183: Fight! Fight! Fight!

22:37Sarah Shannon:I mean, settles are very notoriously LGBT friendly cities. Exactly. But presumably, I'm going to take a wild stab in the dark and say it'll be one sort of nauseatingly sickly pre-roll video about how inclusion is great and everybody should be like valued and then nothing and then no no money to lgbt organizations yes at which point the iranian and egyptian teams will stare at their shoes so does any of this politics over the the visa stuff and you know all of these different difficulties does any of this affect whether this is a successful world cup or not and does a successful world cup does that definition change depending on whether you're the USA or FIFA or Canada or Mexico, I know.

23:20Well, the US definition of a successful World Cup, it's hard to say because it's not as big a deal for them as it is for us, you know. It's their sort of, they've got four sports that they watch more than they would watch soccer even with their big Hispanic communities and everything. But making lots of money is FIFA's primary concern, so it seems, and they're going to do that. they're set to make$13 billion out of this World Cup, which is pretty incredible considering that the Qatar World Cup in 2022, they made, I think, around$7 billion. So that's a pretty good inflationary rate. Where's that coming from?

24:00Well, part of it is because they've got so many teams this time. They've got 48 teams instead of 32. So there's all those extra matches to sell broadcasting rights, sponsorship and tickets. and the ticket pricing has become a really controversial issue. They're doing dynamic pricing, aren't they? Like the big scandal with Oasis. Exactly. People suddenly found that tickets were way, way more expensive than they were when they first got on the phone call to buy one. Dynamic pricing is amazing for a business because you know you've absolutely maxed out your profit but it's terrible for spectators because you just have no idea, you know, there's nothing transparent about the price that you're going to pay.

24:40You know, you just have to... There have actually been a lot of empty seats visible at the early matches, haven't there? Yes, exactly. I mean, Infantino said that all tickets were sold in one of his typically grand statements. But then where are all these empty seats coming from? And they say that they're all standing in the concourse, but I don't think so. Presumably it doesn't matter if the people who are in those few seats are paying kind of$3 ,000 a shot for them, I guess. Exactly. You make the same amount of money. Yeah, and across so many matches, you know, there's 103 matches compared to 64.

25:09So all you non-football fans have got a lot to look forward to. And across three countries as well. I mean, we shouldn't forget, even before the Iran stuff, this was being co-hosted by America and one nation that he's constantly accused of putting their rapists and their criminals and their worst people over the border and one which he's threatened to invade on certain occasions, hasn't he? He was quite mad to start with. Well, that's the irony of the Iranian team being based in Mexico where they are safe, apparently,

25:35Sarah Shannon:rather than the USA where they're not. I wonder how much of this is about sports betting, though. So there's been a massive success in the last few years since the Netflix documentary Drive to Survive, bringing Formula One to America. Do you have to announce it like that? Drive to Survive. I can't. I've been watching Clarkson's Farm over the weekend. Sorry, it's ruined me. But at the same time, the rise of sports betting, just huge. Legalised a couple of years ago in the US, and just people are raking in money from it. And I think that, therefore, the desire to expand the number of sports and therefore the amount of sports betting that goes on must be enormous.

26:08Sarah Shannon:Because they had the Club World Cup, didn't they, in America? That was just a completely random occasion. Yes, with Trump handing over the trophy, as he's intending to do for this one. I mean, he hasn't been seen as a World Cup match yet, but he is supposed to be there. Well, he's going to be wearing his FIFA Peace Prize medal. Exactly. You know how they put a star on the shirts, depending on how many World Cups you've won? He can presumably add bars to his FIFA pre-surprise medal. For every war stop? Or that he's ended and or stopped. Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. But there's a piece in the latest tie in the money column in the back, which is all about the amount of money flooding into the World Cup from the Middle East.

26:48So this is another thing, apart from expanding the number of matches and the number of tickets and all of this. The money coming in, the Saudi Public Investment Fund, Saudi Aramco, Qatar Airways. There are lots and lots of new sources, new revenue streams for FIFA. Yes, Predict Street, which is an Abu Dhabi-based predictive trading platform. They're also a sponsor. So, yeah, the Gulf money has kept pouring in. I mean, they always talk about the legacy of sports tournaments, but I don't think they really mean that the 2022 Qatar tournament had a legacy of still raking in a lot of money from the Gulf.

27:26so Infantino can top up the coffers with that. So he's got the broadcasting money, the ticket money and the sponsorship. And there's also an extra little tweak that he's managed this time which are the hydration breaks.

