This is an audio transcript of the Political Fix podcast episode: ‘Campaign catch-up: the Tories’ ‘kitchen sink’ manifesto’
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Lucy Fisher
Promises, promises — it’s manifesto week. Welcome to Political Fix from the FT with me, Lucy Fisher. This week, the parties are rolling out their plans on tax and spend. So far, we’ve heard from the Tories and the Lib Dems. And to shed light on it all, I’m joined by the FT’s Stephen Bush. Hi, Stephen.
Stephen Bush
Hi, Lucy.
Lucy Fisher
And Political Fix regular, Jim Pickard. Hi, Jim.
Jim Pickard
Hello.
Lucy Fisher
So, but let’s kick off with the Conservatives. Rishi Sunak launched his manifesto at Silverstone, home of British Formula One Grand Prix. I can see the headlines writing themselves. Will this help him zoom ahead or will the wheels come off? Stephen, it’s been called a bit of a “kitchen sink” manifesto, an alphabetti spaghetti of policies. What in it has caught your eye?
Stephen Bush
It’s really a question. I think the thing which most jumped out to me, unfortunately not in a positive way, is the £17bn of tax cuts, which really does add to the kind of petrol station flowers vibe of the Conservative campaign. You know, and the thing about getting someone petrol station flowers, right, is you can get away with it if the you know, if the relationship is strong and your partner is diligent. Someone getting you some flowers that they obviously got on an afterthought is a sweet and touching gesture. If your partner is not, however, and you’re already annoyed with them, then the petrol station flowers are well, like petrol (inaudible) and they complain. (Lucy laughs)
Jim Pickard
You sound very resentful. Did this happen to you, Stephen?
Stephen Bush
I mean, I should be so lucky.
Lucy Fisher
And just to recap, Stephen, so the Tories have promised another 2 pence of national insurance for employees by 2027. The big rabbit that we weren’t necessarily expecting was abolishing national insurance altogether for the self-employed — big tax cut for white van man — and the pensioner tax triple lock as well, raising the tax threshold as well as the state pension by whatever is highest of inflation — wages or 2.5 per cent. Jim, what did you make of it, the tax vows?
Jim Pickard
So the bigger of the two was the 2p cuts to national insurance for employees, because that cost about £10bn. The Nic’s abolition by the end of the decade for the self-employed is most surprising. So it’s more of a rabbit in that sense. In terms of the money involved, I think it starts at about £500mn a year and it only ramps up to £2bn at the end of the decade. So it’s kind of small bear in taxation terms, and I agree with Stephen that we’ve reached this point where, you know, they’ve come up with this huge figure for tax cuts, but this is a government presiding over the biggest increase in tax increases in living memory. And will the public believe them when they say you’re gonna get jam tomorrow? It’s hard to believe that the public will believe that.
And then when you look at how they’ve costed it and where the money’s supposedly coming from, they have this £12bn in benefits, savings from the benefits bill. And Labour has already taken that apart. Instead of the seven measures they’ve listed, four of them were already announced a year ago. And then they have the £6bn, which is supposedly from cracking down on tax avoidance. And I’ve been in this job for quite a while and if I had a pound for every time someone would crack down, the government promised to crack down on tax avoidance. I would need a very good tax adviser of my own for the wealth I’ve accumulated.
Lucy Fisher
Of course, Labour can’t attack that, though, because they too think they’re gonna raise a lot of money by enacting the same crackdown if they get into government. Stephen, I just had to draw together the five key takeaways. Jim and I kind of live-blogged the manifesto. Jim, you did the kind of full rundown online, I did a quick five key takeaways for graphic.
And it was kind of difficult to decide what they were, even if you group them thematically. I counted about 10, but something that stood out to me was, particularly because it made me kind of raise my eyebrows and look at it askance, was what the Tories are offering on home ownership. You know, 1.6mn new houses in the next parliament, just pipping Labour, who’ve promised 1.5mn; promising to bring forward no-fault evictions, which of course was a policy they already sort of announced this parliament and failed to get through. Is it just sort of grasping at straws? Will anyone believe them? Is it bizarre to you as well in a way that they focused on home ownership and housing supply, given their record to date?
