EMQs: Why does Farage fall out with everyone?

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2:01George Osborne: So welcome to EMQs. We're recording it here in our studio in Hoxton, not Shoreditch, as Ed consistently says and introduced our last podcast with. We're in Hoxton, not Shoreditch. Are they different places? Yes. I met a really impressive person this week called Georgia Harrison. and she is a reality tv star who had essentially nude photos and videos of her used online by her boyfriend she went to the police the police have tackled her the boyfriend and uh he ex-boyfriend obviously and now she's created a foundation and she campaigns uh to protect young women and others from this kind of exploitation online really impressive person not at all what you would think of as a you know if you had a sort of a kind of lazy view of what a love island contestant might be like when you meet her in person she's really smart she was also very smartly dressed and she said she was off to the national television awards later that day that was why she was so smartly dressed and um i was thinking you must have also been at the national television awards you probably know george arison because you probably interviewed her but how did the NTAs go?

3:18Ed Balls: Well I have interviewed her a few times and more than that she's really impressive and a brilliant advocate for change and I've said to her a few times you'd make a great politician I mean that's what you should go and do and she's done some advisory work for the government but I think in her book which came out a year or so ago she actually says that I was giving her confidence to go out there and be a public figure making these arguments And so I think she's absolutely brilliant. I've no idea whether she would be Labour or Conservative, but who cares? That kind of person becoming a politician would be excellent.

3:53Ed Balls: I did go to the NTAs. We were shortlisted in the daytime category. Unfortunately, we didn't win. It was won by this morning. This morning?

4:02George Osborne: I thought they'd had a... And they imploded. Wasn't that the Holly, Willoughby and Philip show?

4:07Ed Balls: It's all about the votes. And no, they're back. Ben Shepard, Kat Deely. And they're doing great. and they're a kind of sister show to us, even though in ITV... So really, you kind of won. Well, we were all winners, George. That's how we think about it. Had we won, we wouldn't be saying that. But given that we didn't win, we are clear we were winners. But it was a great night and I had such a good time. Alison Hammond gave me a big hug. Gordon Ramsay comes over. Eddie said, guess what he said? Love the goatee. He said, you've got to keep the beard. Lee Mack was sitting in front of us. He was nominated for three awards.

4:50Ed Balls: I don't know if he won any, but he's so funny. I love Would I Lie to You.

4:55George Osborne: I love these parallel worlds you live in, Ed. You've got your sort of politics, economics world, your professor at King's College. You're talking about bond yields on our podcast. And then you've got the light entertainment side of your life, the Lee Mack's and Allison's and Ben Shepard's.

5:12Ed Balls: walking down the red carpet ed ed gonna do still gonna do some selfies they actually shouted susanna susanna rather a lot more than ed ed and um i was with kate garraway and laura tobin who is our weather uh reader and um also ranvi we say read the weather reader these days not weather girl i assume you know our weather person but the um we all once we hadn't won slipped out to go back, to go to bed, to get up again at 3.30 in the morning to go to work. Laura Tobin. Pushed on through. To the after party, went through, and she arrived the next morning. But I don't know whether we can get a clip of this.

5:52Ed Balls: If we can, it'll be brilliant. The first words when she starts her 6.20 weather report. I mean, just to say that it was a deep voice. Oh, my goodness. I mean, Laura Tobin, is she committed? I think she's got a book coming out about her weather and the climate in the next week or so. So maybe we should give that. You know what I might do? Get her to do us a question for next week's EMQs on the serious subject. But if we've got a clip of Laura's voice on Wednesday morning, she didn't lose. She was a winner. I know I have had sleep, I promise you. And I also I didn't I promise you I didn't drink that much because you're there for the whole ceremony watching it without a drink.

6:31But it's just chatting to everybody and my voice then pays the price.

6:34Ed Balls: Could you give us the weather? Well, I can tell you some of the other winners yesterday. People who got rain in their gardens. We're slowly seeing that grass recovering. And actually, there was quite a lot of rain through southern areas yesterday.

