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Keir Starmer jets off to Beijing, leaving Westminster – once again – bubbling with rumours about his future. The King of the North might be off the cards, but Angela Rayner and even Ed Miliband are eyeing up the top spot.

Reform thinks GB News Presenter and right-wing activist Matt Goodwin is the right man to be their MP candidate in Gorton and Denton – if only he can shelve his disdain for Manchester… Nish and Coco chew it all over with political journalist Zoë Grünewald.

Away from the psychodrama, controversial plans to overhaul special educational needs education in England risk children’s legal rights to cut costs. Campaigners Rachel Filmer and Carrie Grant share their concerns with Coco.

And surveillance firm Palantir is using medical records to target people for ICE in the US – could the UK be next?

This podcast has been edited to remove a story about Matt Goodwin after he clarified the context of his comments about Manchester. We regret the error.

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GUESTS 
Zoë Grünewald, journalist, broadcaster and political commentator
Dr Carrie Grant MBE, TV presenter and voice coach
Rachel Filmer, SEND campaigner

USEFUL LINKS

Save Our Children’s Rights Campaign
https://www.saveourchildrensrights.org.uk/

Stop Palantir in the NHS
https://goodlawproject.org/campaign/stop-palantir-in-the-nhs

CREDITS

Keir Starmer / TikTok
Pod Save America / X
Good Law Project / Instagram
Sky News / YouTube
UKLabour / X

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

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

Coco Khan And I’m Coco Khan. This week, Keir Starmer is off to visit long-time frenemy China. The last prime ministerial trip was eight years ago, so what is he hoping to get from it this time around?

Nish Kumar And it’s been another week of political manoeuverings. Suella Braverman joined the conga line of Tory MPs heading towards reform. Meanwhile, Andy Burnham struggles to make his move from the streets of Manchester to the heart of Westminster. Political journalist Zoë Grünewald is here to help us understand it all.

Coco Khan Plus the school reforms which could make life for some of the most vulnerable pupils even harder.

Nish Kumar And reform mayoral candidate Leila Cunningham’s latest promo features a penguin and mountains in East London. Does it make any sense? You’ll need to keep listening to find out more. There’s a lot to be said about Keir Starmer’s leadership style and demeanor, and I’ll be honest with you, very little of it is good. This is a man who can make damp cardboard look charismatic, but this week he’s given us all a gift, an image of what might be the worst Burns Night celebration on record. We can see a sort of blurry Keir starmer in the back of the shot, but gloriously in focus is a can of iron brew, three tea cakes. Three caramel wafers and three caramel logs, all from Tunnex. It’s hard to know if this is this paid promo.

Coco Khan Yeah, yeah, yeah! Hashtag SponCon!

Nish Kumar I know they said that they were struggling to afford the elections that they’ve got to fight. That’s why Andy Burnham can’t stand. But are they now brought to you by Iron Brew and Tunnock’s Teen Cake?

Coco Khan Well, we absolutely have to bring in political journalist and podcaster Zoë Grünewald, friend of the show, I think is the formal title, to make sense of this very important moment in political social media history. Welcome back and what?

Zoë Grünewald Yes, I think he’s going to get a tummy ache if he eats all that.

Nish Kumar He’s been on a roll this week. He also put on an Emmanuel Macron tribute act during a podcast interview with Matt Ford. Sadly, the glasses were not reflective, which I think is a real shame here. It’s a fairly extraordinary clip.

Zoë Grünewald And Bonjour presumably was his impression of Macron, right? Yeah. Yeah. His best impression of Macron was just saying the French word for hello.

Nish Kumar It was a sort of joking reference to Macron turning up to Davos. Macron had an eye condition that, I mean, didn’t not sound like he was hungover. I had a lot of eye conditions when I was at university turning up in tutorials wearing my Ray-Bans, not Ray- Bans, they were knock-off Ray-bans. They were J-Bands, okay? I was wearing J-bands, OK?

Coco Khan Well, thank you for clearing that up because genuinely I was like, is there a conjunctivitis outbreak among world leaders? Is there something going on? Must we know about this?

Nish Kumar Okay, on to more serious matters. The prime minister has arrived in China on a massive visit from more than 50 people from the business world to a country we would normally hear described as a threat. This is a really complicated diplomatic needle to thread for Keir Starmer, right? Because the UK government is talking a lot about the threats posed by China. It’s something that comes up in the House of Parliament a lot, but also they are the kind of trade powerhouse in the world right now, Zoë. How complicated is this full cast armor.

Zoë Grünewald Yeah, I think it’s very, very complicated. I think there’s a few things here. There’s firstly the question of what does Keir Starmer want to get out of this visit to China? So I think ultimately, if he can come back with the least amount of drama possible, that in itself would be a win. I mean, what he wants is some economic wins, more sort of diplomatic normalization. So this idea that the UK can communicate with China. It doesn’t have to be this big deal, which I think is, you know, that’s pretty wishful thinking considering there’s a lot of hawkishness. Which, you know, you could argue is pretty reasonable amongst UK MPs and the UK public. There’s also all the concerns over human rights violations in China. Obviously, they still have Jimmy Lai, who is the Hong Kong British businessman who is still imprisoned in China, and of course, there’s also the question of the US. He has to somehow walk this tightrope of trying to get closer to China for economic reasons without evoking the Oh yeah. Of the toddler in the White House. You know, that is very, very difficult.

Coco Khan Isn’t this approach already drawing the ire of the toddler in the White House? I was under the impression that especially because of this super embassy that’s being granted to China, that there’s already been murmurs about, you know, if we get closer that there will be hell to pay. What does it mean for our prospects of economic growth if we end up getting tariffed again by the states?

