Reform Donations Scandal and War with Argentina? - Off the Fence

28:23Winston Marshall:I'd say that Channel 4 have verified this work, but it is very much activist. So these are activists working against reform. I see it as part of what Dominic Cummings described, sort of everyone throwing the book at the Reform Party or the sort of uniparty trying to destroy them. I think that you mentioned in passing, Tom, that there's examples of this kind of stuff happening with other parties. Yeah, there's been foreign money coming to the Labour Party. For example, there was the Gary Lubner story when there was 6.5 million from Johannesburg to London. And they kind of, you know, he became a UK resident.

29:08Winston Marshall:Or there's a Cayman Island hedge fund who gave four million quid to Labour after their election in 2024. So there's foreign money going to the other parties. And I imagine this kind of stuff's happened with the Tories as well. But they kind of left themselves exposed here, reform. I would also note, and this is important, the Times and the Telegraph who published that polling without checking into the source of it, they look bad in this. JL Partners, the polling company, look terrible in this. I mean, I think they're finished or they're not finished. The heads have got a presumably role if they want to preserve themselves as an entity.

29:52Winston Marshall:So there's a lot of people who look bad in this whole thing. And I'd also say the problem for reform is James Orr, who full disclosure, I'm friendly and friends with. and I actually think he's a very honourable man and this is this what we see of this story isn't in keeping with the man I know I think that he's actually key for reform he is he brings them a intellectual rigor and robustness that makes reform seem serious and and so to lose him would be significant there's a report that Lee Anderson has says that has said that who's the MP for reform has said that James Orr and Dan Dukes are permanently gone.

30:38Winston Marshall:I'm not sure if that's confirmed. It looks like there's a further investigation into the story. But it is, it's not pretty. My frustration personally, is that Britain has got some very, very serious problems. Our current government, and we have a new prime minister who had his first week sitting and first PMQs this week is under a fraction of the scrutiny of this insurgent party who only have a handful of MPs. We're in serious problems and we're going to come to Burnham later, so we'll cover it later. But the people who actually have power are not getting the scrutiny they deserve. And the uniparty, the blob, all of these are focused on reform, trying to destroy it because reform are calling out some of the problems our country has and for me things particularly immigration I don't hear that it's certainly not being dealt seriously with uh from from the Labour Party so my frustration is if we want to actually sort our problems out we're in a double fight trying to make the problems clear and having the the blob attacking those types of parties in any any way they sort of can.

31:57Winston Marshall:Just to tack on to that, because I think it's so clear now that this is essentially one of the weapons in the toolkit to try and do with scandal what the establishment has failed to do electorally or via kind of conventional means, which, again, is not to suggest that this, you know, that the press should go easy on reform by any stretch of the imagination, that they shouldn't be subjected to scrutiny. but in the in the middle of a kind of medium aelstrom it's very easy for a narrative to set hold when the plain facts might not support the level of scandal which is being discussed like as you were saying there winston like the again the kind of finding of kind of neat ways in order to make sure that a poll can be paid for it's the sort of thing which might look a bit grubby might smell a certain way but at the same time in the grand scheme of things is not the kind of image of corruption which is being presented as um that said it's not to say that it still can't do damage That's the unfortunate kind of power of the media in these sorts of situations.

32:52Winston Marshall:And also the fact that this could have led to immediately just that that those resignations, whether or not they're permanent, is a question that we have to wait for. The thing I would add is that whilst, of course, James was a slightly more recent recruit to the party and has become very central, as you say, Winston, in terms of building out the policy offer, the kind of philosophy of the party, what have you. Dan Dukes has been basically by Farage's side for more than 10 years and is someone who everyone was particularly surprised to have seen stepping down in the manner that he had. And Farage then going on LBC this morning and referring to both Dukes and Orr as contractors of the party.

33:27Winston Marshall:So whilst we wait to hear what is going to happen with this internal investigation and where the dust is going to settle, it's clearly already landed a blow rightly or wrongly onto the party as it goes into this conference. So, yes, the political consequences have been pretty significant. This is part of the problem is that in the midst of the media maelstrom, suddenly you get a narrative that is set, which to a certain extent, the stepping downs have played into whether or not that was the intention.

33:52Tom Slater:Well, see, this is where I've agreed with pretty much everything everyone said to this point, but this is where I actually have a different view on it, because to me, those two stepping down is a clear indicator. Look, I'm not a legal expert. I can't say what's legal and what's not. But the fact that Nigel Farage, who said to our faces only a month ago, I'm really loyal to the people who are loyal to me when we interviewed him. The fact that these two men have resigned, to me, that's an admission of guilt, personally. Just as an outsider, that to me is what it looks like. The fact that he's been prepared to lose Dan Dukes, who's effectively his right-hand man, as people have said, and James Orr, who is as central to reform as we've discussed already.

