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TALKING POLITICS

Labour and Brexit: Beyond the Crisis

TALKING POLITICS

Catherine Carr

News, News & Politics

4.7 • 2.5K Ratings

🗓️ 14 May 2020

⏱️ 45 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

David is joined by Helen Thompson and Chris Brooke to try to get beyond the current crisis and work out where British politics is heading. How different is Starmer's political programme likely to be from Corbyn's? Can the Labour party become the party of the workers again? And is Brexit really going to happen without an extension and without a deal? Plus we explore the renewed influence of the trade unions and ask what it means for the political choices ahead.


Talking Points:


What kind of Labour Party is Keir Starmer looking to create?

  • He never presented himself as a Corbynite, though there are some significant leftward moves policy wise.
  • Labour is a more recognizably a social democratic party than it was during the new Labour era.
  • We probably will see party management return to something that is more familiar from Ed Miliband’s era. 
  • Starmer seems to be moving away from a Green New Deal kind of Labour politics.


Does moving back to being a workers’ party move you away from being a students’ party?

  • Once you have enough people going to university and acquiring a lot of debt to do so, the question of separation between workers and students starts to fall away.
  • The nature of work is changing.
  • The current crisis may give Starmer a chance to cut across these divides. 


Issues about unions and workplaces go to the top of government policy at the moment.

  • The unions will be pushing health and safety issues as far as they can.
  • The unions can make a better case that they’re on the side of ordinary people.


The universal basic income question has emerged again.

  • Starmer doesn’t seem to be that keen.
  • Public opinion isn’t fully behind UBI.
  • A lot depends on the medium-term economic fallout, especially the employment damage.
  • So far, the biggest hits have come in the service sector.


Starmer is trying to move on from Brexit.

  • Is this just tactical? The government will have to make decisions on Brexit. 
  • The virus could be easier for the government to move towards a no trade deal exit.
  • From the point of view from the EU, negotiating a trade agreement with Britain is even less of a priority now.


Mentioned in this Episode:


Further Learning:


And as ever, recommended reading curated by our friends at the LRB can be found here: lrb.co.uk/talking


Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Hello, my name is David Brunsonman and this is Talking Politics. I'm delighted to say that we have the old team together today.

0:16.0

Sort of. I'm in Cambridge. Helen Thompson is in London. Chris Brooke is in Oxford. We're going to be talking about British politics beyond the crisis.

0:26.0

Where is Labour heading? Where is Brexit heading?

0:32.0

Talking politics is brought to you in partnership with the London Review of Books, Europe's leading magazine of culture and ideas.

0:40.0

Improve the quality of your solitude with a subscription to the LRB.

0:45.0

They'll send you exceptional analysis of the politics, economics, sociology and science behind the crisis and reportage from around the world.

0:55.0

But also, gloriously unrelated, richly immersive distraction from the world's best authors and critics, writing about history and philosophy, art and technology, fiction and poetry.

1:08.0

Just go to lrb.me slash talk and get your first 12 issues for just 12 pounds. That's lrb.me slash talk.

1:22.0

Just before we start with Helen and Chris, we wanted to remind you if you are looking for extra episodes, if you've got more podcast listening time, we do have another podcast at the moment, history of ideas.

1:35.0

It's me talking about the big ideas behind modern politics. There are now eight episodes and more to come.

1:42.0

If you want to get those, do please subscribe to Talking Politics History of Ideas. You can find history of ideas wherever you find talking politics.

1:51.0

There's a new episode out this week on Friday. On Talking Politics, we're trying to focus on the current crisis but also to take a step back.

2:00.0

That's what we're doing today. One way to try and think outside of the bubble of the current crisis is a counterfactual if the EE referendum had been won by remain.

2:13.0

Therefore, presumably David Cameron had remained as Prime Minister. He said he would only serve a second term.

2:19.0

So, who knows, who would have succeeded him, but the Fixed Turn Parliament Act, which wouldn't have been repealed, would have meant that the general election would have happened last Thursday.

2:29.0

That was five years since the 2015 general election. Presumably again, Jeremy Corbyn would have been the Labour leader. That would have been his general election.

2:39.0

They would have given him at least one to fight having survived the leadership challenge. So maybe it would have been George Osborne against Jeremy Corbyn.

2:47.0

It's a completely different universe from the one we're in now, leaving aside the pandemic, which is Boris Johnson against Kierstalmer.

2:56.0

Chris, do you have any feeling yet? We've got a pretty clear idea of the ways in which Kierstalmer is presentationally going to be different from Jeremy Corbyn.

3:04.0

Do you have a feel yet for, as not an election coming for a long time, but for the kind of Labour party that he's looking to create is there a gap now between Stalmer and Corbynism?

3:16.0

I think there is a gap. Stalmer made a lot of Corbyn friendly noises during the leadership campaign, and he did get a lot of people who voted for Jeremy Corbyn in 2015 and 2016 to support him in the recent leadership contest.

3:31.0

But he never presented himself as a thoroughgoing Corbynite. He never presented himself as close to momentum, close to the distinctive institutions of the Labour Party in the Corbyn era.

...

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