‘Tax rises are inevitable’: Rachel Reeves’s spending review decoded

0:04Camilla: The Telegraph.

0:09Camilla: It's the second most important day in the Chancellor's calendar after the budget, the spending review. Tomorrow, Rachel Rees will set out how the Labour government plans to spend our hard-earned cash. And the leaks so far tell us that there'll be£17 billion on the new nuclear fleet, $4.5 billion boost to education, more money for defence, oodles more for the NHS and at what cost do people have to pay the bills? The working people of the United Kingdom as unemployment rises to its highest level in four years. Tax rises feel inevitable to me and with riots on the streets of Los Angeles in the US and Ballymena in Northern Ireland, is Donald Trump solving the immigration crisis or making it worse?

0:53Welcome to The Daily Tea with me, Jacob Rees-Mogg.

0:56Camilla: And me, Camilla Tominey.

1:09Camilla: Sir Jacob, how delightful to have you in the Daily Tea studio with me as a guest presenter. Well, Camilla, it's an absolute pleasure. As we're colleagues on GB News, it's nice also to be doing it for this. I know, and united in our right-wing thinking, I think you'll agree. Do we need to call you Sir Jacob? I'm very happy with you calling me Jacob or Rhys Mogg if we want to be proper friends. As if we were at Eton, we could call each other by our surnames. On the subject of knighthoods, I would love your view on whether David Beckham should be joining your esteemed ranks. David Beckham's a very distinguished figure.

1:43He was a very effective association football captain, not that I know anything about that particular game.

1:48Camilla: Do you watch much football, Jacob? No, none at all. Occasionally if it's the World Cup or something. Sir Alistair Cook has got one Geoffrey Boycott's got one I think if our leading cricketers can get them it's only fair the leading footballers could and he's then been a very successful businessman and advert for the United Kingdom I think He queued for the Queen He queued for the Queen He seems like a decent fellow that honours aren't necessarily a recognition of your absolute moral worth they are a recognition that you've contributed something to the country and I think he's improved frankly more people's lives and given them greater jollity than I have.

2:24Camilla: Is there any event that sirs all gather at where you and David Beckham could be caught in some kind of conversation, maybe about posh's fashion empire? Not that I'm aware of, no. If you're one of the grand orders, if you're a knight of the garter, the thistle, the bath, there are periodic gatherings, but not for the ordinary knight's bachelor. We live in hope that one day you two will be united in perfect knighthood harmony. Shall we move on to the spending review? Is it important? I mean, I've said it's the second most important day for the Chancellor. Am I overcooking it? Well, arguably it's the most important day because in a way taxation is the consequence of your spending decisions.

3:07So what you decide today will be what you then have to fund when you get to the budget. So to make ends meet today is fundamental and it's where you decide what the government's priorities are and you then have to think about financing immediately afterwards.

3:24Camilla: The Chancellor seems to be making enemies of every department head. We've got a row with Yvette Cooper over police funding. Will there be cuts to the border force? Can you even imagine a scenario that would be so idiotic that as the government pledges to stop the boats and bring immigration down, that they then implement cuts to the border force? No, but departments do this. And this is where we should have some sympathy for the Chancellor. Because if you say to the Home Office, you need some cuts, they don't say, oh, we'll get rid of all our DEI people. They say, oh, we'll cut border forces. Yes.

3:57To put political pressure on the Chancellor to give them more money. And they get all the senior Rossers to come out and say, we're desperate for more cash.

4:05Camilla: I love the fact you're using the word Rossers. Well, it's a good term. Is this how you regularly refer to our police form? It is, yes. I think it's a good term. They come out and say, we're desperate for money and crime will go up. and we'll lose lots of police on the street, why don't we lose some of the waste from the police? Why don't we lose the waste that comes from on high of arresting or barging in on Daily Telegraph journalists on Remembrance Sunday? Or people who own Brexity things like Douglas Murray books. Quite shocking, really, that they stand anything as outre as that. And so the Ministry of Defence, for years, when threatened with cuts, would always say, well, we'll get rid of Britannia.

4:44Yes. And eventually their bluff was called.

4:46Camilla: I know, despite Chris Hope's best efforts. Indeed. And so that's what departments do, and chancellors, and more importantly chief secretaries to the Treasury, have to be very aware of these tricks and pretty tough-minded. This£16.7 billion to Ed Miliband's nuclear power projects did surprise me. I feel like I should be all for nuclear. Yes, I'm all for nuclear, but I think it's too expensive. and I think we need to look at what some other countries are doing. Why is Korea able to do it much more cheaply? When we're talking about modular energy, modular nuclear energy, we've gone to Rolls-Royce.

