Coffee House Shots
Coffee House Shots live: election aftermath
Get three month's spectator now for just three pounds. Go to spectator.co.uk/trial. Welcome to the Emmanuel Centre and to a live edition of Coffee House Shots. I'm Fred Nelson and I'm joined by Katie Bowles, Kate Andrews and Sir Jacob Reese Mogg who was until recently MP for a summer set. Now let's start having a quick look at the electoral landscape. Rather a lot of red to my delight not very much yellow up there in Scotland. I think it was one of the easily the best things about this general election. The blue dots are few and far between. If you have a look at the voting, proportion of people who voted for Labour is 34%. That is the lowest proportion of voters. Who voted for a governing party in the history of our post-war elections. Now Labour got lower than any opinion pollster predicted. So I think that's quite significant as well. We were told for months on end that there was a 20 points bleed over the Conservatives. A 20 point gap wasn't going to be closed and it wasn't closed. But in the end it was 10 points between Labour and the Conservatives. So that is quite significant and to my mind it means all there's to play for at the next general election. Now when you look at the two main party votes share it was less than 50%. Again this is the first time this has happened since 1918. So you've got lots of parties voting for a third, sometimes fourth party. So I think the two main parties have got quite a lot still in flux. Now this is one of the major themes that we saw. The Muslim vote is not a phrase which we used to say when we discussed British general elections. But there certainly was a trend that the higher the Muslim population of any constituency the sharper the impact of Labour vote was going to be. Up to the extent we've got five independent MPs. Effectually you might call them like gazas of voters or that is the cause of the win. And you've got people like Jonathan Nashworth losing their seats. Because they were a far greater bite when they expected in this particular relatively new arena of politics. They're not all problems that the Labour government is inheriting. Net migration is going down fast. These forecasts were done at the last budget. And you can see in the way that the Conservatives tightened up the visa restrictions they are expected to basically have a number of net migrations. So that will be a win. That Labour party will be able to report by Christmas. Just like this morning's GDP figures which of course have nothing to do with them. Labour in Unvellest these are the dividends which make you wonder why the Conservatives didn't offer an election a little bit later on when they had more successes to point to. And so again you've got a situation now where one in five workers is foreign born. You can also see what happens in Brexit here. A number of EU people stayed the same but the number of non EU people increased quite substantially. But inflation is now down to two per cent and is likely to stay there for the foreseeable. So inflation has been a big bug bear not just in Britain but in the years in the American elections as well. But that tiger as Kate's called it in her cover piece. Kate Andrews pretty much alone predicted the surge in inflation. Now looks like being relatively well tamed for the foreseeable. And this will lead to something perhaps more important for the Labour government. That's disposable income. So disposable income which has taken the biggest knock pretty much again in our post-war history over the last few years. It's going to be rising and before too long even in real terms by the time of the end of this parliament. This is not assuming any upgrade in the conservative year of forecasts. QA Starmer is going to be able to say to British public that you have never had it so good. And technically in disposable income he will be right. So he's got a lot to do and we can come to exactly what he's going to do later. But this is what we're looking at for the Tory leadership contest which Jacob will be as a member you'll be voting in won't you? But not the parliamentary round. So Kimmy Badenich and bookmakers think she's out in front 39 percent. Now typically in Tory leadership contests it's divided between the front runner and anybody but the front runner. So typically you've got Kimmy out in front, ah okay we all hate Kimmy. So let's choose somebody who's not Kimmy and that can be basically anybody. In Duncan Smith was chosen because he was not Michael Portillo etc. John Major was chosen because he was not Michael Heseltine. Quite often conservatives do tend to do that in real leadership contests. But without too much to do let's go straight on to Katie and the overall political scenes. Katie what kind of first week would you say here Starmer's government has had? I think a good first week for QA Starmer in a sense he's got a few things going right for him. The football last night and lots of Labour MPs very keen to tell us yesterday and today that's what happens when Labour's in power so let's see what happens on Sunday. It could be the end of the honeymoon if it goes wrong. But I think QA Starmer's team really wanted to hit the ground running and do you know keep up a sense of momentum for the first week really for the first 100 days and you're seeing that in the sense that recess is being pushed back some of this is performative but it's to obviously give this sense of we're working very hard for you rather than the problem of some electioners you are elected and then everyone goes on a holiday and sits on a beach which is the aesthetic they're trying to get away from and I think when it comes to I suppose some of the things they're doing now we are seeing a reform agenda it's obviously too early right now to say if it's going to be a huge success but I think QA Starmer's making the judgement that you look at the vote share yes a huge majority but a low vote share in correspondence to that number of seats and you look at the fact there's not much money to go around which I'm sure Kate will have more to say on and really the only way they think they're going to bring them out enough change between now and the next election is to try and go for the reform option and that means that we have an announcement this week on planning reform from Rachel Reeves just the early steps but a slightly strange scenario where all the free market Tory think tanks are being very you know praised worthy of Rachel Reeves because she seems to be doing some of the things the Tories talked about doing but then walked back from because of party management problems and also I think on the NHS if you look at what was treating has been saying you know on the first night in the job saying the NHS is broken and it has