 in the midst of the coronavirus crisis, a new job creation scheme was developed, providing ex-Labor MPs and failed advisors alongside far-right adjacent tabloid journalists and disgraced home secretaries a second chance in public life. Yes, the Murdoch Funded Times radio has been streaming for just over a week now. Boris Johnson and Keir Starmer have already appeared and on Sunday, Shadow Foreign Secretary Lisa Nandi dropped in to speak to former Labor MP for Ashfield, Gloriator Piero and fashion adjacent son or expletical editor at The Sun, Tom Newton Dunn. Let's take a look at how that conversation played out. There's been lots of research on what happened to the Labor vote. Lord Ashcroft did a report but also a labor together. They concluded something very similar. I'm quoting from the Labor Together report now. The Labor Party seemed not to understand ordinary working people to disdain what they considered mainstream views. You might say the Labor Party is in favour of every form of diversity except diversity of thought. I want to ask you, if you want to get different people involved in the party, maybe even different representatives, would somebody be welcome in Labor if, for example, they favoured more stringent rules on who receives stir benefits? Yes, I think so because we've had those debates within CLPs that have been part of my own CLP and Wigan. We debate these issues not because we don't like people on benefits but because we think because working class people, as one woman said to me in the run-up to the 2015 election, it's our money love, don't spend it or we haven't got a lot of it. It's one of the reasons, actually, that I was watching the TV this morning and I saw Annalisa Dodds out talking about how we want more flexibility in the furlough scheme to protect workers in industries that are really struggling. She said I want to be really clear that we're not saying that the furlough scheme goes on forever because these things cost money and it's important to be mindful of how you spend people's money. I think there has been a huge journey in Labor, actually, about some of that and we've always had debates around these issues. We don't demonise people on benefits and we don't blame them for the problems in our society but we do have debates about how the benefit system should work. So that was Lisa Nandi talking to Gloria De Piero. Tom Newton Dunn didn't speak in that clip. There she was quoting the Labor Together report. We did a whole show on that. I actually think the report was pretty good. I think it's a pretty good point to draw consensus around within the Labor Party. It doesn't advocate a shift to the right on economic policy. That quote, again, that she read out, the Labor Party seemed not to understand ordinary working people to disdain what they consider mainstream views. Now, you can debate about the truth or falsity of that particular statement but what's relevant, I think, here is what Gloria De Piero translates ordinary working people to mean. So the first thing she jumps to is the ordinary working people they want to cut benefits. Ordinary working people. What do they want? They think Labor is too kind to people on benefits. That's why they didn't vote for them. They felt like they were treated with disdain. I mean, one of the things that's really interesting there is she said maybe Labor could even have some representatives who think that benefits should be reduced. Now, the majority of the PLP in 2015 abstained on the welfare bill. So the majority of the PLP have in recent history signed up to the idea that there should be a benefit cap and it should be harder to claim benefits. This is not the kind of thing that is taboo in the Labor Party and that, you know, imagine if the Labor Party got an MP who believed in reducing the rights that people have to claim in benefits. They have loads of MPs who believe that. A broader though, in terms of Lee Sinani's argument, I mean, I agree that obviously people should be welcome as Labor Party members if they think that benefits should be made more stringent. I think at the same time, though, you should be able to say as a Labor Party representative as a member of the Shadow Cabinet, yes, of course, of course, that's not an opinion that's beyond the pale and these people are welcome in the Labor Party, but we as a party have a very strong position on this, which is that right now in this country, eligibility for benefits has been clawed back to such an extreme extent that the idea that we should reduce it any further is ridiculous. It's for the birds. It would be obscene to do so. And we have been very clear over the last five years that none of the problems affect in this country because of people on benefits. It would be economically catastrophic to further reduce them. And what we as the Labor Party want to do is create a more, you know, generous or sympathetic or solidaristic welfare system. And there's sort of a there's a bit of a problem here, I think, in terms of finding a register to speak, which is neither judgmental and dismissive of people that disagree with you, but also not completely apologetic about your beliefs. And I think, you know, different wings in Labor have sort of flipped between those two and haven't quite found a way to be proud of your opinions, whilst not excluding people who don't necessarily share them wholesale. Aaron, what did you make of that interaction? Well, I mean, Gloria De Piero has got the job she has at Times Radio precisely to make these points. You know, clearly a political party has to have a certain minimal program around which it agrees. It clearly has to have a set of values around which it agrees. Imagine if we had a UNI on Tuske Sauer, we're interviewing a Conservative Party MP, and we said, what if somebody wants to socialise the means of production, would they not be welcome in the Conservative Party? What if somebody wanted to nationalise the entirety of privately owned property and get rid of landlords? Would you not be willing to accept that person as a Conservative Party member? Of course they wouldn't. That's ridiculous. It's the complete opposite of what the Conservative Party stands for. The interest it's meant to represent, the values upon which it was founded. You know, Labor is almost unique in this bizarre self-flagellation it does, that it performs the public. And I don't think it's accidental that this happens. You can earn a very good wage being a lefty or a former Labour MP or a Labour supporter while doing nothing but disparaging the Labour Party. Nick Cohen, Gloria De Piero here. I could name dozens of them. The entire staff affected with the observant newspaper. So I don't think it's a surprise that she's making the argument she's making here on the Times. It's effectively that political function that she's fulfilling there. Furthermore, you know, we've got 9.1 million people in this country right now on furlough. 