I'm Hello and welcome to rock and roll politics with me Steve Richards. Thank you very much indeed for tuning in wherever you are. It's great to have you and as ever we've got a lot to get through

together making sense of it all some brilliant points and questions to come. I'll be

reflecting a bit on one or two things before your questions and before my reflections on

things themes. Just a reminder. I'm live at King's Place, just like the olden days. Do you remember when we could gather together in one place on June the 28th?

And tickets are available on the King's Place website. It's also being streamed.

So wherever you are around the world, you can tune in live and for the following seven days.

God knows where we'll be by then.

Politics, well, I was going to say moves fast, that's wrong.

Harold Wilson's much repeated observation, a week is a long time in politics,

it's not really true. There's an impression quite often of pace and speed and fast moving events,

but when you stand back, you see shapes and patterns that have been in place for quite some time.

But I still, having said all that, God knows where we'll be on June the 28th, or in July,

when I'm going to be live at the Greenwich Theatre and the rope tackle art centre in Shoreham.

So if you're on the South Coast, there are tickets there on their website

and similarly for the Greenwich event at the Greenwich website. So see you there in real life?

Oh yeah, just like those olden days. But before all of that, there is a big moment coming up, which is the decision whether to open up lockdown completely.

And it is so interesting how patterns recur.

There are close to a sort of perverse fetishising about dates in Britain's or Boris Johnson's approach,

sorry, it should say England, of course, approach to ending lockdowns. Do you remember that period?

Basically from September onwards, I'm told,

Johnson was obsessed about Christmas and how things should be opened up for Christmas.

And in a way, that obsession drove his responses, along with his libertarian instincts. His libertarian instincts meant that he ignored the scientific advice

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