138: Beg, Borrow and Steel

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Page 94, the Private Eye podcast.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of Page 94.

My name's Andrew Hunter Murray, and I'm here in the Private Eye offices with Helen Lewis, Adam McQueen, and Richard Brooks.

We are here to discuss the news.

Let's get into it.

I thought I'm experimenting with a shorter introduction.

Okay, good.

We're all just a bit abrupt.

We're all having a quite lovely little sleep.

Oh, hello, we're on.

Yes, so we're going to be talking about a little bit of media stuff later on.

We're going to be talking about something American later on.

But as Richard is here and is a special guest, we thought we'd start off by asking you, Richard, about British Steel.

You are our man of steel.

Aha.

Yeah.

So this is about British Steel, which is the last big steel works in the UK making what's called virgin steel, which is box fresh brand new steel, which is a very strong and useful variety for pretty much anything you want to make.

If you want to make a ship or a skyscraper or a washing machine,

steel is really the thing to do it from.

And British Steel has been owned by a Chinese firm for the last six odd years, was on the absolute brink of going bust until the government stepped in a week or two ago now and snapped it up because if they hadn't done it would have stopped completely.

Well, they haven't quite snapped it up yet.

Okay.

They've sort of told it to sort of snap to attention and they've enacted some legislation where they can essentially tell British Steel what to do.

Okay.

So they're going to say you must keep running your blast furnaces and all the rest of it, and you must buy all the ingredients you need.

Is it still owned technically by Jing Ye, the Chinese firm?

It's technically owned by the Chinese, yeah.

So it's a bit, in that sense, like the Daily Telegraph, in that it's owned by an overseas power.

But it's switch it off for five minutes, it will stop, and you won't be able to get it going.

Exactly.

It's core national infrastructure.

We cannot survive without it.

So at the moment, British Steel is in special measures, very special measures, and it's just having to do what the government tells it to, to keep it going, at a cost of about three quarters of a million pounds a day.

So two, three hundred million pounds a year.

So the situation we've got wasn't sustainable, but it hasn't been sustainable for years.

Is that right, Richard?

Because the last time British steel went bust was in 2019, and that's the point at which the last government, the Conservative government, allowed the Chinese firm Jingye to step in and buy it on the assumption that they would keep it going.

But the industry as a whole has been on a downward slope pretty consistently since the 1970s.

Or yeah, possibly since the 19th century.

Economically it struggled and it was privatized in 1988

and since then a whole series of companies have struggled to make money from it, had to be bailed out.

It became chorus, then Tata Steel, the Indian company, bought it, then they sold the Scunthorpe bit to

another private investment firm called Grey Ball,

which didn't invest.

So they went bust then, had to be bailed out and was sold to Jinye in 2019, 2020 as what Alec Sharma, who was the business minister at the time, called a big vote of confidence in the industry.

So we keep getting these votes of confidence every few years, and then you know, the thing goes down the tubes.

Yeah, they're great quotes from Boris Johnson at the time saying, oh, this is a marvellous idea.

This is steel secured.

So why is it so difficult for Britain to make money out of making steel or to keep doing it even?

It's an expensive business because at the moment, really because of energy costs and because we don't have the coal to produce the coke that needs to go into the blast furnace, we have to import that and the iron ore.

So we're reliant on buying everything in, paying huge electricity costs, and that adds up to losing money.

You've then got other challenges coming in from China, for example, dumping steel on the market.

That caused a bit of a stir before we decided to just sell them Scunthorpe

as some sort of reward.

And there are issues, steel always seems to be at the heart of international trade tensions and wars.

So, as well as the Chinese dumping, you've got tariffs imposed on it.

So, we've now got 25% tariffs on anything that we do manage to make and export to America.

So it's kind of always up against it.

It's always in the middle of a political scrap.

Right.

And it's got huge costs.

So

scrap, very good.

Oh, yeah.

Sorry.

Correct one.

So all in all, that adds up to a business you wouldn't really want to run.

You need some support.

And all of these companies that have run it over, you know, from Grable to Jingye and before that, Tata,

none of them have had a long-term vision of what the future of British Steel might be or how it could be made to work successfully?

I think they have a vision.

They're just unrealistic ones.

Right.

Greyball came along and said, well, this was in 2016 and said, we'll invest

400 million quid.

They didn't invest anything like that.

The government believed them.

Sajid Javid was the business secretary at the time.

He believed them, even though they had a record of investing in companies and then just watching them go bust like companies like Monarch Airlines.

You remember that?

That name?

Familiar?

That went down the the tubes on their watch.

But we still sort of just hand over this critical industry to companies like that, to sort of private investment firms that are only interested in extracting money from them in the short term, or to companies from China, which are effectively state-controlled.

They've got actually state-owned.

China makes, what, 40% of the world's steel?

A huge chunk of the world's steel steel is Chinese made.

So naturally they've got their own interest in their own country rather than

especially caring about whether British steel thrives.

Yeah.

Well, and then we, as we wrote in the current issue, then we sort of hand over thinking about this really difficult problem to the management consultants and not just any old management consultants.

McKinsey, who screwed up all kinds of British institutions and do a lot of work for the Chinese.

and worked for specifically Jinye when it bought out British steel.

So, you know, and we say, okay, guys, also, just tell us what to do with our steel industry.

Right.

And we end up with a mess and we're surprised.

Why were they involved in the decision making?

Sorry to ask a really basic question.

Why were McKinsey involved in that?

Why do we ask them to do it?

