161: Unwise Councils

You really want to be better with your finances. You try to put money away in savings.
You look for deals. You wrote out a budget once a long time ago.

You still overdraft from time to time and you still have debt. The truth is managing money is not easy, but Rocket Money can help.
Rocket Money shows you exactly what you're spending every month.

From there, the app helps you make a budget that meets your financial goals. The app even gives you real-time alerts when you're about to go over your budget so you don't spend too much.

With Rocket Money, you can also see all your subscriptions at a glance and cancel the ones you don't want right from the app.

Rocket Money can even try to get you a refund for some of the money you wasted. Plus, you can use the smart savings feature to start putting more money away.

Rocket Money analyzes your accounts to determine the optimal time to stow away cash without going over your budget. Our members report that the Rocket Money app save more than $700 a year.

Getting better with money doesn't have to be a pipe dream. Rocket Money can make it a reality.
Go to rocketmoney.com/slash cancel or download the app from the Apple App or Google Play Stores.

You've got the VPN, the encrypted messenger, the private browser. But if your mobile carrier is selling your data, those apps are just window dressing.

Meet CAPE, the mobile carrier that never collects your name, address, or data. Because what they don't store, they can't sell.
Premium service, nationwide coverage. Cape is just $99 a month.

Your first month is just $30.

And with code CAPE33, you'll save 33% on your first six months. Go to CAPE.co.
Lock down your network, not not just your apps.

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 iStudio with Helen Lewis, Adam McQueen, and Sabah Salman.

We are here to discuss the news of the last couple of weeks, and because it's Christmas party season, we're having a Christmas party special.

I haven't told you all this, but we're going to be talking about your party, we're going to be talking about the Reform Party,

and later on, we're going to be talking about various corporate parties who are buying each other.

So, I thought for a horrible moment it was going to be like a normal Christmas party where everyone was going to fall out with each other. Oh, no, hang on, man.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, Saba, welcome to page 94.
This is your first time on the show, and you are the new Tim Manogue. I am.
It's seamlessly.

I don't think anyone would see any difference at all.

You're Rotten Boroughs. I am Rotten Burroughs, me and a whole host of people behind the scenes who we cannot name.

I saw something really exciting recently because I know you do a little reform round-up section, given that reform have just taken so many councils across the country and the in the local elections I saw a really exciting headline saying they've managed to cut £331 million of expenditure in total so far terrific news how have they done it well I think the answer is rhetoric over reality

so yes reform has control of 10 local authorities they have been shedding councillors left right and centre or right should we say since they started and they've lost about 40 and Rottenboroughs has indeed on behalf of the nation, been keeping an eye on how many and why.

The war on waste that you mentioned, so this £331 million

saving efficiency, that is their big mantra nationally. And obviously, in local government, they've taken that upon themselves to prove to Nigel that it can be done.

When you actually drill down, this is complete guff, basically, to put it in technical terms.

In the current issue, we mention Kent. And Kent is fascinating because it's the flagship borough.

The person in charge is Lyndon Kemcaran, who's a very firm leader, and she's very big on taking Nigel's words to the absolute maximum.

So she's been doing her war on ways, and she's claiming she's saving tens of millions.

They've cut councillors' allowances by about 5%, which is great. Sounds brilliant, very generous.

But actually, what they've done is they've used that money and they've put it into the community fund, which again is fabulous because it's more money for local people. So what's a community?

A community fund is all local authorities have a fund which councillors can use to give money to good causes. So local projects, you know, kids, animals, nice, warm, fluffy things, important things.

But the point here is that by cutting councillors' allowances, which is a good thing, that could be an efficiency. It's not because actually that money's been siphoned off into this community fund.

So it's not a saving. I presume it's because they can't underspend that money.
Is that it? As in they have to put it somewhere rather than... They do.

I mean, local authorities, as any organisation, you have a certain amount of money and you have to spend it within the year. So I think as you get towards the end of the financial year,

you're left with these pots of cash. I'm not sure if that's the case in this Kent example.
I think it's more the case that it makes a great headline. Right.
Can I just ask a really basic question now?

Where does the money come from? Is it all from council tax? Is there still some money that comes from central government?

There is money that comes from central government, although successive governments have kind of cut that.

So, by and large, yes, it's from council tax.

Did reform experience the thing which I think, Adam, you predicted when they got all those cancers, which is that they went in going, it's terrible, it's all being spent on putting the trans flag above the town hall, and then they discovered, oh no, all the money's going on adult social care?

Yes, I think that's absolutely right. With reform, they've come in guns blazing.

You know, it's a political earthquake, it's going to be fabulous, we're going to do all this, we're going to cut this, we're going to get rid of EDI because it's so expensive, and you know, we're going to stop spending on special educational needs, we're going to stop take money from adult social care.

Doesn't quite work like that because local authorities have a duty to provide certain things and do certain things.

Now, can I check? There's been an accusation levelled against the BBC that reform are targeting its councillors in particular by reporting on all of the councillors who are sacked or resign

or

defect, perhaps.

Now, are you doing the same thing?

You know, they've said, well, the BB are reporting on 90% of reform councillors who leave in some way or another, and actually, only about 15% of Labour or Conservative councillors doing the same.

I think there is a balance between a focus on this particular group of individuals because they have stormed in and they are presenting some wild and wacky ideas.

And you have to hold them to account in a balanced way. We can't do the same thing with all the other parties simply because we actually do that in the rest of the borough's page.
Right.

Isn't it also the fact that because reform have only got a handful of MPs and have never formed a government in any of their various Farage iterations, this has been the first real chance to see what the party make-up is like and also how well they handle actual government responsibility.