34:34Tom Slater:that to me is them basically saying we've screwed up here and we have to put distance between ourselves and the story by getting rid of these two people who are really big assets in in their perspective to their party so from that perspective i think it is an admission of guilt but i also think the context that all of you actually have presented so far is really important because you know what this reminds me of it's like in russia and forgive me tom you mentioned you're not this cynical everyone's at it i am this cynical partly because of my background and partly just because of what i think the reality is uh i actually when last time i was staying up wins i pinched his copy of michael crick's biography of nigel farage which is by no means a flattering book to farage but crick repeatedly details how the tories cheated over and over in by-election after by-election when contesting seats with reform now what does or ukip yeah definitely ukip as you can touch right as as them was my point being is everybody does cheat and this is why i actually never get excited about any of these stories we had a discussion last night about about whether we actually wanted to cover this at all and i think the thing that actually tipped us over the edge is the resignations yeah because if you take that out of this what you're looking at is let's be honest a fairly trivial story about some behind the scenes shenanigans about sourcing a bit of money and by the way this is another thing that is actually very disappointing if you are someone who's reform aligned or reform curious you might say we're talking about tiny amounts of money

36:15Winston Marshall:yeah americans are shocked as for how little we're talking about like 30 i know look 20 grand is a

36:20Tom Slater:of money for for ordinary people and for all of us but for a political party that is seeking to become the government of the country all of this over 20 grand to do a poll it just it seems a level of risk that forget about the morality of it it's not remotely commensurate with with the potential gains of this go ahead when i have more just one point on that yeah so it's a tiny amount

36:45Winston Marshall:of money in in respect to the money for paying for polling but the hit job was expensive in terms of paying for a hit job so they paid yes i was coming to the polling okay sorry i'll let you make the

36:56Tom Slater:point then well well what i was going to say is so there is this broader context which is basically everyone's up to it but i just i think the thing that that you see here is reformer kind of amateurish when it comes to this and that it's not a surprise because they're an amateur new party but it's disappointing nonetheless. And then on top of that, we have to talk about the angle of this. It's not a coincidence that the Reform Party Conference is starting today. This is a deliberate hit job by a far-left anti-net zero, pro-net zero activist organization. Channel 4 had nothing to do with this.

37:31Tom Slater:These activists did all of this work and then brought it to Channel 4, who then went, oh yeah, it looks decent. Let's get it out there. And what you are seeing, as tom rightly said i think is uh the the media class doing what electorally the political opponents of reform couldn't do that said you know if this is properly investigated by the police given the evidence that we've seen it would not be surprised me if there are potential prosecutions out of this because let's be honest the footage is not a good look at all yeah which also wouldn't

38:07Winston Marshall:be unprecedented, it's worth saying, which is not to create excuses for anyone and just to try and rebuff any accusations of double standards or hypocrisy here. Certainly if you look at the way that we at Spikes have covered various of the kind of stories involving the Conservatives, even the Labour Party, we'd essentially apply the same level of scepticism to many of these stories, a lot of this scandal mongering, like even when they were going after Angela Rayner over a stamp duty or going after Keir Starmer over Lord Ali buying his wife dresses for some bizarre reason. Again, what was embarrassing there was the hypocrisy.

38:43Tom Slater:They were running on being whiter than white, on complete polar opposite to a supposedly

38:49Winston Marshall:grubby Boris Johnson. They got caught out. I think whenever you have, you know, beyond clear cut, obvious corruption, money being used to influence policy in a nefarious fashion, politicians becoming bought mouthpieces, influence being bought and peddled in a really kind of clearly undemocratic and unseemly way. Of course, everyone's against that. But when you get down to these kind of more fine grade distinctions around electoral law, ethics, procedures, what have you, what tends to happen is it tends to empower the law, the state or some kind of quango at the expense of democracy. It's like what we need is more rules.

39:22Winston Marshall:What we need is more ethics committees. What we need is more laws that would bar particular political parties if they overstep the mark in this way, that way or what have you. So, again, as ever, outside of clear-cut examples of corruption, which everyone is against, when you get into these kind of finer distinctions, loopholes, bit of wheeler-dealering, bit of creative accounting in order to get around what might be the spirit of a lot of the regulations, this can very easily be weaponised. I think we need to be on our guard against it regardless of where it's coming from. And if you reform, you need to be on your guard against not falling victim to these sorts of efforts to entrap you when they come along.

40:03Winston Marshall:And also, look, and I think you've made a great point, Tom. This is politics. This is the game of politics. Once you get to a certain level, once people start recognising you as being a legitimate threat to them getting into power, whether it's Labour or Conservative, these shenanigans are going to start. and really now this is a moment for reform where they have a choice of whether they go down the similar route that they did which is sort of the you know the wheeler dealer you know let's let's play at what we're doing here you know we can be a little bit woo a little bit way a little bit geezerish and we can you know make our way and all the rest of it or you're going to actually now professionalize and think to yourself we can't do this anymore if you want to get into power If you want to lead this country, then quite frankly, the whole organization needs to up their game and there needs to be far more stringent.

