Hello and welcome to rock and roll politics, the podcast with me, Steve Richards.

Thank you very much for tuning in in wherever you are in Britain and around

the entire globe. We've got, as ever, a lot to reflect on. If it's okay with you, I'm going to

focus largely on what remains the most astonishing part of this political world that we're in at the moment, which is the collapse

of the Conservative Party. The week of the Conservative Party conference is underway, and it was

striking in Liverpool last week, political journalists say,

I'm not going to the Conservative Conference.

You know, it's just not worth it.

Whereas the Labour Conference, for all the issues whirling around it, was crammed.

Anyway, a bit on that.

And then we go over to your questions. Some context for the Tory conference.

In our adult lifetimes and members of the Rock and Roll Politics Cooperative are of various ages,

a lot of students listening, and a lot who are slightly older than students. There has been a constant

factor that the Tory party was either ruling Britain, winning elections with their eyes

almost closed. Seventy-nine, it remains staggering this, from 79 to 1997, 18 continuous years of a Conservative Party,

which had moved significantly to the right. In economic policy terms, it was arguably the most

right-wing party in the European Union. Britain was of course

still part of it throughout that time and didn't contemplate leaving. That followed almost as a

consequence of the years in power. And then in 2010, even without winning an overall majority, Cameron got in with the help of

the Liberal Democrats and implemented most of what was again a manifesto of the radical right, a smaller state

and public service reform that linked back to the reforms of Thatcherism, et cetera,

et cetera, and of course, Brexit. In between those times and of course long before that time,

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