133: Planes, Trains and Automobiles

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That's Wonder F-O-L-D to get 25% off before the sale ends. Page 94, The Private Eye Podcast.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of Page 94, the UK's best fortnightly news podcast. I think in a crowded field.

My name is Angel Hunter Murray. I'm here in the Private Eye offices with Helen Lewis, Jane Mackenzie, and Ian Hislop.

We're here to discuss all the things that have happened since the last episode of The Mag.

Coming up later in the show, we'll be talking about the new biography of Keir Starmer and the Labour Party in general. And we've got some great stuff about cross-pavement charging solutions.

But first... Oh no, we haven't got to wait for that thing, have we? We can't concentrate on anything else.

But first, let's go away to a lovely little archipelago of islands, the British Indian Ocean Territory. Is that what it's called? That's right.

And let's home in on, in particular, the Chagos Islands and one in particular called Diego Garcia, which...

has been the subject of lots of news stories recently because it's technically and actually British-owned at the moment and Britain is proposing to amazingly pay money to give it away to someone.

It's a very reductive way of describing it, but that's effectively what seems to be happening. And Jane, you have been writing about this for a while? Most of my career.
Most of your career. Yes.

So should we start off with a little primer on what these islands are, why they're important and how we came by them in the first place?

Before they were owned by the British, they were owned by the French and they brought a large population of African slaves there to work on the coconut farms.

The British acquired them during the Napoleonic Wars. The slaves were eventually liberated because Britain wasn't allowing slavery.
And many of them then stayed there. They formed their own culture.

They're a long way from anyone else. I mean, the nearest island archipelagos, the Seychelles, the Maldives, and Mauritius, are still like hundreds of miles away from them.

So they were an isolated population, but they were still a British territory. And then in 1965, Mauritius becomes independent, and the islands have been governed from Mauritius.

So just before independence, Britain kind of hived off the Chagos Islands and said, no, we think we'll just hang on to this particular bit. They bought it for £3 million at the time.

And then they effectively handed over the largest island to the Americans. And the deal has never been made completely transparent.

It's been alleged that it was in return for a cracking discount on some Polaris missiles, but that's never been confirmed. But nonetheless, it led to there's a big American base there.

And in order to make make way for a big American naval base, the population were removed.

Initially, people who left the islands to go do business in Mauritius or go to hospital in Seychelles were just not allowed back.

And eventually, people were forced onto boats carrying one bag and dumped in the neighbouring countries.

Rather like Trump's current plan for removing the Carsons, in fact, just remove an entire population. Obviously, they were a much, much smaller population.

This is a bit that has confused me about the recent stories.

I was quite aware of the story about the right to return, you know, the fact that the Jagosian population has been advocating to be allowed home for a really long time. But this isn't that, is it?

This is not, that's not exactly what's being proposed.

No, I mean, the poor Jagosians who still exist as a diaspora in the Seychelles, Mauritius, and largely Sussex, specifically Crawley, are not really a party to this current deal that's being arranged with Mauritius.

In fact,

even those Chigotians in Mauritius really are a minority and not a very well-treated minority in Mauritius.

So why is it that behind this deal, everyone says it's all these human rights lawyers who seem to be very interested in matters of national security and not very interested in displaced persons?

Yes, this notion that it's a sort of decolonialization, we're giving it back to Mauritius. It was never really Mauritius's in the first place.

The people who certainly the courts have previously held had the strongest right to be there were the Chagossians. Way back in 2000, they very nearly did get the right to resettle there.

They won a court case and Robin Cook, who was then the Foreign Secretary, said he would not oppose their right to return.

And am I right in thinking that they nearly got a right to return to some of the smaller islands, not the one with the massive US naval base, But suddenly, after 9-11, these islands had a new geopolitical significance, basically.

They're an incredibly useful base for long-range bombers and also rendition of terror suspects, which is another kind of shameful thing that happened there. Yes, which was denied for some time.

And the UK government insisted that absolutely no Guantanamo-like things were happening on Diego Garcia because it would be against the terms of the lease that we allow the US to be there.

And eventually, we had to admit that there had, in fact, been incidents of extraordinary rendition via Diego Garcia. Just incredible.

All the goodwill that Britain might have possibly gained by liberating a population of slaves, just completely, steadily wasted and wrecked by

two centuries.

What I understand is if the Tragosian population had been given the right to self-determination, they then, as a small country, could have done a really good deal leasing Diego Garcia to the Americans and then funded their new new country for the rest of time.

Absolutely.

I mean, they probably wouldn't have become a completely independent country. They would have remained an overseas territory in a kind of Falklands ascension-y kind of way.

