Is British democracy under threat? With Armando Iannucci | Westminster Reimagined
The Politics Show
The New Statesman
4.2 • 1.5K Ratings
🗓️ 4 December 2023
⏱️ 47 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Is democracy slipping away from us? How protected are we by our constitution? And do governments have the power to swiftly change this? In June, in front of a live audience, Armando and Anoosh were joined by Simon Woolley, founder and director of Operation Black Vote and Principal of Homerton College, Cambridge, and Graham Smith, CEO of the anti-monarchy campaign group Republic.
This episode was recorded shortly after the first data regarding voter ID impact in elections, and also after the arrest of Graham Smith at a pre-arranged Coronation protest.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is a passenger announcement. You can now book your train on Uber and get 10% back in credits to spend on Uber eats. |
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| 0:20.0 | Picture this. Static cars, idling engines, angry horns. |
| 0:27.0 | Now, picture you, zooming past it all, light and breezy. |
| 0:35.0 | Ah, the sweet feeling of whizzing past traffic. |
| 0:40.0 | Book your train journey via Avanti westcoast.co. UK. |
| 0:45.2 | avante west coast feel good travel. |
| 0:49.1 | Welcome back to West Min-imagined, a special series on the New Statesman |
| 0:56.3 | podcast that looks at how politics works and if it can be done better. |
| 1:00.7 | Back in June we wanted to ask, is democracy under threat? |
| 1:04.0 | We recorded this episode in front of a live audience at the New Statesman's Politics Live event. Hi, I'm Anush. |
| 1:17.0 | And I'm Armando. |
| 1:20.0 | And in this special episode of Westminster Reimaginedined recorded in front of an audience at the New |
| 1:24.7 | Statesman's Politics Live conference, we're joined by two very special guests. |
| 1:29.8 | The CEO of Republic, Graham Smith, and the co-founder of Operation Black Vote and Principal of homerton College at Cambridge University and cross-bench peer Simon Woolley. |
| 1:39.0 | And today we'll be asking them, is democracy under threat. |
| 1:45.0 | Now Amanda should we be concerned about the state of democracy in the UK today? |
| 1:52.0 | Yes. The reason I I thought about the state of democracy in the UK today. Well, of course we should, yes. |
| 1:53.4 | The reason I thought this would be a lovely thing to look at is I remember in an earlier |
| 1:59.7 | series of the podcast we would talk about autocracy and you know an autocrat like Putin or Erdogan or Oban |
| 2:08.2 | a much in the UK and we got some constitutional experts on we got some electoral and political experts on. |
... |
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