 The police crime, sentencing and courts bill being debated in parliament was always going to pose a challenge for Labour. On the one hand, the bill seriously undermines our civil liberties. It creates the crime of intentionally or recklessly causing public nuisance, punishable for up to 10 years. If the bill passes, one could be found guilty of that crime for causing, and I quote, serious annoyance. However, on the other hand, Keir Starmer loves to seem tough on law and order to potential voters in the so-called red wall. Or he might just be a closet authoritarian, we're not sure. We've seen how this has played out before these two. On the one hand, it's a terrible law. On the other, I like to look tough. Normally it ends in abstentions. An example, last September, Labour abstained on the second reading of the Overseas Operations Bill. That was a bill which protected British soldiers from prosecution for abusing human rights. When that was voted on, the free shadow ministers who voted against the bill had to resign. In that case, Labour did go on to vote against the bill on the third reading. So not completely a disastrous record there. Then last October, it meant Labour abstaining on the Spy Cops Bill. That was a bill which legalized lawbreaking, including rape and murder by undercover police officers. On this particular one, Labour did go on to abstain on the third reading. So they abstained at the moment when this became law. Really quite outrageous stuff. Now, this time around, it seemed to be the route the party would take once again. More of the same. On Sunday, Pippa Crerar of the Mirror tweeted, Labour sources tell me Shadow Justice Secretary David Lamme briefed MPs on Friday and said the party's position was to abstain on the police bill. She says it will be interesting to see what Labour do now after that demonstration, expecting them to say more on this later today. They did say something on that issue later that day and it was a U-turn. So in the wake of the heavy-handed policing of the Sarah Everard vigil, David Lamme, the Shadow Justice Secretary, announced Labour would in fact be opposing the bill on the second reading. So on Sunday, Lamme released the following statement. The tragic death of Sarah Everard has instigated a national demand for action to tackle violence against women. This is no time to be rushing through poorly fought out measures to impose disproportionate controls on free expression and the right to protest. Now is the time to unite the country and put in place on long overdue, put in place on long overdue protections for women against unacceptable violence, including action against domestic commercise, rape and street harassment. And we must tackle the misogynistic attitudes that underpin the abuse women face. Instead, the Conservatives have brought forward a bill that is seeking to divide the country. It is a mess which could lead to harsher penalties for damaging a statue than for attacking a woman. It goes on. Labour will be voting against the police crime sentencing and courts bill on this basis. We are calling on the government to drop its poorly fought out proposals and instead work with Labour to legislate to tackle violence against women which is forcing so many across the country to live in fear, as well as to deliver the important areas that are long promised like tougher sentences for attacks on frontline workers and increased sentences for terrorists. Now Ash, Labour here have come to the correct position in the end. They are going to be voting against this bill on the second reading but the U-turn has come a little bit late. It's somewhat characteristic of the Labour Party that they'll only move when public opinion has quite dramatically shifted. Well, you saw just how fast the demands developed on Saturday night when the police attacked women at the vigil. First it was, you know, Crestedic resign. Then suddenly there was a much more vocal critique of this bill that's making its way through Parliament. And Labour had to respond, I think, quite quickly to that because they were being asked difficult questions, not just by the left within their own party, who they're quite comfortable to ignore, but also by lobby journalists about this bill. One of the first people I saw raising this question was host of Channel 4 News Christian Guru Murthy. So it's something which they did have to respond to and respond to quickly. The anatomy of that statement by David Lammey is interesting because it also shows you where it is that Labour are coming from at the moment. It's not really being motivated by principle. What is it about this law? Is it good or is it bad? Because, well, the content of the law hasn't changed significantly since Friday when they were instructing MPs to abstain. It's calibrated quite deliberately in order to be focused, groupable. And it means that you do end up, I think, with some quite strong lines, sort of targeted at some persuadables. But you also end up with like a bit of a mulch. So they want to criticise a law and order bill without ceding the terrain on law and order in terms of positioning, fair enough, whatever. But they sort of end up with this sort of hokey-cokey approach of like, we don't want this law, but we do want these other two laws. And the sort of content of, okay, so what precisely is wrong about this one gets lost. I do think it was a smart move by the Labour front bench to sort of make the connection between, look, you're going to get more time for defacing a statue of a literal slave trader than you might for raping a woman that's smart, that tells a story about Tory priorities. But ultimately, they're not that interested in building popular support for the principle of democratic protest in itself. And I think that's quite dangerous grounds to seed. Fundamentally, this body of laws that the Conservative Party are