Labour election chief defends Keir Starmer’s praise of Margaret Thatcher but admits to ‘bit of a fuss about it’ – UK politics live | Politics
Starmer was praising Thatcher’s effectiveness, not her policies, says Labour’s elections chief Pat McFadden
Good morning. Keir Starmer is speaking at a Resolution Foundation conference later where, as Kiran Stacey and Pippa Crerar report, he will say that Labour will not “turn on the spending taps” if it wins the next election. It is a message that firms up what he and Rachel Reeves, the shadow chancellor, have been saying for at least a year, best understood as an attempt to neutralise what is currently the Conservative party’s main attack line against the party, but one with colossal implications for how a future Labour government might govern.
Pat McFadden, the party’s national campaign coordinator, has been giving interviews this morning, but he has been preoccupied by having to clarify remarks made by Starmer over the weekend praising Margaret Thatcher. McFadden insisted that Starmer was paying tribute to her effectiveness, not her policies. McFadden told LBC:
I remember when Gordon Brown was prime minister, he invited Mrs Thatcher to tea at No 10 and he described her as a conviction politician who saw the need for change, and we had some of the same fuss at that time.
There’s a long history to these things, and what Keir was doing in the speech yesterday was making the same point – that there are conviction prime ministers who changed the country and he wants to be one of those, not a prime minister who drifts along and is buffeted by events.
I agree that she was a conviction politician, but it’s not an endorsement of her policy, and the truth is Gordon Brown praised her, Tony Blair said she was a towering figure, now Keir’s said what he said. Every time a Labour leader acknowledges this, there’s a bit of fuss about it.
On Sky News, asked if he admired Thatcher himself, McFadden said that was “not the word I’d use”. He explained:
I recognise she won (the general election) three times. I would hope if we were going to win elections, we would make change with the same determination but not in the same direction.
Starmer made two interventions at the weekend and in the second, an interview on Radio 4’s Broadcasting House where he was asked about his pro-Thatcher Sunday Telegraph article, Starmer stressed that he admired her sense of purpose. He said:
Thatcher did have a plan for entrepreneurialism; (she) had a mission. It doesn’t mean I agree with what she did, but I don’t think anybody could suggest that she didn’t have a driving sense of purpose.
But in the Sunday Telegraph article, which the paper wrote up as Starmer heaping praise on the former Tory PM, Starmer went a bit further. He wrote:
Every moment of meaningful change in modern British politics begins with the realisation that politics must act in service of the British people, rather than dictating to them. Margaret Thatcher sought to drag Britain out of its stupor by setting loose our natural entrepreneurialism. Tony Blair reimagined a stale, outdated Labour Party into one that could seize the optimism of the late 90s. A century ago, Clement Attlee wrote that Labour must be a party of duty and patriotism, not abstract theory. To build a “New Jerusalem” meant first casting off the mind-forged manacles. That lesson is as true today as it was then.
It is in this sense of public service that Labour has changed dramatically in the last three years. The course of shock therapy we gave our party had one purpose: to ensure that we were once again rooted in the priorities, the concerns and the dreams of ordinary British people. To put country before party.
This implies admiration not just for Thatcher’s skill at using the levers of the government to implement change (which only a fool would deny), but also for her desire to unleash “natural entrepreneurialsm”. And if Starmer accepts the UK was stuck in a “stupor” in 1979, he is implicitly criticising Labour, which by then had been in power for most of the previous decade and a half. These views are still contested in Labour, although even Jeremy Corbyn when he was party leader did not propose trying to reverse the entire Thatcher economic reform agenda.
Here is the agenda for the day.
10.15am: Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor, holds a Q&A at a Resolution Foundation conference to launch its Ending Stagnation report. He will be interviewed by Zanny Minton Beddoes, editor of the Economist. The full conference agenda is here.
11.30am: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.
2pm: Keir Starmer speaks at the Resolution Foundation event.
2.30pm: Michael Gove, the levelling up secretary, takes questions in the Commons.
If you want to contact me, do try the “send us a message” feature. You’ll see it just below the byline – on the left of the screen, if you are reading on a laptop or a desktop. This is for people who want to message me directly. I find it very useful when people message to point out errors (even typos – no mistake is too small to correct). Often I find your questions very interesting, too. I can’t promise to reply to them all, but I will try to reply to as many as I can, either in the comments below the line; privately (if you leave an email address and that seems more appropriate); or in the main blog, if I think it is a topic of wide interest.
Key events
Q: Ministers keep changing posts very often. Do you accept that volatility is a problem?
Hunt says that volatility is not a good thing, but he says it was a consequence of Brexit and the parliamentary problems that followed that.
He says he wants to see more stability going forward.
