 Young people have been locked in their homes for months. We are presided over by an increasingly authoritarian government, and with Keir Starmer recklessly purging leftists from the Labour Party, all official routes to transformative change appear closed off. The stage is perhaps then set for a summer filled with social unrest, and last night in Bristol we saw just how volatile that could be. Tonight I'll be joined by a journalist who was on the scene and a participant in the protest to find out exactly what went on. I'll also be talking about the politics of protest with my esteemed colleague Ash Sarkar. Pleasure to be joined with you on a Monday evening. How are you doing Ash? No comment. Do you have a warrant? No, that's and I will accept that you have a right to not make any comment. Now people need to know their rights. Yeah, well that was very patronising police officer I am playing there. We will close the show and by discussing a worrying story about sperm. Do make sure you stay tuned for that. As ever do tweet on the hashtag TiskeySawa, share the show link and put your super chats in on the YouTube. We'll be going to some of those throughout the show and your comments under the Twitch stream. I'm going to start by showing you some videos and talking you through you know an outsider's interpretation of what happened in Bristol last night. So on Sunday thousands of people marched in Bristol against the policing bill which will criminalise disruptive protests and discriminate against the traveller community. As you can see from this footage from journalist Martin Boo for much of the day the protest was a standard peaceful affair. So actually a pretty good turnout. There were thousands of people. I think about five thousand is sort of the estimate I've seen but you've got their people and walking down the middle of the street chanting. Now as the day wore on protesters arrived to Bridewell police station in the city centre and this is where a sit-down protest started. So you can see that people sitting in front of the riot cops. It's a scene that will be familiar from from many protests and you can see that there's actually protests on both sides of the police. So on one side you've got what looks more like a sit-down protest and on the other you've got a stand-up one and you can see here some scuffles start there and you can see a young man who sort of falls through the police line and ends up getting wrestled to the ground by by three or four cops. Now as the day wore no as night fell and we're later in the day now it all got a little bit more feisty. So it all looks very very chaotic. Now back at the police station which is where you know lots of the action took place later on you can see how the police line collapsed. The videos so far have all been from Martin Booth. These next ones are from Alan Avram of the Bristol Cable. Now these are of the police station getting defaced. You first can see some windows graffitied while police look on from inside and some windows getting smashed and the images which have featured most prominently in news coverage of these protests was police vans and this is a police van with its windows broken being set on fire. Here you can see that van from another angle so we can get that up there so looking very dramatic people standing back from that because it's looking quite dangerous at this point in time and you've also got some smashed cars here so I doubt they had a relation to the police that just seems like someone's gone from car to car to car in a car park and smashed the windscreens. Now to find more about what happened last night I'm joined on the line by Martin Booth editor of the website Bristol 24-7 all for of 111 places in Bristol that you shouldn't miss and the creator of most of the footage from the protests I've just shown you. Ah we don't in fact have Martin on the line we have just lost him. Hopefully we might have Alex on the line who is a protester who took part in the protest. Have we still got Alex on the line? Hello yeah I'm still here. Perfect can you talk me through the events as you understand them there's obviously been a lot of discussion in the press as to how a protest went from looking you know like your standard peaceful protest to looking a bit more like a riot from your perspective as someone who who participated in the protest what changed what happened? So yeah I arrived around the around the turning point that you described at the the starting on narrative so when there were like two lines of police and two separate protests on either side and when I got there protesters on on both sides were attempting to to sit back down and like continue the the peaceful sit-down protest. There was like certainly a lot of tension between us and the police but it didn't really escalate until the police attempted that that mounted horseback charge on us and even after that like everyone was just showing like to be honest a really impressive amount of restraint given how provocative the police were being at basically every opportunity. So yeah after that the police started striking people a lot more indiscriminately they made several more attempts to like charge the crowd and beat them back obviously sitting down and at this point it wasn't really an option they left available to us and yeah eventually after right riling up the crowd and being put on the back foot for a bit they retreated to a more defensive line in front of the station and after that is when some of the burning started happening yeah. And so from your perspective could it have been you know just any other peaceful protest if the police hadn't sort of engaged in a number of provocations is that your interpretation of the day's events? Yeah absolutely if the if the police had tactics they were actually geared towards de-escalating the situation and not whatever the hell they thought they were doing on yeah it could have gone a lot more peacefully. Now I think I do have Martin Booth on the line I should start by saying thank you for letting us use your brilliant footage of the day's events. Now from your perspective Martin what do you see as being the trigger that shifted from what looked like a very peaceful protest in the morning to what looked like a much more confrontational one and by the time that night fell? Yeah I hope you guys can hear me okay I'm having a few technical difficulties over here. We can hear you perfectly now. Excellent so it's really interesting to hear what Alex has to say there because because from my vantage point it was the protesters who seemed to be goading the police. There were two police lines in front of the main police station Bridewell and there were some horses in the middle