Trump’s Iran Disaster and the GB News Propaganda Machine

Thanks for listening to The Restisted Politics to support the podcast and listen without the adverts and get early access to episodes and live show tickets go to TheRestistPolitics.com. That's TheRestistPolitics.com. It's been so catastrophic for Trump not to have had a very clear objective about what he was trying to achieve. You don't have a moral obligation to do what you can't do. If you can't fix it then don't try because you'll often make things worse. Most leaders in the world try to do statecraft but Trump only does it stagecraft. Iran has now demonstrated that it can at will shut down neighboring economies, close to straights of formuse. Iran in a sense now feels more powerful and that means there'll be pressure on Israel and the US to just keep going. This is going to be terrible for the economy in Britain and Europe and around the world. Welcome to TheRestistPolitics with Miror is here. And with me, Alistak Ambal and Roy today we're going to talk about Iran but unlike recent weeks, not the whole program, we're going to talk about two catastrophic failures of regulation of our water on the back of an astonishing TV program, dirty business and also off-com who I've tried to give the benefit of the doubt too but they're total blind eye to GB news becoming what even Andrew Neal now calls reform TV. In I think total breach of the law the off-com is meant to uphold. But Rory, before we start, you know how your mum is like the big influence on this podcast in your family. Well, with me, it's my kids. - Okay. - You know what I'm in the generation. - Very good. - So Grace sends me this message, Dad, podcast is fab mainly cause of Rory OBS but you guys need to do more small talk. It's also heavy. Trump, Trump, Trump, War, War. You need a bit of banc at the start like, hey Rory, how you've been, what you mean up to, anything weird going on into your life. Otherwise, she says you'll have people jump your bridges before they get to the break LOL. So FFS, lighten things up a bit. Laughter emoji, love emoji, but I think she's got a little bit of a point. - Let's get to you and what you'd like to listen to. Let's say you went to something and you were looking for an update on Iran and the news and you heard two middle-aged blokes talking about their holiday. - You're absolutely right. - Absolutely. It's true. The podcast that I listen to where they do that stuff, I do go 20 seconds, 30 seconds, 30 seconds. That's true. But I think for younger people, because people go on about, you know this, because we get stopped and people talk to them. They're interested in our relationship. - Yeah. - Right. Of the dynamic. - Yeah. - So I think that's what she means. - Do you think we could do a very, very short one? So it's not too self-indulgent, because to be honest, what's telling you the world's a little bit more interesting than you and me? - No, but for example, she was saying like, this week, talk about whether you like, you're happy with the Oscars. So I'm very happy that one battle after another one. - Okay. I'm very happy, obviously, that Jesse Buckley, one best actress for Hamlet. And that the Irish government flew out her family. That was nice. - Very good. - I was very happy with Sean Penn, that he went to see Zalensky, rather than go to the ceremony. Grace probably thinks that's me being too political already. - I think she's got a little bit of a bit of a point. And also, here's one for you. So as you know, I'm obsessed with music. - Yep. - And I've given up on ever, ever, ever trying to persuade you to get into football. But I'm still hopeful on music. - We were talking about it this morning. - We were. - Yeah. - Because your sons are getting into the music, which is good. But I want to give a big plug to things that I've been following this week. One is Louis Theroux. He's done this amazing documentary on the Manusphere. - And it's got such an amazing kind of earnest man. - Oh, he's brilliant. He's just really getting people to dig their own graves. - And I'm kind of sort of clod surround looking really earnest. - I know it is. - He's like, depressed. - Yeah, it's brilliant. - But the Manusphere is so interesting, because these are horrible views that a lot of young men now hold, partly because of these incredibly wealthy influences. We've been able to monetize misogyny and hatred of women and sort of male supremacy. So I want to give a shout out to that. But I also want, as the antidote to get you into music, promise me that you'll listen to a new album by James Blake called "Trying Times". - All right. - That's quite political. - James Blake "Trying Times". - "Trying Times". And it's the antidote to the Manusphere. - I wanted to say folk music. - It's almost unique. He's been around for a long time. But he's got a very, very interesting voice. The lyrics are quite political when you listen carefully. But the reason I say this is the antidote to the Manusphere. And I've met him a few times. I know him quite well. It's because it's really about men respecting women and men understanding the importance of their emotions and stuff like that. And it came out this week and went straight to number two in the charts behind Harry Styles. - Okay. - So I think if our listeners got involved and engaged, I think it's number one. - I saw a lovely head teacher who, she's actually the head teacher of a school you disapprove of called St Paul's Boys School. - Oh my lord. - But she was the head of. - No, it was Paul Wendt. - Yeah, exactly. She was the head of a girl school before. And she's an extraordinary head teacher. And she said that everybody when she moved to this school with 1500 boys said, "Oh, poor you, being stuck with all these boys." And she had a lovely phrase. She said, "Having one in all girls school for much though I admire the sophistication of young women, I actually really, really enjoy being in a school for the boys." And one of the things I really loved, I did a little conference with her on educating boys. And it was really interesting that people from co-educational schools, boys schools, but just talking about young men and how they were. Is how much it's possible for good teachers to develop real affection and enthusiasm for the strangeness of boys. - Yeah. - Acknowledging, you know, their risk taking, acknowledging their adrenaline, acknowledging their competitiveness. - It was one interesting phrase. One of them said, "There's no problem with aggression as long as it's not violent." I mean, there was a lot of interesting ways of talking about what matters. And I thought it was quite, and she said, you know, she'd been doing it three years ago. It would have all been about Andrew Tate and Toxic Massacre and then we see. And now people are beginning to try to lean into how you talk a little bit more about the kind of positive wonder of boys. - I think there is a sort of fight back against it. This episode is brought to you by Fuse Energy. Energy policy rarely stays in Westminster for long, usually arrives for the bill. And from the 1st of April, 75% of renewables obligation costs will come off electricity bills and move into general taxation. - So if bills are meant to fall from April, why would anyone bother switching? - Because policy sets the floor. The saving itself is automatic. What suppliers offer beyond that isn't, and that's where real competition operates. Fuse goes beyond the mandated saving. Customers who switch save around an additional £200 on average. In the Fuse Energy app, you can see exactly what you're using and what it costs, with 24/7 support if you need it. Listeners to the show will also receive a free trip plus subscription when they switch. Get more than just lower rates. Switch today at fuseenergy.com/politics using the code politics and save around £200 on your bills. Visit fuseenergy.com for full details and terms and conditions. The only thing is I've been reading this book by Liam Byrne about populism and is really interesting how within that, with all these right-wing, maggour, forage, or ban, a lot of that is the sort of, is the manosphere arguments that they play out all the time. And of course a lot of it is related to the whole muskification of the world. Because this manosphere thing is big money. It's big money for the people who are driving this stuff. I think it's interesting. And then there you go. We've done about four different political issues. Final one for me. Jack Watling, who I often talk to. You see the Ukraine analyst has just got a book coming out this week called "Statecroft". He's written a great article in the Guardian about Straits of Formuse, but he's really, really good about trying to provide a formal analysis of how you do strategy. And so for people who are interested in kind of big politics, big strategy, Jack Watling's new book "Statecroft". That's my little