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Claire Ainslie

Claire Ainslie

Director of the Project on Center-Left Renewal at the Progressive Policy Institute and former Executive Director of Policy to Keir Starmer (2020–22).

Sep 29, 2026

39:21
It's making it happen that's as much the challenge, isn't it?
39:23
Yeah, I think there's a couple of things with that.
39:26
I think the first is conviction.
39:28
I think that...
39:30
There was, with that slogan of change, I think people probably projected a lot of what they wanted onto that.
39:36
And I think that the ambiguity in that change slogan, it could maybe mean all things to all people.
39:43
And I think Andy's learned from that and said, I'm gonna tell you today what I've got pure conviction about, And that's what I'm going for.
42:16
A lot of this is England only rather than Wales and Scotland.
18:08
If I was in charge, I don't know what I would do because It does not seem like an enviable position to be in to have to run the United Kingdom right now.
18:19
Yeah, and I think we're not high spending compared to or high taxing compared to quite a number of other countries in Europe.
18:29
But compared to the UK historically and compared to the US...
18:33
We are.
18:33
And certainly people feel that they are being taxed more and they feel they are not getting better services as a result.
18:41
And you can appreciate all the social and economic problems that are coming with that.
18:45
And that sort of political disengagement from what is government for? where we've always had a lot of association with the NHS, and we're not as probably a statist, as I say, as parts of Europe, we are certainly like fond of our NHS, we feel that our welfare state is a good thing that helps people from sort of falling through the floor.

10 MINS LATER

28:37
And I really feel like this is kind of kind of stolen the breath from the center-left parties that they can no longer differentiate themselves in that way to some extent.

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