We Haven't Always Told Our Story as Well as We Should

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Hello and welcome to Strong Message Here from BBC Radio 4, a journalist and a comedy writer's guide to the use and abuse of political language.

It's Helen Lewis.

And it's Amanda Yuchi.

And this week, the government turns one year old, so we're looking at language that has defined their first first year in office.

I want to jump off with this phrase, Amando.

We haven't always told our story as well as we should, which Keir Starmer said to a reporter in Canada recently.

Would you agree with that?

How do you grade Keistama on his end of term report?

Oh, well, he's a hard worker.

Shows promise.

Shows promise.

I think that's right.

I think it's one of the most perceptive things he's ever said.

And I know I've said this before.

I always used to be against the idea of turning politics into a story, you know, the framing, that control freakery of if only we just shouted at the media and told them what they ought to say about us, then everything would be fine.

Why don't they write it down?

That's all changed.

And so much now is about, dare I say it, the vibe that is generated by whatever's going on.

A lot of what we feel about politics is that it's really, I mean, this is a truism, it's really hard, it's very complicated, and therefore anything that helps guide anyone through the complexity of it.

Starmer in particular particular is not someone, I mean, leadership is more than just managing, isn't it?

It's about having a clear set of goals, a defined aim, a sense of where you want to take things.

And he doesn't seem yet able to do that.

His response to, what is your story, is to go back to, well, what we're going to be doing is we're going to be speaking for ordinary people, working people, we're going to deliver for them, we've got a series of missions, is to go back into that language that actually we find difficult to grasp.

Yeah, I was trying to think about one of his five missions and his six milestones were.

And I find it quite telling that I can remember one of the things off Tony Blair's pledge card from 97, which was reduced class sizes.

But I can't remember.

I know there was something about the NHS.

That's all my mental Rolodex is returning.

And it's something that former strong message here guest Stephen Bush of the FT has said many times, which is the problem with not having a leader at the top of the organization who articulates a clear vision.

Everyone further down the organization can't make decisions knowing what the yardstick they're making them for.

So I think, you know, Starmer and Rachel Reeves have tried to say it's all about growth.

And then they've done things like you turn on the winter fuel payment, which isn't really about growth.

You know, it's a different, actually, that's a concession to the electoral reality that pensioners vote and were quite unhappy and it kept coming up in focus groups.

Yes, that's right.

I mean, Liz Truss went on about growth.

It clearly didn't work just using that phrase again and again, because we need to know what growth means.

It's the old Biden problem of him saying the economy is growing at such a rate, inflation's is coming down, but individuals were saying, well, I don't feel it.

And I think it's also just a symptom of how the election was conducted, which is to say very little specifically.

other than you know things will get marginally better yes uh because of the unspoken thing which was there isn't much money we've got to play with partly because we've fenced ourselves in with these promises that we won't raise taxes and and we've put ourselves into this very tight corner you don't want to say that and therefore other narratives crop out to justify certain unpopular things.

Like the cuts on disability and welfare benefits were sold as some kind of moral.

It's a moral move we're making.

We want people to get into work.

You know, Liz Kennel said, this will provide a lot of certainty to people on benefits.

Whereas, in fact, it created a lot of

panic and worry

on in-work benefits.

So, how is cutting them going to help people get in?

And also, it came in two phases when suddenly Richard Reeves discovered she needed a little bit more money to reduce payments.

So they found another moral reason.

Well, it reminds me a bit of Theresa May talking about there's no magic money tree after she spaffed out, was it $11 billion to kind of buy off the DUP?

What you have to be more honest about is the fact that you have a limited amount of money and these are your priorities, either moral or electoral.

Which I think actually the electorate would understand.

Well,

you say that.

I say electorate.

I mean,

I think winter fuel payment debunks that, really, because I think the the polling showed that about 60% of people thought the correct policy on that was to keep the means testing but raise the bar.

So

it was only 11,500, which is a very low income.

And people thought it should be more than that.

You should be entitled to a bit of help, but not the level to which it has now, in fact, been raised.

Yeah, I know what you mean.

I feel very sad because I don't think my opinion of Starmer's moral core, I think he takes the job really seriously.

