Transcript of Has the health secretary crossed a line?

The World with Richard Engel and Yalda Hakim is a brand new podcast from Sky News with me, Sky News lead World News presenter, Yalda Hakim, and me.

Richard Engel, chief former correspondent for NBC News.

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Hello and welcome to Electoral Dysfunction from Sky News with me, Beth Rigby, me.

Ruth Davidson and me, Harriet Harmon.

We have been gallivanting around, haven't we?

We had a lovely night, didn't we? Harriet had us around her new gaffe, which is so stylish, so stylish, like, I want to be Harriet when I grow up.

We're going to come to my house next, but I'm going to have to do a mega redesign because it looks like a pit compared to Harriet's surroundings. And I basically took surreptitious photos of all Harriet's glassware tableware.

If that was surreptitious, I'd hate to see you being obvious. You're practically rummaging in a bloody liquor drawer.

We've got to get down to business on today's podcast because we are going to be reflecting on some really important stories. We will ask whether assisted dying could actually become legal. Harriet and Ruth have lots of thoughts on this. I'm really interested to talk about that. We're also going to talk about trust in institutions. Has anyone got any faith left? And I've brought you a little present from Grimsby, which I will deliver to you later.

Is it a fish?

I'm not telling you.

Okay.

Is it winter?

I have been back from Grimsby. Let's start. Let's get down to business. So, off mic, we have spoken loads about assisted dying and. And Ruth and Harriet are really, really passionate about it. There are now two weeks until MPs vote on whether to make it legal in England and Wales. It's almost a decade since the last time it came to Parliament and I thought where we could start on this, because you've probably read loads about it, but I wanted to start at a slightly different point. I want to go back to basics and explain how the bill has now come into Parliament because it's not come from the government. And this actually is important because it can affect how some people feel about the policy as well. It's come from a private members bill. Can you take us through what that means? What is a private members bill? How does it come about?

Well, normally the law is changed by the government bringing forward a bill for scrutiny and approval by the House of Commons, and that's called a government bill. But if the government doesn't want to bring forward a legislative change, there's an opportunity for members to put their name into a ballot and then the one that wins the ballot has some time to bring forward their own bill. And Kim Leadbeater came top of the ballot, so she has chosen for the subject of her bill, assisted dying. And because it's on assisted dying, which is regarded as a conscience issue, it will be a free vote. So the whips can't tell you how to vote. If it passes, if it gets approval for that, it then goes upstairs into a committee room and a committee of MPs, and that will be a majority of MPs who are in favor of assisted dying. But what they'll do is they'll go through the bill clause by clause to see whether there needs to be any amendments and the committee can vote on it and make changes in the bill which then come back to the House of Commons, and that will have as much time as is needed.

So the reason I was bringing that up is, and you've explained it brilliantly, is the point being that when a government brings a bill, it goes through a kind of excruciatingly detailed process in which the machine of government and civil.

Service before it even gets to the House. That hasn't happened. There's been debate at large. You've seen it all through the newspapers, you've seen it on media and everything like that. So there has been general debate about this. And after it's been up in the committee for as long as it's necessary, then it will come back downstairs to the chamber of the House of Commons and the House of Commons will decide whether or not not it wants to agree with any changes that have been made in committee or even put forward their own changes. It needs to come back to the House of Commons in about June next year from the Lords, in order to get through before November, when there'll be the expectation there'll be a new King speech. So it's got to have got through in this session.

It is quite unusual for private members bills to pass, isn't it? Often they just fall.

Yes.

They don't get very far, do they?

And she did well, to pick something which is not going to be a whipped issue, which is a conscience issue. But there's been very notable private members bill. For example, the first disability rights bill was a private member's bill. The first abortion bill was a private member's bill.

So, as Harriet was saying, the Labor MP who brought the bill is Kim Leadbeater. She sent us this message about it. Let's have a listen.

I'm Kim Leadbeater, the Member of Parliament for Spen Valley, and I am the Member of Parliament who has published the bill around giving terminally ill people a choice at the end of life. So it's partly about autonomy, it's partly about choice and dignity, but it's also about creating a much safer legal framework on such an important issue. This isn't about people with disabilities, it's not about people with mental health conditions. It's very, very strictly and clearly about terminally ill people who are dying anyway. And it's given them the opportunity to die in a manner of their choosing. And it's actually about shortening their death rather than ending their life. I didn't have a traditional journey into politics, as your listeners probably know, but I'm here to try and make a difference and I'm here to try and do the right thing. And this issue is something I do feel really passionate about and it's the right thing to do. But there has been a personal cost, there has been abuse. But I also, when I speak to the families that have campaigned on this for decades, some of them, and are having to tell their stories over and over again of losing loved ones under really horrible circumstances, I'm doing this for them and that's why I came here.

