 It has been 100 days since Keir Starmer became Labour leader. Paul's show, he's made a good impression on much of the public. He's seen as competent and credible. But what does he actually stand for on no subject? Is this question more mysterious than on tax? And in particular, the issue of a wealth tax has, this has got Labour tied up in knots about what it actually believes. We're hearing one thing one day, another thing, another. So this issue, this particular issue about wealth taxes, first reared its head when Annalise Dodds the Shadow Chancellor in a speech on the 3rd of July answered a question about wealth taxes like this. When it comes to wealth taxation, I mean, again, we have seen many changes in this area over the years and we've seen actually an increase in inequalities in wealth over the years. I think the government does need to look at this area. I don't think we're in a fair situation where the amount of tax paid by the very worst off people is actually less proportionately as part of their income than that for the very best off. And of course, for the very, very best off people, quite a bit of their money coming in is derived from wealth. I think we do need to have that new settlement. And actually much of the opinion data has indicated that that's got a lot of support amongst the UK population as well. That position was echoed on Ma the following Sunday. As she told him, we have seen a rise in income and wealth inequality and those with the broadest shoulders should be bearing more of a contribution if that contribution is needed. And then the following day, Keir Starmer confirmed to Nick Ferrari on LBC that Labour supported the principle of a wealth tax. We can take a look at that moment here. What's up? Your Shadow Chancellor has spoken of a potential wealth tax. Is that the solution to this financial crisis? Well, she said, look, it's got to be amongst the issues that we look at. She's right about that. So you would support it? Well, we are saying to the government, look at the idea of a wealth tax. We certainly support the principle that those with the broadest shoulders should bear the greatest burden. But at this stage, four years before an election, I'm not going to start setting out tax. But where would it kick in? Well, we'll have to look at it carefully and we will have a fully-costed Labour manifesto in due course and a much shorter one, by the way, next time. So that was a decent line. He's saying, in principle, we back it. We think that the cost of the crisis should be borne by the wealthiest, but he wouldn't be drawn on detail totally fair enough. I think the last leadership often got to bog down in detail too quickly. However, two days later, after Sunak's mini-budget, Dodds took a different tone. She stated, then, Labour is not calling for tax rises. We are calling for growth. So we've got Labour is not calling for tax rises. A much more definite statement and against wealth taxes. That generated this headline in The Times. Can we get this up? Labour backtracks from wealth tax plan. That article was, in turn, confusingly pushed back against by Dan Cardin. So he's a shadow treasury minister, one of the few left-wingers remaining on the front bench of The Times article. He said, this is false. Labour is clear that the cost of the crisis should be borne by those with the broader shoulders. We are following very closely the academic research underway by LSE inequalities and Warwick University and others on how a UK wealth tax would work. But Cardin, one of the few left-wingers remaining on the shadow front bench, was put back in his box on Sunday when Andrew Ma asked Rachel Reeves the following. But before long as a country, we are going to have to pay for all of this. If Rishi Sunak came to the Labour Party now and said, look, I'm afraid that everybody earning over, say, £80,000 a year has to pay more tax to get the public finances back in support, would you say, no, we're against those tax rises? Well, we would look at any proposals that the government have put forward. And under Keir Starmer's leadership and with Annalisa Dodds as our shadow chancellor, we have tried to be a constructive opposition to support the government when they get things right, but to push them further, including on jobs and support with the flexible furlough scheme that people want to see when we think the government needs to do more. But right now, we think the entire focus of government and the Treasury should be to get people back into work. Sorry to jump in again, but asking people earning over £80,000 a year to pay more tax was a Labour policy. Have you really moved away from those kind of policies? Labour is no longer the party of fair taxes, of taxing people with the broader shoulders most. Is that really the position? Well, we're not setting out proposals at the moment for the next manifesto. The next general election is likely to be four years away. We had a terrible defeat in the election last year. We need to reassess a whole range of policies, and I'm not going to write our manifesto on an ad hoc basis on this programme, Andrew. There's plenty of time to do that work, but right now the focus has got to be on jobs. Sometimes when you see Labour front-benches at this point in time, and yes, they're doing quite well in terms of public popularity, we'll go on to that, but it does sound like you've pulled a string behind them and they say the same sentence, whatever the question. So she's asked, do you support the principle of wealth tax? We decided we're going to be a constructive opposition, so whatever the government wants to do, we'll look at the details and then we'll decide. But