Hurty Words

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The following program was recorded before Nigel Farage accused migrants of stealing and eating swans.

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

It's I'm Adjunucci here, and I'm joined joined this week by returning guest, you're now called, Stuart Lee.

The last time you were on, we asked you if there were any words you wanted to get rid of.

You said minded, as in one of those words that nobody uses apart from politicians.

Yeah, although I've forgotten that because when I was offered to come back on this, I said I am minded to return.

So I actually have begun to use it

before I thought about it.

It's very refreshing to have you.

Thank you.

I've never decided to use words.

It's really costed.

It's a refreshing

one that they use now.

No, no, no, no.

They use, what is is it, uncosted?

Uncosted.

Well, I'm going to use refreshing as much as I can to see what we can get it in.

Good.

Well, I will be enticed to see how

you get on.

You will be enticed.

You'll be enticed.

And you'll be left feeling refreshed, I think.

Oh, I hope so.

This week, we're really getting to the hub of everything we've been talking about for the past year, which is what are words for?

We're really looking at hate speech, freedom of expression,

variations of that term.

Before we do, we normally, for our podcast listeners, who get the longer show.

What have you been up to this week, Stuart?

Well, I've been on tour with my stand-up show, Stuart Lee versus the Man Wolf, which I wrote in November, December last year about the normalization of horrible rhetoric in entertainment and media.

And it looked a little bit ahead of the curve at the time.

Now it's on the nose and it's at the risk of becoming obsolete

as the situation gets rapidly worse.

And do you fear for your safety?

Do I fear for my safety?

Not on a day-to-day basis, but as a comedian, I think if Farage gets in, which he may well do, and learns all the lessons that Trump has shown him, then I think it might be difficult to operate as a comedian.

I mean, I'm not reliant on the patronage of broadcasters.

So I'm not sure.

And you're just a guest presenter.

Yeah, I know.

I remember the then UKIP leader Paul Nuttall saying that if he was in power, he wouldn't want comedians that made fun of UKIP to be allowed to appear at council-funded theatres if UKIP got in.

So it's kind of, you can imagine they'd begin to dismantle the infrastructure that allows you to perform.

Sarah Pasco, who was a guest presenter the last year.

Has she been back?

Not yet, but this is only programme two.

Oh, right, okay.

The new one.

I told a story of her one encounter with Nigel Farage.

It was during the whole Brexit debate, so it was a little while back.

And she was in the...

side room with i think they were both going to appear in the same event um

she thought i'll go up and say hello She said, I know who you are.

I'm Sarah Pasco.

I'm a comedian.

And Nigel Frush instantly said, I don't find comedy funny.

Wow, that's an amazing sentence, isn't it?

It is, isn't it?

It's like saying, I'm disappointed in books.

Yeah, or I don't find that foods has any taste.

Something like that.

Yeah.

Well, you know what?

You sometimes wonder, don't you, about people like that.

I mean, Trump, for example, just seems emotionally tone deaf to culture.

He doesn't seem to have any feel for

music or, you know, people say he doesn't read.

Not only doesn't he read, but even trying to sub down topics for his perusal he won't look at them so basically you've got to boil any complex issue down to one short sentence which you say at him as he leaves the room so it's the last thing he's heard before he goes out and speaks yeah but um just keeping it light to start with i believe you have an amazing anecdote about a bus well it's not entirely irrelevant i was in cardiff i had to go to newport yeah i was going to newport to see carton b morgan the old welsh punk who's got a retrospective coming out this week called Living in Treachery.

I went to see him.

I went to the stop at the correct time.

You're supposed to be able to pay on the coach.

The coach arrived just a little bit late, and by the time the bags had been loaded on, I was unable to pay to get on it because technically it had left, right?

According to the app and the company, it wasn't, it had gone.

I went, but it's there and there's empty seats on it.

And he went, I know, but technically, it's left.

I mean, technically, the driver was already, he wasn't even there.

According to the, you know, he was two miles away.