I think that's a pleasant change from some of our previous recent prime ministers.

But I don't think he has found his voice and in a way to articulate what he thinks is wrong with Britain and how he can fix it.

But also, why not encourage others to provide some of that voice?

You know, he's got other politicians there who are very articulate and are much better at.

But clearly he doesn't trust them because if you look at the media rounds that they do, so where's Treating of Health Secretaries trusted to take some fast bowls?

Someone, for example, like Angela Raynor, you know, appeals to certain electorate that Stalmer doesn't.

And it is the thing that was there when Blair was prime minister, there was a little bit of it under Thatcher, I think, which is any other cabinet minister who starts to have a profile is then regarded as a threat.

Now, it may be a self-fulfilling thing is in that the Prime Minister doesn't regard them as a threat until the media starts calling them a threat, which is the time that the Prime Minister then decides that they might be a threat.

So tries to kind of push them out of the way.

Yeah, I think anybody who's a veteran of the Blair years is scarred by the Blair-Brown wars and just the feeling that, you know, any kind of idea that there are competing factions within government is always a bad story for the government, which is not necessarily how people experienced it at the time.

You know, sometimes having two people from different ideological perspectives making arguments against each other makes the, you know, the outcome better.

But the other thing I saw some academics discussing on Blue Sky recently, which I thought was a fair point, which is that often the government treats it like the best thing you can do as a minister is escape from a media round, which is what they call when you get sent out to do all the days grid of interviews, without having said anything really memorable at all.

And I think it was Rob Ford, who's a professor at Manchester, who said that's a kind of hangover from the days in which the media was very controlled, there were a limited number of outlets.

And if you know, if there wasn't a particularly exciting clip for the six o'clock news, that was kind of it.

You'd escaped scrutiny for the day.

That's not true anymore.

So, what you do is have Starmer's government who think the best thing they can do is go out and play an extremely straight bass.

Yes, no one remembers anything at all.

And then Nigel Farage or Robert Jemrick or whoever it might be.

It's a snow wildly.

Goes out and

get a six.

Yeah, it's absolutely entertaining and compelling.

And we live in an attention economy.

So if you are the government, yes, you get a huge advantage in that you're actually enacting policies.

But you can't just decline to draw any attention to yourself about that.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, since this is not just one year on from the election, but also this is the last of our full episodes before we take a limited break over the summer.

We'll news about that later.

We're also kind of going to take stock over some of the issues and phrases that came our way over the last, I think, nearly 40 episodes.

Do you have any favourites

or new ones?

Yes.

I still don't think anything will, for me, top the tepid bath of managed decline.

It's just so weird.

So weird.

Which was Starmer really having a goal.

Was it at the civil service, I think?

Yeah, and just generally our kind of more of a sort of trusty kind of feeling that Britain doesn't kind of really innovate anymore, which I think is clearly an analysis that everybody across the entire political spectrum shares.

Yes.

But that's something one of those phrases that's had the opposite effect because he's really trying to, he was trying to galvanize us into coming up with mavericks and disruptors and so on, rather than this tepid bath of man-aged decline.

But the phrase we remember now conveys this image of, you know, we don't think about the galvanized.

Do you know what I did?

What the problem is.

I think the metaphor he's going for is a kind of boiling frog one, right?

Which is the idea that decline gets worse and worse and worse and we haven't noticed it because we're so used to it.

But that's not the way that baths work.

A tepid bath is not getting hotter on its own cold you've been in it for too long and it's cooling down yeah yeah but you are i think you are aware when the bath becomes tepid no one likes the tepid bath they prefer the hot bath yeah yeah so it's dear kissed armor update reboiling water but you were going for the other

something sadly appropriate about that's the phrase we associate with isn't it what about you uh well i came across one National Health Recovery Mission Champion.

That's just nouns, isn't it?

That's just nouns.

I know.

And I came across this, I think it was the journalist Isabel Hardman mentioned it in a piece several months ago.

And she was talking about how, and this picks up very much on how our government works in the UK, which is, you know, there are lots of jobs that the Prime Minister can give to his or her parliamentary party, to his or her MPs.

That's the thing.

We don't have the executive separate from the legislature.

The executive actually controls and patronizes the legislature.

