The News Quiz: Ep 5. An Island of Strangers

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.

Tyler Reddick here from 2311 Racing.

The rush of racing?

Nothing beats it.

But Chumba Casino comes close.

Chumba's got fast spins, fun games, daily bonuses, and all the action you can handle.

Now that's a rush.

Ready to hit the throttle?

Get in the driver's seat and head to chumba casino.com.

Let's chumba.

Sponsored by chumba casino.

No purchase necessary.

VGW Group, voidwear prohibited by law.

21 plus.

Terms and conditions apply.

I'm Glenn Washington, the host of Snap Judgment from KQED.

Every week, we don't just tell stories, we drop you inside them.

Real people, real voices, real moments that split a life in two.

What do you believe?

What do you risk?

What do you want?

Snap Judgment, new episodes every Thursday, wherever you get your podcast.

BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts.

Hello, I'm Andy Zaltzman.

Due to threatened cuts to the BBC World Service budget, all shows across the corporation have been asked to do whatever they can to save money to keep World Service alive.

So on this week's news quiz, instead of a microphone, I'm using this homemade loudhailer made of rolled-up cardboard.

My usual pre-show rider of a five-course meal has been replaced with a single sausage

that I apparently have to make myself.

There may be sudden jumps in the audio due to our normal editing software being replaced with an old pair of garden sequeturs and some insulation tape

and covered by nothing but a large potato.

Also, the theme tune will be played at one and a half times the normal speed, so we don't have to pay the musicians as much.

Welcome to the news quiz.

Hello, welcome to the news quiz.

I'm Andy Zoltzman and other cost-saving BBC measures to help world service.

Desert Island discs will from here on in be disused shed in the woods out the back of memory services discs,

whilst interviews with politicians on the Today programme will be replaced by the sound of a hyena and a pelican fighting in a cement mixer.

Our panelists this week in tribute to what Kier Starmer set out to do with immigration numbers and how people reacted to his efforts, we have Team Clamp Down against Team Damn Clown.

On Team Clamp, we have Alistair Beckett King and deputy political editor at ITV News, Anushka Astana.

On Team Clown we have Sarah Barron and Deliso Shaponda.

And our first question can go to Alistair and Anushka.

Keir Starmer announced new plans this week to bring down what?

Is it the balloon of a laughing child?

No, understood.

His own popularity ratings.

Okay, wait a second.

Is it actually the government because he's trying to be a secret double agent for reform?

That doesn't seem to be what's going on, but again, not what he's actually announced out loud.

I know the answer.

It's immigration.

Correct.

He's planning to bring down immigration to the UK.

The words immigration to are crucial in that sentence.

So, I mean, politically, what do you make of the...

I mean, this is a hot potato that, well, it's not so much a hot potato as a, I don't know, a scalding molten snooker ball that is just slammed into the eye sockets of the nation every time that a political party needs a boost in the opinion poll.

So what's the political angle on it?

I mean there is an argument isn't there that the more you talk about it the more people worry about it and it they're never going to be able to do what people want.

I had some polling this week that said 23% of people want negative net migration and 23% of people want zero net migration and basically they're never going to be able to deliver that.

So they're talking up something they're not going to be able to deliver.

But they were very upset about Reform UK doing so well in the elections and they're trying to respond.

But some of their MPs are not happy because they think that he has been echoing language like Enoch Powell's.

So yeah.

Also, that seems futile.

You can't out reform reform.

It's like, I can't out crazy Kanye.

Like, like

initially when I was coming here, I got a little bit paranoid because I was like, oh no, every time immigration's in the news, they ask me to come on the news.

I was like, oh no, it's always in the news, right?

But of course, I am overqualified because I have been everything, right?

I was a refugee, I've been a migrant, I've become a citizen, and I currently am frustrated with all these foreign comedians coming and taking my job.

He's been accused of using dog whistles, which are in political terms, a dog whistle is when you say something that sounds innocuous to most people but to a radical subset of your audience is understood in a more extreme way.

And what Starmer has done, I think, is he's sort of innovated on the idea of a dog whistle and come up with what I would call a whistle.

Of course, I come from a shepherding family, so in shepherding terms, a dog whistle is a whistle that dogs can hear, but sheep can't, so they don't know what you're planning.