what do you think about a wealth tax? We want to be a constructive opposition, so we won't have a manifesto for another five years, so until then we'll just be constructive, we'll listen to what they say, we'll look at the details and then we'll decide. And this whole idea that we're not going to write our manifesto till 2024 is complete nonsense. Yes, he's not asking you, and he shouldn't ask you the details at what threshold is someone going to have to start paying this new tax and is there going to be, you know, are you going to ramp up HMRC so that they get all of the detailed questions? Yes, put that in the manifesto. But do you support a wealth tax? That's an issue that matters now. Before 2024, many of the decisions that get made, over the next year or two, are going to be incredibly important in setting in, you know, a new economic settlement in this country. And do you want to have any role in that? Do you want to say, do you want to be pushing the conservatives in a progressive direction? Or do you want to just stand back and refuse to have an opinion on absolutely anything? It's not even a controversial topic, you know, it just, the mind boggles. Ash, Keir Starmer is proving quite popular, the polls are showing, but you know, I suppose seeing constructive opposition seem quite as shallow as that can be rather frustrating. Well, I've written on Keir Starmer's constructive opposition approach quite extensively, and I've tried to be really fair to him because I know Keir Starmer's politics are not my politics, and it would be unfair for me to criticise him on the basis of simply not being Jeremy Corbyn, of simply not being John MacDonald. Address Keir Starmer for who he is. He's a man who's going hell for leather to claw back the votes of radicalised homeowners, right? That's what he wants to do. And the way in which he wants to do that is, on the one hand, is bolstering his perceived strength on the areas where Corbyn was perceived to be weak, so internal party management, and reintroducing a aura of professionalism to the Labour Party project, law and order, and foreign policy. Those are the main areas. But what I think he's leaving out, and I'm fine with him doing the whole, I'm a sir, I've met the Queen, I'm a QC thing, fine. Whatever Keith and Harrogate needs to hear, fine by me. What concerns me is there's a complete unwillingness to change the conversation in a direction which might be more beneficial to his political party. Because at the moment, Labour policy on tax is being outflanked on the left by actual millionaires. There's been this lesson of millionaires for humanity saying, please, tax us a bit more to be able to pay for this crisis. I think that it's likely that in certain policy areas, you will see Rishi Sunak in particular being more interventionist and advocating more interventionist policies than the present Labour front bench. And that's a dangerous place to be in. I reckon that should Leila Moran win the Lib Dem leadership, she's going to be pushing for visionary things like UBI, requisitioning private hospital capacity, perhaps even a four-day week. And you start seeing a fragmentation of what was once Labour's most reliable core vote, young people, working age, working class people, students and so forth. And these radicalised homeowners, they might like you. They might think that you're better than Corbyn before he is in when the honeymoon's over. Are they going to return to you and give you their vote? Simply because the totems of outraged Middlingland, Jeremy Clarkson, Piers Morgan have said that. They think that you're a better shout than Corbyn. I think no. And I think that that's where not taking the chance of trying to persuade people of things like wealth taxes, of having a green new deal with a clear 2030s target, this is where you're really shooting yourself in the foot. Because rather than having given yourself three years, four years of making the arguments, winning people over, you've got to do it as soon as your manifesto comes out and you're gunning for that ballot box. In the meantime, you've had, I think, a lot of your support become disenchanted. They're less keen to come out and participate and get out the vote operations. And some of them might go green. Some of them might go Lib Dem. And a chunk of those radicalized homeowners are going to stay conservative. I mean, what Ma really should have said then, actually, I wonder if this would get a proper answer. I would say, shall I just invite you back in 2024 then? I mean, what's the point in you turning up for the next four years and refusing to have a concrete position on anything because you're not quite yet ready to write your manifesto? I mean, what are they going to do for the next four years? You mentioned the millionaires, the 83, I think it is multimillionaires who are backing more taxes. Obviously, I don't know how representative they are of millionaires in general, but the public. And we've got some concrete data on them. 61% of the public support a wealth tax for people with assets worth more than 750,000 pounds. That's excluding pensions and main homes. We've only 14% opposed. There are other polls showing that, actually, it's the majority of conservatives who support these kind of policies. And potentially even the Tory party now could come out in favour of hikes on taxes for the rich before the Labour Party do. So Guido Forks tweeted out today that Tories, or Patrick McGuire from the Times, tweeted out from Guido, that Tories have asked members which kind of tax hikes they would find most acceptable. So it could be the case that the Tories come in first here and then Labour have