pushing through are about limiting the ability of people to hold the government to account. And if Labour join in with this, you know, kind of fantasy of middle England's view of protesters, which are disruptive students and get a job. What they're going to find themselves doing is closing down avenues through which public dissent and public disapproval of the government is articulated, which itself bolsters support for Labour. So it's undemocratic. It's, you know, a silly way to make decisions about which laws you vote down. But it's also, I think, ultimately self-defeating to have this approach to thinking about protest. And there's one more thing I want to say, which I sort of talked about earlier. I think it was Stephen Bush who said that the problem with Keir Starmer is that you can always see how the trick is done. So for instance, when there was that whole big brouhaha about Labour and patriotism, and should they have the union jack behind Labour front benches when they do broadcast media, it was a matter of you can see how the trick is done. Labour can't do anything focus groupable without sort of it just seeing, seeming screamingly inauthentic. And that's going to be one of the things that really holds Keir Starmer back. Because he doesn't seem like a man who's got ideas or vision or principles. He seems like he's motivated by chasing after a pole bounce, which by the way, isn't coming. In fact, he's sliding in the poles. So I think that this whiff of inauthenticity is kind of becoming a stench. I think the public can see it. And he's going to be left, I think, quite at sea, almost. There's not an obvious way through it. Because political rebrands work when you go, well, now I'm really being myself. But I think the issue for Keir Starmer is that he doesn't really have a self to be. This is from Ipsos Mori today showing the direction of his satisfaction ratings. So here you can see he goes down from 66% in June to 19% that satisfaction among Labour voters, among Conservative voters going in exactly the same direction. And then you can see among all voters in total, it is going down in that same direction. So he's in pretty poor territory. Now, Ash, I suppose your comment on this, on the one hand, it's kind of cool because it's sort of showing everything that the left has been saying, which is, look, direct action can shift public opinion, can shift the political centre of gravity, which is what that sister's uncut action did. And it's saying that if you stand in front of voters and don't have any principles or stand for anything and just go with the wind and follow whatever focus groups say, it's going to be bad for you. So in a way, as much as Keir Starmer would still probably be a better Prime Minister than Boris Johnson, it's good to see that his pretty cynical strategy is not paying off. I mean, look, I love the fact that my painstakingly put together hot takes for the Cortado are being vindicated by this polling. That's great. But it does have, I think, quite deletious effects for the state of our democracy. It was a bad joke, indeed, when Laura Koonsburg hailed the election of Keir Starmer to Labour leader as the return of real opposition and saying that, you know, everybody suffers when you don't have a real opposition. Well, say what you like about Jeremy Corbyn, elements of his political strategy. You always knew what the difference was between him and the government. That's really important. That's just a basic thing that people need to understand is who are you and what makes you different from the people in charge. Corbyn suffered most when he started trying to triangulate and he sort of stopped being himself when he lost that sense of authenticity. Keir Starmer seems to have learned all the wrong lessons from the wrong people. He's inherited the triangulation of Blair without his combativeness. He's inherited, you know, Ed Miliband's almost fatal desire to please the lobby at any costs without his sort of ideas or connection to a left-wing intellectual hinterland. And in some ways, he's sort of inherited Jeremy Corbyn's gift for making some decisions where you go, I don't know where that came from. But without Jeremy Corbyn's integrity, principle, or clarity when it came to moral political issues. And so what are you left with? You're left with someone who says that they're going to be a bit like the government, but better. But the government's always better at being like the government because they are the government. And someone who has, you know, a voice like Alan Partridge and who's, you know, kind of looks quite pompous and uptight in a suit, sort of, you know, bleeding sadly at people. It's not a compelling image. It's not a compelling emotional or political story. I think that one thing that Starmer has to do, if he wants to turn this around, is that he needs to get rid of the people around him who are saying you live and die by focus groups. Get some people with actual politics around you who don't start from the assumption that the public are fundamentally apolitical and they don't like it when you tell them ideas. And surround yourself with people who are capable of generating ideas. You've got an idea of how you tap into the things that the public aren't quite saying yet, but it's latent and it's there and it's the thing that they want. It's something which Corbyn and his team, when they're at their best, could do very, very effectively. For instance, after the Westminster attack, and they were able to defy expectations and mount quite a searing critique of the impact of the war on terror. That came from sort of tapping into a latent public mood about the war on terror or indeed what Dominic Cummings and Boris Johnson were so skillfully able to do with Brexit. That is the mark of a successful and impactful politician, and it's not a quality that we've seen from him.