PM 'needs to intervene' in PC Harper's killers' release

26:52The Taliban is now very close to the centre of the city. I'm in my own neighbourhood with my own family and there's panic and chaos and fear. We cross live to the airport. Really, really very busy scenes here, long queues, entire families with piles and piles of suitcases.

27:12They showed us a beautiful, beautiful world, and suddenly they abandoned us. I'm 25, I've seen a different country, and then suddenly everything goes back to zero. The women are the front line of this story. We'll get to them with Lise Doucette, the BBC's chief international correspondent, joins us from Afghanistan. Lise, I remember you flying in as everyone was flying out. Well, trying to fly in, Paddy, I'll never forget that day. It's a day seared in memory, most of all, for the Afghans, the thousands of Afghans who were at that international airport as the Taliban entered the city. We were in a plane.

27:50We got into the Afghan airspace. We circled in the skies of Kabul for 45 minutes. And then the pilot of Emirates Airlines said, it's too dangerous to land. But we did get there a few days later on a Qatari military transporter. And it was a dystopian scene, the grey tarmac, the lines of hulking grey military transporters and Afghan men, women and children in single file, leaving, not just leaving a country, but leaving themselves behind all of their dreams, all that they achieved and all that they had hoped for. It's interesting that the Taliban has changed its public position on its horror of education for women.

28:30There was reasoning given and now they're just silent. They've always said, in fact, they continue to say that this is a temporary measure when the right conditions, as they put it, are in place. Girls will be able to go to secondary school and women to university. But I think just speaking to here, everyone understands. It's what they said the first time they were in power in the 1990s, that it's just temporary. It will change. But what is really striking is that five years on, how many young girls and women are those who didn't have the good fortune to be able to leave and to find refuge to start new lives everywhere?

29:09And starting new lives elsewhere has also had its own kind of trauma. but we've been seeing girls who are in secret schools, brave students, brave teachers, girls studying online, women. You meet women who, had it been different, they would now be training to be a doctor, hoping to be a lawyer, starting the future they dreamed of instead. They're making jams. They're learning how to make jewellery. They're doing what they can, hoping against hope that someday, someday, this situation will change. We broadcast an interview here with women based in the UK broadcasting maths lessons to Afghan girls.

29:50It's very poignant to think how much people around the world feel the plight of Afghan girls. it is even though the the people of afghanistan in particular the women and girls they feel forgotten this is not just afghan story afghan story patty this is our story too there were two decades of international engagement which created the space for afghan girls and boys to dream bigger than they ever did before the opportunities for education for employment were bigger than before the skies were the limit and suddenly they were left alone with their dreams. The world is focused elsewhere, on Ukraine, on Gaza.

30:30Aid levels are going down. Britain is still giving aid, humanitarian aid. And of course, they have to be very careful because they don't want to directly support the Taliban, but they say they do want to support the people of Afghanistan. But it's simply not on the radar of most governments around the world, except, of course, Russia and China who are investing here now and exploiting minerals. But on an individual level, there are still so many initiatives of people who have set up Afghans, non-Afghans, setting up online education for girls, trying to get them scholarships. And I should say that there are Afghan girls who have been able to, against all the odds, to be able to study, get entrance to universities in the United Kingdom.

31:15But the policy of the British government now is not to give visas to Afghan girls and boys to come and study in the United Kingdom, despite all that they went through. There are some signs that policy may change, but for now, that's it's not that's not a door that the door has been shut to them. So, yes, individual level, community level, there are those efforts underway by Afghans and non-Afghans. But quite frankly, it's just not enough. Lise Doucette, who will be covering the five-year anniversary all week on the BBC. But now we're going to explain how we can escape the crowds and the expense by taking trips to unlikely places near our home.

31:56So says Chris Moss, the author of a new book, Where Tourists Seldom Tread, Postcards from Bypassed Britain. One such example is this place in Lancashire. And we asked Chris to send us a postcard himself. Hello from Cologne in East Lancashire on a lovely sunny day. I can think of at least six big reasons for coming. One, Titanic history. I'm standing beside the Wallace Hartley Memorial off Albert Road. Born here in 1878, Hartley was bandmaster on the ship and led the orchestra as it sank. He's buried at Cologne Cemetery. If you like film history, Backfield and Hargreaves Street were used for the filming of Monty Python's The Meaning of Life.

