 Over the past few weeks we've been watching in astonishment as the government pursues a policy which they aren't messing up. Yes, the vaccination program is still moving at an impressive pace and on Sunday it was announced the government hit their target of vaccinating the 15 million people in the top four priority groups. It's genuinely impressive and a credit to the NHS. But what now? Now, debate is raging about this on social media in government circles among scientists and to my mind we can probably lump people into three broad groups. One of them, the first one is the let it rip camp. They say because we've now vaccinated the most vulnerable, the people who make up most of the deaths and a large proportion of hospitalizations, we can now basically let the virus rip. We can let it run through the younger populations, let people get on with their lives and have some form of natural induced herd immunity. Their polar opposites who are often on the labour back benches, so the let it rip people are on the Tory back benches, their polar opposites say we should eliminate the virus. Yes, we've got the vaccine but that doesn't solve all of our problems. Let's wait, let's make sure that we get cases right, right down as close to zero as possible before unloosening the lockdown obviously with a good test and trace system and all of those additions. Finally, we have everyone in the middle, so people who say because we've got these vaccines now we probably can start loosening while we've still got some virus around because it's less dangerous than before but we shouldn't do it as quickly as the Tory back benches want. Now this is a big question, it's got big political, ethical, epidemiological implications and I'll be discussing it on tonight's show with Susan Mickey of Independence Sage, so a great guest for a big topic as it's a Monday. I'm also delighted I have the privilege of being joined by Ash Sarkar. We are obviously going to be talking about COVID, we're also going to be talking about billionaires. Who's your favourite billionaire? Do you have one? Well we're going to talk about one now who is not well later in the show who is the world's biggest philanthropist who really cares about climate change. Our final story is not about a billionaire but someone who is intensely relaxed about billionaires. You can get people getting filthy billionaire. Exactly, against people becoming filthy, well he's pro people becoming filthy billionaire. You know the score though, all I want you to do, share the show link, subscribe to that, subscribe to the channel, keep your comments coming, tweet on the hashtag Tiskey Sour, first story. The government have hit their target of offering everyone in the top four priority groups of vaccine by today with at least 15 million people having had their first jab. This is leading to calls from Boris Johnson's back benches to fast track a relaxation of the lockdown. But this afternoon Boris Johnson urged caution. Clearly schools on March the 8th has for a long time been a priority of the government and of families up and down the country. We'll do everything we can to make that happen but we've got to keep looking at the data, we've got to keep looking at the rates of infection. Don't forget they're still very high, still 23,000 or so in COVID patients in the NHS, more than at the April peak last year, still sadly too many people dying of this disease, rates of infection, although they're coming down are still comparatively high. So we've got to be very prudent and what we want to see is progress that is cautious but irreversible. Now compared to what Boris Johnson has been saying for much of this pandemic, they sound like very reassuring words. Boris Johnson isn't saying let's take it on the chin, he's not saying let's not worry about the virus, we can be back to normal in 12 weeks, he's saying let's be cautious and do this properly. That's what I want to hear from the Prime Minister. The real question though is do his actions match up to those words? We haven't had an announcement of the roadmap to loosening the lockdown yet, that's expected next week and the government are being quite cagey in press conferences and when speaking officially about it. So we're having to rely on briefings to the papers as is often the case during this pandemic and we can go through three big ones from this weekend. So from the 8th of March, that's in three weeks time, according to the Times, schools will reopen for all children, both primary and secondary age. Now we've been expecting for a while that schools would start to open on the 8th of March that had been announced by Boris Johnson. The idea that they'd all go back at exactly the same time to me seemed surprising, a little bit worrying, I was assuming it would be staggered, not according to the Sunday Times. The telegraph have another bit of information, another tip bit that we can look forward to which is picnics and coffee in the park will be allowed. That sounds good on the face of it, the small print actually makes this quite a lot less exciting than it otherwise would be, because apparently the rules will still be that you can only sit on a bench in a park and have a coffee with someone who lives in your own house. So it's not the biggest relief to hear that, but also doesn't sound that risky to me. Then we look beyond March, if we get to April, this was a splash in the sun. They're suggesting that from April the first beer and food will be allowed in pub gardens. And I assume that will be people of different households. I'm not quite sure what the small print was there. To discuss whether this is all too soon or not soon enough, or if the government are getting their priorities right or wrong, I'm joined by Professor Susan Mickey of Sage and Independent Sage. Thank you so much for coming back on the show. Nice to be here. I want to start by asking you how you assess those plans that were briefed over the weekend. And in particular, I suppose on schools, the idea of all schools going back at exactly the same time in three weeks' time has worried many teachers. What do you think about that proposal? Well, I think we have to think about what have we done well and what have we done badly in the past and then the lessons from that. We also have to look at the rest of the world and look and see what other countries who are pretty well getting their lives back to normal have done and learned from them. And thirdly, I think we want to ask ourselves the question, do we want to open things as quickly as possible or do we want to think about how to open things