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“Dead and rotting seagulls within the roof insulation” and “maggots literally raining down on to the lobby” – this quote from a court in South Tyneside sums up the state of our creaking judicial system. So what are we going to do about it? Cut jury trials.

Deputy PM and Justice Secretary David Lammy is hoping to clear the court backlog by scrapping jury trials for crimes with sentences of less than three years – but stories like these make Nish and Coco doubtful it will be the silver bullet Lammy hopes. Is removing one of the fundamental building blocks of our justice system worth some sweet sweet efficiency gains?

Then – is this the next post office scandal? Nish and Coco are joined by Liz Sayce OBE to discuss her damning report into how the Department of Work and Pensions failed to notify unpaid carers that they were accruing enormous debt for years.

And Your Party had its founding conference this weekend… and surprise surprise… it was a spicy one. In the end, Team Zarah’s collective vision for the party defeated Team Jeremy. Will this be a new chapter or – for a party prone to in-fighting – will this leadership model trip them up from the get go?

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TRANSCRIPT

Coco Khan [AD]

Nish Kumar Hi, this is Pod Save the UK. I’m Nish Kumar.

Coco Khan And I’m Coco Khan, one week on from the budget. And where are we now? So what? 965 resets? Well, the latest, surprise, surprise, it hasn’t quite landed. The right-wing papers are baying for blood, and the government can’t seem to help but keep shooting itself in the foot and they’re out of feet. And now there’s our feet. Ow! We discussed the latest leaks and the U-turns.

Nish Kumar Then it’s official, carers have been put through the ringer by the Department of Work and Pensions. We find out where it all went wrong with the author of the government’s independent review into carers allowance overpayments.

Coco Khan And the party formerly referred to as the party with a placeholder name of your party finally has a name and it is *horn sound impression* It’s Your Party! Was it worth the wait?

Nish Kumar I don’t know if it was worth the wait. It was worth the wait for that fanfare. It was worth the wait for the mouth trumpet.

Coco Khan Thank you, thank you. You should do that every week. Thank you. Anyway, the question is, is the internal drama over or is it just the beginning?

Nish Kumar And now the show. *Trumpet impression*

Nish Kumar Now, after a pretty painful week defending the budget, the government might have hoped it could finally draw a line and push ahead with the business of actually governing this country, especially given that we’re on the brink of what a lot of people who are experts in the field are deeming a collapse of the criminal justice system. So here is the Justice Secretary, David Lammy.

Clip First I will create new Swift Courts within the Crown Court with a judge alone deciding verdicts in triable either way cases with a likely sentence of three years or less.

Nish Kumar Okay, so in plain English, that is a pretty massive change to how the legal system works in England and Wales. Scotland and Northern Ireland operate under distinct legal systems. But in England and Wales this is removing the right to a jury for all crimes with a likely sentence of less than three years.

Coco Khan So look, it’s clear that something needs to be done around the court system. So after years of austerity cuts, the delays to justice are compounding trauma and undermining even further people’s faith in a system that is meant to protect them. It’s meant to defend them. But right now, a victim of a serious crime like rape might not see their case go to trial until 2029 or possibly longer.

Nish Kumar But look, these proposals haven’t been pulled out of thin air. They are some of the recommendations from a rapport by investigatory powers commissioner Sir Brian Levison, a name that you will no doubt recognize if you followed UK News in the last decade from his previous inquiry into phone hacking.

Coco Khan The Institute for Government, which is an independent and non partisan think tank, argues that losing juries for serious crimes can increase the chances of miscarriages of justice and threatens public confidence in the system.

Nish Kumar So there have been criticisms from across the political spectrum. So the Shadow Justice Secretary and Twitter video maker at London Tube Stations, Robert Jenrick, waded in and said, Why on earth does this Justice Secretary think he has a mandate to rip up centuries of jury trials without even a mention of it in his party’s manifesto? Meanwhile, at the other end of the political spectrum, Diane Abbott said there will be miscarriages of justice if the right to a jury trial is restricted. In the Commons, she actually quoted Keir Starmer in 1992 when he was a barrister, saying the right to a trial by jury is an important factor in the delicate balance between the power of the state and the freedom of the individual to restrict it. The further it is restricted, the greater the imbalance.

Coco Khan Let’s just rattle through some facts around this. So there were 78,329 outstanding cases in the Crown Court system in England and Wales as of June 2025. So this is a record high and it’s up 10% from a year ago. The backlog has more than doubled in the past six years, and almost 6,000 cases have been open for at least two years.