32:34Specifically, the song and dance routine in Every Sperm is Sacred. If you want to hike, the Two Toms Trail links Cologne to the Penang Way and to Pendle Hill. Cologne has lots of listed buildings and monuments, but it also has famously a 10-foot square flagstone in front of the town hall, which the 2024 Mercury Prize-winning band English Teacher celebrate on their song The World's Biggest Paving Slab. There's lots of food and drink, great pubs, great restaurants, and the Ribble Valley's round the corner if you want fancier food. And Colne is in a region that historian Douglas Farney dubbed Cotonia, the mill town region, full of museums of industrial history and abandoned and converted textile hills, art galleries and public art, and above all, lovely Lancashire people.

33:17And all these towns, to be honest, are where tourists seldom tread. Chris now joins us live. Chris, thanks for working twice for us on BH, filling it up. So basically, I remember the movie with the song Every Sperm is Sacred. I suppose what your message is, if I go with my eyes open, I might see other film locations. I might not have the same as a foreign holiday, but I might have joy a mile from where I live. Absolutely that. And thanks for inviting me. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It's partly that openness to discovery, I suppose. But don't get me wrong. These places do have architecture architecture and the usual things people want on holiday as well.

33:57But I do think if you're going to travel to these less obvious towns, you do have to go with a very open mind. And I discovered novels and films and music when I travelled to these 30, 30, 40 towns that I did in the book. Tell me how you discovered novels. Well, for example, I went to beautiful Harwich, which was a place that I'd bypassed in the past, catching the ferry over to Holland. I went to Harwich and I was walking up a lighthouse and I saw a novel in a cabinet in one of the glass cabinets inside. And I said to the guide there, Sue, who runs a volunteer group, what's this about? It was called The Suburbs of Hell by an Australian writer called Randolph Stowe, who I'd never heard of.

34:39I bought the novel, took it home, and it's set in Harwich. So it kind of brought the town to life for me and it filled it with ghosts. And it was strange because I read it after my trip and I felt Harwich was quite an eerie place anyway. and this amazing novel captures that about Harwich. So that was just one instance of me discovering a great kind of cultural asset that I'd never have come across before. Your book also tells me to embrace the burbs because we have a metropolitan gaze where the capital often sucks all the attention and this is true of big cities including Glasgow because you're singing up for Paisley.

35:15I always thought of Paisley as just some place up there near Glasgow. I didn't really, yeah, it's awful I suppose people who come from there, it's basically the size of a city, it has a larger population than some Scottish cities, the station there is the third busiest station in the country so it has this commuter traffic but when you go there it has this extraordinary 12th century abbey and they're about to get an amazing museum and art gallery later this year hopefully if it all runs to schedule, which will compete with Edinburgh and Glasgow And Paisley, again, I knew the Paisley pattern, but as a Lancastrian, I had no idea that Paisley is just as much a place where the Industrial Revolution unfolded as any of the towns that I live near now.

35:59Our guests are here, Simon Cole, the Hanavets, Jasveer Singh. Simon, we think of you as just soaking up what we're hearing here. Paisley, extraordinary place, completely agree. But also, it's really important, I visit a lot, not particularly because I want to see Paisley, but because the bus from Glasgow Airport to the city centre costs about a million pounds, I exaggerate slightly. However, if you walk for one mile to beautiful Paisley Gilmore Street station, you can get into Glasgow Central for a couple of pounds. Hannah, do you travel where you live? It's the voice of God there, isn't it? I mean, these tips, they're priceless.

36:39I do. I wander around. I'm a sort of South London wanderer. I walk and I've got dogs and I am that middle-aged woman. Jasvir, do you agree that we mustn't be obsessed by a glass of rosé in a Tuscan hillside with a beautiful stranger? We must go to Croydon. Oh, Croydon has lots of delights. There's a seat place of worship. I go there quite frequently. There's a shopping centre. There are lots of things to do in places like Croydon and elsewhere in the country. I'd say staycations are very good. Chris, you're going to tell me you love Croydon. I do like Croydon. The thing is, some of these places I've lived in as well.

