Are British institutions really too 'woke'?
The News Agents
Global
4.1 • 5.4K Ratings
🗓️ 22 January 2024
⏱️ 35 minutes
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Summary
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Keir Starmer has accused the Conservative Party of 'desperate, divisive and damaging' politics by picking fights with British instutitions like the National Trust and the RNLI.
The Labour leader has previously stayed clear of the culture wars and stuck on the hard-fought territory of the economy and the new shape of the Labour Party.
But today's speech placed charities and cultural insititutions at the heart of British life as something he was prepared to defend.
Has he given the Tories new amunition? Or found a whole new constituency of voters?
Plus - PopCon - not the fantastic snack but the new Tory group headed up by one Liz Truss. But will the most unpopular British leader of modern history be able to make the Popular Conservatives at all relevant as he gear up to this year's election?
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The Newsagents podcast is brought to you by HSBC UK, opening up a world of opportunity. |
| 0:08.0 | This is a global player original podcast. |
| 0:11.7 | In its desperation to cling on to power at all cost, the Tory party is undertaking a kind of weird McCarthyism, |
| 0:20.3 | trying to find woke agendas in the very civic institutions |
| 0:24.2 | they once regarded with respect. So Kirstama, talking about Senator Joe McCarthy, the McCarthy |
| 0:33.5 | witch hunts that went on in the 1950s to root out communists from all sorts of places |
| 0:39.8 | in American society, the film industry, from government, from wherever else. |
| 0:44.6 | The contention of Stama is that the Tories are pursuing culture wars against all sorts of |
| 0:51.2 | establishment institutions to do the same. |
| 0:54.7 | But is he right? |
| 0:56.0 | This is a real departure for the Labour leader, |
| 0:59.6 | who has run a mile from all the cultural stuff previously. |
| 1:04.0 | And we're going to analyse why he's now running towards it. |
| 1:09.0 | Welcome to the newsagents. |
| 1:18.7 | The Newsagents. It's John. It's Emily. And if you look at how the Labour Party has tried so hard to position itself, really pretty much since Kirstama took over, |
| 1:26.4 | their priorities have been very clear. Kirstama wore the |
| 1:30.2 | t-shirt saying, I'm not Jeremy Corbyn. He wanted to distance himself from the previous Labour |
| 1:35.4 | Leader. And Rachel Reeves wore a T-shirt saying, we will not be stupid with your money. We're |
| 1:41.4 | not out to overspend. And that was pretty much where they wanted to stay. |
| 1:48.0 | They did not take the bait for any of the issues that the Conservative Party, particularly under |
| 1:55.1 | Boris Johnson, I think also under Liz Truss, were throwing at them, whether it was questions about |
| 2:00.6 | statues and slavery, whether it was questions about statues and slavery, |
... |
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