557. Can Burnham Deliver Britain's Biggest Change in Generations?

24:42Rory Stewart:They are keeping the whole thing going. They're making it this lovely place, which allows things like the Park Run, which have incredible benefits for people. I'm sort of trying to speak not just for Kreef or Cumbria, but I guess I'd also be speaking for coastal towns, a lot of East Anglia. And that's where a proper Swiss system is really exciting and interesting, because it's not doing what Germany sometimes looks like it's doing, which is making a big bet on everybody's going to work in Volkswagen and then suddenly working out. Well, that's not going very well right now. Exactly. That your energy costs are too high and the combustion engine isn't working in Chinese competition and then there isn't a job.

25:22Rory Stewart:It's really thinking, how do you across, I think in Switzerland, 230 different sectors provide proper support so that you have people saying, I'm actually very proud to be an assistant on the desk in a dental place or a mountain guide or work in care. Or as you notice this, when you go into retail in Switzerland, go into a swatch shop, people are very, very proud about their professional skills on how they work with a customer, etc. And so that may not be, you know, the point that you were making about where the most productive bits are, which may be London or Manchester Leeds conurbation. but it is very important for equality for dignity for self-respect for incomes that you build up that whole sector even if it's not the bit that excites the treasury yeah just you just you mentioned the park run the member apartment fadden telling me that one of his proudest achievements was the growth of the wolverhampton park run he's a he's a he's a regular regular park runner but i think this this point about it being local i mean we're going to talk about devolution later, but I think this is something that can't just be left to the big businesses and the big cities.

26:30This is about, you know, when Fiona and I are in France, okay, and let's say you need to call out a plumber or an electrician, they nearly always come with an apprentice. It's just built into the mindset of French culture that if you're a small business person, you can hire somebody that you take on at a, you know, a reasonable wage for somebody who's entering the labour market, and they are your apprentice again on apprenticeships i think we often think of big employers but in a sense what we need to think about is a is a mindset is is you know could we all could you and i take on an apprentice podcaster you know george osborne or john

27:11Rory Stewart:sople something like that exactly train up george yeah um but but exactly but i think the final thing I'd say before the break is that if you wanted to really make Britain have something more like a Swiss system, it's a lot of energy, it's a lot of time, and it's a lot of money, because you're starting from where we are. And I don't know, I think it would cost you billions of pounds more a year initially. You could get it back, but it'd probably be 15, 20 years. Small companies, including very small companies, would have to begin to think about how they think about training, supporting the way in which schools work has to change from the age of probably 11 onwards.

27:52Rory Stewart:They have to start introducing people to different businesses, giving them time to go in and do work placements, develop a sense of where they want to. It's got to be the right thing to do. It's got to be the right thing to do. But I'd be interested maybe in, well, maybe we should get Fiona on, talk about what actually needs to happen, how much it would cost, what the priorities are to make schools and businesses go more in that direction, and whether she's talking about a Swiss model or something else. I can't remember what timeline Tomlinson had in his report in 2004, but this is a long-term project.

28:24This is not something that's going to be tweaked overnight. And that's why I think it's actually quite exciting that he's thinking these big long terms. And I think this is something that is going to go with the grain of what a lot of people in schools think, teachers and headteachers. I think it's going to go within the grain of a lot of what parents think. I think it will help kids think, oh yeah, maybe I would enjoy school more than I seem to do at the moment. I thought you were going to push back a lot harder from the kind of, you know, very traditional education point of view. So I think even somebody like you can be persuaded that this is a good way to go.

29:03But I think you're right that it's not straightforward, it's not easy, and it won't be cheap.

29:06Rory Stewart:And I think the pushback that I didn't give, and it took me a bit of time to get there, is that I think vocational training's greatest strength is giving, if it works well, like in Switzerland, dignified, well-paid work to the majority of people, including, as you say, 10 % of people who aren't in the workforce at all. And that's a different argument from the idea that this is going to necessarily guarantee GDP growth, frontier companies, much of which is inevitably going to come from the university graduates who are driving the things that are driving the British economy, which are, you know, pharma, AI, tech, banking.

29:48Rory Stewart:So I think, again, and maybe this is where Burnham saying he's trying to challenge economic models is important. We're saying that vocational training matters because we care about people's dignity, we care about their self-respect. We're not just saying it matters because it's going to generate more GDP growth. It may be that the American economy grows faster without having good vocational training. But the cost of that is you end up with a lot of people at the bottom of American society in a miserable situation. Yeah. Okay, well, take a break and then we'll come back and talk social care and devolution.

