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

Thank you for tuning in in what is a period where we need to make sense of the extraordinary election results that took place at the end of last week.

And I know a lot of you have been reflecting on them and of course that runcorn

by-election because even though it's been a bank holiday weekend, I've had tons of emails

with your reflections. And some of them really illuminating and fascinating. And I'm going to

focus quite a lot on your questions. I'm going to reflect a bit about the implications for

labour. Obviously, there are implications for a whole range of political parties. And I thought

I'd tell you a bit about what we're going to be doing live at King's Place on Thursday.

And this applies to those of you, too, who can't actually make it to King's Place.

There are a few tickets left because it's streaming live. So you can get hold of a streaming

ticket and join in because in a way, I think what's going to be quite important and interesting,

I mean, of course, our gatherings are always important and interesting, is I think the predictions we make on Thursday night, either on the stream or live at King's Place, will provide quite an interesting arc as we go and delve deep, because in a way, the current state of politics is wildly unpredictable. Many parallels have

been made and some of them are very precise actually with the SDP and the early 80s when

lots of people wondered and in some cases dared to hope that they were going to, to quote,

Roy Jenkins, break the mold of British politics. And certainly in the early months, the

SDP was seen as a possible alternative government and certainly a completely disruptive force in

British politics. And everything felt wild then. But I think our

predictions on Thursday night will guide us to quite an interesting place as to where all this

might lead. That's for Thursday night where we will have the space also to explore.

And by the way, our predictions, I know, notoriously wrong, wherever they're made in Edinburgh,

King's Place, the Great Rope Tackle, Art Centre, wherever.

It doesn't matter on Thursday night.

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