What's happening to Keir Starmer's policies? Yesterday he ditched another one, confirming that he would maintain the Conservative austerity policy that saw child benefit scrapped after two children.
Cue major backlash - and today a resignation from a Labour mayor (famously no fan of Starmer) citing too many broken promises from the leader. Meanwhile, Keir is warming to his theme of fiscal prudence. Is it enough to convince people that Labour has a fresh promise?
Later, we look at the resurgence of the morality police in Iran - over women who've ditched their head coverings. Is it a sign of confidence in the draconian regime - or are they losing their grip on the public ?

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got to show some clear water, some clear red water between themselves and the Daily Mail and the Telegraph and themselves and the Conservatives.

minute, many people can't spot the difference.

And that's a shame for somebody who's probably as talented as Keir Starmer is.

He's got to show that he's on the side of working people and progressive politics and

That was Mick Lynch, he's the RMT leader and he was speaking on Sophie Ridge's Sunday morning show on Sky yesterday.

And he's asking Keir Starmer, in words of pretty much 1 syllable, what he's about, where the difference is between what he hates now in terms of the Conservative government and what he's promising tomorrow in terms of what Labour will deliver.

Mick Lynch of course and his RMT union are no longer affiliated to the Labour Party.

So on 1 level Keir Starmer can just shrug his shoulders and say I'm going to ignore whatever you say.

But does McLinch represent a more widespread view that Labour, we know what it doesn't stand for, but not quite sure what it does?

And later in the podcast, a fascinating interview about the situation in Iran today, where the morality police are restarting patrols to check that women have got their hijabs on correctly and fully covering their face and everything is being done according to the rules of the Islamic Republic of Iran?

Or is it the case that the morality police are just showing up how weak the Iranian state has become.

But we're going to start with Labour and we're going to be looking at what Keir Starmer himself has been saying and writing over the last couple of days of this weekend because he's written for The Observer and he's spoken to the BBC and he's talked about this conservative created crisis.

He doesn't like what the 13 years of conservative rule have done to the country and that's kind of his USP to hate it.

And yet, in much of what he's saying, he goes on to explain that he can't actually change that yet.

And so I think there is a growing unease coming through of what he can actually promise.

We get that Keir Starmer wants to be grown-up, we get that he doesn't want to hate on the civil service, we get that he doesn't want to sort of run around calling our institutions kangaroo courts or throwing parties during COVID and lockdown.

It's enough to get you saying, they will be different.

And that's the question that, at the moment, Labour is choosing not to answer.

Well, if you listened to what Keir Starmer pledged when he became the Labour Party leader, he came up with this sort of extravagant list of 10 pledges of what would mark his leadership of the Labour Party.

A lot of them have been jettisoned, watered down, discarded.

We've had a return of inflation into the political system.

If you compare and contrast Kirstame in 2019 to Kirstame today, you're left with the feeling of, oh, he's jettisoned quite a lot of, you know, the key pledges about income tax rising for the top 5%, the scrapping of tuition fees, Universal Credit, nationalisation of public services, freedom of movement, the 28 billion green prosperity plan.

It's all been either watered down or got rid of and therefore people are saying well hang on will the real Keir Starmer please stand up.

And I think the heat has grown in the last 24 hours with that confirmation that came yesterday from Keir Starmer that he would not change the policy of taking away child benefit to families with more than 2 children.

This was introduced by George Osborne in the austerity years and Keir Starmer has previously called it punitive, his deputy Angela Rayner has called it inhumane, obscene.

Yesterday he told our former colleague Laura Kunzberg that actually he had no plans to scrap it.

If you have more than 2 children at the moment, you don't get benefits.

Would that change under a Labour government?

That's a real kind of political trap for Labour because either they want to be the party of ending child poverty, or else they end up being the party that essentially carries on the austerity measures of a conservative government.

And today Yvette Cooper, the Shadow Home Secretary, reinforced that by talking about the importance of fiscal responsibility and saying, actually, Liz Truss is where you end up if you go for unfunded spending.

So they are so cautious about any single commitment to spending that is not absolutely signed off, that they will not even agree to scrapping a policy that they have previously called obscene.

And this is a real risk for Labour and its supporters.

What Blair was trying to do in 97 was to say we are not going to raise the top rate of tax.

He wasn't talking about limiting welfare benefits.

If you're limiting benefits like child support, then that really does affect an awful lot of people and that will disappoint a lot of people as well.

And so there is, yeah, you want to be fiscally prudent, but do you want to be in a position where you're seeming to harm the most vulnerable in our society?

