The Threat from Within

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.

Suffs!

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.

When disaster takes control of your life, ServePro helps you take it back.

ServePro shows up faster to any size disaster to make things right.

Starting with a single call, that's all.

Because the number one name in cleanup and restoration has the scale and the expertise to get you back up to speed quicker than you ever thought possible.

So whenever never thought this would happen actually happens, ServePro's got you.

Call 1-800-SURFPRO or visit SurfPro.com today to help make it like it never even happened.

BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts.

Before you listen to this episode of Strong Message Here, just a warning that we will be using strong language from the start.

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 Noussi.

And this week it's a tale of two speeches: the US Vice President J.D.

Vance at the Munich Security Conference and Conservative leader Kemi Badnock at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship Conference in London, both of them talking about the threat from within.

The threat from within.

But before we get on to that, what have you been?

I've been spending most of this week staring into the abyss, but what about you, Helen?

You've just come back from Bulgaria.

I did.

I went to Bulgaria, part of my continuing mission to visit more of Eastern Europe.

What's left of it?

Well, it's still there.

Yes.

No, I really enjoyed it, mostly because I went to the Civic Museum.

Never let it be said and have fun on a holiday.

And I learnt all about their royal family.

Do you know anything about the Bulgarian royal family?

No, but I have a funny feeling I'm about to find out everything I need to know.

Everything you ever needed to know.

They did one of those kind of classic other bits of Europe bit where they sent for a king and they tried out Alexander of Battenberg at the end of the 19th century.

He didn't work out.

Got out in a Russian coup, actually, topically.

And then they brought in Ferdinand of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha.

He managed to establish a dynasty.

But here's the interesting thing.

Very briefly during the Second World War, Simeon of Bulgaria, his grandson, was king from 1943 to 46, after which Bulgaria became a republic.

He then abdicated, went to live in Greece and various other places, came back like lots of the former monarchs did after the fall of communism.

And his kids are called Cardam, Kirill, Kubrat, Konstantin Assin, and Kalina.

They are the original Kardashians where you theme the children, which I really enjoy.

But here's my trivia question for you.

So, he, as a toddler, was a head of state.

He was technically Tsar of Bulgaria during the Second World War.

And he's still alive now.

He's in his 80s.

There is one other person alive today who was also a head of state during the Second World War.

Who is it?

Oh, no, heavens.

Let's see.

Albania?

No.

Albania at the crown.

I know this because I wrote an Atlantic story about it.

King Zog also got hoofed out and went to South Africa.

And then the new crown prince is now back in Tehran.

A lovely guy, brought like South African accent, but then Albanian.

No, not him.

Not

pulling it quite a complicated thread here now.

Well, okay, I will tell you who it was.

The Dalai Lama.

Oh.

Because he also was a toddler, was selected as Dalai Lama, and then was technically for a while head of state of Tibet.

He's also still alive.

So there we go.

There are two people still alive today who were heads of state during the Second World War.

That is my trivia factory.

Right.

Can you beat that for a reason?

Interesting, going around an interesting museum and so on.

When we were doing the research in the death of Stalin and we were in Moscow, I wanted to look at the Lubianka prison, which is where the KGB or the NKVD, as they were then,

their offices and it were all the sort of torturing went on and so on.

And I was told I couldn't see it, but I could see the outside of it if I went to the top of a Disney store because there was a viewing platform

so we went

up to the top floor of the Disney store out onto the viewing platform and the side of the platform that overlooked Lubianca prison there was a big sort of temporary wooden board put up basically to stop people looking but there was a little triangle that hadn't been covered so i poked my head through the triangle and in two seconds there was a tap on my back and i turned round and there was literally a guy literally wearing a dark suit and dark glasses, just wagging his finger at me, going, no, no, no, no, no, no.

And I just said, okay, worth a try, and walked away.

And I thought, where did he come from?

Patrolling the Disney show, hiding that behind the frozen dolls to pop out at any moment and accost him.

Yes, he will.

I don't think he was the store manager.

Wow.

And you filmed the death of Stalin in Ukraine.

In Ukraine, yes, in Kyiv, yes, which is why the events of this week, and indeed the events of the last few years have been odd to watch.

We shot, there's a scene in the film with lots of disturbances at a railway station.

And in fact, it was at the Ukrainian National Rail Museum, which is at their main station.

It was on a train that Stalin used to use.

