So how did we get here?

We got here because when asked to look into it, the Supreme Court concluded that there was a contradiction between the Equalities Act 2010 and the Gender Recognition Act 2004, which sounds very, very knotty.

But basically, for quite a long time, there was a thing that if you had a gender recognition certificate under law, if you were a, you know, trans man who'd transitioned from being a woman, you were treated under law as being a man and vice versa.

But there was a small number of cases in which, you know, predatory men would game the system by self-identifying as a trans woman-

Yeah

... "Hang on.

You don't look like a stereotypical man or woman," you know, "What's going on?" But it does basically say that if there are realistic grounds for thinking someone is trying to, you know, game the system by being a man trying to go into women's only space, then you are allowed to challenge them.

And the worry for transgender people, you know, and for other people who don't necessarily present in a stereotypical way of, you know, the gender in which they live, is that it could cause, you know, not necessarily people being challenged, but just awkwardness and difficulty and just stress really.

They're all the same.

Well, yes, exactly.

But the problem for Reform is that there's not enough of those people.

They are maybe twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five percent, which is roughly what Reform is on now.

To actually win an election, they need another eight to ten percent of voters who might not be diehard Reform fans, but who might like what they're doing, and more importantly, not think that they're kind of weird.

And the other important factor, too, is to win an election, you don't have to have your own supporters.

You also have to have a bigger mass of people who kind of don't care that very much if you win.

Right.

And i-- And in what ways could this potentially be breaking electoral rules?

Well, at the moment, we don't know, and it's important to point out that Reform are saying that there is no evidence that they broke rules even though Dan Jukes and James Orr who, uh, Dan Jukes is Nigel Farage's longtime right-hand man, and James Orr is his Cambridge University academic who's head of policy for Reform UK.

They've both lost their posts.

Though it remains to be seen if they might come back.

And Reform are basically saying that it could be entrapment, and they're insisting that they've done nothing wrong.

But the police are going to look into it.

It's a tricky one 'cause this is quite a complicated story to explain and thus it's quite complicated for, you know, voters and people who are not that interested in politics to take a grasp of.

I-Is there a sense that there's a slightly different atmosphere this year?

It's something that, you know, some people talk about, but it's not a mainstream discussion here in Westminster, is it?

I mean, I think there's two questions here.

Should the government be potentially doing this? I mean, you know, lots of people say yes.

Will it? I think not immediately.

Not least as the moment you get into anything that smacks of COVID, then politicians and advisers go, oh, no, we don't like that kind of stuff.

But also so far, I mean, one of the criticisms that's been made of Andy Burnham so far from the left, and there's not been that many of them, has been the fact that with the heat wave, the very intense heat wave and drought that marked his first few weeks in office, He's not really talked about the climate that much.

He talked about barbecues, disposable barbecues being banned for wildfire risk.

Actually, this is all looking rather more difficult and long term than some people like Toby might hope.

Mm.

And again, has got a quite high crime rate.

And it, it's, it's, it's a double problem, one of which is more people are going to prison, but particularly they're being sentenced to longer and longer terms.

Because every time you get a new government, a government says, "We need to crack down on X, Y, Z," so they whack another five or ten years onto this particular offense or that one.

And judges absorb all this, so there's people in for much longer than they previously had been.

And you have a choice.

You either stop doing that or you build a lot more prison spaces, 'cause the forecast is that the current rate we're at, we'll have about a hundred thousand prisoners, England and Wales, before too long.

... offend when they come out within a year, within a year of being released.

It just feels like this is a politician who knows how to tell the story about what he's doing, which, as you say, it feels pretty different to his predecessor.

It does, and it's interesting the way they've gone about it.

So Burnham's first week, which was last week, they've kind of retrospectively billed as being the week where they did the consumer focus stuff, the kinda quick stuff.

So there was the VAT off, uh, electricity bills.

There was the measures to try and help pubs and things like that.

That was the kind of consumer cost of living stuff.

