Q&A: the Epstein files, Corbyn as PM, and are Reform clickbait?

17:37Jon Sopel:No, it was great, actually. I have all sorts of...

17:40Lewis Goodall:If it had been the 10 o 'clock news, it would have been boring.

17:41Jon Sopel:Yeah, no, because you're kind of doing the interviews about what the issues are and the policies and the like. But I remember once there was a dinner that John Burt, when he was the director general of the BBC Giving, which I was invited to, and the Liberal Democrat leader comes along to this dinner and John Burt said to him, right, should we leave our guns just outside the door and we could just sit and have a civilised dinner? Because the Liberal Democrats, I think, have always felt that they have been given a bad treatment by conventional broadcasters because they're neither one thing nor the other.

18:12Jon Sopel:And I think that the clickbaity point is true, that we want to hear from Zahra Sultana and Jeremy Corbyn. And we want to hear from Nigel Farage because of the progress that reform is being made. And we do give the impression that unless you've got an extreme point of view to articulate, then frankly, yeah, we'll cover Labour and we'll cover the Tories, but we're not really interested in anybody else.

18:35Lewis Goodall:Yeah, and I think this is why this deficit of coverage is one of the reasons why, if you ask sort of Lib Dem aides and operatives, obviously Davey got some criticism from the way he conducted the 2024 general election. You know, there wasn't a log flume in Britain that wasn't graced by the Lib Dem leaders behind. But it was nonetheless an attempt from them to break through in a way that did not indulge in some of those deeply kind of simplistic and populist messaging, but nonetheless created some attention, created some interest connected with people. And I sort of felt kind of two things at once about it.

19:13Lewis Goodall:I thought I could totally see it. It was very effective. It was really effective. It generated loads of publicity. It was great social media content and so on. It's also a little bit depressing at the same time that a leader of a party with the historic stature of the Lib Dems or the Liberals before would feel compelled or obliged to have to do it. But that is the sort of media environment we're in. But yeah, I think it is not, by the way, a discontent or an unhappiness that is shared or is had by the Lib Dems alone. Other smaller parties and indeed even the Labour and Conservative Party have some complaint with the level and volume of coverage that Farage achieves.

19:46Lewis Goodall:That is partly to Farage's political credit that he's able to do it. He does know he's a skilled player of the game at this. But I think it is undoubtedly true that some of it is being generated and born from a worrying concern of being seen not to cover them. And there is an overcorrection and overcompensation.

20:02Jon Sopel:It's the self-apologetic aspect of the media where we've got it wrong on Brexit. We didn't realise what the country was thinking. We didn't realise that the people were so concerned about immigration as they were. if Nigel Farage says something, we've got to cover it because we'll then be accused of being the mouthpiece of mainstream politics. And I think that it's gone just a touch too far where Farage opens his mouth and he gets on the television regardless.

20:27Lewis Goodall:And we're going to shut our mouths briefly for a break. We'll be back just after this.

20:37Jon Sopel:This is Ashley Akinetti from the Ben and Ashley I Almost Famous podcast. Ben, I've been reflecting a lot lately on how many big life moments our listeners have experienced with us. Yeah, it's pretty wild. They've watched us go from dating shows to engagements, weddings, babies, buying homes. Every stage comes with new decisions. The milestones are the fun part, but the planning is where things get real. That's why Klarna stands out. Klarna gives people smarter tools to help manage everyday money with flexible ways to pay, cash back that builds automatically, everything in one place, and support that makes everyday decisions feel less overwhelming.

21:17Jon Sopel:Since life moves so fast, the right tools can help you feel more confident. Download the Klarna app today or visit Klarna.com to learn more. California resident loans made or arranged pursuant to a California finance law license and MLS number 1353190. Clown a balance account required to be eligible for cashback points. Limitations, terms and conditions apply. This is The News Agents. So let us crack on. We've got a voice note from Sean in Newcastle. Hello, John, Emily and Lewis. This is Sean from Newcastle. Firstly, thank you for the brilliant podcast. I'm eagerly awaiting Lewis's John Soaple biography.

21:58Jon Sopel:My question relates to RFK Jr., who's the current health secretary in America. This week, he announced a withdrawal of$500 million of funding for the development of mRNA vaccines, which comes after he fired all 17 committee members that issue official government recommendations on immunisations, with some people who have criticised the safety and effectiveness of vaccinations. My question is, how does this impact those of us outside the US? Finally, is there any opposition to the changes in the US? Or are RFK Jr.'s vaccine sceptic views generally accepted? I'd be interested to hear your thoughts.

22:36Jon Sopel:Keep up the great work. Thanks. A nice compliment there.

22:39Lewis Goodall:That's very, very important.

