Broadcaster and author Steve Richards has a very successful podcast discussing and picking apart current political events through analysis, comments and questions from his listeners and by putting them into historical context using his vast knowledge of events and the people who created them, often through close personal contact.
However, the podcast is based on his regular live events, which this year are celebrating their tenth year on the Edinburgh Fringe—as he says at the start, the first ever under a Labour government. The audience is heavily involved, though only if they wish to be, not in an intimidating way, and each of the dozen hour-long performances is on a different topic, so it’s a completely different show each day.
When he asked at the start of the performance I saw, which was the fifth of this run, how many had been before, a lot of people put their hands up. That’s a great strategy for ticket sales, but a lot of work to plan it all.
He began by setting the context of the immediate aftermath of a landslide Labour election victory but an “ambiguous” one that relies on a lot of marginal constituencies, so there is no guarantee of a long tenure for Starmer as there was after the Thatcher and Blair landslides. There is also disarray in the Tory party with leadership contests imminent in both the Westminster and Scottish branches, but when he introduced this as a topic at a previous event this week, he was met with “waves of indifference”.
This event was about the politics of tax and spend. He asked the audience to vote with a show of hands on whether they thought Rachel Reeves would put up taxes in some way in the next budget on 30 October (most thought “yes”) and whether Labour would still have won the election if they had not made the promises on not increasing tax that are now hampering them (overwhelming vote for “yes”).
Richards then examined the history of Labour being attacked as a “tax and spend” party, which he said doesn’t go back as far as we may think. It wasn’t an issue in the ‘60s and ‘70s, but the slogan “Labour’s sums don’t add up” was effective in the 1987 election. Blair and Brown took on board how it was used against them in 1992, and even when Labour was predicted to win comfortably this year, they were still cautious, saying, “it could be 1992”.
The final section of each show is “Order, Order”—John Bercow is one of the impressions he does during the show—in which members of the audience can ask questions or present opinions on anything they want. He handles all of the comments with respect, explaining politely where he may disagree and backing this up with real facts and history, a refreshing approach to political discourse, or any form of public debate, in the world today.
For anyone interested in UK or US politics especially, this is an hour very well spent, whether you join in the debate or just sit back and listen to someone who really knows what he is talking about.