Tax hell: How Andy Burnham’s £10bn black hole will hit your wallet

0:02The Telegraph.

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1:20Labour's client state agenda has come back to bite it once again. So what is the solution to trigger economic growth? Welcome to The Daily Tea with me, Camilla Tominy. And me, Jacob Rees-Mogg. What do you make of this absolute unwillingness to cut this bill and indeed government spending per se? Well, it's what you would expect of a socialist government. What the Labour Party wants to do is create a client state that votes for it. So it wants people to be dependent on welfare. The problem is it can't go on forever because you've got a smaller number of people actually working who pay for it all.

1:56There is one civil servant in DEFRA or associated bodies for every five farmers. Wow. One for five. Why? Well, heaven knows. Five a lot of them. Close down DEFRA and tell farmers to get on with it. It's madness. Welcome to the Daily Tea. Morning, Jacob. It's very good to see you as always. Now you're going off to the Socialists Conference and there is going to be a battle of two giants or giantesses. You are taking on old sourpuss herself, Bridget Phillips. Now, hang on. I don't want a cruel word said about our bridge, who is my girl crush in the Labour Party. Well, there's no accounting for taste.

2:37Head to head. The two of you? I mean, it's going to be like sumo wrestling. It could be. It could descend into wrestling, although I'm not sure Bridget is somebody that would want to start wrestling a fellow female at the Royal Liver Building. Do you know what's important to note about this event? I think people are thinking they need to be Labour delegates to attend. No, you don't. You can just get a ticket through the Telegraph website and we're going to put the details in the show notes. So it's outside the secure zone. Anyone can go. You've got to pay£12 for the privilege. Cheap at twice the price.

3:07It really is. I'd pay much more to see this if only I were in Liverpool that day. Now we've had some wonderful messages from our loyal listeners and viewers Right On your singing Oh no Which there's some admiration and some not so admiration This is me trying to give you a clue as to who Oasis were yesterday That's right You were claiming ignorance but I think you did deep down Ignorance is bliss Royston Grange says no more singing please My cat just jumped through a window which was closed And Matt Boynes 2179 says Camilla, I adore your interviewing style witty, playful and occasionally appropriately acerbic however I would suggest not giving up the day job for a singing career that rendition of Don't Look Back in Anger was quite something I'm sorry to say in brackets, bad keep up the great work, best wishes and Scarlett Conway 2881 says and this is the best of them all Camilla singing Oasis this year was not on my bucket list but it cheered me right up well thank you very much so it worked for some people you've got a 33 % success rate Love that.

4:10You're also getting glazed, if you're familiar with that phrase. Well, I thought it was something that was done to pastry. No, but it's also done for people who people admire in the public eye. And some glaze here from Georgia Martin who says, JRM is so eccentrically cool. Have you ever been described as cool before? No, no. I leave that to my children. No, indeed. Now, we've got a really interesting letter from Maria, and I thought I'd ask you about it. She says as follows, I want to say how much I enjoy your podcast and watch it every day. Thank you, Maria. I was wondering if during the Daily Tea, you can discuss and give definition of what is actually middle class versus working class, because those terms are widely used by politicians.

4:51And yet, in my opinion, people who might have considered themselves middle class 10 years ago may not feel the same now. I regard myself to be middle class because although I'd say my grandparents were working class, My grandfather ran an ice cream company. My father was educated to degree level and beyond because he's a doctor and has got lots of qualifications to his name. I was privately educated, brought up in a detached home in a leafy Hertfordshire village, and I am, quotes, professional class. So I've never been working class, but I think I'm middle class. What do you think you are? I'm Good Somerset Yeoman Stock.

5:31I'm not convinced that these classifications are particularly useful because they become very politicized. It's hard to believe that the deputy prime minister is working class just by office. And I'm thinking of the current one. I'm thinking of Angela Rayner. I'm thinking of John Prescott. But they all wanted to go back to their labor roots. But the class voting has broken down completely. If we were talking in the 1950s, class voting was absolutely rigid. Working class people, 75 % of them voted Labour. And that was a kind of blue collar, white collar distinction, right? Absolutely right. And that gave you clarity on what class was.

6:16Now, some people in blue collar jobs are incredibly highly skilled, paid hundreds of thousands of pounds, but they're on a shop floor. They're not working class. Some people in professional jobs are very poorly paid and are living in bedsits with three other people. What class are they? So I think it's much more useful to think about economics and how well off people are rather than to try and stratify them in terms of class. So I always avoid these terms as a way of discussing how people react and think about things. But do you think you're upper middle class and I'm middle class? Do you think you're posher than me?

