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tv   Political Thinking with Nick...  BBC News  November 19, 2022 8:30pm-9:00pm GMT

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a wet start, though, for some across eastern scotland and eastern england. the rain persists in north—east aberdeenshire, caithness and into orkney through the day. a windy, but brighter day in shetland. things will brighten up in eastern scotland and eastern england through the day after that cloudy and damp start. some good long sunny spells. in the west, sunshine, then some showers. some of those showers heavy and thundery. winds a bit lighter, so those showers will be slow moving, and a cool day, all in all. that's how it's looking. see you again soon. this is bbc world news, the headlines... fifa's president hits back at western critics of qatar's human rights record, accusing them of hypocrisy. talks at the un's climate summit in egypt hang in the balance as countries are given an extra day to reach a deal. and rishi sunak meets ukrainian president zelensky in kyiv for the first as prime minister, and pledges to continue the uk's support.
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you are watching bbc news. now, politicalthinking with nick robinson. hello and welcome to political thinking. if you add up the headlines from the budget that we're not supposed to call a budget, the dramatic drop in living standards, the recession, the tax rises and the spending cuts, you've got an enormous job of work for those who speak up for and try to help those in the greatest need. my guest on political thinking this week is clare moriarty. she's the chief executive of citizens advice, one of the largest volunteer organisations in the country. she's no stranger to difficult times because she was the permanent secretary of dec�*s eu, the department that was meant to deliver brexit or exit from the eu.
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she left thatjob to take up the job she's in now and says that it made her feel like she was coming home. claire moriarty, welcome to political thinking. thank you, it's great to be here. it's very well known, citizens advice, and yet what it actually does is not very well known, is it? so 20 odd thousand volunteers doing what? giving advice to people on a huge range of issues. so we're a federated charity. we have 257 local citizens advice, each of which is their own charity. huge range of different shapes and sizes. the kind of core of citizens advice is that generalist advice. you know, anybody can come along and ask for advice. in reality, a lot of what we deal with is benefits, debt, energy at the moment, in particular housing, relationships. we also deliver some services at a national scale. so we deliver the consumer service, we deliver help to claim, which is the service for people
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who are making an initial claim for universal credit. so it is quite a patchwork, it's difficult to sort of sum it up in a few words. and a few weeks ago, citizens advice said the red warning lights were flashing. you were putting pressure on ministers to make sure they did upgrade benefits in line with inflation, for example. have the red lights stop flashing now? have ministers listened 7 well, if you look at the autumn statement yesterday, there is much in it to welcome. so the government has announced uprating of benefits in line with inflation. that's absolutely critical. they've announced a continuation of the energy price guarantee, albeit at a higher level, and they've announced targeted support for people, particularly on benefits. those are all good things, but there are two big holes left by the autumn statement announcement. firstly is this winter we know, because we have huge numbers of people who are coming to us in crisis at the moment, that the cost of living crisis is already happening. and while the support coming
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in april is welcome, it's just not at all clear how people are going to get through from here until there. we're currently helping two people every minute access crisis support. we're seeing more people than ever before who can't top up prepayment metres. and as you know, you know, i will always come along and tell the stories of the people who are coming to us. so one person who came to us recently at let's call it annie, a mother with children trying to get into work, terrified of getting into debt, cut back on everything she can, cut back on, nothing left, so she's not turning the heating on and she is eating one meal a day in order to be able to give her kids breakfast. fortunately, they have free school meals, but sometimes it's the small things, so she was talking about two of her children have got birthdays, one of them had a birthday yesterday, and she had to choose between buying a carton of milk or buying a birthday card. son turns 18 tomorrow
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and she can't buy him a present, let alone celebrate. i heard jeremy hunt this morning saying we want people to be able to go out to the pub. now, here's somebody who can't even buy her son a pint on his 18th birthday. and that's the sort of situation that an awful lot of people are in. so even people on benefits who the headlines suggest are being protected from inflation are going to struggle this winter? so huge numbers of people are going to struggle this winter. people on benefits. people, you know, we're seeing a lot of working people coming to us. the crisis kind of started in april, but it was... in the run—up to april, we were all saying there's going to be a big crisis when energy prices go up by 57%. we got to april almost as soon as we got there, everybody started worrying about october. but that crisis in april happened. it's working its way through. we are seeing it. we publish every month our cost of living dashboard, we can see what's happening.
