This week’s exercise is a practice speech and a gap filling exercise OR reformulation exercise on the subject of the 2024 general election in the UK.

The source material is a section of a podcast I like called The NewsAgents. 

The background is that Prime Minister Rishi Sunak recently made a pre-election speech, in which his basic premise was: the world is a dangerous place, so when it comes to elections, stick to what you know (i.e. the Tories, who have been in government for 14 years).

The problem with this is that plenty of things have gone wrong in the past 14 years (austerity, COVID, Partygate, the cost of living crisis, etc. etc.).

The three presenters of the podcast are analysing Sunak’s speech.

[By the way, I really like The NewsAgents as a podcast. The three presenters are on the ball, sometimes funny and irreverent, and they pull no punches in their analysis. There’s a US version if UK politics is too narrow for you.]

You can choose to do the gap filling exercise OR the reformulation exercise. They cover the same material, but the reformulation exercise offers a discussion of alternative phrasing that could be used.

If you want to make the reformulation exercise easier

Try interpreting the podcast from 0:00-6:00 before you tackle the reformulation exercise.

Obviously, if you do this BEFORE doing the gap filling exercise, you will have heard the answers, which defeats the purpose! 😉 But you could always interpret the podcast afterwards.

Gap filling

Here is a gap filling exercise for you, based on an edited transcript of the podcast. You can find the solutions underneath.

‘At some point in the second half of this year, we will all go to the polls and make a choice, not just about Conservatives versus Labour or Sunak versus Starmer, It will be a choice between the future and the past. Our country stands ________________. Over the next few years, from our democracy to our society to our economy to the hardest questions of war and peace, almost every aspect of our lives is going to change.’
 Rishi Sunak is _______________ about the fact he is properly on the election war path right now, and he’s setting out the vision of a country which is a dangerous place. This dangerous world of Rishi means just one thing: you have to stick with what you know and vote Tory. But how do you make the argument that you are the future, when you have been the past 14 years? And Rishi Sunak is trying to navigate between the selective bits of the 14 years that went OK, and forgetting all the bits that went horribly wrong. Will that __________?
With everything that’s going on right now in the world, the protests in Tbilisi in Georgia or the circling of Kharkiv in Ukraine by Russia, it would have been very easy, I think, for Rishi Sunak to get up and make a speech about this dangerous world we’re in and why he was the ____________, but instead we got this very _____________, electioneering speech, which tried to encompass everything from defence to Ozempic to education.
The funny thing about this speech, given how important it was to Rishi Sunak, was just how much it was _______________ around various different topics, where every single government department said, ‘we’ve got to include a bit on this’, ‘ you’ve got to include a bit on that’,  ‘you’ve got to include a bit on something else’, and all these topics kind of came and they went without a central argument.  It was __________ stuff wasn’t it? I sort of feel a bit for him that he probably went out thinking or having said, ‘I’m going to make a speech about the dangerous world we live in’, and then so he goes ‘yeah, but don’t make it too dangerous, you know, have a positive spin on it, make people feel good about themselves’, and so actually people have given him a speech that doesn’t _________ in any shape or form. There is no policy announcement, there is no pledge, there is no promise to improve things for any one particular group of people. He just had a go at Keir Starmer, he basically said ‘stop blaming the Conservatives for the last 14 years’.
Well if you are going to say that, ‘look at our record, we are the people to guide Britain for the next five years, look at what we’ve done over the past 14 years’ Rishi Sunak has to be very careful in saying to people ‘oh look at what we’ve done over the past 14 years’ because if you ___________ you kind of think, ‘well, what were the great bits?’.

Show Solutions

 

Reformulation exercise

Read the text, and see if you can come up with some alternatives for the phrases in bold.

‘At some point in the second half of this year, we will all go to the polls and make a choice, not just about Conservatives versus Labour or Sunak versus Starmer, It will be a choice between the future and the past. Our country stands at a crossroads. Over the next few years, from our democracy to our society to our economy to the hardest questions of war and peace, almost every aspect of our lives is going to change.’
 Rishi Sunak is making no bones about the fact he is properly on the election war path right now, and he’s setting out the vision of a country which is a dangerous place. This dangerous world of Rishi means just one thing: you have to stick with what you know and vote Tory. But how do you make the argument that you are the future, when you have been the past 14 years? And Rishi Sunak is trying to navigate between the selective bits of the 14 years that went OK, and forgetting all the bits that went horribly wrong. Will that wash?
With everything that’s going on right now in the world, the protests in Tbilisi in Georgia or the circling of Kharkiv in Ukraine by Russia, it would have been very easy, I think, for Rishi Sunak to get up and make a speech about this dangerous world we’re in and why he was the safe pair of hands, but instead we got this very freewheeling, electioneering speech, which tried to encompass everything from defence to Ozempic to education.
The funny thing about this speech, given how important it was to Rishi Sunak, was just how much it was scattergunning around various different topics, where every single government department said, ‘we’ve got to include a bit on this’, ‘ you’ve got to include a bit on that’,  ‘you’ve got to include a bit on something else’, and all these topics kind of came and they went without a central argument.  It was whiplash stuff wasn’t it? I sort of feel a bit for him that he probably went out thinking or having said, ‘I’m going to make a speech about the dangerous world we live in’, and then so he goes ‘yeah, but don’t make it too dangerous, you know, have a positive spin on it, make people feel good about themselves’, and so actually people have given him a speech that doesn’t hang together in any shape or form. There is no policy announcement, there is no pledge, there is no promise to improve things for any one particular group of people. He just had a go at Keir Starmer, he basically said ‘stop blaming the Conservatives for the last 14 years’.
Well if you are going to say that, ‘look at our record, we are the people to guide Britain for the next five years, look at what we’ve done over the past 14 years’ Rishi Sunak has to be very careful in saying to people ‘oh look at what we’ve done over the past 14 years’ because if you cherrypick, you kind of think, ‘well, what were the great bits?’.

Show Discussion

 

Next steps

You could use the podcast transcript as a basis for a summarising exercise, since it’s quite repetitive or long-winded in places.

You could also use the transcript as a basis for a register exercise. Since it’s quite colloquial, you could work on making it more formal.

Here’s an example of a version that is both more concise and more formal:

Show Example

I hope you enjoyed this exercise!