37:16I lived in Surbiton, so I wanted to put Surbiton in the book. But Croydon was a place, a friend of mine used to live in Thornton Heath, and we'd sometimes go to Croydon. But I'd seen it, I'd saw David Bowie put it down. I know Kate Moss had put it down. And then there's this guy from there who wrote a book called Croydonopolis. and that was an excellent book and I began to investigate and the Archbishop of Canterbury once lived in Croydon so it has it has this old older history and of course it was old London airport as well though there was a possibility that it would become the old the old plane to France was the busiest line in the world for a period from Croydon so Croydon has this hidden history and again you may not see it in the physical structure of the place but you do have to make a little bit of effort when you go to places like Croydon because there's been a lot of redevelopment and demolition as well.

38:04Thank you very much. Chris Moss, author of Where Tourists Seldom Tread, and this is Chris treading in Cone on the cobbled, steep streets.

38:24in the 20s and 30s he said you would have heard hundreds and thousands of mill workers passing at dawn in their clogs on these streets I'm not sure why he was dragging his chains with him we'll never know now oh apparently they could have been Morris dancers bells yes Yes, yes. They're the only people who wear clogs and bells. So that's a bit of a lucky guess by the team. It's quarter to ten. We've already met the guests, but let me give you their monikers. Simon Calder is the Telegraph's travel editor who hosts its new Travel Expert podcast. Simon is famed because he pays for his tickets and hotels and declines freebies from the travel trade.

39:07Simon does a lot of what I read a junket. People are going, oh, I loved this hotel, and they're getting it for free. Oh, but they are fantastic travel writers. I do not for one moment feel pious about this. It's just that you perhaps after some decades have quite a lot more to write about when things go horribly wrong, which if you're spending as little as possible is very often. Hannah Betts is the feature writer for The Mail, The Times and The Telegraph. Other people need work, Hannah. Her recent columns include Chewing Gum is a Crime Against God, All that running is doing Gen Z no good. And where have all the plump people gone?

39:42I mean, you know, bringing you the news that matters, Paddy. Jasveer Singh is a family law barrister and social activist who appears as what he calls a progressive Sikh on thought for the day. What is a progressive Sikh? It sounds like a travel instruction. It does, doesn't it? Yeah, going forwards all the time. Progressive Sikhs are ones who are... I guess it's an interesting one to describe. Sikhs who are happy having a chat with anyone who are secure with their own identities but happy being in any environment such as Broadcasting House on a Sunday morning. OK, well, it works for me. And Thought for the Day.

40:21Do you think there should be a secular Thought for the Day? I've heard this discussed. I've had this discussion with some people as well. I think it all depends on what exactly is the message or how you want to get the message over. Thought for the Day is about beliefs. and it's about being secure in one's beliefs and knowing what those beliefs are. If you make it secular, it could be about anything and it becomes, to some extent, almost like a vox pop. OK, thank you very much. We'll judge you brutally before 10. We'll start with you, Hannah Betts, from a piece you're bringing us from the online section of The Guardian, one of the UK's best fossil collections might be sold overseas in a loss to the nation.

40:59Yes, I loved this. The science correspondent Nicola Davis is clearly having a lovely sort of work and staycation summer. She's been down on the Jurassic Coast doing not only her, the news story, as you say, is that we're losing one of our collections, but Nicola has been digging for gold. And it's just lovely. It's a man with a spade. And there's nothing more British, is there, than a man with a spade. Well, no, but all of this stuff is being sold, obviously, to the Natural History Museum in Abu Dhabi, along with an awful lot because, of course, if you're a Middle Eastern leader and you want to acquire quite a lot of cachet, then when you hear the word culture, you reach for your wallet.

41:43Yeah, you buy it. You've already got in Abu Dhabi, the Louvre, the Gubbenheim is going finally to open in December. And of course, Qatar is very keen on acquiring lots of culture too. Now we'll turn to some controversy. This is Jasveer Singh's pick from the Sunday Telegraph, page seven. The headline, which I'm reading faithfully, is Islamic people are less British, claims Restore's co-founder. This is the headline. Can you tell us what the story says, Jasveer, before we do opinions? Oh, no, absolutely. So it's talking about how Muslims in particular are less British than Christians because they have no ancestral or religious ties to the UK.