and the police were just standing still that's all they were doing and on the footage you can see a number of people just beginning to almost kind of look to me as just testing the water just a few pushes a few shoves and then every so often every so often the kind of tinderbox just exploded a little bit and there was a lot more action and that's when the police had to look from my angle it looked like they were forced to defend themselves. So the police had to defend themselves it seemed to me because they were it looked to me that they were being attacked by a small number of protesters. And I mean Alex what do you what do you make of that interpretation I mean obviously it's you know it's a large demo it's possible that for one person on the protest it seems as if the the violence was initiated by the police but in fact the provocation did happen elsewhere on the protest by a small minority of protesters I mean how would you respond to that? I think I'd respond by pointing out that the nobody was attacking the police station initially when it was completely undefended so I think the police are responsible for creating that tinderbox that sort of kindling and like volatile situation that you're talking about. If the police hadn't charged us like if the police were just defending themselves then we were just sitting down I guess. But you're I mean. No can I just say you say if the police hadn't defended themselves so what were they defending themselves against? I mean obviously there was there was pushback from the crowd when when police charged you with horses and with dogs and with batons and pepper spray you tend to you tend to need to defend yourself against that and people were sitting down when the horses came out and when they attempted a horseback charge yeah people were sitting down only minutes before that there was there was no provocation there was yeah. Martin have you covered many many protests in in Bristol and how much do you think this one differed from from other protests you've seen? Do you think the police were behaving differently? Do you think protesters were behaving differently? I think the interesting thing about this one is that it was it was almost a tail of two protests on the same day there was the afternoon march and and the police the police on that march were noticeable by their absence. Thousands of people marching through Bristol and sometimes looked around and there was not a single police officer in sight and on on other protests it's been really clear that police target individual ringleaders let's call them from from marches so there was a an anti-lockdown march. Piers Corbyn got arrested himself because he was targeted as as as one of the ringleaders so the police were on that particular protest they seemed to be cherry picking the organisers of the of of that march to to to make that particular march kind of leaderless, rudderless. The the the unique I think facet of yesterday's march was that it didn't have any leadership structure. There were no there were no individuals that the police could pick out. The only the only time I saw police engage with protesters on the march was on a side street when a young woman had a megaphone and a police officer immediately went up to her and said just just make sure that you don't use that because if she was using that megaphone my interpretation was that she could then be picked out as one of the as one of the ringleaders but that was the afternoon's peaceful protest and and and we had an entirely different set of circumstances for for when darkness fell. Alex I want to know from you as you know someone who's a an activist and organiser where do you think you will go from here do you think this will be a moment which will catalyse a much broader movement in Bristol or do you think this will scare some people off or or you know what do you see is happening next after this? Yeah I'd like to see people kind of moving on from this this single event at some point it doesn't it doesn't help to like constantly obsess over the over the sort of spectacle of the violence that we've seen but yeah I I hope especially if this bill does pass that we've shown at least maybe not in the best way but we have shown that we can't be intimidated by the police and if they want to criminalise peaceful protests then this is what every protest is going to look like because they won't be able to be organised well basically. Martin and Alex thank you so much for joining me this evening that was incredibly insightful even if quite different interpretations of what happened yesterday. Let's go straight onto the political responses although actually let's go straight to a comment now Michael Deary with 20 quid the MPs who are chastising organisers and protesters for what happened were about to abstain last week they lack conviction beyond what's good for them is good but always speak down to those doing the hard work sick of it a reference to political responses which is what we are going to go to right now. This is Pretty Patel no surprises here she tweeted after the protests unacceptable scenes in Bristol tonight. Fuggery and disorder by a minority will never be tolerated our police officers put themselves in harm's way to protect us all my thoughts this evening are with those police officers injured. Shadow Home Secretary Nick Thomas Simons along a very similar line or for shocking scenes in Bristol there is no excuse whatsoever for this violence thinking of those officers who have been injured and their families wishing them a swift recovery that was a kind of boilerplate response there from the Shadow Home Secretary Jess Phillips was had a bit more personality and potentially a bit more offensive to some people she says these people are not only vicious dangerous and wrong they also clearly couldn't give a toss about the cause they claim to care for stupidity and selfishness drives them the police deserve better and finally I'm going to Bristol Mayor Marvin Reese and so he released a longer statement this is probably the key part of it the violence and damage that have emerged from today's protests are unacceptable and have nothing to do with the real work we are doing to tackle political economic and social inequality smashing buildings in our city centre vandalising vehicles attacking our police will do nothing to lessen the likelihood of the bill going through on the contrary the lawlessness on show will be used as evidence and promote the need for the bill um I mean no surprises that these these are the statements that mainstream politicians will make um about any protest which gets a little bit violent ash I want to bring you in for your take um what do you make of the political