Well, weirdly, just as actually as we've been talking, a resignation letter has been published on Twitter by Jamie Driscoll.

No fan of Keir, he has been the Labour northeast mayor and he has just announced that he is resigning to stand as an independent and he points the blame firmly at Keir Starmer.

Many of the things that John was just taking you through are mentioned in this resignation letter.

That you turn on so many priorities, £28 billion to tackle the climate emergency, free school meals, ending university tuition fees, reversing NHS privatisation, a list of promises too long to repeat in this letter.

I think Jamie Driscoll is a very different case.

We know that he's on the hard left of the party.

We know that there was a whole discussion about his seat and he would call it deselection, Labour calls it selection, but it still will come as a headline that Keir Starmer will find difficult to refute.

This is somebody in his own party saying, I don't know what you stand for anymore.

The only thing is that Keir Starmer might be able to use this just as you could use Mick Lynch is you choose your friends carefully you choose your enemies more carefully and it may be to have him against the reforms that Keir Starmer is introducing will underline to the British people, oh, Keir Starmer is not just another left-winger like Ed Miliband or like Jeremy Corbyn, and therefore you have got somebody new now in charge of the Labour Party, and that might actually help him a bit.

I mean, it's interesting the statement from the Labour Party on this because it's sort of what it implies, saying the Labour Party is delighted that local party members have selected Kim McGuinness as our candidate with Keir Starmer as leader, the Labour Party is a changed party brackets you're the old party, relentlessly focused on delivering for working people.

And we make no apologies that Labour candidates are held to the highest standards, brackets, he had low standards.

Well, he saw that line coming, didn't he?

I guess maybe the clear Red water now is not between Keir Starmer and the Conservatives, but between the Mitt Lynch's, the Jamie Driscoll's and Keir Starmer, which is fine if all you're talking about is a kind of internecine warfare, i.e.

Have you sorted out the left of your party, we're not that anymore, we're definitely not Jeremy Corbyn, we're not even Ed Miliband, we're going to look more like Blair, you won't even find us scaring you about rising income tax or anything like that.

The question is, and I think it still remains, yes, okay, you've sorted the left of your party out, but what about the voters who are actually coming to you because they want to feel significantly better off?

They want to see services improved, they want to see air quality improved, they want to see better transport services.

You come to Keir Starmer because you're fed up with what has happened over the last few years and you've got somebody who says we're not going to make the mistake of spending.

We can't win power by spending, was his headline in The Observer.

And everyone gets the fiscal constraints and the golden rules and all the rest of it, but what are they for then?

So I suspect a Labour strategist's answer to that would be, And they would look to the way Blair played this and for Mick Lynch, Reid, John Edmonds, who was the head of the GMB union, or Bill Morris, who was head of the Transport and General Workers Union back in the Blair days and was unhappy about Blair's pledges that they were not going to raise the top level of tax.

They would say, yeah, look, this is creating a dialogue where people are happy who are maybe a bit more conservative to vote for us.

And those people who want all those things, well, where else are they going to go?

So we don't need to super please people who live in liberal London constituencies where Labour weigh the majority.

We want to get people who didn't vote for Labour in

And the difference is that Blair actually sat on a really healthy economy.

I don't think we realised at the time just how comfortably he was boosted actually by what had happened before 97.

This time round there isn't the choice to say I'm not going to do that straightaway, but we'll be fine.

People need to see action taken because look at the NHS, look at public sector workers, look at people's mortgages, look at the rate of inflation.

There isn't the chance that we can just kind of carry on as we were, because as we were isn't working.

Well, we're joined in the studio now by Tom Baldwin.

And he was a political correspondent back in the day when I was.

He then goes on to work for Ed Miliband as his director of communications when he was Labour Party leader.

And he's now writing a biography of Keir Starmer, that Keir Starmer is cooperating with.

So presumably happy that you're writing it.

Tom, what do you make of where we are now?

I think there's a bit of a dialogue of the deaf going on at the moment with the media in that he comes on, talk about these 5 missions that he set out, 2 terms of Labour government.

And journalists, not necessarily yourselves, but other journalists are saying, yeah, but what are you going to do right now?

What are you going to do in the first 100 days?

And what he's trying to say is that these things cannot be fixed in 100 days.

We have deep-seated problems in this country, and people looking for some sort of magic pill which is going to make people happy ever after are going to be looking in vain.

So you try to talk about the long term, and there's a game being played in which journalists are trying to get him to make some sort of unfunded, uncosted spending commitment.