30:34Kind of funny and an avid cyclist. The next thing you know, you're in a cycling crew. Well, a community cycling group. The thing about Facebook, you might find more than what you're looking for. From a browse to a bike ride, this summer, find more on Facebook.

30:57Rory Stewart:Welcome back to The Restless Politics with me, Rory Stewart. And me, Alistair Campbell. So we talked about his big idea or his big plans for reform on vocational education. And then, of course, he also said, quote, if social care is not reformed, the NHS is going to collapse. Well, that says social care has to be reformed. And as I said earlier, he's been talking about this for almost 20 years. I mean, in a very weird way, the first thing that I noticed is that this social care and devolution stuff was what I came up with when I was trying to work out what I really believed in as I was running for leadership against Boris Johnson.

31:34Rory Stewart:And I thought, well, this is a bit odd. Why in 2019 as a Tory candidate was I saying the number one big thing we need to do? And the story is basically that the NHS was a great revolution, but it was never completed because we never worked out what to do with the poor elderly who are seen in Cumbria 15 minutes a day by carers and who are imposing living often very, very difficult lives, but also imposing huge costs on the system. And my second thing was devolution and give power down to local levels. So how did a Tory and a Labour person end up in the same place? And I thought there were two things that struck me.

32:13Rory Stewart:One was maybe it's his Manchester side. So I think in terms of my story, it would be my experience working on the ground in Afghanistan and seeing the nonsense being produced from the capital cities or working on the ground in Cumbria and seeing the nonsense being produced from Whitehall. But the second thing is my strongest memory on thinking about prisons and adult social care is your friend Tessa Jowell. And I remember Tessa Jowell saying that the big question in politics is, would you put your mother in this hospital? Would you put your mother in this prison? Would you put your mother in this situation in care?

32:47Rory Stewart:And I think that is the great question in politics. And then, of course, I remember that Andy Burnham began as the assistant to Tessa Jowell. Maybe there's a great test of jail story here. So that was the first thing. And then I thought, okay, here's two questions for you coming out of that. One is, if I was being self-critical, maybe the reason we come up with this is that they are obvious problems in the country, but they're things that are particularly appealing to somebody who's an insurgent outside trying to run against the establishment. And that when you get inside, it may turn out to be very different.

33:23Rory Stewart:And the second criticism you might make of this is we're spending a lot of time talking about the vulnerable. So it could be adult social care, could be the homeless. You've just done this great piece on homelessness in the newsletter. In my case, it could be prisons. But what are Andy Burnham and I not talking about? You might say we're not talking that much about how we're generating the economic growth and the money to fund this whole thing. Okay, back over to you. That's interesting that you sort of see it in that light. And so in a way, you as a conservative, coming to the same policy attitude, mindset, as Andy, who's clearly not a Conservative and is, you know, pretty leftist centre.

34:00Very interesting as well, how he made an appeal that approached to the opposition parties. And Kemi Badenok, the Tory leader, her response was that she was happy to sit down and discuss this and happy with the proposals as long as they don't involve changes to tax or extra borrowing, which is a way of saying...

34:17Rory Stewart:Which is heartbreaking, because you can't achieve it. And remember that this attempt to solve adult social care was actually what Theresa May tried to make in the middle of her campaign against Jeremy Corbyn. And then Corbyn branded it a death tax and basically killed her re-election attempt. The problem always comes down to the funding. And it's awful that when the Tories are trying to do it, Labour says we're going to oppose the funding. And then when Labour tries to do it, Tories says we're going to oppose the funding. And of course, Burnham is going to hope that he managed to do what he didn't manage to do, is that he'll have political skills that maybe Theresa May or others didn't have to reach across the aisles.

34:52Rory Stewart:But sadly, maybe the other parties are just not going to let you do that. Yeah. I mean, he said he was going to put whatever political capital I have into fixing broken social care. Well, the political capital requirement is going to be huge. But it's interesting how, you know, I discussed this with Steve Rotherham for this series of doing on how Burnham's developed. And Steve Rotherham is somebody who in the book, you remember this, he refused to shake Boris Johnson's hand. He talks openly about how his mother didn't like him saying, using the word hate, but he hated Margaret Thatcher. This is a guy who really burns passionately against the Conservatives.

