Many Questions

Against my better judgement I watched the entirety of the first televised debate between the Tory Party Leadership candidates. An altogether depressing spectacle, except insofar as the paucity of the arguments and the dullness of the speakers should give considerable hope to those of us ( ie the substantial majority of UK voters) who don’t and won’t vote Tory.

 

A much more informed debate overlapped with the above- the regular Friday night Any Questions? On Radio 4. The studio audience was made up of locals from Merseyside, who were keen to express their hostility to the Tories at every opportunity The venue was a Community Cinema in Waterloo, Sefton and the producers presumably gave up on any attempt to create a ‘balanced audience’, not being able to find many/any Tory voters. The panellists were MPs Lisa Nandy, Layla Moran and Jake Berry and ‘financier’ Ali Mira.

 

You can listen to the programme here. https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m00194cq

 

Lisa Nandy is the Labour MP for Wigan and Shadow Cabinet Member with responsibilities for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities. Layla Moran is the Liberal Democrat MP for Oxford West and Abingdon, and the Lib Dem spokesperson for Foreign Affairs and International Development. Both, like myself, are involved with Compass, a cross party organisation which seeks to promote ‘Progressive Politics’ and the building of a ‘Good Society’.  They both focussed on the abject  failure of the current government to ‘ level up’. Jake Berry, by contrast, is a Tory MP, elected to the ‘Red Wall’ seat of Rossendale and Darwen in 2019, who thought the government had done its best in difficult, Covid dominated, circumstances.

 

In answer to the question ‘Who would be the best Prime Minister to deal with the Climate Emergency?” Berry, who is supporting Tugenhat , commended the five ‘ brilliant ‘ candidates left in the leadership race.He  stressed the central importance of the issue and of the need to address it by investment in a Green Industrial Revolution which provided an opportunity for economic regeneration in areas such as his own. He said, apparently with a straight face, that all the leadership candidates and the Tory Party as a whole, were committed to ‘net zero by 2050’ and had no choice but to be so given the severity of climate change etc.

 

Lisa unsurprisingly proposed Keir Starmer, adding that there was no real hope of progress until this ‘shower of a government‘ were removed, pointing to the ‘lost decade’ since David Cameron made his false promises in 2010. Like Berry she also linked climate action to economic regeneration declaring that “the road to net zero is paved with a million climate jobs”, referring to Labour’s commitment to invest £28 billion in the Green Transformation every year for 10 years, so that the UK can win the international competition for the green jobs on offer. Stressing that Labour would be careful when it comes to borrowing money (“ it’s our money and most of us haven’t got a lot of it at the moment”) she  said that  Labour would be prepared to borrow to invest to “ protect our environment, get ahead on climate change action and grow our economy “ ( presumably in a green way ) Green Quantitative Easing, long advocated by Richard Murphy and others doesn’t seem to have registered with Labour’s front bench yet (https://www.financeforthefuture.com/GreenQuEasing.pdf)

 

Layla doubted the commitment of the Tory Leadership candidates to the net zero 2050 target, a date which should be brought forward rather than rolled back. The Climate Emergency was the central issue of our time and younger constituents contacting her fully understood this. Ed Davey had a good track record but it shouldn’t be about one individual but the responsibility of all politicians to step up to the task.

 

Both Lisa and Layla were applauded for their answers to the question, Jake’s having been met with silence.  They were applauded again when they called for an immediate general election. Jake also didn’t get much support for his contention that his childhood hero Michael Heseltine should be given credit for the regeneration of Liverpool in the 1980’s, and was jeered when he suggested that Johnson will be remembered as an international statesman because of his support for the people of Ukraine,  

 

Asked to make predictions for the future Layla got perhaps the loudest applause of the evening for looking forward to the UK returning to the heart of Europe. Lisa believed that within 25 years (!)

“we could be a self-confident, open, tolerant country, that looks after our people at home and stands up for our values in the world “. She went on to say that to do that we needed to start now, and begin to repair the damage done by recent Tory governments, which required getting rid of the Tory government at the next general election.

 

I was left hoping that Lisa and Layla, who clearly agreed on so much, would be at the forefront of growing calls for an electoral alliance between their parties (and Greens and Nationalists too?) to maximise the chances of getting rid of the Tories at a general election which they agreed couldn’t come soon enough.

 

I should also mention Ali Mira, whose Wikipedia profile states that he had tried to stand as a Tory parliamentary candidate in a winnable seat in 2010 but had been overlooked because of his ethnicity (perhaps some things have changed for the better?). His main contribution to the debate was in questioning why Labour wasn’t being more radical in its taxation and spending commitments. He professed a commitment to capitalism but thought that the current levels of inequality in the UK couldn’t be justified. There should be higher taxation and greater regulation. Something which I think all the panel, including Jake Berry, agreed with, and certainly the studio audience too.