How will the Iran war play at the ballot box in May?

0:00This is The Guardian. Yes, of course we will defend British lives and British interests in the region, we'll stand by our allies in the Gulf region, but we're not going to get dragged in. That's my values, whatever the pressure and whoever it's coming from. But you never know what they're at because we negotiate with them and then we always have to blow them up. So let's stop pretending the Kierstormer is a huge philanthropist who's just trying to help people. What he is doing is taxing people to pay benefit. I'm Pippa Carrera, I'm Jessica Elgott, and you're listening to Politics Weekly for The Guardian. Hello, oh hi, we're joining you from our Westminster office today. News does happen, so you know it'll be bustling and busy in here, although not as bustling and busy as usual just because it is, of course, recess at the moment, isn't it? So, um, MPs will fled. MPs have fled back to the constituencies, but the big news this morning was, of course,

1:03the launch of various local election campaigns, namely Kierstormer-launching labourers, election campaign for May in the West Midlands, a quick stump speech. We weren't invited to go up and ask questions very disappointingly. We'd have been there, obviously, otherwise. Tell us about the launch, Jess, and what the government's going to try and get us to focus on. In the weeks running up to that pivotal may vote. So, I think the main focus talking to some labour advisers last night, what Kierstormer is trying to put the emphasis on, is this idea of don't risk it. So, labourers achieving things, doing things in government, he talked a lot in his launch speech about child care, the two-child benefit cap. He's talking about action that labour is broadly taking off across the living minimum wage, and things that he believes will start to bear fruit over the coming years, and can happen as well with Labour councils, which is obviously the main focus of this, as well as Scotland and Wales, voting for either the Greens or Reform or any of the other parties, sort of risks the progress that is being made by this Labour government.

2:05I think one of the things that's quite interesting is you can see a kind of slight shift in tactics towards the Greens. I think you can see that in that language in the speech. They tried out this idea of calling them extremists, just like Reform. Now it's kind of the idea that they're sort of weak and naive, which I think probably lands a little bit better with Labour MPs than the extremist arguments. But the big problem for Labour is that these messages are, you know, looking unlikely to land where they need to, because as Labour and Siders will tell us, you know, ahead of the elections, these are sort of a set of midterms, basically, and many people will be voting to give the government a kicking. And in some parts of the country, they'll be very clearly seen as a referendum on Kia Stammer and his leadership. So he can go out there all he wants and say, look, you know, you don't put your cost of living plans at risk. Don't destabilise my leadership at a time of great international uncertainty. But these are local elections and people know the difference. They're not like kicking him out of power, but they can send him a message.

3:07And I think that'll be sort of the worry that a lot of Labour MPs and one, Labour counsellors and council leaders, I should say. And then Scotland and Wales, members of those parliaments and assembly, that will be the big concern that they have, that this is not going to actually be an election on bins and local services or in Scotland and Wales, running of the public services, it's going to be an election on how people feel about the government or Westminster. Yeah, absolutely. And I think two things can be true at the same time, which might seem like they contradict each other. Firstly, that these are actually really important elections for the things that directly affect people's lives in the areas where they live, and that they can be seen as effectively a free hit on the government. So all the people who might otherwise feel that they needed to sort of coalesce around an anti-farage block, for example, many of them will not feel they need to do that right now. So this is, you know, this looks like it's the worst it could get for Labour people being emboldened to vote for the Greens or being emboldened to vote independent for the Liberal Democrats in areas where they might not necessarily do that,

4:08but would feel they could do so now. Yeah. Now, QStormer is meeting energy bosses later today. Energy bosses from companies like Shell, BP, Central Care and Equinoir in Daning Street, and also some of the big Lords of London insurance giants and shipping firms, as well as banks, and they are bringing them all together basically to come up with a short and long-term contingency planning for what happens if the straight-off hormones continues to be blocked. We're ready seeing the impact on global markets, on Brent Crude or Price, and domestically in the UK, although the US and Eurozone are experiencing similar pressures, things like inflation projections, which are really worrying for people who are already struggling to make ends meet at home. And this is just the start of it, really, isn't it, because the inflation figures we got a couple of weeks ago, you know, we'd seen inflation projections looking like they was going to come down. The Bank of England's target rate is 2%, and it looked like this year would be downward trajectory, and now it looks like it's potentially going up to 4%.