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and we are telling people and seeking to get the focus on that. but there's a bigger picture here as well, because even come april, you know, benefits will go up, there will be further support. the chancellor's autumn statement announcement was the fifth announcement that we've had on cost of living since february, and there's been since the start of the pandemic, we've seen a series of sticking plasters applied to the benefit system. and there has to be a point when we stand back and say, actually, the support that people are getting through the welfare state is not intrinsically linked to what they need. if you go right back to beveridge, beveridge was talking about a minimum standard of living below which people should not fall. and we're not in that position when people are constantly, you know, on the edge of crisis and having to be rescued from worse situations. now, just a few weeks ago, i mean, eight weeks ago, we had a budget that suggested that ministers didn't have this agenda at all. did you get to ministers? did you persuade them? why do you think this new set of ministers listened to those
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saying "put benefits up"? well, we can never know. you know, that the combination of factors that cause ministers to make decisions is, you know, many and varied. but what we will always do at citizens advice is make the case on behalf of the people who are coming to us for help. and one of the one of the things i call the systems of our super power is that because we're seeing two and a half million people, we help two and a half million people, i to i every year, we can tell their individual stories in a way which actually, you know, lands with people. we have incredible data so we can say this is what's happening. and when we talk about policy solutions and the things that are needed, we're not doing it in a i'm going to shout from the rooftops, ijust it's my opinion that is what's needed. we are saying we can see the problem, this is something that would help fix it. is it the civil servant in you that led you to say, once we need to say things in a way that can be heard? i assume you mean don't bash people around the head
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because if you do that, they'll close their ears. yes. and i think it is very much the ex civil servant having, you know, sat listening to this, because what's the most important thing, the most important thing is action, that decisions are made which cause different things to happen. and if you feel that you are just being assailed from all sides, you're not you know, you can't hear the things that are really important, you're not going to take the decisions. let's talk about why you became a civil servant in the first place. it was in the blood, wasn't it? yes. so i am a proud third generation civil servant. one of my grandfathers started as a boy clerk in 1916. one of them was an aeronautical engineer. both my parents joined the civil service, as in what we would today call the fast dream. my mother, when my older sister was born, left because generally people, women, although women could work when they were married, most people resigned when they when they had children. my father stayed most of his career in the home office with a couple of stints in the cabinet office and the northern ireland office.
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so we talked a lot about sort of the business of politics, but they didn't we were definitely not you know, we weren't a labour household or a conservative household or even a lib dem household. when you talk about the business of politics, these are often deeply moral dilemmas. i mean, yourfather dealt with the whole debate about restoring capital punishment, abolished in the �*60s, but for many years it's hard to remember now, but for many years there were really serious pushes to bring it back. yes. so, in fact, my father was in the late �*60s, he was in charge of the team that dealt with capital punishment. and so the 1965 act that abolished capital punishment actually had a sunset clause on it. so it had to be either, you know, properly concretised or abandoned within five years. and the labour government in the late �*60s decided it didn't want to leave that to the uncertainty of the next election. so, my father was responsible for the process that led to those votes that did finally say capital punishment is abolished.
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we'll come to another of your values later, which is christianity, it's very important to you, to your family. did that mean that the morality of capital punishment, notjust the practicalities of how you legislate, was something that you did discuss at home? yes, i think we did, because i mean, that that early period, i was very young. but i remember very distinctly in 1979, so the conservative manifesto, there was a conservative manifesto commitment to have a debate on on making capital punishment available to the courts again. and they moved very quickly because the election was may and injuly they had this vote. i had just done my o—levels, my sister had just done her a—levels and we went to listen to the debate and i can remember the night before my father brought the speech home, the willie whitelaw speech. the home secretary. he was the home secretary for margaret thatcher. i mean, willie whitelaw view was not in favour of capital punishment. margaret thatcher's, i think, was,
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so there was a kind of conflict right at the heart there. but that sense of it was a really important thing and we did definitely know which what was the right answer there. and yet you wanted to be a civil servant. now, was that partly because you wanted to do what your mother was not able to do, which is to carry on as a woman in the civil service and carry on to the top? i don't think it was as formulated as that. so, i mean, at university, thinking about what i wanted to do, i was... i mean, all the things i looked at were in public service so i was quite hard wired into, you know, public servants get up in the morning to make the world a better place. i wasn't particularly... i didn't think i must be a civil servant. and i remember my father carefully, not kind of pushing me towards the civil service. what i was really interested in doing things that were interesting and carried the opportunity to get some responsibility.