But they would have certainly had that same right the people of the Falklands have had to say, no, we'd like to, you know, stay

here, or we'd like to sell out to Mauritius for all this lovely cash. They could have stayed in the Commonwealth, or they could have become Guernsey.

Yeah, if this deal goes through, will the Chagosians get to go home? Will they have to go home? The ones who are in Crawley, that is, rather than the ones who are nearby necessarily.

Most of those in Crawley now do have British citizenship properly protected.

There was a long period where there was a particularly difficult situation where some Chagossians had become stateless effectively because though they were originally from a British overseas territory, in particular, there was a generation who were sort of born during that period where, for instance, their mothers went to another island to give birth and weren't allowed back.

So they were born in Seychelles, but Seychelles didn't give them citizenship and they'd missed out on their British citizenship. But that's been resolved fairly recently.

So most of those now living in Britain have British citizenship. And for the most part, they would like the right of return,

largely to visit the sort of ancestral homeland, visit family graves, just know where they came from. There's probably not that many desperate to up sticks and move halfway across the world again.

Basically, Diagagasia was the only properly inhabited island, I think. There was a bit on some of the islands.

There were two other atolls that were had inhabitants, and there's been some feasibility studies.

And in terms of sort of whether you could build tourist facilities there, whether there's enough fresh water, there are other sort of bits of the archipelago where you could build a fairly small but practical in the same way that the Maldives is capable of hosting tourist industry on little tiny bits of kind of beautiful beachy island.

And it's an incredible wildlife preserve at the moment, partly because of the lack of access to anybody other than the American naval base.

You could build a beautiful tourist industry around, you know, go and dive with the wildlife.

It's so clear the water there that I believe it's used as an international standard for polluted water or unpolluted water around the rest of the world. It's a very, very unspoilt.

It's like Genoa has really had a real bounce. Yeah, really.

Yeah, no, it has. It's funny.

It's another podcast.

Incredible dark skies, too. There's like a US space observation

place there as well.

So, what is the justification for a deal in which we pay Mauritius £9 billion,

possibly, but it could be 18 billion or even 52, as Nigel Farage estimated it. He'd done his inflation-busting calculations.
Do we then charge this back from the Americans?

I can't imagine Trump saying, I'd love to pay Britain to be middle person on a deal that doesn't make a lot of sense.

It will make some international criticism go away.

There's been various sort of UN reports and votes criticising the UK for holding on to the Chagos Islands, which I think partly comes about because of how they ended up depopulated in the first place.

Everybody does agree that was not good. And then also there's a sort of UN committee, which seems to largely be made up of countries, including Russia, Iran.

They just want to have a go at us by saying the UK should give this away. Yeah,

they would say that, wouldn't they? Exactly. Yeah.

It's really tricky because it's an attempt to kind of thread the needle of what Britain would like is to keep the US base there for several decades more to resolve the long-running international dispute over these.

I mean no one as far as I can tell is going to do anything for the Ilwa, the Chigosian islanders. That's not on Mauritius's agenda as far as I can tell.

But if it's successful then you end a dispute, you still get a base there.

And the other thing we haven't discussed is the role of China in all this because China has you know ambitions in this corner of the world, as in every other corner.

They have been investing enormous amounts of money in Mauritius. So you know they have loaned hundreds of millions of dollars to build Mauritius an airport.

They've built the state broadcasters' offices. You know, they've done a lot of construction.
They'd clearly love a base here or on one of the other islands.

And I think the idea is that Britain is hoping that it might be able to negotiate the permanence of the US base and rule out any Chinese construction in the area.

China does tend to just build islands out of nothing.

So if they wanted to build some sort of odd-looking atolls

about 25 feet off the coast.

I guess they might. With huge radars pointing exactly at the US naval base.
Great respect is in the case of Tibet and Taiwan of other places' territorial sovereignty.

This is the my problem with I've been consciously trying to seek out news stories that rebut my knee-jerk prejudice, which is that I feel like and I just don't know if I've consumed too much um X content that the Mauritius is very cynically using the idea of decolonisation and saying, Look at you rich white people, you've come over and been terribly beastly to us in the developing world, in order to basically get lots of money that they would like for their government, which I don't but I just feel like we're sort sort of being had.

And I'm aware that that is a prime telegraph columnist opinion, and therefore I should probably probe it a little bit more deeply and see if it's true.

But from everything that you said, Jane, it seems that the two different issues, the natural justice for the displaced people, is very separate to the idea of like the geopolitical question of the control of the islands.

Yes, I certainly, if you sort of ask the people in Kourali and then the displaced Chagos population on this side of the world, they are not in favour of the Mauritius deal at all.

