The Two Matts Q&A: What is it crypto billionaires love so much about Nigel Farage?

0:05Hello and happy Sunday everybody. Happy Sunday one and all. Welcome to the Two Matt Q &A brought to you by the subscribers of the New World magazine. Go and join them at thenewworld.co.uk forward slash two mattes. First question comes from Mr. Martin Baldwin in Lancashire. would canada's admission to the eu as an associate member help or hinder those of us who dearly wish for the uk's return one day soon good question and emphatically help because it would build the scaffolding or help build the scaffolding let's put it no further than that um upon which i think we might climb back to where we want to be why is that the case well the background is that last week in Strasbourg, Ursula von der Leyen had Mark Carney sitting next to her and she very pointedly said, we must urgently reimagine our partnerships.

0:58I would like to work with you, Mark Carney, Prime Minister of Canada, on opening the door for Canada to be the first associate member of the EU. Now, that status does not exist yet. It was, I think, very sadly rejected for Ukraine. I would have liked to see Ukraine get that, but that's spilt milk under the bridge, as they say. What we know so far is it would involve kind of, you know, defence, industrial cooperation, joint products in the Arctic, tech, energy, critical minerals, economic security. So it's quite vague. And it must be said, you know, for full sort of disclosure is that there are member states in the EU who are not keen on this because they don't like the sort of multi-tier EU idea but um i think we'll look back on 2026 and one of the big events was carney's speech at davos where he talked about there being a rupture in the world order and he's sort of calling for middle order powers to band together and of course since then he's had a you know no end of trouble from trump on trade wars and lake on you know just endless um antagonism and you can see that he feels and I think he's right that it's time now for the these middle order powers that have a history of liberal and social democracy and so on to band together because we do live in a multipolar world and we should be one of those poles I also think that anything that avoids the poison pill word rejoin but expands the way and you wrote brilliantly about this expands the way in which a country can be associated with the EU is a good thing.

2:47So, you know, great. You know, if there's now an associate membership of the EU, which Canada has, that presents a Burnham or a future prime minister who's biddable on European matters with an option that doesn't necessarily involve anything to do with the Brexit referendum, which by then will be distantly in the rearview mirror. It's only already a decade. And I think it's really important, you know, for people who want to get us back into what the European model is becoming. It's already different to what it was in 2016. Not to think too theologically about full membership only or the Norwegian model only, but to think imaginatively and creatively, you know, and this could be, you know, There could be a recognised outer tier for allied democracies, which would give us a path into where we want to be, but not just as a not as a turning back time option.

3:47So I'm I'm down for this. Yeah. You know, I agree. Well, I agree completely. And I think what I really like about the idea is that it's it's really leads you into a conversation around the redefinition of what the European Union is. Exactly, yeah. And that's the conversation that, with a kind of blank piece of paper, Britain can take a full, meaningful role in. And we're not all re-litigating membership of, you know, and rebates and this, that and the other in the euro and all of that. You know, we're talking about, well, what is, in the 21st century, in the environment of Xi and Trump and whatever follows those guys, what does Europe become?

4:29What is its purpose? How does it defend itself? How does it strengthen its economy? How does it make life better for people who share our values? If that club is expanded to something like Canada, then that, it seems to me to be an absolute open door for a national debate here. yeah about well surely we want to be part of that too and i i am i mean i don't believe in that that things are ever this granular but i do think things are aided and abetted by bits of personal good fortune and the fact that burnham and carney are both mad everton fans oh never underestimate honestly i think never there is a there is always going to be a warm embrace between those two guys because the the first the first two paragraphs of every phone call and conversation are taken care of no no exactly right exactly that's not that's not nothing at all right conversation weren't ever since shit at the weekend no no no i mean those pieces of good fortune like that yeah yeah it was always baseball teams or you know in american politics it mattered it really did so i i totally agree and i think that you know it's funny i was talking to on your point about europe i was talking to um very uh intelligent uh former multi-role member of the national security council in america and i was bewailing the fact that you know i miss the america that i love right and he said yeah but i miss the europe that had you guys in it yeah he said because europe is an idea he made this he said those he said europe is an idea and we were talking about canada a bit he said europe is an idea that has the capacity if it if it becomes what it could become to play a major role in writing what's gone wrong so europe a europe or whatever it becomes called that contains canada yeah that's a very powerful you know body that is a body that g and trump and successors cannot ignore yeah i agree i agree and all of the criteria for rejoining that sorry i've used the rejoin word but but it's very hard it's very hard not to but for getting back into where we need to be that these are all positives you know they're getting back in the room they're not concessions and mitigations and oh you know we'll lose this we'll lose that you know we've got to we've got to be back in the room unless we want to shrink away and be more and more irrelevant i think i'm pretty sure burnham knows that right from shea it's been several weeks since the name jason arday was in the news which strikes me as strange because for a while it was literally the only story in town can the mats as seasoned news professionals shed any light on this phenomenon what do you reckon that well it's a very interesting point and it's it's something that i felt aware of myself in in the last few weeks um and you know i i guess the first thing to say is is that what i'm about to say is nothing to do with jason arday really it's about the way news and complicated stories are handled and poor jason arday you know there'll be a coroner's report and all of this business and his family will still be very much coping with his personal tragedy.