6:47George Osborne: Respect. So let's turn to the questions. Our first question comes from a pretty well-known journalist. I remember he did a brilliant account of the election in my constituency, Tatton, before I was a candidate. the Martin Bell, Neil Hamilton election. There's a brilliant John Sweeney account of this. This is a question from John. So my question arises from researching my book on Nigel Farage, and I was struck, actually astonished, by how many people he had first charmed and then fell out with Rupert Lowe, Annabelle Sanderson, his former lover. Neil and Christine Hamilton, Neil says of Farage, he wants to be the bride at every wedding, the corpse at every funeral.

7:37And Godfrey Bongo Bongo Land Bloom, who used to be Farage's best friend in UKIP. And when I asked him about Farage, he said, I am not in the giving vein today. He, Bloom compares Farage to Richard III, and that's not good. So my question is, is being nasty the best way to political power to the top of the greasy pole?

8:09Ed Balls: So good to have a question from John. He's also done some brilliant reporting from the Ukraine over the last few years. And I don't know whether you've seen him. He's been wearing an orange hat, woolen hat, been on our programme quite a few times and really, really doing good, good stuff. And I'm really looking forward to seeing what the detail in the book tells us about the question that John is answering. Because, you know, it's true that Nigel Farage has had these fallouts, but why? Was it about money that they fell out? That would be interesting. Was it because the people he fell out with had their own agenda and that they weren't really committed to the party?

8:45Ed Balls: Were they vain? Was Nigel Farage vain? In the end, does Nigel Farage just not want to engage with them in the way that they want and they get frustrated with him. I mean, I don't know why, but it does seem to be true, doesn't it?

9:02George Osborne: Well, it's a very good question from John and I'm sure his book will be full of interesting stories. Of course, in one sense, you know, is it a bad thing that you've fallen out with Rupert Lowe, Neil Hamilton and Godfrey Bloom? Is that a black mark or is that actually a sign that you're quite a good judge of character? So you wouldn't necessarily hold against him that he doesn't get on with these people.

9:27Ed Balls: So you're saying it would be nasty not to fall out with you?

9:30George Osborne: I mean, if you say you could put this question the other way around, what do you think of someone who's best friends with all these people? I think there's two interesting points here which John makes, which I'll attempt to answer. So first of all, I don't think it's unusual for very successful politicians, not just in this country, but through history, to be loners, to be kind of, when you get very close to them, they turn out not to have any friends. They're kind of one person, one man bands or one woman bands, you know. Was that fundamentally your problem?

10:03Ed Balls: That you had too many friends?

10:04George Osborne: I was about to say, what, that I had no mates? No, you had too many friends. I've been generous there. Don't you think there's...

10:09Ed Balls: I like Boris Johnson, who was absolutely alone, wasn't he?

10:11George Osborne: Yes. No, I mean, Boris, you know, Boris absolutely had some sort of close friends that he'd been at Eton with or Oxford. But politically, he had no real close friends. Very different from David Cameron, who some of his closest friends were around him in politics. But I think it's true quite often of leaders. I also think being in a leadership position, I'm not comparing leading reform or UKIP to being president of the United States or something. But quite often, there is a loneliness in power that also distances yourself from people. and you end up with a kind of small, tight entourage of essentially followers and kind of, you know, people in your court.

10:52George Osborne: So I don't think it's unusual to be a loner. And it's by no means a sign that you won't be successful politically, quite the reverse. Quite often loners can be very, very successful in politics. Now, nasty is where I think I disagree. Well, sorry, John's asking us a question, so I'm not prejudging what I think he thinks. I think many successful politicians, it's a side of also being a bit of a loner, can be ruthless. I mean, ruthless when it's required and take very, very kind of bold decisions that cut off people who thought they were friends or thought they were followers or thought they were supporters.

