 A grim year of news has been punctuated with positive developments of late, it feels like almost every week we hear good news about a successful vaccine trial and the UK rollout of the vaccine has surpassed all expectations with its speed and success. However, this weekend we got our first set of really bad news on the vaccine front. Results from a trial in South Africa have shown that at least in terms of mild and moderate disease against their strain, the Oxford AstraZeneca jab is only 10% effective on tonight's show. I'll be speaking to a professor of virology about what this means for the global struggle against the pandemic. That's not the only story we'll be talking about tonight though. I'm also joined by Ash Sarkar. How are you doing Ash? I'm feeling good. Don't have the South African variant yet, so we'll see. I was going to say you're immune because you've had COVID but you're probably not immune to the South. That's the bad news unfortunately. Well it's also in my area, it's in my neighbourhood so it's nice to know that I'll get an exotic variation. The good news for us and we should say that we don't want to be you know scaring anyone. What the government was saying, what Matt Hancock and Jonathan VanTam were saying is that the strain that this is not effective against is not yet particularly widespread in Britain so I would still get the AstraZeneca jab tomorrow if I was offered it but on a global health perspective I think this is potentially really bad. But I'm going to be talking to someone who knows more about this and myself. In the second half of the show we'll be talking Royal Secrets, a new sinister job for John Woodcock. Stammer trying to win over big business and a controversial Emma Barnett interview. You know the score, share the show link. We like to read your comments and questions throughout the show so tweet on the hashtag TiskeySour but you're super chats on the YouTube and tweet under the stream, oh you can't tweet under a stream on Twitch. The Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine was supposed to be the key tool in escaping the coronavirus pandemic produced on a non-profit basis. It is the cheapest of the available vaccines with 3.5 billion currently on order around the world. However this weekend we got some really bad news. Against the strain of COVID-19 predominant in South Africa the vaccine doesn't appear to stop infections from COVID-19. Now it was a trial of 2,000 people and it was shown that in that trial 19 people who had had the vaccine got mild to moderate disease, 20 people who had had the placebo got mild to moderate disease so basically ineffective against catching it. There was not enough people on the trial to work out whether or not it prevents severe disease so that's still an unknown. It was worrying enough though for the South African government to have paused plans to roll out that jab. I want to get up a graph for you now just to show you how significant this AstraZeneca vaccine is because if it doesn't work against this strain we've got lots of other vaccines that seem like they do. It's not like we give up on vaccines but the AstraZeneca vaccine is quite special just because of how many people have ordered it. I think we can get this this graphic up which is from the FT which is showing you all the top jabs and the amount that has been ordered of them. So as I've said the AstraZeneca vaccine has about 3.5 billion on order and it's particularly useful to look at the colors here because you can see they're dark blue UK, light blue EU or different light blue US and the red is other. So most of the developing world will be in that other category and you can see the AstraZeneca there. That's where most of the developing world have invested their orders or COVAX potentially the World Health Organization's body and that's because it was very cheap. You can see the one that the next vaccine that has lots of orders from not Europe or or the US is NOVAVAX. We'll talk about that later as well. Now the mutation that makes the South African strain vaccine resistant is known as E484K. This is a mutation that develops which seems to make it more resistant to all of the vaccines but so much so to the AstraZeneca vaccine that it can't stop moderate disease that's present in the Brazilian strain as well as the South African strain is also evolving separately in the Kent strain. So it's not necessarily confined to South Africa. To discuss this week's disappointing results I'm joined by Professor of Virology at UCL, Dean Ann Pele. Dean Ann is also a member of Independent Sage and has been on the show before. Thank you for coming back to talk to us Dean Ann. Hi Michael and Ash. Could I start by giving you well by getting your general sense of the significance of these results? So for me I mean it seems significant precisely because of how many people have ordered this vaccine. It seemed like lots of people were relying on this vaccine which no longer seems capable of fighting against one of the main strains that are currently circulating. Yes you're right it is a disappointing result. Having said that it is a very small trial as these trials go for evaluating how good or not the vaccines are. The trial in addition to being small was in a younger age group and that's why the number of severe cases was so small within the trial and so there was no data. There's no data on that. And of course it has led the as you say the South African government and their ministerial commission and advisors to withdraw the widespread rollouts of this vaccine but nevertheless there is going to be a rollout and almost an evaluation in older people in higher risk individuals as the vaccine is rolled out. My understanding is that the doses that have been delivered will indeed be utilized and we get information about that. But I think a broader point about this is that we're in danger of moving into this dichotomy between the vaccines being God or the vaccines being dog. Either fantastic or completely useless and we know that vaccines sit in between there. All vaccines that are currently used are none of them are 100% effective and they vary in effectiveness. And I think we've also learned as we've gone along we've been surprised to some extent the degree to which this coronavirus does vary. Coronavirus that varies much more than what we assumed from understanding about other coronaviruses and therefore it does inform how we develop vaccines in future. And the final thing I'd say is that because it's not all or nothing because the vaccines will always have some impact whether it's higher or lower according to different strains that could nevertheless be useful for the population in reducing that peak mortality, that peak very severe illness. And we've got to bear that in mind and that is why I think like you said at the top of the show is that we would always recommend individuals in the UK listeners to this show to be vaccinated with whatever vaccine is available rather than not. Well I mean my position is if it's safe which they all are then you can inject it into me even if it is only 10% effective because at least then it's 10% less likely. I want to talk a bit about the differences between AstraZeneca and the other vaccines and whether or not we've talked enough about sort of changing which vaccines we focus production on. And before I go to you I want to go to a clip from Sarah Gilbert. She's the lead scientist on the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine. She suggested that the disappointing AstraZeneca results mean we might have to give up on vaccines stopping infections. What we're saying from other vaccine developers is that they have a reduction in efficacy against some of the variant viruses and what that is looking like is that we may not be reducing the total number of cases but there's still protection in that case against deaths, hospitalizations and severe disease. So that pushes us more back to the first scenario with the pyramid of cases that I was talking about. Maybe we won't be reducing the number of cases as much but we still won't be seeing the deaths, the hospitalizations and the severe disease and that's really important for healthcare systems even if we are having mild and asymptomatic infections to prevent people from going into hospital with Covid would have a major effect. And what I thought was a bit odd about that and which I didn't really understand is that she seems to be talking about the AstraZeneca vaccine like it's the same as all the other vaccines. So she's saying what we're seeing now is that vaccines they're potentially not that good at stopping infection of the new strain but they might be good at stopping hospitalization but from the results we've seen some of the vaccines are quite good at stopping infections and from the results we've seen we don't know anything about AstraZeneca and whether it stops severe disease. I want to get up something that I thought was very helpful which was a table put up by Eric Topol his editor of Medscape which showed us the results of various trials up against these new strains and which I mean to me would suggest that maybe we should just invest in different vaccines I'll be