The Tory party have once again chosen violence against themselves, as Keir Starmer’s Labour party are languishing in the polls after 90-something days of a lack of action.

 

Nish and Coco burst the bubble on the news that Starmer’s Chief of Staff has been replaced by his election guru, joined by political journalist Ian Dunt to find out just how big a deal this backroom reshuffle is for the machinations of government.

 

Ian also unravels the ideology of centrism – explaining why it was a huge part of the Labour Party’s success at the general election and why it might not be enough to keep the electorate happy without some actual policy to back it up.

 

Later, Labour MP Nadia Whittome calls in from Portcullis House to talk about why she’s still hopeful for what the new government can deliver, before the biggest WTF moment since Rishi Sunak walked out in the rain – the Tory Party eliminating centrist candidate James Cleverly from the leadership.

 

Guests:

Ian Dunt

Nadia Whittome MP

 

Audio Credits:

LBC

 

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TRANSCRIPT

 

[AD]

 

Coco Khan Hi. This is Pod Save the UK. And I’m Coco Khan.

 

Nish Kumar And I’m Nish Kumar. On today’s show, we’re nearly 100 days of the new government. But what exactly have we got to show for it? It feels somewhat unclear. We’ll be getting into that with political journalist Ian Dunt.

 

Coco Khan And later, we promise there will be some hope. As Labour MP Nadia Whittome joins us to tell us about what she’s working on, the things we can look forward to now that Parliament is finally back in action. Future folks are just popping in here to say don’t miss our discussion of the latest snap back and dangerous antics from the Conservative Party leadership race. We’ll be discussing the shock exit of James Cleverly from the right later in the show.

 

Clip Mr. Speaker, tomorrow the government will publish their anticipated changes to employment law. Given the weekend’s events. Given the weekend’s events, when did the Prime Minister first become a convert to fire and rehire?

 

Coco Khan That’s Rishi Sunak, former prime minister and Leader of the Opposition. Shooting at an open goal.

 

Nish Kumar He shanked it. You sort of forget how thundering uncharismatic he is. Like that was an open goal that he somehow managed to hit the ball with and the ball rebounded and hit him directly in the genitals. Like I’ve got honestly, I am amazed.

 

Coco Khan Hands-No Man of politics. Yeah.

 

Nish Kumar He is just a he. He is. Yes, he’s very. But at the time of recording with 97 days into the new government and things haven’t exactly been going down too well with the public. According to a more in common poll this week, the government holds only a single point lead against the opposition, despite the Tories being, as you can hear from that clip, essentially leaderless. Or they’re led by a man whose head is very much in California based on his performance in Pub Quiz and having nothing to say after 14 years in government. Shockingly, according to YouGov, Keir Starmer is now less popular than Nigel Farage.

 

Coco Khan That is so bananas, such a large majority, arguably squandered. So what is going on here? Well, there’s obviously no one single reason, but there’s been a story that has been leading the Westminster press that may make after some sort of light on it.

 

Nish Kumar Well, yes, the big news in the last week from the Labour Party is that Sue Gray has resigned as Keir Starmer’s chief of staff and is going to be replaced with his head of political strategy, Morgan McSweeney. This is sort of about as Westminster bubbly a story as it’s possible to get. But here’s a quick catch up on how this happened and why we should care. So before joining Starmer’s as chief of staff last year, you will all no doubt remember Sue Gray as the long time civil servant who spent the majority of her career working in the Cabinet Office. Which means she has a grasp of the lay of the land of government operations. But she became a household name following her inquiry into Boris Johnson’s party gate scandal.

 

Coco Khan So Sue Gray has now been replaced by someone called Morgan McSweeney. He was formerly the executive director of Labour Together, and that’s the Labour aligned think tank that was kind of being credited for bringing Labour to power. It’s also been credited with the shift more to the right. Labour Together was created following Ed Miliband’s defeat in 2015 and is yet generally considered to be center right in the Labour Party.

 

Nish Kumar So Graeme McSweeney are two main players and there’s been sort of constant stories of a rift that’s existed between them since Labour came into power. There was a story at one point that Seagrave was insisting that Morgan, between his desk, be moved physically further away from case. I have no idea what to make of any of that. There was a torrent of briefings against Gray, One that really cut through over the summer was that she was receiving a higher salary than the Prime Minister himself, which is sort of artfully leaked for maximum damage at the height of the freebies row, the Gomm drama. It’s also been reported that Seagrave is restricting access to the Prime Minister, holding back on contracts with special advisers and crucial to her downfall that she was responsible for the grid, which is the plot of government briefings to media on what exactly they’d been up to, which, as we know, hasn’t exactly gone down well.

 

Coco Khan So this is my concern is that we all know that just because it’s leading the Westminster pages doesn’t mean it actually is the biggest issue in politics. We know that. We call it the bubble, Tony, for a reason. And who’s in, who’s out, who’s up, who’s down. It’s all a bit gossipy. And so there is a part of me that feels like, sure, we’re just not using Sue Gray as a scapegoat. This idea that, like, the reason the polling is so bad is because Sue Gray didn’t send out press releases about the good stuff that Labour’s doing. Doesn’t that make it seem like, Labour’s been doing loads of great stuff that we don’t hear about and it’s disgraceful? Sure, that’s the case. I don’t know how I feel about this story.

 

Nish Kumar I mean, it’s less about people caring about these sort of internal staffing at Labour HQ or in the kind of immediate team around Keir Starmer and more. Just to do the fact that what you would want the Labour Party to be in a position to do at this stage is to say, look, you can be focused on this if you want to be, but we’re more focused on delivering on. Here are three areas in which we delivered X, Y and Z. The problem is it’s been a bit of a struggle to identify what X, Y, and Z are.

 

Coco Khan And I think as well. You know, certainly a factor and why people are worried is that we still don’t really know who Keir Starmer is. You know, what does he represent? What can we expect? What is Starmer ism? But luckily for us, our next guest is someone who has a bit of an inkling.

 

Nish Kumar So the bubble is burst in Westminster this week and the fallout is left the center right faction of the Labour Party stronger than ever before. But what does centrism even mean? Joining us now, Pod Save The World eight, political journalist Ian Dunt, coauthor of Centrism The Story of an Idea. Ian, thanks for joining us.

 

Ian Dunt Not at all.

 

Nish Kumar So we were just discussing before we went on air about the ethics of swearing at Coco.

 

Ian Dunt And the joys.