And The Tories would love him to do that.

And I'm generally of the view that if your opponents really want you to do something, you probably shouldn't do it.

Tom, it's a funny way to phrase that, though, that journalists are trying to get him to play a game.

I mean, I think that's kind of reductive, honestly, of both our roles.

Because the journalists asking the questions are trying to work out, presumably, what the vision is and what the difference is.

You heard, you know, Mitt Lynch at the top there say, where's the clear red water?

And I guess if Keir Starmer comes in, as he did in last weekend's Observer piece, and says, fucking hell, the Tories are catastrophic.

He literally said, he said, the Conservatives have created a crisis.

So he's on the 1 hand saying, can you believe what we've had for 13 years?

And then you go, okay, so, so, so, Keir, go on, where's the offering?

And he goes, well, obviously, we will carry on doing that.

And you know that thing about, you know, the child benefits policy.

Well, obviously, we'll have to stick to George Osborne's austerity plan on that.

I don't think it's unfair for us to be saying, come on, where's the offering here, then?

I mean, I think there's enormous difference between what the Labour Party stands for and what the Conservative Party stands for and has done.

2 years ago, you could perhaps have borrowed large sums of money to fund a Green New Prosperity Deal.

We've had the economy absolutely trashed by Liz Truss, interest rates have gone up, it's much more difficult to do that.

Now, when the circumstances change and the facts change, policies change.

But if you're going into an election, and let's leave journalists out of it, because we're kind of largely irrelevant to this process, isn't it right that the public are saying, yeah, okay, at the end of 10 years time, you hope to have done this, but I want to know what's going to happen in the next few weeks, the next few months of a Labour government.

Where's the urgency there about telling us that?

Because I think part of the problem is this short-termism.

And you can say leave journalists out of it.

I think, you know, if you think of the problems that the media have identified as the existential crises facing this country right now for the last 10, 20 years, have actually turned out not to be.

Whether that's boats of desperate refugees in the Channel, Europe, benefit cheats, these have not actually been the problems.

And politicians are constantly forced into this position of sort of having to pronounce on what is seen as the latest great existential challenge to our way of life.

And we never actually get around to fixing the long term.

That's really interesting, Tom, because what you're citing, I think here, is, if I'm not mistaken, sort of daily express front pages or daily mail front pages.

It goes a bit deeper than that, but yeah.

Well, Keir Starmer isn't pushing back on small boats and the market.

He's not saying, oh my god, forget the right wing press.

They're trying to lead you down dark alleyways of fear and loathing.

In a way, he's sort of leaning into some of these worries.

I mean, he could just be talking about child poverty and inflation and the cost of living and mortgages and green energy.

But he doesn't seem to be pulling towards that either.

And it's probably not a good idea to be attacking the media.

I can attack the media and I think the media is part of the problem in this country.

And I think it's been part of the problem of the politics of this country.

But I'm not standing for office." And Keir Starmer is, and he's quite rightly, politely answering people's questions.

Now the trouble is I think Sometimes people see this as a sort of cynical game.

Oh, what he's doing is he's pitching towards the centre or, you know, the reason why he's saying this about he's not getting rid of this disgusting policy on the two-child policy is because, yeah, he's trying to play up to the Daily Mail.

I don't have some single big transformative thing I can do in the first 100 days.

It's the worst inheritance if he does become prime minister, the worst inheritance any prime minister has had since the Second World War.

Let's compare to the Blair era, where Tony Blair stood to be the leader as a representative of New Labour.

And I remember him when he became Prime Minister, says we're going to govern as new Labour.

Keir Starmer's campaigned as somebody very different.

Now, I know you're going to say, yeah, look, we've had the pandemic, we've had Ukraine, we've had the Tories running the economy, yada, yada, yada.

What he campaigned on bears no resemblance to what he's saying now.

And therefore, who is the real Keir Starmer?

Well, I would push back against that because if you look at those 10 pledges, I mean, the first most central pledge, he said that he's never going to take his eye off the voters.

We need to win back in order to get back because we can't do anything unless we're in power.

He also talked about public ownership and they're talking about taking the railways back in the public ownership.

You're talking about great British energy.

He talked about new workers rights and they're doing some of that.

He talked about green energy and they're doing some of that.

It's because the economy has been trashed.

I sometimes think that sometimes they should be bolder about saying what they are going to do because they actually do have quite a radical program.

You went through an election with Ed Miliband, an election that he lost.