Zoë Grünewald This is the big question, right? Because I think it was always difficult to try and get closer to China, even without Donald Trump, who is this kind of episodic man who literally will do things on the flip of a coin. He is so, you know, he’s so just motivated by how he feels in that moment. I was thinking about, you now, this relationship between managing Xi Jinping and Donald Trump. And it kind of reminded me a bit of wedding planning in that you kind of have to make everybody, you know especially in a blended family, right. You kind of to make everyone feel included. To make them feel valued. But every seating plan could be an insult. Every speech could be freighted with meaning. But rather than getting a passive aggressive text or a frosty speech, you could get the invasion of Scotland. It is pretty big stakes on either side. So that tight rope is very, very difficult anyway. But especially when Donald Trump is putting as much pressure as he can on other countries now to distance themselves from China. Well, having visited Shanghai once, my

Coco Khan over a decade ago, the big super club there is called Rich Baby. So if you’re looking for a headline not related to politics, Keir Starmer, we know what you need to be. Keir Starmer spotted out at Rich Baby

Nish Kumar Your knowledge of global nightlife is astonishing.

Coco Khan It’s important to me.

Nish Kumar You are the Michael Palin of getting absolutely off your head.

Coco Khan I did actually fact check, to just ensure that Rich Baby is still open. Sadly, I only speak English, so I don’t really know how up-to-date it is, but apparently it is still opened.

Nish Kumar Zoë, just to summarize, a win for Starmer is essentially some trading conversations being opened and no one mentioning human rights.

Zoë Grünewald I-I-I, something about-

Nish Kumar weird position for the human rights lawyer.

Zoë Grünewald It’s not great, you know, it’s going to be like some investment, but not too much involvement in our infrastructure. Yeah. You know, we’re going to work closely with you, but but not so closely that we’re gonna piss anyone off. Yeah. It is. It’s got.

Nish Kumar He’s gone to China for a Goldilocks porridge.

Zoë Grünewald I think if he can come back with some investment and no ire from Donald Trump, he’ll chalk that up as a win.

Coco Khan Obviously, as a human rights lawyer, it hurts to imagine that he doesn’t care about this. Yeah. But what can he…

Zoë Grünewald We actually do. I think that’s true. I mean, we are deeply economically entangled with China already, our supply chains, our clean energy technologies, our consumer goods. We have this relationship with China, whether we like it or not. The question is, how do we use it? And I think because we are feeling very… Unstable because of our relationship with the US and how that has changed because we’ve distanced ourselves from Europe. There is this kind of consensus, I think, that we have to be realistic about that, but you’re totally right. Does that realism come at a cost of ignoring our national security, ignoring the human rights violations that are going on, and ignoring the fact that any relationship we shore up could massively damage another relationship that could then inflict pain on us economically? So it is very difficult to start with.

Nish Kumar Okay, let’s move on to that complicated relationship that you’ve just alluded to, Zoë. The latest fatal shooting of a peaceful protester by border force officers in Minnesota has caused a huge amount of anger and it actually seems to be having an impact on ICE operations in the state.

Coco Khan There’s been endless tribute to the victim, an ICU nurse called Alex Pretti. His family called him a kind-hearted soul, a hero and a good man.

Nish Kumar Video of what happened has been analyzed in great detail. He was carrying a licensed gun, which is legal in Minnesota. The gun was holstered when he was pulled to the ground by officers. He was quickly disarmed and had apparently been struck several times when he was fired on. It’s possible to hear 10 shots fired in five seconds.

Coco Khan Now, initially, Trump advisers, like Stephen Miller, accused Pretti of being a domestic terrorist and said that he’d brandished a gun. But the video evidence and public feeling is so strong, they’ve begun to backtrack, saying it’s up to an investigation to show what happened.

Nish Kumar Our colleagues over at Pod Save America have been reporting from Minnesota, and the protesters who are spending hours in sub-zero temperatures are absolutely incredible.

Jon Lovett What have you been shouting at the passing ICE cars when they’re going into the Whipple facility there?

Protesters Oh just that they’ve got tiny little winkies and small penises because I’m assuming that’s why they hide their face.

Jon Lovett Do you think that’s why they’re hiding their faces?

Protesters I think so. Yeah. They’re attacking our town. It’s an occupation. They’re killing people. They are taking our kids.

Nish Kumar That woman is wearing, for the benefit of people listening to the podcast, a jacket that says grannies against ICE. It’s extraordinary.

Coco Khan Back here, Nigel Farage said it looks like ICE have gone way over the top, but, and there’s always a but with Nigel, he added, if you’re going to a protest, you don’t carry a gun even if it’s an open carry state.

Nish Kumar Ah fuck off. Like I just like every time that man opens his mouth, just absolute nonsense at London Mayor Sadiq Khan has warned recently that we might see a UK ice operating here if reform wins the next election. We obviously already have a border force which does carry out raids and deportations.

Coco Khan So, was reform London mayoral hopeful Leila Cunningham referencing ice with this promotional post? So for listeners, it’s a bit of a surreal picture. It’s an AI image of Leila holding hands with a penguin walking along a frozen Thames. What does it mean? What does this mean? The text says choose a new path for London. In the distance, Tower Bridge is encased in ice. It looks like there’s some sort of mountain. In East London. It is actually a carbon copy of the Trump meme about Greenland with the penguin exported from the South Pole. Lots to take in here.

Nish Kumar Tell me, you’re a political journalist, you are an expert in political messaging, so what the fuck is happening here?