They've been fairly vocal about the fact that this is not the way they hoped to see things go.

Now, I don't know to what extent the other parts of the Chagos diaspora have perhaps followed more the Mauritius government's line, but actually the population here is very sort of substantial.

There have been no reports of the Mauritius government saying we would like to spend this money on a lot of leisure centres and health facilities for the poor Chagossians who ended up in Mauritius.

Those news reports are very, very thin on the ground,

and it's pretty clear what they want. And when they say, oh, by the way, we didn't mention inflation before, but we're factoring in inflation now.
I mean, the price is just going up.

And it's the price for a military base. And in

the whole liquidation of the British Empire, what is left is very odd places in the middle of nowhere in which it's quite important for national security interests to have a base.

And that has to be paid for somehow, but not necessarily this way. It's amazing that we're paying 9 billion quid to effectively get rid of a Lamborghini.
Like, how have we done that?

And also, how does it work in a world where Donald Trump is currently threatening to invade three allies, never mind three enemies?

Do you think it will actually happen? Because one of the things I thought was really interesting about this was that the government's latest justification was something to do with

the broadband spectrum, the electromagnetic spectrum and the control over it.

And then you had lots of people, not just the usual suspects, coming out and saying, I had that advice when I was in government too, and I thought it was bollocks.

And so I just wonder whether or not, at some point, given that the US are against it, and there's lots of relatively sane and sensible voices within the British establishment saying we actually don't think this really stacks up, might we just not do it?

As we started this conversation, I have been writing about the islands since 2000 when Robin Cook made his comments.

It's been at an impasse, bounced through various courts, the House of Lords, the European courts. Nothing's really changed.

There was a US senator who addressed Kirstama directly over this issue and said, put the bong down.

Just notoriously freewheeling Kirstama. And I thought, gosh, somehow Kirstama's got a reputation for dreaming big internationally.
It is quite odd.

We're just waiting for what the Americans say, aren't we? I think so. I don't think in the end, the UK government is going to make the decision on its own piece of land.

Ultimately, they'd rather upset Mauritius and the UN court than they would upset America, right? So eventually it might. But you're right.

It just seems to me everything you've said, the most likely outcome is that people just keep arguing about it for another couple of decades and nothing happens.

Well, we'll be back in 25 years when Jane will look back on a career.

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I can't cook. You know this.
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Right, we come now to Culture Corner. I think that's what we're calling this bit.
It's the book section of the podcast. We occasionally cover political books.

And Helen, you've been reading one lately. I have.
I've been reading Get In by Patrick Maguire, who used to work for me at the New Statesman, and Gabriel Program of the Sunday Times.

And this is the follow-up to their previous book, which was about the Corbyn leadership. They've got an unholy marriage with Tim Shipman does the Tories and they do Labour.

They've got a working it in shifts. I don't know if someone's going to step up and do the Lib Dems at some point, but no one has yet.

If this one's called Get In, what was the previous one called?

Stay Out. No, don't, because they're all, because all the Tim Shipman's ones have all got versions of In, which is like no way out.

Then the last one, the fourth one, is actually called Out.

And then the previous one about Corbyn is called.

Maggie, Maggie, Maggie, Out, Out, Out. That's it.
Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, Left Out. Left Out, though.

Honestly, there is a broad. You'll notice a theme emerging.
Very good. Okay.
And this is a. Is it a kind of biography of Starmer or Labour in general?

Well, no, because there was a very good biography of Starmer by Tom Baldwin, which was actually, I think, a lot more revealing.

It was a semi-authorised one, but I think it was a lot more revealing than perhaps Starmer was comfortable with.

One of the things that comes out in this book and has been a feature all along is that Starmer really is very private and doesn't want to talk, you know, he never names his kids in public, for example.

You know, they've never been photographed publicly.

And he never wanted, you know, before we laugh about his father, the tool maker, they had to kind of like brutalise him, his leadership team, into saying you've got to talk about your roots.

You've got to seem like a human being to people.

So that, you know, the Starmer biography by Tom Baldwin is, you know, is really quite moving about the fact that

he and his dad never said, I love you to each other. You know, his mum was always very ill when he was growing up.
His dad was very buttoned up and in his shed the whole time.

His brother had a really difficult life, the one who died recently. But Starmer's very reluctant to talk about all those things.
This is a political book that takes you from Starma becoming an MP,

at which point it's always kind of thought that he really at that point wanted to be Prime Minister.

But it's really, if any, it's a book about anybody, it's a book about Morgan McSweeney, who is now his chief of staff, who was his, essentially, ran his campaign, who was an Irish guy who started off working on the desk at Millbank during the new Labour years.