Nish Kumar Part of the reason trial by jury exists is that you sort of balance prejudices in society by drawing from a wide social pool, everybody is eligible for jury duty. But the legal system is not maybe as representative of broader society as the open selection of a jury allows for. Judges are overwhelmingly white. Judicial diversity statistics of 2025 show that ethnic minorities make up just 12% of judges in England and Wales, while the representation of black judges has remained unchanged for a decade at just one percent. And that matters because according to the Institute of Race Relations, a survey of 373 legal professionals found that 56% had witnessed at least one judge acting in a racially biased way. 52% witnessing discrimination in judicial decision making, most frequently directed towards Asians and black people. This is a combination of lawyers, witnesses, and defendants have come to this. Obviously, a jury does not create a bulwark against racial prejudice, but as people of color living in Britain who may end up in front of a court, you know, we any of us might end up in court. That’s just a reality.

Coco Khan Yeah, especially the way you drive, Nish.

Nish Kumar But I mean, if I drive at all, I definitely will go immediately to court. I can’t drive. I don’t have a driving license. So if I’m behind the wheel of a car, it’s definitely only ending in a court appointment.

Coco Khan But no, I mean you’re right, any of us can find ourselves.

Nish Kumar ACAP, unless I’m behind the wheel of a car. That’s the way we operate. Regardless of how we feel about this, it is very clear that something has to be done. The actual machinery and the infrastructure of the state of this country is in bad and desperate need of investment. Because the infrastructure of the criminal justice system is completely fucked. A report from September 2025 by the Law Society has highlighted some of the problems that it faces. One respondent in South Shields in South Tyneside said the court had to close early for two days within the last 12 months or so. This was because dead and rotting seagulls were within the roof insulation. The court had to close because maggots were literally raining down onto the lobby. That is straight out of thinly veiled metaphor monthlies sentences of the year. Like maggots are raining down on courtrooms. And almost two thirds of the people surveyed said that the delays within the justice system had been caused by the state of the court’s buildings.

Coco Khan Such a stark image. There’s a 1.3 billion bill for outstanding repairs. And I think it’s important to say that because sometimes how this story is being reported is there’s a lot of focus, understandably, on black and Asian defendants, which absolutely there should be. But in a way, talking only about the race element of it, I think sometimes can make people file it under identity politics, which is it’s just not true. This is, as with so many stories that relate to race relations, there’s a an economic underpinning, a class underpinning of this.

Nish Kumar Well, look, it was a controversial decision. But we should also say that within the kind of massively significant changes to our judicial system, there was another political element to all of this because it all followed another government leak. So last week, an internal briefing document on this subject was leaked to the BBC and the Times, proposing much more extreme reductions to jury trials. Now, this has clearly been watered down since that leak, but the failure to be able to keep a lid on your own information, it suggests a level of total incompetence at the core of this government. We’re talking a week after the OBR leaked the entirety of the budget. Like this is catastrophic incompetence.

Coco Khan Yeah, exactly. And after all of Labour’s criticism about incompetence in the Conservative Party, you know, people talk about the boomerang effect, right? Like you if you’re in opposition, you shouldn’t throw insults that are gonna come hit you back in the face when you are in government. I mean, Keir Starmer is getting hit in the face with several boomerangs.

Nish Kumar The Chancellor appears currently to be safe in her job. The chief of the OBR did resign. Richard Hughes said that he took full responsibility for the leaking of the budget and described it as the worst failure in the institution’s history. But obviously, this is not an ideal thing to have happened. This leak of the internal documents around these changes to jury trials on the back of the OBR leaking the budget. It’s bad. It’s really bad. It doesn’t suggest you’re running an orderly ship.

Coco Khan Particularly looking at Rachel Reeves and the headlines around her, you know, I’m just gonna read some of them out here. So the telegraph’s gone with why lying Reeves must go. The Daily Mail’s gone with here’s proof Reeves did mislead the markets. Just on this subject of leaking things, the press is hostile to the Labour Party. I mean, I I can’t believe that this is not more front and center to of their mind. Yeah, these little incompetencies are not going to be forgivable in this ecosystem of media.

Nish Kumar Anyway, just a quick reminder to listeners that we are running an end of year Christmas special where we look back on the best and worst it’s probably gonna be worst focus of a wild deer in British politics with some very special guests. Now, this wouldn’t be complete without handing out some awards, you know, to celebrate the best of the worst. And yes, there will be actual prizes, and no, they won’t be very good.

