 Keir Starmer has had a rocky few weeks with criticisms from left, right and centre about his lackluster leadership style. Now, of course, his predecessor had weeks which were much, much rockier, many of them. The difference though, while Corbyn had detractors, he also had people who'd vigorously defend him in public. For Starmer, that kind of outrider seems to be in short supply. The people who had backed him now, not as enthusiastic as they once were. Now, that group of people now includes a key architect of Starmer's leadership campaign, Tom Kobassie, who wrote a damning attack on the Labour leader, or at least his reign as leader so far this week in the Guardian. And if you follow me on Twitter, you will have known that we did book Tom Kobassie on tonight, but I have to let you down because unfortunately he's fallen ill. So get well soon, Tom, if you're watching. Don't worry though, because I am joined by my esteemed colleague, Aaron Bostani, and we're still going to run through all of the beef because there's more of it. It doesn't just include Tom Kobassie. Aaron, thank you for being here this evening for me. My pleasure. The beef never stops, Michael. Can I just check in with you, Michael? How are you doing? I'm very well. The vaccination's going fast. I feel like I could get jabbed any minute. I mean, it could be three months, but the end is inside. The winter is over. I slept well. This is great, isn't it? I'm struggling with third lockdown, but I'm glad that you're doing well. It will be over soon, don't worry. That's true. We've of course got loads more on the show other than just labor beef. In COVID news, there's more speculation about a lockdown loosening, which is just trickling out via the front pages, because we're still waiting for the official announcement, as you know. Also, briefings about mass testing and a change in policy on shielders. We're going to finish the show by talking about a concocted culture war, or the concocted culture war that keeps rolling on. You won't be surprised to know that Gavin Williamson is, again, making a right tit of himself. We're going to go through all of those issues for our final story. But first, you know the score. Share the show link. Let's get more people watching this live tweet on the hashtag TiskeySour. Put your super chats under the YouTube video, or to the left of it, depending on how you have it on your desktop, and comment under the Twitch stream. Now, Tom Kebassi is probably someone you will recognize, find familiar, if you've been watching TiskeySour over the years, because he's been a regular guest. He was director at the IPPR, the Institute for Public Policy Research. He was also someone who was known to make helpful interventions when Jeremy Corbyn was leader. One of the few people who wasn't seen as being from the hard left, but wasn't hostile to the project. He also was one of the people who went on from being friendly with the Corbyn project to working on the Keir Starmer campaign, or at least working with the Keir Starmer campaign, even if not in an official capacity. And it's well actually documented in the book Left Out by Gabriel Pogrand and Patrick Maguire, the role of people like Tom Kebassi and Laura Parker and Paul Mason. Anyway, Tom Kebassi directed that video that was super helpful for Keir Starmer, the one where he talks to miners, and he talks to anti-racist campaigners. And now he has come out with a pretty damning critique of his first year in office or as leader of the opposition. So the headline, Keir Starmer's leadership needs an urgent course correction. And it goes on, I helped elect the Labour leader, but his first year has seen an unnecessary war on the left, and the lack of any authentic vision for the country. So we can go to some choice quotes from that piece. So Kebassi writes, It makes sense for those who want to see Labour return to power to examine the lessons of Tony Blair's electoral victories. He was, after all, the only Labour leader to have won an election in half a century. Not such a surprise then that Keir Starmer has asked Peter Mandelson for help, according to reports at the weekend as one of the strategic architects of Starmer's successful leadership campaign. However, I believe that after a year in the job, he appears to have learned the wrong lessons and needs to alter course. So the reference there, that reaching out to Peter Mandelson, which we know that Keir Starmer's office has been doing, we spoke about that on Monday, clearly they thought, Oh, we're not yet consistently polling above the Conservatives, we're going to have to be even more right-wing. They're sticking to their strategy of let's cut loose the left and hope for some people to shift their votes in the red wall. I don't know why the red wall is supposed to really like for people who live in those seats. It's supposed to really like Peter Mandelson. But anyway, there you go. Let's go on. He writes, So this is Tom. In his first year as leader, Starmer has provoked a completely unnecessary war with the parties left. The fact that Starmer received more votes in 2020 than Corbyn polled in either 2015 or 2016 showed that the Labour membership recognised a different approach was needed. Some 40% of those that voted twice for Corbyn voted for Starmer. His campaign correctly assessed that Labour members were never the paying mob that much of the press made them out to be and that they could be persuaded to back a different approach. A full frontal assault on the membership was both unnecessary and unavoidable. So what this is telling us is basically, I mean, what Tom Kibasi is articulating there is basically what was the official line of the Keir Starmer campaign. The official line of the Keir Starmer campaign was we're not against the membership. We just recognised that something new is needed. We're going to take the membership along with us. That was the whole message of the campaign and obviously, as we've talked about, so often on this show, he's completely done a U-turn on that, a screeching U-turn, in fact. Let's go to one more bit of this article that I'm going to go to Aaron because I know he's going to have loads of thoughts but there will be a bit more. When Starmer attempted to expel his predecessor from the Labour Party, his office gleefully briefed that it would be his clause for moment, but this is a spurious analogy. There was a democratic vote on the new clause for, it was an act of persuasion, not the brute application of formal power. The message was that Blair had the courage of his convictions, would confront vested interests and was prepared to take risks. But that is clearly not. It wasn't a clause for a moment for Keir Starmer because he didn't get the party on side when he kicked out. Jeremy Corbyn. We've got a few more comparisons with Blair to come. I want to bring you in, Aaron, for your first thoughts. How damaging is it for Keir Starmer that someone who was so integral to his campaign is now coming out quite publicly saying, look, mate, you've got this wrong? Tom has been openly critical of Starmer and the leadership, but in his own way, so he hasn't done nothing like this. Whenever I've tried to sort of say, oh, would you think about this or that, he's been withdrawn. Tom's a very smart person in that respect. If I've gone to comment from him, he's not really responded to my apparition. Say that, but the point stands, I think he would know it. I think he would happily say, he isn't somebody who says these things lightly. When he makes... He doesn't relish in trashing the leadership. No, he's the complete opposite of that, right? So he is somebody who, when he's going to say something, you'll be thoughtful and considered and he'll think about the consequences and it will fit into a broader sort of view that he has on a certain state of affairs. So he hasn't done this sort of hastily or thoughtlessly. That's the first thing. What's interesting is that, you can compare him to say Paul Mason, like you say, the sort of the Pogrand and McGuire book. I'm not doing this to trash talk Paul Mason, which I did on Twitter last week. I'm doing this to make an important point, I think, is that Paul is somebody who still believes that Starmer's pitch was authentic and honest and he hasn't really deviated from it too much and Tom disagrees. And so obviously what's critically important for Starmer now is how many people fall in the first camp with Mason and the second camp with Tom Capasi. Importantly, however, neither are particularly happy with his performance nor do they think he's doing particularly well, particularly in relation to his own left, particularly in relation to taking on the party, taking on the government with COVID, with the Corbyn question, the broader issue around having an overarching vision, policies, charisma, building a strong team. I think there's actually consensus now, even amongst his own support, that Starmer's failing at those things. And of course, the rejoinder, and it's an important one, is that there could be a general election in two to three years. People keep on saying four years. It could be two years. But let's say two to three years' time. That's true, but I do think that Starmer's wasted, he's wasted a huge opportunity, both within the party and beyond it. His approval ratings with the country were very strong until last October. What happened then? He suspended Jeremy Corbyn at the end of that month. But also within the party, he was really well liked. I think he had a lot of goodwill. And it's fine to expend that for things that matter, but I think he hasn't done that. And I think with regards to Mandelson, it's listening to the wrong people about the wrong things at the wrong time. I think it's the worst possible thing that could be leaked, just like the briefing from a consultancy about standing next to flags. It just makes you look like you're clutching. You've got no core values. You don't know what you're doing. You're both ideologically and also politically quite rudderless. And I think that's a fair assessment of where he is. If, for instance, he went to Alastair Campbell and said, look, I want to know how we can get the right-wing media on side without me making big political concessions. And I want you to be part of my brain trust. I wouldn't be a fan of that, but it's explicable. And that could even extend to Peter Mandelson. I don't think Peter Mandelson is relatively comparable to Alastair Campbell. The man was so stupid, he had to resign twice because of the various things he was doing while at Labour MP. But in any case, I can understand that. But speaking to Peter Mandelson about how to win back, the very voters who Peter Mandelson told Peter Hain in 1999 have nowhere else to go. He was, of course, referring to working-class voters in Labour heartlands. I think that does illustrate the extent of how Stam's out of his depth. So he's out of his depth and he's wasted these critical resources, both within and beyond the party for no particular reason. That doesn't tell me this is somebody who, A, knows what he's doing, or B, really, is going to get anywhere near power in 2023-2024. On the other hand, he's got time to turn it around. And that's what Tom's kind of big takeaway towards the end was. He wasn't saying, I want you to resign. He was saying you could still turn this around. You could still be the next Prime Minister. But you won't be if you carry on like this. And I think that's a really fair conclusion. Let's go to some more quotes about strategy, and especially those comparisons with Blair. Lots of Keir Starmer supporters like to think that just like Tony Blair, he's ignoring the membership because he's listening to voters. Tom Kibassi doesn't agree. Let's get up graphic one, E-Fox. So whether in his keynote speeches or in weekly jousts at Prime Minister's Questions, Blair attacked the Tories with gusto. Those attacks may have started on competence, but never ended there. Blair was always careful to move on the argument to the Conservatives' underlying values and free market ideology. Starmer has instead let focus groups define his strategy, which is to go easy on the government rather than developing a clear message of his own. This is profoundly naive. The public will always say they dislike politicians playing politics. Letting randomly selected members of the public set the political tone, his fellowship, not leadership, and going easy on the Tories was not the inevitable answer to a dislike of incessant squabbling during a national crisis. Starmer could have set out what a Labour government would do differently and why. And then we'll finish on what was probably the killer blow from the article. It says, or Tom says, if Starmer were to depart as leader tomorrow, he would not leave a trace of a meaningful political project in his wake. Now, as Aaron says, he's not calling for Kier Starmer to resign, but he is saying it's about time you found out what you were doing this for. I think that point about focus groups is really interesting, isn't it, Aaron? Because this is almost like campaigning 101. Everyone knows that if you ask members of the public what do you want politicians to do? They never say, I want you to attack the other side because no one likes to see anyone attack the other side. They say, I want a positive vision. But the way publics form opinions about the other side is if you attack them. So you're not supposed to attack the Conservatives to make people like you. You're supposed to attack the Conservatives to make people not like the Conservatives. And then it's your vision which makes people like you. But because Labour doesn't have a vision and it's too scared to attack the Conservatives, it's just been a rabbit in the headlights and hasn't done anything at all. And also, I mean, I think this idea of the leadership of had, which is that the public don't want to see opposition. They don't want to see criticisms. I think they don't want to see opportunism. And opportunism is precisely what we've seen from Keir Starmer's leadership. Oh, open the schools, close the schools, no consistency, no clear messages to what they do differently and why they do that differently. It's just, it does just seem like, oh, it was a bit slow, wasn't it? Oh, it's a bit incompetent. To me, that looks like, you know, carping from the sidelines. Aaron, I want your take on whether or not Keir Starmer is going to find the Tony Blair within him, which is not necessarily what we want, but I mean, it's an interesting question at least. I mean, if you think about Tony Blair, you had people like, you had a lot of the new left, people coming at Marxism today and so on, who actually believed in the Blair Project all the way through to 1996. And we're nowhere near that. And I don't think Starmer's been overtly as right-wing as Blair was before 1997. And already a lot of people, even liberals, right? Forget even people on the left, even social liberals who are like, yeah, I don't believe in extraordinary rendition or spy cops or, you know, they would be like, this is kind of weird what you're doing here. So I think he has really big problems because fundamentally, Keir Starmer's base in society would potentially at best is too far. I say base, not people are going to vote for him, the sort of core constituencies. Social liberals, FBPE, hardcore, EU sort of identitarians, progressive values, university sort of towns and cities. So Lib Dem, Labour swing voters. Or on the other hand, the sort of the people that basically voted Labour in the last general election, but maybe some of them maybe would have gone to the Tories just on Brexit, but will never come back, which actually not many people's were funding out. But also, of course, you know, that core Labour vote from 2019. Those are his two core groups, and he's kind of alienating both of them, which I think is strange. And as we've said repeatedly, that's having so far, it's having no payoff whatsoever. There is no upside for doing that. In Scotland, they're probably going backwards right now. We'll see, it looks like they're going to lose seats at the Holyrood in the forthcoming elections, of course, on four years earlier. It looks like they could even be going back in Wales. There was one national opinion powerful Westminster elections, saying that they actually would lose a seat on 2019. They may have to govern with Plyde in terms of the Welsh assembly elections. So then you look at, okay, well, where is it paying off? The Bet by Stamres, the Red Bull, you know, Labour voters who didn't vote for us in 2019, but again, there's a negligible upside there. At the moment, they're getting 2% of those people back net. They're getting 4% of them back, but then they're losing two to the Tories. So no, I mean, the strategy isn't working. People say, well, he's polling better than Corbyn. And you hear these obviously ridiculous numbers. They've improved their polling numbers by 25. I don't know where these numbers come from. We had a general election two years ago, well, not even 14, 16 months ago, whatever it was. And the Tories won by, I think, a margin of 11, 12%. That's enough. You don't need to exaggerate. Talk about 30, 40 telephone numbers. Yeah, he might win back 3%, 4% of that. But then when you include, of course, the electoral geography of how this country works, particularly Scotland, particularly Wales, when you think about the Tories now talking about using mandatory voter ID for next time, when you think about boundary reform, he could get 3% or 4% higher, and that may just yield an extra half a dozen seats. Now, this is all astrology. We're a million miles away from that. But people need to move away very quickly from this idea that, oh, well, 3% more than 2019 is fine. I mean, it's going to go nowhere, and it's going to make very few inroads, if you think for the election after that one too. So I think it's a lost strategy. I think the sort of blue-labour light is a lost strategy. And I think rather than admit that and sort of pivot to something else, we're seeing these acts of desperation, you know, consultants talking about the flag and Peter Mandel and so on. So I don't think you'll find this Blair, because I think fundamentally, when Blair came to power in 1995, he took the leadership. He had a vision for what he wanted to do with the party, Michael. He had a vision about how he wanted to run politics. And you think about the Clause 4 moment, and it's a really good point made by Tom, Clause 4. I mean, who had buy-in to Clause 4, John Prescott, his deputy leader, right? Does Keir Starme have anybody like John Prescott who is close to him politically, who he uses to manage the left in terms of expectations and political infighting? No. He could have maybe done that with Rebecca Lambert, and he could maybe have a John Tricker in there. But he hasn't got the self-confidence, either a political or personal level, to have somebody like that there. So I don't think he could be like Blair, and I'm not a big fan of Blair. I think the guy should be facing a trial for war crimes. But he had a vision, and he believed in what he could achieve as a person. I don't think Starme has either of those yet. That could change, of course. It's very difficult to do that on the job. We've got a comment from Sam Kelly with a fiver. Thank you very much. What would have to be done for Keir Starme to have a functioning relationship with the left of Labour? Is it even possible at this point? I mean, I think it's quite obvious. He's got a letback in Jeremy Corbyn, stopped this sort of farce of saying, oh, even though he's not suspended, he can't have the whip. And then, very importantly, he's got to stop stitch-ups. They've got to stop suspending left-wing members for really, really flimsy reasons, and then stop stitching up meetings to not let, for example, like they did in Bristol West, 100 people vote after having a five-hour-long meeting hosted by regional bosses. There is no way that the leadership can get the left on board if he treats them, or if Keir Starme and the party in general treats them with the amount of unbelievable disrespect and they are currently being treated with at the moment. That's the only way he can win back the Labour left. And until then, people say, get behind the leader. I think if you have a leader who is being so explicitly obnoxious and disrespectful to left-wing members, I mean, it's almost, you know, it would always be setting a bad precedent if people say, oh, yeah, we're going to take all of this abuse from you, essentially, and then say, oh, no, we'll still come out and campaign for you. And I think he's going to have some real problems getting people to campaign for him in these locals. I mean, it might not matter so much in the upcoming local elections, because I presume COVID-19 is going to mean there isn't going to be much traditional campaigning, but at future elections, that could really come back to bite them. Now, talking of stitch-ups, this was the other bit of gossip we have for you. This is a tweet from Sienna Rogers, which she tweeted out a couple of hours before we went live. Oh, actually, Aaron, you want to come in quickly first? No, I mean, you're going to talk about Liverpool. I mean, maybe I can feed back in. I'll go back to you and set Michael, but I want to talk also about what's going on in Bristol. But we can talk about that after Liverpool, because actually, they're related, potentially. Great. So this Liverpool tweet, again, we actually know less of the details when it comes to Liverpool than we did with Bristol West. Sienna tweets, new hearing that Labour has suspended the Liverpool mayor candidate selection process. Ballot papers were due out today, but that didn't happen. I'm told the free shortlisted candidates are due to be re-interviewed on Friday. So, as I say, the details of this seem quite muddy. I've messaged quite a lot of people to ask for it to be clarified, and not many people seem to know what's going on. But it's quite clear on the surface what's happening here, right? Ballots were supposed to go out today. Someone has intervened at the last minute and said, no, this cannot go ahead. Presumably, they were worried about which candidate was going to win. And now all free shortlisted candidates are due to be re-interviewed. So, if those candidates had to be re-interviewed, who does that give power to? It gives power to the party bosses. If there was someone who they were worried was going to get elected by the grassroots of the party, they can now say, oh, no, we found a tweet that they sent in, you know, 2012. And now all of a sudden, we're going to have to overturn what would have been the democratic result of this contest. Who was standing in this mayoral race? So, one candidate who I imagine is who party bosses are quite worried would win is called Anna Rothery. She's backed by Unite and Jeremy Corbyn. She was one of the free candidates, shortlisted. So, Ballots were going to be going out today when people in Liverpool could vote for her. They can't anymore. She was interviewed for Labor List, which sort of tells you a bit about what her candidacy was about. In that interview, she expressed excitement about standing as a Black woman to be Liverpool mayor. It would be the first woman in the first Black person to be Liverpool mayor, although there only has been one mayor before. It was Joe Anderson. So, you know, it's not saying that much in this context, given there's only one other person who's had the job. She was also commenting on internal politics, though, which, as probably everyone knows by now, is very, very dangerous if you're left-wing. This is from that Labor List article. So, Rothery talks about doing away with the factionalism within our party and bringing the party together so that we can concentrate on the big issues. Her bid is endorsed by Corbyn, and she confirms that, for me, it's important that the whip is returned to Jeremy, particularly because he played a huge part in terms of growing the membership. She also wants members suspended over Corbyn-related local party motions to be welcomed back, responding to the point that many see the issue as one of prioritizing the need to make local meetings safe spaces for Jewish members. Rothery replies, I'm not condoning racism or antisemitism. I'm not condoning that behavior by any stretch of the imagination. She adds, the reality is we've had a lot of suspended members who have been suspended purely for the fact that they don't agree with that particular politics around whether Jeremy should be reinstated or not, and that, to me, is a major concern because that's a freedom of speech issue. Now, when this was announced, that the ballots were being suspended and the candidates were going to have to be re-interviewed, obviously, there was lots of speculation online that the reason this had all been stopped was because of this interview. A couple of hours or an hour after the original tweet, Sienna Rogers from Labour List follows up and says, Labour sources say this has nothing to do with any candidates' views on Corbyn. Candidates have been told they must stand up to scrutiny, so need to be re-interviewed. I hear a Labour spokesperson said, the ballot has been paused for a short period to allow time for the candidates to be re-interviewed. Ballot papers will then be issued. Maybe this has nothing to do with Jeremy Corbyn, but when a Labour Party boss tells me that this has nothing to do with someone's opinions on Jeremy Corbyn, I don't necessarily trust them. So you can bet that if what happens ultimately here is this left-wing candidate is suspended, they're not going to say, oh, they were suspended because they opposed the suspension of Jeremy Corbyn. They're going to say they're suspended because of something they tweeted in 10 years ago, which can be interpreted in a particular way, is what I imagine will happen. Aaron, does this look like a stitch up to you, or do you think, or should we take Labour at their word, that actually for some reason they need to be re-interviewed to face scrutiny from party bureaucrats? I mean, Joe Anderson went for quite serious reasons of an alleged malpractice, and we don't know the broader context about potentially who else was involved in that and so on. We have no idea. However, Michael, I think it's quite right to say that doing this on the day the ballots are meant to go out, given what we've seen more broadly, and I think actually the Bristol example for, we're not Bristol, rather, the West of England mayor nomination process at the end of last year, I'll talk about that in a moment, where Labour's candidate is a chap called Dan Norris. I think that kind of, that would create a background context we think actually, yeah, it's highly likely they're trying to stitch this up. And I think the fact they did it after a Labour listen to you goes out and like you say, that particular paragraph in the interview, I think paragraph six, I think they'll try and pull her. And it's going to be, you know, it's again one of those comic moments. The Labour, if the Labour bureaucracy does try and pull a black woman, a socialist, in the name of anti-racism. I mean, it's just, it's, this whole thing gets more absurd every day. I mean, it gets, you know, like, you know, if you're watching this right now and you have the misfortune of being on Twitter, I mean, you know that full well, you know, various actors saying that name searching themselves on Twitter, finding somebody who says they don't like them as an actress and then upholding this as an example of racism and it's ridiculous. It's obviously nonsensical, you know, not liking an actor is not a hate crime. At least I hope not. And this is kind of a piece with that. On the other hand, like you say, Michael, it may well be, perhaps may not be the case. It may not even relate to the candidate we suspect it does, the left candidate, so to speak, the one who has the endorsement of Unite. Can I speak about Bristol and then maybe people? Yeah, I want to know about the West of England mayor and Bristol. I give a say to Bristol. I mean really the West of England mayoral race, but I mean Bristol as well, obviously, because they overlap quite considerably. So there's an elected mayor of the West of England. Of course, Labour's kind of vote is really around the Bristol area, that metropolitan area, everywhere else. Of course, that's where, you know, the Tories get their votes from. So that Bristol area is a big, big part of whether or not Labour can win. Now, there were CLP nominations for various candidates for the Labour Party nominee to be West of England mayor. I believe there were six candidates put themselves forward. One was the lady who ran in 2017. Two were councillors. Now the lady who ran in 2017 and lost, I believe her name is Leslie Mansel. She lost by tiny, four or five percent, tiny margin. So the general presumption was she would at least be shortlisted because she was previously the candidate. And then, of course, you've also got two prospective parliamentary candidates from the previous year, the 2019 general election. None of those three were shortlisted. None of those three were shortlisted. Despite the fact Leslie Mansel also got the highest number of CLP nominations. So the two people that were put forward, I mean, you could put forward three, you could put forward four. One was a guy called Dan Norris, who's a former MP, Blair Wright MP, from 97 to 2010, voted for tuition fees, voted for every single major piece of labor and terror legislation, voted for the Iraq War, voted against the inquiries the Iraq War. This is new leadership, right? A guy, by the way, implicated in the 2009 expenses scandal. That's the face of a different winning kind of labor party. And yet two prospective parliamentary candidates and the candidate from the previous time were told they had inadequate experience. The other candidate put forward was somebody who I've been told was the kind of preferred candidate of Marvin Rees. So it was a stitch up really between region, east of England, southeast, sorry, west region and southwest, and sort of local power brokers. And they both had their candidate go forward and then they were voted upon. So there are a number of sort of points to make here. A, it could have been more than two, it could have been three, it could have been four. That just seems very strange. But then there was clearly a delimiting of left candidates not being allowed to be put to the electorate. And so I think that combined with the fact that Ben Norris won, he did win a democratic vote, but it was only with two people. I think really that tells you where labor is going. That tells you where labor is going. You get people say labor needs to be the voice of small businesses and bane people and trans rights. It's all baloney. Their candidate in the west of England is a Blairite who was embroiled in the 2009 expenses scandal. That's yesterday's news. And what I'm told is he's going to struggle. He's going to really struggle to win. He may win. What I think is really instructive with regards to the west of England mayoral race, as with the West Midlands with Liam Byrne, is the capacity, of course, there's another sort of Blair-era labor politician, is the ability of old new labor to win. I think if both of those guys lose, I think it's going to be a really important instructive moment about the capacity of the project that people like Luke Hakehurst and Peter Mandelson, et cetera, the capacity of that project to win. I think it'd be a really, really, really instructive moment. Then alongside the shenanigans for the west of England mayor race, you obviously got Bristol West CLP, had an AGM a few weeks ago now, presently writing a piece about this, went on for five, six hours, went on until midnight, basically, of 500 people, around 100 people couldn't participate. People were voting. Some people were able to vote twice. Two candidates were put together as one candidate clearly just not, doesn't resemble, you know, a functioning, effective democratic process. Now, why does this matter? Because actually Bristol West CLP was the second biggest in the country until quite recently 4,600 members has been a real heartland of the party left. So even in early 2020, just a couple of months after the devastating defeat of the 2019 general election, Rebecca Long Bailey won the endorsement of Bristol West CLP. I think Kierstarma came fourth. Dawn Butler was their endorsement on Butler for deputy leader. So that tells you about the tone of politics in that CLP. There's another CLP near there. I think it's called Kingswood, something similar is going on there as well. They've got an AGM coming up and again, that's going to be run by region. And I think what we see with Liverpool Mayor, what we see with the West of England Mayor race, what we see with Bristol West CLP, Kingswood CLP, these are just some examples, by the way, is effectively the labor right through the regional apparatus is trying to subvert democracy, expel the left, put the left out, demoralize and demobilize the left. And actually, if you follow Luke A. Kirst on Twitter or various people from the labor right, they're quite open about it. That's what they want to happen. That's the plan. And right now, those are the people Kierstarma has aligned himself to. Now, people say he's on the soft left, but if the people he's working alongside, if the only people really going to bat for him are people like Luke A. Kirst, people like John Speller, who wrote a piece last week against proportional representation, crazy. That's really important. So that tells you a couple of things, including, by the way, a Stammer Labor Party is never going to endorse, I think, meaning for electoral reform. Not going to happen, which for a lot of liberal critics of Corbynism is going to be a really tough lesson to learn. But my God, I hope they learn it. Let's get a couple of comments up. Ali Ryland with Atenna, really appreciated that Navarra exists today when a progressive, more in scare, quite progressive Scottish Politics podcast gave a trans exclusionary take on the SNP, Joanna Cherry firing. Can you start a Scottish branch? I'm not sure what podcast that refers to, but I probably won't go into it as I don't know. I'm not sure. We do definitely want to cover more Scottish politics, so that is definitely something we've got on our agenda this year that we need to be covering more thoroughly than we currently are. Keir Stammer with a fibre. Michael, I swear I can change. I want to be a Marxist trot like you guys will believe it when we see it, Keir Stammer. Let's go on to coronavirus stories. There are a lot actually this week. So we are still waiting until Monday to find out the plan for loosening lockdown, but speculation has been continuing in the papers today. I'm going to go to the Daily Mail this morning where underneath advice on how to get rid of a turkey neck, you learn what the Daily Mail thinks will be the roadmap out of lockdown. So they think that in Easter we'll see reopening limited to self-cated holidaylets and larger hotels. In May, restaurants and pubs will open with two households indoors and ruled of six outdoors. In June, venues will be allowed to expand to the rule of six indoors. And in July, industry bosses told Leisure and UK tourism will be broadly back to normal. So Leisure and Tourism will be back to normal in July is what the Daily Mail are saying. The Daily Telegraph have quite a different briefing. They've been told that lockdown is to continue until cases drop below 1,000 a day. Now, it's unlikely that both of those timetables can be true if R remains at around 0.8 as it is. At the moment, we would get down to below about 1,000 cases a day in early April, but that would be if everything stays as it is. As it seems certain that at least some schools will open on the 8th of March. It's quite likely that R will rise above that. So I wouldn't expect Britain to have less than 1,000 cases a day on any of those dates that were suggested by the Daily Mail. That may be by July, but probably not before that. Maybe June. But anyway, the timescales don't work. What then is Boris Johnson's line? He was asked today about comments from the Chief Executive of NHS Providers. He said that case rates would need to be an order of magnitude lower before the government could consider seriously loosening COVID restrictions. That was the Chief Executive of NHS Providers. Let's look at Boris Johnson's take. I certainly think that we need to go in stages. We need to go cautiously. You perhaps remember from last year that we opened up hospitality fully as one of the last things that we did. Because there is obviously an extra risk of transmission from hospitality. But we'll be sending it all out on Monday. And I know there's a lot of understandable speculation in the papers. And people are coming up with theories about what we're going to do and what we're going to say and about rates of infection and so on. I would just advise everybody, just wait it. We'll try and say as much as we can on Monday. It's reassuring to hear that the Prime Minister has now realised that yes, actually eating out and going to pubs is a fairly risky thing to do in a pandemic. It's miles away from eat out to help out. I doubt that scheme will be returning. Anyway, that's all quite speculative. We will be waiting until Monday for proper announcements on what days the lockdown will be loosened. Although I'm sure we'll actually find out about it on Sunday because it will be briefed to Boris Johnson's favourite journalists beforehand. Anyway, what we do know is that in the meantime, the government yesterday has announced that 1.7 million people will be added to the shielding list. Now, there were already 2.3 million people on the shielding list. That means people who were told to stay at home, to not go out at all, if possible, definitely to not go into work. Now, the list of people who were shielding had initially been drawn up on the basis of people having particular medical conditions. So that could be severe respiratory problems. So cystic fibrosis was one of the common conditions that would get you on this list. Or people who were undergoing certain treatment such as chemotherapy or things which suppress the immune system. Now, what this new 1.7 million people does, why these people are added, is because an algorithm developed at Oxford University has devised a system for assigning people into the shielding status with a much broader set of risk factors, so including things like age, ethnicity, and other chronic illnesses. So it should, in theory, be much more precise than the quite limited conditions for shielding that were in place before. Those in this new group who have not yet been vaccinated will now be offered a priority job. Now, this is a welcome development. I think people across the board are saying this is a good thing, even if it is very overdue we are. Now, quite a long way into this pandemic, but it is also a good opportunity to remind ourselves of the weaknesses of the shielding program, which I think is one of the things which in political commentary, by politicians, has been criminally under discussed throughout this pandemic. Because, and this is what I still find quite shocking. I think this is the fact about shielding that is most damning about this government's priorities, which is that if you are shielding, if you have been told by the government that you shouldn't leave your house, if you've been told it would be a great risk to your health to leave the house, you still can't demand to be furloughed. You can ask to be furloughed, you can ask your boss to be furloughed, but they can say no. And that's still not a right that the government have given people who are shielding. Now, in full lockdowns, you are entitled to statutory sick pay, but that itself is only £95 a week. So for many people that will be a massive pay cut, if they, you know, the boss says, I'm not going to, I'm not going to furlough you. And so instead they have to say, okay, well, I'll claim £100 a week. Like, you know, there are going to be lots of people who, that is a huge cut to their income for, I mean, most people it would be. And what's even worse is that it's only in those periods of national lockdown, where you have been able to claim that statutory sick pay automatically, if you're shielding the rest of the time, you know, even when cases were really, really high, you still had people who on paper were told they're at severe risk for leaving the house, but who were also told if you can go to work, you should do. It's all completely outrageous, completely bizarre, really characteristic of this government's approach to this pandemic. And in case you still don't believe me that this has been a complete abdication of responsibility on the part of this government, I want to show you a clip, which is, it's from a couple of months ago, but it's still the clip of the Prime Minister that I think is the most shocking thing I've seen throughout this pandemic. So this is a shielder asking Boris Johnson a question on the 19th of December. It was the press conference, you might remember it, where Christmas rules were tightened. Let's take a look. Why are shielders still expected to work in tier three? As somebody who's already lost two loved ones to COVID, this terrifies me. Thank you. Well, Laura, I see your question. Why are shielders still expected to work in tier three? Those who are shielding, those who are vulnerable, should of course take every step to protect themselves. And Laura, I hope very much that you're not being asked to work if you're shielding. Chris, anyone to add to that? Well, I think the first thing to say is I'm really sorry to hear about your two relatives who died from this virus. I mean, it is a very dangerous virus for many people. The shielding patterns are actually being re-looked at. But the view about shielding is that in the first wave, shielding did many things that were useful, but also did many things that were actually actively harmful. And we therefore changed the model of shielding since the first wave. And that includes people being able to get out more in many situations and also areas around work. But this is something which people are keeping on looking at to try and get the optimal balance between isolating people too much and isolating them enough from the virus. Now, what you saw there was Boris Johnson. That was in mid-December, so it was about nine months after we knew that we were in an intense life-threatening pandemic. And he still didn't know that people who were shielding were being asked to go to work. That's been happening throughout this whole pandemic. Even when we're in those national lockdowns and shielders are told not to go to work, they still don't have a right to claim furlough. That shielder who was speaking then lived in a tier-free area. So even in mid-December, when cases were rocketing across the country, they were, according to government policy, expected to go into work completely, completely irresponsible, forced, really painful, horrible decisions on people. There's lots written about it. There's lots of interviews where people are saying, I have to choose between feeding my family and putting my life at risk or putting someone in my household's life at risk because the support wasn't properly there. I also think it is worth mentioning that Chris Whitty's answer there was a bit pathetic, really. He's saying that, look, there's a balance to be struck here between saying that shielders, we need to worry about their mental health. So if we tell people just to never leave your house for a year, it's going to be, that's going to be damaging in its own way and the balance of getting them separate from the virus or protected from the virus. But what that doesn't take into account is, again, you cannot make a mental health argument for someone who has been told that they are at clinical extreme risk for going outside, not being able as a right to claim furlough. Aaron, I want to bring you in on this because I do think that throughout this pandemic, there have been so many fuck-ups on the part of this government, especially late lockdowns is the one we all know about, it's the one that's caused the most deaths. But at the same time, it's one that is properly discussed. Whereas along with, I suppose, a lack of money to self-isolate, which we're going to talk about a bit more in a moment, just the disgraceful way that I think shielders have been treated in this pandemic is just, it's never discussed. And I do find it quite shocking. I think that's just how politics plays out. When you've got a two-party system and people are always pursuing the center ground and seeking consensus, whether or not seeking consensus, it's highly gestural and performative. I do think that means that the marginalized get left out. And look, and the argument is made by people that defend that. They say, well, those people don't win elections. First of all, who knows if that's true or not? We're talking about a huge number of people. But secondly, you should probably start from an ethical standpoint in answering a question like that. It's the same with regards to, for instance, work fair reform after 2010 or disability benefits reform, et cetera. People said, well, it's not that many people. And they just kind of get marginalized in the board of debate. And I feel like something similar is happening here. And I genuinely think it's one of those areas where actually smaller groups in society who are really getting hit hard, that's exactly the kind of issue that is better addressed in a multi-party system with abortion representation. I think it's one of those examples of where first pass the power to a two-party system doesn't really work. And I'm not letting the government off the hook. I'm not letting various politicians off the hook. But I do think our political system, the Westminster system, structurally makes these kinds of things far more likely and they happen with far greater frequency. So is that going to change? If Labour try and push it on the agenda, is it going to change? Not really. I think it's a long-term issue. And of course, for disability activists and people with disabilities across the UK, it's a huge issue. But you can also see it reflected in the discourse around migration and immigrant rights, particularly after 2010. Well, I'm glad you brought up migration actually because I think it is really telling what politicians don't have to pay attention to when they just don't know a fact, when they just don't... They haven't even thought about it. So Boris Johnson there was shocked that someone who was shielding was being asked to go into work just as he was shocked about no recourse to public funds for people who don't have residence status in the country. And both of those times when you think, if he's this shocked, maybe he'll go away and change the policy afterwards. But that clip I just showed you, that was two months ago. The policy hasn't changed, right? So he's shocked at the time and then he forgets about it within five minutes and nothing ever changes. I think probably for the reasons that Aaron has just laid out there, these aren't swing voters. They're people that can be ignored, essentially. I want to go to the final big story of the day, which relates to lateral flow tests. Now, these are the rapid tests whose rollout has been the pet project of Dominic Cummings or was the pet project of Dominic Cummings before he resigned or was fired, however you want to put it. Now, they've been critiqued or criticized as being inaccurate, but Boris Johnson is clearly still very keen on them. That was clear on Monday when he explained hospitality should rely on the tests instead of vaccine passports. For purposes of this country and doing things within the domestic UK economy, I think what we're looking at everything but what we're thinking of at the moment is more of a route that relies on mass vaccination and as you know, we intend to vaccinate all the adults in the country by the autumn. Plus, lateral flow testing or rapid testing for those bits where it is the toughest nuts to crack, as it were, such as nightclubs or theatres. Those parts of the economy we couldn't get open last year. I think that will be the route that we go down and the businesses will go down. You've already seen lots of businesses using the potential of rapid on-the-day testing as well. I think that in combination with vaccination will probably be the route forward. I want to stress to everybody it is still early days. There's lots of discussions still to be had. Now, lateral flow tests are interesting because there's something that Boris Johnson always brings up at press conferences and kind of no one else does. You never hear Patrick Valance bring up lateral flow tests or Chris Whitty bringing up lateral flow tests. It's always the politicians and none of the scientists seem very convinced at all. Mainly, I'll talk about this a bit more in a moment, mainly because they're not that accurate. The details though because that was just hints there from Boris Johnson, we had some details in the newspapers this morning about how these lateral flow tests would be used. So one of the reports was in the Guardian. They suggest that mass lateral flow testing could be used at festivals and sports events. And now they report that the events industry is lobbying for the government to front the cost of the tests which could be used even after most people are vaccinated. And it's lots of the quotes are from someone called Jamie and Joku Goodwin who's the Chief Executive of UK Music. And he's saying that this would be worth it for the government. They should pay for all of these mass tests before people go into music venues because not only will that make the concert safer but it will also be a source where they can find out levels of prevalence of COVID-19 in the community. Now this sounds a bit of a reach to me. I think that probably this is the music industry saying we don't want to pay for this. Please could the government pay for this? Also we don't want to wait to reopen it. It seems like a bit of a flimsy argument from the music industry but that doesn't mean it won't happen especially as until October last year and Joku Goodwin, the Chief Executive of UK Music was a special advisor to Matt Hancock. Lots of close connections. Whenever you read an article about coronavirus there's so many people who used to have a job with that guy who now has a job with this industry lobbying on their behalf. Now festivals are still a long way off. So more immediately that was a bit speculative. This is in the very near future this seems like we will see mass testing for kids to go back to school and for everyone else to get back to work. So this is from a Times report. All school children will be offered tests twice a week once they go back as will their parents and support bubbles. A similar policy is likely to apply to teachers and their close contacts combined with existing tests for people having to leave home for work during the present lockdown. About 68% of England's population will be eligible for repeat rapid tests next month according to documents seen by the Times. It goes on to say a further surge is being planned for between April and May which will include the supply of lateral flow tests to both large and small businesses as people go back to work. People will be able to order free tests online and also pick them up from pharmacies. Royal Mail has been instructed to prepare initially for the delivery of 400,000 a day or nearly three million a week. Although by April one estimate has the government supplying about 75 million tests a week. Now this all seems very, very ambitious. Testing school children twice a week. I mean that seems like quite a good idea. There are some problems though which is that as I've said before as we've talked about on detail on this show these tests aren't very sensitive so that means they're quite likely to give you a false negative. So you could take that test with coronavirus and it will tell you that you don't have coronavirus. Now some of the time it does pick it up and other things being equal that will take more people out of circulation who have coronavirus and especially who have high viral load so are more infectious out of society, out of school, out of the workplace and that should lower the R number. The issue though is that the government has to be really careful and this is what the scientists are all saying that when people get that negative lateral flow test they don't think great. I now don't have to take precautions because if it's not very sensitive that means you're getting that negative test doesn't mean you don't have coronavirus. So the messaging would have to be really, really, really careful here to make sure that people don't become or don't get a false sense of security and end up passing on the virus. It's a bit unfortunate then that the slogan currently being planned by the government is are you ready, get testing, go. Now you couldn't really get further away from encouraging people to have a false sense of security than saying are you ready, get testing, go on a test which is only about 50% sensitive which misses quite a lot of positive cases. Aaron, I want to bring you in on this. We've talked about lateral flow test before being sort of the pet project of Dominic Cummings. Do you think this is that they've invested millions and millions into them and so they just want to use them or do you think that this does have some logic behind it? I think that's right, yeah. I think also it's important to say, look, it's probably worth doing even if it's not 100% bulletproof but at the same time you shouldn't have that false sense of security. I mean, covering procurement of something on that scale is incredible 75 million tests a week. I mean, that is absolutely huge and it may be that these are important relationships to build with various manufacturers and producers and in the future we'll have better tests for different variants so there's still an argument for that procurement. I'm not saying we shouldn't do it and it's good to, you know, it should be part of an effective test and trace program this year, next year. If there's another coronavirus which isn't COVID-19 in five, 10 years time as we've said repeatedly on Navarra, both in Tisca and elsewhere, probable, not possible, probable. All that said though, yeah, I think there is absolutely no reason to sort of pitch this is this will make a huge difference. I mean, A, it won't, it won't make a huge difference and look, kids will still be going into schools after testing. I think, I mean, you tell me the specifics here, they don't, they will go into school after taking the test and don't know the results yet, I presume. Well, you can do these at home. Just twice a week. I'm not sure how they're going to do it. So, they have done it in places where you go and get your test at a center close to school. So, I know that in football stadiums where you've been able to say, look, I'm a student at this school, can I get the test and then you are right and then, you know, you see the result before you go into school. It might be the case that they sort of have a testing room and then you wait in the playground for half an hour. I don't know. Because if you're outside, you're on that. Oh, that worked. If you've got a thousand kids in the school to process them all before starting school, testing each one, then getting the results. Yeah, I mean, it does sound like a rigmarole, doesn't it? I'd imagine maybe it makes more sense to say to the kids, can you get it on a Sunday and you set up a center where people can get it on a Sunday and then after school on a Tuesday. I'm not sure precisely how it's going to work. But the main point is that this only helps if you don't say that this is going to solve all your problems. Because the moment you say you're fine, you've got a negative lateral flow test, that's the moment when the system completely breaks down. You have to be giving people the opposite message. And this is so characteristic of this government who say pubs are fine because they're COVID secure. Schools are safe because kids are unlikely to be hospitalized with COVID-19. They're both things which don't follow. A pub is never COVID secure if the doors are closed because this is an airborne disease. And even if a kid can't get hospitalized, well, they can. But even though they don't get often get hospitalized from COVID-19, they can pass it on. So you've got this constant thing of the government trying to almost intentionally give people a false sense of security. Our final development on COVID-19, this isn't really a news story. This is an ongoing one, which is that, as you know, the government still aren't paying people to self-isolate all of this. If you're going to send out 75 million lateral flow tests a week, you might as well pay people to self-isolate if they test positive. Otherwise, as we already know, people don't do it because they can't afford to do it. Now, we've known this for ages. Sage members, so that the top scientists have been saying this for ages. And apparently now the Joint Biosecurity Center has also got in on the act. So the JBC or the Joint Biosecurity Center was set up by the government to advise them, the government institution, and the Guardian have got a leaked report from them on the problems with government strategy up to this point. And they're looking at how coronavirus has hit areas differently depending on the socioeconomic status of the people who lived there. Let's go to a couple of quotes from that article. In two of the UK's worst hit areas, Blackburn with Darwin and Leicester, the study found that more people seeking financial help to self-isolate had been rejected than accepted. It said, this could increase the likelihood for individuals to be unable to comply with self-isolation requirements as a result of their unmet needs. And later in the piece, it says, having high numbers of people in high-risk occupation is not specific to just these enduring areas. This in isolation is not a reason for enduring transmission, but rather along with a range of other factors overlaid that create the perfect storm. It said that existing socioeconomic inequality had left Black, Asian, and minority ethnic communities at greater exposure to COVID-19 as they were more likely to live in cramped and multi-generational housing in deprived areas and hold public facing jobs. It goes on, despite this, the report noted guidance around how to self-isolate safely in high-density housing does not appear to exist for England as it does for Scotland and Northern Ireland. So what this is laying out is essentially poorer areas are harder hit by coronavirus because the government has essentially ignored them. So people need money to self-isolate, especially if they're on low incomes, especially if they're self-employed, especially if they can't work from home like many professionals can do. And secondly, they haven't taken account of the circumstances that people actually live in. So they're saying it's in these areas, it's not just because people have jobs where they go out and facing lots of people in society. It's also because they live in multi-occupancy housing and the government has still never given anyone any advice as to what to do. So they say self-isolate in your home if you've got symptoms. What if there are eight people there? What if the four kids need to go to school? What if, you know, it's difficult enough to afford for one person to self-isolate? What if the two adults have to self-isolate and then suddenly the household's got no income? None of this has been considered by this government, which is why basically all of the policies so far have failed. And there's no sign they're going to sort it out. It's so, so frustrating. Let's go to some comments. Andy Olderslaid with 50 quid. Thank you very much. Thanks to Michael's great reporting on the pandemic, particularly at the early stages. His excellent work encouraged me to lock down early. Help me to protect vulnerable family members. I am forever grateful. Oh, that's such a lovely comment, Andy. I really, really appreciate that. All of my solidarity out to you. I hope people in your household are getting the support that people need over this pandemic. Rusty Sleaze with 2.51. TS Tiskey Sour helps me keep track of the days of the week. Me too. We have that in common, Rusty. Charles Black with a teller started listening to Tiskey during the first lockdown. Congrats to Michael and Aaron on turning a self-described centrist into a proper lefty. Shout out to my mates and fellow listeners, Leanne and Ollie. That's what we set out to do. Also, I want to get some right wingers over as well, but that's very good to hear, Charles. And Jonathan Mitchell with 7.99. Love listening to the show. Always great work. Would you guys do a weekly Tiskey Sour style show that covers regional news in the Labour Party movement? Interesting suggestion. We've got lots of requests to do more regional reporting. I want us to do more original reporting of that sort. Whether or not you'd like a specific Tiskey for it, tell us in the comments. Tell us in the comments if that's what you want. For now, we've got 2100 of you watching the video. Give it a like. Give it a like. It helps it on the algorithm. Our final story. We're expecting schools to start reopening in less than three weeks' time. So one might expect the Education Secretary to be doing everything in his power to try and make schools safe. That means Gavin Williamson should be busy organizing improved ventilation for schools, hiring new staff so classes can be split up and making sure headteachers have all the support they need to roll out mass testing. But no. Unfortunately, the Education Secretary has been busy with other concerns, obviously, fighting cancelled culture. That's his priority. On Tuesday, Williamson published a long-awaited policy paper on protecting free speech and academic freedom in British universities. Now, this document is 42 pages long. People have spent a while writing this, even though there were many other things for the Education Department to be getting on with. They still obviously haven't got laptops to everyone who needs them. It starts with a foreword from Gavin Williamson laying out why he thinks this is such a priority for his department in the middle of a pandemic, pretending to defend essentially free speech and academic freedom in universities. So he writes, within our society's broader recognition of free speech, academic freedom has rightly enjoyed a special status with additional protections recognized both in culture and in law. This is due to the special place our universities have historically held as centres of inquiry and intellectual debate. Bastions of free thought from which new ideas can emerge to challenge society's cozy consensus from Charles Darwin on evolution to John Spencer Bassett challenging racism that that freedom has been used to advance views which in their time were widely criticised as deeply offensive and immoral but which today are firmly established as accepted wisdom. Now a very, you know, impassioned defence of free speech in the university which he says is under threat and why does he think it's under threat? He also explains in that foreword. So he writes, there are some in our society who prioritise emotional safety over free speech or who equate speech with violence. This is both misguided and dangerous. The social psychologist Jonathan Haight makes the case powerfully. Not only do such attitudes suppress speech, they make it harder to draw a clear line against violence. A shocking finding from a recent study by King's College London was that a quarter of students saw violence as an acceptable response to some forms of speech and indeed we have seen this played out in the appalling scenes in London when Jewish societies invited speakers who other students did not approve of. Now that latter reference, I'm not sure precisely what those events are that he's referring to. I mean it could quite possibly be when there are sort of officials from the Israeli government. I imagine that's what it is, officials from the Israeli government and you get protests. I can't speak about what the specific event was in that case. What I can tell you about though is the misrepresentation that happens when he says that a quarter of students saw violence as an acceptable response to some forms of speech as something which is relevant to no platforming at universities because the questionnaire he's drawing upon has nothing to do with universities, it has nothing to do with people giving speeches at student unions. The question people were asked was if someone is using hate speech or making rationally charged comments, physical violence can be justified to prevent this person from espousing their hateful views. So that to me reads like racist abuse in the street. This was found by Stephen Bush I should say that the New States wrote a very good article on this policy paper and also according to Bush yads that it wasn't just this question that was in the study. They also did focus groups with students and the respondents when they spoke to them personally they weren't advocating violence as a tactic for shutting down events. They were talking about the fact that they'd be uncomfortable sitting there and doing nothing if someone's shouting racial abuse at someone in the street. So the fact that this has entered into a government policy document this isn't just a spectator think piece this is a government policy document pretty, pretty worrying. Going back to that policy paper we've got more problems which Gavin Williams says are undermining free speech on campus in our higher education institutions. He writes, the rise of intolerance and cancel culture upon our campuses is one that directly affects individuals and their livelihoods. Students have been expelled from their courses academics fired and others who have been forced to live under the threat of violence. These high profile incidents about the tip of the iceberg for everyone and goal Carl or Todd whose story is known evidence suggests there are many more who have felt they have had to keep silent with held research or believe they have faced active discrimination in appointment or promotion because of views they have expressed. Now in terms of those free names there Carl is a reference to Noah Carl who was, he was offered a job at I think it was an Oxford college which was retracted after academics said this guy's research actually doesn't really stand up he was publishing lots of things which weren't peer reviewed and which were about essentially race science I think so sort of differences along those lines. The kind of stuff that I think is to be honest rightly taboo but also if you're putting that out it better be well researched and it wasn't in his case. Selena Todd it was trans exclusionary radical feminism I actually don't know many of the details about that particular case. Let's move on though to what Gavin Williamson is proposing. And so he's proposing that universities be illegally required to actively promote free speech and with the office for students to be given he wants the office for students to be given the power to impose fines on institutions if they breach this condition so if they don't actively promote free speech. A new free speech champion will also be appointed to the office for students. Presumably it won't be Toby Young as they already tried to appoint him to the office for students and there was such an uproar they had to U-turn but anyway we'll get someone else in there maybe less controversial. The office for students if you want to wear is the independent regulator of higher education institutions in Britain in response to this because the proposals are still quite vague it's difficult to explain exactly what they are because it's pretty it's pretty murky at the moment this isn't proper legislation yet and this is just what they're proposing to do in sort of vague terms but let's go to some responses the NUS the National Union for students have said there is no evidence of a freedom of expression crisis on campus and student unions are constantly taking positive steps to help facilitate the thousands of events that take place each year so that's the NUS representative we can go to one from the UCU sorry from the University College Union University College and Lectures Union in reality the biggest threats to academic freedom and free speech come not from staff and students nor from so-called council culture but from minister's own attempts to police what can and cannot be said on campus and the Russell group so that's the group of of I suppose the the more established universities has warned against creating unnecessary and burdensome bureaucracy so most people seem to think this is kind of pointless but the Tories want to start a culture war Aaron what do you make of this I mean there are many people on the left who say yeah council culture maybe people are a bit too quick to say you know language is violence and we have to be protected from it at the same time everything being proposed here seems like just a very like a bare naked attempt to get headlines yeah I mean I disagree with quite a few people on the left about this I think cancer culture does exist I don't think it's peculiar to the left I think it's actually generally a liberal formation and actually you see it you know again anybody who has the misfortune who follows us on Twitter you know knows at the level of council culture thrown at Navarro media there are many many people particularly it seems in a culture which is increasingly mediated through the digital environment who just pathologically incapable of living with difference different opinions those people do exist I actually think generally speaking they're in the center of politics and mostly on the right but obviously it's a thing and I think it's a it's a general social phenomenon however it's not new it is not new and what did people and societies do to protect this you know right of freedom of speech they had constitutions they legally enshrined them in the constitutions so that everybody had those rights protected and so you know my response would be why are you only trying to defend free speech in universities why not in workplaces why not at home why not in the pub why not on the street hey you know what why don't we have a written constitution protecting everyone's freedom of speech I think the fact it's so so constricted as a as a proposal as a piece of legislation just universities and clearly it's just about the cultural if you care about freedom of speech let's have an honest conversation about a written constitution and making it a legal right the Tories don't want to talk about that by the way because it's it's an arbitrary limit on on state power and their ability to dominate and exploit people which is what they're all about but until we have that that broader document I mean it's it's a lot of crap let's have a written constitution I'm a bit old school on this Michael I I suspect you agree with me I'm I'd be happy to have a written constitution I mean I I agree I think I agree with you basically on on cancel culture I think people can be a bit quick to say we can't discuss this there are probably more taboos than there need to be at the moment I'd imagine but it doesn't seem that that's that's what Gavin Williamson is interested in here in the slightest and some evidence as to why he's not interested in this I actually want to skip to graphic 16a Fox if that's okay is that Gavin Williamson is not known as someone who has been an avid defender of free speech in university free speech in higher education institutions because Gavin Williamson has been one of the most vociferous proponents of the International Holocaust remembrance association definition of anti-Semitism and all its examples and has actually been pressuring universities to adopt it also threatening sanctions if they don't and we've talked about this before on the show the fact that it has as its examples calling the foundation of israel a racist endeavor which obviously is not actually an unreasonable it says that it's anti-Semitic to say that which is not an unreasonable thing to say given the Nakba given that there was a dispossession of the people who lived in in Palestine on the basis of their ethnicity on the basis of their religious background that's not an unreasonable thing to say but the IRA the International Holocaust remembrance association definition of anti-Semitism says you shouldn't and it's not just us saying this it's also the academic boards of universities who Gavin Williamson so powerfully wrote in that policy document should have autonomy and should be able to speak their minds will they think that Gavin Williamson's policy is not really helping so UCL adopted that definition of anti-Semitism after pressure from from Gavin Williamson or after prompting from Gavin Williamson but in a development just this week so it was last Friday and we can go to the article a vote by UCL's academic board has called on the university to retract and replace IRA working definition with a more precise definition of anti-Semitism it follows a report published in December by a working group of UCL academics that warned the IRA definition conflates anti-Jewish prejudice with political debate over Israel and Palestine which could have potentially deleterious effects on free speech such as instigating a culture of fear or self-silencing on teaching or research or classroom discussion of contentious topics and I think just what this shows you is just how cynical this whole thing is by Gavin Williamson because if you really care about free speech on campus when you've got a bunch of academics saying if you impose this definition on us it's going to limit what we can say about geopolitics then you would listen to them but no Gavin Williamson because he thinks that this is something he can attack the left for because this is pro-Palestine activists who are being discriminated against he's like oh no we need to implement all of these all of these loose definitions which criminalize speech but then the moment someone wants to do badly researched scientific papers comparing people of different ethnicities then that's all that's all good that should be it would be it would be shocking if someone were to disallow that kind of thing which I mean to me just shows this is not this guy's not serious Aaron do you think this is going to have real consequences I mean it's quite easy to just dismiss this as just they want to generate telegraph headlines to rile up their base but do you think this could actually have quite you know long-lasting effects in universities these these kind of policies being put forward by Gavin Williamson absolutely absolutely I think it's part of the tourist vision really is to take Britain on a path continue on a path which is a bit like Orban's Hungary which is to foreclose a pluralistic diverse debate to make impossible a pluralistic media which of course we we barely have already but they're trying their best to shut down any institutions that kind of you know offer an alternative channel for the BBC when it actually does its job and I think this is a big part of that and in the short term no it's not going to make a huge difference but I do think I do think you know you can see in 10 20 years time that the hope would be effectively that universities become this sanitised entirely de-politicised space you know and I think it's of a it's of a it's of a kind and people say that well you know should should school teachers have the right to strike should they have the right to be in a trade union you know they're they're key they're key workers like police officers you ultimately get I think to university lecturers and university support staff and so this this removal I think of of rights whether as workers or as citizens it is part of their broader project absolutely and and this is put in the bank for 10 years 20 years time and we've been on this path for 40 years so no I think it's very very dangerous can it be resisted I mean it's hard to say I mean ultimately as well if you if if the if the university doesn't become a site of of freedom of expression and diversity of views then other other institutions will do that people will just put elsewhere this is a fundamental human need it's not like it'll just stop but ultimately people will no longer go to universities if they want to engage in meaningful intellectual expansion they'll do it to get a well paid job which isn't necessarily guaranteed with a degree these days but you know that may just change the nature of university which suits them fine I think finally you know they they view I think rightly higher education as a source of left power one of the few sources the Tories have media they have obviously financial and economic elites they've destroyed the trade unions they have a big base in society now on the basis of home ownership so if you're looking for where does the left have any sort of institutional power whatsoever local government in major cities universities public sector trade unions they're going after all of them so I think it's an important it's an important thing to defend both as a philosophical principle but also this is part of a broader political censure which the Tories I think would include within within a broader suite in terms of what they want to change over the next generation it shouldn't be taken lightly as ridiculous as Gaffer and Williamson is and you're right to say this is all about getting headlines and the telegraph and the spectator and the times I think it's more than that and I think it's really critical to say freedom of speech really matters it's a left principle Rosa Luxemburg meaningful freedom is freedom to disagree and one reason for instance why you don't get bylaws in the US like anti-vagrancy for instance is that somebody begging for money on a street is exercising their freedom of speech right those bylaws and Westminster council moving people on asking for money begging for money if you have if you have a formally recognized a right to free speech that's a very difficult thing to implement or prevent you know prevent starts to have real problems if we have meaningful freedom of speech in this country let you say the IHRA we could carry on the Tories don't want that they want to destroy a political base of power for the left we've got a comment which sums up actually the argument quite well this is Rob Hogg 68 with Tenna thank you very much to quote a friend on Facebook if they really believed in freedom of speech they would scrap prevent and back off on the threat to withdraw fundings from universities which don't adopt the IHRA definition quite right I think that is very well put and we take Gavin Williamson more seriously on free speech if he wasn't trying to ban loads of speech it just doesn't gel very well together oh one more let's go to this comment as well Lewis Rawlins and we're 45 very generous thank you very much enormously appreciate your work revealing substantially more than the state of UK media readily permits having missed out on the opportunity to do so much earlier to my Chagrin is it Chagrin Chagrin this is also for my mums what is it Aaron Chagran I think oh Chagran this is also Michael can I say to you you know never ever you've done it you've done it there people should never ever take the mic out of somebody who says a word wrong because they've learned the word by reading it and they didn't come from a posh family continue we are going to get to the birthday shout out to Lewis Rawlins mum happy birthday so before we go I need to make a correction for something that was said on last Wednesday's show so on that show when discussing Labour's new anti-Semitism advisory board my colleague Rivka Brown suggested Leo Noe was a member of the Jewish leadership council he is in fact a former member of that organisation now it was also mentioned that members of the JLC believe the concept of Islamophobia is moronic now that was a reference to a specific tweet by a specific person I'm Claudia Mendoza who is co-chief executive of the JLC she quick tweeted a quote from Sam Harris that Islamophobia was a word created by fascists and used by cowards to manipulate morons now of course such a statement has no bearing on the beliefs of Leo Noe and we apologise if such an inference could have been drawn so glad that we have the opportunity to clear that up and thank you for watching Tiski Sauer on Navarro media as you know we go live every Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 7pm do subscribe to the channel we have videos going out every single day we'll be back on oh this is I've lost track of the days it's Wednesday so we'll be back on Friday at 7pm for now you've been watching Tiski Sauer on Navarro media good night