There's a great quote from Peter Mandelson, who now loves him, says, I never, I don't remember him.

I didn't notice him at all. Was he there?

It's a story about how Morgan McSweeney basically decided that the Corbynites were kind of a bunch of out-of-touch lefties who were never going to win an election in the Britain that they exist, which they think is very socially conservative, for example.

Much more that blue Labour, you know, faith, family, and the flag.

And basically, set about to kind of, I mean, it's almost described explicitly in this term, do a con job on the Labour Party to get in, convince Corbyn you were on his side, convince the members that you were pro-a second EU referendum and were very loyal to Corbyn, and then, as we've seen with Kirstarma, actually achieve the leadership of the Labour Party and do something completely different.

And it's about that story about how he remade the Labour Party, but how it's now left him slightly stranded. Because what does Kirstarma believe about anything? Like,

there's a kind of hole at the centre of this book. He's obviously built a machine that's brilliant for taking control of the Labour Party and then winning election in Britain.

But the big question that obviously everybody we've talked about on this podcast is, and then, and then, what is the plan? What is the plan now?

Is there a sense in which political journalists and commentators like to believe in a grand narrative of someone secretly making a puppet who then takes over?

Is it possible he just took over and McSweeney's mildly talented, but the Tory party's exploded and the British public didn't like the look of Corbyn?

I mean, I know we like a very Machiavellian narrative, but halfway through any book like this, I start thinking, really?

There is always a problem as well in political books that you find out you can sort of work out the sourcing to some extent by, you know, sort of Peter Munson walked handsomely into the room.

Michael Gove was up to his usual clever machinations, and you're like, oh, was he? Interesting. I wonder who told you that.
So I always have that question.

There are a lot of books that mention that Dominic Cummings has a walk-on role in which he does something amazingly brilliant and counterintuitive. And you think, oh, I wonder who told you this?

I mean, it didn't end well for Cummings. The key to Dominic Cummings is he doesn't mind if you hate him or love him as long as you think he's clever.

He will take credit for anything, no matter how evil it is, as long as it looks like a smart thing to have done, which is very different to most people's motivations.

He's the guy who came up with the eye test alibi. So we don't need to worry about smartness.

But so I think there is a similar thing. You're right.
Kirstan was the beneficiary of a lot of structural forces. You know, he was lucky, luckier than Ed Miliband.

Ed Miliban came in as a first-term opposition leader, which is just already harder. Like, it's just a harder thing to do because people have just very ostentatiously rejected you.

And also, at that stage, often in the life cycle of opposition, the activists and the cabinet members are not ready to concede that people do hate hate you.

They think, come on, we could just do it slightly differently, like the one-more heave kind of approach.

Whereas I think by the time that the party even had been through all of that, 14 years of Tory rule, there was a kind of slight concession of, okay, they don't like us.

But I would give them enormous credit. This is the bit that depends entirely on how you feel about how this is.
I went to watch Starmer during the leadership campaign.

You know, Rebecca Long Bailey was the continuity Corbyn candidate.

You would not have thought Starmer during that election was going to do what he did, which was hoof out Corbyn from the party, marginalize the hard left completely, and then run on a you know a much like a blue Labour type platform.

He said basically his only points of disagreement were Jeremy wasn't really pro-Europe enough and he was a bit worried about the anti-Semitism stuff.

But that was a result of a tactical decision that when he got into Parliament, that the next leader of the Labour Party would not be somebody who, like a Wes Streeting, like a Rachel Reeves, who had principally sat it out.

So he made a series of tactical decisions already from the start of his political career about what would be the most thing that would end up most likely with him being Labour leader.

And so, some of the people on the left feel just completely betrayed by that. They feel they were lied to.

And this book has a scene where McSweeney goes to see Jeremy Corbyn and sort of says, Look, I've got this amazing polling, I'd love to share it with you.

And I want to be your friend, whilst they're thinking, I, you know, quote, I hate you, you're evil.

I want to destroy you. So, I can see why people who aren't in favour of the project think that they were duped in this really quite unpleasant way.

And then I sort of think, yes, but the question is, do you want to win or not? And it turned out the answer to that was yes, and I'm prepared to do a lot to make that happen.

So this is a record of the defeat of the left rather than the creation of something new for the centre?

That's the most striking criticism that I think is valid, which is that they knew very well what they didn't want to be, but they don't really know what they do.

And I think that's what's got them into trouble in government.

Sam Friedman, who runs a very good sub stack, very policy wonkish, has worked in the Department of Education, did a kind of ask us all questions And he said, one consistent theme of the questions was lots of people who felt they were naturally supportive of a Labour government.

They were really glad to see one, but sort of felt like it hadn't really

done anything. And that's my perception about the general mood in the country.