6:56Oh, gosh, I think I'm good, Somerset Yeoman Stock. Hang on, you're saying that. I refer the Honourable Lady to the answer I gave some moments ago. Well, because you're the son of a journalist, which is professional class, and I'm the daughter of a GP, which is professional class. So even though you're double-barrelled and frightfully more posh than me because of your Eton upbringing, actually, I think we're on a level. I actually think that you are not as posh as your wife. Oh, I'm definitely not as posh as my wife. Yes. Definitely not. Your wife is a class above you, would you say? She's an aristocrat.

7:26I married up. Yes. But my maternal grandparents' grandparents, Yes. were, all four of them were Irish, who left our potato famine to go to America. Oh, so you're coming as muck. So we are all very mixed in our lineage. Right. All of us. We're not fortunately continental, so obsessed by these things. But I went to the College of Arms and they were showing me the quarterings of a very prominent and distinguished person. In the continent, all his ancestors would be armigerous. You're talking in a foreign language now. Whereas in this country, we've always been much more relaxed about that. Can you translate this for the commoners amongst us?

8:13I think telegraph readers completely understand what I'm talking about. Come on. If you bear arms, you are armigerous. on the continent, the continental aristocrats will not marry beneath them. They will not marry people who do not hold arms. In this country, we have had a much greater tendency not to fuss about these things. And therefore, you will find that even the most noble families have within them ancestors who were not armigerous because we'd be much more relaxed about it. And it's a thoroughly good thing to be relaxed about it. Because you then allow social mobility and social mobility goes along with prosperity because you want able people to be able to climb to the top.

8:54Did Helena know she was marrying a scratter that was well beneath her when you met? When I first talked to Helena in adulthood, I was going on about her most interesting ancestor, who was Thomas Wentworth, who was executed in 1641. And she thought, who is this funny fellow who knows more about my family history than I do? Really? But I'm glad to say our eldest son is now just as interested in his family history as I am, if not more so. Now, it's an interesting anniversary today. We managed to look up in the archives the front page back in 1992, a date you remember very well, Jacob, Black Wednesday.

9:31And we found the copy and it's got two extraordinary bylines on it, hasn't it? So it's about Norman Lamont's day of absolute shame and woe. Well, it was a great day for the country. It wasn't Black Wednesday. It was White Wednesday. It led to years of economic growth. It freed the economy from the crazy European exchange rate mechanism project, which would have led us to the euro. It got rid of an absolute disaster. It exploded John Major's terrible, terrible economic policy. I was going to say, Tories didn't think of it like this at the time. Well, Norman Lamont was never very keen on it. He was compelled to do it by Major.

10:06Sure. But interestingly, his special advisor at the time was David Cameron. And you see a very white-faced David Cameron standing behind Norman Lamont in the TV footage the day before when it's announced that we've come out of the exchange rate mechanism. And the copy for the telegraph? And the copy is done by two Johnsons, one Boris, one Philip. Philip's still writing for this paper. We mentioned him yesterday. We mentioned him yesterday. Boris now writing for the Daily Mail. Indeed. And he's done one or two other things in between. Apparently so. He was writing it from Brussels. But just fast forward, because a lot of people are talking about, I know it was 92, but when people try and mark sort of historic economic landmarks in living memory, they talk about the horror of the 1970s, the great wealth exodus, bin bags piling up in the street, and then obviously the ascent of Margaret Thatcher.

10:56They talk about Black Wednesday in 1992. They talk about the global financial crash of 2008. And now, of course, we've got the same sort of rhetoric around some of these calamitous economic markers that have been revealed in recent hours. So we've got inflation up to 3.2%. We've got Andy Burnham apparently facing a£10 billion black hole. Why is it always£10 billion? Nobody knows. We've got the Labour government resolutely refusing to cut spending. We've got warnings from everyone saying, don't put taxes up anymore. And of course, what's the response to all this? It's global headwinds. It's the Iran war.

11:37It's Ukraine. There's nothing we can do about this. Actually, it's thoroughly bad policymaking in this country and spending too much money and taxing too much. And that is having a bad effect on economic growth. It ties in with very bad energy policy that has us having very high electricity prices, four times those in the United States that are bad for business, bad for individuals, make them less able to spend on other things. So bad policymaking has led to an inability to cope with the headwinds that always exist in global economics, that there's always something going on globally that is difficult.