fallout which has followed this protest what do you make about the protest itself um tell me what you think so in terms of the political fallout there are really no surprises here for Pretty Patel I imagine this will be something of an opportunity because the police crime sentencing and courts bill ended up being delayed because of public outcry because of five days of consecutive protests led by sisters uncut because Keir Starmer had been essentially bullied into having to vote against something for the first time in his life and there were also some critical noises coming from the Tory back benches on some of the measures contained within the bill and their limitations on nonviolent protest so one of the people speaking against the bill she did of course then vote for it was quite surprisingly Theresa May so with that context it's quite I think striking that the conservatives who do enjoy an ATC majority who I think could feel quite confident about passing um that bill at third reading um felt the need to delay it could be that they anticipated a bumpy journey through the committee stage where the bills looked at in more detail there are also more amendments put together which are then voted on at third reading and the House of Lords tend to take quite a keen interest in legislation which contains measures on civil liberties so that was the state of play um before this weekend in the events in Bristol and in terms of the political responses you know the sort of response that Nadia Wittem is uh being subjected to simply because she's saying well look let's wait until the facts emerge before we rush to condemn um was there uh you know provocation from the police was their misuse of police powers we've got to look at all of this stuff you know she's now got people calling uh for Keir Starmer to remove the whip from her so this is seen I think as as an opportunity by not just the reactionary right but the right within the Labour Party itself I do think and this is why I'm in agreement with what you said Michael which is that this is I think quite an inevitable consequence of the last year in politics so not just the lockdown not just um the you know economic deprivation that many people are having to deal with but also the whole scale exclusion of the young from the terrain of politics Keir Starmer's made it very clear that he's only interested in winning back you know the votes of five home owning pensioners in stoke on trend and everyone else can go hang but where's the political representation coming from it's nowhere now when it comes to movement building as well you've of course had the tremendous efforts of Black Lives Matter but elsewhere you know so the school strikes for climate that's not really going on at the moment XR those containers for activism and activist energy have sort of fallen away and diminished and you add to that the heavy-handed and quite brutal policing of the Sarah Everard vigil a series of pieces of legislation which seek to put the government above accountability then this is going to be the consequence and I imagine it could be something of a lively summer if things continue on this trend I think the the disorganizedness of this protest is something I keep hearing from people who who I talked to who were there or who have an analysis of it which is is basically that you know there are lots of demonstrations in in in Bristol there have been lots over the last 10 years this one got more violent than previous ones partly because the police and to be fair to the police the government because of the the lockdown laws which have been passed meant that protests cannot be organized with any kind of leadership or any kind of direction so the Black Lives Matter protest which happened last summer much bigger than the protests from from the weekend but there was a group of people who were sort of setting the culture of them which was to be quite open you know reasonably sort of savvy when it came to sort of putting forward an impression of a of a movement that was fairly sort of positive in its in its outlook and the protests which have been happening recently or I mean especially this protest that that was impossible to happen because anyone who you know spoke on a megaphone would have the possibility of receiving a 10,000 pound fine so that's why I think it was you know much more chaotic than many other protests we will likely see potentially even in the summer because once these laws are relaxed again you'll have protests which are organized by people instead of being quite as chaotic as that one looked like last night. I want to talk a little bit about the the strategy and whenever these protests happen you get a debate on on on Twitter and you know in column pages within the left I think a very legitimate important debate actually about the tactical importance of various types of protests so on the one side you have people who are saying that actually um smashing stuff having a somewhat violent protest I always want to be careful you know to distinguish between violence against property and violence against people but to have a have a protest that people perceive to be violent is the only way to get attention is the only way to get headlines and this this protest has got headlines other people would say oh actually this is exactly what the government want because it justifies their authoritarian response or at least it makes it harder to build a broad coalition now I think both of those are fairly legitimate um what I would sort of suggest though something that could potentially clarify this is separating between is it useful for the short term purpose of the protest so is what happened last night useful in stopping the policing bill passing I think probably not I think that you know there were actually a lot of goodwill being generated from the Sarah Everard vigils last Sunday I think this might have lost some goodwill but to be honest I think probably that bill was going to pass anyway so another way of looking at is will this help spark a broader movement and for me that's still completely up in the air I think about Milbank back in 2010 when uh the the conservative party headquarters got smashed up during the student protest did that persuade anyone that people shouldn't raise student fees probably not but in retrospect it was actually quite a key catalyst for building a much broader movement which ended up you know creating a generation of activists but it can go both ways again I think later in that cycle of protests um at the March 26 um anti cuts demo when there were lots of people dressed in and masked up and smashing things and I won't specify which part of of that movement I was at in the time a