Hello and welcome to rock and roll politics, the weekly podcast with me steve richards this is just a short

podcast for a couple of announcements really the first announcement is that i'm going to be live at

the king's place virtual rock and roll politics show on monday at.m. He could well be listening to it on the

very day of the live show. So it is Monday, July the 27th. So there's no doubt. And you can get

tickets by going on to the King's Place website now, any time up to about an hour or so before the show actually begins.

And then, for those of you haven't seen it before, as if by magic, I don't quite know how it

works. I appear at 7 o'clock on the dot via the link they give you on their website and there's a space for questions to be asked

for our predictions to be made those notoriously unreliable predictions and this time i think

it's going to be the fifth or sixth of these virtual shows since lockdown meant we couldn't all gather together in one place

and get that kind of cool vibe. It's coming back. It's coming back very soon, I hope. But anyway,

in this one, because it's the kind of end of the political year, it feels like that, doesn't it?

The kind of end of July feel., it feels like that, doesn't it? The kind of end of July feel.

We'll be reflecting on this astonishing year of kind of, I don't want to go over the top, but of seismic historic significance.

I cannot recall a 12 months and there have been in politics many, many periods of significance.

I always used to think up until quite recently that the most historically significant phase of

the kind of period when I've been following politics was the early 1980s where you had Thatcherism

and that economic experiment beginning to take shape and then there was that formal schism in the

Labour Party for all the talk of divisions and splits within parties you don't usually end up with a formal schism.

Certainly one like that, you can have silly schisms like the formation of change UK, which had silliness

written all over it from the buildup to the launch and the day of the launch and for the 10 minutes it lasted.

But this was big, the

SDP forming in early 1981 with huge figures from Labour cabinets, Roy Jenkins, David Owens,

...