476. Polanski’s Problem, Westminster’s Russia Blind Spot, and Justice Without Juries? (Question Time)

26:21And the story she's telling, and this is where I think she's vulnerable to Corbyn and also particularly vulnerable to Polanski and modern monetary theory, is basically, see if you disagree with this, is that we really want to spend much more money on the NHS. We really want to spend much more money on education. We really want to spend much more money on welfare. We really want to grow a bigger government, have a more generous welfare state. The only thing holding us back is the bond markets and our anxieties about inflation. And the problem with running that argument is that it then leaves a huge space on the left where people like Williamson can say, well, it's not technically true.

27:02If you really want to splurge much more money on the NHS and education and welfare, there are accountancy tricks that you can use which would allow you to do that. What she's not able to do is to make, I guess, the argument that you would get from the right, which is, no, actually, we can't afford this. Now, what they mean by can't afford this is not the bond markets won't allow you or you couldn't borrow the money. What the right has to be honest about is, of course, modern monetary theory is right. Theoretically, you could do this. What they mean by they can't afford it is if we are to compete with China and the US over the next 10 years, we need a smaller state, we need more entrepreneurs, we need less regulation, we need a much more business-friendly environment, because we need to grow the economy.

27:51And that we can't keep spending more and more money on health, education, and welfare, because that will crowd out the private sector, make the government bigger and bigger and bigger, and make us much less likely to grow. But she's not prepared to have that argument, is she? No. And the one person who might have been prepared to have that argument and who kind of did have that argument when they when jeremy corbyn was the leader of the labor party with john mcdonald who's shadow chancellor did actually over time build up a certain amount of credibility around his his analysis of the economy it was a very left-wing vision but he sort of i think did quite a good job in terms of projecting himself in a certain way that people weren't quite as spooked as they were maybe by hearing Zach Polanski the other day.

28:34Now, that being said, Labour didn't win that election. Now, Jeremy Corbyn did a lot better than people thought he would. But I think one of the reasons, the driving reason to me is I just think the country decided very early on, this guy's not going to be prime minister. So where he is now, he's in that same space as Zach Polanski. And that is they're trying to exert influence upon the political debate. He's not going to win a general election. He's not going to be the prime minister. Zahra Sultana is not going to be chancellor of the Exchequer. Those things are not going to happen anytime soon and probably never.

29:08Now, while they're doing that, they have to project themselves in a certain way. And I think that what the problem they've got themselves into, as the questioner suggested, is they've just from the off looked like a bit of a rabble. And it's a rabble that is very easily satirized. I've got to say, you know, obviously I have my spies up there. My favourite piece of intelligence, Corbyn did a poetry event on the Friday night with Len McCluskey, where Len McCluskey, former trade union leader, got heckled as an MI5 plant by the revolutionary communist group. And then later, later, Jeremy Corbyn got heckled for being too pro-Israel.

29:50Get that. That's good. I like the poetry. I want to hear Len McCluskey's poetry. I'm sorry. Can we for next week get a little bit of his poetry? I don't know whether it was his poetry, but he was at a poetry event. That's lovely. We do need some of that poetry. That's a lovely thing. Very good. Let's take a break. And when we come back from a break, let's look at Russian influence on UK politics. Let's look at what's been happening in floods in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Malaysia and Thailand. A little bit on Ethiopia, Egypt. And then we'll finish with your amazing secret campaign to bring us back into the Customs Union.

30:24See you soon.

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33:25Welcome back to the Restless Policy Question Time with me, Alistair Campbell. And with me, Rory Stewart. Michael from Leicester. Rory and Alistair, thank you for highlighting reform's ties to Russian influence, including the Nathan Gill case and conservative friends of Russia. I'm worried the wider media isn't scrutinising these links enough. Should they be doing more and how can reform be better held to account? Absolutely. I'm really pleased that we've dug into this. I do want us also to think about whether there are some reforms that we could bring into parliament more generally on this issue of lobbying, payments, connections.