little bit of an anarchist back in those days it wasn't necessarily that helpful for building a movement it probably had the reverse effect but it is it's too difficult to say in any kind of blanket level will this or will this not have been strategic for movement building even if it is a bit more obvious when it comes to the the short-term bill that's coming up ash what do you make of of the arguments as to the the tactical usefulness of um of smashing up a police station I really liked the way you said like well I was quite the anarchist back in my day I was quite the hellion you might not know it to look at me now but I really was um so in terms of the tactics and the strategy I think that one of the problems is that we collapse moral arguments into tactical and strategic arguments and we actually need to pick them out I have no moral problem with use of force in the name of protest I do not have a moral objection to it I mean look obviously you know mass murders and stuff very very bad don't do that but you know damage done to property for instance I have no moral objection for me what determines whether or not something is strategically or tactically wise is of course context driven so when the police headquarters in Minneapolis was burnt to the ground following the killing of George Floyd well one that was one of the most popular things that happened during that summer of protest in the United States it actually pulled very well and two it was an outpouring of rage which came from the heart of the community and I think that the context there you can no more condemn that than you could condemn a hurricane I think that it was this kind of very organic very authentic outpouring I think when it comes to the immediate goals regarding the kill the bill struggle I think you're right I think that when it comes to the journey of this bill through parliament it was always likely to pass but I think that some of the amendments could have been up for grabs I think that now that moment um isn't really there anymore so what I called a tentative alliance between extra parliamentary forces the labor front bench who really did have to be bullied into whipping against and some grumbling Tory backbenchers I think has fallen apart now this could be a moment to build outwards and you know galvanizing movement which has at its core the defense of civil liberties in this country but that also depends on whether the organizing work is being done in in the aftermath and and what shape that takes and so I want to be very clear that my solidarity and my support is with the protesters and those who have been victims of police provocation you know not just talking about what Alex was referring to in Bristol but there are also some really nasty bits of footage emerging from Manchester of course the scenes that we saw in Clapham as well that's where my politics lie but do you think that we also have to think about as the left do we end up in a position where something has happened um largely spontaneously by people who are also on the left um in a way which has also some negative consequences in terms of a measure of loss of public support um the relatively hospitable narrative environment that you had regarding kill the bill last week has dissipated this week um is that because of the moral argument around uh violence versus non-violence you end up saying no this was the wisest course of action all along um I think that that's sometimes quite dangerous and there's also a danger of I think sometimes believing our own propaganda and not questioning things as deeply as we should and one really key example here being the poll tax riots of course the poll tax riots were a hugely seminal moment in resistance to the poll tax but it was also I think as Shardine Taylor Stone put it the tip of the iceberg um you also had a mass non-compliance movement which comprised of you know millions of people you had people sending in their poll tax in pennies just to make it harder uh for the government to count the money uh you had 78% opposition to the poll tax and that included some Tory voters as well so you can see that you had a broad base of support even if you had a much smaller section of that support and of that non-compliant population actually taking part in the poll tax uprisings themselves and so I think that there is a danger when we fetishize just the uprising part and we don't look at all the other things that are necessary in order to make that um a powerful statement of the strength of public feeling which can force governments to move. I think that's a super important point Solomon Hughes also had a very you know good tweet about the poll tax right there was a very broad campaign of non-compliance and non-payment that led up to that riot. This sort of tactical strategic question of the the pros and cons of violent protests it you know I think there's lots of disagreement on the left that's a good thing um but we're now going to talk about something which will unite the left which is terrible takes about Sunday's protests by various politicians who are nasty people in fact and we've got 2,700 people watching do like the video if you haven't already. In response to riots in Bristol against the policing bill which would criminalize disruptive protest Nigel Farage tweeted the following in Bristol tonight we see what the soft-headed approach to the anti-police BLM leads to the Black Lives Matter leads to wake up everyone this is not about racial justice these people want all out anarchy and street violence and as you can see there he's tweeting that with a video of a police van on fire. Now there are a number of problems with this tweet as you would expect for a Nigel Farage take on any kind of protest but the ones here are particularly clear which is this was not a Black Lives Matter protest. Now in the videos I've seen I think everyone I saw writing was why I can't say that you know as a blanket rule but from the videos I've seen and no one actually claimed this was a demonstration about racial justice it was about the policing bill now obviously those issues intersect but this wasn't people saying we are here as racial justice activists so why has Nigel Farage said this now you know it could seem puzzling at first has he just misunderstood is it the case that he just has not read up the demands of the policing bill or he hasn't looked closely enough at the videos of the of the rioting that took place it's possible I think it's more likely this is part of his I suppose lifelong endeavor to associate non-white people with violence and racial justice movements with violence that's exactly what he's doing there he's you know he's looking at a riot which from my perspective