The New Brexit

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BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts.

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.

With myself, I'm Andre Lucci.

And me back again, it's Helen Lewis.

You are, you are.

Here you are.

You've been away for three weeks.

And in that time, nothing much has happened domestically, internationally.

My God.

Yes.

I'm not saying me leaving the podcast with you.

It's caused war with Iran.

But we will discuss, we are going to discuss huge and apocalyptic themes this week because we're going to look at

the language of what Nigel Farage described as the new Brexit, which is net zero.

But first of all, you haven't been taking three weeks off, have you?

You've been touring with a book.

I have.

That doesn't make you a mobile library, but it's

just one book in my mobile library.

Yes, and

I have enjoyed many events related to the book, including one that we did last week,

which was fun.

I didn't know that you could do an impression of John Lennon as an LBC call-in host.

That was a new and exciting challenge for me.

Somebody asked what would be like if John Lennon was still alive today, and you said he would be kind of using it.

I think he would be grumpy and reactionary.

That's right.

Whereas Paul McCartney is quite graceful about being, you know, everybody's kind of.

I'm not sure I can

attempt the John Lennon impression.

It was a grumpy, elderly John Lennon mouthing off about things you can't see anymore.

Yeah, no, that's what I've been up to.

I've been touring the country talking about that.

And I also went to see 28 Years Later,

which is the new film directed by Danny Boyle, a sequel to 28 Days and then the slightly offshoot to 28 weeks later.

It's bonkers.

But I think one of the things that I think relates to us and kind of language and the way that we think about it, and actually this week's episode theme, is there's a moment where so Britain's been entirely quarantined because everyone's been affected by the rage virus.

If you're just tuning in, this is just a summary of a film.

Do not go outside.

Except for a small population who have retreated to Lindisfarne across a causeway.

But there's a bit where they go to the mainland kind of forage and they run into a Swedish soldier who is one of the people who patrols the boats, making sure that nobody makes a break for it.

And he just talks about the fact that his friend is a delivery driver and he wishes he'd been a delivery driver instead of becoming a soldier.

And it's just this really profoundly sad moment where you realize if we were all overtaken by a rage virus, the rest of the world would just seal us off and then carry on going and ordering packages off the internet.

I mean, we're talking about in a week in which the Middle East is in a great state of turmoil.

And we have all just been carrying on getting our packages delivered because that's how the world works.

Yes, and now I feel guilty about bringing the subject around to my new pair of headphones.

Given that we're looking at apocalypse, some of you may know that I replaced my old headphones with some new ones, exact same make, it said, but with so many features that it became impossible to work.

And somebody wrote in and said, We call that improving things worse.

Well, while you've been away, the headphones have developed a mind of their own in that I found a new feature, which is if you just touch them and rub your finger over one corner of it, it adjusts the volume, which I didn't know about.

But what it means is every time you.

How did you find that?

There I was at home stroking my headphones.

Yeah, yeah, no no as you go to take them off your your thumb sort of brushes the side yeah so as i go to take them off it pumps it up to fill volume

Why?

What?

Anyway, so

I think that, you know, if you're looking for a much more realistic apocalyptic movie, I think Britain overrun in 30 or 40 years' time by super intelligent headphones is the way ahead.

That is a classic Doctor Who plot right there.

I think there is one from the first Russell T.

Davis era where they

sat-nav became

the Cybermen.

Well, yeah, we've all got them.

They're right, that's it.

That's it.

Yeah.

Well, actually, the good thing is, maybe that's how we defeat the Cybermen this time is we put those headphones on and they accidentally deafen themselves and it short-circuits them, and then that's how Britain is safe.

Well, I'm glad we've sorted that alternative reality out, but how about the current one?

We're looking at what Farage calls the new Brexit at net zero because I think it was with the conversation I had with when Sarah Pascoe was filling in for you, Helen.

And we realized that actually we haven't discussed the climate emergency or climate as a theme in all of our 40,000 podcasts that we've now done.

And to justify it, I'd say it's because every week we take a phrase from the week, more or less, and then fan out from that.