35:26But he said even he, as Liverpool mayor, like Andy in Manchester, have had to develop a different approach to politics. And it was quite interesting when the social care plan, in quotes, because there's not much detail yet, was announced. Kemi Badenowicz said that. So she was trying to get the tone quite nice, but then whack, no more money. Reform, I think it was generic, just came out and did a sort of, you know, classic. I can't even remember what he said, but it was up with this, we will not put. But the Lib Dems were very interesting. They were basically quite warm, quite positive, let's see the detail, but.

36:00So he's definitely trying to get a different sort of political debate going. And I mentioned in the first half, 22 reviews we've had. The most famous was the Dilnot Review. I mean, which, you know, the Dilnot Review, virtually everybody thought, this is a really good piece of work, we should do this. But it fell apart.

36:15Rory Stewart:And that was basically Theresa May's proposal. Just remind people, one of the central ideas there is that, look, it's going to cost a lot to fund, at least in the short term. The hope is that if you look after the elderly properly at home, they don't have to go to hospital. And that will save a huge amount of money, but in the short term costs money. So the idea was you were going to fund it by saying after somebody dies, you can recoup some of the money from the value of their home. Not while they're alive. Not while they're alive. They retain their home. But after they die, the government recoups some of the value of their home.

36:51Rory Stewart:And actually, so in some ways, it's a sort of wealth tax. It's got some of the elements of wealth tax. It's combining the fact that a lot of money is tied up in property and the government's facing huge costs. And I suppose the idea is if you're putting a lot of money into looking after an elderly person, it's costing you a lot of money to recoup that money after they die. Yes, the sad thing is that's at the expense of their children, but it's going to help finance the system. Now, here's another challenge. Theresa May was killed by Corbyn saying death tax and returned without a majority in parliament.

37:24Rory Stewart:Andy Burnham has an enormous majority. And if he adds the Lib Dems to it, another 70 seats, he can do almost whatever he wants. He doesn't need the cross-party stuff in the way that Theresa May did, who had a minority government. So maybe this is the litmus test for his government. If he's saying he's going to fix it, this is probably the one chance to fix it. Nobody's going to have a majority like this again in British politics. So you think he could do this even before the next election? He'd have to. It's his only chance to do it, I'm afraid. If he doesn't start doing it in the next few weeks, it's never going to happen.

37:57Rory Stewart:And then sadly, we're going to say, Andy Byrne, it was a nice guy who said the right things. And we all agree, but he didn't manage to do anything. On the BBC News last night, they put up clips of every prime minister in his camera and saying they're going to do this. But he's got the majority to do it. I mean, this is the one chance to do something like this. Well, he has said he's going to speed forward the Louise Casey report. Louise Casey's got this commission that's looking at these issues again. Well, look, it shows he's thinking big. I was going through, before doing this thing with Steve Rotherham, I was going through all my diaries of all the references to Andy Berler.

38:32And it was quite funny, actually, to see that there was quite a lot of me saying, Andy, you've got to get some decent suits. because he's but there's also one point when ed milliband lost the election and was stepping down and it was the second time that andy burnham stood for the leadership and i was talking to ed and he said he thought andy was a good show this of course is when jeremy corbyn won but he said he thought andy was a good shout because at least he thinks in big ideas now then he was probably thinking of devolution social care education and what have you so he is thinking these big ideas so you say he's got a big majority do it but at the same time even with a big majority as Keir Starmofone you have to be able to take the public with you at the same time and you know so how he develops the arguments in a way that doesn't kill him in the way that it killed Theresa May as you say that's the tricky bit but at least he's starting.

39:26Rory Stewart:So Theresa May managed to do it as a manifesto commitment in an election which she then effectively lost he's got I guess nearly three years in which he can try to get stuff through. The Labour Party, the members of Parliament Labour Party, combined with the Lib Dems, there's not going to be enough rebels against a massive change to adult social care to stop him getting the legislation through. So there is literally nothing stopping him in parliamentary terms from doing it. Maybe this is where he implements his removing the whip system. Yes, it's going to be unpopular with the public, but you just have to believe that in three years time, people are beginning to see the benefits of this.

40:07Rory Stewart:Yeah. Well, they're seeing the direction. I think they have to see the direction. Yeah. Well, remember that, I mean, famously Thatcher did things that were very, very unpopular with the public, but then were not undone. An example that we had was gay marriage. So when I voted for gay marriage, it was incredibly unpopular with my local association. People were very angry with me. Fast forward, nobody's undoing that. And I think the same would be true of adult social care. If he pushed through, it's going to be very expensive. and it's going to get him into trouble in his fiscal rules. But he can do it.