In the same way that the Green Control Council in Brighton for a long time got

not an excessive amount of scrutiny, but a higher level of scrutiny because this was a chance

for people to see what the Greens would be like in government, which they weren't going to be able to do at the national level.

So if reform are currently top of the polls, which they have been on and off for months now, Nigel Farage is auditioning to be the next Prime Minister and this is our chance to see what are his ground troops.

Well absolutely.

Pre the last election the complaint was constantly, oh reform don't get the coverage they ought to and you know actually there's an awful lot of support out there but you know I think there is definitely something about particularly with councils like well Kent being the flagship one that this is this is the party of government potentially so there you have it it.

If this is what they're doing on a local level with infighting conduct problems,

the leader effectively firing a bunch of her councillors, that was Lyndon Kemcaron in Kent. They had 57 councillors elected.
There's now only 48 left. So nine have gone.

So my highly analytical maths here tells me that if you use that same rate, they'd all be gone in about three years. But that has always been the problem with Nigel Farage's parties, right?

That they are always the Nigel Farage show.

And when UKIP had a load of MEPs, the turnover rate among them was extraordinarily high, far higher than it was for the, you know, what were then the mainstream parties of Labour and Conservatives.

But he gains them as well. I mean, he's operating a one-in-one-out system, as far as I understand it.

And he's operating a situation where there is a real cult of leadership there, right? So, which the Kent leader is, it's a copycat example of that. She has this sort of authority.

She has the authority. If anyone remembers Jackie Weaver from years ago, she definitely has the authority.
She wants the authority. And if she does not get that authority, she boots you out.

That is where some of those councillors, some of the reasons that they've left, so those nine that I mentioned, the majority have been sacked, but others have been suspended, and there's a few that have left of their own volition.

And, you know, some of those have done so because they don't agree with that sort of leadership cult.

I was going to ask if you have other favourite councils or other especially interesting stories that have cropped up during your first several months. Doesn't it?

Everyone have a favourite local authority since that's

weird.

Favourite worst exactly.

The British ST side. Yeah, I mean I think the thing with Rotten Boroughs, are you talking about reform now or

in general? So in general, I think it's really difficult to pick a favourite or worse because, you know, Rotten Boroughs runs a whole range of, you know, kind of cosy cronyism, bad conduct,

huge amounts of money being spent. I think one of my recent favourites was over in Northern Ireland.
So this was Lisburn and Castle Raids. It's a borough in Northern Ireland.

And this is a typical example of bad conduct. So this is a case where a councillor called Gary Hines

was in a council meeting and he wanted to talk about a housing issue. And the chief exec, a guy called David Burns,

said, no, could you wait? Gary Hines was not happy.

They had a bit of a row, a bit of a verbal disagreement, which ended with Gary Hines, the councillor, spinning the chair of the chief executive in a bit of a pissy fit. That would be bad enough.

But then, on top of that, it got reported to the local government ombudsman over there, the public sector ombudsman, you know, rightly so, but that cost money.

And also, it got reported to NACA, so the police were investigating. This is council taxpayers' money.
Someone being spun on a chair. Someone being spun on a chair.
Now, I mean, I put it to you.

Can you imagine if that happened in our office? So there's dissent. We're in the editorial conference meeting.
Our chairs would fall apart. Our chairs would fall apart.

The chairs would fall apart, but it's just not what you do, you know.

And I think that is the serious point and why I love Rotten Burrows, because underneath all of these allegedly silly stories, actually, there's a serious point to be made, which is that these are elected members, public monies, public sector money

that's being wasted. And these are people who are held to account, except they behave like this.
Can I ask you, Serbert? Councillors themselves are not paid tremendously well. You do see

officers and executives at councils receiving

substantial payments and payouts, and that's all covered in Rottenborough's loads. Why do councillors matter?

If the direction of party ownership or if the overall party ownership changes or if it's in no overall control, what difference does that make to

me as a resident? I mean, my bins are still going to be collected. Well, not even from Birmingham, Andy.

You wouldn't be having any bins collected there. But is that to do with the makeup of the council or is it?

So why do councillors matter?

You know, in a democracy you need people based in communities who know their neighbourhoods and who are made up of lots of different political parties. So you have that

range of representation and their function is completely different to the officers, many of whom are on absolutely massive fat cat salaries.

The people that we write about who are on their salaries, you know, they are entitled to that money because the rules dictate they can earn that amount of money.

It just seems to most normal people absolutely outrageous that someone gets paid, you know, a grand and a half a day to come in to an authority that is struggling financially, is in deficit, has borrowed hundreds of thousands of money from the government or been handed out funding to help it survive.

And on top of that, you're then paying someone a grand and a half a day.

Yeah, but it just feels so much like so many of the things they might have made decisions about in the past or had control over, they now don't.

Which is why you do get changes of party happening and then people coming in and saying, oh, well, we're spending 75% of our budget on adult and children's social care.

I think one of the problems, I mean, but both the reform coming in was the assumption that they will be able to make these sort of swinging cuts and things, and then finding out how little actually local authorities do control and how much of it

is with national government. But I think also there's a sort of democratic problem in that most council taxpayers and voters also don't understand whose responsibility is what.

And it tends to get used in the same way that sort of elections to the European Parliament did, as well as a sort of protest vote and a judgment on the current national government, rather than actually.

You know, this is a case where

you can make a difference to a community. You change things that you will actually see on the ground quite quickly.

Yeah, and I think just to go back to reform on that, I think what's interesting with reform is that a lot of these new councils who've come in are very much towing the national party line, which is that, you know, hard on immigration,

you know, net zero, we're going to cancel all of that. But actually, that is not relevant on a local level because councils don't control immigration.

They have nothing to do with the small boats, you know, in terms of stopping people from coming in.

So there is a lot of- That was a big wake-up call both to them and to voters again when they realised that actually they don't have the power to shut down these asylum hotels, even if they are in their local area.