I came here to try and make a difference. And it's a really bizarre job as being an mp, and a lot of the time I don't particularly enjoy it, but if you feel that you're making a difference and you feel that you're doing something positive, then that that's what motivates me and that's what keeps me going. And you know what the other really important thing is, whatever happens with the bill, I'm having conversations and people across the whole having conversations about palliative care, which we don't talk about enough, about the rights of disabled people, which we don't talk about enough, and also about death, which in this country we're generally not very good at talking about. So the fact that all those things are happening, I think is a really important thing, and I'm proud to have been just a small part of that.

And just to explain, when she says she didn't have a kind of normal route into politics, it wasn't what she wanted to do. Kim Beeter is Jo Cox's sister. And when Jo Cox was killed, she, you know, she's very honest about the fact that she had never had some dream. That was always her sister's dream, was wanting to come and do this. It was never hers. And she is honestly one of the nicest, most collegiate, most cross party, working just, most honest to God decent people that I've met in either house since I've been down here. She is. She's a really good person.

Something that struck me in this voice note from Kim and actually upsets me, is when she talks about the abuse that she has got, not enjoying being an mp, you've got to think about it. She saw her sister being an MP and she was killed. And then when you hear that Kim talks about getting a lot of abuse, that just feels awful, doesn't it?

Yeah, it's absolutely horrific. And Jo was murdered at her advice surgery. You know, very typical. There she was with her constituents, listening to her concerns. You do feel for Kim that all MPs get abuse, but I mean, she is a remarkable person, Kim, to withstand this and her parents as well are absolutely incredibly strong local people. But, you know, she wants to, you can hear that from the voice note. She wants to do good in this world, in whatever role she's in.

Ruth, I want to ask you about this because you actually voted against assisted dine in Holyrood, but I remember in your maiden speech in the House of Lords, you said you changed your mind.

Yeah.

Do you now agree with what Kim said there in that voice note?

So I voted, oh, probably, I don't know, eight, nine years ago now. There was a. Again, a private members bill that was bought forward by a phenomenal woman called Margo McDonald, who had been an SMP MSP, but then went independent. And I really struggled over it. And in the event it was voted down at stage one, it got voted down because in truth, it wasn't that brilliantly drafted a bill. When I joined the House of Lords after I left Holyrood, I spoke about the fact that when you leave a big job like I'd done in Holyrood and, you know, having been a party leader and all the rest of it, you have time to take stock and you kind of think about the kind of wins and the losses and the ones that got away. And this has been the One that's gnawed at me. It's the bit where I know if I look at myself, what I did was cowardice because it was hard and I got to vote it down on the basis of not engaging necessarily with the issues. And it wasn't that I hadn't spoken to constituents and I'd been lobbied and all the rest of it.

And as a party leader, you have a bit more scrutiny on you on big issues of conscience, because people want to divine how other people in your party will vote, even though it's a free vote. And it was a free vote and I'd had considerations from my church and within my own faith separate to the stated position of my church. My sister's an NHS doctor and I talked it over with her and all the rest of it and I voted it down. And I really. I still feel that I was a coward and that's a strong word to use, but I felt like I got a get out because the bill wasn't good enough and it meant that I didn't actually have to wrestle with my conscience as much as I needed to.

This has sat with you because I remember when we were doing the POD a few months ago and you said if there was one thing that you could do, if there was one thing that you could change, if there was one piece of legislation that you could bring forward, it was assisted dying. So now you think this is a chance to put it right, you will obviously back it in the Lords.

It's funny because people have their own reasons for that. It is obviously about people who are in unendurable pain, wanting to have choice and agency over how they die and having a good death and all the rest of it. But it's also about the things that come around that. So, you know, you can look at the stats and the figures and there's about 200 million people in the world that have brought in legislation like this. So I think that shows you that it can be workable. There's about every eight days somebody in this country goes to Switzerland, spend £10,000, if they have it, to die abroad because they feel like they can't do that here. But for me, it was always a bit more about that. It's the sort of. I don't like the idea of imbalance or unfairness, and there seems to me something very unfair about how much things like the church and others talk about end of life and how you can't take away from God and others. What is a sort of a life or death kind of thing. But the church has nothing to say, literally nothing to say about the 50,000 people in this country that make unbelievably detailed decisions about the beginning of life.

