Transcript: Farage — more popular than the PM

This is an audio transcript of the Political Fix podcast episode: ‘Farage — more popular than the PM’

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Lucy Fisher
Welcome to Political Fix from the Financial Times with me, Lucy Fisher. Coming up, we’ll ask whether Reform UK is ready to become a serious contender for government. And we’ll look at the chancellor’s spending review which kicked off this week. Here to discuss it all is FT deputy political editor Jim Pickard. Hi, Jim.

Jim Pickard
Hi, Lucy.

Lucy Fisher
And FT political correspondent Anna Gross. Hi, Anna.

Anna Gross
Hi, Lucy.

Lucy Fisher
Plus, we’ll have Gideon Rachman, the FT’s chief foreign affairs columnist, joining us in the studio shortly to discuss what’s going on in Syria and how the UK should respond.

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So let’s start with Reform. It’s been a big month for the party. In the past seven days we’ve had the first poll that puts Nigel Farage’s party ahead of Labour. And one of the leading bookmakers, Ladbrokes, now makes Farage the favourite to succeed Keir Starmer as the next prime minister ahead of Kemi Badenoch.

Anna, you’ve done this fantastic Big Read this week on the party and I’ll put the link to that in the show notes. Tell us about that and this crucial question: could it become a serious contender for government?

Anna Gross
Yeah. So the party does feel as though it has a lot of momentum behind it at the moment and there are a few different factors as to why that is. The first, I would say, is that just its membership is growing. It’s surpassed 100,000 members, which is not, it’s not far behind the Tories, which are on roughly . . . They don’t publish their figures, but they’re thought to be around 140,000.

And as part of that growing membership, they’ve also had some quite high-profile defections — Tim Montgomery, who is the founder of Conservative Home; Suella Braverman’s husband and Suella Braverman, former home secretary who is still a sitting Conservative MP. So her husband has defected to Reform. And Nick Candy. So he’s a quite significant Conservative party donor who this week said not only is he defecting to Reform, but he’s gonna be their fundraiser and he’s confident he’s gonna be raising the tens of mns of pounds. And then also on top of that you have Elon Musk in the US, who’s been quite vocally lending his support to Reform on his platform. And so that’s going on in the background.

And our piece was trying to look at whether there’s actually a plausible — not probable, but plausible — path to victory for Reform and for Nigel Farage And the conclusion that many came to that we spoke to in the piece was that is highly unlikely, still probably below 10 per cent, but it’s looking more probable than it has done at any other time in the past.

Lucy Fisher
Jim, for you and me at any rate this ain’t our first rodeo with Farage. We’ve seen the Ukip years. We’ve seen Farage many times over predicting a big political earthquake where he’s gonna come in and shake up the system. And to be fair, Ukip back in the day was effective. I think it played a key role in pressuring David Cameron into calling the EU referendum, and the rest is history on that front. What do you think about the sort of the progress he’s made under the Reform UK label and whether it could go forward to become, if not a party of government, maybe the main opposition?

Jim Pickard
So I think the first thing to remember is that when you look at the odds for who the next prime minister might be, it will look as if it’s downplaying Labour because we don’t know who the next Labour leader will be. So a lot of Labour people are more than 10 to 1, but it’s because there’s more than 10 of them. So bear that in mind on that particular point.

But you know, I think the reason that people are looking at Nigel Farage in this way is that, of course, what happened in America with Donald Trump. And we’ve seen that a populist with a kind of, you know, wealthy background but with a sort of invective, you know, pro the workers, rightwing, anti-net zero climate change type stuff, anti-immigration, anti-woke. We’ve seen that in America. It obviously succeeded.

Now there are big differences between American politics and British politics — you know, we don’t have the same kind of heavy evangelical Christian elements or the pro-gun lobby or quite the same sort of, you know, suspicion of inverted commas, socialism, ie, higher state spending, which is like a big thing in America. But what we do have is we have a citizenship which is taking a lot of their political influence from social media, where 10 or 20 years ago they would have taken it from more conventional mainstream media. And that is feeding through into how a lot of people see the world.

And there is a market for things which were not so mainstream, whether it’s kind of anti-vax conspiracies or whether it’s, you know, thinking climate change isn’t something to worry about. There is a market for this stuff and Reform is there not necessarily agreeing with all of those specific conspiracy theories but tapping into that kind of dissatisfaction with the mainstream, with the establishment. And yes, we’ve seen Reform’s posts ticking up. But, you know, I think it’s more of a threat to the Conservatives at the moment as the main opposition. I don’t necessarily think that Reform is gonna form the next government.

