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

Thank you so much for tuning in, wherever you are in the UK, and indeed the rest of the world.

And this is our last time together before Christmas. So if it's okay with

all of you, I'm going to have a festive look at a word. Yeah, we're going to have a laugh, a festive

celebratory podcast by looking at one word. And that word is reform. Now, as you know in this podcast, we

reflect and try and delve deep in relation to a whole range of ubiquitous terms in British

politics, the centre ground, modernisation, hard left, all the kind of terms

that we kind of deploy all the time. And one of the things we try and do here is sort of examine

what it really means and the scale of the imprecision. And spoiler alert, the scale of imprecision with all these

terms is monumental and nowhere more so in relation to reform. So I'm going to talk about that

for a bit. And then we go to a few of your questions, questions that reflect some of the epic themes we've

been talking about here on the podcast together over recent weeks. So a lot to get through,

as ever in our time together. Now, the reason I'm reflecting on reform is because the word has gone out from number 10 that Rishi

Sunak sees reform of the NHS as a solution, certainly by the time of the next general election,

as a way of delivering, given the massive backlog and so on.

He is looking at reform. And there have been a number of admiring columns saying at last

people like Sunak are returning to the theme of reform of the NHS. At the same time,

Labour's shadow health secretary, Wes Streeting, has been hailed for acknowledging that reform is

required. West Streeting gave a talk to policy exchange last week, where again he was widely

praised for saying he is under no illusion when the cliché is applied that the NHS is the

envy of the world, given the number of challenges it faces. And a lot of columnists said, brilliant, brilliant,

brilliant, at least someone is thinking of reform. It's West Streeting. Why out more Tories

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