EMQs: Is it time for another referendum?

0:00Peter Mandelson: The Chancellor of the Exchequer.

0:02George Osborne: Getting a lesson from the Shadow Chancellor on how to balance the books is like getting a lesson from Dracula on how to look after a bloodbath.

0:08Ed Balls: Ed Balls. As steady as she goes budget. What kind of ship does he think he's on, the Titanic? Hello Mary Celeste.

0:17George Osborne: Welcome to EMQs from Political Currency with Ed Balls and George Osborne.

0:27Ed Balls: so hello and welcome to emq's x minister's questions and i don't know if you've noticed i've been nursing an injury i actually had to go to the gp i actually did e-consult i went on and did you know one of those online requests for help for my gp they rang me within an hour i'd had an appointment within five hours so that is the nhs working and it turns out i have an injury a ganglion cyst it's an injury which has come from excessive drumming oh no i've hit my snare too hard in particular i think on pink pony club we play a punk version of pink pony club where it goes bub i can't actually do it because it hurts me bubba so they say i've got a rest is

1:08George Osborne: this is what happened to ringo star or is this what happened to tommy lee is this what happened to um what was it called p entwhistle people who are playing at a higher level often get into

1:22Ed Balls: these scrapes and it's sort of you know i thought it was going to be osteoarthritis but it turned out to be no that she said you've caused this she said did you do anything excessively in the last month and i said yep play the drums so right there we are i can remember it happening but um i was watching the winter olympics this week i don't know whether you've been watching it because you've been away but i have to say it is absolutely brilliant the winter olympics but what these people do is so brave and you know when you're watching the um snowboard half pipe or big air demonstration of kind of tricks and kind of majesty from these 19 year olds and they get injured so often they often hurt their acls or they land badly and you know i watched that and thought that's how i feel playing the drum it's similar you are willing to put yourself in the firing line for your craft.

2:17Ed Balls: You get injured, that's just a price you pay for aiming for the highest level for glory.

2:22George Osborne: I think your injury is more akin to someone snow ploughing down in the beginner class and falling over and hurting their thumb

2:28Ed Balls: rather than kind of coming off the four-man bob. When I was young, my mum got really injured, went to the GP. I think I was about nine. And he said, you've got tennis elbow. And she said, I don't play tennis. And then it turned out that without me knowing, They'd bought me one of those little table football games for Christmas. And after I'd gone to bed, we had a couple of people around. And my mum played table football defence with such force with her right arm, she ended up with a stress injury. So it obviously goes with the family. People are willing to sacrifice their well-being for the team.

3:00George Osborne: I was thinking, I was just at the table football. You've got to have the experience as a teenager when you go into something like a French bar. And like the teenage French kids can do it so quickly. They flick the wrist so quickly.

3:14Ed Balls: Although I bet they spin, though, and spinning is not acceptable.

3:18George Osborne: I was thinking of the Olympics. I mean, we're not going to host the Winter Olympics any time soon with due deference to the Cairngorns and Glenshee and so on. But we ain't going to host the Winter Olympics. But what about the Summer Olympics again? I mean, it was now actually quite a while ago that the London Olympics happened in 2012. And if you bid for the Olympics Games, it's not going to happen for another 10 years or whatever. And there's a smaller and smaller number of countries that can host the Olympics because of its size and complexity. And, you know, I don't think it's such a mad idea that Britain should bid for the Olympics again.

3:52George Osborne: And I know Sadiq Khan has talked about bidding for the Olympics again for London. And that's an obvious place to hold it. But there has been an interesting bid or proposal, rather, I should say, of a bid from the north of England. You know, a bit like these Winter Olympics are, in fact, spread across northern Italy because they're the Milan Cortina Olympics and they're quite far apart, those two places. You can have, you know, a kind of northern powerhouse Olympics. Just I'm trying to think of a kind of catchy phrase that would summarize. I was going to get my vote.