Zoë Grünewald So I actually, I’ve looked into this a bit, so you’re right that it’s a copy of this Trump meme. But this Trump meme was a copy a TikTok, which copied a Werner Herzog film. He’s a documentary filmmaker in the early 2000s. He had this clip of this penguin walking on the ice. The penguin was explicitly suicidal. This has become like a nihilist meme that has been used. It was originally used because it was like, you know, this penguin walking into certain death. The American right actually decided that that wasn’t really what this penguin was. Actually, he was a base national hero. They’ve all said now the penguin is actually used to mean don’t follow the herd, reject.

Nish Kumar Right, sure, sure.

Zoë Grünewald Immigration, embrace destiny, and that’s why Layla Cunningham has ripped it. But if you actually follow it back to its origins, she’s basically saying, follow reform into certain death, which I think is quite the statement. And I’m no political comms expert, but would I?

Coco Khan Go for that? All of this just makes me return back to this feeling about some people do need an arts education. Genuinely. How you watch Werner Herzog and you come out to, I don’t know. I just feel like, you know, we quite often make jokes about like, Rishi Sunak as a big Star Wars fan, but clearly doesn’t get a lot of the subject. Someone needs to go back and be like, what does Werner say about reform using this? Was that good? I thought that was really good. Thank you. All right. Thanks. It’s great.

Nish Kumar Coming back to ICE and immigration controversies, in some ways ICE’s tentacles are, bizarrely, already in Britain because concerns are mounting over links between ICE and Palantir. That’s a US tech firm founded by Peter Thiel, which has a seven-year contract to link and manage NHS patient data.

Coco Khan Currently, US immigration agents are using a Palantir app to pinpoint people for deportation, and they are using addresses from medical records to do it. It’s a chilling prospect for the NHS.

Nish Kumar Last year, the BMA passed a formal resolution calling for the Palantir NHS contract to be canceled, saying it, quote, threatens to undermine public trust in NHS data systems. It’s unclear how sensitive patient data would be processed.

Coco Khan Fortunately, Palantir’s NHS contract is up for renewal in 2027, so the government could end it then. This week, Green Party leader Zack Polanski put Palantir on notice.

Zack Polanski And we say very clearly that Honor NHS must stay in public hands and a huge corporation, a military surveillance corporation that is looking to create further ties with ICE in America that shot Renee Good in cold blood in daylight. The idea that they would be involved further in our National Health Service is unthinkable.

Nish Kumar Not only that, the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights identified Palantir as complicit in war crimes and, quote, profiting from genocide in Gaza. In January 2024, Palantyr signed a deal with the IDF to increase what it called its Advanced Technology Provision.

Coco Khan There is something you can do about this. The Good Law Project has a tool where you can email your local NHS Trust to find out if they’re using Palantir and to object to it.

Nish Kumar After the break are all the Tory MPs jumping ship to reform, really making it more electable and what will the King of the North do next?

Coco Khan [AD]

Coco Khan OK, Nish, so at the risk of sounding like a bad Christmas cracker, when is the Reform Party not the Reform party? I think our listeners probably have guessed, but just to be clear, this is because on Monday, Suella Braverman became the latest Tory to join Nigel Farage’s gang. Here she is being unveiled at the launch of Veterans for Reform.

Clip Britain is indeed broken. She is suffering. She is not well.

Nish Kumar You know, I know that we talk about variations of this every single time one of the conservatives jump ship to reform, but my God, it is incredible. Whenever they give a speech, the speech essentially can be boiled down to, this country is destroyed, someone has destroyed it, that it needs to be saved. Choose me a person who. Was at the heart of the government that has largely been running this country for the last decade and a half. Like it is unbelievable how bad they make this country sound and how able they are to ignore the fact that they have been integral in causing the problems that afflict this country.

Zoë Grünewald It is like, someone’s broken this country, and as soon as we find them, it’s like, well, maybe you found them.

Coco Khan Don’t they all softly believe in this great replacement theory that the migrants are going to replace the indigenous whites? Well, I’m sorry to tell you that the Tories are going to replace indigenous reformers very, very soon.

Nish Kumar They hate people moving from one place to another. No, they really do. These conservatives coming over here taking our jobs. Suella Braverman didn’t even have the decency to turn up in like a Groucho Marks glasses and mustache disguise. Hello, my name is Suello Bravawoman.

Zoë Grünewald My favorite bit is that she said, I feel like I’ve come home. If I were Nigel Farage I’d be like, we didn’t, did we not tell her to take that bit out of the speech? That’s not what you’re supposed to say. You’re supposed say, I love this new place I’ve never been to before. It’s so different from the previous place.

Nish Kumar Reform now has more formatory MPs than people who were in the Reform Party at the last election. Of all the Tories to defect to Reform, Zoë, surely, Suella Bravaman is the least surprising. Can I ask you something, honestly, is this actually good for Reform? The last 10 years there’s largely been people saying, this is the end of Nigel Farage’s political career, this a really bad move, and then he becomes even more successful. What am I not seeing here? Because from my perspective, I’m looking at this and thinking, well, he’s just, I mean, it’s just becoming the Conservative Party. It’s just becoming the party that was absolutely resoundingly voted out with huge numbers at the last election. But what am I missing here? Why is this good?

Zoë Grünewald No, I think you’re absolutely right. This is supposed to be a anti-establishment disruptor party that is literally filling itself with the people. It says, formed the establishment that broke the country. It’s completely undermining. I think at the minute, when we’re quite far out from an election, it just gives the party that sense of momentum, that people are turning away from the Conservative Party, the Conservative party is dead, reform is the new kid on the block. But I think as we get closer to election, a time where, you know, if reform is still on the up, if it’s still up in the polls, I think this is going to become problematic, not just because of the perception of what reform means, but also because Nigel Farage is filling his ranks with extremely ambitious career politicians, right? So you think

Nish Kumar I haven’t even thought about that.