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i distinctly remember thinking, i've got a five, ten year time horizon and of the various options, which is likely to be most fun and interesting for 5 to 10 years. and i decided rightly or wrongly, probably rightly, that the civil service was an interesting place to be. you'll get a huge amount of responsibility very early. but your mother had had a kind of feminist battle of her own, hadn't she? yes. not in the civil service so much, but in the church. in the church. the long, long struggle for the ordination of women. my mother was very much part of that. and as a quite a young child, there was a there was a bbc two, open doors, the documentary series, and they did one on the ordination of women and they mocked up a wedding with a female. and i don't know if there were even deaconesses, but a woman with a married, a couple as a minister, as a minister carrying out that. and my sister and i were dressed up as bridesmaids to add verisimilitude to this.
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and then somebody came in and said, no, you may not marry this people. you know, you're a woman, you cannot be a priest, which was one of the kind of the lighter moments, but there was a kind of endless debate about, you know, why women couldn't do that. and i think for my mother, it was part of, it was part of a broader picture, but that was something that she was personally very involved in. and for you too, i mean, you had a battle with the church to serve. idid, yes. we went to a very we went to a very anglo catholic church where attitudes to women were, you know, you should wear a hat in church and you really shouldn't talk. and there was a great deal of ritual and lots and lots of servers, so, you know, you dress up in cassock and surpluses and all sorts of things. and this was entirely, only boys were allowed to do it and boys were kind of inducted into this from the age of about four or five. incense to be waved. incense to be waved, absolutely. you know, the smallest boy carried the little boat with the incense in and then larger people wave the incense.
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but it was absolutely you know, this was boys. and, you know, i mean, supported very much by my mother, i started to kind of agitate a bit about this. and they kept saying, no, no, no, you can't. eventually, when i was about 1k because i had short hair and it was a very large church, and most of the people who objected most greatly had quite poor eyesight. and they said, it's ok. you know, once you've got it, once you've got a cassock and surplus on, it would be invisible that you were a girl because you'll be right up there. they won't be able to see you and they let it happen. so you could be a woman as long as nobody knows you're a woman! that was... you can get through the door. i think there's a really interesting thing about what you have to do to get through the door — do you compromise your principles to get through the door in order to be able to do something afterwards? now, when you were in your finaljob as a senior civil servant, and you've done a whole series of them at transport and justice and defra, the environment department, but you ended up at dexeu, the department for exiting the eu under a woman prime minister,
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theresa may, at the most sensitive time when the conservative party's going to war inside the government, as well as between the government and parliament. how did you advise this department of civil servants that you led to cope with that? so a lot of it i did just by endlessly standing up and saying, we don't know what's happening, it's a time of great uncertainty, hopefully in two weeks�* time we might have a better idea of what's happening. in the meantime, you know, i value, other people value the work that we're doing, let's keep going. you said once also that you put on a kind of virtual reality set. yes. meaning? so that was a very, very interesting thing. so as we got into summer of 2018 and the preparation that had been done for no deal was generally speaking inadequate, we had actually in defra, we had really bitten into it, but there was the sense of half the cabinet was saying, well, no deal might happen but it's not going to be that bad. and the other half was saying it's so bad that it can't
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be allowed to happen. so there were all sorts of psychological reasons why people wouldn't prepare, not, to be fair, michael gove was very focused on the fact that we needed to prepare, but people were uncertain and anxious and they kept thinking, you know, i don't know if i can make the decision because if no deal doesn't happen then it won't be necessary. so i came up with the virtual reality headset was we're going to put a virtual reality headset on the entire department. inside the virtual reality headset, we are definitely leaving without a deal on the 29th of march and we're going to do everything we possibly can to be prepared. just to be clear, this isn't an actual virtual reality headset? i like my metaphors! so it was a metaphorical virtual reality headset and we said, we're just going to prepare as if we know we're going to leave without a deal. we'll do that for three months, september to december, then we'll lift it up. and if there's a deal, then that's fine, we won't put it back on again. but if there isn't a deal, we'll put it and we willjust focus on delivering. were there in that brexit department moments where the conflict between the duty to serve, the duty to be impartial that