There were about four or five hundred Ukrainian extras playing people in Russia trying to get on the train to go and see Stalin's funeral.

And there was a sort of crowd of just shrieks and lots of distress.

And then, you know, within the first week of Putin's invasion, there was the same shot on the television of people at Kiev station trying to get out of Kiev.

And I just thought, oh my God, it's happened again.

This wasn't meant to happen again.

That was the whole point, we thought, of our reaction to the Second World War and that this would never happen again.

And here we are seeing on our television, you know, images that seem strangely alien to us still because they feel like they mirror exactly what happened 80 years ago.

I think when you go to Eastern Europe, one of the the things that you notice is how fluid the borders of Europe were, particularly throughout the 20th century.

And I think our relative sense of stability about us as an island nation just is not felt at all, either in the Baltic countries.

And I was in Latvia last year or in the lower Eastern European countries.

So Bulgaria, notably, has lots of Cyrillic, you know, Russian language writing on public buildings, which I just did not see at all that I can remember in Latvia, even though a significant minority of the population there is ethnically Russian, Russian-speaking.

And it's a big deal.

When Alex Friedman, Friedman, the podcaster who's originally Russian, moved to America, did an interview with Zelensky, Vladimir Zelensky, there was a lot of tense back and forth negotiation about whether or not they would do it in Russian, which is the one common language they both have.

And Zelensky made a point of saying, No, I don't speak Russian anymore.

I speak Ukrainian now, and I have done since the start of the war.

And I won't do this.

This is a line I won't cross.

When we finished filming, I was presented with a t-shirt from the film crew, the roller Kiev-based film crew.

And it was a t-shirt that says, Fuck Putin, film in the the Ukraine

one for our BBC sounds podcast listeners there

well let's come let's talk about our main subject of the week then okay did you watch the speech or did you

not watch I did not watch this sounding like a doctor's use book now I did not watch the speech of JD Vance I did not like it I didn't give it a glance yeah no I didn't and this is really interesting because this speech that he made at the Munich security conference caused a lot of consternation from all the delegates there.

They were furious.

And it was an interesting example, I thought, of how the story you get packaged on the news, you know, the headlines, are not quite representative of what actually happened.

Just to explain, it was reported that the delegates were furious, that J.D.

Vance was saying the enemy of Europe is within.

Now, that sounds like a slight to Europe, a complete,

slightly arrogant takedown of the whole European project.

You could see why people in the room were furious.

But when I went back and read the speech, I could see why there was a deeper level of not just fury, but annoyance and anger and frustration at the hypocrisy of what he was saying.

I thought it was a really striking quote.

I've got it here.

The threat that I worry about most V of Europe is not Russia.

It's not China.

It's not any other external actor.

What I worry worry about is the threat from within, the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values, values shared with the United States of America.

And I'm afraid I sort of thought a bit like that and I thought, right, but Russia's the one that's got the sort of guns and just

overrun the territorial sovereignty of somebody on their borders.

So I can see why if you're Poland or the Baltic states, you're kind of thinking, no, I still think the biggest threat to us probably is Russia.

Yeah, there is

a threat, not so much within as just over there.

Yeah, it's the people with the tanks.

Yes.

But it also that phrase was also used as a pretext for lots of commentators to say you know well the words may have been provocative and so on but the underlying argument we must actually take seriously which is you know for far too long europe has been relying on america to provide weapon systems and indeed a lot of the money and resources to safeguard europe and it's about time europe stood up there was that but actually when you read the speech so j.

Devance said, you know, the threat was within, and then he gave examples.

So he says, I was struck that a former European commissioner went on television recently and sounded delighted that the Romanian government has just annulled an entire election.

He warned that if things don't go to plan, the very same thing could happen in Germany, too.

Now, that's a reference to there being an election in Romania where a candidate from nowhere, and as it turned out, heavily backed by Russia and Russian bots and misinformation and so on, unexpectedly won.

So they're running the election again.

But the point is, he's saying that as the vice president of a president who's denied the results of their own election, who's talked about sending to prison those who thought otherwise and those who upheld the results of the election.

I think that's what the sense in the room was, that here's somebody who's preaching to us, but about something that is the opposite of what he actually does.

Yeah, when I read the speech, I thought, I now see why actually everybody thinks, you know, it sort of goes, are you going to go to China and raise, you know, know, their human rights record in Xinjiang with them?