12:17And we are less able to deal with it because of really poor policymaking, especially in the Reeves-Healy era. And Healy is repeating Reeves' mistakes, that he isn't being clear about what he's doing with taxation. People are therefore leaving the country, along with that chap who paid£330 million worth of tax, because they're uncertain about how he will tackle taxation and expenditure in the budget. So what are we thinking about the rhetoric around all this? We had stories yesterday involving the business secretary, Jonathan Reynolds, refusing multiple times to rule out taxing pensioners. And we've got this extraordinary situation, haven't we, that the triple lock has meant that the state pension is now worth around£13 ,000 a year.

13:06That is obviously over the personal allowance. And therefore, there's a squabble going on as to whether we should get OAPs to file a tax return, basically for the difference of about, I think it's 80 quid or something, should they be taxed. And then Rishi Sunak, I think, came up with triple lock plus, where as well as being insulated by those three measures, pensioners should also be excluded from any tax returns? Well, you can't exclude all pensioners from tax returns. No, sorry. Pensioners on the state pension only. What the government seems to be saying is that if your only income is the state pension, then you will not pay tax on the little bit above.

13:46But if you've got any other income, you will. This has two effects. One is it undermines what was done by the Conservatives when the thresholds were increased, because when the thresholds were increased, in the coalition period, the age-related allowance was removed. There used to be a specific allowance for pensioners that was higher than the base allowance for non-pensioners. That was removed as the allowance went up and absorbed it. So that's been taken away and doesn't seem to be coming back. The other thing is it means the triple lock is dead. So take the 2.5 % minimum increase. If you take 20 % of 2.5%, what is that?

14:28Oh, don't ask me these mathematical questions. It's half a percent. Thank you. So the triple lock is no longer for anyone who isn't purely on the basic pension. Yes. 2.5%, it is 2%. Right. And all the way up, the triple lock has now been reduced by 20 % unless the government reverses this. So we can announce today on the Daily Tea that the triple lock has been smothered, murdered in its sleep in the hope that nobody would notice. It's almost as if assisted dying has happened in secret for the triple lock. That's right. Were you pro-scrapping it or not? Or you're saying, well, it's inevitably gone anyway?

15:06Ultimately, it had to be a matter of timing. At what point would you need to stop increasing pensions, the triple lock had a very sensible purpose. That is to say, and this is really good conservative economic management in 1979 and 2010. In 1979, the country has no money. And so Margaret Thatcher changed pension increases from wages to inflation. That saved billions and billions of pounds cumulatively. But by 2010, there was quite a lot of pensioner poverty. And the easiest way to removed that was through the triple lock. And that's been successful. It has removed a good deal of pensioner poverty.

15:45But it can't go on forever because somebody's got to pay for it. So it's a question of how long it could run for. It's not something people could promise indefinitely. Should wealthy boomers just be allowed to opt out? What do you mean by opt out? Well, I mean that I understand the need for the triple lock or at some kind of insulation against inflation-busting pension rises that mean that people who are literally on 13 grand a year in retirement don't get shafted. But at the same time, it doesn't make much sense when you hang up your double-breasted suit and perhaps wear some sort of cardigan in later life that you should get the state pension.

16:25Well, the issue there is that the state pension is technically a contributory pension. Yes, so you've paid your NIs. That's right. That's right. And national insurance contributions do relate to pensions, that if people haven't made them, they don't get the pension. So I don't think it would be reasonable to say to people, even though national insurance is a fiddle, even though there is no segregated amount of money that is kept for it. There is a national insurance fund, but it's not segregated exclusively for pensions. It's in a sense fictional, but nonetheless it's a fiction that the government has sold taxpayers.

17:03Yes. And I think it'd be deeply dishonest to change it. But if I do get a state pension at some later date, I'll still be taxed at 45 % on it. Yeah, that's true. But then aren't you concerned as a father of six about the mini mogsters and how they're going to get on in life? Because it's harder now for the younger generation. This is younger people, the Gen Zeders and the Alphas, of which you have a collection, are saying, it's all very well going back in time and remembering the era where our parents could buy a house for a hundred grand. We're now going to be really under pressure. We're going to be landed with a load of student debt.