Now,

you might say to me, Alistair, why not just get a sheep whistle and tell the sheep what you want them to do?

Cut the dogs out of the equation.

I say, you try that and the sheepdog unions will be all over you.

Also, I feel like as a writer, I feel very jealous of the speech writer who wrote Kier Starmer's speech because he's clearly writing the speeches for every party.

He's cornered.

Unlike Deliso, I'm not an immigrant.

I have red hair.

My genes have been knocking around these islands for a very long time.

But in a way, you know, we all are.

You know, the red-headed genes left Africa, pretty sharpish, travelled up.

Travelled up the west coast of Europe, reached Scotland and thought, that's enough for me, I'll stay here forever.

That'll do.

I mean, of course, your roots in this country go back so far that you're actually named after Britain's best-known 12th-century dispute between an Archbishop of Canterbury and a monarch,

Specket King.

One thing I'm worried about, though, is they're going to introduce these English standards that everybody who's migrating has to have.

If other countries reciprocate, every single British migrant is coming back.

Can I ask, like, does this mean that Theresa May's immigrants go home vans didn't work?

It does seem that way, yes.

That's the impression we're starting to get.

I smuggled a few of my friends in through one of those vans.

MPs are really upset.

Some MPs, not all, are really upset about this language, I would say, more than the policy itself.

And I've had like lots of WhatsApps from people.

Someone saying, I think this moment will be the undoing of number 10.

Never seen such anger in moderate MPs.

It's a values thing.

One person just sent me, I prefer the old cure, but what they're getting in response from number 10 is we need to meet the public where they are.

And the polling suggests the public wants immigration to be much lower.

But it is interesting when you ask people who should we stop coming, and I had a list of them this week: doctors, nurses, engineers, care workers, even bankers.

Not on any single category do people say stop them coming.

So I don't know how they think, how we think that immigration will come down.

I have got it.

Comedians.

There must be

one foreign comedian.

We didn't have that on our list.

Yes, Stan was accused of channeling the spirit of prominent 1960s celeb Enoch Powell when he said that Britain risks becoming an island of what?

What?

Yes, strangers.

Oh,

it's almost like you don't respect this show as a genuine quiz.

He was just bursting to yell it out.

So everyone keeps saying this thing like he's echoing Enoch Powell.

And I thought, as a recent immigrant myself, I thought he was echoing the voiceover of the Love Island host.

An island of strangers, hoping to find love.

Well, it could be a follow-up to Love Island.

And rather than them starting as strangers and falling in love, they start in love and end up as complete strangers.

And I think that would fit better with our national psyche, to be honest.

Also, I feel like all British people want is an island of strangers.

Like,

it would mean you never had to make direct eye contact

or hug.

But almost pedantically, it is an island of strangers.

I don't know everybody.

I know.

My problem is my pedantic side always makes me take the wrong side of an argument.

I could agree with you, but then if you start expressing things that are factually wrong, I switch sides.

I resent the implication that immigration has made Britain stranger, because Britain has always been very strange.

You get people in Britain saying, oh, my family goes back 600 years.

Well, everyone's does.

You think my family were invented in the 1970s?

Downing Street on the Enoch Powell echo.

So we definitely didn't mean to echo Enoch Powell.

Nobody had thought of that.

But they do also admit that they thought hard about that language because it would make the story run for longer.

But also, I noticed that the very divisive language was right at the beginning, and then in the middle, there was more kind of reasonable things.

But they know that people have very short attention span, so people only heard the first two minutes.

So, what was that?

Also, on the immigration issue, Keir Starmer's efforts to to set up a return hub in Albania have not worked.

So this was a hub for failed asylum seekers.

So return hubs, not just a memo Liz Taylor quite often wrote to herself.

The name of it, Return Hubs, it sounds like you've asked Amazon to run a concentration camp.

Something slightly disgusting about it.

I think six months for the process is generous.

An expert we spoke to today, because I was making a piece on this issue, said six years.

Six years before you go to the return hub hub with the country not decided.

And it was quite funny to watch Kirstama and the Albanian president.

Obviously, it was quite embarrassing because Kirstama said he wants these return hubs, and then the Albanian president was like, Yeah, everybody wants us, but no,

not going to do it.