And actually, politicians have just not been talking about what was the biggest, most important

danger facing the world up till about seven or eight months ago when Trump took office, I think, has now not been discussed.

Right.

And yeah, and his election victory does have really profound consequences for all the kind of big international agreements on that.

I think the thing is, everybody always talks about don't look up the film as a kind of great satire about climate change.

It was about an asteroid heading for Earth, and everybody's just kind of being in denial about it.

I actually think there's another TV show, and they never really fully developed this, but I always thought this was a potent metaphor for climate change, which is Game of Thrones.

Because the whole whole entire plot of Game of Thrones is that everyone's arguing about who gets to be king of this rather nice city that looks like Dubrovnik.

Yes.

And at the same time, the white walkers are massing in the north and they're poised to sweep through and just destroy everything.

Absolutely.

And somebody's got lots of dragons.

Yes,

which is also true of Donald Trump.

But I guess the dragons in that case are maybe more like nuclear weapons, right?

Somebody has got this one thing that is just streets ahead of everything else that could possibly be used as a weapon of war, an instant ender of the war.

And then at the same time, everybody's having a squabble about who gets to be in charge of this nice little bit of land, not realising that if they don't bang together, then they're all going to be frozen to death.

Now, why is it?

I mean, we'll look at how various political parties and politicians have been articulating their message on climate change.

But

I'm interested in why that's no longer on the agenda.

I mean, I saw a headline in The Guardian last week saying, you know, scientists say we have only three years left to get the amount of carbon dioxide down that will prevent us going permanently 1.5 degrees centigrade above the threshold threshold that will take us into abysmal apocalypse.

And yet here we are talking about Game of Thrones.

I mean are we just as culpable?

Are we is it such an intangible, impossible to realize future that we'd much rather look at stuff that's much easier to find solutions for or to just process?

I think you were doing us personally and humanity down a bit here, Roman Democrat.

For which I apologize.

Good.

On behalf of humanity.

I've tendered my resignation to the Director General with immediate effect.

But I think, even in the last 10 years, certainly within my lifetime, the way that people have talked about climate change has completely changed just because the effects of it have become more obvious.

One of my things that most regularly makes me shout at the telly is when there is a weather presenter who goes, Oh, it's going to be scorching next week, it's going to be over 30.

And I go, No, it's April.

That's bad and weird.

Stop it.

Not everyone loves a heat wave.

No, stop.

But that has happened less and less, right?

And I think the consequences in terms of wildfires chaotic weather systems you know all of that kind of stuff has begun to show real effects and so people are talking more about climate change it's just they aren't they're not following the thought to the end of the sentence right okay here's another person who talks a lot about climate change without ever really mentioning climate change jeremy clarkson on clarkson's farm yeah the most recent series of that is all about how terrible it was for british farmers because the flooding continued really late into year couldn't get crops in the ground and every year he has a plot line like that where there is something there's a drought or something like that, or some blight, something that didn't happen.

But the flat denialism, I think, of the 80s and 90s is over.

Yeah.

And yet, the consensus about climate change politically has started to break down.

So, Kerry Badenock has said sticking to the net zero targets is not something she's going to do.

Even Tony Blair's Institute has said the net zero targets are difficult.

And one of Reform's big platforms is to reverse any net zero targets and almost by extension to look at anything that involves spending money on trying to prevent or to reduce the effects of climate change.

Now why is that happening?

I mean he calls it potentially the new Brexit.

First of all it's dangerous bringing up Brexit as a good thing, given how people feel, you know, the majority of people feel it's gone.

Right, but for Nigel Farage, it's very much his happy place.

It is his happy place, yes.

But one thing we've all accepted, I think, is that the science is very, very clear about climate change.

And so it's okay to say there will be climate change, there is a climate emergency, and not even on the BBC feel beholden to get someone in with an opposing point of view.

And yet, I've found the analysis within the mainstream media about what's happening with the retreat from climate change very weak.

I mean, maybe I'm being cast in the position of defending all journalism, and I don't think that's necessarily the right thing to do.