5:23Is that because it's a national champion or is it because it's the best? There's a company called Last Energy which does 10 megawatt modular nuclear reactors which when I last spoke to them they thought they could do in two to three years at a much, much lower cost proportionately than the actually quite big reactors that Rolls-Royce is doing. So I just wonder whether we're doing it in the most cost-effective way.

5:48Camilla: Somebody's raised concerns about that size well C being rather old-fashioned and there are more innovative measures that we could use, but we're behind the curve. Didn't Nick Clegg suggest that we should invest in nuclear back in the coalition years and we never did anything? Why didn't we do anything? No other way round. Oh. Nick Clegg said this won't happen until 2023, and that's a long time away. That's right, and therefore it's not worth doing at all. That's right, yes. And now we've got to wait a decade for this to happen. But also it's just the Miliband element of all of the cabinet ministers to embolden.

6:20Yes, but I suppose it's better than giving him money to do more mad windmills. Actually what we need is cheap energy, and to get cheap energy we should start fracking. It's very interesting. Ukraine's about to start fracking. There is an awful lot of gas. Yes, I think it was in The Telegraph yesterday. I think it was in your business pages. Don't always read business pages. Do not read your own business pages.

6:41Camilla: Well, you know, it's a long-running joke, but if I read the business pages, I'm confronted with numbers. I'm not very good with numbers. I'm better with words, et cetera. But Ukraine is drill baby drilling, and we aren't. And we aren't. And we've got trillions of cubic feet of natural gas underneath us. And actually, we should be getting the gas out. We should have more gas-powered electricity generation. It would be much cheaper. And we should revisit coal. Drax should be switched back to coal. The whole Drax thing is absolutely ridiculous. Just explain that to the uninitiated. Drax is a power station that is 10 miles away from a coal mine that's now closed.

7:17It was converted from coal to wood chip. The wood chip comes from Canada. The emissions are more from wood chip than they would be from coal. And we're paying£6 billion in subsidies to the company to do it. And the company's been found by Ofgem to have stated that some of its wood chip has been waste product when it's been brand new cut down timber.

7:40Camilla: This doesn't make any sense. None of it makes any sense. And it's the first time in human history, whole of human history, right back to Prometheus, that we have been making energy more expensive. Everyone has always wanted cheap energy until we got infected by Greta Thunberg-itis. Oh, Greta Thunberg. Didn't turn out well for her yesterday, did it? How sad. I loved the IDF soldier handing her a sandwich when she thought she was going to be, I don't know, strung up and killed or something. I read it was a turkey sandwich. Was it? But I thought she was probably a vegan, but I may just have thought that slur upon her because she's the sort of person who would be.

8:15Camilla: Also, it was in a plastic wrapping, and I would have imagined that she would like something more biodegradable. Probably, yes. So we've got money for nuclear, OK, So we're kind of giving that a little bit of a tick, although it's too expensive. Health and defence. I mean, it always goes to health. Well, there's a real problem with health. And John Redwood has kept on pointing this out. Former Tory MP and advisor to Margaret Thatcher. That's right. That's right. And big brain. Big brain man. One of the cleverest people in politics. Fellow of all souls. And also most delightful man. One of the most charming people in politics.

8:47But he keeps on pointing out that since 2019, there has been an 18 % reduction in productivity in the NHS. This is equivalent on its current budget to£36 billion. So what you've got to do with the NHS is get the productivity back. That is making NHS England work properly. It's not just throwing more cash at it. Cash without reform is like burning money. It's really, really silly.

9:14Camilla: It does feel like our money is being burnt. It's weird, isn't it? The more tax we pay, the higher government spending is, and the less efficient are the services. I don't feel that we are being serviced by the public sector these days. Well, I think there is a feeling amongst the electors have broken Britain. Yes. So the potholes aren't attended to. If you ring HMRC, you don't get an answer. The routine services that the government should provide are not being provided. The government consistently makes people's lives more difficult. How many bins have you got to put out? All that sort of nonsense.

9:51We're on the government saying our job is to make people's lives easier and make the routine things work properly. they're spending lots and lots of money without delivering the basic services that people think they're paying for.

10:01Camilla: We've got two daughters going through their GCSEs right now. Yours is finished. Mine's still got another week to go. And we've got£4.5 billion for the school's budget. Now, that is quite interesting because I do remember writing stories about the school budget having not really been touched by the Tories in about a decade, presumably because they were basking in the glory of Michael Gove's reforms. having improved school standards. It's really interesting education because the Tories really ought to trumpet this more because very unusually you've got the controlled experiments. So you know how it is, that Tories come in and they say Labour ruined education, then Labour comes in and say Tory ruined it, and you've got no evidence one way or another because you've got people going through the same education policy for the same period of time.

