Budget Analysis, Mbappe China Furore & Midterms - Off the Fence

Hello, everybody, and welcome to this week's Off the Fence with me, Constantin Kishin, my trigonometry, car hose, Francis Foster, Tom Slater from Spike Den, Winston Marshall of the Winston Marshall Show, gentlemen. Welcome back. We have, I would say two and a half stories for you this week. We will talk about the Great British Budget, the Georgians and all of that good stuff. Interesting. It's been interesting watching it from the US. It kind of puts things into perspective. We will talk about Killian and Bapley, the soccer player, as they would say here, who has triggered a Chinese backlash for joking about Mao Zedong being a dictator. This was very offensive. And finally, we'll check in from here in the US about the midterms. Tom Slater, why don't you take us away with the budget? What have we missed? What are we going to come back to when we eventually return to Blighty? Well, I wish I could say it was a particularly optimistic picture, Constantin, but it really amounted to a whole lot of nothing. If the most memorable moment from a budget turns out to be an announcement on Gerkins, it would probably imply that it's not much to be said about it, but that's more or less what we've ended up with. In terms of sheer volume, this was actually quite a big budget, very long statement. There were 98 individual measures, which were announced, which I understand is a record, but when it actually comes to meaningful change, meaningful spending, it's pretty low. I mean, there was about seven billion of extra spending announced, and therefore seven billion of extra tax to be raised within it. But really, this is the, it was billed as the steady as she goes budget, which might capture it if things out there were quite steady. If the waters were quite calm, but they're obviously not. And so, essentially, this is a sticky fingers in the year, go la la la, I'm not listening budget. I think it's the best way to describe it. There were a few eye-catching things. There was the £100 payment to about 20 million households to help people get through the winter and what was certain to be some pretty sharp increases in energy prices. As many people have pointed out, that's going to be almost entirely wiped out, made insignificant when the energy price cat races in January. And I think that's a good example of what this budget does, is that you've got a few sort of crumbs from the table, as it were, meanwhile the underlying things about society, about the economy are just totally untouched. The fact that we do have the highest energy prices in the developed world, certainly where businesses are concerned, the fact that we are now three trillion in debt, and yet there is no serious attempt to pay that down, now paying more on purely debt interest payments than we pay on defence, policing and justice, combined easily north of £100 billion every single year. Just dead money, just gone. In terms of servicing, our debt, there's nothing in here which has addressed any of that. And the latest route, which is blown up, of course, is that there's nothing in here which would address and certainly know other announcements or indications from the government that would address this ballooning welfare bill. I mean, one of the shocking statistics that is in, not just the budget bill, see the accompanying assessments and documents, is that when it comes to welfare spending, purely on health and disability benefits, in the life of this Parliament, that's going to go up to a hundred billion. And actually the Chancellor John Healey and the Prime Minister have been forced in recent days to admit that they will not make any cuts to welfare spending in the course of this Parliament, having previously said that they might do it in a labour way, which would presumably mean not cutting it at all. There were, I suppose there was a few gags here of them, most notably, Kelly Vaidnot, who responded to John Healey's very gracious announcement that he would chuck, he would cut the tariffs on various foods, definitely, marmalade and gurgings. I believe we've got a clip of that knocking around somewhere. It's one of the few brighter moments from this particular budget. The Prime Minister came in promising to reverse 40 years of neoliberalism. Instead, we got 4p off gurgits. Unfortunately, just like every other major budget, the headline story. One of the few sort of funny moments from what was other, a pretty grim day in the House of Commons, but I think really sums up this government. When it comes to rhetoric, they can be quite strong. Certainly, we were talking a few weeks ago about Andy Burnham coming in saying he's been a rip-up 40 years of neoliberalism, and yet what we've got is a lot of tinkering around the edges to put it very lightly. Obviously, the question therefore is this just a holding pattern for now as he thinks about maybe calling an election, getting his own mandate, therefore being able to do things that he would currently be inhibited from doing. But as we talked about, when we talked about the conference season, I think there is just a fundamental timidity in this government that kind of stops them from going too far in one direction or the other. Deep down, I think they know that those fundamental issues of debt, energy, welfare bill exist. That's why they've got all these reviews which are taking place into them. It's why when pushed, they look a bit shame-faced on the media when the size of these figures have pointed out to them. But at the same time, for the reason of pure politics, they're incapable of dealing with them. At the same time, these dreams that they have of a new social care system, of reversing the Thatcher settlement as they would see it, is just it kind of impossible in the current fiscal climate. And I think deep down, I know that as well. So it feels like we're doomed to more of the same. It's just unfortunately more of the same means an incredibly precarious position in which we're basically just in a competition with poor old France as to who is going to lose the faith of the bond markets first. So when you get back, you've got all of that to look forward to. But yeah, not a lot of positive news, I'm afraid. A big thing I think I'd add is that John Healey Quitt, Starmer's cabinet as defense secretary, specifically because he was not satisfied that Starmer was spending enough on defense. And here he comes in with a budget and he's kicked this defense spending aspect down the road to next year's spending review. So this kind of whole, uh, holier than thou move he did this last year. It turns out to be total nonsense. And I mean, it doesn't take much to get me triggered these days. But I, I'm going to be pretty livid about this whole thing. I mean, a lot of people are just giving it as a nothing burger, damp squib, uh, budget. But actually, I think it's, uh, pretty and raging. So as well as John Healey being what I think is tantamount to a hypocrite, he's also a man who's put a budget through that shows exactly that he's never had experience, experience in the private sphere. He's never run a business. This guy, by the way, looked into it. He, he, it is two years before he went into politics in the private sphere. He was a journalist, uh, the house magazine in Westminster and he was, uh, a PR