So I went through the IVF process, you know, in terms of, you know, all the choices that you make about timing and all the rest of it. Screenings, the donor, sperm for hair color, shoe size, anything you like. You know, you've got so much agency over the start of life and people have no agency over the end of their own life, and that seems unfair. And I also, I've done a lot of work in the last few years trying to make up for my cowardice years ago.

So for you, it's about people choice.

It'S about agency and control. And yes, we have to get all the safeguarding right and all the rest of it, but until you've seen somebody like you say that's going through that, the idea that people whose mind is still completely sound, but whose body has failed them and is failing them to such a degree that they are in excruciating pain every single day, but to take that agency away from them or to tell them that they're not allowed to have it, I think seems to me an imbalance and unfairness. And I've had almost a counter to that in that I've watched people very close to me with now quite advanced Alzheimer's, dementia, and I've been on the journey with them over years and to see their mind go, but their body, see now, they would not be included in this. You've got to be of sound mind. Absolutely, 100%.

I mean, you know, and you raise a point there that's important, Ruth, because it's about being sound of mind, because some of the misgivings around this bill, and I'm thinking about the Lib Dem leader, Ed Davey, he's been outspoken on this, hasn't he? He said he thinks some people will feel like a burden on their families and feel pressured into. That's his view. But then Tani Gray Thompson, she has explicitly said she's worried about the impact on vulnerable people, on disabled people, the risk of coercive control, the ability of doctors to make a six month diagnosis.

And she's an excellent advocate for this and for the other side, and she's done so much work in this space.

But Harriet, when someone like Tani, who's a very famous Paralympian, she's a disability activist, she sits in the House of Lords with both of you, when she, as someone who has lived that life of being disabled, when she says, I'm really worried about this because of the impact it has on disabled people. Or indeed when a devi who, you know, he's got a very disabled son, his wife has multiple sclerosis as well. And he says that he's worried about people feeling like a burden. As a person who has been a carer, he's both a carer for his son, but he also cared for his mother through illness as well. His mom died when he was quite young of cancer. Does it give you pause for thought, Harriet? Because I know you're supportive of the bill, but you hear these arguments with something like this.

You've got to expect that most people will comply with the law and not afford people assisted dying, unless they were of sound mind over 18 within six months of death, and with to doctors and a High Court judge, that unless they came with that within that framework, that assisted death wouldn't happen. But if it did happen outside that framework, you'd expect the law to be enforced. And I remember this with the abortion debate, the thought was immediately that people would abuse the law, but actually the law was very well defined and if people abused it, they got prosecuted. So that's what happens. But I think the most important thing is for individual choice. And nobody should ever be pressured about anything, but nor should people be denied individual choice. And I see this very personally because I see people who are voting against this bill denying me my choice, my agency. When I get to that point where I'm within six months of death, I want that choice. I don't want to impose it on other people, but I want that choice for myself.

When somebody like Tani speaks, when somebody like Ed Davies speaks, I listen to them and I respect them. And I think because they've been good advocates for this, it's actually in an odd way, and because they've been talking about it before, there was in the introduction of a bill, it's helped make the bill better because there has been an attempt by Kim and the team that's helping her to draft it to address this. And part of the bill actually introduces a new law, so a new law called coercion that would have the penalty of 14 years in prison. So, like really hefty.

So, look, we are exploring all sides of this debate and Harriet and Ruth, you are both in favor of it. Ruth, you've been on your own journey where you opposed it and now you have a different view. Obviously, it's important that we do explore other views too. And we've had a voice Note from a lawyer who worked on a case linked to this. Let's have a listen to what he says about it.

My name is Alex Rutkeen. I'm a barrister specializing in mental capacity law and I'm a professor of practice at King's College London. And I think you should also know that I was involved in the last substantive challenge to the ban on assisted suicide contained in the Suicide Act. Law has to serve everyone. It can't simply serve those people whose very emotive stories we are hearing in public at the moment. It has to serve those people who, if the law is passed, we will hear different stories about. And so this is a bill which has been drafted and I don't mean to be rude here, but it has been drafted on the fly in under a month. And you can see examples of that in, for instance, the way it thinks about capacity. It just says for capacity. See the Mental Capacity act, which means, for instance, it leaves open a question of whether we're expecting doctors to support patients to make the decision to end their life. It also leaves open with very little detail precisely how far this bill would go beyond legalizing assisted dying towards actually implementing a system of assisted dying.