They must do this, they must do this.

And I had this very strong sense of thinking, hmm, maybe that is actually extremely counterproductive because they just feel hectored and lectured at because that's how I feel that this guy's come over here and is sort of and I agree with you.

The interesting thing is that I think the Trump administration has a point.

America has provided the security guarantees for Europe since the end of the Second World War at enormous cost to itself.

It might decide that that is no longer worth it.

And actually, if you look at the polling in Britain about would you be prepared to pay more taxes in order to have boots on the ground in Ukraine, only about 30% of people would.

So British revealed preferences is actually that we don't want to spend any more money on defending countries that aren't us either.

And that's a perfectly valid argument, but it's how they put the argument, which is not to argue it, but to

dress it up more as a sense of right versus wrong.

But it was a two-finger argument, wasn't it?

It wasn't a kind of sober policy revealing some hard truths.

It was like, listen up, cucks, get lived hards.

But it was more than that.

Look, here's some more.

Right.

Okay.

As it turns out, you can't mandate innovation or creativity, just as you can't force people what to think, what to feel, or what to believe.

And this is, you know, the last few weeks, Trump has been mandating all federal employees and beyond anyone who has contracts with the government what to think and what to believe, or rather, what not to think and what to believe.

You know, books about slavery are being withdrawn from school libraries.

Yes, Julianne Moore's book, Freckle-Faced Strawberry, is now, which is about coming to terms with having freckles, is now sort of seen as being unduly woken diversity equity and inclusion and administration.

You're not allowed, even in science research documents, you're not allowed to mention things like climate, emergency, temperature.

You know, it's

like Elon Musk on Twitter, he's hiding replies that use the word cisgender, which isn't a word that I personally use, but it is a legitimate word that some people use.

I think you're right.

There's a wildly inconsistent level of,

and I think the way that the American right would put it is the difference there is between jailing people and not jailing people.

So J.D.

Vance replied to my former colleague Mehdi Hassan, who now runs the Substack, saying, You dummy.

There's a difference between barring the Associated Press from the White House pressroom because they won't say Gulf of America instead of Gulf of Mexico and locking people up.

And he was unfortunately enormously undermined by the fact that I think within the sort of span of a couple of hours, Musk then said that because he thinks the 60-minute CBS's news program

has done a very complicated accusation of wrongdoing that I think doesn't stand up at all, But they should, quote, be jailed.

Yes, yes.

And of course, Trump himself has talked about jailing those who investigated the January 6th riots, jailing those who prosecuted.

He wants to sue the pollster Anne Seltzer, who put out a poll in the field a couple of weeks before the election that was

in Iowa that was wrong, that underestimated his support.

He took $15 million off ABC News Network, which its parent company is Disney, because the anchor George Stephanopoulos said he was held liable for rape when he was, of course, only held liable for sexual assault.

And now, almost everybody thinks if that had come to trial, particularly with the much higher bar for defamation in the US, then ABC would have won it.

And essentially, what they did is they paid him off.

And there's a lot of that.

There's a lot, and you know, there are a lot of strategic lawsuits against public participation, slaps, as they call them, and there's a lot of kind of mafia-style shakedowns with news organizations.

So, carry all that in your head if you're a delegate at the security conference when J.D.

Vance then says, in America, you cannot win a democratic mandate by censoring your opponents or putting them in jail.

I think that's why it went down so badly.

It wasn't just hectoring.

In my view, it was just a blatant hypocrisy.

I think it was also because it was so intensely disrespectful and calculatedly so, right?

You don't write those words and say those words by accident.

But J.D.

Vance saw himself as going over there and telling some hard truths to people who'd been too soft, free riders, and they needed a kind of good kick in the pants.

But what that obviously, the point of if you do disrespect people, then they tend to feel disrespectful.

They don't tend to feel that's the cause and effect there is quite simple.

Yeah.

Yes, and I think you're right.

It's a point we picked up on last week, which is a lot of the language used by Trump and his government is very much there to cause a reaction.

It's very much deliberately provocative, isn't it?

It's, you know, they see themselves as disruptors primarily,

disruptors in chief.

Yeah, isn't it interesting to you?

I mean, maybe this is just my perception because I spend too much time reading the online rights kind of stuff online, obviously, where they are.

But I don't feel like Trump is really driving this car at the moment.

I feel like J.D.

Vance is the center of the.