But I do think that there is a relatively hazy zone of uncertainty about the exact way that things will play out and the exact course that we're on.

And I mean, this is something you saw during coronavirus, too.

Scientists are constantly revising their models, which are only ever, you know, the best approximation they can have of what's happening.

We're talking about inherently chaotic systems.

And I think they are now quite wary, and I think journalists are now quite wary, of being too declarative.

Yes.

And I think it's also the actual language used to define what the crisis is has changed over the years.

It started off as like, you know, greenhouse gases, and then that became some kind of that that became too polite I suppose you know it or identified one or two elements that we could deal with and but not the general overall pattern then became

global warming was I think a big misstep because every time there was a cold winter people went so much for global exactly and I think that's why they changed it to climate emergency as opposed to climate change yeah so clearly you know this the scientists are aware of how we might just get bored with using the same term Caroline Lucas did an an article in the New Statesman about two, three months ago, and I thought it was quite interesting because she was talking about...

So she's now a former leader of the Green Party, actually.

Long-term Brighton MP.

She's for a long time the only Green MP.

And I now got a fair few of them.

Yeah, she said a climate movement that hasn't succeeded in making the cause of human survival genuinely popular is clearly missing something.

So she was talking about how actually

maybe it's because we still persist in these abstract terms that, you know, even when I was trying to describe what the danger is, I was talking about scientific consensus, the threshold, the collective data, you know, and she's she was arguing, what if you broke it down, rather like Jeremy Clark said, what if you broke it down into very, very achievable and memorable issues like what are we going to do about flooding?

What are we going to do about the increasingly hot winters?

What are we going to do about drought?

Actually, breaking it down into much more immediate experiences.

I mean, I think that probably is the way to go.

And actually, talking much more concretely about the things that people are doing, you know, the fact that electrification is incredibly important.

The fact that Britain already makes a huge amount of renewable energy.

This is my worry about the constant sort of rhetorical ratchet of ever more scary and apocalyptic things.

I'm not sure it frightens people into action.

I think it's more likely to frighten them into kind of, well, as we're all

right whereas actually, already people have done incredible things since we've really been looking into this in the last 50 years.

I wouldn't say that I feel complacent about it or even relaxed.

I do still feel very alarmed about where climate is going.

But I do worry about about the rhetorical changes have actually maybe not been particularly helpful.

There's a phrase I saw just earlier this week called alert fatigue, which is people are actually switching off their news alerts because they're getting one every half an hour of something terrible's happening in the world.

Yeah.

And people have just had enough of it.

So I think you're right.

There is that sense of being overwhelmed by what's happening now and what we're told might happen pretty soon.

That sense of helplessness.

So the kind of the doom-mongering, the doom-scrolling, and the kind of crisis.

What did you call it?

You had a phrase that you used, I remember you saying, omni, was it omni-crisis?

The omni-cause I think is a phrase, I think, popularized by Mary Harrington and Unheard, in which she said that one of the problems with the way that the left talks about climate change is it's rolled into a bundle and you sort of buy a kind of package of opinions on climate, Palestine, and transgender rights.

And those are three very worthy causes, but they don't necessarily completely go together.

And actually, some of them are quite in tension with each other, right?

You're talking about in Palestine, you're talking about a conservative Islamic society, which is not traditionally very LGBTQ friendly.

So trying to bundle them all up into one sort of, you know, omni-cause

actually, I think, makes people kind of go, well, I can't pick and choose bits of that.

So I have to be on board with all of it.

Yeah.

Or I can't raise kind of concerns with individual bits of the kind of campaigning.

I do think that is one of the problems is that the climate argument is quite vibesy.

When we were prepping for this, and tell me if you had this experience too, I thought, do I actually honestly know what net zero means?

I feel like I know what it means in a vibesy sort of sense.

I want to reduce carbon emissions.

Yes.

But then I went and looked, and of course, it's the idea that we should cut our emissions to the level that can be kind of soaked up again by trees, or in the future, when we've come up with the carbon capture technology, you know, by that.