How wise a message is it to go in and say, dear voter, we can offer you jam tomorrow, but I'm sorry there's no Jam today.

That's a very difficult message to communicate, isn't it?

Yeah, but when Ed was leader of the Labour Party, we were in actually similar circumstances where the perception was there was no money to spend.

And I think The sort of dominant narrative was that austerity economics was here to stay, that didn't last very long.

And there are 3 ways you can get around that.

You can say you're going to tax more, you can borrow more, or you can do what Ed did, which say we're going to regulate more, we're going to put the burden onto business.

Now, that resulted in 2015 with not a single business coming up to support the Labour Party, because they thought Ed's rather moderate social democratic reforms were much scarier than David Cameron's plan to have an in-out referendum on Europe.

And did you at the time think that Ed was on the right track there?

Or do you think it was loony crazy but couldn't say?

I think part of the problem is we presented actually moderate reforms in quite a scary fashion.

We made it seem bigger than it was, partly because of that pressure of what are you going to do immediately?

I think, is interesting, because everyone thinks that Tony Blair came in with this great big bold modernising offer.

If you look at those 5 pledges, they were micro policies, the policy on the NHS.

Microscopic sum in terms of NHS spending.

So when you hear the Mick Lynch's of this world say, he's got to show us who he really is, Is that actually really helpful for Keir Starmer now?

I mean, is that, does he want to be losing, as it were, the voices of the hard left?

Again, I think you can see it as a sort of cynical game, where as a sort of act of triangulation, or he's trying to prove He's not Jeremy Corbyn.

He's a grown-up who believes in long-term change in this country.

I think he is having trouble getting that message through at the moment.

Partly because he's not yet in that final stage of his leadership, I think.

Somebody said the other day he's trying to do Kinnock, Smith, Blair in 1 parliament.

He's offering reassurance to British people that, you know, he's not going to wreck the economy And people do feel very, very insecure at the moment.

He's showing that the Tories aren't fit for office.

And then there's a question about that final stage.

Now how you pitch that, I think, is important.

Because we've had these big transformative offers in recent years.

We've had modernisation, we've had Brexit, we've had austerity.

I don't think people feel much better for them.

I think people are suspicious of a single big transformative idea, a vision.

What they might want to is grown-up, respectful leadership, which is going to get us to a better place, but it's going to be tough.

Now, that I think is Keir's essential message to British people.

At the moment, I think it's getting obscured by...

You know, I listened to an interview on the Today program the other day, he was announcing his fifth mission on breaking down barriers to opportunity in education.

And all he was asked about was VAT on private school fees and these micro issues.

And I think we do have to sort of try and break a habit in the sort of political class more generally, if we're going to start fixing these problems in the long term.

You're almost arguing for, please, can we have a more civilised, reflective, mature media?

You've worked in journalism for years, you've been a comms director, you know what the journalist class is that you're going to be up against.

I thought that was the whole point of the newsagents.

Well we're trying but obviously there is the space to expand on this.

Okay let's just ask you, did Keir have to go to the Murdoch party do you think to get himself into a place where the Sun, the Times, blah blah blah is going to be friendly to him.

He hasn't flown several thousand miles to Australia.

It makes you think That 1 John Soper was probably there in the bushes.

OK, so Tom, nice sort of swerve, but he did still go.

In the end, Keir doesn't need to bend his knee to Rupert Murdoch.

He needs to show Rupert Murdoch that he's going to win.

Because Rupert Murdoch has backed every winner of every British general election since he owned the sun.

And if Keir can convince Rupert Murdoch he's going to win, that's all he needs to do.

He doesn't need to make any more concessions to him.

It would be crazy to boycott a party of Britain's second best selling newspaper.

Is your biography going to tell us anything we didn't know?

I think it will tell you something you don't know.

And I hope you'll paint a picture of someone who's very different from the public image that you're getting at the moment.

What do you think the public image is that we're getting at the moment?

Someone who's dull, someone who's stiff, someone who feels deeply anxious about carrying a Ming vase across a polished floor.

I think he is someone who is very focused, 1 of the most competitive people I've ever met.

Keir Starmer is 1 of the most competitive people I've ever met.

is 1 of the most competitive people you've ever met.

I was interviewing 1 of his legal colleagues the other day.

And they said that when he became leader of the Labour Party, everyone was saying, oh, yeah, maybe he'll get Labour in better footing.

And now he'll win, Because that's what he does.

And really, I wouldn't underestimate him.

Don't you just have to say that because you're his?

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Another pledge broken: will Starmer face a backlash from his party?