That's Alex Keen, a lawyer that's worked on some of these cases. And he's not really arguing against the principle, he's rather talking about the practicalities. And that's why I brought up the idea of it being a private members bill instead of a government backed bill. What did you think of what he said?

I don't agree with him and I don't think the government should take it on in terms of surfacing issues which are not yet been raised, then like issues to do with the definition of mental capacity. If there's an issue to be raised and there needs to be more definition, there are days and days and days of debate in committee, both in the House of Commons and in the House of Lords, which can enable those things to be brought forward and then supported by expert research.

I think there's also a point that at the point of which we get to getting into the guts of the bill, there is no government that wants to have a bill on something as important as this that's got any holes in it. So I think that there is other support that can be given beyond the government taking over a private member's bill.

Let's get a bit onto the politics of it. So we discussed some of the policy and we've heard both sides of the arguments. You said there, Harriet, that the government shouldn't take a view on this that you like the fact it's a free vote and a vote of conscience. There have been many sort of moral, cultural issues in this country where they are free votes, because it's a conscience vote for MPs, things like, I mean, gay marriage was a free vote, wasn't it? You know, where MPs vote on their conscience about something. Right.

And I think it's really important that if there is a free vote and the government is going to be neutral, they walk the talk on neutrality. So, for example.

Yeah, so. So I'm going to jump in there. So when Wes street, in, who is the Health Secretary, gives his personal view on this quite publicly, he said he's voting against it. We don't know yet how Keir Starmer is going to vote. I think he's going to probably, as Keir Starmer likes to do, go through the details of it and then take a view. Do you see that, Harriet, as government interference? When Wes Streeton, the Health Secretary, takes a view publicly like this?

I think you have to work very hard to be neutral and ensure that you keep that position. And we were building up before the last general election to a vote about decriminalization of abortion. And the Health Secretary at the time, Victoria Atkins, was at absolute pains not to have her view in the debate because she was the Health Secretary and she stayed right out of it. And those of us who suspected she might be going to vote on our side for decriminalization were trying to draw her in and saying, you know, but surely you're going to. And she absolutely held the line. She would not let the Department of Health do any work on it at all, one way or the other. And she would say nothing because she was keeping to neutrality. Now, Wes is not doing that.

The Secretary of State, what has he done? Just explain what he's done, Harriet.

I think he's crossed the line in two ways. Firstly, because he said that he's going to vote against it. So he has said, I'm saying this independently, although I'm the Secretary of State for Health, but I'm going to vote against it. He should not have said how he was going to vote because that breaches neutrality and sends a signal. And secondly, he's engaged his department to do work on this, which indicates that he thinks there's a problem. And he said the problem is that it will cost money to bring in an assisted dying measure and therefore he will have to cut other services. Now, that is engaging in the debate on one side. But paradoxically, at the same time as he said that, he also said it will be a slippery slope because people will be forced to bring about their own death in order to save the NHS money. Well, it can't be doing both things. It can't be both costing the NHS money and saving the NHS money. But I think, above all, we should not be having this argument in respect of money. It should not come down to resources. It is a huge moral issue and it is only a tiny number of people, all sides believe that and a fraction, a tiny fraction of NHS resources.

So to bring money into it, I think, is very much the wrong thing.

He said this week that the costs of the bill could take money away from other parts of the nhs. He said to governors to choose and if you to do this, it has a knock on. But as you said, he's also intimated, hasn't he, that it's a slippery slope whereby it's chilling.

He says it's a chilling slippery slope whereby people will be worried about costing the NHS money if they stay alive and need treatment.

You're quite cross, Harriet. Are you cross about this? You seem cross.

I'm disappointed. But I also want him to listen to the view that. But he should be actively neutral. But I think he has crossed the line. And the trouble is, you can't counter that from within government. So you can't have somebody else within government saying, oh, well, actually, I'm going to create the balance by saying, I'm in government and I'm going to be for it, because the Department of Health is in a unique position.

What I've heard is he's not in principle opposed to it, but it's some of the practicalities around it and I guess maybe his perspective. Everyone looks very annoyed at me here, raising their hands. They're wrestling me to the ground, they're seizing the mic on me. I think like some of the issues that you've talked about raising, but that is breaching neutrality.