Stephen Bush
Yeah, I think, look, the biggest, I think strategic mistake that Rishi Sunak made essentially after, you know, Jeremy Hunt’s first Budget which, well, actually, the party did go up a bit in the polls — about 29 per cent in the to about 29 per cent, a figure they would kill for now — is that he decided to run the same general election campaign as the one he fought against Liz Truss, basically going, oh yeah, I hate my record, too. It was all awful. And don’t worry, here’s a bunch of stuff that goes directly contrary to the record, which I just think has this problem that governments kind of have to run on their record, otherwise it’s not believed.
As you say, no-fault evictions. Well, OK. But if you didn’t do that with a large majority, why are you gonna do it next time? You know, I mean, you know, in one of their more culture-war-y policies, right, on the, you know, gender and sex stuff, that is something which a government with a majority can basically do in a week (inaudible).
Lucy Fisher
And just remind people what that policy was.
Stephen Bush
So the policy is that they will amend the Equality Act to clarify that sex in the Equality Act means biological sex, rather than if you’ve obtained a GRC to change your legal gender.
Lucy Fisher
And a GRC is a Gender . . .
Stephen Bush
Gender Recognition Certificate. Sorry, I’m in acronym hell today. And broadly speaking, all of these policies, whatever one thinks of them, have this big problem in common, that they are all things that the government could have done in the last parliament, and either for reasons of incompetence or internal division, was unable to implement.
And if your pitch to the contrary is particularly given the polls and the fact that, you know, I’m sure there are some people out there who still believe that the Conservatives are going to win this election. But I don’t think there’s anyone who can possibly think that they’re going to have as large a majority as they do now. They go, oh, don’t worry, this time we’re gonna do this.
Well, while actually broadly running against the things that they’ve done that, you know, again, what everyone thinks of them actually did happen, right? You know, that broadly speaking, seeing as the tax rises happened, seeing as the response to Covid can’t unhappen, I think that the big problem with all of these promises is that he’s essentially saying that it was an awful period in office but don’t worry because they’ll do some completely different things. And didn’t work with Conservative members, visibly not working to move the polls. And I don’t see why that would change in the next four or how many weeks we have left.
Lucy Fisher
Well, Jim, you and I sat next to each other watching Sunak give his speech on the telly. George Parker, another regular on Political Fix, was there at Silverstone. I was struck with what Rishi Sunak said trying to defend the Tories’ record since 2010. He said they’ve made the UK the fourth-biggest exporter in the world, they’ve capped benefits and reformed welfare by introducing universal credit, they’ve cut emissions by a third. There wasn’t a lot else that he was really able to point to, was there?
Jim Pickard
No. Now that is the problem they’ve got after 14 years is what do they have to, you know, celebrate as a great trophy in the trophy cabinet. And they don’t seem to talk about Brexit a lot these days as a great trophy. He tried to pick up the idea they’ve done a lot of trade deals, which is one of the things they say. They ignore the fact that we already had trade deals through our membership of the European Union.
I mean, I think to be fair to Rishi Sunak, this is a very, very obvious point, but, you know, he has the disadvantage of having all this political wreckage and carnage behind him. Keir Starmer is kind of a clean, you know, he’s a clean face in politics relatively, because he doesn’t have to defend anything. They try and chuck stuff at them from pre-2010 — you know, you sold off the gold or the Liam Byrne note or whatever. But, you know, that enables Labour to feel a little bit untouchable, a situation which of course will change after a year or two of a Labour government.
But Rishi Sunak, you know, I just think the public aren’t really listening. They’ve already made up their minds to a certain extent. They probably made up their minds before the starting gun was even fired on the election, to use a Silverstone analogy.
Lucy Fisher
Was there anything else in this huge kind of range of policies that seized your attention, Stephen?
Stephen Bush
I thought the universities and apprenticeships policy was striking, partly because to return to a hobbyhorse of mine, it’s an interesting example of what I think was video-game logic in policymaking, right, where you go, oh, well, we spend X amount on universities, but I’m going to click a button and shift that money into apprenticeships, which yeah, works well if politics is like a management sim, but it’s, broadly speaking, not.
If you take, say, accountancy and finance degrees, which are one where there are quite wide error bars in how employable graduates are from quite similarly universities otherwise. But broadly speaking, if you look at the good courses for accountancy and finance and the good apprenticeships, they’re in the same parts of the country. So it’s not really a policy, right, and . . .
Lucy Fisher
And just to remind people what the policy is.
