Matthew O'Toole

speaker

264 appearances 3 recordings 3 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 22 Jun

Matthew O'Toole’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 3.

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Liveline · "People can look out their front window and see a sense of decline..." · 22 Jun 2026 podcast

I was, Ciarán, yeah.

I was a civil servant at that point.

I came to point that out.

I wasn't politically appointed.

I was a civil servant.

But yeah, I was there.

Not really was the beginning of what turns out to have been a decade of chaos in the UK following Brexit.

Well, I did think that Brexit was going to

fundamentally destabilised the UK, and I felt it was going to have huge consequences on the island of Ireland.

Both of those things have turned out to be true.

I'm not claiming that I had unique wisdom on that.

I wasn't the only person, but the sense that was why I ended up leaving a civil service career, moving back to this island and becoming a politician in Belfast was that journey for me, and I saw that this was going to be, and lots of other people did too, that this was going to fundamentally destabilise the UK, and that's what's happened.

A lot of the instability has been caused by

For example, yes, the speeding up and destabilization of politics, social media, including social media exploited by actors who have ill intent, but also the economic weakening of the UK.

I mean, real fiscal challenges are created by the fact that the UK has basically lost tens, hundreds, in fact, or billions of pounds of economic activity and tax revenue.

So a lot of this does stem from that original sin of Brexit.

There were problems before then, but that was really a key starting point.

Well, actually, I was actually way back when a member of the Liberal Party in London, but in a kind of inactive capacity.

But I mean, I think the issue, a big part of the issue with Keir Starmer, who was elected with a degree of hope in the sense that people had had an awful chaos, corruption from years of the Tories, the chaos of Brexit.

There was a sense of hope and a degree of, I guess, relief that the Tories had been able

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