The Friday Take Episode 3
Summary
In this episode of Fit For Purpose, hosts Matthew McPherson and Nick Forbes delve into the world of missions, politics, and energy. Join them as they discuss the bold and long-term missions outlined in the conference manifesto, the government's shift towards enabling and facilitating, and the challenges faced by the civil service. From the progress in green energy to the role of media in tribal politics, this episode offers a deep dive into the important topics shaping our world. Tune in to gain insights into the upcoming party conferences, the significance of a by-election, and the potential of nuclear power. With engaging discussions and thought-provoking perspectives, this episode is not to be missed.
Timestamps
00:02:56 Advocating in Parliament, recall petitions, important by-election.
00:05:07 Nicola Sturgeon was an election-winning asset.
00:08:31 High interest in Labour, but Conservative presence. Rishi Sunak's first conference. Future priorities important before general election. Conservatives boosted by recent election result. Important conference for both parties.
00:10:48 Party conference mood crucial; expect tension.
00:16:15 Energy security and nuclear power challenges.
00:17:51 Labour must strategically ensure that funds for net zero are used effectively, potentially leveraging private finance. Investing in decarbonization has positive environmental, economic, and social impacts. Britain can share expertise internationally, and green energy can be popular. Some countries, like America and Australia, are experiencing backlash against fossil fuels. Joe Biden's green New Deal contrasts with his predecessor.
00:20:40 Two tribal media bubbles prevent connection.
00:23:44 Productive conversation covering various topics, anticipating more.
Transcript
Matthew McPherson:
Well, good afternoon, Nick. It's a very hot muggy Thursday afternoon and it's recess, but it feels like there's a lot of stuff going on this week.
Nick Forbes:
Well, it might be hot and muggy where you are. I'm just looking out the window now and it's only just stopped raining after about feels like about seven years of rain.
Matthew McPherson:
Don't make me regret living there.
Nick Forbes:
You see, this is part of the problem that we need levelling up to get more sunshine in the north and more rain in the south.
Matthew McPherson:
Does that make it into the Labour Manifesto?
Nick Forbes:
Might have called for that, actually. He wants more sun in Manchester and the government.
Matthew McPherson:
Well, Burnham said he can't.
Nick Forbes:
Well, that'd be an interesting one. Wouldn't know if they were in charge of sun and rain and had to argue which one got which share of it.
Matthew McPherson:
I did see there was a briefing this week saying that Keir Starmer's team despise Andy Burnham and despise Sadiq Khan. There does seem to be something going wrong with these elected mayors and the power they're giving certain politicians.
Nick Forbes:
Despise is a strong word which is often used by lone party members against each know. I think one of the interesting things I mean, I know we talked about the ULEZ in London last time, but I think one of the interesting things here this is really an example of localism in action where it might be at odds with what the party is thinking nationally, or what its electoral interests are nationally, or what it perceives them to be. And it's a really good example of the kind of tensions that might start being more common in politics if we have a stronger devolution package. And we've tended to see that conflict in a Scottish context, with conflict between the Scottish government and the UK government, but we might see it more in the English regions too, in the future, who knows?
Matthew McPherson:
Well, of course, there's a whole host of new by elections coming up. There's a whole host of new yeah.
Nick Forbes:
Just going to know in the context of Scotland, yet another by election coming up.
Matthew McPherson:
Well, it feels like we've been talking about by elections a lot recently. We had half a podcast on one last week.
Nick Forbes:
And well, certainly keeping us in business and keeping candidates on their toes. Well, we know there's one by election coming up, which is the Rutherglen and West Hamilton one because of the recall petition against Margaret Ferrier, which frankly feels a little bit unfair, actually, if, you know, given the crimes that people have committed in public life. I know what she did was stupid and daft, but you do wonder whether actually that's a proportionate sentence to lose your entire career over.