34:01I mean, we're in a situation in which politicians over the last few years have gone down for some pretty odd connections. There was a scandal involving Mike Hancock, who was a Lib Dem, which included the fact that he was unable to say how many times he'd been to Russia because he'd, in inverted commas, lost his passport in the sea. We've had allegations now against Tulip Sadiq in terms of her acquisition of property in London and in Dhaka. She was the niece of the previous leader of Bangladesh. And I think there's a persistent question around all party parliamentary groups and MPs going on paid trips, which are often propaganda trips organized by governments, and the way in which a lot of governments use members of parliament as election observers.

34:52and sometimes seem to, in the case of Azerbaijan and actually in other places in the Caucasus, try to use European politicians as election observers on their side. So you saw a group of MPs, not just British, but others, declaring that there was no need for them to go to the end of this election in Azerbaijan a few years ago because it was so obvious that the ruling party had done so well. I'm in France, as you know, Roy, and on the drive down, Fiona and I were listening to a very, very long podcast series, which I strongly recommend to people. I know we should only be plugging Goalhanger, but I'm going to make an exception.

35:29And that was Peter Dukes of Byline Times and Carol Cadwalader, ex-of Guardian journalist, who's done some brilliant work on reform in Russia. And it's a 10-part series called Sergei and the Westminster Spy Ring. And throughout it, there are just so many really important stories, accusations, allegations, crimes. There are so many stories that just haven't been properly looked at. Now, they've done their best. They've really done their best. And I'm really troubled as to why Keir Starmer thinks that Nigel Farage should be announcing an inquiry into reform in Russia. One, why would he? Two, why would we believe him if he did, given his reputation?

36:16So why doesn't the government announce an inquiry into this stuff? There is so much stuff right across Whitehall. Some of the stories you mentioned there. I'd be very exciting. And, you know, I'm very happy to volunteer for that job. If one could actually go after reform hard, but also impartially after all the other parties. And this is the thing that worries me a little bit. And I thought you were going to say that what you were listening to in France was a long podcast on the incredible links. between the former French President Sarkozy and the Libyan leader Gaddafi and the funding taking place there.

36:48I mean, what on earth is going on in European politics? So, campaign finance reform, bans on lobbying, much closer investigation into these links, bans on paid foreign trips, and maybe put their salaries up so that they're actually able to go or, I don't know, provide funding for them to go on trips financed by the taxpayers so they're not dependent on being bribed by foreign governments whenever they want to go abroad and look at something. The other thing, look, we talked a lot in the main podcast, the way the press operates. Let me just give you another little insight into the way that reform operate.

37:21Now, Nigel Farage is somebody who does not struggle to get mainstream press coverage, particularly in the right-wing press. Last week, I've written my column about this this week, last week, there was just the beginnings of proper scrutiny. We were getting all the stuff about, you know, The Guardian had rerun these old stories about his classmates, his school at Dulwich saying that he was racist and used to joke about gassing the Jews and so forth. And they had 20 people that Farage went to school out saying he was this, he was that, he said this, he said that. That was beginning to cut through.

37:51Then you had finally, for one day only, Nathan Gill is on the news because he gets jailed for accepting bribes from Russia. What did Nigel Farage and what did Reform do? They took out double page adverts in the right-wing newspapers. They spent almost a million pounds advertising. And what I've, I mentioned Richard Stott in the main podcast, he was editor at the Mirror. I can remember I used to get told off for constantly trying to do stories about smoking. I mean, I was a big smoker myself, but I still thought it was newsworthy. There was all these reports coming about linking cancer to smoking.

38:30And they kept being spiked. I remember saying to a colleague of mine, why don't they interest in this? And he said, go and ask the advertising department, dear boy. And of course, I remembered it. We were funded by tobacco. So what Farage was doing is saying to the papers, listen, loads more where this came from, two page adverts. So they went easy. And think without getting two conspiracy theories about this. Let's say the big American tech companies began to be worried that we were going to be asking too many awkward questions about AI or the domination of American tech or influence. Think about the leverage those companies have.