7:58But the story, the story of Jason Arday, I think, followed a cycle which is so transparently obvious, but is really worrying for how we consume media. And it's because, in a nutshell, it was a very complicated, nuanced story with loads of facts that nobody really had a grip on and still to this day don't have a total grip on and yet the way that our digital news media is set up is for hot takes of one color or another and of binary views and of absolutism and this is i'm on this side of a fence and i'm on that side of a fence and this is where the traffic gravitates to the really interested engaged traffic who feel the emotion of a story will they're not looking for balance and consideration and doubt they're looking for certainty and anger and commitment to resolution and and unfortunately for them in this case all of those things there is no certainty there is no there is a surface of doubt around what this story to this day adds up to so what happens is you get your frenzy your feeding frenzy of of opinion uh on both sides you get this absolute spike of volubility and then because the columnists and the writers and the editors are fairly intelligent they start to realize bloody hell this is actually more complicated than we might have thought on day one to six and they start to back off a bit lose a bit of interest and also the audience dwindles down to the people who are really really convicted about on this topic and so it becomes less commercially interesting to them to pursue it and but even having said that there is something particularly um spiky about the jason arday coverage which is where you have people individuals on social media who are absolutely raging about what had happened one way or another and they've gone quiet a little bit as it's as it's become painfully obvious that it's a much more complicated story than any of us really could understand in in in the in the sort of rocket blast of the first days when everybody was just looking at this enormous event uh and forming very hard and fast opinions and getting entrenched in them as as the nuance dawned on them it it has in the last couple of weeks dissipated almost completely and it's quite hard actually to find even some of the people who were who were going on and on and on about certain aspects of this story relentlessly have been very kind of quiet in the last week or so it is odd it is very true and i i think there there's a respectable reason and then there's the real reason which you kind of nailed which is the respectable reason is that the investigations are now as you said full tilt the inquest opened on the 26th of august uh and then on the 4th of september nazi afsar was named as the um uh the chair of the independent cambridge inquiry into it the first phase anyway so there's the official reason is well we'll wait until the invest the the inquest is over and the investigation at cambridge is is is complete but the real reason is the one you mentioned that which is you know dogs may bark but the train clatters on right which is that I felt that um one of the most grotesque aspects of the um Jason Arde story um was the way in which everyone had been arguing about Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey harmless I mean it didn't matter and I was participating in that but you know in the end it doesn't you know no one no one's life is that there are no real there are no real sort of risks entailed in me writing a column about the odyssey i hope anyway right yeah but everyone was everyone had a hot take on it okay and it was kind of the unicultural moment and then with a hard you know on the car everyone just moved over to jason arday right and it sod the odyssey we don't want to talk about that anymore we're going to talk about this actually incredibly serious and as it turned out tragic story and everyone's going to be furious with each other for a number of weeks and there's of books so that'll keep the story running and it did and then as you said he stopped and um and i i was just thinking back you know what happened what did we then go on and write and i think we everyone started writing about few water scorcher with the heat wave and the early release prisoner row and the eclipse and there was a few asylum scandals and and then there was oh you know tom holland and zendaya's wedding and before you knew it it was jason who yeah and And you're right, there is something grotesque because the only things that were left to write about Jason Arde were by of necessity complicated.

