Name: The Newscast Review of the Year 2025 | BBC Newscast
Uploaded: 2025-12-24T17:03:21.000Z
Duration: 46 min 11 s
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It was the UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer's first full year in charge.

There were some ups and plenty of downs for him.

And it felt like politics in the UK did change a bit.

Nigel Farage's Reform UK topped the polls.

The Green Party got a new leader and an extra surge of support for them.

Donald Trump returned to the White House and fundamentally changed the U.S. s relationship with the entire rest of the world.

And BBC Radio 4 has asked us newscast to review it all in our classic daily news podcast style.

So that is what you will see now, the newscast review of 2025.

Now, it's rare for us four to be together because me and Chris tend to do newscast during the week and you too, Laura and Paddy do newscast at the weekends.

But because Christmas is a time when people get together in weird combinations.

And we've been invited by Radio 4 to basically do an episode of Newscast.

But instead of looking at the day's news or the weekend's news, like we would do normally, we're going to look at the whole of 2025's news and see what kind of thoughts, theories, big ideas we can glean from a trot through the year.

We spend a lot of our time talking about politics.

So he won't be having a turkey sandwich on Boxing Day as he reflects on the year.

Well, I don't know, because some people do smuggle through a little bit of poultry or meat at Christmas time, don't they?

He has been a veggie for a long time with the odd bit of fish and I think a salmon tikka or something like that is his favorite thing to cook.

Something to ask at the first lobby briefing of the day.

Did you have turkey or even Fakin on on top of a faux turkey?

Anyway, this is a faux device to think about how Keir Starmer might be thinking as he looks back on his first full year as Prime Minister.

Because the election was in July, the year before Chris.

Does he seem chipper when you've seen him at the closing stages of this year.

I mean, the short and blunt answer is no, not really.

It's been a really difficult year, I think, for Keir Starmer.

There's been a persistence, and we'll no doubt get into this, a persistence of the kind of competitive spirit across politics, both at a UK level and at a devolved level as well.

There's been a persistence to reform UK's stickiness at the top of the opinion polls and their capacity to make a lot of the political weather.

And there's been a persistence of conversations and chat, and they are very, very real within the Labour Party about whether Keir Starmer is the person to lead them all the way through next year and towards the next general election.

Now, we shouldn't underprice the potential that Keir Starmer sticks around, but we shouldn't underprice either.

The reality of the conversations that are going on occasionally burst out in public.

They are incredibly live in private within the Labour Party.

About that question and why, I mean, fundamentally, because you look at opinion polls and weekly election results at local authority level, et cetera, et cetera, and Labour are in a really, really, really difficult place and we shouldn't underestimate that.

And the stickiness of it is what is worrying for people in government, because it's gone on for much of this calendar year.

I think it's been an absolute horror show.

And I think you'll think 2025, thank God that one's over.

And if we spin back to the end of 24, our conversation this time last year was, oh, well, it's been a tricky star and they found that it's really hard, isn't it?

Oh, and they were kind of thinking, well, it's teething troubles, we'll get the right set in number 10, we'll kind of work out and a bit harder than we thought, and numbers are a bit more grizzly than we thought.

The reflections are not that everything's worse, but also they're not as good at it as they hoped they might be.

This doesn't mean that 2026 is going to be a year of doom for Keir Starmer.

There is an outcome where things look better, but I think it's been a very, very tough year with a few highlights, particularly his sort of profile on the foreign stage.

But when it comes to things at home, it's really been a shocker.

And Jeremy Bowen, the BBC's international editor, will be popping in shortly to talk about some of the things that have happened on the world stage.

Paddy Chris referred to a few of the moments where Keir Starmer's vulnerabilities were revealed.

Things like the local elections in the summer.

Are there other moments for you where you thought, oh, this is a government in trouble.

Peter Mandelson pictured urinating in London, having been sacked.

I mean, these are absolutely, this is true.

CHRIS well, so that brings us on to how many quite senior colleagues Keir Starmer has either had to let go or has just sort of lost.

And I think that contributes, as Laura was saying, to where their mood is at the moment, because they've had various goes at sort of reboots, both in terms of staffing and in terms of how they go about prosecuting the business of government.

I've been asking lots of people in different parties and in different bits of our sort of political machine what their reflections on this year have been.

And several sources have pointed to Starmer ditching his welfare reforms as being the moment which was in June, which was in June when various things happened that have subsequently set a chart.

So, number one, Starmer, rather than trying to stick it to his angry backbenchers and said, I've got a huge majority, come and have a go if you think you're hard enough, dropped his plans.

Two, by dropping his welfare plans, many people in the labor movement would say that's the moment when they gave up on really being a reforming government.

Three, that's the moment that set huge consequences in chain for the financial position.

RACHEL Reeves we got the budget we got because of the welfare changes that were, that we didn't have, but it's also defined the battle between the two traditional parties.

And I think that moment really is a kind of mega, mega, mega one.

And it's very uncomfortable for Labour for all sorts of different reasons.

Although in the short term that change of tackle and welfare has allowed the Labour backed benches to actually find themselves with something to be.

That's definitely true when I speak to lots of Labour backbenchers across the political wings of the party.

Broadly, you know, there is a lot of support for that, but also tinged with the politics of saying, hang on a minute, when you hear the Prime Minister passionately arguing about his desire to cut child poverty, there are plenty of Labour MPs who say, yes, but look how long it took him to do it.

And in the Meantime, slung half a dozen of his MPs out of the parliamentary party for a while for advocating that, you know, in the first few months of the Labour government.

And by the magic of podcasting, we're now joined by BBC economics editor, Faisal Islam.

Now, I will always remember where I was on the 2nd of April, and not just because it was my birthday, but you and I were sat in this studio doing an episode of newscast about Donald Trump standing in the rose garden of the White House with a big cardboard board which had a list of countries and the enormous but varied tariffs, the import taxes he was gonna slap on all those countries there.

And then looking back on that moment, how do you reflect on it?

I mean, utterly extraordinary moment, not just for the year, but actually in our understanding of how the world economy, how America functions.

It's economic, but it's also geopolitical.

There's so many consequences that come from that.

But it is just worth dwelling on that moment, the willingness to sort of rub everyone's face in it around the world, to say, we can do this unilaterally, we not even caring which of that list was allies, which were enemies, or even real countries or even inhabited by actual people.

There's the famous example of the penguins penguin inhabited island that got a massive tariff on it.

So you take it at face value and you have all the actual questions about the policy.

But then it was pretty clear to us that some of this wasn't really well thought through, that there was some fairly random equation it transpired had underpinned the numbers.

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