4:25Ed Balls: Well, you could go and open them because, you know, you always get such a good response from the Olympic crowd. if you are thinking of doing it your next opportunity is 2036 because 2024 2028 and 2032 they've all been taken by paris was last year exactly 2024 2028 and 2032 so these three the point is with those three they were the only cities which bid for them because everybody else pulled out because it is such a financial gamble i'm told that on the northern bid dcms the government department is referring all queries to the british olympic association who are refusing to comment so um basically nobody is asking the treasury whether this is a good idea lisa nandy

5:11George Osborne: come on summon your inner tessa jow and kia starmer summon your inner tony blair although the british olympic association did a great job in bidding for the london olympics and seb co you know a friend of mine played a really key part it was the government getting behind the campaign that landed it in that great moment in singapore do you remember when the result was

5:32Ed Balls: announced so that's right although if things work out with your ai career i mean they could be the george osborne games you could end up sponsoring the george osborne northern powerhouse game it would just be a load of robots playing all these games if you put the billion oh look the robots won the hundred meters well i mean there's no robots in this winter olympics and there's no Everybody's playing for centuries, Dad. Only people like me who are bearing the scars. Our first question is from a former Member of Parliament.

6:02Peter Mandelson: Hi, Ed. Hi, George. It's Luke here, a Gold member and recently appointed chief executive of the Charity Tax Group, which represents UK charities on matters of tax. I've noticed there's quite a lot of talk on the podcast and in politics generally in the UK about personal taxation and business taxation, but we hear a lot less about the impacts of the tax system on charities. The reason I raise it is because the lack of political attention can lead to missed opportunities The opportunity to modernise the gift aid system and drive up philanthropy It can also just lead to legislation dragging behind, becoming out of date Which has resulted in, for example, people living with disabilities paying VAT on essential equipment Or charities paying VAT on social media advertising So I'm really keen to hear about your experiences in the Treasury as to whether you were hearing the voice of charities at that top table, either directly or through officials, and also whether you've got any advice generally on what more the charity sector can do to be heard at that top level of British politics.

7:06Peter Mandelson: Keep it up and well done on the podcast of the year award.

7:09George Osborne: That was Luke Hall. Good to hear from you, Luke, one of my colleagues in Parliament back in the day. He lasted longer in Parliament than me. but he was the Conservative MP for Thornbury and Yate, which if you don't know where that is, it's basically near Bristol.

7:23Ed Balls: So this is a really interesting question from Luke. And I think the answer that for both George's time in the Treasury and for my time, actually charity voices influencing the debate about charity taxation were a big deal. If you remember John Major in 1990, he'd introduced gift aid. Although to get gift aid, which was a tax from your contribution being paid over to the charity. You had to make a donation of£600 or more. The first Labour government in 1970, 2001, Gordon Brown, got rid of that limit. So you could have small donations allowing people to pass on the gift aid. There were so many times, so much pressure from the charities.

8:06Ed Balls: The most effective was when we had all of those individual congregations lobbying for VAT to be relieved on repairs to churches and to roofs and to buildings. And they did it in a very grassroots way. And it was so powerful that we ended up establishing a special fund. We didn't get rid of the VAT because I think it's very hard to do that under the rules and it would have meant a big open door. But we did establish a fund where they could bid to to get their VAT relieved. We did a big review of charities taxation back then. The review of charities taxation, I would say, that's not happened for a long time.

8:45Ed Balls: So if I was Luke, I would be pressing the Treasury to have a sort of first principles look again at the modern tax system. And of course, post Brexit, you've got more flexibility on the VAT side. Interestingly, I hadn't realised this since I just looked into this in the last 24 hours. Did you know that that fund, which I said we'd established in order to support church repairs, it's going. This government has decided to say, you know, it's coming to an end. There's no longer value for money. And despite, I think, the charity then DCMS saying, really? At the moment, that's the plan. Sounds risky to me.

9:22Ed Balls: I mean, they're quite good, these lobbies.

