This is a passenger announcement. You can now book your train on Uber and get 10% back in credits to spend on Uber eats.

So you can order your own fries instead of eating everyone else's.

Trains, now on Uber. T's and C's apply. Check the Uber app. Hello, I'm Anush.

I'm Anush.

And I'm Stephen.

Alver, our third co-presenter is on holiday.

But on this episode of the New Statesman podcast, The Last of the Year,

we discuss the Christmas Rules U-turn and speak about our

plans for getting through the winter.

So over the weekend the Christmas plans in areas that have been moved into

Tier 4 have been cancelled and the idea of three households in a bubble over those

four days of Christmas has also been

cancelled. So Stephen you were following the U-turn closely and we've had a lot of

questions from our listeners about it. You know some of them are asking about the

timing so the announcement

coinciding with this new strain and how concerned we should be about the new strain. Some are asking

about what it says about Boris Johnson's leadership and some are asking about Kieer-Sdama's response to it.

Is this a case of the government sort of being caught on the backfoot by a new development in the

virus and can we really condemn them for cancelling everyone's plans at such last minute?

Well yes and no right so the identification of the new variant strain which which is more transmissible although of course the thing you

should always remember if you want to be optimistic about these kinds of things

it's also just true right isn't the peak evolutionary state of any virus is to be

...