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Kids and teens use the internet every day to connect, play, learn, and explore. That's why conversations about online safety shouldn't wait until something goes wrong. This holiday season make time to check in. Ask what they're doing online, who they're talking to, and remind them they can come to you. Teach them "nope". Notice what feels off. Own your boundaries, protect your privacy, exit, and ask for help. Talk early, talk often, stay involved. Learn more at ACF.gov/nope. Hi everyone, this is James and Anna. We are too far off the hit UK podcast. No such thing as a fish. Yep, no such thing as a fish is where four of us get together every week to discuss our favourite, weirdest, funniest, madest, most interesting facts we've found that week. Anna, did you know that there is an island in Peru where the ultimate masculine gesture is to knit a bubble hat so well that you can carry water in it? That's why you're wearing ten bubble hats today, is that James? That's so masculine. Good on you. All right, go to no such thing as a fish wherever you get your podcast. Page 94, the private eye podcast. Hello and welcome to another episode of Page 94. My name's Andrew Hunter Marie, and I'm here in the eye studio with Ian Hizlop, Justin Smith, and Adam McQueen. We're here in a, can we say a bumper fortnight for news? There certainly seems to be a lot more than usual happening. Some stuff going on, and some stuff going on. So we are recording this episode in the middle of the judge's sentencing of Russell Brand. So we thought we'd start off with a brand story this week. And Adam, I think before we get into the details of it, you wanted to point out a couple of congratulations. Yeah, so I will be keeping my phone open on the desk in front of me. It's not because I'm checking my TikToks, it's genuinely that we've got the judge in court at the moment starting the, starting the sentencing. So I'm keeping an eye on that. Yeah, now I just wanted to start and say, amazing achievement for not only all of the women who turned up in court, one of them today in the sentencing remarks, that she turned up to read her victim impact statement in person, which is a hell of a trauma to undertake on top of an awful lot of trauma. So to, to all of victims, but also to the women who led this investigation, so particularly Rosemond Irwin on the Sunday Times and Charlotte Waste on the Times did some absolutely incredible work on this over literally years. It took to get this story kind of nailed down and then, and then take it through all the way to a criminal prosecution. Lots of other journalists on the Times as well, and Channel 4 dispatches came in on it as well. So it's one of those cases where you just kind of go, unlike the prosecution lawyer in the case, well done to some journalists, we're doing some good work. I was going to say Rosemond Irwin, don't you mean the journalists who disgracefully ensured that some of these women came forward with their stories about what had happened to them? Yeah, one of the most extraordinary things that has come out since the end of the trial all week, you should explain the whole thing because it's mind-blowing. Yeah, is that Ian Winter, who was Russell Brown's lawyer, who's actually a specialist in fraud and financial crime, so very odd one. He has done a few sexual cases before. Charlie Elfick, the Tory MP, you might remember, was found guilty of sexual assaults on two women, and he also represented Harold Shipman early on as well, Ian Winter. So that's picking you to fetch. Yeah, you know where to go. Well, I mean, he tried something absolutely extraordinary, which I've not heard of before. In a pre-trial hearing, which we're now free to report, he actually tried to bring a use of process hearing and said that the journalism that had been done on this case by the Sunday times and the times and Channel 4's dispatches was not only perverting the course of justice, it was also in contempt of court and therefore unlawful and criminal, which is, I mean, as the judge pointed out to him, complete nut and nonsense, because at that point, there weren't any active criminal proceedings against Russell Brown. There was a cart before the horse there with that one. There wouldn't have been court without the journalism. No, there absolutely wouldn't. He tried to turn the whole thing into an assault on journalism. He absolutely did, yeah. For those of us watching, we thought, you're accusing journalists of contempt of court, yet your client is doing a roundup of what's been happening in court on his own log. Yeah, is that not contempt? I don't know, I'm not a KC. There have been a lot of people throwing blame around, not simply at Brown, but offering, saying, well, Brown was actually, you know, he was the darling of the BBC. That was reported in the telegraph, wasn't it? The telegraph said, "BBC enabled rapist Brown." That was their first one. The male said, "Downfall of the swaggering sex predator formed over by the left." And actually, in a way, because Russell Brown has had to have such a long and a weird career, there is sort of quite a lot of blame to go round. I mean, papers as ever sort of selective in where they put it. I mean, the BBC, to be fair to them, launched a full investigation headed up by the boss of their editorial complaints unit in 2023, when the first stories broke about Russell Brown's Brown's behaviour, into complaints that had been made by staff about him, during the very short period of his career that he was actually working at BBC. It was only from 2006 to 2008, when he was a presenter on Radio 6 Music, and then slightly staggering now, Radio 2. I mean, if you think of anyone who's sort of less Radio 2, as a presenter, it would be Russell Brand, I would think, but it was a very much comic relief. Yes, well, that