150: Labour, Heatwaves and Glasto

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Page 94, The Private Eye Podcast.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of Page 94.

My name is Andrew Hunter Murray, and I'm here in the Private Eye office with Helen Lewis, Adam McQueen, and Ian Hislop.

We're back.

It's warm, and we'll be talking a bit about that later, but we're going to start off getting in a couple of days ahead of the great big anniversary.

Do you remember where you were when Liz Truss lost her seat?

It's coming up to a year since

that sad day.

And it's first year report card time for the new labor sorry not new labor you know what i mean the increasingly aged labor government yeah

Helen, how's it going?

Not well.

Oh no.

You asked actually about, remember, I remember my husband woke me up to tell me about Liz Truss.

I had fallen into a stupor by that point and he was very excited about it.

He wanted me to be awake so I would see that momentous time.

No, it's going really badly.

I mean, we're not just at the in the, well, at the moment, we're in the middle of a big welfare rebellion and another U-turn by Starmer.

But he has given a series of interviews in which he's admitted it's not going well.

So he said that he regretted the Island of Strangers speech.

He didn't read it properly before he delivered it because he was too preoccupied with foreign affairs.

There is a feeling that they really stuffed up over winter fuel allowance and double stuffed as well, in the sense that it was one of their first big memorable policy changes.

And then they got themselves to a policy where most people in the polling thought it should, you know, the limit should be brought down, that fewer middle-class pensioners should get this but then they over corrected and they're now giving it to quite quite a lot of well-off people but that then stuffs their argument for welfare cuts because it's it's like you found a you know a couple of hundred million down the back of the sofa for this

so are things really as tight as they are so the current feeling on the welfare cuts is that they're going to you know save billions less than it was initially advertised and as yet there is no word on where that money comes from so they're in a situation where everybody in downing street seems to be quite grumpy they've already if you remember, got rid of Sue Gray.

And now the triumph, you know, the victor of that fight, Morgan McSweeney, now everyone's grumbling about him.

Right.

The policies have been turbulent.

The massive majority has not been enough to stave off the welfare rebellion.

And Kirstalmer himself just seems really personally quite battered.

So the other things that was interesting about that Tom Baldwin interview, his biographer interviewed him for The Observer, was saying that the reason...

Good choice.

Good choice.

Well, it was actually...

I mean, just to give the full CV though, not just Kirstarma's official biographer, but also Ed Miliband's spin doctor.

I mean, this is a man who is absolutely embedded in the Labour Party.

It was a fairly extraordinary kind of set of conflict of interest for a cover story in the Observer, I felt.

Yes, put that aside, but I think what that meant then meant was that the interview was unusually revealing.

And traditionally, the problem with Starmer interviews has been that it's like interviewing a brick wall.

And everybody...

Was that too revealing?

We're talking about giving a report card.

He gave a pretty damning one on himself.

They say everything's gone wrong and I'm really sorry about it.

I don't know how I got.

I don't know what I was saying.

Also, on your report card, you don't usually say the dog ate my homework.

You say, no, I'd done my homework pretty good.

I mean, it's going well.

I mean, to say I was a bit tired, I was a bit, even if these things are true, it does feed into a narrative of, well, I'm

not sure I'm up to this.

Misery.

I think you're right.

Like, he said that the Rosegun speech, when they initially came in and went, God, this is all terrible.

They, again, all that did was depress people.

But then he accounts for the, he says the reason that he overreacted about Freeby Gate, you know, and sort of got very defensive about it was they were criticising his wife.

Then he had the fire bombing on his home, which I think is genuinely, you know,

anyone would be distressed by that.

And then his brother Nick, again, he tried to protect and be very private about died of cancer after having kind of him, again, not wanting to speak publicly about it.

But there is this running theme throughout, which is two things, which is one, he doesn't really like politics, you know, the art of making people do what you want or convincing them.

And two, he's unable to emotionally articulate his own story or himself as a character in the kind of national narrative.

You know, apart from being a bit dry and boring and a human rights lawyer, I mean, Ian, tell me, when you're kind of trying to caricature him and do jokes about him, is it actually quite difficult?

Yes, I mean, it is difficult.

And usually the jokes are about his failure to spot what other people are saying.

The joke comes from him not knowing that other people around him don't agree with his version of himself.

And that is a problem.

But if you remember when Rishi Sunak said, well, don't go for my wife, the public didn't care.

People will accept the narrative, they're not callers.

But what they want to say is, why are you making these mistakes?

And if you say, I'm making those mistakes, because life's tough, well, it's tough for a lot of other people and tougher.

I don't think they buy it.

But also, because in the case of Starma and almost every premise that they obviously schemed and plotted intensely to get there, right?

This was a jog you really, really wanted.

So we're not that interested in you saying, oh gosh, it's really quite hard, isn't it?

Yeah, I mean, I always felt like that about Ed Miliband's tenure at Top of Labour, is that he was terribly martyred by it all.

And it was like, but you've literally torn your family apart, your poor mother trying to arbitrate between the two brothers.

This is how much you wanted it.

So it does seem to be a bit of a pattern with labour leaders, doesn't it?

That they put all of their energies and all of their thought and all of their kind of strategic thinking into becoming leader.

And then when they get there, quite often don't really know.

I'm thinking of Gordon Brown here, who spent most of his time as chancellor, 10 years or whatever that was, just desperately scheming to take over the the top dollar.

And then he got there, just sort of fumbled it completely and didn't seem to know

what he wanted to do with it.

I mean, by that metric, Boris Johnson was also a brilliant labour leader, surely.

Decades of the rise in immigration and borrowing.

I mean, you could argue he was a classic labour leader.

But you're right.

I mean, sometimes I criticise Ed Balls and George Osborne on the way they talk about things on their podcast.

Is it like everything's a sort of game, right?

You know, this is, oh, we did such a great dividing line on this.

And, you know, and you, and like, and then they end up talking about things that you think, well, well, that would have been good if it happened.

So well done for scuttling it.

But the other end of that continuum is Kier Starmer, who sort of disdains the idea that you might ever do anything as sort of grubby as

run a campaign to convince MPs of something that you like.