But I have no idea realistically how achievable that is, how far away we're from that.

I feel my level of education on that is not

very high.

And it then becomes easy prey for anyone who wants to have a go at their opponents or the left if we place net zero as part of that package of walkery that has just done so much to destabilize the world and made us all feel unhappy.

And it's made it an easy target.

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I mean, I've noticed Farage has started using the phrase repeatedly, net zero make zero difference, which is a kind of his attempt to, you know, come up with something catchy.

Don't you think the pushback to that would be much better, which is that, you know, Nigel Farage wants you to have to sit with a damp cloth over your head from June to August in your house.

I think that's sort of like, which is what I have to do in my house, right?

Because we've got skylights, which seemed like a brilliant idea in the time, but it means that my upstairs is like a bakery oven for most of the summer.

And summers didn't feel like that when I was young.

We're having more one in a hundred-year events.

Yes.

We're having them one every three years.

These are kind of different.

Because we are very good at doing that disconnect where we feel one thing and yet we're happy to do the opposite.

So I'll take the don't look up example.

We know the meteor is coming, but we're able to just put that out of our immediate attention for now.

And I think, again, looking at the language used by those who question not just net zero, but the climate emergency, there is an element of that obfuscation where sometimes the attack is, yeah, we know it's real, but it's going to be expensive.

So can't we just...

put it off for a while while we get on with, you know, delivering for ordinary people first.

Yeah, right.

Which is a bit like saying, you know, I see the iceberg approaching, but it's going to cost an awful lot in petrol to swerve round it.

I find there are many prongs to the attack on the climate emergency, usually dependent on the kind of audience they're trying to kind of win over.

So it'll be, yes, it's real, but it's not our fault.

It's nature.

It's volcanoes, according to Raj at one point.

Or yes, it's real, but there's not much we can do about it.

So let's enjoy the summer all the year round.

Or, yes, it's real, but it's expensive.

Two, I don't think it's real.

And if you look at the language they use, that final one does creep in every now and then.

Yes.

So Farage has questioned the scientific consensus on man-made climate change, saying that it might be down to, for example, sunspots and volcanoes.

Bollocks, though, that is, isn't it?

That's

the technical scientific consensus.

I think the signs said, no, that's bollocks.

But you can see why it's incredibly appealing, because who wants to change their life?

All of the solutions at the moment are that are being proposed are quite hair-shirty, right?

Whereas actually, lots of the ones that really worked have been exciting technological innovations.

And again, I think this comes back to something that I do find on the left.

There's a certain kind of masochism on a bit of the left that's sort of

like if it's not hurting, it's not working, right?

You definitely saw this over GLP-1 drugs, the Azempic and the other drugs.

There was a kind of feeling that people were sort of cheating by taking them.

Like, oh, you could just get a...

So there must be something wrong with them, right?

Unless you're sort of suffering and you're being ennobled by the suffering.

And I do think some of the way the left talks about climate change has a bit of a hair-shirtiness, right?

Which is, I actually don't use a phone and I have a composting toilet, I'm better than you.

You know, for some people, that is a really appealing message.

For most of us, it's like, I like being able to flush.

It's

one of the few pleasures in my homecoming life.

I enjoy it.

And therefore, because everything has now gone to the extremes, you know, the response to that is to go the other way

and say that if it costs anything, we shouldn't be doing it.

Yes, well, you just deny that there are any costs to climate change, right?

Whereas actually, I was in Florida a couple of years ago and you can't get insurance for lots of houses around like the Miami area, for example.

They've simply been destroyed by hurricanes and hurricane seasons have been getting more intense and longer.

And now insurers will say to you, well, no.

So the state ends up having to pick up the tax.

Exactly.

And it is a recurring theme of all of these programmes is the headline gets the notice and we don't read the detail.

And that therefore it becomes much more appealing for someone who wants to hit the electorate with a vibe rather than with details to go with the headline.

So to go with the,

well, yeah, I mean, net zero.

How are we going to pay for that?