39:06NVIDIA now, a$5 trillion company. Think about the amount of advertising they can take out. Think about the consultancies they can offer, the financial incentives they can offer, the little suggestions that maybe I'm going to be able to come into your constituency and help you a little bit in doing some data analytics on the needs of your constituents. Think about how easy is the government going to find it to stand up against these companies when these people are offering massive data centers, transforming the data for the NHS, etc. So, I'm really pleased you've raised this. But this is so important because this is about conflict of interest.

39:42I mean, we talked about this with Trump. Fundamentally, we have to keep coming back to conflict of interest. Why does anyone think it makes any sense for Jared Kushner to have been making billions of dollars from Gulf monarchies for his investment fund? Why does anyone think it's okay for Trump-linked people to be having direct conversations with sanctioned Russian companies about grabbing rare earths? Why does anyone not think this is going to influence the negotiation? It's a conflict of interest. You can't negotiate in good faith if you've got the dollar signs going Ka-ching. And why, given that Carol Cadwalader and Peter Dukes have done such extraordinary work on such an important story, why do you never see them invited onto our mainstream media to talk about these subjects?

40:33And what's the answer? People have sort of tried to discredit them or marginalise them? I don't know what the answer is, but I think it's because actually, back to the point we made on the main podcast, the media prefer the kind of here and now story. And so, you know, Nigel Farage denies is a better story than let's go and try and work out what really happened. Somebody sent me last week an analysis of all the times that reform MEPs spoke up for or voted in favour of measures that would stop proper investigation of various aspects of Russian activity. OK, now analyze that. Look at it. Test it.

41:06Now, to be fair to one BBC journalist, I don't know if you saw this, Rory, he tracked down one of the MPs who'd been named in the Nathan Gill case, David Coburn, who'd been MEP for Scotland. And he tracked him down. Guess where he tracked him down? To his chateau in France, where he was driving his little Peugeot out of his chateau in France. these fucking people who got us out of the European Union, whether it's him or Andrew Neil or Nigel Lawson. I've got an excuse for being a Francophile. I've always been a Francophile, and I've always been against Brexit. But, you know, honestly, it's like, but why is that not?

41:46Back to my point about the lens through which we're looking. Nathan Gill, that story, if that was a Labour MEP, actually, probably if it was a Tory MEP or Lib Dem, we would still be talking about him today. There would still be stories about it. It was a one day wonder. So that's why I think we should keep coming back to it. And the media should stop sort of burying their heads in the sand about really important stories that they have decided for their own political and sometimes commercial interests, it's not worth looking at. Right. Well, we've got a question coming in on climate water security.

42:20So Heidi Hellman, why hasn't there been any mainstream press coverage of the National Emergency Briefing on Climate Change held on the 27th of November. The messages presented by the experts were stark, and yet the public hears nothing about it. Alan, TripPlus member of Thailand, sitting in South Thailand, surrounded by floods with no end to the rain inside. I'm wondering why would any right-minded nation send a delegation to next year's G20, which will be presided over by the insane climate denier, Trump and his cowardly sycophants. Over to you. Well, we are back to the same theme. A little apology here.

42:52I was invited to this national emergency briefing and I had agreed to go, but then something came up and I couldn't. And it looked like there was a really impressive lineup of people. And we're in that space where I've used this phrase before, dumbing down, numbing down, dumbing down. We've got a very dumbed down media. They were probably talking about, you know, something else that day that can only handle one story at a time. But these were really serious people. It was put together by Mike Berners-Lee. It was attended by a lot of MPs and a lot of peers, a lot of business leaders. And it was essentially highlighting the fact that we are not prepared as a country for the impacts of climate change and nature breakdown as they are going to affect us in relation to jobs, in relation to decarbonisation and resilience.