10:51With the last 14 years, 2010, 2024, You see what went on in Wales and what went on in Scotland. And you can see the massive improvement in English education relative to Wales and Scotland. Wales and Scotland get worse. England gets markedly better in the PISA tables, which are tables of international comparison of education. It was a real success and it wasn't about money. It was about how you teach people and what goes on in the schools and how you give authority to headmasters and headmistresses. It's basically making every school broadly independent, funded by the state but independent, and then parents can get what they want.

11:31The best headmasters and headmistresses can run their schools properly. Oh, and the ones that don't do it so well? Their pupil numbers go down. Yes. And all of this is being attacked by Labour, and it's a terrible mistake. It will ruin children's education, and it's being done purely for ideological reasons.

11:47Camilla: Yes, it's like the verbal sing-isation of schooling is now being eroded, and she, the Britain's strictest headmistress, was actually out protesting in Parliament a couple of weeks about it. So we have more money, but is it going to help? The Labour government has bragged about 6 ,500 more teachers being employed as a result of the VAT on private school thing, and yet we learnt last week, I think Neil O 'Brien pointed out, and Laura Trott, who's on Shadow Education, that actually teacher numbers are down by 2 ,500. It doesn't make any sense. Also, they're not getting the money from the VAT raid.

12:22No. Why? Because people are taking their children out of private school because they can't afford it. You must remember, well, both of us know. Yeah, well, you've got six children in private school. And you've got two in private education.

12:32Camilla: Yeah, one in state. When you're paying school fees, a lot of parents are living to the maximum of their income. And when you suddenly put it up by 20%, there will be a proportion of parents who simply can't afford it. And that is what has happened. And Eton, where I've got two sons, has increased its level of bursaries to make sure that not a single parent has to take their boys out of Eton. Wow. Although Eton can afford it. Eton can afford it. It's got reserves, not your little independent schools that we've been covering that closed down in a little village in Wales. That's absolutely right.

13:05And they can't afford it. And those schools, again, things operate at the margin. So if you are a school that is just breaking even and you've got 100 pupils in the school and you lose two pupils, you're now loss-making.

13:19Camilla: Yes. And it's the same as with hotels and airlines. Yes, care homes. Care homes, which I know you know a lot about, all of this is at the margin. And so you reduce at the margin and you close. And Labour doesn't understand business. That's one of its great failings. Well, let's talk about that because the backdrop of all this, we had Rachel Reeves come out in the week, in fact, yesterday, saying, well, look, we've U-turned on the winter fuel allowance because the economy is doing better and we can now afford to give more pensioners their winter fuel. I'm not sure that's borne out in any of the statistics that are coming out this week alone.

13:54Camilla: So we've got unemployment out. In fact, your lot, if I can call them that, the Tories, the Tories, Jacob. To be fair, the comms hasn't always been great, but this is an interesting table because they've laid out how the economy has got worse under Labour. Inflation is up 1.3 points. Employment is stagnant. Unemployment is up. We found that out this week. It's up by 0.5. GDP growth is down. Obviously, we had that surprising Q1, but we're waiting for Q2, which is affected by awful April. Borrowing costs are up, 0.6 points. Debt is up, 0.7. So what's your interpretation of what the Chancellor is saying?

14:36Rachel is either stupid or she's dishonest.

14:39Camilla: That's quite harsh. No, it's not. I think it's extremely fair that if she thinks the economy has improved enough to cover the change of the Winterfuel Alliance, she's talking rubbish because the economy has in fact declined since she took over. And the debt position and indeed the deficit position is worse than it was forecast to be a year ago. So there is no magic money that suddenly appeared to pay for this. So either she doesn't understand this, in which case she's stupid, or she knows it perfectly well and she's basically dishonest. What? They should admit they've made a mistake, that it was a bungle and it was a political bungle and it was an irrelevance fiscally because it's£1.4 billion on government spending of£1.1 trillion.

15:20Yes. It didn't make any difference.

15:21Camilla: We've done a piece today saying actually it'll only save£250 million or something. It's piffling, the reverse of the winter fuel cut. What they now save is piffling. That's why it was done as a universal benefit in the first place. and to give credit to Gordon Brown, he understood this, that to means-tested creates as many problems as it solves. And you're now getting to the point where somebody earning£35 ,000 a year suddenly has a 100 % tax on a portion of their income. There's no taper. But then do you agree with the theory that your lovely mum shouldn't necessarily get the winter fuel allowance or my lovely dad?

15:59Look, the problem is there are too few people in this country in the position of my mother and your father that it's just really easy to say, well, they don't actually need it. And the saving you get from taking away from them will be in a few million pounds. It won't be tens of millions, alone hundreds of millions. We had this problem when we looked at helping people with their winter fuel bills when, briefly, Liz Truss was prime minister and, equally briefly, I was energy secretary. And you don't want... I forgot you were energy secretary. You don't want to subsidise, but it wasn't for very long.