to change I think QA Starmer is using the fact he has a lot of political capital right now and he has a party that at least for now very grateful to him personally to try and pursue some tricky decisions some of which are going to be quite unpopular in the coming months when it comes to planning pylons for Ed Miliband's net zero plans everywhere but trying to do that now so you do the tricky bit and then you hope that he has the things to point to in a couple of years time thanks Katie and Kate would you say you wrote about the GDB figures this morning do you think everything's about to turn right for for your starmer or is there still are we going to benefit from the fact that we're relatively stable compared to France which is in turmoil I think you could say things are about to go right but you're coming up from a low bar it has been an incredibly painful time these past couple of years especially trying to get inflation back to target the Tories were deeply unlucky that in April there was zero growth so they went into the selection with zero growth that month now you can't tell a lot from monthly growth figures but what is clear is that a lot of the forecast that were made at the start of the year about how the UK economy might turn out we're looking a little bit negative now that's again not saying much because we're not looking at 2.5% growth we might be looking at 1% growth this year what can Rachel Reeves do with that well she'll have a little more fiscal headroom to play with in her budget come the autumn but the truth is that she's going to need to find tens of billions of pounds to fill the fiscal black holes in the budget and it was estimated before the election it could be around 20 25 billion pounds now their speculation is closer to 30 and labor has made some major public spending promises which are not costed especially around NHS workforce plans these are massively expensive plans and we do not know how they're going to fund them so do you hike taxes i think at the start of a parliament when you have the most political power we may be looking at some tax hikes but they have not been forthcoming about what those will be do you cut spending is the labor government the first thing it does fiscally going to be to cut spending or do you try to grow the economy and my suspicion is it might be a combination of one and three and that labor is genuinely going to try to bring in some pro growth reforms it is going to be terribly difficult governing is very tricky and the idea that you're going to overhaul the planning system reform the NHS these are massive things even for a labor government which might have a little more flexibility politically to undertake so can you get that 1% up to 2 2.5% and you you know even the biggest optimist in the room won't say that you can do that in six months this is a medium term strategy so and i think you know you you can be relatively optimistic if some of these reforms pan out but that a takes time and b it's a big if it's a big caveat and we just don't know the details yet. Jacob if it's come to you you were quite i wouldn't say welcoming but you're certainly very positive towards reform when it came along you were saying that it should be a place for now you've been talking about Nigel Farage having a place in the conservative party and isn't it the case that reform cost you your seats because if it hasn't stood against you you probably would still be there and in the end they had not come that they basically were a huge threat to the conservatives and they achieved almost nothing other than five MPs in parliament so they've we just say that they've they've taken their they've damaged their cause because they're fewer people like you in parliament i can't imagine what Nigel Farage is out to do was to have fewer Jacoby's mocks i imagine he might have liked a few rishi synecks but they've ended up and not just you but Andrea Jenkins there are others he might call the popular conservatism wing who've ended up being the victims of what you again you might call a popular conservative revolution. I was not entitled to the votes of the 7 000 people who voted for reform in northeast sunset i had to win their votes and i had to win their votes wearing a blue rosette and supporting a conservative government that had simply failed to do conservative things that is not Nigel Farage's fault that is to some degree my fault and and the fault in others within the conservative party um one of the advantages of not being a member parliament anymore there's still a member of the conservative party is that i can speak more freely and i will confess to you that it was getting increasingly frustrating during the election campaign on doorsteps when constituents as had been said to me the highest taxation in 70 years immigration out of control a lunatic green policy and you still want me to vote conservative and i agreed with them in all three points and so it's not Nigel's fault it's my fault and the fault of others of us in the Tory party you have to win over voters you can't take them for granted and we ignored our base now what do we do next well i think we have to be a little silent for a bit we have to wait and see we have to see what the Labour party does you see i think what Kate saying so important because economically i think Labour may get a good year interest rates again and come down i'm in the Bank of England's dreadful awful organization incompetent useless doesn't know what monetary policy would be if it bit it in the leg but even the Bank of England is going to produce interest rates now that inflation is back at target that will help but today we had the first big mistake by Labour which is going to make our economy falter over the long term so there may be some short-term help but we are going to remain a high cost energy market and therefore fundamentally uncompetitive uncompetitive year in year out as is the whole of Europe North Sea drilling man or North Sea drilling what we ought to be doing is getting cheap energy and that actually means fracking we need to make this country competitive our electricity prices are double layers of the United States and if we carry on that route i do think we will have an economic pickup in next year or so and i think that will be helpful for the government and i think the government is helped by low expectations i think that chart you showed is actually quite helpful because there weren't people thinking that nobody thinks kyar starma can walk on water but think back to 1997 we all thought that tony blare could walk on water and then he sank now nobody thinks that of kyar starma so when it turns out he can't people won't be disappointed and low expectations in politics are extremely helpful low expectations bit of an economic