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Hello, I'm Alfa. I'm Anouche, and I'm Stephen. And you're listening to the New

Sixth and Podcast. On today's episode we discuss the looming winter of discontent,

and you ask us, why don't we discuss conservative politics in terms of left and right?

So, we're heading into maybe a new period of politics in that the pandemic is still with us,

but there are some new themes emerging. There's been talk of an autumn of discontent,

or winter of discontent, with gas shortages, the cut to universal credit, or the end

to the universal credit uplift. There is other things, unless you've been writing about this,

this perfect storm, as it looks, which, as well as misspelling quite a difficult winter for

a lot of people, is going to be the next crisis, really, that the government has to deal with.

Yeah, I think it's interesting that even though Boris Johnson's been in New York, the main

questions that he's been asked are about the sort of brewing consumer crisis, or even a cost

of living crisis that's happening back at home. And this is because of those factors that you

mentioned, we've known for a long time that the government wants to remove that 20-pounder

week uplift to universal credit that it introduced at the beginning of the pandemic to help people

through. And that's supposed to come in at the beginning of October. The furlough scheme's

running out at the end of September, which means that a lot of jobs that have artificially kept on

ice won't exist anymore. And energy prices are going up because of the gas shortage, which means

that hundreds of thousands of people's bills could go up over winter, which is obviously when you need

your gas the most. So all of these different factors are combining to threaten the government

...