Good morning. Humza Yousaf has embraced the inevitable. This morning he has ended the Bute House Agreement with the Greens, whose members were due to vote on continuing the deal next month. Yousaf was under serious pressure from within his own party to scrap the deal, even though he himself supported it. The move means the SNP will now rule as a minority government. We’ll have more on our website here.
But today: Labour will nationalise the railways. Then Ben digs into the popularity of returning services to the state. And Harry has a fascinating report on the US Speaker of the House of Representatives, Mike Johnson – the man who passed the US aid package for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan.
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Labour has announced plans to nationalise the railway operators by folding them into a publicly owned company, Great British Railways, on a rolling basis as the contracts come up for renewal. The idea is that this will allow Labour to take the railways back into public ownership without large compensation bills. As George writes in an excellent interview with Louise Haigh, Labour’s shadow transport secretary:
The Sheffield Heeley MP, 36, who is one of the shadow cabinet’s leading “soft left” members (alongside Angela Rayner and Ed Miliband), is unambiguous about the alternative she would pursue: renationalisation. “We will bring those remaining operators – there are ten left on the railway contracts model – back into public ownership,” she said, 30 years on from the Major government’s privatisation. “All of them will expire within the first term of a Labour government either on their full contract or on their core contract.”
Although this policy is not a surprise, it has divided the party in the past. In 2022, Rachel Reeves pulled nationalisation when she announced her fiscal rules (or, to be more precise, when she announced that Labour would at some point announce fiscal rules). She said there was no money for mass nationalisation. A split emerged. The party quickly clarified that its shadow chancellor meant to say that while the fiscal rules apply there was a “positive role for rail in public ownership”. That compromise is what we see today.
This is a win for the soft left – and for Louise Haigh in particular. (I think that Haigh’s commitment to Northern Powerhouse Rail in her interview with George could be more consequential.) She was a mildly surprising survivor of Starmer’s last reshuffle and has a relatively low media profile. (“All shadow cabinet are holed up writing policy!” one Labour aide protested to me yesterday when I put this to them.) This rail news is affirmation of her present security within the party.
In terms of the politics, the announcement is broadly consistent with what we’ve come to expect. In the press release, Labour has buried the nationalisation news beneath business-friendly plans for contactless payments, streamlined pricing and a Passenger Standards Authority. Haigh describes herself as “passenger-in-chief”. Customers before ideology; country before party, etc.
Labour is leaning into a more active state here, à la Great British Energy. Prefix dumbed-down Corbynite policies with “Great British”, slap on a Union flag, and you’re on your way to the tepid and cautious economic populism that is becoming a recurring Starmerist motif. It’s ecumenical populism; PR populism; populism by halves; populism, most importantly, without an enemy.
Today’s announcement is one tiny way in which Starmer has kept his promise to Labour members to be an electable radical. He has ditched almost the entire Corbynite 2017 platform, which he promised would inspire his project – except this.
And yet, the contrast with 2017 is telling. Starmer is not touting a victory against surplus value-harvesting big business. This is sold as practical, inevitable almost – a tactic that was so effective for Tony Blair. In case anyone thought this was the start of a campaign to rebalance power away from business, Rachel Reeves has boasted to the Times today that Labour will be more pro-business than Blair himself. A win for the soft left, sure, but a soft win at that.
Freddie’s picks
The BBC’s Lyse Doucet writes this week’s diary about being in Tel Aviv during the Iranian attack.
I watched a gag-ridden PMQs from the press gallery yesterday. It was the clash of the deputies. Here’s what I saw.
Rafael Behr makes a strong case that Labour can stave off a nationalist revolt over immigration by restoring the public realm to good health. I agree this would dampen people’s resentment but I don’t think it’s enough. Weren’t public services pretty good in the late Noughties? And yet Ukip (and the BNP to some extent) were riding high in the polls (Guardian).
It’s been three years since Uber and GMB signed their recognition agreement. Together they have delivered the first pension in the gig economy. But what is the future of work in 21st-century Britain? And how do we combine autonomy and flexibility with security and representation? Join our panel of experts for a New Statesman podcast produced in collaboration with Uber, to discuss all of this and more.
How Mike Johnson defied the Trumpists in Congress over Ukraine
On 20 April the US House of Representatives authorised $95bn in spending, including $60bn for Ukraine, $26bn for Israel and $8bn designed to combat the threat of Chinese expansion in the Indo-Pacific. The Ukraine package passed for three reasons: Democrats in the House were united in support of it, more than 100 Republicans backed it, and – crucially – Mike Johnson, the Republican speaker of the House, allowed the bill to be brought to the House floor after months of delay.
Besides Donald Trump, Johnson is the Republican figure of the moment. He spent months delaying a vote on aid for Ukraine, fearing the repercussions of bringing it to the House when half of his party opposed it, but recently Johnson described himself as having begun to feel the weight of history. “My philosophy is you do the right thing and you let the chips fall where they may,” he said on 18 April. “If I operated out of fear over a motion to vacate [a vote of no-confidence such as the one tabled against the previous speaker, Kevin McCarthy, in October 2023] I would never be able to do my job. History judges us for what we do. This is a critical time right now on the world stage. I could make a selfish decision but I think providing lethal aid to Ukraine right now is critically important.”
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