James Cook
speaker
1,779 appearances
16 recordings
3 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard 19 Sep
James Cook’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 — 15 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 6.
Appearances
And James Antonia Romeo, part of her, if you like, pitch or how she is seen within the civil service was as someone coming in to the top job as the cabinet secretary who could, you know, if not shake things up a bit, be seen to... Is it fair, Catherine, change things in quite a way in terms of the culture of the civil service?
Well, there's two things, two things that strike me about that.
And I wonder what both of you think about them.
One, just listening to the evidence yesterday, and I know it shouldn't be a surprise to hear that the UK Civil Service is bureaucratic.
But the processes, procedures, different arms of government, different bits that knew this and knew that and had to pass this on here but not there, seemed to me astonishingly complicated to the point of wondering out loud, were they necessary?
And that's a question rather than a statement.
And then secondly, I just couldn't help but think of the American context today.
The idea that the US president would not be told something because it would be kept from him so other people could decide it or and then only share the crucial piece of information seemed to me quite extraordinary.
And it struck me that people watching or listening to what was happening in Parliament in Westminster from other parts of the world might be thinking, well,
If the guy at the very top, the Prime Minister, with, by definition, surely, therefore, the highest level of security clearance put there by the public, can't be told stuff, what sort of a democracy is it?
And Catherine, earlier I heard a noise.
You looked slightly startled.
And I now know what the noise was, or rather who the noise was, Faisal Islam.
No, no, well...
What do you make of all these machinations at the heart of government, Faisal?
And of course, you might make an argument that that would significantly sort of lower the tax burden.
That would be a, you know, for some, a laudable thing to do.
For others, the opposite.
But how the numbers, because the combined tax take of both revenue streams around national insurance versus the scale of the tax hike that you might need to be vaguely commensurate with that if it goes in a fairly narrow set of directions within the kind of AI industry.
Now we know what your econ perspective is, Faisal.
Showing 1701–1720 of 1,779 · page 86 of 89
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