So I just thought it was mostly the knock-on effect of that is that I had to get him in e-cab and pollute the environment and blah, blah, blah.

But I just think it's kind of interesting that he and I, we knew it was ridiculous, but we were slave to the reality of the

tyranny of machines.

The machines, yeah.

And I, and it's a kind of funny little thing that happened because it was silly because we could see the empty seats.

But also, you know, it has a kind of relevance, I suppose, to we're told to believe the information that's

yeah.

An AI-generated entry on me my friend sent me that said I died in 2016 and we both knew I hadn't well you clearly you're not because you're on that bus going to Newport but that's the other thing maybe I maybe the dead me's on the bus that got there anyway but so and that's the thing that when you then officially off grid yeah

if old machines thought you were on the bus to Newport could you have gone I wasn't anywhere in Cardiff and committed crimes I was in a limbo or Newport as it's known but the I mean the more the AI generates more information if that information is based on false information,

but that's the information we'll be told to accept.

We'd be looking, here it is on the other side.

Exactly.

I always put AI down at the moment.

They're very, very good bullshitters.

They're like candidates on the apprentice.

They say things with confidence about which they have some experience.

But some of it could be wrong.

Yeah.

And you just don't know which part of it is wrong.

And that's part of the problem because we're now kind of spending, or our governments are spending massive contracts putting AI into every aspect of our lives.

Yeah, I sometimes feel this AI energy deal that's just been done with Trump is basically just using us as a huge experiment to see how is it possible to power the servers that AI requires.

I mean we're going to need 10 times the energy to do that.

George Orwell called Britain, was it SS?

I think actually in the future we'll be known as Battery 5.

Yeah, well it does feel like that.

I mean I know that I was talking to someone last night from Tucson and they're setting up a load in the of servers in the in the desert there.

And now there are underground aquifers for the water, but it will run out.

So it's kind of, it's really weird that we would squander the last of our water resources to enable AI to generate inaccurate information saying that I'm dead.

So great.

Well, thank you for that lovely light story about a bus.

Before we go on to like the really heavy stuff,

I must pick up on, we mentioned...

really and I last week were discussing at the end of the show, Crink, which is the acronym for the China, China-Russia-Iran-North Russia,

Korea alliance and how feeble it sounded as a menacing force.

And I'm indebted.

At this point, I always feel a bit like Cyril Fletcher.

Do you remember Cyril Fletcher?

Older people will remember.

He was getting into Mr.

That's right.

On that's life.

He sat in a corner and read, I'm indebted to Mr.

Wetherswick from Bury

for sending in this potato that looks like Gladstone.

I'm indebted to Kaiser of Crisps.

That's not his or her real name.

On Blue Sky, who said, I thoroughly enjoyed Strong Message Here, Phase Two.

But as I listened, I couldn't help musing that if the China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Axis, Krink, enticed Libya and Yemen to join, the grouping would then be Crinkley.

I'll leave that one with you.

Yeah, it's a good, it's good.

It's like a very, very poor enemy in a Bond film, isn't it?

Yes.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Crinkley wants a weapon.

But the real reason we're here is to discuss hurty words, a phrase used by Lucy Connolly, the recently released

political prisoner, we now must call her, otherwise we'll be taken off air.

The whole question of freedom of speech started, I think, by Vance,

who came over to Europe not long after the inauguration and said...

He said a fairly inaccurate thing about anti-abortion protests.

He either misunderstood or chose to misunderstand a Scottish directive that you shouldn't protest within a certain distance of an abortion clinic.

He chose to misunderstand that, that if you were praying, that was a form of protest, and that if your house was within that distance from an abortion clinic and you were praying privately in your own house, you'd be arrested.

It's an extremely big stretch.

And this became a story that he chose to amplify to give the impression that people in Britain were being arrested for praying alone in their houses.

And that's what he said in that speech.

He amplified that story in that speech.

That's right.

He also went on to say you cannot win a democratic mandate by censoring your opponents or putting them in jail, whether that's the leader of the opposition, a humble Christian praying in her own home,

or a journalist trying to report the news.