communications guy. Basically, he has no idea, but it's not just him, it's the entire cabinet of the 23 cabinet members. The average experience in the private sector is under a year each. And it's kind of a joke what their experience is, all of them, including Burnham, it's like, uh, Burnham was what? Trade journalist at Baltic publishing, Shabbana Mahmoud was seven years as a barrister. If that Cooper was two years at the independent, uh, Jonathan Reynolds, our business secretary, ten months as a trainee solicitor, and he didn't even qualify. So these are the people running our country. What do we expect for, for them to, to, to do something? The neoliberalism thing, I have to address this because it really pisses me off. Andy Burnham, oh, we've got to reverse, neoliberalism here. This guy doesn't give a damn about neoliberalism. For example, when it came, came to Manchester and this whole scandal around Manchester City and the owners, uh, potentially being massively punished for their, their fiscal misbehavior, his response was, I'm very worried about what this might mean for Manchester and, and you know, I was worried about these owners who have put a lot into Manchester. Sorry. What is more neoliberal than foreign owners coming in and buying up lots of property and, and buying community assets like a bloody football club. He doesn't give a shit about neoliberalism. And this budget, what, what applies to the neoliberalism thing, is if you care about neoliberalism, what about the fact that we have hundreds of thousands of people coming in, not just illegally, but legally, undercutting British people's jobs, they, uh, they undercut the, the, the, the wages, which suppresses wages. If you care about neoliberalism, if you deal with the immigration problem, that will raise wages. That is the kind of like, it's kind of like the neoliberal blind spot, I think, for the left. Like they don't, they're so, immigrants and, and immigration is such a, uh, they're sort of protected class and a protected issue. They can't realize the damage it's doing economically. So that's, uh, sort of, uh, another aspect that completely, uh, uh, wire me up. But the thing that's really important is the small changes he has, has made, are going to be incredibly damaging to small businesses. For example, he's raised to the national living wage and the national, um, uh, uh, uh, minimum wage. These incremental small differences, they're, their marginal, uh, sort of, uh, the daily level or the hourly level. But at the end of the year, it makes a big difference. If you raise the minimum wage, what that means is small businesses come the end of the year. Either the, uh, whoever's running the businesses is going to have to make cuts or take less of a cut. But more likely, especially if you've got a lot of people working on, uh, on a tight budget, you're going to have to make decisions like sacking people or like not reinvesting back into the business or not hiring more people. And this goes to show they have no experience. Not one of them has ever operated a, uh, a business run of business in the cabinet, not least the Chancellor. And I think that damage they're doing is going to, it's going to play out. And there's been some amazing people speaking. out about this and even in mainstream media talking about how it's going to damage their business and how they're going to close down. They don't understand this, so for me it's an example of incompetence and it's also another humiliation for Britain. We just run by people who have no idea what they're doing. Well what's interesting is as well is if you I mean they never define neoliberalism but neoliberalism by it what they mean is the government stepping back basically, the state stepping back, you know, privatizing assets, allowing more private entrepreneurship etc. And the problem with that is that even if you passionately believe and quote unquote reversing neoliberalism, I mean I don't see any neoliberalism when I look around and Britain, I see a gigantic state. But if you wanted to do that you're not in a position to do that because of the very things that Tom talked about the humongous debt. And by the way in the last week the government issued a tranche of bonds at over 5% yield. This sounds sort of abstract and academic but basically the government's yield the interest they have to pay people to borrow more money is now at the highest level since the great financial crisis in 2007-2008. In one of these, I think it was five year bonds that we're talking about but have seen fact check me on that with Vanessa. But anyway the point is that if you want to reverse neoliberalism which a lot of these people who rise you rightly say when some don't know what they're doing, you're not actually in a position to do it. You literally can't do it because if you wanted to borrow more money to take things into public ownership you'd have to start in a position where you can borrow money and we are now in a position where effectively when we're coming up to a point where borrowing more and more will mean paying more and more interest and that will just ruin the whole thing even more than it's already ruined. And I think your point was done about experience and business like Francis and I suddenly found ourselves running a small business and it's completely changed that mindset about a lot of these things because we now understand the Thomas Sol line that I love so much there are no solutions only trade-offs. You only really learn it through experience I feel. Intellectually it's not really that appealing an idea but it's only when you realize that when you take away from here you have to then compensate for elsewhere and all of these things are connected that's when it starts to make sense and I think I fundamentally question whether the people who are in charge of our country's economy actually understand what wages are and what they do I think to them it's just to them I think it's they actually just think of it as an issue of fairness they just think well people should be paid well therefore we'll get to a position where we've got to now I think the minimum wage is now on an annualized basis over 27,000 pounds so we've got a situation where you've got a minimum wage of 27,000 pounds the top rate of tax kicks in at something over 50 you it's just complete madness that you have this situation and all it's going to do is make running a business in Britain even harder than it already is and it is already very hard. Yeah and I think it speaks to this sense that the whole burn and project is like a bit of a holiday from reality like people within that government it's sort of outriders in the media are really stuck in this mindset that it's still just about 1997 where basically the fundamentals of the economy are pretty good that really the only overriding question that we we might want to address is ones of fairness is ones of what should the settlement be for social care the problems in afflicting the economy in society are much more fundamental like before you even want to get into an argument about redistribution or about public services what they should look like obviously spending needs to come down but you need to deal with the fundamentals the fact that energy is so expensive and the government are kind of slowly realizing that need to address