9.1 million people getting their wages paid for by the government. You know, in that context, it really shows the extent to which Gloria De Piero, former morning TV, she checked morning TV, chat show host and then MP, the extent to which she is detached from ordinary people. Maybe before December when she was an MP, that wasn't the case. But right now, when 9 million people are on furlough, to be talking about reducing state benefits is nuts. Not even the Tories are going to do that. So I kind of think it probably does show a certain attachment from where she presently is. Probably the major benefit of having Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the Labour Party was that instead of following public opinion, the Labour Party started making it, shifting it. And there is actually no better example of them doing this than on benefits. They didn't just say, oh, these people don't like benefits. So let's, you know, attack benefit claimants. They said, let's change the narrative on this. And the evidence shows they were actually very successful. So these are both data from the National Social Attitudes Surveys sort of put together in a graphic by the Economist. And so this is showing you the number of people who thought that welfare benefits were too generous versus the number of people who thought that cuts would damage too many people's lives. And you can see that all the way from 2006 to 2015, the number who think it's too generous way higher than the number of people who think that cuts would damage too many people's lives. You've got a population there who wants to make benefits more stingy, as it were. What happens in 2015? Jeremy Corbyn becomes leader of the Labour Party. The number of people who thinks cuts would damage too many people's lives goes from about 46% to 56% jumps 10 points in two years. And the number of people who think that welfare benefits are too generous goes down from just over 50%. So 52% to about 43% again by about 10 points. And you could say, oh, well, maybe, maybe that was because there were benefit cuts in that period of time. You'd had five years of austerity by 2015 and Ed Miliband because, you know, all I quite like the guy, but I think his leadership of the party was fairly disastrous. And one of the reasons it was is because what the Labour Party did was they chased, they chased public opinion. And that meant that even though we were seeing the most brutal, most, you know, nonsensical cuts to benefits of the people that are most vulnerable in society, the public still thought that benefits were too generous until someone came along who dared to say, who dared to say, actually, this is bullshit, right? Corbyn did that and public opinion changed. I want to get this next graph up before I go to you, Aaron. So one of the ways this sort of fed back into I suppose one of the ways is the mechanism here is that it got mentioned fewer and fewer times in the press. So it stopped dominating media narratives. We've got the number of phrases related to welfare fraud and abuse in newspapers. And that goes from above 600 to down to 200. I should have checked what this is per, to be honest. But what you can see is that it tumbles from being a very high level in 2015 to very low by 2018. And so not only can you change public opinion, you can also change what journalists write about. If you remember the headlines in 2014, 2015, which was all about benefit cheats, people cheating the state, someone has seven kids and got benefits for a house that's worth X number of money, you know, bullshit stuff, right? The reason that changed wasn't because a new person bought the sun. It's still Murdoch. It wasn't because a new person got the editorship at the Daily Mail. It was the same guy right up until last year. It's because a politician came along who was willing to call bullshit. He did it. And politics still has changed, I think. And that's something that Gloria de Piero and Lisa Nandi, to be fair, do not recognize. Changing attitudes from 2001. There's falling support for benefits. There's increased support for cuts to benefits. Labor in power from 1997 to 2010. So it was under labor that actually a culture of attacking and lambasting and almost often a sort of protein hatred towards people on benefits was actually cultivated. And it's something that labor played along with. They second guessed this fictional public, this fictional electorate, which by the way they were losing, you know, it was during this period that labor loses five million votes. And what they did was help toxify the broader political debate. And I think a lot of younger people now, they go, Oh, Tony Blair was wonderful. Well, if you think somebody's wonderful, who finds torture, extraordinary rendition, illegal war, if you think that's all okay, then you go knock yourself out. But I think on the domestic front, just as bad was that new labor didn't just not make the argument for a bigger state for higher taxation for social justice. They didn't just not do that because, of course, it was financed through financialization, tax receipts in the city of London, PFI. I think actually it's something worse, which is actually they denigrated and vilified working people in this country is as Owen Jones, a friend of the show, so articulately highlights in his book, Chabs. And I think that's something to really think about, you know, labor on both sides of the debate shaped it here. Under Blair and Brown, working people on benefits