putting that to someone who knows more than me in one moment but let's go through this because I found this very useful. So this is the trials in South Africa so against the South African strain you've got the Novavax vaccine there were 4,000 people in that trial and it was shown to have 60% efficacy this is for moderate to mild disease for people who are HIV negative slightly less if you're HIV positive. Now that is less effective than it was in the UK where it's 89% effective but still very effective and there were enough people in that trial to tell us that it does stop hospitalizations and deaths. The Johnson and Johnson vaccine you had 10,000 people in that trial that was 52% effective. Now again that's still less than the strain that's dominant in the US where it's 72% but that's effective it's only once you get to the AstraZeneca one where it doesn't seem to be stopping infections it's only 10% effective. We can also see that he's showing the data against the United Kingdom strain so that what we know as the Kent strain and their Novavax with 15,000 participants it was 86% efficacious against the Kent strain versus 96% against the original strain and AstraZeneca was 75% efficacious against the Kent strain versus 84% against the original. Pfizer and Biontech they're not they don't appear on there that's because there hasn't been any trials with with real people there out in the wild as it were but they have shown that in in labs they think that will be effective so to me and I want to put this to you Dean and to me it seems like we might be overthinking the general limitations of vaccines and actually it's just the case that the AstraZeneca vaccine whilst it's good enough in Britain right now it's not really good enough in general and so maybe we should be thinking about switching supply we've got 3.5 billion AstraZeneca doses on order should we be trying to say actually let's scale that back and invest heavily in Novavax. Well that's great and Eric Topol's side is a good you know is a good summary and a lot of his work is summarizing this very well I would my take on this is is is sort of twofold firstly when it comes to comparing trials in the way and the data from trials in the way that that you've just demonstrated it's bloody difficult to do because trials which are formal their their formal structures and in terms of evaluating a new drug or in this case a new vaccine are complicated things that are structured in a way to demonstrate with statistical power and as much statistical certainty as possible that taking the vaccine is better than the placebo and of course what we're comparing here and not just when whether the vaccines better or not is what proportion of people or what proportion of people get a benefit from it but comparing between trials comparing that percentage for one vaccine versus a percentage for another vaccine is very difficult because the the sorts of characteristics of individuals who are recruited into these trials may very well be different they may be different risk groups different age stratifications different disadvantage backgrounds which may or different genetic backgrounds which may determine the efficacy and that is why it is it's really difficult to do these comparisons and I should say so I would summarize the situation we're in is on the one hand it's fantastic that we've got so many vaccines coming to this level of maturity that now they're becoming available that's just fantastic and it's really literally within a year of the virus first being identified and the genetic sequence being published and and I think that's the strength of the pandemic planning and the the multilateral approaches that have been taken by the WHO primarily as well as other players to stimulate industry to work with academics in this space what the downside of that approach where we're still basing it on commercial farmers large pharmaceutical companies is of course it's in no one's interest to actually start to compare vaccines against each other before it's shown that the one vaccine is effective and therefore we don't have a level playing field in in doing all these comparisons as if you get what I mean we're not comparing one vaccine to another vaccine we're comparing one vaccine to placebo multiple different times in different ways so that's that's that's my take on this having said that having said that it is my sense looking at the way that the virus evolves and mutates and we've got to remember that variants are not stuck in in in a not stuck in history and therefore with us forever is there continues to be an evolution and that's why for instance the 484 mutation that you mentioned earlier is now being which was characteristic of the South Africa what's called the South African variant is now being seen on the background of of other variants that are circulating is that that is continually going to happen and it does seem we're moving very rapidly to a situation which is akin to flu vaccine influenza vaccine which is we look at what each year what that what viruses are circulating what influenza virus is circulating and that winter we've prepared the vaccines that will be given to any one population based on what's been circulating and it does seem that that's the route that we're moving to with with covid in that more maybe annual vaccinations which will be for you know high-risk populations but also maybe broader populations within society which will be updated each year by the by the key variants of the circulating let's talk a bit about what this means for the UK in the short term and we're going to visit this again via via the the medium of clips and this time of our political leaders so this is Boris Johnson today speaking to the press trying to to reassure the public I think we think that all the vaccines that we're using both the vaccines that we're currently using are effective in as I say in in stopping serious disease and death we also think in particular in the case of the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine that there's good evidence that it is stopping transmission as well I think 67 percent reduction in transmission with the the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine so they remain a massive benefit to our country and to the population as we as we go through the pandemic and I've no doubt that vaccines generally are going to offer the way out and with every day that goes by you can see that medicine is slowly getting the upper hand over the disease so so what he sort of said there is that we know the vaccines that are currently in this country are effective against the dominant strains in this country also says that the vaccines we have here we know they protect against severe disease as as I've already you know explained it's actually an unknown whether they protect against severe disease when it's the South African strain so it's it seems quite important that we don't get that many new strains in the meantime before we update these vaccines which is probably why Keir Starmer responded like this I think the South African variant is the single biggest risk at the moment and it's very important therefore that we secure our borders we've known about the South African variant for some time if you can believe it it's going to be 50 days from knowing about the variant to border restrictions quarantine and hotels coming in and even between now today and those restrictions coming in 200 000 people are going to come into the country add to that and this is probably the most significant thing a number of other countries we now know have the South African variant and they're not even in the government scheme for quarantining in hotels this is leaving a back door open at a vital stage in the battle against the virus and so we've we've talked to a number of times on this show about how the government's policy on quarantining travelers is not particularly watertight what i want to ask you though dina because this is a i suppose it's a virology question that's completely i've got no idea about i can do policy i can't do you know virology but this is the you know the argument starmer's making there and a similar the argument johnson's making there really as well as that as long as we can keep out this strain will be fine but it also seems that the strains we've currently got in this country are independently evolving to have this 484 mutation so i suppose my my question is how quickly could that happen you know how quickly could the uk strains become basically the same as the south african strain in functional terms when you're talking about whether or not it can resist the vaccine well that's a really good question i think both kia starmer and boris johnson you know um got it a bit wrong in those in in those clips um yes we need to vaccinate as many people as possible and yes currently the evidence is the vaccines the array of vaccines we have will be effective in in doing that but um the variation you know the genetic variation which contributes then to what are called new variants and there's there's thousands of variants out there we've just sort of yeah we've we've honed down on a uk or a south african or a brazilian variant