might have come from more potty-mouthed colleagues. But yeah, we revealed that these were the things which they knew would be top of their in-tray when they came in. And we now are experiencing the wrath of this government coming in, grappling with these problems.
And yeah, the pay issue is the first one which I think we’re gonna get clarity on properly as early as the start of next week. The pay review bodies, who are these independent groups which examine the case for giving more money to various public sector workers, have already decided that 5.5 per cent is the right level for workers in the NHS and for teachers. We expect a whole lot more pay review bodies to come up for various other public sector professions but somewhere in that bailiwick, maybe a tiny bit lower.
But the overall cost of this is gonna be in pretty high billions that the government had only budgeted for, I think, around £3bn, and the total cost for doing all of them could be something like £8bn or £10bn. But very interesting watching Rachel Reeves on Sunday on the TV shows, basically saying that there’s a cost to not doing this. There’s a very convincing case for keeping these workers happy, keeping morale high, getting more teachers and medical workers coming into those jobs. And there’s a cost not doing it. And very clearly she’s softening up. I don’t think she needs to soften people up per se, but she’s preparing the ground for this announcement that’ll come next week.
The question obviously then turns to where is the money coming from? And the obvious place that money’s likely to come from is tax rises in the autumn Budget. And the broader sense we’re getting day in, day out is, you know, various senior ministers, particularly Rachel Reeves, you know, sort of clutching their heads in this performative shock that they’ve, inverted commas, discovered that the public finances are in a terrible state.
Now, of course, the OBR and every single respected economist has been saying for months, if not years, that the public finances are in terrible, terrible, dire straits. And I think that is gonna reach a crescendo on Monday when Rachel Reeves unveils this study that she asked the Treasury officials to do and (inaudible) things. And that’s probably the day where she’ll also reveal what she’s gonna do on public sector pay. But I think she will find the money.
Lucy Fisher
Rafe, you’ve been writing a lot about the prisons capacity crisis. Keir Starmer has called it shocking, said it’s far worse than he could have imagined before getting into government and seeing under the bonnet. Is that sort of your classic pearl clutching or is there something to that?
Rafe Uddin
He’s not wrong that it’s in a shocking state. Whether he’s actually surprised, given that the crisis has been ongoing for about two years now is a different question. And no, he shouldn’t be surprised because voters would question why he’s surprised. What we’ve seen with the new government is that they’ve gone and taken emergency steps that the previous government were going to do and delayed because of the election and the political reverberations of that. So the new Lord Chancellor, Shabana Mahmood, decided that they’re going to release prisoners at the 40 per cent mark of their sentence, so after serving 40 per cent of their sentence. It will exclude more serious offenders, or at least it intends to exclude more serious offenders. But that’s a drastic measure.
The previous government released about 11,000 prisoners under an early release scheme. Mahmood’s new move to sort of lower the release point will generate capacity of about 5,500. What that does is buys the government about 18 months to actually undertake significant reforms.
What they are undertaking to do is a sort of sentencing and probation review, which frankly, I think is a delaying tactic and isn’t actually the best way forward. I think they know what they need to do, and it’s actually address issues in terms of, as James Timpson, the new probation minister who joined from industry, has said in the past, we are addicted to sentencing. I talked to conservative judges and more liberal judges about the sentencing framework as it stands, and they always raise this point that we’ve gone for this sort of hard on crime stance that works politically but it doesn’t work in practice, because longer sentences means our prisons are fuller for longer and we don’t rehabilitate people and we don’t release them in a fit state. Instead, we sort of leave them in prisons for extended periods of time. And that’s resulted in a capacity crisis that’s actually threatening public safety, according to the new government.
Lucy Fisher
So you make the point that experts in the judicial system are warning Starmer that, you know, he might have to look at giving people shorter sentences, not necessarily popular with the public. Jen, moving on to another potential bin fire facing the government: local government funding. What’s going on there?
Jennifer Wiliams
Well, I mean, we know that local government financing has been in crisis for a long time, so Labour will have been worried, you know, given that this is on the list, Labour will have been worried about anything else potentially falling over in the coming weeks and months. And of course, the big one last year was Birmingham.
I think that the sector’s expectations have definitely been managed down in this regard. I don’t think anybody’s expecting a kind of significant or perhaps even any increase in the kind of quantum of funding that’s coming into the sector. I think there will be some changes that they will welcome, for example, a move towards three-year funding settlements, which they’ve been crying out for for a long time because they’ve struggled to budget. They’ve been kind of veering year to year, not knowing how much money they’re gonna have to spend.
And it’s pretty likely that there’ll be some kind of change to the funding formula, because under the Conservatives, there was a sort of deliberate move of resources away from what tended to be kind of poorer urban local authorities, particularly north of England, usually Labour-controlled. There was, I think, a general view that they’d been sort of featherbedded under the last Labour government so that the formula was altered. I think you can kind of expect that to be tweaked. So therefore, you know, if you are accounts like Bradford or Stoke, for example, which have been teetering on the edge financially for some time, you might expect to do a bit better out of those rules being changed. But in terms of the overall amount of money going into the system, there’s no real sign that that’s likely to kind of substantially change.