this but at the same time they are best deeply conflicted believe we've got a clip of one of these slip-ups that John Healey made he made a few of them in his speech when he was talking about the Jack door gas field which was finally approved I don't know if we can run this here but I think it's quite revealing last week my right on defend the energy secretary opposed approved a few weeks ago we pointed you toward Hillsdale's free course on the Odyssey the course has been so popular that when they told us they'd built a follow-up course on Homer's Iliad we wanted you to hear about it first Hillsdale College's new free online course is taught by professor Steven Smith it's not a highlight reel and it's not Homer for beginners it's a proper walk through the text honor courage leadership friendship sacrifice and what it means to live a noble life you come away understanding why a killie's real fight isn't with the trousers is with himself this is one of more than 43 courses Hillsdale offers on the constitution the roman republic the american founding genesis the second world war and more all build the same way taught properly and not dumb down I couldn't recommend Hillsdale courses more highly go to Hillsdale.edu/trigger to enroll for free that's Hillsdale.edu/trigger very telling my brilliant slit as you can see though because of course we have to fumble the energy secretary their opposed rose but she's a opposed jackdaw and is also a posing rose bank which is the much bigger prize which is this oil fit which could be much more transformative in terms of energy supplies because she's a net zero nut case I mean when under a previous purchase at the new economics foundation she said that you could get to net zero by 2030 she accused that plans give stealing all of her ideas which is not a compliment but she seemed to interpret it that way so you've got these these fundamentals energy is too expensive without that we can't build anything without that how do you expect to have growth and also that the size of the welfare state it's clearly gotten well beyond what anyone say 20 or 30 years ago even on the left of politics I think would understand as reasonable a welfare system which is not only that ruinously expensive but does disincentivise work which does lead to just this generation of mildly anxious teenagers being put out to pasture by the time they're 19 years old it's clearly nothing that's defensible that is that really the kind of high point of human civilisation and some labor rights like to think it is obviously not and so this is the thing they burn a mism is like a kind of nice warm bath like it's a kind of indulgence for the moment you can think oh you know all those big up rouse we were having about defense or about energy or about immigration or whatever we can just go about to our happy place which is talking about social care and those and fairness and those kinds of issues but the thing is it's going to bite quite quickly this winters going to be pretty rough for a lot of people the penny has already dropped that just more of the same is going is still a road to ruin if you stay on this particular par and as always happens after the budget when you start to get the responses not only the full office for budget responsibility assessment the kind of quango charge we've looking over the figures but also all of the various economics think tanks and what have you pointing out I believe I'm right and saying we get Venice double check if I've got this wrong that in the next decade I think this is according to the IFS wage income growth is going to be as it's going to be poor to point me out since it's the 1950s when it comes to per person real disposable income we're all going to be about two thousand pounds worse off at the beginning of the next decade like more of the same means more of that means more decline means more erosion and yet they just stood there pretending like things can only get better to put it in a slogan so yeah I think they've just got their fingers in the air in the ears basically oh well I don't understand why all of you seem so down because I saw a clip of John Haley downing a point in a pub and he just got it in one and it went viral so like I think I didn't see that oh maybe maybe I was wrong exactly yeah exactly this is this is what we're dealing with in British politics where you know it's the lack of seriousness joking aside that really gets me well I will remember watching that clip going could you imagine like anybody else just doing that and the somehow it being a thing to me like I said he moved his tie as well which I thought was precious yeah he moved his tie so he wouldn't get the beer on the tie and then he absolutely smashed it back joking aside joking aside I just had these visions of like Norman Lamont doing that or different Tory chancellors just smashing back pines but I think what's really interesting is what does this budget actually mean and I think what it means and I've been talking to quite a few people in the know is that what we're going to get is a general election coming rather sooner than we thought because Burnham and Haley have by all accounts quite a radical plan for what they want to do to the country they want us to take they want to take us in an ever more left wing direction economically and also socially and I think they realise that they don't have a mandate to actually carry that out at the moment so what we've been given is a bit of a nothing burger in term of the actual budget this time round, but things are going pretty well for Burnham, if you compare it to Stammer, if you compare it to the other political parties, Winston's already upset, I can see him folding his arms. I'm seeping. I'm seeping. I think it's actually going pretty well if you look at what's happening to the other political parties, the Green Party are basically imploded, reform have taken various knocks through scandals and whatever else. The conservative party, they say they're back, but you know, it's like Manchester United, they keep saying they're back. You go, "Oh, you really? It doesn't look like it." And then you've got the Lib Dems, and no one really cares about the Lib Dems. This for me is the moment for Labour to actually strike while the proverbial line is hot, and call a general election in May, because to me, this is as good as it's going to get for them. I don't understand the logic behind that. Because surely, surely, if you were preparing for an early election, what you would do is you'd find some way to make it, you know, you've already capped bus fares, you capped something else, you'd give a bunch of money away, and some big headline grabbing thing so that you could say, you know, we really looked after people, and we ended in a liberalism because we gave you 2p of whatever, alpha pine and milk or whatever. Something, where there's nothing better thing, it's like Tom said, it's the sort of cruising budget where you're cruising into a iceberg. And it just, I don't see the logic of doing a nothing burger budget and then going to, and I heard some people talking about an election this December. I just, I don't, I'm not seeing it right now, but anyway, you've triggered Winston both on terms of economic analysis and by sliding off Man United. So let's eat it from here. Yeah, well, well, I'm