Donald Trump is heading back to the White House. Together we can truly make America great again. We are in for an unpredictable but fascinating four years. And we're going to be following every twist and turn for the first 100 days. We'll be bringing you the latest updates and analysis. First thing every morning. So join me, James Matthew. Me, Martha Kallet. And me, Mark Stone. For Trump 100, every weekday at 6am. Wherever you get your podcast.
Hello and welcome to Tuesday's podcast from Sky News and Police Code that gives you everything you need to know about the day ahead in British politics in under 20 minutes, until that is China comes along with a better, quicker and cheaper alternative.
But meanwhile, I'm here. My name is Anne McElvoy, executive editor of Politico, with me as Sam Coats of Sky News. It's January the 28th, 2025. And overnight, the AI sector and the stock markets have been counting the cost of that new cheap Chinese entrant into the AI market.
known as deep-seek, which President Trump has called a wake-up call for U.S. AI firms. In the meantime, though, that alarm bell has been affecting AI valuations. And meanwhile, the U.S. president has been on the phone to the Indian Prime Minister to talk migration and trade. Will planes containing illegal Indian migrants be heading to Delhi soon?
And will President Trump be kiss dumber or Narendra Modi first? But as the world shifts around us, our focus is back home given it's Tuesday morning. That means we've got the latest YouGov Sky Times weekly voting intention poll. It's released every Tuesday at 6am. And this week,
Still no signs of major change on the start of the year, Labour in front on 27, reform second on 23, Tories on 22, Lib Dems on 14, Green on 9. And basically what that means is that none of the big, big news, particularly around Southport and the arrival of Donald Trump in the White House and everything that's happened has sort of shaken up the British political scene in the last fortnight or so. But we'll keep an eye on that every week. And do you want to talk about today?
Sure Sam, well today there are three things dominating. It's the final stage of Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves' run-up to the Chancellor's growth speech. Tomorrow a lot of pitch rolling has gone into that. There's an internal home office report on extremism commissioned by Yvette Cooper
in the wake of the Southport riots, which curiously has been leaked to the policy exchange think tank and it is already harvesting criticism. And it's a big day in the assisted dying debate with the chief medical officer Chris Whitty appearing before the bill committee on the assisted dying debate. And Sam, I think you've got more on that later.
That's right. But let's start with the fact that there is just one more sleep until Rachel Reeves, Big Speech in Oxfordshire, tomorrow about growth. And Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves going all in. I think the political point of today is Keir Starmer showing that he is completely behind his Chancellor in the run up to that speech.
We've got a big piece on Sky today basically making the point that, look, tomorrow we will hear from the Chancellor a blizzard of announcements taking on the blockers. This government will do what previous governments have really struggled to do. But the point isn't really that this government has settled on the agenda. That in the views of many who are in the sort of progress side of the argument is a good start.
But it's firing the starting on a probably incredibly difficult attempt to get these changes on the statute book to make these things actually happen and to turn them into laws. And really, we are months away from knowing whether or not the government will win that fight despite its big majority against all of
The green groups, environmental groups are really nervous and potential for some sort of pushback from Rachel Reeves' own side, or whether or not, once we get into the weeds of legislation, actually it all becomes a bit more tangled because this stuff is very, very complicated. So that's the big challenge. It's about tomorrow, but it's about much, much more than tomorrow. We've got one announcement into this morning. It was the one that my colleague Mark Kleinman kind of stole from Rachel Reeves at the weekend and revealed, and that is
about pensions, but do you want to just run through the choreography of today to explain the kind of symbolism of how Keir Starmer is also putting his sort of impremure on retro-roof speech?