pickup some routine competence and that's quite helpful isn't it which we weren't we weren't as good at as i would like us to have been do you think hmrc might occasionally answer the telephone things like that if they can if they can sort that out they have a they have i think a more extended honeymoon than the more optimistic tour is a predicting but the long-term economic mistake was made today okay so let's go straight to questions we've got a lot to get through tonight so let's see if we can group them in threes yeah so thank you so i mean i agree with jacob i think if anyone can lose the next election for labor it's ed milliband um my questions actually to k you talked about economic growth in the road to 2029 winning for labor is paved by economic growth they don't have any money pension funds how interventionists will Rachel Reeves be in mandating that those pension funds who have got all the money will will redirect that capital into the uk economy and stimulate growth i'm really interested in how that might play for you please okay and sir so jacob your sort of central prescription for solving the conservative party crisis seems to be to unite the right and to appeal more to a foreign voters which i don't fundamentally disagree with the talk but an awful lot of voters when lived m when labor how are we going to win those people over whilst also uniting a fractured right-wing it almost seems like the two things can't exist at once good question and another one sir the blue shirts so jacob uh you and i have a little bit in common uh in that we were both recently made redundant in fact i was made redundant on tuesday um and my boss he uh he uh wrote in the telegraph earlier this year or i think maybe at the end of last year complaining about your government's um increase of corporation tax uh so my question is uh is this the beginning of a mass exodus right so and you think you may be redundant and you're saying you think corporation tax might be manufactured that will be his reason okay interesting um jacob i posed the increase in corporation tax when i was in the cabinet and accused rishi soon i could be a socialist chancellor i i mean there was nothing more that i could have done to try and stop it i thought it was completely stupid policy when cutting corporation tax had raised revenue and had made us more competitive and just look at arland uh if you don't believe me and this idea that there is more room to raise taxes and have a growing economy is simply false we damaged the economy by having taxation that was too high i also had to think expenditure is too high um to come to the question on it where do the other votes go where we lost roughly seven million votes of which about four million um went reform and then quite a big chunk stayed at home so i think those are the ones that we should have been focusing on before the election interestingly i will be revealing on gb news later this evening an opinion poll that has been done for gm news asking whether a different leader would have helped when people over who'd gone to vote labor and they would be more likely to vote conservative had we kept boris johnson so there is going to be something in leadership um but there's also going to be something in having policies that people like because a lot of labor voters want migration to be controlled a lot of labor voters i i had somebody came up to me when i was campaigning and he said he was voting labor because he'd always voted labor we couldn't stand their green policies nobody wants to be cold and poor and if we focus on an energy policy that will make people rich and warm um or cool in the summer because we can have some air conditioning uh that's going to be helpful so it's it's getting the right policies that will appeal to people it's reuniting the right as a first step those four million and the ones who stayed at home are the easiest to win back once we won those back we begin to reach out to more people but uh on corporation tax i mean we've chucked out the non-doms that was bonkers let me say every billionaire who wants to come to this country comes here voluntarily does not have to stay and spends a proportionate amount of money because they're rich and they can afford to on which they pay VAT they employ people they pay national insurance etc etc and trying to get rid of them all was a really really stupid thing to do it was a socialist policy of envy that we should never have dabbled with uh and and labor is very happy with it it's a short answer on pensions because they again have not been forthcoming about any of those details i think the only details we got from labor about pensions at all during the election was that they would stay committed to the triple lock but not the triple lock plus um all of the speaks of this extent which there's a lot of reform in the area that's up for grabs maybe something labor can do um but what can we speculate it does strike me that Rachel Reeves and those in the treasury have clocked and clocked a long time ago that tax receipts are simply not going to allow for major investment at the moment they had to learn that the hard way with their green investment strategy and i think they know that if that investment money isn't coming from private funds from pension funds from business from all over the place that isn't specifically income tax or VAT receipts that they're not going to have much money for any kind of development they have to unlock it i do think they've clocked that i do think they know that but how they're going to go about it these are the questions we wanted answered in the election that never came okay let's take three more questions hello i had a question about trade policy uh if trump gets elected and tries to end the free trade era and imposes universal tariffs and effectively starts a trade war with china if the u.s insists that europe including the uk follows suit is it right to side with the u.s or should we try and stick with free trade principles in white when what might not be a free trade world yep that's right yep at the end though first of all um if you're a patriot you hope that kiss starma will do well actually but secondly if i if i understand the complacency on the panel the Tories are going to be out of power for a generation this election it's not about labor's low share of the votes it was about anybody but the conservatives due to their entire incompetence and arrogance of changing leaders over the last 14 years and some of the policies they introduced and by the way the reform vote only a third of the voters for reform came from 2019 voters a lot of reform came from people who hadn't voted before so did the panel really think that moving to the right and embracing reforms agenda therein lies the future success