 When Keir Starmer stood to be Labour leader, the fifth of his ten pledges was a commitment to common ownership. Back then, Keir said public services should be in public hands, not making profits for shareholders, and he pledged to support common ownership of rail, mail, energy and water. Like with most of his pledges since becoming leader, Starmer has been lukewarm on pledge five. On the BBC, this Sunday, Andrew Mart sought clarification. Will you nationalise the Big Six energy companies, yes or no? No. No, you will not. This is what you said as part of your ten pledges. Public services should be in public hands, not making profits for shareholders, support common ownership of rail, mail, energy and winter. You promised that 18 months ago and now you're saying no. Why? I don't see nationalisation there. What else does public hands mean? Well, public services should be in public hands, but when it comes to something like energy, we've got an immediate problem in the next few months that we've got to solve, and then when it comes to common ownership, I'm pragmatic about this. I do not agree with the argument that says we must be ideological. So what does common ownership mean if it doesn't mean nationalisation? Look what happens when we're ideological about this. Track and Trace put into private sector £37 billion when we were arguing would be better in the public sector with local authorities. So I'd be pragmatic about it and where common ownership is value for money for the taxpayer and delivers better services, then there should be common ownership. Poor, poor Ed Miliband believed you when you said that, and he was asked on Newsnight just the other day about this exactly. And he said, we're in favour of common ownership, absolutely. Wait for the conference, but Keir Starmer said in his leadership campaign, he was in favour of public ownership. We haven't changed that commitment. Maybe we haven't, but you have. Andrew, I've just set out the principles we will apply. We're not going to be ideological, I'm going to be pragmatic. I'm going to be pragmatic. What that, well, let me spell it out. What that means is that where common ownership is value for money for the taxpayer and delivers a better service, then I'm in favour of common ownership. That was a slippery Keir Starmer saying that, contrary to his pledge about bringing male rail energy and water into public ownership, he would not renationalise energy firms as it would be too ideological. You might be watching and saying, Michael, you're being unfair. He said, common ownership in his pledge, now he's ruled out nationalisation. They are two different things. There's no contradiction there. That's certainly the argument Keir Starmer made to Andrew Marr. There is, however, a problem with that take. Take a look at this clip from Newsnight's leadership hustings. First of all, raise your hands if you're into scrapping tuition fees. That's everyone renationalising water and electricity. That's definitive proof that when Keir Starmer committed to common ownership, he was committing to renationalisation. Put simply, nothing he says is worth the paper it's written on. It's worth noting Keir Starmer's current pitch to distinguish himself from Boris Johnson is that, I quote, I'm different, I believe in integrity, I believe in truth. Ash, none of that is true, is it? He is actually a liar and a snake, a little bit like Boris Johnson. You've absolutely got it in one. He is a snake. He's not trustworthy. And despite his offer of unity, competence and integrity, he has delivered none of those things for the Labour Party. But let me just take this policy seriously for a second where he says, well, I said common ownership, not nationalisation. And that's a meaningful difference. I'm pragmatic. I'm not ideological. Let me just take this seriously for a second. Now, of course, there are different forms of common ownership. Of course, you've got nationalisation where the state takes over a service. And then you've got other things like running something as a co-op. The thing about the national grid is that you cannot run it as a co-op. It is a natural monopoly, similar to the railway lines. It is one thing, one infrastructure. And really what we've been doing all this time is paying for different billers and different administrative services. There are different offers about who's investing more in renewable energy, so on and so forth. But ultimately, that's the system of privatisation we have now. Turning the national grid into a co-op, absolutely doesn't deal with any of these problems that we've talked about in terms of the urgent need to decarbonise the economy, the need to keep energy costs low, particularly when we have a cost of living crisis and wage stagnation. So we've got this matter of how are we able to best utilise the levers of the state in order to have both these things happen at once, low costs of energy plus decarbonising the economy. So the pragmatic response to that crisis, particularly when we are staring down the barrel of an energy crisis, the combined impact of fuel shortages because of a lack of HGV drivers in this country, but also the gas crisis, which is being driven by the price of wholesale gas going up. You actually go, hang on, there's a role for the state here, not just to provide bailouts, solve a market-based crisis with taxpayer money, but actually the state to step in to nationalise the energy sector. And then what you can do is you have the state guaranteeing incomes for people who work in fossil fuel industries, while you achieve this rapid and just transition away from a fossil fuel-based energy. So that's actually quite a pragmatic response to lots of the things that we're seeing. Keir Starmer isn't being driven by pragmatism, he's being driven again by this PR kind of sensibility of what are those retired homeowners going to think? They don't want to see me as some kind of scary socialist, and also Peter Mandelson's going to yell at me if I say anything to you left wing, so I'm going to abandon these principles and also abandon any claim to actually existing pragmatism in favour of right wing triangulation. There's nothing pragmatic about it, and there's certainly nothing honest about it either. I mean, it is ideological to oppose nationalisation, it's just the ideology of the ruling class, so you can pretend it's not ideological. Anyway, Keir Starmer might have no problem with going back on his word or abandoning socialist principles. Conference, however, had different ideas. Just hours after that interview with Ma, delegates voted on a motion drawn up by Labour for a Green New Deal which included a commitment to public ownership. This was the moment it passed. You saw infusiastic responses from the conference floor there, yet Keir Starmer's front bench were unmoved. This was Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves making clear this morning that when it comes to policy, conference is not sovereign. Before we take a pragmatic approach, what matters is that essential services like gas and electricity are delivering for consumers, and we would look at that in the round, but I agree with Keir Starmer. This is not the moment to be looking at nationalising companies. We need to be focusing on the day-to-day bread-and-butter issues that affect in people's lives. The fact that people can't fill up their cars with petrol and diesel in the morning, the fact that people's gas and electricity bills are going up by more than 10% next month, the fact that lots and lots of gas and electricity companies are going to the wall. Rachel Reeves are listing lots of problems, by the way, not really giving any solutions to them, but I suppose what I want to focus on here is I think Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves think going against the membership is a positive thing. People are going to respect them for it. Actually, I also want to know what was behind that expression you did. Tell us what you're thinking there. It is completely delusional to say now is not the time to think about nationalising the energy sector. We've got to deal with the day-to-day issues like the crisis in the energy sector. Well, when are we going to talk about it then? This is precisely the time where you should be having this kind of discussion. This tells me, again, that this isn't about pragmatic responses, trying to work out the best possible solution to these crises. Actually, what this actually is going to look like, it's about defining yourself in relation to some strange amorphous notion of electability, which is characterised by how effectively you can punch left. Now, that's not a pragmatic position. That is a deeply ideological position. Public don't care about votes on the conference floor, but what's going on on the conference floor can really make or break a political leader on the basis of what are they actually offering to the country? You make that the public don't care about whether or not our leadership listens to their members. I think it's a very important one. But the people who do, and I think this is probably what's really going on here, are vested interests, big corporations, because they want to know that if the Labour Government enters power, they will listen to corporations and business, not the democratic structures of their grassroots members. I think this is really Keir Starmer speaking to Britain's business class, even to the Murdochs of the world, because he is looking for, backing from the establishment, say, I am a safe bet. I am willing to go against all of those people who you are scared of, therefore you can trust me. Proof that this isn't because the public are really scared of nationalisation. Recent polling from opinion showed 53% of people support renationalising energy companies. Only 15% oppose it. So whoever Keir Starmer thinks he's impressing here, it's not the general public. It's not the average voter.