Yes, this is an attempt to show that Rachel Reeves and Keir Starmer are joined at the hip on this. They'll meet CEOs of some of Britain's biggest businesses this morning waving around proof that the government is serious about boosting economic growth and lots of chief execs will be attending that from Lloyd's Bank from Nationwide Taylor when the BA systems Tesco beatie. I think the attempt you can
see their sam is to make sure that everybody is invited to all invited to come along and get behind the chance and the pms big growth party and then they will both brief the round table on their plans to slash red tape.
especially on infrastructure activity, you might be able to guess where that is leading towards government support for the always controversial expansion of Heathrow as well as Gatwick and Luton airports. So exactly as you said, this is getting off the theory of growth and all of that talk about how much we need it and how much the government is behind it and getting now really into the details of what is going to have to happen. And that also will mean engaging a lot more opposition from people who say,
Well, I want the growth, but I didn't really want that thing to happen, whether it's the infrastructure changes, the house building, the airport expansions. I think we ain't seen nothing yet. There are more than 100 local campaigns underway right at the moment, largely across England, to stop developments going ahead. They're all starting to coordinate and gear up to find the government on this. And that's just one wing of the opposition. I think that the government will face.
But listeners of this podcast will be familiar that whenever there is an announcement that the government is going to use pension schemes to do this or that, it is met with skepticism here. There is another of such announcements today, basically the Prime Minister and the Chancellor are going to be telling CEOs that they're going to change the pension rules to allow
These are their words, trapped surplus funds to be invested in the wider economy. Now, this immediately makes pension funds sound like free money, and any announcement from the government that makes it sound like pension funds can give out free money for pet projects by government always needs to be treated with kid gloves.
The idea that pension funds are in surplus, when quite a lot of them routinely struggle, even if they define benefit, is a bit for the birds. There are any surpluses, because the actuaries who value pension funds project that they grow in line with guilt yields.
And so there are any surpluses, sort of since Liz Droz came along. Previously, all the defined benefit schemes were in deficit. It's not because they've got more money. It's because of the way that accounting works. And if the government wants them to hand away these surpluses, what happens if guilt yields fall, pushing the pensions back into deficit? Do companies have to bail out their pension funds?
order the pension funds collapse. So one person's investment using pension schemes is another, another person's potential for poor pensioners in future. Be very, very, very careful about this stuff. As we always say, fiddling with pension schemes is nitroglycerin. Right. I think you should get all your financial advice listeners from Sam Coats. I'm not worried about my pension planning.
Don't be very careful about pension announcements for easy headlines by government ministers. And if they're written in jargon, and my goodness, as one pensions expert said, that press release is gobbledygook. It really is gobbledygook. And I think somebody in government should be a little bit embarrassed, possibly even tossed in bellies, the new pensions minister, then be very, very, very wary. Right.
The big story on the front pages is another development in the aftermath of the Southport killing. Do you want to explain what's happened and why it's controversial? Yes. Well, this is an internal home office report. It was drawn up on Yvette Cooper's orders very quickly after Southport, a rapid analytical sprint as it was referred to on counter extremism policy. And it was particularly thought to be needed after the public unrest that broke out
after the South Port attack.
contains a huge slew of recommendations about 38 to combat extremism in the UK. The problem with that as far as the government is concerned is it seems to massively widen the scope of what might be called extremism. And it also has a tendency overall, as far as we know from the leak anyway, to kind of blame a lot of right-wing extremists narratives, particularly around immigration
and policing and says that these are leaking into the mainstream. It says that claims of tutti are policing when groups are allegedly treated differently for similar behaviour, aka riots and how they are handled by the police, etc.
It claims that these are far-right narratives, now the big argument about that. It's probably not what Yvette Cooper wanted when she commissioned this report, and already we can see the Home Secretary distancing herself from these findings.
It's a weird one, isn't it? Because Yvette Cooper commissioned her own officials to do this report. They come up with 38 recommendations. And before the report is even published, perhaps if it was ever going to be published, it gets leaked to the centre-right policy exchange think tank. Andrew Gilligan, no less, who worked alongside Boris Johnson in Downing Street, appears to have got his hands on it. And they're the ones that put it out, came out to newspapers last night.