It's not like, you know, obviously they won an enormous majority, but that honeymoon has been very, very brief and people feel grumpy.

And, you know, the latest pollings put on basically a three-way tie between the Conservatives, Labour, and reform.

It's not like people think that there is a project that they could name, even, that they know what you're being asked to have an opinion on. I'd love a sinister project.
That would be great.

Get on it, here's Darma.

Is that what all the research and the

growth baby growth have been leading up to? But I feel like they have been saying this stuff all along. Have we not been listening? Or have they not been doing it?

I think they felt like they had to do a bit where they said everything's really miserable on the start.

Because if you think about how much juice the Conservative coalition government got out of Liam Byrne saying there's no money, I mean, that note was being brought back to.

It's pretty frayed by the end, yeah. Right, exactly.
As a justification for austerity, it was like, well, we had to do this.

I think they really wanted to bed in the idea that they'd inherited a real mess, so that anything they did, like, that was the baseline. But I think what they mostly did

was true, as it turned out. But I think it made everyone think, oh, God, this is miserable, isn't it? Like,

how are we going to fix stuff? You know, the NHS came out of the pandemic much less productive.

You know, we came to be able to funnel more and more money into it, and it doesn't just, nothing seems to improve. I think there's a real level of misery.

And Starmer doesn't really do lofty eyes raised to heaven aspirational kind of optimism, does he? It's not really his natural tenor.

I felt that because McSweeney is basically a man who wins elections and he's constantly campaigning, part of the chaos since Labour got in can be explained by the fact that they panic and they think we're not popular.

Let's do a stunt. Let's do a campaign.
And actually, we don't want any campaigns. You know, we just voted you lot in.
I feel his brilliance, as evinced by this book, is actually the problem with him.

In that reset, reboot, here's a new idea, here's another slogan, here's growth, baby, drill, or

whatever it is. Baby build, I believe, was the phrase he used.
Growth, baby, growth.

That sounds medical, yeah.

And there's a moment in the book where I read Sue Gray, who's the chief of staff, and McSweeney. Clash of egos, only one of them had to to go.

Now, guess what's going to happen when Keir Starmer reads that he's a man on a driverless train, a useless HR manager, doesn't have any policies, and is really the puppet of his brilliant PR man.

Guess what the next chapter is, Morgan? Yes.

Do you know what I think it is?

I think it's a bit cummingsy.

Classically, the kind of king's advisor will not last until...

If Morgan's McSweeney is still there in position at the next election, that would be historically unusual, I think is probably the way I'd phrase it. I completely agree.

But it but it does seem to capture something that's true.

There's even descriptions in the book of the the leadership campaign in which it's sort of described that kind of Stalma sitting listening to everybody else. He let someone else chair it.

Patrick Maguire in one of his columns wrote that he was, you know, he was loyally in the sense that if you give him a brief to prosecute, he will go out and do it and hammer away at it.

And he did that obviously in the case of the campaign for the second referendum on the EU. What he isn't really naturally suited to is leading, is being the one that leads the decision.

He wants to almost be told what to do and then do it.

And I think that you're right, Ian, that is the bit that kind of, because people don't want to take orders from Walgreen McSweeney. No one elected him.
Ultimately, there is an authority problem there.

I haven't read the book yet, but for me, the biggest revelation in it from the bits I've seen extracted is that Keir Starmer had a voice coach who I think has carried out the biggest con of all here

and has extracted lots of money for.

What?

You don't recognise the charismatic. Honestly, if you'd seen him a couple of years ago, you'd have thought he's very boring and he just uses these weird metaphors and he's not full of charisma.

But now,

now look at Gilgood in his prime.

Yeah. Yeah,

it was one of the many extracts. God bless them.
They've done a lot of extracts for this book. And there was a story about...
It didn't fly that story, did it? Was it lockdown?

I mean, I read it and I still didn't really take it.

She potentially breached lockdown this voice. Yeah, to come visit him on Christmas Eve to prepare him for a speech when London was under tier four restrictions.
It's a bit beergate, isn't it?

It was a real problem about the fact that I think, A, most normal people are now moved on.

Like the coronavirus is something terrible that happened in the rearview mirror and they don't really want to ever think about it again. Absolutely not.

And also, it's just very funny watching the right try and attack it. And it's like, okay, so he might have had a session with his voice coach, which is inherently amusing.

What he didn't do is get 15 lagers on and a curry and a karaoke machine and get hammered and start belting out ABBA. You know,

it's like the

people trying to say it was the same as Partygate was extremely optimistic, I felt. Did the press get hold of any story that really flowed?

