Zoë Grünewald
speaker
1,028 appearances
5 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2024
last heard 9 Jul
Zoë Grünewald’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 — 2 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
We've seen that most recently with the grooming gangs. I saw an interesting statistic earlier, I think from Tortoise Media, that said that over the past week, Elon Musk has posted more than 200 times on grooming gang scandal in less than two weeks. So that just shows you, you know, considering this man owns Tesla, he's the richest man in the world.
That is a lot of tweeting about a, you know, a instant in British politics that doesn't concern him. Yeah.
So I think thus far, Labour's response has been actually quite right, which has been to mainly ignore him. And that's because, you know, you might say these are the rantings of a madman, in which case it probably makes sense to ignore him. But I think there's also now increasingly a sense of actually, even though he is in Donald Trump's administration, how long is that going to last?
Because already people around Donald Trump are saying to him... this man can't be trusted. You know, the way he turned on Nigel Farage after previously throwing around this idea of $100 million donation, supporting reform, turned on him very, very quickly, you know, just over comments that Nigel Farage had made. So I think... What Labour wants to do is, as far as possible, ignore Musk.
Obviously, they have to wade in when Musk is directly putting their own ministers in danger. And what Elon Musk did to Jess Phillips, I think, was something that could not be ignored by any government. And I think Keir Starmer was quite strong on how Elon Musk could put her in danger. So...
Well, I think the fact that they have set them quite clearly shows that they do think they are realistic and viable. The problem is that they're staking a lot on reducing NHS waiting times because, A, because it is a lived thing. It's one of those things that people either have personal experience of or they have family members who have experience of.
And we know the NHS is a huge part of our sort of political fabric. And therefore, progress on the NHS is fundamental to whether people believe Labour is doing its job. but also because the NHS links to their wider economic plan. So we have nine million economically inactive people in the UK. A big portion of those are out of work, sick.
Labour need to get through waiting lists in order to get those people back to work and rejuvenate the economy. The problem is there's lots of things going on in the economy that are out of Labour's control. Yesterday, while all this was going on with Elon Musk, Rachel Reeves was forced to service government borrowing, which has gone up massively.
So we've got the spiralling cost of government debt. This is taking Rachel Reeves within a whisker of breaking her fiscal rule about UK long-term borrowing. And people are saying when it comes to the spring budget, this might mean that they either have to put up taxes, slash public spending, or break her fiscal rules. The Treasury are ruling out breaking her fiscal rules.
So there's lots and lots of concern that if Rachel Reeves wants to meet her... long-term growth ambitions, we're going to see more cuts to public spending. And of course, this has a knock-on effect with things like the NHS. This has a knock-on effect with other public services that get people back to work. All of this is a holistic circle.
And as much as Labour might want to say they're making progress on the NHS, you simply can't do that without all the other things being in place as well.
It's really hard because you're absolutely right. Elon Musk is setting the news agenda. And part of this is because we have this obsession in the media with personalities. But part of it also is that he has been given legitimacy, A, by being extremely wealthy and putting the idea of a donation to reform out there, but also because he's in Donald Trump's administration now.
So it's really hard for them to keep their messaging on track with policy. I think that there are sort of three ways that Labour hope they can defeat the rising threat, the far right, the influence of Elon Musk, the influence of Donald Trump. There's a really good piece by Ros Taylor in The New European about what Labour internally think they should be doing.
And it's broadly split into kind of three categories. So you have The people who want to see Labour really hone in on its messaging, refine its messaging, no more doom and gloom, optimism. What will Britain look like? What's the future we're building? Get people excited about, you know, spades in the ground, new towns, new houses, planning reform, that kind of thing.
There's those in Labour who think they just need to deliver. And then there's those in Labour who say, actually, this is all a symptom of long term decline. What we need are deep rooted constitutional changes. So voting reform, electoral reform, abolishing the House of Lords, talking about our relationship with the EU, you know, these much bigger things which Labour aren't.
quite frankly, going to commit to, at least not in their first term or probably even their second term. But there is some argument in Labour about what do we do? Do we just focus on delivery and ignore the noise? Do we actually start to get a grip on messaging above reform? Because reform are very good at diagnosing a problem, talking about discontents, very easy to do when you're in opposition.
Does Starmer need to take them head on, you know, and say, actually, this is what we're going to do. This is how it's going to improve the country. Or is actually all of this irrelevant if Labour aren't tackling the real deep rooted fundamental problems in this country? So we're going to see lots of that.
I think ultimately, Morgan McSweeney, who basically is Kit Summers' chief of staff, runs the Labour Party, he's all about delivery. We'll probably see Labour trying to keep themselves away from the noise and just proceed with those measurable targets like NHS waiting lists.
I think it's very important. It's a very fair point. And I think it tells you a lot about how not just boring average men, but you're right, like repulsive men seem to get so far in politics.
I think Jenrick thinks he is doing that. Yeah. I think you're absolutely right. I think Kemmy Bain knocked his toast. There was a great quote in a piece I read about this where a Tory MP had basically said, I think the party needs to get the madness out of its system.
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