However, that is still dangerous for Labour. And, you know, there are senior strategists who we’ve spoken to this week who say, look, we’re not taking this lightly because — and Reform acknowledges this as well. Part of their strategy is to build enough support across the whole country that they might win in enough three-way marginals. So if you’ve reduced the Conservative votes enough, Reform could slip in across lots of seats.

Lucy Fisher
That’s interesting. I mean, Jim, Farage himself is a very Marmite character. I’ve certainly spoken to some senior Labour figures who think for the moment Reform is a threat to them because of him. Anna also mentions this point that it’s a similar base that Reform has built up compared to Ukip. That shouldn’t surprise us possibly. But to my mind, it’s very striking that at Ukip’s high point in the 2015 election, they won around 4mn votes and Reform won almost exactly the same number this time. So it has led some people to ask, is that just a cap on the people who are interested in this kind of rightwing-flavoured party?

Jim Pickard
So I think that’s possible to some extent. But I think the known unknown here is what happens if it looks as if Reform has overtaken the Conservatives, if they’re substantially ahead of the Conservatives in the polls for a period of months or, let’s say years, because what we don’t know is how many right-leaning voters would have liked to have voted Reform, Ukip, Brexit party. But when Conservatives, just for the same reason that some people who would vote Green vote Labour. But that’s the system that we’re in.

And so, you know, people talk about Nigel Farage being a Marmite character. Well, let me introduce Kemi Badenoch, who as far as I can work out, is possibly as divisive in terms of whether people think she’s wonderful or less wonderful. And in a popularity contest between Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage I have a sneaking suspicion that quite a few rightwing voters would go for the Farage option.

Now the really big point to get across here and the thing I find most fascinating about all of this is vote efficiency. And of course, you can have all of those three parties on 25 per cent and you can get wildly different outcomes because as the Labour party discovered under Jeremy Corbyn, they stacked up huge majorities in some inner city areas but it wasn’t enough to get a majority. Labour has become much more efficient about where their votes are. The Conservatives, of course, more efficient in rural areas, Labour more efficient in urban areas. Could it be that the Reform party at the next general election gets close to the main parties, inverted commas, or even overtakes them but still gets fewer seats? And I’m gonna take listeners back to 1993 when the Alliance of Liberals and SDP got 25 per cent and 23 MPs and Labour got 27.5 per cent and 209 MPs.

Anna Gross
Well, exactly. And part of their strategy — I’ve been speaking to senior people at Reform UK this week and part of their strategy to combat that, to combat the challenges thrown up by the first past the post system is to do this incredibly targeted ground campaign, building up those councillors, loads of people who leaflet, who will go and collect data for them in those areas where they already have some strength.

Jim Pickard
But at the moment they have very few councillors, don’t they?

Anna Gross
They do. At the moment they have I think 42 councillors, but they’re hoping to get to 200-300 next year.

Lucy Fisher
How plausible is that? Because in the local elections in May, they only stood in one in seven seats and they only picked up two new councillors across the entire country.

Anna Gross
Yeah. I mean, I think it depends how much they convert their membership into people who are willing to stand and I think that is a bit of an unknown at the moment. They’re obviously bullish. They think they can, but there is a hell of a lot of hubris in the party.

Jim Pickard
I think as well the other thing is party membership is a really bad indicator for electoral success, as we saw with the Labour party, which went from under 200,000 members to 600,000 under Jeremy Corbyn, its least successful leader in the century.

Lucy Fisher
Yeah, very good point. Anna, you mentioned Elon Musk. He’s taken an interest in the party. He’s been sort of tweeting about it. There was a curious press report that he was apparently mulling over giving the party $100mn in donations. That didn’t seem to be particularly stood up. I asked Farage about it himself. He said he had not heard anything along those lines about a major donation. What do you think the likelihood of that playing out is and what difference would it make if they got a huge influx of money from Musk or any other source?

Anna Gross
You know, curious sourcing on that, which I think it came from Conservative party people and senior businesspeople.

Jim Pickard
It was run up from someone in the pub.

Lucy Fisher
(Laughter) Did not appear in the pages of the FT, we should add.