Well, that was always the perception that, you know, Trump is such a kind of low concentration threshold and, you know, an aversion to work and to detail that he's allowed to grow up around him the people who are really driving this anti-government takedown and anti-not saying anti-West, but in terms of wanting actually to harangue Europe into adopting a set of values that actually Europe has avoided for the last 80 years.

Yeah, there's a lot of aeration currently online among the online writer about the fact that Germany has, for example, very strong hate speech laws, which arose in the idea that we need to have a Cordon Sanitari, a hard line against neo-Nazis, because we had the original version and we didn't like them very much.

And that's the interesting thing is you put that together with the Musk and Trump administration's hatred of the mainstream German parties, the upcoming election, their enormous championing of the alternative for Deutschland.

They're polling second at the moment, the AFD, but none of the rest of the parties want to form a coalition with them.

There's even concern, you know, there is at the moment, there's lots of discussion about whether or not you should even pass legislation using their vote.

You know, there is a real effort to kind of isolate them.

And Vance and co.

are essentially arguing that the rest of German politics has no right to try and draw a line, which is interesting because I think it's one of the emerging splits on that bit of the right rhetorically.

Yes, as to whether they align with their

talk with them or not.

Or whether or not people who are quote-unquote kind of cancelled, you just become a bucket for all of those people.

And I mean, I'm talking about people like Andrew Tate as well, who the Trump administration has reportedly been lobbying, you know, the Romanians to kind of get off or like downgrade or speed up his charges

of sex trafficking.

Yes.

Serious charges.

Yes.

I'd better see how Trump spins that one if they if he welcomes Tate back into the fold.

Well, but there is a kind of feeling that as long as you've upset a Liberal somewhere, you've kind of done the right thing.

And I think there is a real struggle on the, you know, credit to Nigel Farage for saying that he didn't want to admit Tommy Robinson into his party.

But, you know, in a kind of space where the best thing you can do is say something outrageous, how do you actually deal with people that you think have gone a bit far?

Well, in the same way that, you know, many people online and who have their own podcasts, like ourselves, but I wouldn't put us in the branch that I'm about to talk about, monetize hate and provocation.

There was something I read the other week, I think it was in the New York Times, but it was a real good attempt to try and understand what's going on in American politics at the moment, which is to do with something we've talked about, the attention economy, the fact that actually Trump exists not by what he enacts, but by what he does and says that day.

It's very much of the moment.

That if he can get the attention of everyone that day by doing something, that to him is a success.

And that actually translates into voter approval, in that it works as long as people see him saying and doing stuff,

they will give him the benefit of the doubt.

It's when he doesn't become the object of attention and the center of attention that his real difficulties will come.

But it's hard to see how that can ever happen.

At the BBC, we go further so you see clearer.

With a subscription to BBC.com, you get unlimited articles and videos, hundreds of ad-free podcasts, podcasts, and the BBC News Channel streaming live 24-7.

From less than a dollar a week for your first year, read, watch, and listen to trusted, independent journalism and storytelling.

It all starts with a subscription to BBC.com.

Find out more at bbc.com slash unlimited.

When never thought this would happen actually happens?

Serve pro's got you.

If disaster threatens to put production weeks behind schedule, Serve Pro's got you.

When you need precise containment to stay in operation through the unexpected, ServePro's got you.

When the aftermath of floods, wildfires, hurricanes, and other forces that are out of your control have you feeling a loss of control, ServePro's got you.

Simply put, whenever or wherever you need help in a hurry, make sure your first call is to the number one name in cleanup and restoration.

Because only ServePro has the scale and expertise to get you back up to speed quicker than you ever thought possible.

So, if fire or water damage ever threatens your home or business, remember to call on the team that's faster to any size disaster at 1-800-SERVPRO or by visiting SurvePro.com.

ServePro, like it never even happened.

Can we pivot then to somebody for whom I think that is a problem, the attention economy, I mean, and that is Kemi Badnock, as leader of the Conservative Party, because she can get a lot of attention from the online right by going to, for example, as she went to the Alliance Responsible Citizenship Conference this week and talking about the things that they're interested in.

However,

that is a big constituency, but it's not the only constituency in Britain.

And I think that's that she faces a real difficulty as Tory leader about that's where the money and the attention and the events and the

sponsorship.

The sponsorship and the donors.

Right.

But it's not necessarily, you know, and also Nigel Farage occupies that space very, very competently already.