11:33George Osborne: there's a phrase in there about um british politics that um prime ministers have to be good butchers is a is a phrase they have to be prepared to kind of lay down their friends to save their own skin um and i think there's that actually there's that brilliant is it's one of the great phrases in british politics way back um in the 1950s hugh gate school about harold mcmillan greater love hath no man that he lays down his friends for his life and harold mcmillan was a very very successful politician i think also from what i've read about him a bit of a loner but i don't think you want to be nasty i mean i don't think you feel seen as a

12:14Ed Balls: nasty person but there's no distinction between being seen as nasty yeah and being nasty it

12:20George Osborne: depends what you mean by nasty then isn't it i mean if nasty you're seen as nasty people don't

12:24Ed Balls: like nasty people they don't like to behave in a nasty way yeah but there may be people who are quite successful in covering up their nastiness in a smiling demeanor i'm not going to kind of

12:35George Osborne: define nasty versus define ruthless you know exactly yeah i think there's a sort of the element there's a nasty there's a something about nasty which is it's sort of without any point at all it's kind of random your behavior towards people whereas a sort of ruthless calculating can be quite unpleasant and that's why you may not want to be close to these people but it can

12:56Ed Balls: lead to successful politicians so when theresa may said the conservatives couldn't be the nasty party anymore that was the problem for the conservatives when back in the early 2000s i mean she was

13:07George Osborne: talking there a truth yes because we at the time the party looked like it was kind of anti-gay anti-immigrants or you know people from different ethnic minority backgrounds anti-women you know i mean it was like the old man on the park bench telling everyone that you know the country was much better in the past and then no one says country is much better without you so no i think that's what she um although it turned out of course to be something that became very controversial after she'd said it now i i so i'm i'd be fascinated to see john's book but it doesn't sort of surprise me that farage is a loner no because quite a lot of politicians are

13:44Ed Balls: thank you john looking forward to seeing the book and we really appreciate your question Our next question is from a sitting MP and actually elected in 2024, MP for High Peak and the former parliamentary private secretary to Keir Starmer. Hi, Ed and George. It's John Pearce, MP and the UK special envoy for post Holocaust issues. As you know, Ed, this week in Parliament, we have a special exhibition on what Britain knew about the Holocaust. it turns out a lot more than we would like to admit. What I would like to know is, do you think now more than ever that exhibitions like this and the planned UK Holocaust Memorial and Learning Centre, which will stand beside the Houses of Parliament, are important in making sure we are honest about our past, Britain's relationship with the Holocaust, whilst also honouring Jewish victims and survivors who made Britain their home?

14:45Thanks both.

14:46Ed Balls: so john took over from eric pickles as the um special envoy for post-holocaust issues i think it's a prime ministerial appointment but it's works very closely with the foreign office and on monday we were doing a launch in parliament lord eric pickles and i and uh we had a piece in the um jewish news and john came along it's uh an exhibition which will be in portcullis house in Parliament for the next two weeks and then is then going to go to the Scottish Welsh Northern Ireland Parliament's assemblies and it's about the content it's a first look at the content for the Holocaust Memorial to be built in Victoria Tower Gardens next to Parliament we're in the final stages of sorting out planning for that after a piece of legislation was passed earlier in the year it's been going on for a long time I remember you as Chancellor announcing the funding for back in 2015.

15:40Ed Balls: So this... 11 years ago. 11 years ago. We are still going. There's been a pattern with Holocaust memorials around the world about them taking a long time. And...

15:48George Osborne: Tell us something about, for those who haven't followed it, what will they actually, assuming the planning goes ahead, is it just a memorial you look at? That's a leading question. I don't think it is. There's a kind of education component to it. Is it a centre you go into? Is it what?

16:02Ed Balls: So it will be the most visited Holocaust memorial and learning centre in the world, that all the experts say, because of its proximity to Parliament. It has an amazing design, which essentially digs under the grass of Victoria Tower Gardens. There are some huge things.

