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To find out more, search Barclays communities. Hi I'm Anush, I'm Alva and I'm Stephen. On today's new statesman podcast we discuss Joe Biden and why the political class in the UK is

obsessed with whether he's woke.

And you ask us, is the Just Say No approach to another Scottish independence referendum sustainable.

So two momentous things have happened in politics this week.

Joe Biden has had his inauguration and the word woke is trending on politics

Twitter. So these things are actually related. Shadow Foreign Secretary

Lisa Nandy describes Joe Biden in an interview with the Guardian as a woke guy,

and Boris Johnson has been put on the spot by Sam Coates from Skye

to answer whether or not he also believes that Joe Biden is a woke guy.

And it's sort of got me thinking about how sort of the level of analysis of what number 10's relationship is going to be like with the U.S. administration

is sort of a little bit frustrating and rather poor, but it also speaks to a broader thing about people's kind of neuroses in UK politics at the moment, the back and forth of whether the Conservative Party feels that it would benefit it to sort of engage

with the culture wars. First of all Stephen, what did you think of the way that the British political

class reacted to Joe Biden's inauguration? I think it typifies what you might call like the flight from detail on the part of quite a large chunk of our political class, right?

This is very totally way to get it. It's like one of those things where like a conservative

MP who will remain nameless who in terms of the thing this person

explicitly believes right not just in terms of they say light and when it's electrically convenient but in terms of things they say, like, when it's electrically convenient, but in terms of the things

...