Reform's crime crackdown: Can Farage really fly prisoners to El Salvador?

0:02The Telegraph.

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1:50We're actually facing, in many parts of our country, nothing short of societal collapse. If people are scared to go out of the shops, scared to let their kids out, that is a society that is degrading. And it's happening very, very rapidly. That's the latest leadership pitch from Nigel Farage, who wants to be a zero-tolerance PM in the vein of former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani. It all sounds good, deport the foreign-born criminals, have taller policemen, etc. But the usual questions apply to anything reform says. Will it actually work and how much will it cost? And I get into a little bit of a squabble with Environment Secretary Steve Reid over just how polluted the rivers and seas have become in the UK on his watch.

2:37Welcome to The Daily Tea with me, Tim Stanley. And me, Kimilla Tomini.

2:52We're back from the nightclub, Tim. Well, it felt like a nightclub. We were at the Royal Horse Guards Hotel for this reform presser. Yes. What was going on with the lighting? They had closed the curtains and they had red and purple lights shining down and then TV screens around us that read things like crime is out of control. And also, just to make it even more confusing, the interior of the room is 19th century and there was a massive portrait of Queen Victoria looking down on us. So you say a nightclub. I felt it was like a ride at the London dungeon. Yes, it was. I was expecting to say, it's 1850.

3:23And the smoke-filled streets of London are stalked by a killer. I know, but the whole showman, greatest showman in politics, then the lights go up. Farage appears, as you say, in the shadow of Queen Victoria. This was him trying to solve his woman problem because he's flanked like a thorn between roses by Sarah Pochin, the newly elected Reform MP for Runcorn, a former magistrate, no less, and a very intriguing lady called Leila Cunningham, who is a Reform Councillor for Westminster City Council, but also describes herself as a vigilante mum. And she is a mum of seven, Tim. Yeah, so that's a lot of work.

4:02Isn't it? If you're a vigilante and you're looking after that seven, she said every time her children went out, she said she felt sick. Yes. Well, we could all identify with that. But I thought it was quite funny to see Faraj play the role of patriarch. I mean, he's not somebody that is necessarily associated with being a family man, which might be one of the negatives against his name when it comes to the next general election, not least among female voters. Don't forget that only one in four righty women voted for reform in the locals. I thought it was quite interesting they suddenly started speaking as a father and being concerned the children are our future folks and we need to make sure that they're protected from nasty sadists, rapists and murderers.

4:42Yeah, well, I agree with all of that. What's wrong with that? No, I was nodding along. Were we both nodding along? I was nodding along. There was a lot of things he said that will make sense to people. So let's take a look at some of what he's proposed today. He wants to have 30 ,000 new prison places, including building Nightingale prisons. We will build Nightingale prisons. You remember the Nightingale hospitals? within 72 hours hospitals were built and we'll work with private contractors but we'll want to use the logistical skills that exist in the army and our armed forces to make this happen.

5:17We can build up to 12 ,000 prison places and we can do so actually in short order. As long as Matt Hancock's not involved I don't mind that idea I would remind you that Nightingale hospitals were empty. Yes, that's right they didn't have the staff. So he wants 30 ,000 new prison places He proposes 30 ,000 new police officers and he has in his head a certain kind of person to be a police officer because reform is against DEI in public sector hiring. And we will scrap all diversity, equality and inclusion roles and we will aim for a higher and physically tougher standard of police officer on our streets.

6:00So he said, which I think is really interesting, there should be an element of fear in policing. Yes, this is him playing into his kind of slightly mafia boss reputation with the heavies he has around him. He wants people like his own bodyguards, I think, to be in the police force. And he did mention people who had previously served in the armed forces. I knew a chap who served in the Grenadier Guards. He'd served in Afghanistan. He'd done two tours, one of them, a very, very brutal tour. He came back in his late 20s and applied to join a county police force, but was rejected. Rejected. A fit, young guy, an army sergeant who'd done service, told to come back next year because they were having trouble with their quotas.