That's just not the same. Absolutely.
It's a perfect storm of

the elected members not understanding what the role is, having no knowledge, no experience of local government or any kind of representing any kind of constituency, and that disconnect between what's happening on a national policy level and a local policy level in terms of what you can actually do.

And that changes as well, doesn't it? I mean,

there's already a division between borough councils and county councils with different responsibilities for different things. A lot of that has been changed.

So there were a lot of the local elections weren't held last year because they're being turned into big mayoralties over.

I mean, I live down in Sussex, and we're about to be turned into a mayor for the entirety of both East and West Sussex, which seems like this enormous, ungainly area. Certainly,

you're taking away from sort of Hastings Borough Council, where I live, which is a very, very small and you'd think more manageable area, that we're going to be bundled in with sort of Chichester and Gatwick and Haywards Heath and things.

That's right,

Not Chichester.

Not Gatwick. It's awful people in Haywards Heath.

It's a different language. Inclusive society, Adam.

You need to involve everyone in this. I think

this LGR thing, local government reorganisation, this is where we're dividing up local authorities in a different way and it's meant to be efficient and it's meant to save money.

The problem is not only that, I think most people don't understand what it is, why it's important, but then you've got the fighting in between different authorities because, well, we don't want to go with them because they are massively in deficit.

And officers and elected members at loggerheads about how this should be done. And there was a sort of first wave of mayors, wasn't there?

The sort of Ken Livingstone wave, and then they were brought in. I mean, Bristol has already rejected the idea.
They had a mayor for a while, didn't they? Yes.

They've decided to get rid of not only him, but the concept of a mayor completely. That's quite right, and for very good reason.

And if you want to know about that, look back at Rotten Boroughs and what we've been doing in Bristol. And then, didn't, I would say Doncaster elect a football mascot that was was a monkey.

Angus the Monkey. Hangus the Monkey.
Indeed, yeah. And then, yeah, I mean, that.
Turned out to be rather good at it, didn't he?

I think it's really. He didn't wear the monkey costume the whole time he was mayor, I don't think.
No, right.

But it's interesting to think back of that first wave of mayors, you're right, under the Blair government, it was very much the kind of shiny new thing, and it's, you know,

relatively speaking, quite a sexy thing in local government because, you know, we don't have mayors, it's quite exciting.

You've got these, you know, there's people are fighting and there's promotion, there's campaigns.

And then you compare it to what's actually going on with what these people have done or not done.

Yeah, I mean, to expand on my point that I'm not just a West Sussex Afo, the point then seemed to be sort of devolution right down to kind of city level.

And now it seems to have moved into these sort of macro authorities who are going to take on enormous kind of areas.

And also the other thing that's come and is going as well is police and crime commissioners, isn't it? Which are brought in by the Cameron Government. So never called on.

No one like those in there off now. No, and that's a huge thing.

So I think there's about 40 of these commissioners, police, fire and crime commissioners or police commissioners, depending where you are. And they have been said to be a failed experiment.

They weren't quite a lot of money, weren't they? Yes. So some of them, I think the average is about £76,000, but it goes up from that.
Some of them are part-time, they've got deputies.

These commissioners come in and they scrutinise what's going on with the police. Now, we have got a story coming up, which of course I can't go into because you have to buy the magazine to read it.

But in Northamptonshire, for example, there's been all sorts of problems with the commissioner there.

The previous commissioner got sacked, the new commissioner came in and has been trying to turn around what the police are doing.

Not quite gone to plan. I guess notoriously, reforming the police is very, very difficult.

Even if you're Theresa Mayne, you're coming in as Prime Minister, or you're Sadiq Khan trying to sack the head of the Met, you know, these are really difficult things.

The idea that someone could kind of bowl in and sort of go, right, lads, I've got some great ideas, and be listened to, I think

it's quite ambitious from the start. Yeah, and I think there's also a cultural thing going on where you've got a lot of the commissioners are ex-elected members.

They're coming in to oversee an organisation which is very different culturally. There's a clash there.

One of the issues I had with that were at the outset was it immediately divided along party political lines that you were voting for either your Conservative police and crime commissioner or your Labour one or whatever.

And in a way, that's, I think, a problem with a lot of local government. And there's no actual real need for national parties to be involved in any of it, is there?

I mean, would independent people who are concerned about local issues not be better than possibly party of paraper athletes looking to go on to the House of Commons later and that's the case?

Yeah, and funnily enough, a lot of the reform councillors who've quit or been suspended or expelled are becoming independent.

So, yes, I mean, a lot of local authorities have these independent or you know, independent labour.

So, you're not really aligned with the national, but you, you know, politically and ethically you are left-leaning, so you're independent labour.

And maybe that's the answer. Maybe all these councillors we write about should be independent and therefore not be tied to their national political party lines.
I don't know.

Perhaps you've solved the whole problem. No, we have to do it.

Excellent.

Think about the last time you had a cancel subscription. There's probably some waiting on hold, some guessing at your password, some mind-numbing small talk.

And maybe after all that, you still weren't able to cancel it. Good news.
It doesn't have to be this way. Thanks to Rocket Money.

Rocket Money tracks, manages, and can cancel your subscriptions for you. When you connect your accounts, you'll see a complete picture of all your reoccurring subscriptions all in one place.

Rocket Money organizes your subscriptions by due date and notifies you when something's coming up. So you'll never be caught off guard when you get charged.

If you see a subscription you want to cancel, Rocket Money simplifies the process. Instead of waiting on hold for an hour, you can cancel it right from the app.

Rocket Money will even try to get you a refund for the money you spent on subscriptions you forgot about. Stop wasting your your time trying to cancel subscriptions the hard way.