Zoë Grünewald If you think about it, Robert Jenrick thought himself the next Tory leader. To get him over to reform is quite the coup, except what did Nigel Farage offer Robert Jenrick to make that jump? He won’t have just come in as a willing MP. He will have a ministerial, a high level ministerial position in mind in a reform government. But there are other people in reform who want a high-level ministerial government position. There are lots of egos in Reform UK. And if you think this is also a party that has formed its culture. Around X, for example. They don’t do things politely behind the scenes. There are lots of egos, there’s lots of bad temperedness, there are lots of public shows of consternation whatever. I think things could start to descend very, very quickly into acrimony. I can imagine there being lots of pubic spats about power grabs, about do we really want someone like Robert Jenrick. Becoming Chancellor or Home Secretary when he’s got the fingerprints of all the mess of the previous government behind him. So I think this is going to be very, very difficult for Nigel Farage to control. And you have to remember, Nigel farage is not very good at people management. So juggling all these egos, I mean, Layla Cunningham said of Jenrick, she didn’t want Robert Jenrick in the party when she was asked just a few days before he joined. In my opinion, this could explode. I mean, what were her reasons? Because he had the failures of the previous Tory government, you know, because he oversaw the immigration system that they view as having failed. And Suella Braverman is another example of that. She has a lot to answer for in Reform’s view when it comes to the failures of the previously conservative government, but I’m sure she thinks she is well-deserving of a senior position in a Reform government. There are lots of people circling Reform OK. GB news presenters, you know, commentators who think maybe I could have a shot in a referendum.

Nish Kumar I mean, I’m sure there’s a few monkeys throwing their shit at people who are watching them in a zoo thinking, oh, I could have a go at one of these reform seeds.

Coco Khan I don’t know. I mean, you know, think about how many times we spoke about Suela Brotherman on this podcast. She is synonymous with cruelty, particularly at foreigners. I think there’s loads of people who will like that, who want essentially people who aren’t nasty to foreigners. And then obviously they can say, well, they have governmental experience. I don’t know. I think it might be a stronger the moves than we think.

Zoë Grünewald I don’t disagree with you and I think it actually tells you something about how reform views its own appeal. You know, this is a party that defines itself, not really in what it’s offering the country. I mean, I can’t really think of what reforms flagship policies are apart from just being very, very heavily anti-immigration. The flagship policy is get them out. But there’s no vision of what it wants Britain to be. This is a part that just defines itself by grievance and in opposition to things. And I think kicking the Conservative party is a key part of that. It wants to destroy, it wants to destroy the Conservative Party. And so every time it gets figures over from the Conservative Party saying the Conservative party is dead, you know, give it a good kicking, that plays in to those voters who say, do you know what? I want to just, you know, destroy things. I’m not happy. I want to destroy things too. I want to put a boot into the establishment. And I think that’s why there is some appeal to this. And one of the things I would say is I found it very interesting. I don’t know if you saw the Conservative press release after Suella Braverman’s defection, where they… They were pretty unpleasant. They said, it was always a matter of where, not if, Suella would defect. The Conservatives did all we could to look after Suella’s mental health, but she was clearly very unhappy, which is an extremely low blow, very unpleasant. I think this shows you how nasty politics is getting because the Conservatives almost want to play into that. We can be cruel and unpleasant too. If that’s what voters are looking for, we can do that.

Nish Kumar Government by trolling, which takes us on to the Gortland-Denton by-election. So on Tuesday, as Zoë’s already alluded to, GB News presenter Matt Goodwin was unveiled as the reform candidate for this by- election. Matt Goodwine is a deeply unpleasant character who said a number of inflammatory things and I think most notably in 2025 after a train stabbing in Cambridgeshire, Goodwin posted that mass uncontrolled immigration was to blame. When someone responded that the suspect was born in the UK. Goodwin replied, so we’re all 77 bombers. It takes more than a piece of paper to make somebody British. And he has this week when questioned stood by those remarks. It’s unclear who Matt Goodwin believes is the ultimate arbiter of Britishness, but it seems to be himself. I do genuinely believe there has been in the kind of last decade, a regression in this country’s conversation about race and somebody having those views standing as a candidate right now. Is pretty uncomplicated evidence that this country is being dragged backwards and I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, racism is a deeply unpleasant illness that afflicts a society, right? And it’s something that personally affects a lot of us on a day to day basis, but it is also a superb distraction. If white British people throw their lot behind these races, they will find very quickly that they have absolutely no interest in improving the lives of the working class people of this country. They are standing up for vested interests and they are hiding behind a cloak of prejudice. Elsewhere in this by-election, which is amazing how central it’s become to the news in this country at the moment right now, Andy Burnham, the Labour mayor of Manchester, otherwise known as the King of the North, threw his hat into the ring, with many speculating that this could be the start of his path to number 10.

Coco Khan Right, except a day later, Labour’s National Executive Committee voted 8-1 to block Andy Burnham from standing. So Zoë, as we understand it, Starmer led the charge against Burnham’s candidacy. Was it a good thing to do?