So if you want to stop your party having a protest or voting against you, try and think of some jobs you might give them.

And one was to someone became the National Health Recovery Mission Champion.

I have no idea what it means.

I'm sure they're doing a great job missioning the recovery and championing it.

And apparently there is one of those jobs for each of the five missions or the six missions.

But it also doesn't reflect particularly well on the fact that we don't know who any of those people are.

And it is also kind of

a function of the fact that there is very little money to put into stuff.

That's kind of been the recurring thing we've been hearing.

And therefore, I've often found that a lot of the signal legislation that goes through is it creates great headlines, but it's usually about stuff that's been criminalised or decriminalised.

but doesn't involve investment.

So, you know, it's hate speech or gender issues or, you know, gay marriage was the Cameron one.

I think you're exactly right about that.

I remember right back in 2015 when Maria Miller, then a Tory MP, ran the Women Inequalities Inquiry into Transgender Issues, and the biggest ask from that was more money for mental health services and the NHS.

And sure enough, they didn't get that.

What they got was self-ID, which turned into an incredibly controversial, now overturned proposal.

And I think that's you've seen a couple of things in this parliament in the last year.

So, the assisted dying bill, which was put through as a backbench bill,

the health secretary voted against, disowns and doesn't.

Which he says there is no money for it.

Yeah, which is up there, I think, really, with David Cameron agreeing to a referendum that he didn't want to enact if it passed, you know, in Brexit.

And then the decriminalisation of abortion, again, tagged on as an add-on to a crime bill.

And, you know, those are quite big steps.

And I think there's a feeling if you don't have the debate about them beforehand, it can all be sorted out afterwards.

I'm not sure that's going to, in either of those cases, work out that well.

It didn't work out that well.

Sucks.

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

We demand to be home.

Winner, best score, we demand to be seen.

Winner, best book.

We demand to be quality.

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

Suffs, playing the Orpheum Theater, October 22nd through November 9th.

Tickets at BroadwaySF.com.

So what do this animal

and this animal

and this animal

have in common?

They all live on an organic valley farm.

Organic valley dairy comes from small organic family farms that protect the land and the plants and animals that live on it from toxic pesticides, which leads to a thriving ecosystem and delicious, nutritious milk and cheese.

Learn more at ov.co-op and taste the difference.

Well, for gender.

Oh, and I think the other thing we've ended up falling into, there was a recent case of a man who burnt a Quran, and the kind of justification for convicting him of a public order offence was that people were really upset by this to an extent that might lead them to violence.

That's getting it exactly the wrong way around, right?

That essentially, you know, there's this concept of the kind of heckler's veto.

Well, this is the kind of jihadists' veto, right?

Which is that if people are sufficiently upset about it, they then get more of a say in what actions other people should do.

What an obvious perverse incentive that is towards encouraging people to violence because then you can say, well, they've been violent, so we have to not do the things that would upset them.

Yeah, yeah.

I'd be interested to see if the number of acts of legislation has gone up over the last 10 or 15 years on inexpensive adjustments to the law to create the headline or to create a kind of a legacy that allows you to say you were a social reformer.

Yeah, I think everybody wants a bit of that, don't they?

Everyone wants to be kind of the Roy Jenkins of now.

And I think that's, you find that actually among the Conservatives as well as Labour.

It's not purely a kind of a left-wing thing in the way that it once was.

The other thing I think is politicians like doing is creating statutory duties.

And this has been one of the big problems with HS2, the train line, is just the idea that lots of quangos get a say about what things that they would like, and they don't have to take into account the costs.

And you end up with a situation where you get lots of people, you know, it is really letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.

The same thing happens with housing development as well and requirements for social housing.

Ultimately, that I think has been hijacked by NIMBY's in order to open the best way now to oppose a housing development, but not to feel bad about it is to say, oh, we should do it if there's more social housing.

But then that makes it uncommercial for the developers to do.

So guess what?

Your nice amenities and view get preserved.

And I think you're right, like the empty rhetoric is probably a sign of deeper structural malaise, I guess.

Yes, yeah, the tepid bath.

In fact, the tepid bath.

I discussed last week with Marina High delivery, and

I got a not a tweet, was it?