27:40Sarah Shannon:Love the hydration break. Love the one they were having in the matches that was being held in Canada where it was genuinely colder than here. They've just turned it into quarters like an American... Exactly. So hydration breaks. Can you fill me in? So halfway through each half now they stock play. they have a three minute break for hydration. They used to be allowed hydration breaks at the discretion of the referee. So if people were sort of, you know, turning puce and fainting because it was 40 degrees, then maybe they'd let them have some water. But now it's absolutely standard. And they said it was easier to make it standard.

28:12I mean, not BBC, obviously. ITV, I noticed, stuck a quick competition for some World Cup tickets in their hydration break. But on Fox Sports, it's been really annoying viewers because, I mean, the first match at Mexico-South Africa, they actually overran the hydration break with the ads. So they came back and they were too hydrated.

28:35Sarah Shannon:They came back and they were, you know, already playing. So that was very, very annoying to the viewers. I mean, I've been living in a household with someone who has expressed a desire to watch every single game, which I think he may bail out of. because he's got to hold down a job for the next couple of weeks. But it stops the run of play. This is the kind of phrase that gets said in my household now, and we nod sagely about the run of play. However, they have come up with a different rule, which is about the fact that you can't piss about with throw-ins for a really long time now. So they've found another way to speed up the game.

29:07Sarah Shannon:But essentially, they have made the game worse in order to serve the needs of advertisers, which is pretty much peak. And it does change the way the game is played. So your momentum's stopped. So, you know, Morocco are beating Brazil. They have a hydration break. They get some really good advice from their coach and they go back out and score. It's, you know, it's not the way things are supposed to be. Right, right, right, right. You don't have the full tension of the half. Is all of this now locked in for future World Cups? I think so. I feel like once the genie's out of the bottle, hydration breaks will become a thing.

29:41Sarah Shannon:I mean, in Saudi Arabia, I mean... Yes, they'll have to be a bit there. It might be necessary, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's part of a hot place. Even the air-conditioned stadiums, they're going to need that. Yeah. Germany Curacao the other night had, you know, a roof and air conditioning. But it still needed a hydration break, apparently. Right, right, right. And they're having a half-time show in the final, so it'll be like a Super Bowl. Oh, that's good. I like that bit. Shakira's coming on. Yeah, that buddy was fantastic. Shakira and Madonna. I think we've got through almost a whole section without referring to any actual football, which was always my secret aim at the start of this, is to talk only about the things surrounding football.

30:14Does all of this sully the really good name of FIFA as a completely impartial and benevolent sporting body? Or was this always going to be the trashiest, least fan-friendly World Cup ever? I think, I mean, you always hope that once the action gets underway and the knockouts start, the excitement builds and people get into it and forget about all the politics. But I don't know that the time difference is really anti them in this occasion. and I think there's so much sort of bad taste left by the ticket prices and all these visa exclusions. It's going to be a hard one to get over this time, I think.

30:51Who's getting it next? So 2030 is a real mishmash. It's Portugal, Spain, Morocco and some centenary matches in South America, which had the advantage of basically meaning that Europe, Africa and South America were out of contention for the 2034 World Cup on the basis of the rotation system. You're not suggesting some kind of grubby fix-up. Then, luckily, Saudi Arabia stepped forward for the 2034 World Cup. We should just congratulate the Saudi Public Investment Fund once again. Yes, for their hearty investment. So there's a by-election coming up in Makerfield and it seems like the Daily Mail might have started something that it can't quite control.

31:37Adam? Yeah, yeah. No, I mean, the situation is that the latest polls in Makerfield show that it's kind of, it's basically a two-horse race. It's Andy Burnham's Labour, as opposed to New Labour, that's what they're now called, Andy Burnham's Labour, versus Nigel Farage's reform. But Restore are coming right in there and polling at sort of 5 % to 8 % in the polls, which is not going to be enough to get their candidate in as MP. But it is potentially going to split that vote on the right, take votes away from Nigel Farage and let Andy Burnham win by an even larger margin. We don't know what's going to happen for definite yet, but that's sort of what the polls are showing at time of recording.