was his last appearance, wasn't it? Well, I think it was 2017, he helped come relief for the BBC, yeah. And they borrowed him from their LA offices, though, for the exhibition in the toilet? Yes, yeah, yeah, no, there was a certain action taken, yes, it throws himself to a woman in the toilets at the L.A. studio at that point. But that's when the action stopped, no further. It seems to have done, yeah. Yeah, the BBC did a bit of sort of Mayuck Alper over it in 2023, no doubt there's going to be some more going on now. I mean, for the male to say, formed over by the left, well, yes, okay. There was a period post the sort of BBC period, where Russell Brand suddenly became this great revolutionary guru, quite inexplicably, and started sort of. The trues was his video podcast, that he was doing at that point, wasn't it, which was the true news, see what he's done with that? And there was an interview with Ed Miller-Band. Ed Miller-Band went round to his kitchen on the eve of the 2015 election, yeah, to kind of beg him to endorse Labour at that point, because he was thought to be such a big force in getting out the youth vote. Yeah, and he rather unhelpfully said that his advice was for everyone not to vote, which isn't hugely helpful, even when you're on the left. Yes, the left, during the brief people he was left, made him, you know, a huge star and formed on him. But in recent memory, it's entirely the right. It absolutely is. It's Trump, it's the MAGA Brigade, it's American lunatics online, and some British lunatics, I don't know, being unpatriotic in case anyone accuses me that they championed him, and are still doing so, and saying he's not guilty, it's conspiracy. Well, the difference, I think, I mean, one of the other. rather brilliant defence tactics, which Ian Winter case he tried, was to say that poor Mr. Brown, no one were touching with the barge poll after these allegations came out. But actually, quite a lot of people had quite large barge polls they were touching with, and I could list a few, we've got Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones, Donald Trump Jr, Elon Musk, Jordan Peterson, RFK Jr. And on our own side, as you say, Ian, the GB News presenter, and Bonport and Chief Bev Turner, who still last week was still standing by her view that he is the victim of a witch hunt and a vested interests pulling strings, and that was the reason behind this belated justice being served. During the period where he was huge, I mean, the kind of 2006 to 2015-ish period, were these complaints known about, I mean, there seemed to have been lots of people in the comedy world who knew, and famously Catherine Ryan, had a good go at him on air during a recording of something. Do we know if there were other people talking about this outside that world? Well, it's like all of these cases that, suddenly, it seems to be one of these things that's been an open secret forever, but certainly nothing came out. Now, part of that was down to extremely judicious use of lawyers by Mr. Brown. So in several cases, he was protected not only by a couple of his agents, who called lawyers in Hannah Chambers, who was his comedy agent, and Ang Howard Wood, who was his literary agent, both at certain points allegations were made to them in Hannah Chambers' case. It was another comedian, male comedian in that case, who was talking about Russell Brown in terms of sex fences in his act. And she accused him of slander. Ang Howard Wood called lawyers in when allegations were made. And I was just thinking through the list. We listed them back in 2023 in a piece I wrote for the eye. We had Thompson Heath Associates, who represented him at that point. BCL Solicitors, Archerfield Partners, Shillings, almost inevitably, perhaps most strikingly, Philip Barden of Devonshers, who in 2020 wrote what was described as a very aggressive letter, personally, to one woman who was claiming sexual assault by Russell Brown. And he said, "I suspect you are trying to obtain money from him." Which was not what she was after at all. She was after an apology and some retribution. But on Brand's part, after decades of talking about the importance of his own freedom of speech, and how he should be allowed to say anything at any point at any time, to anyone, even in the middle of a court case, against him, when it comes to other people saying anything at all, he immediately reverts to lawyers. He doesn't say, "No, I didn't do it, this isn't true." He just tries to shut down free speech, which is interesting for both his left wing and his right to the fans. And also for his Christian fans, I would like to say that not only did he think the left would be good cover, then the right would be good cover, he thought faith would be a good cover. He was a Hindu briefly, if you remember, his marriage, then he became more of a sort of wealth is great Christian. And they're all being remarkably slow to come forward and indicate that they now disapprove. Baptised famously in the tens by bear grills, adding to the level of shit floating into it. And one of the things that this whole case has revealed is how actually trying sexual cases, cases of rape and sexual assault, it has come on in some ways in court those were discussed and there was an attempt to defangle those myths in court like the idea that victims, if they don't, if they're not screaming and running away, then actually everything's fine, this kind of thing. But another thing that's revealed is how actually things haven't moved on. I know that around this table there is plenty of experience of writing about these stories. Justine, you've written about some of them. I have indeed, yeah. I mean, going back to Jimmy Seville, I was told by a woman that she'd been attacked by him many years earlier, it had destroyed her life and she described in very minute detail