Transcription
Now, when they get into power, they start to commission reviews. I think there are 60 reviews, last time I counted them, about what he should do. It's not our system; it's simply what happens if you come into government without an agenda for government.
Fraser Nelson, former editor of The Spectator, now a Times columnist: "Let me start with this: that there's quite a contrast with Trump's dynamism, issuing edicts left, right, and center, and the more ponderous Starmer government. Is that a consequence of two different political systems or two very different personalities?"
"I don't think it's the political systems. I mean, let's remember that when Tony Blair came to power, he had almost biblical kind of momentum, doing a big change every day, and on the seventh day he rested. So that was how they wanted to do it, and he thought about government; he advised—he was advised by people who'd been through it, where Starmer seems to be surrounded by people who haven't really run anything before and have—didn't—their main strategy was to present as small a target as they could in opposition by saying as little as they possibly could and hoping just simply to be the inheritors, if you like, of the Tory government's mistakes. Now, when they get into power, they start to commission reviews. I think there are 60 reviews, last time I counted them, about what he should do. It's not our system; it's simply what happens if you come into government without an agenda for government."
"Well, I think you get the fundamental difference there because Mr. Trump has come to a second term with a clear agenda. You can like it or not like it, but it is a clear agenda, and he has a plan to implement it. He's doing that already. Yet, for all his talk of growth being Labour's core mission, Mr. Starmer won with almost no plan for growth. We didn't really know what he was planning to do, and he's ended up doing a lot of things that he actually said he wouldn't do."
"Yeah, and I think even worse was that he delayed the budget. We normally get after general elections in this country. So, so okay, you wait for it, leading us to believe that there was going to be this economic plan that was going to be revealed to us after the summer, and then when Rachel Reeves published it, it was astonishingly—a plan to make the public finances worse, and the OBR, even more importantly, said, 'No, this isn't going to make any difference to growth.' Cue the panic, which we now see, and in Davos now she's even beginning to regret, um, all of the high net worth individuals running for the shores. I think she's beginning to work out that if you take in Britain the top 0.01%, that's the top three and a half thousand taxpayers, are paying something like £4.5 million each in income tax on average. I mean, we are a country which is really very highly dependent on a small number of very mobile rich people, and I think we can now see the start of Rachel Reeves realizing in government what she should have realized in opposition and trying to undo some of what she's implemented."
"No, I—I mean, the tax base is walking out the door at the moment. If they carry on like this, and uh, the more that walks out the door, the more everybody left behind will end up having to pay more tax. It's as simple as that. And on—on the growth side, the American—American economy is already robustly growing; it's already got lower taxes than Europe, lower energy prices, less regulation. Trump plans to double down on all of that, and I just wonder how Europe, including Britain, which is in the slow lane—it may not be in the EU anymore, but it's in the EU slow lane with all the other EU countries—I just find it quite hard to see how Europe is going to cope with this."
"Well, Europe just simply doesn't have the financial firepower of the US. I mean, Trump can—can basically say, 'Look, I'm going to cut tax, and I'm going to borrow lots,' and of course, the US's reserve currency status—he can do these things with the American economy which Britain would struggle to do. Um, and we've gone through a strange period where, for three or four years, it seemed as if there was such a thing as Bidenomics, and that was the new consensus, and Rachel Reeves comes up with what she called 'securenomics,' her version of Biden's thing, and she believed it was the emerging consensus. Now, Europe watches in horror where America does an about-turn and pulls stunts—it's difficult to do um, if you don't have the dollar's currency. And also, you've seen the way that the—the markets are reacting to it. Yes, of course, borrowing—the gilt yields are up because they expect Trump's deficits to be bigger, but America can handle it; Britain can't. We're way more exposed to these—these extra—higher gilt yields. So the big question, of course, will be whether Trump succeeds or not. The American stock market is roaring right now in the expectation that it will, but you can't see that reflected in stock market performances on this side of the pond."
"Now, the Labour Party is chock-a-block with lawyers, from Mr. Starmer down. Uh, many of them have grown rich on welfare—on—on lawfare—it's a legal form of welfare—on lawfare. Is there not a certain irony in Mr. Starmer concluding that he has to do something about that—about this rule by lawyers if he should get the economy growing?"
"Well, I do think we're approaching the moment where he has to decide whether he's a politician or whether he's a lawyer. I mean, take last week's um, High Court ruling that struck down welfare reform. That should have terrified Kier Starmer. That was a judicial review which torpedoed it on a technicality that the consultation hadn't been done properly. Now, if Kier Starmer does intend to put rocket boosters behind house building, NHS reform, and welfare reform itself, how is he going to do that in a system where activists can use—for lawfare devices which Labour bequeathed to the 2010 Conservative government—and to—basically stop reform in its tracks?"
