Hello and welcome to rock and roll politics, the podcast with me, Steve Richards.

Thank you for tuning in wherever you are.

And as ever, we have got a heck of a lot to cram in in our time together.

Whole range of brilliant themes in your emails, all urgently relevant.

And I'm going to be reflecting if it's okay with all of you.

And what I think are the myths of the New Labour 1997 election campaign, which are being unfairly applied

to Keir Stama now. In other words, you read a lot of why isn't Keir Stama as clear and with

the same sense of purpose as Tony Blair in 1997. Well, let's explore precisely the

new Labour pitch in 1997 and I'll show I think why that is an unfair charge against

Kirstama now. Then we turn to your brilliant questions but before before all of that, we've got some sad news.

Last week, I asked those of you who are in our barometer focus groups to get in touch with your

latest thoughts about how you're going to vote. These are listeners or those connected to the rock and roll

politics cooperative who normally or often vote conservative, but are having doubts, but have they

got to a willingness to vote Labor or are they still doubtful about that? Anyway, actually, I've got quite a few emails on that very theme later on.

I don't know why the parties pay for focus groups.

We can be it.

But the sad news is that one of the most legendary of our focus group was Denise Williard's mum.

But I got this sad email the other day from Denise saying,

I'm writing with sad news of Maureen Condick, my mum and our one woman focus group.

She became suddenly and seriously ill on Friday evening and passed away

peacefully on Saturday lunchtime with me by her side. So that is really sad and I emailed Denise and said,

well, we must at the very least dedicate this podcast toureen, because although I haven't met Denise,

...