Coco Khan So, for example, could the worst TikTok award go to Ed Miliban for his terrible nuclear power ASMR video that we played recently? Please go back and watch it, but do prepare for all your body hair to just stand on end. It is very, very creepy. Although, you know, some would say it was probably his best work. To do this, though, these awards, listeners, we need your help. What awards should be up for grabs, who is worth a nomination? We expect your ideas to reflect the insane times that we live in. So please do send them to PSUK@reducedlistening.co.uk or drop a note in the comments.

Nish Kumar Now, after the break, is this the next post office scandal? We unpick the carers allowance clusterfuck.

Nish Kumar [AD]

Nish Kumar Unpaid carers are the hidden backbone of our healthcare system, and they save the government a staggering £162 billion each year. Given the nature of our aging population and the number of people that need assistance, it’s very possible that you listening to this right now may well be a carer or know somebody who is a carer. Over the past six years, we’ve seen thousands dragged through the courts after falling foul of the rules around how much they’re allowed to earn while receiving benefits.

Coco Khan Yes, so for anyone who hasn’t been following this, let’s just quickly lay it out. So in England and Wales, if you have a loved one who has a disability or a chronic illness and you care for them at least thirty-five hours a week, you are entitled to a weekly carers allowance of eighty three pounds and thirty pence. This is considered a salary top up as you are not able to work a full time job while doing this.

Nish Kumar Here’s the catch, though. Your weekly earnings must not exceed 196 pounds. Now, if carers go over that limit, even by a penny, they must repay that entire week’s allowance. It’s called the cliff edge effect, where a small increase in wages can lead to a disproportionately large loss in income, as opposed to the tapering off effect that we see in other benefits. Another term for all of this, of course, is complete fucking bullshit.

Coco Khan In this case though, the cliff edge, or the complete fucking bullshit effect, was compounded by the fact that the Department for Work and Pensions, the DWP, didn’t alert unpaid carers when they overstepped the limit. So hundreds of thousands of people were unknowingly racking up these huge debts, sometimes of more than twenty thousand pounds, and leaving some even facing criminal charges.

Nish Kumar Now, it’s not like people were taking the piss around their earnings here. An example being that one carer was forced to repay four thousand three hundred and thirty one pounds after exceeding the earnings limit by one pence each week. It’s life ruining stuff.

Coco Khan Now, this was first flagged by a whistleblower back in 2016, then again in 2019 by the National Audit Office and a Common Select Committee. In a hearing at the time, Peter Schofield, the DWP Permanent Secretary, said officials would consider sending text messages to carers who breach earning limits and promise new data matching technology will stop overpayments.

Nish Kumar Fast forward to 2024, and a Guardian investigation reveals that far from stopping repayments before they happen, tens of thousands of carers are still being asked to repay huge sums, while others are being pursued through the courts for fraud. By May 2025, at least 357 million pounds in carers allowance benefit has been paid out in error over the past six years because of official failures.

Coco Khan So what we have here is years of failures, and nobody really did anything about it until October 2024, when the new Labour government commissioned an independent review. And the result of that review is pretty damning stuff. A catalog of failings by the DWP. Most importantly, it says that breaches of the rules were not willful rule breaking, but honest mistakes as a result of unclear guidance by the government.

Nish Kumar Joining us now is the author of that review, which was published last week, Liz Sayce, OBE. Liz was the CEO of Disability Rights UK for 10 years and was formerly the vice chair of the Social Security Advisory Committee. Liz, welcome to Pod Save the UK. Thanks very much for joining us.

Liz Sayce Good to be here.

Nish Kumar This is now being compared to the post office scandal. And as a result of your review, the government has said it’s going to reassess cases dating all the way back to 2015, meaning there could be huge numbers of people who are reimbursed and also crucially have their criminal convictions overturned. Carers UK, who provided evidence to the report and work with the Guardian investigation, say they feel vindicated. How big a moment is this?

Liz Sayce So many people thought they were playing by the rules and they weren’t. So one of the big findings of my report was there have been really unclear rules on averaging of earnings.

Nish Kumar Right.