recommendation. I kind of read something this week where somebody was saying that most leaders in the world try to do "Statecraft", but Trump only does "Stagecraft", which I thought was quite a very interesting observation. That's very good. Well, let's use this as our transition into Iran. Iran. Okay. So I was thinking one of the fundamental things I'd like to say in my analysis is Mt and C, Mtc, right? So M is morality, T is threat, C is capability. Okay. And my point is this, we confuse when we think about invading a country like Iran. Morality, our moral judgment, right? This is an evil horrendous regime that's killed tens of thousands of its own people and is profoundly unpopular. That's the M, T threat. This is a regime that may or may not pose a threat. What kind of threat? Who is it threatening? Is it able to threaten the US? Does it have nuclear weapons? Is it only able to threaten Israel? Right. And then the C, which is the most difficult thing of all, which is capability. What can we actually do about it? And we tend to conflate these things. We tend to think it's enough to say, if you really think this is an evil horrible regime, therefore we should be intervening in the assumption as if there's a problem somehow we can automatically fix it. And I think the depth of the problem we're in now is about our inability to move clearly between these categories. We get stuck in saying, this is a very evil regime. So surely you can't be against intervention. Or getting very confused about threat. You know, is it a threat to Israel? Is it threat to the US? Is it threat to you? What kind of threat is it a threat in three years time if it develops nuclear weapons? What kind of threats are these proxies? Is it a threat to the straits for moves and are we making it worse threat? And then finally this question capability. What can you actually do about it? Yep. can bomb it, you can take out missiles, you can flatten it from the air, you could even invade the country. But is that going to change the moral nature of the regime? So is it going to produce more liberal regime? Is it going to make it less of a threat? And what leveraged you to? What knowledge you have, what power do you have, what capacity have you got? I would add a P. Okay, gone P. Planning. Planning. So I think you've got to have all four. Okay. So you've got to have a moral case. Yep. Otherwise, you're not going to take people with you. There has to be at least an understanding of a real threat. And you have to have the capability and the capability depends on the planning as well as the, you know, who's got the biggest. Can I be more at just pushpap second? Because this was slightly the conversation we had with Jonathan Powell where I got in trouble with him and he said, you didn't get in trouble, he's got angry. He just, I got angry and he said he was used to dealing with terrorists. But Jonathan Powell was trying to make the case that the problem in Iraq was absence of planning and the kind of implication was that if we planned better, we would be able to do these things. I'm more pessimistic. I think that there are certain kinds of things that we cannot do regardless of how much you plan. And I have this sort of idea that we live in two optimistic world where Americans in particular think, if there's a problem, there's a solution. And if you haven't got a solution, you just have to spend more money and plan more. My catch phrase, I'm going to throw back at you is, ought implies can. So it's not enough to say the Iranian regime is horrible and that's right. If you can't fix it, then don't try because you'll often make things worse. Yeah. And right, I mean, historically, and definitely right now with Trump, Trump thinks he can fix anything, which, last night, he was blathering on about, I can do what I want to keep you on. I'm going to do it soon. But I think on the, on the planning, Rory, my son sent me a clip of Trump because I can't watch Trump at the moment. So I have to rely on the people to say, it is a rile to be up so much. So Peter Ducey, who is from Fox News in the White House, and he said this Trump, you said they hit Qatar, Saudi Arabia, UAA, Bahrain, and Q8. Nobody expected that. And then he went on, I surprised the nobody briefed you ahead of time. That, that might be their retaliation. Trump, nobody, nobody, no, no, no, no, no, the greatest experts, nobody thought they were going to hit. Everybody thought they would do this. And what's more, the Iatola himself, the now dead one, quote, the Americans should know that if they start a war, this time, it will be a regional war. And then get this, I've been reading, I know you read for on the first magazine, and I read it very, very closely, particularly when stuff like this is going on. And I don't even have been reading this guy Nate Swanson, who's written some interesting pieces. And he's one of the leading experts on Iran in the world. He was director for Iran, a National Security Council between 2022 and 25. He was Trump's chief negotiator on the negotiation team, and he was sacked not long ago, because Laura Luma, Magger, cultist influencer, she, he was on her list. He wrote a piece in Foreign Affairs' magazine on February the 24th, four days before the invasion. Headline, US military strikes and the risk of a quagmire. And we talked about this when the thing started, because he was the guy he was saying, Trump will think that because he's done Venezuela, and everybody said it would be catastrophe and it's not because he moved the embassy in Israel to Jerusalem and it would be a catastrophe and it wasn't. And he says on this, it's easy to see why Trump will believe the warnings about another attack on Iran overall, he can repeat his formula. This time is different. I spent 18 years working on Iran with Biden Trump. From that experience, I see that Trump fundamentally fails to grasp that Iranian weakness will not lead the country to capitulate. On the contrary, Iran's present fragility narrows the space for meaningful compromise. Nord has Trump understand Iran faces in entirely different conditions than June 2025 when it chose to de-escalate. The Islamic Republic now believes that Israel and the US intended to strike repeatedly its ballistic missile program and that it must be more aggressive to forestore the kind of perpetual assault that could topple it all together. And then goes on to say, Tehran could target global oil flows and international shipping, send the energy prices up and creating a serious political liability for Trump. Iran may well encourage the Houthis to resume attacking ships. The country's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has also been preparing to seize a verse of ships in the strait of hall news. If conflict with the United States deepens, Iran may consider targeting the Gulf Arab states energy infrastructure directly. This is Trump's advisor saying it for days before. Okay, that's brilliant. Really brilliant because it's very rare historically that you can have such a clear example as somebody who is from the National Security Council saying something back in the way. I mean, I like you occasionally asked to go into talk to businesses, corporations, governments to give geopolitical advice. So I was asked an event recently in the European country sitting with the CEOs of a number of companies and they were all talking about, you know, what's the point of people like you and me coming in to give geopolitical advice? And I said, it's a really good question. Let me just take one example, right? Let's say we had said to you, Al-Steronite, that back in November, December, Trump is building up a massive flotilla of ships near Iran. Let's say we'd said to you in December, and by the way, when he built up a massive amount of ships off Venezuela's way to let to a strike against Venezuela. So there's a decent chance that there's going to be a strike against Iran, right? And that's why, you know, we were trying to get Rob Malley on the show and all this kind of thing because we were trying to get it done before Trump struck. Right? Let's say we'd also said that every expert in the world had spent the last 40 years saying one of the problems with Iran is the Straits of Formus. I mean, we weren't remotely originally that, right? It's a completely obvious. It's their territorial waters and you stop the Straits of Formus, you stop 20% of global asses, right? And let's say we then explained that that would lead to a spike in global oil prices and actually a spillover that could be really catastrophic for the Gulf Economist, right? That was pretty predictable that that would happen back in my suppose December January. We also knew that Israel wanted to strike Iran because Netanyahu had said it again and again, and we knew that Trump had historically come along with Israel. So let's say you had said to these businesses four months ago, there is a 