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

This is an emergency edition, a quick reaction to the election

results as they are coming in. There will be much more to reflect on in the coming days,

and we in the Rock and Roll Politics Cooperative will no doubt reflect. So no question time in this

special podcast, but there will be the space for many questions

in the coming days also and many points to be raised. We've also got the live show at King's Place

in the main concert hall on Monday night. There are only a few tickets left. Grab them because by Monday all sorts of things

will probably be happening and we need to get together to make sense of it all. And there are also

streaming tickets for those of you who can't make it into London that evening. So there would be

many ways in which we can explore what's happening in British

politics. What has happened so far, I think, is largely unsurprising. They reflect the state of

the national opinion polls, although those polls are often wrong. The kind of trend in the polls is

rarely wrong, and it's, you know,

reform has been ahead in the opinion polls for a long time. And what we are seeing is a battle over

that word change. It's one of the most potent words in politics when people are feeling pretty miserable

about the state of the country.

When growth is stagnant, people turn to change.

And one of the reasons why Labour and Kyr-Stama are struggling in the way that they are, is a misreading of the potency of that term.

So their manifesto in 2024 had as its title, one word, change.

But they didn't wholly mean it, or didn't dare to wholly mean it. They were too influenced

by how New Labour won in 1997 and misread the nature of that victory too. So there was,

in some respects, a direct attempt at imitation. Even though in 1997, there were

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