Matthew McPherson:
Watching so watching House of Commons TV, she was there in Parliament, almost all the time, advocating for her constituents. And it does seem one of the slightly more on the mark sometimes, these recall petitions, they're quite obvious what should happen, but it does feel like this is almost slightly different case. So we've got this by election in Rutherglen and Hamilton West. The earliest it can apparently take place now is the 5 October, which seems an awful long time away, but Parliament apparently has to be recalled before, or sit again before they can move motion. It's going to be sit just days before the Labour Party conference, just after the Conservative Party Conference and about ten days before the SNP conference. So it's going to be potentially at a very big political time. How important do you think it is that Labour win this by election?
Nick Forbes:
Well, frankly, if Labour doesn't win this by election, there's a real question about whether Labour will be able to win office. But if Labour does win it, it's a sign that Labour is back in business, because that means that the Scottish seats that fell to the SNP in 2015 and 2017 and that they held in 2019 are reversing. And that is a game changer in terms of the overall government perspective, because I think Labour needs a 14% swing to win, but that is a 9% swing if you take Scotland into account. So it makes a Labour government much more likely if Labour wins the Rutherglen by election. And then, of course, the other by election that we are expecting but haven't had, is the one in central Mid, Bedfordshire, where Nadine Doris has been resigning for longer than Liz Truss was Prime Minister.
Matthew McPherson:
I see that her local town council wrote to her to demand that she resigns this week. Do you think that'll have any impact?
Nick Forbes:
I suspect she's never heard of them.
Matthew McPherson:
That does tend to be the case with town council sometimes, doesn't it? But we've got the Rutherglen and Hamilton West by election. What's your prediction? Do you think they'll take it?
Nick Forbes:
Yeah, I think Nicola Sturgeon was a real electoral asset for the SNP and she was. There's a funny paradox, isn't there, in politics, that often the party's leader can be far more popular with the public than they are inside their own party. It's certainly been true of some of the Labour leaders in the past and I think it was true of Nicola Sturgeon. I think Nicola Sturgeon was an election winning machine. I'm not sure that Hamza Yusuf is, and I don't think the SNP are going to have an easy time winning this by election. I think the most likely outcome is it will go to Labour, particularly if there's a slump in the Tory vote, because it was a three way marginal a while back. I can't see the Tories achieving that kind of success in terms of being up there in the top bit like a bit like Uxbridge, actually. It's Labour's to lose, but really, Labour should be winning this.
Matthew McPherson:
And how many seats do you think, for the Labour Party coming to play in Scotland in a general election with the polls as they are, and the SNP collapse, do you think there's real potential there? We've heard some people talk about the idea of sort of 30 seats. I mean, maybe that's getting people getting ahead of themselves. Of course, Labour did quite well in Scotland in 2017 in that snap election and won seven seats, quite unexpectedly. There was an awful lot of seats there with tiny, tiny majorities. The SNP clung on. So there is a tipping point in Scotland, isn't there, where if it goes over, labour could be winning huge numbers of seats without potentially even topping the vote share in Scotland across the whole country?
Nick Forbes:
Yeah, it's a really important observation that, as you say, there's quite a lot of seats in Scotland with very small majorities. And so, actually, a marginal swing one way or another, or a particularly strong local issue, could sway quite a lot of those constituencies. Personally, I think probably about 25 seats in Scotland. In contention for labour, in serious contention. And if labour picks up, say, 25 seats in Scotland, then that really is the party on its way back to office in Westminster. And what we'll see in Rutherglen, I think, is a bit of a dry run for some of the issues that we fought out in the general election campaign in Scotland in the year ahead.
Matthew McPherson:
So do you think Labour MPs are going to be flying back from their holidays then and off to campaign in Rutherglen?
Nick Forbes:
I suspect it's the first place they'll go on holiday, actually. It's not unknown for Labour MPs to take their entire family to go on holiday to a by election and stay there for a couple of weeks and really enjoy the whole experience away from politics on the doorstep. Can't say I'll be booking airbnb in any time soon, but not because I don't like Rutherglen, it's just because I have other holiday plans over the summer. We're in that sort of period where, because Parliament isn't sitting, it feels like politics isn't doing much, but we'll be into conference season in September before we know it. And what do you think the mood on the ground is about the Conservative Conference this year?
