You've described the Stama government's project as a case of authoritarian modernisation.

Can you explain what you mean by that exactly?

Okay, so there's kind of two components to this.

And also we have to think about Stamaism in the context of the failure of the Tories, because one of the aspects of the Conservatives' 14 years in power has been effectively a slow demolition of the state.

Now, part of this was entirely contrived. It was completely intended in terms of being able to scale back the state

to scale back social security entitlements, scale back on public services, to go back to Cameron's

old manifest around the big society so that big government would get out of the way and the big

society would take over, which was of course always a fairly crude code for austerity. So there's pairing back public services. But the other

aspect of this as well, in which we saw until the fall under Boris Johnson, was an attack on the

state's capacity to do anything itself. And this was a very conscious project by the Conservatives,

or at least in sections of the Conservatives, or at least

sections of the Conservatives, the view of, if we scale back the state and we make

it incompetent or we make sure that public sector institutions are dropping to bits, then

people will have a negative perception of what the state is. People will not therefore want to make demands on the state,

which makes politics as a whole much easier to manage.

Problem with that, of course, is the state loses legitimacy.

And if the state institutions lose legitimacy,

then people aren't going to necessarily obey,

which causes social control complications for the future.

One of the things that Keir Starmer and his project is responding to is that crisis in the state.

He wants to be able to restore state capacity.

He wants to be able to effectively modernise the state along the kind of the Blairite, technocratic lines.

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