17:37And meanwhile, the boomers and the Gen Xers continue to get richer. Yes, we need to look at the things that are creating obstacles to economic growth. We need to look actually at the 1945 to 51 settlement, because there are bits of that that are proving very expensive and don't actually work. What are the three big bits of that? The Town and Country Planning Act, which stops sensible development. You then get the welfare state that has become unaffordable, and you get the National Health Service, which doesn't work and costs a lot of money, as we see with these endless inquiries into hospitals where babies have been killed.

18:16And so what you need is not to say, well, we must squeeze the pension and so on and so forth. We must grow the economy. But to grow the economy, we need to reform the socialist agenda of Attlee. Attlee's decisions underpin so many of our costs and problems today. Economic growth strangled by planning, which of course got worse since his day. I'm not saying it's all the same, but those are the three great underpinnings of our economic inefficiency.

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19:43Not because humans aren't enough, but because they're everything. Based on over a 94 % reduction in serious injury or worse crash rates, Learn more at Waymo.com.

20:22app today.

20:31Well, on welfare, these are the latest stats. And this is depressing, frankly. More than 4 million people are now getting disability benefits after PIP claims, that's personal independence payments, surged by almost half a million to a record high under Labour. We've now got, I think, nearly a million young people, 18 to 24, claiming disability benefits. We've got a government that is seemingly unwilling to cut the welfare bill. And they are saying that rhetorically because we had Andy Burnham in PMQs, the last one he did, saying, well, we're not going to compromise on social security to pay for national security.

21:08So no cut in welfare to pay for warfare. Fine. Not fine at all. One of the most stupid things you could have said. Sorry. I mean, fine in how he expressed it. But I totally agree with you. And I think, how do you have welfare if you're at war and you can't defend yourself? But second of all, the truth of the matter is that regardless of any Labour backbench rebellions, the welfare bill is going up by the end of Parliament. They're trying to cut a cut, but they're not cutting the actual substantive numbers. The Conservative have pledged to trim the welfare budget by 23 billion. Reform is saying 50 billion.

21:43So they're in a competition as to how to get this bill down. But what do you make of this absolute unwillingness to cut this bill and indeed government spending per se? Well, it's what you would expect of a socialist government. What the Labour Party wants to do is create a client state that votes for it. So it wants people to be dependent on welfare and look at the figures and think, well, if we vote reform, if we vote conservative, will these cash? And they want two groups of people to be dependent upon Labour and then vote for them. One is people in the public sector. That's why they're giving so much to the public sector in terms of pay rises, an incredible increase in the numbers in the civil service.

22:24And then they want to give more money to welfare dependency. They like this because it's seen as their voter base. The problem is it can't go on forever because you've got a smaller number of people actually working who pay for it all. And they then run out of money. And then every single Labour government, other than the one that lasted nine months in 1924, has had a financial crisis where it has had to cut spending dramatically. Andy Burnham is facing significant deterioration in the public finances that will leave him needing to find about£10 billion in either tax rises or spending cuts in his first budget.

23:01Now, Andy Haldane, a former Bank of England economist and an ally of Burnham, has come out and said, of those things, cut spending or raise taxes, Can you cut spending, please? He said this, and he said it to the LBC programme presented by Andrew Marr. The market now suspects that this is a traditional tax and spend socialist government with better TikTok videos. The Achilles heel of this government thus far has been its unwillingness and or inability to cut public spending. Mr Haldane said the government faced a choice between raising taxes and cutting spending, but insisted ministers should not impose further taxes on businesses.

23:38Now, this makes perfect sense to the likes of you and I. However, that doesn't mean that John Healy is going to do anything of the sort on October the 28th. No, I mean, I hold Hal in very high regard. I think it's a pity he didn't become governor of the Bank of England. But there we go. What he's saying is extremely sensible. Labour only cuts in an emergency, which it's going to find it faces. However, £10 billion is neither here nor there. that the government spends 1.3 trillion. And we get hung up on remarkably small amounts of money in relation to government expenditure, which will be swallowed up by marginal changes in interest rates, in economic growth, in inflation.

24:22So it's not really the 10 billion that we should be fussing about. It is the overarching approach to economic policy. And the overarching approach to economic policy is wrong and is not allowing economic growth. And this includes the extra regulation that they are imposing on businesses, have imposed on businesses, which are stopping people employing the employment rights. Angela Rayner and Louise Haig have been at the trade unions conference banging on about this employment rights bill. The trade unions who bribe them for these policies. You'll love this though. It's ka-ching, you know, put the money and you get the policy.