You don't be neutral on the principle, but entitled to talk about the practicalities. You should be neutral about the whole thing. You should stay out of it, let individual MPs decide.

So I've got a thing here. Simon Case, who's the Cabinet Secretary, wrote to the entire Cabinet back in October saying that Kim was going to introduce this bill, blah, blah, blah. It's long standing convention, issues of conscience. But then there's a really interesting bit in it. The government will therefore remain neutral on the passage of the bill and on the matter of assisted Dying at the dispatch box. Ministers should reiterate that this is a question for Parliament on which the official government position is to remain neutral outside of Parliament. All ministers should take the same approach in all forms of media, including social media. Though ministers need not resile from previously stated views when directly asked about them, they should exercise discretion and should not take part in the public debate. So where I'm angry with it, Wes, is that this isn't a long stated view of him. I actually don't mind if he's directly asked, as he was on radio, will you vote for this? And he says no, personally I will not. I think that's fair enough. He's allowed to say that.

I don't think he is allowed to say that.

Okay, well, we disagree on that.

All right, Just to play devil's advocate here, because you both, I mean, all you're disagreeing in is how cross you are with Wall Street.

I'm the most cross.

That's the only disagreement here.

I bow to your cross, Ms. Harriet.

Harriet is the most cross. Just to kind of put a counterpoint, to give another perspective, maybe a more street in perspective. Could it also be that as the Health Secretary and having his eyeballs on the NHS and the state of palliative care in this country, that his view is people aren't being given real choices here? Because if palliative care and hospice funding, etc, etc, is really poor, then will people have such bad end of life experiences that they think this is a better option because they don't want to be a burden, the cost stuff. But also that we are not doing end of life well enough in this country and that actually that needs to be fixed before this legislation comes in. That could be a counter argument.

There are plenty of people around who can make that counterargument. People who work in palliative care who are on both sides. But the point is this is a free vote and the government must remain neutral. And the principal department engaged here is the Department of Health. And by analogy with abortion, they have to work on being neutral. They have to step right out of the field of discussion and let ordinary backbench MPs and other, you know, front benchers discuss it. But I think it is disappointing that he's crossed over the line.

Okay, but there's another question about Wes street in which is he's extremely close to the Prime Minister and his intervention has led to some chatter that actually this is a government that is less persuaded by this, they might not want the assisted dying to happen and that via Wes, who is a kind of symbol of Keir Starmer, of the Prime Minister, that the government are using Wes as a kind of Trojan horse to try and signal that actually Keir Starmer isn't so keen on this. The government are going cold on this idea. And actually, is Wes's intervention going to Dissuade Some Labor MPs for voting for it because they think it might evoke the displeasure of the Prime Minister? I'm not saying that that is what is going on, but that is a discussion now about whether or not Streeton is trying to shift MPs and standard behind that is Keir Starmer. Harriet, I'm not imagining this, am I? That this is becoming a live discussion in the party.

Right, well, that is the problem of Wes treating having crossed the line. But actually the truth of the situation is the government is neutral and they will make an individual decision. So when it comes to that second reading vote on the Friday, all individual ministers will vote as individuals because the government does not have a position you'd be forgiven from if you just take a cursory look around the discussion. You think the government has got a position because the Health Secretary has, on the basis of his department, put forward a position. But the government is neutral. And I would reassure anybody who thinks is actually Wes treating being a kind of proxy for Keir Starmer or proxy for the government? No, he isn't. The government is genuinely neutral and all of those backbenchers, they can vote whichever way they want. The whips will not be having a view. Nobody will be having a view. They can just vote with their conscience and I hope they'll do that and not feel overshadowed by what Wes has done.

Do you think that the Prime Minister should reprimand Wes Streeton on this, Harriet?

Well, I think it's interesting hearing Ruth reading out Simon Case's letter. It's not a ministerial code thing, so he's not broken any official rules. This is the kind of unofficial stance, but I think that he needs to look at the good practice previously. I'm sorry to be praying in aid. A Conservative Health Secretary from the previous government that we were so keen to see the battle.

He's telling us that we did some things right.

The World with Richard Engel and Yalda Hakim is a brand new podcast from Sky News with me, Sky News lead World News presenter Yalda Hakim, and me.

Richard Engel, chief foreign Correspondent for NBC News.

Every week we'll be reporting from the front line of the world's trouble spots and asking The Big Questions to the world's most important and influential people.