I mean, you're obviously saying, you know, it's a really interesting and the details fantastic and the thesis, but was there a shock revelation in it that everyone should have been excited by?

I don't know. Starmer's quite boring.
I mean, you know, who knew?

I think it's quite well timed that it's come out now exactly at the point that questions have begun to emerge about what do you know, what do you actually want to do? Like, what is the project?

But you're exactly right, Ian, about that permanent campaign strategy. It's exactly the same problem with Trump, which is the blizzard of executive orders.
What does that Trump government exist to do?

It exists to own the libs, cry harder libs, like, how do you like this? But that's not the same as like making the trains run on time, right? It's just not the same thing at all.

Don't go through that line because they already know it. Okay.

The moment of maximum effectiveness for Starma was the riots,

which has nothing to do with spin or being shown to do the right thing. He's good at locking people up.
So over that weekend, he locked them up quickly and the sentences were quite big.

And then the weekend afterwards, people thought, maybe I don't want to be locked up.

For me, I mean, obviously, I'm sort of trying to resist all spin, but it seemed the moment of doing something was more effective than the moment of posturing, of pretending you're doing something.

But it was also, that was a very authoritarian moment, which is a very, you know, Blair and his constant love of ID cards.

I mean, there's not anything in the world that Tony Blair doesn't think that ID cards aren't a solution to. It's sort of one of his weird kinks for like 25 years now.

And I think that was a moment for Starma that that is the kind of McSweeneyism prescription, like the tough on crime, tough on Yobos. It felt a bit like, oh, Asbos are going to come back soon, right?

Didn't it? It felt Blairite in that sense. I think that's where that project is comfortable, which is wearing the clothes of the right.

But again, that's not, again,

there are right-wing, actual right-wing parties.

So if we're going to have Yvette Cooper kind of wearing a stab-proof vest and going out to kind of you know be filmed doing deportation reads Theresa May kind of tried that with the hostile environment and actually it didn't save her it might be your answer to Farage but it's not it's not enough is it I think saying that there are terrible problems people do expect the hard bit of government is they expect you to solve them it's an answer to someone else's talking point rather than one of your own yeah and I think that's the thing that has bedeviled Labour for all the time that I've been covering politics is the feeling that they always have to play at the kind of a away end.

Anything they do that's even very slightly left-wing, they kind of get shouted at for, which means the easiest thing is not to then do any of those things, right?

I think it's a you know, it's a criticism from the left of the Labour Party that I have a quite a lot of sympathy with, that there are already right-wing parties.

Why are you not them? Like, tell us a bit more about why this if we've elected a Labour government rather than sort of a Labour government that's trying to cosplay as the Conservatives.

The inconsistency is immediately obvious.

If you're doing an immigration video of you storming into people's houses and sending them home for working in a nail bar, and then you're saying, yeah, but I mean, we're not going to have any restrictions on legal immigration in this country, obviously, because business needs these people.

And people are going to think, well,

have you got any ideas then?

Because these two things don't really match. And if you have legitimate concerns about one and a half million people having arrived in the last two years, is some policy not overdue?

No one will ever say the bargain is that it's good for the economy, but so you're going to have to lump it, right?

There's always a pretense that you can have, you can cut immigration enormously and with no economic consequences. There's no difficult trade-off to be made.

But yeah, I think they've, I think they are, I would say Labour currently are refusing to engage with that and instead, let's get Yvette Cooper dressed up like she's an extra on the bill.

Like, that's what people want. And have somebody in a hard hat saying, we're going to build, you know, a million and a half homes in the next 10 years.

And then someone says, but we had a million and a half people came in last year. So what they all get a home each, do they?

Well, I think it will be really interesting because everyone's getting very aerated by how well reform are doing in the polls. And that's going to be undoubtedly one of the big stories.

If you're Labour and you now think your biggest opponent actually is reform rather than Kemi Badenox Tories, which I think they increasingly do, how do you fight that?

Because my take on it is the only way that anyone really falls out of love with the reform is they let reform have a go at governing and they aren't very good at it.

Which is exactly what happened with UKIP running local councils as soon as they had to run anything like Planet, got to see what the reality of them looked like.

Yeah, it's all very well to be doing these high-flown rhetoric about whatever, but it's like actually what people care about is their bin collections at the end of the day.

And they were terrible at those things.

And they're just staying united. Like just as one local council, they couldn't manage to hold it together as a party without all falling out.
That has been a a consistent f factor of night.

So the two things that happen in Nigel Farage's parties is one that he always wins any eternal power struggle and the second thing is that everyone else always leaves.

Is there going to be another book? I don't think they can be stopped in. They will kill again.
Yeah.

