Health, membership, rail and reshuffle conundrums for May

Political Fix

Financial Times

Politics, News, News & Politics

4.2 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 6 January 2018

⏱️ 29 minutes

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Summary

2018 has brought a slew of domestic challenges for Theresa May, can she tackle them while keeping her government on the tracks? Plus, what do the state of the respective memberships say about their parties? With George Parker, Jim Pickard, Miranda Green and Laura Hughes of the Financial Times. Presented by Sebastian Payne. Produced by Madison Darbyshire.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to F.T. Politics, the Financial Times podcast on all things British politics.
0:10.0	I'm Sebastian Payne and we're back for our first episode of the New Year.
0:14.4	We'll be discussing what lies ahead for Theresa May's government, the bumps as it entered 2018,
0:19.7	and the state of political party memberships. I'm delighted to be joined by our political
0:24.4	editor George Parker, Chief Political Correspondent Jim Picard, Political Correspondent
0:28.9	Laura Hughes, and Deputy Comment Editor Miranda Green. Thank you all for joining. So 2018 arrived and brought with it a few
0:36.4	domestic problems for Theresa May's government. Railfares were hiked up by an average of 3.4% to much grumbling and disgruntement from commuters emerging from the festive season.
0:47.4	The NHS had to cancel thousands of planned operations,
0:51.0	leaving the Prime Minister and Health serving she
0:53.2	apologizing for the problems that they might have had something to do with.
0:57.0	And the speculation continues about a big relaunch and a cabinet reshuffle in the
1:01.2	coming weeks, and whether Mrs. May will keep her top team in place.
1:04.8	George Parker let's begin with the domestic things this week so the NHS has been a
1:08.9	bit of a problem for the government that every year we say it's going to be a bad winter for the NHS and this one actually did seem to be and these cancelled operations have been an open go for labour really.
1:19.7	Yes they have it's marred the the vaunted relaunch of the government to the first part of 2018.
1:25.5	Labour has had no goal as you say saying this is all the result of under funding of the
1:29.9	NHS over many Tory years of austerity. I think the truth is that although we are
1:35.6	describing this as a winter crisis, this is not a real winter crisis for the
1:39.0	NHS, it's not a flu epidemic, which is obviously the thing that keeps Jeremy Hunt the health
1:43.0	secretary lying awake at night. I think the last time we had a proper flu
1:45.8	epidemic was in 2009. So things could be an awful lot worse and you get the sense
1:49.8	with the cancellation of these routine operations or the postponement at least of the
	...

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