Anna Gross
To be honest, I think it’s plausible. I don’t think . . . The figure that was touted was £100mn. And I think one of the things that made it slightly absurd is that’s how much Musk donated to the US campaign. Why would he donate the same amount to Britain, first of all? But, you know, it is important and particularly for Reform that they haven’t historically had very much money for the past five years. They’ve been kind of scraping by and their strategy at the moment, as I said, is all about really targeted ground campaign and getting people doing the leaflets and getting people doing the ads, the local ads. That costs money.

Lucy Fisher
And just tell us very briefly, where are the areas that they’re hoping to kind of build up their support?

Anna Gross
Yeah. So the person I spoke to this week, which I really enjoyed, called them the Danelaw area, so the areas that were taken over by the Vikings. And so it’s a stretch across the north-east.

Jim Pickard
This is where I’m from, Anna, isn’t it? I’m actually from a village called Danby, which is a village of the Danes on the Yorkshire moors. So those kind of areas, I guess.

Lucy Fisher
They’re looking to to target the the Senate in a big way in 2026, aren’t they? I’ve been struck, in fact, that given they don’t have as much money as comparable sort of national parties, they’re doing very well on social media. It was one of the charts in your piece, Anna, that really struck me: how many more followers, likes and engagement Farage and Reform have compared to some of the other equivalents.

And Jim, let’s just pause a moment on Badenoch, who you mentioned, you know, you think might lose out to Farage in a personality contest. I thought we have to just discuss some of the fascinating things that she said this week. Firstly, can you just read us the quote about what she said about lunch being for wimps?

Jim Pickard
Tory leader Kemi Badenoch in today’s Spectator: What is a lunch break? Lunch is for wimps. I have food brought in and I work and eat at the same time. There’s no time. Sometimes I will get a steak. I’m not a sandwich person. I don’t think sandwiches are real food. It’s what you have for breakfast. I will not touch bread if it’s moist.

Anna Gross
Amazing reading, Jim.

Lucy Fisher
Yeah. Thank you, Jim.

Jim Pickard
I was trying to put energy into it. I don’t know how she said it. I can’t guarantee that Kemi Badenoch said it in that tone of voice to The Spectator.

Lucy Fisher
OK, well, one of my colleagues said she was channelling Gordon Gekko. I think other people think it was a little bit more David Brent perhaps.

Jim Pickard
It doesn’t make sense to me. If you think lunch is for wimps, what are you doing eating steaks at lunch? That’s quite a big lunch.

Lucy Fisher
Yeah. And Anna, she also got into a war of words with the vice-president of Nigeria, the country from what she hails.

Anna Gross
Yeah, that’s correct. So the vice-president said that she was denigrating her country of origin, Nigeria, and treating it like a country of lepers.

Lucy Fisher
She hit back, didn’t she, saying I’m not interested in doing Nigeria’s PR. I’m leader of the opposition in the UK. I mean, that speaks to again how combative her personality is.

Anna Gross
Yeah, it is.

Jim Pickard
There’s a line in the Spectator interview where she talks about how she doesn’t sort of think of her lineage as being Nigerian per se but more the particular tribe that her family is from. And she goes on to describe everyone in northern Nigeria as being Boko Haram, which is a peculiar thing to say because of course, Boko Haram is a jihadi group and not everyone in northern Nigeria would have any affiliation to it at all. It was a very strange thing to say.

Lucy Fisher
I mean, she’s making some quite unusual interventions in strategic terms, isn’t she, for her first few weeks and months as leader?

Jim Pickard
To be fair to her, I don’t think she expected her steak-eating lunch habits to be the main focus of the meeting. And it would be further proof of what she sees as the essential triviality of the press and our determination to catch her out at all times. The problem she’s got, though, is that, you know, four-and-a-half years out from general election when you’ve only got 100-odd seats . . . 

Lucy Fisher
121.

Jim Pickard
A hundred and twenty-one seats, you know, no one’s that interested in what policy ideas you throw out. So you’re only really being judged on your character and personality and political signposting. And what people are getting, what the general public are getting at the moment are quite peculiar things like she loves warm Coca-Cola and she thinks that you can work on McDonald’s for a few months and become working class. That is quite an eccentric collage of her personality building up, which they need to be quite careful about and maybe do some more strategic interventions where she doesn’t come across in this slightly odd way.

Anna Gross
I think there is a bit of a vacuum at the moment. I think she’s done two broadcast interviews since she became leader of the opposition and . . . 

Lucy Fisher
That is not many.