And this week is being billed as, you know, Burnham running towards these seemingly intractable problems that other PMs have ducked for quite a long time.

Andy Burnham is taking approach by looking at local schooling, isn't he? Why, why is he looking at that in particular?

Yes

...

when he became Greater Manchester Mayor, he said he would do that.

The numbers went down, some argue because, partly because of COVID, and now the numbers have since been creeping up.

Um, and his people will say that's because as a mayor you don't have an impact on the kind of national policy stuff, so housing allowances, uh, asylum seekers being kicked out of where they live.

You know, these are the kind of things as a mayor you can't control.

So he now is, has his hands on these enormous policy levers and can do it.

Mm

Yes

...

when he became Greater Manchester mayor, he said he would do that.

The numbers went down, some argue because, partly because of COVID, and now the numbers have since been creeping up.

Um, and his people will say that's because, as a mayor, you don't have an impact on the kind of national policy stuff.

So housing allowances, uh, asylum seekers being kicked out of where they live.

You know, these are the kind of things as a mayor you can't control.

Mm

T-tell us about her.

She was quite an unusual one because e- as, um, a politician, she was quite well-known, even though she only held relatively junior roles.

She was never, um, a cabinet minister.

Uh, she became well-known, first of all, for her slightly, uh, hardline views.

She was an, um, interior minister, um, near the start of her ministerial career, and there was a big news fuss because she insisted that pregnant women who were in jail would have to be, uh, handcuffed, um, as were taken from the jail to give birth.

That was slightly mistranslated, as she said that they were gonna have to be, uh, handcuffed during birth, which wasn't actually the case.

But she got a bit of a reputation for being a kind of tough conservative.

What do we know about that?

Yeah.

But I think the £5 million is, as some people understand, it's the sort of stuff they could never accrue, most people, in their lifetime, and the idea of him giving it as a no-strings-attached gift just smells a bit odd.

In the more kind of everyday sense, if the Standards Commissioner looks into this and then the Standards Committee decides to, um, approve what the punishment, if the punishment is a suspension of more than 10 days, then he faces this process where if at least 10% of his Clacton constituents sign a petition, then it could be, um, a by-election.

I mean, I think the chances are he'd probably win, but this would be the sort of fuss he really doesn't need.

But there are, you know, real questions about whether this is really gonna stick to Farage in the longer term.

I think whilst he would probably win a by-election just because the opposition vote would be split, I think the reputational damage is shown by the fact that he used to do press conferences on a more or less weekly basis, and apart from a very hastily arranged one in Makerfield, he's not done one for about 50 days.

Um, his lieutenants, like Jen Rickett, get sent out.

Nigel Farage did a brief broadcast round about a week ago, which went incredibly badly wrong.

Okay.

So it means Keir Starmer gets to go to the NATO Summit in Turkey earlier in the month, and he kind of gets, you know, three or four weeks to do whatever legacy project he want to do.

And it, it's, it's this quite fascinating period that Prime Ministers when they've announced they've got to-- they're gonna go, it focuses the mind.

You had, uh, Theresa May, um, in particular, had a period of about six weeks where she told the party she was gonna go.

And I was talking to one of her former staffers, um, a couple of weeks ago, who was pointing out that she spent a lot of it making sure that the landmark bill, which made the UK the first major economy to set net zero targets, went through.

Yeah.

He can do all that kind of prime ministerial stuff, um, without having these quite awkward set piece, uh, Commons debates and statements.

He's not been an MP since twenty seventeen.

Good morning.

Good morning to you, Nick.

I agree with what you've just said.

And also, I'd just remind anybody who's seen the film Sully that once people actually realised it took time to think of what was going on, they took a different view of the way in which he had handled that dreadful situation.

aircraft into them now this particular case officers will have turned up to a very confusing situation but i i cannot understand the um the way in which handcuffs seem to be the first choice whenever somebody's being spoken to i've i've seen not just this case but a number of other cases where people who are obviously compliant In this case, the young man was gravely injured, and they're being put into handcuffs at the first point.

