Cheat Sheet | Mahmood defends asylum reforms, UN backs Trump's Gaza plan, ticket touting banned

0:00How does a banana trigger a CIA-backed coup? Do AirPods herald the arrival of a new global order? What do LED lights say about the future of humanity? I'm Ed Conway, and in each episode of my new podcast, Stuff Matters, I take an object, crack it open, and reveal the world-shaping forces hidden inside. This is economics told through the things we think we understand. Search Stuff Matters on your podcast app to listen and follow. Hello, you are listening to Cheat Sheet, the podcast that gets you up to speed with what you need to know in the day ahead without the doom scrolling. I'm Sophie Ridge.

0:39Sophy Ridge:And I'm Wilfred Frost. It's Tuesday the 18th of November. Here's what's coming up. So some Labour MPs are calling the Home Secretary Shabama Mahmood's new asylum reforms cruel and inhumane. Donald Trump's peace plan for Gaza has been approved by the UN. And reselling tickets to sports events or gigs above face value is about to be banned by the government. So we talked a little bit about the Home Secretary Shibana Mahmood's new plans to reform the asylum system yesterday. She announced them in Parliament and took questions in Parliament about it yesterday and it was pretty heated. Of course, the headline of these new reforms involves making it a 20-year period rather than a five-year period for refugees to seek permanent status here, making it harder to get that status in the first place, reforming how we interpret the ECHR's rules on the right to a family life, i.e.

1:37Sophy Ridge:making it harder to bring more family members over here and also making it clear that people could be deported if they're already here and fall foul of their rules. It's led to a huge reaction, including from those on the right. But perhaps most interesting is the reaction from the left, both her Labour MPs who don't like these plans, saying they're too tough on immigration. We've got a sound clip of her reaction to one of the more pointed questions from someone on the Liberal side of the argument, specifically a Lib Dem MP, Max Wilkinson. Here's her response, and it captures the very robust, fiery way she dealt with pushbacks from people on her side of the political aisle.

2:22Sophy Ridge:We've had to beep out two of the words she used. Unfortunately, I am the one that is regularly called a **** and told to go back home. It is I who knows through my personal experience and that of my constituents just how divisive the issue of asylum has become in our country. So that's clearly really difficult language to use in the House of Commons. It is punchy language. But I just want to take a moment to talk about Shabama Mahmood's response to all of this, because I think it is honestly quite impressive. And this isn't me saying that I agree with what she's doing or not. The policy itself is by the by.

2:58But what Shabama Mahmood does as a politician is she takes on the argument and she explains why she's doing things, no matter how robust the language. And you saw her doing that with Max Wilkinson with the Lib Dem. He said, this is stoking division. She said, I understand the division. And this is why I understand the division. This is why I'm doing it. And in a world where I think so much of the problem with Labour is that they're saying with these policies that are controversial, I don't want to have to do this, but we have to because of the Tories or because of the financial situation. Shabama Mahmood is saying, these are difficult things, but I'm doing them because I've thought about it a lot and I think it's right.

3:37And I find that refreshing, I'll be honest, in a politician.

3:39Sophy Ridge:I agree. And do you know what? If the same was used for some aspects of welfare reform, if you just put the chart on the screen of how it's getting out of control, a lot of people would say, oh, I understand that. You're not doing it because you're mean. You're doing it because we need to. Response from the right, quite interesting. Nigel Farage saying, you can join reform if you want to, or words to that effect. Really helpful for her. Yeah, really helpful for her. Kimmy Badenock saying, I'll give her her due. I've offered her the support of my party to get the sensible measures through, albeit in a statement that was littered with caveats.

4:12Sophy Ridge:What I think will be really interesting for those two parties, Reform and the Conservatives, if they don't vote in favour of these plans when they come in front of them, they'll have to carry some responsibility if the numbers keep getting worse. And that's, again, as difficult as this is going to be for Shabana Mahmood and her own party, politically very clever. If they say, oh, we want you to go further and leave the ECHR, they're now going to have some responsibility if they vote against these measures. Now, this all comes as Keir Starmer's given an interview. He's talked to the Daily Mirror and he's been forced to speak about his position as prime minister.

4:49So the headline is Keir Starmer saying he is going to lead Labour into the next election, which could be as late as 2029. and also, I have to say, a YouGov poll on The Times at the same time says nearly half of Labour voters want him to step down before then.

5:05Sophy Ridge:23 % want him to quit now, 22 % before the next election. And this is Labour voters. Labour voters. You could maybe say that things have been so bad for him late that only 23 % want it now. That's an attempted positive spin on it. I'd just say the other thing that stood out from this interview he did in the Daily Mirror. He said, let me be really clear, every minute not spent talking about and dealing with the cost of living is a minute wasted. His focus was not immigration. It's the cost of living, which I think almost always, apart from a recent spike in people caring about immigration, the economy is what matters.