But isn't one of the problems that we traditionally blame the advisors?

So I was reading a lot this week where it's all McSweeney's fault.

And before that, it was all Sue Gray's fault.

Maybe, maybe it's not.

Maybe it's Starmer's fault.

Just possibly.

Are we keen to sort of let people off and then blame the people around them?

Oh, unbelievably so, because you don't want to be disloyal to the leader who is ultimately the one with the power of patronage, right?

When they're, I mean, there's a lot of Labour MPs, and most of them won't have government jobs, you know, so there's an incredibly cutthroat atmosphere among them.

So one thing you don't want to do is go Kier Starmer's rubbish.

You end up on Rosie Duffield's trajectory, where you just criticise yourself out and out in the tent and you end up as an independent.

And I think there are lots of them who aren't ready to make that step yet.

So having a go at Morgan McSweeney is the sort of acceptable face of something is wrong in this party.

But of course, King Starmer can fix it.

We still believe in him.

And it's always quite useful for a leader as well to have a kind of worm tongue who they can sacrifice at any given time.

I mean, thinking of the, and there was a real point of Alastair Campbell retiring from Downing Street post sort of Hutton inquiry, still stuck around and seemed to be doing the job for most of the time.

Damien McBride was let go, wasn't he, partway through Gordon Brown's tenure.

So it's quite useful having someone you can.

Pete Mandelson, of course, was dumped

early early on over the mortgages.

So having someone you can kind of put out there as kind of chum to distract the sharks is quite useful as well, I guess.

And we all say that, oh, the Tory Party is now obsessed by, you know, regicide and murdering.

But it could be that just everyone's obsessed by it.

And we've had Kit Kit Stubbor's been in charge for ages.

Can we have someone else now?

I mean,

is not everybody guilty of this failure to have an attention span more than about a year for any one leader?

I'm just, I'm concerned.

No, I think there is an interesting point about trying to be really objective about marking how well the government has done, which is just really hard in terms of they put in lots of things that won't pay off for several years, like the attempt to get house building going, for example, like Angela Reina calling in projects and approving them.

Those are things that might look very different in five years' time than they do now.

But one thing, I think the thing that you're alluding to is the fact that Kier Stammer is quite ill-suited for being a prime minister in the age of social media.

He just doesn't like it.

He doesn't do it.

It's not his.

I think I suggest that if he doesn't like doing politics as it is in the modern era, he might be in the wrong job.

Right.

Well, you become a...

I know he's only been an MP since 2015, but there is this supposed rule of politics that whoever can govern the newest medium wins.

And unfortunately, by that metric, that's Nigel Farage, you know, because I think some extraordinary state he has more followers on TikTok than the other 649 MPs combined.

And that's good, is it?

No, not at all.

I'm joking, Andy.

Yeah, he's...

But he talks very directly to people, doesn't he?

I mean, that's the point.

He's found a way to bypass media gatekeepers, which has meant that they've ended up running to catch up with him.

I think that's one of the things that Labour struggles to do, is they're still locked into the Sunday shows and the morning broadcast round.

There is this obsession with the newspapers as well, which are, I'm afraid, a dying industry in terms of like setting the agenda.

But they do still seem to agenda for a lot of newspapers.

Magazines.

Magazines are doing brilliantly.

But there is this desperate number, and they spent so many years.

There are redundancies available.

So much time courting the Sun and The Times and all the Murdoch papers before the election to sort of no avail, really.

It didn't get them anywhere.

They got a really sort of half-hearted last-minute endorsement from the Sun and not even one from The Times, I don't think.

And

they're working in an analogue age still, that the idea that is the Sun what want it, which was never particularly true anyway.

The other interesting thing, I think, is the attitude towards reform.

So Stalma says explicitly in that Observer article that yes, he is running against Nigel Farage, which on the surface looks mad, right?

It's a party with half a dozen MPs.

But they are leading in almost every poll these days.

And the other thing he says, which I don't think he's done yet, is if the reforms arguments are really popular, we have to take them head on.

I would probably like to see a bit more of that because for all that he's recanted Island of Strangers, he says he regrets

any idea there was an echo of Enoch Powell, although they didn't see it.

He also said he regrets what was in the foreword to that white paper, which remember we picked up on the podcast here, which was that immigration has done incalculable damage to this country.

But the problem about that is you can say, oh, I wish I hadn't said such spicy things, but he's not said anything proactively himself yet that is anti-Nigel Farage.

You know, I mean, I just, I'm not sure.

What they really need is a couple of absolute attack dogs who will go personally and hard for Nigel Farage, but have the credibility, the background, and the aptitude with social media to play in that sphere, right?

Who have they really got that's got that ferocity?

Well, Angela Rainey could probably do it, but they're quite scared of her because she's seen as being the big rival to Starmer, isn't she?

Well, so she's not allowed to be any good publicly.

She's allowed out in public, is she very much?

Well, I guess for her, it's also, yeah, as you say, it's a question about how much she wants to associate herself with this project that's not really going very well.

Because someone who is delighting in not going well, like, well, maybe that's a bit over the top.

But certainly, Andy Burnham is handing around the fringes going, well, I wouldn't cut welfare, just putting it out there, right?

And Sadiq Khan, too, to some extent.

That is the problem of having those big mayors who don't sit in parliament, is that they can say, oh, well, I personally would give everybody a rabbit.

Well, we've talked a lot about their failure to do anything with messaging.

The messaging that the MPs were sent out there to defend these welfare cuts before the U-turn on them was completely disingenuous anyway.

Because it was trying to, I mean, essentially, this is all about saving money, as everything is in government at the moment.

But it was presented in this totally nonsensical way of restricting personal independence payments will get people back into work.

Well, that doesn't work because personal independence payments aren't related.

They're not an employment alternative.

They are there to support people with the mobility equipment or the care needs that they have in order to be able to live their life, which for an enormous percentage of people who are on PIP is it does involve actually working.

So the argument didn't even make sense that they were being sent out to kind of sacrifice themselves.

But you're right, that comes back to following the papers, right?

Because they halfway wanted a sun-friendly scrounge of Britain.

Too many people are out of work.

They need to know the value of an honest day's graft.

