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Hello and welcome to Coffee House Shots. I'm Lucy Dunn and today I'm joined by James Heel and Michael Simmons.

Kier Starmour is getting to celebrate something of an international win today as India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi is in London to sign a free trade deal with the UK. James, this is a deal that's been touted since the days of Boris Johnson, but Keir has got it over the line. Is it fair to conclude this is a rare good day for Stormer? Yeah, I think it is. And I think it's an example where Labour got the plan right in opposition. There's a lovely long read today in The Guardian by Lenny Curia, which talks about some of the colour behind the negotiations and really stresses in more detail than we've had before made public just how much Labour was willing to do in private, in opposition, to make sure this deal got over the line.

So in February 24, Johnny Reynolds went and visited his opposite number in India and made clear that if the negotiations with the Conservatives were successful, they would support that. If they weren't, they would pick up where they left off the election. Of course, this is a trade deal that's been going on for three and a half years in negotiations. I remember when Liz Truss said that she wanted a deal by Davali in 2022. DiVali has been and gone a couple of times since then. And it's a sign of a couple of things. I mean, one of which is, of course, the obvious economic benefit. I think the government today has put out figures saying that it's worth $4.8 billion. But it's also about strategic benefit as well, which is that India wants to send a message that their economy is open. The average tariff rate for the Indian deals is 13% compared with our 1.5%. That's a legacy of the third way during the post-independence path from 47 up to about 91, when India was very protectionist and still coming out of that kind of tradition and culture. But also, as I say, in Nelani's piece, there's some lovely bits about sort of the colour in terms of a, you know, one point where Johnny Reynolds' opposite number is Pieschgal, and one point he said that he was a huge fan of Yesminster, so negotiators brought him a written note by Jonathan Lin, one of the co-creators. And of course, it's an important thing in terms of geopolitics, because India is a really interesting country in terms of the West versus China, and it's a sort of unreliable ally.

You know, for instance, in the fight against Ukraine, the number of barrels of oil being imported from Russia to India's increased by sort of, I think it's quintupled.

So the West really wants to peel off, you know, India from being a potential kind of anti-Western force into kind of being at least, you know, hopefully positively pro-Western but also neutral at best maybe. So it's a good day for Kyr Starma and for Labour. And I think it's a sign of how he's trying to get back on the front foot this summer being like, look, for all the blather, etc. For all the sort of short-termism, I'm someone who can deliver. So they'll be celebrating this trade deal, even though, of course, we still got to iron out the technicalities and there may be potentially some controversy around the element to the chat to do with national insurance contributions whereby temporary workers in each country will pay their home country's rates. So you can see a scenario where temporary Indian workers in the UK would pay Indian levels of national insurance or counterpart as opposed

...