Where's the money going to come from?

You know, I'm not paying for it.

So even though I think, and I think polling still shows this, you know, the overwhelming majority of people genuinely do believe there is a climate emergency, we should do something about it.

But when you question them, it's interesting.

When you question them on, should we do something about flooding, or very much in favor, even if that costs money.

But if you question them on, you know, should we be putting up taxes or should we be spending more to get to net zero?

That's where there's this pushback and there's a reluctance to agree to that.

So I think...

Doesn't that come back to something we discussed all the way through this series, which is that politicians talking in vague platitudes is really a good idea.

You know, say, my mission is to improve the NHS.

Could you be more specific?

And some of the best political pledges are like, you know, for cancer, there will be a two-week waiting time to see a specialist.

Okay, you know what that is.

And yes, we can talk about the fact that that then ends up causing problems elsewhere in the service and you get people sort of teaching to the test and all that kind of stuff.

But essentially, it just feels to me that the way we should talk about climate and politicians should talk about climate is here are things we should do to stop floods.

Here are things we should do to offset the terrible heat problems we're going to have.

And actually,

although I think climate activists would like us to talk a lot more about the high-level narrative, I'm not sure in political communication terms, it's

buttering any extremely hot parsnips.

Oh, what a thought.

And I mean, just Kier Starmer, when he's had to make financial commitments that have meant reducing the budget on climate change, he will do that thing of starting.

This is a structure we've come upon many times in the show, starting with something we all agree with.

Of course, there is a climate emergency that needs looking at in order to get the bad bit teed up yeah of course there's a climate emergency that we must do something about it but uh the world is unsafe at the moment so we must look at our defenses the early bit is not a justification of the second bit they're two disparate things but by joining them together with the but it makes it sound as if he's being reasonable i noticed a kind of wider version of that when nigel frouge said in more or less the same speech uh this was when he was talking to your friend uh john peterson john peterson uh yeah i'm not a scientist i think i quoted this one before i'm not a scientist.

I can't tell you whether CO2 is leading to warming or not, but there are so many other massive factors.

To then say, the one thing I hear that drives me absolutely potty is that carbon dioxide is a pollutant.

That's what they tell us.

That clearly is absolutely nuts.

Yeah.

Clearly.

Let me knock you in a box with only carbon dioxide in it, and you can tell me whether or not that that's an atmosphere that can sustain life.

I also like, what was the bit at the beginning?

I'm not a scientist.

I'm not a scientist.

I really like that.

I'm actually not a marine biologist, so I can't tell you whether or not sharks are deadly.

Yeah.

It's just got the sort of like, well, why, in that case, why am I listening to your opinion?

Exactly, but it's that thing of saying, once he says, I'm not a scientist, you think, oh, that's honest and refreshing.

Yeah.

Because he's admitted he's not across all the science.

So therefore, the next bit, we come a bit more slack because he's been honest with us.

He's not like one of those politicians who says the science is very clear.

He's got, I'm not a scientist, you see.

So therefore, it's nuts, isn't it?

At the CO2?

Isn't it nuts?

Isn't it nuts?

Yeah, yes, exactly.

I'm not going to give you figures because I'm not a scientist.

But then I think what the American description of this was when it came to creationism, which was the idea that the Earth was created 6,000 years ago and therefore evolution by natural selection was a lie and people had planted fossils in order to deceive us all.

The explicit strategy there was a phrase that they called teach the controversy.

And so the idea was that you always had to say, some people say that evolution is true.

Other people, however, let's teach the controversy.

And there are lots of situations in which that is a valid thing to do.

The science is actually much less settled.

I think maybe we got it a bit wrong on some of the things over COVID.

They were, you know, the evidence on masking, for example, was more fluid than we were led to believe.

But this is one of the ones where 99% of scientists say that point nine can go recurring.

I mean, is that

the climate has changed since the Industrial Revolution and it doesn't appear to be naturally cyclical.

It does appear to be caused by humans.

And so then at that point, teaching the controversy becomes its own kind of fraud.