A blue sky was a blue do we have I can't remember we had this discussion it's a terrible word that you mustn't look up

a skeet that's the one don't look that up from Chris Gom who says whenever I hear a politician say deliver I think of this story and he sent a link to a story about how orca killer whales attack sharks and bite out their livers

so that's one too

promises made promises delivered delivered thank you orcas once again showing the way on that one I also wanted to talk a bit about the other side of I think the starmer blandness problem, which is that it has created a space that I think you are see more and more,

I would call it even kind of inflammatory.

Certainly, it's race-baiting rhetoric on the right, particularly on Elon Musk's ex,

and now clearly, also therefore filtering into the kind of stuff that is being read by some politicians on the right.

And there are a couple of phrases that I think people need to know to understand some of the arguments that are being made there.

One of them is the Boris wave.

Now, is this a

Boris wave?

The Boris wave is the spike in immigration post-2019 under Boris Johnson, which is real.

It absolutely happened.

And it's quite funny that the people who are upset about this are mostly Brexiteers.

And, you know, this is exactly what happens when we got rid of free movement from Europe, but we needed to source jobs from elsewhere in the world.

Yet, if you're going to detach yourselves from the world's biggest markets and then say, now we're going to do trade deals,

you're already at a disadvantage.

You know, if you go to, like, for example, India, you're never going to be an advantage within, because you've detached yourself, yourself, you've already made yourself weaker.

Yeah, and then that is being linked to something else, which is, I don't know if you've heard this phrase too, about the UK or UK.

How are you spelling that then?

Y-O-O-K-A-Y.

Uh-huh.

So, the UK is what you would tweet over a picture of some black or brown people shoplifting or riding around on stolen line bikes or they're being graffiti on the train, right?

It is about this argument that Britain's social fabric is decaying, and that is attributable directly to the Boris wave.

Okay, so it is partly an argument I think that lots of people have sympathy with, which is that if you do go to town centres, they are often now full of betting shops and coffee shops.

As Marina was saying last week, you know, the high streets have decayed, prices are high, you know, all of that kind of stuff.

But it has been kind of explicitly racialized, essentially.

And of course, these posts will not actually be as explicit as that.

They will just put the one image against the word UK.

Yeah.

And you're then meant to kind of join the dots.

But it's a bit like the way that Breitbart, the very right-wing website during the the 2010s, used to have a tab that was called Black Crime.

And they just reported every single...

All I'm doing is reporting some statistics.

Right,

I'm not saying there's anything we should take from it.

Yeah, you did not need the ears of an Alsatian to be able to hear that dog whistle.

And there is a similar thing with the UK.

So

I think it's a very potent political strategy of melding together things that people undoubtedly notice and feel unhappy about.

And then spoken or unspoken is a racial undertone.

And sometimes it's there, it's not.

We talked about Robert Jemrick in his video, his very popular viral video about tube evaders.

He doesn't necessarily need to make the correct.

Right, but the weird Turkish barbershops is as close as he comes to talking about the subtext there.

But he knows that there are other people out there who are making that argument in much more explicitly racial terms.

And that's right, which brings us back to Starmer's approach to all these things:

you know, how he's going to attack reform, is not to

show how his views are distinguished from Nigel Farage's, is to sort of half copy.

So his main message is: if you like reform, you'll quite like us, which is not the galvanizing kind of thing.

Yeah, Nigel Farage's is something right.

And therefore, there is this vacuum.

There is no one arguing publicly saying this is wrong, these connections that you make it.

You know, if you look at statistics, it shows a different picture.

They're not being challenged, and therefore it's left to us to, as you say, join the dots the way these people want us to.

Yeah, and I think it's so Jim Watson of London Centric did a really good piece about this

Dominic Cummings back group called Looking for Growth.

And one of the things that they do is talk a lot about things like vandalism on the tube.

They've done vigilante tube cleaning, which I have to say.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

You know, and Jim, to his credit, went and looked into why people feel that the tube in London is kind of crap and covered in graffiti.

And one of the reasons is that some stations are at the ends of the lines, don't have very many users on them, so and then other stations aren't heavily staffed.

So that's the bit where you can get on and do the tagging.