Q: What about institutional reform. The Economist recently published an article saying it was too short-termist.
Hunt says he normally agrees with the Economist, but he suggests he did not agree with that article. He says the argument might be right historically. But he says since he has been at the Treasury he has found it very pro-growth.
Hunt says the government wants to speed up the time it takes to get a connection to the national grid by 90%.
Zanny Minton Beddoes, editor of the Economist, is interviewing Hunt. She says he has mentioned the 110 policies, but she wants to know what the growth strategy is.
Hunt says he wants to improve productivity. And he says he takes a very clear view as to where the UK’s competitive advantage lies. Outside the US, it has the best higher education sector, and the best financial sector, he says. He says it needs to focus on innovation.
From Peter Walker
After all that gloom, Jeremy Hunt is now arguing that the UK is *not* doing worse on incomes, equality and growth than equivalent nations, contrary to the evidence we have just seen. Asked if he would do anything differently economically since 2010, he dodges the question. pic.twitter.com/4QNzWI6494
— Peter Walker (@peterwalker99) December 4, 2023
Jeremy Hunt speaks at Resolution Foundation conference
Jeremy Hunt is speaking now at the Resolution Foundation conference.
He says its Ending Stagnation report is interesting, and asks the right questions.
But he says Torsten Bell’s summary ignored the context – that Britain was affected by the worst financial crisis since the second world war about 15 years ago.
He also says the report was written before the autumn statement, which contained 110 growth measures, was delivered.
Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor, is about to speak at the Resolution Foundation’s conference. Torsten Bell, the thintktank’s chief executive, has just been presenting the main findings from its 300-page Ending Stagnation report.
Here are two extracts. This one has 10 facts about the economy.
And this one has 10 proposals.
BBC likely to receive below-inflation rise in licence fee
The BBC will receive a below-inflation increase to the licence fee, the culture secretary, Lucy Frazer, has in effect confirmed after Rishi Sunak said he welcomed cuts made by the corporation to its spending and services. Peter Walker has the story.
According to a poll by JL Partners, Rishi Sunak now has even less support from people who voted Conservative in 2019 than Liz Truss did when she was PM. Alex Wickham has written up the findings for Bloomberg and he says it is the rise of Reform UK that is hurting the Conservatives most now. Wickham says:
Just 59% of voters who backed the Conservatives under Boris Johnson at the 2019 election are sticking with the party under Sunak, the report found. That’s down from 74% in August 2022, and from 63% in the aftermath of Truss’s disastrous “mini-budget” in September 2022, which roiled markets and brought about the abrupt end of her premiership. That event had been seen as the polling nadir for the governing Tory party.
It’s the rise of Reform UK, a right-wing anti-immigration party founded with the support of former Brexit campaigner Nigel Farage, that’s most hurting the polling performance of the Conservatives under Sunak, JL Partners said.
While some 5% of 2019 Tory voters have switched to the centrist Liberal Democrat party, 15% are now backing Reform. That’s around 1.5 million people. Reform has overtaken the Lib Dems as the third party in the North of England, Midlands and Wales, the report found, with the latter party now polling worse than its 2019 result. Around 18% of 2019 Tory votes have gone to Labour.
And this is from James Johnson, the pollster who co-founded JL Partners and who used to work for Theresa May in No 10, on how the Tories should respond to these findings.
Only one option for the Conservatives now: go big on immigration or go home
Tory members view Sunak as worst-performing cabinet minister, survey suggests
Rishi Sunak is seen as the worst-performing cabinet minister by Conservative party members, a survey suggests. The ConservativeHome website has a panel of Tory members that it consults every month and its latest survey results show Sunak at a new low.
ConservativeHome measures net satisfaction ratings and this month Sunak’s ratings are the lowest for any member of cabinet. In their write-up Paul Goodman and Henry Hill say:
The biggest news is that Rishi Sunak, whose ratings have yo-yoed around during the past few months, hits his lowest trough yet in the table. Last month, in our first survey since the Conservative party conference, he was on 7.1 points and ninth from bottom. The month before, in the wake of his net zero speech, he was up to 26 points and eighth. Three months ago, he was in the red on -2.7.
Minus 25.4 is a dire rating – though not as lamentable as the tooth-grindingly terrible -51.2 and -53.1 scores racked up by Theresa May and Philip Hammond in April 2019, let alone Chris Grayling’s record -71.6 score in the same poll. The fact is that during the last month every good piece of news for the government has been followed by bad.
The survey also suggests that James Cleverly, the new home secretary, has seen his popularity with party members dive. Last month his satisfaction rating (+72) put him at the top of the table. But now he is 11th from the bottom, which is probably a consequence of his stance on the Rwanda deal (he does not deny calling it “batshit”) and the claim that he dismissed Stockton as a shit-hole.