You've not bought into the way policy is made heavily.

No, I love the way policy is made.

I just wonder with the really important

management consultancy industry.

The one thing I've really noticed over the last 20 years working at Private Eye is that every so often new governments come in and say, oh, we're going to get rid of the management consultants.

We're not going to be relying on the management consultants.

And yet it's always the same management consultants, as you say, as well, isn't it?

It's just again and again.

Always.

Yeah, in the case of steel, McKinsey have been given these sort of rolling contracts over about four or five years to advise on the future of British steel, you know, as that future sort of diminishes and diminishes.

And then,

a few months into the new government, they were given another contract by this government on the future of British Steel.

Who's already done that announcement about fewer management consultants, haven't they?

I'm Richard Reeves doing that one.

Yeah, soon after the latest announcement that we're going to stop using management consultants.

It's outsourcing, isn't it?

I mean, I remember John Ellich when it worked at the New States saying to me that the reason the government's like outsourcing, it looks like it's about saving money, but it's actually about making someone else responsible for it when it goes wrong, which I thought was fairly cynical, but I also feel that probably life since then has vindicated it.

But you do see that, like in this case, it's about outsourcing the thinking to somebody else.

So, not that we're going to talk about the Supreme Court judgment this week, but I think that was an example where government outsourced its policy to charities, for example, and let them set what they thought their interpretation of equality's law was.

And I think there's a sort of weird parallel thing going on here, which is that ministers never wanted to be the ones to close an iconic steel works.

They never wanted to be the ones to nationalize an iconic steel works.

So, they wanted somebody else to do things for them.

It's outsourcing blame as much as it is outsourcing decisions, isn't it?

But also, but the problem is that there are so many factors coming into the decision, or so many factors that should determine what you do with the steel industry.

They go beyond just what the business department needs to look at, or what even the steel industry narrowly wants to look at.

There are all kinds of wider economic considerations, even political and geopolitical considerations about having a steel industry that you can't expect a management consultant who's pouring through their spreadsheets to take into account.

So, you end up with very narrow decisions which say, oh, okay, we'll trust this Chinese company.

And no one says,

Are you sure?

You can't really do that.

Presumably, a lot of those geopolitical factors have changed a lot in the last few weeks, even, haven't they?

Because suddenly we need to go full Bismarck.

We need to get back into the steel, you know, the sort of gunship

and weapons and tanks building business.

Somewhere Dominic Cummings is crying.

He loves the idea of going full Bismarck.

It's like his favourite thing in the world.

That always could have happened.

I know that these developments with Trump and all the rest of it are...

are a bit unusual, but it always could happen that we were exposed, particularly in an area like steel.

So you always had to guard against suddenly having an industry that was really in trouble and having to have some source of your own steel making.

That was foreseeable.

And in fact, I think we did foresee it when the Chinese took over.

We said, is this really a good idea, trusting this critical industry to the Chinese?

There is something about the steel industry which just really reminded me of the mortgage situation.

So when this trust came in, blew everything up, went out again, everyone's mortgages went through the roof.

Lots of people's financial situations were dependent on mortgage rates or interest rates remaining around 1%.

And when they go up to 4%, suddenly you're in a world of pain.

So the British steel industry, even though it was on a downward slope, was slightly dependent on gas remaining plentiful and cheap because this country imports loads of its gas.

And then suddenly when the price goes up, you see this amazing, like these foothills rise into this amazing mountain range and the gas price chart.

Oh, then you're absolutely screwed.

And it's now substantially higher than it has been for, you know, that period accepted for some time.

And what does Britain make a lot of its electricity from?

You know, gas.

And British Steel have said the main driver of the price disparity in how much it costs to make steel is wholesale electricity costs driven by the UK's reliance on natural gas power generation.

And the whole thing has, of course, been dragged into the net zero cultural war with Nigel Farrow saying, well, I'll nationalise this.

And the answer is to scrap net zero, which will actually increase our reliance on gas.

It's not totally...

You can replace the kiln with a really big heat pump, Andy.

Oh, dreamy.

Heat pumps don't get that hot, I'm afraid.

Electric arc furnaces do, but I don't think we've got time or inclination to go fully into them.

But

we've also ended up in this really odd space, haven't we, where we talked about nationalisation.

The only person at the moment who seems to be where hey, let's nationalise is Nigel Farage.

Not traditionally a left-wing politician, although increasingly so on some of his utterances.

And it is an odd thing, isn't it?

Because Labour seem to be running absolutely terrified of the idea of nationalisation in any industry, be it water or rail or something like that.

They're doing trains by stealth,

quietly doing the trains now, aren't they?

But I mean, I remember back at the 2015 election, so we had Milibound standing, you know, polls were returning huge support for the renationalisation of the railways.

It's not something that the public are scared of, and yet politicians seem absolutely terrified of it.

Presumably, some of that is economic worries, but also there does seem to be a sort of ideological, no, no, no, we're not like old Labour sort of feel to it.

Yeah, I think they're testing the waters there.

They said, you know, that it is an option.

And I think they're looking to see what the reaction is.

But, you know, I hate to agree with Nigel, but it is the sensible thing to do.

You know, this thing is a bit out of control, and you do need to take back control.

Never had you down as one of those people, Richard.

Interesting.

You're right.

There are a couple of ways in which we've discovered that things that we tried to introduce a market to that, you know, which is hugely dynamic and benefited lots of industries, but in some of them it doesn't work, right?