So for her, as a Tory leader, how does she get an any air time for classical Tory values?

It's very hard.

And she will, you know, she, you know, to hear her talk about the economy, she said, you know, she said, well, I don't have fully formed policies yet.

It's a long time out.

I'm not going to kind of try and do that stuff.

But she has ended up being pulled inextricably by the gravity of that space towards talking about DEI pronouns, grooming gangs.

And yeah, it will get her loads of attention.

The question is, will it get her the kind of attention that leads to her becoming Prime Minister of Britain, a country that exists online as well as online?

She's saying that it's too early to talk about politics, but she is very much forming a philosophy, isn't she?

It's very much,

she's forming a kind of identity of where it is she's coming from as leader of the party.

She's twice said that she, you know, she didn't ever really think of herself originally as conservative.

She thought of herself as a kind of classical liberal.

And that's something that she said in that ARC speech as well.

Yeah, that was at something called the ARC.

Yeah, that's the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship.

I went to the first forum they had in Docklands two years ago now, and it was a really interesting mix.

The piece I wrote for The Atlantic at the time called it a kind of mashed together of two distinct bits of the right.

So two of the prime organisers of it, one of them is Philippa Stroud, who worked for Ian Duncan Smith and Department of Welfare and Pensions.

And has survived.

And is to live to tell the tale.

And is now a Tory peer and worked for the Legatom Institute.

And the other big kind of prime movement is Jordan Peterson, who obviously I notoriously interviewed some years ago.

Canadian provocateur, shall we say.

And those were the two kind of of competing tendencies.

I talked to some people who were from that Christian conservative tradition that's very concerned with looking out for your neighbour, you know, alleviating poverty, living a good life.

And then there was also this, you know, very online tendency as well that was much more populist and kind of controversialist and, you know, lib

poking.

And they were kind of a slightly uneasy link up to the, you know, in terms of their values.

And I wondered which one would kind of win out.

Yes.

yeah, and I think in terms of the these are people who like the free market the free market bit has been the fact that what people really want is is the kind of you know lip pocket yeah spicy stuff on YouTube so that's the bit that I think really gets all the all the coverage miserable is a lot of these but I find them just very miserable about their own country you know that most of the time they say they won't dress it up as like being unpatriotic they'll say they're so patriotic but isn't everything terrible these days and it must be someone else's fault yes i i find that's often very that people, they sort of think they live in an apocalyptic hellscape where

you can't walk out the door without being robbed and sort of beaten to death with a coroner.

Because it's mostly Kent, isn't it?

Well, and I think that's really interesting, because I wouldn't deny that we have got social problems, crime that has risen lately in the country.

All of those things are true, but it's not my daily experience of living in the Britain that actually exists.

Yes.

The sub-secker Max Reid has called those people the soy right.

And I think the economist called them small bean conservatives.

So there's two very online phrases for people who are fans of the way that language has changed online.

But essentially, the kind of thing is, even when you're controlling the government, you're just a sort of sad little birthday boy.

And why is everyone picking on you?

Yeah.

And, you know, you can't say anything, you can't do anything.

And it's a very odd attitude.

Can I snap my fingers?

Yeah, because the kind of...

It's not a national infrastructure.

Right, but also that the idea that the kind of right-wing ideal used to be the kind of, you know, more like an ubermensch, right?

More like a kind of somebody who was a strong masculine figure.

And now it's a

specificity and weakness.

Yes.

And I think that's a very interesting rhetorical The kind of wine, I think.

Yeah, that has developed on the internet.

And actually, I think to normal people, it's not that appealing.

And just as all the lefties hanging around on X, chiding people for using slightly the wrong word, irritated people, I think this sort of whininess will also irritate.

I mean, it irritates me, and I consider myself a normal person.

Other people can write in if they disagree.

But then this week, she said in the speech, she says, some cultures are better than others.

It is only contentious to say this because honesty has become impossible.

When I thought that, I thought, there are two ways of reading that, aren't there?

There's one which is a kind of race-based way of saying it, and there's another which is, I think, sort of unobjectionable.

I think almost everyone in Britain would agree with, which is, I would rather live here than in Saudi Arabia.

So I think our culture is better than Saudi Arabian culture as it currently exists in this current moment.

I'm not saying there's anything inherent to the people of that country that means that they will always think that.

But that's the bit where she, I'm not sure she successfully navigates that line.