Join us for the Ground Truth to help you understand what is happening in the world today and why it matters to you.

So that's the World with Richard Engel and Yalda Hakim.

Listen every Wednesday, wherever you get your podcasts.

We're back and I think we should talk about what happened with the Archbishop of Canterbury this week. It was a massive moment. He stood down as the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby. It came about because of sex abuse in the Church of England and a view that he did not deal with this in a way that perhaps should have been dealt with years ago. He came under huge pressure and he was forced to stand down. Now, I don't think it's maybe right for us right now to get into this discussion about the details of what happened within the Church of England. But it also is another scandal that speaks to something else that has plagued public life in this country and we have talked about on this pod, and that is trust, trust in institutions, trust in authority figures and faith that the institutions that are meant to look after you and protect you actually badly, badly let you down and damage people and damage public life and faith in institutions. Ruth, I know you feel quite strongly about this.

It feels as if the foundations of quite a lot of the institutions of the United Kingdom have been shaken quite a lot lately. And I think that this is going to be a really turbulent time for the Church of England who already had issues in terms of, you know, we'll introduce women bishops, but we'll allow some male bishops to say that they won't ordain them. They're trying to modernize in some ways and be allowed to say prayers and give blessings to same sex couples. It kind of feels as if there's a schism coming, like it's being held together by, you know, by senior leaders and good faith and goodwill. But actually there's areas of the Church that doesn't have a lot in common with the others. And I, I say that as an observer. I'm Church of Scotland, I'm not Church of England. But also in terms of just the change in the UK, so the census in 2021, for the first time ever, less than half the people in England and Wales said that they would consider themselves Christian. And that's not people that regularly go to church, but even people that think of themselves as culturally Christian rather than agnostic or atheistic.

So I do feel that actually in the absence of all of these kind of institutions, there's A job here for government to do because people have, you know, they've fallen out of love and don't trust the media because of various scandals, they've fallen out and don't trust politicians, particularly because of Partygate and other things. And then you had kind of Keir before the election saying, you know, we're going to turn politics into public service for people. And then expenses gate happened and freebie gate happened. But nobody's telling that tale of what we could be. We're all just mourning what once might have been. And I think that that's really damaging.

What do you think? How do you agree with that?

Well, I don't want to go back to the day when people had deference for institutions and they trusted institutions just as a matter of belief. And now we've gone past that view whereby just because it's an institution, whether it's the Church, whether it's Parliament, whether it's the police, whether it's the family, that you believe it's a good thing and you have trust and confidence in it. Now institutions have to earn trust and confidence and they have to be justify trust and confidence. So we don't say the family is just a good thing. If there's violence in the family or child abuse, we say, no, that is not a good thing. And the thing about institutional defensiveness, which is what happened with the Church of England, is that they are harking back to the day where you defend the institution. Actually, you have to defend the substance and the credibility and the integrity within the institution. Thereby the institution can be trustworthy.

That's the thing about Welby as well. He didn't really want to resign, did he? But in the end, the bishops, other bishops were publicly saying he needed to go. It's part of trying to earn trust back and giving people confidence in the organization, someone taking responsibility.

But I don't think. I don't think that does earn trust. What it does is remove an obstacle to the task of rebuilding trust.

Right.

It's a condition precedent. It doesn't actually deliver it.

But the point is.

But you can't even embark on that without it.

And I think the institutional defensiveness point that Harriet makes is a good one, because quite often when it comes to this, this is not about allocating blame and firing people and sacking them or having them resign. This is about how do you defend and uphold the values that you say that your institution lives by and use that as your watchword. That's your North Star. And if people contravene them Then you know exactly how to deal with that within an institution. And that's how you clean your own stables. That's how it works.

Because the choice could have been to listen to those children who were having grievous bodily harm inflicted on them. That was a criminal offense of violence. And the choice was, do we listen to those children, be horrified about it and take really swift action, or do we just carry on as an institution? It's that choice moment where an institution has got to always prove itself to be on the right side.

I mean, Justin Welvey has said that he had no idea or suspicion of the abuse before 2013. He did say that, didn't he?

But of course he had that knowledge after 2013, and the man carried on doing those criminal offenses.

Yeah, and I'm sorry that I only knew for 11 years isn't much of a defense.

Well, look, on the issue of earning trust in institutions, Harriet, you are right that part of having confidence in institutions is doing what you say and saying what you do. And this leads me neatly onto a little treat I have for you, because I've brought you a present from Grimsby. Can you guess what it is?

