Should Polanski be arrested for his Farage Insta post?

0:02This is a global production. The Reform Party have reported Green Party leader Zach Polanski to the police over an image which they say is incitement to violence. If you can say that Zach Polanski was a klutz and may have broken the law for posting this stuff inciting violence, how can you simultaneously be defending Lucy Connolly saying, you know, let the fucking bastards burn? It cannot simply be that the police are asked to and ought to, in your view, investigate incitements of violence or call for political violence when it's against you, but not against people that you like. Zach Polanski, the leader of the Green Party, has just posted to his 700 ,000 followers on Instagram a photo of a man wearing a T-shirt calling for the beheading of Nigel Farage.

0:55It is undoubtedly shocking. That is Zia Yusuf, the Reform Party's Home Affairs spokesperson, also saying that the matter has been reported to the Metropolitan Police as a potential case of incitement. Zak Polanski is a political leader who's made his name online and might be bringing about his political undoing online. But should reform be careful of throwing stones in glass houses? Welcome to the News Agents.

1:29the news agents it's john it's lewis and this story we broke late yesterday afternoon and it involves uh the reform leader nigel farage and zap polanski the green party leader two uh figures we spoke about last week as potentially having perhaps peaked in british politics this story might contain some of the clues respectively as to why what happened was that zap polanski on his Instagram accepted a collaboration request for a carousel of photographs from a Green Party event. One of the images on this carousel showed a man wearing a t-shirt featuring a guillotine beneath the words, we're only making plans for Nigel.

2:11Of course, a play on the song, the 1979 song, Making Plans for Nigel. After the image was highlighted, Polanski did remove or unshared the post but of course it had been seen many many times since then a green party spokesperson said that he had not realized the image was included condemned it as a dangerous message and said that polanski did not support it but in the interim nigel farage and the reform party said that the incident was insightful and he should expect to be arrested yes and it's all very well saying didn't realise. But you are the leader of a political party with all the responsibility that comes with it.

2:55And the Reform Party was seemingly on a one-way trajectory, like Reform, going up and up and up. And Zach Polanski has got a bit of a track record now emerging on his social media posts where things get put up and then they get taken down. Or he then apologises for something he said, but several hours later. And the thing that puzzles me about Zach Polanski is, look, I saw it for years with Donald Trump, where he would repost things from a white supremacist, say, then hours later, take it down. But in the interim period, an awful lot of people would have seen what he posted. It sort of sent out a dog whistle to his base.

3:41Don't worry, guys, I'm with you, I share these views, but then taking it down when the controversy rages. That's one explanation. Or is he, to put it bluntly, a bit of an idiot on social media for spending so much time there and isn't really kind of checking and verifying in a way that a party leader should with all the responsibility that comes with it? And that is the bit I'm still unclear about when it comes to Zach Polanski. Yeah, I mean, the first thing we should say, of course, is just to reiterate the message, which I think, you know, reform are perfectly legitimately entitled to say, which is that sort of image, that sort of message, that sort of content should not be being shared by anybody, let alone the leader of a major political party with such a substantial following, whether he saw it or not.

4:32I mean, that is absolute self-evidently clear. Yusuf is right to say, you know, we're only two weeks on from the appalling murder of Anne Whittacombe. Circumstances are that obviously still being investigated. But, you know, we have developed this really, really toxic and appalling recent lineage of political violence in this country. It's not as bad as somewhere like the United States, but it's certainly as bad as it's ever been in this country, with perhaps the exception of the period of the IRA. so i think that all of that being said it is also true to say as you say john zap polanski has a history now of making missteps misjudgments largely related to the online sphere of course people will remember that during the gold is green uh after the gold is green attack polanski reshared a post alleging that the metropolitan police officers had been repeatedly and violently kicking the suspect in gold is green the met commissioner then actually ticked zap polanski off about that, saying the claim was inaccurate and misinformed.

5:26Polanski had to apologise for it. One of your theories is, you know, that you could posit, is that this is a sort of Trumpian play, which gets you attention. And maybe deep down Polanski is not that bothered if this is what everyone's talking about it. I suspect that that is not the case. Because I just don't think Polanski actually is that Machiavellian, really. And I don't think the Green Party is. I don't think it's quite in their bones. They've moved in that direction, but I don't think they're quite there. I think it's actually something kind of, it's not worse, but it's certainly as problematic and what keeps getting Polanski in trouble.