16:19George Osborne: These are the gardens that not always... There's also Palace Green, but quite often reports from Parliament.

16:24Ed Balls: That's right.

16:25George Osborne: TV reports happen on this grass. That's right.

16:27Ed Balls: And then when you walk in through the memorial kind of physical building, there'll be a learning journey downstairs, which is an hour long, which will be the story of Britain's engagement with the Holocaust. And it starts with the first place you go into is a mock-up of Parliament, and people can sit on green benches and hear the debates in the 1930s. And then it looks at the individuals, the communities who, in a positive and sometimes in a negative way, were engaged in Britain's engagement with the Holocaust through to liberation, and then the aftermath which followed. And although it's a memorial to the Holocaust, it has that British perspective, and it's warts and all.

17:10Ed Balls: And I think this is very important. This is John's question, because if you take, for example, the Kindertransport, which was an amazing, fabulous liberation for very many children fleeing from the Nazis at the end of the 1930s, It was also a moment where they were forced to separate from their parents because the view that Parliament and the government took at the time was that the children could come, but the adults couldn't. And that was at a time when there was great concern about immigration and in this case, Jewish asylum seekers. and there are very many other examples where decisions were made which are challenging to remember but it's very important that we do and part of our exhibition...

18:01George Osborne: But it's not all the kind of everything we got wrong. Hopefully it's got some of the things we got right.

18:05Ed Balls: Well, no, of course. But I think the accusation is that it's only going to be about what we got right and it's important that we also show because why are we building this next to Parliament? It's both to remind Parliaments about their duty to tackle anti-Semitism, but it's also to remind Parliament. So let's not forget, in Germany in the 1930s, Hitler started as a parliamentarian in Parliament. Sometimes Parliaments can make mistakes. And so, as I said, the article we had in Jewish News was about the importance of truth. And I think that it's vital in our memorial that we celebrate the great heroes and the individuals and the successors, but also we're open.

18:47Ed Balls: You know, think about what happened in terms of collaboration with the Nazis in Guernsey, in the Channel Islands. The thing which we know, the last survivors are so old now. And it's when the last people who lived the experience go, the history kind of is often kind of written. And I remember being over at the Holocaust Memorial in Washington and talking about the website. And they said, the thing you have to understand is whatever we do in terms of engagement with our website, we are outgunned 10 to 1 and more by the social media and Internet reach of Holocaust denial. And the only way you can take on Holocaust denial, and there are huge numbers of people around the world who will want to deny the truth about the Holocaust in the decades to come.

19:35Ed Balls: the only way to take that on is for us to be open and embrace truth. And that is what our exhibition is about. And that's what the memorial will be about. And it's very much about the lessons we learn for contemporary Britain.

19:47George Osborne: OK, I know we've got lots more questions. Just one question more on this. Some people would say, OK, you can't just talk about the Holocaust. What about genocides that have happened since? And is there going to be a sort of, you know, this continues to this day. And then how do you how are you going to try and navigate all the really difficult politics around Gaza and so on? Some people use the word genocide. So not one, but some people do.

20:10Ed Balls: Our remit is the Holocaust and subsequent genocides. And we will absolutely do that at the end of the journey. Sebu Nica, Rwanda. As you know, Ed Miliband, this week in his statement in Parliament, said that, you know, that word was a matter for kind of, you know, the international lawyers. But that's something that we will deal with as things evolve. But it is the Holocaust. And, you know, this is 85 % the story of the Holocaust and Britain's engagement with it. There were 6 million Jews who lost their lives, including one and a half million children. But there were hundreds of British Jews who lost their lives in the Holocaust.

20:53Ed Balls: And it's important that we recognise that story while also remembering one story so striking. A Polish teacher who had come with her family, escaping previous intimidation and violence at the turn of the 20th century. She was teaching in Liverpool, I think, and married two children. and she travelled in the late 1930s back to Poland to meet her family and for them to meet their grandchildren. And the children made it out and she didn't. And so she lost her life. She is one of the six million. We managed to find her son in Birmingham and to be able to talk to him about his mum, a British victim, and her story.