Yeah, are there any more puns on the words in or out? I think it's going to have to be shake it all about next time.

A reference to Qatari investment.

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Now we come to the third section of today's show. This is about something that Rachel Reeds announced, actually.

So the last episode was just before the Grow Baby Grow speech, as it's being called, by nobody.

And as part of it, one of the tiny footnotes in it was that she gave 50 million quid to a company that does electric car chargers.

And they're called Connected Curb, and I think they provide chargers for slightly difficult places to fit them to.

And my contention is that this is exactly the wrong thing to have done. And I think I could have saved her 50 million quid and made her life a lot easier.
And made everyone's lives a lot easier.

Andy. Thank you so much.
I'm so glad you asked.

No, no, I'm going to tell you at enormous length.

So, basically, as we all know, the new electric car mandate is going to be that all new cars in 2030 have to have a plug and a battery of some kind.

They're still havering a bit over the details, but new cars, so not like most sales are second through to like ninth-hand cars, but new cars themselves will have to do that.

There are currently 8 million households in the UK which cannot charge a car easily. So, 60% of homes have their own driveway.
Brilliant.

Stick a charger on the house, plug in, you're absolutely laughing. And if you do that, I mean, most tariffs, you can get down to charging a car for about a Fiverr, which is very tempting.

It's Gregor when you think of petrol prices. Yeah, I mean, do you want to pay a Fiverr, do it at home, drive off every morning with a full tank, effectively?

But is it like an iPhone in that you have to charge it every night because it doesn't last?

Unless you are driving to and from London to Scotland and back every day, you won't have to do that effectively.

Am I guessing from this that you don't have a driveway?

I don't know how you do it, Ian. I don't have a driveway.

So, for example, if you have one of these situations, you can't charge for a Fiverr. You have to use a public charger, and they're between five and ten times the price.

And in a world where you're asking everyone to have one of these cars eventually, that's a bit of a sticky point. You know, people are going to be a bit miffed.

And most people don't want to think about charging methods. They just want something that works and preferably something that's cheap.

So there are two ways of doing it, like solving the problem for most of these people. For people in flats, it's going to be tricky, and that's like half the 40%.

But for about 4 million households, you can either stick a charger in every lamppost. That works really well.
And there's electricity there. Brilliant.

Or you can do a thing where you kind of run a little cable under the pavement. You dig a one-inch channel in the pavement.
And

these are incredibly boring things, we should say.

Sometimes they're called gullies, sometimes they're called channels.

Yeah, they work.

They work. It's a less dangerous version of just running lots and lots of extension links down the street.

Exactly, yeah.

We don't want a world where

if you have any kind of wheeled thing, whether it's a pram or a wheelchair or whatever, it's a nightmare going along a street. So quite sensibly, like these.
We've got line bikes for that.

So that's the solution. They take about an hour to fit these things, one hour, two at the most.
This sounds amazing, Andy. What's the catch?

The catch is, it is a nightmare getting one of these things. Like, you wouldn't believe it.
Firstly, it's the the responsibility of your council, right? I mean the process is just so Byzantine.

So in some places you need planning permission to put a charger on your house. You know, if your house opens straight onto the street, you know, you have to do that.

And there are some places where you need planning permission from your county council for a channel and from your district council for a charger. Try putting one on a list of buildings.
Oh, God.

Secondly, five out of six councils just say, no, you can't have one of these.

Just like that.

There's no obligation to provide provide any so there is there was a pot of money set aside for installing these things but it didn't come with any guidance about how you can do it who are good operators of these ski like that kind of thing it didn't come with any of that so most councils just said oh sorry computer says no can't be having it and then the other weird thing is in the councils which do do it so like lucky old me i live in one of the places the one in six councils which which is doing it the process is amazingly complicated like it's because it's highways there's liability there are all sorts of questions which basically means...

Please tell me there are not bats involved in this. I have not encountered any bats.

They're very small. Some micro-bats, I'm afraid.
It's a perfect nesting environment.

No, what the thing is, councils have all been doing their own individual trials of their own individual pavements to see if these things work. Pavement is not that different up and down the country.

Some places you might have cobblestones, some places you might have a flag, whatever. It's not that different, basically.

And the other mad thing, and this takes us right back to Rachel Reeves, is that these things need planning permission, which, because it's, you know, it's a highway, it's outside your home, okay?

But they also need a thing called a section 50. Have you had the difficulty of coming across these? No.
Okay, this is the thing that you need.

It's the permission you need when you want to dig up like a chunk of road.

You're doing a gas main, you need a section 50 for that, right?

But you currently need an individual section 50 for every single less than one inch wide strip.