42:20And this is a comment by Charlie Downs, who's Restore Britain's co-founder. But it also follows comments that were made by Rupert Lowe, the leader of Restore Britain, who refused to say that the king, King Charles III, is a white Briton. And he refused to say that because Prince Philip, his father, was born in Greece, Corfu to be precise. Yes, I heard this covered so that if you follow the logic through, you need to have white British parents. So, Simon, do you want to enter this controversial field? Well, only to point out that Prince Philip wasn't just born in Corfu, but to be even more accurate, he was born in Morepo, which is a wonderful mansion where Empress Sisi of Austria-Hungary used to reside as well.

43:11Well worth going to. It's about a one-mile walk, I'd say, from Corfu airport. Right, but I don't want to be accused of diverting from the issues, Hannah, which is, you don't have to join in here, but is there increasingly a discussion about how British we are if we've just arrived here or our parents just arrived here? There is, and a lot of us find it nauseating, don't we? I mean, yeah. But it could also be true that a family that goes back longer has got bigger ties to the country. Are we going to start doing doomsday type? I mean, it worries me. It worries me. How far back do we go? Do we suddenly start saying that anyone who came in the Norman invasion isn't British because they're not the true Angles who were here in the first millennium?

43:54We're all mongrels. We're an island nation. Speak for yourself. Well, look, we've touched on that. It's in the papers. It's very worthwhile discussing at longer length on other programmes. And we'll move along. Hannah, we'll go to you now. Where would you like to start? Well, there's a wonderful page three with Mary Portis in the Sunday Times talking about saving Harvey Nix and how she brought Harvey Nix's mojo there back in the 90s. And as Burnham heads off on his not-at-all messianic British tour this week, he's talking about saving the high street. And I think he needs Mary. She's a national treasure.

44:37She talks about the rather lovely thing that she heard there was going to be a BBC comedy, Ab Fab, didn't know what it was about, and decided she wanted in. And that's what turned Harvey's, this rather Sloan-y, stuffy place, into Harvey Nix. Should we do more for our high street? Do you go to your high street, Jasvir? Oh, absolutely. High streets are a wonderful space. And if you look at the impact of Harvey Nichols in 2002, Leeds was single-handedly transformed with Harvey Nichols opening its first shop outside London. And it was called the Knightsbridge of the North. So echoes of the number 10 of the North.

45:15Simon let me stay with you because you've given me some glasses made of plastic and paper with which I can view what? You can view the partial as it will be in the UK solar eclipse which is happening on Wednesday the 12th of August. As the Telegraph says using old glasses to watch the eclipse risks eye damage warns experts. So therefore you have new glasses. They correspond to the international standard. they will block out 99.99 % of the sun's rays, which means you can safely look at it. But please don't use the ones that you had for the 1999 eclipse, if anybody can remember that. And certainly do not use sunglasses.

46:00They will be no good at all. Or you can always hold up a colander and then you will see dozens of little images of a partially eclipsed sun on the ground. Right, but you'd look at the ground. You wouldn't look at the sun directly. Very important. And Jasper, you've picked an eclipse story. I have, yes. I was reading about this in the mail on Sunday and apparently nightclubs in Ibiza are gearing up for the party to top all parties as the total eclipse nears. So I can imagine just how much fun many people will be having as the eclipse suddenly takes place. I mean, take enough drugs and there's always an eclipse there, isn't there?

46:34But I think, Simon, you said it's not a great place to go. It definitely isn't. I'm flying off from Luton to Madrid tomorrow in order to head to Burgos. Of course he is. north central Spain to watch totality, which is a rather different experience from a partial eclipse. But the track starts off actually in the far north of Russia. It goes over the North Pole. It comes down through Greenland and then brushes the western edge of Iceland. And then finally, northern Spain, round about tea time, it's going to sweep across and then end up at sunset in the Balearics, Mallorca, Menorca and Ibiza, but the trouble is, it's going to be about two degrees above the horizon.

47:13If there's any clouds in the way, it's going to be a bit of a washout, I'm afraid. But if you want to try it, best flight is Ryanair from Bournemouth. It should touch down in Mallorca at exactly the time the eclipse happens. You're listening to the news picks of Simon Calder, Hannah Betts and Jasveer Singh, who I'm coming to next to tell us about The Observer. Sketch satire bites back at the fringe thanks to what? Well, thanks to the Saturday Night Live effect. Saturday Night Live UK. Everyone said it would be... We were all so cynical about it. It was a bit rubbish at first, wasn't it? Well, the reviews of the first one were covered here and everyone changed their mind if there had been.