And then they also didn't want to upset all of the key groups and disability groups and their own MPs and people who've been through that process and know that it can be really bureaucratic and horrible.

So you're right, they ended up neither doing one nor the other, really.

But that's true in all of the major U-turns, isn't it?

Yeah.

I mean,

they're U-turn because they didn't get the message right to start with, saying people like Ian should not be claiming winter fuel benefit, old balls who can afford it anyway.

Good messaging.

They didn't do any of that.

Even now, the compromise they've come to seems equally nonsensical because at the moment we're speaking ahead of the vote, which is going to be on Tuesday this week.

But the suggestion now is that the restrictions on PIP are going to come in for future applicants, but nothing is going to change for the people who are on it now.

So if you've got multiple sclerosis now, you're going to get help that people who are diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2027 won't get.

I mean, it's either wrong or it's not wrong, isn't it?

But this alludes to the salient fact of British politics, and I guess probably all politics you need to understand, which is that once you give people entitlements, it's really hard to take them away.

Well, the winter fuel allowance is spoken about now as if it was sort of part of Magna Carta or something.

Was it 97, 99?

Gordon Brown brought that in, but once it's there, you know, you can't then rein back on it.

Isn't there a one-off £10 payment that was a Gordon Brown innovation that appears across your...

Yeah, it's the Christmas £10 top-up.

And it appears in everyone's statement at the end of the year when you're totting up, you know, if you're liable for tax or anything, all these other quite normal-looking amounts of money.

There's one little tenor in there as well.

And that is the same kind of thing, isn't it?

But the Winter Fuel Lance, you're entirely right, Adam, was brought in at a time when pensioners were the poorest group in Britain.

They are now the wealthiest group in Britain.

And that's not to say there aren't people within that cohort who are really challenged, but there are also lots of quite middle-class people who are doing better than working-age people who are not getting help with their fuel bills.

So,

what's wrong with the policy as it originally was?

Well,

but no, the cut-off at 11,500 was too low.

I think that was the thing.

And the polling said that a plurality of people thought the policy was correct, but they've now changed it again to make it really quite high.

I mean, there's all kinds of weird stuff about the tax system relating to pensions.

They don't pay national insurance, for example.

Like, I just that seems to me to be people could write in and explain to me why I'm wrong about that.

But I don't know why we treat pension incomes so very differently from working-age incomes when

the demographic change has been so stark, which is good, by the way.

I'm just saying it's really good that people live longer and there are a few of them freezing to death in their homes.

That's great.

But political reality hasn't caught up with it yet.

Nor has it caught up with the fact that, particularly since the pandemic, a lot of people, more people are sick and claiming benefits.

And there is clearly something, whether or not you think all of those are legitimate or not, that is just a statistical fact.

So we do have to do something about it.

Yes, and if you don't state that, if you don't admit that up front, that this is the situation and we're trying to do something about it, then people just assume your motives are wrong.

I mean, I think it's difficult.

I know some of the press do it, to say Starmer, what he really wants to do is target poor people and make them poorer.

I'm guessing that isn't true.

I would guess that's not his life's work.

But if you allow that to grab hold as some sort of macho position in your politicking, then it will.

I'm worried that Anthony Seldon says that Keir Starmer has started off worse than Liz Truss.

It's not the review you want, is it?

So do we have a little list of top tips or recommendations to send out Big Ange against Big Nige?

When you say Big Ange, I thought you were talking about Poster Cogli and I was like, he's been sacked by Spurs, Andy.

What are you talking about?

But yes,

you've lost me already.

I ripped Dieter into some football lore there.

I think the problem is they need to level with people about how little money we've got and the fact that it's now a zero-sum game between competing groups.

And if they're going to give winter fuel ounce, that means that is coming from somebody.

But they obviously won't do that.

I also, and I've been saying this now for some time,

I'm going to keep saying it, is just put up income tax.

Just do it.

I don't want to, none of us in this room, I'm sure, are clamouring to pay more tax, but there are no ways to, you know, we can't borrow anymore.

Our debt repayments are already pretty crippling.

There's not obvious cuts, or at least not obvious immediate immediate cuts without some upfront investment, right?

Like I'm sure we could cut the spending on justice in prisons, but we're gonna have to get through the backlog first.

We could maybe cut some of the spending on asylum, but we're gonna have to get through the backlog first.

There's lots of sticking plaster solutions all over stuff that we will require money to to put in first to fix them.

And I don't know how you don't do that with just simply more.

Anyway, Rachel Reeves will come to this conclusion in about September, I would have thought.

So, yeah.

You need one of your big hitters to point out that the reform version of tax less, spend more

doesn't usually work.

No.

I thought his Robin Hood tax idea, you know, this one-off fee for non-Doms, that then you give it to poor people, I thought that was really, he's got the opposite problem to Kirstan, which is that's really smart politically, right?

I like the idea of saying, let's charge rich people a flat fee and let's get that directly to the poorest people.

Unfortunately, Dan Nidal, who's a tax expert that I would trust, has just gone, I'm sorry, the sum simply don't work like that.

You'll lose a lot of money by it.

Billions and billions and billions.

It doesn't work it's a nice idea but you will see in that the contours of the new nigel farage argument which is our protected interest groups are going to get more money he's not a dry thatcherite fiscal conservative anymore he is i think as you were saying earlier in like he's like left new left-wing nigel right he wants to give he wants to give the people who might vote reform more money and protect their money right and and he claims that there's an easy cost-free way of doing this but there's there's not well at least there's no time in the past where he's claimed something where the numbers don't add up and won a lot of people over.

Anyway.

You have to bring it up, don't you?

Yeah.

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You're juggling a lot.

Full-time job, side hustle, maybe a family?

And now you're thinking about grad school?

That's not crazy.

That's ambitious.

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I think we should point out that during the ad break, there's been a coup.

Yeah.

And a rather dry leader of the podcast has been replaced by his feisty female deputy.

God.

That's so true.

The gobby woman has finally taken over.

Right, Andy.

I want you to tell me, Andy, why is it so bloody hot?

And is it fossil fuels or is it just the sun?