seems to have been involving overwhelmingly white people they're not Black Lives Matter what's the first thing he brings up Black Lives Matter and racial justice campaigners who he wants us to demonize and assume because they're talking about racial justice actually want to burn down police fans now Ash this is all very gross do you think that we've just sort of chosen you know one tweet the most obnoxious but marginal opinion which is Nigel Farage who's now a politician condemned to the past anyway or is this sort of association that people draw between any kind of violence whoever's committing it and for whatever end with Black people and racial justice issues to associate them together what do you make of it well this is actually a tactic which is being deployed by other sort of you know shock jock figures on the far right whenever there is anything to do with protest immediately it's BLM defund the police you know Marxist anarchists from the street and it doesn't matter what the cause is it could be the Sheffield tree defenders and that's going to be the narrative that they pull for because what they're trying to do is import a very Americanized law and order culture war which is explicitly racialized and use the exact same coordinates for framing and understanding UK politics over here so I think we're going to see a lot more of it and it's going to be commonplace and just like McDonald's Starbucks friends and MTV the most annoying things which dominate America will eventually find their way over here as well there's I think another aspect to this which is sort of worth bearing in mind which is that we have an incredibly shallow media culture and it also I think creates quite a shallow political understanding as well so you've got to understand that when people look at images they're sort of reading them through other images which they have a grasp on and can kind of understand so it doesn't matter that all of those people are white you know they look like the same you know and Tifa that you know the far right have been distributing videos of you know who've mustered in Portland or Washington DC or wherever else it is so it forms part of a kind of network of images which shape a kind of right-wing paranoiac political imagination and so Nigel Farage appeals to that kind of imagery because he knows that it works it lands and it's also something which gets sort of you know recycled upwards and finds its way in the kind of framing which exists in mainstream media there is a convey about of framing you know images rhetoric which start on the kind of weirdo corners of far-right internet and then find themselves you know in the times and the BBC at the evening standard and wherever else you care to mention so obviously this is ignorant it's untrue and it's misleading but it's not an accident it's deliberate and I think it will have an effect it's important to mention as well you're talking about this network of images it doesn't actually just come from right-wing shock shock so it's a really important study and that was in the Huffington Post just about a week ago where they had compared the number of people found guilty of a crime in a six month period in London with the number of people whose convictions were press released by the Metropolitan Police so we can get up a graphic here so of the people who were so this is this is showing you white people and black people and in the the blue column is the share of people who were sentenced and in the green column is the share of people who were press released their their sentencing so you can see here that of people who were sentenced who were arrested in London 45 percent of them were white but 33 but only 33 percent of the people who were press released by the police were white so you can see there's there's this big disparity and you've got the same thing on the other side obviously so the share of people who were sentenced who were black in London was 29 percent the share of people who were press released saying that there had been a crime and there had been someone who was convicted 44 percent of those were black so you've got this complete disparity and whether or not that's intentional or otherwise I mean that probably is a sign of institutionalised racism where you're a police force you choose whether or not to press release different convictions you don't you don't press release them all and you're way more likely to press release them if the person in question is black than if the person in question is white um ash I want your yep go on you're completely right to point that out is that it's not just far right shock jokes it's also a strategy which is employed whether knowingly or not by the police um but the point about institutional racism is that it doesn't matter really whether it's you know conscious or not it has these impacts which contribute to the ongoing criminalisation and unfair treatment of black people within our criminal justice system but you can also see the police playing into a kind of culture wars uh media framing in terms of how they responded over the last week so one of the things that's happened uh you know is that the metropolitan police put up a guard around the statue of Winston Churchill following the Sarah Everard vigil now the statue of Winston Churchill I think at one of the BLM demos had racist graffiti on it now of course criminal damage is a crime but you know it's also a fact in this case um but nobody had any interest in the statue of Winston Churchill following the abduction and killing and arrest that was made in the case of Sarah Everard and absolutely nobody was bringing Churchill into the conversation after the heavy-handed police tactics prompted a kind of nationwide debate about uh the appropriateness of those kinds of measures no one was talking about Churchill but just by having the visual of coppers in their hives surrounding the statue what it was symbolising is we are part of this culture war and we are on the side of this you know very reactionary very nationalistic and very paranoiac um political fantasy of what the battle is and who our opponents are so the police are taking a very active role in this at the moment and it's because you've got this kind of unholy triangle of political interests of Cressida Dick uh the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police and the nation's most senior cop Pretty Patel and Boris Johnson each of them is covering the other's right flank and so I think that you are going to see I think a much more active role being played by the police in this cultural framing of what their job is totally I mean I'm not looking forward to it I have to say and we've got we've got one more very