47:52OK, I need to go back. I'm interrupting. I think you should. Do go on. Well, I thought it was a good show. It was a mixed bag. Some sketches were better than others, but on the whole, it was fantastic because it was good to see satire being back on TV. I mean, I remember in the 1990s, you know, watching Spitting Image and their approaches towards political figures and things of that nature. But I also remember one of the phrases that was used massively back then on Spitting Image was political correctness gone mad. And then we now refer to that as wokeism. But I think there's ripe, you know, news is ripe for satire and ripe for satire on TV.

48:30and the fact that at the Edinburgh Fringe there are lots of sketch shows being done or shows being done by SNL UK cast members. Many of them have sold out. Others are doing shows which are similar, looking at satire and trying to bring that back. I think we're living in a golden era, one could say, for satire. I'm hoping that we enter that when it comes to TV. So the greatest hits of Saturday Night Live UK, according to The Observer, include Traitor's Great Big Crab Man. Celeste Dring plays Claudia Winkleman in an illustration of the frustrating experience of watching a traitor's round table where the faithful fail to spot the obvious signs that one of them is a traitor, who in this case is a massive crab.

49:13Did you watch the traitor thinking, Traitors, we know they're very foolish, these contestants are very foolish. Well, they do seem it, don't they? I've become an acolyte of Celia Imry, who I've run across a few times, and I think she's a bit bored with me now going, Great wind, Celia, great wind. That did happen. It did happen in my lifetime. I pay not to go to Edinburgh. Is that an awful thing to say? Well, I think so. I love going to Edinburgh when I get the chance. I mean, I like it at other times, just not during the festival. Well, the Fringe is fantastic. You get exposed to different sorts of shows, different sorts of one-man musicals, for example.

49:49It's things you wouldn't see in your local area necessarily any other time of the year. The Observer, the same paper, creator of The Chopper and A Million Childhood Adventures, Raleigh pedals off into the sunset. Simon. Yes, this is really, really sad because if you go back to the 70s and 80s, Raleigh was just absolutely mighty. They were selling two out of three of the bikes that were sold in the UK and they, of course, brought us the chopper. Hands up who had a chopper. I didn't. I had a Raleigh sit up and bag. Oh, OK. The girl version. Yeah, good enough. Anyway, the chopper based basically on a Harley Davidson only stripped down a bit.

50:30And also, Raleigh was incredibly successful in the Tour de France. They had a fantastic team. I mean, not riding choppers, but riding proper bikes. So it's a great shame that the accountants haven't been able to save Raleigh and it's basically just ending. So you can also buy a bike these days for 100 quid. I had a BMX, so I was more interested in those sorts of bikes than it was a rally, I have to admit. But yeah, it is sad to see, you know, another kind of national brand just disappearing overnight. We've seen it so often. We're talking about high streets. So many high street brands have disappeared over the years.

51:09And it just seems to be symptomatic of the era we're living in, I guess. The other Great British brand I'm mourning this weekend with the front and the back of the Tory graph is rain. I want some rain and we're meant to be having it today, aren't we? But then there's a fifth heat wave. Kill me now, Paddy. I don't want to do that, but everyone will be applauding you saying you want rain. It's really very sad indeed, isn't it, this lack of rain? Oh, totally. Just seeing, you know, I was coming past lots of fields and so forth and just everything's so dry and arid, green grass turned yellow. It's awful.

51:48And we've been talking to farmers just last week, but we thank you very much for talking to us today and filling us up with all this news. Hannah Betts, who has a substack with a very rude title. Simon Calder, we can read in The Telegraph and listen to. And Jasveer Singh, we can hear all thought for the day. Today's producers were Olivia Sopel and Lucy Thomas, remarkable studio direction from Sarah Kimberley. The editor was Louise Aservice. Thousands of people have voted. It's a very tight race for how to leave you. And here is the answer to how Radio 4 listeners wanted to play us out today.

52:36For the time I was falling in love, now I'm only falling apart. There's nothing I can do, a total eclipse of the heart.