going to leave a front, that was it. Let's be, let's be, just on the election idea, I mean, we're in the speculative here, but it seems to me looking at it more like Burnham Kane, man, he's like, oh yeah, I'll be Prime Minister, you know, yeah, give it a go, yeah, you know, whatever, I don't know what action that was, sorry, but he comes in, and then he actually, no, it's a generic Northern accent. It's perfectly respectable advice, I respect that well done with carry on. He came in and they didn't actually look at the budget and then he sat down with he Lee and was like, oh, dear, John, and, you know, they've looked at it and realized they can't do anything because they're hamstrung by their ideology of on welfare and not being able to touch that, their ideology on immigration, not being able to touch that, not trying to upset their green base, whilst trying to balance an unbalanceable budget, as Tom pointed out with our debt, our debt interest and all the other. So it seems to me, it's just kind of amateur out. They realized they actually can't do anything and they don't know what they're doing. And so then they made the next decision is like, right, how do we not mess this up? How do we not screw up the ball markets too badly? How do we kind of get through this and not screw up the economy and keep investment coming in? And I see it as that, rather than as a, a ploy for a upcoming election. Am I wrong? I mean, I agree with you. Tentals, I think, because I, I completely agree, as far as imagine calling one now, imagine going into particularly a December election, how grim the mood music is going to be. I suppose, and it is worth saying that Andy Burnham has said, including this week, I've done a how more clear I can be on this. I'm not calling an early election, read my lips. No, no, no, no. Of course, is, even over the course of the past few months, is political gymnastics and new terms in relation to Brexit and all manner of other issues, would imply you can't really trust the word that he says, even though he does come across a somewhat more maysy and relatable. That doesn't mean he's any less deceptive. But maybe this is as good as it gets, I suppose, is the best argument you could say for it. They are about 30% in the polls, which historically would be terrible for the Labour Party, but in the new multi-party system ring could be enough to make them, if not the large, certainly the largest party, but potentially even edging towards a majority of the seats, if the votes fall in the right places. And also, it's by the spring, things are going to be markedly different. I mean, energy prices would have made that £100 bang look like nothing. The energy price caps are going to go up in January. I believe most of the estimates are that it's going to be hyped by about 27% that the specter of blackouts is never that far away because of the nature of our energy grid, the fact that we have to rely on the kindness of strangers in other countries to help us balance it at huge expense because of how unreliable the renewable energy stock is. And imagine trying to make the case of the country after all of that. So yeah, I mean, it's really hard to see, but he's got a menu of terrible options, I suppose. I really can't see how it's going to get any better than this forum. Does that mean he's going to call an election for all the reasons that you both say it seems unlikely, but maybe as bad as it is, this is as good as it gets. There's an irony thing that Gurkin. Sorry, the irony of the Gurkin thing is that this in a bunch of other tariffs is removed. It's because of Brexit that we it was able to remove these little tariffs. And so if we were to rejoin or do some sort of deal with the EU, we'd have to reimpose those tariffs that he's sort of saved us whatever it was. There's another important part of this that you read his budget all the way through or you listen to him in Parliament. It's all of it is spun around, oh, the Middle East War, the Middle East War, that's why all of this. And that's the kind of their political, that's his two years of PR experience kicking in. Maybe it was worth it. And it's all the problem with the Middle East. And I don't want to sort of open up the kind of worms of another argument because I know you've got a toll of fans here. Every week about. But it doesn't deal the underlying fact as we've, Tom has you rightly pointing out this 100 quid. Bung, it doesn't deal the fact that our energy prices are just through the roof. Our household electricity is 3x, what the Americans play, industrial, industrial electricity is 4x, what the Americans play, 6x, what the Chinese pay. It's not because of the war in the Middle East, it's because we haven't gotten, we're not talking seriously about energy. Yeah, that's absolutely the case. That's absolutely the case. And it's worth saying, by the way, just we've talked about the bond markets a couple of times on the show. And I think it's actually worth pausing on that because the bond markets is a phrase that to most people sounds like some sort of weird abstraction. All that the bond markets really are are people that we've borrowed money from as a country. That's all that that is. We borrow money from people to spend on welfare, defense and whatever. But just to pay for the illegal immigrants staying in HMOs up and down the country because, you know, someone's got to look after them, make sure they have little mobile phones. That's what the bond markets are for. Just as a quick contextualised fact check, I should say that that's not the only thing we borrow money from. It's the most impeccable thing. Can we check Venezuela's AI? I mean, Venezuela will be rather unflattering to you, I suspect, than this regard wins him. But anyway, the bigger point, I think, and it's worth saying this, when it sounds like, you know, if I'm a kind of a neutral viewer, a centrist dad watching this, and I hear, I tune into this, and I hear Winston Marshall, the evil right-wing fascist, you know, screaming about how these people don't know what they're talking about. You actually need to understand what we're saying here. Andy Burnham said, I think this was before he became Prime Minister, that we can't just be in hoc to the bond markets. That's the equivalent of me borrowing the equivalent of my annual salary from somebody. So if you make, let's say, 40 grand a year, that's equivalent of you borrowing 40 grand from somebody, and then saying, well, I'm not going to be in hoc to him by paying it back. Like, where do you think that leads as an economic model? And this is something that I think people really fundamentally don't understand nearly enough. Bond markets are just people that we owe money to. And if you don't want to be in hoc to them, then all that will happen is they will stop lending you money, and then you're going to be in hoc to some pretty bad things very, very quickly, in a way that you really didn't expect. So this point that we've been making throughout about being governed by economic illiterates, it's actually really important because ultimately there will be a price to pay for this kind of approach. And I think it's not only the fact that they're economic illiterates. I think it's the fact that basically they don't want to make tough decisions. They don't want to make tough decisions because