21:40Ed Balls: And I think, as you know, in anything like this, although you're talking about a big global story and something a long time ago, people, and it's the same with the Bay of Tapestry, the individual stories, whether that's a story told in pictures or in video or in tapestry, are the things that start people's connection. And that's an important part of what we're doing. Thanks, John, for your question.

22:05George Osborne: And we're going to be back after this break.

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24:05George Osborne: Welcome back. Okay, here's a question on the Burnham agenda, which hearkens back to New Labour. It's a question from Catriona. Hi, Ed and George. Cat here. I love the podcast. I've been thinking about the government's ambitions on devolution. Back in the New Labour days, the focus was on regions rather than cities, with John Prescott in particular really driving this idea. It's unsurprising that the PM, as a former city mayor, seems more focused on cities. But does it matter whether devolution is to cities or to regions? I think it does matter. So I think the difference between cities and regions, often regions don't have a genuine regional identity to them.

24:44George Osborne: In other words, the people who live in the regions don't feel. If you live in Liverpool, you wouldn't necessarily say you live in the northwest, that you're a northwesterner. You might think of yourself as a northerner. You'd certainly think of yourself as a Liverpool. one of the problems with these administrative regions is that they kind of lump a load of people together who wouldn't necessarily feel any kind of particular attachment and so therefore if you then try and construct a political apparatus on top of that like regional parliaments or regional assemblies there's nothing that kind of binds people together if you think of the southwest region there's a hell of a difference between living in bristol and cornwall you know a cornish village in the middle of bristol um and in the indeed in the northwest where there's a big difference between living in the middle of manchester and living in rural cumbria and yet those kind of those uh regions and the incoming coalition government got rid of regional development agencies and the plans for the regional assemblies were scrapped altogether one of the reasons we were able to do that was because there had been not much support for this sort of regional approach It seemed when I was an MP campaigning against the Regional Assembly in the north-west of England, my strongest partner, and we worked together as a team, was a Labour MP, George Howarth from Knowsley.

26:06George Osborne: Now, I can tell you, the two Georgians had had very different upbringings, George Howarth and George Osborne. I don't think anyone would say you were natural political bedfellows. Yet he was absolutely vehemently against regional devolution and regional assemblies in the north-west of England. And we ran a campaign when I was a backbench MP, ran a campaign. And even in the northeast of England, where John Prescott pushed for it, and I say even the northeast because it was the smallest, most compact region, it didn't work. There was an assembly, there was a referendum that failed. And so I think city regions is what emerged as the phrase.

26:43George Osborne: The wider kind of city areas. So in Manchester's case, Andy Burnham was the mayor of Greater Manchester, which is not just Manchester City Centre, but also Bolton, Holdham, Bury, Rochdale, which have fierce sort of local identities, but still would see themselves within the kind of Manchester orbit. Same true in Merseyside. And that's proved a much more successful, I think, basis for a devolution because there's a sort of genuine connection that people understand in order to get Bolton growing, you might have to take some decisions in Bury. it's harder to play people across regions so i would say there is a there is a difference

27:18Ed Balls: that's right the story of the evolution um to where we are now and i do think we have the best chance of embedding a as you say a consensual but identity-based way of doing economic policy and that we've had in the past the evolution is interesting go back to the very late 1930s when we were preparing for the war, these regions were essentially constructed in Whitehall as ways to manage war readiness based upon the traditional county boundaries. But it was, as you said, a completely administrative structure. And then, because this was the time when, partly also about the war effort, the government for the first time was collecting information and statistics.

28:04Ed Balls: in 1940 they took that administrative organizational model and said well let's collect data around those big regions and then if you go through to 1994 that is the first time John Major as Prime Minister says we're not only going to have these regions as ways of collecting information we're also going to have government offices and the government offices will look at public service delivery across those regions. But as you said...