9:24George Osborne: I actually thought that. I remember the church roof fund being such a good idea. I kind of copied it and extended it to repairs of cathedrals. No chancellor visit around rural England or regional England was complete without popping into someone like Wells Cathedral and saying hello to the stonemasons and whatever who were repairing the roof of the cathedral. So I thought that was a very good idea. I mean, Luke, it's great to hear from you and glad to hear you've got a really interesting role outside of Parliament. So I'm going to come to your kind of main question. there were actually a number of reforms under the coalition government to charity taxation and building on some of the things that ed was saying so for example i too made reforms to gift aid and got rid of some of the paperwork you had to fill in you know those forms that in kind of church pews and so on and i said well you know if in total you were raising up to five thousand pounds a year you could get rid of the paperwork i wanted to get rid of it all but treasury officials were adamant that this would lead to a kind of abuse and fraud and i said but what happens to all those little forms that people fill in and they were all accumulating in some enormous warehouse they're livable i said no one's reading these swamps the idea that you know the hmrc is going through all these hundreds of thousands of forms is a bit of a nonsense but anyway it acts as a deterrence but the reform didn't mean that you can put money into a kind collecting buckets and that charity if it's a small charity can claim the gift aid without you having to fill in the forms and then i tried the big reform which i think probably luke is alluding to here which is there's always a feeling that in the united states they've got much more of a giving culture giving to hospitals to the universities you've been to to um art museums and the like and there's you know there's one of the reasons it's often said is it's not just a different culture in which the government don't support these institutions in quite the same way.

11:21George Osborne: It's because the tax breaks are really significant in the US for very rich donors for philanthropists. That's an element of truth. But I remember I did try and introduce something like that so that if you gave at least 10 % of your estate when you died to charity, your inheritance tax rate on the rest of your estate that you passed on actually was reduced. And, you know, I'd like to say it was a great reform and I think it's been used but it certainly didn't create the kind of change in the culture that I was hoping when I launched that thing and I also remember running into a complete brick wall when I tried to introduce something which the liberal democrats wanted to call the tycoon tax it was in the ill-fated 2012 budget this was a way of saying that rich people have to pay some income tax every year because there are people who avoid paying any income tax who are wealthy because you know they give all their money to charity and they essentially live off capital gains and uh you know i ran into not the billionaires but charities who blocked the billionaire tax which i always thought was a bit ironic since quite often these charities complain that you know billionaires don't pay enough tax well my attempt to do it ran into very serious opposition from the charity sector um but anyway the reforms that i did get through I think were kind of good.

12:42George Osborne: I wouldn't say they were transformative. And I think Luke's making a good case for if the charity sector can get its act together. But the problem with the charity sector is it's so diverse. It's got so many different components. So maybe, Luke, your job is to boil it down to a single deliverable, not overly expensive proposal, or at least not overly expensive in the short term, i.e. in terms of cash flow over the next few years, that you can present to the chancellor. And I think most chancellors, whether you're Labour or Conservative, or indeed Liberal Democrats, we discussed on our previous C &Qs, would go for a sensible package of reforms to charities taxation.

13:20Ed Balls: Look, George, if you get in touch with Robert Jenner, he'll probably come out and back that one as well. So, you know, a bit like on the Bank of England, the OBR and the two-child benefit cap. Thank you very much indeed, Luke Hall, for that fabulous question. Our next question is from a civil servant. We're going to call her Jane. She wishes to remain anonymous.

13:36Luke Hall: Hi Ed and George, big fan of the podcast. I'm a civil servant who joined back in 2015 through something called the Fast Track Apprenticeship, which was first introduced by the coalition government. So I suppose I partly have you to thank George and I've since built a long term career in policy. A bit of a thought experiment for you. Could the UK ever hold a national referendum on its overall fiscal model? For example, choosing between higher taxes with more public services or lower taxes with less. Would that strengthen democracy by clarifying public consent about the size of the state? Or would it oversimplify complex trade-offs and limit government flexibility?

14:17Luke Hall: Thanks.