Jim Pickard
I think as one in her defence a little bit, we have had 14 years of Conservative government which left the public very fed up and therefore deserting the Tories in droves. So some of this is not the leader’s fault. Some of it certainly for a year or two is gonna be structural that people aren’t really in a mood to listen to Conservatives, which is another reason why they’re possibly a little bit more willing to give Reform the benefit of the doubt for now.

Lucy Fisher
And just to end this part of the conversation where we began on, you know, the rivalry with Reform. I was struck that at PMQs this week Kemi Badenoch went on immigration. She is talking about coming up with a cap, a much more hardline policy. But can she ever get to a tough enough position where she isn’t gonna be outflanked by Reform?

Anna Gross
Well, yeah, exactly. And I think it was notable that Starmer’s response was you basically don’t have a leg to stand on because you, especially when you’re talking about legal migration and having a cap like she’s suggesting, the Conservative government presided over the highest level of migration into this country on record. You know, over 900,000 people came in in the year 2023. It’s a quite vulnerable position to be going so hard on that message because the track record is so recent.

Jim Pickard
Exactly, whereas Nigel Farage has no record of government against which to be judged.

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Lucy Fisher
Well, a lot has been happening in the wider world this week in geopolitical terms. I’m sure we’ve all been absolutely glued to the news coming out of Syria. Gideon Rachman, the FT’s chief foreign affairs columnist, is on hand to help us understand what is happening in Syria. Gideon, hello.

Gideon Rachman
Hi.

Lucy Fisher
So the west obviously detested the dictator Bashar al-Assad, but his downfall, is this a moment of hope or jeopardy for Syria?

Gideon Rachman
Both, really. So, I mean, it is true that, you know, as long ago as 2013, Obama was saying Assad must go and so on. But I was in Washington in the days that he was, you know, obviously about to be toppled, fairly obviously. And the uncertainty of even the US — and there were some European officials around — about whether they were totally happy with what was gonna happen.

I remember what one American official said to me, you know, normally when there’s a big crisis in the world, we at least know how we want it to turn out. But here we’re not even sure what the best outcome is because of the fears. I mean, everybody knows he was, you know, a terrible, brutal leader and not a friend of the west either. But experience has taught us over the last decades that when leaders like Saddam Hussein or Gaddafi fall, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you have sunshine and roses afterwards.

Lucy Fisher
And tell us a bit more about HTS, the Syrian rebel group that led this extraordinary lightning assault through the country to the capital. We know that they are a proscribed armed terrorist group in the UK, but the UK government has tried to make clear that that doesn’t preclude it engaging with HTS.

Gideon Rachman
Sure, because, I mean, obviously, if things are gonna turn out for the better, then you have to hope that the kind of some early promising signs about from this group can be built on and that they will bring the country together and that they won’t turn out to be either jihadis — well, I mean, they were linked to al-Qaeda in the past — or sort of super-fundamentalist because they are, in theory, committed to sharia law.

So obviously, the fears would be either that they give encouragement to terrorism or that they turn Syria into Iran or Afghanistan. You know, that’s not impossible. But they are the people who are in power now and so you need to try and encourage them in the right direction.

Lucy Fisher
They’ve tried to give assurances but minorities are bracing. How do you see the next few weeks and months playing out?

Gideon Rachman
You know, nobody can be totally sure because, you know, they are clearly the strongest group, but they’re not the only group in Syria. There’s the Kurds, there’s the Free Syrian Army and there are all sorts of outside players from, you know, Iran will still want to have an influence. Turkey is currently probably the most powerful outside player. Israel has moved in and started bombing, destroying the Syrian navy, grabbing bits of Syria, creating a buffer zone. The US still has interests, Russia has interests, the Gulf states. And all of them will be sort of trying to manoeuvre the situation. Plus there are all these disparate groups on the ground as well as new forces emerging, which will have been repressed by Assad. So how that very combustible mix plays out, one doesn’t know.

But I think that one of the things that does slightly worry me is that there is a UN plan sitting there from 2015 for a transition and for elections and so on. And that would be a way of trying to have a democratic transition and keep the country together under agreed rules. But those kinds of things tend to work when great powers work together. And there’s just really no prospect. I think the US and Russia and China all getting together to make a UN process work in the way that it might have done in more kind of peaceful times.