obnoxious take from a politician about these protests now when it comes to violence at protests people on the left will often disagree some will see riots as a legitimate response to state violence others will think violence is always wrong many will see protesters burning vans and smashing windows as no moral disaster but rather a public relations one these are all options which are widespread on on the left I think we can have productive disagreement about these questions what you don't normally see among progressives though is applauding cops as they swing battens at crowds but that's what Labour's Shadow Minister for Further Education did this afternoon now he quote tweeted a video by journalist Billy Stockwell of clashes between cops and protesters at Bristol's March against the policing bill and wrote this is Toby Perkins this looks to me like entirely appropriate use of the baton a good example of proportionate policing under extreme pressure well done with free clapping emojis now let's take a look at the video which Perkins thinks was a great example of proportionate policing worthy of of a round of applause now whatever your position about policing and protest do you want to abolish the cops do you think the cops do a good job I think the idea of clapping at that situation which you know it looks quite difficult for everyone involved actually but seeing that as something to celebrate I think just seems completely sadistic I mean there's someone really swinging his baton people really getting hurt I mean to me that doesn't look particularly defensive if you're swinging your baton like that it's not someone holding up their their shield that's a real you know that could cause real damage and you've got a Labour MP here Shadow Minister and a Shadow Minister who represents young people Shadow Minister for Further Education and he's giving a round of applause as a as a cop hits a protester with a baton now obviously that didn't cause any controversy today the tweet that caused controversy perhaps it was an interview that caused controversy was Nadia Wittem saying actually maybe I want to work out what the facts are before I start condemning people that's seen as beyond the pale a Labour MP who's giving a round of applause for a cop hitting someone with a stick that's completely acceptable people are saying Nadia Wittem should lose the whip this guy no one's even saying he should be be forced to apologise or resign from the front bench Asha I want your take on Toby Perkin's intervention it's just kind of pathetic isn't it when you see somebody cheering on bullying which is being done by other people there's something about that which I just find so unsheak do you know what I mean it's just so kind of pathetic you're clapping from the sidelines that you know these kind of you know puffed up drunk on their own power cop swing baton around but you know batons around that's not I don't think that you know it's becoming of a Shadow Cabinet minister not just on the politics of it which are of course atrocious but just because it's so pathetic it's like Randall the school snitch from recess you know you don't even have the kind of gumption to do it yourself but you're kind of you know in the sidelines going oh I'm approved of this it's also come to my attention that Toby Perkins has said some pretty offensive things in relation to the GRT community he said that he wouldn't want a travellers encampment to set up near him he apologised afterwards after there was an outcry from the GRT community but when you sort of put those two things together the applauding of indiscriminate baton strikes against protesters who are there in part because of a bill which will criminalise and really crack down on on the GRT community I wonder if there are some connections here if not consciously but then unconsciously about a kind of desire to see a more authoritarian measures from the state against those who are deemed to be you know disruptive and criminal whether those people are deemed to be that way because they're protesters or if they're deemed to be that way because they're part of the GRT community that's really dark I hadn't thought of that connection actually I mean my interpretation of it was and I think that's very valid I didn't know about those previous tweets from him or previous articles previous comments I mean my interpretation of this was it was more standard just sort of like Labour trying to sort of appeal to parts of the electorate but sort of just ending up going too far and looking kind of stupid so obviously you've got you know Keir Starmer said we have to look like we support the police we have to look like we're you know we don't want to defund the police and we don't want to abolish the police and they've ended up saying oh we have to now clap everything they do so you have a situation you now have front bench shadow ministers you've got a cop hitting someone with a baton like literally beating someone up and they're like oh yeah that's brilliant that's pretty we love that too we love that too and then you can sort of just imagine them sort of you know how far does it have to go where they won't be you know giving this huge round of applause because they think it makes them look good and sooner or later we're going to have a situation where they're they're doing this huge round of applause because they think that's what you have to do to get elected and then everyone's just looking at them like guys no one thinks that's cool like where does this end if your instant reaction to seeing police violence is to say well we're the Labour party we want to get elected that means whatever the situation we have to side with the cop i mean it could go really badly wrong couldn't it well i mean yeah yeah it could because one is unprincipled it's so unprincipled and two um you're never going to be able to out water cannon pretty patelle you know there's always going to be a politician on your right flank who can who can go much further and the thing is that they really mean it you know pretty patelle has previously spoken out in favour of bringing back capital punishment um you know that goes to a place which you know i hope no Labour shadow minister would ever want to go so it's just it's inauthentic it's pathetic and it's also not even that successful as an electoral strategy but what's more i think that it is a real insult considering Labour's own history so when you think of the violence meted out to miners when you think about what happened at all grief when you think about what happened at Hillsborough and all of these events have really played into the politicisation of their membership and have shaped Labour's history in self-image and