41:02Winston Marshall:They need to start professionalizing and they need to start looking at who the people are that they're interacting with and really, really doing some stringent checks because this can't happen again. This is a massive wake up call for everyone involved. it's a potential body blow like I said before particularly with the floating voters but I don't think this is the end for reform this is a chance for them to go right we can get better but it means we're going to have to make some very tough decisions and it means we're going to have to take out and eliminate some of the kind of wide boy antics that you can see in this video

41:43Tom Slater:Well, the thing is that while that may all be true, I think, as I mentioned, given the small amounts of money involved, you know, I remember having a conversation with just a randomly bumping into a very senior media executive at a function of some kind and them saying to me, well, the problem for reform is they just can't raise the money that they need. and so you've got these competing things you say well they've got to professionalize what we know this from our own experience running trigonometry what what does professionalize means it means you have to hire people who are better than the people that you have uh that costs money where do you get the money from donations how do you get donations and then you're back to to where we started this entire conversation to say nothing of the fact by the way that i you know i agree with winston we know james personally james or is a very decent and principled and moral man so if he found himself and broadened this smacks to me either of desperation or of slip of standards or whatever i don't know but my point is i don't think it's as easy as you know get a grip and sort it out like there are structural issues going on here which is for a party to be successful you have to raise a lot of money and as we've already talked about you're not competing in the level playing field everyone else around you is cheating while not being subjected to the same scrutiny and this is what i was going to say from my russian angle it it reminds me a little bit of what happens in russia where effectively everyone is guilty but your guilt is identified and investigated not when when it's sort of the police miraculously discover that you've been doing something wrong but rather that when the powers that be decide that now is the time for you to be exposed and so what you have is the the the completely uh unbalanced application of these rules and norms because i guarantee you i guarantee you that if independent journalists which these people were not these were activists were spending tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of pounds trying to entrap labor officials and trying to entrap tory officials and trying to entrap the officials of other political parties and similar schemes they would all come out with egg on their face and the only reason you're not seeing that is that those efforts are not being made equally but rather they're being targeted or because

44:06Winston Marshall:they're seen as the enemy and also just to add to that the extent to which the rules aren't being applied or the rules of engagement aren't being applied equally also the rules around and the law around donations. The Labour Party have been trying to change them precisely in response to reform doing quite well in relation to donations. It's one of the many things that Andy Burnham has had to kick into the long grass because he's just got too much to deal with at the moment. And there's a story earlier this week, they kind of realised that some of the proposed caps on donations would have potentially affected the Labour Party's coffers in terms of the union.

44:38Winston Marshall:So naturally that's, oh, we've got to rethink this now. But again, not only are the standards not necessarily being applied equally, the government is has been trying in real time to change the law so as to scupper the insurgent threat from reform so all of that is very very real and it's like how you deal with that how you kind of scale and also how you do what reform been trying to do which is which is genuinely unprecedented in british british politics which is to go from five mps at one election to potentially being a majority party at the next one we've never seen that before and the of course that's going to come with it a lot of thrills and spills and arguably a bit of corner cutting that's not to excuse any wrongdoing and any alleged criminality if that is what comes out of it of course but that's the context in which all of this has has happened um and it's at least worth bearing in mind when we look at the full picture of this all right well moving on to uh i

45:29Tom Slater:was going to say let's go to something more light-hearted but unfortunately this being a topical news show it's it's all downhill uh next story is uh of course the story of lindsey clancy the trial of Lindsay Clancy and Winston is going to bring us the details.

45:45Winston Marshall:So Lindsay Clancy killed her three children in January 2023 and the murder trial has been underway these last weeks and we have had now another day where the jury are undecided. Neither the prosecution or the defense are disputing that she killed her children. Neither the prosecution or defense are disputing that she is mentally unwell. What they are disputing is whether this or how culpable she is in knowing and perpetrating the killings. So it's really a question between whether this is first degree murder, secondary degree murder or manslaughter. I don't think it's a question about acquittal, although technically that could be what the jury decides.

46:40So it

46:42Winston Marshall:continues to go on. So that's the very core of it. But at the next sort of level, you then have a bunch of people, a bunch of women, not just in America, but here in Britain, as far away as Peru, South Korea Portugal who are coming to her defense in the millions has been raised to vent to defend her they were wearing pink and they're outside the courthouse protesting and they are claiming that she is the victim that the real culpable culpability lies at the feet of the industrial uh sorry uh the the medical institutions that failed her so it is the case that she had been seeing various professionals uh for psychiatric help uh this isn't uh just made it isn't made up post hoc that she had these illnesses there is a there is a a track record of her having postpartum depression and it seems that I don't even think postpartum depression is in dispute right now so but what's disputing is is how culpable she is and then there's another uh sort of secondary or tertiary offshoot to this story which is that the a lot of men or a lot of women are reporting on social media on reddit and beyond that their boyfriends or even fiancés are calling off weddings or ending relationships because when asked about the Clancy case, they gave answers dissatisfactory to the boyfriend.