Stephen Bush
So the policy is to get rid of the, about a sixth of underperforming courses — so courses which get a bad rating from the Office for Students in terms of their value for money and their value to students — and replace them with apprenticeships. And I think that the thing which is a real shame is actually, that short tail of about 15 per cent of courses with poor outcomes is a policy problem that we should try and fix, and it would be good if politicians were talking about it a bit more rather than the political debate we often have where on the one hand, you have a kind of Labour party going la la la, I can’t hear you or engaging in some not very helpful analogies about like, oh, well, no one expects to do that well with a fine art degree. So, OK, yeah, but not all of the 10 per cent are in the fine art degree space. And then on the other hand, the Conservative party, whose solution is either well, we’ll just close them and we’ll work out what happens later or this kind of very video-gamey press button and magically, all of those people are on apprenticeship schemes.
Lucy Fisher
Jim.
Jim Pickard
I thought the most interesting things that I hadn’t seen before were in the property space, and one of them was that they were gonna have a new and improved Help to Buy scheme, which would help young people get on the property ladder. Now, we’ve been through this before. We’ve had Help to Buy before. And the problem is always that if you give young people a boost on the demand side of things, then of course, what happens is that people selling nepo properties can charge a bit more for them.
And what you’re not doing is you’re not tackling the underlying problem, which is that property is just too expensive for most people to buy. And of course, the answer to that people talk about all the time is let’s build more homes. And of course, because the Conservative party is lifting their target to 1.6mn homes over five years, which is slightly higher than Labour’s target. But it’s not really that obvious how they expect to get there or how they hope to get there, whereas the Labour party does actually have quite a comprehensive list of planning policies that we will probably see in their manifesto on Thursday.
Where I think they did have an interesting policy — it might be a little bit niche — but they’re gonna have a capital gains tax holiday where landlords sell to their tenants, which I think is something that doesn’t particularly happen very often. But if this encourages more of it, then great. And I wouldn’t be surprised to see the Labour party steal that policy in the coming months.
Lucy Fisher
I do think there’s just a huge overlap between the two main parties, isn’t there, not only in their fiscal plans, but even now and thematically, how they’re talking about their programme for government, which you just reminded me of, Jim, talking about Labour and, you know, potentially sort of stealing elements from the Tories, because I thought today, I thought on Tuesday, Rishi Sunak very much borrowed from Keir Starmer’s pro forma speech when talking about security and economic security and financial security. And he was at pains to talk about his commitment to defence, including this much-touted vow to increase defence spending to 2.5 per cent of national income by 2030 to make the UK the biggest defence exporter in Europe by that date. A new national interest test for foreign aid and of course, the very Marmite policy of mandatory national service. Stephen, is that enough? Has he done enough to kind of move past the D-Day disaster?
Stephen Bush
I doubt it. I mean, the difficulty with assessing the Conservative campaign, right, is that broadly speaking, it’s not, you know, it’s not a campaign to win the election. It’s a campaign to get people who are either saying they’ll stay at home or that they’ll vote Reform to vote Conservative. And I think the problem is, is the sort of halitosis of the D-Day fiasco is just really hot. You know, you kind of can’t policy announcement your way out of something which is so emotionally resonant. I can’t really work out what he could have said, short of going, you know, under me, I, you know, don’t worry, I’ll turn up at the 90th one if you . . . (Lucy laughs) I mean, you know, it’s just really hard to fix that.
I thought on that vein, though, I was surprised at how little he had to say about healthcare, given that, broadly speaking, in terms of that group of culturally Conservative pensioners who are the mother lode of the Conservative campaign now. He can’t invent time travel and not and go to the D-Day thing. He can’t invent time travel and keep his promises on immigration. He admittedly can’t invent time travel and resolve the NHS strikes. But broadly speaking, the two things that culturally Conservative pensioners care about are immigration and the fact that they can’t get an NHS operation. And I thought it was surprising that none of his closing argument had anything at all, you know, just any form of words to suggest that he had some plan to improve that for those voters.
Lucy Fisher
And, Jim, can I ask from a tactical perspective, two questions? Firstly, on the D-Day gaffe and trying to move past that — was it right, in your opinion, if you were the spin-doctor advising him, for him to adopt this very plaintive tone earlier this week and said, you know, I hope voters can find it in their hearts to forgive me.
And secondly, you know, Stephen points out, quite rightly, very little on healthcare, both in the manifesto but also in the speech and the way he’s talking about the Tories’ programme for government if they get an unprecedented fifth term in power. Is that the right decision tactically as well, given the problems with the waiting lists going up under his tenure?