And then he had this funny language because they're doing a deal with Italy, and he said, We've gone for a marriage with Italy, but for everyone else, it's just love.

And if any nation takes marriage seriously, it's Italy.

Another question.

Overseas graduates will be forced to return home after 18 months under these new schemes unless they find what?

Is it the golden scarab of Amenhotep?

Love with someone.

Above the necessary income threshold.

That's exactly what I was thinking.

Is it a collection of Noel Edmonds' old beards?

Most people don't realise he actually sheds them like a snake.

Is it a skilled job?

A skilled job, correct?

Yes.

This is a little insulting, I think, sometimes to a lot of the jobs which they call non-skilled require a lot of skill.

Like, one of the big ones which is causing a lot of discussion is the care homes.

They're going to get rid of the care worker visa and try to get more British people in care.

I have never seen a British care worker.

Like, I went to see a friend of mine, and everybody taking care of him was African.

I felt homesick.

Yeah, I don't think of like public-facing, warm customer service as this country's greatest asset.

There is 131,000 vacancies in the care sector,

which is obviously why we've had very high immigration.

Although there is an argument, isn't there, that so much cheaper labor has been brought into this sector, it's suppressed wages.

And actually, whenever we've done anything on the care sector, people say to us, we we can earn more money working at the supermarket down the road.

But I agree with you, it is a skilled job, and it should be treated like that.

Also, if you paid them more, it would gradually fix itself.

But then the problem is, people would have to pay more for it.

But it's a fact, I think, that the average Premier League left back

gets paid, I think, something like one and a half thousand times more than the average care worker.

So for that, you could have 1,500 care workers.

But the problem is, how do you play 1,500 care workers in a flat back four?

I graduated from university 20 years ago, and I have never done a day's work since then.

And frankly, I resent the implication that just because I was born in this country, I have been of any use to anyone.

I don't see why the taxes of hard-working immigrants should pay for me to sit around pontificating on Radio 4.

This country has gone to the docks.

But actually, you point out something quite revolutionary.

Why not, instead of deporting the migrants, we deport citizens?

I think we tried that.

That was called the empire.

This proved a little controversial over the years.

Yes, immigration.

If there is one issue in politics that does not deal well with the infinite complexities of reality, and there are loads of them, that one issue is immigration.

Undeterred, however, Prime Minister Kirstama this week became the, I'm going to say, 35th consecutive Prime Minister to pledge to take back control of this nation's borders.

Can he do better than the previous 34?

Time will tell.

The government's white paper laid out eight core measures to reduce net migration, which has peaked at 900,000 per year, several hundred thousand above what it was before Brexit.

So whilst it has been a difficult time for many industries in this nation, British irony is doing tremendously well.

Critics from all sides and depths of the political swamp slammed the Prime Minister for saying that Britain risks becoming a nation of strangers.

Robert Jenrick, the Conservative Shadow Justice Secretary, belly splashed into the debate off the top turnbuckle to claim that we are already a nation of strangers, anxious, evidently, that the Tories should get most of the credit for fracturing national society, rather than letting Starmer waltz in to finish the job and claim it all as his own.

Others said Starmer was veering into the same kind of linguistic territory that Enoch Powell chundered out in his infamous Rivers of Blood speech in 1968.

But it's quite a big leap from we're not going to know each other very well to rivers of blood.

But of course we are living in the 21st century, the greatest ever age of hyperbole and exaggeration by far.

Look, I have a particular interest in this topic because I am the son of an immigrant father who himself was the son of a refugee and also because I'm from the UK which has a well-known history of, shall we say, two-way immigration.

And I'm a member of a species which has built its success on moving from one place to another pretty much ever since Eve and Adam refugeed the crap out of the Garden of Eden.

So maybe I'm not objective enough, but there doesn't seem to be a huge amount from any political party on what can be done to deal with the main problems in this issue, which are one, a fully dysfunctional planet, and two, the evolutionary glitches in the human brain that mean that if we live somewhere not very nice, for whatever reason, we want to move to somewhere a bit nicer.

If we just fix those two things, everything else will fall into place.

But the obviously obvious best way to reduce immigration is to make the UK a much less desirable place to move to, and fair play to successive governments for stepping up to that particular plate.

At the end of that round, the scores are five to Alistair and Anushka, and three to Deliso and Sarah.