Liz Sayce So the reason it sounds very technical, but the reason that for so many carers it was so difficult to know if they were going over the limit was because on gov.uk it says your earnings may be averaged. The law, the regulations allow for averaging of earnings. So carers understandably thought, you know, for example, we we we heard from a woman who had a disabled child, and she wanted to work less over the half term because she wants to spend time with a kid. So she worked more the week before to make she thought, well, that’ll average out, that’s fine. But it wasn’t fine. And there were lots of examples like that where people assumed very understandably that their earnings would be averaged over a period of time. Sometimes they thought it would be over a year. And the problem was that the Department of Work and Pensions was using guidance for their staff that actually almost didn’t allow for averaging. It was so rare, and that didn’t fit the legislation. The legislation says there’s lots of scope for averaging. I’m sorry if this sounds technical.

Nish Kumar No, no, this is exactly what this is exactly the kind of thing that we need to know about. Is that computer error? Is that a problem in the policy? Why if high on this of all issues, like a hugely significant thing that can result in people getting a criminal conviction, why is there ambiguity in that? How how does that happen where the law says you can average things out, but then in practice that isn’t the case at all? How does that happen?

Liz Sayce So one of the reasons is that the legal regulations. Are actually quite ambiguous. So one of the things the government has agreed to do, which I’m really pleased about, is to revise those regulations. They’ve also already made changes to the guidance for staff, and they’ve said they’ll keep that guidance under review. This is really important stuff because with unclear guidance, even, you know, different tribunals have come to different decisions on what those regulations mean. So, how an individual carer is supposed to understand it when the experts haven’t agreed on what these regulations mean. And then the guidance basically kind of said, oh, there’s got to be a recognizable pattern of your work. So you had carers thinking there was averaging going on, and you had members of staff working to guidance, which almost didn’t allow averaging. So the result was people were trying to organize their work in a modern economy, you know, flexible work opportunities, different shifts. I’ll take on an extra shift so that I can do my caring, working around caring responsibilities and falling foul of these really flawed rules on averaging. And I think if that hadn’t been the case, then you wouldn’t have had such a problem about whether DWP knew about the earnings and whether they were alerting people in time and so on. That’s, you know, you shouldn’t have a situation where lots of people have gone over a limit inadvertently. It should be clear. And it hasn’t been. I mean, you know, we heard from people who said, Who said things like, well, I mustn’t go over the earnings limit. So I’m really lucky. My employer lets me turn down shifts, or people have turned down bonuses. People have worked below their earning potential, you know, but because otherwise, if they earn at their earning potential, so say they’re a qualified nurse or something, then they’d have to earn a massive amount more. They’d have to do far more hours to actually be better off than to earn national living wage plus the carer’s allowance. They can just about make ends meet. So there’s lots of things wrong with this system. And that particular problem is to do with the cliff edge, which you mentioned, which means that you know, you earn a penny over and you have to give back 83 pounds 30, not a penny.

Coco Khan Whilst you were talking, I just wanted to work out quickly, okay. So, you know, you can’t go over this weekly limit of 196 pounds, and then you get the 83 pounds roughly at top up. Okay, what would that be in terms of an annual income? 14,000 pounds. So essentially the government is saying if you care for a loved one, which is saving them an enormous amount of money, and psychologically it’s so much for you, you absolutely must live in poverty. You have to. And I’m sorry, 14,000 pounds, that is forcing you to live in poverty. And then you get saddled with all this debt. I’m quite finding myself getting quite furious right now. You know, I I want to mention the Joseph Roundry Foundation’s annual UK poverty report, which found that 28% of unpaid carers are in poverty compared to 20% of the wider population. I wondered if you could speak about the psychological impact that this will have and has had on carers already in a system which, let’s be frank, is not generous to them.

Liz Sayce First of all, Yeah, it’s meant to provide some income support because you can’t work full-time. But of course, for those carers affected by this sudden envelope coming in the post saying you owe 10,000 pounds or something, it plunged families into real financial hardship. And people said things to us like, well, I used to pay a bit for somebody to come and sit with my elderly parent with dementia. I can’t do that anymore. So it’s impacting my well-being, it’s impacting that person, and you know, and they feel more of a burden. People talked about just not being able to buy nice things that that might make their or their loved ones’ life a bit better. And then there’s a sort of the emotion of it. You may know that if you were asked to pay back an overpayment, many people were also given a kind of fine, a civil penalty. They were asked to pay a 50 pound fine on top of paying this money back. And at one level, this is 50 pounds compared to what might be thousands of pounds of debt. But actually, it felt like the sort of last straw, you know, it felt like such an insult. And people said, I felt shame. I felt I couldn’t talk to people about this. So I’m pleased that where government is going to write off a debt, cancel it or repay it if someone’s repaid it, they will also, I’ve been assured, repay that civil penalty and scrap it. So I mean that’s really important psychologically, I think. It’s it’s less important financially, but so there’s that and I think the other impact on people has been we’ve talked to some people who’ve said, I I just can’t do this trying to juggle work and care. I’ll give up work.