Yeah, well,

but that has all changed.

Six, seven months later,

following the assassination of Charlie Kirk, we have, first of all, there's been threats to take the licenses away from main broadcasters.

Jimmy Kimmel was taken off air air and subsequently reinstated after thoughtful conversations with Disney.

I haven't seen the transcript of those, but I imagine.

But Trump has said we have radical left lunatics out there.

We just have to beat the hell out of them.

And when asked by an ABC News reporter whether the Attorney General Pam Bondi, who threats to prosecute people who disperse hate speech, who would be those targets, Trump said should probably go after people like you because you treat me so unfairly it's hate you have a lot of hate in your heart yeah i mean the problem the problem with trying to make sense of anything trump says it's just like a baby isn't it that responds to the last thing that happened to it and on on a whim you know what's more weird is vance and these statements about freedom of speech and and the press i mean what's absolutely bizarre is that trump and vance's angle about the uk is that we don't have freedom of speech

starmer maintains that we do and actually quite robustly stood up to them about that idea where they were trying to bully him in the White House.

And yet he completely cooperated this week with, you know, led by Donkeys, were projecting factually accurate information, journalism, if you like, about Trump's relationship with a paedophile onto the wall of a house where a man whose brother was also friends with the paedophile lives, Windsor Castle.

And they were arrested.

What was the offence?

Malicious communication.

Malicious.

Yeah, which is communication that might upset someone.

Well, it might upset Andrew.

Yeah, probably.

Run the other side of the quadrangle.

And then, oh, that's my face.

There were, there were.

Am I back?

Yeah, and journalists that had criticised Trump before were not let into the press conference.

They were told it was for operational reasons.

Operational reasons to be affected by weather.

So, you know, we're trying to make this case that we have got freedom of speech.

But for the period of Trump's visit, it was definitely suspended in a way that it isn't normally here.

And also,

we've had for the last last six months how precious freedom of speech is.

You know, Farage has deployed that argument and Elan Musk has repeatedly, he's called himself a free speech absolutist.

And therefore, you know, there's a disconnect between all of that and then what happened last week when people like Kimmel made remarks, I wouldn't say even jokes, remarks about Charlie Kirk.

The

concerted attack on anyone who made light of the Charlie Kirk event, whether it was the killing or the reaction to it, employers were encouraged to report other employees who might have used

remarks on their social media.

Take their jobs off them.

You know, so I mean, also, Kimmel's remarks weren't really about Charlie Kirk, they were about how strange Trump's reaction to it was.

There was a particular interview with Trump where he was asked to respond to the killing of Charlie Kirk, and he said, like, one word, and then started to talk about the renovations that were happening to the ballroom in the White House.

Yes, I mean, at the memorial to Charlie Kirk, he said, I hate my opponents.

He praised Charlie Kirk for saying, you should love your opponents.

He said, I hate my opponents.

And then he announced he was going to make a big, big announcement the next day about autism.

Yeah,

one of the conservative commentators has said that it was the Reichstag moment.

This is Matt Forney, American middle-right-wing journalist.

The Reichstag fire was used by the Nazis who said that the communists had done it, and that meant that they could crack down on the left.

And so it's really weird because if he understands the actual history of the Reichstag fire, then he knows what he's saying is that we can exploit this event

cynically to get our own way.

But he's done that.

He said he's doing that.

You're not supposed to say that's what you're doing.

I know, because part of their critique of the left is that they have encouraged violence by portraying the right as Nazis, calling the right Nazis and fascists.

And the right saying, we're not Nazis.

So it doesn't help the case when one of them says, like the Nazis,

we will use this, like the Nazis did, the Reichstag fire.

It kind of undermines the argument, which makes you think that actually this is more.

Isn't this knowing?