70% chance that Trump will hit Iran. Global oil prices will go up. All these countries are going to be destabilized. Did any of you do any contingency planning? And the answer was none of them did. Now, what was really interesting is I pushed harder and said, well, why not? And one of them said, well, all that happens is that we have a senior American general son of a board who'd been banged on about China Taiwan for the last four years and telling us China's bad about Taiwan. And they have very large checks. And they haven't been telling us about this tool. The second one said, well, we calculated that Trump was kind of a bluffer. The historical record is he'd do something for a couple of days and then he'd stop. And we didn't really believe he would keep going in this way. I guess look, they're entitled to think people like you and me don't actually know that much more than they do. We could argue, well, actually we do talk to lots of people and we can maybe assess things and we'll have you. So I get that. But I think the other thing they're probably speaking to is that Trump is so unpredictable. I think with most American presidents, you've always had a sense of what they might try to do. So like yesterday, when he suddenly starts going on about Cuba, I think before Venezuela, I'd have thought, oh, this is just a kind of distraction to try and get you off talking about because he realizes it's not going well. But actually, it could mean that's the next block. I think this is 60% chance he goes into Cuba. I mean, again, what's weird about it is we're not in a world of there's 100% chance he's going to keep it. But I would say it's more likely than not that he goes into Cuba. Given that he said he was going to go into Venezuela, he's signaled he was going to hit Iran. He did both those things. He's signal on Ukraine. So I think Cuba is very likely. Listen, can I just also lean into something that isn't discussed maybe quite enough in the Western press, which is the way in which this is shattering the economies, the Gulf. We see it with Dubai. Everyone's noticing what's happening there. So think about the fact that in Dubai, a lot of people are living in huge skyscrapers. Think about what you feel if you're high up a skyscrapers. If you think the electricity is going to be cut off and your elevator isn't going to work and a drone might strike the Saudi masala. Are you, if you are somebody who's moved to Dubai, going to think that's the safe place to be? You didn't move there actually thinking this was a place that would be hit by Iranian missiles. So I imagine the property prices are going to collapse in Dubai. I also imagine it status as a financial center is going to drop quite quickly. But in the short term, Qatar is currently exporting close to zero liquid national gas. That means that going from billions of dollars of revenue a day to zero, UAE is probably down at about third of its exports. The spillover effects of this will be unbelievable because actually countries like Qatar have become central to the global aid environment. As USAID is cut and stop putting money in and the UK and Germany and others, Qatar has stepped up in its funding, UN agencies, nonprofits, charities all over the world. A lot of the money that's supposed to be going into gas and reconstruction is supposed to be coming out of the Gulf. And all those countries are not just hit in the short term. They will be very worried about medium term because a lot of the people who are buying from them will begin think, well, maybe I'm going to die. I've asked to find my contracts. Maybe I thought this was reliable. It's not quite as reliable anymore. Insurance values are going to go up. - These are countries where it's going to spend an absolute fortune developing the image as safer business, safer tourism, based on their alliance with the United States. - And I think it's heartbreaking. Look, I know there are many people who listen to the show who are not very sympathetic towards places like Qatar. I really am. I felt that actually in many, not perfect, but in many ways they've done actually very, very good things on trying to bring peace around the world, do resolution support development support aid. - I think where people are unsympathetic is people like Isabel Oakshot, who emigrate to Dubai when Mr. Richard ties the man with the interesting tax scam that the most immediate seem not to be interested in. And yesterday was, she's back in London posting pictures of how awful things are because she took a picture of somebody sleeping on the streets. - But these countries have done an incredible thing over the last 40, 50 years, just transforming their economies. And they've become really interesting places. And it's tragic what's happened because they didn't sign up for this war. And it certainly Qatar was not driving this war. In fact, if anything, they were trying to dissuade Trump from it. And they now fund themselves in a completely impossible situation, which is every day that Trump continues to bomb around and more missiles coming to them, more disruption to the streets. But even if he stops, Humpty Dumpty's fallen off the wall because now everybody can see for years to come that Iran in a sense can blackmail everybody. Iran has now demonstrated that it can, it will shut down neighboring economies, close to streets, form moves. So Iran in a sense now feels more powerful. And that means there'll be pressure on Israel and the US to just keep going, trying to chase this very, very difficult idea that they can somehow topple the regime. I guess I think close to impossible idea. - I guess also that one possible outcome in terms of this thing ending is if Iran basically says to the Americans, well, okay, we can call off what we're doing. And we don't have to bomb the whole time. We just have to take out a few Americans every now and then. We just have to close down the streets of all moves. We just have to do, cause you a lot of trouble, which we can do. And we're showing you we can do that. So you need to get a guarantee from Israel that they're gonna stop. And they, the Iranians, if Trump were to do that, then can say, well, actually we won. And that's why I think it's been so catastrophic for Trump, not to have had a very clear objective about what he was trying to achieve. He's a rambling sort of changing goal post, moving objectives. The other thing that this guy, Nate Swanson, said in the pieces written post, he was written another piece for a fairs magazine. And he made that point. He says, "He ran doesn't need to score major military successes every day. The regime only needs to inflate enough periodic damage to keep regional partners, markets, and the American public jittery." They can do that easily. Yeah. Well, I was talking to someone in the US Defense Establishment and the most optimistic line, which is being sold by American admirals, is if we just keep going for another four weeks, we can degrade Iranian capacity so much that at huge expense, we can safely escort some vessels through the straits, and then we will have won. Because we will have proved the straits are open and Iran can't shut it. My response is that doesn't make any sense to me at all. You mean they've got a grip when they want it? I mean, yes, yes, maybe the US may and four weeks time be able to take a vessel through the straits at huge expense with aircraft, carres, and destroys. But they're not going to want to do that every day forever. And Iran doesn't need to demonstrate that it can hit 100% of vessels going through. It doesn't even need to hit one out of 100. People just need to believe there's a possibility that it might be able to hit one out of 100 next time in the next six, 12 months in the US of last. So there isn't a clear point at which they will be able to say the straits in our completely open, completely safe we're back to business as usual. Maybe that's a good point. I wish to turn to the whole kind of big political picture and Trump's attempts to persuade other countries to get involved in sending warships, sending destroyers, sending mine hunters to get the straits of all moves operating again. And one by one, every single one of them was given in the Bums rush, which makes him angry. So he's lashed out again at Gears Starmer. Mark Carney, who was quite welcoming at the start, he's been absolutely clear we have nothing to do this. - Pistorius was very clear. He said if the US and maybe he can't do it, what hope we got? - Matt said last night, this is not a job for NATO. Nick Carter, former senior military guy in the UK, he said yesterday, Trump's suggestion that NATO should take this on completely misunderstands why people are in NATO in the first place is a defensive alliance. If you think of the principle of what Trump's saying, any NATO country could say, right, we're going to war over there. Are we then expect you all to