Jim Pickard
Yeah. I mean, I think the problem with the D-Day apology was that, you know, one of Rishi Sunak’s weaknesses is that he does look and sound a bit like a seven-stone weakling to begin with. He looks and sounds like the guy from The Inbetweeners comedy programme, of course, and therefore if you, the more kind of desperate and plaintive your apologies, the less kind of legally sound like. I agree he had to come out and clear the air, but I think he should have not prolonged that quite as long as he has prolonged it.
I think as well that, you know, the thing is, you can announce a policy or an ambition or manifesto thing you wanna do in the future, whatever. But the thing about these gaffes is that they linger in people’s memories. And, you know, the equivalent one I can think of is Keir Starmer talking soon after the Gaza situation happened last autumn and that mistake he made in LBC, where he basically thought it was OK for the Israeli government to cut off water and power supplies, that the Gaza Strip is something that an awful lot of voters have not forgotten. And even months afterwards, after he changed the policy, Labour’s policy on that issue and started calling for a ceasefire, you know, months later, he still got punished in Muslim communities in the May local elections.
And I think the D-Day constituency of people who care about D-Day and thought he was disrespecting some 100-year-old veterans, that’s gonna linger a long time in a way that no amount of promises about national service or putting up defence spending is quite gonna erase that problem.
The reason he doesn’t wanna talk about health is of course because health waiting lists have gone up since he promised to cut them. He made that weird comment in the first debate for ITV, where he talks about, well, the numbers are lower than when they were higher, but they’re of course, still much higher than when he made that pledge. And I still think one of his biggest mistakes he made as prime minister with not just to pay off the junior doctors, because that is the one thing that led to, well, one of the big things that led to the health waiting lists going up. And in fact, you’ve made that one of your five priorities. Why wouldn’t you just find some money to deal with that?
Lucy Fisher
To play devil’s advocate, though, the junior doctors — you know, the BMA (British Medical Association) — is asking for 35 per cent pay rise. I mean, he couldn’t get anywhere near that, could he? And even if he showed a bit of ankle to them, then, you know, the nurses, other members of the NHS staff would say, well, hang on, why do we accept something, you know, much lower? You can see the bind he’s in, right?
Jim Pickard
I don’t think he could have gone anywhere near 35 per cent. But I think he could have just found, you know, and that if he knew he wasn’t prepared to pay them more than they needed to stop striking, then he probably shouldn’t have made it one of his pledges.
Stephen Bush
Yeah. I think also that we’ve had the guts of £20bn of tax cuts taking us right to the, you know, the inch of Jeremy Hunt’s wriggle room. It would not have cost £20bn to end the strikes. And visibly, that would probably have done more for the Conservative party’s electoral prospects, and it certainly wouldn’t have been more irresponsible. I’m willing to accept it maybe wouldn’t have been much less irresponsible, but it wouldn’t have been that much more irresponsible than those cuts to national insurance.
And I think in general, this is the thing which was a bit awkward I thought today in, you know, Ben Houchen is like, “Oh, he’s a deliverer” was he couldn’t actually name anything the prime minister had delivered. You know, he kicked off this campaign being unable to deliver his flagship smoking ban policy because he couldn’t grasp the quite simple process of making sure it was in the wash-up legislation. And in some ways, the awkward truth of the Conservative election campaign is he’s not a very effective administrator as prime minister. His political priorities have been eccentric. He’s had multiple rebrands, per that very fun scoop we had. They are now correctly going to start pivoting towards don’t have a Labour landslide because that is their best available play.
Lucy Fisher
And I’ll put a link to that story in the show notes that you mentioned, Stephen, which was our analysis of a new raft of adverts that the Conservatives have been pushing on Facebook and Instagram only since last Friday that highlight the prospect of a Labour victory and suggested a vote for Reform or the Lib Dems will hand Keir Starmer a massive majority. They seem to assume that a majority of some kind is now a fait accompli, or at least that’s what their critics in the Lib Dems and the Reform party have told us. Jim, you wanted to come in?
Jim Pickard
Yeah. I think just in the interest of fairness, I think Ben Houchen was claiming that Rishi Sunak’s government had brought some benefits to Teesside, whether it was freeports or whether it was the new Darlington campus, for the Treasury. But yeah, maybe relatively thin pickings, I suppose.