they know it will be upsetting to certain people within their voter base, but also their MPs as well. And when you don't make tough decisions, all you do is you kick the proverbial can down the road. And really, this is all this budget is kicking the proverbial can down the road. As a result, our debts are going to continue to increase. The situation is going to get worse. People aren't going to see their lives getting materially better, but they can claim that they're the good guys that they want to deal with neoliberalism. It's actually the bomb markets that are evil. Your analogy was perfect for it because what it is is just failure to take responsibility for actions, for the actions and for the situation you find yourself in. The reality is we spend too much, [BLANK_AUDIO] don't make enough, we need to make cutbacks, but we don't want to accept the kids because they're going to have a tantrum. That's where we are now. And you can keep doing it, which is fine, fine in the short term, but eventually you're going to have to pay the debt back or you're going to go broke. And that's where we are. We often talk about Britain's economic challenges on the show, and Francis and I have been worried about it for a long time, which is why we've been investing in gold. One thing a lot of people don't know is that gold coins are legal tender in Britain. So if you buy coins like sovereigns, which is what we've bought, they're free of VAT when you buy them, and for UK residents they're free of capital gains tax when you sell. So if you're in Britain and you want to protect your savings with physical gold, scan the QR code on the screen right now, click the link in the description or just go to purehifengold.co/otf to get your free copy of their guide to buying gold. And remember, always do your own research, the price of gold can go down as well as up, and past performance is not necessarily a guide for the future. The site again is purehifengold.co/otf. And of course, our second story for today is Killian and Bappe has upset a lot of people in China where told, or at least the Chinese Communist Party, by referring in a joke to Mao Zedong as the Chinese dictator. Winston take it away. Yes, Killian and Bappe, the French World Cup winning player and real Madrid star has been cancelled from the whole country of China for offending the late profit, Chairman Mao peace be upon him. And it's not just the CCP, the CCP TV is actually the name of Chinese State Television, funny enough. They are not playing all Leliga matches. And anything related to them, Bappe is now not being streamed on CCTV in China. His face has been removed from ads in the Chinese subway. He's been dropped for three of his sponsorships, Chinese sponsorships. Should I try and pronounce them? It's not going to, it's going to come across you. Yes, please. Yeah, try to do the accent. I want to see you cancelled as well as Killian. Yeah, go for it. Okay, good luck everyone. Don't hang, mignon and milk ground. I think I got one of them. There you go. Yes, he's lost $7.5 million in terms. You can't, what's, there's a funny part of this story is that this uproar. No one in China actually knows what he said because he's been completely wiped from the Chinese Twitter. So, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not going to succeed in pronouncing this white bowl. I think his, how it's pronounced. And you can't look it up on Chinese AI model. So Chinese people don't know what the fuss is about. They've just been told that he has offended someone. What did he do? Well, he broke the law of the people's Republic of China on the protection of heroes and martyrs, which is a legislation they brought in a couple of years ago. What did he say exactly? Well, this is back in April and we have a video, which, do you know, it's going to kindly play for you? You could see it, you could see it. No, there's a plan. This one, I have the most worried. It's that we put a video of a man, I think it's a Chinese dictatorship, he's used a lot with my friends in the league. We have to play it. Okay, so let me explain that. What he's, he's been asked there. What's his favorite meme involving him? And he said, the one I love the most is the one where they put my head on, I think he's a Chinese dictator. And it makes me laugh a lot. And this is the meme. Do you know you're going to show us the meme? Well, it was on the screen. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I couldn't help noticing, I couldn't help noticing that while I was playing, and me, Winston and Francis were enjoying it, and Tom was sad still and not moving. Tom, are you concerned about Spikes Chinese sponsors dropping? Yeah, it's a very big market for us. I will hear nothing said about the great man. I'll hear nothing said about you should be. I'm going to recuse myself. I think it's because, I think it's because Tom is the most British out of all of us. You know what I mean? So I don't know what this again. Yeah, back to the blood test for a few weeks ago. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, exactly. I think I'll both count, yeah. Oh, my goodness. Okay, so this has spun out, and Bappé issued an apology, it wasn't good enough. And China, China media group, who owns, behind the CCTV, which is the China state television, we believe that Mbappé's outrageous remarks have harmed the Chinese people, crossed the line and exceeded the scope of freedom of speech. Not only that, Mbappé is a Real Madrid player in the club, there's significant responsibility. Therefore, we do not accept Real Madrid's explanation that Mbappé never intentionally offended and asserted the players have, yeah, so that's what they said. Oh, yeah, no, asserted the players have the right to express their personal opinions. That's what Rayal had said. They do not accept Real Madrid's attitude. And so now this is probably going to cost quite a lot of money for La Liga and Rayal because it's a significant income stream. It is not the first time something like this has happened. You might remember Mesut Ozil, the Arsenal player with the goggly eyes, who had a great football chance, well, the Arsenal fans had a football chance. Oh, Zil, your eyes are offside. You remember that fella? In 2019, he called out the Uyghur situation in Xinjiang. And he was dropped from the team, frozen out and sold in the summer. He said that was because of, he described the Uyghurs as warriors who resist persecution. And he said that because of that, Arsenal said we don't do politics. Of course, they then spent about five years taking the knee and doing BLM. But they don't do politics when it's anything to do with China. This has happened in the States as well. You guys had, and is Kent on the show, right? We've actually just interviewed for a second time because he's now identified as a woman and is trying to get drafted by the WNBA. But in the original instance, yes, he was, he raised the case of the Uyghurs and was basically immediately prevented from playing in the NBA ever again. So you're right. This has been going on for a long time. By the way, I don't sound like, why are they offended? Like, he was objectively a dictator. You're not speaking of that. He was a great dictator. Mao described himself as a dictator. In a 1949 speech titled, "On the People's Democratic Dictatorship," he