6:00Zach Polanski is a terminally online political figure. And that has been an asset. To some extent, it has explained his rise. You know, during that period of the doldrums of the Labour government and the Keir Starmer government, his using his social media content, which was so crisp and had such clarity and had such a clear message, it propelled them up the polls extremely quickly. And it managed to appeal to a disaffected left populist vote in the country that basically hadn't been spoken for and to since the days of Jeremy Corbyn. But you can have too much of a good thing. And you can see in terms of Polanski, I mean, to be perfectly honest, I sort of notice myself sometimes tweeting or putting something out, one of the first people often likes it or sometimes retweets it is that Polanski and that happens once and you think oh that's quite nice he's paying attention to what you're saying but when it happens a sort of second third fifth tenth hundredth time you're like may have you not got anything better to be doing than retweeting my stuff don't get me wrong it's excellent but you know what I mean and I think that to be honest this will probably be a case where he has just seen what's online accepted it without looking through it and is now having to pay the political consequence for it so I'll give him the benefit of the doubt then on this one that he hadn't seen it and oh god he should have seen Absolutely.

7:16You're firing with live ammunition when you're the leader of a political party. And don't start putting yourself your name to stuff that is, you know, ridiculous and stupid and dangerous in the way that that post was. You know, the idea we're making plans for Nigel on a picture of a guillotine. I mean, it's just plain wrong. But I think the other one that you talked about, Lewis, just a moment ago about the Golders Green Post. I'm not so sure. I don't think it was that Machiavellian. I think he wanted, you know, two Jewish guys had been stabbed in gold as green. And it was almost like it was an attempt to shift the attention away from the stabbings into the way the police had behaved and making the person who'd carried out the stabbings the victim of what had happened.

8:02And, you know, and what happened was you then propel a news cycle, which is about police, police ticking him off then him apologizing which gives it another round but then saying i stand by the criticism i just shouldn't have made it in that public way and i just thought that looked to me like you were trying to get two or three days news cycle out of something to take attention away from something so i'm not sure that i quite buy that he is as you know oh i didn't mean it i I didn't think it through. I think he's quite capable of, he's pretty clear about some of the messaging he wants to get over.

8:42And I think he was trying to appeal to his base. Well, look, in one sense, as we say, it doesn't really matter because the result is the same and he just shouldn't be in a position where there is a fine line between engaging with people online, doing stuff for yourself online, not appearing like you're being curated, but curated by someone else online. There's a fine line between all of that and then simply spending so much time on your phone that you're basically just sort of approving and accepting kind of like every kind of little bit of dopamine rush you get from a notification. You know, if you're a political leader, you shouldn't be doing that.

9:14And I think there's a sort of wider context to this, of course, though. The Green Party has, for quite a while now, it had this rapid ascent and it's had quite a rapid descent as well, you know, in a very short space of time. You know, the poll we were talking about just yesterday showed them at eight points, eight points in the latest sort of more in common poll you know at one point they were around 20 points or quite substantially far ahead of labor now down back to around eight points or so so on one level it's like zapolansky actually needs to get back into the attention economy again and do more extreme stuff potentially in order to get noticed but i think there's a backdrop to all of this which is this that partly explains why the greens have had this sort of precipitous decline One is obviously now they're now up against a political figure in Andy Burnham, who is more on their turf, leans a bit more heavily into left populism than Keir Starmer did.

10:10He's a far better communicator, that's for sure. Better than Keir Starmer is, arguably better than Polanski himself is. He's playing sort of Zach Polanski's trick back at him. My understanding as well is there's been a lot of internecine kind of trouble within the Green Party over the past few months. and this has absorbed a lot of Polanski's attention and energy. They've absorbed a lot of the figures from the sort of Corbynite left of the Labour Party. There have been a lot of internal battles about, you guessed it, Israel, whether the Green Party is too Zionist. Would you believe that's something that's been and has been debated about?

10:43I think the Jewish community will find that hard to believe. Indeed, but that is a debate that's been going on within the Green Party. And thirdly, you know, I've been told as well, Polanski himself, and I can understand this, was deeply bruised and shocked, I think, by the level of opprobrium that he got from some of the papers and the level of attention he received, which on one sense he courted, but in another sense he did not anticipate the sort of stories that were coming out. If you remember just before the local elections, kind of day after day of kind of negative stories about this, that, and the other half of the press seemed to be digging around his past trying to think.