 

Nish Kumar And the joys of swearing, and Coco conceded her position, though it’s neither big nor clever.

 

Coco Khan Just think the English language is a very beautiful thing to be on the way. She’s got something to read on it.

 

Nish Kumar Yeah, well, they ended by offering a vigorous counter argument. Listen, let’s talk about the book. Let’s talk about centrism. But let’s start with a sort of a weird old summer for the government. If I may quote a journalist’s tweet about sucrose resignation and again, getting straight into obscene language. For fuck’s sake, why in God’s name did they make this decision? Now that the journalistic question is, of course, you Ian.

 

Ian Dunt Oh shit, is that me? Even though as was you were saying. I was like, that sounds like a pretty sensible analysis. I haven’t heard any. All right.

 

Nish Kumar Have you come to any conclusions on why in whatever deities name you believe in, they come to this decision?

 

Ian Dunt Yeah, because of the absence of politics. I mean, that’s so it’s. It’s odd, right? Like we all we do is we talk when we talk about politics, whether it’s sort of, you know, Fleet Street journalism, whether it’s Westminster itself. We talk about the day to day, the clatter noise of of thing. This person’s out, this person’s in this person left this thing on a train. This person said something that contradicted someone else in cabinet and now they’re going have a row about it. What are they going to spending day to day basically empty calories. The other bit of politics that actually fixes people’s lives is the bit that we never talk about, which is like the machinery, the engine room that is about the civil service. It’s about special advisers, it’s about competent ministers, and it’s about working according to a deliverable timetable on meaningful targets for change. You know, especially when you look at something really complex like the health service, like education, it’s not enough to just go more money. It’s not enough to just say the words. You’ve got to get the engine room functioning to grow. It was the engine room that, you know, Morgan McSweeney, who’s now taken her job was the royal politics bent, right? Royal politics worked for the election. Her bit was starting for the public. Okay. So fine. So you put him there. Now what do we have? We’ve got all the Raw Politics, and I think that will improve and there’ll be narratives and there’ll be a grid, a media grid. And, you know, journalists will have less sort of food to feast on in terms of scandal. But the engine room concerns me because at the end of five years, Starmer needs to be able to show that he’s addressed the reasons that the last government was thrown out, which was not as I would wish it to be, about Brexit or about, you know, anything else. It was about should isn’t working. So unless there’s someone there to make sure that it does start working, not just throwing meat to the tabloids every day, then I think he’s going to end up having a big problem.

 

Nish Kumar Can you just give us a quick summary on Morgan and Sweeney? He’s he’s sort of widely credited with being the sort of mastermind behind the stolen reelection campaign. But his background is in politics and not in government.

 

Coco Khan Yeah, and everyone always compares him to Malcolm Tucker. But how many Malcolm Talk is.

 

Ian Dunt So boring.

 

Coco Khan So Boring, so boring.

 

Ian Dunt And there’s also, like, a macho thing to that, right as well. Like, it’s always just like, the backstage shouty, you know? Yeah. Dry treatment, all of that kind of stuff. So I take on board that I’ve never met the guy, so I can’t give you any kind of personal assessment. You look at the kind of strategic programs that he put forward. You know, he was basically formulating during the Corbyn years when he was out in the wilderness. And it was the sort of, you know, multiple stage process of like, what do we do? First of all, we extract Corbynism. And his program for doing that was like really quite extraordinary degrees of central control over the candidate selection process. Well, she did through the National Executive Committee, you just basically said no one’s making any choices about their candidates anymore. We are going to do that. And by the way, the Corbynites would have done the same thing if they’d succeeded in taking control of the national executive committee. It’s kind of like the brain of the Labour Party, but they didn’t really put forward a plan for doing it. He executed it. They took control, they extracted Corbynism. The second thing was to start functioning like a like a decent opposition in Parliament to make it work that way. And the third was to defeat the Tories on their own territory, which is basically crime, defense and the economy. The economy in particular. He said that that was the flaw in the Death Star. Now, they got lucky in that the Tories decided they were going to behave with a degree of biblical incompetence, that it is impossible to summarize using human language. But nevertheless, like you still say, he executed that plan and it delivered the result that he wanted. So there’s no point underestimating this guy when it comes to, you know, how do you win an election? He has proved himself to be a very, very capable man indeed.

 

Nish Kumar So but. What’s the concern here? The gap between winning an election and actually governing a country?

 

Ian Dunt Governing a country is not winning an election. You want an election guy there. You want to make sure that what are narratives? What’s the storyline? We’ve got to tell every day that clearly has fallen apart? These first hundred days, it’s just not been there. But you also need to make sure that you do things right. Let me give you an example. Blair’s first term was kind of wasted, and the third time was just, you know, the Gordon Brown internecine warfare. The second term was really good. Well, we were talking about Iraq and Afghanistan and September 11th. None of that talking about what was going on in education, what was going on in health, what was going on in transport. And it was good because predominantly because of a man called Michael Barber working in number ten in the delivery unit who was coming up with targets that made sense. They used to have 98% people in A&E would be seen in four hours. Why did that target exist? Not because it felt great in A&E. It existed because if A&E is working, it’s because you’re getting people off A&E into the wards. If there’s space in the wards, it’s because you’re getting them off the wards into social care. It was like a litmus test of the health of the of the health service as a whole. You’re working towards sensible, evidence based targets. You need someone doing that job. Maybe it’ll be Morgan McSweeney. Okay. But at the moment, that doesn’t seem to me where his skill set is. And that was supposed to be what she was doing. So I’m concerned that now she’s gone and no one’s being very clear about what is the governance function that’s being put in place of her.

 

Coco Khan I think as well, Morgan McSweeney occupies a particular space with, say, the center right of the Labour Party. I think it’s fair to say we’re not on the center right of of of our own politics. Do you think that this signifies a change in what we can expect? Because also, I would say I don’t know what to expect from Keir Starmer. What is Starmer ism?

 

Nish Kumar Part of the election tactic was, you know, essentially to campaign off the back of conservative malfunction, which made a lot of sense. It and obviously it worked very well. But now it’s sort of a point now where he we’ve got to define terms a little bit and define what this Labour government is going to be about.