of the conservative party everybody knows elections are won from the center right not the far right and jacob your complacency is absolutely breathtaking you should be ashamed of yourself okay um certainly mixing up there sir thank you for that and um and and let's let's get a third question yes yes i'm old enough to remember 2030 years ago post-industrial society going to balanced economies etc etc i come from a manufacturing base and i watch manufacturing bases from all types of products totally destroyed 25 30 percent of employment was it what is it now 10 or 12 percent and struggling how can that possibly come back the factors are now warehouses the machinery is gone abroad the skills have disappeared how can we have wealth creation when we're just talking of um you know the city of london and a few other odds and ends okay um good point right well let's answer that certainly maybe sir you you're very passionate question and i'm not sure anybody here is saying that the conservative result was anything less than the calamity i think that's the starting point of pretty much everybody and when it comes to and the labor small vote share i'm not saying um that this somehow it makes a calamity even next i just think it's important because never have we had such a mismatch between votes and seats when we're talking about political and the country it's worth bearing that in mind as it is the two the low vote share of both two main parties lots of other votes are in flux for exactly the reason that you state now whether the conservatives should move um right or left or more what they should do next isn't a question we have yet come on to so you're perhaps uh but i suspect that jacob we would probably think we should do more to reconcile the conservative party with the voters that it left but um on that point i'll let jake speak for that um kt do you want to pick up any of these points yeah i mean i suppose just briefly on on the result um i think that you have a situation whereby it's really hard to see the Tories coming back in one term now the Tories are trying to cheer themselves and i do you know what you mean i spoke to some Tories um after the result and they said i was really not that bad there's clearly no enthusiasm for kierstarma and you didn't want to say sure but there's a lot of hatred for you guys you know and and you can also argue you keep looking at the voting that yes not you know lots will didn't vote for labor but there was tactical voting going on where some people perhaps would have voted for labor had they thought that was the most effective way to stop the Tories but they thought no voting lived damn is what's going to stop the Tories in my seat and perhaps as the election did closer to some voters who maybe stayed on the sofa but did want the Tories out would have gone out to vote so i don't think they can take too much comfort from that result but i think we can say that voters are more volatile than ever it will be some recent elections and i do remember after the 2019 result which was a less jerry coven had a better result than rishi soon act which will probably remind ourselves but you know after the 2019 elections so many people perhaps myself even i may have said this said oh boris johnson will have at least two terms there will be at least two Tory terms because they have such a big majority now of course kierstarma has a bigger majority but the same thing as being said which is no two free terms and we just you know you just cannot predict what events are going to happen and i think if you look at the labor majority it is a you know it's a good problem to have for kierstarma to have over 400 labor MPs they're problem this week when they all met up in the houses of parliament was the normal room they couldn't use because they can't actually fit them in so they had to go to church house which is near here which is about tony blare had his 1997 moment but you know keeping over 400 MPs together when the second party and lots of these constituencies could be reformed it could be you know you know they some are seeing you laughing and surrogacy threats i think will be tricky when you get closer to election with difficult reforms and another quick quick point there the other reason why i think labor's vote share is important is that because i think this means that the government is not going to be complacent i don't think that vote share necessarily says 10 years in power i think that if kierstarma had thought he had 10 years he would have been disabused by that seeing how this anti-encompancy factor that we saw in france we see it in america and we saw it in britain if people disappointed in you the government they will turn against you and there's no party trial loyalist forces couldn't stop that so in my view this will make starma morning client to apply radical reform hopefully in the nhs hopefully in welfare because i think he believes that if he has got nothing to show for it in five years but he's going to be meeting versions like the one jacob says he met in summer set saying he promised us a b and c and none of it happened therefore we're going to put you out so that's why i do think that matters i don't think the c has changed i think that no single party feels secure right now okay um on the question about free trade uh abandon it at your peril if you want your country to be poorer and you want people to have fewer opportunities you can go the way of what donald trump is proposing and for those who don't know he has mentioned that he might slap a ten percent import tariff on all imports i mean the the policy is a bit vague like a lot of trump's comments and slogans um i you know i'll eat my words if if this isn't true my suspicion is donald trump will do no such thing because uh he has two ambitions one is to do a rematch of the 2020 election and we don't know quite yet if he's going to get that exactly what joe biden that's a question that's very much up in the air but i think regardless whether it's biden kamala harris or a different candidate for the democrats in this election there's a very good chance donald trump will be back in the oval office and then i think he wants to try to relive what he considers to be the glory days and frankly many americans do of the best economy that they can remember and if you want the best economy that you can remember you don't do a ten percent import tariff um so i hope that the very reasonable to ask the question but i i hope we don't see that that world come to fruition i also think it's an interesting question about what is left and right i mean the Tories have taken the tax burden to its highest level in 70 years is that is that center right and is is that left i mean the things that jacob talks about are very much on the mind of