Make your life easier and go to rocketmoney.com slash cancel. That's rocketmoney.com slash cancel.
Or download the app from the Apple app or Google Play Stores.

I was sipping my latte when my friend gasped. Her phone had just alerted her to a data breach.
Again, that's when I told her about CAPE.

It's not just another app, it's a mobile carrier built to protect your privacy. No name, no address, no data collected.
Cape offers premium nationwide service for $99 a month. First month, just $30.

Use code CAPE33OF and get 33% off your first six months. She signed up that afternoon.
And now, no more gas. Go to CAPE.co.
Privacy starts at the source.

Now, for the next section of today's show, we're going to talk about a party that doesn't have a leader or not an effective leader. And it doesn't narrow it down much, I know.

So let's zero in and say we're talking about two particular parties which I think are very closely linked we're talking about the Democratic Party in the USA yes and we're talking about your party in the UK but these are parties which don't have leaders your party have just had their first conference and they've they've voted not to have one single leader yes by the cursed ratio of all pretty much 52 to 48

terrific

and then the other thing is that the Democratic Party in the States doesn't have a leader and I've always found it baffling.

I've never understood, right, so you've got your man in the White House over here, and

who? Well, that is one of many downsides I would say to a presidential system.

The other massive one, of course, being different from a prime ministerial system, being that there's no incentive for the party in government to get rid of a duff leader, right?

Whereas, what happens in the prime ministerial system is they go, well, thank you, Liz Trust, but you've delighted us long enough. And

that can't happen in the same way in the States, even though even now, and the remaking of the Republican Party, the party is still full of Republicans who are deeply unhappy about his leadership.

But sorry, just to labour the point, why does a presidential system mean you can't have some kind of party leader, even in

the essentials?

But what official position would they hold? Because that's the thing, constitutionally, we have her leader now, His Majesty's loyal opposition. They are in the Commons.

They get the questions at Prime Minister's questions.

There is a kind of constitutional role for them. There's no version of that in America.
There are, obviously, there's the Senate and House minority leaders as they are at the moment.

So they're the most senior Democrats in the legislature. But they've got three branches of government and no one, there's no executive version of them.
Although

what's essentially happened is that people have tried to make themselves into that person through the medium of podcasts.

How's that going? Well, actually, not too bad, as it goes. So, obviously, a very tough and rough defeat for Kamala Harris at the last election.
She's vibing around.

She was thought to be running for governor of California, but has declined to do that. Tim Waltz, her running mate, is a governor of Minnesota.

He's currently engaged in an ongoing feud with Donald Trump, but then who isn't? I'll be off, yeah.

I really do not rate his chances of running again for a number of different reasons.

But, you know, you have these kind of bigger figures emerging, mostly governors, actually. So

people were for a time very excited about Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan. Gavin Newsome in California has just come off this big victory of redistricting, which we can talk about.

I know you're excited about the gerrymander. But also also people like Pete Buddigig, who served in Biden's cabinet.
He was Secretary of Transportation.

He's done a podcast around, essentially, to pop up. But J.B.
Pritzker, the governor of Illinois, is another example of a governor who is having profile-raising battles with Trump.

So that's what a lot of the Democratic governors are doing, is trying to turn themselves into the leader of the opposition by being the most effective anti-Trump voice.

both in their own states and also on you know on on tv are they doing that though specifically to take a run at being um uh at being presidential candidate next time round? Because that is

who can say, Adam, they're not they're not announcing, they're not running, who can who can say what the ambitions of the

I do find it slightly bizarre I'm in a situation here of kind of arguing for a system of Kemi Babe knock but having no effective leader of the opposition is quite weird, isn't it?

I mean we don't th we d we don't get a single figure who the party unites behind until the next round of presidential primaries, which is sort of what two, three years away.

Yeah well there'll be after the midterms it will begin to the pack will begin to emerge so that's november next year but is that why they have to have so bloody long choosing the the candidates so that they can actually show their people to the electorate and say look these are your potential leaders of the party there is a real idea that the primary season is about really lots of people the core various core votes for the parties getting their say and and and like what also one of the things one of the big questions about next time is pete but is is running he hasn't announced it but everyone knows that he is he is gay married to a guy got two adoptive kids there is a question over whether the democratic base, which is church-going black Americans, often in southern states, are ready to vote for a gay candidate.

And so people are very tense about him running. But in 2008, people were very tense about the idea about whether or not white Americans would vote for a black Democrat.

So one thing that you do is have that primary season, and Barack Obama emerged through that primary season as just being the obvious superstar.

And therefore, people felt okay about sending him into the general. They didn't feel it was such a massive risk because he had proved himself through that long audition process.

Is it not a big disadvantage to whichever party is not in office at the moment that you have a president who is very well known and m most of the electorate are not paying a huge amount of attention to politics, but you know they they will know who the president is.

Yeah, that's why they call it the bully pulpit. That is the great benefit of the American Presidency is you get to just be the one person who's in charge and there's no one with an equivalent stature.

And quite notoriously when you have the first president versus contender debate, that contender gets a bump in their polling ratings because for the first time they're on stage with the president.

They move up from this sort of amorphous realm of opposition to being like president versus would-be president. You know, the status increases.

You know, and that's often about that, you know, when you narrow it down to that one person who is the nominee for the other party, that's when they get secret service protection, for example, right?

There is just a feeling at that point they ascend. But this is compounded at the moment due to the fact that the Republicans control the presidency, but also the House and the Senate.

So they've got the trifecta,

I'm going to use one of my many knobby American words in this. The midterms are such a big event that Trump has been very keen to consolidate his power.

And basically, if they lose control of the House, the Senate in the midterms, that means that the opposition party gets to control the legislative agenda, so what gets voted on.

