Chris Johns

Is the UK just like Italy, but with worse food?

Yeah.

And the answer seems to be yes.

It's fast becoming – I'm reluctant to say ungovernable because it's not, but it isn't being governed in any meaningful sort of way.

You have this chap who's running –

the government apparently um but isn't he doesn't take any decisions he thinks that he's in some kind of quasi middle management job where he just sees the problems coming across his desk and files them away without doing anything about them uh it's it's most extraordinary most extraordinary so we're not ungovernable in the way that italy became for many years after the second world war

But we're not governed.

So the two things end up looking like the same, I suppose.

spectrum you know there's there's there's no doubt about that and then you look it is very depressing jim because the people that you're mentioning there angela rainer for example is touted as a possible leader once her own tax issues are dealt with by her majesty's revenue and customs and the electorate may or may not forget about those problems the the

The issue seems to be, as Rainer says, that she and so many other people in the Labour Party want the Labour Party to be more of the left, to go leftwards in terms of its policies.

I mean, it's pretty lefty as we speak, at least in terms of the broad brush taxing and spending headings, because it's clearly now a very high tax country.

in terms of income tax, in terms of all sorts of taxes, actually.

And it's a very high spending country.

And we still spend an awful lot more than we take in in taxes.

So we're a high borrowing country.

And those borrowing costs, which I've mentioned in a recent podcast, have gone over £100 billion a year in debt interest on government debt.

They're going up.

So all the new debt that is going to be incurred by whoever is leading the Labour Party is

they're going to be paying over 5% a year, which is a lot, and it's unsustainable.

There's lots of arithmetic around budgetary...