| | Hi, my name's Phil, I like to talk about politics and in this video I'd like to discuss how Labour Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds, in the debate about Steele in Parliament today, was able to expose a massive lie which Kemi Badnock told yesterday about her role in the affair. |
| | What ensued was a comical attempt by Badnock and her underling to rescue the situation, which just left the Tories looking clueless and incompetent. |
| | Surely Tory MPs now see she is a complete liability. |
| | But first for daily news and commentary please hit the subscribe button to stay notified. |
| | Okay so my schedule is all over the place again. |
| | I talked about this emergency legislation to save blast furnaces in Scunthorpe yesterday. |
| | I did not expect to have to discuss the details of the debate itself. |
| | I thought it'd all be fairly predictable and mostly it was. |
| | Until that is, Labour's Jonathan Reynolds made a play which drew Badnock into a trap. |
| | Reynolds referenced a statement which Badnock made yesterday. |
| | The Tories of course are not pro-nationalisation but also they know it's not a good look to say that an entire town should lose its primary business either. |
| | They haven't gotten away with saying that since the 1980s. |
| | Even Nigel Farage has called for the nationalisation of British Steel, right? |
| | So instead their tactic has been to attack Labour's negotiating skills. |
| | However this begs the question as to why the Tories didn't just negotiate a deal themselves. |
| | After all they were in power less than a year ago and these issues have been affecting steelworks for years. |
| | It's not a new thing. |
| | So Badnock claimed that she had negotiated a plan with British Steel in order to counter that argument. |
| | She tweeted it yesterday. |
| | However Jonathan Reynolds referenced this statement in the House today and told MPs that when Labour took over from government there was no such deal left to them. |
| | The legislation we're setting out today will also help end the uncertainty that has been hanging over British Steel's Sikonthorpe site for too long. |
| | And I welcome the opposition's support today for this recall. |
| | But this issue should have been resolved years ago. |
| | I also believe they may now view it as a mistake to have given this essential national asset to this company. |
| | But I have to address, and I do this as a matter of genuine regret, the statement I saw made by the Leader of the Opposition yesterday. |
| | Because she claimed that, while she did my job, she negotiated a modernisation plan with British Steel to build an electric arc furnace at Teesside followed by one at Sikonthorpe. |
| | Mr Speaker, I wish to make unequivocally clear to the House, the new government inherited no such deal. |
| | We could not renege on that deal because it did not exist. |
| | On day one, I was told there had been a lack of progress on this matter to date. |
| | So if such a deal was negotiated, somehow in secret, I would ask the Leader of the Opposition to say how much money she agreed to give Xinguet for this deal. |
| | What were the conditions placed upon it? |
| | And to state the obvious, building two electric arc furnaces in two different locations would be more expensive than building one in one location. |
| | And given Xinguet's request to build two furnaces in Sikonthorpe was for £1.2 billion in taxpayer support, what... Now at this point, Badenok took the bait and elected to make the situation way worse. |
| | She tried to state that she'd made no such statement. |
| | There's a... there's a... there's a tweet there. |
| | Which word? |
| | Come in, Ben. |
| | Mr Speaker, I would like advice on how to counter the points which the Secretary of State is making, given... given that they are factually, factually incorrect, given that they are factually incorrect, and they're factually incorrect and a complete misrepresentation of the situation that he inherited. |
| | It's just been clarified by her good self. |
| | I can say I can't make the Secretary of State give away when you want to come to this fight spot. |
| | But I'm sure if he noticed again, he may wish to. |
| | Secretary. |
| | Secretary. |
| | Speaker, this is an excellent chance to clarify this. |
| | Because if the Leader of the Opposition agreed a deal with Xinguet to cause massive job losses in Sikonthorpe, transfer the jobs to a completely different place, at higher cost than the request the company made to us, I think she should be able to tell us. |
| | And I'm more than happy for her to give a clue. |
| | Mr Speaker, Labour cannot negotiate. |
| | We... We were negotiating a modernisation deal that would have had limited job losses, just like we had in Port Talbot. |
| | They inherited a functioning commercial deal in Port Talbot. |
| | The same was going to happen with British Steel, had we not had a snap election. |
| | What he is doing now, Mr Speaker, is the union pushed deal. |
| | They brought that deal to me, Mr Speaker. |
| | I said no, he said yes. |
| | Mr Speaker, this is genuinely revelatory. |
| | I say again, if Xinguet's request was for £1.2 billion to build at lesser cost in one place, what was the sum of money agreed by the Leader of the Opposition when she was Business Secretary to build in two places? |
| | Give it because it certainly wasn't in the accounts of the Chancellor. |
| | I will give that. |
| | how much money was agreed to Xinguet to close the jobs. |
| | It's going to go back. |
| | Mr Speaker. |
| | Mr Speaker. |
| | When you are negotiating, you do not have... |
| | They're cheering and laughing because they love this. |
| | They think that the public taking on billions of pounds of liabilities is fantastic. |
| | We had not finished the negotiation, so there was no amount, but it would have succeeded better than the terrible plan that he's got now. |
| | So let me read out exactly the crucial point, I think, word for word. |
| | She says she negotiated a modernisation plan with British Steel to limit job losses and keep the plant running, including introducing an electric arc furnace in Teesside, similar to what we did with Tata at Port Talbert Steelworks. |
| | So that's from her tweet, right? |
| | So she said she'd negotiated a deal. |
| | She said it was in line with the Port Talbert deal in Wales. |
| | She and her underling then tried to muddy the waters because, again, Jonathan Reynolds saying, so where is it? |