Also, the trains can't be taken out of service for cleaning very often because they don't have enough trains.

The stock is old.

And so, that's a story about social decrease, which you can either read as Britain's gone to the dogs, or you can read it as TfL is really overstretched and hasn't had enough investment for a long time and really struggled through the pandemic and had to be bailed out.

You know, I just think that Kirstama needs to be a bit on the pitch.

If he doesn't agree with the Robert Jamrick proposition about the fact that Britain is rubbish, then

what is his alternative explanation for the things that people undoubtedly see and feel in their everyday lives?

Yeah, and one thing that also doesn't cost money that is also effective is sense of place and sense of pride in your community and your country.

It's not that hard to speak positively about the things that we do have and that we do well, the arts, culture, our immense generosity.

It's shocking that there are so many food banks and maternity banks.

But actually, it's also a mark of

how open and generous we are as a country in terms of communities.

But we don't talk about that.

A lot of national conversation politics is reduced to these very kind of data-driven economic points.

Not enough about what we are as a people, I think.

There's a very interesting, very long profile by Tom McTabe, the new editor of the New Statesman of Starma.

And he, in it, Starma both expresses regret for island of strangers, you know, that phrase that we talked about a few weeks ago.

But also, there's a really, I just want to read it to to you because I think it's fascinating.

There's a bit where Tom writes, you know, he's trying to get Starmer to articulate his vision.

And he says, what was the central thing that went wrong in the country and therefore the central mission of his government to put right?

Of all my questions, this is the one he struggles with the most.

The words come, but the answer is long-winded, circuitous, disjointed.

What was the central Tory mistake?

It's a big question, Starma says, searching for the answer which he should not only know, but feel.

I thought it was a very good way of capturing it.

Well, here's something that Stan to say, I think you mentioned it.

We put it on a Kioskama metaphor tree, I think, which he talked about mainlining AI into the veins of the UK,

which was an extraordinary image.

It's up there with, you know, your turbocharges and you're at scales and you're we're going to move fast.

Every now and then you get these kind of very energetic phrases in speeches, but unattached to any financial commitment that somehow just by kind of exciting us with the prospect of something, it will happen.

Yeah.

And yet, you know, as we've said a number of times in this program, the idea that AI is going to be the future that will

be.

But I'm very ambivalent about AI.

I've been trying to

sort through my feelings about it because there are obvious use cases for it that are really interesting.

For example, it's very useful for radiographers, right?

Yeah.

And actually, it doesn't seem to have devastated the profession, but it's helped make them better at their jobs.

Because, for example, it can spot some breast cancers earlier

when they're smaller stage.

So there are things that.

Yes, it's good at pointing pointing out in a faster way than any of us could do, patterns within data.

I think we will end up being having it integrated in the workplace.

I don't think it's a complete hype machine.

At the same time, there are a lot of people hyping it in a way

that suggests that it can cause these incredible productivity gains that basically hopefully solve all our problems, which I think is a bit the politicians are clinging to.

That's the thing that they're wooed by, but all the evidence shows that if you speak to a lot of these people, I mentioned this last week, privately who work in that sector, they say we don't actually actually know whether it can be improved much further than it actually is.

It can get a bit more sophisticated.

It can maybe work faster.

But, you know, you give it a complex problem that involves interpersonal skills.

It falls apart.

Oh, my husband's been playing tic-tac-toe with ChatGPT in the last couple of weeks.

He got an enterprise license for it.

I did say this is where one of these stories ends up with you kind of proposing to the AI, isn't it?

You start, oh, well, we argued so much and then we fell in love.

Has it cheated or changed the rules?

Well, it just keeps losing again that it ought not to be able to lose.

It's not apologised.

Yes, that's the thing he said was fascinating about it.

He said, You've lost again, you shouldn't be able to lose here.

And it goes, Yes, you're right.

No.

And it always says, It does this kind of thing.

I'll hold my hands up.

You've got me.

I just sort of think it basically reacts a bit like Boris Johnson.

It just kind of goes, No, no, no, no, I don't know.

And then does exactly the same thing again.

It's like the house elf.

What's that in?

Dobby, the house elf.

Sorry, Master.

But that's, yeah, that's.

I just.

