Attention at all passengers. You can now book your train tickets on Uber and get 10% back in Uber credits to spend on your next train journey.

So no excuses not to visit your in-laws this Christmas.

Trains now on Uber. T's and C's apply check the Uber app. I'm Alva, I'm Anush, and I'm Stephen.

And you're listening to the New States and Podcast.

On today's episode, we discuss the planned easing of restrictions over Christmas and you ask us about the Grandfel

inquiry.

So we've promised this was coming for a while that we would talk about the UK

government's plans for the easing of restrictions around Christmas. I think it's

already been clear from offhand comments in

other episodes that we think it's maybe not the best idea, but we haven't spoken

about it at length yet and of course this comes as there's quite a lot of speculation today we're

recording on Monday morning that London could soon be placed into tier

three restrictions with cases rising in lots of parts of London.

Initially I'll start with you these plans for three households to to bubble up over

Christmas with no travel restrictions for a short period of over Christmas that came out a few weeks ago, but we haven't talked about it yet.

What was your initial reaction when you heard about that

announcement? Well I wasn't surprised that that was the announcement I think it

was sort of the people pleasing element of it was in keeping with I think the way that the government

has approached the pandemic from the start.

So over the summer there was the eat out to help out policy and there's always been this pull between trying to stop the virus from spreading but also trying to sort of keep people happy or sort of delay conflict between the government and their own backbenchers rather than, you know, really to do with public opinion because we still know that public opinion is waited towards, you know, wanting a stricter restrictions and being generally sympathetic towards lockdown

style responses. So it is more to do with that kind of political conflict rather than with public

attitudes, but of course there's that side of Boris Johnson's character that sort of wants to rescue Christmas and wants you to hug Granny and you know these things that sound good on the front pages of the Daily Mail. So I wasn't very

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