the nation i i couldn't possibly characterize talking about tax immigration and green industrial policy is as far right and and will debate it i mean i have a very liberal view of immigration and i know it's deeply unpopular at the moment but i i think one of the problems through the Tory party is that it has really been questioning what it is who it is it has been a tent held together by very weak polls for a long time and that infighting about what it believed created so much chaos that the nation didn't want to tolerate anymore but i think these discussions are exactly what we have to be having because um you know it has has the past couple of years been center right i certainly don't think so certainly not on not on a lot of topics jacob the important question on manufacturing first of all that is part of the problem with our green policies which have closed down or are closing down our steel industry because they're simply uncompetitive because of the input cost of energy and then we import it with the higher emissions from abroad um and close down our own manufacturing this is where the green policy is so crazy but to come to the question of complacency perhaps i didn't explain myself clearly enough when i said that the lack of enthusiasm for starmer is potentially helpful to him because if there isn't an enormous enthusiasm you can't disappoint and tony blare ultimately disappointed everybody because they thought he was amazing and then they realized he was human like the rest of us kya starmer only has to perform adequately to do well i think this could be in electoral terms a beginning for labor rather than an end now that may not mean that they remain this super majority but i think their vote check could easily go up but the next election as people think they've done quite well and i don't think that you look at that 34 percent and you say oh and it's now easy for the Tories we thought that in 2001 we thought the pendulum would naturally swing backwards it didn't it remained exactly where it was and i think we should be very careful about that however on the issue that elections are one from the center this is not true it is historically false let me run through the last 50 years of elections the elections in my lifetime i won't be too long i promise i've got to get it i've got to get a gb news um Ted Heath wins a majority overturns a labor majority of a hundred on an outright free market selston man manifesto he loses having you turned and given in Margaret Thatcher 79 83 and 87 wins historic majorities as the most right wing leader we have had and delivered on the free market home ownership getting rid of regulation getting rid of immediately one first thing she did exchange controls this great liberation of the economy that she brought in that's not some pinko lefty middle road stuff and then 92 we go down 97 a catastrophe when do we next do well 2019 when we're leading on brexit which is perceived as being the most right wing policy because people want to get brexit done we do badly when we're middle muddle fiddle fuddle we also do badly when we're not seen as competent now there are two bits of politics aren't there there are parties that are cuddly and there are parties that are competent and when labor which always appears cuddly also appears competent it wins by miles we never appear cuddly just look at me therefore we have to be competent but we just weren't we weren't doing the routine business of government well delays in every interaction you had with the state i mentioned hmrc but it wasn't just hmrc dvla wasn't opening its post for ages and i found as a constituency mp if you were dealing with dvla online it worked fine if you actually had to write to them nothing happened till you got in touch with your mp or with a newspaper and then they suddenly found your letter this routine competence really did us damage that the i know there are reasons for it but waiting lists on the nhs so many people mentioned those they just felt we weren't good at the business of government and that destroyed us in 97 it destroyed us again this time and it's hard to win that back from opposition because you can't prove you're competent in opposition because you're not doing anything but it's absolute nonsense to say we win from the middle we have one majorities when we have been proper conservatives and that's what we should be again okay well given that jacob's got to go in five minutes are there any more questions for him specifically sorry you've got your hand up so high you must have a really good question what what jacob wasn't doing was looking at where the left was in all those right victories Thatcher won from the right but the center the center's voters had nowhere to go similarly with Johnson Johnson won from the right but the the center's voters had a choice being called in johnson and can you name an instance when they can serve to party one without those center's voters yeah good point jacob do you want to join some of the work i mean i i think if you take 2019 there was a centrist opportunity to get the lib dams which people heartily rejected no government opportunity i think he means when the old third the realistic governing party wasn't as crazy as kine core as um well jim calahan was not crazy and actually by 1987 nor was neil kine he'd made enormous changes and had a very successful campaign in remodeling the labor party so the examples of crazy leaders are 83 and 2019 but in 2017 a crazy leader got more votes than the same leader got and won with just a few weeks we're just under a week ago so so i i don't think that really works i think people voted positively and if you look at turnouts turnouts were high in 70 or 79 etc they've been low in elections like a one and this recent one 2024 when we haven't had a proper forthright conservative manifesto then there's a question for jacob will milk his last three minutes with us um yep sir hello jacob i'm also called jacob and i'm a Roman Catholic but that's where the comparisons stop i'm i guess i'm um i'm just looking for your endorsement for the next leader basically and um given how robustly can be bayden auger's distance herself from najafaraj um what you're looking for to take up the mantle for your party it's too early to say i think we should take a bit of time and try and work out who the best leader is i don't think there's a great rush no one wants to listen to us at the moment doesn't really matter who our leader is for the next few weeks months possibly even longer we need to work out who we are what we want to do and then find a leader who can be a spokesman for that and lady at the middle here yep oh hi i just to ask you actually you was just saying you didn't do all this stuff when you had 14 years so why didn't you do