43:39And you have some key military people there. You have food security experts. So it's a very good question. And the answer, I'm afraid, Heidi, why hasn't there been any mainstream press coverage of the National Emergency Briefing on Climate Change, is because we don't really have a serious media anymore. We have pockets of it, which occasionally do stuff. But I didn't see, I could be wrong, I saw next to nothing on this. And then the point from Alan in Thailand, these floods that have been going across Thailand and Indonesia, they are horrific. Hundreds of people are dying. Exactly. So Alan is sitting there, as are millions of people in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Malaysia, seeing relentless rain.

44:23So very, very heavy monsoon-style rains and tropical cyclones. 502 people being killed in Indonesia, 355 in Sri Lanka, 170 in Thailand. And Sri Lanka, this is basically the worst that they've seen since the 2004 tsunami. Hundreds of thousands of people are now homeless across the region. And this is something which is connected to the fact that the world is getting warmer in a whole series of ways. Firstly, as the air gets warmer, clouds can hold more moisture. So when the rain comes down, there's much more rain. But also as the sea temperature rises, the air moving from the hot sea up into the cool air creates a rushing system that can get winds up to hurricane speeds.

45:13So warm seas are making cyclones more frequent and stronger. And we are moving into a world where we are beginning to see very, very directly now these basic facts about science, these basic facts about, as people used to say, carbon dioxide putting a great duvet over the earth. And the point that the question amaze is that this is what Trump calls the greatest con job of all time. I mean, I don't know how you can, apparently he watches television a lot, mainly Fox News, but how can you watch television and see some of the things that we've seen in Sri Lanka and Indonesia and Thailand and Bangladesh and sit there and just be absolutely determined to say to yourself, this has got nothing to do with climate change.

46:00This is not man-made. Well, there's a great line from Claire Perry, who's the former conservative environment minister, who keeps saying that water is the key cutting edge of climate change. It's where we will see it first in too much water and not enough water. In other words, in flooding and in drought. And one place that we should see this play out, which will have big geopolitical consequences, we've talked about the Indus Valley and the way that India controls a lot of the water in Pakistan. But Ethiopia basically controls the water flowing down the Nile into Egypt. So Egypt contributes about 86 % of the Nile's water.

46:39And Egypt has 118 million people relying on the Nile for 97 % of its fresh water. And Ethiopia has built this thing called the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, just opened. So it was just inaugurated a couple of months ago. It's there to generate an enormous amount of electricity for Ethiopia. But essentially, is Ethiopia now putting Egypt in a very vulnerable state? And we've got to watch this because it's been back and forth, back and forth between those two governments, a real flashpoint. And you can also expect the flashpoint to happen quite soon between Ethiopia and your friend, who you went to interview all those years ago in Eritrea.

47:23President Isaias Afawarke. Absolutely. And I think you're on record saying Ethiopia is one of your favourite places. Maybe we should go and interview him again. Do you think he'd give you another interview? I'm not sure if he would. Oh, go on. We can try. We can try. That would be that. I'd be absolutely up for that. And then we can show some pictures. of you as the glamorous youth sitting there looking adoringly, even better disposed towards him than you are towards Nicholas Sturgeon. Oh, please. I think that I'd have to give him a bit of a tougher time than I did when he was a freedom fighter, which is what he was at the time, before he became one of the longest serving dictators on the planet.

48:01Well, listen, we should definitely come back to this Ethiopia-Egypt crisis because I think that is not going away. Now, Rory, big news today, Tuesday, Kate in London. How can the government be allowed to dismantle the jury system? Surely it's enshrined in our centuries of democracy. Do you think Starmery's cohorts, nice negative sort of word, will be able to push it through? Quite a lot of questions on this and a lot of opposition. I have got some sympathy here for the government. We have got a criminal justice system close to collapse. We have got a backlog of cases that is off the scale. Well, we've got people waiting years on remand, people waiting years as witnesses, people waiting years trying to get justice because the backlog has grown and grown and grown and grown.

