 The narrative right now is that the the national elections that are happening on Thursday will be a disappointing set of elections for. Lay but now kids armor has been pretty clear when he's appeared on television default is the ghost of Jeremy Corbyn principally saying is bringing down the labor vote even in seats that Jeremy Corbyn one and he's saying it's because the vaccine rollout was successful that's the official story. But increasing numbers of people both on the left and now some on the center are saying that failure to the failure to do particularly well in those elections if it happens will have a different cause and that's the lack of any clear vision for the party and any vision for the country. So to start off this conversation, we're going to give you an example of a Labour candidate really failing to express a vision for the country or the party. This is Paul Williams, the candidate for Hartley Paul, who struggled to tell Owen Jones what Labour stood for. What is Labour's vision for the country now? What does Labour stand for? Don't say fairness and everything being nice and mother had an apple pie. What's it concretely? What's the vision? People in this election aren't talking though about about the country. They're talking about Labour's vision for Hartley Paul. What's Labour's vision for Hartley Paul? That's unique and different and distinct. So the best companies come to Hartley Paul to provide the best jobs because we have the best trained people because we've invested in people right from the start of life. And you make that difference to children so by the time they start school they're not behind their peers, they can read, you then have small class sizes and really good. My kids are at primary school and they say that the class sizes are large, their headteacher talks to me about cuts in schools and having to reduce teaching assistance. So you help the most vulnerable children, you help children with special educational needs and when kids aren't coming to school you send out support workers to find out what's going in the household and you help people to get to a point where they can have really great skills, really great training and then employers come to you not because you've got the lowest taxes but because you've got the best people. There's some direct things. But I'm genuinely interested. Do you know what the Labour vision of the country is? What are you asking me about? Do you know what the country is? What's the Labour vision of the country? To replicate that and you start the best place for a child to be born and the best place to go. That sounded like he was asking why he was found in the back of a taxi with Ketamin on his collar and a dildo in his hand. It seemed like that was a really hard, hostile question. He was really squirming. You asked him quite a basic question, Owen. What was going on? Was that as uncomfortable as it looked? It was quite a long interview and we didn't include very exceptions where we asked other questions with similar results. I should say he hasn't been found in the back of a taxi with Ketamin on his collar and a dildo. For reasons of labour, we need to clarify that he clearly hasn't happened. It was like as if he was answering a question. Yeah, just to avoid a protracted lawsuit in exchange of legal letters. That hasn't happened. I think to be generous to him, as I said earlier, to be generous to the local Labour candidate, whoever they are, they're going to struggle to articulate what Labour's vision is for a very simple and straightforward reason which is Labour does not have a vision. They don't have any idea what they want to do with political power whatsoever. And the fact is that we do have a clear vision. They have a vision of nationalist populism, which is via their interpretation of Brexit, which is wedded to strategic investment, particularly in areas which are popular as they see it. Health, education and police, those are the three big things they went on in the election, and targeted investment in communities that they hold or are seeking to gain. And that vision is cutting through and it is effective, particularly amongst older white homeowners in communities which are often called and lumped together and homogenised as the so-called redwall. And that's the voter coalition that they have sought and are now seeking to cement. The problem Labour have is Stammer's team watched into that operation, believing that all that was needed was for the grown-ups, as they see it, to come back in the room of politics. That self-evidently they were more competent and able, I'm explaining their narrative here by the way, than their predecessors, who were self-evidently as they see it, shambolic. And that they had a candidate, Keir Starmer, who didn't have baggage in the same way, who was a knight of the realm, who had run, who'd been a prosecutor against criminals, and therefore he would attract back socially conservative voters in particular, that Labour lost. And that has not worked at all. One of the reasons is a lot of the people around Keir Starmer, they're basically on safari, they don't understand the communities they're talking about, they just grow up in them, they know almost nothing about them, and they're trying to caricature and cosplay the sorts of voters who live there through focus groups where they repeat back the messages that they get without coming up with their own clear or distinct message. And that looks inauthentic to lots of people, the whole Keir Starmer going around, always a full pint, not entirely convincing, plus flags. And that's an attempt, as they think if they tick those boxes, then they will attract those voters back. What they don't have, Labour did have a clear vision in 2017, which was to redistribute wealth and power from the top to everybody else, for the many, not the few. Of course that vision then got worn down very significantly by the Brexit trauma and drama, which is why in 2019 Labour didn't have a