and connections working class struggle in a really powerful way for then a Labour shadow minister to turn around and say you know i applaud baton strikes or to symbolically endorse indiscriminate baton strikes um is an insult to that history or a sign that you never took it all that seriously in the first place um and this is this isn't about whether you consider the events last night in Bristol to be either morally or strategically right that's entirely a separate issue it's a measure i think and a very basic political test of whether somebody is serious about progressive politics is how they react to images of state violence and anyone who applauds or celebrates it cannot be trusted i mean i think that's very much safe advice i'll hold by that rule of thumb and we're going to go to our final story which is as i say worth the way it is worrying do you remember the movie erin brokovich now the film which was based on a true story so julia roberts play a legal clerk who helped uncover the scandal of an american energy company dumping a carcinogenic chemical into a town's water supply she won the case she she got actually about three hundred and thirty three million dollars in compensation for the people involved she did well now the real erin brokovich is back and once again she's shining a light on the health impacts of toxic chemicals this time specifically their effect on sperm counts um this was an article in the guardian um plummeting sperm counts shrinking penises toxic chemicals threaten humanity and that's obviously not julia roberts that's the real erin brokovich the subtitle the chemicals to blame for our reproductive crisis are found everywhere and in everything now the article which definitely grabbed my attention is based on findings from shana swan who is an environmental and reproductive epidemiologist at the ican school of medicine in new york now swan in a recent book um well the findings in her recent book shows that average sperm counts have dropped by 60 percent since 1973 and could drop to zero by 2045 now brokovich drawing on the work of swan writes that the chemicals to blame for this crisis are found in everything from plastic containers and food wrapping to waterproof cloves and fragrances in cleaning products to soaps and shampoos to electronics and carpeting some of them called pfas are known as forever chemicals because they don't break down in the environment or the human body they just accumulate and accumulate doing more and more damage minute by minute hour by hour day by day now it seems humanity is reaching a breaking point now the swan and now publicized by brokovich mean the average man is now has half the sperm count of their grandfather at the same age but it's not just sperm count that is affected so brokovich writes as if this wasn't terrifying enough swan's research finds that these chemicals aren't just dramatically reducing semen quality they are also shrinking penis size and volume of the testes this is nothing short of a full scale emergency for humanity um the article lists the inadequate measures currently being taken to address the use of pfa chemicals and ends with this call to action so she writes scientists have found these substances in the blood of nearly all the people they tested in the us no country or region on earth is untouched by pfa's contamination it is a global problem pfas has been found in every corner of the globe it is virtually present in the bodies of every human it's found in deep fish in the sea and birds flying high in the sky and it's killing us literally by harming and attacking the very source of life our reproductive capacities the rapid death and decline of sperm must be addressed and it must be addressed now there simply is no time to lose now or reading this i was quite surprised that this isn't you know people i'm sure people dispute what is causing the lowering of sperm count but i haven't seen anyone dispute the fact that sperm counts have decreased by 60 percent since 1973 which is you know we're looking at children of man territory here if she's saying by 2045 we might have no sperm at all i mean i don't know how the projection works you know is it is it uh sort of a situation where it falls dramatically and then levels off at a lower level or does it keep going down but either way this seems like probably something that should be as erin brokovich says demands some political attention ash what do you make of this are you are you worried i mean i haven't noticed any decline in sperm quality i i don't know about you um not that i can comment on on you know the state of my partner's grandfather in the 1970s but um from from what i've seen no shrinkage and and you need to comparison across generations that's going to be quite difficult in one time to work out there is the problem i'm doing my best but it's a lockdown you know um i mean look i read this article because you sent it to me and i i um i don't feel like i've got a comfortable grip on the science at all so i don't know how reliable this data is i don't know if the causal link which is being established between these forever chemicals and um declining sperm count and shrinking testes and smaller penises bears out and i'm not familiar with the work of this particular epidemiologist uh who erin brokovich is talking about but there have been concerns raised about fertility overall um over the last couple of decades and some of it has been assigned to social changes that particularly in the global north where you have um women in the workforce and you also have access to reproductive health care and you have changing social norms you have lower rates of infant mortality you have declining uh fertility rates because women are making a choice not to have children so young there have also been concerns raised about um sperm counts particularly in relation to hormones used in in agricultural production leaching into the water and whether or not that's having the effect on on on male sperm counts so i think these fears have been around for quite a long time and i sometimes wonder um because you do also sort of see these these um it's not obviously science was in its infancy centuries ago but there were also these moral panics around the virility of men and the kind of virility being sucked out of them either because of certain social practices or because of you know the food they eat and so on and so forth so i wonder if this is a scientific expression of a very old story and a very old fear which has got something to do with kind of the the both the metaphorical and literal like sap of male virility sort of seeping away and i wonder if this is is a replaying of that um but i'm not familiar enough with with