UK would be a climate leader again under Labour, says Starmer
The UK will come back strongly to the world stage to “lead from the front” in tackling the climate crisis under a Labour government, Keir Starmer has pledged, after meeting world leaders at the Cop28 summit in Dubai. Fiona Harvey has the story.
Starmer was praising Thatcher’s effectiveness, not her policies, says Labour’s elections chief Pat McFadden
Good morning. Keir Starmer is speaking at a Resolution Foundation conference later where, as Kiran Stacey and Pippa Crerar report, he will say that Labour will not “turn on the spending taps” if it wins the next election. It is a message that firms up what he and Rachel Reeves, the shadow chancellor, have been saying for at least a year, best understood as an attempt to neutralise what is currently the Conservative party’s main attack line against the party, but one with colossal implications for how a future Labour government might govern.
Pat McFadden, the party’s national campaign coordinator, has been giving interviews this morning, but he has been preoccupied by having to clarify remarks made by Starmer over the weekend praising Margaret Thatcher. McFadden insisted that Starmer was paying tribute to her effectiveness, not her policies. McFadden told LBC:
I remember when Gordon Brown was prime minister, he invited Mrs Thatcher to tea at No 10 and he described her as a conviction politician who saw the need for change, and we had some of the same fuss at that time.
There’s a long history to these things, and what Keir was doing in the speech yesterday was making the same point – that there are conviction prime ministers who changed the country and he wants to be one of those, not a prime minister who drifts along and is buffeted by events.
I agree that she was a conviction politician, but it’s not an endorsement of her policy, and the truth is Gordon Brown praised her, Tony Blair said she was a towering figure, now Keir’s said what he said. Every time a Labour leader acknowledges this, there’s a bit of fuss about it.
On Sky News, asked if he admired Thatcher himself, McFadden said that was “not the word I’d use”. He explained:
I recognise she won (the general election) three times. I would hope if we were going to win elections, we would make change with the same determination but not in the same direction.
Starmer made two interventions at the weekend and in the second, an interview on Radio 4’s Broadcasting House where he was asked about his pro-Thatcher Sunday Telegraph article, Starmer stressed that he admired her sense of purpose. He said:
Thatcher did have a plan for entrepreneurialism; (she) had a mission. It doesn’t mean I agree with what she did, but I don’t think anybody could suggest that she didn’t have a driving sense of purpose.
But in the Sunday Telegraph article, which the paper wrote up as Starmer heaping praise on the former Tory PM, Starmer went a bit further. He wrote:
Every moment of meaningful change in modern British politics begins with the realisation that politics must act in service of the British people, rather than dictating to them. Margaret Thatcher sought to drag Britain out of its stupor by setting loose our natural entrepreneurialism. Tony Blair reimagined a stale, outdated Labour Party into one that could seize the optimism of the late 90s. A century ago, Clement Attlee wrote that Labour must be a party of duty and patriotism, not abstract theory. To build a “New Jerusalem” meant first casting off the mind-forged manacles. That lesson is as true today as it was then.
It is in this sense of public service that Labour has changed dramatically in the last three years. The course of shock therapy we gave our party had one purpose: to ensure that we were once again rooted in the priorities, the concerns and the dreams of ordinary British people. To put country before party.
This implies admiration not just for Thatcher’s skill at using the levers of the government to implement change (which only a fool would deny), but also for her desire to unleash “natural entrepreneurialsm”. And if Starmer accepts the UK was stuck in a “stupor” in 1979, he is implicitly criticising Labour, which by then had been in power for most of the previous decade and a half. These views are still contested in Labour, although even Jeremy Corbyn when he was party leader did not propose trying to reverse the entire Thatcher economic reform agenda.
Here is the agenda for the day.
10.15am: Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor, holds a Q&A at a Resolution Foundation conference to launch its Ending Stagnation report. He will be interviewed by Zanny Minton Beddoes, editor of the Economist. The full conference agenda is here.
11.30am: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.
2pm: Keir Starmer speaks at the Resolution Foundation event.
2.30pm: Michael Gove, the levelling up secretary, takes questions in the Commons.
If you want to contact me, do try the “send us a message” feature. You’ll see it just below the byline – on the left of the screen, if you are reading on a laptop or a desktop. This is for people who want to message me directly. I find it very useful when people message to point out errors (even typos – no mistake is too small to correct). Often I find your questions very interesting, too. I can’t promise to reply to them all, but I will try to reply to as many as I can, either in the comments below the line; privately (if you leave an email address and that seems more appropriate); or in the main blog, if I think it is a topic of wide interest.