24:56You'll love this because didn't you go around when you were minister for government efficiencies. You went around saying, where are you to civil servants who are absent? Louise Hague has now said that as part of this legislation, if anyone does want to work from home, a boss can't say, no, I'm sorry, you're needed here for productivity purposes. They need to have a sit down meeting and the boss has to give proper justification for why that person must return to the office. This strikes me to go back to the question we had from a reader as very classist. Why? Because the cleaners and the people working on the factory floor cannot work from home, can they?

25:33It's the boss class who can work from home. So they are featherbedding the boss class when the people doing the hard manual labour can't get away with working from home. Why do you think, oh, I said it was 3.2%, it's actually 3.1%, the inflation rise. Obviously, the target set by the Bank of England is 2%. petrol and diesel prices have increased this. I mean, I've noticed that. My daughter and I had to drive to Cambridge at the weekend and we were driving around using that petrol prices app. Someone was trying to charge something absolutely ridiculous like£1.98 for a litre of unleaded, not even diesel.

26:11You weren't going to a service station on a motorway. To be fair, I was... Never go to a service station on a motorway. No, no, no. Rob dogs. You can't even buy a sandwich at a service. They mark up even the sandwiches and the coffee. No, it was a bit of a kind of, oh, no, we're running on fumes, where do we go type situation. And even she had observed as a new driver that when she passed her test several months ago, she was getting petrol for£1.49. Yes. And we couldn't find anything cheaper than£1.68. Okay, I got£1.64 on Friday in a petrol station where I went to the thing to fill up. And an announcement came over the tannoy.

26:46And it was, I have no idea what was being said. I mean, those towns are so useless. I went to a chap and said, what was that? He said, our card machine isn't working. Can you pay in cash? And fortunately, I'm old-fashioned, so I could buy my petrol with cash. Had you already filled up by that point? No, no, I hadn't because he wasn't switching it on until I'd worked out what on earth had been said. And how much did it? What is it you're driving around in these days? A Bentley? It wasn't a Bentley, no. Anyway, fortunately, it's a reason why people should carry cash because sometimes things don't work.

27:19but cash is always there. You should go electric, Jacob Rees-Mogg. Go electric? Yes. Have an electric car? Yes. They're dreadful. No, they're not. And they don't make a nice roar. I like that roar that a car makes. But do you think then that the government can turn around and say, well, listen, inflation, once again, rampaging upwards isn't our fault. The Strait of Hulmuz, Donald Trump, Iran, Ridley, Gaza, blah. I mean, they probably can, can't they? It's a very difficult conundrum for the Bank of England. I don't actually know what I would do if I were on the monetary policy committee because the inflationary pressures are external, are outside the government's control.

27:57But those inflationary pressures feed through to the domestic economy unless you take steps to do it. I think the monetary policy committee should focus more on monetary policy and its monetary policy levers. And I think it is going to stop bond sales, which were tightening monetary policy in one direction. If you're loosening monetary policy by not selling bonds, you may need to tighten it a little bit on the interest rate level. On the other hand, the economy is pretty anemic. So you might squeeze out economic growth with an interest rate increase. I would be minded to give it a little bit more time.

28:38They've got another meeting in November, so a couple of months off. and then you could see whether the Strait of War military opens, whether the Saudi pipeline can be mended, whether the Houthis can be dealt with. The thing is, another reason it's extremely difficult is that if just a few things go right, we are on the cusp of a collapse in the oil price. So if Iran comes to an end and oil flows from there, the oil price comes down, goes back probably to$60 a barrel. If Russia and Ukraine find some accommodation, then we get Russian oil on stream again. And Venezuela is now potentially coming on stream too, with its admittedly very heavy crude, which takes time to get the refining capacity up, but nonetheless is there.

29:28If all those three come on, you could have the oil price down at$40 a barrel, the inflationary pressure gone. And that could all happen within a year. I know, but then does shopflation come down? I think from a punter's point of view, or speaking as a mother who occasionally takes the whole family out to the pub, you can just see the prices and how much they've risen just in the last year alone. So if you do the beef burger test, if you can get your child an adult's beef burger in a pub for less than 15 quid, you're doing well. Those prices are now closer to 18, 19, 20 in the Southeast and certainly in London.

