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

Thank you for tuning in.

And I know some of you are tuning in angrily. The Rock and Roll Politics Cooperative is dividing over the international crisis that we are trying to make sense of.

Some brilliant emails. We've had another email from our defence specialist,

Jonathan Marcus, who's furious with me, and I think we'll read his email out. I think you won't

be entirely thrilled with my few reflections before we come to your emails. We've heard from

other defence specialists, other takes on the current crisis. So we'll come to all of them.

I'll give a few thoughts with an image of Jonathan Marcus throwing his phone against the wall.

And a few reflections also on a story that would have been given much more prominence under normal circumstances.

The resignation of Annalisa Dodds, who was an international development minister,

who resigned over the cuts in international aid to pay for the sudden announcement of increased defence spending.

I think that is a significant resignation for reasons that I'll briefly reflect on.

But beforehand, let me take a sort of step back in terms of the British situation.

Kirstama, their leading European leaders on Sunday.

And incidentally, one of the glimmers of light in the darkness is this capacity of a British

Prime Minister to work closely with other European leaders rather than berate them.

But that's a relatively minor development compared with the other things that are going on.

I'm always staggered on one level at a country like Britain that can't run a train service,

can't build a high-speed railway system as they can

in other equivalent countries, can't properly provide health provision. I still look back. I mean,

memories go so quickly. It's five years, isn't it, since the pandemic and lockdown began in

March 2020.

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