Isn't this this

this there's something it's beyond cynical i'd say there's something kind of cold about taking

all of that walk you can't see this you can't that has so that has so riled them for the last five or six years

and just using it uh in reverse well they want to re-badging it and using it yeah they want to use it in reverse right but they but on some level the hive mind of the far right in america or america is it understands that there's a hypocrisy about that so so it's had to rebrand cancel culture with its own new phrase yeah which is what consequence culture consequence I think it is yeah the idea that that you're not being cancelled yeah that the that your cancellation your loss of your job for your comments is a kind of natural inevitability a consequence like wind or rain or just it's something that just it's not it's not like anyone's decision it's just so it's there it's not an argument that your words have consequences

because of course that's protected by the First Amendment and the Freedom of the Secretary.

It's just that consequences will happen to you if you do this, you know, because of consequences.

It's a really interesting bit of language.

Yeah.

It's a really interesting bit of language.

And the battleground that allows them to do what they're trying to do will be about language, won't it?

It'll be about how you rebrand fascism

as

consequences.

Yeah.

Well, it's labeling your opponents as not just opponents, but as criminals, as enemies.

I think today Trump has signed an executive order saying Antifa is a domestic terrorist organisation.

Even though it doesn't actually exist as a organization, it's a very loose assembly.

Yeah, yeah.

The word terrorist is going to lose its meaning.

And I think that argument was used by backbenchers like Stella Crete,

calling Palestine Action a terrorist organization, devalues the use of the word terrorism because you then end up with teachers and vicars being arrested for saying I support Palestine action.

And by saying I support Palestine action, I'm not trying to get across the message that I support Palestine action.

I'm just saying that that phrase I support Palestine action, the government is trying to suppress that phrase.

Well, it's important that we don't keep using the phrase I support Palestine.

That's why you had the great, you know, the great responsible people wearing t-shirts saying I support Plasticine action with a picture of Morph on them, who I always had my suspicions about, to be honest.

That guy was arrested and then the police said later they had to unarrest him when they realized it was about Plasticine.

There's an interesting disconnect happening, though, isn't there, where all entertainment is ultimately owned by about five people now.

And those five people all seem to be in hockey to Trump and they're lent on to drop particular people.

Disney, for example, ultimately are the paymasters of Jimmy Kimmel, aren't they?

And

Disney owns Marvel and Disney owns Star Wars.

And the message of those films, it's always a broadly liberal one about a little person standing up to the Empire or whatever.

And yet the way the companies work is opposite to that.

I was doing a show recently at the Royal Festival Hall.

I started improvising with the woman in the front row and she worked for Disney.

I thought, this is interesting.

I said, you own Marvel Comics, don't you?

And I said, yeah, I said, so how do you think this is why, this is why I'm not on panel shows because I just had a, I said, how does it work?

How does Marvel Comics work in a Trump world, right?

Because Spider-Man, you're a comics, Spider-Man is the friendly neighborhood Spider-Man.

Spider-Man would be out stopping ice.

He would be stopping ice, arresting his Hispanic friends, of which he has many.

And that was a key part of the landscape of those stories.

In the 70s, when Nixon was in, Captain America hung up the shield and stepped down for a year and called himself something else.

So

if those characters were following the trajectory of the Jewish liberal, self-educated intellectuals that created them in the 60s, they would be opposed to this government, absolutely, and to its actions.

And yet, so you've got this kind of world where the entertainment corporations have inherited all these characters that come from a broadly liberal tradition.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And yet, they have to, how are they, it doesn't make sense for them.

Maybe something will emerge that is not necessarily a critique of their government because it's hidden behind layers of allegories.

I'm talking about consequences man.

Yeah.

Maybe consequences man will be

will be launched.

I don't know how he gets his superpowers.

Bitten by a vance.

Yes, yes.

And so has the ability to see what consequences might occur depending on your actions.

I think you'll have to write it and try and get it funded.

Yeah.

Well, that's going to be a hard bit.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I think that's a really interesting point that once they move the whole argument on to just the meaning of words and the arrival of new words for which they can supply the meaning, you then get further and further away taken from the facts and the evidence.

So the moment Charlie Kirk was killed, there was a lot of chatter on social media about this is war, as in this must be more than one person.