They get to be in charge of the committees, which might do things like investigate some of the actions of Donald J. Trump, Esquire, that sort of thing.
So he's very keen to retain control.

And so he's been pushing Republican states, red states, to change their congressional maps.

And you do that by basically taking a swing district and finding a bit of red and kind of cobbling that on on the side. That's the gerrymander.

However, this has gone not as well as he thought. And I thought we could just take a moment to appreciate.

I love it when someone does something that's really ethically wrong and then in fact fires on them. And this one looks like it might do that.
So it started really in in Texas.

They made another five seats that were really much more likely to swing to the Republicans there even though the Democrats all left the state for the summer to try and avoid having to vote on it.

But that has been stayed by a federal court basically because someone in the Department of Justice, one of Trump's appointees, wrote a letter saying, We're doing this on racial terms, you know.

And of course, one of the things that's very much not allowed is to do gerrymanders to reduce the power of minority voters. But illegal, maybe?

Under the Voting Rights Act, we're against that. Right.
And so she probably should not have put that in writing. At the moment,

Justice Alito on the Supreme Court has let that map go forward for now, but it's not nailed on that that will happen. So that's five seats the Republicans were hoping to have.

And then what happened in response to that is California, a very blue state, went, well, see how you like

the gerrymander becomes the gerrymandee.

And they've come up with a new map that adds five Democratic-leaning seats. And being California, they had to vote on this.
And they love a ballot measure.

So Gavin Newsome, who very much does want to be president, put this to the people.

The only people opposing it really was Arnie, who was very in favor of the independent redistricting, but he came out and said, terminate the gerrymander, and then didn't really do any other campaigning.

So Gavin Newsom won. And so, sure enough, you're in a situation where the Texas one might not go through, the California one definitely has gone through.

And then places like Indiana, Donald Trump is massively pressuring the lawmakers there. But I thought this was an interesting information point.

There's an Indiana state senator who responded very badly to Trump sent a true social post over Thanksgiving in which he called Kamala Harris's running mate Tim Waltz.

He said he was retarded because of all the things that he was doing in Minnesota. And this guy did a tweet that said, I've got a daughter with Down syndrome.
Words have consequences.

I will be voting no on the gerrymander. And this is very rare.

The Republican Party, and particularly people at lower levels levels who don't want to get firebombed, I mean, people in Indiana are talking about their threats to their physical safety, don't oppose Donald Trump.

You know, you get primaried by MAGA people or you get threats to your office and your home.

And this was interesting to me that this guy said, oh, I'm sorry, there are still some lines in American politics. We don't use language like that.

I wonder if it's the first cracks beginning to show and a lot of people thinking we're going to get walloped in the midterms, the incumbent party traditionally does.

And at some point, unless he really does run for a third term, we're looking forward to this post-Trump future.

Six months, a year ago, it looked completely hopeless for the Democrats, but this is the kind of thermostatic equilibrium of politics.

So, when asked last month who is the Democrats' leader, do you know who won?

Have a guess. Well,

I'd say Newsom. Governor Newsom, Governor of California, has the most name recognition.
Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama, Oprah,

Don't Know. Oh,

don't know came in a thumping 21%.

16% did say Kamala Harris. In third place, nobody.

So,

don't know, don't know and nobody.

Isn't that the answer to the who leads your party?

Actually, that's true. Maybe Kamala Harris has got, she's not got anything else on.
Maybe she could run for the leadership of your party. Let's see.

So, just for any international listeners to this podcast, we have a party in the UK called Your Party, which is our newest party. It's a very left-wing party,

maybe explicitly a socialist party, so you know, hugely exciting, got a lot of grassroots energy behind it. And the two leaders are Jeremy Corbyn and Zara Sultana.

And just for international listeners, I would say imagine Bernie Sanders and AOC,

but a very

cut-price version of that, and they do not get along. But also, they're not the two co-leaders as a result of this.

Which is probably a good thing, because they really don't get on with each other too much. So they've had had a conference in which they've elected not to have a leader.

Yeah, at least they've agreed on that, though. That's the one thing they agreed on that they won't have a leader.

Right, well, they'll have co-leaders that are chosen b b by a long process that starts with an executive committee. They will allow people to be members of other parties as well as them.

It's going to be tricky because we've been talking a lot on this podcast the last couple of weeks about the success of the Greens under Zach Polanski.

And that is a party that moved from a dual leader model to just going, maybe let's just let one guy or one woman have a crack at it, and then it'll be a lot more easy to identify the party with a person and a set of positions.

The thing I would say that I really took away from watching maybe too much of the live stream of the Your Party conference is that there is a difficult split between the anti-colonialist, pro-Palestine bits of the coalition and the socially liberal,

younger, whiter activist part of the coalition.

So already two members of the Gaza independents, two Muslim MPs, male Muslim MPs, resigned from your party, essentially because they're more socially conservative, they said they have some concerns about the definition of woman, all that kind of stuff.

And they were repeatedly attacked from the podium as being transphobes

by younger members.

And the chair kept having to say, Well, actually, we're here to debate the standing orders. Right, right.

But those are the two who've already left the splitters. Yeah, and that's sort of also a bit where, I mean, Corbyn sits uneasily between the two groups, right?

And he did when he was leader of the Labour Party have to bridge this divide. But essentially, your party grew out of these Gaza independents, five male Muslim MPs plus Jeremy Corbyn.

And then Zahra Sultana, who is also from that background, but is much more socially liberal Gen Z about it, kind of bolted onto that. And it's a slightly unhappy mixture.

She boycotted the first day of your party's conference, didn't she? Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. And that was specifically over.
This amused me.

The problem always for parties on the left and for the left side of Labour has always been entryism and kind of Trotskyist sects trying to sort of worm their way in through membership and then affect things in that way.

