The

The Hello and welcome to rock and roll politics with me Steve Richards.

Thank you so much for tuning in wherever you are around the world and around the UK.

And as ever, we've got a lot to cram in in our time together.

This is how we're going to structure it if it's okay with all of you.

A few announcements from me.

Then on to my theme of the podcast, which is

looking at the British economy hurtling towards the cliff's edge and the implications.

We're going to contextualise and reflect on consequences in the light of the cliff edge that we are heading towards this autumn and

winter. And by the way, no wonder Gordon Brown has as ever come up with a more precise and

focused analysis than the absent cabinet ministers and prime ministers and so on, on where we are and what should be

done immediately to mitigate the immediate consequences of this crisis. Anyway, more of that

to come. Amazing questions and a range of questions from you, all, of course, urgently topical.

A bit of kind of August fun in there as well.

We've got the Reverend Cannon-Paul, Abathnot, linking current political dramas to premiership football at the start of another season.

We've got, yeah, reflections on books that you're reading over August as well as

urgent questions about the current political dramas we are living through as ever. And by the way,

I found this ever since I was a political journalist, you know, in the 80s, August isn't quiet.

There are either kind of ripples that become a wave when politicians return in September,

or there are immediate, noisy events.

Preparing for my show at the Edinburgh Festival, I was thinking about when I was last there

pre-pandemic in the summer of 2019. Of course, little did we know what dramas were going to

...