Coco Kahn
speaker
1,632 appearances
19 recordings
2 series
first heard Sep 2024
last heard 12 Jun
Coco Kahn’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 3.
Appearances
And later, with US elections looming, we're joined by co-host of our sister podcast, Pod Save the World's Tommy Vitor, to discuss what it means for US and UK relations.
Yeah, so on Monday, the Health Secretary, Wes Streeting, announced an open public consultation on the future of the NHS. And in the grand tradition, it makes you so patriotic, things got very weird.
This is ridiculous. You do this every opportunity you can. Just make some little dig about some false accusation about me and potential recreational drug use. It's just utterly absurd. I would never take recreational cannabis, not least because it makes me sick.
obviously there's a that's right in fairness i've never seen you taking cannabis and that's the end of that sentence that's the end of that sentence that's the end of it isn't making stuff up fun so obviously obviously there's plenty of uh you know actual productive suggestions to you know some of the uh the comments that have come in include clean the hospitals now and then uh better health care which is you know certainly one we could agree with as well as maybe actually providing some health care to trans people an actual good suggestion um
Well, exactly. It is important that patients have an opportunity to speak about their experience and more information is good. But I would be surprised if there wasn't already a wealth of patient data out there and there was already stuff that they could be working on to, you know, stop this acute problem that's going to happen in winter because that's what people want.
Yeah, it's like a fact-finding mission.
Well, I don't think it's unreasonable for us as citizens, as voters, to expect that there was already a robust plan in place. Which actually leads me very nicely to our next guest, who famously produced two very thorough plans that he put to the public before two general elections.
Now, Labour might have won a landslide victory in the general election, but one of the more surprising outcomes was the unlikely gains made by the Greens and a surge in the number of independent candidates. With greater collaboration, could they become a real power in politics?
Oh, actually, I remember us talking about this and I thought to myself, you should have had youth, Jeremy Corbyn. You know, 16 years old, could have been rock and roll.
Yeah.
So you use the phrase, you know, it's not very well thought out. And I'm glad you said that, because I think it's fair to say that's a concern Nish and I have had. You know, we were talking about West Streeting's public consultation for the NHS. Of course, you know, getting the public involved is wonderful. You know, increasing democracy in our political participation is wonderful. But also...
I thought you had a plan, mate. Keir Starmer stood in front of the public, you know, went on television and said, it's much worse than we thought. Now, we can argue about whether that is the case. It certainly seemed like the press knew it was much worse than they were saying.
But I guess one of the things I wanted to ask you is, how reasonable is it to expect the government to have had a plan before they, you know, on the run up to election that they should have already had these things in place? You went to an election twice. How much of a plan did you have for the first 12 months?
According to The Guardian last month, you spoke at the launch of a new left-wing political party, reportedly named Collective. It was attended by left-wing grandees such as yourself, former Unite head Len McCluskey, filmmaker Ken Loach. Can you tell us anything about this party? What is it?
You don't like grandee.
Okay, fine, fine, fine, fine.
Okay, all right, we'll work on it. We'll work on it. Everything's a process, Jeremy. These are just first attempts, okay?
I can tell you're not going to give me an answer on whether it's going to be a party or not. But in the spirit of democracy, I'm going to give you my thoughts.
Well, look, I'm a millennial and an ageing, ageing millennial. And, you know, I would say there's a bit of a deficit of democracy for my generation. Like we don't actually have a lot of choices. And part of that is because of the first past the post system. But also it's because no one's having these conversations.
So I'm not going to say whether you should or should not start a political party, but it is... Interesting. So hypothetically speaking, if we did have a new left-wing party, do you think it should be a separate political project or just really to influence the Labour Party, a bit like reform did with the Tories?
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