And if we need, as you say, for national security reasons or whatever it might be, our own supply of steel, then by relying on the market might not be the right way to do it.

It's ditto the utilities, as I I think you would sort of refer to.

In the case of hydration and not getting cholera, for instance, so the water industry.

It's not about nationalising the whole industry either.

It's about this part of it,

so that you have a rump of the industry that is publicly owned.

So

in a crisis, you do still have something there.

But we still import the ingredients for it.

Isn't it a slight red herring to say, oh, we'll be independent as long as we...

And do you want to bring back coal mines?

Well, that that is where the net zero comes into it because it was turned down, wasn't it?

The coal mine, was it up in up in Durham that was going to be specifically producing coke for the

coal that, annoyingly, the coal that that mine produces doesn't really work properly for the furnace.

It's not the right quality.

So

the coal would not have.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So there are a lot of very easy solutions being punted, basically.

We just need more coal.

We just need to get the North Sea going again.

And none of it is especially, how can I put it, aligned with reality?

But we do import the things we need, like the coking coal and the iron ore from relatively friendly countries.

Yes, the odds of war with France

or Australia

seem slim.

That will be going some.

Yes.

But the other thing, the sort of new method that Tartar Steel has shifted over to, the electric arc furnace, solves not the whole problem, but part of it, because it's a way of making steel from recycled, from scrap steel, basically.

So pour in scrap steel, add a lot of electricity, I mean lots of electricity, and you can generate new steel, which is useful because Britain exports more scrap than almost any other country in the world.

Because we can't use it.

We don't have enough electric arc furnaces basically, yeah.

And globally, I think about 40 to 50% of new steel-making capacity plant is electric arc furnaces.

And that figure has steadily been rising.

So for a lot of steel uses, that will be an answer.

But that needs investment.

It needs a lot of investment.

And at the moment, it's not really capable of producing the top grades of steel, but you need some of the defence uses.

Do you have to protect that in its kind of uneconomic sphere?

And then

this is why you need a proper strategy, not decided by some management consultants.

Because

you need to look at what this new technology or relatively new technology can produce or will be able to, because it's improving and there are a lot of people who think that before long, in a few years, it will be able to produce the the highest grade steel.

So you've got to sort of move towards that.

But in the meantime, if you want your own steel industry, you've got to keep the other steel production going.

And you've got to pay for that.

All that has to be managed.

And that's what's been mismanaged for years.

I think that's a great note.

I am more well informed about the steel industry.

That was a blast.

Hey!

Now, Richard has disappeared in a puff of smoke to go and torment another management consultant, but we're left with Adam and Helen, and we're going to be talking about a new phrase that helen coined i think this morning in the i office do you want to debut it helen well i i'm wondering if if people think this is now a racial slur in our new sensitive age but i have i was thinking about the phrase yank avoidance i think now that trunt's back in that the phrase yank avoidance is such a gentle slur that i think it'll barely even

register on the slur ric just the slurometer yeah so i was looking out to see whether or not that all of the you know absolutely lurid headlines which i have to say are on top of stories that turn out when you inspect them to also be lurid and true about um deportations, about hassle at the border, things like that, were actually affecting Europeans' desire to go to America.

Now, we know already that Canadians have taken their ball and taken it a boot.

I don't know, that doesn't really work.

Substitute check.

But already Canadian border crossings were down.

Mark Carney has been running a very patriotic campaign for the Canadian election, basically on the kind of I'll stand up to Trump.

So there's a kind of great patriotic swelling of like, we won't be the 51st state sod off in a normally mild manner to Canada.

But the similar thing has been happening with European travel to America.

So Axios reported that flights to America are down 20% year on year in March to the 10 biggest airports in the US.

And if you look actually, like Head for Points, one of the many sites that since I became obsessed with Avios, I spend a lot of time on, reported that actually you can get really quite good deals on translating flights because they're not filling them in the same way that they were.

So I had been wondering about whether or not this was just a kind of thing that everybody was sort of saying in a kind of, oh, everybody hates Donald Trump.

but it does actually seem that the number of reports there have been so there's there's two issues there's the one people within America they're on green cards they're on student visas whatever might happen or people who are there illegally getting deported but there's another separate issue of people who have citizenship in nominally friendly countries getting a terrific amount of hassle at the border and ending up in detention for a while some of these people are slyly coming into work while on a tourist visa some of them aren't you know have slightly sort of red flaggy things in their travel history, like they're only booked for a hotel for the first night or, you know, they don't have a return flight out again, which are the kind of things that trigger stuff.

But it does seem to me that America, you know, America has given the world the rest of the, you know, the rest of the world the message, basically, don't expect us to be nice to you if you turn up.

And lots of people have kind of taken that.

And America Border Forces did until recently have a reputation for being the sweetest, friendliest, loveliest people in the world.

Lovely bunch of lads.

I don't know.

I remember, have you ever been to somewhere that's a kind of like slightly more hostile country?

I just think this is a really interesting thing.

Because having a British passport, obviously, is an absolute golden ticket.

Most countries are absolutely delighted to see you.

And even the countries that are, you know, not, maybe you have to buy a £50 visa on arrival, like somewhere like Nepal or Uganda.

They want more US dollars in the country, basically.

And I remember the first time really thinking about this was going to Russia in like 2016, where, you know, they check your passports before you get on the plane.

You know, you have to have the visa that you apply to in the consulate.

You get there, and someone said, your hair is different to the way it is in your passport photo.