5:11The economic picture, which the government hoped this year would look a little bit rosier right across the board, isn't looking that way. They were obviously criticised post the Ukraine war and the energy crisis that followed that, for not doing more to act against inflation, which is 11%. I mean, my god, those were, that was scary. But they responded with putting interest rates up 14 times in a row, whether we see increases this time, we'll be worrying a lot of people that own their own homes. And then there's a broader market uncertainty, as markets globally react to the uncertainty of what is going to happen next in the Middle East. So it's not exactly a very happy economic backdrop to be going into the selections. Absolutely not. And I think one of the things that feels almost the most cruel about this scenario is this is a situation where Kia Starma is not the protagonist. It's the worst case possible in terms of US president who's moods and moves are completely unpredictable, who clearly has no plan at all for this conflict. And it will affect every single measure that the government has

6:14been using to demonstrate that it's on the right track economically. So take interest rate cuts from the Bank of England. You know, he's been able to boast of five rate cuts during the time that Labour's been in power. He was expecting at least another two, maybe three this year. Now it looks like we might get rises instead of cuts that will affect start to affect people's mortgages, especially people whose mortgages that people hope to start to come down this year. But energy bills huge intervention by Rachel Reeves at the last budget to cut people's energy bills. A big thing that Labour could champion. Now it looks like those bills are going up and more intervention might be needed. Rachel Reeves is headroom 20 billion, which is supposed to give them sort of ease in their budgets. Now that looks like that might be wiped out by inflation. And government borrowing costs going up as well. So what the government would argue, of course, is that they are going into this crisis in a better position than they might otherwise have been. But still, those cost-living measures, which Kirstoff had talked about his local elections launch, things like minimum wage going up, that £150 energy support that you mentioned,

7:15and the two child's limits being lifted will not have the positive impact that they'd hoped. And of course, energy has sort of become a bit of a theme of this local election campaign. We've seen the conservatives and reform and the Greens and the Liberal Democrats all come up with their own kind of view on what should be done to kind of tackle this core problem of rising energy bills, even though that's nothing that anyone's got control over. The conservatives said they would cut the AT for three years on energy bills, reformed cut VAT and green levies. The green party wants ministers to guarantee no energy bill rises in July. So they're coming out of pressure right across the spectrum from the other parties, lip-dancing. They could halve bills by breaking the link between global gas prices and energy costs. So it's worth us just looking just at where the parties are ahead of the local elections. Now, much has been made of the they do not bounce. She was out this morning in a Olvig in Aberdeen, a training Olvig, I think, talking about her energy policy. I find it astonishing that the Tories can be so far below the point even they were

8:19after the general election when they received an almighty kicking from the electorate. They took 24% of the vote and they're currently hovering around 17%, and yet she still seems safe. Part of that is down to her own personal ratings being better than her parties. Her own party have a bit more faith in her ever since her conference speech last year and she says in good outings at PMQs for those that notice them and people within her own party do notice them. And there's the feeling that even though she has lost or her party has lost several MPs to reform UK, she's handled the departures of Robert Generic and Sir Lebroughman in particular well. And so she seems safe for now, even though her party is likely, we talk about Labour having a catastrophic set of results in May. But the Tories bearing in mind that some of these councils were last fought at the height of the vaccine bounce in 2021, where nationally the party was polling over 40%. These results could be pretty devastating for her, but there doesn't seem to be any suggestion that she's going to feel the pressure on her leadership as a result of that. It kind of feels a bit like

9:23Kimmy Badenock is cheerily leading the charge of the light brigade into the value of death ahead of these elections. And no one seems to mind that. I don't think there's any way to sugarcoat it, that these will be terrible election results for the Conservatives. They're unlikely to take back. Those Bellweather councils in London, maybe one of them sort of barn it or one's worth, but it very much doesn't look like they will. And they could lose some of the Essex councils to reform and potentially some other councils lose at least a slew of council seats to the liberal Democrats. So similarly to Labour, they are losing votes on all sides. They're being eaten away, you know, on the kind of affluent southern seats, they're being eaten by the Lib Dems in their northern heartlands or in their sort of east heartlands, they're being almost completely devoured by reform. Now this is really fascinating electoral test for reform as well, isn't it, because they have grown, even in the last year, since the last set of local elections, and they have soared ahead in the polls. But what's happened over the last few months is that

