Afternoon briefing Monday 1st June

0:00This episode of the Times Radio News Briefing is sponsored by PwCWC. Staying competitive means getting ahead, not just keeping up. So how do business leaders cut through the noise and focus on what really matters. PwC takes you further with tech, from optimising the systems that put your data to work, to scaling AI from proof of concept to competitive edge. PwC helps you meet tomorrow's tech demands so you can compete at a speed that rewrites the rules. Discover more at pwc.co.uk. Welcome to the Times Radio News Briefing for the afternoon of Monday 1st June. Union members are now as likely to support Reform UK as Labour.

0:44Polling has both parties on 28%, while Labour has dropped 20 points since it won a landslide election just two years ago. JL Partners polled a representative sample of just over 1 ,000 trade union members last month. Tom Lubbock from the polling company has been talking two times radio. When you dig beneath the surface, it's kind of even worse than the headline numbers. So we asked union members only whether Starmer should step down. 58 % say he should step down. We asked if Labour has lost touch with working people. Over half, 62%, like a big majority, say Labour's actually lost touch with working people.

1:22It's quite remarkable. More government documents about Peter Mandelson are due to be released this afternoon. They're expected to show that Mandelson offered unsolicited advice to ministers on policy areas outside his brief as the UK's ambassador to Washington. Lord Bemis chairs the Intelligence and Security Committee, which has been deciding what can be released. He's told Times Radio there is a lack of important detail. The major point that we were concerned, particularly with the Foreign Office, is the lack of proper record-keeping of decisions that were taken. There seems to be a lot that's done verbally rather than actually meetings that were minuted, etc.

1:59And that's got to be put right and we've emphasised this to government. A young man who lost a graduate job because of AI says the UK could face severe financial penalties because of the technology. Tobias Templesmith, a final year economic student at the University of Leeds, was looking forward to starting work as an analyst in September. But that position has now been rescinded. He's told Times Radio that politicians should be very concerned. We're facing an existential problem to our economy. Every graduate that loses their job, that's another 10, 20k of tax that HMRC is losing out on. And that's another person that's going possibly on benefits.

2:38And at the same time, that money that we're taking away from our graduates is being funneled to a data farm in Texas and the billionaires that own them. And a choir of farmers set up by Jeremy Clarkson in Oxfordshire to help their mental health as one Britain's Got Talent. The former Top Gear presenter, now a farmer himself, of course, has been telling Times Radio it's been a lovely thing to be involved in, given how hard farming can be. For most farmers, they're on their own all day long, you know, from 5, 6 in the morning until well after. The sun's gone down and they've got all these worries about the weather and the government and so on.

3:13and there's no one to share those worries with, which is why the suicide rates in farming is so alarmingly high. So to bring a gang of farmers together to be in a gang for the first time in their working lives is satisfying. And you can follow the Times Radio News Briefing on Spotify and listen live to Times Radio online.

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