Rachel Reeves in China BUT Should She Have Gone?
Newscast
BBC
4.3 • 6.6K Ratings
🗓️ 11 January 2025
⏱️ 26 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Today, Paddy and Laura discuss Rachel Reeves’ trip to Beijing to meet with her Chinese counterpart. But some of the opposition are saying she shouldn’t have gone at a time when soaring government borrowing costs threaten to squeeze UK public finances.
And, after Meta announced it will no longer employ factcheckers and will boost political content, a grieving father - Ian Russell - tells Laura why this announcement will hurt children.
You can now listen to Newscast on a smart speaker. If you want to listen, just say "Ask BBC Sounds to play Newscast”. It works on most smart speakers. You can join our Newscast online community here: https://tinyurl.com/newscastcommunityhere Newscast brings you daily analysis of the latest political news stories from the BBC. It was hosted by Laura Kuenssberg and Paddy O’Connell. It was made by Chris Gray with Bella Saltiel. The technical producer was Gareth Jones. The assistant editor is Chris Gray. The senior news editor is Sam Bonham.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. |
| 0:04.8 | So here we are with Flexicast or Newscast, as we like to call it. |
| 0:09.3 | You can't say Flexicast. |
| 0:10.6 | It sounds like something you'd get at an orthopedic clinic. |
| 0:13.1 | Well, it's a moving subject, smorgasbord, |
| 0:16.3 | and Adam has recently had a hit by having a quiz at the start of weekly newscast. |
| 0:22.1 | He loves a quiz. |
| 0:23.5 | Weekday newscast. |
| 0:24.5 | And he asked what was the biggest social media platform, which I have no idea. |
| 0:28.6 | Oh, I didn't. |
| 0:29.5 | Anyway, so our quiz is who was the last chancellor to go to China? |
| 0:34.1 | When I first saw this, I answered George Osborne. |
| 0:40.2 | No, I don't think it was. I think it was actually Philip Hammond, is the answer in 2017. But had it been George Osborne, then I could |
| 0:45.6 | have told you about the trip I went on with George Osborne when I was political editor to China. |
| 0:51.5 | When he used that trip to warn about the dangers of Brexit, he sat down to do an interview in China with me and he said, everybody's house price will fall immediately. There will be a severe economic shock. This was a long time before the actual referendum, but it caused all sorts of ructions at home. And he talked about the stability of the pound and all sorts of other things. What you might not know about that visit is the thing I really remember is that there was this |
| 1:14.0 | big sort of ceremonial lunch on a golden boat on some sort of beautiful lake in the middle of |
| 1:19.7 | in China. |
| 1:21.8 | And during our interview, the golden boat, do you want to know what happened? |
| 1:24.9 | Or am I just banging on? |
| 1:25.9 | No, I said it was flexicast because we're so far away from the news. We have to give it a new name. So the treasury, |
| 1:32.5 | in their quite understandable consideration to want to make this look fabulous, they wanted to |
| 1:38.3 | make the interview look amazing. And it was quite an overcast day at this beautiful location in |
... |
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