Sorry, Mrs.

Helen.

Sorry.

The fascinating thing is that they've programmed it to be very convincing.

Yes, exactly.

But not very factual.

And it's, yeah, yeah, anyway, which is very like a politician.

The story that's not told is

how various companies who are a little bit more under the radar, like Palantir,

Alex Karp, who said this at one of their quarterly shareholders calls, which go online.

I mean, this is interesting from somebody who basically runs a company.

He said, we are crushing it.

We've dedicated our company to the service of the West.

and the United States of America, and we're doing it in the United Kingdom.

Palantir is here to make our institutions.

We partner with the very best in the world and when it's necessary to scare enemies and on occasion kill them.

We hope you're in favor of that and enjoy being a partner.

Yes, because they're involved in weapon systems.

I love that.

There's something beautiful about the language there, which is a blend of like purest distilled essence of LinkedIn.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But also like,

I have a lethal weapon.

Yeah.

It's sort of like imagine.

Two guns, basically.

Guns and bombs.

Like Terminator, but LinkedIn Terminator is that register that he's gone for.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I look forward to hearing more of that kind of language in the next year.

We will kill them.

We hope you enjoy being a partner in our march towards death for our enemies.

But that company has our NHS data.

Well, I, for one, feel more happy about partnering with them.

There was a great line in Sam Altman of OpenAI, has partnered with Johnny I, formerly of Apple, for these kind of new fancy AI products.

And he said, we know we don't have artificial general intelligence yet because we still have diseases.

And I thought this is a really fascinating linguistic insight into the fact that, talk about, you know, when you've got a hammer, everything is a nail.

That he thinks that solving diseases is a medical engineering problem.

Right.

Rather than, for example, we invented these incredibly brilliant mRNA vaccines in record speed, and then the problem was getting people to take them.

Yes.

Yes.

And why wouldn't you think there's also a human problem in all of this?

So is he arguing that in the end, AI or AGI will get rid of disease?

Yes.

And then that's why I say the radiography example, you know, it's brilliant.

But if you can't get women to take mammograms because they feel scared about the procedure or they don't know when they're at risk or whatever it might be, then it's pointless.

These are human problems.

I remember being at a kind of Google-sponsored event, like a TED Talk, where the head of Deep Mind,

Demisisabus, that's the one, had two things on his kind of presentation slide.

He said, with Deep Mind, we want to do one,

solve the problem of AI.

And then once we've done that, we will do two, and then solve everything else.

And that was a proposition.

That was his belief.

People chuckled and went, don't laugh.

I'm serious.

He might as well have put up the underpants gnome.

From South Park, you know,

one like harvest underpants, two question marks.

There is this belief.

But what we know so far about AI is very good at, you know, drawing together data.

It's also very effective

lying to you about what it knows.

At advising governments and which buildings to bomb and what to leave alone.

There was something I noticed about so Google always, going back to Google, Google always had this thing of like, if we do AI, it will only be for good.

You know, don't be evil was their original kind of setting.

But Ken Walker, who's the chief legal officer at Google, explained recently why Google has now moved,

decided to remove its prohibition against using AI for weapons and surveillance.

So his quote was, he explained it would be good for society for Google to be part of evolving geopolitical discussions.

While it may be that some of the strict prohibitions that were in, the first vision of the AI principles, don't jive well with those more nuanced conversations we're having now.

It remains the case that our North Star through all this is that the benefits substantially outweigh the risks.

That's like, don't jive.

I really, that should belong on the, maybe we need to have the AI metaphor tree, but is your North Star jiving well, Amanda?

That's the question we all ask ourselves.

They're now decided to allow its AI to work with military and surveillance and weapon systems.

It's not a terrible thing, it's just something that might not jive well with our previous controls.

I presume the real explanation is all of our competitors are, and so we'd like to be able to do that.

We'd like to have government contracts too.

So,

what was the point of buying this conversation?

One thing we haven't done yet, looking at the time we've been on errors, is mark the slight passing of Elaine Musk.

Eileen Musk.

Do you think we've now reached and got over Peak Musk?

Yeah, I mean, unless unless he gets to Mars.

That's unlikely, looking at what's been happening to his rockets.

