Lord Stewart (Stuart) Wood

speaker

257 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 19 Jul

Lord Stewart (Stuart) Wood’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Newscast · What No 10 Will Really Be Like For Andy Burnham · 19 Jul 2026 podcast

Yeah, welcome to the job, right?

The first pre-power briefing and you start to create tensions.

I mean, that's the way it goes.

It's an interesting issue because for years, Tony Blair was very keen on an ID card.

Not pre-digital age, but sort of pre-digital age.

And then the logic for ID cards came into its own, I think, with the digital era because of protection, as David Blunkett said, protection of individuals, but also the idea of stopping illegal work.

So there's all sorts of social policy functions that ID cards could serve.

The problem is that you've got into this world of cost.

You got into this world of intrusion into people's lives.

And you also got this problem of contracts with private sector providers that cause a lot of angst inside the Labour Party and inside the country.

I suspect what's going to happen is they'll get headlines out of scrapping the high level commitment and probably some savings that have been allocated in the Whitehall trajectory.

But actually, as David Blunkett says, over time, we'll still accrue something like a digital ID card out of functional necessity.

Well, I think the second one is the sort of meat and potatoes stuff when it comes to Andy's commitment to ending 40 years of neoliberalism, as he calls it, because he wants something totemic to show that he's reversing what he thinks has been a terrible settlement for the country that started with the Thatcher privatisations and all the regulatory stuff that goes around it.

What's interesting, in the late 80s, that...

That settlement about privatising our utilities was kind of the Thatcher heartbeat issue, right?

And would have had a lot of support.

Now, you go well into the right of politics before you get people who support the current system on public utilities.

Massive public support for doing something.

That is a tension that every, Gordon Brown had that in 2007.

How could he, was he a continue of Blair or was he a change from Blair?

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