And I thought,

how can I explain the concept of hair growing to this boot-faced Russian official without sounding intensely sarcastic and ending up in the black ibanka?

But I think something similar has kind of happened in the way that people feel that America treats them.

You know, you get taken over secondary screening, and the reports that we've had have been of people who said, you know, they just said, things are different now, like Trump's in charge.

You know, people really seem to slightly revel in their power.

And it only needs a couple of, you know, people who are bad appling in that way for lots and lots of people in Europe to get the message that they don't really want to go to America right now.

And you travelled back and forth to and from America a fair bit for your work.

Yeah.

Have you noticed the departure lounge is empty?

Are the queues substantially shorter for the nice nibbles?

For the buffet, yeah.

God knows how I've suffered from my journey of cigars.

I've only been once since Trump was in, actually, and while I was in the air, I wrote about it in this week's column.

Everyone started sending me the story about that French scientist who got

detained at the border, so I shouldn't laugh, but it's such a strange thing he got to pay for, which was having on his phone messages which were something like hateful about Trump.

And that was the point where I really thought, I hope they haven't re-read any things I've published under my own name on the internet.

So I have, you know, if anyone's listening and they are thinking of going to America, I would have a couple of recommendations, same as if you're going to anywhere you're slightly worried about.

One is

take a phone, like a pay-as-you-go phone, or take an old phone that only works on Wi-Fi so you don't have access to all of your emails, all your social media, all that kind of stuff.

On.

If you're an American citizen, you can say that the border aren't allowed to search your phone and unlock it.

If you're not a US citizen, I'm afraid they can.

If you even want to slightly get into the country, you have to let them have access to your phone.

They will go through things like even your deleted photos.

Now, someone got done for this.

Her deleted photos contain photos of her at the Pezbola leader's funeral, which I have to say, I wouldn't strongly recommend doing if you want to go to America.

And I just think if if there are people who are worried about going to America, just like basic security practices plus anything you can do that says I'm not dodgy, I would strongly counsel doing.

You look worried and

I'm not even planning a trip.

I was going to say, it's your world tour, your world book tour going to take you to

Louisiana Penitentiary.

I remember years and years ago, because I'm very, very old, but when I first went to America, it was in New York in 1998.

And

a few years prior to that, I'd gone interrailing around Eastern Europe.

So I had lots and lots of very officious-looking stamps all over my password, all in sort of Cyrillic alphabet.

And that was,

they gave that quite a going over at that point.

I'm sure, you know, a couple of years after that, after 9-11, they wouldn't have been bothered about it at all.

They've been looking out for sort of passes to Pakistan and Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia and things.

But you always got asked if you were or had been a member of the Communist Party, didn't you?

Yeah, you had to take a form that said you hadn't been involved in the Nazi genocide of 1930 to 45.

And the people who've been coming in for this so far have not been US citizens themselves, but they have been people very close to American citizens, haven't they?

Or they have certainly been some people who have been there legally, for example.

So, Mahmoud Khalil, who was a green card holder married to an American citizen, who actually his wife had a baby this week, and he wasn't allowed to be there at the birth because he's still being held in Louisiana.

He was held for being a pro-Palestine activist.

So, he's, you know, if you have a green card holder, you have the right to live and work in the US.

It's

on the steps to citizenship.

He's been held.

One of the notorious cases of someone deported was somebody who was El Salvadorian had an order from a judge ordering them not to be, specifically not to be deported, saying that they would be at risk.

So

there are gradations of worry.

And, you know, I know from people who have non-British passports that it is a much more hassly experience.

And it's being done in an entirely performative cruelty way as well, isn't it?

I mean, it's not just a case of them, oh, sorry, that was a mistake.

They're literally going, well,

he was a gang member.

He's screwed.

He's got to stay there.

I think this is what worries people.

Obviously, now that there's this tension here, every single person who has any kind of hassle experience at the American border, we're going to hear hear about it.

But equally well, this is why I go back to my Russia experience.

Russia to deport me would not have made the slightest bit of difference to them.

They don't need my money in the way that, you know, Nepal was very glad to have it.

They don't need diplomatic relations with us in the same way that France or Germany would be.

And the US is now in that position where if they put off some people coming over by doing things that are ostentatiously cruel, that's kind of part of their shtick now.

Is this intentional or is it a side effect?

I think it's more like if you give people power, they might end up using it.

You see what I mean?

Like the incentives are all there to be more aggressive on the border.

That's what the diktat is coming down from on high about.

And the Trump administration likes these stories.

As I wrote in the column, immigration is about the issue that Trump is polling on the most well.

Actually, the deportation program, which I think is

disgustingly cruel in an overt way, actually has more favourably than unfavourables.

That might change as people hear more details about it, but polarisation in in the US is such that as soon as Donald Trump starts doing it, a load of people really like it.

And then the reverse happens, which is lots of Democrats who thought globalization and free trade were bad and right-wing things have now suddenly become much more in favour of them.

And there is, like, this is one of the things that I think

it's said so often about US politics that it almost becomes a truism, but genuinely it is so polarised to the extent that half the country has, you know, takes its views on something almost straight down the line and the other half takes it straight down the line on the other side.

There isn't a lot of room for people to have opinions that are out of line with their tribe, whether that's the red or the blue one.

And it's a very different tone to that taken by most European countries, except some

on the European borders which do like to show off yeah Victor Orban being a very

I think he's the European pattern maker for most of what Trump is doing and he has said you know I want I want new Hungarians I don't want immigrants I mean the reality is that every politician in the modern world is going to have to deal with the fact that people are on the move and that that is very destabilizing to their original citizens.