But yeah, but I mean, he would always say that you expect some level of technical failure.

Unfortunately, as I've said many times, you can't really apply that principle to a government because it's not how people feel about their social situations.

Do you know that?

The thing is, you know, last week we were talking about climate change.

I think one of the things that has, because of all the madness going on everywhere else, really been under discussed and uncovered is the fact that Elon Musk, in what, like four months, basically managed to come in and destroy the U.S.

aid

whole program.

You know, malaria prevention programmes, AIDS prevention programmes.

I think that realistically, of all the things that Trump and his White House have done in that term and all the discussion we've had, that is probably going to lead to the biggest number of deaths.

Well, it's happening already.

Yeah.

And people have answered.

But

almost not at all discussed.

Bill Cates said something about Elon Musk.

He said the richest man in the world is going to kill some of the poorest children in the world, which I thought was, for Bill Gates, A, unusually spicy and memorable, but also quite rare to have billionaire on billionaire rhetorical violence.

So, yeah, a very interesting.

I mean, Bill Gates, to be fair, has to rehabilitate some of his own reputation after having been friends with Jeffrey Epstein, which is the kind of thing you'd place lower down the CV these days than previously.

Anything else before we wrap up about things that have come your way over the last,

how long have we been on air now?

It feels like 40 years.

In fact, it's a bit last time.

It's 40 weeks, I think.

Yes.

This was originally going to be an eight-part series, but by public demand or

lack of anything to replace us with,

once the bots arrive, once the Radio 4 bots arrive and we're no longer required.

I think it's been a really interesting time to do this because we have, after a long period of Conservative rule, had a complete change of government that promised to be transformative.

And watching that run into the brick wall of reality has

been interesting.

And whatever you say about Donald Trump since January, he has been a consequential president, the most neutral of adjectives.

And I think that, you know, we're

recording this at a time where the political language has changed, right?

The kind of politicians are competing in this sort of marketplace of attention.

That's interesting.

The radical right is gaining ground.

You know, reformer now leading in polls consistently.

Like, there's been a lot of change.

Given that Rima is to look at language primarily, it has been fascinating seeing how much the right words matter or how the wrong words are utilized, that the power of words and the power of rhetoric, not in the kind of 1930s way, demagoguery, but the way words still matter, even in a media environment where everything is very fast and technical, and it's, it's still

still what a politician says still has massive impact on how we feel

and how events unfold.

So just to go, we'll see what happens, as Donald Trump says, is

falls wide of the mark.

So I suppose I want to leave this before we go for a summer break, the quote from George Orwell's fantastic essay, Politics in the English Language, which he wrote in 1946, just after the war, where he wrote this, one ought to recognise that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end.

I mean hopefully true and also the kind of thing you would say as a writer or in our case for as a podcaster.

Maybe aren't we in some ways the people who are saving democracy Arvande?

Oh I like to hope so.

Yeah.

Saving something.

Yeah.

And we're about to break for the summer so I think

we should probably thank people for their attention to this matter.

Very good.

Thanks for listening to Strong Message Here.

Throughout the summer we'll be popping up weekly with with a run of Strong Message Here, Strong Recommend.

Helen, what is Strong Recommend?

That's our mini series of short episodes where each week we'll recommend a book, a film, a TV series, an album, a video game, it might be in my case.

Anything else that we've enjoyed that has had an impact on language, political or otherwise.

So you can listen, then check out our recommendations and let us know what you think of our taste and if it's any good.

And these episodes will be available weekly in our podcast feed.

So make sure you're subscribed on BBC Sons.

Goodbye.

Goodbye.

Hello, Russell Kane here.

I used to love British history.

Be proud of it.

Henry VIII, Queen Victoria, massive fan of stand-up comedians, obviously Bill Hicks, Richard Pryor.

That has become much more challenging for I am the host of BBC Radio 4's Evil Genius, the show where we take heroes and villains from history and try to work out were they evil or genius.

Do not catch up on BBC Sounds by searching Evil Genius if you don't want to see your heroes destroyed.

But if, like me, you quite enjoy it, have a little search.

Listen to Evil Genius with me, Russell Kane.

Go to BBC Sounds and have your world destroyed.

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