22:40Jon Sopel:Let others learn from that. All right. So we're only going to include questions now where people are sycophantic or... To be honest, I thought that was a policy position we already possessed. I'm amazed that some have slipped through the net. So you've either got to be complimentary or have a first in genetics.

22:54Lewis Goodall:Yeah, something like that. We're getting a few messages from various TV news presenters, by the way, as we're going through there, calling you a complete wanker. Yeah, I know. Tom Bradby says, honestly, who the hell does this guy think he is? Fuck off. Even Trevor McDonald's got involved, honestly. We're getting some bile in for you, honestly. Anyway.

23:12Jon Sopel:Jan Neeming, has she commented yet?

23:14Lewis Goodall:Not yet, but we've sent the word out, so we'll get her comments before the end. Yeah, Maurya Stewart as well, by the way. We're still waiting to hear from her, but she's so polite.

23:23Jon Sopel:Is this riff going to carry on for another couple of minutes? Might do, might do, because I'm just trying to think of something to say to Sean's question. So our editor in that break just said to us, could we be a little tighter in the second half?

23:35Lewis Goodall:And somehow we've mentioned Morris Stewart. Do we think it has much of an effect outside the US? I can't remember what the question was. Well, my question is, does this impact those of us outside the US, is it his vaccine scepticism and what he's done in terms of funding?

23:47Jon Sopel:Well, I suspect that some of the big pharma companies, if they've kind of thinking, well, the grants have dried up here. And if you're at universities and you were getting grants from the US and you suddenly might start thinking, I wonder whether I'd be better off in Canada or London or anywhere else. We've got great seats of learning and you've got a history of academic research. I think it's incredibly short sighted. I mean, I do think RFK junior is a fascinating health and human services secretary, because on the one hand you've got the kind of appalling vandalism of just saying right we're going to take all this money out of mRNA research when the vaccines allowed a lot of us to kind of resume normal life post-covid but he's also doing some really interesting work in terms of wanting to take on big ag big pharma the food industry and the like and so i think his kind of legacy

24:39Lewis Goodall:is pretty mixed yeah i actually think that's long after the trump administration has has shuffled off into the far distance of history. I think that one of the things that will, the most impactful legacies that will linger for a long time is the effect on scientific research and so on, that happened really early on with Doge and Musk shutting off federal funding to Harvard and other research institutions. I mean, there was so much going on in those early days, but I remember being so struck by some of the reporting that was coming out talking about, you know, astonishing work on cancer and treatments for cancer, you know, being stopped in their tracks, just being stopped in their tracks.

25:14Lewis Goodall:MS, other degenerative diseases, just being stopped because, either because people were losing their visas, either because federal funding was disappearing. And you say, John, that stuff, once it's gone, it's gone. And it's not easy to pick up again. And there'll be such reluctance from the leading research scientists of the world and so on to resume their work in the United States. Because even if, let's say, I don't know, Gavin Newsom becomes president or whoever in 2028, there's always that lingering sense and worry about whether science in the US has become so partisan, you know, views on science has become so highly partisan that they are going to be permanent political environment, which is just polarised and which is going to be a sort of systemic risk to scientific research over the long term.

25:56Lewis Goodall:And you have to do it over the long term because scientific research doesn't fit neatly into electoral cycles. It takes place over years and years and decades.

26:03Jon Sopel:And you look at the treatment of Anthony Fauci, who was the head of the spearhead, the medical lead in the fight against COVID-19. He'd also done AIDS research. He was an astonishing public servant. His commitment was to public health of the United States of America and the rest of the world. Under presidents of both parties. Under presidents of both parties, he had been brilliant during the Bush era, Obama era, and suddenly he is now a political football requiring bodyguards 24-7. And you just think, why would anyone who put themselves forward for that, But why don't I just do have a private list of patients who I'll see.

26:40Jon Sopel:I'll make a ton of money. I'll join the country club, but I won't get the shit that I'm going to get by being in the crosshairs of a partisan country which sees scientists as part of that political football.

26:54Lewis Goodall:And in terms of answering the question about is there opposition within the US? It's like, yeah, of course. But that's the point. It starts to divide down partisan lines. And thank God, you know, we haven't had that to nearly the same extent in this country or in Europe. But you see glimmers of it. And I think that's one of the ways in which the RFK stuff does affect us. It's not so much directly in terms of the development of vaccines and so on, although doubtless there will be medical treatments, as we say, which are never developed or are delayed substantially, which would eventually have been rolled out to us.

27:21Lewis Goodall:So that will affect us. But I think the general kind of anti-science discourse, the sort of sense that science becomes polarised, It does obviously legitimise when you have someone like Trump or someone like RFK at that level of the American government. It legitimises this stuff. And we see clearly, we see it in the effect of that in the politics of our own country. It's a slow thing, but it legitimises it in a way that it would not have been legitimised or widespread only a few years ago.