clear vision and kept chopping and changing its slogans throughout their election, because they didn't know how to deal with how Brexit polarised their voter coalition. But in the aftermath of Brexit, Labour don't have that vision. Now, one of the excuses they have is the pandemic, but actually that would have been, you know, that national emergency is an opportunity to showcase a vision. Look at World War II, Winston Churchill should have won the 1945 election by a landslide. He was extremely popular Winston Churchill in 1945, but Labour crafted a vision in 1945 of once we win the war, we've got to win the peace. And we're best placed to secure that peace by addressing the injustices that have been exacerbated and exposed by the war. And that's what they could have done with the pandemic, and they didn't. And they didn't pin responsibility on the government, who then people now feel resigned as thinking, well, they could have done things better that Labour would not have done a better job, because they haven't offered a narrative of what they would have done better that is convincing or compelling. The problem we have now with the Labour leadership and the Labour vision and the Labour strategy is they're not winning back the voters Labour have lost at all. They're becoming cemented in the Tories electoral coalition, whilst at the same time, the new core vote of the Labour Party, which is disproportionately younger people who rent in precarious and insecure jobs, their reasons for feeling inspired by the Labour Party are being trashed. There is no clear, coherent, inspiring vision that's speaking to them. And I think the other problem is Keir Starmer stood on those ten pledges to safeguard the core domestic policies of the Corbyn era. They haven't spoken about them, all they've just violated them as they did by opposing the Tories, increasing corporation tax quite literally from the right of the Conservatives, and that just looks shifty and dishonest. And I think what's cutting through, and it is cutting through in places like Hartlepool, is these guys don't believe in anything, they're not authentic, whilst the Tories have a vision and they're turning on the taps. And that's why Labour are failing. They have no clear vision, they don't know what they want with power. And do you know how they're going to respond after this? The only way they know how to respond, punching left. Simon Fletcher, who is the former Chief of Stato Corbyn, who was taken on by Keir Starmer's team during the leadership election to try and assuage the left. He's leaving the operation. The operation will move to the right, I think quite self-evidently. They may do a reshuffle, which brings in people from the right. And they will try and impose a narrative that a lot of their outriders and a lot of the media will cement, which is in violation of the facts, that this is somehow on the left and they're not defining themselves against the ideas and policies of the left sufficiently. And the problem is they don't have, their cupboard is empty. There's nothing in their intellectual cupboard. There is no project for European social democracy of their political iteration that is relevant to the crisis we live in, unlike the 1990s, a period of financialized growth and rising living standards. They don't have the answer to it. And I think what we'll see in 2019 after this election is them doubling down, shifting to the right and trying to define themselves against the left even further. And it will not work, but it won't stop them from doing it. We don't have Keir Starmer here to defend himself. I'd love him to come on the show. He's obviously not particularly interested in doing that. We do have in one moment a clip where he is quite explicitly asked to lay out his vision. Before we go to that, if you're enjoying the show, please do subscribe to the channel. We go live every Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 7pm. We put out videos every day, so hit that subscribe button. Now let's take a look at Keir Starmer having another crack at the vision thing. Here he is in conversation with Kathy Newman on Channel 4 News. Would a Prime Minister Starmer be as radical as the US President Joe Biden with his four and a half trillion dollar plan? Let me tell you what I would do. I would fix the economy. What we've had over the last 10 years, an economy which is short-term and that has led to low pay, low standards, low investment, low productivity and the model is broken. Inequality is baked in and that is morally wrong and it's economically stupid. I would also have the ambition to go beyond the economy. Public services need to be looked at. We need a preventative set of public services and we need public services that cut across each other. I've seen so many examples in my time of people coming through the criminal justice system who for a bit of intervention and support would never have been there and their victims would never have been victims. But we also need the ambition to change the culture because for the last 10 years, whether it was in America, whether it's in the UK or across Europe we have had this utter focus on what divides us. But am I up for the radical change that's needed to make our economy work better for everybody? You bet I am. Part of that was just sort of Keir Starmer cringe and it's down to him being a bit of a technocratic politician. I suppose expressing a vision is harder when you're up against a politician quite as wily and quite as flexible as Boris Johnson is. Yeah, I mean, Boris Johnson is an extremely wily politician who, you know, he succeeded partly because he's not seen as another Tory even though you'd think from our perspective he embodies tourism. I mean, I think just to see where they should get to, where they got wrong, I think sums it up because back in February they did this big keynote speech, Keir Starmer which was supposed to be the 21st century vision for the Labour Party which was partly as