Hello and welcome to the start of a new week of politics at Jack and Sam's Daily. Everything you need to know about the week ahead in British politics in under 20 minutes. It is Monday, November the 18th. My name is Jack Blanchard of Lithgow with me as always some coats of sky news and Sam I am distraught to see that you are in your house today and not on the Copacabana in Rio de Janeiro.
with some of the luckiest people in the travelling lobby and the Prime Minister who is on his travels yet again this week and where better to be than Rio. Yes, it was a long old flight to Brazil yesterday, according to people who were travelling. With the Prime Minister stopovers in places like Cape Verde, I was told the Prime Minister sort of even the Prime Minister was looking bored as he stared wistfully down the plane all alone during some of the stopovers.
Another few days after the country, they're not back until Wednesday afternoon missing at PMQs. So it's going to be one of those weeks where the Gamekeeper is away again.
Yeah, and he's got a freezing cold Britain to look forward to when he returns from blazing hot Brazil. There's a lot of domestic policy going on this week while Starmer is at the G20. The Labour round, Sam over assisted dying is getting more and more public and very interesting to watch. We'll talk about that in a bit. The government's very public round with the farmers continues. That's going to be a big story this week.
and we're expecting the welfare white paper, which is due out next week, but there are bits of that now leaking out as well. Should we just talk very quickly, Sam, about what is exactly coming up this week before we get into the day ahead and Rio and all of that? Why don't you just start off with Monday, please? So, Kia Stommer in Brazil. David Lammy also abroad. He's at the UN in New York, and it's buses in the Commons today. The bus bell with Lou Haig. She's also meeting Andy Burnham and Richard Parker to talk about bus networks out of London.
Tuesday is going to be dominated by two things. The farmers protest in Westminster. We're expecting up to 20,000 farmers. I don't even know we had 20,000 farmers in this country coming to protest in Westminster. The government, of course, saying only 500 farms a year will be caught up by the changes to inheritance tax they're protesting about, but I'm sure the farmers will dispute that. The other big thing on Tuesday is it is 1,000 days since the Ukraine war started.
The government will be marking that and President Zelensky will be in Europe addressing the European Parliament making a big speech there.
But Jack, I just checked and we do not know who Angela Rayner is going to be facing. When I put in the inquiry in the last half an hour, so at six o'clock in the morning, thank you to the person on the other end of the phone, I was told TBD.
So that's not even TBA to be announced, but to be decided. When you go back at Look at the Shadowing Cabin at this that was released by Kermi Badernock a couple of weeks ago, there's no indication who her kind of de facto deputy was. They sort of shot down the idea that it might be Ben Houch and that he's appeared, so it couldn't have been him in any way. So either they haven't announced or they haven't decided who will be Kermi Badernock's common deputy from here on in, which is quite something.
Maybe they could have sort of a lucky dip or a raffle or something like that to decide who gets to be, who gets to stand in at PMQs and want to say it could be quite fun, couldn't it? What else is happening this week? The COP summit, remember that? It's still going on, it finally closes on Friday and Miller Band is there and we're expecting the off-gen price cap announcement on Friday as well. Prices are likely to be increasing in January, which is obviously going to be a big story given the winter fuel bills everyone is talking about and paying.
Should we crack on with the day ahead, Sam? Because Kia Stommer is in Rio right now. He was on the plane chatting to hacks about what he's going to be talking about at the two-day G20 summit, which is basically Monday and Tuesday of this week. There are two big things that are on the agenda today. One, the Prime Minister is meeting with President Xi Jinping of China from a face-to-face meeting. The first face-to-face meeting between a British Prime Minister and President Xi since Theresa May way back in 2018.
Secondly, Ukraine is very much top of the Prime Minister's agenda, and we had this announcement, this story that broke last night in the New York Times that the US is finally giving permission for Kyiv to start using long-range missiles, firing them into Russian territory, which is something that you and I have been talking about on this podcast for a month, Sam.
and it seems that one of Joe Biden's final big axis US president has been to give the green light to that and allow the water escalating quite a significant way. Is this a win for Keir Starmer that Biden's done this? I mean, Starmer was over there in September telling Biden that we ought to do it. We were expecting maybe he'd get a breakthrough in September at that White House summit. That never came, but it feels like
Better late than never as far as Star Wars is considered and the Brits and the French and indeed President Zelensky have finally got their way. Probably, but not absolutely certainly is this a win for Kia Starba. Look, what we know, which as you say is a combination of what the New York Times reported last night and kind of reading between the lines of President Zelensky's address to the nation in Ukraine, is that the US have authorized their missiles
Attackers, as they're known, and they can now be used in the Kursk region of Western Russia, according to that New York Times report. So these are weapons with a range of 200 miles, and they can be employed against Russian troops there. The sort of pretext for this was the arrival of troops from North Korea.