14:18George Osborne: Well, Jane, first of all, I'm absolutely thrilled that the civil service apprenticeship scheme that we introduced worked for you and you've built a fruitful career in the public sector. And therefore, I would love to be in a position to agree with your proposition, but I can't. And the great thing about, you know, the relationship between civil servants and ministers, as I'm sure you know, is you get given honest advice and hopefully you should give honest answers on the advice. and I'm a bit averse to national referendums anyway. You used to be in favour of them. I was never a massive fan of them.

14:53George Osborne: I did support the Scottish independence referendum as a way of trying to forestall the SNP's rise in Scotland, the rising support for independence in Scotland. But in this way, I think if we hadn't had the Scottish independence referendum, we'd be under huge pressure now as a nation to hold one.

15:10Ed Balls: And it was on the issue, wasn't it? Yeah. The Scottish referendum was about the issue which the referendum was about. But the big danger is it becomes about something totally different.

15:17George Osborne: I think national independence, as the SNB would put it, is a legitimate question for a referendum. I don't think choosing a tax and spending model is a question for a referendum. I think that is precisely one of the central questions at a general election. And ultimately, if there are people in Britain who would like to see a government that spent much less of GDP on the state and therefore assume would have lower taxes or a much higher percentage of GDP and therefore higher taxes, although advocates of both causes will say these will pay for themselves or whatever. But I think then forces would emerge in the British political spectrum to fill that space.

16:00George Osborne: But the truth is, even when we were facing each other across the dispatch box and having fierce arguments, we were arguing about single digit percentage points of national income consumed by the state. You know, I was more like it should be 40%. You were probably more like it should be 44 % or something like that.

16:17Ed Balls: The average under Margaret Thatcher.

16:19George Osborne: Right. We weren't arguing about 20 % or 60%. I don't think anyone has yet been able to mobilise the political will to do that. But I think that's precisely what general elections are for, and parliaments is for, not a referendum, in my honest view.

16:35Ed Balls: So let me give you a counter view. And look, I think I agree with that in general. Fundamentally, the size of the state, the role of the state and who pays is what general elections are all about. But let's say we talked on our last podcast about defence spending and whether we need to rearm. Or if you take, for example, social care, Boris Johnson proposed a national insurance rise for social care, then it got ditched. If Labour had come in and said there's this massive problem about social care, at the moment we pay for it in such an unfair, haphazard way. and rather than that, which is really unfair, as an alternative, let us have a social care levy.

17:14Ed Balls: I mean, he could have set up a commission, Keir Starmer, to look into it, propose the levy, then put that to a referendum. If you had something where it's narrow and focused and where the alternative is easy to understand, if the alternative is don't pay the tax, people might just vote for not paying the tax, but if the alternative is something which is tangible and you could see either you do it this way with everybody who pays a levy on social care or those people who have catastrophic needs pay for it from their houses, which would be fairer. Is there an environment where you could do that?

17:51Ed Balls: I think you could pose that choice to people. I'm still not sure I'd want to have a referendum about it.

17:56George Osborne: I think it wouldn't be. It's not a precise, you know, you'd also have to decide on the two options. I don't think you'd get sort of two clean campaigns arguing for one or other option because there's so many gradations in between. But it was a good question from Jane. Extremely good. And good luck with the rest of your thriving career in the civil service.

18:14Ed Balls: And we will come back after this break.

18:28Ed Balls: Welcome back. Our next question comes from Ian.

18:30Peter Mandelson: Hi, this is Ian, a former Australian political advisor who has recently washed up on UK shores. With the cost of restoring Parliament running into many billions, are we asking the wrong question? Instead of spending heavily to keep a 19th century building functioning as a modern legislature, should the UK build a new Parliament outside of London and only restore the Palace for ceremonial use and as a museum? That could actually be cheaper, but it also presents a once-in-a-century opportunity to reshape political culture. Buildings shape behaviour and Westminster was designed around the norms of a Victorian gentleman's club in a London-centred age.

19:08Peter Mandelson: Is it time to rethink not just the building but the culture it produces?