This is what I've been saying for the last five years.

They're all out to stop us, the left, the haters, the so on.

There's not even a single acknowledgement that evidence is required.

And that makes you think by saying it's just obvious.

I'm sure in a lot of people,

part of you goes, well, they seem very definite about it.

I suppose that must just be the case.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, it was already too late.

You know, before we knew anything about the shooter or his motives or his family background, you know, Sheila Fogarty on LBC had done a three-hour phone-in about exactly this, inviting people to express opinions on left violence.

At that point, we didn't know.

And as it happens, you know, he may have some kind of agenda to do with the trans movement.

We don't really, we still don't really know.

You know, compare that to the assassination of a labor mp that happened uh during the brexit campaign that shooter his house was full of neo-nazi literature and he was connected with those groups so it's kind of and yet he clearly also was someone with a loner with mental health issues and really it does it's more likely to be you know the man that shot ronald reagan did it because he wanted to impress jody foster yeah you know i mean there are other ways

other ways flowers are flowers you know so it's it but that moment was seized upon and to to force the issue.

And of course, the political assassination of Democrat senators was never mentioned.

There was a study conducted by the Department of Justice America over political violence, and it concluded that the bulk of political violence was from the right than on the left, although from both sides.

But that was taken down.

That study was taken down from the Department of Justice website this week.

A lot of things were taken down from websites in America, including the name of the aircraft, Enola Gay, during...

Oh, that's

Tom's initial push.

Because obviously

the assumption there was that the Enola Gay aircraft that bombed Hiroshima was being used in some way to promote the gay community because there's nothing they like more than the irradiated deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.

So, you know, lots of...

That's a fact.

Lots of weird things that are missing there.

But yeah, that does seem a removal of that fact.

The majority of violence from political violence is from the right is obviously targeted.

And we talk about this as if it's far away, it's in america but of course more and more we're seeing how u.s politics uh has more than intruded on uk politics if and when farage gets in he's got the blueprint now for how you do all this yes although it'd be interesting his remarks about so elan musk spoke at uh the london anti-immigration rally yeah unite the kingdom rally which is its official title.

Do you think you've just called it the London anti-immigration?

Anti-immigration rally.

You know, it's the BBC, right?

You've got to provide balance.

So what you have to call it a patriotic demonstration of love of Britain as well.

Yes.

The march for consequences.

Yeah, the march for consequences, yeah.

So Musk said this.

This is a message to the reasonable centre.

The people who ordinarily wouldn't get involved in politics.

They're quiet.

They just go about their business.

My message to them, if this continues, violence is going to come to you.

You will have no choice.

You're in a fundamental situation here.

Whether you choose violence or not, violence is coming to you.

You either fight back or you die.

That's the truth, I think.

What does it even mean?

I know.

And what is it relevant to?

But what that's doing is taking something that at the very, before he speaks, the idea that he's about to put across to you, you would think of as being far-fetched.

But he gradually makes it present by being more and more definitive about it.

So he starts by saying, you know, people who ordinarily wouldn't get involved in politics, that sounds reasonable.

A lot of people are like that.

That feels like airy-fairy, kind of a very general, nice way of describing most people.

They're quiet, they go about the words.

My message to them, if this continues, whatever this is, right?

So you just have to work out what this is.

If it continues, violence is going to come to you.

Are you against this or for this?

Exactly.

What is this?

Violence is going to come to you.

You will have no choice.

So he's now criticising you for being, oh, I don't want to get involved.

I can't really, it's too hard.

It's, I want other people to take those decisions.

No, you say, no, no, you have to decide.

But it's not actually a decision because it's a fundamental situation that gives it a special status because it's fundamental whether you choose violence or not okay so the option is still open violence is coming to you you either fight back or you die so you have no options now violence is definite and you have to respond with violence and that's why he says that's the truth brackets i think okay when you when you analyze it like that right that speech does seem to build you suggest that the deliberate ambiguity of the word this is planned because it allows all the people with their different grievances, whether it's about immigration, economics, town planning or whatever, in that crowd, it allows them all to think about

them.