what happened. So I said to her, I can't write about this, I'm not allowed to report on it, am I without any kind of evidence or police involvement. So I suggested she go to the police anyway because I said, well, if he's done this to you and I had had another report when I was on a newspaper many years ago from another victim who was unable to go to the police at that time and I said, you need to go to the police. She went to the police, the police turned up and said, Jimmy Seville is going to employ the best barresters in the country, they're going to take shreds in court, I suggest you don't go ahead with this, it's going to do you more damage than good. So I went to the police press office and it was a guy I used to work with years ago and I said to him, this is absolutely outrageous, this is a victim of a sexual crime, she needs to be treated as such, she doesn't matter who she is accusing of this, you need to treat her claims very seriously and I was accused of making it up for a story. It was unbelievable. Luckily I kept my transcript. When was this? This was in back 2010. Long time ago. It was alive at the time. It was alive. He could have faced just this. Right. So the police refused to accept it and she was put off completely, she didn't do anything, she went on to die, lauded and she said it was horrific scene, like all of his victims, just imagine seeing, he's dying and everyone's saying what a great guy is, how much money he's raised for charity and we all know he's been a mass abuser and it was very well known, wasn't it? So yeah, so I kept the transcript and gave it to the inquiry and then ended up looking into it very closely, the police force got, I've managed to say, should have done and she ended up getting quite a lot of compensation because it had destroyed her life. Every time she saw him on TV, which is exactly what Russell Brand's victims say today, it re-traumatises, you see this person, walking free, being lauded, celebrated. We've literally, as we're speaking, we've got a sentence, it's just come through the judge has sentence. It's Russell Brand two 10 years and six months in prison for rape and sexual assault. So how long of that will he serve? It will be around two thirds, so sentences obviously are being cut a lot at the moment because of the prison overcrowding, but serious sexual offenses still get a more substantial of the sentence served actually in custody in prison. Right, so Katie Perry said he should be in prison, her verdict on their marriage and she was right. Yep. But I think, I mean, what you talk about, and it comes back to Ros and Charlotte and the incredible work they did, these cases, there are a lot of these cases where afterwards everyone will say, well, everyone knew about it, but getting things to a point where you can safely, legally bring these accusations published, these allegations is incredibly difficult. And it involves enormous bravery, not from the journalists particularly, although there's a lot of lawyers and things that they have to face down, but that's fine, that's part of our job. But from the victims in the cases who generally have to come through and put their names to things, Ian, you've had some experience with this early on in your journalistic career. I did. I mean, one of the first stories I ever wrote for the eye, which was about seeing you figure in the BBC who is indulging in this sort of sexual predatory behaviour, I mean, this is in the early 80s. Can you imagine the climate was somewhat different, and the women who came forward, I mean, there were only three TV channels, they knew pretty much that this was going to end their careers, and they were incredibly brave. But I have to say, I mean, the early 80s, this was before ladder-y. I still can't believe I lived through a period of nuts unloaded and zoo and old, funny, dirty, old, boring, private eye bunch of, you know, moralistic, public school twats. What we noticed was that this bunch were pretty grubby, and having all the channels devoted to, you know, chat shows about anal sex and football was not necessarily a huge development in the history of feminism or human rights. So all I'm saying, this has been going on an awful long time, and I couldn't believe how old fashioned the defence was. I think the judge couldn't either, could he, in this case, because he kept leaping in and saying you can't save his or no, that isn't right. I thought the days of that were passed, you know, crucifying the witnesses, trying to make them look unreliable, suggesting that their action has said men that they couldn't have possibly been raped or attacked in any way. I mean, it was a real throwback, wasn't it, and I think, you know, and the way he behaved afterwards, which was targeting one of the journalists, which one was it, you went in there. Yeah, yeah, that was it, that was it, that was it, that was it. You said it was all down to you, I mean, denying the role that the jury and the CPS and the police play and the victims in all of this. After the confrontation with Roger Roswell and from the Sunday Times, he went to report himself to the bar standards board, but also the way he put that even was, having seen the ways matters have been characterised in today's press, he said he was going to do that. Just leave it at this point. Come on. It's not about paternalism, it's about your behaviour. And he didn't stop there when he was speaking just before the sentencing. He said to the judge, "Do not sentence him, his client, as the monster portrayed outside this courtroom." No, no, he was portrayed as a monster inside the courtroom. Yet again, this man went incapable of not turning anything, he said, into an attack on the media. That's it. The other element of the complainants, the damned if you don't, if you don't think, you know, if there's only one complaint, then