And she uses it really to berate the fact that she feels that you cannot say things like that.

Whereas, in fact, as you've just proved, you can.

She just did.

Yes, there was David Sachs, the AI czar, said, you know, he did a post on X.

I thought there's an AI czar.

There is an AI czar, I'm afraid.

He's one of the former PayPal Mafia, another South African immigrant to the US, along with Peter Thiel and Elon Musk.

And he said, you know, there's all these items in our federal budget, and you're not even allowed to ask what they are.

And it was like, not only are you, you just have, but they're on a website and have been for some years, and you simply haven't cared to look at them until now.

There was a quote that came up, I think Alex Massey used it in the Times this week.

There's a great bit in Alice and Wonderland where they're talking about the definitions of words and who gets to define the words.

And like, well, I can define words how I want.

And then the final line is something like, there's only one question, who is to be master?

Yeah.

And that's what all of this stuff comes down to, essentially, doesn't it?

It's that I get to define language.

I get to define what's, you know, what's allowed and what's not, what free speech means and what it doesn't.

I can say the things I want to say and you can't.

And

it's a shame because in its best form, that Kemi Badenock speech was a defense of freedom of thought and free markets and free intellect.

It was the idea that people could disagree with you and you would sort of beat them by arguing.

Although

she did say when asked, you know, you were in government and you didn't deliver.

She did give the example of Donald Trump.

Oh, this is my favourite speech.

You had to go through one game.

Yeah, there you go.

What difference new leadership will make?

Well, take a look at President Trump.

He's shown that sometimes you need that first stint in government to spot the problems, but it's the second time around when you really know how to fix them.

Yeah.

Just the 15th year of Tory rule.

That's the charm.

That's the one.

It's going to be an interesting campaign slogan when there's the next election.

I mean, do you campaign on vote for us?

We won't get it right,

but we will learn by our mistakes.

We'll have a look under the bonnet and then give us...

There were some other lines that really stood out to me.

A country cannot be successful if its people and intellectual elite don't believe in it.

This means we're dealing with the poisoning of minds minds through higher education.

Of course.

Which is really unfortunate.

She makes it sound like she thinks that getting a degree ruins your brain, which I'm sure is not what she was going for.

But again, I think she could have given that one more pass.

And also, isn't it plain to the gallery of those in America talking about shutting down the Department of Education because it's merely just a propaganda machine?

Which is not something we really think of the Department of Education here.

It sounds like she's very much eyeing herself up to then speak at an American conference on the subject where she'll get a bigger crowd and maybe a more enthusiastic response.

Yeah, it's a bit like some of those Liz Truss speeches, even when she was, you know, a serving UK politician, felt like an audition for moving up to the really big leagues of proper politics in America.

And you're like, they won't even let you be governor of Utah.

Like,

what are you shooting for here?

But I just thought that the poisoning of minds through higher education, which again is that very long-standing online right critique.

I remember a BMP press officer once telling me the problem with the university, they were teaching cultural Marxism.

Like there's a very deep strain about the idea that universities are hotbeds of leftist indoctrination.

Whereas actually what they are are the thing that allows us to compete.

in skills and

the biggest thing you can do in your life that gets you more money, right?

That's the main problem with higher education is that it's not maybe everyone who benefited is not getting it, can't afford it.

Well, one other thing that I wanted to bring up that I thought was really fascinating that Kevin Badenock said this week in a podcast interview, which was that she was a Brexiteer she supported leaving the European Union but then she was shocked to find out that quotes we didn't have a plan or slightly my paraphrase that we didn't have a plan and it just reminded me very strongly of lots of people who supported the Iraq war and then were very disappointed to find out that the Allies didn't have a plan and then now are willing to admit that that was a yeah that went very badly and you know Dominic Cummings said the same thing in an interview with the Sunday Times which was he thought there was a point to remain there was a good face for you know leaving the EU and then doing something with it and he thought we've done something bad which is we've left the EU and then haven't really well the lack of the plan is I think down to lots of lazy thinking that's become part of a pattern of behavior within government which is that I think a lot of people

when they get into power now seem to think that if I just say it it will happen and then they're stunned to find out that people are going okay but how would you like it to be done what's the could you just say a bit more about how you would like us to do this and and that's where they're stumped partly it's the result of you know the the 12-year-olds with, you know, I found this when we were researching In the Loop, which was a kind of fictional look at the Iraq war, Britain and America going to war.

