Cindy Yu (CY): Slashing winter fuel allowance, keeping the two-child benefit cap, cutting foreign aid, cutting the civil service, axing NHS bureaucracy and slashing welfare spending. Rod, are we actually living under a conservative government?
Rod Liddle (RL): No, because the Conservative government didn’t do any of that, because they didn’t have the appetite for it or the bravery. I’ve actually, in the last month, considered rejoining the Labour Party. It’s a blue Labour Party, it reflects pretty much everything I ever wanted from the Labour Party. There are a few problems. I think Rachel Reeves is a problem. But other than that, I think Labour is doing things which will make it appeal to working class voters far more than it did in the first 100 days of its existence. And I don’t for a moment blame Rosie at all, who I think is a terrific MP and a great figure in the House of Commons. I don’t blame Rosie for having resigned the whip when she did, because I think the first 150 days of Labour were catastrophic. And you were right about the winter fuel allowance. That was completely wrong of the Labour government to do that. But suddenly a kind of realism afflicted the party, the government, pretty much as soon as Donald Trump had been elected as President. I think that’s the change that’s happened. And I think what it can do now is carry on appealing to working class voters. It’s still remarkably, despite its enormous unpopularity in those first 150 days ahead in the polls, the Tories are nowhere to be seen. And Reform, as I’ve always said, will never get much more than 25 per cent, ever, no matter what they do. So I think Labour has performed incredibly well since about the middle of December, early January. I think Sir Keir Starmer, though I’m not his greatest fan, I have to say – and I know Rosie isn’t. I think he’s performed reasonably well with Trump. I think also he’s getting advice from good places – Morgan McSweeney, not least among them or ‘Boaty McBoatface’, as I call him.
CY: Well, Rosie, you left the Labour Party about half a year ago. I assume you’ve never felt so far from the Labour party as it is today?
Rosie Duffield (RD): Yeah, absolutely and it’s so interesting hearing what Rod’s saying because, you know, we’re in this bubble. And to hear a completely different point of view is really fascinating because I have almost another way round view of it. I don’t think voters take kindly to a party pretending to be something that they’re not. And they seem to be trying to ape the Tories and ape Reform. But actually, that’s not what people want when they vote Labour. They’ve got two other parties to vote for if they want those things. And I think that we proved that in 2017. For all of the things that were wrong, and Jeremy Corbyn was, you know, at the height of his sort of powers and especially amongst young people, for all the things we then got wrong at that time, we got the Tory government’s majority down to 12. I felt on the doorstep that it was because we had a very red offer. The Tories had a very blue offer. People had a really clear choice. Unlike in 2015, when Ed and all the other men in suits all looked pretty much the same. I thought in 2017 we really had a very good identity about what we were as a party and our history and our values. I don’t think we’ve got that at all now with the Labour Party and the Labour government, and it’s all very well saying yes, they’re doing some okay things Rod happens to like, but that’s not a direction, that’s not an ideology. It’s not even good politics. It’s messy. It’s muddled. Who are you appealing to? Who are your MPs? What party did they join? Where are your members? It’s all a complete mess. And Labour veteran MPs like me are just watching in absolute horror and disbelief.
CY: Rosie, what do you say to Rod’s point that it is actually a blue Labour approach?
RD: I think it is trying to be that, but you can’t be that when you’ve got such a large movement and you’ve got MPs who’ve sat under a very left-wing regime. And now this seeming right-wing, or not even political regime, I think it’s just kind of accidental if they’ve landed where Rod is politically and that he looks he thinks he’s looking at a more blue Labour Party. I think that’s accidental. My entire sort of political experience of this leadership is that they’re not political, and they don’t really know what they’re doing. I think it’s happenstance. You know, Trump coming in and all of those things, I think they’ve just accidentally been in the right place at the right time. And that’s not going to last long.
To watch the rest of the conversation click here.
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