The Battle of Ideas festival takes place this weekend, on Saturday 17 & Sunday 18 October at Church House in Westminster. Tickets are still available with substantial discounts for students and concessions.
We’re back in parliament and back inside the Lords. The atmosphere is interesting: the parties have just had their conferences and both Conservatives and Labour are convinced that they’ve pulled off some good speeches, meaning things just might go back to normal. But do they really think that politics can simply settle down, that there isn’t a major political realignment happening?
Perhaps a sign of that naivety – the idea that we can just turn back the clock and forget all the change that’s taking place – was the fact that Andy Burnham has used questions in the House of Commons and his appearance on Remaniac podcast The Rest is Politics to reopen the Brexit wars. Talk about rewinding time. Burnham admitted that one of the first things he asked about when he reached No.10 was whether or not there was Russian influence in the Brexit vote. Really? A country in major crisis and that’s his priority? The only solution that the Labour Party has to everything – from our economic woes to immigration to the physical defence of the realm – is to rejoin the EU in some shape or form. Never mind dealing with the huge waste in the welfare system or investing in industry and confronting the barriers that Net Zero politics has put in place…
But what is perhaps worse than Burnham’s ‘Russia did it’ ideas is the fact that a few days after his pronouncements in the chamber and with Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart, he tried to pretend that he hadn’t said any of that at all – or, at least, he didn’t mean it like that. Ministers were falling over themselves to brief the press that their boss hadn’t just unleashed conspiracy theories about the most important vote in recent British political history. But he did. Burnham has gone back on his Makerfield promise: to not reopen the Brexit issue.
All of this made a mockery of what we were doing in the Lords this week which was discussing the ‘Hillsborough Law’ – the Public Office (Accountability) Bill – a piece of legislation which seeks to compel government bodies, authorities and officials to have a duty of candour – to tell the truth, in essence. That government thinks you need to legislate to compel public officials to be honest – well you couldn’t make it up. Up the corridor you had people doing anything but telling the truth about what the country’s leader thinks about Brexit and the EU, while we were demanding that people in the public sphere should be straight and honest with the public.
Lots of people have criticised Burnham for ‘shooting from the hip’ or ‘speaking off the cuff’ on issues like Manchester City or Brexit. But I don’t mind him speaking freely – in fact, I welcome it. Burnham can be as loose lipped as he likes and we should judge him for it. We need to know what politicians actually think, not just what their speech writers deem to be acceptable. We have been given a real insight with this Brexit chat and clarity on suspicions many of us had about the Labour Party’s desire to reverse the Brexit vote. Now we can discuss what to do about that.
And where should you discuss this? With me and thousands of others at the Battle of Ideas festival, which is taking place this weekend on Saturday 17 and Sunday 18 October at Church House in Westminster. We’ll be discussing everything from the EU to the rights and wrongs of surrogacy, censorship and free speech to the hype around the Bayeux Tapestry, angry young women and why they’re voting Green to what China is up to in the Middle East… and so much more. Come along and emulate Burnham – speak your mind, try ideas out and join us for two days of public debate and discussion.
Speaking of trying ideas out, I was on Cross Question with Iain Dale the other night and we ended up having an exchange about Reform’s plans to halt asylum claims. After I suggested that it was an idea to at least consider, two of my panel members jumped on me as though even taking the proposal seriously was ‘beyond the pale’. But the thing about politics is that you’ve got to let yourself think the unthinkable, to experiment and to consider all angles so that when you come to your position, you know you’ve got a strong sense of why you think what you think. Our festival is a place to do this in person, in the flesh: conversations for the public, with the public, in public. See you there.
Claire
“… the idea that we can just turn back the clock and forget all the change that’s taking place…”
As far as Andy Capp, Spangle of the Northern Heavens is concerned the clock stopped in 1979 bringing to an end a golden age, and everything that has happened in all the years since needs to be eradicated.
Latest poll puts Labour on 30%, 6 points ahead of the Tories and 9 points ahead of Reform.
Yes it’s just one poll - but have people gone mad? Are we to go back to Uniparty which won’t clear up the mess it has made, just pile it higher?