Coffee House Shots
Keir Starmer slaps down Elon Musk over ‘civil war’ comment
The Spectator magazine is home to wonderful writing, insightful analysis and unrivaled books and arts reviews. Subscribe today for just £12 and receive a 12-week subscription in print and online. Along with the £320 John Lewis or Waitrose Voucher, go to spectator.co.uk/voucher. Hello and welcome to Coffee House Shots, the Spectator's Daily Politics podcast. I'm Ross Grenmenson and I'm joined today by Katie Balls and Kate Andrews. So the Prime Minister has clashed with billionaire owner of ex Elon Musk, over comments that Musk made, claiming that the UK is heading for civil war. Katie, you've wrote about this on the website. Can you take us through it? Yeah, what a different year or so makes. I mean, it was November last year, when we had Rishi Cena actually hosting Elon Musk with his AI summit. They had that quite cozy fireside chat, but they must was not interviewed by a journalist, but instead the Prime Minister. There was talk of a romance. I don't think the new Prime Minister has the same attitude towards Elon Musk. Effectively, what's happened is in the number 10 lobby briefing, the Prime Minister's spokesperson was asked about comments that Elon Musk had made on ex, his social media platform, where he had said civil war is inevitable in response to what we have seen over the past week or so in terms of this violent disorder in various parts of the UK. And this was in response to, you know, comments on this. Kissed armour has been made clear that he did not share that sentiment and actually thought it was the wrong thing to say. Since then, Elon Musk has now started just taking to tweeting at Labour videos and Kissed armour. There was one tweet about how the Labour government would be, you know, protecting Muslim communities. And Elon Musk has now replied to that saying, not all communities. So you can see this dragging on a bit. What does it tell us? I mean, I think what's interesting is Peter Carr, who's the secretary of state for the technology and science department, you know, he has met with senior figures at the various web companies this week. He and his team are very keen to not make it look as though they're being dragged in for a ticking off. So I don't think this is part of a new strategy to go to war with the tech giants. I think it does show you, though, that the way, of course, some of this is being fed online is then putting Kissed armour in an awkward position in terms of what he then says. And I imagine Elon Musk versus Kissed armour wrote her some way to go because she have a very outspoken person who has a big platform. He was now decided to have this ongoing personal spat with the prime minister in terms of the actions that we might see. I mean, I do think there is some pressure, that said, on social media companies from coming from the Labour government to make sure they are fulfilling what their policies say they will and so forth. And you've seen some of that. But for now, at least, they were very keen to say it's mostly about those who are actually putting the content up there, as opposed to the companies. I guess the question is, is Elon Musk now one of the ones putting the content up there, given he is personally acting of his views rather than just in charge of the platform? I mean, what do you make of that, Kate? Do you think Musk needs to take some responsibility considering this disinformation about the identity of the South for perpetrator with spread on his platform? Well, look, I think first and foremost, you take down on his public policy is let's say a little bit strange. So Musk's comments about an inevitable civil war are not really the first curious comments we've heard recently. We had that video clip of JD Vance Trump's vice president talking about how the UK is going to be the first Islamist country to have nuclear weapons. It was intended as a joke. It didn't really land. And it seemed particularly strange, given the fact that Labour had just lost some quite senior MPs in the general election, the health secretary won his seat by 500 votes because there were breakaway independent MPs and the fight was over Gaza and Labour was taking the more pro-Israel position. So I think that there's just been perhaps a little bit of a brash outspoken attitude in the US with some very senior figures that maybe don't fully understand the nuances of what is going on in the UK. This is, this by no means a justification of those comments that we've heard US states side. I think it is just a reflection of perhaps one of the challenges for this Labour government. When Musk is tweeting at key astonishing to represent all communities, we have to remember that Labour is in many ways making a first impression. What Elon Musk and others JD Vance might have seen of the Labour Party so far when it was an opposition, I really wouldn't be surprised given the culture wars over in the US if like one of the only pieces of information. One of the few pieces of information that they've really had on the Labour Party is when Keystone and Angela Rayner took the knee. And so they might be thinking to themselves, you know, that Keystone and Angela Rayner represent a certain kind of Labour Party, which I'm not convinced they actually do anymore. I think Dom has taken quite a hard line on the rise that we have been seeing. You know, I think he plans to continue to crack down on that in a very real way. Whether or not he's successful, whether or not the policy is correct is kind of another question. But the take the knee symbolism is simply not here. And it's something we're probably not going to see again now that they're in charge. And so I think it's just also a reminder of the image that perhaps the Labour Party has, a limited image with some of these people. And that doesn't make the comments okay. But it is something that Labour will have to challenge and they will have to assert their authority and their, you know, slightly more governmental style positions on these things rather than trying to make a statement in opposition. And I think actually looking at Keir Starmer's response so far, that is an interesting point. Because I think at times is felt a little bit like what an opposition leader would say. And you are getting lots of steps and obviously we've got a Cobra yesterday. But I think some of the initial rhetoric coming from Keir Starmer, you know, is speaking to figures in the Labour Party and the Tory Party saying, you know, it's a very good speech from a leader of the opposition. But of course, as soon as you take power there, you know, I think down the street now, how to get used to obviously the press every day saying, okay, fine, you've taken that step. What's the next step? And there's constantly to show actually, even