She was saying specifically right at the outset, we've got to have entriism.

anyone from any Socialist Workers' Party, whatever other Trotskyists want, they've got to be a part of it and that's got to be part of the foundation of the party is that we allow these people in.

So good luck trying to decide anything with no leader and a committee in charge and then a load of different

parties kind of women in the way in there as well. Didn't she also say that it's a 40-year project, this movement?

Maybe by then they'll have agreed. That's good, like the years in the desert.
Yeah, so it's not a quick fix. You know, this is a long-term.

I'm pretty sure that's what Change UK was saying back in the day. Do you remember then? Do you

Jeremy's gonna be

114 years old by the time this 40-year primary. He'll still be making the same speech.
He'll still be chanting oh, Jeremy Corbyn. He'll be fine.

Think about the last time you had a cancel subscription. There's probably some waiting on hold, some guessing at your password, some mind-numbing small talk.

And maybe after all that, you still weren't able to cancel it. Good news.
It doesn't have to be this way. Thanks to Rocket Money.

Rocket Money tracks, manages, and can cancel your subscriptions for you. When you connect your accounts, you'll see a complete picture of all your reoccurring subscriptions all in one place.

Rocket Money organizes your subscriptions by due date and notifies you when something's coming up. So you'll never be caught off guard when you get charged.

If you see a subscription you want to cancel, Rocket Money simplifies the process. Instead of waiting on hold for an hour, you can cancel it right from the app.

Rocket Money will even try to get you a refund for the money you spent on subscriptions you forgot about. Stop wasting your time trying to cancel subscriptions the hard way.

Make your life easier and go to rocketmoney.com slash cancel. That's rocketmoney.com slash cancel or download the app from the Apple app or Google Play Stores.

You ever sit there staring at your plate thinking, why can't this pasta be just a little healthier without ruining it? Yeah, me too. That's why I started using Monch Monch.
It's like a food wingman.

It steps in when your meal's trying to sabotage you. It blocks extra carbs and sugars before your body gets them, adds fiber your gut actually loves, and keeps your blood sugar from roller coaster.

So yeah, I still eat the pasta. I just don't pay for it later.
Make your food work for you, not against you. Go to monchmonch.shop and see what your meals could be with a little backup.

Now, as the party winds down.

No, it's only winding up because there's something incredibly exciting happening in British media, isn't there, Adam? This is huge.

Yeah.

It's the sale of the telegraph. How long have we been talking about this?

This actually been running longer than this podcast now, the attempted attempt to sell off the telegraph it's quite yeah you do get this sort of sense of oh gosh are they it's like seeing someone july 2023 when uh lloyds bank swooped in and said to the uh the the barclay family you can't pay your debts anymore we're going to take your newspapers off of you so the the telegraph has been languishing without an owner for a good good couple of years now and there have been various bids that have come or gone it's emerged in the last few days that the new prospective owner uh of the telegraph he's put in a bid, is Viscount Rothomir, current owner of the Daily Mail and the parent company of the Daily Mail and General Trust.

Can I have a quick recap? So basically, after that happens, they then try and sell it to a Qatari-backed fund. No, no, no, no.

They

initially, Lloyds Bank tried to put it up for auction.

Before they could do that, a fund called Redbird IMI swept in and said, we will pay off the debts of the Barclays in return for receiving the newspapers and at that point, the Spectator as well, the magazine,

in kind of security for those debts.

Then the government intervened because there were protests across the newspaper industry and from journalists on the Telegraph themselves saying we can't possibly have a fund which is backed by the government of the United Arab Emirates coming in and taking control of a British newspaper and everyone agreed this would be terrible.

So the law,

the whole thing was frozen.

Ever since then, the Telegraph has been effectively being run by some independent directors who were the people brought in by the bank in the first place, so not people who necessarily know much about running running newspapers, which has effectively meant that editorially they've been allowed to go completely far and do whatever they wanted to do, which they have taken on with great gusto under editor Chris Evans.

They've been, to my

reckoning,

not the Chris Evans, the DJ, or the one who was Captain America. No, it is the Captain America one.

They might have done a better job.

But this is a very interesting point that we've made somehow in all three sections is the Telegraph have not really had a leader.

Well, they've run lots of leaders

over the last two and and a half years. You've got the Your Party thing.
You know,

we've got a This is your policy of actually, you always come back to the Belgian government having

one for three years. Everything was fine.
What if we just maybe.

Am I an anarchist? No, but there was a terror cell in Belgium, and I remember thinking, oh, maybe actually a year and a half is too long not to have a problem.

And there's Alistair Heath and Alison Pearson at the Telegraph. So, I mean, I, you know, this is okay, the rough side.

But look, the ancient history is over.

Our slightly unstable friend has finally found a new man, and the new man she's found is Viscount one of the old people who were originally going to bid for it in the first place.

Viscount Rothomere, who tried to go out with our friend, I'm going to continue the analogy 20 years ago. He tried to buy the papers but didn't manage to.
He's had two goes so far.

He tried to buy them originally when the Barclays got them from Conrad Black, that other interesting businessman, in 2004 when he lost control of the Telegraph Group.

He came back for another go at the initial auction before it went to the UAE.

At that point,

as I say, the law was changed so that no foreign state would be able to take a stake in a newspaper initially. At that point, the Daily Mail group, Lord Rothermere's group, dropped out because

they were talking to the Qataris and to various other governments in the Middle East about bringing some money in to make a bid for them at that point.

That law has now been tweaked so that foreign governments are allowed to take 15% of a British newspaper group now. But Lord Rothermere, back, back, back,

is saying that he's not going to need any foreign state funding at all. None of that will be involved, which does beg the question, where is the money actually coming from?