openly embraced the label. And I think the PRC is still defined as a People's Democratic Dictatorship. So it's still, and it's still kind of a word used. I'm not sure exactly what was supposed to be offensive about it. Maybe they didn't like the meme with the, maybe that's what I don't know. Maybe it's because he was like, I think he's a Chinese dictator. Like, they didn't really know him. And Buffy doesn't really know who Mao is. Which is actually quite, that's quite something actually worth talking about. Because I think a lot of people don't know who Mao is. And this is a Chinese dictator. He's a Chinese dictator, but he's not just any Chinese dictator. He's one who, as dictator, was responsible He talked a lot of shit. He talked a lot of shit. But he didn't get banned. But his people got banned. To the tune of 80 million. I mean, the top figure is 80 million killed. And that's by a guy called Chen Yeezy, who lived in exile in the States. He said he thought that it was at least 80 million killed under Mao. But you had Frank Decotta on the show, right? Recently, it was a great episode. I really recommend it. And he said, at least 45 million killed. So you got 40 and 80 million, 45 and 80 million killed under this guy. So I think he's in the running to be possibly the most evil man who's ever lived. I mean, if you don't just buy death cam, certainly certainly not there. And Bapaya doesn't really not reassure who he is. It's not funny. It's not weird. We talk about Hitler the whole time. And Mao, this guy, people don't, who is he? Or Stalin for them. Or Stalin for them. What's interesting is Stalin, I was just thinking about it in the Russian context because it's it's something that I know. So Joseph Stalin is, this is kind of scary, but other than Vladimir Putin, Joseph Stalin is the most popular historic figure in Russia. And if you talk to people who are fans of the J Dog, what they will tell you is we like him because there was order and they don't, they wouldn't even, necessarily dispute that he was addicted. This is what I don't understand about this whole thing, like how are you getting triggered by someone calling Chairman Maui Dictator when he was obviously a dictator? Now you might think that he was the right dictator for China at the time, but like this is a level of, I just boggles the mind, and I think what this entire story is, it's kind of a microcosm of what has been happening vis-à-vis China for the last 20 or 30 years, where people didn't realize that Chinese money came with Chinese restrictions about what you couldn't do and what you couldn't couldn't say, and eventually we've now got to a point where the influence of Chinese money on American universities, on Hollywood, et cetera, as such, that actually there's a restrictive culture. Francis and I were watching, I can't remember what podcast it was, but a fairly big podcast here in America last night, who says they're talking about Taiwan, and then he says it and then he corrects himself to say Chinese Taipei. You know, things like this are already, you can kind of see it getting into the culture, and those things aren't happening by accident because that money comes with certain power. By the way, the Man City story that Winston referred to earlier is exactly the same. When you take billions and billions and billions from other countries, that inevitably comes with obligations. That's why probably most of us have an instinctive hesitation to borrow money from anyone actually, because you're like, well, I can borrow this money, but it probably comes with some sort of, you know, strings attached, everything tends to come with strings in my way. What you're seeing here is that a lot of Western companies and businesses and sports leagues and entertainment and everything relies on Chinese money, and you're going to inevitably, I think, see more of this. Oh, absolutely. And by the way, the CCP are notoriously thin-skinned. I mean, they've banned memes of Winnie the Pooh because, you know, people joke that Xi Jinping looks like Winnie the Pooh. So you now, on Weibo and all of these social medias, you can't actually do the meme anymore. And what I find really interesting is, on the one hand, this is a very, very minor thing that Killing and Bappé has done. It's incredibly minor. And really, it would have passed without comment. But what China or the CCP, rather, have done, is actually go, this is what happens when you talk badly about us. In any shape or form, no matter how minor, we will pull your funding, we will hit you where it hurts in the pocket. So, play by our rules or you live without our money. And what that does is that really does engender a sense of these companies because they know that they have become more, more reliant on the money. And what they will do is they will do anything in order not to set their Chinese partners. Because if they do something, if they withdraw their money for something as small as this, what are they going to do for something bigger when you actually criticize some legitimately all their policies? No, absolutely. And it's also clearly points to the complete nonsense law of the predictions that were made during, was often called the period of opening. China being welcomed into the WTO, the sense that it was going to, obviously, its integration into global capitalism. And the hope that this would lead to China changing, that it would become not just more prosperous, but also this would put it on the road towards liberal democracy or something. If anything, the world is ended up with capitalism with Chinese characteristics. As far as you have so much of this potential economic and therefore cultural and political clout being wielded by China, which may have happened anyway just by didn't have how large the market is given the fact that it is the challenger would be superpower. But this is something that was eminently foreseeable. And there have been so many cases of it now. And the fact that it tends to revolve around sport, I think, is really fascinated because there are so many leagues, there are so many sports, which obviously for now China is a very important market to them. With the Man City example, we also have foreign state ownership of so many key football clubs in this country and across the world. And as much as Andy Burnham doesn't want to be in hot to the bond markets, he's totally fine about being in hot to Abu Dhabi. If you've noticed by any of his comments in the wake of the Manchester City cheating scandal, just the fear that that money would be pulled out, not just a Manchester, but also all the other projects with which UAE money is going to be underpinned by. So we've put ourselves in this position once again. I mean, I have to say that when I first saw this scandal can't be think footballer, CCTV scandal, is it Karl Walker up to his old tricks again, as he was really locked out? Thought it was maybe something around that. But this is actually something very, very serious and it's something which clearly China is the most impossible to ignore example of this. There have been so many people who now have to issue basically groveling apologies. But it's other peace with the fact that in pursuit of other aims, in pursuit of economic growth, in pursuit of foreign investment and whatever you, you're allowing entire leagues, sports, even