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Lucy Fisher
While Sunak’s campaign has been faltering and he’s been under fire from Tory colleagues in the aftermath of the D-Day gaffe leaving early from the commemorations last week, Ed Davey has been having an enormous amount of fun, including on Monday when he launched the Lib Dem manifesto and then immediately headed to Thorpe Park with his frontbenchers to hit the rollercoasters. Let’s just hear a little flavour of what Ed Davey’s been up to.
[AUDIO CLIP OF LIBERAL DEMOCRATS AT THEME PARK]
Interviewer in audio clip
Do you think that people will take you seriously when you are out each time doing things like this?
Ed Davey in audio clip
Yeah, because each time — oh, that’s not very good, is it — each time there’s a message. And the message, I think, connects with people. (Laughter)
Lucy Fisher
Well, that was Ed Davey with other Lib Dem MPs on a rollercoaster this week, on a water slide and answering questions from a reporter while trying to play tennis. And I would just say, if anyone has seen some of the pictures of him on the rollercoaster, the best part of it is another Lib Dem frontbencher, Sarah Olney, who is clearly hating every moment of every ride. Her facial expression is well worth checking out.
Stephen, I’ve got to give a sort of slight mea culpa. I wrote a story a couple of months ago slightly taking the mickey out of the Lib Dems for hosting an away day where one of the shock scenarios they gamed out was the prospect of “Ed-mania” taking off. And actually, while I thought at the time that seemed highly unlikely, it has in a way, he has had this kind of level of cut-through, Ed Davey, hasn’t he? He has both managed to show a sort of fun, very much unthreatening side of himself with all these stunts on the one hand and on the other with the kind of very moving video of him at home with his son John, showing this kind of very caring side. He seems a person of kind of more depth. What’s your take on the way that he’s being presented? Is he a mad genius?
Stephen Bush
Well, as you know, as I think probably the number one Ed Davey apologist, I think what’s happening is that he is using the election campaign, which has always been a benefit to the Lib Dems ‘cause it’s when people, when they suddenly get broadcast and people start going, oh yeah, they exist. He’s very cleverly got this basically a picture-story campaign, which makes him seem like a fun centrist dad who’s game for a laugh, which, broadly speaking, seeing as economically successful, socially concerned voters are the, you know, the voters who matter most to the Lib Dems. Just projecting that he’s one of them is very clever and effective. Then he’s taking his very inspiring personal story, and also a very ordinary story, because there are millions and millions of people who are who are caring either for their parents or their children at any given time. He’s using that to talk about the issue of care more broadly, which is a kind of classic Lib Dem issue of a thing which is a bit too politically difficult for the big parties to talk about in an election campaign, going, “Hey, we have a policy on this”.
Lucy Fisher
So, Stephen, what he’s promising is free adult personal care for the elderly and people with disabilities. He’s also promising 8,000 more GPs and to restore the 62-day pledge for cancer patients to start treatment after urgent referral.
Stephen Bush
So it’s a big and ambitious expansion of what the state does in that space. And I think he always had the potential to therefore have a very good short campaign because he’s, you know, he’s not embarrassed to do the classic Lib Dem “Oh, I’m game for a lot of stuff”. And he has this ability to then add extra depth because of his own personal qualities.
And I think the other reason why that, you know, that scenario was worth gaming out is inevitably, Lib Dem activists are doing what Lib Dem activists tend to do, which is go, “Oh, maybe we can win Tewkesbury. Oh, maybe we can expand the map here, maybe we can campaign here”. And, you know, he and, you know, the most important Lib Dems that people won’t have heard of — Mark Pack and Mike Dixon, their CEO, have got this very ruthlessly focused list of targets that they are not allowing themselves to be knocked off of from. Now I suspect after the . . .
Lucy Fisher
And how many is that? Is that 25?
Stephen Bush
Yeah, it’s about 25 because broadly speaking, from their perspective, if they get 40 they know they are going to be third again in the House of Commons. And that unlocks more short money, unlocks more media exposure. It just makes their lives a lot easier now.
Lucy Fisher
Because they were overtaken by the SNP at the last election, and they’re coming from a low base, aren’t they? I think they won was it 11 MPs in 2019?
Jim Pickard
They’ve had some by-election sense on this.
Lucy Fisher
So they’ve got 15 going into this election.