16:33You blink and you miss it. You don't want to subsidise billionaires, but you wanted a system that could be efficient, quick and easy to administer. So you didn't have lots of administrative costs around it. It was therefore much cheaper to pay for the few billionaires who were going to benefit than to set up an elaborate system that would take them out.

16:53Camilla: Just on Liz Truss, what did you think when Mel Stride attacked her last week and said, oh, we're never going to repeat your mistakes? I thought it was really stupid, actually. I thought it was politically idiotic to engage in blue on blue. Haven't you got enough problems? There's the great line of Ronald Reagan about never saying something rude about a fellow Republican, and I think this broadly applies. I also think that though what Liz tried didn't work, it is clear from what we're discussing about the failure, the stagnation of the UK economy, that something serious needs to be done. We need reforms that make this economy more competitive, that grow it.

17:33If we want to pay more money to the NHS, we want more money for education and we want particularly more money for defence, we need to grow the economy. We are not growing the economy by following the failed Treasury OBR model. Now, what Liz did didn't work and it's something we can go into on another occasion. but there are supply side reforms we need, there are rearrangements in tax system we need so that money is used more efficiently in this economy and that will lead to growth. So what she was trying was the right thing to be doing. She didn't do it in a way that succeeded.

18:07Camilla: Can I ask you something I don't think I've asked you before? Did you wish that Boris Johnson had made you Chancellor? Yeah, but would you have liked to have done that job? Look, I was very supportive of Boris. I loved being... Oh, but were you a bit wasted? I mean, you were great as leader of the Commons, but... You're very kind. Well, what do you think? I mean, I'm just intrigued by people that want to be Chancellor because I would kind of think it's a poison chalice, really. Whatever you do, there's going to have to be huge compromises made. And as you say, you've got to take on the behemoth that is the Treasury.

18:38Well, the people who are very good Chancellors are people like Nigel Lawson, who have complete intellectual self-confidence.

18:47Camilla: Well, you have, huh? And he made a very, very good job of it because he wasn't misled by Treasury orthodoxy and the ridiculousness of forecasting. All forecasts are wrong. Nigel knew this. They're wrong but necessary. He understood they were also necessary, which was what failed with Liz Truss's explanation. Does Rachel Reeves have complete intellectual self-confidence? I don't think she's got any at all. I mean I sometimes feel rather sorry for her when you see her sitting next to the Prime Minister at Prime Minister's Questions A few months ago she looked as if the world had collapsed on top of her head She doesn't seem to exude any confidence about anything And did you see that thing last week with the fellow rolling his eyes behind her Yes, it's become what's known as a meme, are you familiar with memes?

19:35My daughter educates me about these things

19:37Camilla: Yes indeed, but that was a bad, bad look Yes, she doesn't look happy Will she be in office in a year's time? It's very interesting. I had Lloyd Russell Moyle on my GB News programme last night. Massive lefty. Massive lefty. Famously took the mace in the House of Commons and nearly caused a political riot. Michael Hasseltine did that as well. Did he? All of these troublemakers are constantly grabbing maces. You didn't get where you are today grabbing maces in the House of Commons. I never grabbed the mace, no. But he was very interesting on this because he was saying that unless she really ups her game, Starmer will have to replace her.

20:13Camilla: That puts him in a very tricky position. A Prime Minister that sacks a Chancellor, as Liz Truss can vouch, doesn't last long in office. It depends on the reason for the sacking and depends on the strength of the Prime Minister. So Margaret Thatcher was able to replace Geoffrey Howe without any great difficulty. She wasn't able to replace Nigel Lawson without that being the beginning of the end of her period of office. Boris survived Sajid, but Rishi was the final nail in his political coffin. I think Starmer could sack Reeves and survive because it so looks as if this was Reeves' mistake. And that may be clever briefing from number 10 against number 11, but it looks as if it was Reeves who wanted to cut the Winterfuel Alliance.

20:59She went ahead with it. Downing Street agreed, but without enthusiasm. And therefore, she's the one responsible. And she also had a terrible budget last year that really hit business. Yes.

21:11Camilla: What's your feeling about business? I mean, you've got your fingers in very many pies. You're close to people in the city. You ran Samoset Capital, so you understand, you know, you're economic onions. What's your general feeling about the state of business in the UK, big and small? Business is very cautious at the moment because business costs have gone up, the national insurance rise. People are fearful about the death duties that are going to clobber them from next year. Energy prices are very high, so the economy isn't very competitive. There's an employment law coming in that's going to give workers rights from day one.

21:45So why do you want to increase your workforce? You're just taking on extra risk. So business is very cautious. And we see that in the unemployment figures, that they're rising because people aren't employing people. And you see in things like the hospitality industry that run on low margins, the 2 % national insurance rises having a real effect.