48:28Winston Marshall:So men are now ending relationships because they don't like the answers of the women when it comes to asking their opinion about what should be done and what should be the verdict in this clancy case i think that's my summation of what's happened is that is that i think before

48:45Tom Slater:we get into the debate uh and i'm keen to hear everyone's opinions before i give mine i think there's a couple of things that are worth adding factually winston one yeah it's not just that she saw different professionals for for various things so by all accounts including the the the testimony of her mother-in-law who believe me as a married man i can tell you that is an as objective a source in these circumstances as you're gonna get according to get the jury just get her to decide it yeah well quite prior to the to the four months in which her mental health deteriorated she was uh a devoted mother uh a delivery nurse i believe uh widely respected in her job and so on had no history of violence towards the children or anyone uh and was in every way basically a normal decent person who really looked after the kids she was prescribed 12 different medications including antidepressants antipsychotics things to treat her and so i think benzodiazepines but there's a beans by different practitioners many of whom were not in coordination with each other.

50:00Tom Slater:And she committed these killings three weeks after coming out of a psychiatric facility. So these just little bits of context. And the final one, which will be relevant to my opinion, which I'm happy to give later, is her own ex-husband, whose children it was that she killed, says that she's not evil. She was just ill. um i leave it there before for us to get into the discussion

50:30Winston Marshall:and just to look at one dimension to it as well which is the there's a sort of outpouring of sympathy for lindsay clancy and the kind of the the growing number of people it seems like who feel that at the very least she wasn't kind of culpable in the same way as one might be if she wasn't suffering from severe mental ill health as they claim there's also of course that kind of conspiratorial fringe which basically rejects the idea that she killed these children whatsoever something that even her own defense aren't contesting completely spurious allegations that the father Patrick who discovered his three children killed and apparently the 9-1-1 call which hasn't been allowed to be released but was played in court was so shocking that most of the jurors were in tears many even the kind of very battle-hardened journalists who were in the room and covered a lot of very, very grim cases, were pretty shot by the kind of prime screams that they heard.

51:26Winston Marshall:There's this kind of group of people online, which you now see whenever you have a high-profile case like this. It's a kind of weird mix of kind of post-COVID conspiratorialism and sort of true crime fandom, which has created this level of uber cynicism in relation to cases like this. They've just been openly claiming that he did it and using as proof the fact that he remarried relatively quickly after the horrors in which he suffered as proof of that. so there's that dimension to it but the one thing that kind of struck me is even if we park that because there's always going to be some nutters out there and the thing about nutters in 21st century is that they all have social media accounts and more of a platform than they used to have is that even the kind of outsized level of sympathy for her or identification with her is to me quite striking and a little bit troubling like it'd be one thing to say this is an absolute if you take as read her defense which is that she was suffering suffering from this postpartum psychosis and that as a consequence of that it wasn't the same as if she was completely within her well-minded just decided to do this out of evil or what have you um even if you take that as read the extent to which there are a quite large number of women primarily obviously who see their struggle in her story who see this as part and parcel of a society which doesn't take mental health sufficiently seriously i think is a little bit off is a little bit strange it would be a bit like when we had that killer in nottingham a few years ago valdo calicane who's a paranoid schizophrenic murdered three people in the midst of a very heightened episode again there were various missed opportunities to stop him one of which was the fact that he was black and the local authorities were concerned about putting too many black people in that form of kind of medicalized confinement but nevertheless it would be it's one thing to say that's a horrific story um and of course he was not a well man when it happened but to say we're all valdo calicane and to say that isn't this a damning indictment of the way in which our mental health services are failing people i think we would see as an odd response and it's something that you see nowadays growing when there is a kind of vaguely woke political script that one could apply to it so it's mental health in this case you even saw a little bit bit of it in the wake of arena's horrific murder on that bus in charlotte where you had the local kind of democratic mayor come out and suggest that basically everyone including the killer was a was a victim in this because of the failure to take mental health seriously because he was also clearly quite a depraved man so even if we we recognize the kind of the ambiguity the complicated nature of this i think that level of kind of full-throated identification with lindsay clancy i think is a little bit strange there's a slight kind of blessed are the murderers tendency which seems to kick in what provided that there is a kind of political script that could be folded into i.e.

54:06Winston Marshall:mental health and how that's supposedly not taken seriously by society supposedly in this instance i i think one of the reasons why this case has captured the imagination beyond the obvious is because what it really talks about and thomas used the words mental health when actually mental health is a catch-all term which doesn't really mean anything what we're actually talking about here is mental illness and there's someone who uh believe it or not has uh mental illness in their family. And I've seen my cousin have suffered from severe schizophrenic episodes. In fact, I saw her essentially break down and develop schizophrenia pretty much in front of my eyes.