Zoë Grünewald Well, look, there are people who are going to say that Starmer had a difficult decision to make either way, because on the one hand, if he had allowed Burnham’s candidacy, it would have cost Greater Manchester an awful amount, millions, to hold a new election. That it risked the Labour Party’s stability if there was a leadership election. There can be a seat for Burnham at the next election if he wants it, but it’s better for to see his mayoralty through, all those kind of things, except… You need to think of this decision in context, which is that Keir Starmer has been constantly plagued with accusations of ruthless control over the party for his own and the people around him’s sake, and not for the good of the party or the good the country. And I think whatever the rules are about, you know, abandoning your malty halfway through, the optics of this are terrible. You know, Andy Burnham is a popular, autonomous figure. He has a track record of delivering for the people of Manchester. He has experience in government. Equally, local members were cut out of the decision. Andy Burnham has public trust, he’s widely liked, which if you’re looking at Labour MPs or Labour politicians, there aren’t many of them that are widely liked. So it’s not good for Keir Starmer, I think it makes him look weak. It makes him like he’s putting his own interests above that of the party. Now I was talking to MPs over the past few days, they’re not saying if Keir starmer goes, they’re saying when he goes.

Coco Khan Mmm.

Zoë Grünewald The thing they’re all waiting for is a viable candidate and a handover that looks coordinated and friendly, rather than like a coup. And I think a lot of people thought that Burnham was their best bet of doing this. At least they’d get someone in who was widely liked, who they think could take the fight to reform. Kirstam has cut that off at the knees. And I this is going to happen, whether we like it or not, Keir Starmer’s going to go. Now we don’t know who the candidate is or when it’s going to happened. At this moment in time.

Coco Khan I’m not really sure how I feel about it, but I, this is a very small sample size, but when the news broke that Burnham was putting himself forward, I received a few messages about it from my friend who tentatively felt excited. And that’s quite a rare feeling, I think, for people who have voted Labour, who tended to, well, certainly in my friendship group, those who did it, did it sort of crying at the ballot box. And, and that feeling of something getting better. I just wonder if that can be found any other way outside of Andy Burnham.

Zoë Grünewald Okay, so there’s been a bit of chatter about Angela Rayner since Burnham has been blocked. Because this is all about trying to field a candidate for the soft left. And I think the reason why we’re talking about that a lot is because I think that the thing that feels like it’s missing from the Starmer government, I mean, there’s a lot of things missing, but in terms of policy is those kind of soft left Labour values, redistribution, returning to progressive instincts over things like immigration. And I think. Now, people are trying to find a candidate to coalesce around, and there is definitely a raft of MPs who would like to keep West Streeting out, so they want to find us off left and be able to do that. Angela Rayner is coming back in the fray as a potential. She’s got the year of the unions, she’s strong, she is a good communicator, she has done a lot of the good, sort of more progressive stuff of this government, like the Workers’ Rights Bill. Thank you very much.

Coco Khan This week as well we had the news that ground rent is to be capped at $2.50 a year, that is her do-

Zoë Grünewald So she’s got a lot of things that I think under her belt that she can point to. The question is whether she wants it. She got so much stick. Well, she consistently had so much stick from the media about her personal affairs. She still is waiting for the outcome of this HMRC investigation into her tax affairs. So she might not want to throw her hat in the ring before that. But you know, her name is definitely floating around and you get the impression that she wouldn’t totally be opposed to it. The other name is Ed Miliband. He’s got a lot of support by party members. Yes, lots of support from party members, I know, in a big way. In a big way.

Coco Khan Look, I watch EastEnders as much as the next guy, but just bringing back characters from the past. I think this… Just let me know in the comments below.

Zoë Grünewald This is the thing, right? And when you talk about Andy Burnham, I think it’s really easy to kind of canonize him. But he served in many governments. I mean, there’s that joke and I’m not going to repeat it because journalists always get a lot of stick for repeating it about a Brownite, a Blairite and a Corbynite walk into a bar and it’s Andy Burnam. I did repeat it, but it’s this thing of, okay, he can be a bit of a chameleon. Is he really this new fresh blood that the Labour Party needs?

Nish Kumar The Green Party is sort of flanking Labour from the left, and I saw a story last week that polling data suggests that they’re now the most popular party with under 30s. And so Andy Burnham, as you said, has been seen as something of a political chameleon within the Labour Party. He was a Blairite, he voted for the Iraq War. In 2020 he voted for Starmer and said that, this is a quote directly, Keir is a brilliant man. What does it say about where the Labour Party’s compasses politically, that even Burnham is being sidelined because this is a really soft left figure. It’s the Labour Party situating itself in a political space that really appeals to a group of technocratic MPs and also people that have newspaper columns. But actually, when you look at the way the country’s going in terms of all of the polling data that’s available to us. There’s a lot of younger people skewing left. The center-right appears to have disappeared and seems to have been eaten by reform, and now the Conservative Party are essentially just aping reform’s tactics by saying we’ll be even tougher on immigration and making wisecracks about people’s mental health. Am I reading too much into this, or is the Labour Party currently trying to situate itself in a political space that does not have much cut through with the general public?

Zoë Grünewald No, I think you’re right. I think this reads as, and I think it’s fair to interpret as, the leadership almost locking themselves in the bunker, right? There is a real fear of a loss of control going on. And I think the question that a lot of Labour MPs are going to be asking is, what is that control for if you’re not putting that power that you’ve hoarded to good use? Where’s the vision? Where is the using your majority for real structural change. You know, you can argue about the ideology or… Whether the party should sit more left or more right or whatever. I think a lot of the frustration is there is just no vision, you’re right, it’s a lot of technocratic tweaks and a lot top-down party management. But to what end? If we’re not actually doing anything consequential, what’s the point of having this iron grip on the party? And I think the reason people wanted Burnham in, and there was a strong argument for bringing Burnham and giving him a cabinet position, like David Cameron did with Boris Johnson, where obviously it didn’t. Stop him from becoming Prime Minister and ruining the country. But it did kind of keep him a bit silent for a while. It’s that you could have a cabinet of all talents and you could show that you want someone who has vision and experience in there. And the fact that Keir Starmer has cut that off, I think is making people say, what is the Labour Party for? What are we doing here?