So in terms of what they do to prevent individual local authorities falling over, you know, there’s some chat within the sector that they could continue along a similar path to Michael Gove. It’s called capitalisation. And essentially you say to councils, yeah you can have exceptional financial support. But that doesn’t actually mean a bailout. It doesn’t mean extra grant funding. It means that, you know, you’ve got more flexibility to borrow or to sell assets to pay for day-to-day services. And that may then kind of help stave off some of these effective bankruptcies, maybe change the accounting rules somehow so that you kind of don’t technically end up in that space.
What you are potentially doing, nevertheless, is continuing to kick the can down the road, because we know that local government has got particularly acute pressures on funding for children’s social care, funding for special educational needs provision; obviously, adult social care, which has been in crisis for years, and the cost of putting families into temporary accommodation as a result of rising statutory homelessness, which is kind of linked back to cost of living and welfare being kept down. So you’ve got these huge, huge financial pressures which are not gonna kind of magically go away. And I guess the test will come in the spending review.
I think the final point leads back to what I was saying about mayors earlier on. There’s such a huge backlog within the audit system, which means we don’t necessarily know how bad local government finance is because a lot of the books have not been audited. So whether Labour move towards something that’s a bit more kind of coherent across the system so that they can get a handle on that, I don’t know, but it’s definitely one of those areas where you kind of, you go away and have conversations and wonder whether perhaps there is a secret plan to deal with this and you don’t really come back with any sense that there necessarily is one, because a lot of this stuff does literally come down to funding.
Lucy Fisher
A very difficult situation facing central government. Jim, there are also potentially looming bankruptcies elsewhere, the university sector and in utilities. Lots of concern about Thames Water, a lot of concern there.
Jim Pickard
What we’re seeing here is the fact that, you know, some people will, of course, blame the austerity of a decade ago for some of these problems. I think also there’s this point that if you ringfence certain departments, notably health and the proportion of total government spending that it consumes — you know, it’s gone up and up and up, you know, taking a monstrous proportion of government spending. And in part, that’s because health costs have risen faster than inflation as companies develop more expensive treatments and that kind of thing. We have an ageing population as well, you know, don’t underestimate how much the increasing demands of health have squeezed other parts of the public realm.
So one of those two points: we have universities which are complaining on two fronts that their finances are tightly squeezed. One is that international student numbers have been suffering, possibly in part because of all this chat about a squeeze on visas for students. And then we have income from domestic students hasn’t been going up because that cap on tuition fees hasn’t really changed for many, many years. And there is pressure from the sector on the incoming Labour government, you know. Please, can we lift the cap of just over nine grand?
And the repercussions of that is that we have a large number of universities in financial trouble. There’s a suggestion from the Office for Students, I think, that 40 per cent of universities are facing budget deficits this year. I think there’s a suggestion that 66 universities are in financial difficulties. And so we are seeing courses getting cut. We’re seeing departments getting shut. We’re seeing potentially thousands of job losses.
And yes, on utilities, Thames Water still afloat just about. But, you know, Britain’s biggest water company has been teetering on the edge of collapse for around a year, struggling to get hold of private sector finance to come in there. So government is on standby however, if and when they run out of money, which is currently estimated to be at some point next year. And of course Labour doesn’t want to actually nationalise. It was a long time ago that they, under Jeremy Corbyn, wanted to nationalise the sector. They very much don’t want to do that any more.
But I think one of the potential lifelines there was that Ofwat, the water regulator, made its determination for price rises for the sector a couple of weeks ago and they said to Thames Water, you can’t put up your prices anything like the amount that you wanted to. And you can’t help look at that and thinking that could actually be potentially the deathblow for the company, because private investors aren’t gonna come in if they think they can’t make a return.
Lucy Fisher
Rafe, any other hidden nasties that the government is grappling with now?
Rafe Uddin
So this week is skills week for the government. Keir Starmer’s started on Monday by delivering a speech about this new body called Skills England which will replace a previous quango in this sort of space. And Liz Kendall on Tuesday will deliver another speech, her first sort of landmark speech as the Works and Pensions secretary, where she will outline the various sort of measures that the new government wants to undertake to get Britain working again as part of this sort of wider growth agenda.
It’s also, funnily enough, one of those areas where Liz Kendall has set out the economic inheritance that she’s received from previous government to make this point around the sort of current rate of unemployment, around issues sort of surrounding the number of people on benefits, issues around benefits fraud, areas where this new Labour government have again signposted the issues they think have developed under the previous government, issues that they’ve known about potentially for years, but are resurfacing in an attempt — to I think it’s as Stephen Bush, one of our columnists, has made this point. It’s the sort of eating-your-greens government. It’s about sort of saying there is hardship to come still and we need a long time to fix them so don’t expect any radical changes just yet, particularly sort of in the areas around benefits and skills. But if you give us two terms, perhaps we can turn the ship around.
