Hi, I'm Freddie. I'm Andrew. And I'm Rachel. And this is the New

Statesman's politics podcast. In this episode, we'll be talking about what the

air-rated concrete scandal says about modern Britain.

Hello, I'm Freddie Hayward, political correspondent at the New Statesman

and joining me in the studio, I have Rachel Cunliffe, associate political editor

and Andrew Marr political editor. Rachel, the government's start of the political

terms completely overshadowed by this rack scandal. What's been going on?

Yes, we've all learnt this new acronym, RAC, which stands for reinforced,

auto-claved, air-rated concrete. Can you tell a lot? I practice that.

That's very good. Which looks a bit like the consistency of one of those

arrow chocolate bars. And it was a cheaper form of concrete that was used in the

construction of lots and lots of buildings from the sort of 60s onwards. But in

particular schools, we've known, basically since these buildings were put up,

that it has a safety shelf life of about 30 years, obviously, we're well,

well, well past that. And yet, it seems nothing was done to make these

buildings safe to the point that just before the start of the new school term,

150 schools were told, actually, you can't open, it's not safe or you're going to have to

get builders in or reinforce in some ways. And so we've all become experts in the concrete

industry, but it really, you could not find a more perfect political analogy for the state

of the country after 13 years of conservative government, because this is an issue,

it didn't come out of nowhere. It's not like they were struck by lightning.

This was known about there was money meant to be allocated in various budgets over the last

...