22:03Camilla: What does this all mean for taxpayers? Well, there's the problem with Labour governments is that they think that tax revenue will rise as you put up rates. And therefore they put up rates and they squeeze more. But they will find that we are actually at the maximum level of taxation that this economy ever gets to. It's about 38 % of GDP. And we're around there at the moment. So however they tweak it, they won't get more money, but they will create less economic activity. This is very much the experience when Howard Wilson was Prime Minister. You eventually get rates up to 98 % on what was called unearned income but you don't get any revenue from it because people don't bother having any income.

22:40Camilla: But that's not going to stop the Chancellor putting taxes up in the autumn budget, is it? No, of course it's not because it's popular with the Labour base. You saw Angela Rayner's become increasingly popular with Labour members by saying that she wanted to put up taxes which economically would be the worst thing to do at this stage. Angela Rayner. Very briefly, what's your analysis of Angela Rayner? Oh, I think she's very effective. She's got great charm. I met her once, twice in the House of Commons and she's a Labour person you can speak to very easily. Really? I thought she thought Tories were scumbags.

23:14She's quite happy to chat to them. She's quite funny. I did an awards thing for cartoonists and she made a much funnier and better speech than I did. She was very good. and charming. And she's charismatic. She would be a much more effective Labour leader in appealing to voters. Oh, yes. Because she's fun. She's a bit like a female Boris Johnson. Not sure either of them would be complimented by that comparison. But she's got that personal magnetism that I think people like.

23:44Camilla: She's got charisma, which is something that Keir Starmer lacks. She's riz, I think. Is that the right term? She's riz. Your daughter has been teaching you a few things. Slay. Right, let's get on to the next topic, which is Trump and these riots in LA. Has he coped with them well? And also, what do the protests in Ballymena in Northern Ireland tell us about our relationship with immigrants coming into our country?

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25:23from every angle. Listen daily, wherever you get your podcasts.

25:39Camilla: Welcome back. Shall we talk about Trump? What's your general impression of Trump, Jacob Rees-Mogg? I reckon you quite like him. I'm quite proud of Trump. He keeps on crashing my programme because he does his press conferences at eight o 'clock. So it's quite nice to have as a special guest coming on night after night, Donald Trump. It's really rather exciting. I don't manage to get to ask him any questions, however. I thought you were going to say he keeps on crashing my investments. No, no, no, not my investments, my programme. And then we sometimes lose what we were otherwise going to talk about.

26:07But I'm broadly very pro-Trump. You see, I think there is a terrible problem in global politics. It's in the UK, it's in Germany, it's in France, it's in the US. and that is that the electors are completely fed up with the people that they have elected. Yes. And they feel that whoever they vote for it makes no difference, no change. Nigel's referred to the uni party. It's that type of approach. In America, Republican president, Democrat president, nothing much happened, all carried on the same. Concerns of John Doe weren't taken seriously. And that's become a real problem. And we see that in this country.

26:43Ballymina is part of that. The concerns over immigration are part of this. The rise of Nigel in this country is part of this. And Donald has come in and, you know, it's amazing. He's done what he said he would do. This is really important.

26:57Camilla: But it's divisive, isn't it? I mean, let's just talk about, just to contextualise Ballymena, what's happened is there are now been some protests on the streets of Ballymena, which is in County Antrim in Northern Ireland. Missiles are being thrown at police. And this is because people have come out, lots of young people. there's been an alleged sexual assault against a local female member of the community there allegedly by two Romanian immigrants that's caused a huge amount of unrest and then we have the situation in Los Angeles which is ongoing where Donald Trump has brought in the National Guard to try and sort out riots on the streets there because of his let's be honest fairly robust deportation plans.

27:38Camilla: If you're there illegally, we're going to bus you out. But both of those stories tell a tale of, I think, complete, and it's not just frustration. I think there are genuine fears now, not least in the UK, that the immigration genie has been released from the bottle and can't be put back in. And that's why you get fear and loathing around things like Professor Matt Goodwin's white minority report. We had him in last week. Some of the statistics in that are quite scary. You know, white British people are going to be in a minority by 2063. And it makes people anxious. And it makes me think that the next general election won't be decided on economic issues, but the immigration issue.

28:24Camilla: I don't know whether you agree with that. I think immigration is fundamental. And immigration is a matter of concern across the political spectrum. It's concerned to labour voters. It's concerned to conservative voters. It's concerned to all sections of society who feel in certain areas that their jobs are being taken, in other areas that the culture of the nation is changing. It is a real problem, and Donald Trump's shown you can deal with it. The decline in illegal arrivals in April is 91%. What's been going on in the UK is the numbers have been rising because Labour's not serious about immigration.