13:04Yes. And didn't have, you know, sorry, but headlines. Right. They had if they had honest headlines, I'm not absolutely sure. Or, you know, I need to know more headlines, which are harder and harder. And look, you know, I mean, this is just the world in which we live. it is harder to write stories uh that are nuanced in a in a digital environment it just is and i hope that we carry on doing so it's one of the reasons i love working at the new world but you know it is it will be idle to deny that that in our kind of careers respectively the kind of number of pieces that are written which admit at least some level of doubt or nuance is has declined spectacularly because it is if not a professional risk then what was once seen as a strength is now seen as um well what do you really believe you know well that's right why am i why am i wasting my time reading this guy is he hitler or isn't he you know i want to know i mean the other factor that you and i both know and i'm sure the listeners do is that media has become more personality based you know it's less about the big titles it's now about the voices within them you know or outside of them and like you say you know there's no there is no um there's no reward for for doubt and ambiguity um i have to say one guy who i admire because he's built a big personal um following on substack and but does embrace doubt and ambiguity and is quite brave about marching towards it is david aronovich that's very true that's very true he's um he's made that part of his shtick is saying look you know i don't i don't always know um but yeah this is what's happening i think that that is a valuable journalistic service he wrote a great he wrote a great newsletter this week just on that point he wrote what i thought was an excellent newsletter this week about uh being at a gym or someone a friend being a gym where a woman had a free palestine t-shirt on right yes and um i personally think ludicrously the cops were called right um But what David did was he went through all the different scenarios without coming down on it.

15:14And I thought exactly to your point, Matt, that was a very, very brilliant piece of journalism. Yeah. Yeah. Just just to say, look, you know, I don't have to have an absolute opinion. I can make you I can make I can lead you, dear listener, to thinking about this in perhaps a deeper way than you have been up until now. That's the whole point, isn't it? Isn't that the whole point? It used to be anyway. Yeah. Let's have another question from Alistair. Alistair. Oh, by the way, Alistair, our dear listener is spelt with an A, which reminds me that... Oh, it's so good. It gets better and better. It reminds me to plug our evening with Alistair Campbell and Michelle Hussain on October the 22nd at Cadogan Hall, where Michelle is going to interrogate Alistair about his new book, which is based on the new word he's coined, Percivilliance.

16:04and there are tickets available at cadoganhall.com and two Matt's listeners can get a tenner discount. Well, I'm hoping there's still tickets available. Get a tenner discount by entering the code ALISTERLIVE at checkout. So that's Alistair spelt with an A, live, all one word. AlistairLive at checkout and you get a tenner off your ticket. And Matt and I will both be there, so pop along and say hello. Right. The question from Alistair, this Alistair, is what is it about crypto billionaires in that they literally compete in how much cash they can shovel Nigel Farage's way? It's amazing, isn't it?

16:43Thank you for the question. I'm sure everyone knows, but over the 48 hours of the 11th and 12th of September, Reform UK got 36 million times two, 72 million promised or given by two crypto billionaires, Ben Dilo and Christopher Harbourn. and you know which is an extraordinary measure of the fact that even though Farage personally is in desperate you know straits with all sorts of investigations there are still people out there who clearly want him to win and are willing to spend a lot of money on it so the question is a very interesting one now Harbourn owns a substantial stake in a country called Bitfinex which is one of the world's major crypto exchanges and Ben D 'Lo co-founded BitMEX.

17:37So they both have massive interests in crypto. What do they want from reform? Well, they want all sorts of things. They want, for a start, a cut in capital gains tax on crypto. They want, this is something that, I mean, I'm not an expert on crypto at all, but I have picked up from reading a bit about this. which is they want a Bank of England Bitcoin reserve because they want Bitcoin to be given official legitimacy by central banks. And another they're doing looking for this in other jurisdictions. You know, Trump, of course, is very pro crypto. They want to stop the Bank of England's proposed digital pound because they see it as a competitor.