The amount of policy that was formulated by 12-year-olds, well, not 12-year-old, 22-year-olds with a degree in terrorism studies from Georgetown University, one of whom was put in charge of helping Iraq drop its new constitution after the invasion, even though

he didn't quite know how buying a house worked.

His mum was still doing his washing.

And, you know, people telling us in the Pentagon off-record, obviously, that the Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, you know, when he was recruiting people to help run Iraq after the invasion, would ask him if they spoke Arabic.

And if they said yes, he said, well, you can't go.

The fact that you've learned Arabic shows you have pro-Arab tendencies.

So, you know, after the downfall of Saddam Hussein, there was chaos because it was run by people who didn't really understand the language or the culture.

There were lots of road blocks where Marines would put the palm of their hand in front of them to tell them to stop, not knowing that in Baghdad, that sign actually means come forward.

And the cars would drive forward.

And so the Marines would shoot at them, thinking they were possibly terrorists.

It's just lack of clarity and communication.

But unfortunately, you know, the closer I've got to governments anywhere, the more you find out that people are sort of making it up as they go along because they don't quite know or they don't quite have enough time to consider what should be done.

Have you ended up with more sympathy for politicians as your career has gone on or less?

Well,

a little in that it's a bit of both in that I think we put unfair pressure on politicians to be perfect all the time.

You know, they must come home from the holidays now because this bus has broken down.

They must have answers and solutions.

We're all reporters now with phones and whatnot, so they mustn't put a word wrong anywhere.

You know, if they misphrase something, then they should be out.

There's that.

But I think a lot of people also do go into politics thinking, as I said, that you just have to click your fingers and it's happening.

If you're in power, then you should be powerful.

Why isn't it happening?

And it's a sort of lazy thinking going on.

The fact that, you know, if I just, you know, emit the headline, the rest will take care of itself.

And I think that's part of the problem.

This podcast is really about us talking about politics and language and whether a belief, I suppose, that words matter

and that therefore how politicians use language actually does have an effect, which is why we've been talking about

two speeches, Kemi Bandenock's speech that is in a bit of an echo chamber, so might not matter.

Well, it tends to define herself to a group of people who were entirely happy with the definition.

Whereas the J.D.

Van speech does matter for what it's saying.

And what it's saying is a complete kind of reconstruction of how America and Europe sees its relationship.

Marco Rubio, the American Secretary of State, said something interesting, which he said, it's it's not normal for the world to simply have a unipolar power.

That was an anomaly.

It's not right that America should just be the one big superpower.

And

that's another thing that people in Europe are worried about.

Is he talking about, therefore, Russia has to come back into the fold?

Should we be looking at a world,

you know, 100 years ago, like 100 years ago, when the superpowers carved up their spheres of influence, is it Russia and then China and America?

Those are the three,

triangle of power that will assert itself.

And where does that leave Europe?

Yes, the Russia-China-Iran alliance, essentially.

Yeah.

And then the American, you know, it used to be America plus Europe as a bloc.

And I think it will, in the long term, have turned out that J.D.

Vance speech was incredibly useful.

We might like lament the tone of it, but that is clearly the policy of the United States.

Even under Biden, to some extent, that was the policy.

It was a kind of you guys are a bit more on your own than you think.

And time to wise up about it.

And finally, you know,

I was shocked when I heard Olaf Schultz, leader of Germany, say it was premature to start to talk about, you know, whether or not other European countries could put peacekeepers into Ukraine.

That war has been going on since 2022.

You know, there is no solution to it that doesn't involve some kind of security guarantee.

Yes.

Unless you're prepared to just let Russia have whatever it wants.

It's not at all a bizarre thing to ask.

You say that you care about Ukraine's territorial integrity?

How much do you care in terms of how much are you personally willing to put behind that?

It's right.

Kirstan has been talking about, you know, there must be a backstop of US guarantees.

No, no, I was not happy about that phrase returning to Irish.

It's a word that's been a lot of five, ten years.

But it does go back to what you were saying and what Lewis Carroll was saying about whoever's really in charge is the one who gets to say what words are important and what aren't, which is why I suppose we have, you know, we we talk about us looking at two speeches.

There are two kind of conferences taking place as we record this.

One is the real one at the moment, which is between America and Russia.