to constructively accept these tax rises unless they want to try and outflag them from the right. I don't know. Aaron, what is going on here? Wealth taxes are popular with the public. Let's put this in a different way. We know that Keir Starmer wants to be popular with the public. He thinks that the previous administration took on too many battles, took too many positions that people that he wants to appeal to weren't onside with. A wealth tax wasn't one of them. This seems popular across demographics in this country. Why is he not just coming out and saying, yes, of course, we support the principle of more taxes for the very wealthy so that we can rebuild a more equal society which coronavirus has shown is so desperately needed? Of course, he's not very good at politics. You know, he's been in politics for five years. His chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, a lot of people say he's a really talented guy. I mean, I have no idea. Look, he's working for the Leader of the Labour Party. He's working for the Leader of the Opposition. So I presume there's obviously some truth to that. But you know, he was working for Liz Kendall in 2015. And so I do wonder, in terms of their instincts, I wonder how good they are. And of course, the coronavirus has created a political environment now, which is heavily dependent on instincts. And I really don't think Keir Starman knows what he thinks in this context. And I think what Ash said about the Lib Dems, I think there's a very real possibility that if Leyla Moran does become their leader, and right now she's not the favourite, right now, Davey is the favourite. But if Leyla Moran was to win that, I think Labour would lose seats in the next general election. And that sounds like a huge claim. But you know, people talk about the Red Wall, which is another blue wall. In many of these seats, which the Labour Party just held on to by 1,000, 2,000 votes, if you lose a couple of hundred young people, a couple of hundred Bane people, if the Tory vote basically stays where it is, those seats are gone. In Laboury seats, only a 700, 800 majority. And I do think this is something that the Labour Party needs to be alive to. You know, in 2010, they got 28.5% of the vote. Why? Because Nick Clegg did so well on a message, and it was just a message, there was nothing to it, of being more progressive than they were. In 2015, they got hammered fundamentally because they lost votes to yes, the Tories, to UKIP, yes, the SMP, also to the Greens. You know, the Greens got almost, I think almost a million votes in 2015. You know, there were like 15, 16 seats. It basically would have been a hung Parliament if a lot of these Green voters had all voted Labour in sort of Lib Dem, Labour or Labour Tory marginal seats. And of course, that wasn't going to happen, but it's an interesting thought experiment. And I can see a repeat of that in five years' time. And, you know, it's kind of like, we're stuck in this time warp, Layla Moran will promise the scrap tuition fees, and then she'll enter some coalition with the Tories. Presumably not, maybe even in that scenario, Labour will say, well, we could have some kind of, I can almost see it now, you know, Jeremy Gilbert and Clive Lewis and Paul Mason, all these people are like saying, we're going to have a progressive alliance between these two parties, and the Lib Dems are talking about a four-day week and a UBI. I mean, maybe, right? But that's not what the critique of Corbynism was about. The critique of Corbynism was, you know, Jeremy Corbyn's taking us to disaster. And I do feel that there's a very raw possibility that Labour get fewer seats next time around if Layla Moran wins. It's a big, big problem for Kirstam. It's a really big issue. You know what? I think it probably will be ignored because the fundamental worldview of the people around him is that you don't need to appeal to progressive voters. You don't need to do that. You just need to appeal to a small 15% part of the population, you know, home-owning men in marginals. That's not going to be good enough in a context of the S... That used to be the case when it was a two-party system with the SMP, with potentially the Brexit party. You know, this has not gone away, and they need to have a much more nuanced approach to this. I mean, there's also potentially a more conspiratorial explanation for all this, which it isn't just about appealing to that 15% of the electorate that live in swing seats, but it's about appealing to the one or two or three or four people that control Britain's press. So wealth taxes are very popular with the wider public, popular with Labour members, the people they're not popular with, the likes of Rupert Murdoch. And if Kirstam is still thinking it's a possibility that he can get the Times, the Sunday Times, Talk Radio, The Sun, all of these organisations on side, many of them backed Tony Blair in 1997, he can't be supporting things like wealth tax. We should just finish this segment by saying that Kirstam isn't just disagreeing with the public, disagreeing with Labour members, and potentially even the Conservative party, as well as a bunch of super-rich millionaires. He's also disagreeing with himself. Let's get up. The first pledge of Kirstam was famous, 10 pledges, which helped him win the Labour leadership. It was, increase income tax for the top 5% of earners, reverse the Tory cuts, incorporation tax, and clamp down on tax avoidance, particularly of large corporations. No stepping back from our core principles. No ambiguities there are there. All the ambiguities, shock horror, were introduced after he'd got the votes of Labour members.