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Coffee House Shots

Are citizens' assemblies the future?

Coffee House Shots

The Spectator

News, Daily News, Politics

4.42.2K Ratings

🗓️ 19 February 2024

⏱️ 13 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In the Times today is the latest instalment of Tom Baldwin's authorised biography of Keir Starmer. It includes reports that Labour chief of staff Sue Gray has been drawing up plans for so-called citizens' assemblies. Are citizens' juries the future of democracy? Or is this simply a way for Starmer to avoid making policy decisions? 

Elsewhere there is some interesting polling out from the think tank Labour Together, warning that Labour should not get complacent despite their huge poll lead and recent by-election success. This is due to the large 'don't know' vote share and the possibility that the Reform vote could be squeezed at a general election. What would happen if the Reform vote collapses?

James Heale speaks to Katy Balls and Fraser Nelson. 

Produced by Oscar Edmondson. 

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Transcript

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0:00.0

This episode is sponsored by Canacord Genuity Wealth Management,

0:03.6

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0:08.0

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0:10.0

It's navigating today for a brighter tomorrow.

0:13.3

Visit can do wealth.com.

0:19.6

Hello and welcome to coffee house shots.

0:21.3

I'm James Hill.

0:22.0

I'm joined today by Katie

0:23.2

Wars and Fraser Nelson. Now Katie in the times today there's the latest serialization

0:27.6

of the ongoing Tom Baldwin book about Kiastama and there's a report that

0:32.0

Sue Gray has been drawing up plans for so-called

0:34.8

Citizens Assembly. Tell us more. So what's quite interesting in this book which

0:39.2

has received a lot of access from the stama machine, largely because it was originally meant to be stama's own book with Tom Baldwin, former Ed Miliband Spinner as a ghost writer.

0:50.0

Kia stama eventually realized he was too busy, slash it might be a little bit complacent to have the big biography that he penned himself ahead of a general election.

1:00.0

So in the end what happened was Tom Baldwin has written a book as a biography but an authorized biography effectively

1:06.6

and there's been lots of serializations. I think the most probably interesting part of it so far is I think more details of

1:13.9

Kirstammer's childhood his difficult relationship with his father and problems

1:18.7

growing up but it also has various interviews with key stammer figures so for example Tom Baldwin speaks to Kistama but he also has the first on the record interview from Sue Gray since she has taken on the role of Chief of Staff and she has an on-the-record denial of claims

1:35.5

that she was once a spy saying that is not the case because there are lots of

1:40.6

things saying she'd had this pub where she'd been working to get information on the Irish side of things.

1:47.0

In terms of what her interview tells us about what to expect from a labour government. She has been talking about citizens

1:54.8

juries as something that labor would do in government, so plans to bypass Whitehall

...

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