Because the other strange thing about this is that he appears to be offering the full 500 million,

which the current sort of impotent owners who aren't allowed to do anything for it want to pay back what they paid in the first place.

But no one thinks it's worth that, right? Even the Telegraph had been admitting that they are not worth that.

They've been saying that a more realistic valuation of the newspaper group is sort of 300 to 350 million.

Why is he offering the full whack then? Sorry to ask a really basic question. It is a very odd question.
Most of us barter. Yeah, yeah,

it does seem an odd one. I mean, the Telegraph is profitable.
If he's looking at a long-term kind of investment in it, you know, there are ways of making that money back.

There will be obvious, as we like to call them in the business world, synergies, or as we like to call them in the journalism world.

Lots of people getting sacked, particularly if I were working in the sort of backroom kind of things of the IT departments or HR or

the business side of either of those. The Teacher desk and the subs desk, right? Like, that's the classic we have.
It's integrate the backroom.

I was going to kind of come on to that because the other thing that's been going on at the Daily Mail Group over the last year, as chronicled in the Street of Shame pages since January, is massive job cuts at the Daily Mail, which is Britain's best-selling newspaper and still sells an enormous number of copies.

So, the Daily Mail, Mail on Sunday, and the

newspaper website, formerly known as the Mail Online, now known as dailymail.co.uk, was sort of shunted together and a load of duplications and stuff were got rid of at that point in January.

They've since made big job cuts to all the other places that they own as well. So that's the eye newspaper, which people sort of forget is part of the mail group.

It's in a sort of separate wing of the company to be kept separate, along with New Scientist, which they also own.

And then last week, literally a day before it emerged that he was offering hundreds of billions of pounds for the Daily Telegraph, journalists at the Metro were told that an awful lot of them were also at risk of redundancy because they need to make massive cost savings kind of across the board.

Again, those cost savings probably still not quite enough to raise that 500 million we're talking about here.

Is the idea to try and create sort of another massive media block in the style of Rupert Murdoch's

Times Sun, formerly News of the World? This is the fascinating thing actually it's going to be much much bigger than anything Rupert Murdoch has ever owned.

Rupert Murdoch was an enormous fuss back in the 80s when he took over the Times and it was involved with the Monopolies and Mergers Commission as then because he was going to be taking over two major daily newspapers and three Sunday newspapers.

This we'll bring together when we've just mentioned them. It's going to be four separate daily newspapers and a couple of Sundays as well.

So in terms of a block and in terms of circulation as well, Press Gazette has done some calculations, they're going to be a million ahead of Murdoch's titles in terms of circulation.

Combined circulation of everything, if this deal goes through and the mail group take over the Telegraph and keep all of the titles they've got at the moment, 2.5 million copies a day they're going to be selling.

The other thing that's changed enormously is of course is paper circulation is a very different piece now to what it was in the 1980s.

These are all essentially digital operations, you know, they're websites, and a lot of them are international-facing.

And Rotherme has said specifically that the Telegraph, that's the bit he sees as ripe for exploitation. They're going to turn it into very much an American-facing thing.

They think there's a big market out there for a slightly classier than Fox News, kind of broadsheet-y type, but very, very right-wing coverage, which is what is the direction the mail is moving in.

It's quite MAGA at the moment under Chris Evans. But the Telegraph's the sort of ABC1 version of that, isn't it?

That's the kind of heritage foundation sort of for the elites, you know, for the kind of the you know, the telegraph always used to be known as the paper for the sort of retired colonel in the shires, and those people in the American context now are MAGA, right?

Whereas the American male is still pursuing it's like it's very strongly aimed at like middle, particularly lower-middle-class women, right? It's very

I think they'd see their competition as being things like um People magazine and U.S. Weekly, they're much more kind of celeb focused uh on their own their American kind of facing stuff.

So, I think if they've got any sense, and certainly Ron Mo's talking about keeping them as two very separate and distinct businesses, although obviously there will be be those combinations to be done

on staffing between the two of them. Politically, they're coming from a sort of similar sort of area.
Can I just check? Is

Sir Herbert Gusset now MAGA?

If he's retired Colonel Herbert Gussett, you know, 5th platoon of the whatevers, then, yeah, he's got a massive American flag in his driveway. He's in an SUV.

He's in the Gusset wagon, which does about like two miles to the gallon.

His grandchildren definitely bought him one of those red MAGA hats a few Christmases ago and got him to pose for a selfie wearing it backwards awkwardly, didn't they? No, this is so sad.

I just like the idea of the sidebar of shame in the Telegraph website. Yeah, I don't

think the retired colonels and the packing on the PDA. I mean, but presumably,

when this was first mooted, this merger, Lord Rothermere wrote a piece in The Times, which was a sort of weird thing to see that happening, or was interviewed in the Times.

He was interviewed, yeah, yeah, yeah. Saying essentially his argument was the thing is no one reads newspapers anymore, so it's fine if I own loads of them.
I think that that was an encapsulation.

We've got a strange situation everywhere where the Telegraph is saying, we're not worth all this money, and the man who wants to buy them is saying, oh, no one's interested in newspapers anymore.

Right, but essentially the argument was like, but people are getting their news from a really wide range of sources, like TikTok and social media.

So although this looks like it's edging close, not to a monopoly, but certainly to a huge market share, it isn't really. But those things are not quite market in the same way.
That's the thing.

Taking up with Lord Rothermere. It is likely that Lisa Andy, the Secretary of State for Cultural Media and Sport, is going to intervene in this one.

And probably, probably, as happened with the last big takeover we had, was when Trinity Mirror took over the Express titles to create Reach PLC.

And she ordered investigations by the Competition Markets Authority and Ofcom into that and the effect that that would have on the market.