28:33George Osborne: That was a big John Gummer initiative, wasn't it?

28:35Ed Balls: But without there being a clear identity basis to that, these were maps which were really kind of drawn by civil servants of the 1930s. In parallel to that, you had work which came out of the European Commission, the British Commissioner Bruce Millen, looking at the way in which you could drive kind of regional policy, it was called, turning round deindustrialisation. And John Prescott, as a sort of Bruce Millen disciple, latched upon this, did a piece of work. And it was from that that came the regional development agencies to look at economic development across those administrative regions. And then John, I think, always wanted there to be a political identity to that because he's always worried this was just civil sovereignty and administrative, hence his desire for elected regional assemblies.

29:23Ed Balls: the problem you had in that first period of government and i was at the treasury at the time on the one hand you had these regions which as you said were kind of too big and there wasn't identity but then you had on the other side the core cities and this was um the big cities manchester leeds bristol newcastle um who all said it shouldn't be about these regions it should be about us the cities and the problem with that was it was too narrow because it was all very well say well let's back Newcastle or Leeds but what about Wakefield or Bradford or Wigan or Stockport and if you'd gone for a city-based approach that wouldn't have worked either it was too narrow and what evolved because of the work of the regional development agencies was city regions where you would look you know at a bigger footprint but in the region of Yorkshire and Humber you'd have you know four or five city regions rather than just just one but you would make sure you included the towns and that is where we've ended up because what you started actually what we started but you accelerated was to have a elected mayor looking across that city region and i think that is the best model so long as and this is important when you go back to the regional map it needs to be comprehensive because i don't think you can say to bolton or Blackburn or Preston, really sorry, you know, you don't count.

30:47Ed Balls: And so that is the challenge. The challenge for the government is to have something which is simultaneously comprehensive, which the regions were, but also based upon genuine areas of identity where you can drive economic decision making, which is bigger than the individual local authority. And Michael Heseltine would say that's what he was trying to do with his local government reorganisation in the early 1970s, which then got ditched. What we're essentially doing is returning to a form of that again yeah i mean actually you know the previous question was

31:16George Osborne: from john who's the mp for high peak i mean that's a high peak sort of peak district around um

31:21Ed Balls: it's sort of derbyshire but it's actually near to a dental and redditch and to um into stockport isn't it i mean it stretches across that part is it manchester is it sheffield is it nottingham

31:33George Osborne: yeah is it derby no i mean it's it's actually the hype it's the peak district but it's all So that's the classic, you know, where does that fit? And that is the challenge of it. So I can see why you want to have every part of the country covered. But to some degree, I think you have to be quite flexible. And what works in cities isn't necessarily right for rural areas.

31:53Ed Balls: That is true. But you won't, I don't think, I don't think it's possible for a Labour government anyway to say that we're for the Leeds and the Manchester City region, but to Holland Grimsby, you're on the outside.

32:04George Osborne: Oh, yeah. Sorry. Right. Buxton, I was thinking of the town in the middle of, I think, the high constituency. You know, where is that? It's a wonderful town.

32:14Ed Balls: But connectivity to urban centres and to the rail network matters to them.

32:18George Osborne: And I guess they're actually, although they're in Derbyshire, they're kind of part of a West Yorkshire corridor with Huddersfield and Hannafax.

32:25Ed Balls: I mean, it's definitely, it's definitely, when you get to the big counties, it's more challenging. but you know at the moment the government's gone backwards on trying to reorganise the local government map to fit this agenda and hopefully that's just a temporary thing but I do think it's important you can neither make it too big or too small.

32:44George Osborne: Right we're going to be back after this with two final quick questions.