Border crossings have dramatically fallen under Trump, which most Americans heartily approve of.

But I think the thing that is the case that I think is worth making is there is a difference between having even a quite a tight immigration policy and the kind of casual disrespect for the law, the courts, the constitution, the almost trollishness of that, and the revelling in the kind of punishment aspect of it.

So one of the things that's happened is they've tried to deport this guy who they say is a member of MS-13 which is a gang and Trump tweeted a photo of this guy's knuckle tattoos with MS-13 written over them.

So he's got like a cross and then one of them is a dub.

And he said, you know, the cross means one because there's one God.

And he, you know, there was no mention that this photo he had photoshopped on the MS-14, or presumably some underling who understands how to work Photoshop.

But that they have made the entirely, as far as I can see, a fabricated case against this guy.

And then now really very dodgily manipulated photographic evidence to say this guy's got gang-affiliated tattoos.

Right.

And this is someone who is now in prison.

There's an order, the Supreme Court says he should be brought back, and they're just going, no, you won't, Carl Makus.

The scale to which we've gone in four months, whenever you stop and look back at it, it does just sort of make you think, wow.

I mean, that's a government fabricating evidence and being gleefully posting it from the President himself.

So, just to bring us back to

summer holidays, for any British listeners, what what next for Yank avoidance?

Well, I'll be really interested to see whether or not people decide they're going to go anyway.

It'd be really interesting to look at the conference market.

We've got a World Cup coming up, which is co-hosted with Mexico and Canada.

Oh, my God.

Yes.

It just does not seem possible at the moment.

Yeah, and exactly.

And

lots of academic conferences are having big conversations at the moment about whether or not they feasibly can ask their staff to come and do a conference in America.

Because if you're an international association of physiologists or whatever, is it really fair to your staff with less favourable passports to ask them to come to a conference in the world?

It's a stand from Jacob Reese Mark saying anyone who's been critical of the government can't come and give lectures to the civil service, isn't it?

It's actually genuinely, people are scared to come into the country to speak at academic conferences.

Will this be good for America's soft power, do we think, or maybe not?

Before we go, I just wanted to have one update from the last episode when I talked about SwiftBricks.

Now, I actually heard from Hannah Bourne-Taylor, who is the campaigner behind the Swift Brick proposed legislation, who thought I was slagging off SwiftBricks.

and I had to point out that I was merely being slightly cautious about them.

She says that she also thinks bee bricks are a bit

musty and filled with things that aren't bees.

But she does say Swift bricks won't ever risk blocking development, and without them, there is no future for birds who breed in building cavities since we're destroying their cavity nesting habit without mitigating their loss.

So I'd like to make a formal apology to the Swifts of Britain.

Because they nest

community, because they nest in Eaves, basically, and new houses don't have eaves.

And without Eves, they just literally can't survive.

So she's been doing it all on her own as a solar unfunded campaigner.

And I think that's something that I, you know, some of the most important changes of British law have come from someone banging on for a long time with very little support initially.

So I want to give Hannah big credit to her.

Yeah.

I actually had a hunky fireman come around and put some swift boxes on my house only the other day.

Because that's what firemen do these days.

You're absolutely sure it wasn't a stripogram.

You just handed him the sweatshirt.

He said he was very confused.

As he took his braces off, I just said, come on, up the ladder.

Now, for our final section of the show, we're going to try something daring, something bold, something Page 94 has never done before.

We're going to make a section of a podcast about podcasts.

Wow.

If it goes badly, we can discuss it next week on a section about podcasts, about podcasts.

The rest is podcasts.

This is going to be the snake eating its own tail at long last, as we've been threatening to do for years now.

Before we start this, we're going to be talking a little bit about the BBC, for example.

We're going to be talking about commercial podcasts and independent podcasts and all of this.

Let's have some declarations of interest right off the bat before we go.

I make another podcast which is on BBC Sounds.

I also make a Radio 4 show which is on BBC Sounds and releases a podcast.

That's me done.

Helen.

I make a Radio 4 show which is also on BBC Sounds and I have appeared on every podcast ever made.

Three Hail Marys.

Adam.

I know my place.

I'm not sure this declaration's been as much as just boast it.

No, it's nice.

You're like, you're monogamous.

You're faithful to this podcast.

That's what I'm not like the hoo is on this side of the aisle.

Let's come to the newsy element of it.

Last year, the BBC proposed that they might put adverts on some of the podcasts that they make if those podcasts are listened to on platforms other than the BBC's own in-house one, which is called BBC Sounds.

So those other platforms are things like Spotify, Apple, Spotify,

people might be listening to us right now.

Exactly.

A couple of weeks ago, they said they had considered the idea and they wouldn't be doing that.

That was partly due to a big backlash from lots of independent or rather commercial podcast producers, which said, Well, if the BBC wades in and releases podcasts, they'll swamp the market and we won't make any money anymore.

That's basically what they said.

And that was specifically because when counted as BBC podcasts are actually lots of very, very popular BBC radio shows, such as, for instance, Desert Island Discs, The Archers, which get listening figures in the millions and are obviously where all of the advertising would flock for obvious commercial reasons.

Any other great

radio force shows, maybe sort of Friday night satirical comedies.

No?

Well, the news quiz is very good.

Dead Riggers is really, really good.

Anyway, they said they're not going to do it.

