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I'm Ed Vasey and we're going to be unpacking the politics of the day from Scare Stalmers' comments about the fraying social fabric of the UK to reform's 19-year-old council leader.

He's old enough to play for the England team.

Joining me is the Times columnist Robert Crampton.

Welcome to the show.

Morning, Ed. And the historian and author, Phil Tinline. Welcome to the show, Phil. Thank you. So nice of you to join us. Let's start with the story on the front page of today's Times. It's a report about yesterday's cabinet meeting in which both Kirstama and Angela Rainer said to have told colleagues that Britain is fraying at the edges.

My view is this is nonsense. I grew up in the 70s and the early 80s,

a period of mass unemployment, end of strikes, crumbling infrastructure and serious riots.

That was when Britain was broken. Aren't I right, Phil?

I think they're both right.

I think there's a long period in between those two points where things seemed relatively okay. But, you know, we're not in the same place as the 70s, but we are in a kind of weird reverse version of it to some extent, I think. You know, we're going back away from the sort of Thatcher model, which was supposedly a solution, or what worked as a solution, to the 70s. It was very striking the other day that Farage was talking about, sort of societal collapse, and it did make me think that he's one of the few politicians in the front rank of British politics at the moment, who would be old enough to remember the 70s when talking about societal collapses as ordinary as having angel delight for dinner. You know, you had everything from the clash and Derek Jarmer

and, you know, predicting it from the left. You had people in the centre sort of panicking about military cues and then you had people on the right talking about the trade unions taking over. So yeah, I mean, the 70s was certainly kind of rich with it. But I think we have some serious problems now. I think there are places where the social fabric feels pretty fraught. like the so- I hate the phrase, but the so-called left behind towns, I think the sense that,

you know, as you saw with the riots last summer, and, you know, Rainer said that, you know,

of this, I think it's 17 areas where the riots kicked off, 16 of them are, you know, very, very

deprived.

I think, you know, there's a kind of been a bit of a fool's errand over the last few years, particularly around Brexit to try and sort of separate out, you know, are things, are people motivated by cultural forces or economic forces? I think it's quite hard to disentangle those. And what was striking about the report in the paper was how much those two things were being acknowledged as interwoven, that, you know, if you are in a place where the high street

is dying, where there's kind of boarded up shops, and you've got asylum seekers in a hotel

that you used to be able to go to, but now you can't, you know, the two things do kind of intermash.

And I think there are places where people do feel pretty afraid.

Robert Crampton, you're leading your best life. You're not going to fall for this nonsense. I'd echo really what Phil said. I mean, I remember the 70s. I'm the same age as Nigel Farage, the fact which constantly depresses me. He's three months older than me. And yeah, it was a grim time. You had people... David Sterling, the founder of the SAS, a very honored man, was talking about military coups against the Wilson government. So it was, it was, and you know, then I was, I remember the Poltax riot 1990 there were there were so we've

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