Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Alex and Faisal, I've got a special offer for you. It's more of an invitation.
Go on.
What are you doing on August the 10th to the 14th?
Oh my God, no idea.
I have got a plan for the 14th because you know what's happening on the 14th. I hope you haven't double booked here. Uh-oh.
What's happening on the 14th? It's the solar eclipse in Ibiza. And are you going to be there? No.
But I imagine I might go. I mean, how cool would that be? Solar eclipse in Ibiza.
Yeah, well, I mean, the second most exciting thing happening on the 14th, for example, is Newscast live at the Edinburgh Fringe. Oh, yeah. We're making our triumphant return to Edinburgh. And I was going to say, the door is open to both of you, either of you, to come to any or all of the days. Adam, the eclipse can wait. Great, glad to hear it, the eclipse that you weren't going to anyway.
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Chapter 2: What are the main critiques Tony Blair has of the current Labour government?
The other criticism of this... is that some of the stuff that he is suggesting in terms of policy, which is where he wants the focus to be, so like on loosening net zero, on exploiting oil and gas in the North Sea, on loosing regulations on smaller tax state, they are not values that many in the Labour Party might naturally align with.
So you can make the kind of argument that Tony Blair is making, which is that you shouldn't be hamstrung or entirely driven by... your political ideology in the face of pragmatic and practical solutions. But you've got to factor in how that's going to sit with the people that vote for you and with your own party at the same time. You know, that's just kind of politics.
So I think that's where some of what he's suggesting is going to hit up against. And we're already starting to see a bit of this in some of the reaction. People in the Labour Party now who are saying, all well and good, Sir Tony, we know you won three elections, but we don't know if they are the solutions that are right for the country and our voter base and what we believe in right now.
I just find when I was reading it and then listening to him on the Today programme that a lot of what he was suggesting in terms of things that should happen sounded either quite conservative, like with a capital C, or quite liberal with a small l, or quite deregulatory with a small d. And Nick Robinson obviously came to that conclusion as well because he then put that to him.
You see, I'm not asking the question about...
Is it Tory? Is it reform? Is it Greens? Is it Labour? I'm just saying, OK, take a step back, analyse the world. Where do we go? And I don't really... I think part of the problem with the way we have this debate is that it always does start and usually end with politics. You started a sentence there and you stopped. I don't really. I thought you were going to say, I don't really care.
Well, I was going to say, I was going to say, I don't really care whether it's left or right in a traditional sense. You don't really care whether it's Labour anymore, do you? In that sense, what was the policies? I don't. I don't think Labour's got something... I'm not tribal in the sense that I think one political party is going to have the exclusive capability of deciding the right answer.
And I guess, you know, the interesting thing when you go out of politics, and this is where I think the most interesting politics today comes from people outside of politics, because when you step out of politics... and you start seeing how the world is changing, it's not really about traditional left and right politics.
In fact, I think that gets in the way a lot of the time of just asking the question, OK, look at the world. How do we make sense of it? How do we keep Britain strong, its economy strong? How do we build its military and so on?
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Chapter 3: How does Tony Blair suggest the Labour Party should focus on policy over politics?
And I do think that that is why what he says is being listened to and examined and reacted to in the way that it is. But he's not universally popular within the party. Some people didn't like his brand of politics, Labour Party politics. And I think now there are plenty of people saying, I'm not sure that this kind of set of solutions is necessarily in touch with the needs of the country.
And I think this notion about kind of wealth distribution and income equality and broader inequality is what is going to, people in the Labour Party that don't agree with what Tony Blair is saying are going to start to coalesce around that notion and suggest it cannot be solved by some of the things that he's advancing in this argument.
Faisal, I promise I'll let you talk about the price cap in a second, but I'm going to give you a really hard philosophical brain teaser question to end this section of the podcast on the Tony Blair essay. You get quite a few people saying, oh, lots of people at Westminster know what needs to be done. It's this list of things which are quite politically difficult to deliver.
And then you get Tony Blair saying it's all about having a big vision that matches all the big changes that are happening in the world. I'm not really convinced we have a political system where all of those things can actually happen. happen because there's lots of stakeholders, there's lots of constraints like how much the government's borrowing.
There's also the fact that are we in a world where you could get everyone to sign up to a vision that allows you to do the hard political things that delivering the vision requires? I'm just not convinced that we have that system.