I mean, a fish?

A wind turbine?

A wind turbine or a fish? No, no, it's better than that. Ladies, I haven't brought your fish. I haven't brought your wind turbine. But you might remember that during the election, I also hosted that leaders event and interviewed Starmer and Sunak in front of the audience. And then the audience put questions to leaders, which was by far the best bit. We can all agree on that. Well, what I can give you is I went back up to Grimsby and I can give you some of those audience members four months on, because we went and had a chat with some of them, some of them that had interviewed the former Prime Minister and now the current Prime Minister about what they thought. And one of the people I saw again was Sharon. And I actually think Sharon asked the question of the election when she asked Sir Keir Starmer how he would pay for everything he was promising without putting up taxes. Sharon, I should say, is a lifelong Labor supporter who lives in Grimsby. It's a few months on, we've had the budget and I asked Sharon all about it. And this, the gift I give you is Sharon from Grimsby.

I did vote Labor. I've always voted Labor. But the Labor I'm seeing so far, it felt chaotic and it's overshadowed the good things that have gone on.

But your question went to the heart of it, which was, how are you Going to fund it?

Yeah.

And they said through grants.

Obviously they've done that by putting it all on the employer following the budget. I actually think I've been indirectly taxed. I know that's going to affect the double whammy of actually putting it all onto employees of the minimum wage going up, but also actually the national insurance going up. And then they've obviously said that there's three choices that employees have either going to take less profits. This is real world. You know, my husband works in the private sector. They're not going to take less profit. Most majority are not going to take less profits. So it's then going to be either passed on to the consumer because things will go up, so then it's coming out of our pockets or it's going to directly freeze low pay rises.

So that was Sharon. It was interesting to go back because reform came second in Great Grimsby and Cleethorpes. It was a seat for Sky News, one of the target towns. The Cleethorpes section of it was, and it was a new constituency, so it sort of bound together two seats and particularly Great Grimsby had been a bellwether. It was one of those seats, Labor since 1945, very pro Brexit, flipped to Boris Johnson in 2019 and then it merged for this election with Cleethorpes. And Cleethorpes had been in a seat that had been conservative since 2010. Melanie on, who lost the Great Grimsby seat to Boris Johnson in 2019, became the MP again in 2024 and had a reasonable majority of 4,000. Reform came second there. There's two things I want to ask you about, Harriet on this one is what did you think about what Sharon said? Because we talked about the budget at length and Sharon, who is pro Labor, wanted a Labor government, wants Keir Starmer, from everything she said to me to succeed. She was pretty pissed off. Huh.

Well, I think it is difficult times and Keir Starmer warned that it would be difficult times when you. When we fixed the foundations which had been so broken by the previous government, so there wasn't going to be any easy steps, but if we're on the path to growth and we're getting the public finances sorted out and getting more investment, but then hopefully we can come back to Sharon and life will be better for us.

It will be better. And that's the gamble. But the bigger question, I think, in all of this, and it goes back to what Ruth was talking about, trust, trust in institutions, trust in government, is that what is biting on the heels of Melanie on and indeed dozens of seats for Labor across the country is not the depleted Conservative Party, but reform. And the idea of the politics of grievance, if you like, that Nigel Farage talks about uses in his speeches about how don't trust any of this lot, they haven't got your best interests at heart, they have failed you. I'm the guy coming in, I'm going to change how things get done. I'm going to make life better for you. There's an issue here, isn't there, that if Keir Starmer doesn't deliver and people like Sharon want him to and are losing faith, that they're going to turn to other parties and reform. You know, I've been talking to people in the Welsh Senate elections. It's looking like they're going to take a lot of seats. I mean, this is. This is hairy for Labor, isn't it, Harriet?

I think it's very difficult when you've got a party which is a populist party, offering easy answers which are absolutely undeliverable. And that is something that then really undermines trust and confidence in politics. Because if people are told fairy tales, you know, whether it's by, you know, by Nigel Farage and really it really does undermine trust and confidence in politics. I think it's one thing people doing a protest vote where they're just saying, I'm hurting, but it's quite another if it just completely offers solutions which are no solutions at all. The truth is, if your public services have been completely degraded, which they have been, and if your public finances have got a big black hole, which they have got, you have to take action.