Coco Khan It’s so banal isn’t it, because the classic thing to happen when there’s a really important by-election is that the leader of the party comes down and on this occasion I think they might be saying, Mr Starmer please stay away, that would be best.

Nish Kumar Is Andy Burnham available?

Zoë Grünewald Yeah, you might have some business in China that time.

Coco Khan Finally though, we have some very good news this week!

Nish Kumar Genuinely good news, genuinely good news.

Coco Khan Renewables are outpacing fossil fuels for electricity production for the first time in the EU. And this follows an earlier report in pretty much the same thing for UK renewables. This is a huge deal. On roughly a third of days in 2025, renewables generated at least half of Britain’s electricity. So that’s according to a BBC analysis of the data. But the grid does still sometimes rely heavily on fossil fuels. 27% of electricity in 2025 was generated from gas and that’s up from 2024.

Nish Kumar Every week, my friend Brett Goldstein listens to this podcast when he’s not busy winning Emmys. And every week he says, I’m going to listen to the Nish makes me want to kill myself. And he was like, is there any good news that you can ever offer me, or is this all terrible? This is a Brett Goldstein moment for you, Brett. It’s not all bad by a quite small percentage.

Coco Khan It’s only by twenty-nine percent.

Nish Kumar Into renewables making up more of the grid in the EU and the UK. This is genuinely good news and should be celebrated.

Coco Khan Now, after the break, our children with special educational needs at risk of being failed in the upcoming school’s white paper. So look, special needs education in England is at breaking point. Parents are battling to get their children the support they need and costs are spiraling out of control. Everyone agrees something needs to be done, but will the government get it right?

Nish Kumar Major overhaul of the Special Educational Needs and Disabilities, or CEND, system is set to be announced next month in a highly anticipated school’s white paper. But Save Our Children’s Rights, a new cross-party national campaign, is concerned that the reported leaked plans suggest potentially severe cuts to children’s rights.

Coco Khan Earlier this week, I caught up with Rachel Filmer, one of the prime movers of the campaign, who is the parent of twins who are autistic and nonverbal, alongside Carrie Grant, TV presenter and voice coach of Fame Academy and Pop Idol Fame. She has four children, all with additional needs. Now before we begin, I just want to say a massive thank you to everyone, teachers and parents who shared their stories with us. We couldn’t include them all, but they very, very much informed this discussion. Now we hear over and over again that the send system is in crisis, but what does that mean for parents and children on a day-to-day basis? So I started by asking Carrie and Rachel about their experiences.

Carrie Grant The first thing to say is that as a mum, I think the majority of parents and mums want to just do their kids the normal way. And bit by bit, across four children, we began to see that life was going to be a little different. Now, that didn’t really show up before school. So they were quite happy at home. But when they started going to school, particularly our second child, we really began to see there was an issue. And the school. Did have a little bit of training, but not nearly enough. And so bit by bit, that child began to withdraw. Even though they were hitting educational targets, they would be getting home and you could see a seven-year-old depressed. You know, and I know that there are people that are gonna listen to this, they go, how can a seven year old be depressed? Well, they can. Till you’ve dealt with it, you don’t know. But once you’re dealing with it you feel like you’re on a different planet. So every day is a fight. Every day is battle. Because my child was refusing to go to school and I was so terrified of the attendance officer that I thought, my gosh, you’re gonna go to schools so I just need to shout a bit louder. And of course that didn’t work. All of our children have struggled with school. So it raises the question is, how can schools cope with and deal with and cater for children who are different?

Coco Khan There was something you said that I just wanted to come back to. You said, I was scared of the attendance officer. I can understand that as a parent, there’s probably a lack of support, but then there’s one thing to have lack of supporters. Another thing to be antagonized, to actively be criticized. Is that an experience?

Carrie Grant That’s an understatement. Parents are absolutely gas lit at every step and every stage. And I’m quite rejection sensitive. So I was like, I’m going to be really obedient. I’m also autistic. So like, I’m gonna make sure I line up everything and everyone does what they’re meant to do and they’ll all get to school and it will be joyful. And it wasn’t. And but the hardest thing was that my biggest battle was actually with the system and not with kids. My kids, it’s been a learning journey, but I learned. Once, you know, a child went onto suicide watch, I was just like, I need to jump ship. I can’t do this anymore. I need find a new way of parenting. And once I did that, I began to flourish as a parent. My kids began incrementally to change and we began to see changes. And then, you now, of course, loads of parents, including us, will have had a social services investigation. My goodness me. That’s quite normal. We like brush this stuff off like it’s like, yeah, I had to deal with one of those. They’ve taken it to tribunal, your case, yeah, we’ve had one of those. Your child’s been out of school for three years and now you’re a full-time carer, yeah. We’ve done that. Oh, your child’s on suicide watch, yeah? Every parent, we’re talking about thousands of parents in this country that have the same story.

Coco Khan Rachel, let me bring you in, not just as a parent, but also, you know, being part of this campaign, I’m sure you’ve heard countless stories and it’s with, I was saying to Carrie before we started this interview, you, know, I became a parent myself, my child is not even one. And I really realize how absolutely everything, making breakfast, leaving the house has now become a tenfold massive experience and it takes so much time and headspace and I, you know, grind you down. Now you add onto that a child with. Uh, special educational needs or a disability, I can’t, I cannot even imagine then obviously then add onto that the state treating you like you’re a criminal or a negligent or feckless. It is absolutely shocking. I, I wonder if there’s any stories that stand out to you from your own life or from the campaign that really bring home this, just the frequency and the.

