00:00I'll jump straight in and ask you, because we've had a couple of months of it now, of the new Labour government,
00:06what are your thoughts on how Keir Starmer and his team are doing?
00:09Well, I think they've made a great start. I think they picked up the international agenda.
00:14Keir Starmer has been to Washington twice in the weeks since 4th July.
00:22We have the Blenheim Palace European Political Council
00:27and we had, of course, to deal with the riots which, of course, affected Rotherham in our area.
00:34I think all of those were handled extremely well.
00:38And, of course, he settled some of the major outstanding industrial relations problems,
00:43not least in being prepared to meet the pay review body recommendations
00:50for absolutely key workers who we need to recruit in health and in education.
00:56I'm slightly bemused about the miserable-est bit of the agenda.
01:02I know we've got a major gap between income and expenditure.
01:06I know that measures are going to have to be taken to deal with it and it's not going to be easy.
01:11But I think after the austerity measures of 14 years ago and then the Brexit division
01:20and then the Covid epidemic, pandemic, I think actually we need to lift our horizons a bit.
01:27So, realism, yeah, but we need motivation, we need to lift morale, we need to energise the country.
01:34I think my take is that we're tired. I mean, I don't mean personally, although sometimes I am,
01:40but I think as a country we need lifting and I hope that in the months
01:45and in the four and a half years ahead of us we can do just that.
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