18:21and you know generally they want a government that is going to just let them do what they want I mean in a sense it's it's it's as simple as that and Farage has been involved commercially in in crypto endeavors and he would of course say oh I wasn't in politics then but he is and And the alignment between the far right and crypto around the world, yet another example of how their claims to be tribunes of the people is beyond a sick joke, but also consequential because crypto is an attempt essentially to take the power of how we manage our money in the world. It's quite a big deal away from official federal banks and the rule of law, but to occasionally ask for a little bit of spray on legitimacy from the state.

19:19Yeah. So it is complicated and there's a lot of jargon in it. But what it boils down to is, is this is a this is a massive and dangerous. I'd say I was going to say libertarian, but it's really anarchic, anarcho insurgency. and they see farage as viable which he is yeah i agree and also i think once you extend out you know it's not just crypto this is this goes to farage's fundamental political values exactly you know he is as you say he is biddable and viable even though he would say they've asked for nothing well come off it of course they they don't have to ask me that's the bloody point you know and And what's truly scary is that these are enormous sums of money, but they're minuscule in the bank balances of the benefactors, but they are having such a disproportionate effect on British politics that it seems to me that, you know, I remember Burnham, I can't remember the exact proposals that he was saying when he was either likely to become Prime Minister or just become Prime Minister, but there was going to be a real limit on foreign donations.

20:29100 000 quid um well they've got to get that through and they've got to make it retrospective i think but even which you can yeah you can it's civil legislation it's not criminal but it's almost that it's and this is why they've rushed to give the the money now and that the the uh the first one was explicit about that saying i was going to do a million pound a month but i'm going to give it all in a one because i'm worried that they'll try and claw it back if i do that so i think we've got to do that but then of course now it'll just enhance the sense of victimhood and you know with unfairly penalized different rules of the unions all that but matt you know 72 million quid buys you an awful lot of electoral potential oh yeah i mean digital media advertising we've seen the daily telegraph um being a willing partner in so-called spoilers from reform um unpaid as far as i know but you i wouldn't put it past a very highly polished commercial operation like the daily telegraph to be taking full page advertising from reform at whatever cost to to burnish their chances at the ballot books you know exactly and as one of the lessons of um uh brexit and maga has been actually the cost of campaigning has has declined because uh of course you do still want physical campaigning and posters and and adverts on the telly but you you know you also want to you know have um bot farms and cheap you know invasive cambridge analytica type uh practices which are very very cheap and 72 million quid i'm not saying You can buy an election outright, but it's it's at minimum, it distorts the democratic process.

22:23So there is, as you say, a massive issue here as to whether the bill, which is in the Lords at the moment, can be amended. And just just to I know I know people worry about retrospective thing, but there is a complete difference in law between criminal and civil law and criminal law. It's a complete no, no, and rightly so. But in civil law, it can and has been done. yeah right okay um we're going to take a very quick break and we're going to come back uh with a question from a listener called skunk worth must be worth waiting for

23:01welcome back dear listeners um to matt's podcast brought to you by the subscribers of the new world magazine next question and it's from the suggestively named skunk um thank you thank you for a fascinating discussion on AI and humanity in Thursday's pod. Thanks. Given the first line of the United Nations Charter reads thus, to achieve international cooperation in solving international problems of an economic, social, cultural or humanitarian character. If this isn't an example of something the UN should be dealing with, what is? Well, great question and great reminder of the UN's kind of mission statements, which goes on and on from that.

23:40But But yeah, you know, international cooperation is solving international problems of an economic, social, cultural or humanitarian character could be a definition of the challenges we're facing now with AI completely. So, yeah. So why aren't they dealing with it? Well, they're dealing with it because powerful nation states don't give a damn about the UN, nor do they have to. they're very very protective of tech sovereignty of you know wanting to control their own tech destinies and and people like Donald Trump and President Xi and Vladimir Putin well even Ursula von der Leyen you know would probably resist having a supranational body telling them what they can and cannot do but i do think we are you know as we discussed on on thursday ai is such a game changer in in the effects it's going to have on all of us and the risks associated with it that there ought to be and you made the point matt that there's been a failure of of of our ability as a species to self-regulate and to and to impose guardrails in our own common interest and not be led off down paths that certain groups of people or certain nations are are interested in we lack that now and the un we've we've said this before i think the un has come to a point where it's borderline as as as as a central body i'm sure it's got lots of worthwhile um extensions of of brand un if you like but in its main mission it is borderline irrelevant now isn't it It is.