It's a combination of volcanoes, sunspot activity, nothing to do with fossil fuels at all, so don't worry about that.

But genuinely,

as we're recording this, it's in the thirties outside, and that is unusual for June, or is it I mean, because that was the problem for a long time, if you remember, every time someone would talk about global warming, someone would go, it wouldn't feel very warm, does it?

It's very cold in here, it's December.

Well, I had a little look at the Met Office, who do keep quite good records on this sort of thing.

So this spring, it's been between 1.3 and 1.6 degrees above the long-term average.

That is obviously a weird thing to say when it is swelteringly hot outside.

You think it is not 1.6 degrees warmer.

Actually,

when you do that at a global level, what it means in reality is that bits of the UK are five degrees warmer than normal.

Some bits of the UK, as we record this, are 11 degrees warmer than they normally are.

So

the 1.5 degrees above actually translates to really quite scorchio temperatures for all of us.

So that's the Met.

Yeah.

And are British homes and buildings particularly badly adapted for this?

I say this as somebody who lives in a house that in about June transforms into an oven and doesn't kind of transform back again until September.

Well, a lot of people are probably rethinking their conservatories around now.

That is true to say.

I don't think the UK is especially badly adapted.

I think traditionally we've had a kind of very normal, pretty mild climate in both directions.

You know, the reason that we struggle when it snows unexpectedly in winter is that it's only ever been snowy for a couple of days, so we've never bothered buying a huge fleet of snowplows as you might get in Canada.

Same thing is happening now with heat as the climate is warming.

You know, our homes are not really built for this kind of heat.

But I don't think Britain is unusual in having set up its entire society and infrastructure and everything like that for a particular range of temperatures, which we're now going beyond.

Bits of Europe are now kind of 42 to 46 degrees Celsius.

Southern Spain is not built for 46 degrees Celsius.

You know, that nowhere really is outside places like Saudi Arabia.

Nowhere is, is it?

I mean, India hit fifty at some point in the last couple of years, didn't it?

And all the like lists of stuff that they had to do, the traffic policemen wearing like sort of sleeves made of ice, you know, to go under it.

Like just trying to keep people who had to work outside cold is almost impossible.

Yeah, yeah.

So I think ev everywhere is is maladjusted for the temperatures that we're having now is is basically the thing.

I'll blame grand designs for this, but the adaptation everyone has been making for the last sort of thirty years whenever they do a property is to replace most of it with glass, isn't it?

I mean enormous glass extensions and things.

So actually presumably, you know, we're actually making things worse quite a lot when we're Sell your shares in glaziers and buy shares in blinds manufacturers.

You know, I think that's...

Blinds manufacturers and suncream are two growth industries definitely for the next few decades.

Am I allowed to buy and install air con in my house or does that make baby icebergs cry?

It's all electricity demand, isn't it?

But I think if it's extremely hot, people need air conditioning.

I think saying that we shouldn't have air conditioning is a...

a bit of an unusual argument saying you should swelter through 40 degree heat.

The thing to do really is ensure that the electricity you're powering your air conditioning with is renewable.

Now you might not be able to install solar yourself on your own home or whatever it is, but the idea is that as we install lots more renewable energy, that it covers all the growth in demand and then starts eating into existing fossil demand.

That's that's the idea.

Is it my imagination, Andy, or do I not hear any of this when I turn on the television or open a newspaper?

I mean, it's lovely, it's hot, is the main sentiment.

It's not, oh my gosh.

What a scorcher.

Look at these fruity young ladies on Brighton Breach, I think, is still a lively growth area.

It certainly is, yeah.

I mean, I have been looking through various papers in terms of how they deal with it.

You will get little bits of coverage, especially if there is a heatwave inferno in Europe that might kill British tourists.

That gets coverage.

The bit at the back of the paper where someone has to write a column about the weather every day, they will often mention it because these hacks know what they're talking about.

But overall, the editorial line, certainly of most papers, is it's lovely and hot.

As we mentioned a lot in this podcast, newspaper readers are older than average by quite some way.

In fact, the older you get in Britain's population, the more concerned on average people are about climate change.

You might think it would be younger people who are more concerned, given they're going to have to live with it for 50 or 60 years.

Actually,

people who say they are at least fairly concerned, it's bigger in the over 65s.

So it feels like newspapers are not.

Because I already feel like I remember summers when I was young did not feel like this.

I feel like in my lifetime the weather has become more extreme and if you've lived for twice as long as I have then you must be thinking this is weird now.

This is very weird.

Someone said to me recently oh these aren't the calm English summers I remember from my childhood.

They were my age at 37.

That's a very short time scale for things to have got like this.

And one of the saddest things I think in the American context particularly, the Atlantic Rena piece saying that we've lost those cool summer evenings.

One of the really big things that's hard to adapt to now is the fact it's not just 30 during the day, but it's 24 during the night.

And that's terrible for people sleeping.

It's terrible for animals.

It's terrible for old people.

I mean, you know, there was a huge heat wave in Europe in 2003, which I think led to 70,000 excess deaths.

Wow.

So the newspapers tend not to run pictures of dogs fainting in the heat or farmers struggling to plant crops.

But that is quite a bit.

But that makes it weirder then, because that is the people who buy newspapers.

I know, I know.

It's an editorial line thing.

And again, most papers have quite decent coverage of the actual news, with a couple of really, really dishonourable exceptions.

Are we going to name them?

The Telegraph and the Mail.

Yeah, I mean, the Telegraph coverage really is.

Can I give me an example?

I'd love to.

Well,

let's bring it back to ARM magazine, Private Eye.

I mean, there was a piece a couple of issues ago pointing out the sheer number of times the Telegraph have said, yeah, we got exactly all of this climate story wrong.

We're very happy to correct it.

They printed a story saying the UK is planning 10 times the number of solar panels it actually is.

Being out by an order of magnitude is not good when you're a reporter.

They claimed renewables were responsible for the big Spanish blackout.

It was actually due to power plants of all kinds not managing their voltage properly.

Oh, I have a new one for you, if you like.

In May, they printed a graph from a really embarrassing outfit called the Renewable Energy Foundation.

They're actually incredibly hostile to renewable energy.

