This is a passenger announcement. You can now book your train on Uber and get 10% back in credits to spend on Uber eats.

So you can order your own fries instead of eating everyone else's.

Trains, now on Uber. T's and C's apply. Check the Uber app. Hi I'm Anush and I'm Stephen and welcome to the New Statesman

podcast this week we talk about Grenfell you ask us what's it like to be an

MEP and then we talk about the looming election.

So although the big kind of political news this week is the fact that we are having

election on the 12th and we will discuss that later in the podcast, the most important

sort of policy story this week is the phase one of Martin Moore Bix's report into the Grenfell Tower Fire which came out this morning.

So we thought we'd talk about that first.

Yeah, my first reflections on it was sort of not the

report itself but the sort of the way it's been staged and sort of released has been a

bit of a shame for the survivors and relatives of the people who died in the fire.

First of all, it was announced a while back that it would be released on the eve of Brexit.

Of course, we were supposed to leave the European Union tomorrow and that was you

know some activists in the area were dismayed about that because they thought rightly

that Brexit would overshadow the findings of the report. That hasn't happened but unfortunately

it has coincided with the arrival of the sort of election date and the beginning of

the campaign. So that's a shame. Also it was leaked which didn't give the actual community a chance to look through the report before it started being framed in the press.

And the way that it's been framed and sort of the order of things has meant that there's a lot of focus on the fire brigade

rather than on other things that are present in the report such as building regulations and the

cladding that was used on the building as well. So I think it's sort of, it's a bit topsy-turvy

and it's taken quite a lot of the limelight

...