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you mentioned, and another duty to the national interest were almost unbearable for some people — theyjust thought either brexit was a bad idea or no deal was a bad idea, and it's very difficult, therefore, to do the work on preparing for both? i don't think, both in defra, and let's talk about dexeu, i don't think people felt that that was the tension. i think the tension was simply, you know, trying to operate in an environment where nobody nobody could take decisions. you know, government became unable to take decisions. dexeu was a department which probably in hindsight should never have happened because the conditions for it to be successful weren't there. so people people were operating in the most difficult circumstances, but it was because they were doing work, they didn't know whether the work was going to be valued, they did a lot of work that got put in the bin and a lot of work,
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if it was good, somebody else took credit for it. given what you said at the beginning about the fact that you've always had values, you believe in bringing your values to work, how would you, as a civil servant, deal with a situation where you thought there was a clash between those values and your public servant duty to do whatever the minister told you to do? so, fundamentally, as a civil servant, you have a nuclear button. if you think that something is intolerable, then, you know, you have to leave. but, you know, a lot of the time, there is a kind of proper conflict at the heart of the civil service code because it says you must give ministers your best advice and it says you must implement what the minister decides to do. ultimately, the way in which you bring your values has to be about how things are done. it's not for it's not fundamentally for civil servants to say to politicians, "i don't like your policy because i don't agree with it". that's, you know... that's just not part of the deal. there are those who think that the rules we're seeing about ministers�* behaviour,
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whether it's dominic raab —— there are those who think that the rows we're seeing about ministers�* behaviour, whether it�*s dominic raab or suella braverman or, before her, priti patel when she was home secretary, are really not about how they behave, but about civil servants thinking they can frustrate what politicians want to do. i don�*t know if you saw this article in the daily mail. "he can�*t run britain with a civil service hell bent on blocking policies and plotting to get ministers sacked". leo mckinstry writes, "the tories might be in office, but their ability to implement their agenda is being drastically curtailed by their opponents in the civil service, many of whom hold them in contempt". has he got a point? i don�*t think so. i mean, ijust i have never seen civil servants trying to block ministers policies. i think there�*s a debate that we don�*t have about the the nature of the relationship between ministers and officials and about particularly about the balance of power. because the word "servant" is there. it has meaning.
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and civil servants don�*t get to challenge ministers as equals. so i remember working with a minister many years ago who was, you know, not at all a bully, very, very courteous and polite, but it was quite difficult working in the private office. and i remember them saying, well, i treat the private office like my family. and it was quite a light bulb moment because i thought, actually, i�*m sure that�*s right. and that feels fine to you. but the private office don�*t get to treat you like family. i mean, because one of the things you cannot do as a civil servant is express your frustration to a minister. so ministers do, you know, rightly, not always in the right way. but it�*s perfectly all right for a minister to say, you know,
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"i�*m quite frustrated, this isn�*t going fast enough" or "we need to do this differently". civil servants do not get to express frustration to ministers because it�*s just not part of how the deal is set up. the effort of building the relationship, maintaining the relationship falls very much more on civil servants, and particularly i know in a kind of permanent secretary, secretary of state relationship, it�*s the permanent secretary who does the heavy lifting on the relationship. and that�*s not fundamentally a kind of healthy way to operate. now, you weren�*tjust coping with this political chaos, and it was chaos when you were permanent secretary. you weren�*tjust dealing with civil servants feeling the stress. you then found out you were very seriously ill. yes. so 2019 was was quite a year. i was diagnosed with breast cancer injuly and i had my final diagnosis on, i think, it was two days before borisjohnson became prime minister. i had a mastectomy over the summer and later on i had radiotherapy. so there was a there was a lot going on. and not just that. my mother also was diagnosed with lung cancer.
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and the same day that i got my diagnosis, i went to hospital in the morning to get my diagnosis, and i went with her to a different hospital in the afternoon and she had herfinal diagnosis. now, i mean, the nature of cancer is that you know you have cancer well before you know precisely what it is. so it�*s a sort of quite a slow process. the fact that i had been supporting my mother through discussions with doctors meant that when it happened to me, i was able much more quickly to go. i can tell by what you�*re saying and what you�*re not saying that this is cancer, isn�*t it? and they said yes. so that got me to third base much more quickly. this is an extraordinary amount to cope with, though. a very sick parent, you�*re very sick. you�*re dealing with an effectively a new government and possibly the worst political and constitutional crisis that we�*d seen in several decades. and with two children still at home, two children who are about to go to to university? yes. so what�*s the secret? i mean, the good news is you�*re better.