Matthew McPherson:
Well, I think there's been certainly in the events that we're doing, there's been a huge amount of interest in Labour, but still a significant presence at the Conservative Conference. So it's going to be Rishi Sunak's very first conference. I think people are going to want to know they've had the five priorities from the Prime Minister. What comes next? What is the positive future? And I think we are going to be, at that point, pretty much at most a year away from a general election when that Conservative Conference happens. So they're going to want to hear from Cabinet ministers that idea of what is the next stage, what is the positive offer that people can offer their constituents? MPs can go out and activists can go on the doorstep and sell and the MPs can offer to their constituents. And we saw that result in Uxbridge the Conservatives have had actually quite a boost from that. There's a hope, there's some sort of self confidence that potentially there is a way that Richard can win. And that's something that hasn't been there for quite a period of time now. So I think it'll be an interesting conference and very important for both of the parties in that conference period to be able to have an offer to set out to the country, because when we're at that conference, that is really the starting gun, I think, for the general election.
Nick Forbes:
One of the things that you and I have been talking about with the Purpose coalition membership is this is probably the most important year ahead in terms of engaging and helping to shape an influence in politics. Because this is the time when all the parties are desperate to look like they're engaging with industry, with business, with universities, with the NHS, with councils. And therefore this is a really good time to be involved in some events that we're doing to help to put the progressive work of our members firmly on the map as good examples of what can be delivered.
Matthew McPherson:
You're obviously going to be leading our work at the Labour Party conference. What are you most looking forward to about the conference? I mean, you've obviously done plenty of them in your time, but what are you most looking forward to about that period?
Nick Forbes:
Conferences? I don't know if you have this experience, but I have what I call conference friends, which are people that I probably only speak to at party conference once a year, so I'm quite looking forward to catching up with those. But every time you go to a party conference, you get a really strong sense of what the internal mood is, whether that's depression or optimism or hope or fear or anxiety or whatever. And I think the mood at this party conference is going to be at least as important as what's talked about. Labour knows that it can't be too triumphalist and so it can't assume that it's got the election already in the bag. But at the same time, there's a lot of expectation from Labour Party members that Labour will start coming out with some more bold, radical policies. And actually, there's a bit of tension there between the party membership who are calling for more in the expectation there's going to be a Labour government, and the party's leadership who are saying, hang on, we haven't got the election won yet, so we need to be careful about this. And it's going to be quite interesting to see the dynamic that plays out with over the three or four days that we're in Liverpool together.
Matthew McPherson:
We obviously saw Keir Starmer announce those missions earlier this year and the last couple of months he's been putting meat on them. Do you think in terms of the manifesto, everything will link to those missions, it'll all be related to those missions or will there be other things that they decide to bolt on?
Nick Forbes:
I think the missions are very clearly going to be the main pillars not just of conference but of the manifesto too. And we're having some conversations already amongst our purpose coalition members around what they can contribute to the missions, what it means for their business, what the opportunities and challenges might be in those missions for them. And they're deliberately bold as missions, they're deliberately longer term than just the normal electoral cycle. And I think it also points to a different way of the government operating in the future, so less directly providing and controlling, more enabling and facilitating, which I think is quite an interesting change, and will, I think, be quite a challenge for the civil service. But there's no doubt that I think we'll see some big steps forward, and particularly, actually, in the stuff that we've been hearing this week around green energy and the energy transition and the announcement about the oil and gas. Exploration in the North Sea or further oil and gas exploration in the North Sea has kind of thrown into sharp relief some of the alternatives around nuclear and onshore wind that I know labor is perhaps much more keen on than the conservative government is.