29:00I'm sure you're right. I think immigration is going to be front and center. And Margaret Thatcher was so clever about immigration because in the 1970s, the National Front was beginning to make a little bit of headway. There were National Front riots and problems were arising. And Margaret Thatcher just stopped all of that. She was instrumental in giving us a very happy, settled culture, unlike America, which has a much greater race problem than we've ever had. Why? because of the 1981 British Nationality Act, which limited the numbers coming in and allowed people to live together happily because it took away the fear, the concern that we were being overwhelmed.

29:40The concern that you're being overwhelmed...

29:42Camilla: Can you remember how much it limited the numbers back in the day? Oh, it was phenomenal because up until 1981, anyone in a still-remaining British colony had the automatic right to come and live in the UK whenever they felt like it. Yes. So there were millions of people, potentially, who could have come here. It was really very important. It took away birth citizenship so that you couldn't come to the UK, have a baby, and the baby would become British. And then that giving you a right to stay here, something that's much more difficult in the US because it's constitutional right rather than simple legislative right.

30:12So it brought the numbers down from the relatively low levels of the 1970s. But it also got them under fundamental control. And they didn't start rising again until considerably later. And then interestingly, Michael Howard controls migration when he is Home Secretary and does that very effectively. And then from 1997 onwards with new labor, it begins to get out of control and control is never regained. Most of it European. European immigration is much higher than we anticipated and forecast at Brexit. When we left the European Union, we thought 2 million people would apply for settled status.

30:51It ended up being nearly 6 million people. Yes. So not only has immigration got out of control, but we can't even count it.

30:57Camilla: No, and we can't stop the boat since Brexit. Do you buy that argument as a lever? It's Brexit's fault that so many people are arriving here illegally by dinghy across the channel. No, it's a complete lie. Under the Dublin Accords, we took in more asylum seekers than we sent away. It was completely pointless. Dublin Accords did not help us get rid of people. We took in people from Greece who were claiming asylum, and we got rid of a few hundred and we took in about a thousand. So we actually net took more immigration prior to Brexit under the Dublin Accords. No, the reason people are continuing to come is that there's no effective deterrent.

31:37Labour gave up on Rwanda and it's very comfortable if you get here. You'll put out a nice hotel, you'll get spending money, you'll get some pocket money. What's to lose?

31:46Camilla: But how can we be Trumpian? I mean, it's one thing to be a president that can just issue a series of executive orders. It's quite another with our membership of the ECHR, our adherence to the refugee convention, the lawfare that is being played out in the courts of the land. You know, we're in a very, very different situation. That's why even Rishi Sunak had to admit that his kind of claim that he was going to stop the boats was absolutely ridiculous. Rishi Sunak didn't introduce the right legislation. The king in parliament is sovereign. It's much easier in the UK if you can be bothered to pass an act of parliament.

32:22In the US, they've got to deal with the constitution. As I mentioned, the birthright to be an American is a constitutional right. Now, Donald Trump has said he's cancelling it. We will find out whether the courts agree with that. In this country, the High Court of Parliament is supreme. So, really simple. We pass an act of parliament that repeals the Human Rights Act, repeals our membership of the European Convention on Human Rights, and repeals our membership and its effect in British law of the Refugee Convention. And we can do that. And then we're compared to Belarus. Oh, I don't care.

32:55Camilla: No. Does it matter? Who takes any notice of that? Well, I mean, people don't point out, for instance, that Australia and the US aren't a signatory to the ECHR, and yet there's no problem with that. No, quite. Our best protection of human rights is by our democratic right to elect members of parliament, not by a bunch of foreign judges in Strasbourg. But is there going to be an appetite for that kind of legislation to be tabled? I mean, you'd think that somebody like Nigel Farage would table it. It would then depend on reform having a majority. Half the Tories that are left might support it, half won't because they're wet and they don't like the idea of turning our back on international treaties.

33:33Camilla: They can be quite Keir Starmer-ish about it. They love these international treaties. They think they've got primacy over domestic law. Almost all international treaties have a mechanism for pulling out of them. You can pull out of them perfectly legally. But because domestic law is what is set in Parliament, we're a duly system, as you know. So international agreements do not have binding effect in UK law unless Parliament says so. So Parliament can always override the effects of international treaties if it feels like it. But we need to get away from this idea that the world is best run by Davos Mann.

34:06It isn't. It's best run by democratically elected and accountable people in this country. and if we have it run by Davos man and if we don't get control of our borders we will have more ballymenas. But there is a real problem, there's real anger and I think politicians perhaps are too remote from the reality of the discontent there is amongst voters. They feel very, very badly let down, they feel lied to and they feel that their vote doesn't change anything. It's why Nigel is so popular because people think he may change things.