And if you do want to go on the economic argument, I mean, we've seen it this week, saying that we must return to fossil fuels.

Fossil fuels are much more expensive than

essentially we must return to subsidising the industry.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mean, we've seen this week the price of oil go up and down depending on which

stands.

I was going to say, Donald Trump did a great truth social post in which he said, the oil price should not go up.

He said.

He basically shouted at oil.

And he said, I will be watching.

Oil, I've got my eye on you.

Yeah.

I've got you.

I've never trusted you, Oil.

I'm staring at you.

If you dare go up,

there's going to be hell to pay.

Yes.

I came across this a couple of months ago.

It was just this quote from Amin Nasser, who's head of the world's biggest oil company, Saudi Aramco, talking about the increase in oil production, you know, with Trump and

more and more world leaders saying we really ought to go back to fossil fuels.

He said to his shareholders meeting, we can all feel the winds of history in our industry's sales again.

It's interesting that he picked up on wind energy and he's in a sailboat more than an engine as his kind of go-to for a metaphor about progress.

We're all knee-deep in oil again and it's absolutely lovely.

I bathe in it.

Exactly and it's fantastic.

Oh, you can't, I can't believe I get so much joy out of how slippery it is.

Oh look, I dunked a cormorant in it.

It's just like the old days.

Right, okay.

Well,

if you're looking forward to the new Brexit, I thought I might drag you back to the old Brexit, classic Brexit.

Of course, this week is Brexit Anniversary Day.

Is it?

23rd of June 2016 was the Brexit vote.

I believe.

Yeah.

Anyway, back in 2016, the now conservative peer Daniel Hannon wrote a piece for reaction predicting what life would be post-Brexit on June 24th, 2025.

So on Tuesday this week.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

If we left the EU, would you like to hear

what he thought this week?

I'd like to to speak to you what I did on Tuesday.

There we go.

Okay.

It's 24th of June 2025, and Britain is marking its annual Independence Day celebration.

As the fireworks stream through the summer sky, still not quite dark, we wonder why it took us so long to leave.

The United Kingdom is now the region's foremost knowledge-based economy.

We lead the world in biotech, law, education, the audio-visual sector, financial services, and software.

He also predicted Denmark, Ireland, and the Netherlands followed us out of the EU.

Three other countries have had referendums.

And then the peace ends.

Perhaps the greatest benefit that though, you could try and imagine, if you will, strings swelling beneath me saying this.

Perhaps the greatest benefit there is not easy to quantify.

Britain has recovered its self-belief.

We saw that there were great opportunities across the oceans beyond the enervated Eurozone.

We knew that our song had not yet been sung.

Bit of nimrod to close.

Yeah, yeah.

Now, would you like to hear the headline of the latest column in the Daily Telegraph about Britain, written by Lord Hannan?

Okay, you ready?

Yeah.

Britain is turning into a third world country.

So, a bit of a delta there between the prediction and what he feels has come to pass.

We've done trade deals.

We've, you know.

We have done trade deals.

You could argue that our vaccine procurement was easier because of Brexit.

And we've done a trade deal with Europe, which we wouldn't have done if we'd been in the EU.

So it's given us the chance to actually do a deal with Europe.

Because it is, I mean, if you look at a map, it is actually the biggest market close to us, isn't it?

So, I mean, it was mad that we weren't doing trade deals with Europe in the past.

I just found that very funny because obviously we did what Daniel Hannan wanted and left the EU.

We then had Conservative governments, his party, for nearly a decade afterwards, and yet somehow

it's all gone terribly wrong.

We're living in a hellscape.

Well, that's the I mean, that's the Farage argument in that Brexit was good.

It just was handled badly.

Yes,

we've not had true Brexit.

True communism has never been tried.

Yes.

Yes, I'm afraid so.

Well, I think that's probably that's probably a good note to end on, unless you've got a no, no, no.

I found Daniel Hannon's vision of Britain as unbelievable as 28 years later.

I think he does actually think we are living in 28 years later, except with, you know, much higher mortgage payments.