This must stop or the violence will come.

So it allows them all to think it's addressing them.

You suggest that the use of the word fundamental by him is deliberate because it gives weight to the thing and that he's proceeded in three sort of paragraphs, short paragraphs, from this is for the reasonable centre to the suggestion that they must fight against something.

But you talk about that as if he's deliberately constructed that and I don't know that he does.

No, I think he just like all of them

laughs about.

Exactly, but I think it's an instinctive, I think it's an instinctive mode that they have of thinking, which is to declare something as absolute and present.

And therefore there is no further need to explain it.

Or to put

that to provide evidence.

There's no definite article in it.

There's only this.

I can read you Farage's response to when he was asked, isn't that a bit inflammatory?

For I said, well, the context in which the words have been used left a degree of ambiguity which is fair enough for the study he added if the fight that musk was talking about was about standing up for our rights and free speech it was about fighting in elections to overcome the established parties then that absolutely is the fight that we're in

violence is coming to you either fight back or you die that's really about participation in elections about what it's about um making sure that you perhaps vote in person rather than using a postal vote to make sure that it really really counts

Farage cannot know and neither can we because it's this.

It just says this, right?

So, like,

Farage can't know what Musk means by this.

We can't know.

I don't know that Musk knows what he means by this.

He's probably been awake for four days.

So

it'd be really weird if the tipping point towards violence in our country is based around a speech from Musk in which there's an indefinite article in the middle of it, the word this, which we have no idea idea really what the this that we were supposed to fight people about or die is.

I just see a menacing moment when, you know, the word this is spray-painted on people's houses.

But

it hadn't really struck me how awful and sad that is.

There's an assumption that there's this terrible thing happening and we all know what it is, but you're not allowed to talk about it.

You're not allowed to talk about it on the BBC.

You're not allowed to talk about it anywhere.

You lose your job if you talk about it.

And that thing, whatever it is, that is this.

And this, whatever this is, they need to sort that out.

Because if they don't, it's going to be trouble.

Well, thank you for clearing that up.

That, again, is very refreshing.

Well, I was enticed towards a decision there about the word this.

Yeah.

There was so much else we wanted to talk about, but

we'll have to do it another day.

But at least we've got to the nub of the issue, which is consequences and this are the two words to look out for.

Before we go, just resuming my Cyril Fletcher pose,

Lena and I last week discussed the use of the word plastic as in Kirstama's complaint that reform were plastic patriots and that the Green Party were plastic progressives.

To call the Greens plastic is a biodegradable red flag to a bull.

Sorry, you were going to say, Stuart.

Well, I mean, I think the worst, perhaps the worst example of the plastic, you've got your plastic paddies, plastic greens, plastic bertrand of course if you remember which was an assats version of a belgian punk and that's that's where the thing stama was basing it that on that's where the phrase all right because i was i was inundated by three uh tweets and skeets uh from people explaining it uh andy skeeted plastic is a reference to stama's football fandom it's what supporters call other fans who've never been near their clubs matches kane on x however said plastic reference is from mean girls the plastics are a group of popular vacuous girls at school who make everyone's lives a misery.

I'm 60s, so you have no excuse.

Watch the film, it's epic.

And ISHBMB said, I believe it's referenced to plastic punks in the 70s, derogatory term for people who are not real punks.

So actually, no agreement on plastics other than plastics means plastics.

But you say it's plastic Vertron.

Plastic Vertron, yeah.

But I also think the plastics may relate to the flags that we see draped on

the M6, because I took a load down and tried to burn them in the garden, and they uh they just coagulated into a kind of plastic mess.

So just a patriotic fat bar.

Yeah, yeah.

Thanks for listening to Strong Message Here.

Stuart will be back over the course of the series, whatever that means.

And I'll be back next week bringing you an episode from the Labour Party conference where Kirstama will be making what's billed as the speech of his life.

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

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