54:49Winston Marshall:What it talks to is responsibility. When somebody is having these types of severe episodes, which the condition that Lindsay Clancy is alleged to suffer from can cause, that sparks a debate of responsibility. How much responsibility does the individual have? How much of it is caused by an illness? How much of it is society's fault for not intervening sooner? How much of this responsibility belongs to the medical authorities? How much do these drugs, for instance, that the medical authorities, the doctors that are prescribed actually work? How much of it do they exacerbate the condition? And how much of it is simply that we don't like to talk about these conditions.

55:36Winston Marshall:And when people are suffering from these type of severe mental illnesses, do we just push the people to one side because we just simply don't want to deal with it? And I think that's a lot of what is happening here and why people are reacting so strongly to it. Of course, there's the obvious three horrific killings, etc. Because these are issues that we are wrestling with as a society in real time.

56:02Tom Slater:Winston, you never gave your take on it. So why don't you give your take? Yeah.

56:07Winston Marshall:So I'll say something that goes against a lot of the right wing commentary here, who seem to be very shocked that this deliberation is taking so long. I'm actually not shocked that this deliberation is taking so long. I think seeing as what is not being disputed is that she's being killed. What's being disputed is the impact of her conditions on her. For me, this is bloody complicated. And so I'm not actually surprised this is taking so long. I think it's quite difficult. If you're going to force me to come off the fence on this one, it's certainly not an easy one to call. And I would prefer to do it with more information and have been in the court case before coming off the fence on this one, which shows how tricky an issue it is.

57:01Winston Marshall:But I also think, regardless of what they decide her culpability is, she should be in prison for a long long time because as a society we need such crimes must be punished properly and so whether whatever they decide whether that's some sort of mental institution or serious prison for me that's for them to decide but she should be locked away i she cannot be free i that that's where i come off the fence well the one thing we haven't addressed

57:33Tom Slater:so far which is actually to me by the way tragic as this story is i actually don't think this should this should be a new story at all the only reason i've had any opinion on it whatsoever uh is the commentary around it which both you know tom and winston you've both alluded to which is this first of all this idea that women are quote unquote defending her i i'm sure there are a bunch of nutters who are defending her but broadly speaking what i see is a lot of people saying there's not enough understanding of what it's like for women postpartum and some of the hormonal and mental changes i give you very small example it's got nothing to do with murdering children but nonetheless is important like my wife is breastfeeding at the moment we have a four month old she if we i remember literally the other day we were sitting having breakfast having a chat about our plans for the week and then the moment the the little one latches on she goes baby i literally can't think right now and i can literally it's like you know one of those scenes in a movie where someone in a big like a server room or a big hangar presses all the light switches you can just see the brain just like the lights going off that's what it looks like so i think part of the thing that people are trying to to explain to people who maybe don't understand this is the the female brain in these situations in particular nursing postpartum pregnancy etc undergoes extreme hormonal changes and in those situations things occasionally can clearly go very very badly wrong then there's a lot of evidence i remember reading a very long article about uh the potential for the links between mass shootings in america and the prescription on certain anti-psychotic medications so when you give somebody 12 different medications of all different kinds in a very short period of time, combined with sleep deprivation, combined with postpartum problems, combined with hormonal changes, all of that together, you may, in some individual cases, get this kind of thing.

59:41And this is why I brought up the factual stuff about her previous conduct and history.

59:45Tom Slater:Like, I really think about, whenever we think about stories like this, about trying to put myself in the shoes of some of the people involved where I can relate. If I put myself in the shoes of her husband and i go my wife who's up to this point been the model mother and everything perfect i come home i find out she strangled our children and tried to commit suicide a thing we didn't mention uh in our factual introduction i can totally understand why he says she's not evil she she was just sick because if that was to happen to me i'd obviously be horrified and devastated but i'd be like going this is completely out of character so whoever did this is not my wife as i understand her something has happened in that situation and i know that people like very much to make these comparisons with you know the guy who stabbed arena zarutsko or the this the paranoid schizophrenic who stabbed people but i think we also have to recognize that your prior conduct really matters.

1:00:47Tom Slater:Both of those, if I remember correctly, had a long and extensive deranged criminal history. So we're talking about people who have a consistent pattern of behavior that was not dealt with because of various concerns, fears, the way the criminal justice system works, et cetera. It's not the case here. You're talking about somebody who went from being effectively a model citizen to suddenly strangling her three children in some kind of fit uh and i think these are very different things and so i i totally understand why there's a big campaign about sympathy for her but more broadly understanding mental illness in relation to to these things and the other thing as well we've got to be honest there is a massive difference between the pattern of male violence and female violence um and i think that's relevant in the

1:01:38Winston Marshall:situation as well i think on that just quickly because what's interesting is that a lot of the nuance around essentially culpability where serious mental illness is concerned when people want to suspend that discussion depends on the politics and the optics of the situation so go back to the sort of valdo calicane example who wasn't who might understand it kind of deteriorated over a period of years wasn't unlike the kind of arena's situation wasn't a kind of down and out criminal per se but was a student and was had a series of episodes which were violent and weren't dealt with um in that situation there were a lot of people on the the right who were kind of reflexively saying, I don't care about these mental health claims.