but these are their variants all over the place um and we've got to remember that those variants only emerge and develop and develop then and the risk of new variants if the virus is able to continue to replicate and if the virus continues to replicate by transmitting from person to person so as an extreme example we don't hear of all these variants in new zealand why because there's no transmission in new zealand you know so this is where um a vaccine itself is not just the answer the vaccine must come along with um with with policies and the policies to significantly reduce transmission and of course part of that is border controls and border controls is both about protecting the uk but it's also protecting the rest of the world stopping people from the high prevalence country we're in in the uk taking these viruses elsewhere um and so these two things must go together so the idea again coming back to boris johnson clip that it's medicine that's going to that mantra coming back to its science that's going to take us to get us out of this it's medicine that's going to get us out of this it is it is medicine but within an infrastructure where there's strong public health control of ongoing transmission that is the way that we get out of this it will never be vaccines alone for the reasons that you've we've now discussed that these new variants developing in south africa or identified in south africa which we we don't know where they developed in south africa they're called south african variants because that is where the genetic characterization first went on um and and um equally in brazil but we know that what is called the south african variant is present in something like 10 or 15 countries around the african continent as well as the uk and elsewhere now so um the the idea that border controls is for a country rather than across the world and is bilateral with all nations um it is is nonsense really we've got to actually control both infection transmission within our society within our community as well as limit the movement of these viruses around the world and that will ensure that we can almost keep up with developing vaccines updating vaccines and being able to provide those vaccines protect us all yeah i can see you can see why boris johnson wants to say look science is going to save us uh this is now out of my hand sorry if i fucked up earlier um as you as you put very eloquently that's probably not the case ash i want to bring you in because i know you've got uh you've you've got a question you've been waiting to ask what happens after you see data like this which suggests that a vaccine is less efficacious considering what we know about long covid that you can get it even if you've had a mild or moderate case of the disease from a public health perspective is it better to react quickly and perhaps overreact and go okay we're going to scrap that in favor of the other vaccines which we know um are are more efficacious against things like the south african variant or is the wisest thing to just go on with the vaccine rollout as planned and keep an eye on consequences and react after that yeah good good good good question there i think this has got to be taken into context of what other vaccines are available so for instance you know we we've heard about the at the european level i think uh uh macron saying that the AstraZeneca vaccine is no good for the over 65s you know which was disputed by both the company and the scientists and and obviously we're giving it in the UK to the over 65s but that was in the context of other supply chains that they had of other virus of other vaccines so in a way this separates out the science from this from the the the the scientific policy of what is available and what can be given um clearly um you know it's very sensitive so the south africans i mean and we've not talked about so far when we come back to south african we've not talked about the huge you know discrepancy and availability of of of vaccines and the fact that we're moving really however much the company's wanted vaccines to be available for the whole world um that's clearly not happened and there's a you know inequality not only within societies but also between countries has been exacerbated here so i think you know i'm sensitive to not over guessing or over um advising from my perspective of what countries should do but i think um there i would be surprised if south africa for instance doesn't go ahead and roll this out i do think that some antibodies um or some immunity is going to be beneficial compared to no um no immunity and we've got to remember as well that one of the contexts the more sort of virological context here is that when sars-cov-2 the virus that causes covid did start to emerge from bats and however it got into humans through to humans it was almost like the human population is naive to this has never seen this virus before and that's what's also driven the transmission and the severe disease and my my i suspect that as soon as there starts to be some level of antibodies even if they're partially effective they will start to attenuate the disease for instance if you've really had the vaccine and the vaccine may not be 100% maybe poorly effective but then when you get your neck next you come across the virus that will stimulate more antibodies and it may then protect you for future variants so all of these things are uncertain it's very difficult to do trials about this but i do think we should in terms of that come back to your question whether we should respond immediately with it in a knee jerk fashion i think that would be wrong i think the vaccines are demonstrating that they provide some protection and that is important not only for the here and now but also for the future i think that was actually a very good note to end on because it's we we haven't concluded that AstraZeneca is a dud and wherever you are in the world um not at all Dean and Filet thank you so much for joining us this evening incredibly insightful and informative a pleasure take care everyone and you we are going to go on to our next story which is about who someone who was always my least favorite MP i think we can get an image up of him john woodcock is a former labour MP who endorsed the Tories at the 2019 general election and was rewarded with a seat in the house of lords he was also appointed UK special envoy for countering violent extremism at the home office and this weekend we've learned he's been tasked with a new pet project woodcock who left labour while subject to an investigation into sexual harassment has been put in charge of an investigation into political extremism on the left and the right this was a story in the telegraph exclusive far left influence on black lives matter and extinction rebellion to be probed and it will report to Boris Johnson and pretty battal to whom woodcock will present both his findings and his recommendations and we can go to that article now it states unveiling his probe in an interview with the telegraph he warned that the UK must heed the growth of the far right in the US which culminated in the storming of the capital last month on the other end of the political spectrum however he stressed we must be vigilant against a similar blind spot in Britain to the prospect of progressive extremism that is unacceptable disruption or even violence carried out in the name of progressive causes to which the political establishment and lords majority of the population have great sympathy like climate change and racial injustice now there's lots of boxes being ticked there and equivocation between left and right there's no specification at all as to what counts as unacceptable disruption that makes it quite possible to equate someone issuing death threats with people blocking roads or pulling down statues to very different kettles of fish civil disobedience is disruptive yes but it also has a place in in any democracy including liberal democracy including to liberal theorists like John Rawls not my favourite philosopher by the way i'm just saying this isn't a far left thing now it also seems um and this is just as worrying that the report will go into plenty of areas which really shouldn't be the government's business at all so let's go to a quote um this is about environmentalism so he says this is john woodcock there have been a number of at the moment isolated examples of climate change activist groups particularly extinction rebellion overstepping the mark into antisocial behavior i think there's been a recognition that even among that movement they have at times risk undermining their own cause i'm coming at this with an open mind but with an understanding that there is clearly a potential for groups to develop into increasingly problematic areas now one i mean given john woodcock's behaviour over the past five years the moment Jeremy Corbyn was elected he was doing everything in his power to destroy him i'm not sure how open minded a fella he is but more importantly here what he's talking about there should have nothing to do with the government you know we'll often say on this show oh we think this particular action by extinction rebellion backfired people in