and keep them open? So I would say in relation to schools, March the 8th sounds like a reasonable date on the basis that schools are made safer than they have been previously. I know many teachers who work in secondary schools who just said you wouldn't know there was a pandemic, it's just life as usual. And Independence Age and others have said all the way along that if we are to keep schools open because that's what we want is keeping schools open, the school environment has to be safer. There has to be better ventilation in the classrooms. There has to be better ability to distance within the classrooms. And we have one of the most crowded sets of classrooms in Europe. Other countries who've done much better have much smaller class sizes and much more space. So for many, many months now, we've been saying to the government, bring back all these empty buildings that could be used as schools. There will be many retired teachers and others who can contribute to the effort of being able to supplement the current teaching staff to help with this mission. And think about ventilation and think about the wearing of face masks which in other countries is just routine among school children. If we just pile all the children back into exactly the same situations they were in before, I think we can all have a bit of an idea as to what's going to happen, especially since we have a much more infectious variant this time around than we have previously. I mean, in general, what's your sort of perspective on how low cases have to be before we significantly loosen the lockdown? In my intro, I sort of made this distinction between people who think we should have zero COVID, sort of a strategy that Australia and New Zealand pursued successfully last year and is still enjoying the fruits of now. People who are the Steve Bakers of the world who are saying, let's let it rip, let's let it go through society now that we've prevented potentially most of the deaths via vaccinations. And then people who sit in the middle, which is basically the government policy at the moment, even though Boris Johnson seems like he's veering towards the let it rip people because he's always got those people in his ears. But where do you sit on that spectrum? I mean, you might reject altogether my free groupings. One thing to say is that we've never had a national debate on these issues because there's never been a national strategy for us to debate. And that's been a real weakness. Other countries that have done much better have had a clear strategy of what they're trying to do and how they're going to set about doing that. You can then discuss it. But because this government hasn't done that, we haven't had a national debate. So, you know, what are the acceptable number of thousands or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of deaths we are prepared to put up with? What are the number of tens of thousands of people with long term COVID of all ages, including 13% of children? What are what are people's views about trading off opening up sooner and quickly versus a guarantee of never having to be in this lockdown again? Now, I think if you put those points to the British people, people would be happy to do things cautiously now with the perspective of never having to go through this sort of long term lockdown with no particular end in sight, no strategy as to how to get out of this, other than let's vaccinate lots of people, which is not a silver bullet. There has to be a comprehensive approach. That's what's worked in all other countries. And I also think if it was put to people, people would prefer to have the strategy that we use with measles, for example. With measles, we have a zero measles policy. What that means is we'll never eradicate it, but we work towards it. We work towards elimination, which means we generally have got it out of the regions, but occasionally there's an outbreak. When there's an outbreak, we have a good system in place that can jump on it, find out who's got it, trace people who might be infected, isolate them and we're able to contain it that way. We've managed to change this around from many thousands of people dying from measles to hardly anybody. And I think people would understand that we'd like something similar for COVID, which is not a flu. It's a completely different and much more dangerous, more infectious, more harmful, and more insidious disease than flu is. Having a comparison with flu is just not accurate. Having a comparison with measles as a strategy is a good one. I suppose where I stand on this is I think Independence Age were proved absolutely right when it came to the zero COVID strategy last summer. I think if we'd implemented that, we would have missed this hellish winter that we'd had and we would have saved tens of thousands, potentially over 100,000 lives. But now, I actually want to get up a graph while I explain this because this is a graph from the Sunday Times, which was their projection of if rates still fall at the rate they are now, and this is how low they could get. So to get in the low hundreds, 460 by May, it seems we'd have to have similar restrictions to now for free whole months. And for me, that would be worth it if it were to avoid another winter like this. But given the vaccines mean we're not going to have another winter like this, then has not the sort of cost-benefit ratio changed? And actually, we can afford to take more risks this time around than we could afford to take last time because we do have these quite remarkably effective vaccines, which could be injected in the arms of 90% of the population by the summer. Well, that would be lovely if that were true. But sadly, it's not. We're not guaranteed of not having another winter like this because this virus and all viruses carry on mutating. Their job is to carry, as they transmit from one person to another, mutations happen, and then clusters of these mutations become new variants. And the most infectious variants are the ones that survive and cried out the rest of them, as we've seen with B117, the one that emerged from Kent in the UK. There's now crowding out the old variant and so much more infectious. Now as these new variants come along, there is no guarantee that the current vaccinations are going to be effective. We don't know whether the current vaccinations help in terms of reducing infectiousness. So it's all right for the moment. But while we have these high transmission rates, while we have leaky borders, I mean, the government strategy on borders is not learning the lessons from what other successful countries