 On the same day that Keir Starmer released his 12,000-word essay on what he stands for, one of the co-authors of the pamphlet released his own piece in The New Statesman. Philip Collins was a speechwriter to Tony Blair and he's now helping Starmer with his conference speech. The subheading of the essay in The New Statesman was, in a changed world, the party is unsure quite what or who it stands for. Now, it's potentially not a great look for a speechwriter to admit they don't know what their own party stands for. Interesting choice. But I want to focus on another bit of the essay, because Philip Collins, now working with Keir Starmer, has a go at a member of Starmer's shadow cabinet, Ed Miliband. The first of Collins' argument is that Labour has to drop its commitment to socialism to appeal to the electorate and he is especially critical of the shadow business secretary for this intervention he made on a recent episode of Newsnight. It was an emergency. We would be investing in the green recovery. We would be borrowing to invest because it makes sense to do that. Ed, I'm going to put to you at your conference, a Labour socialist grouping is going to ask Labour to vote for their Green New Deal motion. You'll be aware of this. It sees energy, water, transport going back into public ownership. I'm a favourite of common ownership. So you'll vote for that. Keir Starmer said that. Well, look, there's always management of these things at conferences, but yet I can tell you we're in favour of common ownership. Energy, water, transport, all goes back into public ownership under Labour. Is that right? Wait for the conference, but Keir Starmer said in his leadership campaign he was in favour of public ownership in those areas. We haven't changed that commitment. Why is that? Let me just explain this to you, because in particular, in relation to natural monopolies, if we're going to make this green transition, then public ownership is the right way to go. We don't resolve from those commitments. So we may see the Labour front bench voting in favour of that. We may see that. We may well see about this. There's always messy in these things. Philip Collins called that performance on Newsnight a strangely fiery display. But what's his concrete problem with it? Interestingly, Collins doesn't criticise the policy of nationalising Britain's utilities, and he notes that even the Conservative government are now considering bringing any of the bigger energy companies into public ownership were they to fail. Indeed, Collins says he personally has no particular ideological opposition to public ownership. Instead, Collins' opposition to Ed Miliband is political, because while common ownership might be a good thing, it is never something that should be proposed by Labour. What does he mean by this? Let's take a look at the quote in question. So, Phillips writes, The reason Ed Miliband is wrong is that politics is unsymmetrical and unfair. When the business secretary discusses an intervention in the energy market, it is a little surprising. It sounds like an exception to a rule that is being breached because the circumstances are indeed exceptional. That's when a Tory does it. When Labour says the same thing, it sounds like the arrival of the ideological cavalry. The same thing happened with the price cap, which sounded like the essence of Labour when Ed Miliband proposed it and a one-off aberration when Theresa May did. This is not about whether it is right or wrong. It is about the political signal that is emitted. Quartet comes across as acting briefly out of character for reasons of temporary pragmatism. The Labour Party, it sounds like its moment, has finally arrived. The long and the short of this argument from Philip Collins is that while left-wing policies might work, they can only be introduced by the Tories, because if Labour were to argue for them, it would seem too ideological. Ash, this is a guy writing Keir Starmer's conference speech, which presumably we'll hear on Tuesday or Wednesday. He's saying that only the Tories can implement progressive policies. What reason does that give anyone to vote for Labour? Look, there's a reason why I call him the wrong Philip Collins. I don't think he's particularly insightful. That's my experience of his work. What he has laid out is a strategy for the country to keep moving inexorably rightwards. You praise the Tories whenever they do anything, the slightest bit progressive, whether that's nationalisation or an energy price cap. You say nothing when they do things which are perfectly predictable. For instance, implement hostile environment policies, dish out taxpayers' cash to their old uni mates, or cut vital funding from public services. And then what do Labour do in order to, I guess, confound expectations? They just come out with right-wing policies because it makes them seem pragmatic meters of the moment. Should Keir Starmer come out in favour of torture and capital punishment, would it have been better if Diane Abbott, instead of taking a principled stance against the hostile environment, said, you know what? Lock him all up, throw away the key. And if you can't do that, deport him. It's a really silly worldview because it forgets that you are actually fighting for a set of politics. The ultimate goal isn't simply do you get a two-point bounce in this week's YouGov. It's to implement changes that you think will transform the country for the better. And that means making a case for the things that you think will transform the country for the better. Simply traipsing along rightwards in the hope that you're one day going to get a pattern ahead from the Daily Mail of the Times is silly. And we've also seen how it's bitten Keir Starmer on the arse. Going into the pandemic saying, well, we're going to support this government, we're not going to oppose for opposing sake. It meant that when he did come out and criticised the government, you had the political journalist who had once cooed over him for writing something in the Telegraph or writing something in Daily Mail going, oh, but you said you support the government. Haven't you thrown away your right to criticise them? So it's completely silly from a strategic point of view. But again, I wouldn't expect anything else from the wrong Philip Collins. I mean, it is really worrying to me, this kind of thing, because this is, you know, this is why under new Labour, we ended up with everyone thinking the real problem in society was asylum seekers and benefits cheats. Because the Labour Party for, oh, look, the people who like public services and who like immigrants, we've already, you know, they've got nowhere else to go. So we're going to focus all our attention on saying we're tough on asylum seekers and we're tough on benefit cheats. If you read the book by Philip Gold, another wrong in Philip, he was one of the pollsters for Tony Blair who'd do all of these focus groups and say, no, they want you to be more right wing, they want you to be more right wing. And so Labour, even though they were in government, even though they had the levers of power, and they could have done things like regulate the Murdoch press, instead what they did was pander to it and say, we have to speak to our vulnerabilities and their vulnerabilities were always that they weren't right wing enough. So they'd move to the right, then that would move public opinion to the right, and they'd have to move to the right again. It's actually internal to the logic of what Philip Collins says, I think, because essentially what he's saying there is that when the Tories propose a left wing policy, it makes that policy seem reasonable, right? So when quasi-quartank says we might have to, I mean, he hasn't used these words, but if those gas companies fail, they have essentially said the administrators will come in and for a while it will come into public ownership. They don't want to just do a bailout. What Philip Collins is saying is that when quasi-quartank says that because he's right wing, people think, oh, that must be reasonable then. If the Tories are proposing this left wing policy, that means it's reasonable. Well, the converse of that works as well. If labor is saying the public finances are in a dire straight, then that must be reasonable. When Boris Johnson says the public finances are in a dire straight, so we need austerity, people by this point in time, I say, oh, this is just the same old Tories. Why should I believe them? When Keir Starmer stands up and say, oh, well, even the labor party agree. This is what it means to move public opinion to the right. You're confirming all of the Tories' prejudices and saying, oh, no, we back those as well. We back those as well. It's really depressing, especially as they'll say, oh, this is just a cynical tactic to get into power. One, if you get into power on that politics and you end up implementing right wing policies, as we saw with new labor, two, they're probably not even going to get into power. So all we're going to have is an opposition who reinforces all of the Tories' attempts to move British public opinion to the right and then lose anyway. There's a real lose-lose situation there.