societies to be sort of infiltrated by the dictates of dictators effectively. And unwinding that is going to be a really important thing too. Particularly as we are now in this era of kind of great power conflict at the point where we work and competition to the point that we weren't, you know, even 10 years ago. So a taste of things to come as humiliating as this was. But the fact that not only in Bapet to apologise, that the league has to apologise, the fact that it was talked about in terms of the hurt feelings of the Chinese people. I mean, if something this mild is enough to trigger them to that extent, then this won't be the end of it. And also, the fact that you said it sport, it's actually a really smart ploy to make because the CCP know that Killian and Bapet is one of the biggest football players in the world and intellectually famous footballer Real Madrid are the biggest football club in the world. LeLiga is one of the biggest leagues in the world. They know that they can make their headlines all around the world just by doing this. And it's a real flexing of their muscles. And the fact that the Real Madrid, LeLiga, Killian and Bapet have capitulated completely shows in many ways who has the power in this instance. It's a very, very smart ploy by the CCP. I've got to say. There's a couple other offshoots to this story. Firstly, I forgot to mention that they've erased him from all the football games. So you can't play as in Bapet now on any of the Chinese football games. But there was an interesting response from Chinese people on Twitter. It looks like Hong Kong based Twitter, so they don't have it within the Chinese Great Firewall. But people are like, "Oh, look, we can criticize Napoleon now. We can criticize George Washington now." Yes, you can. You can criticize him. It's great. Welcome to the West. Nothing about Killian and Bapet. Now, I don't want to annoy Francis here because I know you're a big Marine Le Pen. Sorry, you're very anti-Marine Le Pen. And you're staunch defense of her last week. I don't want to trigger that. Open that can of worms. But Bapet is a guy who's several times come out against Marine Le Pen against Rassemblemore National. You know, we can never leave our country in the hands of these people. It's really urgent. We hope that everyone will mobilize and vote for the right side. This was in the 2024 election. So this is a guy who has that sense of urgency with someone like Le Pen. But look at him, Caltown with an actual, an actual truly evil dictator. And there was another aspect of this is that you have some Cambridge professors coming out defending Mao. So this is something about Britain. And I remember, of course, Diane Abbott, when she was on whatever Andrew Nielshow was saying that arguing that Mao did more good than harm. I mean, how can you. And when we have that again now, these trying to, these Cambridge professors, they're probably the same sort of people who end up forming a Labour cabinet and Labour budgets, you know, who have sort of green party economists, these kind of people doing this defence. I just sometimes feel like I'm living in a parallel world. How can you even. Who would dare do a defence like this? It's very strange to me. It kind of. It shows the power and the failure of education in the West, I think, as well as the authoritarian nature of China. Well, it certainly shows all of that. But also, it just shows the amount of money that they now provide to Western sports leagues and businesses. And I mean, killing and bapet effectively didn't actually do anything wrong whatsoever. What A) what he said was fact to the accurate. And more importantly, he was joking about a meme about him. You didn't mean any disrespect by it. But the reason that both his club and his league that he plays and have to apologise is, otherwise the Chinese will take out whatever billions it is that they spend on it. And the reality is, killing and bapet, you might say, "Well, you're killing and bapet." You know, a gazillionaire footballer. He could. He could stand up to this cancel culture and whatever. he actually could, but all the people that work at Real Madrid who clean the toilets there, or Mo de Gras, or do whatever, they are the ones that the Chinese Communist Party is effectively using as hostages against him, against Real Madrid, and against LaLiga, because they know that that's who will be hurt by the withdrawal of Chinese money from their league and from their team. And so, ultimately, this is, it comes back to the bond market conversation we were having, when you take money from people, it has consequences, and you'd like it or not, you're going to be in hope to the bond markets if you take money from the bond markets, and you're going to be in hope to the CCP if you take money from them. And therefore, I just like to say, I look forward to next week when we all have to do a massive apology, but because it turns out that some advertiser of ours isn't quite the right way. I'm not sure if we're going to be so proud to announce that after our apology, our incoming sponsorship with Weibo, so. Yeah, post-ponson negatives. Why bother? That's just a negative. Winston, I can't keep a hold of yourself, right? Final story from here in the US for this week is, of course, the midterms. We've been traveling around, we were in New York, we've been to Michigan, we're now in Austin and headed to LA for, I think, we'll be arriving there on the day of the midterm results coming out, and it's been fascinating watching what's been going on here. Oh, absolutely. So, we have been in three states already, and it's just talking to a broad range of people, and this is a story that is absolutely dominating in America. Believe it or not, it's not the GERKIN budget that people are talking about over here, or whether John Healey can down a pint in, however, in no, 22 seconds or whatever it is that he did, it's actually the midterms. And if we can get the cowsheet odds up, please, Dino, what we can see here is that the Democrats, the chances of the Democrats winning both the House and the Senate is 68%. Now, obviously this can change, et cetera, et cetera, but what we can see is the mega movement has been severely hurt at the moment. Now, look, polls have got it wrong, time and time and time, again, maybe they've got it wrong this time, maybe prediction markets have got it wrong, but we have seen that things are very, very much in the balance. And one of the things I find really interesting is this is you go to people, oh, who's going to be the next Democratic leader of the party. Nobody has a clue of who it's going to be. Some people will say, AOC, some people will say, oh, maybe it's an outsider like Josh Shapiro. Other people got, well, it can't be Josh Shapiro because Josh Shapiro is Jewish. Therefore, Jewish, he's connected with Israel, and you're like, isn't that a bit anti-Semitic? And they went, never mind, let's not focus on that. But it's really fascinating as to what is going to happen at this point. It's really in the balance because if the Republicans lose the House and the Senate, it's going to really damage Trump's ability to push through the changes that he wants to implement in his final two years. Well, not only that, but he's going to spend the next two years, not only with the massive reduction in