1:02:16Winston Marshall:He shouldn't be in a medical facility. He should be in prison when it was quite clear that he was in the midst of very deep, paranoid schizophrenia, was convinced that the state were spying on him, that all of these things were really kind of textbook and clearly guided his behaviour. Then you get some of the commentary, certainly on the right around the Clancy trial seems to be because of the response to and the commentary around the case has been just sort of so easily folded into a sort of narrative around kind of toxic femininity and the idea like why all these women seen themselves in them that therefore again she should not only be locked up but potentially um that she should be potentially you know actually killed as a consequence of um what she has um committed there so again i think it's one of those things where it's just become another feature of the of the culture war not particularly useful fashion i suppose where i find it a bit strange though is again that level of identification with and that level of sort of sympathy for because we can recognize that someone does something absolutely horrific when being quite literally out of their mind but at the same time to see one's own struggle in that person i think is a little bit strange and also we kind of see this conflation going back to a point that francis was making earlier of the kind of forms of should we say men like mental health issues if we're going to use that phrase around postpartum whatever um thing what used to be called the baby blues you know the the very very common experiences of women after having children with this most extreme example we could possibly think about and i think it does get to grips with an issue that we've had for so long in our public discussions around this is that we talk so much about mental health and the idea of it being in its most minor forms often you know barely diagnosable and definable issues is something which we talk about endlessly meanwhile very clear-cut mental illness and the way in which it completely can destroy a person's psyche leave them a danger to themselves and others is something which is oddly speaking a less sexy and interesting issue even though it's much more consequential and serious in cases like this so being able to disaggregate those two things i think is really important if we're ever going to get a clear-eyed sense of not just cases like this but how we think about this issue in general well and it's also as well tom we simply don't know how to deal with this issue we don't know how to deal with serious mental illness we don't know how to deal with these these people when they're when they're a danger to themselves or to others and in particular in the states this is true i mean go around any city in the united states in the city center and you will see people who are profoundly mentally unwell unable to take care of themselves posing a danger to themselves and maybe to other people as well what do you

1:04:55Tom Slater:mean maybe terrifying walking around a lot of these places it's terrifying yeah no i'm saying

1:05:02Winston Marshall:but they may be posing a danger to other people or to themselves or i'm saying it's not there's

1:05:07Tom Slater:no maybe about it they routinely attack other people and and because they they are in that state and it's because by the way i don't know if you know this but i suspect you do it's because uh you know uh there was a point there was a big uh anti-institutionalization movement in america which basically said that the way to help people who, by the way, in those days often were held in institutions where they were badly treated and those institutions were, you know, not up to the standards that we would want them to be. The way to deal with that is to let these people out onto the streets because that's freedom and that's, you know, it's liberating them from the constraints of institutions.

1:05:48Tom Slater:That's why you have the zombie hordes that you do see in the centers of major American cities.

1:05:54Winston Marshall:No, absolutely. So and then but that speaks to a wider problem, which is nobody as of yet has a solution to this very, very important issue that actually affects a lot of people. And you and is actually it's kind of damning indictment about our society as a whole, because if you're not going to look after people and at the risk of sounding who are actually truly vulnerable. and can't support themselves and are a danger to themselves or others, then we've gone wrong somewhere.

1:06:34Tom Slater:Well, I don't know if I've heard the kind of words on this,

1:06:36Winston Marshall:but it's a bit... So if you take somewhere like California, billions is being spent trying to deal with this problem of what is mental illness, but on the surface level, homelessness and drug addiction. um the the it's not a question of a desire to try and do something about it is that that they can their ideology around the problem is so twisted that they that they actually are making things worse because they're incentivizing the bad behavior this is something that i know you've had michael schellenberger on your show he's been on my show a couple of times and he's exposed this and really shown this so i think that the society does actually want to help this but progressive ideology in particular in places like california is exacerbating the problem well this is why i

1:07:20Tom Slater:brought up the deinstitutional deinstitutionalization movement because actually i do think there is an answer to this which is if someone is a danger to themselves and or other people then they have to be in a facility where yes they are deprived of their liberty for a period of time until we can be certain that they're not longer in danger to themselves or others those are unpleasant trade-offs of this terrible reality the mental illness is a thing that that exists but throwing these people out into the street to to smoke fentanyl and be uh the the victims of the most horrific life circumstances is not the solution uh i feel that that in the short history of off the fence that has been the most on the fence segment that we've had actually trying to be nuanced about it but look i think we we live in this era of slopulism where every issue is presented as a sort of black and white good versus evil debate between you know the men who are correct to dump all their girlfriends and the women who who have gone all of them have gone mental over this i really don't think that if you're splitting up with your girlfriend because she has a slightly more sympathetic uh understanding of someone who had a terrible mental episode uh you're probably an idiot.