come in and help us when it fucks up? Because that's all that's happened. All that's happened is all these things that Nate's once and said to Trump on Presumes, which is why he got the boot. This will happen. Trump wanted to ignore it to have the war. And now that it's happening, he's basically saying Britain, France, Germany, Japan, South Korea, Australia, you've got to come in and help me. I think, look, it's terrible what's going on. As you said last week, this is going to be terrible for the economy in Britain and Europe and around the world. But I think in terms of getting America under Trump, hopefully for some time back into it, maybe just getting a few grownups around to say, listen, this has gone far enough. My really, really, really big worry about what's happening in the moment with the kind of, you know, star mechanic Macron melts or pushing back a Trump, is he's just going to one day wake up in the middle of the night and do a truth social post saying, we are pulling all support from Ukraine because the NATO countries are not being there to help us in our need. Yeah, I mean, I think that's a real risk. But equally, we couldn't be in a position where that black male threat meant to sign up to everything. And that was where I disagree with Mandelson. Mandelson was continuing even after he'd been fired from Washington to write articles and give interviews, saying things like, basically, we should let him have Greenland because the only thing that matters is US support for Ukraine. There were people in our own intelligence and security establishment who were very critical of Starmer's line saying, what happens if we go to war and we need the US to help us and we've got to go with them? People are saying, when we went to Spain, you know, what happens when Spain gets the tax? And I think the problem with that idea is the idea that Trump does favors or feels loyalty or because you've helped him out here, he's going to help you out there as for the birth. So the reality is that actually, US support for Ukraine has been reduced to basically zero dollars. So we've had to step up fill in a $50 billion. There's still a lot of the intelligence. They do a lot of the intelligence security and they sell us stuff that we buy. Although a lot of the stuff we're trying to buy, they've now blowing, in Italy, so it's not even available to buy. But the main thing for which Trump was always given credit was putting sanctions against Russian oil and driving down the price of oil. He's now lifted those sanctions and put up the oil price. So it's basically down to the intelligence and security enablers. Yeah. And that is very vulnerable. It's a big problem, but the bigger problem he's done, he's done much more damage to Ukraine than helped it in particular around oil and the Russian economy. And that was before this. I'd say he was damaging Ukraine before this he's always taking put inside of the argument. So he's work off. Curial of Demetriya, who's butch, put in this kind of work off in this equation. And he did a post on telegram. He said the United States is effectively acknowledging the obvious without Russian oil, the global energy market cannot remain stable. EU bureaucrats will soon be forced to recognize this, acknowledge their strategic blunders and a tone. Russia is, I'm afraid, hate to say it, but I think it's true. Russia is the only power there's one out of this whole thing. He, because of the lifting the sanctions on oil, driving the price of oil up through what he's done in Iran, he is basically putting very, very large sums of money, 1.6 billion per month for every $10 increase in the price of crude. I mean, that is a lot of money. And this is why-- And that's going to fuel the fund the next stage of the war. And this is why all the sort of-- I have friends who are like to poke Europe in the UK and say it's all awful. And one of the great things they like to say is it was all Europe's fault for continuing to buy Russian oil. And that at least Trump had called that out. Well, now it's quite clear that Trump is on the other side. My final thing before we maybe take a break is my biggest fear is that this could continue for a very, very long time. I mean, the optimistic idea is that Trump somehow declares a victory. And we know that Trump is able to declare apparently a victory out of almost nothing. But his ability to do that feels less than it was before. Because if he was saying what he would have wanted to say before, which is, I've destroyed their new click capacity. So I've won. I've taken out their ballistic missiles. I've won. The problem is the whole world can now see that Iran has choked the straights of formulas, driven up the oil price. And basically, it's now holding all the Gulf countries to run some. If he says tomorrow, I've won, and I'm stopping, the Gulf countries, and a lot of the world will be like, you want? Excuse me. You're leaving these guys in place. They can now fire missiles that us whenever they want. they can click. the streets for moves whenever they want. You've declared victory, right? So one of the real risks is that actually places like Saudi that might have been a little ambivalent about this may now be pushing him to keep going. And you'll start seeing this. I'm beginning to see this from some of our own British diplomats, generals and intelligence people who said to me, "Well, Rory, I didn't agree with the war in the first place, but now it's happened. We've got to finish the job. We can't leave these people here because that's actually there too much for danger to the world." To which I have to keep saying, "What does it mean finish the job? How do you finish this job?" Because another problem is all the experts on Iran put so much emphasis on the fact that the regime only had 15% of the support of the population was very weak, was very unpopular. And they thought that would mean it would collapse like a pack of cards. In fact, I think they were optimistic it is ready analysis. I have one of them saying to me yesterday, a Brit saying, "I thought Israel understood Iran better than anyone else." And what he meant by that is Israel was always much more cynical about Iran, much more aggressive about Iran, but Israel was wrong. Israel thought this regime would collapse the mission in an absolute you did not. It's proved much more resilient. So the options are now, I don't know how you avoid to completely horrible outcomes. Horrible outcome number one, this war continues indefinitely because you never get anything that you can describe as a victory. Horrible outcome number two, you stop the war, and you suddenly have Iran in a much more powerful geopolitical position able to essentially blackmail all the Gulf countries. Well, if we go to Bray, which is tomorrow for question time, as you described it, as you described it, we can show little humility. We put out an appeal to listeners and viewers for questions on Iran, we got tons of them, and we got a guest for question time, which is one of the world's leading experts, genuine leading expert on Iran, that's Karim Sadjapur. And hopefully people will enjoy that tomorrow. Take a break and we'll come back and talk about how useless our water and media regulators are. Very good, looking forward to it, Al-Sahab. Good break. This episode is brought to you by NordVPN. Spring is the season of movement, travel, shared networks, systems that aren't ours. When you operate inside infrastructure, you don't control your vulnerability increases. Mobility increases exposure. A cyber attack happens every 39 seconds. In the UK, hundreds of cyber-enabled crimes are reported daily with around 4.5 million pounds lost each day to cybercrime. Frictionless systems tend to hide their weaknesses, bank details, passwords, boarding passes, sensitive data moving across networks we don't control. So that's why we've been using our friends over at NordVPN since it encrypts your connection, making your data far harder to intercept. It hides your IP address, reduces your digital footprint, and keeps your personal details secure. To get the best discount on your NordVPN plan, go to nordvpn.com/restispolitics. You'll get four extra months free on the two-year plan plus a 30-day money-back guarantee. The links in the episode description. [MUSIC PLAYING] Welcome back to the "Restis Politics." It's with me, Anastak Campbell. And with me, Rory Stewart. Now, Rory, you probably know I do occasionally weave in little plugs for my newspaper, The New World. But today I am doing so underlined 10 times, because they've done a piece this week written by Alan Rusperger, who you thought should have been registered in the BBC, Senator the Guardian, and a prospect. And a prospect. Maybe in the play. I think it would be a great job. I think we both. Most great jobs are nightmares. If I was manager of Argentina when Maradona was playing, I mean, absolute bloody