extinction rebellion will say that that when they sort of jumped on a tube train that probably made them more enemies than friends and the message was a bit weird but that shouldn't be the subject of a government investigation you know you don't need to be making recommendations to the government because someone climbed on a tube train and that might have lost the core support no the government is there to say if you broke the law then we will try you for that not to say we think what you did was unstrategic and therefore we're going to use the you know the levers of the state to make you do something different all very bizarre it also bleeds i mean really into the extremely disingenuous remember this is a report by john cock to boris johnson and pretty patelle and this one's about black lives matter lord wolney which is the name of him in the house of lords for some reason i need to look that up really lord wolney also raised concerns that the leadership of black lives matter uk have pushed a very hard line an absolutist view about defunding the police which he predicted was a world away from where the vast majority of blm supporters would be that niche agenda risks taking attention away from religious and urgent debates on reform which may need to be had about racism and wider society he said now ash i want to bring you in on this john woodcock is saying he's writing a report giving recommendations to pretty patelle and boris johnson to stop people in black lives matter doing unstrategic moves which could alienate them from the broader racial justice struggle are you feeling grateful for this helpful hand being offered by john woodcock well i mean i don't want to hear very much about the helpful hands of john woodcock and you think that uh you know he'd stay away from phrases like independent investigation you know considering the circumstances under which he left the parliamentary labor party but i digress look this is absolutely not the business of the state there are already laws in place to deal with the kind of disruption which you see from civil disobedience be it obstruction of a public highway or trespassing and so on and so forth quite recently we've had a case where the crown prosecution service really overstepped the mark in trying to crack down on a form of civil disobedience now the act of the standstill 15 to lie on the runway and disrupt a deportation charter flight was an unlawful act but there are laws to deal with you know trespassing in an airport in order to seek out a uh greater punishment perhaps in recognition of the political dimension of the act uh initially the protesters were convicted under a section of terrorism legislation now at an appeal i think just last week the week before that was overturned and the judge explicitly said you know there was no case to answer in this regard you know dismissed it out of hand so i think that it's really worth pointing out that the way in which laws are used are already pretty you know proportionate in this country and if you try and overextend that you will get some kind of resistance from the judiciary in terms of not getting that balance right between upholding the law and allowing for civil disobedience which happens in a democratic society now taking a step back and thinking about the politics of this what is this all about i think it comes back to a point that i've made quite a few times about the right's attempt to redraw the boundaries of acceptable politics some people call it the obertson window i prefer talking about Gramsci um and it's about redefining universal values in a shared common sense now they've tried to do it um in terms of reshaping institutions and what they're for we've talked about this in relation to off-com and the charities commission now you've got a kind of state mandated acceptable protest which extends beyond just the means which are used to carry out the protest but also the goals of the protest and the demands of the protest it's not the state's business to to decide what a reasonable demand from BLM is BLM can demand that the queen is replaced with i don't know mega man right it's up to them in a democratic society you've got protest groups deciding what it is that they want to pursue and you know within the means which are available to them for me there's you know strategically nonviolent means um go ahead it doesn't matter if you consider them more alienating than not john woodcock and there's a third thing that i want to sort of talk about which is the way in which the history of protest movements it's deliberately misremembered so i don't think that john woodcock would look back at say the freedom riders who protested segregation in the united states in the 60s and say oh you guys have really overstepped the mark here i think you're alienating some of the people who could be convinced well he probably wouldn't say that now but back in the day the majority of white americans had a very negative opinion of the tactics which are carried out by the freedom riders which now we look back on and we celebrate similarly with act up who conducted die ins in protest of the government's inaction with response to the ace crisis you know these are actions which didn't have a particularly hospitable reception at the time they were happening and so that's not to say that every time something disruptive is done in the name of protest that it's necessarily a good idea there are political differences but the fact is if you think that it's always obvious what's going to be remembered kindly by history and what's not and that answer is going to be made obvious to you because of where the polling is you are absolutely laughing that's never happened at any point in history so yeah i think it's idiotic i think it's overstepping but i also think it's part of quite a sinister project and the reason why john woodcock is involved this is my take is that perhaps he's been left with some kind of blasting antipathy following his marginalization and then departure from the labor party and there is an element to which former labor figures like himself and also like lord ian austin are being used as a means to sort of make sure that the left will never be as powerful again as when it accidentally captured the leadership of the labor party well i'm i think in a way john woodcock being involved in a sinister project doesn't you know that might be something that sui janaria explains itself because he is no stranger deciding with very very sinister characters to carry out very awful misdeeds this one is clearly the one i'm about to show you is clearly on a completely different scale to this report i don't want to say they're in any way compared but john woodcock is quite famous in west minster for being the closest mp or at the time he was an mp to the the leadership of saudi arabia so he has met king salmon of saudi arabia and sort of said gushing things about him very praising of sort of the reforms that were being done he sort of celebrates this relationship because he says it helps bae sell weapons now those are the same weapons of course that are being used to bomb yemen a war which john woodcock has explicitly defended so when jeremy corbin stood up in parliament and said you know we should we should freeze sales um to saudi arabia because they're bombing yemen and it's leaving literally millions of people at the brink of starvation now there've been so many um credible accusations of war crimes against the saudi's in in that yemeny conflict because they did things like bomb civilian infrastructure which left people at the brink of starvation and he stood up in parliament john woodcock and said oh no if we stopped selling them weapons that would just mean that they were um less targeted it would mean that they'd be sort of more sloppy in their use of weapons and that would kill more civilians now it's it's it's well documented that they've intentionally bombed civilians and civilian infrastructure so you've got this person who is standing up there saying i am going to defend this incredibly i mean it's an extremist dictatorship right it's an islamist dictatorship and one which has no respect for human rights and one which is very um willing and has has a great proclivity to bomb other countries into smithereens and now he is the you know the envoy against extremism it's it's like through the looking glass you could not make it up and i'm glad you actually ash that you brought up um the other characters who were um ennobled by the conservatives because john woodcock isn't alone it's john woodcock ian austin and kate hoey they are free former labor mps who in the 2019 general election endorsed the conservatives within a year they had all been given peerages and were sitting quite comfortably in the house of lords i mean it really tells you the nature of these people that they left their political party to back someone else who they've said oh our whole life was against their politics and then they get quite a handy reward from them afterwards ash is that i've got all of them there i think that those are the main three aren't they kate hoey ian austin and john woodcock who were sort of like we hate corbin ian austin and john