 

Ian Dunt Yeah, I mean, I think that they should be doing a better job of that because if you guys can’t do it, then there’s a problem because I’m guessing that you’re more hooked in than most people. You know what I mean? But I think that can be done. I think there is a story to tell that I think most of the time when you read Starmer talking, you know, whether it’s in the book about him, which sort of was almost half ghostwritten, that came out, I don’t know this book or whether it’s in his speeches, what’s the word that comes up most is dignity. And at first I kind of ignored that word, dignity, because I was just something that just sounds like some kind of fluffy hallmarks, vacuous, nonpolitical nonsense. You know who’s against dignity, right? Everyone likes that. And then I notice the way he uses it is kind of it’s in a way that kind of combines liberalism and socialism in a way. It’s like, what is dignity at work? To have autonomy over your life, what is dignity in the way that you’re treated when you’re in a hospital ward You know, what is dignity, even in the manner of like being a passenger on a train? Like, actually, if you just start thinking that the words that the left would use for equality and the words that liberals would use for freedom, he just seems to be using the word dignity for most of these at work in your life in health care. I think you start to get a picture of how he works economically. I think you put him in Reeves together. Rachel Reeves And there’s actually like a really coherent, interesting program there. But primarily what fascinates me about it is that it’s so much more left wing than Tony Blair, and yet no one seems to talk about. Everyone acts like Starmer is just Blairite is just another Blairite kind of the Blair vibes, when actually almost everything they say is about market failure, state intervention in the market to correct the market failure. That’s what it is for fixing the Labour markets, you know, kind of Deliveroo jobs and whatever. That’s what it is when it comes to climate change as being the market and providing the solutions, we’re going to have to get in there and do it ourselves. That’s what it comes to providing security in the economy to try and address some of the boom and bust problems that we’ve had over and over again. I feel like that is a it’s actually a pretty left wing narrative, more left wing than anything we’ve had in this country since before Margaret Thatcher. And yet that storyline just kind of isn’t being told.

 

Coco Khan Interesting, because obviously your new book is about centrism. And I was under the impression that Keir Starmer is a centrist. If I’ve got that wrong.

 

Ian Dunt I think the things that I say can be fitted in a form of centrism, but there’s different kinds, right?

 

Coco Khan Well, yeah, let’s let’s talk about centrism. What? What is it?

 

Ian Dunt I don’t know. I don’t know.

 

Nish Kumar I don’t know. Who the fuck.

 

Ian Dunt Knows? I don’t think anybody does. I mean, I started, like, when you started beginning. I was just like, what? I’ve always hated that work because I just always. I sounded really slippery, and I kind of had this impression of what if your job is just to sort of stay in the middle of two competing things? What are you. Right. You know.

 

Nish Kumar If you if you were a centrist, then that you would define yourself by wherever the extremes on if the extremes land in a particular place. It feels like it could be, you know, it’s worse. The sort of apologia for fascism, like, you know, that’s the concern around it. But over the course of writing this book, have you moved away from that idea of that thinking?

 

Ian Dunt Yeah. Yeah. So hardly any centrists really think or behave that way. The middle ground that’s got a long, hard, you know, you could you could trace that middle ground stuff back to Aristotle. The median, basically the smartest place to be is in between the two extremes. You don’t want to be too. Brave. You don’t want to be too cowardly, but someone who’s always cowardly without someone who’s too brave would die very quickly. You look for the moderate middle. But actually, there’s another way of looking at this stuff, which is about like the centrism of the whole. And it’s basically to say, what are you. You’re not looking for the middle ground, but you are non-tribal. You are non-ideological. You’re interested in practical solutions to problems. And you’re primarily concerned with thinking that there are good ideas all over the place, scattered around in different political traditions and different individuals at different times. And your job is not to submit to tribalism, to keep on being open to those ideas. That has got a quite a proud history to it. A lot of the people who form part of that history would include themselves centrists, to be fair. But then no one, even Macron, doesn’t call himself a centrist. Pretty much any person that does his story doesn’t really use that word very much.

 

Coco Khan Does that mean centrism? Because my my thought about it was that it’s it’s it’s constantly relative. It’s always moving depending on what’s going on. You found that not to be right is absolute in that it has certain principles.

 

Ian Dunt This is the mad thing, right? This is the problem that they get themselves into. Yes. So they start and they go, well, we don’t like ideology and, you know, we don’t like uncompromising behavior. We want cooperation and consensus. And then you get to a certain point and they’re like, actually, no, no. I mean, you can’t do that. Right. Because, of course you do. Because what does that mean? If you’ve got you’ve got no ideological resolve. So how do you feel about Naziism? It’s that thing of, you know, it’s in the antechamber of fascism apology. And of course, they don’t like that stuff. So then they’re like, no, Well, actually, we are opposed to this and imperialism and, you know, all the other stuff that no one likes. So then you also you do have values. So there are things that you won’t compromise on. And over and over again in the story, you see people confront that reality. And I believe in compromise, but I won’t compromise on that. So like, for instance, John Stuart Mill was kind of a core part of the centrism story. Again, you wouldn’t call himself that, obviously, but, you know, he was there’s two like on one issue, women’s liberation. He was just like maybe like 100 or 50 years ahead of his time. I mean, in a way, like him and his wife, Harriet Taylor, were like the stars of the female suffrage movement in this country. He was so far ahead. Reading him at the time on feminism must have just been like reading some alien from a distant planet when it comes to colonialism. I mean, he used to work for the East India Company, and so he would sit there and he was a kind of centrist on colonialism. He was like, Look, we can’t just leave instantly, but we should leave eventually. He’s called government by leading strings. The job of colonialism was to try and raise the country to the level where it could self-govern, which at the time would have seemed like a moderate opinion. Now, all of a sudden, he seems completely toxic. And in that, in where he compromised and where he didn’t, you get a sense of like the dangers of centrism where it ends up. But can I just add one thing to that, which is basically like that is not just their problem. That is all of our problem because we all want it. We all want to compromise and none of us think like it’s a great quantity to never compromise. Right? Like we all know, that’s a disaster that we turn into lunatics if we behave that way. But none of us can quite figure out when is the right time to compromise and when isn’t. We might feel it at a given moment, and that might be emotional and social as much as it is intellectual or moral. But none of us really know the answers to these questions. It’s just that by virtue of being like a kind of system of thought that’s based on compromise, unlike socialism, unlike liberalism, unlike conservatism, they highlight that problem in like a really acute form. And for that, they’re kind of useful to read because they sort of helped to teach you about maybe there’s like some contradictions and some messy wiring in your own thought process about politics.