48:46And I'm guessing that is that that David Lam is trying to address. This is where my you accuse me of my massive conservative instincts kicking in. But look, trial by jury is the most miraculous, wonderful thing that we have in this country, because it's basically putting ordinary citizens right at the heart of the most important thing, which is whether you are found guilty or not. And at a time when actually citizens feel so detached from democracy and government, juries is this wonderful thing. It's like a citizen's assembly, a miniature sortition, random citizens getting to decide. I think this is going far too far.

49:26There is absolutely no doubt the government has got itself in a massive mess, and it's a mess that goes all the way back to the Tories. It's stacked up even worse since COVID, but we had a massive crisis of a creaking court system, even when I was a minister back in 2018. But the answer is not to abolish the jury system. I'm so worried by this because it's a fundamental assault on what was really the difference between the continental and Anglo-Saxon systems of justice. It's something that wouldn't be contemplated in this way in the United States. And essentially, there is no reason why we cannot run a decent court process.

50:06We were running a decent court process when you were in power without having to abolish the jury system. We were running a decent court process in the 1970s when the country was much, much poorer without having to abolish the jury system. We're all hearing how crime is coming down. So with crime coming down in a wealthier country, we should be able to keep a system that we've had for 800 years. Okay, Roy, but you talk about me and my friend, be they Macron or Afaworki and all the people that you label, Polanski, all these people, apparently my friends. This is all down to your friend austerity.

50:36This is because the system is crumbling. Luckily, we voted in a new government that has been in for well over a year and has turned against austerity and is coming in with a new approach to everything. And presumably, it's getting rid of austerity, isn't it? It's going to provide good funding for the courts, good funding for prisons. Well, it should do, but it's bloody hard to do. So, the real problem is that they're pushing ahead with austerity, aren't they? I haven't noticed the budgets going up for the courts. Them having spent all their time saying the problem was the evil Tories cut the budgets.

51:05What they're putting the budgets up for is welfare payments. Remember, one of the first things they did when they came in was they had to actually let people out of prison who should have been in prison serving a sentence. I agree with that. I think they should have done that. I think this is one where it is entirely legitimate to say that this is a direct inheritance of a government that let this go. Fine, fine, fine. I've got no doubt the cause of this is austerity. But the The solution, presumably, if the problem is lack of money, the solution is more money, not abolishing the jury system. Yes, but at the same time as we're talking about more money for Ukraine and more money for the health service and more money for education and more money for child poverty, more money for lifting the two child benefit cap.

51:49Look, at heart, I agree with you. I think the jury system has been a very, very good thing for this country. That being said, to go back to my journalistic days, I used to think when I was sitting there covering the magistrates court in Tavistock, I didn't worry that some people were being sent down by magistrates. And I think you could maybe give them more leeway in the sorts of sentencing that they could do. There are lots of tradeoffs we have to make with the fact the government's shorter money and the government's made certain kinds of tradeoffs. Right. We talked about it. It's decided that what it wants to do is, for example, lift the two-char benefit cap.

52:26And it's also decided what it wants to do is cut international aid, broadly speaking, by more than the half breaking a manifesto commitment to do that. Which we totally oppose. Yeah. It's decided to cut 30 % of the staff in the Foreign Office when Britain should be leaning out to the world, instead of which it's massively diminishing. Tough choices. It doesn't seem to me as though it's going to bail out. I think the British Council is on verge of disappearing forever. The World Service is in trouble, et cetera, et cetera. Terrible, terrible, terrible. It's all terrible, right? and they're very short of cash.

52:52But of all those things, jury, trial by jury, is something so fundamental to British liberty. Yes, I think it's that. Yep. If you had to make me choose, would I choose to save the trial by jury system and sacrifice the other things? I'd keep the trial by jury system. Okay. Well, you said to Zapolansky that if you're analysing these problems, you have to work out how much is it going to cost. So how much, and this is a very unfair question because you haven't done the research, how much would it cost to deliver the sort of justice system you're talking about? You've now got 80 ,000 cases. The cuts under austerity in real terms to the court system were in the region of a few billion pounds.