It's somehow the immigrants get less

rude.

Looking for excitement?

Chumba Casino is here.

Play anytime, play anywhere.

Play on the train.

Play at the store.

Play at home.

Play when you're bored.

Play today for your chance to win and get daily bonuses when you log in.

So what are you waiting for?

Don't delay.

Chumba Casino is free to play.

Experience social gameplay like never before.

Go to Chumba Casino right now to play hundreds of games, including online slots, Slingo, and more.

Live the Chumba life at chumbacasino.com.

No purchase necessary.

VGW Group voice were prohibited by law 21 plus targets conditions apply.

Wouldn't it be nice if your cash savings could just grow by itself?

With the Wealthfront cash account, it can, earning 4% annual percentage yield from partner banks on your uninvested cash, nearly 10 times the national average.

Just imagine if other things in your life work the way Wealthfront works.

If your houseplants grew at 10 times the average rate, you'd have 10 times fewer issues with sad stunted succulents.

Your crocodile ferns would go to the size of crocodiles.

Wealthfront's cash account keeps your money thriving just like that, earning you an industry-leading rate with no account maintenance fees and with free 24-7 instant withdrawals so you can access your money whenever you need it.

Money works better here.

Go to WealthFront.com to start saving.

Cash account offered by Wealthfront Brokerage LLC member FINRA SIPC.

Wealthfront is not a bank.

The APY on cash deposits as of December 27, 2024 is representative, subject to change and requires no minimum.

Funds in the cash account are swept to partner banks where they earn the variable APY.

The national average interest rate for savings accounts is posted on FDIC.gov as of December 16, 2024.

Right, science round now.

Deliso and Sarah, you can have this question.

Weight loss drugs could result in people having much longer watts.

Stretch marks.

Scientifically true, but not the answer I've got written down.

Deliso?

Legs.

Legs?

No?

What's the logic behind it?

I guess it's an optical illusion.

Conversations with people who used to treat them as invisible.

Again, scientifically correct answer.

The answer is lives.

Lives, correct.

So, someone very close to me started Ozempic this week.

I'm American.

Everyone's on it.

And I was happy, therefore, to learn that apparently it makes you like one of the side effects is less likely to have a cardiac event, but also less likely to contract an infectious disease.

And what was unclear to me, I'm not going anywhere funny with this, and I do want someone to explain this to me, is that just because getting to a smaller weight makes you less susceptible to something like a cardiac event, or is it some other side effect entirely?

No, I think you're right.

My brain, when you say cardiac event, doesn't think of a heart attack, I just think of any event involving hearts.

Okay,

do you think that we're getting to that part of your personality right now that is very pedantic?

So, if a surgeon is doing a heart transplant and they drop a heart, that's a cardiac event.

Don't encourage him!

All right, fine.

Don't use it as a chat-up line, though.

Don't say I'm having a cardiac event on a date, it just sends out the wrong impressions.

But I mean, it's quite exciting scientific breakthroughs that these drugs designed for weight loss could end up making us live forever, essentially.

I think it is a big exaggeration.

I don't think weight loss drugs are the reason people are living longer.

I lay the blame squarely on box sets of prestige television.

There's just too many of them.

They're all great.

They're all 10 series long.

I think people are living longer just to get to the end of all the quality content

that is on the streaming services.

You've got people in their 90s who haven't started breaking bad.

Come on.

The thing is, we've got an aging population in this country, and older people need younger people to support them and to work, and we're running out of young people.

And we could deal with that by, I don't know, allowing students to stay here, like immigrants to maybe stay on and contribute to our society.

But I think we would prefer to do it by magic.

You are a very short step away from just becoming a politician spontaneously.

Please don't put words in my mouth, Andy.

Actually, if you'd just let me finish.

This research has shown that the weight loss drugs that are causing widespread existential panic in the enormous trousers industry could have massive health benefits for everyone, significantly reducing the risk of heart attacks and strokes and significantly increasing the risk of saying, I remember when all this was fields, I can't even make out the words.

And don't worry, my darling great-grandchild, home ownership and career stability is overrated.

Before we finish our health round, another health story.

Why might people, sick of waiting to see their GP, choose instead to book a flight to a rainforest and hire a pantomime chimpanzee outfit.

Anyone?