epidemiology to say whether or not this is true or not and and like i said the sperm seems just fine to me i want to end the section on a positive note because like i said like you i suppose i don't have a real grasp of this science when it comes to these forever chemicals and sperm but unlike many scientific problems which you know present themselves to the earth climate change being the big one i feel like if this does become a serious problem it will get acted on quite quickly and that's because historically when it comes to sort of our political class penal health tends to quite easily become a political priority obviously because of you know the demographic of who's in charge especially this idea that it makes your penis smaller i feel like probably there will be some sort of political movement to make sure we get rid of these pfas chemicals an example of how i suppose penal health is a political priority for people is japan now until 1999 they hadn't approved the contraceptive pill for women obviously and the reason they hadn't is because i said one we you know we've got to check the safety of it um also it could damage the morals of society 30 years it was going through committees lots of people campaigning for it then viagra came along that was approved in six months because it you know affected penises and because that was approved that was when the contraceptive pill got approved so by sort of having this penis issue you ended up having these sort of side benefits because then other rights couldn't be denied and so i'm also wondering here maybe the political processes which are brought into play because men in power are worried about their penises could have some actually quite positive side benefits so maybe we get rid of the pfas chemicals and then we realize actually we can get rid of all these other toxic chemicals which we didn't really care about because they didn't disproportionately affect men could this be actually the best story of the year ash i mean i wonder then if there's a political case for tiskey sour to move in a much more alex jones esk direction so if you open every show just bellowing into the camera about these chemicals and the impacts that they're having on you know sperm counts and penis sizes and you just really go for it and then you do get some government action on these chemicals which seem not great regardless of whether or not that they're making the penis smaller and you know other nasties as well micro plastics those are being found in fish that's not good um but i i think this is probably a really serious story which i'm not taking seriously enough because you've made me talk about sperm and penis size on a monday night we'll try get shana swan on the show at some point you can talk us through the science properly we would need to have a debate though we would need to have we would need to have this epidemiologist up against somebody else because we don't have the skills to stress test her claims and we don't have a big file of acts of penises to examine the data i'm not sure anyone's disputing this we'll have to see if anyone's disputing it if it's seriously disputed then yeah we'd need a debate otherwise if this is just an unrecognized but consensus position of the scientific community then we can just run with that come we'll talk about the we we can debate the political implications of it she can explain the science but again we'll go away and see if this is more controversial than erin brokowicz makes it out to be do you think like in 20 years time i'm going to be looking back on this piece of footage and we're going to be in this sort of you know um barren hellscape where people are like fighting with rifles for like the last drop of man milk and i'm going to go oh i was so dismissive about that 20 years ago it's like the people who in february last year said oh covet 19 that's not going to kill anyone doesn't age doesn't always age well um i want to finish um by um tying up some loose ends in terms of previous stories we've covered we've had some interesting developments over the weekend so last monday um we talked about concerns in europe about the astrazeneca vaccine um the european medicines agency has now approved that all good even though it has caused quite a lot of vaccine skepticism on the continent which is a shame probably that seems like it was handled very poorly by the governments over there the news we've had this weekend though i mean today in fact um is that astrazeneca has now um the results from the us trials have come through and it looks like it's probably actually even more effective than we thought it was so all good news there also some good news for the s n p um that's because sturgeon has been cleared of breaking the ministerial code we've discussed on previous shows how i mean my take was kind of that it seemed like maybe she had broken the ministerial code but it would seem a bit harsh for her to have to resign for that because ultimately this crisis was caused by the inappropriate behavior of of alex salman so it would be a shame if then um one of the the leading woman in uk politics was forced to resign for it especially at a point where she's quite popular because of a handling of you know much more obviously sexual abuse is a very serious issue but the particular emails or meetings that she had with alex salman are less important than corona virus are less important than social and public policy so i think from my perspective it's it seems a bit of a relief um that there is going to be less pressure for her to resign now although i think we are getting a vote of confidence in the next couple of days we'll have to see how that goes although i understand the smp and the greens are going to vote against it so nicolas sturgeon should be safe i'm going into those may elections which we will definitely be talking about much more on this show and we finished on time today ash it's this never happens does it no it doesn't it i was just trying to bring that penis conversation to a close i felt absolutely out of my depth if only i had somewhere to go now just means another another 15 minutes sitting alone in my house um as sarco it's been an absolute pleasure as always lovely to be here michael as always thank you to both our guests at the start of the show thank you for watching an even bigger thank you if you are a supporter of navar media you make this show possible if you aren't already please do go to navarmedia.com forward slash support and then the equivalent of one hour's wage a month subscribe to the video hit the like button it helps us in the algorithm i'll be back on wednesday at seven p.m for now you've been watching tiskey sour on navar media good night