it i mean i'm thinking about the health service mainly because i think that's such a and i was hoping that you were going to do this radical reform actually really look at it and have strategy and use the brains are up there apparently a Westminster but you didn't you gave it up and now i i read katie balls about that um alan millburns been working with west treating for the last 18 months but they're not bringing in a social insurance model i mean they're not looking at more radical thinking because technology has been introduced anyway all the time so i mean why didn't you just get to grips with it and get on with it it's an extremely fair question um an immigrant hatcher's words we were frit we thought that any major reform of the NHS would be so unpopular coming from the Tories that we just poured more money into it and more money didn't actually improve things it just meant some people got more money and i think west treating is a really important figure because he has opened up the discussion that we can join in on and we should have started earlier but we can now join in on on how you have fundamental reform of the NHS that he's taken labor away from saying the only answer is more money and if they're saying that then we can begin to too but i'm afraid we just thought it was too hot to handle we did however reform welfare with ideas and we reformed schools with michael gov to really important big changes that have been fundamental in improving people's life opportunities so we shouldn't be too negative about the last 14 years there were mistakes of course there were but there were some things we can be proud of and on that happy note um i must go to the qe2 center to um do state of the nation but thank you so much for having me and i'm sorry not to stay longer thank you thank you thank you Jacob and so who else has got some questions um thanks um i was really interested by the the graph you put up with the predicted share of the vote that labor would get and then obviously didn't get and i was wondering if that influenced people to either not vote assuming that labor had already won and whether we're moving to the way it is in the uk in the u.s where people sort of things are assumed to be definite democratic or republican states therefore people don't bother voting and it all comes down to about three or four swing states and i'm wondering if that's coming going to happen in the u.k with the number of polls we had predicting voting share so that people stop voting because they think it's already over yeah well so i i won't try to guess where you're from by a voicemail been in Australia they forbid the publication of opinion polls during the campaign for that kind of reason and and every opinion poll told everybody massive labor majority almost no point in voting now when we see a labor of course you will see the problem with opinion polls is they might ask you as a person who would you want to vote for but when it comes down to it it all depends on your constituency because people do vote tactically and that's why you do get the results quite often different to what the polls do so i think it's absolutely the case lots of labor voters will have either stayed at home because i thought they would have won or they might be the more inclined to vote for the green party because i thought well labor is home and draw anybody but it really didn't mean my vote so there's all of these factors going on under our system and and i i also think but i do think we're living in the era where opinion polls do get it calamity'sly wrong when Donald Trump was first elected i remember there was a one percent chance of his being told he would do so look at the French elections just last weekend everybody was voting for the um for the left wing block thinking the aim was to deprive and the um the national rally of its majority and just make it win by best molar amount but to their amazement for left wing block of parties came first now they can't agree he's going to be the prime minister so i think there is and the french was a case study in the way that they elect the people voted depending on what and also did their voting arrangements and were packed based on what they thought where the polls were and it was all wrong so i do think there is i do think the great thing about these elections is they do pack surprises so for that reason i don't think we're going to get on the american way i just said briefly in terms of the uk election campaign if you bumped into anyone from the conservative campaign headquarters in the days leading up to the election you would not get a smile um but you'd also highly likely get them slagging off the polls and saying that the polls were having a destabilizing effect in their campaign now some people laugh at that saying you know it's almost blaming the voters when you start saying the problems the polls and then you see the result but i think they felt that it meant they couldn't really get a break or a hearing or a focus on policy certainly i think that it says something about the Tory campaign but by the final two weeks they felt in their focus groups by far the most effective line was the super majority warning and saying you know you stop kids super majority but obviously speaks to the fact that they had very little positive to say obviously you know what they would do with what they were arguing or standing for um but that was why they just doubled down so hard on it because the campaign had all these errors and then really just um i think lots of people perhaps wanted the Tories out but weren't quite sure any political party should have a majority of 200 so i think it had an impact in that sense it's okay um of course let's remember Theresa May had a general election thinking the polls were going to give her a stonking majority and then was proven catastrophically incorrect let's take some more questions um we've not talked about social policy um should did did the Tory party mr trick and will labor be work on speed be work on speed right okay hi Fraser when you asked people how they voted earlier you missed out a very very important category people who didn't vote or people who spoiled their ballots i'm been a member of the Tory party for more than 50 years i've been a parliamentary candidate i've been a deputy leader of a London borough i worked in four Tory seats during this election all of which turned Tory MPs but i and i'm going to make a public confession now i've not told anybody else i spoiled my own ballot paper and the reason i did that and it's it's a it's a phrase that's not come up today and i'm going to use it we had lost the trust of the British public because we had failed to govern with integrity and there are those two big words and i claim responsibility for