53:36So you would have to increase the budget by a few billion pounds. Now, they've just decided to put another three billion pounds, three and a half billion pounds a year into lifting the two-child benefit cap. So if you ask me, provider of a choice, I'd put that three and a half billion pounds into making sure that we can retain trial by jury. Yeah, Rory, now you're having your cake and eating it, you also supported lifting the two-child benefit cap. If you're asking me my priorities here, I would choose trial by jury over the two-child benefit cap. I'd keep the two-child benefit cap in place. Okay.

54:05And I'd go after your winter fuel allowance and I would save trial by jury. Okay. And building new prisons, we're going to do that? I think we probably have to build more prisons, but I also think we should have far fewer people in prison. The government should be much, much braver about following through on what David Gawke suggested and more. I mean, the government here with trial by jury has gone well beyond what my friend Brian Levinson suggested. This is well beyond in terms of the trial by jury. Brian Leveson, who did the Leveson inquiry that the then government didn't properly listen to, which is why the press is still as awful as it is.

54:42He did a review of the court system and particularly this backlog. This does go further than his recommendations. And you're right, it probably is about saving money. But just go through some of this. is let's say you're a victim of sexual assault, okay? Which is hard enough anyway, because we know that a lot of people who suffer rape and sexual assault, they say the courts don't take it seriously, the police don't take it seriously, et cetera. You can take now longer than an Olympiad, longer than a parliament to wait for your case to come to court. And the other thing that's happening, and this isn't just the politicians saying this, because I've heard this from lawyers as well, is that if you're the criminal or the alleged criminal, you, quote, game the system.

55:29Because what you do is no matter how low the case may be, you say, I must have a jury trial. And you have that right. Okay, you go for a jury trial. Why do you have that? Because you know that the longer it goes on, the worse people's memory becomes and witnesses become less reliable, the more time you might have for a bit of intimidation as well. And therefore, the idea of swift justice, which is what we think the justice system should give us, it isn't being delivered. And so when people are making that choice, I think, would you at least agree that it should be tougher, the conditions by which you should be allowed to say, I deserve a jury trial, that maybe a judge could be allowed to make that decision for you?

56:12Yeah, I think that's an interesting idea. And I think I have so much admiration for Brian Leveson. And I almost everything you'd recommend I go with. But I think there's something, you know, we talked in the last podcast about the fact that I'm beginning to think as I go through all these departments I served in, how I would evaluate what's happening. Let's look at this one. This was the department I was in the Ministry of Justice. At no point did I think think that we would have considered that the answer to the mess that we got into with courts is to abolish one of the basic constitutional rights in the country.

56:46We can fix this by abolishing the constitutional right. It's a real recipe for despair. You cannot seriously be saying that our courts are in such a state that with a money focus energy, you can't get those lists down. And that's, we talk a good game about digitalization. We're not doing digitalization in court. So a lot of this is basic administration, getting through backlogs, getting people through, making sure that you're paying the right people enough, making sure you get the incentives right in terms of - More money, more austerity slash legal aid. Absolutely. So the government has a choice here, right?

57:25And the choice is, do they say, we're going to fix this by spending a bit more money. I absolutely agree. Probably will require a bit more money, but also lots of other things we're going to do. We're going to actually really get into the details of what's going wrong. Why is there a backlog? What's going wrong with the lawyers? Why have we got ourselves in this mess? How come we could run the system well in the 1970s with much less money? What's the problem here? Not, well, we give up on the whole thing, so we're just going to abolish trial by jury. So, Rory, while we've been talking and disagreeing agreeably about jury trials.

57:58Phone has been pinging away because David Lammy has been on his feet in the House of Commons, slightly watering down what he was planning, I think, but essentially backing or saying that they will implement the Leveson plans, which means that anything up to three years, no jury trial. Offences that might carry a sentence above three years, jury trial. Does that satisfy you? Well, it's a real lesson, as usual, being caught out on the hoof here, because of course i came out big in favor of brian neverson thinking that was a safe position would allow me further out um i guess if i was in the complete palace of truth alistair even though i adore and worship brian neverson um i'm a bit troubled by this i remain very very pro-jury trial and would prefer we were clearing the backlog another way okay okay well final one before i come to you on your plot on the customs unit i just wanted to pay a brief brief tribute to tom stoppard who died this week, who was, as many people know, the playwright famous for plays like Rosencrantz, Gil and Sanded.