| | Why wasn't it left to me? |
| | Why wasn't it left to me? |
| | So she tried to go, oh, but the negotiations were still ongoing. |
| | So where were they? |
| | Where were the negotiations up to? |
| | How could Labour possibly take over without the records? |
| | So, but Reynolds said, well, so how much was it going to cost then? |
| | How much would it cost? |
| | No figure. |
| | But I do not trying to claim that because the negotiations were still ongoing, there was no figure. |
| | That is absurd. |
| | How can you have negotiations without proposals? |
| | Like, how do you rock up to negotiations and go, OK, tell me your proposals. |
| | Yeah, we don't have any of our own. |
| | I'm only interested in yours. |
| | How does that work? |
| | So there have to be proposals. |
| | The proposals have to be written down. |
| | The proposals need figures. |
| | In fact, if there had been negotiations, there wouldn't have just been proposals. |
| | There would have been records of the proposals. |
| | That's by law. |
| | Officials have to take records of these things. |
| | So the new government would have had those records. |
| | Indeed, Badenock claims that Labour bungled the subsequent negotiations based on her proposals. |
| | But Reynolds has told MPs categorically there were no proposals left for him. |
| | That he didn't renege on the proposals, as Badenock suggested in a tweet yesterday. |
| | There were no proposals to renege on. |
| | There were no accounts in the Treasury either, he said. |
| | Who would have to have been involved? |
| | And Badenock didn't deny that she hadn't left him proposals or records or anything. |
| | She was trying to claim that because negotiations were still taking place, that's why there are any records of them or proposals or Treasury calculations. |
| | And this this ludicrous situation was not lost, even on the Lib Dems. |
| | There was a Lib Dem and a Labour MP backbench. |
| | They both queried the lack of evidence of any negotiations. |
| | They asked to see them. |
| | Can we see them then? |
| | Can we see this deal? |
| | In just a forgiving way, we are hearing about the efforts of the previous government to save British steel. |
| | And we have found a somewhat confusing account about the deal that the now shadow leader of the opposition has negotiated. |
| | If such a deal existed, can we perhaps see a record of any of that? |
| | I thank the shadow minister for giving way. |
| | I'm still a little confused as to what the deal was that the last government negotiated. |
| | And seeing as the leader couldn't answer it, and you didn't respond, I just wondered if you could please just clarify that situation for the House. |
| | Clearly not a question of confidentiality because the now government are also inviting Badenock to produce the evidence. |
| | And yet the Tory front bench continued to act as if the very idea of having proposals for negotiation was laughable. |
| | Oh, absolute amateurs fancy having proposals in negotiation. |
| | What idiots, they don't know what they're doing. |
| | And they claim Labour can't negotiate. |
| | They are the ones trying to claim that negotiations can get to a very advanced stage without ever having a proposal written down or financial offerings calculated by the Treasury. |
| | Badenock would have just done better to have kept her mouth shut than make her party look completely clown-like. |
| | It may have been reported that Jonathan Reynolds called her out to be a liar. |
| | It's definitely been reported now that she's challenged it. |
| | It's worth noting something I pointed out on the politics social stream yesterday as well. |
| | Reform UK, they've lost a lot of ground and they've gained, sorry, a lot of ground in the poll since last summer. |
| | Labour have lost a lot of ground. |
| | And it would make sense therefore for you to assume, I would have assumed, that a lot of 2024 Labour voters who have clearly decided they're not keen on Labour at the moment have switched to reform. |
| | Because Labour have lost ground, reform have gained it, right? |
| | But the latest polling from YouGov suggests that Reform UK are actually mostly getting their gains from Conservative voters. |
| | In fact, Labour's lost votes are more to the Lib Dems and to a lesser extent the Greens than reform, which is remarkable. |
| | Badenock is actively trying to prioritise those lost Tory votes to Reform UK. |
| | That's what her focus is. |
| | And yet her efforts are actually, it's not that they're not winning those votes back. |
| | They're actively driving more of them to Reform UK. |
| | She's got a win votes back from Reform UK strategy, and yet what she's doing is driving many more votes to Reform UK. |
| | The Tories already suffered a catastrophic loss of votes last year. |
| | And yet of the ones who stuck with them, the ones who still voted for them despite everything last year, 18% of them now say they would vote for Reform UK. |
| | How is it possible when you're specifically targeting a particular voter? |
| | Like, it's understandable when you target one type of voter, you could piss off a load of others, right? |
| | But when you're targeting a particular voter, how are you actively repelling that voter? |
| | Well, performances like today are why. |
| | It's not that the country is going to see her embarrassing performance in the debate today, but it is that same sort of lazy thinking, that denial of reality and sandwiches, which does feed through her entire operation. |
| | She is just like, she's like, if you were to genetically splice all three of the past Tory leaders together and create someone wholly gestalt. |
| | She's as lazy as Boris Johnson. |
| | She is as mad as Liz Truss, and she is as bad at politics as Rishi Sonner. |
| | And the thing is, when they do get rid of her, because they can't keep her for too much longer, can they? |
| | I bet you they actually do go for someone even worse. |
| | I think there's a good chance, like in the last parliament they had three leaders, that was chaotic. |
| | They could end up with having had four leaders inside this one parliament to beat their record. |
| | But there we are, those are my thoughts. |
| | Let me know yours in the comments below. |
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| | Thanks for watching, and until next time, I'll see you later. |