 

[AD]

 

Nish Kumar In terms of like looking at Keir Starmer through this idea of, you know, cherry picking interesting ideas and whether we consider Starmer a centrist or not, it’s almost a whole separate conversation. But the minute, you know, just looking at the 97 days or whatever we’re at today, his attempts to sort of cherry pick from both the left or right. For example, on the one hand, he’s met with George Maloney, who, you know, by anyone’s estimate, sits very far to the right, the political spectrum in the political tradition. He’s met with George Maloney and said that he’s trying to pick up immigration tips. On the other hand, he is talking a good game about giving pay rises to public sector workers and also improving workers rights. Will those kind of compromises eventually get you into trouble? Will you sort of be pulled apart almost by trying to pick from those two political traditions?

 

Coco Khan And also, just to add on to that, are there like out-of-bounds areas? You know, you’re talking about the centrism of the whole and you pick from everything to get the best of everything. It’s hard to stomach that like a fascist would have good ideas, but it’s not central to the the system of centrism.

 

Ian Dunt These are annoyingly good questions. Okay. Can I do that last one? I’d like as part of this book series like me and Dorian Minsky, to do a book on fascism as well, which, by the way, is also really hard to pin down and might sort of say what it is for the right. It’s not so much that there’s good cause fascism isn’t really ideas. It’s quite it’s just sort of like violence really, like the esthetics of violence, the potency of it, you know, especially for young, traumatized men. But even their like, their sense of belonging and identity, there’s something to learn from it. It’s not like, didn’t I have some great idea, you know, But it’s more like we can learn something from that. And I think especially on the left, like lots of the work after the war, you look at stuff by like by George Orwell or by Isaiah Berlin was basically like, okay, what is there for the left to take from that shit that happened over there? Because we don’t want to leave it to those guys anymore. You know, what do we have to say about belonging and identity and nationhood? That cleanses it of some of that toxic mess. So, yeah. So basically, nothing’s off limits.

 

Coco Khan Nothing’s off limits.

 

Ian Dunt Nothing’s off limits. Yeah. But of course, again, all centrists are ultimately liberal Democrats. Small l, small D, right. Like so. None of them are. If you say, like, fascism is just illegitimate, they’re all going to be like, well, no up with that. I will not put. And then you trigger that problem with compromise. I remember the.

 

Nish Kumar I was talking about some cherry picking ideas. Can you can you can you reconcile borrowing ideas on immigration from George Maloney whilst also you know. Handing out public sector pay rises and improving workers rights.

 

Ian Dunt You see, I think one of the reasons you can do that is because he’s he’s a really weird form of centrist like. All of the centrist centrists don’t like the classic left right split state and market. You know what I mean? What’s most efficient? What should you be relying on? They’re all somewhere in the middle on that question. He’s way to the left, like I said earlier, of Tony Blair on that question. You just look at the basics. You look at the kind of changes to the fiscal rules that we think Rachel Reeves is going to bring in. They are way to the left, to Tony Blair. I mean, 1997 comes at the end of a period of, you know, triumphant Thatcherism and Reaganism, the end of the Cold War. You know, Francis Fukuyama, in the end, you know, just this feeling of like, capitalism wins. Now, where are we? It’s like, well, right, So financial crash pretty much bottomed out our entire sort of world economy during Covid. Who are you looking out for to help you then? Was it the markets? You know, what’s the IEA’s response to who helps you during Covid? Because it’s going to be the state in the end.

 

Nish Kumar And the private interventions that did happen in Covid have saved historic sums of public money, essentially disappear into wherever we don’t we still don’t even know if even Brexit.

 

Ian Dunt In a way it was weirdly, economically a push to the left. Like when you look at the way that conservatives started speaking about, well, actually now we kind of mess with trade around. We can do things that are economically not beneficial to the country if we decide that it has meaning. Well, if the right can do it, then the left can do it, too. So the whole narrative shifts. However, there’s another side to politics, right? Which isn’t about left and right. It’s about up and down is usually like liberal versus authoritarian. But in recent years, we typically talk about open versus closed. Are you open to immigration? Are you open to trade? You’re open to international institutions. That’s the kind of populist, anti populist sort of thing, whether it’s Brexit, whether it’s Trump or whatever. Now, some centrist like Macron position themselves on one side of that binary. Macron is just I am open. Like, I mean, admittedly it’s all coming now because he’s been forced into a, you know, basically being controlled by his enemy, Le Pen. But nevertheless, views of how he talks is I am the enemy of the nativists. I’m pro open. Stallman is not like that at all. His business, he is centrist on the up down as well as the left right. He’s basically like, No, that shit, that culture war shit destroys a left wing electoral coalition. It separates out a blue collar sort of work. You know, voters primarily in towns from a white collar, you know, university educated, much more liberal voters, predominantly in cities. It is the death now of the left, if you allow that take over. So what do we do? We do not fight the culture war. We don’t fight on the up down by Macron used to do. Instead we kill it as an issue. We just bury it as an issue. We suck the emotions out. We find stuff from various elements to appease some of your concerns, but not to do too much damage over here. That is clearly the approach that he’s going to take. Whether it works or not. Fucking nice.

 

Coco Khan I keep going back to this thing. What is it? It is still this nebulous concept. You know, James cleverly calls himself a centrist. Okay. Starmer doesn’t call himself a centrist. But as we’ve discussed here, probably is a centrist that everybody’s centrist.

 

Ian Dunt So that also. Can I just say the part of that is the flaw in the whole project, that if I have to sit down right now and summarize to you conservatism, liberalism or socialism in one sentence, I can do that. Right. It’s a one sentence definition. There’s loads of variation within that, and I just have to argue about whatever. But you can do it. You can just describe it. You cannot do that with Central. And that usually is is a sign that I think you have a significant problem in your like conceptual framework. Basically, if you have to if you have to spend like a 45 minute podcast, that again and at the end of it, someone is still a student. The whole is overrun with the whole idea. I totally get that. It’s no, it’s not like Blair would sometimes claim it has as proud a heritage, you know, as the people, you know, as the socialists and the blah, blah, blah. It does not. Right. It is not on that standing. Does that mean that it’s completely without value? No, I think I really know. And I might.

 

Coco Khan Say it scares me when you don’t know what it is, you know? But I mean, the point of principles is that it is a barometer in which you can use it to assess things when something is so slippery. You know, I find it unnerving in a personal way. Yes.

 

Ian Dunt So I agree with you. Right. And by the way and I think in political people, like whether they’re in broadcasting or whether they listen to sort of political podcasts or whether they’re in politics, they tend to hate centrism specifically because they usually people have a very strong opinion either way. Right. Voters don’t feel that way. Voters almost every time you ask them, what do you want through a political budget, I want them to be quite centrist. I think of myself as quite centrist. Then you’re like, Rudy, what are your views on capital punishment? Love it. You know, whatever people like, they like the way.