Coco Khan Yes.

Liz Sayce It’s easier to just give up work. Yeah. And and that’s the exact opposite, of course, of what, you know, current policy is all about wanting everybody to contribute to our economy. You know, not everybody’s able to to work, but depends on their carrying responsibilities. But but a lot of people do want to.

Coco Khan Of course. It’s very natural to want to feel if I work a little bit harder, if I take that extra shift, I can go on holiday. These are all and that actually stopping people from d achieving that and fulfilling that. These are just these are not luxuries, these are just normal parts of life. I I want to buy this little thing, I want to go to this place. I just I find it so unkind. And even though I’m so delighted to hear that of course the government’s gonna repay it, I keep returning to this question of okay, but it doesn’t change the fact that carers still aren’t receiving enough support, the limits are still too low. It does leave me wondering about the Department for Work and pensions completely. I mean, are they fit for purpose?

Liz Sayce Well, I I mean, I think on the level of benefits, it’s obviously a sort of big political discussion, isn’t it? You know, there’s a lot of debate at the moment about reducing the welfare bill. But but as you’ve just pointed out, you know, there’s a lot of people who are living in poverty who, for reasons of, you know, severe ill health or caring responsibilities, you know, sometimes they they need that social security. We any of us might may need social security support at any time. So that’s a very live debate. So governments have committed to exploring alternatives to the cliff edge, including a taper, which is what works with other some other benefits like universal credit, which would make such a difference because you you you could, you know, if you earned a bit more, there might be a bit of claw back on your benefit, but but basically you would always be better off by working rather than at the moment you are not always better off.

Nish Kumar It’s so counterproductive and counterintuitive to everything else that’s coming out of the I mean you’ve already mentioned this. Yes. Given everything we’re being told now is we need to get everybody back into work. Everybody has to be in work. Work, work, work, work, work. Like it’s so unconstructive, right?

Liz Sayce Yeah, we I mean we need to have a system which makes it really easy, as easy as possible, for people to combine caring and employment. It’s maybe important to say carers allowance came into being in nineteen seventy six.

Nish Kumar Yeah.

Liz Sayce This was a time when people didn’t work that sort of flexible shift system in the same way. This is just not a benefit that that meets modern caring, modern Labour market. You know, it’s it’s it’s kind of outdated. And the cliff edge is definitely, you know, it’s it’s impacting disproportionately on lower paid women, which is a real worry.

Nish Kumar The government has stopped short of offering compensation. Do you know why that’s happened?

Liz Sayce It’s interesting. I mean when I was doing the review, obviously we spoke to a lot of care as we had a whole series of round tables of people sending in their experiences and views and so on. And three big things came out in terms of what people most wanted. The first was they wanted the debts written off, repaid where necessary. The second was they wanted these civil penalties got rid of for where people had made innocent mistakes. And the third was they wanted the system fixed for the future. Compensation didn’t come out, interestingly, as one of the sort of top demands. I think for whatever reason. I think people were so incensed about the debts and the civil penalties. And also a lot of people, I mean, pe some people were saying this may not help me, but I really want this never to happen to anybody else. And and some of the things the government’s committed to should should help. I mean, we haven’t talked about the the alerts that Department for Work and Pensions gets from HMRC about what you’re earning. And they were only looking at about 50% of them in the period after 2019. So that meant that some people still had these debts racking up at that point, which is one of the things that, you know, didn’t happen after 2019 to resolve it. But I think now they have cleared that backlog and they’re committed to looking at that quickly. So that should mean. That there’s no reason why anyone in the future should get a debt asked of them for thousands of pounds. If there’s an error, it should be a small amount and it should be resolved quickly.

Nish Kumar It’s just a kind of point of interest that we’re talking the day after the independent office for police conduct has published a huge report into the Hillsborough disaster where ninety-seven people were unlawfully killed. That report has taken 36 years. People responsible have are no longer in position. Some of them are dead, so there’s no accountability, and a lot of those families are feeling very, very hurt today in this country. I mean, what’s important here is consequence and change. When an institutional failure like Hillsborough, the post office scandal or the CARES scandal happens. What would you like to see going forward in terms of both accountability and meaningful systemic change that is gonna benefit carers in the UK right now?