Because there was a news story this week that chimpanzees can give each other first aid.

Correct.

And it raised the very interesting question: does this mean Bubbles chose not to resuscitate Michael Jackson?

I saw an article in the Daily Mail that said a lot of those injured chimpanzees are just faking it to get free tire swings.

White screen bananas.

I just saw it as a sign of the far-reaching fingers of big pharma.

How big is this pharma?

Maybe it means we could hire them to be care workers.

Don't say things like that out loud.

They will become party policy for someone.

Yes, researchers from Oxford University, sorry, boffins, have discovered that chimps administer first aid to each other.

The chimps were recorded chewing special leaves, then dabbing them on wounds, as well as performing more advanced human-style medical procedures such as supercutaneous epidermal banana ostomies, that's peeling a banana,

chimpanzee ECGs,

and atombroscopies, which is looking around to see if David Attenborough is hanging around with a bloody TV crew again.

The scientists found that chimps were surprisingly willing to help other chimps, even if they were not related to them, provided that the ill chimp requested help at precisely 8 a.m.

and not a second later.

Well at the end of our health round the scores are now seven to Alistair and Anushka, eight to Deliso and Sarah.

Let's move on to our next round which is a cuts round and to mark these cuts it's a missing syllable round so I'm going to give our panelists a headline from the week's news that has had one syllable cut from it.

And these are all related to the state of the economy and government cuts.

So, we'll start with this one.

This can go to Alistair Ananushka.

One in four employers plan red undies in the next three months.

What?

What is the missing syllable in that headline?

What?

Dance?

Is that a syllable?

Ants?

Yes, ants.

Ants, ants.

Ants, red undances.

Redundancies.

Yeah, that's how we say that word.

There's a lot of red undancies coming.

It's gonna be tough.

I think

the jobs market is really tough.

And when I think about it, loads of jobs that were around when I was a kid don't exist anymore.

Like when I was a kid, local characters were everywhere.

You could just be a local character.

You could just grow a blonde moustache, just get a pair of grey tracksuit bottoms, pull them up to your armpits, and just stand at a school gates.

People would say, Yeah, he's a local character.

And if you did it for long enough, they made you a PE teacher.

But I mean, politically, the state of the economy, this kind of thing, you know, how do you balance out, say, slightly better growth figures with more concerning employment figures politically?

Well, Rachel Reeves really, really needed the good growth figures because behind the scenes, Labour MPs are not very happy about the state of things.

They didn't like what happened with winter fuel payments.

They're not happy about welfare changes.

And actually, the reason for the redundancies, or people think it may be the reason, is the decision to increase employers' national insurance, which actually might be the most controversial of all in the longer run.

And lots of MPs were not being very nice about the Chancellor.

She really, really needed some good news.

And actually, 0.7% growth was better than anyone expected.

I think I saw a prediction of 0.6%.

Let's move on to our next missing syllable headline.

This can go to Deliso and Sarah.

Government announces plan to reduce bets on world's poor.

What is the missing syllable?

On world's poor.

Is this the story that they're cutting like aid?

Yes.

Bet, bet, bet.

But bud, bud, j at.

Budget.

Udj practice.

Uj is the missing syllable.

But udjet.

Hold on.

I can see this catching on.

I can see this getting its own show.

So

politically, again, cutting the aid budget always seems to be the first thing against the wall in difficult times.

Yeah, and you can picture them just being like, yeah, well, they were only going to spend it on drugs.

And you're like, yeah, but they were going to be life-saving drugs.

And also, like, again, this is not funny.

This is, I can't believe I'm being forced to make an actual point, right?

But it's never actually been foreign aid.

The better way to look at it is foreign investment, because what you you end up having is like after the interhamway in Rwanda, there was a lot of aid given, and then the country regenerated, and now they're sponsoring Arsenal.

You see?

It's a surplus.

Do you know what?

You sound like Kirst Armour in 2021.

Yeah, it's nuts.

It's, oh, let's run the government like it's a business.

Let's ride a horse like it's a bike.

It's a different thing.

It it doesn't make sense.

