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The News Agents

Why is Labour being so weird?

The News Agents

Global

Daily News, News, Government, Politics

4.24.3K Ratings

🗓️ 3 October 2024

⏱️ 33 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The Labour freebies story “broke“ over a month ago. Yet last night whilst Keir Starmer was meeting with Ursula von der Leyen in Brussels he found himself fielding questions about what free stuff he was handing back after agreeing to repay 6k.

Why is Labour being so weird about this? Does it tell us something more about labours naïveté? Or perhaps their unreadiness for government? Or is the media environment just a whole lot more complicated since they were last in power.

Later, new documents have been released overnight in the US claiming Trump “resorted to crime" in his attempt to overturn the 2020 election. Will this change the Supreme Court view that he’s “immune from prosecution?”

And lastly, the Chagos Islands - Where are they and what’s going on?

Editor: Tom Hughes

Producer: Natalie Indge

Digital Editor: Michaela Walters

Social Media Editor: Georgia Foxwell

Video Production: Rory Symon, Shane Fennelly & Arvind Badewal

Digital Journalists: Michael Baggs & Jacob Paul

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Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

The Newsagents podcast is brought to you by HSBC UK, opening up a world of opportunity.

0:09.5

This is a global player original podcast.

0:12.8

Forgive me, Prime Minister, you've decided to repay £6,000 worth of gifts.

0:18.7

Why now, why those gifts and not all of them?

0:21.6

Have you decided it was wrong to take them or did you come under pressure?

0:24.6

Look, we came in as a government of change.

0:28.6

We are now going to bring forward principles for donations because until now

0:34.6

politicians have used their best individual judgment on a case-by-case basis.

0:39.3

I think we need some principles of general application.

0:43.3

So I took the decision that until the principles are in place, it was right for me to make those repayments.

0:49.3

What is a principle?

0:51.6

It's not a law, and it's not even a rule. It's something that still sounds very

0:58.0

grey in terms of what MPs, what cabinet ministers, what the Prime Minister himself decides he can

1:06.7

or cannot accept as a donation. And how is it possible that we're still talking about his clothes, his glasses, his Taylor Swift tickets and all the rest of it, a month on from when this story first came onto our radar screens?

1:25.6

Is it a scandal? Is it being mishandled? And why are Labor being so weird about it?

1:33.1

Welcome to the newsagents. The Newsagents. It's John. It's Emily. It's Lewis. And the Labor Party,

1:46.8

with this whole freebie gate business,

1:56.0

are making a kind of little situation so much worse. Every intervention that they make just seems to make it a bigger story, another news cycle, and on and on it goes where you kind of think that if they had

2:03.8

just grasped this at the beginning, said everything they had to say, and then shut up about it,

2:10.0

they would be in a much better place right now.

2:12.6

Look, I think we've discussed on the show before, the extent to which we think that at least elements of

2:18.3

this story have been exaggerated in terms of how it's covered or taken out of context, or

...

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