11:17I think he felt pretty bruised by that. And so you put all of those three things together and you've seen a guy, to some extent, retreat from the political stage. And you can really feel that. You can really feel that. There was a moment when you could, you know, barely turn on television or the radio or podcast like this. And he wasn't there. And he's been pretty absent for something since the local elections, it's felt like to me. So can we just talk about the other side of this, which is, as I say, I utterly condemn the idea that people are putting up posters of guillotines and saying we're making plans for Nigel.

11:50Political violence has no place in a democracy and it's absolutely obscene that this is what got put out. And I'm very interested that Zia Youssef is saying that the police should be taking action against this on the grounds of incitement. Because this is the same party that wants to be the party of free speech that championed Lucy Connolly, who was imprisoned for posting, you'll remember after the Southport riots that she posted a call to set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards i.e. you know asylum seekers isn't that an incitement to violence isn't that an incitement to murder and yet Nigel Farage used that as a as a kind of recruiting sergeant to argue the case that the British establishment had become authoritarian, was clamping down on free speech, even went to Congress in the United States of America to say Britain has turned its back on free speech as a result of what happened to Lucy Connolly.

12:58Now, if you can say that Zach Polanski was a klutz and may have broken the law for posting this stuff inciting violence how can you simultaneously be defending lucy connolly saying you know let the fucking bastards burn yeah it feels to me that there are potentially two responses from reform on this one of which i think they would have complete legitimacy to say but one does expose themselves as you say john to the charge of quite profound hypocrisy perfectly legitimate for them to say that polanski is completely out of order and outrageous perfectly legitimate to say as farage reminds us many times that you know he's a man who absolutely lives with the shadow of political violence um against him lots of threats against him attempts of violence against him and it is outrageous for someone to even a political party leader for anyone to even skirt around the sort of imagery um that that t-shirt involves but then they've gone one step further which is to say that the police should get involved yeah now for a party as you say john that repeatedly tells us and collaborates with American political figures who want to tell the world that we are a police state because the police quite literally police and try and sanction us for what we put on our social media profiles, for them to turn around and say that the police should not only, that they are themselves reporting it to the police, which the Met have confirmed, but that they would expect Polanski to be arrested for it But well, I think you can say that it's one or the other lads.

14:35Either you want the police to be getting involved in our online life, political life, or you don't. And they might say, well, no, but this is different because this is an incitement to violence. Well, as you say, John, we have heard little else over the course of the last 18 months, ever since the Southport riots, well, two years ago, two years ago now, about the cause celeb, the martyr in the online rights view that is Lucy Connolly. Lucy Connolly has even spoken at the Reform Party conference as a star turn at that conference. As you say, John, it is hard to say or describe as what she did and what she said as anything other as incitement.

15:19Indeed, she pleaded guilty to the charge of inciting racial hatred under the Public Order Act of 1986. Now, which is it? Because it cannot simply be that the police are asked to and ought to, in your view, investigate incitements of violence or call for political violence when it's against you, but not against people that you like. And frankly, we see this so much in terms of the way that reform responds to these things. I'd really love reform to give an answer to the question in the way that you have framed it, because it seems to me that, you know, there is a centre ground of opinion which says that people advocating political violence, whether it's burning down asylum hotels or whether it is threatening to kill a political leader, it's just wrong.

16:12It's not acceptable. There are limits on free speech. You cannot be a free speech absolutist because it is ridiculous to say you can go in to a theatre and shout fire, cause panic as people try to get out when there is no fire. There are limits on what we can say. There are libel laws that limit what we can say in this country. And I think that the idea that somehow reform are taking umbrage at one thing, but then when they have got their own heroes and champions, they turn a bit of a blind eye and say, well, this is the police state and an authoritarian government. As you say, Lewis, you cannot have it both ways.

16:53And I think reform do need to say, where do we stand on this? And what are we going to say are the limits of free speech when Britain has been scarred by real violence in terms of riots and political violence, most recently the horrific killing of Anne Widdicombe? And we've seen examples from the right of politics of when we had a really appalling, disturbing sinister attempt at political violence that probably almost certainly involved a foreign state an adversary of ours of course I'm referring to the attempted firebombing of Keir Starmer's home when he was prime minister was this always greeted with the sobriety and the fury and the indignation of the prospect of political violence being brought upon the prime minister's home from some in the Reform Party and others.