Stephen Bush
Yeah. And I mean I think that the thing which is gonna be interesting is I think you’re exactly right to say he’s having a good campaign. However, I suspect that after the election, the Lib Dems being what they are, that there will be some grumblings where people go, “Oh, if only we’d had a more ambitious campaign, we could have done X, Y, Z”. I think that is wrong, but I think that will probably be where the party ends up, because the thing which has been very impressive about this campaign from an analytic perspective is just how ruthlessly focused it’s been on the Lib Dems’ most important priorities, which is getting back to third. But I suspect, given how poorly Rishi Sunak has campaigned, given that, I suspect, the Conservatives will do quite badly. Many Lib Dems will then have this fantasy that if they had a more ambitious campaign then they could have, you know, they could have got second.
Lucy Fisher
And Jim, moving beyond the kind of personality of Ed Davey to what they’re promising on the policy front. I mean, was it smart strategically to see that, you know, the Tory party weren’t gonna kind of go big on health or care and to try and fill that. Are they gonna get cut through for that, or do people mainly know them as a sort of the friendly option that isn’t Labour or the Tories and maybe promising something on sewage?
Jim Pickard
Yeah, I think people mostly know them as the anti-Tory vote, which is pretty centrist, and they probably know that they campaigned very hard on sewage. I think on tax and spend generally they’re doing some quite interesting things. So they have this plan to put up capital gains tax by £5bn and the proceeds of that would go into health. And that is more than the Labour party, as I understand it, is promising to put into the National Health Service at the moment.
And so for the Lib Dems talk openly about lifting CGT, which is a kind of form of wealth tax, that is coming at a time where there’s a lot of scrutiny on Labour’s tax policies and whether they have a secret plan to lift CGT. The answer to which is we don’t yet precisely know, but what we do know is that they’ve gone from a situation where last summer, Rachel Reeves, who’s the shadow chancellor, was interviewed by the Telegraph and she said that she had no plans for any kind of wealth tax brackets, including lifting CGT, and said, you know, this will not happen, ruling it out.
And yet we now have a situation where Labour’s going into the election with only four tax rises properly ruled out, and that is income tax, corporation tax, national insurance and VAT. And that means everything else, including a wealth tax, including put-up CGT, is, whisper it softly, very much on the table and something that they can pull out of the drawer if they get into government and they say, oh no, the public finances are worse than we could have possibly imagined.
Lucy Fisher
But it is interesting, Stephen, isn’t it, exactly as Jim says, that the Lib Dems are sort of outflanking Labour from the left on tax rises. They say their package would raise £27bn more a year by 2029. And on top of that reform of capital gains tax that Jim mentioned, they say they’d raise the levy on banks. They’d tax oil and fossil fuel companies, water-polluting companies, tech firms, more. There’s been a lot of kind of raised eyebrows from the tax experts at the IFS and further afield, hasn’t there?
Stephen Bush
Yeah. Look, I mean, there are a lot of reasonable questions here from the IFS, from Dan Neidle going, look, actually, do the Lib Dems’ tax policies raise what they say they would? You know, long-term Lib Dem watchers will remember some of the arguments about the penny on income tax, which they spent on multiple things. And one of the reasons why they had to abandon their tuition fees commitment when they went into coalition is that they, you know, the sums did not raise what they said they would, you know, said it would.
Obviously, that would be a problem if the Liberal Democrats got into office. And, you know, people who read my newsletter will get very angry about how hypocritical this is, because I’m gonna be much more critical of Labour for the same thing tomorrow and over the next couple days, but that’s because Labour are actually going to win the election. And so their optimistic fiscal pledges are actually a problem for them.
However, for the Lib Dems, broadly speaking, everything they say policy-wise is necessarily impressionistic because they have hardly any money and also impressionistic because they are the third party vote time to vote. And really, all they’re saying is we are party for right-on people who have done well for themselves and we don’t hate the private sector.
Jim Pickard
Yeah. And this is why Nigel Farage from Reform UK can promise to basically give everyone an income-tax cut via the threshold and also raid the banks to the tune of, I think, £30bn by sort of changing the interest treatments of intrabank transfers. And no one is gonna be interrogating this hugely because no one really expects Reform UK to emerge with a big majority on July the 5th.
Lucy Fisher
Final question on the Lib Dems. Interesting that they say in the manifesto that they would like to rejoin the EU single market. You surprised to see that there, Stephen?