night. I have a great job. But no, so what they've done, and it's really, really interesting. I do love The New World, and it's not many newspapers do 12, they call themselves a magazine now. 12 pages on one story. And well, with the front cover. And then, say, Alan Rusperger. All written by Alan Rusperger. Brilliant. And it's an analysis of GB news. And just quickly remind, listen to GB news. GB news, a right wing TV station founded a few years ago, funded very, very heavily by the sky, Paul Marshall, sort of Christian right winger, used to be a Lib Dem, Andrew Neal, very well known journalist, was the kind of founding driver of it. He's quoted in Rusperger's piece as saying, "It has basically become reformed TV, reformed Nigel Farage's party." But what Alan does, he put together a team of quite a large team of journalists and people who had experienced a regulation. And not just kind of left wing people, there were people who were the spectator, for the telegraph, as well as for the Atlantic, for the Washington Post, for Tortoise. And so lots of different, journalist people. And they sat down, I think, in pairs, and they watched a lot of GB news. And they were asked to score these programs that they watched for Argers' program, an interview that Beverly Turner did with Donald Trump, Matt Goodwin, his program, some of the sort of chatty programs. And they asked him to score them against Off-Comb's own guidelines. And the Off-Comb guidelines, just to come in for a second, if I'm right, a lot of them are brought up broadcasting. And this is different from how news papers regulated or podcasts regulated. Correct. Is about impartiality, is that right? Is about impartiality and fairness and accuracy. Okay. And the idea, if we go back to the beginnings of this, are that whereas news papers were allowed to endorse political parties, and we've got the top-sciambi bias, broadcast was supposed to be. This is going back to the days of the founding of BBC and ITV in Channel 4, was supposed to have balanced points of view, was supposed to be impartial, was supposed to be objective. And the idea of that was you didn't want streaming into people's living rooms. Propaganda. Completely biased propaganda. Yeah. And if you didn't abide by the Off-Comb rules, you did not get a license. So GB News have a license to broadcast around the clock, which they do. The team that RUSP had put together, they include people who were the Sunday telegraph, the SPAT-8, the Times, the Observer, BBC, ITV, the Daily Mail, the Mirror, prospect the economists, the Guardian, Buzzfeed, the Washington Post, Tortoist Media, GQ Magazine. So they put a lot of people and sat them in front of television and said, "You watched this for hours and hours and hours." And what they've got, both in Alan's report and in the New World's account of it, they've given their explanations as to why Off-Comb rules were being broken. Okay. Give us an example. So, for example, Donald Trump, interview with Donald Trump by Beverly Turner, he says, in the interview, climate change is a complete hoax. An interviewer who's governed by Off-Comb, should at the very least say, "Well, that is disputed." Right. Okay? Or have somebody who comes on afterwards to say why that's completely wrong? Yeah. Instead of which he said, "It was so amazing to see you drop all those truth bombs at the United Nations." It's propaganda. Okay. Matt Goodwin is an academic who did research and immigration has become increasingly right-wing and then managed to run as the reform party candidate in Gorton Denme by election. Which he felt when he came second. Your famous generosity there, or even calling him "academic." And what was more, he had a program and has a program. And guess what? He was discussing four days before it was announced that he was going to be the candidate in Gorton and Denton. Denton? Yeah. He was discussing Gorton and Denton. And he was discussing these were the subjects he chose. Is Europe falling apart and becoming unrecognizable? What is the risk of Islamist fighters arriving on small boats? Why are Calbra residents up in arms over a local camp for asylum-seekers and finally, on this fair and balanced program, sexual assaults by refugees in the Netherlands and the UK? So that Matt Goodwin program was scored by these guys at one out of five for being in keeping with the off-com guidelines. Okay. So just to put it in context, when I in 2010 showed the then Prince Wales around my nonprofit in Afghanistan and BBC News showed a couple of images of me pointing to things. Gorton Brown then Prime Minister made a formal complaint to the Palestinian off-com saying it would help me in my election in Penerife and the border. Penerife Brown? Yeah, yeah. Because I appeared with the king and was shown on television showing him around the project. So to see how far we've come, in 2010 it was considered for me to be in the edge of a shot with the king as a parliamentary candidate about a sound for Penerife and the border was in Gorton Brown's views, breaching impartiality and political action. Oh, I can understand that. Compared to what would have happened if I'd actually presented my own program on the Penerife border election. Every night. Every night. About all the issues that I was campaigning for as a main broadcaster, let alone on the Marchion of a pro-German. Exactly. And so for example, Andrew Neal in the interview he does with the new world with Rosperinger, he says that when he was starting GB News, he said that, you know, there's no way that we would have allowed Nigel Farage to have his own program. Nigel Farage now has own program. Jacob Reece Mock has his own program. Leanderson has his program. Matt Goodman has his program. And they all get finance too. That's the other thing. So one of the interesting things here is about conflict of interest and the funding of members of Parliament. So as people will be aware, members of Parliament. often feel underpaid. A lot of the population disagree, other bits of population agree. But they are allowed to have second jobs, but they have to declare quite carefully what those incomes are. If you are a presenter on GBNes or if you are as Boris Johnson was when he was an MP, a columnist for a newspaper, or indeed actually some of the labor MPs who presented LBC radio programs, you can end up earning literally hundreds of thousands of pounds a year, but I think Boris Johnson was in that hundreds of thousands certainly for large seems to have been hundreds of thousands of income. And those are in effect or can be indirect donations coming from the owners of these media corporations. So the Barclays brothers, I think owned the telegraph and he was getting this money. Marshall, as you say, has been a big founder of GBNews and so a lot of the thing that's maintaining the lifestyle of Nigel Farage is not being declared as a direct donation from an individual with a political cause to Farage, which he has to justify. Instead, it's just presented as I have a second job and I think all these questions around MPs, incomes, conflicts of interest, their future jobs are not being sorted, personally to return to my current session, pay them more and stop them from having these additional sources income. And also for the backers, Paul Marshalls, they are, this is the equivalent to funding a political party because Andrew Neill says this is not a reformed TV. By the way, fair play to Gordon Brown, right in my view, right, because if you have rules, they've got to be upheld. Right, right. One of the things that's happening with this report is it's going to go to Lisa Nandy, the culture secretary is going to go to the culture committee. Two things should happen in my view. First of all, the Labour government needs to get its head round why this is such a problem for our democracy and as it happens for the Labour Party as well. But the other thing you said about how the things change, let me just read you this line from Russ Bridges piece, to see how far off-com has journeyed in the way it operates. It's worth revisiting a meticulously argued 12 page adjudication it published eight years ago, which found the BBC had breached its duty of due accuracy in 2017 by failing to challenge Nigel Lawson's remark on the science of climate change on the today programme. These guys on on GB news, they don't just not allow voices on to rebut what they say, they kind of almost cartoonise issues like climate change. And so something like goodwin, he has a programme where he literally talks about immigration day and night. And they would say so they got Gloria Del Piero, former Labour MP, that's balance. They have got so many really right wing presenters. This is why Liam Burns book is so interesting because this is all of a piece with how Putin corrupted his own media, how Trump is corrupting his own media. You now have Brendan Carr, who runs the FCC, the Federal