I'm Hello and welcome to rock and roll politics with me, Steve Richards, the weekly podcast.

Thank you very much indeed for tuning in.

I hope you're all kind of settling back

into the early autumn rhythm. I like early autumn. It fills me with a sort of curious optimism,

not based on anything, because there is quite a lot of darkness around. But you know what I mean?

We're sort of back from August away and you kind of feel,

oh yeah, maybe there is some hope ahead. I don't know. But anyway, thank you so much for tuning in.

Now, last week, I did episode two of the prime ministers we never had, but I didn't at the end of that episode

tell you all the characters in the books. I'll do that in a minute. Then if it's okay with all

of you, I'm going to reflect on the politics of social care, which is going to be huge this week,

next week, and indeed in the months to come. And the sort of weird, well,

it's not weird, I think there are reasons for it, but illuminating reasons for the catastrophic

failure of political will to deal with this crisis.

And then we've got your brilliant questions.

They reach genius level as ever.

Afghanistan, all kinds of other rich themes on your questions.

Labour and Scotland and yeah, on and on, brilliant questions.

And I won't be able to get through all of them, but I read them all and I'm just overwhelmed.

And the ones I read out, they're no better than the ones I don't, they're all brilliant.

So thank you very much and keep them coming in.

So yeah, if that's okay with you, that's the kind of

line up for our time together this week, as ever. There are people in Australia, the whole of

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