were increasingly hatred, increasingly hated, increasingly disparage on Jeremy Corbyn, that change. Now, the question for Keir Starmer is, this is somebody who says, this is someone who says, as a politician, I'm about winning power. Tony Blair won power, but he also lost the debate. And I do wonder, Keir Starmer, although I don't think we'll be promised that, but even if he is, you know, would we see a repeat of the trend that we see under Tony Blair? Because what the left has to understand in this country is it's not just a battle at the ballot box, it's also a battle for public opinion, for ideas, for consensus. And unless that's shifted, actually, Labour can't do very much. And so I think, yes, it tells us something about Jeremy Corbyn, but there's a lesson there for Keir Starmer about the changes under both Blair and Brown and the decreases in consent for an extensive welfare state. We're going to go straight into the next part of that clip with Lisa Nandi and Gloria De Piero. Let's take a look. Could you attend a Labour Party meeting with a copy of the Daily Mail on Duran? Would you be welcomed? Well, yeah, I think you would be welcomed. I mean, people turn up with a Wigan evening post generally to us, which sort of begs the question as to how interesting meetings are. Could you be pro-life? Yes, so I'm pro-choice myself, but a lot of my party members are pro-life. This is a very Catholic constituency. I thought that second was quite good. Yes, I'm pro-life. No, sorry, I'm pro-choice, but of course she can be pro-life. I don't know why she didn't give a similarly confident answer when it came to benefit cuts, probably because she's not so confident in her opinion there. I think Lisa Nandi did abstain on the welfare bill, but we're going to focus on the Daily Mail point. And so Gloria De Piero is, again, before she was sort of identifying ordinary working people with people who want benefits to be cut and what evidence there is for that. Now she's saying ordinary working people are those people who read the Daily Mail, which isn't really borne out in the evidence. Let's take a look at the demographics of who does read the Daily Mail. So this is from the Daily Mail's own, this is from Metro Classifiers. This is them advertising or them telling advertisers why they should advertise in the Daily Mail. And their big takeaway is the Daily Mail provides advertisers with unrivaled reach of a predominantly cash-rich, time-rich audience. Cash-rich, time-rich. This isn't necessarily ordinary working people. Time-rich because they don't work, which is, you know, these people on pensions, fine. Cash-rich because they've got quite a lot of money, right? So how this translates to ordinary working people is, obviously, we want these people to vote Labour if they want to, fine. I want to go now to the, a bit more, some more statistics. So 83% of Daily Mail readers are home owners. 70% of them own their home outright. So that's people who aren't even paying a mortgage anymore. 62% are from ABC1. So that's the professional classes in the traditional methods by, for looking at class background. And then half a million of them have savings and investments of £100,000 or more. So, you know, it's the idea that the people who read the Daily Mail are sort of like Britain's forgotten classes, the Labour Party denigrate because their classes snobs. I don't think holds that much water. And obviously, the other factor here is age. Let's bring up the average ages of people who read the Daily Mail. So the Daily Mail, you've got 45% of people are over 65. Again, Labour needs pensioners to vote for them. But let's say pensioners, not ordinary working people. Whereas the Guardian has 21%. Only 9% of people do read the Mail are under 24, 14%. Or if you add those two up, 23% under 34%. So you can see, and this is not to say, oh, Labour, we don't need pensioners. Obviously, Labour needs pensioners to vote for us. But this idea that ordinary working people means retired white people who own their homes, like fine, maybe that's a significant demographic that Labour needs to win. But for them to stand in for ordinary working people, there's something else going on there, isn't there? But that's what she means, Michael. I mean, their view is commensurate in her imagination. This white, affluent mortgage owner is, and also a really critical thing is, and we're not huge fans of this kind of barbarian typology of careers, ABC ones, other people who enjoy autonomy at work, like you say, it's managerial, professional class, C2Ds are people in retail caches or warehousing, logistics and so on. So by any measure, this is the more affluent, more privileged part of British society. You're absolutely right. Labour needs to win these people. That's not to say they don't. But you want to win these people over the Daily Mail is now Britain's most read newspaper. I mean, those statistics are slightly out. It's readership in the context of coronavirus is just below a million. But still, that's in the context of coronavirus, right? That's a huge readership. It's now more widely read than the sun. What was really revealing about that whole moment there was that sort of Tom Newton Dunn, slimy as he is, she said, would somebody be welcome if they were reading that? He goes, Tom Newton Dunn went to Eaton. Okay, so Tom Newton Dunn is the kind of the tribune of Britain's work and class, because he was a political heir to the sun. No, he went to Eaton. I think it's really important here as well to say, you know, young people are reading the FT, as well as the Guardian, right? We're talking about people in work. Labour, even under Jeremy Corbyn, was doing very well with people in work. But we have this weird phenomenon where people who have to work for a living no longer constitute the working class. Why? Because they tend to have more progressive attitudes. They tend to be renters, or they tend to be bane, or they tend to want to get rid of things like student debt. So these categories automatically, existentially, ontologically disqualify them from actually being the working class, even though, under any economic understanding of what the working class actually is, they're the bedrock of it.