25:25And, you know, I checked on what they've done so far on AI. And to be honest, it's a nothing burger. There are a few they set up a few panels to investigate. There have been some General Assembly resolutions. That's it. But, you know, it's it's again, one shouldn't be fatalistic, I think, because one of my great heroes is Dag Hammarskjöld, who was, you know, I think the greatest general secretary of the UN. You know, he really he put in a shift. You know, he got through the International Atomic Energy Authority in pretty short order in 56. And then and I always think this is an example of how the UN has mattered and could matter again with the right leadership.

26:09In 56, again, during the Suez crisis, it took the UN 10 days to a. invent peacekeeping and b. put boots on the ground. So Britain, France and Israel invade Egypt on the 29th of October. On the 4th of November, the UN approves the creation of a UN force. on 7th of november establishes the un emergency force and its first troops reach the egypt on the 15th of november now that is global leadership right which is probably why they killed him because that how much guilt seemed rather mysteriously to die in a plane crash uh which to this day remains a mystery i don't know but anyway um in other words if there's if there's and he was surrounded by it wasn't just him he was surrounded by very very able and brilliant people but and i'm afraid antonio gutierrez does not fall into either of those um uh adjectival categories um but the whole institution is just like thought for the day in a bloody big tower um but it needn't be and i think we've talked before about wouldn't it be great if the rules would the conventions would change so someone like an obama could be the general secretary it would be game changer if obama was the general secretary amazing i mean when you think about the the most powerful table within the un that people sit around and the security council and you look at the permanent members of it which are china russia uh france us and the us none of whom agree on a single bloody thing yeah exactly it it does and all of them having a veto to prevent any kind of any action that they don't like.

28:00It does seem to suggest that it's hit the buffers and it's long out of date and it needs completely reshaping and reformulating. But again, you know, who of those nations who would all have to give up this incredibly powerful position, who are them going to volunteer to spread the love and produce more equanimity in the world? At the moment, it's just like the Holy See, without the power. Yeah. You know, I keep saying, you know, I thought Magnifica Humanitas that the Pope did on AI was terrific, right? Yeah. But it shouldn't be the Pope that's doing it. I know. Well, I mean, it's utterly remarkable that the Pope is having more material impact on this conversation than the whole of the United Nations.

28:45It's ridiculous. Next question comes from Frank in Rotherham. And Frank writes, a striking and terrifying cover on this week's New World magazine. I found Annette Dittert's words inside every bit as chilling as the image of a 21st century Nazi salute. How worried should we be here in the UK about the AFD's electoral success in Germany? Well, it was indeed a great piece, Bionet, and thank you, Frank. So the immediate jumping off point of the piece, of course, was the AFD's victory in Saxony and Halton on the 6th. and this pod is being posted on September the 20th when there are elections in Mecklenburg, Pomerania so we don't know what they will be I mean there are reasons not to think that there is a read-across from the AFD and then there are reasons not to be sanguine so on the cheerful side of the ledger as Annette says in the piece and she's right the Germans don't have an Andy Burnham now Andy Burnham, how much of an Andy Burnham our Andy Burnham is going to be.

29:50We've yet to see. But he's not Friedrich Merz, right? He's a more agile and switched on and modern politician. So there's that. The grievances of Eastern Germany, which have been so important to the AFD's rise, are sharper and greater than any of Reform UK's strongholds. They really are. We haven't had a single comparable shock event like the arrival of around a million refugees and migrants in 2015 and 16 in Germany under Angela Merkel, with good intention, but, you know, very complicated consequences. So there's that. There's a paradoxical argument, which is that Brexit is awful, but it has discharged a lot of the anti-EU energy that still remains in Germany to be.

30:43And a final reason to be cheerful is that the far right is a lot less fragmented than here. So in Germany, where there has been a lot of fragmentation, which is good news. The reasons not to be cheerful. Well, Burnham is good. But at the moment, in spite of all of Farage's problems, YouGov has reform and labour still tied. Right. So they ain't gone away. There's another comparison, which is that. and I think this is really the bone, as it were, which is that if mainstream parties keep promising control and visibly fail, the insurgent movement just gets more and more credible and the ratchet effect of iterative failure carries on.