 

Nish Kumar Or the alternative. I think we should tax the richest people. I write about the politics.

 

Coco Khan The field, Goldilocks. Right. Not too hot. Not too cold, right?

 

Ian Dunt Yes, exactly. That’s exactly what it is. However, let me say what the what the what the danger is in the alternative. Like people would it would often say someone who just has the same principles their entire life that they’re so consistent in their lives is a really valued by them, as I was saying. Are they or are they just not thinking, you know what I mean? And they just kind of just they’re unchallenged. And whatever political views they develop to like, you know, 20 and university or whatever, and then they just go through life, you know, just not allowing any new evidence or arguments to change. The most of the time when I see you see it in the Conservative Party right now, you saw it, you know, you see it in Labour periodically when they’re defeated at the ballot box, it’s all gone wrong. It’s not like all those Tory leadership candidates that are there have been like, shit, What’s really happened here? How do they retreat into this kind of ideological bunker and be like, you know, we didn’t do enough conservatism, You know, that is like, that to me is like even scarier than someone who goes, you know what? I just always need to be open to the evidence. I want to reject ideology. I accept the fact that I can’t be certain. And I said that sometimes that means people can have a hard time pinning me down. And I can’t always tell you what I do and do not want to compromise on. But these are like the two kind of twin dangers that you find in life. And to be honest, if I personally had to be vulnerable to one of those dangers, I’d rather be vulnerable to the one that the centrists do, rather than becoming an ideological robot, as you often see on the binary side.

 

Nish Kumar Something you said it’s not. The conversation itself is pitch is dignity. One of the ways that he talks about dignity is dignity manifesting itself in public service in the office, that it does sort of it sort of presents a problem for him insofar as any kind of indiscretion. Is likely to reflect poorly on somebody that is supposed to conduct themselves like the proverbial grown up.

 

Ian Dunt Well, it’s like the you know that John Major, back to basics, measures back to basics. And then suddenly every MP who’s, you know, caught in a threesome or whatever it is, is a major problem for you because that’s not considered basic to being with a strong thing. I think you’re basically right. I mean, you do have to own it. That comes before it, you know. Boris Johnson, to give him full credit, which is not a sentence that I like, say something I even like thinking he never claimed to be some kind of moral saint. Right? So, I mean, when it was like, the wallpaper and the blah, blah, blah. Yeah. It’s like, why are you worrying about the wallpaper? I literally don’t even know how many children. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, you can get away with that stuff. Whereas if you say, Well, this is all about service, then it’s going to be much tougher and it should be tougher for him to deal with. So I do think these are teething errors. I suspect that we won’t remember them in two years time, let alone in five. But you’re definitely not wrong to say like you need to be doing much better than this. You should be doing much better than this. This is not acceptable and it needs to improve very quickly.

 

Coco Khan So can I infer from this that you’re optimistic about. You know, the next four years.

 

Ian Dunt And I’m still a bit discombobulated by the new gray thing. I am pleased that there are a lot of people with civil service experience in senior positions of the Labour Party anyway, including Keir Starmer. I mean when you’re in charge of the DPP, that’s basically what you are. You’re essentially a permanent secretary. I am concerned about can they make shift work? And I think that the ultimate we will talk a lot and there’ll be lots of noise and roar for the next five years when it goes back to the country. The question they’re going to ask is, how was it when I called an ambulance? You know, have I just heard the my next door neighbor’s died, you know, died from a heart attack because an ambulance never came. You know what’s going on with the rivers? These are the judgments that people will make. And if you can demonstrate improvement, you can win certainly against this conservative party, certainly on the basis of the number of seats that they have. So it’s all about doing that. I think they’re serious minded people. I think they can do it. I I’m just a bit concerned that the person who is at the top of that project has now gone and there’s very little chatter about how that project will now continue. So cautious optimism, which in a way is kind of interesting and I’m.

 

Coco Khan Not when it comes full circle.

 

Ian Dunt I don’t feel great about that.

 

Coco Khan Don’t you love that?

 

Nish Kumar Ian Dunt, thank you very much for joining us.

 

Ian Dunt Thank you.

 

Coco Khan Thank you.

 

Coco Khan Wow, what a fascinating conversation.

 

Nish Kumar It is interesting to come away from, I guess as Ian has done writing a book about centrism and then not necessarily feel closer to defining what it is. But I guess by definition, if you’re talking about cherry picking lots of different ideas with no fixed ideology, that is going to be quite a hard thing to pin down.

 

Coco Khan Yeah. No, absolutely. And I mean. My instinct is I still don’t trust it, so trust it. But it’s been interesting to sort of hear about even just the like, long legacy of it and how people who would not consider themselves centrist, all centrist and and those who claim to be centrist don’t necessarily exhibit the qualities of it.

 

Speaker 7 [AD]

 

Coco Khan Joining us now is Nadia Whittome, Labour MP for Nottingham East since 2019. She’s been outspoken on the cost of living, the climate crisis, care work and LGBTQ plus rights.

 

Nish Kumar Nadia has also just told us you needed to be busy to blow her nose. I also was scrabbling around looking for her AirPods. So it’s another day in the life of Britain’s most relatable MP, having to view a zoom to blow your nose and frantically searching for AirPods. It’s the kind of thing that the average British person could really connect with, I think.

 

Nadia Whittome And then finding them in the place that you were looking.

 

Nish Kumar Umm Nadia, last time we spoke to you, you were in opposition and he was still the baby, the house, and now you’re in government and you were essentially at this point as a political veteran. How does it feel to have made that transition to being the party in power?

 

Nadia Whittome Yeah, I mean, it feels weird to be describes this like a veteran Gen Z MP when I like just turned 28.

 

Nish Kumar Yeah, that’s a lot of seemingly contradictory terms. Is that you and Billie Eilish are the veteran Gen She’s.

 

Nadia Whittome Not so nice to be in the same category as Billie Eilish. I think that’s incredibly generous. But yeah, how does that feel? Obviously it feels very different. First of all, most of that means a new MP, so it’s like having to get to know loads of new people, loads of new faces, not knowing whether it’s a new Tory MP or a new Labour MP. Obviously the chances are it’ll be a new Labour MP. But if, like I hosted a reception in Parliament yesterday with schoolchildren about decolonizing education and climate education. And we were. Bringing round with those like this little book and flicking through to see, like, the amputees. Well, it’s like there are 650. Like, we need to hurry up.