6:42Enough. Enough of all that rubbish. And, in fact, on that theme, we would look very much to go to people who have served in the armed forces who we think would make ideal police officers. And I actually thought to myself, you know, we do have this issue in the UK with people coming back onto Civvy Street, being at a bit of a loose end. I'd be perfectly happy to have some former soldiers in the police force, wouldn't you? And I think what he says is correct. It used to be that policemen, and particularly prison wardens, were men of a certain age and height and authority who scared people into obedience.

7:16Of course, that's not the Dixon of Dot Green style of community policing. It's more like the Sweeney. I mean, it's interesting what his role model for a policeman is. And it's one that, of course, a lot of people would say we had to move away from because they poisoned community relations. True. It's the whole difference, isn't it, between the police being a police force or a service? Well, and he is very much in favour of stop and search. Stop and search in areas where knife crime is prevalent will go on up until saturation point, until we drive knives off the street. And believe me, this is a policy that I know from my campaigning recently around the country, supported by people right across the political spectrum.

7:59And if we have to build more knife arches at the entrance to train stations or bus stations or whatever it may be, then we will do it. He wants what he calls zero tolerance, including on things like shoplifting. Yeah, he wants to get rid of that whole amnesty for anyone nicking less than£200 worth of goods because the police just isn't interested and is apparently too busy. He thinks that's given people carte blanche to thieve. And let's be honest, we have spoken to shopkeepers on the Daily Tea who say precisely that. But for every 50, 60, 70 quid that's nicked from a little corner shop, the owner of that corner shop has to pay thousands paying for what has been stolen.

8:38He shrugged and raised his arms in that very Farage way and said, who wouldn't shoplift? And I just feel that's going to be an internet meme at some point. He wants to see fast-tracked arrests. He wants to see fast-track courts. Oh, good luck with that. Courts usually start at 10 and finish at 4, which is something I've never understood. Even in COVID, we must clear the backlog, but let's just get going at about 11.15. Yeah, and of course it's also very expensive, and we'll come to that. He wants to deport foreign-born criminals, although when pressed on that, when someone pointed out, will you in return take British-born criminals in foreign prisons here?

9:14And intriguingly, he said yes, he would. Of course we're prepared to take British prisoners from other parts of the world. That's fair, right and proper. So no question, argument about that. Yeah, so does that mean you pointed this out? You whispered in my ear. I whispered the words Gary Glitter. And I went, what? And you went, do we really want Gary Glitter back from Vietnam? I was using Mr Glitter as an example. Mr Gad, I think he might be known as. I was using it as an example of there are a lot of very bad people in foreign prisons. There are drug addicts in Indonesia. There are paedophiles in Thai and Vietnamese prisons.

9:45Are we saying that we would welcome those people back as part of a fair swap? I think some voters might think, no, I just want to get rid of the foreign born ones. I don't want some British born here. So that was sort of interesting. That could be picked apart. He suggested that we should do deals with foreign countries to take our most serious repeat offenders. So he mentioned Estonia. He pointed out that some other countries are doing this, like Denmark apparently does this. America certainly does it. He was also very keen to push El Salvador as an example. And we'll come back to that. Yes, because we asked a specific question about it.

10:20There may also be a chance that he's able to strike a deal with Albania because he boasted of the fact that he is in communication with their prime minister, Eddie Rama, a very tall man who always wears trainers to global summits. And perhaps the Albanians will take back some of their criminals that do make up quite a large proportion of the foreign criminals in British prisons. And there was some confusion from reform over what that proportion is, because Leila Cunningham said that around a quarter of people in British prisons are foreign-born. Well, that's inaccurate. The figure for England and Wales is about 12%.

10:5727 % are ethnic minorities. And it sounds to me like she confused foreign-born and ethnic minorities. It was a good line to say that currently it costs 52 grand a year to house an inmate in the prison estate in the UK. And actually, you'd pay less to send a child to Eton. Yes. Which was, as is ever the case, Farage has got this way of just communicating. You caught up with him after the presser and had a great conversation about what the thrust of the whole event was. The theme, which I thought was really interesting, was you were saying punishment must fit the crime. Because when you were asked about ID and all this sort of stuff, especially should we be policing all of us?