And that seems to me to be disproportionate.

In this particular case, the officers have been told the lies by the individual that mean that they then started thinking in terms of racist conduct.

When did that start and why?

That's my belief, so I'm gonna say it clearly

I think everybody knows that's what Andy Burnham thinks, and some right-wing journalists have already been gleefully retweeting that particular clip.

But I think you can be very sure that Andy Burnham is gonna do his best not to talk about Brexit for the next month.

David Lammy was the government representative on the broadcast round this morning.

I was listening to him on various, um, shows, and [chuckles] whenever he's talked about Brexit, he's basically saying, you know, basically, "I'm not gonna say anything." You know, "It's collective responsibility.

We're not making any decisions now." And the point you made is that any decision to even go beyond the current government's red lines over customs union single market would need a new election or stuff like that.

in a way, the worst outcome here may be for anybody apart from Wes Streeting in the Labour Party is if Burnham now loses because you've, you're left with a hobbled prime minister and not many other options.

Basically, the Labour Party, in allowing Burnham to stand, has bet the mortgage on him winning this 'cause there's now a clear plan of Andy Burnham returning to Parliament as the person who can win in a Reformer-friendly seat.

This is The Guardian.

If Labour mess this up, then the chances are we have a Nigel Farage government.

I know that people are frustrated, and some people frustrated with me.

Keir Starmer promised a gesture, but it wasn't a holiday to the Maldives.

It was like a three ninety-nine bunch of roses from the garage down the road.

For a lot of Labour MPs, something needs to change.

The question is what and when? This kind of whole game theory that a lot of what you do depends on what other people do, and it's very, very hard to predict, very fast-moving.

Mm

Mm.

Which is the fact that the old political c- consensus has gone.

Labour are doing very badly.

Reform are currently doing extremely well.

The Conservatives are still in a big trouble.

There's opportunities for insurgent or minor parties, you know, on, on a national level.

I think what's gonna be interesting to see is how much within this tactical voting plays a role.

Mm.

She's quite quickly had to U-turn on that position, which Keir Starmer has been able to attack her two weeks in a row in the Commons over that U-turn.

Yeah, she U-turned last week.

So if you speak to her spokespeople, they will vehemently deny the idea it was any kind of a U-turn.

We had this slightly strange briefing one week ago where her spokesman was basically saying, well, no, no, we never said we should join the war, but we are in the war.

And we're all kind of going, what? So their position is, well, I mean, when the US-Israel attack first took place on February 28th, Kemi Badenock was quickly out of the blocks.

She was on social media saying, you know, this is basically a just cause.

This is a good thing.

But There are questions about whether that visit should go ahead in the circumstances and these very targeted attacks against the UK government and Britain more broadly.

Mm.

And it's, it's for two reasons.

One, the more general one, is the fact that kind of motorists, as politicians always call them, have this kind of emblematic role in political consciousness.

And even though, you know, people get around by all sorts of means, the price of petrol becomes this symptomatic part of the kind of cost of living.

And there's also been this very, very effective lobbying effort, partly done by Conservative MPs, but also there's this fair fuel group, which has got very close links with newspapers like The Sun, who've basically frightened MPs for years and years and chancellors.

So it's been frozen, but this is a nettle that the Labour government has decided they want to grasp because fuel duty in terms of fiscal levers is really big.

Mm.

And it is something that they've fallen down on in the past.

Mm.

Kent County Council, the head of their DOLGE, I think they call it, which is Department for Local Government Efficiency, [chuckles] which is a fantastically British thing, confessed actually to the, uh, FT a few weeks ago, that they basically had not- no money to, to, to save.

This guy was then relieved of his post, and they're having to do the difficult stuff that every council does.

They're having to put up council tax.

They're having to trim a little bit here and there.

The uniquely Reform thing about them is that they're also losing a lot of councilors because...

I mean, it's, it's, it's partly not necessarily a Reform issue.

Um, but yes, so Keir Starmer came out very quickly, didn't he, after that?