when actually perhaps there are limited tools right now they can go to. And Kate, moving on to the markets, Rachel Reeves has been in North America this week, attempting to bang the drum for Britain as a stable place to do business, stable all except for some pretty significant market turmoil. Can you give us the update? Yes, Rachel Reeves has gone to the US and Canada under rather difficult circumstances. She is there trying to drum up investment for the UK. I think having, you know, quite correctly realized that there isn't going to be a lot of money in the public finances to spend on all these investment projects they'd like to pour money into. They're going to need private sector investment. But she has gone at a time where the world of finances just glued to the turbulence that we are seeing in the stock market. And this is after the Japan stocks had their worst crash on Monday since 1987, since Black Monday. They have largely rebounded today. But Europe, the FTSE, they're struggling. All eyes are on Wall Street as the US opens. What's going to happen today is the dust hasn't settled. You know, we don't have a lot of clarity yet. It's really too soon to say whether or not this was a blip or whether or not this is the catalyst or the beginning of something that's going to be a lot more painful. And you have economists on both sides of that argument saying we need to remain calm and others saying, gosh, this could be really quite bad. And everyone's trying to pinpoint the reasons for it. And, you know, it's a real combination of factors here. The Bank of Japan decided that it was going to start hiking interest rates at a time where the Federal Reserve decided that it wasn't going to start cutting interest rates. Central banks are operating in a way that is somewhat unexpected given what markets thought was coming down the line. You have some serious underlying issues in the US economy. They've been there for a long time though. I mean, this is kind of one of the big question marks is how new is all of this information? So we recently got some poor jobs data from the US showing that unemployment was up, showing that the number of jobs being created was pretty lackluster, certainly under performing expectation. But hasn't been a great spring. It's become very clear that the forecasts that were made for 2024 for growth in the US were way too optimistic. So I think we just have to remember that this is a real combination of factors. And I was reflecting on a piece that I wrote last year for the magazine maybe a year and a couple months ago about the looming crash test. What were the skeletons that we were going to discover right below the surface of domestic and global economies as interest rates went up quite quickly? You know, we saw the regional bank crisis, you know, zombie companies, we had to prepare ourselves for the fact we were going to discover a lot. I think what we're seeing now is a new discovery process. What happens when we have expectations that central banks are going to cut rates? What happens when you have the world's biggest economy, the US, that has been stimulated with trillions and trillions of dollars post-COVID? Now maybe actually revealing itself for what it is rather than what all of this money was propping up. Americans have been saying for years that the economy is at the top of their list for their concerns. And the rest of the world says why you have such an impressive growth rate. And the sense has been for a long time that they knew it was a sugar high. It wasn't necessarily something that really reflected how well the economy was doing. So, you know, I think this is another wave crashing down post-COVID and what is just looking to be a much, much more turbulent time is a lot of the things that, you know, some economists used to say we're going to come to the surface. They never did, but COVID really forced a lot of these issues. And now we're going through many waves crashing down on us. And I think that this is in that line of succession. And Katie, just finally, taking all of this together, is it fair to say that the Stama honeymoon is over? And have we got any more details on whether he will actually be going on holiday at the end of the week? So I think it's fair to say the honeymoon has ended. I don't know what you're even going to really define 'cause Stama's honeymoon as. I think you can see he had a very brief one because-- A lecture night? Yeah. An election day. Yeah. The day. The day in the evening. No, I think about the week or two after that when he went to Washington. I think in terms of world stage events, he had a great inheritance in terms of going, you know, straight to have lots of bilaterals. Obviously meeting Joe Biden at the time looked like he might hang around a bit longer. Now not so much in terms of the job, of course. And then I think if you think about, you know, the European political community, I think that was a gift to his Stama, given where they want to go to Europe, the fact that he got to host that. And he got a poll balance pretty early on, which suggested that actually, you know, the election balance meant that he was more popular and the labor was more popular. But I think in the past week, you can see his personal ratings and her back and the negative. And I think the, you can say always Rachel Reeves blamed the Tories day, assigned the honeymoon's end. I don't think it was because that was labor's choice to do it. And it's their choice to do framing and get ahead about what they want to do in the autumn. I think that it is effectively what's happened over the past weeks since I've bought means that Kid Starmer is now in a position of USA Oscar whereby Downing Street will not comment on whether he is going to on holiday or not at the end of the week. And he is in a bit of a lose lose. I was speaking to someone in Rishi's team about this, you know, from back when Rishi's team was in government and they were saying they actually felt quite sorry for Kid Starmer here because you can't really go on holiday. If you do go on holiday, everyone is going to say, you know, say if something does happen during that time when you're flying back. And I realized some of this is what I'm saying, he is prime minister if you need to get like the small violin out. But I think it just, you know, the toll in that sense. So I think what has happened over the weekend and into this week, Kid Starmer is now currently facing his first crisis. Now it's one that he's taken steps on, but it does mean I think he's moved to the second stage of the promotion. Well, thank you, Katie. Thank you, Kate. And thank you very much for listening. And if you do enjoy the podcast and you're listening to us on Spotify or Apple podcasts, please do give us a follow. Be much appreciated.