11:36And I infer that what you're saying is no, make the punishment tough enough, and then the law on disorder will drop and you don't have to police people quite so invasively as we've been doing. Is that a fair interpretation? No, it's a very fair interpretation. actually, if the ideas that we're putting forward work, and if there is a turnaround in respect in society, and perhaps even a tiny little bit of fear of getting caught in society, we may well find this pays for itself within five years. Yeah. What is the ideal kind of policeman or woman? Somebody who is... Tall? I think height is actually a factor.

12:08Yeah. No, I do, seriously. Somebody who has a degree of authority. Yeah. And with that comes respect. Yes. I made the point that the criminals have lost respect for the police. They openly taught them. It's quite extraordinary what goes on. But the real worry is your readers are also increasingly losing respect for the police, losing respect for their priorities, losing respect for some of their stances, political stances. I don't think the pride flag is an important part of policing. I'm sure Telegraph readers don't either. Yeah, I think they'd agree with you. Of course, some people will say there are communities that feel that the police are invasive, that they're bullies and therefore what we've done since the 90s is adopt a softer style which gets people cooperating with the police has that gone too far hasn't that worked well well done teresa mate absolutely marvelous let's let's ease off stop and search and see what happens to the knife crime yeah in our cities now we've got this all completely wrong uh the old-fashioned rules work thank you very much thank you he is on to something when it comes to the sort of quality of police officer that we have these days we've had a number of top cops in this studio decrying the state of training, saying that that police headquarters in Hendon that trains all of the officers for the Met Police has been sort of downscaled and downgraded.

13:22We've done stories on The Telegraph revealing that some people who train to be police officers are illiterate and innumerate. Right. So it's as if the standard has dropped. So in that regard, I think he is playing into what the public wants to hear. The thing about Farage is, I mean, you can have reservations about reform. They're untried, they're untested, they're inexperienced, they're coming out with these policies. I don't know if they'll work. But deep inside you, you want them to work. You like what you're hearing. You listen to this man and you think, actually, this is what we've been wanting to hear for the last 10, 20, 30 years.

13:59And why couldn't we have it? It's not mad. Why can't we have it? Why couldn't the Conservatives have given us this stuff? I mean, he is playing into a very cogent narrative of just ordinary men and women in Britain, law-abiding people, tearing their hair out, literally saying to themselves, how has it come to this? And on crime, when you're making that uniparty, successive governments have let you down, the figures are in his favour. Also, it's a great stick with which to beat the Tories, isn't it? Because don't you think that Theresa May as Home Secretary cutting police numbers was one of the most catastrophic decisions she ever made?

14:37Yes, yes, I do. And I think we've seen the wokeification of the police, like we have all public services, where the emphasis was more upon having a service that represented the country rather than a service that did the thing it's contractually obliged to do, the thing we expected to do. We have a problem with the public not having faith in the police, but then also seemingly criminals running rings around the police. And we see this often in social media where people are sort of filming the police grappling to wrestle criminals to the ground. I do think some of these sorry tales are overrepresented because everyone is now videoing everything they ever see.

15:15But when they speak to the kind of lawlessness of Britain, particularly London, the case of that young man who was killed for his designer watch a few weeks ago at the age of 24, that does strike the fear of God in me. I mean, I don't think I would want just to channel Leila. I'm not particularly comfortable. I live out in the shires, but I'm not particularly comfortable about the idea of my children going into London by themselves. And similarly, even at the local shopping centre in Watford, we've had scenes with masked and balaclavied youths running amok. You know, one of my friend's sons was just indiscriminately punched in the face, hasn't gone back there.