10:25they have kind of started to plateau at around 30%. And that's, you know, if you're projecting at that international vote share, that's not enough, good to be enough for them to win a majority at a general election. So this is quite an important electoral test of whether their strategy is working. And they will inevitably do really well in some parts, in some parts of the country. So faces like West Yorkshire, for example, which is a legal stronghold reformer likely to cause quite a lot of opposite there, the Northeast Durham, Sunderland, you can imagine them doing well there too. Obviously in Wales, they are likely to eat into both Libra and the Tories vote, although they're likely to be the biggest parties under current polling. Scotland likely to do less well, I think they at one point were second in the polls, but seemed to have slipped back to third. You could even see them going further down than that. And they had a bit of a chaotic weekend losing several of their candidates for the Scottish Parliament, a variety of controversies that seemed to beset reform candidates everywhere. But the fact that they will do well in

11:30reformer labour heartlands, and potentially also sort of in the eastern flank of London, you can see them taking Bexley, Council potentially havering and making inroads in somewhere like Buckingham and Dagonham, will make labour MPs not just in the sort of former Red Wall, very anxious, but also in some of the big cities. The other party, of course, we're going to be monitoring really closely as the green party. They've seen a massive polling bounce, and since the victory in the Gorton and Denton, by election, although you'd expect them to pile up votes in very specific areas rather than it'd be country-wide. But I think you've seen that polling bounce because Gorton and Denton has shown that voting green is not necessarily a wasted vote, and the place where we might expect them to see the biggest advances is London and some of those real heartland labour councils in London, so thinking about, you know, Islington, Newham, they're expected to take the Hackney-Mailty, and you know, places around that Bank of East London or South London where, you know, they've been labour for a very, very long time, maybe even potentially

12:32making inroads in Camden, which is, which is Keir Starmer's own backyard. Keir Starmer's own backyard, and a lot of London labour MPs, and there are, and there are dozens of them, will be very spooked, and therefore we will have much more speculation about Keir Starmer's leadership, May was seen as a pivotal moment for him, a potentially perilous moment for him, the aftermath, which is party-mount some sort of coup against him, because as you know Jess, you speak to MPs as much as I do, it's quite hard to find any that can absolutely confidently predict that he'll be the the leader that takes him into the next election. Lots of them think that he shouldn't be the leader that takes him into the next election, but there are a couple of notes of caution that I'd signed for people thinking that he's about to be iced at Post May. One is, and Daniel Street recognised this, and they're kind of capitalising on it, the fact that there is a global conflict going on, and that that's probably an area where most people think that Keir Starmer actually is, you know, handling things pretty well, he's sort of adept at the diplomacy and international relations, and sort of his sort of, the cautious side of his character fits well with making sort

13:34of a careful sound decisions when it comes to moments of real sort of tension internationally, I've spoken to MPs, including those who are allies of the two people who might be considered his most likely leadership challenges, West Streeting and Angela Rainer, and they are all very cautious about the idea of destabilising the party at a moment like this, because you potentially would destabilise the government and the country, and who really wants to have a legal leadership contest when you're potentially having to sort of deal with such high stakes issues. And I think that that's absolutely right. I think the broad feeling amongst Labour MPs who I talked to is A, that it would look self-indulgent and electrically damaging to spark a leadership campaign in the middle of what could potentially be a massive economic crisis as well as an international one, and B, that the fundamentals of their dissatisfaction with Keir Starmer's leadership haven't actually changed. So those two things I think can be true at the same time, and probably mean that any kind of leadership is delayed rather than denied.