31:26We've had stop the boat, smash the gangs, whatever Burnham comes up with. This has to work, right, whatever it is. The AFT has also located what is the sweet spot of populism, which is the economy and migration, where you promise lying no doubt to raise the standard of living but also to get tough on migration and integration and that's the growth quadrant in and that's where reform sits so we can't be sanguine about that i think and you mentioned this on the thursday pod man i think spot on which is moral denunciation is exhibiting now a rule of diminishing returns in other words just saying you're racist, you're bigots, you're racist, you're Hitler, even if in the case of many in the AFD they are, is actually helping them because it's giving them an identity, you know, of protest and defiance.

32:20And the final thing I think that's worth mentioning in terms of the parallels is that Annette talks very eloquently about the collapse of the so-called Braunmauer, the firewall, which means that constitutional parties have always said we won't deal with extreme left or right wing parties in in in in electoral politics and coalition building well we have our own firewall which which is not anything like that but it was it's effectively established by Enoch Powell's rivers of blood speech in 1968 which was no mainstream politician can go this far or further and it was observed for many years I'm not saying Powell did a public service but he sort of inadvertently did because you could never go that far and now you can go that far and much further and much further yeah so that's what worries me so it's a great piece anyway do you know if you haven't yeah no no it's uh thank you yeah it's um it is a really good and it is really chilling and you know because she you know Annette is German she loves Britain she lives in Britain she's German very very well known very famous journalist in germany actually and and and john kampfner also who lives in berlin also wrote um um about about this problem the week before but annette's piece is very stark in that it's coming from a german talking about the fr you know the the expression in germany never again which you don't need to explain in germany what never again applies to and now she's saying well well, maybe that's not the kind of, you know, unimpregnable dam we thought it was, and perhaps, again, is coming down the tracks.

34:02And one thing that occurred to me a little bit in the context of Frank's question, which is about how should we reflect in the UK about the specific success of the AFD, there's probably, in Germany, a generation of voters, maybe the ones older than us people who had more direct proximity to world war ii who will be really really worried about yes an association between far-right uh political success in germany especially and any kind of rubbing off on hard rights let's call it hard right slash far-right parties here in the UK. And you might just think, well, bloody hell, don't want to go down that road because of the specific connotations with what happened in the middle of the last century.

34:56And so, you know, I don't think, you know, it's helpful to Farage and helpful to Rupert Lowe and helpful to, you know, the Tommy Robinsons of this world and the far end of things, where it's normalising a hard right slash far right expression of politics. But also there will be some voters who shudder a little bit at thinking, bollocks to that, I'm not going to have anything that could drag us down that route. Anyway, yeah. Right. One more question. OK, and it's from Jenny in Ballam. I am so fed up with pop stars posturing about politics on stage and I don't cough up 100 quid to hear them or their support acts tell me what to think.

35:41Isn't Ed Sheeran basically right? Well, now we've reached the big subject of the week, haven't we? Oh, God. Poor old Ed Sheeran. I'll never say poor old Ed Sheeran. Yeah, no, exactly. If ever a man... Have you ever seen that David Lynch exchange? No, sorry, not David Lynch. David Byrne. David Byrne, interview with him, where he basically says to Ed Sheeran, why don't you just make your music a bit better? and Ed Sheeran says, well, people keep coming up to me and saying how much they like it, so I'm just going to carry on with it as it is. And what would you change? He said, well, and David Byrne says, well, it's just basically shit.

36:18And I think basically Ed Sheeran's stance in all of this has been basically shit. And, you know, absolutely pathetic. And if I was, I mean, it's no surprise to me that every single support act has walked away. and i've no idea what any of them think about palestine or i couldn't care less to be honest i mean i sort of agree with jenny in the sense that i don't care whether my musical idols express a view on the middle east in the in the pop contact pop uh concert but i suppose if i'm going to see a guy that has done it consistently for years and years and years i wouldn't express surprise if he did it as the support act to ed sheeran what's mystifying is that ed sheeran seems to have been caught in a way.