Always standard, name yourself after the thing you're trying to destroy.

And that graph, it claimed that 40% of the electricity is a renewable subsidy of one kind or another.

Obviously, that's not true.

You know, it's it's between six and eight percent.

I feel like even if it were true, I'd be in favour of it.

But the point is, it's not true.

Really important thing to drive home there.

Only a few days ago, we had a headline in the Telegraph: heat waves will trigger net zero meltdown, which is where all the technologies that are being installed to try and deal with climate change and take the edge off it, actually, they'll all stop working if it gets warm.

They won't.

Although the Guardian does notoriously have an air cooling system in its offices which packs up when it gets above a certain temperature.

Which I think this is what we call anecdotal evidence.

No, I do still think that climate change is real.

What I look to you for, Andy, is it is somebody to slightly cheer me up that we're not all just going to doomed to fry like bacon in a frying pan?

Yeah, I'll have a go.

I mean

we know it's going to get warmer.

The amount the world is emitting is about 40 billion tonnes a year of carbon dioxide, which is not something any of us can...

No one can really compute that.

And until it comes down to a net of zero that is being emitted, that means either we're emitting nothing or we're emitting some, but we're using natural zincs or carbon capture to soak up what we are emitting.

A net of zero, then it stops.

It stops getting worse.

At the moment, obviously, emissions are still rising a little bit, so it's getting worse a little bit faster.

I suppose the good news is that we have solutions for about 75% of emissions at the moment.

The hugest sectors to take fossil fuels out of that solutions really do exist for are electricity,

ground transportation, heating and cooling our homes, and about half of industrial use.

You can easily do it with

renewably sourced electricity.

So the solutions do exist.

It's now really a matter of politically finding the, you know, the will and the

acceleration to roll them out as fast as possible.

There are still a couple that are tricky.

Aviation shipping, you know, no one's invented a plane that can fly 5,000 miles on batteries.

Carbon capture doesn't yet exist, is it?

Carbon capture will need to scale up a huge amount.

Well, larger than a small pothole.

Yeah,

it's going to have to become a much bigger industry than it is.

But I thought the essential technology isn't really there, is it?

I mean, at the moment, it captures a very small amount of money.

I don't want it not to be there.

I'm just saying I want to be realistic.

At the moment, it captures a very, very small amount of emissions.

I mean, if you're holding a tray of glasses, the analogy is it's much easier not to drop the glasses in the first place than to say, I'm going to invent a terrific dustpan and brush.

If I can put it that way.

and solutions exist but it's not cheery no no but the well the cheery bit is solutions exist for the overwhelming majority of this stuff and Ian is our old Sparky our columnist who looks at all of this sort of stuff is he on the same page

not entirely but that's all right but he he is very good on the the myth of carbon capture and and the fact that it would be lovely when it's

available to work but it isn't now and it really would be worth considering that.

I mean he's an energy specialist and he tells tells you about what's going wrong and what's going right.

The wider points about, and I'm particularly interested in selling the message of, you know, he is very much aware of climate change.

No, we're not in that territory.

What I like to see is,

is there any way of doing anything about this in a way that you can take people with you?

It's your point about starmer and politics.

It's a lovely idea.

that you could be pure in your beliefs about this, but if no one wants to come with you, how do you do it?

You know, there was a consensus on this politically, very much so.

I think probably before it started getting to the sharp end of actually having to do it.

You know, whereas now the conservatives and reform have really rode back.

They're now saying, let's not effectively and let's not try on this, which is, you know, I don't know if that message works.

I think the important thing is for it not to seem like it's being imposed on people.

But we had a political change in that Cameron was managed to sell the Green Conservative and Boris, of all people,

took the public with him.

You know, the idea, oh, well, if Boris says the green agenda's good, well, maybe it is, maybe that's all right.

And that was lost.

Just to counter the kind of really bad report car that you had in the last action, Helen, the climate and environment stuff is one area where particularly the British government have been taking a lead.

Ed Miliband.

Ed Miliband's unlikely reinvention, but he spent years on this before becoming the minister at the Department of Energy Security and Net Zero.

And pretty much every day, every week since the election, there has been an announcement which has been broadly welcomed by industry by green groups by by all sorts of people who are normally really unhappy about all sorts of stuff but not in the editorials in the editorials everything is Ed Miliband's fault yes and he's about to be sacked permanently but he never is is he no it's I mean one of the things Kierstama has been really consistent on is this stuff matters it is a big growth opportunity I mean you talk about wanting to get to two percent growth you know china is rolling out electric technologies and green technologies solar EVs, all of this.

The main bureau of the Chinese Communist Party are not wokies.

They're doing it because they want to sell this stuff to the entire world.

Happily, it'll take the edge of climate change, but that's not the only reason they're doing it.

That's why it's quite a big turnaround because, I mean, the excuse that people always made was, oh, there's no point in us doing anything towards net zero because China's still pumping out all of this.

It surprises me that they do seem to be accelerating the green stuff.

China still gets a huge amount of its electricity from coal.

They are still, unlike almost everywhere else in the world, building coal plants.

But they are also building ginormous amounts of solar and wind power.

I mean, truly unnaturally huge amounts.

And now, these days, half the cars in China come with a plug.

Ten years ago, it was a handful of percent.

So the change is very rapid.

And I suppose that's the other positive thing.

In 2012, the UK got 42% of its electricity from burning coal.

We've just shut down our last coal plant.

When these things do change, they can change quick.

Yeah, and Labour's entire policy in power has been to...

it's it's a it's a two-pronged thing.

Firstly, they want to clean up the electricity supply because at the moment we get about a third of electricity from burning gas.

Secondly, they want to change the uses so that everything we use, whether that's heating our homes with heat pumps, driving around in electric cars, comes from that clean electricity.

So Chris Stark, who's the head of the clean power mission, has said this is not a mad sprint to 2030, getting clean power.

This is the warm-up for a marathon.

We're going to need a lot more power.

We want it to be clean and cleanly sourced.

Which seems a much more sellable approach than we're all going to die.

Yes.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's weird reading people who you think would be sort of solutions-oriented saying, well, there's no point in doing anything.

Oh, Trump's got back in.

