Q & A With Helen and David: UK Politics and the Union
TALKING POLITICS
Catherine Carr
4.7 • 2.5K Ratings
🗓️ 1 July 2021
⏱️ 58 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The second part of our attempt to answer your questions, this week covering British politics. Helen and David tackle whether Labour can win, what happened to the Lib Dems, where the Greens are heading and what's in store for the Union. Plus, how much is being held together by the Queen and what will happen when she is no longer around? Next week, Trump, and much more.
Talking UK Politics…
Our State of the Union Series:
From our archives:
- Election Fallout (May 2021)
- Where is the Opposition? (December 2020)
- Labour and Brexit: Beyond the Crisis (May 2020)
- What’s the Future for Labour? (January 2020)
- Party like it’s 1974 (November 2019)
- The Party Splits! (In 1846!)
- Who is Jeremy Corbyn? (February 2018)
And as ever, recommended reading curated by our friends at the LRB can be found here: lrb.co.uk/talking
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, my name's David Rundsenman and this is Talking Politics. Today it's the second episode |
| 0:10.5 | in a sequence of three in which Helen and I are trying to answer your questions. Today, |
| 0:16.9 | it's questions about UK politics and the future of the Union. |
| 0:27.7 | Talking Politics is brought to you in partnership with the London Review of Books. |
| 0:31.6 | And with the summer of COVID-delayed sport now underway, |
| 0:35.0 | the LRB has a special offer for Talking Politics listeners. |
| 0:39.2 | Subscribe for just £1 an issue, that's six months of the LRB for just £12 and you'll also get a collection of the LRB's best pieces about sport |
| 0:45.4 | introduced by me, David Rundsman and featuring Tarak Ali on cricket, Carl Miller and Football, |
| 0:51.9 | Amir Srinivassan on surfing, among many others, all for free. |
| 0:57.5 | Just use the URL, lrb.me, slash freebook, one word. That's lrb.me slash freebook. |
| 1:18.0 | As with last week, thank you all so much for the many, many questions that we had on these topics. |
| 1:21.1 | We're really sorry if we didn't manage to get to the one that you asked. |
| 1:25.5 | We hope there's going to be more opportunity for these question and answer sessions in the autumn. |
| 1:28.9 | Our producer, Catherine Carr, is putting the questions to Helen and me, and we started with one about the Liberal Democrats. When I was in England in the |
| 1:35.2 | 90s, the Lib Dems seemed as likely as Tories or Labour to win elections. Could you review and or |
| 1:40.9 | discuss what happened to the Lib Dems in the past 25 years. I have to say, I think |
| 1:45.3 | the person who's remembering that probably is slightly looking at it through rose-tinted spectacles. |
| 1:50.9 | That's not exactly, I know about you, Helen, not my memory of the 90s. But what certainly has |
| 1:56.0 | changed is that through the 90s and actually up until 2010 and the 2010 general election was almost the |
| 2:03.0 | high point of this, the Lib Dems were the place to go if you were discontented with the two main |
| 2:08.7 | parties. They didn't have a monopoly of that space, but the nationalists were much less |
| 2:12.7 | prominent. Scotland down in Wales, the Greens were less prominent. The parties of the further to the right |
... |
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