37:01His due diligence doesn't seem to be clear because it wasn't news to me, and I'm hardly down with the kids, that Macklemore, the rapper in question, had fairly strong views on Gaza, right? To which he is richly entitled and has performed on stage. So whoever Mr Sheeran's sort of handlers and indeed Mr Sheeran himself, he's obviously not that well informed. So to come out and say it wasn't me, it was my management team, that sucks it's like come off it mate honestly but the the what i don't like i don't like people being excluded from platforms you know no no you know if they're ex if they're promoting um you know it's well say the guy stood up and said you know i'm pro hamas right and i i won't that's not what he said that's but that's not close to what he said what he's doing expressing expressing something that i'd feel comfortable expressing that you know lots of people you know and so and so and for robert craft who owns the stadiums to say this is hate speech no i think i well look i i can i can i can map out the logic of how he's got to that statement i think it's totally wrong but i can map out his logic but what i would say is that the whole thing has been utterly counterproductive if they thought they were stamping out a little fire then all they've done is set fire to the pine forest they really are it's ridiculous i mean there are so many levels on which it's ridiculous i mean the first is that ed sheeran is a bloody big hypocrite right i mean he's done lots of political things like the concert for ukraine and he wrote he on the on the side of the angels about brexit and you know he endorsed corbyn and you know he's been quite political himself so that's ridiculous second thing is you know he said something i hate this that he wanted a place of safety and sanctuary right that his concerts right you're a pop star right that's they're not meant to be places of sanctuary that's the whole fucking point you know i mean does he not know about i mean for example let me you know let me put go Bob Dylan, you know, John Lennon, the sex pistols, public enemy.

39:14Right. OK, let's go a little bit more vanilla, beige, awful, bedshearity. You know, Live Aid was quite political. Right. Yeah. Dolly Parton. Right. Dolly Parton, bless her of sacred memory. When vaccines were very, very politically divisive in America, had the guts to say, take your vaccines. drag take medina like i'm gonna do good on her right yeah but music and politics have always gone together so i don't know what straight i actually can further convince us to be that ed sheeran was genetically bioengineered in a horrific vat in switzerland right and hasn't actually in suffolk in suffolk and he's actually only three calendar years old or something right and he hasn't he doesn't know anything about anything because look the only circumstances and you you made the point mad about how it is that in which a artist on stage or any world should be shut down is a public order one right that's it not a political one so that was why there was all the hoo-ha around bobby villain last year at glastonbury saying death death to the idf and it was kind of is this a incitement to hatred and in the end the the view was it wasn't there were no charges and and you know on we go right but we can't we can't be having this situation where I don't want to and I certainly don't want my children and if they happen grandchildren to live in a world in which pop stars go oh no I want my concerts to be a place of sanctuary whatever happened to healthy anarchy for Christ's sake you know yeah honestly I think he's really really blown it hasn't he and I wouldn't be surprised if the tours are cancelled as well at some point he's lost a lot of followers there's a wonder I think I mentioned this is a wonderful moment in the Oasis documentary which if you like Oasis I recommend to everyone where they talk about slightly grandiloquedly about how everything went wrong when they split up right and you know there's a there's a there's a there's a montage of you know covid ukraine and all this but then finally they land on ed sheeran and noel says you know and ed sheeran you know and we take responsibility and i thought well that is a heavy burden to bear i can see now why you felt you needed to get back together again so anyway yeah as you as as you refuse also and um yeah i think ed has been really cowardly in dealing with this and and who would have thought i mean he looks like a warrior does he looks like he looks like a revolution he looks like a street fighter you know yeah all right well jenny thank you for your question um no we don't think ed sheeran is basically right i'm sorry but 100 wrong sorry yeah um right folks um that's it for this weekend uh do remember to get your tickets to alistair campbell meets michelle hussein at cadogan hall on october the 22nd tickets at cadoganhall.com your discount code to get a tenner off is alistair live a-l-a-s-t-a-i-r-l-i-v-e one word and so you can get your ticket for 25 quid and sit there smugly as you're surrounded by people who've paid 35 quid what a bargain people have greatness yes um send in your questions for next sunday's q a to twomats at tnepublishing.com subscribe to the new world if you don't do already to uh go to uh thenewworld.co.uk forward slash two mats thank you to the third matt matt producing the show um and until that latest next thursday um Have a great week.