Why can't the left be mobilised?
The New Statesman | UK politics and culture
The New Statesman
4.4 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 21 March 2025
⏱️ 16 minutes
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Summary
Are Labour on track for their target of 1.5million homes? What is NHS England? Why can't the Green's electrify the left in the same way that Reform has done for the right? What will the consequences be of cutting international aid?
Hannah Barnes answers listener questions with the New Statesman's political editor, Andrew Marr, and associate political editor, Rachel Cunliffe.
Read: Labour’s housing slump
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The New Statesman |
| 0:02.0 | Hello, I'm Hannah Barnes. It's Friday, so this is where I put your questions to the New Statesman team. |
| 0:11.0 | Remember, if you would like to get in touch, you can go to Newstatesman.com |
| 0:15.0 | forward slash you ask us or leave us a comment on Spotify or YouTube. |
| 0:20.0 | Today I'm joined by our political editor, Andrew Marr, |
| 0:23.5 | and our associate political editor, Rachel Cunliff. Right, let's kick off with a couple of questions |
| 0:28.0 | on housing. Here is one from Graham, who gets straight to the point, Labor's big plan to build new |
| 0:34.3 | homes. Is it happening? Andrew. Well, the homes aren't actually happening yet, |
| 0:39.4 | but the preparation for it is. I mean, these things take time, not very much time, but, you know, |
| 0:44.0 | there is a big planning law coming, which is going to sweep away quite a lot of the barriers. |
| 0:49.1 | Labour have made clear they're going to build on the edge of the green belt, what they call |
| 0:53.3 | the grey belt. So I think, |
| 0:55.0 | you know, I think the determination is there. But, you know, the question, the skepticism is also |
| 0:59.7 | justified. It's going to need a lot of people and a lot of money from private enterprise to |
| 1:04.7 | start to get this going. My guess is that by the time of the election, we will see the beginnings |
| 1:10.5 | of new towns and quite a lot of housing spreading around the south-east and outside London in particular. |
| 1:16.9 | Rachel, our colleague, business editor Will Dunn, wrote about this at the beginning of the month because obviously the government has made a really big commitment to building one and a half million new homes by the end of the Parliament, as Andrew said. But Will was reporting that construction output and the plans in the pipeline |
| 1:32.3 | for new homes in the UK are actually declining at the fastest rate since May 2020. |
| 1:38.3 | So I think there is a reason that the policy was 1.5 million homes by the end of the Parliament |
| 1:42.9 | rather than dividing that by four or five and saying this number of homes per year, which is that the policy was 1.5 million homes by the end of the parliament rather than dividing |
| 1:44.3 | that by four or five and saying this number of homes per year, which is that the government |
| 1:48.6 | is expecting a lot of the progress to be made towards the end of the parliament and now is |
... |
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