the story is, well, there's only one complaint and that can't possibly be real. In this case, there was the initial rash of stories in the Sunday Times, but the complainants in this case were completely separate to the complainants who'd come forward to journalists. You know, they had seen the journalism and been inspired to actually finally speak out about it. And then that was attacked by Ian Winter, saying, well, actually they've been forced to reimagine what happened to them, which was all perfectly fine at the time. And now they think it can't possibly have been fine, because they've seen journalism about it. It's exactly the same thing. It's extraordinary. Well, you'd say as well there are two more cases that police are pursuing, one of which does come out directly out of the Sunday Times reporting. Right. Yeah, yeah. No, there are more to come. And there's an important role to be played by the media in that as well, in sort of, you know, breaking the down and making other victims realise that they can come forward. And of course, that's something you have to be really, really careful with, because you always stand the possibility of ending up with someone like Carl B2 who comes forward with completely false allegations. Yeah. You know, there are two men out at the moment that can't be named, one of the most recent proceedings, and then one from sort of several months back. Both of them, there are injunctions on reporting, anything. Both of them, multiple, multiple victims. Both of them in the public eye. I mean, I've spoken to one of the alleged victims in one of them. She's prepared to speak publicly and be named, but we still can't publish them. She's managed to get an injunction, very heavily slapped, anyone who dares say anything about it. So we know this man is out there potentially abusing other people. And there's nothing we can do to report it. We should say, actually, I mean, again, events may have moved on by the time that people are listening to this, but the injunction, which we talked about in the last episode, the injunction was removed, but the celebrity in question was given leave to appeal, which runs out currently at 4.30 this afternoon as we're recording, so things may have moved on that little by the time this podcast comes out. We've given a kicking to almost everyone who I think deserved kicking. Is just room to fit in the sun, newspaper here, Adam. Well, we should put no word for the Guardian as well. I mean, there was no bigger fan sheet for Russell Brandy in the early '90s in the Guardian, which seems bizarre. And as you say, it was the era of kind of zoo and nuts, but no, the Guardian were right in there. It's his bookie-wook, George Mombio, also I should say the bookie-work full of very, very long sentences. So, Brand does have experience of this. Thank you. Yes. Thank you very much. To their credit, some of the Guardian felt a bit differently, Polytime B, Suzanne Moore, Hadley Freeman, or all at the time of the Guardian hero worshiping him, kind of saying, "Yeah, no, actually, maybe not." And Suzanne Moore famously, there was another person, he threatened legal action against, on the grounds that she'd said he might have ghost-written the bookie-wook, and he threatened it. He didn't just want a correction. He sent a lawyer's letter, saying, "No, no, this is extremely deeply libelous." And he guest-edited the New Statesman in September 2013. There is an extraordinary photo, which the magazine post at the time, which they recreated the loss supper with Russell Brandy as Jesus, and I have to say our own, of this parish Helen Lewis, who was then deputy editor of the New Statesman, does appear in that as well. But the sun, yes, yeah, they've gone big on it, absolutely shocked on Friday, just a big banner headline after the guilty verdict, just said, "Rapist," 2006, 2007, and 2008, they crowned him their Shagger of the Year for their bizarre column, their showbiz column. And in 2009, which is actually the year when Russell Brandy committed the rape that he has been convicted for, in addition to the sexual assaults, they renamed it, and effectively retired it, the Russell Brand Shagger of the Year award, to which he gleefully said, "I've now become the global authority on shagging and the arbiter." So, there you go, it was the sun, what, won it? That's my conversation. conversations about online safety shouldn't wait until something goes wrong. This holiday season, make time to check in. Teach them "nope." Notice what feels off, own your boundaries, protect your privacy, exit, and ask for help. Talk early, talk often, stay involved, learn more at ACF.gov/nope. Hi everyone, this is James and Anna, we are two-fought of the hit UK podcast No Six Things of Fish. Anna, did you know that there is an island in Peru where the ultimate masculine gesture is to knit a bobble hat so well that you can carry water in it? That's why you're wearing ten bobble hats today, is it James? So masculine. Good on you. Alright, go to No Six Things of Fish or wherever you get your podcast. Well that Russell Brandtchap was thoroughly depressing in various ways, so let's move on to something nice and cheerful now, justine the Samaritans. Samaritans. So antithesis, hopefully, of all of the grub we've been speaking about. These are heroes, every single one of them. All of these volunteers, the peak I think they had, 23,000 of them, turning up all day and night to listen to people in their very very darkest hour, set up in 1953 by a reverend with a single black phone in his vestry of his church, that phone still there apparently. Since then, since 1953 they've taken 134 million calls and I don't think you could even begin to calculate how many lives they must have either saved or improved. However, I'm sorry to say, it's not another happy story today. It's why we're here, I'm