14:35Let's pause there, lots more speculation about Keir Starmer's leadership to come, I'm sure. But when we come back, we'll be looking at what's happening to one of this parliament's key bits of legislation the government might wish had never happened to the assisted dying bill. Chicago, 2011. A cop is murdered. Police and prosecutors swear they have the trigger man. He swears he didn't do it. How far will each side go to prove their right? Like it's just one bombshell after another, you know where you're like, what, what? The story of a playstation, a brain eating amoeba, and the relentless pursuit of justice. Off duty, out now. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

15:39Welcome back. While we've got Jess with us, we want to talk about something that you've covered extensively, all the detail of Jess over many, many months, which is of course the assisted dying legislation, has time run out from it finally? Yes, I mean, there's no other way of putting it to that. I think there'll technically be two more days of debate in the Lords, but we expect the bill to fall after that because it has run out of time. It's been talked out in the Lords thousand plus amendments have been submitted mostly by six or seven peers who were opposed to the bill. That's successfully sort of eaten up enough time for it to fall. And, you know, what they are arguing is that it was so flawed that this number of amendments were necessary, and this is a perfectly legitimate way of stopping what is a deeply flawed bill from progressing. But for many and peasants, and I think including quite a few who are speaking to have voted against the bill in Parliament, it feels anti-democratic that it didn't even come to a vote in the House of Lords, and because of the end of the parliamentary session, because it's a private members bill,

16:39it will fall, and that will be the end of it. Is that the end of it, though? Can you see a situation where it ever comes back? Maybe supported by the government? So there are two scenarios that could play out in the next parliamentary session, which means that it does have a chance of being resurrected. So firstly, someone could just use a private members bill again, and many of its supporters are so incensed by what's happened in the House of Lords, that you could expect the more to pile into that private members bill ballot and try to get the bill back into the commons, via that route. There is another way, which involves MPs putting quite a lot of pressure on the government, which is for the government to grant time for the bill to be brought back again, and to pass the commons again to go back into the Lords. That doesn't necessarily mean it has to be a government bill. That's a comment misunderstanding. It just means they have to grant government time, which could be a very short amount of time. On a Thursday or Friday afternoon, for the bill to go through the commons again and go back to the Lords, then it can something can apply called the Parliament Act, which means if the bill goes through two sessions of Parliament, the Lords cannot continue to block it. They can still try to amend it. They can send it back

17:44to the commons in the usual way. If they try to pull the same tactics again, the bill would automatically pass because of those provisions in the Parliament Act. Lots of people I've been talking to feel like Keir Starman, even though he's a massive supporter of the assisted Dying Deal, isn't inclined to make that kind of intervention. But if the bill was to come through in the private members bill ballot, which is how it originally came, the Parliament Act could still apply. So in both those cases, it is possible to resurrect it. And I think, you know, if we look back at the last time the bill was in Parliament, which was I think in 2015, the bill was voted down. And that meant that its supporters sort of accepted it. They thought it was fine to press pause in it and maybe bring it back again, you know, 10 years later. But this time, the mood is incredibly different because they feel like it wasn't it wasn't rejected. It was passed by a sort of reasonable majority. And it has public support. Now, whatever you might think of this bill or might think of the issue, those things are objective facts. So because of that, I think they feel like they want to fight to bring it back. They won't accept this as the ending for it. And I think that

18:48can mean that it becomes, you know, a bit more of a feature of the next parliamentary session. But of course, if they don't make it in the ballot and the government doesn't grant time, they've run out of options. But it has become quite a divisive issue, hasn't it? I mean, MPs were given a free vote. Obviously, as you say, Kirstama was privately or personally, I should say, hugely supportive of it. But then there wasn't government ministers like West Streeting and Shabbana Mahmoud who revoked against it. How divisive, given that the issue does have public support? How divisive does the send up being for the government and more importantly for the country? I think that's the main consideration for Kirstama in maybe not granting the bill time because at the moment of peril for his leadership to do something that would be deeply divisive amongst your own MPs, even if you know the majority of them support it and are angry with the House of Lords. And I think Kirstama is very angry with the content of the House of Lords. That is a big move for someone whose position is in peril. And I think, you know, knowing what we know about Kirstama's personality and caution, it doesn't feel to me like a decision

19:49that he will take. That's absolutely fascinating, Jess. Thanks for bringing us your insight on that. But that's all from us. So please like and follow politics weekly to make sure you keep getting our episodes in your feed. Please do keep your emails coming. You can get in touch with us and send us your thoughts and questions to politicsweeklyuk at TheGuardian.com. We do read everything. This episode was produced by Frankie Toby. Music by Axel Kukuti and the executive producer is Danny L. Stevens. Goodbye. Thank you. This is TheGuardian.