Uh and we're not on track to hit net zero, we're nowhere near, and the Tories think we should stop trying, and we want to cut foreign aid, and at the same time we want to reduce immigration, and it's not going to work because the planet's getting hotter and the equatorial regions are going to get hotter, and I think we're about to see a rhetorical shift from the right saying climate change isn't real, man-made climate change isn't real, to it is happening, it's too late to stop it, and that's why we have to close the borders, which is a a really good point, I think.

Let's have one final missing syllable said, Love, Of course, they'd be taking a look.

Sorry to criticise your game, but ujj is not a syllable.

Thank you.

Well, you're not going to like this one because this isn't a missing syllable.

This is three missing letters in the middle of a word.

Oh, my God.

Okay.

Either side can take this.

Government pledges to remove pants from some people with disabilities.

What are the three missing letters?

I think that actually is labour policy, isn't it?

PIP?

Personal independence.

You're right, but that's not the word.

That's not the missing.

Oh, payments.

Yes, yes.

Payments.

Why M and E are the missing letters.

Like Anushka is saying, there has been a negative reaction in the Labour Party about this.

I think Imran Hussein, the Bradford East MP, said something might scrap these unfair cuts and do the right thing and tax the super rich.

And you hear a lot from the super rich because it's like they own all the media or something.

And

the super rich are always saying, oh, the far left wants me to pay 95% tax.

And it's like, you know, you have to understand, the far left wants you evicted from your homes by Bolshevik gunmen.

Taxes were the compromise.

I think you should take the deal, guys.

Yes, the Department of Work and Pensions has confirmed that the government has no plans to back down from its controversial cuts to disability benefit payments.

Also, the aid budget is going to be slashed from 0.5 to 0.3%

of GDP.

And maybe we just have to accept that we live in different times now, and things like foreign aid and dignity and hope for those with disabilities are just two of the outdated political relics that modern Britain is bravely moving on from, along with other social antiquities that we've gradually shelved from our national priorities during recent years, such as the poor, truth, dignity for the old, public transport in financially inconvenient areas, libraries, a functioning legal system, due process, logic, a manufacturing sector, objectivity, nuance, empathy, Northern Ireland logic, the Ford Defensive Shot, Children, the Future, and most tragically of all, correctly used apostrophes.

Yeah, well, that is the end of this week's newsquiz, and the final scores.

It's 10 to Alistair and Anushka, 12 to Deliso and Sarah.

Yes!

Thank you for listening to the newsquiz.

I've been Andy Zaltzman, goodbye.

Taking part in the newsquiz were Alistair Beckett King, Sarah Barron, Deliso Shaponda, and Anushka Astana.

In the chair was me, Andy Zaltzman, and additional material was written by Catherine Brinkworth, Cody Dahla, Samira Samira Banks, and Eve Delaney.

The producer was Rajiv Karia and it was a BBC Studios audio production for Radio 4.

Strong message here from BBC Radio 4.

I'm Amanda Yanucci.

And I'm Helen Lewis.

A comedy writer and a journalist teaming up like a pair of unkempt and unlikely superheroes.

Our mission is to decipher political language.

Stress testing to destruction those used and abused buzzwords and phrases.

Finding out what they really mean.

And looking at whether whether they're meant to deceive us or to distract us or to disturb us.

And our pledge is to help you spot the tricks of the verbal trade.

But be warned, this series does feature strong political language that some listeners may find an inverted pyramid of piffle.

Strong message here from BBC Radio 4.

Listen now on BBC Sounds.

Today on Hey Culligan, reverse to reduce, here's Bob.

Hey Culligan, I love fresh water, but I got plastic bottles coming out.

Whoa, Bob, you are not kidding about the bottles.

But did you know Culligan's reverse osmosis and always-on drinking water systems provide fresh, clean, delicious drinking water and help reduce the equivalent of over 15 billion plastic bottles from landfills worldwide?

Holy, fresh, environmentally friendly drinking water.

Am I right?

Right, Bob.

And we're already on the way.

Let us help you out with a free in-home water test from a local Culligan water expert at Culligan.com.

Sucks!

The new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway.

We demand to be home.

Winner, best score.

We demand to be seen.

Winner, best book.

It's a theatrical masterpiece that's thrilling, inspiring, dazzlingly entertaining, and unquestionably the most emotionally stirring musical this season.

Suffs!

Playing the Orpheum Theater October 22nd through November 9th.

Tickets at BroadwaySF.com.