sorry. So there's trouble at Samaritans, it's been going on a while now, so the headquarters has announced a future proofing scheme, I don't know about you, I hate the word for future proofing. Future proofing against what? Well, it sounds like future proofing against being able to have a presence in every community and have volunteers who can go into offices and work together and support one another, you know, make their presence known. So we should say how it works at the moment, which is there are about 200 branches all over the UK and people go into small local operations and it's often night shifts, isn't it? Because that's when people are feeling at the lowest and most desperate and all of that. And it's minimum two people on a shift. Minimum two people on a shift, yeah. Now, what the centre is saying is that 10 years ago they got rid of all of the localised numbers and had a central number and it now runs through a system where if you rang, you might speak to someone in Northern Scotland or Northern Ireland, it doesn't, you know, so what they need is more bombs and seats at those difficult times in the night when they can't get people in. So they're saying that the model of having all of these different buildings and running these different buildings doesn't work anymore, it doesn't work, charities are struggling, income is lower, you know, it is for all, lots of charities are struggling at the moment, but what the local branches are saying is that actually most of us run our own, something like 140 of them are called affiliates, they have their own budgets, they run their own money, they raise their own money, they talk to the media, they recruit, they train, most of all, they look after one another through these difficult hours when they are taking these calls. They've run three pathfinders, so one in Scotland, one in sort of Humberside New Yorkshire, one in the south-east. Where is that trials of? Trials Pathfinder Trials yet, try out this new regionalised system where they want to build these bigger hubs where you can have more people in them and you remove all the smaller offices. So they've tried these out and they said, you know, these will be tried between 25 and 2028, but suddenly last month lots of volunteers in a number of offices about nine were called in and told they'd be closed down by the end of November, by the end of this month, in January, and they would be given two options. One is go to the nearest hub and the second would be eventually, because this isn't been set up yet, answer calls from home. Yeah, I know. So working from home, working from home. Working from home. Working from home. Working from home. Yeah. Dealing with the most traumatic phone calls you can possibly imagine. So number one. Terrible idea. Number one, some people would have to drive two and a half hours each way for a three-hour shift potentially in the middle of the night. Otherwise the option is, listen to this trauma from home, allow this trauma to come out in your home. It assumes you've got a spare room with confidentiality and got children running around, you haven't got people who can over here, and imagine you're sitting for three hours and you're talking to someone in their darkest moment, and obviously if you're talking to someone, sometimes those calls are going to run on, because you might be keeping people alive in that very moment, and then you have to put the phone down on your own with your thoughts in your house, and you have nobody to talk to, nobody to turn to, and in fact they did an informal survey in Wales and ask people if they would do this, 90% of them said they wouldn't do it. Right. What organisation apart from perhaps Mountain Rescue and R&L I has this willing army of volunteers who are willing to do so much for their community? I can't think of any other, that is the asset that they've got, and that's the asset they want to strip. And in your story about it, Justin, which we should say is in the latest edition of the I, you mentioned that the Samaritan's Central organisation has set up its own helpline for volunteers. Yeah. That sounds like a really black joke. Really? Yeah. So they are so distressed. I mean, the ones I've spoken to a lot, they are so distressed, some in Omar, for example, Omar is not part of this cost cutting, sorry, not future proofing. Omar, the volunteers, they took one of three calls when there was the bombing in 1998. Some of them have been there since helping their community to deal with that enormous trauma, the biggest single atrocity in the troubles. They were told they were closed down, their office has been closed down. Now they own their own building, it was gifted to them as a legacy, okay? These people have worked through terrible trauma, they've been told that their offices are going to be closed down, all of the assets will be stripped and sent back to the centre. Now the centre now accounts for something like 18 million pounds of the 23 million raised, lots of it, most of it in the legacies and donations. That used to go straight into the services now, staff costs are something like 18 million pounds in an organisation that we all associate with volunteering, don't we? As you can understand, there is a lot of upset, a lot of sadness, people are in tears when they were told the biggest worry for them is who will be there for people in their darkest hour. You know, there's a lot of these people who would be until they're dying day, and it's just not going to be an option for them. So I imagine you put all of this to this, what was their response? When the home listening service is set up, because it hasn't even been set up yet, there will be being monitored, that creates safety for callers, but not necessarily for the listeners, and only one in ten will actually be watched by the centre, so nine out of ten callers will not