that or a tribute responsibility to that to Boris Johnson and Liz Truss um Rachel Reeve's speech on Monday focused strongly on changes to the planning system so i have two questions first of all realistically what growth can they deliver and secondly do you think that the government will invest the political capital to see those reforms through okay do you want to take on that question about growth and housing is the low hanging fruit and it has been for a long time actually building anything in the UK building some homes building some energy infrastructure it is incredibly difficult Labor's language on housing and planning reform is good if you look at the details they've given us so far i am still somewhat skeptical if you're not willing to build upwards and urban areas if you're not willing to build in the areas where people are desperate to live and where the most job opportunities are you're going to struggle to see that growth so talk of new towns especially if you're not going to invest the money to connect them with roads and to build a new school in a new hospital i think that gets a little bit dicey they do seem serious about going after the gray belts which is land that gets classified as green belt but is basically abandoned car parks and i think you can see some winds on that but the irony is that a labor party and a prime minister who likes to attack the Tory party for law fair could find that actually a lot of environmental legislation gets in the way of some of these planning reforms but if you want to grow the economy you you have to address housing and then very quickly did the Tories miss a trick on woke i don't think so they tried to make changing the equality act to address issues of transgender recognition and women's spaces very early on in the campaign they made it a big talking point i think at that point a lot of people had just tuned out and frankly i think they tuned out more than a year ago i think after that many budget anything on social issues on issues that a lot of people will associate and identify with the Tory public policy wasn't going to change their mind but you think labor will be work on speed as it were a worker it's really interesting because um what was very notable to me in the last days of the campaign was how strongly kia stama was trying to insist that he knew what a woman was and you know of all the things to be talking about he was really pushing it and that is of course because it's a question that he struggled to answer in the past i didn't necessarily take that as an indication of how woke they will or would not be i took that as an indication of is this a politician actually he's quite willing to change his mind if if votes and power seem to be going in a different direction and that's why i'm going to wait to see what they do on housing on NHS reform on a lot of these promises that they've made because and it did seem to me that view see held quite strongly once upon a time had changed dramatically in the final days of that campaign so on what else could that happen i think if you look at what the new culture secretary has said so lisa nandy gave a speech to her department and it's been interesting i think um all the new cabinet have really been making a big thing of these welcoming speeches they try and reset the tone and trying to come across a lot of times the adults in the rooms are saying they'll be nice to civil servants they can wear whatever land yard they want and so forth and but at least the nandy was saying that under hell there'd be an end to culture wars now that is obviously easier said than done i think some would say uh you're ending it from one spectrum perhaps you're taking a side as it is i think that it what certainly feels to be the case so you think back to you know soon after kya starma had become leader and he took the knee alongside angel arena and they posed for a photograph i can't imagine today's kya starma doing that and they have clearly moved more to the center and to the right i think on the question of woman's biology and it took him quite a long time to get there rosy duffield a labor mp would still say that kya starma has barely reached out to her and she's had a really tough time by you know stating some facts about womanhood and but there are women in the shadow cabinet who feel really strongly on this and i think have pushed kya starma's position on but i think there will be tricky decisions coming up the track and i do think you're going to get a softening on some areas you know already on you know trans policy uh you know gender certificates and others it's going to be a different stance in the Tories and i think that some of the changes they might find easiest to make is cultural change given the lack of money so so i don't think it'll be on speed and but you know perhaps the tool toys that gab is paced as we go on the kya team is say when back to clock and Nicholas sturgeon had passed the gender self ID thing now kami bade and and als to jack both vetoed it do you think that had that mean a labor government a starma government they would not have vetoed it i don't i don't think personally i don't think his starma would have vetoed the smp gender recognition rule you have to remember scottish labor we were backing it anasawa backed it and then yes labor in westman's it took a different position but it was actually you know one of the bolder things rishis duneck has done was actually issuing that order to block the smp gender self recognition act now you can say that's because it was kami bade and als to jack suggesting he do it but lots of people thought even boris johnson might not have done it because he often changed his position a bit on gender had different voices in the room and so i've really uh can't imagine there would have been a kya starma move to do something like radical um i think he's not going to be doing front fitted things but you know tony blare recently um did come out and say he didn't know why politicians had got and such you know it was such a mess on the question of biology and and perhaps kya starma he does speak to tony blare a lot we'll go to him for guidance on some of these issues okay let's say we're almost getting into a time so let's take okay there's many questions as we quickly get away with do you think forages around for good and does that mean the toys will have to make a deal good question yep so it's less for question more of a request um which is um the you uh i noticed the inspector you you do criticize the government a lot or the previous government should i say um and they deserved it though didn't they yes yes um what i'd like is you guys to attack labor more because you have to bear in mind okay i know you do a lot already the right wing is the weakest it's been uh