But naturally, the BBC does make lots of podcasts because they make lots of shows.

To me, this seems natural.

Well, there is this odd thing.

Can I give you just a brief history of basically of BBC Sounds, I think, is the way to go in with this.

So BBC Sounds was launched by James Purnell, remember him?

Ex-Labour cabinet minister, who then went off to the BBC and was sort of all in the running for the top job until he wasn't in the way that you are at the BBC and has now sort of disappeared out of the out of the equation.

But not before launching BBC Sounds, which was the very controversial at the time replacement for the BBC Radio iPlayer.

And the specific and explicit reason for this was to try and get more young people listening to what was rebranded as BBC Audio.

So it was done as a way of going, hey, if we make these subscribable and digital, then people won't notice they're actually radio programmes because young people don't listen to radio.

So there was a lot of, as we said, things like the Archers and Desert Island Discs and stuff moved over to become downloadable and subscribable too and effectively compete in that market against lots and lots of podcasts.

Now, the BBC also did all sorts of other good stuff in the audio market.

I'm thinking specifically a couple of documentary series.

Catherine Nye's A Very British Cult, which is about the lighthouse movement, which is absolutely brilliant.

Rihanna Croxford's World of Secrets, which was about Abercrombie and Fitch and the sexual abuse that was going on in that company for many, many years.

Now, I think resulting in all sorts of criminal charges over in America.

Those were done in conjunction.

So I know Rihanna did a sort of panorama on the same topic and stuff.

So they're sort of within the BBC, but they are standalone kind of podcast things in their own right.

There was lots of other spin-offs as well from brands like Newscast and Americast and all these kinds of things.

As it's gone on, it's kind of developed into an odd sort of hodgepodge of all sorts of things that are a lot less sort of obviously BBC-y.

And here I'm thinking of stuff like Lily Allen and Makita Oliver's Miss Me, which is very popular.

Very popular, perfectly good podcast, but sort of slightly hard to see quite why this is a BBC thing and not sitting in the commercial market.

You know, it's two celebrities gossiping, basically.

It's the same argument that essentially played out with the BBC website, which is so and the main problem is that it's really good and people like it and it doesn't have adverts on it, which makes it a more pleasant user experience than most newspaper websites, see Reach, for example, podcast passim.

And I think there is always a feeling that the BBC has to navigate this line between what is an offering that means people support the concept of the BBC versus what does the commercial bits of the sector feel is like a level of unfair competition bolstered by the kind of licence fee and the centrality of the BBC to British culture?

I find it such a weird argument that the BBC should only serve brown rice in its canteen.

I really do.

Is this entertainment or is it not?

There are some risks that the BBC can take, things like making detectorists.

Where you say this is a show about two guys standing in a field going beep and finding a metal cap.

Would maybe more commercial aggressive rivals have taken a punt on that?

Maybe, but I just think this idea that the BBC shouldn't be trying to entertain people is really weird.

I'm not saying they shouldn't be doing that.

I'm saying that it's one of those areas a bit like local radio and specifically local news online, where suddenly you've got a very direct kind of competition going on with local papers who are trying to

go digital as well.

So it's one of those things where there is a constant fight over it and a constant balance, however you feel about that.

It's also happened, you mentioned then, newspapers are piling in, national newspapers are piling into the podcast market as well.

I mean, the Mail Online has enormous number of podcasts, most of them about women being murdered in horribly gruesome ways.

It seems to me.

They're kind of cornering that dress.

Yeah, I mean, stick to what you know, yeah.

The Telegraph has got in there as well.

Very, very good Ukraine cast, and also a podcast with Alison Pearson called Planet Normal.

And

the Daily Tea with Camilla Tomani and Camilla Ahmed.

I think one of the things that's happened is, I mean, this is part of my broader analysis of what's happened to the media, is we've moved from institutions to kind of influences or personalities.

And so the feeling has, you know, been that if you're any, if if you're the BBC, if you're a newspaper, if whatever it is, you should build up personal brands.

And they should sort of have a podcast, which is a bit like the book of the film.

It's like the podcast of the person, if you see what I mean.

So if you've got a columnist and you're a newspaper and they're a big deal, you will also find them a podcast vehicle, right?

The Atlantic, where I work, has just given David Frum, who's one of our most popular writers, his own video podcast for exactly that reason.

Because it's like, why wouldn't you max out this person that people like across all media formats, which wasn't the way people were really thinking.

It happens with podcasts as well.

Podcasters get asked to do books.

There's a book by Stephen Bartlett, who very popular Diary of CEO podcast, which I think is comfortably maybe the worst book I've ever read.

It has like the 13 rules and the 19 buckets, and it's just, I mean, it was too early to have been written by Chat GPT, but honestly,

it was just a brand extension.

It bore as much relationship to a book as I do to a horse.

The same thing complaint has been happening actually over at Substack, the newsletter website, that was pitched as being a place for writers to build their audience.

What's happened now, because it's been really popular, is like big beasts have moved in.

So you have somebody who's got a following from somewhere else, and now they do the Substack of the brand, along with the podcast of the brand, and the column of the brand, and the TV show of the brand.

This is what people say about celebrities writing children's books.

that they muscle in, they take up a lot of space, they get a lot of publicity opportunities that others wouldn't get.

I think there's a pretty fair case to be made for all of that.

And fundamentally, people are buying and consuming their work.

So I hope that there is a certain sort of Darwinian justice, which if something is bad, it can't go on forever.

Can I at this point?

We'd like to.