There's no point in doing anything.

But that's because that's a sort of millenarian tendency, isn't it?

That's the sort of same impulse of people who sort of boast about going off-grid or whatever it might be.

Like the degrowthing, I think, is just a particular psychology among a certain set of people, but it's not widely shared.

I would say that Doomers and net zero sceptics are two hands of the same glove.

Hang on, that's the same thing.

I believe that George Galloway line is two cheeks of the same arse.

There you go.

Yeah, I mean, they both say, let's not do anything about this, there's no point.

So there are lots of policies that have been announced, things like new houses all to have solar power and heat pumps, which will mean they're sort of low or not zero-bill houses, but low-bill houses.

That feels like the sort of thing you can sell to the electorate.

Oh, my house has got solar panels because it's a new build.

And I tell you what, when all those those energy price rises happened post-invasion of Ukraine,

I really felt it.

It was really, really good.

So, that I think is the challenge by the next election, is to say, right, here are the concrete results.

The other thing I thought was interesting, we had a report in the magazine by Flunky, which was about the fact that King Charles is mustard keen on this stuff and therefore

rather likes Ed Miliband, which must be cheery, Fred Miliband.

Yeah, it's nice for him to have a friend anywhere in this incredibly hostile environment.

He finds that the king or anyone?

That's probably what they talk about.

Maybe they, yeah.

Unfortunately, I think the report said that Kier Starmer tried to muscle in on this and was kind of, he wasn't allowed to be friends and complained about.

That's why the dealer of them exchanges meet.

Yes, you know, my brother's awful as well.

I don't get on the hood at all.

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Right, let's turn to something even more cheerful

than a heat pump, not possible.

Glastonbury.

Adam, you were there.

I was there on my sofa

watching pulp and enjoying the red arrows going over.

Yeah, no, I was nowhere near it at all.

But the sofa was the place to be, were you watching the live stream?

Everyone was expecting the contentious bit to be kneecap, who no less a person than the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition had demanded should not be either put on stage, platformed at Glastonbury or broadcast on the BBC.

So the BBC, this is of course because one member of the Irish band, NECAP, is facing terrorism charges over holding up a, I believe, a Hezbollah flag at a recent concert.

That being, of course, a prescribed terrorist organisation.

No less a person than the Prime Minister, and in fact, the Leader of the Opposition as well, said that Glastonbury should not be platforming this band, and the BBC should certainly not be broadcasting their set.

So the BBC very carefully decided not to put them out on the live stream.

They were going to put them on a delay and have them broadcast later on with their chance to edit out anything terrible.

And while they were getting on with that, the band that were on directly before them on the stage, who go by the appalling name of Bob Villain, which is just...

I was going to say the worst pun in pot, but actually the Beatles take that, don't they?

But pretty awful.

Anyway, Bob Villain.

My opinions on this story changed when I found out that both members of the band Bob Villain are known as Bobby Villain, spelled one with a Y and one with an IE.

And I thought,

what are you doing here?

No consistent branding.

I know, I don't know.

That's the sub-editor's objection, really.

How am I supposed to tell them apart?

Which was which?

Mr.

Villain.

So Bob Villain were meant to play before Kneecap?

NECAP?

They did play before NECAP.

And as part of their set, they chanted both From the River to the Sea, that very controversial slogan about what's going on in Israel and Palestine at the moment, and also death, death, death to the IDF.

Not, as has been reported in quote marks on the front of several newspapers, certainly the Mail on Sunday and the Mail went with it, death to Israelis.

They're very specific in what they said.

It was the IDF, which is, of course, the Israeli army who are engaged in a war on several fronts at the moment.

When you say this was broadcast, is this on BBC One?

Not on any of the BBC channels that you think of as channels at all.

Okay.

Nor was it clipped and added to the Glastonbury channel on the iPlayer as an option for you to watch.

This was literally a live stream which was going out where they just had cameras trained on all the different stages at Glastonbury because there's 400 BBC staff or something filming pretty much everything that goes on.

And this was effectively what used to be called the red button, but is now the iPlayer.

It was going out live.

I understand.

This is the equivalent of Radio 4 Longwave doing the test matches.

Pretty much that.

Yeah, yeah.

For our older listeners, who are probably the only people who can afford to close Glastonbury anyway.

And Brian Johnston was always talking about the IDF on that, wasn't he?

Sorry, that's one for much older listeners.

Deep cops, really.

Interestingly, it's still not available.

But the action that was taken on Monday, the BBC announced that with hindsight, we should have pulled the stream during the performance, and we regret that this did not happen.

But what they did do on the day was to

immediately say they wouldn't put a recording of the performance out as a kind of clipped thing on iPlayer that people could tune into.

I I discovered so you cannot see that on the BBC anyway.

Where you can see it, where you can see the chant of Death, Death, Death through the IDF is on the Daily Telegraph website, who've got it running constantly on a loop, which was kind of worth saying how disgusting and appalling this is.

And the organisers themselves apologised immediately and said it shouldn't have happened.

So it wasn't just the BBC who then immediately took it.

Emily Evis, who is now in charge of Glastonbury, said it was against all of the principles and everything that Glastonbury holds dear, which is slightly disingenuous because this is not something that Bob Villen, who I must admit I was not very aware of before that, but apparently is not something that

is uncharacteristic for them.

They do make political statements like this and in fact those specific chants at various gigs that they've been to.

The BBC also are slightly in trouble, I've discovered, in kind of trying to detach themselves from this because they have, to a certain extent, championed Bob Villain.

I had a look, they've done sessions on Radio 6 music, they created a playlist for

BBC Sounds, they've also been sort of live on Radio 1 as well.

So there is, it's not as if they came entirely out of nowhere except for people like us who maybe don't follow this kind of music.

So, you know,

there is definitely some trouble ahead still on this one for the BBC.

But I just don't know how the BBC can be held responsible for the fact that rappers have strong political views and that they will express them in their music, right?

This is the bit I just don't really understand with this.

I don't think, personally, don't think the death of the IDF chant is inherently anti-Semitic.

I think the bit when he talked about working for a record company boss and he said, you know, we've all made compromises, we've all worked for fucking Zionists.