And then, if that wasn't enough, as you say, ministers already disowning it, the quote from the Home Office overnight, says, the findings from this sprint have not been formally agreed, and we consider a wide range of potential next steps arising from that work. Now, why hasn't it been agreed? Well, you can spot from space the political route that this report is going to trigger, and indeed, Chris Vilt, the Shadow Home Secretary,
has landed on that space. He is saying that effectively what the government officials have said is to smear as far right those who raised concerns about young girls being gang raped and by extending the definition of extreme and so widely government risk losing focus on
uh, ideologically met motivated terrorist, um, uh, Islamist terrorists effectively, uh, who pose, uh, more of a threat to life. And it, and, uh, I think it is that debate about, uh, the extent to which, uh, you know, some people were branded far right for the way they pursued arguments in the, in the aftermath of Southport and whether or not this report legitimizes that accusation, uh, that is really lining up, not just Tories, but reform figures as well.
You know what I think is so interesting about this partly that these sometimes these homemade reports have a habit of backfiring on the home secretary and indeed they can also backfire on the Prime Minister because he did seem to refer to ideas coming from the far right into the debate when Elon Musk was issuing his volley of criticisms of the government referring to grooming gangs and to generally to
to handlings of Islamism in Britain. So I think this is an area that's particularly sensitive for this government, not least because quite a lot of ministers probably think that there's a lot in this report. It is the fault of the Manosphere, which is also blamed for this, by the way, the influencers.
that it is the fault of people who want to stir up trouble from the further and far right. But Yvette Cooper, I think, is very keen, as we can see by this response. And I think we will hear more of this to hold the line that we really have got to narrow the focus. And some people will say, well, how fair is that? You commissioned a report that said the problem lies broader, but now you're back to only looking at problems you think arise from Muslim Britain.
Meanwhile, one of the most complicated things that the report suggests, something that you can see ministers being incredibly wary about, is a suggestion that you reverse the trend of the last few years and actually go back to recording non-crime hate incidents and get the police to record more of these. So these are where an incident doesn't reach the threshold for criminality, on the one hand.
But there is something that's happened, which is, and here's the definition, perceived by a person other than the subject, be motivated wholly or partly by hostility or prejudice towards persons with a particular characteristic. Now, I think it's incredibly controversial, the extent to which the police should or need get involved in that. Home office officials are pushing in one direction,
I think that's another reason why the home office is saying very clearly today. We're not accepting these recommendations wholesale. Dan Jarvis, the security minister is out saying, hang on a moment, we're going to give this one a bit of a closer look before we embrace the report. Let's see what happens next.
A lot of criticism, I think, coming in some cases, certainly as far as I'm hearing, closer to the Prime Minister than usual for it, that could be for maybe rushing through this. And if you're going to commission these reports, there's usually a bit more of a sense of what is wanted out of it. So I'm sure there will be a bit of blame throwing around in the home office about that. And of course, I think as you referred to there earlier, Sam, if you're the Conservatives or Reform,
or associated critics, you're going to say, hey, these are these left-wing officials from civil servants we've been warning you about for years, and they really exist because we know they exist now because a Labour home secretary has distanced herself from them.
I want to move on in the last few minutes of this podcast and I want to start with a sort of political confession that you can talk about a lot of things when reporting on British politics and commenting on it. But not every single one has a direct impact on people's lives.
Actually, the thing that could end up being the most consequential today in British politics is the thing that I think we're going to talk about third and last in this podcast, because while the growth stuff from Rachael Reeves may take 10 years and the report from the home office may end up being buried, the discussions around the assisted dying bill actually matter to everybody in England and Wales, not Scotland, not Northern Ireland.