I hope so.

Again, you're sub-tweeting us.

Thanks very much.

Can I, at this point, bring us on to phase three of my history of BBC Sams, which is the other odd thing that started to go on.

While the BBC were considering putting advertising on their programmes whilst on external podcast providers, they also started buying in lots and lots of really, really successful commercial podcasts and running them on BBC Sounds without adverts.

And this was, I mean, some odd choices there.

So they've got Help I Sexed My Boss, excellent podcast featuring Jordan North.

Seemed to come in about the same time that Jordan North left Radio 1, not under the best of circumstances, because he was sort of yanked off air and there was no announcement made about where he was going until it emerged he was going to join a commercial rival.

Gary Lineker last November was brought in to do his incredibly successful rest is brands.

They've got football, which is specifically Gary Lineker and Alan Shearer and Micah Richards, who are, of course, the team from Match of the Day, at the same time that the BBC was running into all sorts of problems and trying to gently maneuver, as he's now admitted, Gary Lineker out of his berth at Match of the Day because it was causing them all sorts of problems with impartiality and things.

So, I mean,

in terms of a joined-up BBC, it seems slightly odd in that way.

And also, you know, these are commercial ones that are coming in one way, and they're trying to compete with them on another market.

Now, the next phase, which is the most recent one, is that at the same time as saying they weren't going to run adverts on these external podcast providers, the BBC has also quietly launched a new podcast, a Formula One podcast, The Inside Track, which goes out not on BBC Sounds, it goes on the commercial ones, it has adverts in it, both in the UK and abroad, and it carries BBC branding.

And you have to look quite carefully to see that the BBC branding actually belongs to BBC Studios, which is that mysterious commercial entity that is part of the BBC sort of when it's convenient to be and not when it isn't convenient to be as in this case.

And the feeling, certainly, in in the commercial podcast sector is that this is the BBC very much trying to have its cake and eat it.

The thing that's interesting about this is that we're treating radio and podcasts like they're similar kinds of show and they're really not.

And at the very top end very good podcasts and very good radio shows probably are quite similar because they both take quite a lot of work, editing and production to make.

They might not sound like it because podcasting is traditionally a more scrappy and conversational medium.

But actually, you look at shows like In Our Time, which is the most radiophory of radio 4 shows but that is like a really really really long-running podcast and that's partly because podcasts also thrive on repeatability and having the capacity to make lots and lots of different episodes it doesn't mean they're better than six parters it means they're a different kind of show yeah i think it's a bit odd treating these things as though they're the same just because they're both audio the thing that's interesting about in our time which i love by the way is that there are it is essentially like a long-running podcast in which there are only two participants and those two participants are melvin bragg and an academic right it's just sort of one academic being barked at about like the Medicis or you know, theorems or whatever it might be.

And they're in the same role.

Every there's a familiarity to it that I think really, really works.

But you're right, like linear radio is sort of, you know, it still attracts pretty whacking, great, big audiences, though.

The crucial thing about linear radio is it also helps people discover things.

You might switch on the radio at a time and hear something you otherwise wouldn't have done.

And I think the worry everyone I talk to in the podcast sector is, you know, how do you recreate that for investigative podcasts?

And people have thought about very innovative ways.

I think the girlfriends is an example.

I think that's one where they did an initial limited run and now they're producing new episodes.

So people are really thinking about the format point.

But you're right,

the format is as important as the content in some respects.

And that is also a function of the platform.

Sorry, I sound like I'm about to give a keynote today tonight.

That I think is where it gets very muddled with BBC Sounds, because if you open your BBC Sounds homepage, you end up with this extraordinary hodgepodge of things which are, you know, long-running podcasts along with in our time, but along with like The World at One or Last Night's PM and things, you know, they are all sort of bundled in together.

I mentioned in the previous section about heat pumps, and wasn't, is there not a heat pump-related controversy?

There is a, this very week, a heat pump-related controversy, which kind of demonstrates some of the difficulties that the BBC have with this.

So, this one's not a BBC podcast, if you're keeping track of all of these, if you're keeping a tally.

It's an independent one, which is called the Happy Heat Pump Podcast.

And I wish, listeners, you could see Andy's little eyes lighting up.

I have listened to the Happy Heat Pump podcast.

Of course, and it's great.

Because you are net zero dad.

Yeah, no, absolutely.

Well, it's gone.

It's over.

Sorry about that.

Because Evan Davis announced on Tuesday morning that the BBC worries it may be seen as steering into areas of public controversy, which I would argue was more areas of public controversy steering into that particular market.

It was co-hosted with somebody from the industry, wasn't it?

And the industry wants subsidies for heat pumps to be installed in people's houses.

And I think that's the blurry bit as far as I see with that one.

But it seems to be everybody I've heard from, not just Andy, actually, there are other people out in the wild, it turns out I know who are interested in heat pumps, and it was really informative.

It was just a really useful, bread-and-butter, informative, like, what is this thing that I might be interested in?

Five minutes of time on does this work in a flat?

Does it work in the cold?

Informing and educating people.

It was possibly also entertaining them and the sort of things that the BBC maybe ought to be doing.

Well, I can see where the difficulty came in because the co-host was a guy with the implausible name of Bean Beanland.

Amazing.

No notes.

Yep, no notes.

Just terrific.

And he's the head of the heat pump federation.

So So naturally, they have an interest in propagating knowledge and, you know, making people aware of heat pumps.

Evan Davis was very clear at the start of every episode: saying, look, I work for the BBC.