Sharon, like many people, you know, there is a line that has been taken by Labor, but she, she sees the knock on effect of the employer's national insurance rise. And we're beginning to see it now with businesses warning that they're going to have to cut jobs or they're going to have to push up prices in the supermarket, it comes back to the trust point, doesn't it? Like, how much of a problem do you think this is for Labor?

Well, it does come back to the trust point. And like you say, Sharon works in the care sector, so kind of sees it from both sides, even though she talked about her husband working in the private sector. But the whole point was in the whole campaign, Labor said, we don't have to choose between raising taxes and investing in public services because we're going to get growth and the budget that we've just had. The Independent OBR said there Won't be any growth over five years. So I think that Sharon's question is valid, but I think the point that Harriet makes about delivery is important. That's how you get trust back, is you actually have to deliver for people. And the problem that I see is that Labor ran this a really brilliant, disciplined campaign. They've come into government and I don't know whether it's a lack of institutional memory, because there's so few people have been ministers before, whether just governing is hard or whatever, but they've had a lot of missteps. They're not firing on all cylinders and they might sort that out, and I hope that they do for the sake of the country.

But they're, you know, they're. They're not landing well. They've used up a lot of political capital to not much return, so they need to get on with the delivery of stuff. But they also. If you're going to take on a populist insurgency like reform, the government has to give us a bit of vision. Where is the country going? And I had this argument before the election that neither Rishi Sunak nor Keir Starmer offered the vision part of a political campaign. What is the trajectory for Britain? Where are we trying to go? And I get. And I understand why Labor are trying to pin everything that's shit in the country on the Tories, because they've been in power and really land the message of we've had a terrible inheritance. But you've got to do more than that. You're the government now. We want to know where the country is headed. Like, you've got to do the positive side as well as the negative.

Let's just finish off with the final question that I put to Sharon and the other two wonderful audience members that came back, who both asked questions of the PM former and PM current, Amy and Cayman. And this is the question I asked them at the end of our interview. And I'm gonna. Let's play it out now to round off this. If you were gonna give Keir Starmer a mark out of 10, what would you give him? 5 average? 4.

4.

I'd rather not say.

I'd rather not say. No, but really, I mean, but you are.

I would rather not say you.

But it's just you actually have always voted Labor after.

Yeah, but I do have not say at this point, because you need organization and you need strength. And with that and some of the things that have happened, the blunders, for one of word, which is obviously been highlighted in the media Because. But it doesn't make you feel like they know what initially it thought, do you know what you're doing?

So that was Sharon at the end. Again, I was quite surprised. She said, I don't want to say. I don't want to say. And she did it in a way she was uncomfortable because I think the thing is she would have given Starmer a really low score and she didn't want to give him a low score because she wants him to succeed. And she talked about the blunders and when she talked about the blunders, she raised the prison crisis, which arguably in the early release scheme, which arguably is a hangover from the lack of prison planning for the previous government. Like, you can see that start. That is a kind of crisis that was given to them. And actually, if you talk to some conservatives, they're like, part of the reason for going early in that election for Sunak was he knew that this was coming down the track. But also they did mention freebie gate. They did not like that stuff at all. And you know, and just the lack of what Ruth was saying, like kind of, just the lack of, kind of purpose, drive, professionalism, the rouse in number 10.

Do you have the clip of Keir Starmer's answer to her pertinent question?

We don't, but he said, we're going to invest, we're going to put more resource in. And then he sort of dissembled a bit and actually I listened back to. And I was like. He didn't particularly answer the question, but he said, to be fair, he said we're going to invest and put some resource in. He did?

Yeah.

He just didn't say how. Come on, let's. They've done the ratings. How would you rate the government out of 10 so far, Harriet?

I'd say eight.

Eight, Ruth?

I'd say five.

Okay, well, we will come back to this. I'm not going to give a rating because obviously I'm the political editor of Sky News.

I think I probably shouldn't have given a rating. Can I take my rating?

No, you. 8 out of 10. 8 out of 10 is a good score. That's 80%. That's like a first grade A. I mean, all you take it back to do, Harry, is say 10 out of 10.

That's probably true.

So look, that's all for this week. Send us your ratings of the Prime Minister if you like. You can also rate us if you like. That's five stars. You can rate us five stars on, on any review, wherever you get your podcast. I'm joking. You can rate us how you like. You can voice note us. Just send it on the WhatsApp to the burner phone 0793420044. Email us at electrodisfunctionky.uk that is it. That was a really, really fascinating chat today. Thank you ladies. Goodbye and we will see you next week. Goodbye.

Goodbye.

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