 By focusing on attacking the left instead of the Tories, Keir Starmer has royally pissed off Labour members. Now, New Polling suggests the public aren't impressed with the Labour leader, Eva. UGov's latest voting intention poll suggests the Conservatives have a 13-point lead over Labour. The Conservatives are on 45%, which is plus four from last February or late February, and Labour are on 32%, which is down four from that same date. As you can see from the UGov Westminster voting intention tracker, this is the biggest gap that we have seen since last May, of course, before Dominic Cummings' infamous trip to Barnard Castle. Now, this surge in support for the Tories, of course, we can't ignore the fact that the vaccine rollout is going well. It probably has a lot to do with that. At the same time, Keir Starmer has been having lots of personal problems of his own making over the past few weeks, whether that be indecision, a lack of substance, or the general impression of being driven by opportunism. And all of these problems were foreseen by one of my guests tonight, who in December labelled Keir Starmer a wet wipe. It was a story that apparently got under his skin. Moja, do you think this poor polling is not necessarily caused by the article you've written, but do you think that the wider public are like you, recognising that Keir Starmer is a little bit of a wet wipe? I mean, it's quite clear that for people who were paying attention earlier, such as who, unfortunately, it's our jobs to pay attention, that this man was someone who perhaps didn't know what he stood for himself. And I think that's the problem with Keir Starmer. He's someone who has only been a politician since 2015, so he's vastly inexperienced at this job, and it's amazing that he was even elected Labour leader. And I think it's because his background as a lawyer, you know, as a QC, he's a Knight of the Row, gave him this sheen of almost being more prepared for the gig than he was. People didn't really know he came from, he was a new face almost. And he spoke, I wouldn't say a good game, because he didn't do anything to really convince the existing Labour members. But there wasn't, there wasn't so much as, I wouldn't say there was stiff competition. So he spoke again during his campaign to be Labour leader, and immediately set about not doing anything he promised, which never goes well. Another U Gov poll recently, I think on 15th February, found that 41% of people now think that Starmer is doing badly as Labour leader, while 35% think he's doing well. This is the first time that those two lines have crossed. So for the first time now, his ratings are overall negative compared to before it was overall positive. And it's only going to get worse, the more the vaccine rolls out. And his Labour front bench, the problem is a front bench under Starmer shows a lack of vision that is not distinct from the Tories in any way. They'd merely sort of exist to not oppose in a strange way. For example, one million more people are now going to be paying income tax by 2026. And the Labour front batch has supported that in principle, while simultaneously opposing an immediate rise in corporation tax, just doesn't make any sense. Like it just does not make any sense. His approach seems to be there's many beige ideas at the wall and hope that something sticks. And the problem is it's both contradictory. So you don't get any trust there. And it also lies a lack of vision. So no one knows what your bigger aim is. And at this point, there was such an open goal to set out a vision. You know, post pandemic, we could have had this really big ambitious plan from Labour. That was the perfect time. It's like, we want to go into the war metaphors, it's the 1945 classic rebuild a new state. But Labour didn't do that. They just sort of been like now's not the time for policy. But also we have policies, but we're just not saying them. And yeah, just gradually rise corporation tax, don't take the big businesses. They can't even, there's an open goal on things like corporation tax, and they can't even shoot it in. They're like Arsenal at the moment, which is Kirstalmer's team. So yeah, all in all, really poor. I think that he won't be Labour leader by the next election. I think he might not even be Labour leader by the end of the year if the 6th of May goes poorly. Maybe he is taking inspiration from Arsenal. I should say, Labour are drawing upon the 1945 analogy, but they're just doing it in speeches which no one reads because they don't contain anything else that's interesting. So it's all very well, as Kirstalmer is saying. We need like in 1945 to build a future that's completely unlike the past, but then you have to fill that out and you fill that out with the decisions you make and the decisions he's making is to still remain on the fence. I do want to show a clip of him this morning though, because I mean, it seems to me that he's been waiting for the Tories to make mistakes, which he thinks are completely uncontroversial for him to oppose. And it seems to be that this 1% pay rise for healthcare workers is something that he has recognised as something which is a win-win to oppose. It is uncontroversial enough to stand up for a higher pay rise for healthcare workers, even though he won't say exactly how high it should be. In any