Stephen Bush
Not really. I mean, partly because, you know, because I’m a big nerd is that it’s in the Lib Dems standing orders that they want to be in. I mean, the standing order’s so old it refers to being in the European communities, plural. So I think there was never any prospect that the Liberal Democrats would not go into this election with some form of fairly expansive, pro-European commitment.
Lucy Fisher
Even though they’ve won all these by-elections in very Brexity places, they’re desperate to hold on to those. And Ed Davey never talks about.
Stephen Bush
You know, broadly speaking, the party membership (inaudible) was not going to sign off a manifesto which didn’t have a bit of leg to the pro-European cause. I think what is interesting, referring back to what Jim said earlier in the part about how the Conservatives never talk about Brexit, is how, you know, there have been in all of our inboxes a lot of messages from CCHQ about the awfulness of the Liberal Democrats and the Labour party. There has not been a single message about the Liberal Democrats basically promising to unpick what was the core retail offer of Brexit, which was that we would no longer have the full freedoms, which I think does really show how much the politics of Brexit have quietly moved under the surface. They haven’t even really done a sort of targeted hit on the Lib Dems in North Shropshire or in any of these quite Leave-y constituencies that the Lib Dems are trying to hold, having won on by-elections. So I wasn’t so much surprised by it being in there. But the political reaction or lack thereof to it is very telling, I think.
Lucy Fisher
Jim, final question to you just on a third topic, which is Reform. This week, it felt to me like quite a big moment, not only when a candidate was uncovered as having said that the UK should have remained neutral on the question of Hitler in the 1930s, but then the kind of the party’s response to it and the way its spokesperson kind of weighed in on that. Tell us a bit about that and your assessment of that whole row.
Jim Pickard
So this candidate, Ian Gribbin, and his comments, were uncovered from 2022, I believe, where he sort of talked about how Winston Churchill was some kind of disaster and the British government in the ‘40s and ‘30s shouldn’t have waged war with Germany, which just kind of sat it out like Ireland or Switzerland. He subsequently claimed he was deliberately being provocative. Didn’t necessarily believe some of the stuff.
There are also some very sexist comments there about women. But it’s interesting that instead of just immediately dropping him from a great height, which is what would have happened if this was a Conservative candidate, I think there was some kind of attempt to to defend him by the party institutionally.
Now, on the right wing of British politics it does look as if there are votes to be harvested from being actively anti-political correctness. And maybe this is a particularly extreme version of this, but it is a bit of a reminder, I think, that all this talk of a merger between Reform UK and the Conservative party, which we saw, for example, from Suella Braverman this week, I think it just underlines the fact that you can’t just say Reform is on 17 per cent, the Tories are on 22 per cent or whatever it is, and if you add them together, you come up with 39 per cent, because as soon as you merge those two parties, you lose a lot of Reform people who are fed up with the Conservatives and see them as a kind of, you know, institutional establishment party. And but you would also lose a lot of moderate Conservatives from the sort of tradition of Heseltine or Ken Clarke or David Cameron, who find Farage and his views repellent. So it’s, you know, it’s going to be very interesting to see what happens if the Tories do have a bit of a wipeout at the election and if Farage does become an MP. But I wouldn’t diss the idea that one plus one equals more than two is gonna be tested to destruction, I think.
Lucy Fisher
Really interesting, Jim, and I hope we can discuss this more as the campaign goes on. What’s happening with Reform? What could happen after the election? And Nigel Farage, I’m sure, will continue to make waves as well as perhaps continue to have objects thrown at him. That’s happened again on Tuesday after the banana milkshake some days ago. George Parker will be in the hot seat later this week to fillet the Labour manifesto. Jim, I know you’re gonna be at an undisclosed location in the north to see Keir Starmer unveil it. I will be at the G7 in Bari, Italy, and back next Tuesday. But for now, Stephen Bush, Jim Pickard, thanks for joining.
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Jim Pickard
Thank you.
Stephen Bush
Thank you.
Lucy Fisher
That’s it for this episode of the FT’s Political Fix. I’ve put links to subjects discussed in the 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 Bush’s award-winning Inside Politics newsletter. You 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 Audrey Tinline. Manuela Saragosa is the executive producer. Original music by Breen Turner and sound engineering by Simon Panayi. Cheryl Brumley is the FT’s global head of audio.
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