27:48Jon Sopel:Look at the uptake of the measles vaccine.

27:50Lewis Goodall:Yeah.

27:50Jon Sopel:Does anyone want a return of measles being widespread with the devastating effects that that can have? and yet at the moment the numbers of people getting their kids vaccinated with mma is in decline and you just think this is terrible yeah this is madness question from ace 1980s doctor who companion of course ace played by also a band of the 90s ace of base ace oh just ace yeah all

28:13Lewis Goodall:right oh i go what's the song oh we're not going to sing again are we yeah oh okay fine um no ace played by the great sophie aldred if you're listening sophie anyway is it naive to think that the Epstein files will ever see the light of day?

28:27Jon Sopel:No, I think it's naive to think that you're going to learn everything, that there's going to be a wholesale distribution. I mean, the House of Representatives have subpoenaed the Department of Justice to hand over everything they've got. That ain't going to happen. I think there'll be highlights of grand jury testimony, which we already sort of know about, which led to the prosecution of Ghislaine Maxwell, which was the case that was going to be made against Jeffrey Epstein if he hadn't killed himself in prison or been murdered. Let's feed the conspiracy theories. But I don't think that they were going to hand over anything that could be in any way compromising to Donald Trump or embarrassing to Donald Trump.

29:06Lewis Goodall:I just don't see it happening. I mean, when you consider just how profoundly damaging this entire episode has been to Trump, the only thing that's really touched the sides since his restoration and re-election. And even that is just so interesting, right? Like the kind of the MAGA movement learning that if you live by the sword, you die by the sword. And that you, in the end, you can rail against the establishment and you can create this politics of conspiracy and paranoia and augment the deep sense of paranoia that has always been in American politics. And you can ride that wave and you can ride that wave and you can ride that way.

29:37Lewis Goodall:And then you become the political establishment. You become the state. And then suddenly those exact forces, those same forces, don't just go away. I almost felt sorry for Trump. I didn't. But I almost, I had sort of had a sort of rueful laugh when he was saying the other day that everybody just needs to sort of stop asking these questions. It's just getting silly now. It's like, well, you can't. You know, you've opened Pandora's box, or at the very least you've ridden this wave. And when you become the establishment, when you become the state, you find yourself subject to exactly those same pressures and exactly that paranoid style that you have done so much to heighten and to augment.

30:11Lewis Goodall:And there is a sort of poetic justice to that.

30:14Jon Sopel:Yeah, there is nothing more deep state in a conspiracy theorist's mind than to say there is nothing to see here. And that is exactly what Donald Trump is trying to say to the American public. Oh, move on. Nothing to see here. It's all nothing.

30:26Lewis Goodall:It's like that old joke about conspiracy theorists. You know that one about, you know, the one about conspiracy theorists dying. Goes to heaven. Yeah. Sees God. Conspiracy theorists goes to heaven. Been dying to tell this joke on the podcast. But do you want to tell it? I'll let you do it. Out of deference to your age, John.

30:40Jon Sopel:Conspiracy theorist dies, goes to heaven. And God says to him, you've got one question. and the guy scratches his head and says, OK, who killed JFK? And God says to him, it was Lee Harvey Oswald and he acted alone. And the guy looks aghast and says,

30:58Lewis Goodall:this goes even deeper than I thought. And it is that sort of comedy styling that makes us one of the unparalleled comedy duos of our age. We'll be back just after this.

31:14Jon Sopel:this is ashley kennedy from the ben and ashley i almost name this podcast ben i've been reflecting a lot lately on how many big life moments our listeners have experienced with us yeah it's pretty wild they've watched us go from dating shows to engagements weddings babies buying homes every stage comes with new decisions the milestones are the fun part but the planning is where things get real. That's why Klarna stands out. Klarna gives people smarter tools to help manage everyday money with flexible ways to pay, cash back that builds automatically, everything in one place, and support that makes everyday decisions feel less overwhelming.

31:55Jon Sopel:Since life moves so fast, the right tools can help you feel more confident. Download the Klarna app today or visit Klarna.com to learn more. California resident loans made or arranged pursuant to a California finance law license and MLS number 1353190. Clown and balance account required to be eligible for cashback points. Limitations, terms and conditions apply. This is The News Agents. Before we go, a question from Josh. It feels like we're living in really dangerous times with seemingly greater global tensions and nations at war than at any time I can remember. So I wonder when you think within the last, say, 100 years, global tensions were at their calmest and the world was seeing the fewest active wars.

32:41Jon Sopel:And importantly, do you think we were aware of it at the time?