32:12Yeah. And this is worrying a lot of people who, well, specifically, I'm going to come down to the Daily Mail, who, after years of telling readers the country is being swamped by immigrants and wokeness and what's really needed is a return to kind of firm, hardline conservative values, suddenly surprised to find actually that people might be listening and they might actually want to vote for that kind of thing as represented by Rupert Lowe. So there's been the most extraordinary coverage over the last few days at time of recording. They basically noticed something that Private Eye's been pointing out about Rupert Lowe and his outfit and his acolytes for a while, which is quite a lot of them are quite unpleasant racist people.

32:46So the Mail on Sunday splash last weekend was restore activists at white supremacy summit, reporting that what they described as a hardened neo-Nazi was campaigning for restore in Maker Field. Also a neo-fascist and ethnic cleansing extremist, someone who not only wants mass deportations, which is Rupert Lowe's policy anyway. But that to include all Jewish people as well, or an awful lot of Jewish people. Oh, old-fashioned.

33:10Sarah Shannon:It's nice to see return to traditional. Old-school neo-Nazis, these people. Old-school Nazis, you might even. We could probably take the neo off, couldn't we? Yeah, Restore's spokesman told the Mail on Sunday that this was totally irrelevant and a hit piece. It was undoubtedly a hit piece, but I would question the total irrelevance of it. A lot of this seems quite relevant to me. I might well to Mail readers as well. But it didn't stop there. There was an editorial right in the middle of the story, which was quite an unusual thing in the mail where they actually kind of box out an editorial and whack it right in the middle of the story.

33:39It said, how can any reasonable person vote for Restore in Thursday's by-election? And especially, especially, how can anyone support Restore when doing so can help propel the Labour left's great red hope, Andy Burnham, into Downing Street? So it's kind of, yeah, we've told you they're all neon Nazis and fascists, but actually the real worry here is getting Andy Burnham in. Again, this is the relevancy kind of issue here, I would suggest. So is it that the papers have been flirting very heavily with Farage and with Reform UK and now they think their readers have gone too far or taken this to heart.

34:12Essentially, I think that's it. We talked about this before, about the slight irrelevancy anyway of newspaper endorsements for political parties in this day and age. But both the Mail and the Telegraph, even more so, have been moving very, very far further to the right than the Tory party and kind of lionising Nigel Farage for quite a while now, helped by the fact that he churns out reams of copy for them and lots and lots of op-eds. for both of those papers and kind of anyone else that will have him. The Mail is now in a really, really odd position where they've convinced themselves that what has to be done is to unite the right, as they're calling.

34:45They actually had that as one of their little stamps that they put on stories, unite the right. Now seems to have turned into unite the right, but not those ones. Right, OK, OK. And they think the answer to all this is that Kemi Badenock and Nigel Farage should form a great marriage of convenience and everything we want. Actually, bizarrely described by Sarah Vine, male and male on Sunday columnist last weekend as turning them into the John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John of British politics. If you can imagine such an image. There you go. But yes, I mean, this is something... I mean, Helen, how honestly likely do you think a pact between the two of them is to happen?

35:20Sarah Shannon:I'm still so stuck on Olivia Newton-John and... Which one of them's got the hairpiece? Kemi Budnock spoke to Tim Shipman and The Spectator and he said, well, she's wavering, she's not ruling out. She suddenly came out and said, no, I really do. I really absolutely do. So they have the exact same problem as, if you remember, the kind of Labour SNP stuff in 2015. Voters don't want to hear that vote someone and you get someone else. What I see that mail thing is as a classic pre-by-election squeeze message. So from the point of view of the mail, whether you're supporting reform or the Tories, what you most want to happen is you want to max out the UKIP vote, as it was, reform a vote now, and get the reform MP, defeat Andy Burnham, humiliation for him, he's knocked out.

36:05Sarah Shannon:Labour then have to either continue with an unpopular prime minister in Starmer or have some kind of leadership contest with other people who are also stagger on, limp on, and then the great victory in 2028 is won by the right. That's their kind of game plan. What they absolutely don't want is Restore to come and nibble a huge chunk out of the side of reform, get Andy Burnham, and then the terrible fear, not that he's too left-wing, but that he's good. and people like it. And therefore they re-elect a Labour government again at the next election. So I think this is a preview of lots of stuff that's going to happen in the next general election, which is that you're just going to have lots and lots of squeeze messages and every race will be tried to, people will try and get it down to such and such can't win here.