woodcock were like actively going around um with this banner saying we're against extremism don't vote for jeremy corbin and then they just get rewarded straight afterwards it's not subtle it's explicit i mean that's the thing about you know corruption in this country um it's just so in your face that people often feel like well if it was really corruption it wouldn't be so obvious so we've got to give it a different kind of name but three people have been rewarded with a permanent seat in the upper house of our legislature 300 pounds a day until the day they die simply because they were of political strategic value to boris johnson and dominick comings now i personally don't think that's how an upper house should work in this point so i think you know bigger problems in our democracy we're going to move on to the big one at the top of it miss qe2 herself um but this is another one it's that it's such a porous system open to abuse you know it's not actually that long since we had the cash for on a scandal back in the heady days of new labor um it's always been a pretty grim and dirty business but to now see those same figures oh john man that's who we forgot john man that's who we forgot i knew there was a missing link john mandem um you know he's the he's another one who is sort of you know using his position to try and bring in ever more sort of expansive definitions of anti-semitism and sort of i think looking at institutions like universities and left-wing organizations and so on and so forth um i think that that constitutes a threat to freedom of expression but again it's about trying to make sure that you place the left in such narrow confines that the phenomenon of Corbyn couldn't happen twice that's what it's about and that's why it's being led by these figures absolutely quite scary really isn't it um i suppose this is a good time i don't want to scare you into subscribing to navara media but at the same time i do think that if you want a counter narrative to the kind sort of pushed out by these very very cynical people then it does help to have an independent media um so if you are already a supporter of navara media thank you so much if not please go to navara media.com forward slash support and donate the equivalent of one hour's wage a month um ash said our next story goes right to the top and boy was she correct britain is a democracy and the role of our hereditary royals is supposed to be purely symbolic however a very interesting guardian investigation has revealed that on multiple occasions the royals have lobbied to affect legislation to protect their own interests the first story which broke on sunday shows that in the 1970s the queen successfully lobbied to modify legislation that would have led to the scale of her wealth becoming public now the legislation in question was intended to stop investors from secretly building up significant stakes enlisted companies by acquiring their shares through front companies or nominees um to that end it gave company directors that the power to say if you're investing money in my company i want to know who you represent so it was so you couldn't basically have a sort of secret underhand takeover now at this point the queen saw a threat um let's she saw a threat because she thought that this could give company directors basically the power to find out what the queen might have owned or what the queen might be investing in so the guardian right they continue following the queen's intervention the government inserted a clause into the law granting itself the power to exempt companies used by heads of state from the new transparency measures the arrangement was used in effect to create a state-backed shell corporation which is understood to have placed a veil of secrecy over the queen's private shareholdings and investments until at least 2011 um now this article i do recommend reading it it has loads of documentary evidence that the changes were due to lobbying from the crown um we're not going to go into all of the details now what i'm going to do though is just explain to you um how this was possible no what was the the constitutional arrangement that gives and still gives in fact the queen power to lobby um parliamentarians based on on legislation that she thinks could be of detriment to herself or the crown in general not necessarily the person of of the queen and the mechanism they use is called queen's consent now i'd heard of royal royal assent but not queen's consent royal assent is the situation where once a law is passed then you have to get that the queen's consent um to or assent before it becomes a law so you will have you might remember when parliament was prorogued um there was a sort of kind of deranged campaign on the internet from follow back pro-eu people to say um we want the queen to not give the bill which prorogued parliament royal assent they thought she might intervene from above she doesn't do that because it'd be very explicit if you've had parliament pass a law and then she says oh no i'm not gonna i'm not going to put that into into law i'm not going to give that royal assent then you've got a constitutional crisis what's different about queen's consent is that it's sort before the legislation goes to parliament so they have to show her the legislation if they think it could affect her interest and that's at the point at which she can lobby that means it happens behind the scenes it's not particularly public that means it's possible um now the guardians show the queen has sought prior sight of legislation using queen's consent over a thousand times um that was most recently used on the european union bill passed last december we don't know if she lobbied to change anything on that one obviously these are the the guardian story are based on documents that don't get released until a few decades after they're originally written um which means they don't have proof she she lobbied on on many um of these instances they cite four instances in the 70s and the 80s involving traffic rules on the royal estates and national heritage sites where where intervention is proven to have happened also they say when asked by the guardian the queen's representatives refused to say how many times she had requested alterations to the legislation since she came to the throne so they're they're they're not saying they have changed laws they're not saying they haven't they're saying uh notably silent on this now ash this isn't quite as shocking as the royal's treatment of diana but should we be worried about this aristocratic threat to our democracy but i was going to say the queen having oversight around traffic legislation that's good actually i don't want to get sued by clarence house so i'm just going to leave that there i think everyone um but look i think this is why um being even indifferent to the existence of a reddetry monarchy is completely incompatible with a belief in democracy or equality and this is why i feel so angry that the left has worn its republicanism with such embarrassments in recent years um you know kia starmer rolling back from comments he made in earlier years where he was very much a republican now sort of saying you know the queen has a symbol of great hope to many hope to do what to be able to skew legislation in your favor without any oversight from anybody else in a way that no other private citizen would be able to do is that what we aspire to i mean i do aspire to be like rich and idle like the rest of the royal family but that's kind of um where it ends and i think that what's going to happen in coming years as one more of these stories come out and some of them will come out you know probably after the queen has passed on and we've got you know king charles the third is that that combination of the person who has really sort of been this grandmother of a nation figure to you know all of us who we've only ever known as kind of this you know older and very very deep politicized figure the combination of this kind of information coming out coupled with a king who doesn't have the same kind of popularity i think he's a more polarizing figure he himself has been sort of involved in the black spider memos we still don't know what they concerned um where he was perhaps lobbying a government of the day which is not something that the royal family are supposed to do um but that could actually be a moment where you do have a resurgence in republican sentiment and i do hope that there is more space created to share these opinions and not you know be looked at as if you've just drowned one of the andrex puppies you know republicanism isn't motivated by a desire for cruelty or to be really mean to this nice old lady is motivated by a desire to have a modern functioning democracy where you don't have someone who is both unelected ahead of state and hugely wealthy and able to make sure that laws don't interrupt with the accumulation of that wealth you know the way you say it's to be republican is seen as an extremist position in this country it's not it's not only that a majority of people are for keeping the royals if you are for example you know high up in the labor party and you suggest that maybe we shouldn't have a