And Tony Blair was a master of the broadcast era. You know, 24-hour news emerged around, I forget, probably just around the time he became, maybe just before, he became Prime Minister. And he would be used to the Prime Minister of the day having the mic, as it were, and being able to command the airwaves.
Yeah.
I also remember one of his last speeches was about the media was out of control and he said, when they're pursuing a story, they're like a feral beast. And the beast has only got more feral and there's more beasts in the intervening period.
Well, exactly. One wonders what would have happened with the Iraq war in the era of social media. There was a fair amount of protests about that. And indeed, the very political system upon which he built Well, it was pretty stable, wasn't it? Compared to what we've had since.
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Chapter 4: What are the implications of Tony Blair's essay for the future Labour leadership contest?
So we use this idea of a typical household dual fuel bill a lot. Now, what's happened is Ofgem has changed its calculation. And when I first saw this, I'd forgotten that this happened every three or four years. And I thought, well, this looks like a bit of a stitch up, doesn't it?
What, to make it look less bad?
To make it look less bad. So in fact, the actual typical household bill when it comes in July will be considerably less than the number I just used, which was £18.60. It'll be £16.63, so £200 less. Why? Because actually typical use of Gem, say, has gone down. And it's gone down... An awful lot, actually. And that is what has happened.
I've checked this out with a couple of bosses of energy companies. You're talking about a 17% reduction in just a couple of years in the average use of gas by a household. So that's 2,000 kilowatt hours a year, down from 11,500 to 9,500. I did the calculation on the movement. That is it.
Well, 17% fall in anything is big.
I mean, that is... So what is going on here? And you can look at this in two ways, and it kind of distills to the same thing, right? Which is, it's energy efficiency. In the old days, it's LED light bulbs, which have been a tremendous policy success. I remember all the debates about that. That saved unbelievable amounts of energy. Electricity, obviously. It is turning thermostats down. It is...
potentially some heat pumps, some solar, all this sort of stuff, changing from gas to electricity.
Or just people being super aware of the energy price because it's on podcasts every quarter.
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Chapter 5: What challenges does Tony Blair highlight regarding the current government's policy direction?
Well, and it's been high, right? Responding to high. But then there's also people using electric blankets to heat the human, not heat the home, right? Is that sensible energy efficiency or is that, you know, terrible sign of poverty? Should people be allowed to just, you know, or people should, you know, should normal just be you put on the heater whenever you want to? I don't know.
Or as I heard directly when I attended a call centre for an energy company yesterday, You do get people calling in, and this is to Alex's point, you know, who badly for health reasons need to use electricity for refrigerated medicines, for the stairlift, whose electricity gets cut off when they don't have enough to put in the prepayment meter.
You know, so there's a bit of, there's like, if you like forced lower use of energy and there's energy efficiency, But in general terms, we've seen this in other countries, and it goes back to the Blair point, where a politician can have a conversation with the public and say, do you know what, we all need to use less energy.
Because in Germany, for example, they were very explicit with the German people. We've got to pull together in a sort of war effort to use less Russian gas. And they had to because there was physically fewer molecules. Whereas we're in a country where you can't say put on a jumper when you're cold.
You can't have that. People literally get fired for that. But it sort of happened. So I think that this may explain when you see people's general sense of like, I'm being squeezed. But there is some degree, and I don't know how much of this is sort of, if you like, bad loss of energy access versus...
people being smart and cutting down on their energy at time of high prices, but it's a bit of both. But it's a big, but it's a big, but it's a big change. And it's a big change that, you know, again, like it's, you can see it in the data and not many people are talking about it in politics, but I bet it's affecting every voters sense of wellbeing. And there's some interesting government schemes.
You know, we filmed with somebody who I didn't realise it at the time, who was getting solar panels paid for by the taxpayer on their house in Derby. Very, very happy. Previously had to use an electric blanket rather than heat their home because it was so cold. You know, there's a lot of stuff going on. You know, it's interesting. And energy in particular is really interesting.
And they'll be happy if the gas price, if they can delink the electricity price from the gas price, which is what they say they want to do, which is highly technical, that would be a big move.
Another thing we shall see if it happens in the next decade or so. But that's all for this episode of Newscast. So just a reminder about the Edinburgh Fringe festival tickets on sale at edfringe.com. I think, Faisal, actually the clips might be on the 12th, not the 14th. Ah, OK. So good job you're not going to Ibiza because you would have been on the wrong day.
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