Lucy Fisher
Well, David Lammy, the UK foreign secretary, has made a statement in the Commons this week talking about Assad, whom he dubbed the “rat of Damascus” fleeing to Moscow. We know that the UK has closed its asylum scheme to Syrians, like many other European countries. I think I know the answer to this as I ask the question. Is there really much of a role for the UK to play? And does it make any difference that Assad himself and certainly his wife have such strong links to the UK?

Gideon Rachman
Well, I think in the old days, the British did think that that might give them an in. I mean, oddly enough, although I never met Assad, my brother-in-law, who’s an eye doctor, met him when he was training as an eye doctor in Britain. And he was sort of sitting in the canteen in the western Eye Hospital. And actually when they approached him and said, are you Hafez al-Assad’s son? He just said no, because the . . . 

Jim Pickard
Because they look like each other.

Gideon Rachman
Yeah, totally. And my, you know, my brother-in-law had a Lebanese colleague who recognised him and said (inaudible), you know, but he did it because he just wanted to, like, I presume, get on with his medical training.

And then so, the fact that he had done this and that he had this connection to Britain meant that in the early years when he came into power, I think it was the Blair government really reached out to him. And there were . . . I remember meeting diplomats who’d gone to Damascus to meet Assad and they were talking about what he was like and frankly, how unimpressive he was, but also not the sort of swaggering Saddam-like sort of threatening figure. He was rather sort of . . . He lisped, he was rather sort of wimpy, frankly. But as it turned out, he was a super-brutal dictator.

And at that point and then particularly after 2012, there was no real scope for the UK. And I think that it’s not just Britain, but one of the striking things is how little say Europe will have or seems to be likely to have in what happens in Syria now even though the influx of Syrian refugees into Europe in 2015 was arguably one of the biggest things that destabilised the EU and led to the rise of populism in Europe.

Lucy Fisher
Jim.

Jim Pickard
Yeah, and one of the things I found fascinating about this is the unforeseen consequences. You know, you see these dramatic historic events playing out in Syria and then next thing you know, there’s questions over the repercussions for those millions of people who came to Europe, repercussions for Russia, Israel intervening, what’s it mean for Turkey?

And I just, I wanted to ask you, Gideon, what you thought of Israel’s decision to basically lay waste to the Syrian military hardware in such a sort of rapid-fire way. Does that have the potential for more unforeseen consequences where, if a neighbour decides to just send an army into Syria, that they basically don’t have the defences any more?

Gideon Rachman
Yes, it does. And I mean, I think that Israel’s actions will have shocked some in Europe, but the Israelis are at a completely different sort of mindset at the moment. They think that we are sort of living in dreamland, you know, and not prepared to see things as they are and that there’s a clear danger of a jihadist group taking over and that they’re just gonna lay waste to everything that might fall into their hands. But it certainly doesn’t give peace a chance, really.

And, but it’s part of what I was saying before, because these . . . I think that another thing is the possibility of a Turkish-Israeli clash, because Erdoğan and Netanyahu absolutely detest each other. Syria matters hugely to both of them as a major neighbour. They’ve both got forces manoeuvring in there. So that’s another element that could go wrong.

Jim Pickard
Do you think Syria will survive as an entity in the coming decade?

Gideon Rachman
I don’t know. I mean, I think probably formally, but whether it’s all actually governed from Damascus, one doesn’t know. I mean, I think a lot will, you know, one obvious bit that might break off would be the Kurdish area, but the Turks will be incredibly keen to prevent that happening. And interestingly, some of the Kurdish rebels were saying today that they were committed to staying in a unified Syria. So I guess that’s one kind of possibly hopeful sign.

Lucy Fisher
Anna.

Anna Gross
Just on the question of European countries, France, Germany, the UK, who have paused decisions on Syrian refugees. I was quite surprised by that move, to be honest. It seemed to me that it was principally a political move. I mean, the idea that now that HTS has come in, it’s totally safe and within months, we’ll be sending all these people back. We don’t need to give any. I mean, it’s a complete, it’s a vacuum, it’s an unknown, it’s an incredibly unstable situation.

Gideon Rachman
I would guess, I mean, you guys know better than me, but it seems to me that it’s a piece of political messaging, as you say. And it’s often struck me that if you’re a government, say, in Germany or France or the UK and you look at the rest of the world in purely political terms, like what is the foreign issue that most concerns my voters? It’s migration. You know, it’s not these big geostrategic questions. It’s can you find some way of stopping uncontrolled migration? Or at least tell your voters, look, we’ve got a handle on it. So I think a lot of people want to sort of grasp at this and say, ha! We can we can start returning people. It’s not all a one-way flow.