That's a bit more like, is that just a code word for Jew?

And this has come up with lots of black artists saying that the record industry is run by Jews and they just take advantage of black artists.

Like, this is a fairly well-known sort of anti-Semitic drumbeat.

So I'm not going to kind of entirely defend him,

but I also think it's tasteless, but it's legitimate political speech to my mind.

And I don't see why the BBC actually should apologise for it.

And the people who are most outraged about it are, of course, the other media outlets who've been running a campaign over the last year for absolute free speech for all, and particularly equating it with the case of Lucy Connolly.

I mean, absolutely directly, the the Telegraph was saying on Monday.

In fact, they were saying it was worse.

Lucy Connolly, of course, is the

person who tweeted during the riot saying set fire to refugee hotels.

Toby Young, I saw, came up with the extraordinary.

Toby Young of the Free Speech Alliance or Foundation of the Everyone Look at Toby Young organisation, basically, essentially, said, at least Lucy Connolly caveated what she said by adding, for all I care, which apparently is the thing that makes the difference now of your calling for people to be burned alive.

No takes these backseats in rooms.

I just wish people would have these arguments and they'd just say what they think of the actual speech rather than in reference to some other speech that they disagree or agree with.

Don't you think?

The reason to crack down on death, the IDF is as incitement to violence.

So, if that's what you think it is, then make that case.

I don't need to have a you can say this about X, but you can't say it about Y, because otherwise, the conversations just become incredibly circular.

But I can see the point of Glastonbury, you know, originally set up by hippies, it was CND.

Calling for other people's deaths isn't usually their thing.

Peace, love, not death.

Life on the whole is usually it.

And I mean there are very few acts where people come on and say death to the Red Army.

I mean I haven't heard them.

So Adam, is the problem that now all of Glastonbury has to be completely compliant with BBC rules about everything if they're live streaming it and that Glastonbury is now effectively the same.

Well Glastonbury is effectively a BBC co-production now.

I mean it is as much a TV event as it is Emily Evis' thing in some fields in Somerset.

They are very much involved in it.

They are the main kind of media sponsor of it.

They may lose that, of course.

They might just say, okay, well, someone else can do it.

Channel 4 did it for a few years.

They don't have the same resources that the BBC has got to plug into it.

I mean,

the same newspapers who are busy condemning the BBC for their coverage of Glastonbury are all leading with nice shots of

Rod Stewart and Ronnie Wood on stage together as well.

So, I mean, everyone gets quite a lot of content out of the BBC being there at Glastonbury.

It's really difficult.

I mean, in practicality.

Can I just say that whoever was live-streaming that, as soon as Rod hit the first button note, which was very, very early on at the set, I think there's a reasonable case for pulling it.

Just to cut away,

that's it.

I would have done it to be honest.

The instant I saw that outfit with the lacy blouse and the boot cut jeans, I thought, well, who is Rod's sign list these days?

And I also think,

you know, you can say I'm wrong, that I am sailing is a coded message about boats

and is part of a reform agenda that I do not want to have thrust down.

I don't know.

I just strongly feel there should be latitude for artists of all descriptions to have really weird and terrible opinions.

Latitude is a completely unique.

Oh, I knew you were in the army.

To move along from festivals, this has, of course, happened in the same week that another controversy with the BBC and this particular area has kind of come to a head, which was you will remember the documentary that went out earlier in the year and turned out to have been narrated by the child of a Hamas official, which was a...

enormous,

however you cut it, was an absolutely enormous editorial cock up by the BBC.

It really, really should not have happened.

As a result of this, they paused the broadcast of another documentary about Gaza, which was following doctors who were working in the war zone.

They have now, as of last week, declared that they will not be broadcasting that one at all.

Not because there are any editorial problems with that, they've had a good look at that, but because, and this is the quote from the BBC Press Office, we have come to the conclusion that broadcasting this material risked creating a perception of partiality that would not meet the high standards that the public rightly expect of the BBC.

Now, if we're not going to broadcast anything that might create a perception of partiality in a world which has the Daily Mail, the Daily Telegraph and Rupert Murdoch in it, they're not going to be able to broadcast anything at all, are they?

I mean, that just seems so extraordinary to me as an excuse.

The documentary actually has now been taken up by Channel 4, who has said there are no editorial problems with it whatsoever, and it is going to be broadcast this week on that channel instead.

He reminded me more than anything of, do you remember after the enormous soul-searching reviews that the BBC did after all of the stuff about Jimmy Saville emerged?

Do you remember who the only person who got sacked over that was?

It was Tony Blackburn, who wasn't accused of doing anything like Jimmy Saville had done, but it was because he had given a different recollection of his encounter with a female fan in, I think, the 1960s to the internal investigation by the BBC.

So he was the one that ended up getting punished for it.

And then they had to reach a settlement with him.

He came back

on Radio 2 fairly, fairly swiftly.

So it does seem to be this thing as well.

I mean, if you think of the Princess Diana interview, Martin Bashir,

which again was an absolute failure on so many levels and turned out to be a huge cover-up right at the top level of the BBC.

The only person who got sacked over that was a freelance graphic designer who had been asked to mock up some fake documents to convince Diana to give the interview.

It does just seem that they fire off in all directions, consume themselves over these things,

and then do the wrong thing in the end of it so often with the BBC.

The BBC is under

enormous pressure over this, and as you say, it tends to buckle in the wrong direction.

I mean, there are marches saying the BBC is violently pro-Israel, and then the next day there's one saying it's violently anti-Israel.

It certainly can't win, and the I have made this point, but there are groups who are very keen to make sure that

BBC is anti-Israel keeps appearing in the papers.

In the Times, it had a piece by Danny Cohen, who's a former senior executive at the BBC, and he runs a research group that is dedicated to finding this stuff out.

So, in the Times on today, we have a piece by him saying there's chance at Glastonbury about killing Jews, which is not strictly true, as we've tried to explain.

And then I look in the rest of the paper, and there is no mention of the whole weekend in which large numbers of people died because they were in queues trying to get aid and were shot by the IDF.

Yeah, I think you're right.