Liz Sayce The first thing is that there needs to be, and I think there will be, a proper plan of action to put these things right. And it’s really important that things don’t get kicked into the long grass. For example, there’s been this extraordinary thing that if you earn care if you get carers allowance and universal credit, you might get an overpayment of carers allowance and you might be asked for that back. But actually, if you’re paying that back, that means there might be a corresponding underpayment of universal credit, but it’s left to you to work that out. It’s not all knitted together within the department. So things like that.

Nish Kumar Yeah.

Liz Sayce Need to be resolved, not in ten years’ time but quickly.

Coco Khan Mm-hmm.

Liz Sayce So I think accountability for a real action plan, they’ve got now a senior person overseeing it. They say they’re going to report regularly on what’s happening to resolve these issues and in the recommendations they’ve accepted from the review I did. So I so that kind of accountability going forwards and transparency, I think is hugely important. History tells us that there can be horrible delays with these sorts of processes. You know, Windrush, post office, and all the actual, the actual process of putting things right seems to take forever. And I really would like to see the Department for Work and Pensions working with carers organizations to make sure make sure that the criteria, the way of going about this is fair and seemed to be fair, and that then it proceeds in a, you know, in a s in a simple and transparent way. Yeah, and I also think that carers allowance compared to something like universal credit, carers allowance is a smaller benefit, but it’s vitally important.

Nish Kumar Yeah.

Liz Sayce But I kind of think it didn’t get the attention it deserved. And you know, it needs to be, as as you said in your introduction, you know, if carers weren’t providing care and support, actually the the health service and social care would collapse. You know, it’s it’s absolutely vital and crucial. And people want to do it. But they want to do it with a fair system, you know.

Coco Khan And able to combine it with work where they can. Liz Sayce, thank you so much for joining us on Pod Save the UK. Now, after the break, your party had its founding conference this weekend, and surprise, surprise, it was a fiery affair.

Nish Kumar [AD]

Nish Kumar So this weekend was the founding conference of Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana’s Your Party and its official *trumpet impression*.

Coco Khan Don’t forget the gun fingers.

Nish Kumar Gun fingers.

Clip Your party is the name of your party. Yeah.

Coco Khan Your party is called “your party.”

Nish Kumar Yes, the party formerly known as your party is now currently known as your party.

Coco Khan I just wanna say that when I spoke to Zarah Sultana, we did a gig together in Bristol, she asked me, Oh, what do you think? And I said, Your party, Zarah, you have to call it your party. It’s the best name.

Nish Kumar Also everybody’s been saying your party so f often in the last sort of three or four months it might it would have been crazy to not do that.

Coco Khan Well, I’m I’m glad that in a democratic vote, common sense won, the other options were being voted were our party.

Nish Kumar Yeah.

Coco Khan The popular alliance, or for the many. Any of those appeal to you?

Nish Kumar K-pop demon hunting. Just pick the most popular thing in culture and just name it after that. The name of your party is Taylor Swift.

Coco Khan So anyway, let’s let’s let’s just have a think about what’s been going on with your party. Getting to this point.

Nish Kumar Do we have to?

Coco Khan I feel like we should.

Nish Kumar We should. Obviously, we will. It’s just, you know, getting here has been pretty torturous. There’s been public fallouts, furious posts on social media. So this conference was your party’s big moment to put all of this behind them. Chance for a fresh start and to decide on a name and governing structure for a party that Zarah Sultana has said could one day run the government.

Coco Khan But, sorry to say, in usual fashion, it got off to a chaotic start, with Sultana refusing to attend on Saturday in solidarity with delegates expelled for links to other parties.

Nish Kumar The big fight of the weekend was on this leadership model. So it seems that Zarah Sultana’s wing of the party came out ahead of the Corbinistas with members narrowly voting to choose collective leadership over that of a single leader by the cursed ratio of fifty-two to forty-eight percent. I don’t think I’ll ever I was yesterday I was watching a football match and the team’s possession percentages were fifty two and forty eight. And when that stat flashed up on the screen. *Laughs*

Coco Khan So how will collective leadership work? Well, from what we understand, this means your party will be led by members on a new central executive committee with MPs barred from the top roles. This committee will make the big decisions around the party’s management and strategy with a chair, deputy chair and spokesperson in charge of public leadership. Here’s what Zarah Sultana made of the decision.