But as you say, can you really safely return them to Syria? I mean, it does look like some are voluntarily returning, including from Turkey and you know, great if people feel that they can do that. But whether you want to compel them is quite another call.

And the other thing is that, you know, Syria is not the only unstable country in the world. So, I mean, I gather that the biggest single group on the other side of the Channel are now Sudanese. You know, as different countries collapse, they begin to appear in Europe.

Lucy Fisher
And just a final question from me. What does the fall of the Assad regime say about Russia and Iran, which were, of course, propping up his administration? Is it a loss of face for them that Assad has had to flee?

Gideon Rachman
I think, yeah, it’s a big setback for Russia at a time when I think that they felt that they were gaining ground, literally gaining ground in Ukraine and that the west’s sort of narrative that they, a couple of years ago, that Russia had made this massive strategic error, that they were reversing that. So for Russia to lose its foothold in the Middle East, which was really Putin’s first big aggressive move outside Europe for, you know, a long time, and that’s in 2015. It’s a bit of a humiliation. And Iran’s situation is even more insecure because their main line of defence with all these sort of proxy forces, Hamas has been smashed, Hizbollah has been smashed. Now they’ve lost Syria. And incidentally, their missiles turned out not to be able to hit Israel. So they’re feeling much more vulnerable.

And I guess if you’re sitting in London or another western capital, you’ll think good. You know, we’re worried about this four-country axis of resistance, or whatever you want to call axis of adversaries I think is the term they use. So Russia, North Korea, China and Iran. And two of them have now suffered a major blow. But things are never that straightforward because then the next question is OK, well, what does Iran do?

And one thing that is worrying people is OK, their other forms of defence have gone, so are they gonna accelerate the nuclear program? And if they do that, will Israel go after it? Will the US join Israel and what are the implications for Britain? Because in fact, although we were saying, you know, Britain doesn’t play much of a role when the Iranians were firing missiles at Israel, Britain and France joined in with the American effort to not, successful effort, to knock back those missiles. So if there was a war with Iran, would we be expected to take part? And those are the kinds of questions I think people are beginning to have a think about.

Lucy Fisher
We’ll have to get you back on in 2025 to discuss this as matters unfold, but for the moment, Gideon Rachman, thanks for joining.

Gideon Rachman
Sure.

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Lucy Fisher
On Tuesday, chancellor Rachel Reeves and chief Treasury secretary Darren Jones launched the spending review. Jim, tell us about this review and why it’s gonna be so integral to Labour’s fortunes in the coming years.

Jim Pickard
So this is the six-month review, spending review of over a trillion pounds of UK public spending and it basically takes the government a few years further from what we saw in the Budget. It’s what they call the first zero-based study of government spending since Alistair Darling in 2007, where you look at every single little bit of spending and say should we be doing this, should we not be doing this?

And I think the thing to remind listeners about here is basically what is the trajectory of spending that was set in the Budget at the end of October. And it was that there’s a big influx of cash, particularly for health, but also for some other areas of spending. But it’s a sugar rush the last couple of years and then it drops off and what we basically have for two to three years towards the end of the parliament is really restrained spending. So it’s kind of the opposite in some ways of what happened at the start of the 1997 Tony Blair government, where what they did is they stuck to Ken Clarke’s conservative spending strictures for a couple of years. But then as time went on, they started spending more and more. But with this lot, we’ve got the opposite.

Lucy Fisher
And another conundrum really is that, as Jim mentions, kind of spending starts to kind of taper off in terms of the way it is growing towards the end of this parliament. But at the same time, at the current rate, we are projected to see expenditure reach 42.5 per cent of GDP. The size of the state is still growing.

One of the things that Rachel Reeves has warned there will be some level of restraint on is public sector pay. And already we’re hearing noises from the unions that they are not happy with the kind of affordability criteria that the Treasury is looking to impose on them when it comes to the pay deal wrangling that has begun and will be announced in the spring.

Anna Gross
Absolutely. And I think it’s looking very likely that we’re gonna see strike action next year potentially from rail workers, from nurses, you know, teachers, potentially even doctors. After such lengthy battles, which, you know, Labour will have hoped they’ve drawn a line under. You had your great scoop this week about the civil service will have to cut up to 10,000 jobs. And so I think there are gonna be a lot of departments that are really, really concerned.