15:55We saw that ridiculous footage of one teenager throw a massive piece of furniture off a staircase in Westfield with no regard whatsoever for who was below. Yeah. I think he's over-egging it because he loves the broken Britain and reform can fix it narrative. Yes. But he is tapping into something and then two-tier. Well, and Leila is a robo-mum who, when her AirPods were stolen, would not take it lying down. I've run after my AirPods for about three hours across Hype Park, tracing them. I got on a line bike, I called my teenage son. I'm like, I've got them. And I caught up with them in the end.

16:31They'd passed it on to someone else because within 10 minutes it was in East London. The next day it was in China. And I've done that with my mobile phone. I wouldn't recommend anyone doing it. It's just I've just had enough. And Nigel Farage, again, very good at personalising issues in a way that weird politicians seem incapable, also talked about one of his relatives being the victim of crime. Had a case in my family a few months ago. somebody at Victoria Station a relation of mine punched, phone taken but they had a tracker on the phone so we could see exactly where the phone was going and I assume it wasn't just one phone, there would have been a couple of hundred phones we even gave the police the address of the house in southern Buckinghamshire where the phones had gone to the police took no action whatsoever When you have that kind of disorder and when you have an ineffective police force, the paradox is that the police force then becomes more authoritarian because it has to sort of impose itself more.

17:36So there was debate in... So people was asked questions about facial recognition ID, about laws on speech, etc. But it's not just that. I've noticed when you see video of the police kicking off rather than criminals kicking off, they have to project themselves. And so they become shouty and screamy and inappropriate. And that's kind of the flip side of the rise in disorder, is a state which increasingly tries to find new ways to police us, and it does it in a really ham-fisted way. A lot of our listeners will be thinking, I hate crime, I want the police to be tough, but I also don't trust the police and feel that they overstep the mark a lot of the time.

18:18They aren't tough enough when it comes to, for instance, pro-Palestinian marchers spewing hate on the streets of the capital, but at the same time they'll send six officers along to somebody's house because he may or may not be in possession of, quotes, Brexity things, including a book by Douglas Murray. Right. The classic thing was taking the knee. Yes. No one who takes the knee has authority. By its very nature, in that action, you are submitting. You are saying, in all modesty and humility, I bow before you and acknowledge all the wrongs of my society. Well, that's a nice Christian gesture.

18:52I appreciate it. But the moment you do that, take that uniform off because you've just surrendered all your authority as a police person. How are you expected to strike, as Nigel would put it, fear into people when you've just been kneeling to them? Yeah. And on that note, it's interesting that the lioness Lucy Bronze has said that they're abandoning any BLM kneeing at the Euros this week because they think it's lost all of its original meaning. Why were they still doing it? It's a good question. Why were they still kneeling? I don't know. For someone who died abroad who isn't even British. Well, also, you're a footballer and it's all about defunding the police.

19:28You need the police because otherwise you can't have hooligans ejected from football matches that you're playing in. We got specific, didn't we, when it came to El Salvador? We did. Now, I picked up on this because they picked up on this. They pushed this. They floated this all morning. The one thing we might do is send prisoners to El Salvador. And it sounds tough. It's very tough. but I think I was worried it might be a bit too tough. So these are the questions that I asked about, first of all, chemical castration, and secondly, about El Salvador. Camilla Tomini from Telegraph. It's actually not me, it's my partner in crime.

20:04OK. Hello, I'm doing work experience. Very good. Two questions. One, does reform support chemical castration for prolific sex offenders? It's not on the list. No. I suspect. Secondly, you just said you will not be taking human rights away from British prisoners, right? But you've mentioned El Salvador. El Salvador, as I'm sure you know, is in a three-year-long state of emergency where it detains people without trial, including around 3 ,500 children. It is notorious for overcrowding, a country in which there are just 70 ,000 prison spaces with 109 ,000 people in them, and where torture is reported and over 350 people are suspected to have died.