10,000 North Korean troops, which are being moved to support Russian forces on the border, which is clearly a escalation from their side. So the US can claim that that gives them justification for an escalation from their side. And we will see how this plays out. There is anger, of course, in Russia, in the Russian parliament, although we haven't heard from Putin. There is anger from some allies of Donald Trump, who asked what on earth is Joe Biden doing in the last two months of his presidency.
And I say pre-text, the North Korean troops were pre-text, because when I was talking to foreign office people, what? A month ago, they thought that if Donald Trump won the presidency, Joe Biden would, in some senses, step up his support for Ukraine in the final weeks of his presidency, sort of to give Ukraine a better hand if Donald Trump then forces the country to negotiate in table after he becomes
president. There's just an interesting quirk. Downing Street and everyone on the plane, Prime Minister yesterday, were not commenting on this story. And I wonder whether that is because, although the authorization has been given for these attackers' missiles,
I just see it towards the end of the story in The Times. They say it is not 100% nailed on, but it also means that Storm Shadow, the British missiles, will get authorization from the US to deploy missiles into Russia as well.
Now, storm shadow missiles are UK missiles, but they do require American technology, which is why there is this need for US approval. So that is a slightly separate question. It can probably come on the basis of why not, but it isn't definite and automatic. So there is just a quirk there to watch out for maybe that is resolved by the end of the day. But I was just, I was just noticed in the reporting, there isn't an automatic really cross.
No, that's right. And our reporters were hassling Downey Street about this specific issue all last night and through overnight into this morning about whether this also means that Storm Shadow missiles, which have different capabilities to the American-made ones that have been given the green light, will also be given the green light. Absolutely no comment so far from Downey Street. Keir Starmer is going to do some interviews or some sort of pool clip or something in Rio later today. This is probably going to be the first or second question he's going to be asked about.
So we will find out then, if not before, there's obviously a morning lobby briefing from Downey Street here in London in a few hours time. This will be asked there as well, so this will probably emerge one way or another over the course of the day. It seems like the main thinking in the US is that what this extra capability for the Ukraine will allow them to do is allow them to try and fight to keep that parts of that Kursk region that they have
held on to so far in the war to give them a better negotiating position in 2025 when President Trump returns to the White House and we know that negotiations were certainly likely to begin pretty soon after that. So the better position that Ukraine are in at that point, the theory goes, the better chance they have of getting a better deal in whatever it is that whatever approach Trump decides to take in bringing it into the war as he has promised to do.
Should we talk about President Xi in China as well, Sam? Because this is a really big moment in UK-Chinese relations. It's been more than six years since a British Prime Minister, as I said, sat down with the Chinese president for life, as he appears to be calling himself. Rishi Sunak tried to do it, but the meeting got cancelled.
The COVID pandemic meant that President Xi didn't leave the country for a little while, so there wasn't much chance of meeting him for that period. But Starmer has been pretty clear that Labour will take a different approach to Chinese relations than what we saw under the Tories, or at least the latter end of the Tory government, which was obviously pretty China skeptic, particularly under Liz Truss. And when she was in the Foreign Office and then in Downing Street,
I think it felt like Rishi Sunat wanted to take a slightly less hawkish approach to China, but wasn't really allowed to do so by his party. Keir Starmer comes into this meeting today with a very different political context. The political instincts of the Labour Party are
Not pro-China, but the less China skeptic, I think, than the more hawkish end of the Tories. And obviously, Keistalmer also has this massive parliamentary majority, something that none of his Tory predecessors ever enjoyed, which means that he faces less pressure from his backbenches anyway. And so if Keistalmer wants to reset relations with China, as he appears to do,
then he has much more political capital to do so. That's right, allowing him to do things that you wouldn't normally expect like the Prime Minister having this meeting before the UK has actually concluded its review into UK-China relations, which was one of the first things that they announced when they came into office.
still isn't concluded and yet you've had this. You've already had the David Lamy visit to China. That was a couple of weeks ago. It has been announced that, or it's certainly been privately confirmed, that Rachel Reeves quite soon is going to go to China. And then I am told that there is discussion and preparation underway for Kiyastama himself to go to China. That looks like it'll be next year. We are in a
a properly different place that we are creeping back much more to Theresa May style relations back from 2018 when some of the Golden Era language was still around. Where does this come to a crunch policy-wise? Well,
It is absolutely clear that one of the government's top priorities is its green agenda and pushing through the net zero targets that we were talking about when the Prime Minister was a cop. That means more electric cars. It means more investment in green power generation. And to a certain extent, you're going to require a sort of greener form of steel.
The question is where does all that stuff come from? And the big debate in inside government and outside is how much are we going to end up in order to do the carbon transition, how much are we going to end up relying on China to provide a lot of that stuff, because it's just cheaper to come from there.
versus if we do start becoming even more economically dependent on China, what does that do to our relationship with the United States, where frankly, it's both parties in Congress, the Democrats, as well as the Republicans, as well as Donald Trump, who became increasingly hawkish on China through his premiership. He wasn't at the start, but by the end,
he was when he was present the first time round. It looks like Congress will push through escalating sanctions on China and potentially people that deal with China just at the point where the UK might be pivoting towards China in order to sort out its green transition. That's the kind of push me, pull you situation that we could find ourselves in.