Matthew McPherson:
There does seem to be the change in approach on both parties since the by elections on this, do you think? Obviously heard all the stories about the 28 billion that was promised and has now been rowed back on in terms of green energy by labour. Do you think that's something where we're likely to see? I mean, as I said last week, one of the things I think that Keir Starmer and Ed Miliband have done very well is to tie the idea of energy security together with the cost of living and people's bills and the cost of those energy bills. So do you think it's something where we're going to see more innovation or are Labour concerned about the electoral impact that some of their green policies could have?
Nick Forbes:
Well, as we were saying last week, I think it's a danger to extrapolate from the ULEZ example in the recent Uxbridge by election and assume that voters are opposed to all green policies. When it comes down to it, I think there is always an issue about changes in transport and traffic management that causes a lot of upset right at the outset.
Matthew McPherson:
You must have had a fair few of those in Newcastle.
Nick Forbes:
Oh my goodness, yes. I remember all of the fuss around Acorn Road in Jesmond where we reduced the amount of traffic, in effect a sort of pilot low traffic neighborhood before they became a real thing. And there was huge opposition from the shopkeepers in particular. And interestingly, a year or so later, when the local paper went back and spoke to them, they all said, actually, businesses picked up, this was the right thing to do. So these things, I think, on the whole, can be positive, but it's the fear of change often. But you're right, framing the net zero agenda, not in terms of global issues in the planet, which feels a bit remote, but framing it as reducing your household energy bills, keeping your home warmer for longer, those kind of things I think will make a real difference in terms of how they're perceived by the public.
Matthew McPherson:
Yeah, and as I say, I think on that, you make a really good point about the global side of things and people will so often say when you talk about climate change, well, there's no point of doing it in Britain because other countries are polluting more than us. But actually thinking about it in terms of energy bills and the cost of energy and energy security is a really good way of looking at it and a really important thing for the country we saw last year.
Nick Forbes:
The energy security issue is one that is really on people's minds at the moment. And I think we've got some big questions around nuclear, and onshore wind, in particular in nuclear power generation. We know that our current nuclear state is well past its sell by date, so we're going to have to have some serious decisions about investing in that longer term. And I thought it was really significant that in his conference speech last year in Liverpool, Keir Starmer talked about I think I counted him saying nuclear power nine times in his speech. He really majored on it. And to a Labour audience, that's quite an important thing because there can be a bit of a reaction against nuclear power in some labour quarters, but absolutely clear that nuclear is part of the answer. And then, of course, onshore wind, which the current government has been really reluctant to do anything about, but I think we're in danger of losing the window in terms of international expertise on offshore wind, and it feels odd that we've got such an obvious solution on our doorstep, but we've just not been prepared to implement it.
Matthew McPherson:
And that point on nuclear, there's been obviously a huge step change since Jeremy Corbyn was leader of the party just a couple of years ago. Do you think that's Labour has promised things like GB Energy? How do you think that plays? How does a labour know where there's not going to be huge amounts of public money? Put that into practice.
Nick Forbes:
Well, labour is going to have to think tactically and strategically about how to make sure that every penny of that 28 billion, or however much, is actually in that ring fence budget for net zero is spent. And I suspect very little of it will go on direct funded projects. A lot of it will be leverage to get because there's a lot of money in pension funds, in venture capital funds, in private finance that could be invested here if it's structured in the right kind of a way. And I think one of the questions that is worth thinking through from a business point of view is what are the opportunities that we could help to shape around long term investment propositions which generate a return over a period of time? And why wouldn't we want to invest in decarbonizing our energy supply? Because it has an overall impact on environment in a positive way. It develops skills, creates jobs in new sectors which are going to be important for the future of the economy here and for future generations. And it means that we're making the most of resources available, and particularly in terms of some of the longer term pension fund investments, helps to create that sustainable future for people in retirement, too. For all those reasons, and because genuinely, I think there's an opportunity for Britain to share its expertise here internationally, I think if it's framed in the right way, broadly, green energy can be seen as a vote winner, not a vote loser. And it's fascinating to look at other countries around the world, like America and Australia, where you see much more of a backlash going on now against things like fossil fuels and coal mining and so on. And there's almost a sort of not just climate change denial, but a sort of real rejection of the need for change. And we saw that most obviously in America until fairly recently. Joe Biden really put America on the map in terms of, in effect, a green New Deal, which is in stark opposition to his predecessor.