17:43No, it was actually sometimes treated with laughter and derision. This is Sarah Pochin, the Reform MP for Runcorn, talking about it at the time. Our Prime Minister, we are told, was attacked by a foreign state. His front door was bombed, his car was firebombed, and then the Russians started a conspiracy about two Ukrainian rent boys. Keep your face straight. And why have we heard nothing about it? That's absolutely outrageous. it is all very murky and very weird why would russia want to bother with keir starmer is all i'd say i can't no no one else wants to bother and why wouldn't russia be happy that we've got an incompetence legacy free prime minister i just feel this story uh isn't quite right um and you know almost i almost feel like look let's not waste time talking about this in a way because i feel like there's some information missing on this story um and uh and i think perhaps more will come to light.

18:41Either they're trying to brush something under the carpet or, I don't know, it just doesn't feel right to me. It just doesn't feel right to me. I'll go on and give it oxygen. I'll give it air. I'll give the conspiracy theory that it was two rent boys that did it and Keir Stummer must have been involved in some ways. Indeed, I haven't watched it today. I seldom do, I must confess. But I suspect that our friends at Talk TV and elsewhere have been absolutely indignant about, rightly so, perhaps about what Polanski has done. But the disgraced Jeremy Kyle, who we saw there had plenty of form on all of this because with Matt Vickers as well, who's a deputy Tory chairman, he did exactly the same thing at the time, spreading baseless conspiracy theories about what was a Russian state attempt to blow up our then prime minister's home, dismissing it, putting out to his viewers that there's something else going on here.

19:27Nudge, nudge, wink, wink. And then with Matt Vickers, the deputy chairman at the time, sort of laughing along like a nodding dog, doing a series of just homophobic, utterly homophobic crash jokes about it wasn't his back door it was his front door being uh targeted and all this sort of stuff you know disgusting revolting stuff so this is the thing you know my frustration with all of this all this stuff is just like we've got to be consistent here yeah completely and and you are it your your calls and your anger and your fury about people not treating political violence or the threat of political violence or even sort of skirmishing around political violence, your protests about it will ring completely hollow unless and until you are similarly incensed when your own side does it.

20:14And it really is as simple as that. I mean, I saw the other, as someone else pointed out, Zia Yusuf, tweeting out earlier that if a council candidate for reform had posted a threat to kill a left-wing politician, it would lead every news cycle of the country for days. And some clever person on Twitter pointing out that this indeed literally happened during or before the local elections. The deputy leader of Lancashire County Council having to apologise after resharing a social media post that appeared to call for an MP to be shot. I remember covering that at the time. It's a jog my memory. Reform Simon Evans said he shared a post about Natalie Fleet, formerly the safeguarding minister and the Labour MP for Bolsover, from an unknown user containing a misattributed quote suggesting she had voted against having an inquiry into grooming gangs and that therefore she should be shot.

21:02That guy still has the whip. He's still a reform politician. So you cannot, you cannot be judicious about this and you cannot be angry at other people unless you adhere to and live up to the standards that you are preaching. Political violence is wrong. Full stop. The threat of political violence is wrong. Full stop. Doesn't matter where it comes from. Doesn't matter which side is propagating. It is wrong. and the Green Party, learn from the stupidity of what you have done and reform. Really, just be consistent. Right, we'll be back talking about Andy Burnham's latest plan. He's got one a day.

21:44One a day. One a day. So many plans. Five a week, five a day. Keeps the doctor away. He's got his latest plans this time on education. Stay with us.

22:07For decades young people have been told that this leads to success and this doesn't. I'm not having that. I want an education system based on parity between academic and technical. In a fundamental change to the system I'm announcing new routes for 14 year olds to get early access to technical education, skills training, work experience and connections with employers, giving them the knowledge and experience they need to get quality, well-paid jobs where they live. This is just the start of our work to restore opportunity and hope across the country. Okay, if you are listening to this podcast rather than watching it, when he says this leads to success and this doesn't.

22:52He has in his hand a university kind of cap saying this is what traditionally thought was of success. And then it goes to him holding a hard hat and saying this doesn't. And he's saying, actually, hard hats are a way to success as well. And this idea that Andy Burnham has unveiled, that children as young as 14 will be encouraged into technical training rather than academic education, again, has the catch line value the hard hat as much as the graduation cap. And I think this is really a fundamental shift for Labour for what has been, I think, as near a consensus as there's been on secondary education about academic subjects and the Blair goal of 50 percent of students going to university.