It's amazing. So it is like going through the process to amputate your leg every time you want to cut your toenails.
That's basically what the situation is. And it costs so much as well.

And the costs vary massively from council to council. But some councils will charge nearly three grand for section 50 permission.
At which point you just say,

I'm not doing that.

This is the vetocracy that I was talking about, which is the, you know, I think all the people who are talking about growth, do you have a real point that we have layered completely needless levels of computer says no and you have to sign this off?

I know, you know, not that I'm turning into like Richard Littlejohn in my old age, but there is a kind of like

three pods. You've made surprisingly

early. But I think this is one area in which the right is correct, is that there is a presumption about not doing things.

They call it in central government treasury brain, right? The idea is stuff is too hard, we can't do it, let's just keep doing what we're doing already.

There's down to be some people who are, you know, there's some downsides. So what if we just never do anything? Yeah, yeah.

You know, like the kind of people who think you could run a hospital really well if there just weren't any patients that are ruining it. There's that kind of attitude, I think, as well.

It does seem to me amazing that

HS2, yeah, I get there are certain problems putting it in, but a very, very small HS2 would tell

if we want it going along a piece of pavement. I would have hoped that was possible.
I know. If we can't do this, we're not going to build another nuclear plot.
It's just not going to happen.

No, that's not going to happen. No, I know.
Obviously.

And, you know, there will be places where, you know, different solutions are needed, where you can't park in front of your house on a regular basis. You might need to do more lamppost things there.

The process for, by the way, getting a lamppost charger in takes between nine and eighteen months. That's the paperwork.
Getting it in takes one day. So we've got this really funny situation where

it's very hard to do something that would make things very easy. Because you've got a laudable aim.
Right, get the country onto very efficient cars which drive much further per quid you put in.

That's great. A quid in a petrol car, well, 25p of it is moving the car.

the rest of it is lost as inefficiency in electric car it's about 90 is moving the car so even if there wasn't any good green reason of doing it it's you get much more bang for your buck so the false solution i think is the kind of lots and lots and lots of big street furniture the way to make this as easy as possible is to do the nice thing is there's precedent for this excitingly

do you remember phone boxes Yes. Yeah, just about.
I'm old. Yes, I do.
Thank you.

So the process for doing that was basically there was a list of approved contractors, you know, like big firms like BT or whoever it might be, were sort of pre-approved to bang a phone box in where they needed one.

So they did not need to go through this very Byzantine process. Internet hubs, same thing happened.

This is also what they're trying to do with planning permission, to say, here are some zones in which the presumption is in favor of consent to get planning permission, which makes a lot of sense to me.

Completely. And there are kind of moves in that direction.

So if you're a big CPO, which is like a charge point operator, you know, you run the big charges that you get at motorways and wherever, you now don't need section 50 permission anymore.

So that is a step in the right direction. But if you do the tiny one-inch right things, you still do.
So

it's evolving fast, but to have a laudable aim of like switching things over and then to be making this bit very hard feels all a bit arse about face.

I like your niche, which is basically that you talk about green issues in a way that isn't just, oh, whoa, the end is night, ring my battle.

But like, here are some very small practical things that we could do that would actually make life better. I think that's a much better way of covering the subject.

I guess it's interesting that people say, well, we need a network of charging points, and then you think we've got them. They're called houses.

The network already runs into them. And what you need is quite a long extension lead.
Do you think, well, that sounds good? Yeah, we have, it's exactly that. I mean, you wanted to make a big change.

The best way to do it is in very low impact ways.

There isn't much that's lower impact than a lamppost or your existing fuse board, you know. So, yeah.

Well, in answer to what you're saying, Alan,

I have no influence over US onshore or offshore wind policy.

You are in the pocket of big cross-pavement charging. If anyone wants to crowdsource a driveway for Andy,

which again,

there are worse charitable projects, absolutely. But no, there are people who are like paving over their front garden so that they can just cram their car into it and, you know, and solve this.

We're bad for flooding, it's not good for flooding, so yeah. So, for God's sake, write to your MP.
If you're listening to this, just write to your MP and demand the right. What do we want?

Cross-pavement charging charging solutions. When do we want that?

Good, stirring. There we go.
I've made this the hill I'm going to die on, and I fear I might.

Okay, that's it for this episode of page 94. Thank you so much to Helen, Jane, and to Ian.
We will be back in two weeks with three more topics from the infinite

news.

Until then, why not go and buy the magazine, which has even more stories than these? It's got about 50 more stories than we've been able to cover today. It's a fantastic magazine.

Go to private-night.co.uk and subscribe right now. Thanks until then for listening.
And as always, to Matt Hill of Rethink Audio for producing. Bye for now.

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