even be being monitored by anyone else. So their response to, this is a terrible idea, but we can make it less terrible. Well, they're saying that the hubs are more likely to attract more volunteers, and then in those hubs, some of them have got 60 seats, they can ensure that the difficult times in the middle of the night are better covered. Which doesn't sound like a terrible argument if you've got, because I read through their response to you, and they were saying, well, if there are two people on a shift, and then one of them doesn't turn up, then the other one can't do it, and so you do lose a bit of capacity during that time. But why are there two people on a shift, I mean, to protect one another, to look after one another, to protect anyone else, anyone to protect callers? Maybe you have someone, a third person, say, who's on call, in case one of the others does, I mean, far be it for me to do logistics for them, but you don't need 60 people in a hub to preserve the fact that if some person is ill and doesn't turn up for the job, you don't just close down the office. The thing is, they're spending millions on building these hubs as well. One person who's been a supporter of the Samaritans for very many years wrote to private eye and said, I've changed my will, and I've told them I'm changing my will, I was going to leave my entire legacy to Samaritans with £100,000, and now I'm not. Now, what I'm worried about, I do not want this reporting to make people think, A, they can't call Samaritans, because that line is still active, it's still going, it's still there, the people are there, or to think that they shouldn't give money to it anymore, because it's a really important service, but we do want the centre to listen to its volunteers, the people who have run it for all these years, who've made it what it is, and that's all that they're asking, they're saying, you know, we're the listening service, listen to us, we know what we're doing here, and I think that's what's not happening perhaps at the moment. Kids and teens use the internet every day to connect, play, learn and explore, that's why conversations about online safety shouldn't wait until something goes wrong. This holiday season, make time to check in, ask what they're doing online, who they're talking to, and remind them they can come to you, teach them nope, notice what feels off, own your boundaries, protect your privacy, exit and ask for help. to discuss our favourite, weirdest, funniest, madest, most interesting fact we've found that week. That's why you're wearing 10 bobble hats today, isn't it James? That's so masculine. Get on, yeah. All right, go to no such thing as a fish or ever you get your podcasts. So, Andy, the COP26 summit begins on the day we're recording in Turkey, I believe. COP31 begins, actually. COP26 was five years ago, yeah. Well, that's just confusing. Or five years plus a pandemic again, yeah. COP31 in 2026 kicks off. One question. Good COP, bad COP. Lovely. Dirty COP, I think is what we're brighter into the conclusion of, yeah, yeah. COP means conference of the parties and it is the annual global conference that tries to do something about climate and energy and it is all the nations of the world attending bar one. Can you guess? It's the USA. Yeah, quite a big one, but not the whole game in town. And so what's interesting is we're recording this on day one of COP. The UK has always been an enthusiastic partner in and in some ways leader of the process has made an enormous amount of progress itself on emissions, something that UK can be quite proud of. And yet day one of this conference, which is all about electrification, efficiency, lowering emissions by tiny things electric, the UK is in the middle of this extraordinary series of steps backwards on electrification and cleaning things up. It's really weird. I mean, there are announcements that are being made all the time right now that are completely contrary to the presiding spirit of this big global conference that's happening right now. So we've had Jack tour, the big gas field being approved. I think today I saw headlines about electric vehicles, the targets being road back on those as well. Yes. This is one of those things which is extremely heavily briefed in both directions by people who are sticking their aura in but don't want to admit they're sticking their aura in. And this target has changed so much. I mean, it's absolutely exhausting. This will be the third big change in three years to this target. At the moment, the car industry, you know, they're either screaming out for just some certainty or they're screaming out saying, can you cancel all these electric targets because they're fractionally harder to achieve than we thought. Yes, the idea has been for a long time for about a year that by 2030, 80% of new car sales, which is a small proportion of overall sales, most people buy their car secondhand, 80% of new car sales will be electric and the rest can be hybrids. And there has been intense screaming from the car industry, mostly the bits of it which haven't managed to get their ducks in a row, people like Jaguar Land Rover, that kind of thing. So this is impossible. It won't work. You've got to lower that 80% to 70 or 60 or 50. And the headlines today are suggesting that the government are going to be making a big change on that. And that is one of the main policies they've got for lowering emissions and making cars more efficient. And their briefing will go as low as 50% of new cars to be electric by 2030, which would be a huge collapse in ambition. Like 80 is a lot. Like the trajectory at the moment, 80 will be pretty hard to achieve. There was a lot of tolerance even in the, you know, the woke eco-loons among us saying, well, 80 is going to be quite hard, maybe 70 is more realistic. But to cut it down all the way down