30:01You're then a publican facing all of the pressures that they're under. I think Kate Nichols of UK Hospitality said 75 % of anything we earn in hospitality goes back to the government anyway. People are looking at those prices and thinking, well, they're not just going to come down because the Strait of Hormuz has opened in the same way that I do my Haribo test at the supermarket. Haribo were of quid for a long, long time. Now they're 125. That's 25 % inflation, not 2%. I think that's right. I think inflation has been much higher than the official figures are showing. everything like the haribo test is much more expensive it's sort of thing where you don't notice that prices have changed and suddenly you look at something you realize oh my goodness that's much more than it used to be you must notice it taking the whole family out well i try not to take the whole family out um so i think that is a problem and in hospitality energy prices feed through to absolutely everything yeah our green policies are madness and are making everything very expensive uh the straightforward news is making it worse but food is more expensive because fertilizer is more expensive distribution is more expensive if energy prices come down if we were to use some of our own energy if we would reverse the green madness, then we could see some strong economic growth and low inflation.

31:22The public is divided on how the government should approach balancing the budget. YouGov asked what the priority for the government should be when balancing the books. Avoiding tax rises, avoiding spending cuts, or avoiding borrowing too much. 29 % of Brits say avoiding tax rises. Another 29 % say avoiding cutting services and 20 % say avoiding borrowing too much. So Brits in cake and eat it shock. I don't want the tax to go up, but I don't want the spending to go down either. Up to point, I took that, you see, as 20 % don't want borrowing to go up. 29 % don't want taxes to go up. That's 49 % who are against higher expenditure with only 29 % who want to spend more money.

32:07But it's interesting how they've been asked. If the question had been loaded, would you like to see a return to austerity? This is the trouble, the toxification of government efficiencies, which was a great, shrewd and genius move by the left to call it austerity. Not least when you consider how much George Osborne pumped into, for instance, Andy Burnham's beloved north, the northern powerhouse. All those billions went in. But as far as the Labour government are concerned, for the entire time that the Tories were in charge, they were literally expecting people in the north to digest paving slabs.

32:40It's a quite impressive piece of political chicanery, that, because any notion of any government cuts these days isn't presented as efficiency, isn't presented as balancing the books. It's presented as austerity and making the poor suffer. But all the telegraph readers know that the government wastes enormous amounts of money. There was a wonderful thing I saw. Let me just check it. I'll get it on my telephone. Yeah, sure. Because I got sent this this morning by the great Alistair Jack. Explain who Alistair Jack is. Alistair Jack was the Secretary of State for Scotland, a very important political figure.

33:23And there is one civil servant in DEFRA or associated bodies for every five farmers. Wow. One for five. And the number of people employed by DEFRA has gone up from about 1 ,500 to about 7 ,000. Why? Well, heaven knows. Then they don't do anything productive. Fire the lot of them. Close down DAFRA and tell farmers to get on with it. Have one person who says what the law is and otherwise just get on with it. I mean, it's madness. And everyone in this country knows it's a racket. One civil servant for every five farmers. That's insane. It's bonkers. This is a racket as well. You know the one-in-one-out deal announced by Oh yes,£56 ,000.

34:07Exactly. So Mike Tapp, formerly of the Home Office, he was Immigration Minister and then he kind of got shuffled out because he disagreed with Mahmoud about aspects of policy. And by the way, I have a Sunday showdown with him. It's great fun. Right versus left or whatever it is that Mike Tapp is. He's politically confused because he's in Dover. He's trying to be a socialist but he's trying to be anti-immigration which is a challenge for the poor chap. That's going out on Sunday so do look out for it. But you're right. So deporting channel migrants to France under the one-in-one-out scheme has cost the taxpayer 56 grand per person returned.

34:43The Home Secretary told the Home Affairs Committee that this was the average cost for each of the 1 ,400 migrants returned to France since the scheme was launched last summer. 1 ,400 migrants returned to France. So it's utterly trivial. Sorry to use the phrase, but it's a drop in the ocean, isn't it? Very good. Goodness me. A final thought. Two big meetings are taking place with some of your favourite figures. First of all, Andy Burnham meeting Mark Carney. Now, do we blame the former Bank of England governor for any of our economic woes today? Because he was criticised heavily, wasn't he, for massively quantitatively easing.