Clip And today we will finalize the structures of a party that belongs to its members, not to MPs, not to donors, not to nameless, faceless, unelected bureaucrats, but you, its members.

Nish Kumar So look, it’s clear that she’s making a sort of not particularly veiled attack on Jeremy Corbyn and his allies, who she clearly blames for the dramas of the last few months. As for dual membership, so this is the question of whether your party members can be members of your party and also a member of a previously approved political party. So one that the kind of your party steering committee has recognized as a political party. Zarah Sultana actually won there as well, under the slogan of the witch hunt must end with a massive margin of sixty nine percent to thirty one percent. So your party members are also going to be able to be members of other political parties.

Coco Khan So is this a new chapter for your party? The start of building something new, as Sultana hopes, or will a collective leadership model in a party that struggles with infighting trip them up from the get go?

Nish Kumar This is not a hugely significant football match in my life. It’s just what I did last night, okay? So the football match with the fifty-two to forty-eight percent ratio was Spurs Newcastle. And that game ended 2-2 and it was resolved by, I think, the worst overhead kick I’ve ever seen go in.

Coco Khan Okay. This is going somewhere this anecdote.

Nish Kumar Sergio Romero basically shinned an overhead kick. I’ve sort of never seen an over like an overhead kick is an intrinsically impressive skill, but somehow he it sort of still looked ridiculous and bad. The whole of this your party conference feels like a shinned overhead kick. Okay. Like they’ve got it over the line. Somehow they everyone managed to look undignified in the process of it getting over the line, but they’ve got it over the line. The party has a name, it has a leadership structure.

Coco Khan Listen.

Nish Kumar Is are we counting this as a win?

Coco Khan First of all, Shinned Overhead Kick should be the name of the party.

Nish Kumar I I would urge people.

Coco Khan We solved it.

Nish Kumar Even if you have no interest in football, it’s sort of worthwhile it’s w quite a freak goal that went in yesterday.

Coco Khan Look, I’m choosing hope, right? And part of it, look, I accept that I’m a little bit biased. I’ve got a lot of friends who are really excited about this, your party. And don’t get me wrong, they have their reservations. And one of one friend texted me from the conference being like, I’d expect it, it is total chaos. But nonetheless, you know, they are they have understood that there is a space for a new party. And there is a part of me, and you know, I’m sort of conflicted as I even say this, how much I believe it or not, but there is a sense that being within the political machine, if you want to call it that, has a corrosive effect. That Westminster is detached from the people, right? And so actually, they’ve been not responsive enough in terms of things like cost of living because actually they don’t experience that first hand. You know, they’ve become insulated in this weird old building that’s all oak paneled and quite grand and it’s it’s all quite strange. In a way, the fact that they have this committee where they will not become part of the political machine. I do wonder could that potentially lead to different outcomes? Could that potentially lead to different ways of thinking? Could it make them more exciting down the line? So I’m just I’m remaining hopeful that actually something interesting is happening, something innovative is happening, and there is potential there. You know, it remains to be seen about whether that potential is grasped and whether they are able to actually implement stuff out of that potential. But at this moment in time, I’m not denying the potential. I think it is still there.

Nish Kumar I would like the Labour Party, I would like the Green Party, and I would like your party to discuss more openly where electoral packs are going to be made. Okay, because let me tell you, the other side of the political spectrum is thinking about that already. The Guardian this morning, as we record on Wednesday, has run a story that Nigel Farage has been telling donors that he expects reform to do an election deal with the Tories. Now, we should note that Farage and the Conservative Party have both denied these claims. But the Guardian and the Financial Times are claiming that reform donors have told Farage that they are expecting his party to join or make a deal with the Conservative Party. Denials notwithstanding. That is my big personal fear in politics because I’m a huge fan of narrative resolution. And the narrative resolution of 21st century British politics is that the Conservative Party facilitates Nigel Farage in becoming the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. And regardless of what they’re saying publicly, we have seen, particularly in the 2019 election, the fact that reform and the Conservative Party, when it is convenient and politically expedient for them, can set aside their differences and work together. And I want, I need to hear more of that from every single progressive political party. The Labour Party, your party, the Green Party, the Liberal Democrats, and the SNPs. I need to hear more conversation about. Cooperation and coalition. We need to hear that from Sinn Fein. We need to hear that from across the political spectrum as it sort of sits in the United Kingdom right now. We need to hear that from Plyde Cymru. We need to hear progressive parties talking about how where there are similarities in policy and where there are areas and possibilities for electoral cooperation, they are going to take them. That is absolutely essential because I’m telling you that when it comes to the punch, the far right and the center right have proved themselves to be very, very adept at cooperation over the course of the 21st century. Okay. So I need to hear more of that from all of these political parties. And I think the thing that I really welcome here is the fact that your party has voted to allow people to be members of two political parties.