32:45Lewis Goodall:This is a really, really interesting question. And it gets to the heart of something that I think is a real narrowness of our politics and media. and also going back a little bit to the discussion we had on Hiroshima earlier in the week, the narrowness of our understanding of history, because it is very, it has received wisdom. And it's been very commonplace to say that, you know, we're living in times of almost unprecedented uncertainty, a time of poly crisis, you know, where there's just crisis everywhere and it's all linked. And of course, things are profoundly uncertain. There is huge geopolitical tension.

33:18Lewis Goodall:It can be scary. I'm not sure, though, that by comparison to much of the 20th century with perhaps the exemption, and I think this is where a lot of this this is coloured from the late 1990s pre-2001 actually you can point I think we could sit here and go through each decade of the 20th century and you can point to endless crisis you can point to endless geopolitical uncertainty even in eras and periods which we think of somehow as sort of being grey and dull people often talk about the 1950s for example and this rising consumer kind of wave and all that and all that's true But you also have the Korean War.

33:56Lewis Goodall:You have the prospect of nuclear conflagration between the Soviet Union and the United States. To take another one, people always talk about, they talk about the Edwardian period and the kind of golden summer of that time. Did not feel like that. If you were living then in Britain, you had huge geopolitical tension with the rising United States and Germany. You had massive kind of conflagrations at home with kind of, you know, protests over rights to women and suffragettes. You had massive industrial discontent with, you know, rising trade union movements. You go forward to the 1920s, you have the general strike, you have Ireland basically coming to almost civil war in 1910.

34:31Lewis Goodall:So if you were, I think, sitting in almost any age, you don't sit there and go, we're in a golden age of relative prosperity and stability. There is always in any era and often in any era, profound unease and angst about the future, because that is what we're like as human beings and a lot of tension within the geopolitical system. So sometimes I think we get a bit, we almost aggrandize ourselves to believe that we are living in uniquely difficult times. And actually, I think that that often, if you look through history, is not the case.

35:02Jon Sopel:I would say that the year you were born, 1989, felt like a year of optimism. When the Iron Curtain came down, the Soviet Union collapsed. There was a kind of move towards democracies. Francis Fukuyama wrote this book, The End of History, and people thought, oh, it's the triumph of liberal democracy, and we all live happily ever after, which, of course, it didn't turn out to be. But there was a kind of, you know, growing up, and we talked the other day on the podcast about Hiroshima and the effect of that. You know, I grew up very aware of every time there was a sort of rise in tensions between the Soviet Union and the United States of America, and could this lead to nuclear war and the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 or whatever it happened to be, there would be these things.

35:45Jon Sopel:fixed points where you think oh my god there'd be these books about how to protect and survive and what you to do in the event of a nuclear war it felt at the 1990s that the risk of that had depleted considerably it felt like we were then living in a unipolar world that the soviet union had collapsed that china wasn't the great power that it is today and that american hegemony was there to stay and of course within Europe there was the breakup of Yugoslavia which caused the most terrible fighting but it was pretty localized it didn't feel like it was ever going to spread to anywhere that was going to affect your life and I think it did feel and of course you know 9-11 was the kind of okay we're in a new century now and it's been defined by what happens on 9-11 with those planes flying into the World Trade Center and the like and I think so I think there was a brief period then you could breathe a little easier and governments were taking decisions right well we don't need the old biblical line of turning swords into plowshares

36:46Lewis Goodall:the peace dividend obviously the period in the late 90s was a period of of unusual stability it was a very rare moment of unipolar power you know these moments don't exist very often where there is one power that is so hegemonic yeah that it's able to create order and the world i mean in a way the word which epitomises our own period, it feels, is disorder. And it feels as if the world is increasingly disorderly. There's also, which is probably unique, the threat of climate change, which is so systemic and overwhelming that previous periods have not had. But I suppose what I'm trying to say is exactly that.

37:23Lewis Goodall:The period of order, of geopolitical order and stability, which did exist in the late 90s for a few years, you know, smattering of years, that is the aberration. That is the abnormality. actually generally speaking if you take the sweep of modern history certainly in the 20th century but even before generally speaking there is not a hegemonic power british empire was for large periods of the 19th century yes we had the united states at the end of the 20th century but actually what there generally is what history is usually characterized by is geopolitical tension between established powers and rising powers that is a tale as old as history itself and more than that history is usually characterized by ideological contestation of big ideas being fought between states for dominance and for their own to try and project their own vision of order that's what we saw in the cold war between the united states capitalism and communism with the soviet union we're seeing that different forms of global order on display from china and the united states in our own era that is normal and it sometimes sort of annoys me when people almost complain about the times that we're in as if something is unusual about it actually the times we're living in now would be far more familiar to say someone who is living in the 1920s or 1930s 1960s or even you know the early 1980s than the late 1990s would have been we will be back thank you for all your

38:47Jon Sopel:questions remember compliments and only people with first class honours degrees need apply we'll see you soon bye bye bye bye this is a global player original podcast

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