36:51Sarah Shannon:That's going to be quite complicated in a lot of seats. It's not in this one, and it wasn't in Gorton and Denton as it turned out. Right. What seems quite clear is that the papers are becoming much less relevant to this. I mean, the whole restore phenomenon is down to Rupert Lowe's extremely high popularity on all kinds of social media. To a certain extent, Twitter, where he's, you know, he's backed by Musk very heavily. And he gets an enormous income from Twitter as well. He gets a big income from it. He's monetised that in a big way, tens of thousands of pounds every year. But we've been told for a couple of years that Nigel Farage, and more recently, Zach Polanski, are extremely good on social media.

37:26Actually, Rupert Lowe has been surprisingly big and places like Facebook. And it's where he's been pitching himself much softer than a lot of the rhetoric and a lot of his far-right supporters would have you believe. He's presented as a kind of country squire. He has a farm. There are lots of images of him, you know, with his animals on the farm.

37:43Sarah Shannon:I think that's very telling when you read the Daily Mail copy about Tommy Robinson. So the backstory to this is that Tommy Robinson went to Moscow via Turkey, where he hung out with Errol Musk, who is Elon Musk's... The even more racist Musk. Right. Very rum father. And from there was kind of, as ever, interfering in British politics. When he came back, he was detained at the airport and questioned for it on the basis that, you know, we are sort of essentially at war with Russia through Ukraine. And the editorial, the Daily Mail, that wrote against, like, who would let this man into their party.

38:18Sarah Shannon:Like, Nigel Farage has always had a red line. If you're ever a member of the BNP, you're not in my party. I will not let Tommy Robinson in my party, which is what precipitated his falling out with Elon Musk. But Rupert Lowe did this magnificent thing where he's like, anyone's welcome to join. Like, I'm not in charge of who joins my party. What? Of course you are. Like, it's not how parties work. But anyway, the essential line of that Daily Mail article was, he's a petty mortgage fraudster and a yobbo. And what was the word they used, Adam? The phrase they used was a bigoted and deeply sinister hoodlum.

38:48Sarah Shannon:A hoodlum? A hoodlum, yes. I mean, it's thuggery. It's definitely a kind of class-orientated thing that he's the unacceptable face of kind of yobbery and extreme white-wingedness, which Rupert Lowe, you know, he's basically landed gentry. He's got a 550-acre estate in Gloucestershire with an awful lot of barns he's trying to convert into very, very expensive houses. Huge shepherd's huts. Yeah, bigger than shepherd's huts. £700 ,000 shepherd's huts. So he's much more, to the Daily Mail, I think, he'd always been seen as a sort of more... I mean, he was a reform MP. They certainly never objected to him, at that point.

39:23But I did think that was really, really interesting. The other thing that I thought was really interesting, because this continued into Monday's Daily Mail, we had another front page splash which just said, Restore is the new home for neo-Nazis. Pretty unequivocal there. Which was based on this, you know, Rupert Lowe saying Tommy Robinson was welcome to join the party if he wanted. They ran another, well, it was a very, very odd piece because it read like an op-ed. It read like an editorial line that a columnist would take. I mean, it was basically a kind of portrait of Tommy Robinson and his past career and all his criminal convictions and things.

39:56But it ended with the words, anyone on British soil with eyes in their head and more than a couple of brain cells to rub together can see him for the toxic, hate-fuelled, rabble-rouser that he is. No sort of messing around there. But it was unsigned. It was bizarre. It seemed like an opinion piece. And it literally, the byline at the top of the page read Daily Mail Reporter, which is very odd. I can only think of, there's two possible reasons for this. One is that Tommy Robinson and his supporters tend to go after people who displease them in the media because he's a charming man like that. So it's possible they're just trying to protect their...

40:27I mean, we've talked before about how there is a non-existent journalist on the Mail Online called Melody Fletcher who essentially does all of their reports on people like Taylor Swift and Millie Bobby Brown. Looking old. People who have these very, very... That's what they said about it. We should say that's not what we're saying. No, I'm saying the Daily Mail. But basically people who have a kind of rabid online fan base who they know will target individual journalists on social media and come after. so they did put this fake byline on it. But, yeah, so it's possible it was that. But I wonder what sort of backlash they got on the Sunday from their readers and whether they're actually worried about enough of their readers who presumably are amongst those 5 % to 8 % of people in Mayfield and elsewhere who are kind of thinking maybe Rupert Lowe is the way forward.