Commission that gives out licenses to broadcasters and basically saying, if these guys don't cover the war properly in P.H.S. view, they can lose their license. And that is already having an impact. One of the things that is also odd, which I guess is going on in Off-Cumbs Head and some listeners I think will already be shouting at our podcasts pointing the sound, is they will say, listen, how come we can put out podcasts algorithmically streamed on YouTube into people's living rooms and we're not governed by Off-Cum regulations. And you don't need to be dominant comics to point out that you and I have particular political views. We are rampantly pro-European, for example, and we keep putting out those views. So there's a really interesting thing that's happened since these regulations were set up. Now I'm not defending Off-Cumbs because I think your point is right. And these guys get a broadcasting license, there is a law, they're not sticking to it. But just to explain why it's getting more complicated. It's getting more complicated because when these rules were set up, you didn't have podcasts and YouTube platforms. And actually our reach is now bigger than these guys. So if you look at the figures, these figures suggest that they are getting at one time just under 100,000 viewers. Now this is a rolling average over a particular period and it's quite difficult calculating. But it's worth pointing out that they will come back and say, hold a second, you know, you are often getting 10 times the number of people listening to your podcast and they would probably say, understandably, listen, we have our own political view, which is incredibly pro-European, and of centrist dad, et cetera. So they would say, how come you as a podcast get to have a pretty clear political view, but we as a broadcast network? Which is, examples as us, there's new stations. And then there's stuff coming from the states like Joe Rogan, right? As a client or whatever coming in, which Off-Cumbs can't even touch. I mean, if you wanted to regulate Joe Rogan, you would have to deal with the fact that people would start using VPNs to get round government things. It's a very, it's a very, very fair point. And I went in to see Off-Cum sometime last year because I was already kind of spotted that I was in a real problem. And I went in and it was before the election and I was basically saying, look, how can you have Farage presented this programme virtually daily? It is total reform propaganda. That's all it is. Minute after minute. And the one thing we know about Farage is very good at it. It's a good broad customer. He's a good talker. He's a good propaganda. So I met these people at Off-Cum. And we'll come on to the water in a minute. But one of the best things about the water programme that we're going to talk about were these, the sort of bullshit merchants that they employed to give sort of empathetic lines to take. And one of the things the Off-Cum people get saying to me is, well, we can only take action under our remit if we get complaints. Okay. Well, Matt Goodwin did a poll on his own programme on whether Trump was right that Europe was recognisable. Guess what? 97% of the great, the viewers agreed with it, right? Now, even Trump's interview, which was the biggest blowjob you've ever seen on television, I think they got 32 complaints. And none of them were upheld on the basis that in other times on the channel, other points were made. If Donald Trump's on your TV station, you're going to get a lot of coverage. Rebuttal is not. The rebuttal has to be in the programme. Yeah. And I think Labour, the government and the Conservatives, I think, should join in on this as well and definitely the Lib Dems. I think they're underestimating how serious this is. I get your point about the podcast. And they may come a point, by the way, where Off-Cum's remit has to be extended. Yeah. But right now, in relation to what Off-Cum's duty is to see that their own guidelines and laws are upheld. They are being broken minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day, on a news station that claims and boasts that it now has more viewers than the BBC News and Sky News. So that is a real problem, I think, for our democracy. Yeah. And you've got to get a grip of it. Yeah. Also, what an amazing change in the video landscape we've seen. I mean, it's not just podcasts. 1989, something like 30% of the British population every night watched the BBC News for the ITV News. Right now down to about 10%. It's the same as true in the US. Come from about 20, 25% of the US population watching the main news anchors and evening down to about 5%. We've gone from, in 1989, 5% of people getting no TV news to 32% of people. From 2% of people getting no TV on newspaper news in 1989 to about a quarter of the population getting new TV on newspaper news today. The number of people using a newspaper has dropped from 75% in 1989 to 34% today. And it's only the over 55s where almost half people are actually regularly watching TV. If you get under 35s, 58% their main news source is social media. Yeah, a lot of the stuff they consume on social media is being produced by the newspapers. Yeah, well, it's very complicated, isn't it? I mean, so advertising revenue for newspapers has collapsed, which also I think gives the poor marshals this world more control. Because when you were in Downing Street, they were making close to 10 billion pounds a year in real terms. They're now making about a quarter of that. Which means that if you're a wealthy person, you can step up full the gap, which otherwise would have been made after. So we're in this very, very, very weird world. And then the other thing we've talked about, you were teasing me, you know, what am I doing? And pairing on Piers Morgan, what am I doing? Apparently today program. Today programs very interesting, because that's remained incredibly high. It's falling though. Falling, but not as fast as you think. It's been a 75% collapse in the TV news. Yeah. To Bay program is pretty, pretty constant. And then Piers Morgan, you were saying, well, nobody watched the film. Well, the weird thing is that gets picked up on YouTube, which can make it even more complicated. So, which is not regulated either. So off-coms in a really, really weird world. But I agree with you. If you are going to say newspapers and podcasts, one thing people expect them to have political views, broadcasting is supposed to be impartial. Then, of course, you can't have Nigel Frarch regularly presenting a program. But I think if you're teasing him, if you read this full report, you will see this is deliberate systemic. They should shut it down. They should shut down. They will be, they will be, they will be loving this conversation, of course. Right. They also heard the lefty bedwaters. They don't like them. It's the feet on the other boot. Because the other thing that they've done is the managed to persuade people like off-com that the rest of the media is really left-wing. We've got the most right-wing newspapers basically on the planet. The BBC is constantly scared of his own shadow and there's neither one thing or the other, rightly in my view. I'll tell you what I would say if the today program don't have Alan Rosbridge or on at 810 talking about his report, I will say they're all part of the same bloody club. Anyway, listen, I think it's a brilliant, the new world is a brilliant magazine and this is a particularly brilliant piece of reporting and I'm really, really glad they've done it. And because we're fair, Rory, and balanced, unlike others, the new world actually offered, off-com, an interview or an article or some sort of response and they said they didn't have time to do an interview. They gave a statement which says, "Our rules around due impartiality and due accuracy in use are cornerstones of the Broadcasting Code. They ensure that audiences are not misled and that they're exposed to an appropriate range of alternative views and perspectives." Well, we'll see how that stands up against the excellent piece by Mr. Rosbridge. GB News didn't respond to the new world's request for response, but they, of course, have often said that they call themselves fearless defenders of free speech in the United Kingdom. And the link to war is this, the final line of Alan's 12 pages in the new world is this. Clean information is in theory as precious as clean water. We know what happened to war in this country is our national news going the same way. What a link. That's good, that's it. Okay, let's get a word and tell us about dirty business. Well, dirty business actually got me even angrier than the post office stuff. Because as you know, I like to swim in cold water. And it made me think, in fact, funny I was talking to somebody this morning but also a senior said, I don't think I'll ever swim in a river again. Because you just can't trust it. You