40:38Rory Stewart:He can absolutely do it. He must do it. It would be awful if he says, I'm waiting for Dame Louise Casey to produce a review, and then I'll put it in the manifesto for the next election. There's never going to be a majority like this again. The one thing we know from all our look at these opinion polls is the days of big majorities are over in British politics. So this is the last chance to fix it. Very interesting, yeah. Well, look, I think this is why people are feeling a sense of greater optimism than there was and greater hope that there was, because we're talking about big things. He doesn't feel defensive about it.

41:11I didn't see the panorama, but you said you watched it, and it sounds to me like he wasn't defensive. No. The other point, maybe this is the useful way to flip to devolution. The other point that Gus made when he phoned me up, he said he thought we're a bit harsh on the Green Book. This is the thing that assesses. He says, actually, it's been rewritten twice in recent years. And he said, the problem is the Green Book is not used. He said, if the Green Book process had been applied to HS2, it would never have happened. But he also said, Gus is a treasury man, right? So he's maybe, but he's also, Gus is a great guy and he actually thinks in very innovative, modern ways.

41:53He says he doesn't accept that the treasury is going to automatically be against devolution. What they'll be against, he said, is the risk of local authorities being able to run what he calls spectacular missions which which go broke and he also said another really interesting point he made when you and i were both saying you know you want more in cumbria and we need more local this that the other he said you you know the more local you can get the better but very rare will be the place that will put the hands up and say yeah we'd love to have a prison built here or you know yeah we totally accept health secretary that you know we need to close down some of these close small hospitals.

42:31Can we close down ours, please? You know, you have to have a national overlay. So anyway, it's interesting that he, I thought he made some really, really important points.

42:41Rory Stewart:On government and getting stuff done, I wondered whether the key thing now for Andy Burnham isn't working out what the two questions that every civil servant and minister asks themselves when looking at a policy to think, what would the prime minister want? So let's say it was Margaret Thatcher, maybe the question would have been, can the market do this? And I wonder whether for him, the questions aren't firstly the Tessa Jowell question, you know, would I put my mother in this institution? The second question on devolution might be, is this something that could be done at a lower level? Is this something that needs to be done at the centre?

43:16Rory Stewart:But really getting those two questions up in light so that everybody through the whole system knows what those questions are are going to be central. Maybe I haven't quite got the questions right. No, I know what you mean. I know what you mean. Just on Tessa, by the way, I talked to Steve Rotherham about Tessa. I made the point, and I think this is right, and Steve agreed with this, that Andy, as it were, doing his political apprenticeship with Tessa meant that his first real experience of Westminster was alongside a politician for whom empathy and kindness and liking people were fundamental. There was no faking how much he was interested in people, how much he was genuinely empathetic about other people.

43:54And Andy's definitely witnessed that. Just as then he goes on as PPS to David Blanke, he witnesses extraordinary work ethic and extraordinary drive, extraordinary determination. So I think he's somebody who's learned from these things as he's gone. And then the test that you're describing is what the Europeans love to call subsidiarity, which is, you know, do it at the most local level that is humanly possible. so you don't need Andy Burnham to decide when your bins get collated you couldn't have Camden Council having its own navy you know it's like that has to be national and then of course it's international when you get to the level of NATO so and I think that is the best way to think of this if you go through all of the jobs that you did in government if we're being honest with ourselves did we really operate subsidiarity no we didn't we're the most central one of the most

44:43Rory Stewart:centralised countries in the world then the question is can the minister to resist the temptation when a crisis happens to pull all the power back into the centre and say, I'm going to fix it from the centre. So maybe Andy Burnham needs to almost say from the get-go, by the way, things are going to go wrong and I'm not going to bring it back to the centre. When these kinds of things go wrong, I'm going to allow the local councillors to fix it. Maybe also, this is a horrible word, capacity building, but maybe also there needs to be a recognition that some local authorities are stronger than others.

45:17Rory Stewart:Maybe Manchester is not the model all through the country. So maybe I'm going to choose five or 10 authorities, which I'm going to really invest in building up their capacity, along with giving them the power, the tax raising power, etc. That's similar to what's happened with schools where, you know, weaker schools, learning from better schools, not least by, you know, giving heads who are in charge of several. So maybe you build up kind of, you know, different relationships between councils as well. Look, I think this stuff's really, really exciting. And the point you made there about relationships as well, sorry to sort of, well, no, I'm not sorry, actually, because I think it's going to be really interesting, this Steve Rotherham giving his analysis of how Andy Burnham has become the prime minister.