19:12Ed Balls: Look I have a really clear view about this Ian which is it's not really about the building it's about the place. You know I'm chair with Eric Pickles of the Holocaust Memorial Foundation. We've just got a new law to enable us to build the memorial in Victoria Town Gardens next to Parliament. We're not saying next to Parliament because it's a Victorian building. We're saying next to Parliament because for a thousand years, this has been the site of the oldest Parliament in the world. And you want to remind people of what parliaments can sometimes get wrong, because fascism and Nazi Germany started in a parliament in Germany.

19:54Ed Balls: And our parliament didn't do a great job in the 1930s pushing back against what was happening in Hitler's Germany. But I don't think it's about the building. And there's no way you would kind of knock down the old parliamentary building and build a new one on the same site. I think the place is just really, really important. And I'm not sure whether most parliamentarians care about the building, but I think they do care about parliament being sited where it has been for hundreds and hundreds of years. I can see the argument for a new parliament in Leeds or Manchester, but it's not going to happen.

20:25Ed Balls: So I think in the end, Ian, you don't solve the problem.

20:28George Osborne: I mean, I guess you're referring, aren't you, Ian? I mean, there are countries that have chosen to build new capitals and therefore new parliaments. Canberra in Australia, of course, which you will be very familiar with. Brazilia. Ottawa in Canada. Ottawa. And of course, Washington, D.C., famously, because I couldn't agree where the Congress should be in Philadelphia or New York. in the south and so they put it on the border between the northern states and the southern states now i i mean it's it is it is it's actually true that it would be a lot cheaper to build but where exactly you would build it i don't know and to come out of britain's most famous building this great extraordinary gothic temple on the thames i just don't think it's that's right and i think you maybe you know we should get a follow-up a reply from ian because my understanding of everywhere but Washington is that these new capitals haven't really thrived as cities.

21:26They feel a bit isolated from commerce, entertainment industry.

21:32George Osborne: And, you know, one of the great things about, you know, our capital cities is all these things are brought together. Good question. But as Ed said, ain't going to happen.

21:41Ed Balls: So let's have another question from Sam. Hello.

21:43Peter Mandelson: My question is whether the Labour Party will come to see Mandelson's actions as a betrayal on the level of Ramsay MacDonald's formation of the national government in 1931 or the Gang of Four splitting to form the SDP in 1981.

21:57Ed Balls: So I think there is a fundamental difference here between what we've just seen with Peter Mandelson, but you could put in the same category scandals like Profumo or David Blunkett resigning over visas or Ron Davis, the problems he faced as the Welsh secretary.

22:15George Osborne: A moment of madness on Clapham Common, wasn't that what he described it as?

22:20Ed Balls: But these were like individual things which went wrong. They may. People will charge that they say something about a wider culture, but it was the individual. Whereas if you take Ramsey and Donald in 1931 or the Gang of Four in 1981, these were movements which split parties. The Labour Party was split in the 30s and in the 80s by a political decision of historic proportions. In the end, it didn't work out for the SDP. And in the end, Labour reformed under Attlee through the War Cabinet after the Macdonald National Government. But in both cases, the betrayal was against the unity of the collective.

23:02Ed Balls: It was a party split, a party betrayal, rather than just an individual.

23:07George Osborne: I mean, I agree with you about the SDP and about Ramsey and MacDonald. I mean, I think in those cases, those politicians genuinely believe what they were doing was in the national interest and that the Labour Party had to be sort of left behind, even if history didn't agree with them. and the late body, of course, came back. Where I draw a distinction between the Peter Mandelson scandal, if you can now call it that, and Ron Davis, David Blunkett, or any number of Tories, is not just a sort of embarrassment. It's sort of leeched into No. 10 Downing Street and decisions taken because of his appointment as the ambassador.

23:47George Osborne: I think if he hadn't been made the ambassador, let's just say he was in political retirement, This would still be quite a big story, Peter Mandelson's involvement with Jeffrey Epstein. What's really rocket-fueled it is the appointment of him to Washington. And therefore, for those who are against Keir Starmer, both in his own party, but also for the opposition parties, and particularly Kemi Maidenock has done well on this, this is a kind of shot at the premier. This is, you can drag government into it.