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35:24Ed Balls: Welcome back. Quick trivia question for us from Robert. Hello, Ed and George. I've been a regular follower of the podcast ever since my son brought your insights to my attention. I continue to be impressed by the breadth of views and opinions that you're able to provide, despite being educated at the same university, namely Oxford. As you'll be aware, our new Prime Minister was educated at Cambridge. I wonder if you can then be the last Prime Minister prior to Andy Burnham to be educated at Cambridge. And how do you explain the asymmetry in this pattern of tenure? Now, the answer to this question is Stanley Baldwin.

36:00Ed Balls: You looked it up. I did. He was Prime Minister between 1935 and 1937. I mean, I actually knew it.

36:06George Osborne: And in the 1920s.

36:07Ed Balls: No, but he was the last Prime Minister. So the answer is Andy Burnham is the last one since 1937. Now, what is the reason for this? Why has Oxford had so many more prime ministers in recent years than Cambridge? I mean, do you think it's because? It's a better university. Well, I mean, isn't Cambridge sort of, you know, dreamy spires and fens and rural and just sort of, whereas Oxford is more urban and modern and thrusting and driving?

36:37George Osborne: Well, firstly, it's probably just entirely coincidental because, you know, there was a period in the 1990s when almost all the sort of Tory cabinet, John Major's cabinet had been, or much of the Tory cabinet had been at Cambridge and they'd all been in the Cambridge Union.

36:52Ed Balls: But they were all Neely Rens. Yes, Ken Clarke, Michael Howard. Michael Heseltine.

36:58George Osborne: John Gummer.

36:58Ed Balls: They never actually would.

36:59George Osborne: I'm not sure, was Heseltine one of them? Wasn't he? I thought he was a young thrusting entrepreneur.

37:03Ed Balls: Maybe that's right.

37:04George Osborne: Anyway, they'd all been in the Cambridge Union. And so there was a sort of moment. It's partly coincidental, but I think there is probably something what you just said, or maybe put in a less pejorative way, which is I think Oxford has a longer history of being engaged in kind of politics and economics. It has PPE. And Cambridge has more of, has had in the past anyway, more of a reputation for science.

37:26Ed Balls: If you want to go do PPE, if you want to do politics and economics, you go to Oxford and do PPE. Well, surely that is the reason.

37:30George Osborne: Yeah, I think you're just trying to wind people up. but and of course there are quite a lot

37:35Ed Balls: of newly rams in Oxford as well David Miliband Ed Ball George Osborne Jeremy Hunt George Osborne yeah what a better run country

37:45George Osborne: it would have been if anyway but the I think it turns winding people up we're also winding up 99.9 % of the country who didn't go to Oxford or Cambridge but it's interesting it's not really Oxford our Prime Ministers have not until Andy Burnham been Oxford educated they've been Oxford educated thank you for that question Robert And then our final question is from Violaine. Hi, Georgian Ed, Violaine here. I'm French, but I live in London and I love the podcast. I actually never miss an episode. My husband is also a gold subscriber, so I shamelessly nicked those two. I was a bit depressed to see the Conservatives come back to Parliament this week and immediately try to scrap the Climate Change Act, especially after a summer of wildfires, droughts and the UK's hottest summer on record.

38:29Seems odd timing, to say the least. George, your party once led on this under David Cameron. Is rowing back on climate really smart politics, according to you? Or does it just put off people like me who really care about how seriously we take this agenda? Thanks.

38:45Ed Balls: So I think this is definitely a question for you. Are the Conservatives making a big mistake? And I should point out, if you go back to my August interview with Kemi Badenok, summer interview, She said very clearly that she is not denying climate change. She's very committed to tackling climate change. She thinks it's about the how, not the weather and the method. But I'm not sure if that's the way in which it's coming over to people like VLN.

39:13George Osborne: It feels like a different world in which the Conservatives campaigned to say, vote blue and go green. That was our slogan. Hug a husky. I think it was hug a hoodie, wasn't it? And then go sledging with a husky. That was the. And of course, the thing that Kemi Baden-Ock sets herself against, net zero, was actually a target introduced by Theresa May. And championed by every other conservative prime minister in government. Yeah. So do I think it's a mistake? Without getting into the detail of the net zero target, I think generally it's a mistake for the Conservatives to give the impression they don't care about climate change or that they don't care about the natural environment.