20:46Now, prisoners who go there may well be wrong-uns, but they are British, they are human beings, and they have human rights. Are you comfortable, if you can get past the lawyers, with sending British people to prisons with those kind of conditions? OK, we are not going to send people for trial in El Salvador. Let's make that absolutely clear. You know, people will be tried in this country, and El Salvador might be quite an extreme example, but the idea that we could send prisoners to Kosovo, to Estonia, and everything else is a very, very serious proposal. Would we be comfortable with you? Well, we'd have to...

21:22I mean, look, we would not want to think that people going there would be in danger of their lives. We thought that we wouldn't send them, fairly obviously. And on chemical castration, that is not on the list. But tell you what, over the course of the next six weeks, you'll hear an awful lot more from us on a whole range of subjects. I'd just like to add to that point. What about the human rights of the women that have been raped, the children that have been subject to sexual abuse. Our prisons are too soft. And clearly, El Salvador is an extreme example. But the point is that other countries have already got these agreements.

21:56Our prisons are too soft. If they lose some human rights about family visiting or whatever else it might be, or Sky TV in their cells, well, it's a good thing, because it's about time we got tougher with these people. You asked the chemical castration question, because we were trying to find out how far are reform willing to go we have this issue with the party that sometimes reform meets reality and they have to backtrack so on castration he says well hang on just wait for our next announcements i was thinking well you're not ruling it out but you're not ruling it in and then on salvador i was finding during his answer to your question that he was just tiptoeing away.

22:38He dropped the El Salvador bomb. Clearly, no one's really googled it. You did. Put it to him that it perhaps wasn't the best idea. And then he said, oh, yeah, maybe you're right. Yeah. El Salvador probably doesn't have the prison places to take people because it's overcrowded. It has the same problem as Rwanda, which is it's a government with a dodgy human rights record. By the way, what it has done is rounded up and arrested a lot of people involved in gangs. I'm not going to dispute that. El Salvador has done an impressive job of reducing its own crime rate, but it's done it essentially by suspending human rights.

23:11And like it or not, prisoners in this country have said human rights. And if you send them to that kind of country, there's a risk that's going to be infringed. And if nothing else, you can just see the human rights lawyers descending on this. If you couldn't get someone flown involuntarily to Rwanda, only four people went voluntarily in the end. How the hell are you going to get them to a country like El Salvador? Although in the way that only Faraj can, I did like the point he made about the Soham killer. So if we can send some of our worst violent criminals overseas to serve their terms, then yes.

23:45And if that means that Ian Huntley goes to El Salvador, well, our attitude is so be it. I had a further chat with him afterwards. Huntley going to El Salvador. Yeah, you don't think that's a problem? I think that may just be pushing the edges of our policy. But I think it says quite a lot. And it's something people would understand and something people would talk about. Whether we'd actually do it is another thing. A lot of people would pay for his flight. Oh, yes. But note, having discussed it, having faced a little bit of pushback, they there on end kept saying El Salvador was an extreme example.

24:22It is. And it's the extreme example they gave. And if you look at their list of things that they handed out... I've got it now. So we've got a two-page document entitled Policies. And if you look, they put in bold... Yes, they have. We would consider multiple partners, including El Salvador. You've got another great piece of paper, which is Costings. Yes. I mean, I don't want you to kind of be Carol Vorderman right now under pressure. But they're always asked, is this going to add up? He was asked by Chris Hope on GB News, are you going to have to put up taxes? He said, no, we're going to scrap HS2 and I'm going to be like Millet over in Argentina with a chainsaw to the state saving money left, right and centre.

25:06Therefore, this is all affordable, even though the top line figure on it was. 17.4 billion pounds over a five year parliament. Wow. It is a lot of money. And of course, the counter argument is, yes, but in the long run, the cost of crime is, quote, between 80 billion to 170 billion pounds every year. So if you reduce crime, then hopefully in the future you're saving money. And I get that argument. It's always going to be a case with reform that they are presenting us a shopping list of things they would do for us. And we at some point need to know, really, does this bill add up? Because as Labour has learned, you don't want to get elected promising you're not going to raise taxes.