23:41Yeah, I think it's a really big moment. And it's something that Burnham has long believed and has championed in Greater Manchester with the so-called MBAC. So it's a sort of prototype version in a way of these proposals. So what Burnham is talking about is that, as John said, secondary school pupils in England will be able to take study subjects like manufacturing and AI in addition to core academic learning. The government said the courses which will be available from year 10 would be linked to local industries and designed to give children a clearer pathway into work. and obviously this is partly looking at and trying to arrest the you know substantial problem around needs those students or those young people not in education employment or training which has been getting worse and so it's clear that something needs to be done the question is is whether this is the right mechanism to do it as you say john i think this is this is significant i think it's significant in a recent labor history and it's also quite significant if they go through with it in terms of the broader sweep of our post-war education policy.

24:40Because one way you could look at it is starting to unpick the consensus which has really existed to a greater or lesser extent since the mid to late 1960s, that a comprehensive education, i.e. roughly speaking, most or all children getting a knowledge-rich, academic-led education, which they might provide, obviously prepare them post initially, you know, 15 and 16 and 18 might be a launch pad to further technical training down the line or whatever. But until you get to that point of departure from school, that more or less what we have is, as I say, an academic knowledge rich education. And that was, you know, at variance with what we had after the war.

25:26We had the Butler Education Act when we were supposed to have the sort of tripartite model where you have some kids going to grammar schools, some kids going to technical schools, some kids going to secondary modern schools. And that comprehensive education consensus was a riposte and an answer to that because it was considered to have failed. And I do think that, look, Burnham is right to say we've clearly got to do something. We have got an increasing youth unemployment problem that's driven by many factors, including, of course, increasingly technological change. um the thing that i think we've just got to be slightly wary of is unpicking though the thing that just in my guts i worry about slightly is unpicking that consensus on comprehensive education because there is always a worry at the back of my mind and i'm sure burnham is alive to this but there's always a worry at the back of my mind that whenever prime ministers come up with this stuff and i suppose maybe my own prejudice would be a bit more aware of this with maybe a slightly different type of prime minister but whenever this comes up i'm always very alive to and concerned with the idea that there are going to be certain types of kids who are pushed away from the academic route and away from the route that ultimately might help engineer as it did for andy burnham himself social mobility and the ability to move away from the circumstances and the place of your birth and all of those sorts of things and i do worry that you know When we get to a world where the David Cameron's children, for example, are very happy going down this route, then that's fine.

26:54But in the back of my mind, I always worry that we're never quite going to get there. I think that's so true. I think, look, an awful lot of people, you know, younger listeners or not as old as I am. I mean, you know, when I was at primary school, it was you either did, you know, passed the 11 plus and you went to grammar school or you didn't. And you went to a secondary modern school. and the grammar school where I went to, it was a lot of working class kids who did extremely well for whom it was a great engine for social mobility. But if you were in the secondary modern system, you were sort of almost on the scrap heap then and not expected to do that well and expectations were lower of you.

27:35And so the idea of the comprehensive education was a really noble one, that there shouldn't be this idea that there is a sort of, you know, there is a two-tier education system. There would be a one-tier education system where there would be some streaming within it. I suppose what Andy Burnham is arguing is at the age of 14, that if you want to do more vocational courses, then those will be open to you. I just worry that in the very middle class areas where you've got a lot of very articulate professional classes in the inner city, you know, in cities like London or wherever, they will be doing the academic subjects and in poor areas there'll be an expectation well you know you're not that bright go down the technical route and go down the trades route well yeah look i am i feel like i'm one of the less believers really in actually you talked about the sort of the end of the kind of blair era of more and more people going to higher education now this is a very unpopular idea in much of the right-leaning press it's it's a very unpopular idea across much of the British establishment, that people always say we've got too many young people going to university.

28:39And there can be no doubt that in some cases, degrees are not offering value for money for students. And they're going there and they're getting settled with a lot of debt and they're not getting much return. And that is an increasing problem as the employment market changes. So I'm not, I'm not oblivious to that. But generally speaking, dare I say it, and no one ever seems to say it, the expansion of higher education in this country has been a tremendous success. It has been a tremendous success. It has been a motor and a vehicle for extraordinary social mobility for literally millions, hundreds of thousands over the generation, millions of young people who have got jobs and moved into professions and accessed social and political and economic worlds that would have been completely unavailable to them without higher education.