41:08There is another interesting element which is that Restore seems to be doing quite well among women and they are promoting themselves very heavily with that we want to protect British women and girls. the subtext is pretty clear from foreign invaders basically from being assaulted by foreigners and Reform have been pushing that very hard at their own conferences but I think Reform's candidate with his long record of sexist comments has put women off quite a bit. Restore is saying well look we've got a, you know our candidate is a woman, she's called Rebecca Shepard and we'll do the thing to protect British women so I think that might be another.

41:46We should say as well Rupert Lowe has made that absolutely his specialism and ironically I'm now talking over a woman so I'm going to stop. I was going to say the irony is that Carol Vorderman then wrote a letter to all the constituents telling them that you know Robert Kenyon was actually really misogynistic and pointing out some of his past comments and saying do you want a sexist to represent you so she's boosted Restore's vote among women who've gone no you're right Carol I'm going to vote for that Restore woman she's a nice 53 year old business woman that lives locally and right yeah i mean ripple has very much made that his his kind of cause uh cause celebra i guess in a way is the grooming gangs he's run his own supposed independent inquiry yeah into into all of that which i think is is due to report any imminently so yeah he's made that very much his issue at the same time

42:32Sarah Shannon:that nigel farage and others have been very nice about andrew tate who as far as i can see it mixed race muslim accused of running a grooming gang some are saying that maybe they're you know They are some double standards in operation. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I should say that Andrew Tate has denied all charges. Thank you. We should note as well that all of this has very visibly and obviously pushed Nigel Farage further to the right. I mean, a lot of the comments recently, the pure cold anger after the trial of the killer of Henry Novak and the essay that he wrote over the weekend. Yeah, he's got a sub-stat now in which he wrote a piece and it used very MAGA-type language about DEI and his big campaign is now against the Equality Act, basically saying that there is anti-white bias.

43:14Sarah Shannon:And you hear it a lot, you know, and it was, the Nowak case was really interesting because he wasn't, he was a Polish extraction, right? It couldn't be framed in the way that Nigel Farage would normally frame it, which is about kind of like this about British identity that's under threat from minority groups. It then transmuted from that into white and white European, and white European values are under threat. I think this is also a response to the fact that immigration has dropped like a stone. So I think the latest net figures, it's down by about half. And that's not because of British nationals leaving.

43:45That's because of many fewer non-EU nationals arriving. It's due to many fewer people who are studying, bringing their families with them, this kind of thing. so immigration's salience has dropped and i think the the focus is now moving in an even more unpleasant way to people of different skin color who are already here which is what's driven a lot of restores saying we're going to just kick out millions of people many of whom will legally

44:09Sarah Shannon:be here right and yeah i guess you're right and then sensor the inflow and actually this we seem to have had some success with the french in stopping or not stopping the small boat small boat crossings are down 40 percent year on year 40 in a year that's pretty good but the issue that you do have is obviously that we're now coming off the several years of record immigration so there will be people still in the country and the other big focus that seems to be now is about social housing I really understand it because it is incredibly unfair that some people essentially get a golden ticket and get to live in central London for 650 quid a month or whatever it might be that is a it's something that successive governments have failed to address the fact that housing is is too much for young people but what's clearly happening is that reform and restore and their kind of online outriders are turning that into a classic and because it's all gone to foreigners, essentially.

44:58Sarah Shannon:In London, where you do have a lot of foreign-born heads of household, I think that is a message that can resonate with young people because you're talking about Restore and Facebook. That is essentially targeting people 65 and over. There's an attempt to find a message that will resonate with Nick 30-ons, if you know the online jargon about this, but essentially young people who feel locked out of opportunities. when we at the moment we have a younger generation who are much more likely to be voting green right if they're looking at Labour and thinking there's something wrong with them they're going to the left rather than to the right of them so we're not going to predict the outcome of the by-election but I believe there is going to be maybe a special episode soon afterwards maybe a bonus episode of this very podcast is that right?

45:38Sarah Shannon:not promising anything okay you know could happen could be an emergency an emergency podcast? there is no such thing no emergency has ever occurred to which a podcast is the solution. No, quite right. But there is an emergency issue of Private Eye on newsstands right now, as there always is. So if you'd like it, you could just go into your local newsagent or supermarket and get a copy of the magazine. You can also get a subscription to the magazine at private-eye.co.uk. Subscriptions are unbelievably reasonably priced. A single issue of the magazine will set you back far less than a month of cage fighting on the White House lawn or whatever it is you were saying, Helen.

46:16So that's it for today. thank you very much to all of you for listening thank you to helen adam and sarah for participating and thank you to matt hill of rethink audio for producing bye for now