And that's the subject of the Bill Committee. Chris Whitty, the Chief Medical Officer for England, is going to appear before the Kim Ledbetter led committee today. And we will hear more details of the debate around how that bill might change. And the reason I wanted to flag that, Anne, is I think there are awful lot of massive questions that haven't been bottomed out. If you remember the story so far is Kim Ledbetter, a backbencher, a Labour backbencher,
has drawn up this bell and is kind of single-handedly with, you know, holding the pen on what's going on with lots and lots of advice from officials near daily talks, according to the Times. But we don't know a huge amount about how the assisted dying system would work in practice. And what I've picked up
is, well, it might be surprising. It might not be surprising, but the fact I didn't know it, I think, is the whole point. I was chatting to a couple of people involved in all of this. And there are discussions in government and amongst the MPs in Parliament about how this service has actually worked. And it seems like they're heading towards three conclusions.
First of all, unsurprisingly, as it says in the legislation, that the use of this system will be free at the point of delivery. That's a gruesome way of putting it. I'm using Whitehall jargon, but that is one basic tenant of it. The second is that it's not entirely clear yet, and government isn't going to make any formal announcements sometimes. It's not entirely clear that it is a purely NHS service, providing it is free at the point of delivery. There could be other organisations involved, just as there are
The comparison given to me is a comparison with abortion services not all provided by the NHS, some by other organisations who are effectively paid by the state, so the service is free. And then the third thing that struck me is that there is a debate around whether or not this service should be offered at home.
And I was struck that I don't feel that's been a big part of the public conversation. But where we end up is perhaps potentially we could be on a path to assisted dying being an option given to people by a private company or a charity when they are at home. And that's quite a big leap mentally, I think, for a lot of people. I'm not saying it's good or bad, but it just underlines, I think, how much discussion there's yet to have before everyone fully gets to grips with
what Parliament could be authorizing over the course of this year. Big, big, big questions. A lot of the bill is just going to leave a lot of stuff to ministers. Ministers have said almost nothing about it. But those are things that are in the mix right now about how this service might work. I think that's fascinating. I think you've honed in there on three things that show what are ethical, but also what a practical delivery kind of maze this subject is. And this committee today is going to start really
to deal with that, but it will be hearing from people, including Sir Chris Whitty, who have had to deliver actual services, as you say, to use the jargon. Almost everything sounds a bit off when you're talking about end of life, but it is in the end. If it is to happen, then there has to be a route to it happening and to know who is delivering it. What are the possible problems from what you highlighted there, Sam? Well, one is, as you say, the free at the point of delivery,
seems self-evident. But for those who are on the opposing side will say, there you are, you know, we are supporting through taxation, we're basically supporting assisted dying and a lot of people don't agree with it. And I think that is just, I mean, you can't get off the fact that you're going to have to sort of have it paid for, it's not going to be
paid for privately, but I think that will, yeah, it will sharpen the division in a lot of public opinion, put it that way. And the other thing, as you refer to is the how and the who. And there are a lot of people inside the senior levels in the NHS who really don't want this poor, the word assisted dying to be put too closely besides national health service, the national health service. A lot of people's minds is really about sustaining you when you're alive. The NHS would have to be involved in some way.
But I think you are absolutely right that this is going to become a big argument. It's going to pull in. We're going to hear from General Medical Council, British Medical Association, and in due course also from NHS England on what that relationship, if this were to go ahead and into practice with the NHS would be.
Uh, that's why the testimony of Professor Chris Witty today is going to be so fascinating. See where he falls down or comes down on those arguments. Right. And that's it. We've breached 20 minutes. We're all done. Thank you very much indeed. Breakfast time.
Donald Trump is heading back to the White House. Together we can truly make America great again. We are in for an unpredictable but fascinating four years. And we're going to be following every twist and turn for the first 100 days. We'll be bringing you the latest updates and analysis. First thing every morning. To join me, James Matthew. Me, Martha Kallet. And me, Mark Stone. For Trump 100, every weekday at 6am. Wherever you get your podcast.