24:19Ed Balls: So it's not Mandelson's actions, as Sam said in the question. It would be Keir Starmer's actions. So the betrayal isn't a Peter Mandelson betrayal, it is government betrayal.

24:27George Osborne: But it's a governing crisis. And I think, you know, the only there's a kind of the parallel. I mean, it's not a great parallel is, you know, there was a Tory MP, Chris Pinscher. Various allegations were made against him, of which he refuted. And then Boris Johnson kind of tried to weigh in to defend him. It was his sort of Boris Johnson essentially being accused of lying about his involvement that brought down Boris Johnson. It was the trigger. It wasn't Partygate that brought down Boris Johnson. Although, you know, in some ways this was just a proxy for things like Partygate and the way he was running the government at the time.

25:09George Osborne: But again, with Starmer, I think if he falls over all of this and we haven't seen publication of the emails and WhatsApp messages and so on, it won't be probably because of the scandal itself. I don't think it's the kind of thing which would bring down a premier who's riding high. It's more like the straw that breaks the camel's back. And therefore, very different from the splits in the leg body in the 1930s and the 1980s.

25:32Ed Balls: Very interesting. Thanks for your question, Sam. We'll take a break. We've got time for one final question.

25:49Ed Balls: Welcome back. Our final question today is from Christopher.

25:52Peter Mandelson: Hello, my name is Christopher Berg and I'm a lecturer at Trinity College, Cambridge. Now, I followed the podcast from the beginning and I listened to it between supervisions with my students. My question is, what does the constant churn of politicians mean for the UK? So I'm from Norway, where political leaders stay active for a very long time. Some argue, too long. Whereas in the UK, brilliant politicians often leave at the age of, say, 43, 45 or 54. Do you worry that this is a problem? And if so, what can be done about it? Thanks.

26:25George Osborne: So I'm going to challenge us both to do a bit more research into this, because is it true that British politics people are out more quickly than in other democracies? You know, I get the impression a lot of people churn through the House of Representatives, for example, which is the closest thing to the House of Commons in the US system. Senators may be in there for longer, but you quite often get members of Congress who are there for two terms, three terms, four terms, which I think the average length of service of a British MP last time I checked, the amount of change was seven years, which is not very long.

27:02George Osborne: so i don't know whether that churn is because people can't you i guess the argument that i don't want to put a sort of conservative label on it but a kind of private enterprise minded person would say that such are the rules now that prevent members of parliament from pursuing other jobs or professions while they're mps that once they've left ministerial office and they don't think they're going to come back to ministerial office they essentially leave and join the private sector because they can't do that in government. Whereas in a previous age, members of parliament used to have other jobs, whether they were trade union leaders or lawyers or whatever.

27:39George Osborne: And that would become increasingly hard. That's the kind of classic argument. I think this is more to do with the churn of British politics in recent years, big changes. And even if you feel like, okay, well, we've had long periods of conservative government. We actually had quite a lot of different types of conservative party in that period and big churns of people leaving. so maybe the average age has come down and then you know when you get a longer period of stable government which doesn't look imminent but nevertheless if you were to have that you would actually have people in for longer on average because they'd hold their seats for longer but i think there is an element of once people have done their time in office they tend to quit although i think it should be to the credit of rishi sunak who i if you're listening to our regular podcast i saw on the plane that he's a prime institute decided to stay in parliament which is not following the pattern of most recent primists.

28:29Ed Balls: I think you are right that there isn't any reason why people would leave our politics generally younger than in other countries. What I do think is right, that because of the nature of our party system and the fact that we elect party MPs into Parliament, it's actually much harder to return once you are kind of out. I mean, Andy Burnham has found this in gone to be mayor of Manchester, finding it very hard to return back into Parliament. Very hard to do, as we discussed in the podcast in recent weeks, to do a Mark Carney, become elected leader of the party and then become a member of Parliament.

