 We dedicated much of Friday's show to Kier Stammer's leadership wobble with people briefing against him from left and right and focus groups left confused as to what he stands for. Now, this weekend the drama continued as the Times revealed Stammer's team had thought of an original ploy to rebuild momentum for the party and for his leadership. What did they think of? Coming out as pro business. Has anyone thought of this before? If only the Labor Party came out as pro business, everything would have been okay. We would have been in power for the last 11 years. Let's go to some text from that report. The Times write, in a strategy that will do little to endear him to the left of the party, the Labor leader is preparing to park his tanks on the Tories lawn by unveiling a bold pro business policy agenda before next month's budget. It is understood that this will include tax cuts for firms and a pledge to extend the business rates holiday to help companies struggling amid the coronavirus pandemic. A leaked email from Claire Ainsley, Stammer's director of policy, which has been seen by the Sunday Times warns, we won't recover if the Tories raid family finances with universal credit cuts, forcing councils to hike up council tax or freezing key worker pay. But we also won't recover if we just stand by as businesses go bust to be the party of working people and their communities. Labor must be unashamedly pro business to drive growth and opportunity in every part of our country. Ash, what do you make of this? I don't think many of our audience will be surprised that when Stammer sort of, you know, the first rocky patch he's encountered, he's decided, I know what I'll do. I'll be unashamedly pro business. No fault to the fact that potentially the reason why young people and labour activists are annoyed at him is maybe because he kicked out Jeremy Corbyn or because he hasn't offered really any opposition to the Tories during this pandemic. No, the problem is we haven't got business executives onside quite enough. Let's offer some tax cuts. This really does feel like Groundhog Day. Kier Stammer made this exact same announcement about being pro business at the beginning of his leadership. So it's not just that, you know, what we're seeing is microwaved millibandism. It really is. What we're seeing is reheated Stammerism, you know, this recycling of tropes and talking points, attempts to sort of distance himself from what he sees as the Corbynite legacy. Well, this isn't even a fresh way to do that. So I think what this indicates is someone who really is at a loss for ways to sort of revive a plateauing leadership. He's having to nick from his own ideas. But as for this thing about being microwaved millibandism, I remember when Ed Balls was going around to anyone who'd listened, saying that he was ferociously pro business, I think under Gordon Brown and Tony Blair, you know, it was said that Labour was, you know, unashamedly pro business, pathologically pro business, neurotically pro business, you know, just new adjectives every single time. And what it fails to do is actually come up with a set of policies, which would be, you know, concretely supportive of small to medium businesses, which are struggling. We've seen that with the death of the High Street, the sort of tendency towards, you know, kind of big retail monopolies, which do disadvantage smaller businesses, and also disadvantage the workforce. None of us are saying, you know, hey, it's really great when, you know, your local shop, which has been there for 40 years, goes bust. What we're saying is that, well, hang on, in order to sort of protect those smaller business, to prevent the accumulation of monopoly capital and the outsize, you know, political clout those businesses have, you've got to be the party of Labour, you've got to be the party of the workforce. And I think that Keir Starmer's really struggled to articulate that in any meaningful sense. And part of the reason why is because the section of voters that he's targeting are retired homeowners, pensioners, they're not people who, you know, are in the workforce anymore. So this is the kind of platitude which, you know, he hopes is going to reassure people who had their feathers ruffled by John McDonald and Jeremy Corbyn. John McDonald also, by the way, you know, made his overtures to the business community. I kind of remember his, you know, tea time, wooing initiatives towards the city. He tries to sort of rebrand himself as, you know, the people's bank manager a bit. But it wasn't just John McDonald, because you've gone through previous Labour leaders who tried to court business. You had Blair Brown and Milliband. But it wasn't just them. This is Jeremy Corbyn speaking to the Confederation of British Industry during the 2019 general election. It is sometimes claimed that I am anti-business. Actually, this is nonsense. It's not anti-business to be against poverty pay. It's not anti-business to say that the largest corporations should pay their taxes, just as smaller companies do. And it's not anti-business to want prosperity in every part of our country, not only in the financial centres of the City of London. And I say this to business, too. If a Labour Government is elected on the 12th of December, you're going to see more investment than you've ever dreamt of. You're going to have the best educated workforce you could ever have hoped for. And you're going to get the world-leading infrastructure, including full-fibre broadband, you've long, long demanded year after year at these conferences. Now, for someone whose intention or whose main job was to go out and say, look, I'm not hostile to business, he didn't seem particularly pleased to be speaking to a lot of business executives. He did have a good point, which is to say that if you are pro-business, not necessarily pro-the-big monopolistic, parasitic businesses, landlords, and are just sort of getting money for not doing very much, if you're interested in the productive economy, then having high wages, which means that people have purchasing power, means that firms invest in productivity, having a government that's willing to invest in new technologies, that is really good, actually, for