I think we could probably stand to have a little more explanation of why people might be unhappy with the actions of the IDF in order to explain why people are doing that chant.

It hasn't come out of nowhere.

There is some important contextualisation there.

Is the answer for the BBC just to keep someone on hand who can be sacked at any moment as a kind of corporation whipping boy?

The deputy head to roll.

Yes.

Well I would imagine, I mean we are early in this at the moment.

The BBC response only came out this morning as we're speaking.

I would imagine this one is going to run and run and I'd imagine eventually someone will go, someone probably quite senior in the Glastonbury coverage who I'm sure was not monitoring live feed from one of the smaller stages at the time when that was going out.

Well I would imagine, just from my knowledge of how these things work practically, that most of the kind of senior staff are on the big stages and working out what stuff is going to be cut and looped and put on the iPlayer and used for the actual broadcasts on BBC One and BBC Two, which we're covering much and much of the weekend.

It would have been some very, very junior people just trying to keep a feed going and probably none of them with the authority to just say, right, cut the feed, they've said something controversial.

So they would, they will have, I mean, I'm no doubt they will come up with procedures for this, which will then go across all live events.

But it struck me, though, they did take it down.

That's the point.

They took it off the highlights and they didn't re-broadcast it.

They moved very, very quickly.

It's quite difficult to see what more they could have done actually on the day to me.

I'm quite impressed that actually all of these papers had anyone in the office to be able to write this up given that almost everyone I know works in journalism was at Glastonbury.

Well Katie Hind who as showcased in our in Hackwatch in our last edition glad to say she personally, I was there at the moment because of course she'd been sent by the Daily Mail along ready for kneecap to appear a couple of hours later so she could be outraged by what I was going to be doing.

And luckily she got a bonus story early on.

I love that.

I was there I was ready to be outraged by Nekap.

Like, the number of people who would have heard this, had it just happened organically, is about all the people who were there, plus about a couple of hundred people.

This did not need to be deiry barlowed into the national consciousness for Clear Starmer to have to come out and condemn it.

And certainly, Bob Villen, in terms of Spotify playlists and general acknowledgement by the general populace, will be shooting up, just as Necap did when that whole frorry erupted.

And I'm probably half of the crowd who were seeing them at Glastonbury and waving their Palestinian flags on Saturday might not have even been fans of them six months ago.

So I mean the fact that they had Rod Stewart headlining as an avowed reform sporter says this is the most right-wing Glastonbury

balance for you.

Yes.

To tie all these stories together, I'm sad that climate change has robbed us of the mud bath Glastonbury stories.

We haven't had one of those for years.

Yes, it's all dustbaths now, like the sparrows.

I used to enjoy watching Kate Moss and some Hunter Wellies having to wade through what looked like a sort of pig farm, but no more.

You see, there are big victims and small.

That's the thing.

Would you like to finish off with a very quick pop quiz?

Yes.

Yes.

Right.

No.

Will there be a classical quiz afterwards for me?

All right.

Some of these go back a bit, Ian.

You might be able to get some of these.

Okay, question one.

Of whom did the Daily Star demand, kick this evil bastard out on their front page?

Prodigy?

No, you're going a bit early than that.

Was it Rod Stewart?

It wasn't Rod Stewart, no.

The shaman.

Oh, good guess.

Was it Ebenezer Good?

I think it's about drugs, you know.

It was not.

No, no, no.

It was Snoop Dogg.

Ah.

who in 1994 had been arrested on a murder charge, which was later dropped.

I mean, of all of the careers, to go from kick this evil bastard out and demanding that he be thrown out of the country to advertising juste and appearing at the Olympics closing ceremony, you do get the slight feeling that the route from kind of like national terror to national treasure is a long one, but it does bend towards cozy just eat adverts, doesn't it?

And do you think the trajectory is the same for everyone?

Will it be Neecap in 20 years' time saying, have a lovely cuppa with us?

Sipping it through his little tea cozy and his bana clava.

That would be good.

Yang, yeah.

Selling the bana clava's tea cozies, that would be fantastic.

Well, it might be, because

question two: who recorded the protest record in 1972 after Bloody Sunday, Give Ireland Back to the Irish, which was so controversial, it was banned by the BBC and the independent television authority and accused, the band were accused of raising funds for the IRA at their concerts.

We know this one.

This was wings.

It was.

Really?

Lovely Paul McCartney's.

Lovely Paul McCartney.

Yeah, yeah.

The debut single by Wings.

And on the political front, again, so U.S.

country band Dixie Chicks, now known as the Chicks, in March 2003 were accused of attacking US troops, blacklisted by radio stations across the USA.

They had public crushings held of their CDs with people kind of driving tractors over them and things.

They were called traitors and dubbed Saddam's Angels.

What did they actually say to

earn them all this opprobrium?

And where did they say it?

Well, it was definitely, it was an anti-Iraq war.

So they said something that I really rather do think that George W.

Bush should rethink this chaps, actually.

It was pretty much on that level.

It was extraordinary.

When you actually go back to how innocuous it was, they said, just to say, we do not want this war, we don't want this violence, and we're ashamed that the president of the United States is from Texas, where they were from.

And it almost destroyed them at the time.

It was absolutely extraordinary.

They said it extraordinarily the Shepherd's Bush Empire as well.

So they weren't even in America.

Somehow this apparently made it worse.

The U.S.

media said to go off to a foreign land and say this is even worse.

So there you go.

End of pop quiz.

And our ultimate pop picker is, of course, Mr.

Ian Islop,

the man with the musical plan.

That wings knowledge really came into its own.

It did.

It's taken 53 years, but

we got that.

That's it for this episode of Page 94.

We will be back in a fortnight with another one.

We'll find out what controversy went down at Wimbledon and who will have had to resign over that.

Can't wait for that.

In the interim, why not go and buy the magazine, which has all sorts of similar stories and plenty, plenty more besides?

It's available on newsstands and it's available for subscriptions at private-i.co.uk.

It also works as a fan, or if the weather has turned to rain, as an umbrella.

So

thank you to Helen, Ian, and Adam.

Thank you to you for listening.

And thank you to Matt Hill of Rethink Audio as always for producing.

Bye for now.

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