Hello and welcome to rock and roll politics, the podcast with me, Steve Richards. Thank you for tuning in.

And as ever, we have got a lot to cram in our time together. We've got these elections

coming up later in the week and they will feel, I suspect, seismic reform are going to do brilliantly. I would be surprised

if they don't gain the runcorn by-election and make huge gains in the local and mayoral elections

that are being contested. And in a way, I think that will in itself be unsurprising.

Because Britain, like a lot of countries, is going through a period where the electorate are

restive and hungry for real substantial change. And the battle in British politics, as in a lot of

politics elsewhere, is who owns that word change and really owns it. And you can see from what has

happened how reform and the title is clever.

No one is against reform.

It's one of the words we explore in detail in this podcast.

Who is against reform?

It's the nature of the reform that matters.

And we've had the Tories in for 14 years.

They were agents of sweeping change, but nearly all of it calamitous and recognized by the electorate as such, which is why they were kicked out. Their response to the global crash,

the experiment with austerity, real change of economic focus,

and one that made communities already left behind, even more deeply left behind them before,

and public services on their knees. Brexit, another experiment, which was calamitous,

but unquestionably a form of change, deep change.

To some extent, under-explore change, because all the obsessive focus on Brexit was before it happened.

After it happened, a conspiracy of silence descended.

Then we had Boris Johnson's experimental change in relation to how to deal with COVID in the early days.

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