in the spectase history if you can attack labor more that be great with better in mind better in mind by the way i mean i hate to right now i'm feeling quite positive about to i think the way the streaming thing is incredible um you pointed out the health service was exactly right i think we're streetings about to do the reform which the conservatives didn't do and when in my view if a government whether it be labor lived them or whatever does things what the spectators would be advocating then you should you take the policies where they are don't think but should be tribal instinct which was which we're going to say everything starmard does is wrong so long minutes continue and let's take another sorry we'll come back to you but not just right as you run for good and we'll be able to make a deal with them but sir right in the middle there if you're yes thank you um i'll be quite interested to know why you're so optimistic about west streeting and the NHS as someone who works in the NHS we don't know what reform they're bringing in and with regards to the one graph you didn't show which is the waiting list it will come down anyway but it won't be half in the next parliament speaking to my colleagues okay do you want to take one five yeah let's take one for a question say everyone might need to take it down sorry yeah sorry you so your your wife's campaigning for you over there all right um Jacob Reese Mogg said that the government was frit it was more than frit it was utterly gutless and it allowed the debt to GDP rise from 34% to 100% it could never say no it just said yes yes yes how long do you think it will take because this country's on the verge of bankruptcy now on the verge of bankruptcy how long will it take to pull that back to a reasonable let's say 34% how many generations do you think that will take okay nice easy one to add right um i'll like keep winding first i don't know how many generations it would take because you would first require a politician who admitted to what you just said and uh the fiscal rule that Rachel Reese says she's going to keep from Jeremy Hunt is that debt falls as a percentage of GDP on a five-year rolling period what does that mean it means it never has to fall it means every year you can pretend in five years you're going to make really hard decisions and it keeps going up and i agree with you and i'm actually terrified i don't know when it happens but if you don't admit to it and don't prepare for it that means that at some point people get really badly hurt because there's a there's a break moment and to combine your question with our first question about um our second question about uh can we attack the left more i think we have been attacking the left for the past five years it is the Tory government that has been on a borrow and spend spree it is Boris Johnson endless trust with that mini budget that thought that they could spend forever so i think we are attacking the left maybe in a slightly different way why am i excited about west treating you're you're so right they have not said it all really what the fundamental reform is going to be but this time this month last year our politicians were in west mr abbey literally praying to our NHS on its 75th birthday at the altar praying for it how refreshing just to have anybody at that top level of power not talking about the NHS as a deity and talking about it is something that's failing its patience i give them credit for that on the forage question i mean i think it's a big conundrum for the Tory party because there are lots of Tory MPs who are adamant that they don't want Nigel Farage in the tent and i think that cammy beige knock who i think is cammy beige knocks to lose in this Tory leadership contest and she could still lose it and but you know i think she is the one to beat right now and she has made clear that she doesn't think you can have him there because reform has said it wants to destroy the Tory party Nigel Farage hasn't often used that phrase himself but loads around him and you think about the pitching and the effect and you speak to lots of Tory MPs across the party and they think it's i would say about two-thirds of the current parliamentary party rough don't want Nigel Farage in and they don't want an alliance from Nigel Farage i think therefore either you're going to have a Tory split or their best hope is that Nigel Farage decides that washington dz is a fantastic place to be if there's a donald trump return and decides to spend quite a lot of time there and then the cracks emerge in the reform of five MPs and they become less of a force because i'm struggling right now to see how the current Tory party and the current reform party come together in a meaningful way i mean Nigel Farage wants to replicate that what happened after the canada wipe out where you had a reunited what reunited right but i struggle i think with the bloodletting and so forth to see that coming about any time soon okay i'll add my quick tap into whether or Nigel Farage i'd be interesting to see this time next year how many common sessions he's still showing up for i think that would he will determine where he's here to stay or not whether he's got the intention span to do the long slog of opposition i suspect he might be living in america before rishizumek actually um if his friend donald trump gets elected and so as to why he's optimistic it's not just the verbal positioning look at who he's got look at which reasons got around him he we now see the return of allen milburn as one of his advisers we see the return of paul corrigan now if those of you who haven't heard of paul corrigan imagine it's everybody and he is um he is a very committed reformer to whom i devoted my daily telegraph column tomorrow and he has been saying a whole bunch of things of any gesture of form and he he's very much a person of action and darren murphy as well who's merber a milliman's more informal adviser this band is back together like some eighties pop drip coming back to replay their hits uh in their in their pensioner years so i will take this labor government as i find it and i'm prepared to keep an open mind about it as well um so i i may be very quickly disbused of all this um i do worry that this ken doesn't look much as well for a form agenda but i do think um we're treating has earned the right to be taken on trust so far um um so probably the last time i'll be saying this in the audience like this but come back in the years time anyway so we have hit our post recording time so i should just like to thank you guys all for coming i could be here all night but you all live dinner plans to go to so i let you get to them and please join me in thanking the absent jacob and my other panelists thank you [applause] [music] [ Silence ]