5:39Sophy Ridge:So it's interesting to see him focus back on that. Obviously, the budget's coming up. He also said, I want people to have more money in their pockets. And he also said, everything we're going to do is going to make people feel better off. It's a tough task for Rachel Reeves to achieve that and put people's taxes up. But that was what he was saying in the Daily Mirror. Good luck with that. My experience of leaders and prime ministers who say they are going to lead the party into the next election, that means you're in shaky territory. It's not something you want to have to confirm. I don't think anyone's ever said it with this big a majority after a year and a half.

6:14Sophy Ridge:So the United Nations Security Council has voted in favour of Donald Trump's peace plan for Israel and Palestine. Pretty interesting this to me because it's kind of slightly dropped off our radar perhaps. It was backed by 13 countries including the UK and France. Russia and China abstained. But it was also backed at the lower levels by the Palestinian Authority by eight Arab Muslim nations including Egypt, Saudi, Turkey. It includes some of those initially received very controversial things. So including the International Stabilization Force. It includes the Board of Peace that Trump is likely to chair.

6:54Sophy Ridge:All things at the time people thought, this is outrageous, this can't possibly go ahead. But it's got UN backing. So it's a win for Donald Trump. And of course it comes as he welcomes one of those all-important backers of this plan, Saudi, their Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, to the White House today. Yeah, his first trip to the US in seven years. It'll be interesting to see how that goes down. Well, we know their relations are back on track. But the first visit, because of, of course, the high profile killing of the Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi. But these relations have been patched up despite that, you know, for years now, even if this is the first actual visit.

7:33This is a really interesting story that the government is pushing through today. So, you know, when you miss out on tickets to a gig, right, and then you go on a third party site that resells the tickets and you can buy them, but you're buying them for like five times the price, right? And then you have to consider whether it's worth remortgaging a house to actually buy other tickets. Well, that is all going to be banned. It's going to become illegal because restricting ticket outs was one of Labour government's election pledges. Last week, of course, some of those big name stars, Sam Fender, Dua Lipa, Coldplay, all called on Starmer to protect fans from exploitation.

8:07But what I think is interesting here is initially the thought was they were just going to limit the amount you could make at 30%. but now it's thought that they could actually say you can't sell any tickets on unless it's at face value.

8:20Sophy Ridge:You know my views on this one Sophie. We're going to have a row here. I think legislation is not the solution. By the way, we haven't seen the legislation yet so we don't know exactly what it's going to say. But so much of this stems from what Oasis did last summer. This won't stop that because that's the artists hiking up the prices. And so those artists can still do that if they so desire. And weirdly, what you could frame this as is cutting out the middleman who was making some money. And instead, it all goes to the big players, the record labels and the artists, if they so desire to make the most of the demand that's clearly out there.

8:58Sophy Ridge:And either way, what I think that highlights, the artists could stamp this out without legislation. And you're telling people that they can't resell at certain prices an asset that they own. I think it gets a bit messy. But my main point on this is I think this is seen as a solution to what Oasis did, but it won't solve that. Yeah, I understand what you're saying there. But I come at this from a different perspective. As someone who watches quite a lot of live music and really enjoys gigs and all that kind of thing, it can be so hard to get tickets to stuff. And it's unbelievably frustrating. If you are a fan, you know, a genuine fan, and you've got to get in there, you know, you've got to try and find a ticket by love for money, then they've gone.

9:45And the reason they've gone is because people are basically using these algorithms to kind of game the system, hoover up as many tickets as they can, and then shove them on these websites for inflated prices, which basically just prices out straight away a whole load of people who would love to go and watch their favourite artists. They might not be in London. They might have extra transport costs. I just think that it's unbelievably infuriating and kind of distorting the market, if you like, because of the use of this technology.

10:15Sophy Ridge:I don't disagree. I think there's other ways to solve it. I was going to ask you what your next gig is that you're coming up. Everything, everything. I've never even heard of them. Oh, I'm excited. What's yours? Mumford & Sons. I saw them at Glastonbury, Mumford & Sons, a long time ago and they were excellent. Well, that is today's cheat sheet. Thank you very much for listening or for watching on YouTube. You can email us if there's any stories that you want us to cover. The address is cheatsheet at sky.uk. Thanks so much for listening.

11:03open and reveal the world-shaping forces hidden inside. This is economics told through the things we think we understand. Search Stuff Matters on your podcast app to listen and follow.