Why has everyone sat on their arses instead of thanking Gillian Keegan?
The News Agents
Global
4.1 • 5.4K Ratings
🗓️ 4 September 2023
⏱️ 38 minutes
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Summary
The blame for the school concrete scandal has landed right at the Prime Minister's feet - after a former civil servant from the Department for Education revealed it was Chancellor Sunak that cut the funding for rebuilding schools five years ago.
But it's his Education Secretary - Gillian Keegan - who's conducting the political heat today after a sweary off-mic rant which she is almost certainly now regretting. In fact she gave a subsequent apology ON mic.
The News Agents are back - yes all three - asking what it means for our children's education - and how damaging it is to the Sunak government. And as Keir Starmer shuffles his top team, we ask what it tells us about Labour's priorities a year out from an election.
Editor: Tom Hughes
Senior Producer: Gabriel Radus
Producer: Laura FitzPatrick
Planning Producer: Alex Barnett
Social Media Editor: Georgia Foxwell
Video Producer: Will Gibson-Smith
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The Newsagents podcast is brought to you by HSBC UK, opening up a world of opportunity. |
| 0:09.3 | This is a global player original podcast. |
| 0:13.0 | The former permanent secretary at Sparm for Education has said this morning that when they wanted |
| 0:17.7 | to put more money into repairing schools, you as Chancellor didn't allow that to go ahead and in fact cut that budget. |
| 0:24.6 | Are you to blame for what's happening now? |
| 0:26.3 | Do you want to apologise to parents and pupils? |
| 0:27.7 | I think that is completely and utterly wrong. |
| 0:30.1 | Actually, one of the first things I did as Chancellor at my first spending review in 2020 was to announce a new 10-year school rebuilding program for 500 schools. |
| 0:40.1 | Now that equates to... |
| 0:41.1 | Utterly wrong to blame me, says Rishi Sunak, |
| 0:44.7 | which tells you two things about the present crisis. |
| 0:48.9 | One, a recognition of just how serious this is for the government, but two, how much Rishi Sunak is aware |
| 0:58.0 | that this has now got his fingerprints on it after the claim that he halved the school's rebuilding |
| 1:05.2 | budget when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer. We're talking about the concrete in schools and it is literally a |
| 1:13.0 | schoolgate issue. In other words, it's the kind of thing that people, parents, voters really, |
| 1:20.7 | really care about. And when you hear Sunak with that tetchy voice, utterly wrong, completely wrong, he says to the interviewer, |
| 1:29.3 | you get a sense of just how concerned he is, that this will all come back to bite his government |
| 1:35.3 | right now. Welcome to the newsagents. |
| 1:41.0 | The news agents. It's Lewis and it's Emily and I'm back. |
| 1:45.8 | No, yeah, well, we know you're back because they've seen a bloody avalanche of stories |
| 1:49.7 | ever since you have come back. |
| 1:51.3 | We've been scratching around in an arid desert and you have turned this into the Burning Man Festival |
... |
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