 

Coco Khan Nor do I have to give you my tip, right? So basically, if you’re in a situation and you’re talking to an MP and you don’t know their name, you go, So sorry, what’s the name again? And then they’ll say, I’m Roger Moore. It’s not Roger Moore. I don’t know why.

 

Nish Kumar Soldier Moore was first came.

 

Coco Khan To my mind and I see that.

 

Nadia Whittome And again, I’m like, I don’t know whether it’s just like the power of gaslighting, but I think there might be and I’m.

 

Coco Khan But then and so then they say, I’m Roger Moore. And you go, Roger, of course I knew you were. It was a last name. It was the last name. And then you, you know, you finesse it. Anyway, you can have that for free now.

 

Nadia Whittome That’s a good one. What I used to do when I first started before was I’d say if I was talking to like a male MP, like a white male MP, which you call him.

 

Coco Khan He’d say, John, you just get.

 

Nadia Whittome So it’s it’s John, isn’t it? And they’d say, no it’s not John, It’s, it’s Robert, let’s say of Robert, of course. But sometimes it would be John and they just say, Yeah.

 

Coco Khan God, I feel like this could be dangerous.

 

Nish Kumar Listen, I’m very happy to be part of this. I would definitely enjoy you to present a sort of Life Hacks podcast for me, but for people struggle to remember other people’s lives.

 

Coco Khan Apparently we’ve had a note from the producer. There’s a Robbie Moore, the Conservative MP for Keeley in Ilkley the. Maybe you’re thinking of him.

 

Nadia Whittome Who’s that? What’s that?

 

Nish Kumar My God.

 

Coco Khan Okay.

 

Nish Kumar Well, that’s definitely Yorkshire, but I can’t help you with the Who. Robbie Moore is.

 

Coco Khan I don’t know who Robbie Moore is. Anyway, I think we revealed something there.

 

Nish Kumar You definitely revealed. Something that you think all white men are called Roger Moore.

 

Nadia Whittome Some of my best friends are white, actually. And if you go far, far back and of some of my ancestors were white in colonialism. So.

 

Coco Khan Yes, you tell him.

 

Nish Kumar So, listen, it’s been a sort of summer of nonsense on any number of levels. But parliament’s back in session. There’s a massive Labour majority in terms of. Positive things. As we recall on Wednesday, Rachel Reeves has signaled that she will change the government’s borrowing rules to allow more investment. But whilst not raising taxes, how are you reacting to that news now to presumably it’s something to be celebrated, this idea that she’s moving away from those stringent rules about borrowing because it actually means it’s going to be able to be some money to be invested into the country?

 

Nadia Whittome Yeah, this is absolutely a positive sign. We we can’t be so. Strictly wedded to a set of fiscal rules that the government can’t make decisions to improve people’s lives. It’s something that governments have to do more to invest. That’s that makes economic sense. I think the conservatives sold us this myth over the last ten, 15 years that government spending was like a household budget. And you don’t spend you don’t have that actually. Governments have to borrow to invest in our public services and not just improves people’s lives, most importantly. But it also, if you’re talking about economic growth across the economy to.

 

Nish Kumar Is your hope now, presumably, that this idea of no new tax rises, the manifesto commitment, some of the language during the campaign was, I think it’s fair to say, like deliberately vague around what the phrase no new tax rises would mean. Presumably, given your interest in a wealth tax, that’s something you’re going to be actively pushing the government towards.

 

Nadia Whittome Absolutely. I mean, we all understand that the new Labour government inherited a huge economic mess from the Tories and that’s resulted in big spending pressures on the new government. But we have to be clear that further cuts will not help fix our broken society. We need more public spending, not less. And actually, austerity is not an inevitability. The government does have other choices. So. We have a lot of wealth in this country. But the problem is it’s concentrated in the hands of the few. So we’ve got super rich individuals hoarding extreme amounts of money and assets. I was really shocked when I looked up the statistic that we have 165 billionaires in the UK and I find it difficult to even comprehend. That level of wealth. I think most of us do. But if you if you spend 1,000 pounds every day. Guess how long it would take you to spend 1 million pounds?

 

Coco Khan I’ll be dead. Will I be dead?

 

Nadia Whittome Oh long dead. And your grandchildren will be dead and their grandchildren.

 

Coco Khan Wow. Okay.

 

Nadia Whittome And then.

 

Nish Kumar Sobering.

 

Nadia Whittome 2740 years it would take you to spend 1 billion pounds if you spent 1,000 pounds every day. So that is that’s just an illustration of what obscene wealth we’re talking about. And if you if the government introduced even very moderate wealth taxes, like, for example, a tax of 2%, a threshold of 10 million pounds a year. So that would mean you can keep everything that you have up to 10 million. I say to you, I obviously don’t literally mean you or me or any of.

 

Coco Khan The 2,000 pounds a day. I’m dead in a week. Trust me on that. I’m done.

 

Nadia Whittome So if there was a 2% tax on wealth above 10 billion pounds, that would only impact about 20,000 of the richest people in the UK, but it would raise an estimated 22 billion pounds a year. Think of what that money could be spent on. It could fund public services, fund building mass, a mass program of council house building fund, but just transition to net zero anti-poverty measures. Also, if you equalized capital gains tax and income tax, which I know is something that you’ve spoken about before on the podcast. Yeah. So not a radical demand. Nigel Lawson, when he was Tory chancellor, supported this measure that could raise up to 15 billion pounds a year. It’s a no brainer.

 

Coco Khan I mean, listening to you now audio, it sounds like there’s like, you know, hopeful things, low hanging fruit that can be won, things can be changed. That sounds great because I’ll be honest, sitting here is outside of the party. We’re coming up to 100 days of this new government and it feels like the notes are quite do me a bit, you know, bit sort of expect the worst things aren’t going to get better. Is that how it feels inside the camp?

 

Nadia Whittome I’ve got to say that the mood is pretty subdued, right? I think we were all voting on a high after the election, but the honeymoon period hasn’t lasted for long. The polling is looking bad. What I’m concerned about is that we were elected on this promise of change, and I’m very worried about what will happen if we don’t deliver on that. We’ve got far right. And we saw them mobilizing and organizing across the country over the summer. They’re waiting in the wings. So we have to get this right. There’s too much at stake. If if we fail to deliver, we’ve got to show people show Labour government can improve people’s lives. And we’ve got to say very clearly that the problem for your fall in living standards is not migrants, it’s not people of color, it’s not Muslims, it’s not refugees, it’s not trans people, It’s a Tory government, exploitative bosses and landlords. And we are going to take measures to tackle those things and improve people’s lives.