45:59Steve was making the point, when he was the mayor of Liverpool city region and Liverpool got city of culture, Andy Burnham was the secretary of state for culture. And he said what he, you could imagine, let's say when Boris Johnson was mayor of London Boris Johnson saw it as part of his him, self-obsessed bit of a narcissist, his job in the Olympics, particularly once it was up and running, was to make it as much about him as he could, okay? I'm not saying he didn't have a role and his people didn't have a role in making the whole thing come together, he did. But there were so many people involved in that that had they wanted to, could have gone out and say oh I did that, I did that.

46:35Steve said that what all that Andy Burnham cared about as Secretary of State for Culture, who was going to Liverpool virtually every week was actually, is this thing running properly? Is this thing happening well? And was perfectly happy that Liverpool and the key figures in Liverpool were, as it were, getting all the credit. So I think that sort of sense of the relationship between centre and local, centre and regional, I think that's what we have to kind of rethink. And I do think there are Europe and Scotland, I do think there are lessons in all this for Scotland at the moment as well. Because I think one of the downsides, I think there's been a lot of upside to devolution.

47:11But one of the downsides is actually that so much of the power has flowed to the centre in Scotland. So the power is in Holyrood. And I think a lot of Scottish local towns, cities and authorities feel weakened by it all.

47:24Rory Stewart:As a final thing then, maybe before we close, you know France very well, and we are now looking at these completely horrifying wildfires. The reporting, I think there's been good bits of But the basic news reporting just keeps reiterating 250 ,000 people evacuated, fire getting near Bordeaux. From the outside, it strikes me there's a couple of quite interesting things. One of them is that a lot of the stuff that's on fire is this Atlantic forest planted by Napoleon III. It's a commercially managed forest that's felled every 20, 30 years that was on previously waste time. And the second thing I think, I guess, that's interesting is the whole culture of France and the way in which firefighting operates there, the kind of pride of the fire services, their professionalism, and presumably fights within France about how much of this forest should be kept, how much revenue it generates, how much is cleared, etc.

48:17Rory Stewart:Anyway, over to you on the world first. Well, I found the whole thing absolutely horrific this week. Both France and Spain and Scotland and England to a lesser extent and the Cairngorms, these fires were going for a long time. Canada, truly horrific, the fires. One of the most moving things I saw was an interview with a Spanish firefighter who looked charred and sweating and exhausted. And he just looked into the camera and said, anybody who doesn't think the climate crisis is real, come and do this. You come and try and do this job. I really, really do hope. And we've seen straws in the wind.

48:49I thought I don't normally say nice things about columns in the Daily Telegraph. Tim Stanley wrote a piece in the Daily Telegraph yesterday saying the right needs to wake up and realise this is a real issue. Stop politicising it. Stop weaponising it. So I think that's the first thing. You know, I've watched so much of this coverage, including on French television. And even on French television, it's about the weather. It's about the fires. It's about the story. It's about the evacuations. The big story has to be the climate crisis. And so I think that's the first thing I would say. The second thing, I think, in relation to both France and Spain, you know, I love the Tour de France.

49:22I was watching the end of the Tour de France on Sunday, going through the streets of Paris. And it was just amazing. It's huge crowds, incredible passion, incredible atmosphere. And I think in the two or three hours I watched it, I think there was one mention of, you know, meanwhile, we should have a thought for the people down in the southwest. It's sort of, I think there's not the kind of national sense of urgency and emergency about it. But the truth is, let's be frank, Rory, we're going to get this year after year after year. And last year when Fiona and I were at our place in France, we had forest fires there two years ago now.

49:55Now, we're in a pretty isolated place, but the sight of them rolling through a forest is absolutely terrifying. And we did. We see all these canadares, these planes coming along and dropping this stuff, and then they go off and they pick up another load and they come back and dropping it. But it's terrifying. It's absolutely terrifying to watch. Now, they've actually responded to that where all the forests got wiped out. They're replanting them, but they're replanting them with quite large gaps between trees. I hope this is wake-up time. I hope this is wake-up time.