Lucy Fisher
And Jen, on welfare in particular, Labour’s really gearing up for a big fight with some of its backbenchers on the two-child benefit cap.
Jennifer Wiliams
It is, and I think we have this army of new Labour MPs that are a bit of an unknown quantity, really. Clearly there’s a very large number of them, but also it isn’t clear how they will kind of line up in terms of what they are willing to trade off on, right?
So as you say, this government is going to expect them probably to swallow quite a lot in terms of difficult decisions about, you know, spending decisions may not be particularly palatable. And we’re also probably going to see a whole series of rows in their constituencies, including MPs in particularly marginal seats, about greenbelt development, because that is very clearly the government’s stated aim, they’re very clearly saying we are Yimbys, we are going to take that battle out there, we’re going to have that fight.
So which issues are a new intake of fresh backbenchers going to be up for rebelling on? And I guess the two-child benefit cap is gonna be the first, is one of the first tests of that.
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Lucy Fisher
We’ve just got time left now for Political Fix stock picks. Jim, who are you buying or selling this week?
Jim Pickard
So I’m purchasing somebody called Richard Parker, who’s the newly elected West Midlands mayor for Labour. We talked about devolution earlier, and I think the thing about this guy Parker is no one knows anything about him at all, outside of the West Midlands. I exaggerate slightly, but you know, if you compare him to Andy Burnham of Greater Manchester, who’s now quite a prominent figure, he has a bit of work to do in terms of becoming more well-known and of defining himself politically. Yeah, he’s a former PwC partner, FT kind of person and he seems very sensible. And I think from a standing start of a very low profile, I think it’s good to buy people when they’re cheap.
Lucy Fisher
Jen, what about you?
Jennifer Wiliams
Well, I’m actually also gonna go for a mayor. I’m going for Kim McGuinness in the North East, because Kim McGuinness has essentially become the mayor of an enormous swath of northern England, which is going to include, I am imagining, some of the kinds of places where the government is likely to want to pursue its green energy agenda. She’s fresh in post, so, you know, unknown quantity in terms of how much she’s going to be willing to push back against the government. It’s gonna be really interesting to see how Kim McGuinness actually uses that profile in the North East, uses any connections that she already has within the Labour party at centre. So I’m gonna buy now because I think she’s gonna be quite interesting to watch.
Lucy Fisher
Rafe, how about you?
Rafe Uddin
This might be a very long time hold or someone I’d sell quite soon. I’m thinking Bridget Phillipson to buy, the education secretary who’s held this post in shadow cabinet for quite some time, who’s now fronting various different issues. So whether it’s on skills or the two-child cap on benefits or private school fees, the introduction of VAT as a measure there, she’s going to be responsible for a number of the quite headline-grabbing measures as education sec. And if they can deliver on these areas, then it’s a massive coup for her. But if they fail in sort of a year or two, that would be a sell to come.
Jim Pickard
And what about you, Lucy?
Lucy Fisher
I am buying Robert Jenrick, the former immigration minister. We finally, after much hand-wringing and wrangling and hours in a one imagines is a sort of fusty drafters room, the 1922 committee has agreed the rules for the Tory leadership contest. They’re gonna go pretty long. They’re not gonna unveil their new leader until November the 2nd. They’ll be using the party conference earlier in the autumn as a beauty parade for four candidates. Sounds potentially risky to me, but I’m looking forward to being there and covering it.
And I just think even though it’s gonna be a long contest, at this stage of the game, it feels like there’s a lot of momentum with Robert Jenrick. He’s got a very well-organised campaign. He seems to have been, you know, reaching out, tapping up donors. So I think that on the right wing of the party, he’s stolen a march on some of his soon-to-be-announced rivals.
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That’s all we’ve got time for this week, Rafe, Jim, Jen, thanks for joining.
Jim Pickard
Thank you.
Rafe Uddin
Thanks, Lucy.
Lucy Fisher
And that’s it for this episode of the FT’s Political Fix. I’ve put links to subjects discussed in this episode in the show notes. Do check them out. They’re articles we’ve made free for Political Fix listeners. There’s also a link there to Stephen’s award-winning Inside Politics newsletter. You’ll get 30 days free. And don’t forget to subscribe to the show. Plus, do leave a review or a star rating if you have time. It really helps us spread the word.
Political Fix was presented by me, Lucy Fisher, and produced by Manuela Saragosa. Original music and sound engineering by Breen Turner. Cheryl Brumley is the FT’s global head of audio.
I’m taking a short break later this week so George Parker will be in the hot seat. Join him on Friday.
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