the businesses that most people care about. So it was a good argument. And we still haven't seen what Starmer's specifically labor pitches on this question. You're watching Tisgis Arundhavara, media we go live every Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 7 p.m. If you haven't subscribed already, please do and hit that notifications button. We're going to keep on the theme of Keir Starmer and his little wobble, because it revealed itself, let's say, in some polling figures today. So these were all released today. I'm going to show you polls from Yugov, where the Conservatives are on 41 and Labour are on 37. You can see there that the Conservatives are up four and Labour are down four, not necessarily a straight switch, because the Greens are also up two, but those polls aren't moving in the right direction. If you're thinking, maybe that's just an outlier, and again, we can't guarantee it's not, but we also have this poll from Ipsos-Mauri, the same direction of travels the Conservatives on 42. That's one up from the previous poll, and Labour on 38, which is down three. And again, the Greens doing pretty well there on eight points. The final one I want to show you is, would Keir Starmer make the best Prime Minister? This has been the source of polling, which most people, myself included, have been pointing to to say Keir Starmer's team won't be unhappy with this. They still won't be distraught by this, but Keir Starmer and Boris Johnson are now level pegging on who would make the best Prime Minister. 33 points. Each Keir Starmer down one, Boris Johnson up four. Presumably, this has a lot to do with the rollout of the vaccine. I'm not really sure if the electorate were looking that closely at a leak about Union Jacks. It's probably something more fundamental than that. For context, for that, who is the best Prime Minister? Britain's elect put together a nice handy record of UGov over time, who they found was people's preferred Prime Minister. You can see there that there was a period at the beginning of the pandemic where Keir Starmer dramatically caught up with Boris Johnson, then their rating sort of danced with each other for a few months, and Boris Johnson is now on the way up. Ash, these are all... We shouldn't really overinterpret polls, which are just going up and down a bit, but there is this impression now that Keir Starmer has lost momentum and also confidence. If he ever had a mojo, I don't know if Keir Starmer ever had a mojo, but if he did, he's kind of lost it. Yeah, I wouldn't say that he had a mojo. Maybe sort of a hint of a vibe somewhere. An air of authority, at least. An air of confidence and authority. At the moment, he and his team are looking increasingly rattled. They're casting about for ideas, nothing's really working, and it's because their strategy of present competence, a political image rather than a policy story, that's how you're going to win over those laboratory switches who were decisively lost in 2019. That isn't being borne out in much of the polling at all. It's maybe 4% of those switches being won back, but there's no significant dense. Meanwhile, you've got a kind of steady seeping of progressive votes towards applied and towards the Greens. I imagine for younger people, that's something which might exacerbate, if that's of course, if they don't just switch to non-voting entirely. And on the question of individual poll ratings, well, if you're saying that your big thing is, I'm more competent than the other guy, and you don't have a sense of the policy vision, well, what happens when the other guy actually gets something right? Like vaccine procurement, like the vaccine rollout that's really given people no pun, a shot in the arm, and a sense of optimism. Did you like that? A sense of optimism, looking forward to summer, looking forward to being able to reunite with their families, see their friends, do all the things that they want to do. This idea of I'd be better if I was in charge because I'm just a more competent and together guy doesn't really work when people are going, actually, the government got something right. The sort of disavowal of vision, and I think that it is a deliberate strategy on the part of Kia's team, I think is really, really flawed. Because I think the starting point that they work from is that the electorate is essentially passive. They respond to images and not policy. They don't really care about what you're going to be like governing the country and how their lives are going to be different outside of the run up to election day. Before that, you may as well not say anything, just don't fuck up too much and project a sense of authority. The thing that's really flawed about that is that one, you're not really diverging from the government because if you want to look authoritative, the best thing to be is already in power. The second thing is that if what you're trying to do is reclaim terrain that's been lost because of 40 years of economic drift where you've got one section of the population who tend to be older, enriched by asset price inflation and the protection of their pensions, and the majority of the workforce excluded from wealth, from economic stability and security, you're not going to deal with that in any meaningful sense if you just say, well, my tactic is going to be don't spook the boomers. If what you want to do is stage a political upset and put together an electoral coalition capable of winning, you're going to have to, in some ways, represent the economic interests of the working age population and appeal to them on the basis of policy. Wrapping yourself up in a flag isn't going to cut it. Trying to just look better in a suit than Boris Johnson or Jeremy Corbyn isn't going to cut it. And punching left, trying to demonstrate your own competence by going, look how often I can make Rebecca Long Bailey cry, isn't going to cut it either. It keeps you caught in that place of labor in fighting story. It cuts you off from your grassroots. We're going to go out there and do the campaigning for you. And it also turns out a sizable chunk of young, socially progressive voters who could mean the difference between, you know, a labor or a Tory seat in an urban setting.