Rayner vs Streeting – and what is 'active government'?
Coffee House Shots
The Spectator
4.4 • 2.2K Ratings
🗓️ 30 January 2026
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In his column this week, Tim Shipman has finally hit upon an answer to the age-old question: what is Starmerism? After a concerted effort from his team to tie the Prime Minister down to a definitive ‘-ism’, he has delivered a threefold structure: firstly, the contestable claim that Labour has achieved macroeconomic stability by clinging grimly to the Chancellor’s fiscal rules, which will mean interest rates and inflation fall; secondly, Starmer will say Britain needs an ‘active government’ to intervene directly in retail offers; and finally, the PM will seek to tie together domestic and international policy by arguing that Britain needs ‘an active and engaged government abroad’ if it is to control the cost of living at home.
But is this the sort of thing that can secure his position? The rumour swirling around Westminster is that Streeting has up to 200 supporters waiting in the wings, and a straight fight between him and Angela Rayner is the most likely scenario given a poor local elections result.
Tim Shipman and James Heale discuss.
Produced by Oscar Edmondson.
Become a Spectator subscriber today to access this podcast without adverts. Go to spectator.co.uk/adfree to find out more.
For more Spectator podcasts, go to spectator.co.uk/podcasts.
Contact us: podcast@spectator.co.uk
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Hello, welcome to Coffee House Shots. I'm James Hill. I'm joined today by Tim Shipman. |
| 0:09.1 | Now, Tim, for this week's magazine, you've written the age old question, which is, what is stomerism? Do you have an answer? |
| 0:14.6 | Well, sort of, insofar as the government sort of has an answer as well now. I mean, this goes back to the chaos of the last |
| 0:22.6 | couple of weeks. If you go back to November, Kirstama said any moment not spent talking about the |
| 0:28.4 | cost of living is a minute wasted. I think we're well over 10,000 minutes have been wasted since. |
| 0:33.5 | And he was supposed to make a speech a couple of Mondays ago about the cost of living. |
| 0:37.6 | And he didn't because he was busy batting off tariffs from Donald Trump and wrestling with Andy Burnham and all that kind of stuff. |
| 0:44.3 | But I'm told that speech is written essentially. |
| 0:47.0 | And the argument it makes, it seems to me, is the first sort of attempt since we had all those sort of baffling smorgas board of missions and pillars and |
| 0:54.7 | goals and pledges, which has now all been junked. Growth is the top priority. That's gone. It's all |
| 1:00.5 | about the cost of living now. But the way of trying to tie that together with what Starmo also has |
| 1:05.5 | to spend a lot of time doing, which is international affairs. He's in China this week, as we know, |
| 1:09.6 | is this idea, they've come up with |
| 1:11.4 | this idea of an active government. Now, just try and restrain yourself from racing to the ballot |
| 1:17.1 | box to embrace this. Active government. But it's basically the argument is that in order to improve |
| 1:25.8 | the cost of living, they need an active government in three ways. |
| 1:28.3 | The first is that they needed to stabilise Britain from the macroeconomic point of view, |
| 1:34.0 | which is a slightly debatable point, given that the economy is not exactly purring along. |
| 1:39.9 | But their argument, Rachel Reeves' argument, is that they've stuck to her fiscal rules. |
| 1:44.1 | They have got things vaguely under control in terms of the markets and that that sets the |
| 1:50.1 | platform that they need. |
| 1:51.5 | Secondly, they're touting an active government in intervening directly in some things. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The Spectator, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of The Spectator and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.