25:44And then one year in, you're around the cabinet table discussing how do we raise taxes without anyone noticing? Yeah, but the cumulative effect of it all, regardless of the very sensible questions you, I and other journalists are asking, is the public will very much be left with the impression today that the person who is going to be toughest on criminals of all is Nigel Farage. So that's a job well done. Yeah, and I think it's probably correct. Coming up next, Labour has announced the biggest overhaul of the water system in recent memory. But when I asked Environment Secretary Steve Reid why pollution has gone up on his watch, he wasn't very happy about the questioning.

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28:47Our rivers and seas are full of muck and the government is committed to cleaning them up over the next five years. Environment Secretary Steve Reid has said that they've got the policies to do it, but there's some doubt about whether or not they can. Camilla, you spoke to him earlier. Steve Reid, Environment Secretary, lovely to see you again. The last time we spoke on the Daily Tee, it's when we did our State of the Rivers special, and you said back then, along with many other experts, off what must go. It isn't fit for purpose and hasn't been for years. You've now announced that in a speech, but what will replace it and how will it be any different?

29:21Well, as you know, and your listeners will know, our water system is completely broken. We saw extraordinary, unacceptable bill increases at the end of last year. And people will know that our rivers, lakes and seas are being poisoned with record levels of sewage. So we need a root and branch reform of the entire system. And that includes abolishing off-watt. but of course we have to have regulation in the sector it needs to be much stronger regulation in the past so we're going to create a new super regulator by bringing together the water functions of four different regulators and give them responsibility for the entire sector at the moment the gaps between the different regulators and the confusion that there is amongst them taking different approaches to the same company have created spaces where water companies have been able to get away with things that should never have been allowed.

30:19So we're replacing those multiple regulators with a single regulator that can be much more effective at regulating the companies. But Sir John has made in total 88 different recommendations for how we can tighten up the rules. I can't comment on all of those today. I only got the full report, 450 pages long over the weekend. So the government will go away. We will come up with a full response to what he's saying and then we will consult on that and that will lead to new legislation where we will have a complete revolution in our water sector as we strengthen the regulator and tighten the rules so the abuses of the past can never happen again.

30:57Now the Telegraph audience will completely agree with you when you talk about how bills have gone up, how you have tried to tackle the bonuses of some of the water bosses, but they'll also be thinking to themselves it doesn't matter what the government announces, my bills are still going up by 30%. So that's difficult, isn't it, for customers? You can announce a huge raft of changes, and yet the customer still ends up paying more for what they perceive to be a failing service. Why can't the government get a grip on bills and bring them down? Well, it's an absolute outrage what's gone on. And getting a grip on bills is precisely what I'm trying to do.

31:35Now, an analogy I use sometimes, because it does make it more understandable is if you see a crack in the wall of your house and you leave it for 10 years, the problem gets worse and it costs much, much more to fix it. And that's what the previous government allowed to happen to our water system. So the sewage pipes were already crumbling, the water pipes were already leaking, but because they didn't make sure the water companies were investing to upgrade them, the problem got worse. It costs more to fix and that led directly to bills going up. So in many, many respects, it's fair to say that bill payers have been left to foot the bill for 14 years of failure under the previous government.

32:13And what we're doing is drawing a line in the sand under all of that, creating a much stronger regulator, toughening up the rules so those abuses can never happen again. I mean, the water companies should never have been allowed to pay out billions of pounds in undeserved bonuses to their bosses, billions of to their shareholders while they were failing to invest in upgrading the basics like water pipes and sewage pipes. That was allowed to happen under the previous government. It won't happen anymore because we're changing the laws to make sure it can't happen anymore. That will allow us to get a grip on bills.