his ability to do anything, but also fighting off all sorts of impeachment investigations, probably prosecutions, etc. And the entire thing is, you know, obviously, we don't need to open the can of worms of the Iran war, but he has also been able to do good things too. And the ability to do those good things, particularly on, you know, stopping illegal immigration, etc. Has been because of the dominant victory that he had in 2024. People forget now what it was like. We were just recounting this in an interview. We recorded with Stephen Crowder when we talked about the fact that we were sitting here in exactly this position two years ago. We were in Texas about to fly to Los Angeles on the day before the election. And everyone here in Texas is going, what are you doing? Why are you flying into California? There's going to be riots when Trump wins, etc. And when we got there, Trump won. He won the House. He won the Republicans won the House, the Senate. He won the popular vote and the electoral college. And I remember sitting down the next day with Rob Schneider and Adam Corolla. And there was this mood of like, everyone's accepted this. There are no riots. It's clear that America voted to go in this direction. And there was a lot of hope and optimism at the time, which is just completely disappeared. To the point where today, as we sit in Austin, Texas, it's very likely that Texas will have a democratic senator. And one other thing I'll say is, I mean, some of the ads we were preparing for a couple of interviews. So we stuck on the TV and you can watch YouTube on the TV. So we're watching a few things to prepare for interviews. But we were not locked in with our YouTube premium accounts. So you're getting served local American YouTube ads. And the ads, I mean, if you think British politics has become dirty and personal, oh my word, it's like James Tallerica wants to take your children and transition them. And it's like literally like that. And then the, and it's exactly the same the other way. Like Ken Paxson loves pedophile. You're like, whoa, whoa, whoa. But I'm not exaggerating. I'm genuinely not exaggerating. Like the way these debates are being hand here is vicious. It is absolutely vicious right now. And one of the other things that is fascinating that we don't have in the UK. This is the upside, the positive tradeoff of us having the most expensive industrial electricity in the world and absolutely no AI involvement whatsoever in terms of infrastructure is data centers have become a gigantic talking point here in America. And we drove past one when we were in Michigan. I don't remember if I mentioned this before, but the guy who was showing us around, he said, we said, how many jobs is this going to create for people? And he said, I know how many jobs it will be inside, but they're going to need a lot of security jobs because that is the level of feeling towards data centers, not only because they're ISOs, but because they consume and drive up the price of electricity. There may be water issues. And actually, if you look at certainly democratic party advertising, I mean, data centers are effectively being talked about like their big oil, you know, 20 or 30 years ago. These are the most evil people in corporate America who are about to do something terrible in your backyard. And actually, what's interesting is concern about data centers is at this point a bipartisan issue as well. So there are lots of interesting things that will come out of this. But as Francis said, very, very likely. I mean, I think our Cal Shards, we showed that 92% of the Democrats will take the House, everybody sort of price, I didn't already. Very possible that they will take the Senate as well. Although David Pakman, the left wing commentator who we just had on the show, that episode will go out tomorrow. He actually said that he thought it was not as likely as people were saying. And to Francis point, I mean, he made the point about democratic. I think he just baked, he's, I think himself, Jewish. And he just said, yeah, some of the candidates to potentially lead the Democrats, you know, I really like this guy, this guy, this guy, but I just think a Jewish person can't be a leader of the democratic party at the moment, which I thought was very telling that he was someone who was very careful not to offend his own side in our interview. But that, I thought, was quite revealing. So one extra thing, which I've been interested to use to perspective on is the amount, because we knew that there were obviously the economic turmoil, the cost of the pump, the fact that whereas it seemed like Trump had primarily got elected for a domestic agenda, which there are significant wins, I'm certainly talking about closing the border. The Iran in particular, but not exclusively was always going to be hung around his neck. The question is, was it going to be an Albatross or a medal? And it does feel that this point is probably going to be the former. But also one thing that I detect, even a lot of the kind of right of centre, relatively friendly to Trump commentary, is that these concerns about corruption at the very high level of the Trump family seem to have crept in, even amongst Trump voters in a very real way to an extent that has quite surprised me, because everyone remembers that when he was actually originally running, I think, for the nomination, let alone the presidency, you know, prior to 2016, where he would have this line where I know the systems rigged because I used it myself. But there has been an element of maybe continuing to use that whilst being the commander-in-chief, the way in which those around him, the family and so on, have been able to use their plumb positions as kind of international top-level diplomats to get some pretty tasty contracts in various parts of the world, has added to that kind of bad smell around the president. You do wonder, again, without wanting to re-opened in a Iran argument or without wanting to make this purely about foreign policy. Like if he had just really drilled down a focus kind of exclusively on, not exclusively, but largely on what A) would America domestically cost of living price of eggs as he always likes to bang on about, closing the border, getting on top of workism. That was always going to generate a certain level of backlash, it wasn't going to demoralize his own base, which seems to have been the consequence, the knock-on consequence, a lot of the other decisions that he's taken. So yeah, I'm not sure if you've detected any of that corruption stuff, but that is because that's sort of cracked up on me, that is an issue, which is quite surprising. Yeah, if you talk to people privately, even people on the right, it basically just, there's no dispute that everyone sees that that's happening, in fact, really. Other than people who will go on TV and publicly defend it, most people are at this point just go, "It's happening." Winston, final word from you? I guess we will know when we speak next week about what the results are. Indeed, we will. I don't love speculating, but we'll see. He doesn't love speculating. He loves figuring. Oh, no, no, no, no, no. All right. Fantastic. Well, we will see you next week when no doubt we will all be triggered by something, have a wonderful week, and thank you for watching. Thanks, guys. Bye.