1:08:34Tom Slater:Anyway, there's me.

1:08:35Winston Marshall:It's a new Brexit, Constantine.

1:08:37Tom Slater:It's a new Brexit, exactly. Final story of the week is, of course, Andy Burnham is back, Francis. He's back, back again, tell a

1:08:48Winston Marshall:friend. So I actually think this is possibly the most important story of the previous week, or rather this week that wasn't really covered but actually speaks to a very real problem that our country has and is going to dominate conversation either directly or indirectly and that is Andy Burnham refusing to rule out tax increases in the new budget. So he refused to rule out tax rises. He was also promised by 2030 to increase defense spending to 3 % of GDP. So he's already promised to spend more money there. Cost of government borrowing has risen to its highest level in 18 years. We have a 100 % debt to GDP ratio.

1:09:40Winston Marshall:Debt interest costs us around$120 billion a year. Some economists say a little bit lower, some say higher, but that's pretty much the average figure. And our debt now is double what it was after the financial crisis in 2008. And when Andy Burnham, and this is where it gets really interesting, when he was asked, when he was blaming essentially the reasons for our current financial woes, do you know what he blamed it on it's good let's play left wing bingo gents come on what did he blame it on thatcher brexit um the far right who else is no no it's got to be list trust as well no it's brexit it is brexit it is um it is uh thatcher there's one more it's not list trust is it no come on sport beginning with a the billionaire austerity austerity there you go

1:10:46Tom Slater:so well thatcher is a funny one isn't it because thatcher was of course became prime minister before any of us were born and sadly we're no longer that young so uh it's incredible uh i was going to mention oh yes uh the reason i brought up liz truss of course is we all remember how she crashed the british economy famously according to all the media well unbeknownst to the media class who promoted that story as vigorously as they did bond yields this week are higher than they were at the peak of the list trust crashing of the economy um now that's not to say the list trust did everything perfectly certainly not but i think there's just this general financial illiteracy in the media class and uh increasingly in the political class that comes with it as well, which is why we're having this conversation for us.

1:11:36Winston Marshall:No, absolutely. And this is a conversation that we're going to continue to have because the path and the trajectory that we are on is quite simply unsustainable for this country. And we are going to have to make some decisions. And we're going to have to make some very difficult decisions. And these are decisions which are going to make the current political party and the leader unpopular now where Andy Burnham is is I would argue that he's at the peak of popularity because he hasn't had to make any decisions yet but unfortunately for him and he's going to have to get and I quote off the fence at some point and actually make some political decisions particularly fiscal ones if we are going to progress and turn the sinking ship that is the UK economy around.

1:12:32Winston Marshall:I think it's quite rare situation in which the substance of the Prime Minister we have and the scale of the problems we face are so mismatched. The same was true of Keir Starmer, but we're kind of expected to be even pleasantly surprised that Andy Burnham can string a sentence together. You've got bordering on bankruptcy, as you say, Francis, the borders are still broken. We've got this glorified bus conductor who has managed to find his way into number 10. It's a really dispiriting spectacle. and part of the reason that obviously the markets are so skittish because Andy Burnham was Mr I don't want to be in hot to the bond markets not too long ago and this is the problem you might not want to be in hot to the bond markets but we are in hot to the bond markets you can lament the fact that we have allowed ourselves to become so exposed that that is the case and you could put in place policies to bring down the debt over time in a significant way to pursue the kind of policies which would not only be good in terms of easing market tensions but would also be good for society getting on top of the welfare bill ending the the kind of social tragedy that is so many people being put out to pasture and all of the sort of downstream fiscal effects of that but you can't just wish it away and it seems what we're the problem with andy burnham i think that we're going to end up with is that partly because he doesn't have his own mandate and therefore even if he wanted to have some sort of drastic break with starmerism or thatcherism or any kind of ism we kind of couldn't um but also because of the just inability to get anything vaguely sensible through the labor back benches these days who have become kind of captured by what is often euphemistically called the soft left but it's basically the most vibe is based on a principle we just we're labor and we do nice things kind of section of the party um that is we're just going to have loads of trundling along like it's just going to be walking of a kind of tightrope not wanting to do anything that would seem unfair to this section of society or unkind towards those who supposedly need to be in receipt of the enormous state largesse, which is now laid on towards them.

1:14:27Winston Marshall:So it's just going to be more of the same, I dare say. And I think whilst that might change if an early election comes our way or what have you, we're kind of doomed to continuity starmerism where this is concerned, which is not anything that anyone should be excited about.

1:14:43Tom Slater:it's a really interesting point you make particularly about the the fact that you know burnham famously said he doesn't want to be in hock to the bond markets britain is like that position is like a bit like a 35 year old who still lives with his parents and borrows money from them every month going i don't want to be in hock to my parents well living under the fucking roof then you moron yeah you don't have to make it personal mate but you know

1:15:09Winston Marshall:you go out there one day francis don't worry about it yeah no you know what i mean it's like if you keep borrowing money from people yeah if you keep borrowing money from people you will be

1:15:22Tom Slater:in hock to them and for the reasons that francis laid out beautifully we are now extremely in hock to them in fact uh you know one of the things we talked about the bond yields britain is paying a premium, I don't know if you know this, we're all similar age, I think. Certainly in my 20s and early 30s, the basket case countries of Europe were Greece and Italy. We now have higher bond yields than both Greece and Italy in this country, because our economic policies, our government's policies have created a situation where we are less trusted to repay our debts than Greece and Italy. That is the reality.

1:16:06Tom Slater:And, you know, the point about this is the biggest problem with all of this is none of it will be solved by the policies that are being advocated for or pursued because raising taxes is not going to solve this problem because you cannot tax even more to pay for all this spending that we can't afford. We spend more on welfare now, as we said earlier in this conversation than we raise in income tax. This is insane. This is insane. And by the way, it's not all scroungers. It's not all people who've been, you know, abusing the system. A lot of it is people who simply don't have jobs because of the economic policies that our government pursued.

1:16:48Tom Slater:And a lot of it, by the way, is because we have an aging population of pensioners who continue to vote for policies that protect and support them at the expense of their children and grandchildren um and uh that is another massive problem that no one wants to talk about

1:17:04Winston Marshall:and it's also so many of the problems that are unique in this country like just very quickly sorry wisdom is that things like the growth in sickness benefits and outwork benefits amongst the young um which is you know the idea that the young would become a particular area of interest for the welfare state just grates against what the whole point of it was to look after the old and the sick and so on you know and the destitute rather than those who actually should have a bit of get up and go that's often blamed as a kind of post-covid thing whether that relates to mental health or long covid or some kind of bollocks like that you look at other european countries you do not see that pattern repeated so there have been particular decisions that we have made in this country which have made the issue so much worse and there's there's a kind of refusal to grapple with that there's just a constant kind of gesture to how terrible it is across the piece and what have you and uh the fact that these are factors almost entirely out of the government's control.

1:17:53Winston Marshall:That's just not good enough. There's things that you can do, you can act and you can try and deal with and clean up the mess of a lot of what has happened in the quite recent past that would start to amend this. You don't have to have a reckoning with 40 years of failed policy, as Andy Burnham might see it, to get us back on the right track, even in the near term, I think. Just to add even more detail, 30-year bond yields are now the highest they've been since 1998. The problem we've got is that there's looming tax increases without serious talks about decreases or sorry without decrease elsewhere or welfare decreases and they just don't so I'm not to be contrarian here or I'm not actually against some certain tax increases if they're offset with decreases elsewhere.

1:18:46Winston Marshall:What Burnham is doing is so the other big thing and this is a guy I keep an eye on called Lord Jim Neill. He's famous because he he's a labor grandee. He took coin the turn bricks and he was at JP Morgan. And it was rumored. There were some rumors that Gary Stevenson was going to be the economics advisor for Burnham, which was all nonsense. But it was more true that Jim O 'Neill was and he and Jim turned it down because and he said he didn't want to give up his business uh his businesses and and dealings uh but he's someone really worth keeping an arm because he would have given Burnham a seriousness in government because he's someone who does understand the bond markets and does understand how to work a budget in a way that would keep the markets and the city settled.

1:19:38He has said this week that capital gains tax increases are looming.

1:19:45Winston Marshall:Now, I don't want capital gains tax because it's going to be tax on me. But I'm in theory not against capital gains tax if there's massive reduction in income tax. And actually you create incentive for people to work. What we're seeing is just more tax and no real decrease in welfare. So things can only get worse. But the most offensive thing to me of all of this is watching Andy Burnham's PMQs and his various videos from cabinet meetings. And the amount of times he says, uh, or um, he puts the uh in Burnham. and it's very fitting that Burnham as a word starts with an uh and ends with an um because those are the two sounds I basically only hear from that man it is so offensive to me that he talks like that it's so frustrating to hear can he not does he not have convictions can he not just speak shoot from the hip what does what do you think man that thing drives me more insane than the tax talk by orders of magnitude so it's good to see what's the big issues i was going to

1:20:57Tom Slater:say welcome to off the fence where we give things their true measure of priority exactly exactly well uh gentlemen that i think is us for the week thank you uh for being here thank you uh for watching and listening make sure you subscribe to trigonometry the winston marshall show and of course spike and share this with a friend uh share this with everybody and we will see you same time next week