case, let's take a look at him speaking about this issue to the BBC this morning. Public sector workers should get a pay rise. They shouldn't have their pay frozen. They have been keeping our country going throughout this pandemic because he's absolutely wrong to freeze their pay at this time. At the same time, by the way, that's giving Dominic Cummings a massive pay rise, 40% pay rise. So all public sector workers should get an above inflation pay rise. That's your position. We have repeatedly said that the freeze on public sector pay is wrong. We've challenged the government on it. I challenged them in the budget response on it and we'll continue to challenge them on it. So you want pay rises for everyone? You don't want any tax rises. Is that financially responsible? We have to have a plan for the future to rebuild the foundations of our country. You don't do that by freezing the pay of those on the front line throughout this pandemic, public sector workers, whilst at the same time giving people like Dominic Cummings a pay rise. That is the wrong priorities. But is your position financially responsible? Look, you have got to reward those on the front line who have been keeping our country going for the last 12 months or more and freezing their pay is a pay cut for them. That is wrong in principle. But, Sakir, obviously, the country has built up a huge amount of debt because of coronavirus. So just if you could address that question, if you're saying pay rises for all public sector workers, no tax rises, is that responsible? What I'm saying is the what we need now is for a recovery as swiftly as possible. And you don't build that recovery by cutting expenditure and by putting up taxes. That is the wrong thing to do. Now those interviews often look a bit awkward because basically both the interviewer and the interviewee is trying to get a 10 second clip for the news bulletins at 12 or 6 or 10. So that's why it can seem very repetitive. It's not necessarily a bad thing that he seems so repetitive in that answer. James, I want to bring you in for the content on this one, for the substance of what Keir Starmer was saying. Because you've been writing persuasively that Labour can't pretend they're fighting the Tories of the 2010 era because this isn't a Tory government which is as interested in austerity as George Osborne was. But at the same time, when it comes to public services, kind of are they and can Keir Starmer legitimately fall back on that sort of safe ground for Labour to just say, look, what we do differently is we treat public sector workers and we fund public services better than the Tories are doing. They can do that and they should do that, but I'll take that as a sort of bare minimum of what you might expect Labour to be doing. This is the minimum thing you're doing and you're basically opposing the government, which is what you do if you're the opposition. And then at no point you land out how this is going to look in the future. What the Tories have realised, and I reckon they've got wind of this at least in public for about September last year, is that coronavirus isn't going away, not any time soon. And the impact of this is therefore very, very long term and it changes what you can do on the economy. Suddenly every question on the economy goes from being like, how do we manage the economy better? Oh, well, let's fine tune this tax or don't do that tax or whatever. The kind of stuff, frankly, that Labour wants to talk about a little bit too much right now, and instead, they're starting to lay out a kind of political reshaping of the economy, because that's what the crisis has opened up. Like any big crisis after 2008, there was this opportunity to reshape the economy politically. And what we got was austerity, it's political reshaping of the economy. So no longer just managerial stuff, you're kind of trying to alter what the economy itself looks like one way or the other, austerity meant shrinking the state over time. So they have this opportunity, the Tories have grasped that. That's why they're doing things like this corporation tax increase, why they're throwing around lots and lots of other pots of money and doing different things all over the place. They got that sense of it. It's building on what they were moving towards anyway, but they've got that sense of it. Labour don't have that. So they have this basic fallback position saying, we should pay more to NHS staff and we should absolutely do that. The crunch will come, by the way, if Labour have to support a strike and I would like to see them do that, but let's see where they go to on this. So that's the minimum of what to do. What they need to be doing is getting to the politics of what does rebuilding out of coronavirus or with this endemic coronavirus that we're going to have actually look like. What are the jobs that people are going to be doing? Why, for instance, they're not talking about building a national care service and overhauling how we do care work in this country? It's massively underpaid. It's been hit polingly in the last year. It's been squeezed for years in funding. They could really go out and lead on this and they're not. It's just this continual on the back foot responding to what the Tories are doing, not trying to shape the kind of arguments we could be having about all of this.