39:57George Osborne: And as I think we've discussed on this podcast before, there's a sort of natural etymology of conservative and conservation. And there's a kind of proud history Margaret Thatcher lent into this as Prime Minister of concern for the environment. there was a lot achieved by the Conservative Party not just in policy terms but in terms of broadening its appeal when it had a war more overtly its concern about green issues but what I would also say is this I don't think is unique to the Conservative Party I think one of the most sort of dramatic things the last two years was the way that the Labour Party in government did two things it just ditched really its interest in international development I mean Keir Starmer dramatically cut the international development budget.

40:39George Osborne: And if you think of what an important part of the sort of Labour story that had been over the previous 20 years, that's kind of remarkable.

40:47Ed Balls: It's coming back, though. Andy Burnham and Ed Billaban say we're going to get back to 0.7.

40:52George Osborne: Right. Well, not anytime soon. But at least they're saying it. The second thing is one of the first Burnham announcements. I think it was to fund, was it not, the cut in VAT on electricity, or maybe it was one of these other, maybe it was the bus fares, actually. the bus fare cap of£2, funded by raiding remaining international development budget for climate change projects around the world.

41:14Ed Balls: I think it was the VAT.

41:15George Osborne: Yeah. So I would say, unfortunately for VLN, it's not just, from her point of view, it's not just the Conservative Party. And broadly, I think it's worth saying also that the world has changed. The price of energy has gone up dramatically. And I think some of the push for transition on things like electric cars just was too fast, too brutal. look what's happening to the British car industry. And I would be very surprised if the Burnham government doesn't at some point announce that it's ditching the kind of new target of, you know, that a certain percentage of, I think it's like 80 % of new cars or something have to be electric by 2030, which, and the British car industry is something we should come back to on our main podcast because it is in serious trouble at the moment.

41:57Ed Balls: Look, the truth is Donald Trump does deny climate change is a real issue and so does Nigel Farage. And can we make not a decision to make as to even if she disagrees with the net zero policy levers, is she wanting to pose as a climate denier? She says not, but that is her danger. Anyway, thank you for your question, VLN. Can I just say this? I was part of a Labour treasury which abolished the married couples allowance. And George, despite flirting around, never reintroduced the married couples allowance. Am I right in saying? No, I did. Did you?

42:32George Osborne: Yeah. Did you? Yeah.

42:34Ed Balls: What did you do?

42:35George Osborne: You just obviously haven't claimed it.

42:37Ed Balls: Are you sure? Yes, I'm very sure. While you were taking child benefit away from people?

42:42George Osborne: Well, only the richest people.

42:44Ed Balls: Anyway, the thing I was going to say, I'd forgotten that. We are very happy, VLN, that you benefit from the political currency married couples allowance. Although you'd have to be married. Whether your husband is a husband or a partner, the fact that he's a gold subscriber means we're happy for you to listen to his subscription too. are we?

43:06George Osborne: Totally, yeah we just want to sell as many of these gold subscriptions as possible so we don't care about relationships we're like proper conservatives who don't want to know what goes on in the bedroom that's not the business of the state

43:22Ed Balls: if people want to listen to EMQs in the bedroom that's fine by me that is it from this episode of EMQs we don't want to know what goes in the bedroom But we're quite happy to get your questions on socials by email. Questions at politicalcurrency.co.uk.

43:39George Osborne: I mean, if you want to tell us what goes on in your bedroom.

43:41Ed Balls: It says here, we love variety in tone, era and subject. I don't know what that's referring to. No.

43:47George Osborne: We're going to be back on Thursday with our main show. See you then.

43:56George Osborne: Thanks for listening to Political Currency. This has been a Persephoneca production.

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