hereditary mono because head of state who also has loads of money and quite a lot of power then you're like that's crazy you know it's like it's like you're in the 1700s like in France where it's not like to say off with the head of the king obviously we don't want to get off her head she seems nice enough but she she doesn't seem nice enough but still we don't believe in capital punishment um to say you know we shouldn't have a royal that's out of you know that's almost out of the it's not the overton window what was the word you used the Gramsciam one ash so it's you know completely illegitimate and outside the boundaries of you know acceptable opinion and political position but you know it's not you know you talked about you know it's an extremist position like in France it actually really wasn't an extremist position at the time obviously what happened with the reign of terror was you know a touch more polarizing but because of the excesses of the the french court at that time the political instability uh the poverty the hunger you know this idea that you could have a modern functioning democracy and that would help people flourish it actually wasn't you know super duper extreme at the time um obviously we live in very different circumstances um the nature of our monarchy is different or at least it should be but the fact that it exists at all allows for these loopholes which constitute and facilitate I think an abuse and misuse of her power as a constitutional monarch and that's not something that you can get rid of just by switching the personalities at the top so you know for instance you know she you know leaves the stage and Prince Charles comes on or Prince William or I don't know what his kids are called Alfie Albert George George you've got it you've got it George I was just a girl I was just going through like plausibly Anglo names until I hit the right one you know or Georgia weather that you can sort of deal with these excesses it's built into the entire thing right it is in the DNA of a constitutional monarchy um that in some ways you you undermine proper democratic practice and oversight and I don't think that that's an extreme opinion you know all I'm saying is go be rich on your own time and then we're going to go on the shit out of you we're going to go on to uh you know a character who's potentially even you know further in the you know the fabric of the British establishment than the Queen which is Sir Keir Starmer now we dedicated much of Friday's show to Keir Starmer's leadership wobble with people briefing against him from left and right and focus groups left confused as to what he stands for now this weekend the drama continued as the Times revealed Starmer's team had thought of an original ploy to rebuild momentum for the party and for his leadership what did they think of coming out as pro business who would afford it has anyone thought of this before if only the Labour Party came out as pro business everything would have been would have been okay we would have been in power for the last 11 years um let's go to some text from that report the Times write in a strategy that will do little to endear him to the left of the party the Labour leader is preparing to park his tanks on the Tories lawn by unveiling a bold pro business policy agenda before next month's budget it is understood that this will include tax cuts for firms and a pledge to extend the business rates holiday to help companies struggling amid the coronavirus pandemic a leaked email from Claire Ainsley Starmer's director of policy which has been seen by the Sunday Times warns we won't recover if the Tories raid family finances with universal credit cuts forcing councils to hike up council tax or freezing key worker pay but we also won't recover if we just stand by as businesses go bust to be the party of working people and their communities Labour must be unashamedly pro business to drive growth and opportunity in every part of our country um Ash what do you make of this I don't think many of our audience will be surprised that when Starmer sort of you know the first rocky patch he's he's encountered he's decided I know what I'll do I'll be unashamedly pro business um no fault to the fact that potentially the reason why young people and labour activists are annoyed at him is maybe because he kicked out Jeremy Corbyn or because he hasn't offered really any opposition to the Tories during this pandemic note that the problem is we haven't got business executives on side quite enough let's offer some tax cuts this really does feel like Groundhog Day. Claire Starmer made this exact same announcement about being pro business at the beginning of his leadership so it's not just that you know what we're seeing is microwaved millibandism it it really is what we're seeing is reheated Starmerism you know this recycling of tropes and talking points of attempts to sort of distance himself from what he sees as the Corbynite legacy well this isn't even a fresh way to do that so I think what this indicates is someone who really is at a loss for ways to sort of revive a plateauing leadership um he's having to nick from his own ideas but as for this thing about being microwaved millibandism I remember when Ed Balls was going around to anyone who'd listened saying that he was ferociously pro-business I think under Gordon Brown and Tony Blair you know it was said that labor was you know unashamedly pro-business pathologically pro-business neurotically pro-business you know just new adjectives every single time and what it fails to do is actually come up with a set of policies which would be you know concretely supported the small to medium businesses which are struggling we've seen that with the death of the high street the sort of tendency towards you know kind of big retail monopolies which do disadvantage smaller businesses and also disadvantage the workforce none of us are saying you know hey it's really great when you know your local shop which has been there for 40 years goes bust what we're saying is that well hang on in order to sort of protect those smaller business to prevent the accumulation of monopoly capital and the outsize you know political clout those businesses have you've got to be the party of labor you've got to be the party of the workforce and I think that Keir Starmer's really struggled to articulate that in any meaningful sense and part of the reason why is because the section of voters that he's targeting are retired homeowners pensioners they're not people who you know are in the workforce anymore so this is the kind of platitude which you know he hopes is going to reassure people who had their feathers ruffled by John McDonald and Jeremy Corbyn John McDonald also by the way you know made his overtures to the business community I kind of remember his you know tea time wooing initiatives towards the city he tries to sort of rebrand himself as you know the people's bank manager a bit um there was a there was like a tea and biscuits offensive yeah John McDonald did a tea and biscuits offensive but it wasn't just John McDonald because you've gone through previous labour leaders who tried to court business you had Blair Brown and Miliband but it wasn't just them this is Jeremy Corbyn speaking to the Confederation of British Industry during the 2019 general election it is sometimes claimed that I am anti-business actually this is nonsense it's not anti-business to be against poverty pay it's not anti-business to say that the largest corporations should pay their taxes just as smaller companies do and it's not anti-business to want prosperity in every part of our country not only in the financial centres of the city of London and I say this to business too if a Labour government is elected on the 12th of December you're going to see more investment than you've ever dreamt of you're going to have the best educated workforce you could ever have hoped for and you're going to get the world-leading infrastructure including full fibre broadband you've long long demanded year after year at these conferences now for someone whose intention or whose main job was to go out and say look I'm not hostile to business he didn't seem particularly pleased to be speaking to a lot of business executives but there's absolutely no attempt to sell the line like people say I'm anti-business that's nonsense like Jeremy makes some eye contact when you say that how would Daniel Day-Lewis deliver the line come on because he hates everyone in the audience but he was he did have a good point which is to say that if you are pro-business not necessarily pro the big monopolistic you know parasitic businesses landlords and and are just sort of getting money for not doing very much if you if you're interested in the productive economy then having high wages which means that people have purchasing power means that firms invest in productivity having a government that's willing to invest in new technologies that is really good actually for the businesses that most people care about so you know it was a good argument and we still haven't seen you know what Starmer's specifically labour pitches on this question you're watching Tiskey Sauronavara media