34:34Camilla: All right, let's get on to Nigel in just a moment but let's just listen. The trouble is, it's rather unedifying the debate that goes on. So, for instance, Trump's obviously brought in the National Guard. Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, doesn't agree with it, says, well, you should have done that with my permission. And we're OK policing this for ourselves. And we can have a debate about that. The trouble is, though, is that the discourse then becomes quite juvenile and immature, as is often the case with the White House, unfortunately. And we get him nicknaming Gavin Newsom, Gavin New Scum.

35:06Camilla: I mean, they've had a row, haven't they, because they disagreed over the handling of the wildfires in America. And it's just all rather unedifying. And then the debate in this country, you know, it becomes debased in an equally irritating fashion. Anyone expressing any concern about immigration is a bigot and a racist. We even saw that story in the week last week, Jacob, where the people who write the guidelines for prevent regard anyone who is concerned about our borders being too porous. regards them as being a right-wing terrorist extremist. What's happening here? It doesn't make any sense.

35:42Camilla: But then you do get people protesting on the streets. I mean, we've had busloads of criminals that we want to try and deport and you've got, you know, I suppose Greta Thunberg or other types sitting down, staging a protest in the middle of the street trying to stop it from happening. Indeed. I wouldn't be too critical of people using language to get a point across in politics and the way they did in America. We would never behave like that. No, but you have to use language to get your point across. I may do it by saying floxy knocking and hillipillification. Donald Trump may do it by saying newscom.

36:16We all have our different approaches, but nonetheless the use of language is how you get your message across and you inevitably have to shorten it. The prevent thing is fascinating because it means almost everybody listening to this podcast is probably, in their view, a potential terrorist. Yes. I quite like this idea that all the retired colonels who read the Daily Telegraph and listen to this podcast are very dangerous people. They probably are, in reality, if they got that fed up. Well, maybe if they're gun-toting. It's silly. And that's the point where you lose respect for the left because all they can do is resort to mere abuse, like this Attorney General fellow who thinks we're all Nazis.

36:54Oh, Lord Hermer. Yeah, silly, silly old goose. They can't be taken seriously. They're not engaging with the real argument. They're not engaging with how you best protect human rights. I think you best protect them through the king in parliament, through democracy.

37:07Camilla: Although, don't you find it interesting, not least with Zia Youssef leaving reform, having a bit of a tantrum and then coming back over a row, over a burka ban of all things, that this is even a dilemma for reform now. How right-wing should reform be? Because Sarah Pochin comes out with a burka ban, Clearly the chairman, who is a Muslim, doesn't like it. Nigel is a little bit in a difficult place, actually. He has picked off as many righties as he can. He now wants to appear more moderate. He certainly wants to appear more moderate than somebody like Rupert Lowe. There was an interesting exchange, let's just listen to it, at the Reform Press Conference in Westminster this morning when our very own Tony Diver, who's associate political editor, he asked a very good question yesterday in Port Talbot and he's asked another great one today.

37:56Camilla: Let's just listen to the question and then Nigel Farage's response to it. Tony Diver from The Telegraph. Thank you. Can I ask a bit more about your staffing plans and the shadow cabinet? When you're looking for people to join your party and be spokesmen for these issues, will you be looking for former Conservative ministers who've got some experience serving in government when you're pitching to the voters? And if I may, Kemi Badenock has said that she would let bosses ban the burqa, and she's also backed mass deportations of foreign criminals. going... Oh, wow. I say she is moving, isn't she?

38:28Gosh. She's gone further on both of those issues, arguably, than you have. Is it possible that she is more right-wing than you? Well, most people are more right-wing than me. I mean, I'm a socialist, after all, given our family policy. Look, it doesn't matter what Kemi Baden-Ock says, no-one's listening. No-one's listening. No, no, I'm not joking. No-one's listening. The country is not listening to what she has to say, does not take what they say seriously. I even saw Jen Rick the other day say we're going through economic and societal breakdown. I mean, perhaps I'll lend him my clothes next, you know.

39:00Camilla: Discuss. What is it that Disraeli said about finding the Tories bathing and stealing their clothes, that this is a constant theme of political life, that people often make that point. Nigel Farage is a very effective communicator. But I think it is important that Kevin Bednock is beginning to say very clearly what the Conservatives believe in. The Burka issue is a slightly more complicated one because whether or not you're viewing it as a right-wing position, there is a tension on the right, isn't there, between those of us on the right who are basically in favour of freedom and those on the right who are basically in favour of control.