Coco Khan Yeah, no, I think that’s really, really important and something that we should be celebrated. You know, we’ve also talked over the course of this show, in probably more refined words than I’m gonna choose now, but essentially a lot of how Britain has been going in terms of politics, we’re choosing the fuck you button, basically. And that is dominating it. And I think that sometimes we

Nish Kumar It’s glob global politics.

Coco Khan Yeah, we’re not alone in that.

Nish Kumar Or not alone in that year.

Coco Khan We choose fuck you. That’s what we we choose. And we need to see progressives leading by example and not choosing the fuck you button. You know, and I get that there is a sense from I I won’t name any from the leaders, they don’t want to say that they would work with XYZ because they want to tap into people’s desire to say fuck you to Keir Starmer or fuck you to whoever it might be. And I just feel like on this podcast, let’s let’s leave we there’s no fuck you’s here, right? We’re we’re not doing no no fuck you buttons anymore.

Nish Kumar I’ve said it before. We are the progressive broad church or fat mosque. That is the way that we set ourselves up.

Coco Khan Fat mosque.

Nish Kumar We are the fat mosque.

Coco Khan You should be careful about saying that because Robert Jenric’s gonna think it’s a fatoire or something and it’s gonna be a problem for us.

Nish Kumar We are the wide temple. We are the outsized Gurdwara.

Coco Khan Yes. Yes. Fat with a PH, yeah? ‘Cause it’s very good. But yeah, no, I I I would love to see that. I would love to see leaders moving forward into twenty twenty six, turning over this new leaf and saying, actually, you know what? I am happy to say I don’t agree with this this person here, here and here, but for the sake of our country and the sake of our future, we will you know, work together. ‘Cause they expect voters to do it all the time. I mean, how many voters have really voted for a party and believed in one hundred percent of it? Of course not. We vote because at the time when you make a kind of calculation in your mind about will it be okay? I think we should expect that from everyone else.

Nish Kumar Just just be thinking about it ’cause I’m telling you, your political opponents are thinking about it. Before we go, a reminder that we are running a new year mailbag special where we answer all your questions.

Coco Khan So we’ll answer serious political ones, like where does Nish see his political home as the Labour Party lurches right?

Nish Kumar Or what’s politicized Coco the most since becoming a mum?

Coco Khan And the not so political are also welcome, for example, who are Nish’s favorite comedians.

Nish Kumar I’ll be answering favorite comedians. I won’t be answering least favorite comedians, okay? Because my agent has specifically asked me to stop slagging off Jimmy Carr. Anyway, we also want to know what inspired Coco to go into journalism and would she encourage others to do the same today? Anyway, all and any questions are welcome. Send them into psuk at reduce listening.co.uk or drop us a note in the comments. And this is the final time you will hear the credit thanks to producer James Tinesdale. Ugh. Because he is, to put.

Coco Khan He’s leaving us.

Nish Kumar Not too fine a point on it, fucking off.

Coco Khan Yeah.

Nish Kumar To go get a better job.

Coco Khan Yeah. He’s been poached by a similar progressive media organization that will remain nameless. And I just want to know if you’re from that organization and you’re listening. I do hold grudges and I’m really I’m genuinely so sad that James is going

Nish Kumar Yes, to be clear, we’re not at liberty to say the name. All we will say is in terms of poaching employees, it’s one all. That’s all we’ll say.

Coco Khan That’s all we’ll say. Yeah. But yeah, it he’s been amazing and I as listeners, you don’t get to hear directly enough from the producers, I say, but very much the fingerprints are all over this show. So best of luck to James.

Nish Kumar Yeah, thank you, James. And we do often reference the producers but they often cut those references out.

Coco Khan And that is it. So thank you for listening to Pod Save the UK and don’t forget to follow at Pod Save the UK on Instagram, TikTok and Twitter and Blue Sky. Pod Save the UK is a Reduced Listening production for Crooked Media.

Nish Kumar Thanks to producers James Tinesdale and May Robson.

Coco Khan Our theme music is by Vasilis Fotopoulos.

Nish Kumar The executive producers are Kate Fitzsimons and Katie Long with additional support from Ari Schwartz.

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