Giant rabid Jacob Reese Morgs run your own going, be happy, be happy.

Have you got your blue passport?

Yeah.

I would like to draw your attention to a new habit of Donald Trump's truthing, which he likes to end his truths with, thank you for your attention to this matter.

I've noticed that.

Yes, what's that about?

I thought we could start ending the show like that.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

And he just did a series about, I mean, what an incredible poster he is.

After having potentially tipped off the Iranians through his, the frequency of his truth social posts about, well, I bombed them.

Oh, it's hard to say.

He did a tweet welcoming the ceasefire and which he said, yeah, so Iran bombed some places in Qatar, but no one was injured.

So he said, most importantly, they've got it all out of their system.

Yeah.

Which just sounds like the kind of thing you'd just say to a toddler who's sort of been sick after too many sweets.

You're all out of their system.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Are you happy now?

Yeah.

So an incredible run of posting by him in this week.

I know.

I've noticed he tends to say, we'll see what happens when asked what he's going to do.

I know, like that, like he's not involved at all.

No, no, no, no, we'll see what happens.

You know,

I'm interested in this one.

I'd be interested to see how it ends.

Well, we'll be bombing run.

He then waits to see.

who the likely victor is going to be and then he'll come out.

Well, there was reporting saying exactly that actually, which was that he got annoyed that Israel were getting such good feedback on Fox News for all the bombing they were doing, and started sort of subtly taking credit for it and implying that he was really behind it.

And then he was like, Why don't I bob someone?

Well, I don't have a word of the week, but there is a phrase from the press release the BBC put out after deciding it was going to not show a documentary about doctors working in Gaza, which they pulled because, quote, it risks creating a perception of partiality that would not meet the high standards that the public rightly expect of the BBC.

And my beef really here is with people who write BBC press releases because that's awful.

There's so many layers of woolliness in that.

So it isn't impartial, but there might be a perception of partiality.

And it's not even that there is a perception of partiality.

There is a possibility that it might create a perception of partiality.

I think it's very unfair on the filmmakers involved because it's not even really about them as far as I can see.

It's about the BBC earlier airing a documentary whose narrator was a boy whose father was a Hamas official, which wasn't disclosed during the broadcast.

And therefore, extra sensitivity has been in place because of that.

But I think you're essentially slightly, you know, putting a kind of mark of suspicion on this new documentary without ever bothering to evidence that.

If this new documentary is biased, and that's why you're scrapping it, then that's a reason and we should know about it.

But you're right.

It's 15 times removed.

Exactly.

But we've no way of knowing.

No.

We don't know if there was a problem with the documentary or whether the problem was with the risk of perception that went with it.

Yeah.

Well, maybe someone else will pick up the documentary and it will end up somewhere else.

And then we can make a more informed judgment.

Well, I'm glad we got that out of our system.

To quote

Donald Trump.

Hey, Donald.

Thanks for listening to Strong Message here.

We'll be back next week.

All our episodes are available in our feed, so make sure you subscribe on BBC Sounds.

Goodbye.

Goodbye.

From BBC Radio 4, this is What Seriously?

I'm Dar Obrie.

And I'm Izzy Sutty.

And in our new series, we're bringing you short stories and tall tales.

What, seriously?

It's packed with real-life, strange, but true stories that make you go, what, seriously?

And provide you with excellent social ammo to impress your friends.

The twist is, we don't know how each story unfolds, and we'll have to figure it out one fragment at a time with our special guests, who each have a mysterious connection to the tale.

That's right.

I am your spy expert.

And I don't really want to bring you back to the real facts of the story because you're making me laugh so much, but I feel like I should.

We're the only country in the world that ate the animal on our crest.

and I never know whether to feel terrible or brilliant about that.

All these engineers trying desperately to reduce the amount of dust in space, and you get Izzy taking up a balloon full of glacier.

Wow, you're welcome.

Shut up,

I know, you're right.

It's like I'm reading from a sheet or something, but no, I have

join us for what, seriously, from BBC Radio 4.

Available now on BBC Sounds.

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