39:41Camilla: Yes. And I'm in the freedom category. It's like lockdown all over again, Jacob. It's like lockdown. I don't want to tell people how to lead their lives. Even if they do things that I wouldn't choose to do or I wouldn't want members of my family to do. Mind you, if Mary said to me she'd like to wear a wimple, I'd be absolutely delighted. Remind me? What's a wimple? It's part of a nun's clothing. Oh, I should know that. You see, this is why you are a practising Catholic and I'm a lapsed one. You should definitely know that. But don't we all want our daughters to wear wimples? I'm not sure whether my daughter would be seen dead in a wimple, or indeed yours.

40:12Camilla: I think that very briefly... No, I know, it is difficult. As a righty, I don't like the idea of telling women what to wear at all, although I am disturbed with the idea of women covering their faces as a result of some kind of patriarchal, oppressive society. It depends whether they're forced to or not. And the question is here, do they really know the rights that they've got under English law, strictly English and Welsh law, that they don't have to do this? I worry about Sharia courts. If people volunteer to accept arbitration, that is perfectly fair, but they need to know that it is not law.

40:53We actually, interestingly, established that only the king's courts have authority in his realm. In 1269, it's a very ancient freedom that you're protected by only one court. Now, if women who are divorced under Sharia law understand that that doesn't affect a legal marriage that they have in the UK, if they have one, that's fine. If they don't, then it shouldn't apply to them because it's undermining a basic principle that justice can only come from the king's court.

41:24Camilla: I know, but that then comes down to assimilation and our ability to educate people coming in and to deal with the subjugation of women in certain communities who aren't taught English, who aren't enveloped into our economic scene because they're not working, don't interact with other white British girls and women who can tell them these things. Which is why teaching English to immigrants is fundamentally important, because then that opens up to them the information that is available about the freedoms that they enjoy and allows them to engage with civic society. But on Nigel Farage, on that point about doesn't he need some former Tories beefing up the top tier of reform?

42:04Camilla: I mean, there's talk of defection. Suella Braverman's name comes up a lot. Your name sometimes comes up. I think reform needs two things. That's why I think it needs a deal with the Conservative Party. It needs to have a moral mandate as well as a nominal mandate. What do I mean by that? Kirstarmer has a majority of 170, but only on 33 % of the vote. Yes. So he has the nominal mandate, but because he doesn't have the moral mandate, he's not actually able to do radical things because there isn't the support for it in the country and it allows his MPs to become more difficult as they're gradually becoming.

42:39If Nigel does a deal with the Tory party, you're then talking about a vote share close to 50%. I think in 2020... Are you?

42:46Camilla: Well, no, OK. The latest polling gives them, the Reform Party, 29%. This is YouGov. And the Tories, 17. Well, that's 46%. So, yeah, OK. But you could add the Labour Party to the Greens and the Lib Dems who are all lefties. We've still got this half and half split in this country, half left, half right. You could, but the Lib Dems are quite different from Labour and the Greens are complete lunatics. So I wouldn't put the Greens with anybody. Well, you could put them with the Islamist MPs. You could possibly. But if you're talking about that level of popular support, we are going to need to do things as radical as Margaret Thatcher did.

43:27That the government is running things extremely badly. Our discussion on the economy, the economy is in a terrible state. It's in a downward spiral that shows no sign of changing. And it's going to need real changes to make the economy work to get the growth that we need. And that will pay for the defense that we need with a renewed threat from Russia. and what was it that the head of NATO was saying? If you don't up your defence spending, you'd better learn Russian. That's quite a serious message. So that's why you need the radical reform, but you can't do that on 33 % of the vote or 29 % of the vote.

44:00If Nigel gets up to 33%, got a majority, that wouldn't be enough to change things fundamentally. So that's one reason he needs the Conservatives. And the other reason he needs the Conservatives, and he doesn't necessarily need them in office, but he needs to speak to one or two of them, is what does he do when he goes through that door in 10 Downing Street and the cabinet secretary shakes him normally by the hand, he's clapped in, and then he's enveloped by the blob. Because how you change things in this country depends on the existing constitution. You may want to change the Blairite settlement, but how do you do that?

44:35What steps do you need to take? How do you make a decision in cabinet? How do you know that when you haven't actually been in cabinet already? And you can be told some of this, but you need people who will be there saying to you, these are the powers you've got. This is how you exercise the royal prerogative. All these basics of government that the Tory party and the Labour party just know because we've been doing it for generations, but reform doesn't.

44:59Camilla: What's the percentage chance he walks into Downing Street? It's a very interesting question. I mean, it seems to be going up. If you'd asked me a year ago, I'd have thought it was cloud cuckoo land. It now is not cloud cuckoo land. the cuckoo has flown out of the cloud land, so to speak. And we will continue to watch it fly. Jacob Rees-Mogg, what a pleasure it's been. It's always fun chatting to you, Camilla. It's always fun chatting, isn't it? And we are going to be back tomorrow with a comprehensive breakdown of what's in the spending review. So do tune in at five o 'clock.

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