 

Coco Khan You mentioned the far right riots there. And, you know, there was there was many different things that happened to cause this hellish month of intimidation on the streets. But one thing that was part of it was disinformation on social media. Now, you are one of the most popular politicians on social media. I can imagine. That is extremely challenging. Do you think this reflects where politics should be, that we should have politicians engaging with social media properly in order to curb the more malignant forces that we see coming through?

 

Nadia Whittome Yeah, I think I think that’s a really a really big question. And there are lots of things at play here. I think we need more democracy in the media so that people aren’t just hearing from the media and that is controlled and owned by a couple of billionaires. Like that’s that’s the diversity that you get in a lot of the right wing media is that owned by different billionaires. You not even that many different billionaires.

 

Coco Khan Are they all called John?

 

Nadia Whittome Some of them are called Rupert stuff. The other Roger, Robert, Rupert. And they say all our names are not.

 

Nish Kumar You use Tik-tok very effectively to communicate around political issues. Is that the sort of do you think that’s the future of political campaigning or is this some has shown us that like it can actually be quite dangerous? You know, I would personally argue that some of Nigel Farage’s interventions via social media exacerbate an already pretty horrific situation.

 

Coco Khan I mean, reform, a massive and genuinely massive is quite chilling. Yeah. Is it the new frontier?

 

Nadia Whittome I absolutely agree with what you said about ferocious interventions, and I think that the popularity of the far right tech talk, including a millennial among young people and especially young men and boys, is extremely worrying, especially when you’ve got a kind of a fertile ground for radicalization, with people being more isolated, with people’s living standards being an afterthought. And that’s not because people are more likely to be racist or. You know, misogynistic, as is the code because that’s that’s also some of the far right radicalization like with with Andrew type. There’s not because working class people are more likely to be racist because of their living standards. Like racism has always come from the top of British society. But far right groups are exploiting the very real problems of poverty and state and corporate neglect. And they’re convincing people that the perpetrator someone else. And then, as you say, that bolstered by right wing politicians and parts of the media who also scapegoat people, and they do that to deflect responsibility, to distract from their own failings and crucially, to divide people so that they can carry on doing that, so they can carry on making the same political choices that have screwed people over in the first place.

 

Coco Khan I’m really glad to hear you say that, because it’s been a big bugbear of mine, is this idea that the working class are more racist. That really winds me up. You know, even if you just just by the crudest measure of like mixed families, you tend to see them more in working class communities. So working class communities are more diverse as I find it. I think you’re absolutely right that, like, it can sometimes we can’t solve these issues because we wrap it all up in snooty class politics and it’s really unfair and it doesn’t solve anything. Does it make anything better?

 

Nadia Whittome Definitely. And I think that, you know, when people like sharing memes saying like, all these people have no teeth and no GCSE is it’s I think it’s it’s really harmful. And I don’t say that from a kind of liberal perspective of not not wanting to hurt people’s feelings, but it misdiagnosed this problem as being coming from working class communities. That’s not to say that racism doesn’t exist in working class communities. Of course it does. But it’s always coming from the top of British society, and it’s always been in the interests of the ruling class to to cement it. So, yeah, it misdiagnosis the problem. And then if we’re not diagnosing the problem properly, how do we solve it? And how do we how do we build a coalition of people who have the same interests, the same the same worries of like putting food on the table, making their rent, paying their mortgage, paying the bills if if we’re dividing people further.

 

Nish Kumar Before we let you go, no deal. I just sort of on a personal level, just want to ask you, you know, coming in in 2019, being in opposition for all this time in government now, is it are you enjoying yourself?

 

Nadia Whittome I’m really bad for lying. It’s really obvious in my voice. And I wasn’t prepared for the question. So I don’t even have time to come up with. yeah, no, I’m having a laugh. But no, I’m not particularly enjoying myself. But I. I do think that there’s hope in the new government and there is space for us to collectively put pressure on the government so to make changes that would improve all of our lives. So alongside some of the good things that the government is doing, like the renters rights bill, which were it’s. Massively redress the imbalance in power between landlords and tenants. The New Deal for working people, which would be the biggest shift in power firm from bosses towards workers. The rest of the hope is is in our collective power and action.

 

Coco Khan Well, that’s a beautiful place to leave it. Thank you so much, Nadia. I’m sorry you don’t have a good time. But listen, work is never fun and you are doing the work. So thank you for that.

 

Nadia Whittome And thank we don’t dream of work.

 

Coco Khan We thank you for joining us on Pod Save the UK.

 

Nish Kumar Thanks, Nadia.

 

Nadia Whittome Thank you so much for having me.

 

Nish Kumar And now to close off the show on some lighter topics and it doesn’t get much lighter than the Tory leadership race. Tom Tugendhat was knocked out of the race on Tuesday. Hello. This is for you to initiate. Now, not to give too much away about how we record the show. But we have actually recorded three different versions of who made the final two in the conservative leadership contest. But with the result having been announced, I just had to record this briefing because it’s simply too funny. So James Cleverly was positioned as the moderate candidate and was the clear favorite to make. The final two based on Tuesday night’s media analysis, was knocked out of the Conservative leadership contest in an absolutely sensational result. To borrow a phrase from Twitter about ten years ago, conservatives woke up this morning and chose violence. So the final two is now going to be ten debate in all. And Robert Jenrick to different bits of the back seat east wing of the Conservative Party. So on Tuesday night, after the elimination of Tom’s economics, I believe it’s on 39 votes. Now, it was widely assumed that he would get the bulk of two House votes and so would sail through to the final two, leaving us in what we thought was going to be a direct contest between Bible and Jenrick. But he went backwards so cleverly, ended up 37 votes behind Jenrick, who had 42 and 41 votes respectively. This has caused an absolute shake up of shock lights. Bloomberg’s Alex Wickham suggested the company’s team may have led Robert Jenrick votes in an attempt to keep everybody off the ballot, but may have led them to many. It’s absolutely unbelievable and I was not the only person who was shot. The Guardian’s David Greer said that there were audible gasps in the room after the result and suggested that James probably was 18 points ahead yesterday. And she said that she spoken to Tory MP who were voting for their preferred second candidate of the final two. Assuming the cleverly was safe. All of this adds up to the idea that those of us who already had a very low opinion of this iteration of the Conservative Party are finding ourselves completely validated. These people are even stupider than we had assumed. So it is possible that James Carville, in an attempt to keep campaigning off of the final ballot, lent Robert Jenrick so many votes that he has kept himself off the final ballot. It’s absolutely on top of the boil and especially in the end of a difficult couple of weeks for the Labour Party. Keir Starmer can’t drop a break like he eats. It’s unbelievable how fortunate he is as a Prime Minister and as the leader of the Labour Party that every time he looks like he’s swept up the Conservative Party or sees it as a challenge and says, Well, I do think you’ve made a mess, we’re going to. Absolutely. Mike, somehow even bigger mess. And earlier in the show, we actually spoke to journalist Ian Dunt about what a more centrist candidate like Cleverly might mean for Starmer. We’re going to play it here instead, because I still think it’s an interesting conversation and one that’s worth hearing. What do you think? A James Cleverly led Conservative party does to the way that Starmer’s government presents itself. Does it present a problem for Starmer in a way that potentially Jenrick or Badenoch wouldn’t because they would. It’s easy for Silver to go look at these two. They’re absolutely batshit. They’re a continuation of a sort of truss. Johnson is a hard right politics. It does cleverly present more of a political problem for Starmer.