fine as far as it went, it was a diagnosis of inequality but it was going back to the whole, you know, under Miliband blessing. You know, that whole project was often diagnosing what was wrong, cost of living crisis, promise of Britain where the next generation have a better life than their parents, squeeze middle, they kept jumping from analysis to analysis without a policy. There one signature policy they came up with was the British Recovery Bond which has never been heard of since and that I think sums it up. They're looking desperately around for a vision, anything, any sort of vision and they're not, you would then what you do is you stick to that vision hammer away relentlessly and they're not doing that and I think they'll get stuck in a cycle of relaunches, stagnating polls, relaunches, they'll brief to the press. Another, Keir Starmer's resetting his leadership with a new speech, you can hear a lot of that and I think the other problem is this whole Tory sleaze approach, attack line, I think is very misguided in lots of ways. I think part of it is trying to hark back to the 1990s because a lot of them saw that work for new Labour quite well. A lot of that was to do with sex by the way. I mean there was the Neil Hamilton stuff where it was about dodgy envelopes but a lot of that was the Tory's launch to back to basics campaign and morality to return to the Victorian age and then lots of Tory ministers were clearly having sex with anything that moved so that was why sleaze stuck because sleaze is often associated with sexual issues, isn't it? And I think the problem with their line of attack this time round is people are very cynical about politicians. Politicians are less trusted than advertising executives according to the polling and I think the danger is with this attack line is it feeds into a sense that all politicians are on the take, they're in it for themselves, they've got their snaps in the trough. That's what you hear over and over and over again, repeated, verbatim by voters but actually that's just seen as spread around, that's what all politicians are like and the more people think that, the more it actually often hurts the left because if you think all politicians are corrupt in it for themselves you don't trust them to come up with grand national projects of social reform or you're less likely to and what they should have done is stuck to an anti-elite framing PPE contracts is about, for example, being handed out to their mates is about an elite that looks after themselves the fact that tests and trace failed again an elite that looks after themselves hands to their private sector mates who made an actually pigsy of the whole thing not locking down quick enough was because again, they feared it would hit the profits of business human life was less important and Labour should have done what they did under Atlee with World War II which is to go, look at what this national tragedy has done we clapped from windows for the key workers who have been undervalued and underpaid for so long and now we're going to give them the wages and terms and conditions the millions of them that they deserve and instead we have Keir Starmer on national television you can't even commit to anything more than a two and a half percent pay rise for nurses that the self-employed, the millions of self-employed and precarious workers in this country again, they've been exposed one pay packet away from insecurity that will change universal credit which millions of people have been sucked into the orbit of inadequate, we need to build a new welfare state which is actually suits the needs of the times and the polling has shown that people's attitudes towards the welfare state has completely and utterly changed that we've seen from how test and trace failed private sector mess, unlike the vaccine rollout public sector NHS rollout that shows public ownership works so we're going to go down that avenue they could have knitted that together we're going to stand up against an elite that looks after their own by redistributing wealth and power and curing the injustices that were exposed and exacerbated by the national emergency that worked in 1945 they beat bloody Winston Churchill, the wartime leader in a landslide it's not the same obviously but there are some similarities but they didn't do that they were too scared to pin responsibility for the pandemic on the government they let them get away with it and now they're going down a line of politicians who are dodgy that's rebounded on them they've got the various new labour ghosts of Christmas past associated with them and people just go well you've got that problem as well and they're not coming up with that coherent inspiring vision instead they're jumping from message to message to message throwing an occasional policy to the ether forgetting about it, it never cuts through it never sticks if you do that and that's their failure, that's their problem and if they stuck to that clear vision I think it would cut through but they don't have a vision they have any confidence in so all they'll do after this is carry on down the line of I'm not Jeremy Corbyn or Boris Johnson but they won't define who he actually is instead all the leadership and they're looking at continued stagnation and decline this is not going to end well by any stretch of the imagination and I think I'm afraid to say all too many of them, this whole political project of Keir Starmer seems to have been founded on a fraud because it was a case of people who voted for Liz Kendall or campaign for her back in 2015 the Blair Eye candidate in 2015 signing up to a soft left agenda because they thought that was the sweet spot of the Labour membership in 2020 and I don't think they believed it I don't think they believed it one bit and now they're going to just throw all of that overboard and go the way of the European sister parties which I'm afraid to say are in a far worse state than Labour Party ended even in 2019