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

Thank you for tuning in.

I'm coming to you from the Edinburgh Festival, where now I'm more than halfway

through the run of Rock and Roll Politics 2025 at the Edinburgh Festival. I'm doing 14 shows this

year, and it's a different show every day. So I thought I'd sort of update the Rock and Roll Politics

Cooperative about some of the themes we've been exploring

each day so far. There's still quite a few days and quite a few themes to come.

I say to people at the festival, if you come to all 14, by the end, you'll feel deranged,

but you'll know everything. So, yeah, for those of you who subscribe to Patreon, first of all, thank you.

You keep the show on the road with the great podmasters who produce the podcast.

But you will have heard the first one.

I'm sorry, quality isn't the same as at King's Place because their members of the audience also get microphones and therefore the

recording of the interchanges are clearer.

Here, there is as much interchange with the audience as in London and elsewhere, but we don't

have mics for the audience, this being the fringe.

But I hope you got the gist of the first one, a kind of

overview at the beginning of it all about how things had changed from Edinburgh Festival

2024 to this one. And of course, things have changed a huge amount. The last one took

place weeks after the labour landslide. And now we have this situation

where reform are well ahead in the polls and all the other twists and turns that have happened

in recent times. Another theme, and it's related to it, was the battle for Scotland and the parliamentary election for the Edinburgh Parliament, which will take

place next year. And interestingly, the audience predicted, I asked the audience for those who

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