50:25Rory Stewart:It's the two things, isn't it? It's the rise in mean temperatures. You know, so everybody's watching what's the temperature going to be in France today and how firm that makes everything. And then there's the second question in the shorter term of land management. You know, how you plant these things, what kind of things you're planting, how big the firebreaks are that you create. how you balance very different objectives. I mean, is this forest there for the timber industry? Is it there for biodiversity? Is it there for carbon capture? And actually, there's a lot more disagreement there than we're really acknowledging as a policy area.

51:00Rory Stewart:You will find the firefighters, the environmentalists, the forestry industry, all in pretty big tension. I mean, we like to believe that in politics, there's a right answer that pleases everybody. Actually, it can be pretty tough. You could say, in some cases, we're going to create big firebreaks, or we're going to fell these forests, or we're not going to allow this kind of tree to be planted in the future. And that isn't necessarily always the most biodiverse, wild, natural solution. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't. But these are really difficult debates, which have to happen at the same time as addressing climate change, because the climate change question is a 2030-year question.

51:40Rory Stewart:This is a next year question. I was wondering whether your friend, His Majesty the King, might think about doing a joint visit with his Spanish counterpart to... What about that? Very good. Very good. Very good. We'll feed that in. That's very good. But I do... It is terrifying. It's terrifying to think that they'll get it eventually under control. The places where our fires were... I mean, I was out there a few weeks ago down the bike and it's it's still you're still looking at charred landscape and what you've seen just on just outside bordeaux and just outside madrid i mean it's going to take years and years to recover from this it's all very well for people to say well we're just going to get used to this yeah fair enough but you know when we talked to dan jorgerson the climate commissioner he was actually saying we might already be beyond the tipping point we don't know and once we are beyond that tipping point people are going to say we have to do everything we can to stop this?

52:32And we might all end up saying, well, maybe we were just a bit late. If anybody hasn't yet signed up to listen to Caroline Lucas' series on the climate, honestly, it could not be more timely. She's done a series of absolutely brilliant interviews with people who really, really know this stuff. And it's interesting to watch Caroline because she's not, you know, she's so passionate about this herself, but actually she's very, she's just teasing out the argument. She's not sort of evangelizing herself.

53:00Rory Stewart:She's wonderful. I mean, I was thinking about when you were talking about Tessa Jowell, how actually just very natural and non-tribal she was and how easy she was to work with as somebody from a different party. The same is true for Caroline. I think these are proper, thoughtful, empathetic people. for caroline sign up at the restlesspolitics.com it's a mini series on climate but of course one of many many mini series we're creating because alice has also been talking about the steve rotherham one and you can pick up on some of our past ones on ai or one that i'm about to do on existential risk so check out restlesspolitics.com and start you better make sure you better make sure climate's the big one rory i don't make sure climate's the big one all right well thank you very much i also look forward to regrouping for question time yeah and we're going to talk about India.

53:48We're going to talk about this new deal on nukes and the enrichment of uranium between America and Saudi Arabia. We're going to talk about AI and data centres and much else beside. And we should probably reflect very briefly on Donald Trump's utterly insane speech to the White House Correspondents.

54:07Rory Stewart:Very good. So more international questions I do. We've done a lot on Andy Burnham over the last few weeks. So next episode will be quite international. Looking forward to it very much. Thanks. See you then. Bye. Bye-bye.

54:27Hello, this is Saul David and Roger Morehouse from the Battleground podcast. And we're here to tell you about an exciting new strand we're bringing out every Wednesday, the big picture. Yeah, there's a lot going on in the world at the moment, as we know, Ukraine, which we cover every week, but also sort of wider developments as well. So we wanted to have a section where we did interviews with high-ranking individuals, people who can illustrate and inform us of that wider world. Yeah, we all get a fog of information in common. And we want to cut through that to give some real insight about the conflicts and geopolitics that are affecting our world today.

54:57And we've got a pretty stellar lineup to begin with, haven't we, Roger? Yeah, I'm just prepping now for an interview with Radek Sikorsky, the Polish foreign minister. Poland's very much a big strategic player now in Europe with the Ukraine war as well. So he'll be a fascinating interview. you who have you been speaking to so yeah well this morning i spoke to al khan's soldier turned politician who until recently was minister of armed forces but resigned on a matter of principle because he felt the government wasn't committing enough money to keep britain safe in the years and decades to come and he had some really fascinating things to say so do listen out for the big picture every wednesday and also on friday when we'll be covering the latest from the ukraine war and it's things are really hotting up there at the moment to find out more search for battleground wherever you get your podcasts

55:43Transcription by CastingWords