And there was a nice detail in a story this week that the Treasury is gonna start having a dashboard that flashes red whenever departments start inputting things that go over their spending limits. And you know, there are some departments that are, you know, not gonna be as generously looked after by the Treasury as others.

Lucy Fisher
And Jim, Rachel Reeves has outlined this plan to bring in what she calls challenge panels that will have senior former executives from the likes of Lloyds, Barclay, the Co-operative Group, who’ll kind of help go through this expenditure line by line.

Is that a gimmick? Is it something that will give her political cover, or is it actually a useful exercise to really challenge every line of spending and encourage, you know, officials to think again, as well as ministers?

Jim Pickard
So I think it’s a mix of both. I can see why politicians think it might appeal to the public. I think more broadly, the political danger here with all this rhetoric and looking at some of the things that ministers have been saying to Darren Jones, chief secretary to the Treasury, where spending is not contributing to priority, it should be stopped. And he’s saying it’s definitely not austerity. Asked about spending in departments, he’s saying it should always be tight if you’re spending public money.

I think there’s a danger that we have a Labour government where a third of the public voted for them because probably they wanted somewhat higher taxes and higher public spending. And we have an awful lot of attention on the higher taxes. And we have ministers who prefer talking about how tight-fisted they’re gonna be. So the reality that they are spending more money on public services for a couple of years and there’s a danger that very careful balance between the two things is tilting a bit more towards a sort of Scrooge running into Christmas with kind of rattling a load of chains.

And it’s just a little bit risky where you’ve got people that aren’t natural kind of charismatic political performers like Rachel Reeves and Keir Starmer already sound a little bit downbeat. You know, Boris Johnson could take an empty paper bag and tell you it was a Gucci handbag. These politicians can’t do that. So if they’re always talking about spending restraint, the public might fall into the trap of thinking that they’re not spending any more money on the public services.

Lucy Fisher
Well, we’ve just got time left for Political Fix stock picks. Anna, who are you buying or selling this week?

Anna Gross
So it’s with a heavy heart that I am gonna sell Angela Eagle, who is the immigration minister. I like her. I think she’s smart, but she was giving various interviews a couple of days ago around some policy work that was being done on small boats. And, you know, just to Jim’s point about some of the kind of senior cabinet members lacking kind of energy and enthusiasm, being able . . . Being salesmen.

I mean, migration is such an important issue. It’s gonna be absolutely crucial to get this messaging right. And Angela Eagle, she just lacked the energy. She lacked the salesmanship about the policy. And I think that Labour really needs to put someone in that role who can sell a message, who can present something that’s compelling to the public.

Lucy Fisher
OK, I’m gonna jump in here with mine because I think it relates to yours and I’m selling Matthew Pennycook, the housing minister, who I think has also been charged with this really important task, one of the six milestones that Keir Starmer laid out last week to build 1.5mn houses.

He’s been out on the airwaves as well this week trying to reassure the country that this target, which is incredibly ambitious, it’s a level of housebuilding we’ve not seen for almost half a century in this country. And ultimately all the signs are that I think they’re really gonna struggle even with the changes they’ve announced in the national policy planning framework this week. Jim, how about you?

Jim Pickard
So I’m gonna sell somebody who can’t ever be accused of lacking salesmanship and that is Nigel Farage. Not because I don’t think they’re doing pretty well at the moment, but because I think the hype has got a little bit out of control and that the odds are becoming a little bit detached from the reality of where I still feel Reform are gonna land at the end decade of the next general election.

Lucy Fisher
Well, that’s all we’ve got time for. Anna Gross, Jim Pickard, thanks for joining.

Anna Gross
Thanks, Lucy.

Jim Pickard
Thanks, Lucy.

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Lucy Fisher
And that’s it for this episode of the FT’s Political Fix. I’ve put links to subjects discussed in this episode in the show notes. Do check them out, they’re articles we’ve made free for Political Fix listeners. There’s also a link there to Stephen’s award-winning Inside Politics newsletter. You get 30 days free. And don’t forget to subscribe to the show. Plus, do leave a review or a star rating. It really helps us spread the word.

Political Fix was presented by me, Lucy Fisher, and produced by Clare Williamson. Manuela Saragosa is the executive producer. Original music and sound engineering by Breen Turner. Rod Fitzgerald and Andrew Georgiades are the broadcast engineers. Cheryl Brumley is the FT’s global head of audio.

We’ll meet again here next week. 

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