And the other is this other one happening somewhere in Paris with the European powers who look a lot like, you know, who weren't invited to the ceremony, but, you know, might be asked along later to the evening event.

You know, it felt a little bit subsidiary.

But that's as a consequence of the words that have been coming from America for the last two or three weeks.

Yeah, I think that some of the smarter observers on that say, well, where was Europe, why didn't they have a ready-made plan for the exit to this war that they were willing to, or, you know, concepts of a plan, to use a Trump phrase, that they were willing to present to the Americans and say, here's what we want to sign up to.

There has been a leaderlessness.

And also, I think, a kind of disbelief that even though it was clear that Trump might win the election and it was very clear what he was going to do, there was still a disbelief that that might actually happen like that.

That's what I mean about the advance speech being usefully clarifying.

Yes.

In that if you have had to now hear and internalise the message that America is not prepared to write huge checks to Europe, then Europe has got to then deal with that.

That is the new reality.

He said it out loud.

And I think that's, you know, that's, that will turn out to have been a hopefully help people stop kind of deluding themselves that they're still living in the 1990s, which clearly we're not.

More's the pity the music was better, Amando, let me tell you, back when I was young.

Well, there we go.

Lots to chew on there.

I'm sure we'll return to this, if not next week, over the next five to ten years.

Yeah, exactly, the rest of our natural lives.

Before we go, I just want to pick up on a couple of things.

I mentioned a couple of podcasts ago the story of the language expert who did a lecture saying that in every language dialogue, it's possible to come up with examples of

a double negative.

Double negatives that mean a positive.

Double negatives meaning a positive.

But there's no language that you can come up with a double positive meaning a negative.

At which point, someone in there put their hand up at the back and went, yeah, yeah.

And apparently, that's a true story.

However, for the last two weeks, since I've said it, I've been dogged by people from Scotland, who I like to be dogged by,

including family and friends, who've pointed out to me that, you know, as a Glaswegian, I should know full well that there is a great term in Glasgow, because in Scotland we have I Wright,

which of course means no chance.

Right.

Which is such a famous phrase to the the extent that there is even, I believe, I believe I've been to it, a Glaswegian literary festival called I Right.

Oh, very.

Was it a right-wing festival, or was it

a perfectly politically neutral festival?

I didn't realise that

they were negging me, and now I realise it.

But well, that's good.

Thank you to our Scottish listeners and Omanda's family and friends for berating him about that kid.

He was right in front of me.

If you've got any more, you can send it to strongmessage here at bbc.co.uk.

Thanks for listening to Strong Message Here.

We'll be back next week.

That's all for now.

All our episodes are available on our feed, so make sure you subscribe to BBC Suns.

Goodbye.

Goodbye.

Funnily enough, as we were discussing that, Nigel Farage has just told Jordan Peterson that the Labour government are miserable and declinist.

But this is why Nigel Farage is more successful than Kemi Badnott, because Nigel Farage looks like he's having a whale of a time, he's having a fag, he's having a pint.

Right, like,

and Boris Johnson was very successful.

He was like, he was trapped in a zipline, but he was loving it.

Like, they are the most most successful right-wing leaders of our time because they're not miserable.

I know.

I know.

Please put that in the podcast.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

My praise for Boris Johnson.

We should do one on miserabism, actually.

We really should, because people don't want to.

And try and make it funny.

All the way, just like...

Let's make it laugh-free.

Let's challenge ourselves to make it miserable all the way through.

Hello, Greg Jenner here.

I am the host of You're Dead to Me from BBC Radio 4.

We are the comedy show that takes history seriously and then laughs at it.

And we're back for a brand new series, Series 9, where we're covering all sorts of things-from Aristotle to the legends of King Arthur to the history of coffee to the reign of Catherine of Medici of France.

We are looking at the arts and crafts movement and the life of Sojourna Truth and how cuneiform writing systems worked in the Bronze Age.

Loads of different stuff.

It's a fantastic series, it's funny.

We get great historians, we get great comedians.

So, if you want to listen to You're Dead to Me, listen first on BBC Sounds.

My POV?

Veterans like me should join a company that has their back.

That's why I joined Verizon.

Here, exciting benefits like tuition assistance help me stay focused on my broad career, not stressing about the costs.

Now I use my master's in global security for a role I love as an equipment engineer.

That's life in the V-team life.

Head to mycareer.verizon.com to explore opportunities to join a team that supports your development.

Suffs, 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.