That's right. And it's worth remembering that Donald Trump has picked the Florida Senator Marco Rubio as his Secretary of State, one of the biggest China hawks on Capitol Hill will be in the State Department. And that gives you an indication of just how hawkish towards China, this Trump 2.0 regime is likely to be. And as you can say, you can see the clash coming with Britain just as Britain's
likely tiptoes a little bit more in the Chinese direction than it had been over the past few years. Equally, there will be voices in Kia star Mazir saying that America is no longer looking like the absolutely rock solid dependable security ally for Europe that it has been for the last 60 or 70 years.
and therefore hedging bets slightly and making sure you have reasonable diplomatic ties with lots of other centres of power is not a bad idea for a British Prime Minister just as he may be tiptoes towards Europe a little bit more for similar reasons.
reaching out some sort of olive branch towards China might seem like a smart thing to do. We will see how that meeting goes today. So we spent the last few minutes talking about some domestic stuff, Sam, because the assisted dying debate has really dominated conversations within Labour Party circles.
over the last week or so. Really interesting the way that has sort of blown up really as an internal political issue wasn't really predicting that was going to happen when we realized that the private members bill was being brought forward. But I feel like we're treating the health secretary has really put a bit of a hand grenade under this issue by coming out so strongly
And so publicly, vocally against it. We were saying last week how that has encouraged quite a lot of Labour MPs who were on the fence to potentially decide not to vote for the bill. And it's also angered lots of West Streetings colleagues who are in favour of assisted dying and weren't expected to see the health secretary come out in that way.
What do you think the latest is in Labour Party circles on this? We've still got another what about another 10 days to go until the decision day for MPs, which will be the big vote in the House of Commons on the 29th of November. Where are we right now, do you reckon? Well, first of all, to say the red on red on this is escalating and dismaying quite a lot of people at the top of government. It actually reminds me a bit of the Brexit debate.
You know, what Kiyastama has done by quietly encouraging all of this is actually to light the touch paper on quite a bit around on this, as you were just referring to. I mean, I think it's even quite unpleasant in bits of the health department, to be honest, because
Wes treating this against this, his deputy, one of his deputies is for it. And that's just not good optics. And this is going to last, these rounds, this tension is going to last for absolutely months, because if on November the 29th MPs do vote for this measure and it gets through, we are looking at a huge part of the first half of next year actually being dominated by this bill, line by line, because each bit of it
The detail is of huge public interest and the politics is inescapable. And that is why, Jack, my understanding is that there are people, basically I'm saying, number 10 is split. Not really split so much on should we authorize a assisted dying or not.
but on whether or not it in labors political interests that this continues. I'm told by multiple sources that even Morgan McSweeney, the chief of staff in number 10, isn't very keen on this getting through and rolling into next year, not because he's taking a view on the issue itself, but just because it's a bit of a horror show. And there is some regret at the heart of government that they allowed this to happen.
So the problem is to keep saying, as he did on the way to cop last week, I am neutral. I'm not going to take a view. I don't think we're going to hear what he thinks until he actually votes in terms of whether or not he backs it. But there is actual regret at the heart of government that this has been allowed to happen, and it's seen as a bit of a fail.
But I also think, procedurally, we're in another world of pain. You remember last week there was a row over Wesleyan saying he'd asked his department to do an assessment on the costs of this. We are not going to get that.
before the big vote on November the 29th. Indeed, we're not going to get any kind of impact assessment on this bill before the big vote on November the 29th. I am told by people around Kim Ledbetter that we will only find out the impact assessment, how it works, what resources are needed, what impact it'll have on the justice system, what impact it'll have on the NHS.
after if it goes through and that will be done by the government and that puts MPs in an awkward position when they're doing this big vote not on the basis of all of the facts and that is concerning people and one final thing
There's just a presumption that this is all going to be done by the public sector. Now, that debate doesn't seem to be to have been actually had out in public either. There is an idea that the service that will carry this out, and those words feel awkward to say out loud, but this new National Health Service for Assisted Dying is a will be a publicly funded, publicly operated service, sort of along the same lines as the NHS.
But look at Switzerland, that is a heavily regulated but private and, you know, fee paying service that anybody can access. And that option, although it will be for the sector to decide exactly how it works, that option hasn't even been debated. There was a presumption that it's public, but we don't even seem to be having that debate, which would have a huge impact on the cost of this.
So whether it is how this debate is conducted, what people think in Downing Street, whether we're going to get all the facts, all the way it all operates in practice, so much up in the air and a week on Friday everyone's going to make up their mind.
to being the one on my travels tomorrow and I'll look forward to chatting to you then man. Can't wait to see where you're coming to us from. See you then. Bye bye. Have a great day.