Matthew McPherson:
Well, his predecessor's been in the news a fair bit this week, hasn't he?
Nick Forbes:
It's one of the strange things about it's. I just don't quite understand how Trump can have so many indictments made against him and continue to gain don't but.
Matthew McPherson:
We saw this week there's a poll out with him miles ahead, according to those opinion polls, despite everything that has happened.
Nick Forbes:
Yeah, and I genuinely think that part of the problem is that in America you've got, in effect, two opposing tribes who almost entirely get their media information from within their own bubble, so they never see what the other side sees and they don't have any points of connection at all. And so, in effect, they can look for the evidence that proves their own thought processes. And at least in this country, although it's not without its faults, we do at least have state broadcasting through the BBC and Channel Four, both of which have a requirement to provide balance. And that is kind of an anchor point for people right across our political spectrum in this country. That is, I think, actually really important, given there are so many different ways in which people can get their news and information. And it's one of the things that genuinely, I think, as a country, gives us the same starting position in terms of understanding our world.
Matthew McPherson:
Yeah, and that's absolutely right. Actually, I saw really interesting interview with Keir Starmer where he was talking about how he has those cross party friendships, people who he's been friends for years with new friends who know conservatives. And actually, that's just something you would never see in America. You just don't have those same kind of because there is such a big divide, there's two different viewpoints on the world and it's a blessing, I think, that we don't have that in this country.
Nick Forbes:
Well, you'll go to Labour Party conference and you'll see a few people saying Never kissed, wearing T shirts, saying, Never kissed a Tory. I wish I could say that was true of me, but, hey, probably not. I think politics can be a bit too tribal in those terms. We've got to be confident in what we think as politicians in our own respective parties, but also willing to engage and speak across the political divide. And the more tribal our politics gets, the more negative it gets, the more confrontational it gets, the more the public has switched off and the more people think that democracy actually doesn't work. So I think demonstrating a maturity in politics and that means being able to work and no reason why people shouldn't be friends across the political divide. I mean, we are, aren't we?
Matthew McPherson:
Absolutely. I think it's very well put.
Nick Forbes:
Often it's funny. People in Parliament, in my experience, will knock chunks out of each other in the chamber, but then recognize that that is a bit of political theater and go to the bar together or have a coffee together afterwards. And I think that's quite good, actually, that I think we still have a level of maturity in our politics that you certainly don't see in American politics. And thank God we don't have guns.
Matthew McPherson:
Well, I think we can all agree on that. Nick, it's been really good to talk today, as always, and I think we've covered quite a bit of ground there in 25 minutes. It's been good. We've talked about by elections, green energy, all sorts, and I look forward to doing this again soon.
Nick Forbes:
Yeah, well, have a good summer and any holiday plans the next few?
Matthew McPherson:
I'm off away next week to Italy, so that should be very nice.
Nick Forbes:
Well, I'm going to Brussels for a few nights, so I've not been to Brussels for a very long time, but I'm very much looking forward to trying some of the beers in specific glasses, because it's actually a crime in Brussels to serve the wrong beer in the wrong glass.
Matthew McPherson:
Is that true?
Nick Forbes:
Yes. And that's Belgian law, not even EU law for any listening into the podcast.
Matthew McPherson:
That is extraordinary, really.
Nick Forbes:
So every bar that sells 150 beers will have 150 plus different types of glass. Part of the fun to match the beers to the glasses, because you say, oh, I want to drink out of a glass that's shaped like an elephant. Which beer is that?
Matthew McPherson:
It very good. Well, it's been good to talk and look forward to catching up soon.
Nick Forbes:
Have a good holiday.
Matthew McPherson:
Take care. Bye.