32:45We will not see the kind of increases that we saw at the end of last year ever again. Although you can't blame the Conservatives for the last year, which has witnessed pollution increase by 60%. Now, the clean water campaigner, Fergal Sharkey, says, hang on a minute, Labour were in opposition for 14 years. They had 14 years to work this out. He's called for your resignation because he says things haven't got better in the last 12 months. They've actually got worse. What we've done is we've secured£104 billion, that's billion with a B, of private sector investment to invest in our water sector, upgrading leaking water pipes, replacing broken and leaking sewage pipes, building the new reservoirs we need so that there's water to cover us in the dry spell so we don't have hose pipe bands like we're seeing now.

33:37We started spending that money in April of this year. We'll keep spending it over the next five years until we have rebuilt our water sector. That means more water available when we need it, like in the droughts right now. It means a massive reduction in the amount of pollution going into our waterways. Now, unfortunately, you can't make that change happen overnight. It's impossible to spend£104 billion in just a couple of weeks. You have to plan a programme of works over a number of years. And that is what we are doing. People will understand that. So I think really Fergal is being quite unrealistic and think you can fix the problems that are built up over decades in just a week or two.

34:17Well, it's not a week or two. You've been in power for 12 months. He's questioning the credibility of you saying that you can half pollution over the next parliament if in the last 12 months alone pollution has increased by 60 percent i mean basic mathematics suggests that you are going to be really up against it if you can't even reduce pollution while you're environment secretary pollution has increased because the water pipes and the sewage pipes were left to crumble and we've only just got in the funding that is going to replace and upgrade them. So we're turning the corner. This government is turning the tide of sewage that has been choking our rivers, lakes and seas, so that we will start to see a reduction in the amount of sewage that's going into our waterways.

35:00And we're not using as off what was the baseline of 2021. Sewage increased between 2021, 22, 23, 24. We're starting at 24 when sewage was at its absolute worst. And we're using that as the benchmark from which we will start to reduce sewage. So we can take action with this reset of the entire sector to prevent big bill rises happening in future and also to reduce year on year the amount of sewage going in our waterways. That is what people voted for in the election. That is what this government is doing. Let me just clarify that. Can sewage have been at its worst in 2024 if pollution is up 60 % now in 2025?

35:40Well, we haven't got the figures for this year yet. So the last four years for which we have it is the baseline we're working from. I do just want to ask you something about farming away from water because it's also on your patch. Last month we learned of the absolutely appalling and tragic death of a farmer who was 78 called Philip Charlesworth. He had spent weeks worrying about the changes to inheritance tax and took his own life as a result. Don't you think that this policy needs a rethink? Well, obviously my heart goes out to anybody, any family that's experienced a tragedy like that. I don't know enough about the circumstances to comment individually, but you'll have seen over recent months, the government has been able to offer four million more appointments in the National Health Service.

36:24That has made a dramatic reduction in waiting lists. Everybody needs and wants to see a doctor when they're feeling ill. That includes farmers. It's only by making the changes that we did in taxation that we've been able to fund those changes. at the same time, we're putting into farming the biggest amount of money in history for sustainable farming and nature. As I speak now, there's more money in the hands of more farmers under the sustainable farming schemes than at any point under the previous Conservative government. So this government is backing farming, but we're also taking action to cut the record National Health Service waiting lists that we inherited from the previous government.

37:02OK, thank you very much indeed, Steve Reid. Thanks, Camilla. Nice to see you. And you. Bye now. Labour's doing more than anyone in history to help the farmers. First one that came to my mind was Stalin. Right? But in reality, is that fair? Is that true? No, I don't think farmers would think so. I think that they think that the person that's doing more for them than anyone is Jeremy Clarkson. Yeah, yeah. And I'm not sure if the waiting list coming down argument really works. Again, the figures are being fudged on this because actually waiting lists have gone up to 4.5 million under Labour's watch.

37:33This is where this argument that it's all the Tories' fault falls flat. Can you keep on saying that the last year is all the Tories' fault when you've been in power and these are your policies? Yes. Will they be running on£22 billion Black Hole and Liz Truss in four years' time? Let's hope that that one's been crossed off the bingo card. Right, we'll be back tomorrow, 5pm.

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