29:24Moreover, the Blair era reforms were designed to arrest a serious problem, which is by comparison to our competitors, we didn't have as many young people going into higher education as we ought to. I mean, this is not something, as you will know, John, that Americans talk about. Americans don't talk about we've got too many people going to college. No, it is considered to be something that is desirable for as many people as possible. And this is something else we always miss as part of this debate. the modern higher education sector when this is talked about people it's as if like every young person is studying classics or is studying a you know archaeology or studying or studying you know some sort of very sort of recondite um artsy subject that isn't going to give them anything now as i actually think that we actually need more arts graduates and humanities graduates in this era of you know profound technological um philosophical change where we're re-engaging with the world i actually think that ability to think critically is going to be more important in the AI age and ever it was.

30:19But leaving that to one side, my overall point is that the modern HE world in Britain, it isn't just that. People, when they're going to get degrees, they are doing technical education. What do you think half of the science and technological and computer, and goodness knows what else. These are all fundamentally technical subjects where you get a degree, but it is a form of technical education. And indeed, these days, universities do so much in a way of sort of hybrid courses. Sometimes you can do apprenticeships and still get a degree at the same time you know it is a multi-layered kind of tapestry of education options which already exist so i think we've just got to be wary of throwing the baby baby out with the bathwater here because i think that there has actually been tremendous success in the expansion of higher education and as well the focus that there's been for 20 years and actually long ago about to 60 so like 50 60 years on gradually having a as i say knowledge rich education curriculum and academic subjects it's worked we've climbed up the peas and lee tables england schools are way better than than they used to be this has actually been a system that has actually been succeeding in the tech knowledge era that we're living in yes we've got a needs problem it's getting worse but i'm not convinced that the curriculum is the problem or at least the answer to solving this problem yeah look i'm my old university i was at southampton university and i'm you know i I stupidly was asked to become the pro chancellor or pro vice chancellor, whatever it is.

31:46I do graduation ceremonies, big events. And for years. That's you all over. Just come in and do the big stuff. And for years, I've loved the graduation ceremonies. And I've said, look, this is your passport. Your university degree is your passport to your career. It shows you can think. It shows you can reason. It shows you can argue a case. You know, whatever it happens to be, whatever you're trying to do, your degree is your passport to the future. and I really felt this year and I went was in Southampton a couple of weeks ago doing graduation ceremonies and I had this nagging doubt in my head about I wonder whether it still is I've spoken to so many people over the past you know a couple of years who've got really good degrees in really good subjects and they are struggling to get a job because they've got to go through AI interviews you know where it's not a real person that's interviewing them that and they are you know fewer and fewer jobs on the milk ground that there used to be where the law firm instead of taking 100 or 200 are taking 20 now because they you know ai can do so many of these jobs whereas you do think that the one place you're going to be safe is if you are a plumber or an electrician or a car mechanic or whatever it happens to be ai is not going to put you out of a job and i just wait until the lucky robots come.

33:00Yeah, well, you know, maybe. But you look at all these things that you think, God, unskilled jobs, you haven't got a future. And then you look at the high street where it's nail salons and barbershops and whatever else. Those are still places that are doing well. I completely agree with all of that. And I absolutely would first say, you know, we have got to address this problem. And God, I mean, if I, a number of times you hear politicians say, we've got to treat technical courses at the same parities academic like people have been saying and we do and we should and i'm getting to the point now where i think well certainly everybody says that we do so at what point at what point uh what's what's the metric here when we actually say we have or not because virtually every politician across the political spectrum says that we should and they're absolutely right to do so i mean the question is i mean actually stephen bush wrote a good piece in his ft newsletter about this today and i thought he bang on the money which is that if you believe that our neat problem is correlative with or actually caused by i should say the um uh the problems around the curriculum then why is it the case that the northeast has twice as many needs to say the southwest or so way more london has way fewer than why is that and it's not because that in the northeast there's a lack of engagement with industry or local businesses or getting kids into that no it's because of the quality and productivity of the local economies right which is what you've ultimately got to address you've got to make sure that the economy and the jobs market is thriving as it is a position where it can absorb the young people actually going into it and actually just trying to basically augment the existing curriculum with extra vocational training or work placements and this sort of thing is not guaranteed by any stretch to ameliorate the problem that you're trying to solve.