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

Thank you very much for tuning in.

This is the podcast where we delve deep and contextualize and look at consequences, etc, etc.

And we'll do that via some brilliant questions very shortly from all of you.

But if it's okay with all of you before that,

I thought I would reflect on the centrality of communications in politics and in government.

And I'm going to do it by absolutely reinforcing the sense that in this podcast together,

in the rock and roll politics cooperative, we do context, because it is interesting to compare

how the new Labour government in 1997 was perceived after 18 months compared now with the

Stama government.

And here is the twist.

Arguably, if you look back, and I did when I wrote a short biography of Tony Blair, which is out now, came out in mid-October.

What is so interesting is that 18 months in, on the whole, the government, the new Labor government, was still walking on water.

The newspapers, the media were generally very

positive, still talking about how radical it was and what a sense of purpose it had. And of course,

it was way ahead in the opinion polls. And yet, if you delve deep to use one of our favorite phrases,

it was beset with problems in those first 18 months, which have absolute parallels with the

Stama government now. And before we explore them, remember the one huge advantage the

Blair Brown government had in 97, significant economic growth. Britain was still in the European

Union, flourishing in the single market, and growth meant revenues coming into the treasury. It gives

government space, especially labour governments that need to invest. But in spite of that,

there were problems over some of the key issues of the time and deep internal tensions as well. Before we get to them more broadly,

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