29:07Ed Balls: In America, because you have individual nominations for the big jobs, Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump went out of politics for a few years and then returned back in to seek re-election again. If Emmanuel Macron stops being president of the next presidential election, he can take time out and then re-enter if he could win the nomination. Whereas in our system, you have to go through the whole party process of being selected first. And I think that makes it harder in our system. I think there is a question about whether political systems have the maturity, the confidence to use people well. And look, we're lucky because we do this podcast.

29:41Ed Balls: We can continue in our own way to contribute to debates by the conversations we have. We are influencers, aren't we? We are influencers. But it was a good thing that Rishi Sunak brought back David Cameron. If I was Keir Starmer, I might be bringing back Rishi Sunak in order to do some work for the government on AI, using his contacts and his networks. And I don't see...

30:03George Osborne: What about David Miliband? Why is David Miliband left out there in kind of exile in New York? Why is no one, no Labour frontbench in opposition or in government not used him in some way?

30:13Ed Balls: I think it goes exactly to my point. If David Miliband wanted to go into the House of Lords, I'm sure he'd go into the House of Lords as a former foreign secretary. If David was willing to come back and do a review or to be a minister, I would expect he would be welcomed. but if David hasn't given up ambitions of being the Chancellor or the Prime Minister, then the only way to come back is by being selected first of all as a Labour MP, fighting a by-election or fighting a general election. And if David got the nod from Keir Starmer, I really want you to come back into the House of Commons to be in my cabinet.

30:50Ed Balls: Maybe he would do that and maybe Keir Starmer didn't give David Milliman the nod.

30:54George Osborne: He feels he would add to his problems rather than to attract for them.

30:57Ed Balls: Well, I mean, on the main podcast, that was the argument you were making about Andy Burnham. It wasn't mature and confident. It was feeling under pressure, which meant they denied him returning to the House of Commons.

31:05George Osborne: There are a couple that we should just know. I mean, Jackie Smith, I think, has made a quite successful return, hasn't she, to the government?

31:11Ed Balls: Into the Lords, definitely.

31:13George Osborne: And Dougie Alexander has come back into the House of Commons and is doing a job as a minister as far as sexy.

31:19Ed Balls: And he went for selection, which is a tough thing to do, and won. So congratulations to Douglas. and he's now back in the cabinet of Scottish Secretary, you know, presiding over the complexity of the Scottish election. Thanks a lot, Keir. Having to go onto the television to explain Anas Sarwar's views on the leader.

31:39George Osborne: Thank you very much. I was travelling around the world doing trade deals and lauding our deal with India and our deal with, you know, America. And now I'm in Livingston explaining why the Labour Scottish leader wants to get rid of my boss. Very good.

31:54Ed Balls: An excellent question, Christopher. We're really pleased you listened to our podcast and we hope you're encouraging your Trinity College Cambridge students to do the same. And really good question. That's all we've got time for this week's EMQs.

32:07George Osborne: Yeah. And if you want your burning questions answered, then do make sure you send us EMQs of your own and send them to questions at politicalcurrency.co.uk and include a voice note so we can hear your voice as well.

32:20Ed Balls: also we want to make sure that you are real and not ai and we promise to answer them ourselves rather than getting chat gpt to do the job for us we'll be back on thursday with another episode

32:29George Osborne: of our main i did actually use chat gpt on one of these answers i was just looking up the reforms i've made to charity taxation and i was like oh yes i've forgotten so there we go i actually have

32:40Ed Balls: been playing um bill evans peace peace which is a 1958 classical jazz muse on debussy but was very formative in modal jazz just before kind of blue which he played on with miles davis in 1959 and i went to chat gpt to ask it about the bill evans method on peddling and on improvisation and what it gave back was astonishing i mean it was amazing i tried searching on you know normal search engines and you don't get anywhere i mean goodness me if you want to understand music and you're willing to um i didn't check the sources but it was so interesting i loved it oh a bit of a free advert

33:20George Osborne: there thank you very much we're going to be back on thursday with another episode of our main show

33:25Ed Balls: see you then

33:33George Osborne: thanks for listening to political currency this has been a persifonica production

33:44Thank you.