we go live every Monday Wednesday and Friday at 7 p.m if you haven't subscribed already please do and hit that notifications button we're going to keep on the theme of Keir Starmer and his little wobble because it had I suppose it revealed itself let's say in some polling figures today so these were all released today I'm going to show you polls from you gov where the conservatives are on 41 and labour are on 37 you can see there that the conservatives are up for and labour are down for not necessarily a straight switch because the greens are also up too but those polls aren't moving in the right direction if you're thinking maybe that's just an outlier and again we can't we can't guarantee it's not but we also have this poll from Ipsos Mori the same direction of travels the conservatives on 42 that's one up from the previous poll and labour on 38 which is down three and again the greens doing pretty well there on eight points the final one I want to show you is would Keir Starmer make the best prime minister this has been the source of polling which most people myself included have been pointing to to say Keir Starmer's team won't be unhappy with this they still won't be distraught by this but Keir Starmer and Boris Johnson are now level pegging on who would make the best prime minister 33 points each Keir Starmer down one Boris Johnson up four presumably this has a lot to do with the rollout of the vaccine I'm not really sure if the electorate we're looking that closely at a leak about union jacks it's probably something more fundamental than that and for context for that who is the best prime minister Britain's elect put together a nice handy record of you gov over time who they found was people's preferred prime minister so you can see there that there was a period at the beginning of the pandemic where Keir Starmer sort of dramatically caught up with Boris Johnson then their their ratings sort of danced with each other for a few months and Boris Johnson is now on the way up. Ash these are all you know we shouldn't really over interpret polls which are just going up and down a bit but there is this impression now that Keir Starmer has lost momentum and also confidence like maybe his I mean if he ever had a mojo I don't know if Keir Starmer ever had a mojo but if he did he's kind of lost it yeah I wouldn't say that he had a mojo maybe sort of a hint of a vibe somewhere wouldn't go as far as an air of authority at least an air of confidence and authority at the moment he and his team are looking increasingly rattled they're casting about for ideas nothing's really working and it's because their strategy of present competence a political image rather than a policy story that's how you're going to win over those laboratory switches who were decisively you know lost in in 2019 that isn't being borne out in you know much of the polling at all it's maybe four percent of those switches being won back but there's no significant dense and meanwhile you've got a kind of steady seeping of progressive votes towards you know applied and towards the Greens I imagine for younger people that's something which might exacerbate if that's of course if they don't just switch to non-voting entirely and on the question of you know individual poll ratings well if you're saying that your big thing is I'm more competent than the other guy and you don't have a sense of the policy vision well what happens when the other guy actually gets something right like vaccine procurement like the vaccine roll out you know that's really giving people no pun a shot in the arm and a sense of optimism did you like that um that's very good a sense of optimism you know looking forward to summer looking forward to being able to you know reunite with their families see their friends do all the things that they want to do this idea of I'd be better if I was in charge because you know I'm just a kind of more competent together guy doesn't really work when people are going actually the government got something right the sort of disavowal of vision and I think that it is a deliberate strategy on the part of Keir's team I think is really really flawed because I think the starting point that they work from is that the electorate is essentially passive they respond to images and not policy they don't really care about what you're going to be like governing the country and how their lives are going to be different outside of you know the run up to election day so before that you may as well not say anything just don't fuck up too much and you know project a sense of authority and the thing that's really flawed about that is that one you're not really diverging from the government because if you want to look authoritative the best thing to be is already in power and the second thing is that if what you're trying to do is reclaim terrain that's been lost because of 40 years of economic drift where you've got you know one section of you know the population who tend to be older you know enriched by asset price inflation and the protection of their pensions and the majority of the workforce excluded from wealth from economic stability and security you're not going to deal with that in any meaningful sense if you just say well you know my tactic is going to be don't spook the boomers if what you want to do is sort of stage a political upset and put together an electoral coalition capable of winning you're going to have to in some ways you know represent the economic interests of the working age population and appeal to them on the basis of policy wrapping yourself up in a flag isn't going to cut it trying to just look better in a suit than Boris Johnson or Jeremy Corbyn isn't going to cut it and punching left you know trying to demonstrate your own competence by going you know look how often I can make Rebecca Long Bailey cry isn't going to cut it either it keeps you caught in that place of labor in fighting story it cuts you off from your grassroots we're going to go out there and do the campaigning for you and it also turns out a sizable chunk of young socially progressive voters who could mean the difference between you know a labor or a Tory seat in an urban setting now there is a silver lining for people who are worried that the Labour Party doesn't have any direction at the moment because while reheated millibandism might not be a particularly attractive prospect the actual man Ed Miliband kind of does taste better reheated here he is speaking to Andrew Ma on Sunday I think that there is a coalition to be built in this country for a different approach in the future you know we've had in the last decade the financial crisis the crisis of brexit and now the injustices and inequalities revealed by covid and I think they should all tell us something about the deep inequities of our country and I think you know there's a big coalition to be built that we can't just carry on with businesses we're talking today about supporting businesses there needs to be a new relationship between government and business we're saying that we've got to suspend business rates for another six months to keep businesses going through this crisis maybe you wouldn't have expected that from Labour but it's about government and business working together a proper industrial strategy for the green jobs we need building up our public services again not making people live on 74 quid a week on universal credit not saying to kids to poor kids you can't get free school meals during half terms those are the values that Keir Starmer's fighting for and that we're fighting for now that was the first time I've heard someone on the Labour front bench actually sound like they know why they want to be in government ooh we've got a problem with my camera Ash I'm going to throw to you there that's happened to me a couple of times look I think Ed Miliband is a particularly strong performer these days one because there aren't very many people speaking in an impassioned way on the Labour front bench and two because he's now able to be himself to say the things that I think he's always wanted to say he's somebody who has maintained quite a productive and constructive relationship with parts of the left you know even after the sort of defeats of Corbynism in 2019 he's particularly interested in ideas which are generated by this sort of new ecology of left-wing think tanks including Commonwealth and autonomy that's why he's such an ideas guy and he can sort of root what Labour's talking about within a bigger vision of the economy because that's very much where his head is at at the moment and I think there's also the element of because he's no longer a leader and he doesn't have all these people around him going hey you know tilt towards Blue Labour oh go for a bit more social conservatism you really need to make your pitch to you know those homeowners who've paid off their mortgages you can kind of enjoy that freedom and speak authentically the thing which he you know was sort of excoriated for was a sort of sense that he was trying to be somebody that he wasn't unfailing you know that was the sort of killer blow which I think did him in and now he's just not held back by the same constraints how's