“R” Wars against the Phantom Menace

Inside Briefing with the Institute for Government

Institute for Government

News, Politics, Government

4.6 • 252 Ratings

🗓️ 1 May 2020

⏱️ 43 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

How do you weigh human wellbeing against Coronavirus deaths? How do we get “R”, the rate of Corona transmission, to a manageable level? As the government wrestles with lifting the lockdown, has “relying on the science” given it too narrow a focus regarding the serious trade-offs that are coming? And how will the criminal justice system deal with the massive backlog created by COVID? Cabinet secretary of the Blair and Brown years GUS O’DONNELL joins us to discuss the enormity of the Government’s challenges. “We’ve effectively got huge experiments going on all over the world to try to find out how we get out of this.” – Gus O’Donnell “To say the peak has passed and you can go out, and then see ANOTHER peak… that could be a blow that a government might not recover from.” – Giles Wilkes Hosted by Bronwen Maddox with Giles Wilkes and Nick Davies. Audio production by Alex Rees. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to Inside Briefing, the podcast from the Institute for Government.
0:12.2	I'm Bronwyn Maddox. The Prime Minister is back at his desk, other than being there for the birth of his son, that is.
0:18.1	MPs are back in Parliament, at least by video link, and the rest of us are
0:21.7	still at home, more or less. The coronavirus lockdown continues, though governments across Europe
0:27.2	are now setting out their plans for easing restrictions. And Boris Johnson may follow suit soon,
0:32.1	although there is still a fierce cabinet debate on when and how. We'll be taking a look at
0:37.0	the government's options. We've got a new
0:38.4	paper out on the exit strategy this week and we'll be looking at making decisions in the middle
0:43.8	of great uncertainty. Keeping the economy moving will be at the heart of any decision to lift
0:49.0	the lockdown. The government's bailout package has been generous, but how does it begin to pull
0:53.5	away that support?
0:55.0	Again, we're another big paper out on that this week.
0:58.0	And we're also going to talk about criminal justice, another area hard hit by the coronavirus
1:03.0	outbreak, where we've also published a third big report this week.
1:06.0	With courts across the land temporarily shut down, we could be set for a record-breaking backlog of cases.
1:12.4	Before we get going, a reminder for you to look out for our sister podcast, IFG Live, which brings
1:17.1	you the events which we used to hold in our building, now in very lively form. Get IFG Live on
1:22.4	Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get inside briefing, or at our website, institute for government.org.
1:29.1	And this week look out for a bonus podcast, an inside briefing extra.
1:33.9	Yesterday I talked to Jacob Rees-Mogg, the leader of the Commons on the new virtual parliament,
1:38.8	whether it can really scrutinise the government's legislation properly
1:41.7	and whether there is any innovation from this time
	...

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