Show Notes
David and Helen are joined by the historian Colin Kidd to try to make sense of last week's elections in England, Scotland and Wales. What do they mean for the future of the UK? What do they mean for the future of the Labour Party? Are either (or both) in terminal trouble? Plus we explore how Nicola Sturgeon and Boris Johnson are going to resolve their standoff over a second Scottish independence referendum.
Talking Points:
Gordon Brown says that Scotland is a 30-30-40 nation. Scotland is pretty evenly divided on the question of union, but the polls don’t measure the depth or shallowness of commitment. In effect, there are now two Scottish Labour parties: the actual Labour party and the social democratic SNP under Sturgeon.
Alex Salmond’s party lost, but it put forward a more coherent vision for an independent Scotland. Salmond and Sturgeon are now on opposite sides on both the EU question and the currency question. You can’t pursue EU membership without a currency that you could in principle put into the exchange rate mechanism.
There’s a new alliance in Scottish politics between the SNP and the Greens. The Scottish Greens are more associated with independence than the environment. The Green relationship makes oil a trickier issue. The SNP’s committed to more gradual decarbonisation.
Where is the SNP’s greatest weakness? Johnson’s approach to pump more money into Scotland is unlikely to work. Currency, the tax, and the border are interrelated challenges. The SNP is brilliant on politics and positioning, but it doesn’t devote enough time to political economy. A referendum could be politically risky for both Sturgeon and Johnson. This may mean a long period of shadow-boxing.
How should Labour think about the basic challenge of reassembling a coalition? The basic problem that Labour faces is that its old class coalition doesn’t fit together. The Union also causes Labour big problems. Is first past the post the only thing keeping Labour alive?
Mentioned in this Episode: Colin on the Anglo-Scottish Union The SNP’s referendum Gordon Brown on Scotland and the Union Tony Blair in the New Statesman
Further Learning: More on the SNP’s manifesto Colin in the LRB on Scottish independence
And as ever, recommended reading curated by our friends at the LRB can be found here: lrb.co.uk/talking Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
More from TALKING POLITICS
UnHerd political editor Tom McTague and Cambridge professor Helen Thompson team up to investigate the history of today’s politics — and what it means for our future. Each week they will explore the great forces, ideas and events that led us to where we are, whether in Britain, the United States, Europe or beyond. It’s a politics podcast for those who want a deeper, historical understanding of the news, to understand what has really shaped our world and why. We hope you enjoy!
Talking Politics producer Catherine Carr returns to her role as mic-wielder in 'Where Are You Going?' a unique storytelling podcast, delivered in bite-size episodes.
Past Present Future is a new weekly podcast with David Runciman, host of Talking Politics, exploring the history of ideas from politics to philosophy, culture to technology. David talks to historians, novelists, scientists and many others about where the most interesting ideas come from, what they mean, and why they matter. Ideas from the past, questions about the present, shaping the future.
David, Helen and Catherine get together for our final episode, to reflect on podcasting through six extraordinary years of politics, and what it means to be ending at the beginning of a war. We talk about the current crisis, how it connects to the crises of the past, and where it might fit in to the crises of the future. This episode is dedicated to Finbarr Livesey and Aaron Rapport.
For our penultimate episode, David talks to Helen about her new book Disorder: Hard Times in the Twenty-First Century. It’s a conversation about many of the themes Helen has explored on Talking Politics over the years, from the energy transition to the perils of QE, from the travails of the Eurozone to the crisis of democracy, from China to America, from the past to the present to the future. In this book, she brings all these themes together to help make sense of the world we’re in. Talking Points: