 Hello and welcome to Tiskey sour where we are even more appreciative than usual to be joining you on a Wednesday evening because we went through quite an ordeal yesterday. You probably know about it if you if you follow the channel because we talked about extensively there was a deletion. Incident on YouTube will be giving you a bit of an update later on the show I should say darling this is your first time back in in the virus second coming. How are you feeling will you stress just today. I can't tell you how glad I am to see you on the other side of my screen right now what a dramatic 48 hours. How does like really scary but yeah I'm looking forward to talking about it later on in the show and what it tells us about. Litchy infrastructures we had a we're gonna talk about again yet the implications of it all we also did have a call with YouTube today so we can give you sort of a bit more. Information about what happened although we still are largely in the dark the main story today is not YouTube is not anything to do in our media it's the budget. The big announcement by Rishi Sunak about his spending plans there was also a spending review which means that it determines the next three years. The British economy not just the next one I'll be joined by James Meadway to discuss that before we get started and hit the subscribe button if you haven't already. And do tweet your comments your questions on the hashtag Tiskey sour or in the comments box. Let's get going I should inform Fox that the notes in front of me are upside down which I'm going to struggle with and what we can sort that out in in in one moment. At today's budget and spending review Rishi Sunak said his goal was to reduce taxes and railed against those who want to expand the state. However he also promised to boost to public sector spending and his budget leaves Britain with its highest level of tax since the nineteen forties. I'm joined by James Meadway to discuss what the budget means I'm not going to ask you a big picture take on the budget yet because we're going to we're going to go through. You know parts of Sunak speech one by one and take the themes as they go so to get us going as is customary the budget started with an outline of the state of the UK economy as assessed by the office for budget responsibility. I'm grateful to the OBR for their work and I'm pleased to say they now expect our recovery to be quicker thanks to this government's actions they forecast the economy to return to its pre covid level at the turn of the year earlier than they thought in March. Growth this year is revised up from four to six and a half percent. The OBR then expect the economy to grow by six percent in twenty twenty two and two point one one point three and one point six percent over the next three years. In July last year at the height of the pandemic unemployment was expected to peak at twelve percent. Today the OBR expect unemployment to peak at just five point two percent. That means over two million fewer people out of work than previously feared and wages are rising compared to February twenty twenty they have grown in real terms by almost three and a half percent. I suppose some pretty decent sounding statistics growth of six point five percent this year followed by six percent in twenty twenty two unemployment to peak at five point two percent next year instead of the eleven point nine percent previously predicted that sounds especially impressive and wages which have grown in real terms by three point four percent since February twenty twenty. James from what Rishi Sunak said there the points he'd taken out of that report from the office for budget responsibility it sounds like the British economies in a very healthy state is is that a correct interpretation of his presentation. Not not really and it's not a correct interpretation of what the office budget responsibility figures are telling you I mean first of all these things are forecast right and and what Rishi Sunak is saying there is that hey we got the forecast wrong before and now we're changing the forecast. And things are going to be magically better this hasn't actually happened. And what you've seen over the last year is that kind of conventional economic models and most economists have basically got large parts of what coronavirus is going to do wrong. I mean there was a wide expectation early on that this would be a sort of short sharp shock a very rapid rebound and life will go back to normality pretty rapidly that isn't going to happen. We're going to be living with COVID now for decades effectively. So that isn't going to happen. The projections in the future once you look beyond this kind of period of recovery from the real sort of deep crisis last year. Once you look beyond that even the OBR forecast say that basically it's going to be quite low growth and to be honest from my point of view I think they're probably being optimistic. We're going to be looking at years now a very very rocky sort of fits and starts of growth of uncertainty of supply chain disruptions potential new recessions down the line financial instability all of these sets of things. So none of this actually looks particularly good but right now Rishi Sunak can say hey our forecast say it's going to be all right and things don't seem too bad. He's bet the farm on this by the way which I think is a huge risk for him to be taking when it turns out in six months time. Things aren't anywhere near as good as he's trying to play. I know I take your point that these are forecasts. The statistic wise but do we call them statistics when they're forecast anyway? The statement that stood out to me was this unemployment to peak at 5.2% next year instead of the 11.9% previously predicted. As you say it's a forecast it could be wrong but it does seem like people wildly overestimated the effect that coronavirus would have on unemployment and we are in a much better situation than I think we on this show often predicted. What's that about? What's going on? A couple of things. One is the impact of the colossal expenditure really through the furlough scheme which is what 190 billion I think the figure is 9 million people protected by it at its peak and then some additional bits and pieces of support that the government put into the economy. Now if the government moves and spends that amount of money whatever else happens it can have some impact on unemployment. The question is how much it has and once you're saying okay we're going to simply pay a large part of a great deal a very large number of people's wages for a period of time then you're going to insulate them from the effects of falling demand which is what happened last year and what is coming out on this side. That's the first thing. The second one is probably a slightly more complex point but it's to do with how economists tend to think about the world which is I think a lot of people a lot of economists assumed that what was happening with COVID was a shock to demand that in other words you would have people spending less and that would be the driver of the recession and not thinking through what was also going to happen when you had to impose all these restrictions on how people work, how they supply goods, how they supply services and the way that would play out in the labour market. And that's kind of what we're seeing in this country right across Europe certainly in North America where you have these really tight labour markets in particular bits of the economy where people are still there are still some restrictions in places increasing demand for some services and actually there's people now especially in the US you can see people going out and strike and demanding higher wages and bits of that starting to happen even in this country. Now this from a point of view of here we are in Mavara this is a good positive thing there should be more people going out and strike there should be more people demanding more money because that's the only thing that's going to get us through the next sort of few years which is going to be a time of much higher inflation than we've been used to over the last sort of 10-20 years or so. Let's go on to spending. In his speech Sunak said that the budget for foreign aid would return to 0.7% of GDP by 2024 that's after being cut by the Tories which was by the way not in their manifesto he also said this about budgets for the rest of the public sector. Today's budget increases total departmental spending over this parliament by £150 billion that's the largest increase this century with spending growing by 3.8% a year in real terms as a result of this spending review and contrary to speculation there will be a real terms rise in overall spending for every single department and public sector net investment as a share of GDP will be at the highest sustained level for nearly half a century. If anybody still doubts it today's budget confirms the Conservatives are the real party of public services. Rishi Sunak there announcing a real term rise in the overall size of every single department's budget in government he also said that under his plans public sector investment as a proportion of GDP would be the highest they've been this century. James I want your take on this it sounds like the words of a Chancellor who's abandoned austerity. Yes this is someone one of the researchers at the Institute of Fiscal Studies put it quite well earlier which is austerity is over but it's not undone. In other words yes there is going to be increases in real terms right the way across what government does so the government is going to be spending more money on basically everything it does that isn't enough to undo the previous 10 years where it was basically cutting everything or certainly not increasing spending enough to keep up with demand as happened in the health service. So although there's a kind of turning point here and actually it's been one that's been in train for a while you know as soon as Boris Johnson took over as Prime Minister this government started increasing public spending it was up something like 4.1% in his first year as Prime Minister then we had coronavirus hits obviously public spending goes crazy and then even as we move out of that first phase of the coronavirus crisis they're still maintaining quite a high rate of public spending increase. I mean to put it in context I think there's some disputes over the figures that Rishi Sunak used there the IFS reckons it's a sort of 3% annual average increase in public spending to the end of this parliament. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown when he was Chancellor increased public spending on average by about 4% a year up until the financial crisis so it's not as rapid as new labour in government but it's still a big turn from what we've seen in the sort of 10 years or so of consistent real-terms cuts in what departments are spending. I mean the way to look at this by the way is not Rishi Sunak has had some I don't think he's had some damascene conversion to the joys of Keynesianism and the need for a bigger state. You saw his little homily at the end of his speech which is really just there to appeal to like Tory backbenchers and the Tory membership where he says I still believe in low taxes in a small state really but he's not making the decisions here. This is Boris Johnson's government, it's Boris Johnson's budget and he's someone who really doesn't care about all that sort of ideological stuff. He's quite happy to just spend a load of money because it makes him popular and it makes it easier for the Tories to win the next election and that's why they're doing it. So yes I think there has been a turning here and I think we're going to have to be quite careful about how this plays out and what that increase in spending means. It doesn't mean that everything's magically going to look suddenly better all over the place. We're going to have to fight and say we need more, much more than the government is putting in, especially in things like the green investment programme but nonetheless it's not just the cuts are going through all the time in every department like they used to. Let's look at some charts, these are from the IFS, they're the same organisation where they said this is austerity which is ending but not being undone. So we'll start with education. Boris Johnson has often called it his priority. You can see here how spending per pupil has changed over time. Now as Rishi Sunak said they will be increasing spending on education but it is only going to get back to 2010 levels in 2024. So one you've got a wasted 15 years there where every child has had to go through school with less investment than they were able to in 2010 and also even if you hadn't seen that dip a stagnating amount of spending on children for 15 years is historically disastrous if you look at how fast it was rising before that. We can also look at all the other departments so this again is from the IFS, the Institute for Fiscal Studies and here they show you how this budget leaves departments again compared to 2010. So you can see there that the health and social care department that's been going up throughout the whole of austerity potentially not by enough to make up for an aging population et cetera but it's going up the home office way up way higher than it was in 2010 education will only just have recovered by 2024 but all the other departments even in 2024 after these spending increases kick in will still be considerably below where they were in 2010. That DWP one that really stands out for me as well as housing both ending up more than 40% lower than they were in 2010 in terms of those departmental budgets. One thing that to me sort of gels oddly with these graphs or which I'm going to ask James for an explanation of is how this compares to tax rates. So while we have these budgets which have lower levels of funding than they did in 2010 we do have the highest levels of taxes since the 1940s by 2024 according to the plans in this budget and spending review we will have the highest level of taxes as a proportion of GDP since the 1940s. How do we square that circle James? Why have we historically quite high level of taxation but still the majority of departments poorer than they were 10 years ago? The issue here is the kind of the overall balance of government spending what you've seen from that graph you've just shown is that even during austerity the government was consistently putting more money in real terms into the health service. Now crucially as you said this wasn't actually enough to keep up with demands of an aging population essentially. So even though more money was going in the NHS was still starting to lag I mean lag quite severely by the time we hit the pandemic last year. So that means that the government is spending more and more of everything it spends on health and then of course more and more also on things like pensions which have been again protected not shown on the graphs there for a long period of time. So that's actually like quite a big part of what government now does and a large part of what government does in terms of how it spends its money is simply health, business, social care and pensions and then everything else is jammed in over here. So that's how you can get this peculiar thing where taxes have gone up but most departments have seen this decline in how much money they have relative to 2010 because the balance of what government is doing has shifted over those 10 years or so. So that's how we got to this situation now. The other part of that of course is that broadly this government is trying to target a somewhat tighter balance than New Labour did when it was in office. Rishi Sunak has introduced this fiscal rule that says he's going to target a surplus actually on day-to-day spending. In other words the government getting more in taxes and it spends day-to-day in three years time. So that's a certain amount of sort of squeeze that's being applied there and that means that you go off and try and find more taxes to deal with it. There's also this business of trying to bring down the amount of government debt relative to GDP which is another sort of squeeze that's being applied. Put all that together and this gives you the total mix of things. What got Rishi Sunak off the hook was exactly where we came into this discussion which is that the Office of Budget Responsibility, the official forecasters have turned around and said hey the economy's growing faster than we thought. That's given Rishi Sunak another £30 billion or so to play with. Again this is a kind of forecast error rather than something real. The economy has grown faster than expected but it's not like he's had to say okay now we're going to go out and tax the rich more or borrow more money or whatever it's a bit of a free gift for him. So he's been able to use that to increase spending over this period of time and avoid some of the harder arguments about whether you want to increase borrowing whether you want to increase taxes. I'm just going to show one more chart on wages. We often hear Boris Johnson say that wages are rising. The OBR forecast, this is presented by the IFS, suggests that average wages in 2025 will be around £18. If we had continued on the trend that Britain was on from 1997 to 2008 in fact wages would be £11.70 higher per hour so closer to £30 an hour. So that's just to show you, well I mean the Conservatives would say the disastrous consequences of the financial crisis but in reality it's a disastrous consequences of austerity. This is quite unique to Britain seeing a chart that looks quite as stark as that. Let's talk about the climate and I'm going to bring in Dahlia for that topic. First of all let's have a look at a clip from the budget. Of course today's budget came just days before COP26. Britain is hosting it and so has an extra responsibility to show leadership. That all means this announcement in today's speech came as a bit of a shock. The United Kingdom then they do when flying home from abroad. We used to have a return leg exemption for domestic flights but were required to remove it in 2001. But today I can announce that flights between airports in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland will from April 2023 be subject to a new lower rate of air passenger duty. This will help cut the cost of living with nine million passengers seeing their duty cut by half. It will bring people together across the United Kingdom and because they tend to have a greater proportion of domestic passengers it is a boost to regional airports like Aberdeen, Belfast, Inverness and Southampton. So days before COP starts we're announcing a massive cut to taxes on domestic flights. We should be phasing out domestic flights not encouraging them with tax cuts. How big a surprise was that? We often talk about the government not going far enough when it comes to climate change but this is just an actively this seems like vandalism days before you hosted international conference. Yeah it's totally ludicrous and to announce something like this just before the UK is hosting the climate negotiations it's really just a kick in the teeth and not only does it tell me how little this government actually cares about climate breakdown but it also just tells me how comfortable this government is. We're in 2021. We are in the last decade that we have to take the necessary radical action to create the worst excesses of climate breakdown. At this point in time a government should not feel able to do something like this. No matter how much pressure any lobby aviation lobby whatever is putting on them it should be seen as essentially political suicide. The public pressure should be that high that it should be seen as political suicide to announce something like this. And if we had a public that was supported by their media I have barely seen any senior political journalists actually drawing attention to this and drawing attention to the implications of this then something like this would be an utter scandal because as you said not only is the government not doing enough to protect us from the excesses of climate breakdown to halt climate breakdown but they're actually actively going in the wrong direction and bringing us closer to that reality. And it also tells me that as COP is coming up we have to make sure that any attempt by this government to portray itself as a world leader of climate as a climate leader needs to be completely exposed for what it is because there is no amount of bioengineering of talking about fictitious carbon capture storage technologies that don't even exist yet. No amount of tree planting that can compensate for making a decision like this in this particular moment. This is not how you help out the aviation sector and aviation workers who understandably are likely to be nervous about what their future looks like in a post-carbon world as we try to transition away from fossil fuels but the way that you put aviation workers at ease isn't by bringing them closer to climate breakdown but by retraining and redeploying them in well unionised jobs in other sectors. And that is how you actually tackle not only tackle the issue of worker insecurity and worker nervousness about what a post-carbon future looks like but it's also bizarre that we are having this conversation about internal aviation in a country as small as the UK when train travel which is actually a much more sustainable way of moving around a much more accessible way of moving around that is completely unaffordable and also poorly planned in this country it would be much better for everyday working class people if money was actually invested into renewable transport into renewable train transport and also in rewiring how that transport is planned so that it's easily accessible particularly for people in areas that have been neglected and that transport is actually brought into public ownership so that it's much cheaper so that people can access it. That would actually bring people together rather than focusing on this method of transport that is really only for very rich people, let's be frank. When was the last time anyone took an internal flight in the UK? Of slight spending increases does not make up for the deaths those years caused. I think that's very well put. I think there will be lots of people who heard Rishi Sunak say that and felt incredibly angry because they'd witnessed the pain and suffering that conservatives had caused to anyone who relies on public services over the past decade. You've seen a lot of Rishi Sunak, we're going to move on to the Labour response. Keir Starmer today tested positive for Covid-19. We wish him a speedy recovery. That meant that the budget was responded to by Rachel Reeves the shadow chancellor. Let's take a look at what she said. The chancellor in this budget has decided to cut taxes for banks. So Madam Deputy Speaker at least the bankers on short-haul flights sipping champagne will be cheering this budget today. Arrogance after taking 6 billion pounds out of the pockets of some of the poorest people in this country expecting them to cheer today for 2 billion pounds given to compensate. In the long story of this parliament never has a chancellor asked the British people to pay so much for so little. It's claim and again today the chancellor compared the investments that he is making to the last decade. But who was in charge? They were. A bunch of decent points. There were some references we hadn't mentioned yet so the champagne issue. There were changes to VAT on certain forms of alcohol. Now fizzy wine will be charged at the same rate as non-fizzy wine, which does include champagne of course. We've already talked about the cut to short-haul flight taxes. The cut to universal credit which took 6 billion pounds away from people who are entitled to that benefit. There was something for people on universal credit which was an increase in the or a decrease in fact in the taper rate. So when you start to earn they only they'll take less money off your universal credit for every pound and then a standard but decent point about the fact that this comes after 10 years of Tory austerity. What we've been talking about for the past 20 minutes. James did Rachel Reeves get the tone right in that response to Rishi Sunak? I thought she actually did a very good job with it. I mean she's a relatively unusual politician in that she's quite comfortable talking about sort of economics issues. And particularly on the Labour side most people will literally find anything else other than economics to talk about which has just not been a permanent problem because the Tories talk absolutely rubbish about the economy and then you have a bunch of MPs talking properly on it. Rachel has a background in economics and is very confident about doing this and you can see the Tories getting rattled by the amount of noise that started making. This was all a good sign and also these are good solid pick your enemy and define who it is and say that the Tories are actually on these people's side is exactly the right thing to do. Cutting the bank's surcharge whilst also cutting universal credit for what 4.5 million people is a disgraceful thing to do. It's very very clear where your real preferences are. Spending your budget speech mostly talking about cuts to alcohol duty which is fine but spending more time in this than the climate emergency ahead of COP. It tells you again something about your real priorities. I would just say on the air passenger duty thing. I think it's absolutely extraordinary to do this before a conference where the government is for the entire time running up to COP has wanted to go in and say we are leading the world on climate change. We want everybody else to do better. This is what the Prime Minister has been saying and now they have to go in and say oh you must do better to all these developing countries when every single one of them can turn around and just say oh well you've cut taxes on flying. You're complete hypocrites if you're asking us to do more when you're making it cheaper and easier for people to fly in your country. It's scuppers. It really damages what the government is trying to do in COP. So I find it extraordinary intervention. The only way to look at it I suppose is to try and put it in Tory party terms is this is Rishi Sunak playing again to the crowd, the climate skeptics, the small state weirdos, the Thatcherites in the Conservative Party membership for when he wants to run for being Prime Minister himself. But it's risking an entire international conference to do it. So yes I thought Rachel Reed's intervention there was very good. The problem you've got with what Labour's doing is well what would you do about this instead? And it's still a little bit vague if you saw some of the stuff they were tweeting earlier about you know Labour would tax fairly. Okay what does that mean really? If you say everybody wants to tax fairly what does that actually mean? And pinning Labour down on what they would do differently rather than what is their critique was always I think difficult. David West with 10 Euros a relevant super chat if only Labour were offering policies that were better than the scraps the Tories are throwing instead of going for sound bites with no substance to back them up very quickly James is that fair? There's too much of that. I mean Labour does end. They said they will spend £28 billion a year on Green New Deal investments. I mean this is big. This is actually bigger than Labour said they'd spend in 2019 in the Green New Deal. But they don't make enough of that and actually it's a little bit here's one thing here's one thing here's another thing. They don't necessarily stitch it all together as one coherent story at the minute. I thought we saw elements of that in Rachel Reed's speech where she's starting to have a go at the millionaire sipping champagne and their short-haul flight. I mean this is good but there's not enough of that so everything turns into this kind of slightly lighter well there's a little bit of a complaint here there's a little bit of a complaint there what's your big picture? What's the world going to look like? What's this country going to look like? Should Labour manage to form a government in a few years time? Unlikely as it presently seems to be quite honest. That's the problem that the Labour is up against and they just haven't solved it and they don't at this point in time really look like they're about to solve it. Finally let's talk about the media. We're not going to cover in detail how this budget was covered but there is one tweet from BBC News that we should bring up which is sort of indicative of everything that can be wrong about economics coverage in this country. So the BBC tweeted the UK government borrowed heavily to cope with Covid. Now Chancellor Rishi Sunak has to balance the books and pay for spending promises. Now I saw James you shared that and shared a complaints link alongside it. It's now been taken down so that was potentially some effective Twitter activism. Can you explain what is wrong with that tweet from the BBC and why you think they are still tweeting nonsense like this? Well I mean the BBC is too close to this government. That's been obvious for a long period of time in lots and lots of different ways this is happening. It operates under sort of a cloud of fear and uncertainty about its future and this cows it and disciplines it and it ends up doing things like what to me looks like you're basically tweeting a conservative party press release rather than actually writing a sort of more neutral at least description of the kind of choices that Rishi Sunak has Chancellor faces and that's the issue. He has choices to make about what to do. He does not have to balance the books and actually if you look at what the government is doing it isn't balancing the books because it's going to borrow lots of money to spend on capital investment and it'll say that this is okay to do that. So on every level saying he has to balance the books is not doing that he doesn't have to do that you shouldn't be using this language it's nonsense to talk like this about a national economy and to be honest I think if people are on Twitter and they see things like this especially from the BBC which is supposed to be a public service broadcaster after all then I think people should challenge it and should poke journalists about this. We have to get to the point where especially political journalists can talk in a grown-up fashion about how the economy operates rather than this kind of nonsense about balancing books or the cupboard being bare or God helpers Rishi Sunak's piggy bank. You know we have to get out of this infantile stupid economically literate way of speaking about things and I think it's time that Jonas get challenged on some of the language they're using this and get challenged consistently about it. James Meadway thank you so much for taking us through today's budget always a pleasure to have you on the show. Thank you. Let's go to a comment Jonas Patrick Marvin with a tenor thank you very much. 2000 Palestinians many children are being illegally detained purchase the dignity and hope album over on the Baladna Youth Bandcamp and you'll be donating directly to the Detainee Solidarity Fund. I'm really glad this super chat came in because I know some of the artists that are part of this definitely do check that out so the dignity and hope album and it's on the Baladna Youth Bandcamp do do check that out. If you haven't already do hit like on our stream it helps us on the algorithm. Next story as you might already know we at Navarra Media had a serious falling out with YouTube on Tuesday at 10 30 a.m. they deleted our entire channel we were told it would be permanent but after a public backlash within three hours we were reinstated. If you want to know more about the initial sequence of events we go through it blow by blow on Tuesday night's show was that wasn't a tiskey was an impromptu show what I want to do now though is fill you in on what has happened since then. We still don't know exactly what happened on Tuesday or why we were deleted but today we did have a call with people at YouTube they told us they were still trying to work out exactly what went on but they could tell us two things first the decision to delete the channel wasn't made by an algorithm it was a human error. Second our deletion wasn't the result of just one mistake but two the first mistake was flagging us as an account that promoted scams or spam you'll know we do neither of those things and the second mistake was punishing us by deleting the account in other words even if we had been guilty of what we were being accused of deleting the account should not have been the course of action they pursued so two mistakes one saying we were you know producing spam and the other saying because you're producing spam you need your account to be deleted. As I say still many unknowns we don't know we know it was a person now instead of being an algorithm but we don't know who or why made these two errors will of course update you as we get more information. Dahlia I want to I mean again Dahlia you'll know exactly the same as I do when it comes to this on the details so I want to go I suppose instead of just speculation to talk about sort of your take on this I did a show with Aaron and Ash yesterday on the topic I've seen from Twitter you also have lots of thoughts on what this incident tells us so what did you what was your experience of Navarra getting deleted what what are your political takeaways. Yeah what as I said before incredibly dramatic sort of 24 hours but we made it through and I think that this whole incident really shone a light onto the problems of the fact that we live in a society where almost so much of our life is platformized particularly you know our media and our communications infrastructure and so you know the big the big five platforms the you know Facebook Microsoft Apple Amazon and Alphabet which own Google and YouTube I think it's they don't really operate like tech companies I think it's a misnomer to call them technology companies they're much more like giant multi-layered infrastructures in fact providers of many different infrastructures which is why I kind of alluded sometimes think of the more of us like a government not in terms of their any time of kind of political participation or democratic process but in terms of their kind of these overarching organizing forces that have lots of that govern lots of different infrastructures within them and they've taken on this very ubiquitous embedded role in our society and they've done that in a really rapid way and so it's become if you really think about it it's become impossible to communicate to travel to to purchase things to buy consumer goods without going through one of these platforms and on top of being deeply unaccountable they are often very glitchy and that's and when they glitch it really shows us how fragile a lot of the systems that we rely on are it sort of plunges people into uncertainty there was a lot of news for example that came out of WhatsApp being down and the implications that that actually had particularly in the global south for a lot of workers and a lot of the you know the ways in which people communicate and stay together and that kind of glitchiness is partly to do with scale it's partly to do with the fact that they've gotten so big and so all-encompassing in such a quick way in you know so rapidly and part of it is to do with a sort of shaky reliance on a combination of machine learning and outsource human labor you know we often there was a lot of speculation about was it an algorithm or was it a human in reality those two things are very intertwined it's a person that you know designs an algorithm or it's a group of people that design an algorithm and when an algorithm flags up content that content is often then reviewed by underpaid over exploited workers largely in the global south and so this very muddled and splintered you know geographically splintered way of of building our infrastructures creates this this this kind of systemic glitchiness and we got a little taste of that but we were actually very very lucky because when I'm you know not doing my phd on platforms and when I'm not running my mouth on the internet I do a lot of trade union support work for uber drivers and those few hours when we were locked out of what is essentially a key part of the livelihood of a lot of Navarra staff members really reminded me of what it's like when I'm trying to fight to get a deactivated driver reinstated on the platform more often than not a driver will be deactivated from uber they won't be told why they won't they'll be told it's permanent it can't be reviewed and they'll be left to fight with an automated messaging system for their livelihood and it's only when we get external political pressure involved that we can get them reinstated and even when they are reinstated we don't get an answer and to me that was much more akin to what's happened with Navarra than you know the idea of Silicon Valley execs sort of censoring Navarra in the way that for example they removed Donald Trump off the Twitter platform but that doesn't mean that it's any less sinister or it's any less a commentary on how power is concentrated in society today it shows us how fragile and unaccountable the platforms that increasingly run our lives are and the fact that of course these platforms don't conduct themselves as providers of essential services they conduct themselves as private companies and so for us as a somewhat prominent media organization with a lot of political backing we got off really easily but for many workers who rely on these platforms to survive to communicate to live including other content creators this is actually really a really endemic problem and so I think that it actually exposed a really really interesting problem with how we are organizing our society that because it's infrastructural it's in the background we don't really think about it it doesn't come into our purview until it messes up and when it messes up the consequences can be really dire and I'm obviously going to have to use this as an excuse to plug tomorrow's episode of Planet B which is of course on the topic of infrastructure where we will be talking to guests like Kate Aronoff like Yanis Varoufakis about what happens when you outsource essential services to unaccountable like lacking in private companies that aren't transparent and how we can reclaim infrastructure from the private sector in order to you know protect ourselves and create a more hospitable world in the wake of climate breakdown so I'm glad that we're all back together but the conversations shouldn't end the thinking shouldn't end because this is actually a lot more common on a sort of smaller scale than we might think. No I think that's a really important point I thought your tweet Fred yesterday was very astute I mean I do think that it had even if it wasn't consciously censorship I think the fact that we are a media platform and ultimately whether or not we can speak to our audience is dependent on the the internal policies of a Silicon Valley owned company I do think that means that it relates to censorship even if we were deleted because of you know some opaque mistake somewhere the fact that we can get taken down by that and then we have to go begging to a you know to a tech giant I do think has you know quite severe implications when it comes to media freedom and censorship but I absolutely take your point and think that that association and that sort of commonality between that experience and the experience of an Uber driver and also how you know we were in a privileged position where we could you know use outside means and not just rely on this sort of you know anonymous chat bot and sort of go go outside those formal processes to to you know get reinstated I think that's all you know super important things to keep in mind. Yeah yeah totally and I think that the thing about censorship it's also about how it's so easy to get excluded from these essential platforms because these platforms don't carry themselves with the scrutiny and the regulation that you know infrastructures that do provide these services should be and that's because they are falsely classified as tech companies and understood as tech companies when they're actually much bigger and much more ubiquitous than that. They've become natural monopolies right they are they've become more like a public utility more like a you know a printing press in a particular newspaper you know the the only printing press. Let's go to some comments Rob Hogg with a ten a very important point here who would take internal flights just checked east mid to Edinburgh by easy jet is 53 pound return by rail some dates and times from 132 pound this is the problem absolutely agree and also a good corrective if we suggested that yeah you know why the hell would you take an internal flight the real problem is that internal flights are often cheaper than train journeys what Rishi Sunak should have done is stood up and say because there's a climate crisis what we'll be doing is investing in the railways so that it's affordable to move across this country you could then use that same flowery level of that that would bring the people together from all the four nations but without ruining the planet instead he said we're going to make flights cheaper and had very little to say on rail in fact Tom Hilton with a fiver thank you very much please give a shout out to the staff and students at Goldsmith University planning industrial action after proposed cuts from senior management I will happily send you all of our solidarity in that particular struggle Goldsmiths quite quite nearby to Navarra media I hope you win and Alice and Barbara with 1799 thank you all at Navarra media and Daniel Goff with a ten a well done Navarra keep on doing what you are doing thank you so much for all of your super chats and thank you if you are a regular donor it is those regular donations that really keep this organization going if you are donating anything or the equivalent of one hour's wage a month which is what we usually ask for thank you very much if not please do go to Navarra media dot com forward slash support next story insulate Britain have driven the issue of energy efficiency in UK homes to the top of the political agenda but their method of doing so blocking cars by sitting on main roads has made them lots of enemies in the process spurred on by a hostile press we've already seen many incidents where members of the public have forcibly removed protesters from the street that's now escalated with an elderly protester being targeted with ink let's take a look it wasn't painful it didn't hurt it was unpleasant but um just sad you know the whole thing is sad you know it's sad that we have to do this i hate doing it you know i'm a retired doctor i've spent my life trying to help people and i'm reduced having to do this because the government will won't address the problem adequately basically are you worried about violence against you of course terribly worried yes what a sad image a retired doctor always wanted to do all his life has helped people now he's got you know he's speaking to the media with ink sprayed across his his face it wasn't a pleasant sight and he's you know understandably worried about other forms of violence we've seen people at these protests you know driving their cars um into people you know normally stopping before real damage is done but it's it's dangerous and it's incredibly intimidating and yeah dragging people dragging people from the street before i go to darly let's look at the moment that happened i saw a bit later today you know someone released this this clip of of the man going along spraying people with ink and what an indictment of our media that they have so committedly cast these people as the villains like our interlake tactics interlake britain's tactics disruptive yeah but do you know what else is like incredibly disruptive climate breakdown like precarious food supplies increases in in global floods and droughts and heat waves and mass displacement these are all things that are far more disruptive than a road being blocked and yet our media are letting the people who are continuing to put push us down that path off the hook we just spoke about earlier in the show about how sonax budget is making it easier for people to fly within the uk and we've heard very little contextualizing of that in the media we've had very little attention being put towards that in our mainstream sort of political broadcasters and you know yeah it's the elderly protesters who are trying to to ring the alarm on this issue who are facing the bile of the public and that's because the way the media have treated them is essentially essentially a form of inciting hatred against them and and i often say this but this is because the people who were in the upper echelons of the media are ideologically very intertwined with those who not only you benefit from our fossil fuel economy and would you know be disadvantaged by a serious shift away from you know fossil fuel capitalism um but also because they probably feel quite insulated ironically from uh from the impacts of climate breakdown you know whether whether right or wrong someone like i think it was richard madley who was uh you know going after an insulate britain protestant feeling very good about himself for doing so he probably feels rightly or wrongly fairly secure that that him you know his kids his kids children's children's um are going to be able to protect themselves from the excesses of of climate breakdown they'll be able to you know grow money at the problem they'll be able to get up and move freely to somewhere else if they need to and it's because him and other people of his kind of class and privilege have historically been able to shield themselves from the worst excesses of you know health crises or financial crises that have sunk the rest of us so he sort of probably has no reason to believe that this is going to be any different but also we we really need to make it clear that whatever you might think of insulate britain's tactics which by the way are sort of very standard civil disobedience tactics like this isn't some kind of historically unprecedented moment this is what happens when people have exhausted legitimate ways of expressing themselves and legitimate ways of trying to to move the political spectrum uh towards you know an urgent crisis this is sort of a normal part of the course it's actually very historically precedented but we still have to make it very clear that whatever you might think about their tactics or however inconveniencing you might find them the vast majority of british people's interests are far more aligned with you know insulate britain than they are with those who are telling us that these protesters should be at best ridiculed and at worse you know physically attacked which is a really worrying situation for us to be in and it's sort of right has become wrong and wrong has become right and i think we can only blame a sort of insufficient media and and toothless media for for bringing us to this position i mean it's super interesting with insulate britain isn't it in a way i sort of you know i kind of sit on the fence about the strategy i'm a bit sort of you know live and live and let live i don't know if it's pissing off more people than it's winning over or if it's it's worth pissing off people and stopping the odd person get to somewhere important to get this issue up the media agenda um generally i mean with extinction rebellion in general i thought you know even though some members of the public quite understandably annoyed the fact that it got that issue up the media agenda was was so important that it was worth it but one thing i think that has changed in the way that people on the left are discussing insulate britain is at the start people like i mean i can see why people are getting kind of annoyed at being blocked in the the road but the longer it's gone on and the more that the insulate britain protesters have taken you know this abuse in the street this absolute demonization from britain's press pretty patelle saying she's going to change the law just to stamp down on them and then day after day you still get you know often these retirees or you know people who've in the words of that protest i just wanted to help people there their whole life saying no we are willing to go out and and get shouted at by by members of the public to get dragged away by police people and and to risk get abuse it is you know it's impressive they're still going it is very indicative of a bunch of people who really really care about their cause and it's a good cause and so that's i mean that's that's impressive i think our next story also involves insulate britain i've got double wear me today um uh a message from piali mendirata a tenor thank you very much solidary to all at navara on the day of su next black budget let's go to our final story mike graham is a loudmouth radio host employed by talk radio which is part of the rupert murdoch empire it's always been clear mike graham is a little dim i've i've met him before i've tuddled with him on social media but an interview this week takes the stupidity to a new level this is mike speaking to insulate britain activist um cameron morning mike oh hello what are you glued to cameron uh just your screen unfortunately unfortunately what do you do for a living cameron i'm a carpenter a carpenter right so how safe is that for the climate well i work with timber which is a much more sustainable material rather than concrete i also work with trees that have been cut down then don't you it's a sustainable building practice how is it sustainable if you're killing trees because it's regenerative you can grow trees right well you can you can grow all sorts of things go you well you can't grow concrete you can see your cameron cheerio that was cameron uh he grows trees and then cuts them down and then makes things from them brilliant marvellous i don't think i ever want to talk to any of those people i've watched that clip so many times like it's now got 10 million views on on twitter and you know sometimes you think oh it's probably not 10 million people this time i'm i'm sure it's not 10 million people because i've watched that clip like 20 times now like it's just it's addictive it's a joy to watch fox can we play it again please morning mike oh hello what you glued to cameron uh just your screen unfortunately unfortunately what do you do for a living cameron i'm a carpenter a carpenter right so how safe is that for the climate well i work with timber which is a much more sustainable material rather than concrete i also work with trees that have been cut down then don't you it's a sustainable building practice how is it sustainable if you're killing trees because it's regenerative you can grow trees right well you can you can grow all sorts of things go you well you can't grow concrete you can that silent moment where he just looks at the camera to your camera interior that was cameron he grows trees and then cuts them down and then makes things from them brilliant marvelous i don't think i ever want to talk to any of those people i don't think i ever want to talk to any of those people i don't know what people he was you know just carpenters he doesn't want to talk to carpenters because just anti-carpenter bigotry that is just rifle i mean also firstly this this video has literally dominated my relationship over the past two days because all my partner wants to do is just watch this video i'm just like can we please have dinner and he's just like there's just one more time like let's just talk about like however firstly also this guy should do media training it didn't occur to me that i could just not say anything and just let them like hang themselves with their own rope but i just what i find so funny about it is that talk radio posted it like what i refuse to believe that that was not posted by like a disgruntled employee trying to troll mike graham because how could you possibly watch that and not be like oh this makes our entire channel and our flagship host look like a clown we can also get they didn't just post it they also let's see how they how they replied to the tweet where they posted it so the the original tweet says no mike's mike's interview of insulate britain spokesman cameron lasts less than a minute and then they follow that up with watch more insulate britain fails on youtube that was not an insulate britain fail that was a mike graham talk radio fail because he thought you could grow concrete he was also the way he you know the cogs just weren't turning in his mind this guy you know i don't necessarily think is what you do climate positive is a fair question to ask anyone who's taking part in activism because i i don't think to have an opinion on how the government should respond to climate change you have to work in a green industry lots of people have different kinds of jobs but this guy had specifically a very very green job he works in a green architectural practice which is based on sustainable wood where you you know you grow the wood that absorbs the carbon then you create it into timber use it instead of concrete that's actually a carbon sink because until you burn um that that wood you know which will hopefully never happen um then it will never return to the atmosphere so that's that's actively removing carbon from the atmosphere but mike graham was i suppose just too too dim to work that out um he has been sort of trying to he went on the radio on talk radio again later saying no concrete can grow because it can expand which makes absolutely no sense at all um i we need we should get Cameron on shouldn't we that activist um any any final thoughts on that video before we call it a night darlia we need to track him down like we need to hire him because he is just like just so it's just such a perfect like segment and also just like because i thought i recognized this mike graham dude because he was the one who on jeremy vine was he the one who said that thing about crushing the minorities on jeremy vine no i was a different a different guy with a similar look oh it was a different okay wow i i can't tell my uh you know my pound shop you know fascists from each other although to be fair i don't know if this mike graham guy is a fascist i just know that he is not the sharpest tool in the shed let's wrap it up there we we would show you the clip again but i mean you can find it and you can watch it as you know to your heart's content as i say i'll i'll be watching that for weeks um well done cameron ford um darlia absolute pleasure to have you on tonight's show yeah lovely to see you a relief to see you yep all the sweeter because it seemed at one point like it might not happen um thank you everyone for your super chats tonight we'll be back on friday at seven p.m you've been watching tisky sour on the bar media good night