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

Thank you so much for tuning in wherever you are.

And what a day Monday was for British politics,

and indeed, if I could be pathetically parochial for a moment,

for the rock and roll politics cooperative,

because the themes that erupted around

the devastating, illuminating report on contaminated blood are the themes that we explore and focus on

our different ways every week virtually on this podcast. And here they come

together, not for the first time, as we've discussed many times before. And one of the reasons why

the podcast is a bit delayed is I wanted to have a chance to look at the report. It's huge and constructed forensically

and in a way that makes the whole thing accumulate in an even more devastating fashion. But as I read it,

not all of it, I hasten to add it, it's over 2,000 pages. And by the way, it's a vindication of

inquiries. Theresa May announced it, and here it is four or five years later, and is a form of

accountability in itself. We'll have to see whether lessons are learnt because we have been through these rituals before of inquiries, a deeply serious House of Commons, a Prime Minister responding, and although there is immediate stuff that then happens, the compensation and so on in this case, will the wider lessons be learned?

That's what I want to explore for a time in this podcast. There are many lessons, obviously,

and I won't sort of summarise parts of the report because you will have read them or heard them or seen them in the news

bulletins where it has rightly been dominating media coverage. And you can guess what I'm

going to say. Clearly, one of the issues that arises from it is accountability. Who is accountable to whom? A theme that's going to arise throughout

the week when Pauline Vennells finally appears in front of the post office inquiry. Some of you will be

listening to this after her appearance, some of you before, but it's a week where

these issues of who is responsible for what, who is finally in control of what erupt around us

again. And it also raises the fascination of where does power lie?

...