Rachel Filmer The nonstop-ness of it. My twins are nine now, but it became clear that they had quite significant needs when they were babies. And so we have had quite a different experience from Carrie’s family and you hear there were all these different types of experience based on the level of need that your child has. So nobody can deny for a second that my children have very significant needs. They can’t talk when they were two. I didn’t know anything about send autism this system and you literally nothing. And I thought, well, it’s obvious that they’re really quite disabled. And so this should be quite straightforward. Here’s the law. What? Easy, right? So I applied for EHCPs for them. Well, EHCP is just for the layman listeners. Education, health and care plans are legal documents, which set out a child’s needs, the provision that’s required to meet those needs and then outcomes that they can achieve if that provision is given to them. And also which school or setting that they will attend. So you can apply for it yourself. Most requests come from schools who have pupils that they can’t support well enough. And so they make a request for this plan, but parents can apply too. And at that point, my boys were in nursery, so I just did it myself. And I could see them ignoring the law. The law is very, very clear. It says things like, professional advice must be very specific and quantified. It must say exactly what is required, but then the reports came back very vague and it said things like, oh, they need access to books, sharing books with an adult. And I thought, well, I think every child needs that. That’s not really provision. And I kept saying to them, hang on a minute, doesn’t the law say this? And they would just ignore the question like I hadn’t asked it. I just thought like, am I going a bit… Bit mad here. And in the end, they were saying they wanted to send one of my twins to mainstream and want a specialist. And I said, he’s never going to survive in a mainstream school. And then they said, oh, well, in that case, the only places we’ve got are in a school for profound and multiple learning disabilities, like the most severe category of disability. And I say, well they don’t have that either. That doesn’t make any sense. So I ended having to go to Tribunal in 2020. I go to this hearing completely unrepresented, up against this barrister. And after a day and a half, they were like, yeah, okay, we give up, we concede. You can just have the school place. So we lost nearly a year of specialist education and therapies and all the things that they needed at their most formative age. Yes. When it could have had the most impact. I, you know, I was on sedatives with my GP. I was so stressed and anxious and it was COVID. So their nursery was closed and I was taking SendLaw courses on the internet at night just to try and get through this because I thought they were going to rip me apart. I thought, they must know something I don’t. And of course, it’s only later that I found out that parents win or not win because you don’t win anything. You just get what you need, but parents are successful. In almost 99% of tribunals, and they use it as a delaying tactic. It’s cheaper for them to take me to court than to give my children what they need for that year while you’re waiting for the court date. Yes, kicking the can down the road.

Coco Khan I assume there will be parents who cannot go through with that level of stress and that’s the tactic, right? Is to grind them down and hopefully give up.

Rachel Filmer I know people who’ve been through seven, eight, nine tribunals for their child. Oh my God. It breaks you.

Coco Khan The spending by local authorities, the number that’s being projected is 14 billion by 2028 and the IFS are saying, you know, this is scary, it’s a big crunch moment. How did this happen? How has this number got?

Rachel Filmer And so big. Back in 2014, they changed the law, the Children and Families Act was brought in. And at that point, it’s a fantastic piece of legislation. It really is in children’s best interest and it should work very well. But they extended the scope of these plans. So statements previously were for five to 18 year olds, but they extended it so that it was for naught to 25 year olds. But, they didn’t increase the funding or sources, too. Support that extra capacity. Right from the start, it was on a downhill slope. Previously, schools could support children with lower levels of need in a mainstream school, in a standard classroom. They could buy in some speech and language therapy time, they could bring in an educational psychologist, they can make straightforward provision for some children. But that gradually was eroded as all of the funding and the resources. Going towards these statutory plans that have to happen. So then more parents were in a position where their only option to get any help was to apply for an EHCP for a statutory plan, and so the numbers have just gradually gone up and every year it’s been a spiral. It’s like a vicious circle. You can’t get the help without a plan, so you have to apply for a plan. And then there are more children with plans which cost more money, so then there’s less money to help the children who don’t have a plan and it just goes round and forever.

Coco Khan I am not an economist, but I find it bananas that there’s not more discussion about how money invested in children generally is some of the best investments you can make out there. Let’s just go back to the EHCPs. So around 640,000 children have them. As you described here, they’re absolutely vital and it’s not as clear cut as you have them or you don’t. Know, this kind of gradations within that. Nonetheless, there is a reform that’s being floated, which is that these plans will only be reserved for children with the most severe and complex needs. I know it’s sort of hard, as parents who have experienced what you have, to imagine why anyone would think this is a good idea, but for the sake of argument, what is the government’s thinking on this?

Rachel Filmer Think it will be cheaper, at least in the short term. I mean, EHCPs do cost money. You have to administrate them, you have to get children assessed, but once they’ve been assessed the first time, often they’re not reassessed by professionals for years, sometimes ever. So the real cost of an EHCP is in the provision, in the help that you give to a child. So the only reason to take that legal right away is if you don’t want to fund that support anymore. And what you’ve said is absolutely correct. If you fail children, it does cost you more money long-term, but no one’s ever looking long- term. They’re always looking at the next five years, the next election. So they’re thinking we can make it look like we’ve saved a lot of money here. And by the next selection, we’re not really going to see the extent of the fallout probably. It will take a bit longer than that. And a lot the things that this government has been very focused on, you know, the number of children and young people who are out of work. And or not in education training or employment, the number of young people on disability benefits. This is very directly linked to how much support they get in education. And for some children, it’s the difference between them needing one-to-one carers in a residential placement for decades, for the rest of their entire lives, or potentially living in supported housing with carers who pop in, you know, a couple of times a day. The cost difference there, even if you want to just ignore the human element of it completely and just look at costs, that is not a good use of money. All disabled children have a different level of potential that they can reach with the right support. It makes sense to invest in it.