35:17Mark Carney was a disastrous governor of the Bank of England. Get off the fence. Seriously? Yes. Disastrous. He didn't understand monetary policy and he printed money like there was no tomorrow. And he failed to begin the process of normalizing interest rates when the economy was doing quite well. So, um, quantitative easing that was done to get through the global financial crisis of 2008 was a sensible thing to do, but it carried on too long. It went too far and it wasn't reversed. And that meant that when we got to COVID and there was more quantitative easing, there were no other instruments for the Bank of England to use because interest rates were still zero.

35:56So he was a failure as Governor Bank of England on that ground. He also politicized the Bank of England and discredited it by being the chair leader for George Osbenomics, that is to say very anti-Brexit, which was not the business of the Bank of England. Oh yes, he was a key proponent of Project Fear. Oh he was, yes. He was one of the leading figures in Project Fear. Although he might be able to give our Prime Minister some advice on how to handle Trump because Burnham meets the Donald. I wouldn't take advice from Carney on how to handle Trump. Well, to be fair, Carney stood up to him somewhat, didn't he, with the whole Canada's the 51st state nonsense.

36:33Well, he won the Trump orderly won the election for Carney on this. But Canada's had a difficult time and very high tariffs now imposed by Donald Trump. Right. And Carney's just been snubbed by the European Union. He wanted to bring Canada into a close association with the European Union. What is it with this guy? He's absolutely obsessed with Brussels. He loves Brussels. Why? Has he ever been to Brussels? I don't know. Anyway, that's what he wants to do. Poor old Canada. And Alberta may be thinking of leaving Canada. I don't know if you've seen that. Yes, I have seen that. That's very interesting and probably lots to do with hostility towards Carney.

37:14So no, I wouldn't take advice from him. Oddly, whisper it quietly. the person I take advice from on handling Donald Trump is Sir Keir Starmer. Keir Starmer? He did it quite well. Yeah, but do we think Keir Starmer and Andy Burnham are in touch right now? Keir Starmer's... Doesn't cost much to keep in touch. International direct dialing. No, but Keir Starmer right now polishing up his CV, maybe putting it through some kind of clawed system, AI-ing it up. Oh, how I might be a good fit for the next leader of NATO. We know he's doing that. He's not phoning Eyelash McGraw, is he, giving him his advice?

37:47I wouldn't have thought Mr. Burnham would want Sakeir's advice. But he might need it. Do you think Starmer was good at managing the Donald? He was all around picking up his paperwork and looking a little bit like, I was going to say his b****, but you don't like such language. He didn't do it as badly as most people did. He managed to get some pretty good terms for Britain. He did the royal visits, which were incredibly popular with Trump, made Trump think well of Britain. The problem is you need to keep on doing it. We basically need the king to go out to be his own ambassador to the United States and keep the president of the United States friendly because as soon as he forgets when he last saw the king, relations deteriorate again.

38:32But what do we think the US president is going to be making of the UK Prime Minister? They're meeting, by the way, in New York because they're going to the United Nations General Assembly. That's on Tuesday. One to watch. Not really. I mean, I can't understand why the Prime Minister is going off to the General Assembly. Why? What's the point? I don't know. I mean, it sounds like a really big, important summit. Why? The United Nations is a useless organisation. The G7 is quite important because you talk to people who matter. But the United Nations is a waste of space. And we have to have it, but it's a waste of space.

39:04I think prime ministers go abroad far, far too much. They need to be at home running the country. Starmer was away far too much and it did him a lot of damage. Well, it got damaged domestically, but he's now lined up for a plum job somewhere on the world stage. I'm interested in the country, not Starmer's employment. Me too, but you can see it from Starmer's perspective, can't you? I mean, he was basically greasing the diplomatic wheels. He would much rather have remained prime minister than get an international job. I don't know. He once said he preferred Davos to Westminster. He did indeed. A very silly thing to have said.

39:33Trump has said about Burnham, I've spoken to him. I think he's a really nice guy. He tends to be on the liberal side, unfortunately. That's priceless. Yes. Trump is marvellous in his way, but he won't be consistent in his view of Burnham. He's not consistent in his view of anybody. Burnham's not even consistent in his view of Burnham, to be fair. But Trump will do what's in the interest of America, not what's in the interest of the United Kingdom. We should never forget that in the special relationship. It doesn't matter who the president is. They put America first. And we need prime ministers who put the United Kingdom first.

40:10We don't always have them. We will be back with more Wit and Wisdom together tomorrow, 5pm.

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