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

This is the second one of the week where we get together to delve deep and contextualize, and

we're going to do a lot of that today in our time together. Thank you for some brilliant,

brilliant emails from the Rock and Roll Politics Cooperative, some related to my brief reflections.

It's so interesting, isn't it, those two bigger parties, the Labour Party and the

Conservative Party, going through in very different ways, very public manifestations of internal

tensions. And certainly, of course, there are always internal tensions in big parties. They are, as Harold Wilson once called Labour abroad church.

And Labour, in spite of all the machinations and all the rest of it, remain that actually,

albeit now leaking support to the Greens for various reasons, which we've explored on many occasions on this

podcast. But today I want to focus on the Conservative Party briefly, because in a way that has never

been fully explored, we have a Conservative Party now almost unrecognizable from the party of the

post-war period, the party of McMillan, Rabb Butler of Alec Douglas' home. I always pronounce it

wrongly and you'll tell me it's Hume and Heath and so on. Of course, it began

with the Thatcher revolution and in many ways it really was a revolution, the consequences

of which are still being explored and thought through in a very muted way. One of the things that interested me about the

Burnham, Andy Burnham article, which I referenced in the previous podcast, was his contextualising

our favourite word, Broken Britain. Going back to the 80s partly with what he called the deindustrialisation

of the period, none of which

the consequences have been fully explored, not least by Labour. But the Tory party has moved to the

right or stayed on that Thatcheride right ever since the Cameron period portrayed as modernisation

actually was more like what Oliver Letwin described to me as turbocharged Thatcherism,

and we know what has happened since. Not least the purging of the so-called one-nation Tory MPs from the parliamentary party in the build-up to Brexit,

...