 

Ian Dunt Yeah, he’s a much, much bigger threat than either of the other two. But I also think Starmer would do better out of having cleverly in that position than either of the other two. Like especially Jenrick, you know? But the bad knock as well. I mean, she’s all over. Like, really, you just journalists are going to say if she’s leader, they’re just going to say they know I can just upset you very easily indeed. I can get you really mad. So that’s what I’m going to do. That’s kind of my job. And she will keep on doing that. She is I don’t know what they’re seeing in her, but I don’t get it because she’s not much. Corbyn Jenrick is many times worse than she is on any kind of level, including moral and presentational. And so credibility is the biggest threat. The thing is. I think that’s quite helpful. If the Tourist, you know, it’s basically like I think what happened to Labour under Corbyn, you know, the Tories just went completely mad. They just become everything. They become their own government, their own opposition, the only ecosystem in which they need to reflect. And they just went straight off the reservation. I think you can look at how much of an easier time Starmer was having during the Tory party conference than he was during the Labour Party conference. Right. Like as long as the Tories are part of that conversation, as long as they’re halfway sensible, you actually maintain some kind of criticism of their ideas. You have something to define yourself against. You can keep your MPs more onside. It’s generally an easier life for him. And to add to that. There is this weird dynamic that the more sensible the candidate you pick electorally, the harder time is going to be, because if cleverly is there, you’ll probably get a bunch of conservatives decide, you know what, we want to go to reform. I want the full fat version. I want the raw meat version. That’s a whole nightmare for you to try and grapple with and deal with. So even in the Tories best case scenario, they are about to enter a world of pain.

 

Nish Kumar So it looks like there’s going to be a huge party at ten Downing Street tonight. Speaking of full residents of that address, Boris Johnson has been out about embarrassing himself whilst promoting his new and we must simply assume absolute bag of shit book. But here he is speaking to LBC, Nick Ferrari, and then we’ll go straight back to the studio and hop back in to the rest of the record.

 

Clip The whole thing looks like a bit like a, like a crack dad to be told and it needed to be to be refurbished. Then the whole of that 200,000 pounds. Mr. Johnson I don’t recognize that substantial bill. It was. It was. It wasn’t. It wasn’t Manchester, by the way. It wasn’t gold wallpaper. It was total rubbish. And it cost. It didn’t cost them a total of 2200 seconds what it cost. But anyway, wasn’t some. Did you like it? I look. Anyway, I tell you, I’m not a great expert, All right? I paid for it. You’re very paid for it, right? I paid for.

 

Coco Khan Wow. Wow, wow. The last the person before him to live in that place, presumably the one who left it as a crackdown was Theresa may. I mean, I don’t buy it.

 

Nish Kumar I just I’m not I’m not I’m not completely convinced. Boris Johnson knows what a crackdown looks like. I’m not sure that Boris Johnson. I just think, once again, what we’ve seen is him showing the grasp of detail that he showed all throughout the coronavirus pandemic. It’s that it’s that sharp mind that was managing the country. It will never stop being a source of profound national shame that we allowed that man to be our prime minister.

 

Coco Khan You didn’t feel comforted by him saying I paid for it, but you know, I don’t know how much I paid.

 

Nish Kumar I mean, I think that that means fiscal responsibility.

 

Coco Khan No nation. That’s what we want in this country.

 

Nish Kumar It’s one of the dumbest fucks we’ve ever allowed to be anywhere near public office. We should rightly be shamed. We should rightly be shamed in the call of, you know, international opinion of us as a nation. It is anyway. And now he’s written a stupid fucking book, which I imagine is a pile of shit, but I won’t be buying it. And we’ll be doing what I often do with those books, which is if I see them in a bookshop, it’s putting them under a shelf so people can’t find it.

 

Coco Khan I saw a picture of Theresa may in her flat. It looked absolutely lovely when she was in ten Downing Street. So this is before Johnson took over. And I had this moment of like, my God. Well, she had some of the same coffee tables as me.

 

Nish Kumar Oh God.

 

Coco Khan I know how chilling is that? I don’t mind second hand. To be fair, it’s from Habitat. Anyway.

 

Nish Kumar Did you get them secondhand from Theresa May?

 

Coco Khan So that’s it. Thanks for listening to Pod Save the UK and we want to hear your thoughts. Email us at PSUK@Reducedlistening.co.uk.

 

Nish Kumar Don’t forget to follow up Pod Save the UK on Instagram TikTok and Twitter. And if you want more of us, make sure you subscribe to our YouTube channel.

 

Coco Khan Pod Save the UK is a Reduced Listening production for Crooked Media.

 

Nish Kumar Thanks to senior producer James Tindale and assistant producer Mae Robson.

 

Coco Khan Our theme music is by Vasilis Fotopoulos.

 

Nish Kumar Thanks to our engineer Ryan MacBeth.

 

Coco Khan Both the executive producers are Anoushka Sharma and Madeleine Herringer. With additional support from Ari Schwartz.

 

Nish Kumar And remember to hit subscribe for new shows on Thursdays on Amazon, Spotify or Apple or wherever you get your podcasts.

 

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