🎧 Election Fallout

Episode summary: 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…