Predictions for the year ahead
The Politics Show
The New Statesman
4.2 • 1.5K Ratings
🗓️ 19 December 2025
⏱️ 40 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Is the New Statesman too soft on Wes Streeting? Are the Lib Dems an unserious party?
Plus our journalists make their predictions for what will happen in 2026, and listen back to their guesses from last year…
Oli Dugmore is joined by Anoosh Chakelian and Rachel Cunliffe.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The New Statesman. |
| 0:05.7 | I'm Olly Dougmore, and this is the listener questions edition of the New Statesman podcast. |
| 0:10.1 | I'm joined by my colleagues Anoushia Kellyan and Rachel Cunliff. |
| 0:13.3 | Hello. |
| 0:14.8 | And we are going to get straight into it. |
| 0:17.4 | We have a long, and he has to be said, quite angry question from George. But here at the New Statesman, we are not afraid to face our critics. Presumably not George Eaton. I imagine. We're not sure. There's no surname attached to it. Maybe it is George Eaton. Okay, here we go. Westreeting has been a main topic of multiple podcasts in the last few weeks, but there's been little to no mention of how he is performing as Health Secretary. Strikingly, there has been no focus on how he is handling |
| 0:41.4 | the resident doctor's industrial action. Why is this topic being completely sidelined in |
| 0:46.1 | favour of highlighting his unofficial leadership bid when it is surely relevant? Does the portrait |
| 0:50.9 | you paint of West Streeting as being likable and personable not fall apart when he calls doctors juvenile delinquents on national TV? |
| 0:59.7 | Discuss. |
| 1:00.3 | Well, I do think this is a fair question because we've talked about West Streeting a lot in terms of all the maneuvering that's going on in terms of who might succeed Kirstama. |
| 1:09.9 | I don't necessarily think that his confrontation with |
| 1:13.3 | resident doctors is going to be the thing that stops that happening. However, the way that he |
| 1:19.7 | talks about them is something that I do think he needs to bear in mind because Labour members have a say |
| 1:24.1 | in who gets to be Labour leader and they they probably aren't, on the whole, |
| 1:28.2 | the kind of people who want to hear resident doctors asking for a pay rise being called |
| 1:32.3 | juvenile delinquents, as our questioner has put it. He's also called the moaning minis. He's accused |
| 1:38.1 | them of cartel-like behaviour. So this is quite provocative confrontational language. The kind of |
| 1:43.3 | language, actually, he did use in |
| 1:44.5 | opposition as well. He actually wound up the BMA when he was shadow health secretary too. So he |
| 1:49.8 | hasn't been afraid of a fight with them for some time, which speaks to something that we have been |
| 1:54.9 | talking about West Streeting on this podcast for a while, which is his straight talking manner can be |
... |
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