This is not a BBC podcast.

And we're not trying to promote anything at all.

So it sounds like the attitude that's been taken is that even talking about these things is promoting them.

So what we've ended up with then is the situation where we've got podcasts out there which have been presented by well-known BBC names saying, I'm not with the BBC.

We've got BBC-branded podcasts which are out there but are made by BBC Studios, so aren't the BBC, even though they sound like the BBC.

And then we've also got on the BBC a load of podcasts which aren't made by the BBC and are nothing to do with the BBC, but the BBC is piggybacking on the back of them.

So do you see what I mean about a slightly confusing hodgepodge and a lot of conflicting things going on?

Very well then, they contradict themselves.

They contain multitudes.

You know, is this do we do we need order in the podcasting world?

Is this what we were set up for?

Surely that what is behind this is the idea that there is a lot of scrutiny on the BBC and particularly over net zero and about anything that's seen as being climate related.

And a lot of the criticism, some of it is always valid.

You know, obviously the BBC is a huge organisation, it gets plenty wrong, but a lot of it is code for I would like the BBC to be completely defunded.

It's the other thing that we're not saying.

But there are also issues within there about fair competition with commercial sector, which came up again this month.

And this is back to radio, which, as you say, is still proper linear radio, still really, really popular out there.

One of the things stations that was really popular out there is the brilliantly named Boom Radio, which plays old golden oldies essentially for readers of a certain age.

It's only accessible.

It's only accessible on yachts as the boom swings across.

That's when you get the brief period of reception.

That's the boy.

There we go.

The boy.

Yep, good.

Carry on.

Boom radio.

Yeah, no, I mean, it's doing that golden oldie stuff, which you might remember, older listeners, Radio 2 used to do a lot of before moving into a slightly younger demographic with people like Vernon Kaye on it, as well as Boom Radio, which amazingly has David Diddy Hamilton, who knew he was still alive, Simon Bates, who used to do our tune.

You're looking at me blankly.

You're too young.

This is all just very, very old names.

This is like when Helen talks about American members of the cabinet, who I'm sure are very important, but I've just never heard of.

I've never felt so young in millennials.

Tell me more about our elderly radio presenters.

David Diddy, the other stories about elderly Radio 1 presenters are much less platinum, and none of them are featuring on Boom Radio or anywhere else these days, I'm afraid.

But there's also Gracie Sits Radio, which is the one that Ken Bruce famously absconded from Radio 2 to go and present present on.

Both of these massive, massive success stories, BBC essentially has looked at them and said, hang on, that's quite a good gap in the market, and proposed launching effectively BBC Radio 2 and a half, which was going to be the same sort of hits from the 50s, 60s and 70s,

and aimed at an older audience.

Ofcom, the broadcasting watchdog, have stepped in and said, no, you can't do that.

If you neglected this audience and someone else stepped in, you now don't get to step in

and take that back away from them.

They've said that would be unfair competition.

Interestingly, at the same time, I'd missed this story.

They let through a couple of other Radio 1 extensions, they're called.

Radio 1 Dance and Radio 1 Anthems, and Radio 3 Unwind, which is kind of classic chill-out music of the sort of kind that I thought Classic FM was set up to do back in the day, but there you go.

The one they didn't let through was an extension of Radio 5 Sports Extra, because they said that that would compete unfairly with Talk Sports specifically in that market.

So there is,

as well as various people with undeclared commercial interests who are complaining about this stuff, there is also a broadcasting watchdog out there who is trying to ensure some kind of level playing field for it.

Yeah, you don't look as happy about that.

And

if you do that he pumps it.

It just sounds so hard to ensure a level playing field.

What a complex set of decisions they must face.

It is, it is.

But I will put in a word for the idea of an everything platform because I think the most irritating thing in the world, and I think listeners might sympathise with this, is you can't bloody find anything these days.

God, I'm old.

No, we go.

Do this on boom radio, okay?

I spent half of my life going, where can I watch this program?

And you have to Google it in order to find out whether it's on Netflix or People Say iPlayer or Sky or Now TV or Okay,

there's a website called justwatch.com.

Okay.

And you just put in the name of it and it tells you where a film or TV program is available and

where it's free, which ones it's paying.

Right.

If you take anything away from this podcast, I've helped you locate your next binge watch, justwatch.com.

This is too.

Life was a lot easier when there are only four buttons on the telling.

We're going to end this right now and just say that one thing that is available very easily is Private Eye magazine, private-eye.co.uk.

That's the website you should go to to get a subscription.

You won't need all of these channels and gadgets with a lovely edition of Private Eye.

Subscriptions are available very reasonably priced.

The magazine is out every fortnight.

Thank you for listening to this show, which has been produced, as always, by Matt Hill of Rethink Audio.

The only other thing we have to say is that we are going to be at the Cambridge Literary Festival this Saturday, the 26th of April, 2025, for future listeners.

Sorry, you missed it.

Tickets in the room are sold out.

Streaming tickets to see us do our thing.

Adam's prepared his dance.

Helen's going to do magic tricks.

It's going to be great.

The three of us and Ian are going to be there on Saturday.

You can get tickets to watch the streaming event in the room at the Cambridge Literature Festival website.

It's going to be great fun.

We are accepting a few final questions for our Q ⁇ A session.

So send those to podcast at private-i.co.uk.

We'd love to hear a few last questions before we do the event.

Where can I watch Passport to Pimlico?

That's it.

Goodbye.