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Rock & Roll Politics with Steve Richards

Episode 10

Rock & Roll Politics with Steve Richards

Podmasters

News, Society & Culture, Politics

4.7909 Ratings

🗓️ 18 July 2018

⏱️ 20 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Reflections on what will not happen in the Brexit saga. There'll be no National Government. There'll be no election. Theresa May's Brexit Plan will not last, but her Plan is a battered shield while the rest of us search for an alternative plan...And the BBC needs some much deeper thinking on what means is to be a publicly funded organisation reporting in wild times.

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Transcript

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0:00.0

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

0:15.0

And today, what else can we reflect on again, I'm afraid, but Brexit?

0:20.4

Because so many themes erupt from Brexit. People's hearts

0:25.2

might sink when the word is mentioned, but it invites reflections on many other things. So, for

0:31.5

example, over the last few days, we've had some MPs calling for a government of national unity to sort out the chaos of Parliament,

0:41.3

that parliamentary paralysis that I reflected on last week.

0:46.3

There won't be a government of national unity, but it's a rich theme, and you can see why some MPs so desperate for a reasoned route out of this nightmare might think that the coming together of soft Brexiteers or Remainers and pragmatic Brexiteers would be the solution rather like 1940 in the Second World War. It's not the solution and it won't happen.

1:15.2

It's not the solution because there is no way the leadership of either of the two bigger parties

1:23.1

will stand aside, which is what would happen to happen, for both sides to come together with new leaders

1:30.0

to sort this crisis out. There is no route towards a government of national unity. There was,

1:37.9

sort of, in May 1940, during that famous or after that famous parliamentary debate on the Norway debacle,

1:47.1

when Chamberlain went and Churchill came in and Clermakley became his deputy prime minister.

1:53.0

There is no equivalent sequence here, although the crisis is deadly serious.

2:00.4

It's also not the solution because this has been an issue that

2:04.9

raises many issues, some of them ideological, and the idea that there is a coming together of people

2:12.2

from different sides at a moment of heightened ideological divisions is, I think, a kind of fantasy and would be almost

2:23.6

part of the whole Brexit delusion. There are so many kind of illusory dimensions to Brexit,

2:32.7

but a kind of neat consensus coming out of nowhere amidst this

2:37.9

turbulent chaos would itself, I think, be a distortion.

2:44.2

Theresa May is becoming a figure of such endurance. It's almost a sort of Monty Python sketch where someone is kind

2:53.1

of battering her to bits, one of those Terry Gillian cartoons perhaps where someone has been

2:58.9

kind of nearly destroyed, then up they pop again as if everything is completely normal. It's almost

...

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