your camera Michael oh so you are watching Tiske Sauer with your new show Ash Saka I will be demanding a raise from Navarra Media and I'll also think about something else that maybe I want to talk about in the meantime I'm just going to quickly bring up the document which has been sent to me by Fox. Emma Barnett who's the BBC host of Women's Hour has been accused of Islamophobia after adopting an aggressive line of questioning about female Imams while speaking to Zahra Muhammad. Zahra Muhammad last week was elected the first female chair of the Muslim Council of Great Britain. Let us have a look. How many female Imams are there? In the UK at the moment just because I presume we'll get to this more but representing of course women which you will do as part of this how many do we have in Britain? I mean I think again I'm not I wouldn't have a clue on these numbers because my rule is making sure that we include our affiliates particularly women in the work that we are doing and making sure that and where our structures as well as the work we do are truly representative so I think that you do we sorry you don't know that's fine if you don't know but do do we have female Imams in this country? I mean again it's not what are you referring to chaplains or you're referring to women that lead the prayer what are you referring to and I think you tell me I'm genuinely intrigued to know of course female priests have been around for some time we've also seen the advent of female rabbis in this country what is the picture for women leading prayer in Britain in in Muslim communities? Well I think my role isn't really to adjudicate or to examine that part of spirituality I think where women want to make those choices and we are you know that these are all religious discussions of the Muslim Council of Britain. Oh no of course it was just I thought because the Muslim Council of Britain has played such an important role in getting the number of Muslims for instance added to the census I mean that was done at the turn of the turn of the century so we actually knew how many Muslims there were so do we have female Imams? I think what's really important for the Muslim Council of Britain the work that we do is actually that it's not about defining you know or going into these types of questions regarding spirituality but actually looking at how we can benefit our communities especially given the pandemic and given the role that everybody needs to be playing and we will get to pandemic it's just quite striking that you can't sort of answer that question I recognise it's not a religious or spiritual role. Exactly I don't feel like that's within the parameters of my roles and responsibilities especially as you know the first elected female representation. I would have asked a man but I'm asking you because you're here. That video has caused a lot of controversy it's had a lot of backlash online people thinking that Emma Barnett there was being overly hostile because she had a Muslim guest and especially putting someone on the spot because she'd been elected as the first woman to the top of the Muslim Council of Britain. At the same time she is hosting a show called Woman's Hour so you might think it is appropriate for her to be asking about the role of women in Islam or in mosques in the UK. Ash I want your much more informed take than I can offer on this. What did you make of that interview and the backlash to it? Okay so I'm going to sort of go through the thread that I wrote on Twitter about it because I think it encapsulated what I think it's not illegitimate to ask the question itself but the way in which it was you know gone about by Emma Barnett it was clearly intended as a gotcha so to encourage Zahra Mohammed to say an embarrassingly low number and then the Muslim community is sort of painted as backward and anti-women because of it. Now the reason why it doesn't quite work is because imams are not just the Muslim version of a priest or the Muslim version of a rabbi. We don't have as sort of you know institutionalized a spiritual hierarchy and professionalized a spiritual hierarchy as other religions do and also the word imam refers to somebody who leads the prayer. Now there are women who do that in this country and because it's you know fairly common for women to lead the prayer mostly to single sex congregations it's not necessarily something that you'll keep tabs on in terms of numbers. The second thing that it could refer to is this professional role of a spiritual leader you lead the prayers all the time you're also an Islamic scholar you know you're somebody who has memorized the Quran. Now there are women who can do elements of this I'm not sure how many professional you know full-time female imams there are in this country that's not data I have but the things which make up an imam within the community are things which are open to women in Islam as well. So the question it seems to me that's interesting to address is to what extent has the role for women in spiritual leadership changed in the Muslim community in this country in recent years that's a really really interesting question and there also aren't straightforward answers to it it's only been within the last few years that you've had a female imam lead the prayer in a mixed congregation in this country which is perhaps a much better measure of progress on this front but again the way in which this was set up was intended as a gotcha and the reason why that's a problem is because when you're a Muslim and you're talking about something to do with Islam within the British media you're already operating within these constraints and these constraints are a set of assumptions that because you're Muslim you are uniquely backward and anti-women in a way that other religions are not. To the point where you do have hosts overtaking very ill-informed lines of questioning which is what I think happened with Emma Barnett or in the case of Nick Ferrari who brought me on to talk about a gay friendly and feminist mosque that was going to be open he was just denying to my face that feminist Muslims exist and I was like hey what am I chop chop liver you know you also had the instance of Kathy Newman claiming that she'd been you know sent out of a mosque and ushered away because she was a woman whereas actually she should have wandered into a mosque on visit my mosque day no one really spoke to her and then she wandered out again looking kind of confused and that was all there was to it but there's this predetermined narrative to do with Islam and women within the western perspective within the European perspective which means that it prevents you from actually seeing what's there and I think that's precisely what happened here I do you think that that comes out of you know quite entrenched Islamophobia but I don't think that it's a terminal case I think we can work with that by explaining to lots of people working journalism well hang on these are things that you have to know before you take the line of questioning I don't know if Emma Barnett would be open to that but I think it's possible I live in hope that's super interesting we should do we should do some more I'm not my my knowledge of the different roles in different religions is very poor I have to admit um ash it's been a pleasure speaking to you this evening thank you so much for taking over when my camera um died I've learned now that these these need to be charged which I will make sure to do before the next time I will be charging for hosting during that time so you can just monse me a tenor or something whenever you want of course you can have the super chest no I don't think that sounds dodgy doesn't it that sounds like you've just been embezzling from the talk and I don't embezzle the super chest go straight into the central account on that note let's go to the superchats um Divya Patel with 1999 hi Michael please can you give a happy birthday shout out to my sister Monica she loves your show thanks happy birthday to Monica I hope you have a wonderful day um and so lovely to hear you love the show and Laura Hamlet with 11 pound 11 hi Michael please can you wish my lovely partner David a happy birthday for last Friday he introduced me to Tiskey sour about a year ago and we both love tuning in every week three times it's three times a week three times a week is Tiskey Sal but no that's that's once a week is fine uh happy birthday to David also he sounds like a real catch he's introducing you to quality content no we like we like David he's good he's a good guy yeah don't don't start saying that he was three nights a week though downstream also once a week I mean I don't you only have one night off if you are a true a true father of the Navarra media no there are other single men out there who know all of our output and when come on Ash it's his birthday um all right we're gonna end there um Ash it's been a pleasure as always thank you for tuning in thank you for your support if you are a donor at navarramedia.com forward slash support and thank you for subscribing if you're a subscriber hit that like button it helps us on the algorithm for now you've been watching Tiskey sour on Navarra media good night