59:01Incredible story. He was a Hungarian émigré to Britain. He was the most intelligent, courteous man. He was also probably our most loyal and regular listener. He was always getting in touch, saying that the one thing that kept him walking was listening and he would listen to absolutely every hour of content we produced because it was one of the things that got him out of the house and walking around the countryside which was a huge honor because he's definitely much much smarter than me much wiser than me much clever than me and uh i i'm pleased that we at least provide a bit of distraction while he stretched his legs be missed terribly well that's very very very nice to hear and you know he was one of those as i'm in france he got a lot of coverage for his death and big obituaries here as well you know big big figure and so yeah very very sad right final question for you alistair here we go george trip plus member from liverpool the telegraph claimed in their saturday essay that alistair is secretly plotting to get us back into the customs union is this true and if you are why am i not part of your secret plot it's so funny this isn't it so um i don't is there anything secret about saying, I think it'd be a really good idea if we got back in the customs union.

1:00:20The Telegraph actually went further, Rory. It said that I am even, I love that word, I am even plotting to try to get a second referendum to get us back into the EU as a whole. Now, what was really interesting, I did get, to be fair to the Telegraph, they did send me a

1:00:45Starmer to change his position on Europe. And they were told that I was one of the key movers in this and would I talk to them? And I didn't. But what was really funny about this story is the plot consists of me, Tim Allen, who was my deputy many, many years ago, then went off to set up Portland and is now back in Downing Street, and Tom Baldwin. Tom Baldwin, ex-journalist of the So it was Keir Starmer who worked with me on the People's Vote campaign. And what was nice about that, it was ABC, Alan, Baldwin, and Campbell. They were the plotters. I've got to tell you, George, I sort of wish there was a plot.

1:01:26But what was really interesting, how did I find out about this story? Which went on and on. I ended up reading it. It went on and on and on with this anonymous quote and that anonymous quote. and he said this and he thinks this and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. What was hilarious? Well, is this hilarious? I got so many people getting in touch, offering money for the campaign. One guy, very, very wealthy guy said, how much can I give and where can I send it? So maybe there should be a not so secret plot. Well, it's absolutely amazing, isn't it? I mean, it really is incredible how you can generate a story like that because I think we've consistently said we wanted to rejoin the customs union from day one of the podcast and probably said it on air 50 or 60 times.

1:02:12Yeah. And yet it's a very secret plot. Why weren't you included in the plot? I don't know. I'm passionate pro-customs union. I've been pro-customs union since 2019. So there we are. Anyway, so we've talked a lot about the way the press worked this week, haven't we? That was a classic example, though. There was literally nothing in the story. The thing about Tim Allen, for example, so Tim Allen's now in Downing Street. So the story made the link that in recent weeks and months, including yesterday in his speech, as I mentioned in the main podcast, Keir Starmer has been more vocal in saying that Brexit has been a disaster.

1:02:47Well, I've been saying that since 2016. So no, George, I'm not secretly plotting. I am openly campaigning. Excellent. Well, Alison, lovely to see you and look forward to talking again next week. Let me just try to draw together what we're doing. So today we did Polanski and the Green Party and where it's going with monetary theory. We talked about Jeremy Corbyn. We talked about the extraordinary developments in climate change and denial and the national emergency briefing. We talked about your plot to get us back into the customs union. And we talked about Russian influence on the policies of reform UK.

1:03:27Very good Russian accent. And I think the binding thing that brings it all together is the very odd way in which some stories are picked up, some aren't, and the way in which the media oscillates between ignoring stories entirely to then getting dragged into the details of what I keep insisting is not mixed martial arts, but modern monetary theory. Anyway, thank you very much. Great to see you. Bye-bye.