can't trust what they say about it. So that dirty business is the story of these two middle-aged retired guys who notice that where they live down in near where David Cameron's old seat went knee, that the river wind rush is changing color. And they get very troubled by this and they sort of dig and dig and dig and dig. And essentially what they're finding is these massive sewage bills. And then woven through the story as they then try to campaign, want to get the truth, which they struggle to get because these agencies just lie to them all the time. But secondly, to get things improved. Weaving through this story are two stories based on fact, one of a young girl who walked through some human sewage on a beach in Dornish, which had a blue flag and she ended up dying. She died. She died. From infections. Contractions. And people couldn't work out what's going on. But she died. And then another guy who in a different water incident contracted many airs disease, which was utterly life-changing. What is the disease? You sort of lose your balance all the time and you have these kind of never any sort of vomiting fits. It was really horrible to watch. But the basic point is that human searches are very serious threat to human health. Yeah. And that actually stepping into these rivers and swimming them is not something you should do if there's human sewage fletching. Well, but the point is you don't know. So the Dornish beach had a blue flag right saying it was clean. Saying it was clean. And the fact you saw the family basically trying to get some sense of justice, or at least to find out why she died. Yeah. And constantly being fobbed off and saying, well, you sure she didn't eat something and all this sort of stuff. And it's really what makes it so compelling as television. The first thing is it doesn't hide what sewage is about. Yeah. And what you see is the, I'm afraid this goes back to Margaret Thatcher and privatization. There's just been a complete undermining of the systems that keep our water clean. Whilst these companies aren't making fortunes. And what's more, you see one of the worst things about the program is the guy who is in charge of the environment agency, which is meant to be the regulator, which is just in this program just comes over to complete bullshit industry. He ends up at the end of the program working for one of the water companies. So it's the old revolving door from regulator to business. It honestly drives you mad. And I've got to tell you, you're in it. I mean, it 'cause I have a water minister. Well, you're sitting, there's a cup in the cup. And they mix real footage from policy. So for example, there's a Keir Starmer's regulation speech, which I didn't particularly enjoy. And but you're sitting behind a list trust as she's sort of, you know, doing what ministers do, saying, oh no, we're dealing with it. I mean, what was your experience of the environment agents? 'Cause they come across so badly, they look like a total failed operation. It's awful, right? And then firstly, I feel very loyal towards my teams. So I naturally felt very, very loyal towards the environment agency. And I really was proud to work with them during the flooding. I used to go out and, you know, I walked the super sewer down the Thames with them. I mean, I really took a lot of interest. And every week my Monday morning started with a call with the chief executive and the chairman of the Environment Agency, getting an update on what they'd done, what was going on, et cetera. I'd go and visit them and Bristol. I'd go and visit my New York, I'd go and see my company. And I always felt as individuals, they were hardworking, dedicated, thoughtful people. They were very happy to jump in a car with me, go out and see a farmer if there was a protest. And then on the other hand, right? You have the other side of the story, which is every farmer saying to me, this is a criminal organization. When I see the environment agency turn up, I want to hang myself. Really? All the businesses saying the environment agency's got no idea what they're doing, local residents saying, they're dreadful, these stories around the water companies. And then I'd go back to the environment agency and see these very kind of educated, polite, helpful people in their special things going on. I'm not sure there are good people. A lot of them became friends with me. And I liked a British diplomat who'd been our ambassador in India, ended up as chair of the environment agency. In fact, I was briefly put up to be chair of the environment agency. Fortunately, Boris Johnson scotched it because he hated me. But the reason they were considering me is I really was very interested in subject as water minister and laughter. But all these things were completely true. So you're revolving door point. One of the first things you noticed when you were a minister in this is that the water industry was very, very good at entertaining ministers. Very good at suggesting just how much money you could make as a chief executive water company or how much money you could make on the board of water company. Indeed, some of my colleagues followed that route. So that's a conflict of interest. Number two, guessing to the information. So the story that we were told, again and again, while this train wreck was happening, it's clear now looking at Tim's water that it's a train wreck beyond imagining, disgusting, sewage overflowing, water not being provided, bills going through the roof, bonuses being paid out, private debt companies coming in, KKR being offered $3 billion quit and then walking away, because apparently they can't make enough money off this. Unbelievable, right? But the story that I heard again and again as the water minister and now going back 10 years is water privatization have been one of the great unsung successors of all time that costs had been kept down. So you spent one pound a day on getting a water and an out, $20 billion of investment had gone in from the water companies and none of this would have happened if it had been kept in public hands was the argument that the investment wouldn't have happened and the costs would have gone up. Anyway, that was my experience of water minister and I was the final thing is that when I think I said this before when I tried to challenge off what and say, look, are you sure these water companies are really doing a good job because I keep hearing from different people, their beaches are full of poo, et cetera. You would get these presentations, which would say, you know, this is all the improvement that we've done with 5% improvement this year and this is the EU regulation and this is the number of blue flags. So you're given the blue flag in fashion, right? As a minister, you have to be really persistent in curation. Okay, you've told me this is a blue flag on, I'm going to that beach. Here's a piece of human pool on the beach. Why is there a blue flag? You know, you're busy, aren't you? They know that you're busy. They know you can't visit every beach. And you're dealing with these very, very champion people. No, here's an pushing further. What would have happened if I'd gone completely ballistic, made this my obsession and the way that I did violence in prisons and really started saying, I think these water companies are crooks. I think the whole system screwed. I think our beaches are filthy, right? And I think we as the treasury need to spend 20 billion pounds more on sorting out the sewage system. So pretty soon, I think people would have been saying to the prime minister, whoever the prime minister was, I'm afraid your minister's gone a bit on to it. He doesn't really understand what he's talking about. He doesn't really understand the church implications. He's embarrassing the government. He's asking all questions. How are we going to get investment in from KKR if this guy keeps suggesting that he's been. Well, there's a very interesting exchange that I tweeted about this and somebody sent me an exchange between Barry Garden of the Labour MP and he was grilling Emma Reynolds in Parliament just so could you. And Barry really had his facts on him. He used to grow me too. He's been on this for a long time. Quite good grilla. And he really was going for it. And when you boil down what she was saying without wanting maybe to say in these terms, she was kind of saying, yeah, but listen, Barry, the only way to do this is to take it back fully into public ownership and there just isn't the money for that. So one of my heroes, as you know, is Dieter Helm. And I might try to say if we can persuade him to do a little bit for the newsletter on this, because he thinks about this a lot. But essentially he says, in the end, you've got a pair of mine that someone's got to pay. Someone's got to bear the risk and someone's got to finance it. So who's going to pay? Is the government going to pay? Is the person