Coco Khan Carrie, let me ask you. I mean, you have four children with additional needs. The health secretary has used the word overdiagnosis. What do you say about this idea that there is simply a limited number of people that are neurodiverse? And if it goes over that number, well, it must be overdiagnosis.

Carrie Grant Interesting. For the last 14 years, I’ve run a parent support group for over 300 families and we see patterns. You start to see patterns in those groups. I think what worries me is those children whose presentation is a little bit more subtle, but the needs are still profound and they become profound if their needs are not met. There’s certainly not any overdiagnosis, I don’t think. I think if anything, we’re underdiagnosing.

Coco Khan I do want to go back to what the announcements have been. So the Department of Education’s promised three billion in creating 600,000 places for children with send in mainstream schools and 200 million pounds of funding in a package to make all teachers send teachers. Are these reforms welcome? It’s a little.

Rachel Filmer Complex, I think obviously mainstream schools should be as inclusive as they can possibly be. If a child can access a mainstream education with some additional support, then that is what should happen. The problem is that it’s kind of being presented as an instead of to specialist education. At the same time that they announced that plan, they also announced that they were pulling the very long list of planned specialist schools across the country that have been in the works, some of them for up to three years, local authorities had been waiting for these schools to be properly funded and built and now they’re not going to happen. And as for the training, obviously welcome, it’s kind of baffling that it doesn’t already happen, but what is coming out of the government at the moment seems to be suggesting that schools are going to be given significantly more responsibility for not just understanding SEND, but for identifying it, for deciding what help children get, what level of help they get. And this amount of money, this amount of training, it’s not going to equip teachers to do that. And I’ve spoken to so many teachers in the last few weeks who’ve just said, I’m not qualified for this. I can’t do this effectively. And that’s before you even get to what I think is one of the biggest problems with the mainstream inclusion plan. And that is conflicting needs of children. So if you think about all of the disabled children that live within a three mile radius of your nearest mainstream school, you’ll have autistic ADHD, you’ll also have physical disabilities, visual impairments, hearing impairments. Medical needs. And this money is to go towards, it’s capital money, so it’s to go toward building units, building additional rooms, it’s not to staff them or provide that. So they’re gonna have what? A couple of additional rooms to house all of the disabled children from the local area. So potentially four to 12 year olds with any possible disability and teachers are expected to manage that, the logistics of it do not work.

Carrie Grant I think Rachel said it so well, is that a child that hasn’t been educated to flourish will end up much more dependent on the state. And that is down to finances, and it’s also down to attitudes toward inclusion. You know, everyone has something to offer this world, everybody, every child matters. But if we are teaching children to be even more disabled… We’re not going to produce that. We’re not gonna produce children who feel purposeful and happy and feel like they can take their place in society.

Coco Khan Okay, let’s try and round this off with some hope. I think we need it. What are some good ideas? I think I always like to return to good ideas because even if they haven’t been implemented, the fact that we have them, that we know what works is we’re not waiting for something to be invented. We have systems that we could be rolling out and that always makes me feel a little bit better. So I wonder what have you seen that could solve the send emergency?

Rachel Filmer Right help as early as possible is the best thing that we can do both for children, for schools, and for the economy. Making mainstreams genuinely more inclusive will help many children and young people. But again, it can’t be a tokenistic effort. It has to actually be what they need. I think that’s what this white paper really, really comes down to.

Carrie Grant Normal is an ideology. I’d like to just challenge that. I would like people to challenge what it means to be normal, because I think when we do that, we begin to understand the brilliance of colors that are around us and what’s going on. And it becomes an incredible space, an incredible space where there’s all kinds of people that have so much to offer that we’re missing out on, because we’re married to the ideology of normal. And for me, that meant I to jump ship. I had to jumpship on water. Being that normal parent is. So I think it’s the DFE’s job to work out how do we do education outside of normal. And then some of us have more profound needs, some of have less leads, but the needs. But what I hate is just the way that society right now is disabling us further. And education is not helping our children. The idea that your children were happy before they went to school and school ruined them. That shouldn’t be the way. With lovely teachers who’ve got lovely ideals and ideas about working with your kids. It should not be happening.

Rachel Filmer One of the biggest issues for me is that, you know, this is a very vulnerable group of people and these rights are very hard one. And, um, I find it concerning that the wider public isn’t more troubled by just the idea that we might start stripping legal rights away from some of the most vulnerable children in our country. And I appreciate it doesn’t affect everybody, but it could affect any, any of you, you, know, whether you have children or not. It will affect children in their class. If you do have children, it might affect your child in the future, even if they’re not currently disabled, disability can be acquired or needs can become more apparent as time goes on. What other rights are people willing to give up in the name of saving some money? And there is really no other part of society where we look at legal rights, you know, not maternity, not employment, not finance or anything. And we say, actually, those rights are just costing us too much money. We should get rid of them. We need to all sit back and think what are our rights worth to us really and which of my rights will they come after if they take these away and there isn’t a strong response to it. But I think there will be a very strong response if they go that way.

Coco Khan Carrie and Rachel, thank you so much for joining me on Pod Save the UK.

Nish Kumar And that’s it. Thank you so much to Zoë. And thanks to you for listening to Pod Save the UK. Don’t forget to follow us on at Pod Save UK on Instagram, TikTok, X and Blue Sky.

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

Nish Kumar Thanks to lead producer May Robson and digital producer Jacob Liebenberg.

Coco Khan Our theme music is by Vasilis Fotopoulos.

Nish Kumar Our engineer is Dana Ruka and our social media producer is Nada Smilinic.

Coco Khan The executive producers are Kate Fitzsimmons and Katie Long, 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.