to 50, given all these extra flexibilities in there, it just feels like a total collapse in the batting order. And this is a target. So are there fines if you don't? There are fines if you don't meet your target. No one has ever had to pay a fine. Every manufacturer has met their target every single year because there are flexibilities. And if you clean up your fleet a bit here, you can sort of get fresh credits over here. No one has ever had to pay a fine yet. Is this because the greens are so popular? Labor are desperately rowing back because of a few different reasons. We think of labor as being, you know, relatively strong on environmental stuff. There are big undercurrents within labor that, frankly, don't really give a toss about it. And we've got a new chancellor, John Healey, who has a long record of going slow on stuff like this. I mean, he's been the chunk of his summer objecting to the idea of a new solar field at his constituency. And then you've also got donors. You know, there are institutional donors, like the unions, the GMB, whether B stands for boiler makers. And you've got individual clues, it's a bit of a clue. And you've got individual donors, like Dale Vince, who doesn't like various solutions like heat pumps and thinks, you know, that his solution of bio methane will work instead, which it won't read about this in the eye under the very, very disguising moniker of sunny gym. He's good. I like his stuff. Or her. So obviously as a journalist, I can only perceive in things in terms of Westminster, which is something who's up and down. I mean, Ed Miliband being moved over to foreign secretary, sounds like a promotion. Is it just to get him out of the way of the green stuff? Presumably not, because we're also told that the new environment secretary, me, at a fun bullet, he's a protégé, if he is, that's how she's always described. She is, definitely. I think Miliband was such a bet noir for the place I like to tell her off of the mail that people want to, you know, stories got even more clicks when it was Miliband's woke eco-alunacy rather than fun-billars woke eco-alunacy, just she's not as recognizable a name. But I think in general, remember this name now, Keir Starmer was stronger on green stuff than Burnham has been so far, and that's despite Burnham talking a very good game. There is a series of actions approving Jack Dor, maybe approving Rosebank, which is a much bigger oil field, like Jack Dor, you can kind of make a case for Rosebank is would trash a lot of climate commitments, you know, but Rosebank's figures were amusingly put into the budget as though it was going to happen, and even the dimest of financial journalists thought, hello, yes, it looks like this is already done. John Healey has been saying, well, of course, it's all me at her decision, and I wouldn't dream of interfering with this process, but wouldn't it be nice to get a bit of this tax revenue? So, isn't she opposed to it, though, has she been publicly? She has not publicly said, she's been quite careful to go to Aberdeen and say we do support this industry and we quite like to keep some seats in Scotland, but there is a debate over whether or not Burnham and Healey will together say, no, we're having it, and intervene with that process. But all of this is happening in week one of COP, which is meant to be trying to resolve some of these issues. And it was cross party this UK initiative and involvement. It's, I mean, really, it's a Tory thing, you know, it's Theresa May, was Theresa May's side of its law, yeah, yeah, and then, I mean, the UK has never missed one of its climate commitments. I think if some of these steps go ahead, for the first time under a Labour government, the UK will miss its targets, which are legally binding, not that that makes too much of a difference to what actually happens on the ground, but will Boris Johnson intervene? I mean, I don't quite know where his politics are, but he used to be quite green. He was very hot on this stuff. He was terrific at announcing big targets and then jollying people along, which probably did a fair bit of good, I mean, on the green stuff, as with Ukraine, he certainly talked to good game, even if the results of the ground weren't actually quite as fast as he hoped. I mean, he brought forward the target to 2030 for electrifying new car sales. But it can be being long, very much the other way, isn't it, she doesn't prove any other stuff. No, she recycles, though, and give for her, that's all she says at interviews when asked about it. Yeah, the conservatism and former, you know, scrap all targets, scrap all of this. We'll get there somehow anyway, but they don't say how. Right. Do you think they will? No. No, no, no. All of this comes with the big background of, do the COP conferences do anything? You can't get nations of all these different sizes, different wealth, all of it, to agree on anything. The petro states are always going to try and gum the thing up anyway. So there is a big question over whether it's a worthwhile process to engage in. Didn't last year, they agreed not to mention fossil fuels. I may be exaggerating slightly, but the wording was rather. I mean, basically, they hosted last year. I remember this wrong, wasn't it? Didn't the Saudis host it one year or something? It has been hosted in the UAE. It's been hosted in all sorts of nations, which have all sorts of variable records. I mean, if you only want to host it in perfect nations, then you're only ever going to host it in small island states or in Denmark or places like that. So you sort of. I mean, small island state that's getting smaller by the day might be quite a good bit of focus people's minds a bit. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that's the thing. They don't mention fossil fuels. The target this year is quite snappily named 35x35, which is the idea that by 2035, 35 percent of final energy, so not the energy that's put into the system, the actual useful energy services should be electric, right? Now the reason people say that is because there's this massive thing about primary energy, where people say, well, fossil fuels provide most primary energy that goes into the system. And what that means, basically, is that the energy that goes in is fossil, about three quarters of it is lost, is wasted during the process of getting stuff out of it. Basically, if you've got two postmen, and one of them delivers a hundred parcels, but throws 75 into a hedge, that is actually not a better postman than someone who's delivering 30 parcels. Can I put it that way? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So, into a great metaphor. So the target of 35x35 is going to be haggled over for the next couple of weeks. But as you say, and no one's mentioning fossil fuels, there's this awful embarrassing uncle in the corner of the room, and everyone's just saying, well, let's just try and move around the uncle. Couldn't we do more, though, by helping the global south with its targets than giving a bit of money towards heat pumps in this country? There's definitely a case to be made about what is the most effective thing to do. And where the responsibility lies for action, you know, should nations contribute to forests, overseas, and keeping them. but then that becomes a bit of a hostage to fortune. It's obviously saying, well, we'll drop him down if you don't pony up. So, yeah, I mean, it's described as a multiplayer problem with a multiplayer solution. You know, it is a bit of everything. - 'Cause there was a 83 billion pledge to help other countries who are. - Yeah, the rich nations are very slow on delivering and signing up, and even the things that are agreed are mysteriously slow to appear. - I'm getting the impression that Targets is the name of the game here, isn't it? Rather than actually doing an effect. - Gold, starting Targets. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. And this is why this one, the organizer's Turkey, who are kind of co-hosting with Australia, don't ask about the footprints of traveling around. Everyone's flown in, never mind that. They have said they want this to be the cop of implementation. - I do think. - The cop of implementation. - That's not the bad cop. There's a guy, hi, I'm the cop of implementation. - Good cop, bad cop, implementation cop. You do think maybe 30 years ago could we have focused on implementation, but we are where we are. - I don't like that now. - Yeah, and the fact is that by getting Paris, the Paris agreement over the line 11 years ago, that has made a huge difference to the overall trajectory of global emissions, which is extraordinary, you know, is just that it hasn't gone far enough or far enough yet. - Isn't the US just withdrawing from it all anyway? - The US likes to play Hoki Koki with these negotiations. I think we've had out in, out, and then we'll wait for two years from now to see if they're going to be back in again. But the conversations kind of move path where the America's evolved really. It's much more about challenges. - China and India. - It's all a bit up for grounds. What's going to happen in America now after the midterms and losing control of both houses? - Yes, there are lots of Democrats just making their own freelance trips over to the COP conference, saying, "Well, we're going to sort this out," you know? Which is very interesting. - Well, you've been very, very positive, Andy. (laughing) - I didn't mean to be, I don't alarm everyone. But no, we'll see what happens with this sort of mad UK rollback, 'cause it really is sending all the wrong signals, basically. - Is it the lab buddy saying, "We can do the pragmatic thing, even if lots of people hate it?" - Because we're the government now. - I think it is. And I think there is a question over this word pragmatic, because I don't think when we get to two degrees in 20 years' time or whatever it is, everyone will be saying, "Well, thank God, "we were so pragmatic 20 years ago. "I think that will not be on anyone's lips." - And we have forgotten the summer already. - Yeah, it was quite warm. - It was really cold now. (laughing) - The hottest hotest October of record in this country, and it's going to be the hottest year on record. They've just announced in the last couple of days, aren't they, that this will be the hottest year, surpassing 2024? - Well, that sounded dangerously radical, Dusty. And I think we need to cut these electric car targets just in case. That's it for this episode of page 94. Thank you so much for listening. Hope you've enjoyed it. Thank you to Ian, Dusty, and Adam. We will be back in two weeks with another episode of this show, but until then, if you find yourself needing more stories, there is a magazine out there that I can recommend to you. It's called Private Eye, and if you go to privatehyphenye.co.uk, subscriptions are available. - Failing that, just go to your nearest news agent, assuming you still have one in your local area, and get a copy of the magazine. Thanks also to Matt Hill of Rethink Audio for producing. Bye for now. - Kids and teens use the internet every day to connect, play, learn, and explore. Teach them, nope. Notice what feels off, own your boundaries. Protect your privacy, exit, and ask for help. - Hi everyone, this is James and Anna. We are two faults off the hit UK podcast, no shooting is a fish. - Yep, no shooting is a fish, is where four of us get together every week to discuss our favorite, weirdest, funniest, maddest, most interesting facts we've found that week. - That's why you're wearing 10 bobble hats today, is James. - So masculine. - Good on you. All right, go to no such thing as a fish wherever you get your podcasts.