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yeah. so one of the one of the interesting things is, actually, i wasn�*t sick at all. you know, breast cancer is... no, you can have breast cancer and have, you know, a significant—sized lump. it doesn�*t affect how you feel generally. and one of the things i found that was most difficult to deal with was everybody else made their own assumptions about whether i was ill or not. so i remember when i had to have my mastectomy, i remember going off and saying really clearly, "i have got breast cancer". and i said openly to the department because it would have been unconscionable just to disappear. so i said, "i�*ve got breast cancer, i�*m going to have a mastectomy. i will have two weeks of recovery time as advised by doctors, assuming all goes well. i will be back on the 1st of september and at some later point i may need chemotherapy or radiotherapy that will be two weeks, for it�*s a quite a straightforward operation". it is really quite strange. you manage the two weeks, and i managed the two weeks
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and i managed the two weeks and i came back and then i discovered that senior people in in the government, including, you know, dominic cummings and probably also the prime minister and people have been told that i wasn�*t going to come back because i was terribly ill and i had cancer. actually, managing other people�*s responses, whether it was people thinking i was going to die or people thinking that we were going to fight this was much harder than, i mean, as a cancer patient, ifound you just do what you�*re told. and when they say you need radiotherapy, you say, "yes, fine, when shall i show up?" there�*s a theme, i think, running through this conversation values, yes, faith, belief. and for some people listening, and i would suspect your children�*s generation, they will struggle to understand how you can combine a commitment to impartiality with all those very strong personal beliefs and values. yeah, and i think it�*s very interesting because i know the campaigning, the
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feminist campaigning gene that comes down through through my family, so i, you know, i, isort of have it and i have reflected a bit on why, you know, i didn�*t everfeel, oh, no, i�*m having to shut down this sort of the, you know, the campaigning side of me, you know, while i�*m a civil servant because i have to be impartial, i think, you know. the thing about values and beliefs is that you can hold a number of different things. and as a civil servant, you know the value of doing what you�*re there for, which is making the government�*s decisions real, helping the government make those decisions and then delivering them. and then delivering them, that�*s a really fundamental value. and let�*s finally return to yourjob now at citizens advice. what must be hard for you, for your volunteers sometimes is knowing that you ultimately can�*t solve the problems that people come to you with. yes. and that is definitely an issue at the moment, because some of the tools that we would traditionally use, you know, debt advice is predicated on the idea that if you can make sure that people can get
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all the income they�*re entitled to and you can help them access, support and budget, then they will have the ability to repay debt. we�*re now seeing that half of the people who come to us for debt advice actually can�*t make ends meet. but i think that, again, that goes back to the great strength of systems advice, is that we help people individually, but we also use their experiences to be able to bring policy solutions grounded in experience and evidence to government. so the balance change is about, you know, when we feel that our ability to help people 1 to 1 is a bit on the wane, then we really put off foot to the floor on making the case to government through the evidence that we have. so it�*s that balance of advice and advocacy that means that i think we will always be able to do things that put people in a better position. clare moriarty, chief executive of citizens advice, thank you so much for coming on political thinking. thank you. clare put herfinger on one of the challenges now
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facing this government. on the one hand, they�*re going to face criticism from their own natural supporters, from tory backbenchers and the tory press for adopting what some describe as labour policies protecting benefit claimants from inflation, increasing the minimum wage, targeting help with energy bills on the poorest. and yet at the same time, those like clare who speak up for the most disadvantaged, will feel the need to point out that still may not be enough to stop people feeling real pain this winter. thanks for watching. hello. river levels may have dropped a little bit for some of you through the day, but there are still flood warnings in place across the uk.
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all the latest details on the bbc weather website. the not great news is that we have some further rain to come tonight. it�*s pushing its way from west to east. some heavier bursts mixed in. it�*s not going to be the widespread persistent rain we have seen over recent days, but given that the ground is saturated, any rain is unwelcome in some parts at the moment. it will be across eastern areas to finish the night. clearer skies into the west. temperatures a little bit up and down for many overnight and roughly around six or seven degrees for most as we start sunday morning. a wet start, though, for some across eastern scotland and eastern england. the rain persists in north—east aberdeenshire, caithness and into orkney through the day. a windy, but brighter day in shetland. things will brighten up in eastern scotland and eastern england through the day after that cloudy and damp start. some good long sunny spells. in the west, sunshine, then some showers. some of those showers heavy and thundery. winds a bit lighter, so those showers will be slow moving, and a cool day, all in all. that�*s how it�*s looking. see you again soon.
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this is bbc news with the latest headlines for viewers in the uk and around the world: fifa�*s president hits back at western critics of qatar�*s human rights record, accusing them of hypocrisy. i think for what we europeans have been doing in the last 3,000 years around the world, we should be apologising for the next 3,000 years before starting to give moral lessons. talks at the un�*s climate summit in egypt hang in the balance as countries are given an extra day to reach a deal. rishi sunak meets ukrainian president zelensky in kyiv for the first as prime minister and pledges to continue the uk�*s support.

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