That was way through, again, that was an enormous share of the market. That was way through partly because those papers were kind of at the opposite end of the political spectrum.

Daily Mirror, traditionally labor-supporting, Express, traditionally very sort of traditionally old school conservative.

Hasn't really carried on that way, given that they're sharing enormous numbers of their pages now and have kind of been shunted together in a way that is not working out brilliantly for all the journalists.

It's not a happy ship.

Very definitely.

There's very few newspapers out there that are particularly happy ships at the moment, but certainly the ones owned by Reach PLC are particularly unhappy and slightly sub-aquatic at the moment.

That said, though, it is a good sign about the healthiness of our press and democracy that Lisa Nandi will refer this to a kind of arm's length thing, right?

Whereas if you think about, we've talked about this in the last pod, one of the things that Donald Trump has absolutely done is just blocked media mergers that he doesn't like because they've been mean to him personally.

So if this were America, Lisa Nandy would be going, I think we could stand to hear a few nice things about Lisa Nandy, the Telegraph, if you'd like to get approval for this. Right.

A couple of things just to add to that.

We've talked about how most readership has migrated online and the difficulties of measuring that, which is something that Lisa Nandy's going to have to get ahead around.

In terms of profits, an enormous amount of it still comes from sales of paper copies of newspapers. It's something like 75% of the reach titles.
I think it's up there.

The Telegraph, I think, is something like 80%.

It's an enormous amount of money still coming. Well, they've got expensive now, newspapers.
And you've got a kind of loyal readership who are getting them delivered to their door every day still.

They are an older readership. They are, sadly, you know, the nature of mortality means they're not going to be around for all that much longer.
So that is always going down.

But that is certainly what brings the money in much, much more than any online advertising in this country has ever done.

One of the reasons everyone is keen on exploiting an American market for British newspapers, and all of them now have, or certainly all of the tabloids, have launched specific US-facing websites, which are sort of separate operations to the British ones.

Is that in America there's some valuable advertising out there which people are willing to put on

newspaper and magazine websites. You can actually make some money off online advertising out here, which is a thing that no one has ever found a way of making work over here.

It is also the case, isn't it, that quite a lot of people in the States like reading about rainy porridge island. I think that's a

New York Times. They're completely doing that.
The hellhole that is London or Birmingham and how we're all living under Schreyer law as well.

There is a big seller, you know, to how awful the old country has become. For those of us that still live here, because the rest of us are off to Dubai, aren't we? Absolutely, we are.

I mean, you can't overstate that. There is a kind of weird place for Britain in the American, like American MAGA right imagination.

I mean, to the extent that Elon Musk described us as being like the hobbits in the Shire, and we're like, well, and therefore we didn't realise that the orcs were coming and Sauron was coming, right?

And they need to be defended by the men of Gondor, which I think is him with the Tesla. Oh, he wishes it was Aragorn, doesn't he? He's barely gimbling.
Man in charge of Army of Trolls. Yeah.

Meets back on the menu, Laz. Sorry.

And the other thing I would just say is that

the future does seem to be these larger and larger media groups and these huge, huge takeovers.

I mean, even to come back to Rupert Murdoch, he realised a few years ago that with Fox and Sky, he was just not at the sort of scale where he could compete with the really big streamers and the really big studios.

Fox was sold on to to Disney, Sky to Comcast. Now we've got Sky, as part of Comcast, looking at buying up ITV, the broadcast side of things.

So I think the future seems to be in everything getting bigger and bigger in order to compete with those tech giants like kind of Facebook and Google and people like that.

So we're going to see a lot more, I think, of this kind of like consolidation and growth of media brands going on.

Well, I, for one, I'm just hugely relieved that the Telegraph's going to be owned by someone at least at Viscount level. I just think that feels like a sort of...
Are you reassured by that?

It's as it should be, isn't it? It's not for a baronet, but I'm reassured.

Okay, that's it for this episode of page 94. Thank you so much for listening.
Thank you to Adam, Helen, and Saba.

If you would like more Private Eye in your life, the thing to do is go to your local news agent or TG Jones, just so I'd give them a little shout-out and buy a copy.

If you want to find out even more, you can go to private.co.uk and get yourself a subscription. What a good Christmas present it would make for someone in your life.
Or even the annual, I hear.

Oh, what a good idea. If you have two friends in your life, that's all your Christmas problems sorted, isn't it? Easy.
Brilliant. We'll be back again in a fortnight with another of these.

And the only remaining thanks are to Matt Hill of Rethink Audio for producing. Bye for now.
Cal State East Bay was founded on a belief that every student holds incredible potential.

And when that potential is unlocked, doors open to opportunity, to purpose, to a better future for their families and communities.

Our students are modern-day pioneers, breaking new ground and paving the way for generations to come.

Here, they find an intellectual oasis, a place to pause, reflect, and rise, gaining the knowledge and confidence to make their mark on the world. Enroll today at csueastbay.edu slash start.

The howlidays are here. For your dog, that means three things.
A visit from the uncle who always drops food on the floor. Lots of decorations to knock over during playtime.

And of course, holiday toys and treats from Barkbox.

This year, Barkbox is bringing you collections inspired by classic holiday films like Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, the Muppet Christmas Carol, and Peanuts.

Barkbox is the perfect gift to keep them snarfing and slobbering all season long. Subscribe today and we'll double your first delivery for free.
Just visit bark.co.

The country's best chefs know there's nothing like the quality of Nyman Ranch meats. That's because exceptional flavor starts on the farm, where our animals are raised by independent U.S.

family farmers who set the standard for humane animal animal care and sustainable farming practices. Every step is handled with care from farm to plate.

It's why award-winning chefs across the country choose Nyman Ranch meats to serve their guests. Nyman Ranch, raised with care.