"Now, we do hear some rumblings, like for this week, for example, Kier Starmer said, 'Okay, I'm going to cut down the number of um, environmental um, quangos that you need to go through if you want to build things.' He's um—but what we haven't really heard from him is any attempt to move the power away from the courts and back into Parliament, and I'm not sure if he wants to do that. I mean, there are—Jonathan Sumption, the former—one of the former Chief Justices, says that there were two views of the world: there was a legal view where there are principles which no government should be able to overturn, and the political view where Parliament is sovereign. Yes, I think Kier Starmer is simply of the legal view, so is his Attorney General, Lord Browne. He is the—the Ayatollah of the judicial review, the high priest of that movement. So if you look at those around him, these are very much people who believe that Britain should be governed, sure, to an extent by the elected authorities, but also by these principles enshrined in law, and I don't see much sign that Starmer is going to change his mind on that."
"Well, that—uh—would explain why, if you take the legal view as you've outlined it rather than the political view, that would explain why his massive parliamentary majority hasn't really been put to good—good purpose, because if you take the legal view, it doesn't matter what your majority is; the legal view trumps it."
"Yes, that's—and I think that he's about to—to find out that what annoyed people about the last government was that there was no progress. What annoyed Americans about the Joe Biden administration was there was no progress. Trump has responded to this by the flurry of executive orders, showing achievement after achievement after achievement. You may think they're a good or bad idea, but the orders are coming out. Now, I think Starmer is going to be judged by whether he can deliver some of the things he's promised, and some of the—for example, the house building target of saying one and a half million houses—there's no way he's ever going to achieve that. He's not going to achieve his employment target of getting 80% of people in employment. Now, at the time it was just verbiage; it was kind of like political soundtrack—from him making these promises, but as his time in government grows, he's going to find out that he's going to be held to these pledges, and if he's not able to govern—if his—even his government is being tied down by legal knots—he's not going to be able to deliver what he wanted, and the voters will throw him out as surely as they threw the Conservatives out."
"Well, he's been saying he's on the side of the builders, not the blockers. He wants to make it easier to invest and develop; he's going to change the planning rules to do that. It's all welcome stuff, I guess, but I think you've just explained to me why I still feel uneasy that in the end the blockers will win. Rachel Reeves may say she wants a third runway at Heathrow, but it probably won't happen. Of course, I mean, this is what we found out last time: political authority doesn't really matter when you've got all of these other agencies. For take HS2: if the leg of HS2 going from London to Birmingham had to go through literally thousands of approvals from councils to authorities, and that's why you end up with a £100 million bat shed being built in part of it to protect—to its non-existent threat—threat to bats. Now, of course, it's very easy to rail against that—even Liz Truss railed against that—but to actually change it means rewiring the way that Britain works, and it means taking power away from the courts; it means dialing down judicial reviews, and it means confronting the legal view of the world and putting the power back to Parliament. Now, as—as a lawyer, Starmer is well positioned to do that, but I think he's going to find out pretty soon that he will have to do—use more than say the words; he'll have to actually start to dismantle the system which he and people like him did so much to create."
"The irony is that 14 years of Tory government did almost nothing to address this, as you mentioned earlier—what they inherited in 2010—if anything, they made it worse. But I suppose the double is that if—if the Tories in power had tried to do something about it along the lines you're talking about, Labour would have opposed them at every turn."
"Yes, because they would have to do things like repeal the Human Rights Act, repeal the Equalities Act. Politically, this is very difficult because it sounds like you're against human rights and you're against equality rather than simply being against um, the attributes of both of those things being taken out of Parliament and put into the courts. So the Conservatives, because they never quite understood this, they never quite knew the way around it, and the likes of Dominic Raab, who's actually fully signed up to—and the legal view of this—so they—they put out a consultation about judicial reviews but never quite went along with it. Kier Starmer is the kind of golem of this legal underworld; he knows every single nook and cranny, so he would have the power and authority and knowledge to do what the Tories failed, but I simply think he lacks the inclination."
"Well, I do wonder, just very briefly, my final point to you, that uh, outside of his narrow legal experience, I do wonder how much Kier knows very much about public policy."
"Yes, I think we're finding that—that he rose through the—legal bureaucracy um, in—in government, and when it comes to actually being advised as to how to achieve reform, he doesn't have very many people around him, and by the number of reviews he commissioned, it seems he doesn't have much of a clue either. He may arrive at a clue in about two or three years' time, but by then it'll be too late to get the kind of reforms that he's already promised."
"Well, it looks a little gloomy at the moment, 'cause I don't think the economy is coming right quickly. We shall see when we get the growth figures. We'll leave it there. Delighted to see you in The Times; even more delighted that you joined me on the show today, uh, Fraser Nelson."