with their bill going to pay or are you going to ask a private company to pay? And who's going to take the risk of it goes wrong? I mean, if the sewer turns up on the beaches that the private company is going to take the risk. Is it the government that's going to take the risk? England is the only country in the world with a fully privatized water system. Only one in the world. So if we renationalize, we've got to understand that in the end, the government's going to have to take cost. And there's no desire from the government to do. In fact, what the government's doing in John Cove's report, I'm afraid, may be the worst of all worlds, which is suggesting that off what's going to be beefed up and interfere even more in a pretty arbitrary way with these companies. which will just drive the cost of financing up. So let's say you have some, I don't know, massive American fund and you're trying to persuade them to come in. And why is the government persuading mass American funds to come in? Well, the problem is the government doesn't want to pay and they don't want the household to pay. So their idea is that somehow some complicated international private finance debt structure is going to come in, take over Tim's water, and the question is why? Why would they take it over? Well, presumably because they think they're going to make money. But in order to make money, that company needs to know there's a predictable revenue stream. If Conniff has set off an off-wall, which every year or two politicians stand up in the House of Commons or Channel 4 produced a news program saying, "These companies are horrible, we need to hit that bottom line, they can't be paying their bonuses, they've got to take the risk." Well, they'll say, "Fine, but I'm going to charge you more. If you're going to have an unstable regulatory environment and you're going to say that I have to take all the risk, well then the cost to the government of me, KKR, whoever producing this three billion is going to go through the roof." So we've got to keep coming back to this question. Absolutely, we've got to pay for that. Absolutely. McCory is the private sector villain of the piece in terms of this program on Channel 4. But honestly, I really do recommend people watch it because it's a drama, but these two guys who have actually done an interview for our newsletter this week, they go ash, myth and beta, and you can sign up for the newsletter in the description below. They're beautifully played. You've got these wonderful shots with you going along to these meetings where they're being bullshit and they sort of look at each other and they're like, "It's coming right, can it?" And they're not sort of shouting out of people, but you see through the series, you just see a system that's broken and everybody who has invested interest in the system not being broken saying that it's not broken. Yeah. But if you just, you know, the figures are stunning, 585,000 times, sewage was dumped into our waterways in 2024. And they have this line that is only when it's heavy rain, and that is bullshit too. So this experience, though, that you've described of going to a meeting, sitting there and just thinking quietly, this doesn't quite make sense, this can't quite be right. Is I'm afraid the experience of British citizens in so many bits? I mean, if I'm trying to get to the bottom of why my constituents are angry, I don't know whether this is your Lee and Burns book on populism. Touches on this. The biggest driver of anger I felt with my constituents was the sense that something was going clearly wrong, right? Something's wrong with their school, something's wrong with their hospital. I remember, you know, famously, this old woman saying to me, "I don't need to pay to go to Switzerland to get killed. I can just go into the Cumberland infirmary, right?" Or your fields have been flooded, or people are rewilding that to imagine you're a farmer, a suddenly, let's take what's happening actually at the moment today in Cumberland. The whole Louth Valley, all the way from Penrith down to Kendall, has got into a government rewilding scheme, which is basically driving sheep off the fels, leading to a lot of farms being closed, and essentially trying to create a native wilderness, right? And it's really disruptive for traditional landscapes, farmers, communities, schools, etc. You turn up to a meeting as an ordinary person, so you're a Cumberland farmer. And what do you meet? You meet a bank of people in lovely fleeces saying, "Invieramentation, "See natural England, national park." You have people who've done masters degrees in environmental science. It's Manchester, you have government regulation, you have lawyers, and they're all telling you, "It's the only thing to do." And they make you feel stupid. Right, you stick up your hand and say, "Well, this can't make sense because there's "gawls and bracken all over the hillside, "and how am I supposed to make a living when I'm going to sheep?" "No, I'm going to sell my farming." It's the same with inheritance tax. I mean, that was a really interesting one with farmers. The farmers are like, "This inheritance tax is going to kill us." And the government says, "No, no, no. "If you look at the figures, it's not going to affect any of you." And they're like, "Well, that's just not true." "So, it'll make me honest." They wiped out. And the government saying, "No, no. "If you look at the figures." Right, so this really weird world that we've created. And sometimes it's about lawyers, sometimes it's about coin goes, sometimes about agencies. But it's also a lot about class. Right, it's about people often from cities with advanced degrees, telling people who have less resources, less education, less power to just put up with stuff that they know is no good. Well, I think what it is is the state through our political system, the way that people get elected, the way that governments are formed, basically saying, "Whatever problem you face in the world, we can fix it for you." But actually, once you've contracted out most of the fixing to people whose motivations are completely different. So I talk about 585,000 surge bills in 2024. Shareholders of the UK water companies were taking out a billion indivitants. For what surely is reward for failure. And so I think it's that sense of the state failing. But the state partly fails because those at the top of it, across all the parties, basically say, "We can fix everything for you." And you can't. And I think a little bit more honest in that front would be no bad thing. But I think this is two cases of, I think, that's a lot of the stuff that's wrong with our country today. I think it's down to that. Watch privatization is absolutely a symbol of it. The environment agency was funding was massively cut during the austerity period. And then off-com, I mean, God knows what they do. God knows what they do. Because here's something happening on their watch. Well, what are they doing? I don't know. Wait, I mean, if they're not shutting down GBN, I mean, we could go on loads of work to do. I'm sure they do, you know, telecoms and all that stuff. We can debate whether or not they should be regulating broadcasts in a completely different way to broadcasts. But is that their job? That's the law. Do it, yeah. But I think honestly, I think what people will be amazed at. I kind of felt a little bit because the way that these people speak, okay, these bullshit merchants, when they were dealing with staff, some of the environment agency staff in the drama, are basically, you know, what are you doing? You're not doing your job. You're not letting us do our job. They do this thing called self-monitoring, where essentially the water companies decide when they're spilling out stuff that they shouldn't be. And they have the responsibility then to tell the environment agency when they're doing terrible things. Well, hey, guess what? They say it's not very wrong. And so you've got people who are really complaining about it, wanting to do it. And you have these sort of suits and PR merchants who are basically just giving a line. There's been some amazing comic. I mean, maybe just finished on this, we could share with these amazing short YouTube comedy sketches on how the water companies do this. And actually, the trick seems to be that they start with empathy and then move to super-specific detail, which you can't follow. It's to do with this exact widget on this particular control that you can't do this yet. There's a great character. He was the guy who's looking after the sewage works. And he's his one little character. He just keeps saying, "Oh, I hate my life." [LAUGHS] Oh, horrible job. Anyway, it's really, really, really good. So there you are, people. Dirty business in the new world. There you're two cultural references for the week. Thank you very much. See you soon. Bye, bye. [MUSIC PLAYING]