are doing. They're very leaky. So we're vulnerable to more variants coming in from other countries where we don't know what the genomics of it are because there are no genomic sequencing being going on in many countries. We're really putting ourselves into a risky situation. So I would say do what we could have done last summer, drive it down. And if we want to get down quicker, then what I suggest is that we make sure that schools are safe. We make sure that workplaces are safe, which hasn't been done to date. We stop the leakiness of the borders and we do a root and branch reform of test, trace and isolate. The big commercial contracts are continuing to show that they're failing on all counts. We don't have supported isolation that other countries have where they pay people to stay at home if they're infected or they think they might be infected. So if we did all of these things and put test, trace and isolate into the local NHS primary care public health infrastructure, which we know we can see from the brilliant rollout of vaccinations can do a good job, then we can get the transmission rates down much quicker. But the government has to learn the lessons from what's not worked in the past and what is working in other countries. Why do you think people like Neil Ferguson disagree with you? Because I suppose there, I in a way just have to listen to different experts and make a judgment about what sounds more plausible because I don't know much inherently about how viruses mutate. But he seems to be quite confident from what I've heard and read that even if the virus does mutate, that won't mean that we're completely vulnerable to the virus in a similar way that we were before. So even if the vaccines give us less protection, they will still give us some protection, especially against hospitalizations and death. So there seem to be lots of people who are very confident we are in a fundamentally different place than we were last year because of the vaccines. And so I want to know why you think that's not the case. Well, all I'm saying is that it's very uncertain that we can't say anything with certainty because a few months ago, we were talking as if there weren't going to be any more variants. And there are. There's not just, you know, B117. There's the one from South Africa. There's the one from Brazil. And there'll be other ones because that is just what happens. So all I'm saying is I don't think we can speak with any certainty. Yes, vaccination will be helpful. And the more people we can get vaccinated, the stronger position we'll be in. I absolutely agree with that. It's one of the really important tools in our toolbox. But what I'm saying are two things. One, it's not enough on its own. You have to have a comprehensive strategy to really get on top of this virus. And the second thing I'm saying is nothing certain, especially when these rates are so high, such high rates of community transmission means there will be high rates of mutation with more likely possibilities of other variants. Keep my fingers crossed, you know, that it doesn't happen. It's a race, you know, between can we get enough people vaccinated, get the transmission rates low enough before any more nasty variants come along or not. It is a race. And I'm optimistic by nature. But all I'm saying is there's no guarantee. And I think we've had enough of strategies based on hope. We do need to have strategies based on realistic assessments, which includes uncertainty and dealing with uncertainty. Let's go through some of the sort of practical policy. Well, there are no policy announcements at the moment, because everything is a little bit up in the air. So what we're getting is is policy hints, I suppose, is the only way we can put it. And I want to talk about vaccine passports. This was a big story today. Matt Hancock on radio four this morning said that because other countries had plans to make vaccination a condition of entry, it's, you know, just a basic responsibility of the government that they give people a way to prove whether or not they have been vaccinated. So for example, if Greece says you can only come here if you've been vaccinated, they've hinted that's what they'll do this summer, then our government's going to have to give you a form or a certificate or whatever. They do seem to be hinting that they won't introduce a domestic vaccine passport, so the kind of passport that would get you entry into a pub or into a workplace. This was Boris Johnson speaking to Sky earlier. I think inevitably there will be great interest in ideas like can you show that you've had a vaccination against COVID in the way that you sometimes you have to show that you've had a vaccination against yellow fever or or other diseases in order to travel somewhere. I think that's going to be very much in the in the mix down the road. I think that is going to happen. I don't what I don't think we will have in this country is as it were vaccination passports to allow you to go to say the pub or something like that. I think that that would be going it a bit. I think that if just looking at the future, what we hope to have is such a high proportion of the population vaccinated that when you couple that with rapid testing, lateral flow testing, you really start to get the kind of answer that you're you're talking about. So I think it's in the in the context of a really having vaccinated a lot of the population as we're already doing and we'll do a lot more of in the next few months. The rapid test approach will start, I think, to come into its own. The rapid test approach will start to come into its own. He's still talking about these rapid tests. As we know, not particularly sensitive. You get a lot of false negatives, but if you take them enough, I think they might have some use. Ash, I want to bring you in on passports and I want to know how you would feel if you know we're all excited. The pubs have just reopened, but we can't enter them. I say we because I'm assuming I'm fairly low down the priority list because we haven't been vaccinated yet. Do you smash the window? Well, you know, I had a fake ID when I was 16 and I'm sure I'll be able to get my hands on another bit account of it documentation again. I'm actually really, really skeptical of the idea of domestic vaccine passports. I think they're a common sense measure within the context of international travel. There are lots of countries where you've got to demonstrate that you've had your yellow fever and stuff like that. I think that's fairly responsible. What worries me about domestic vaccine passports is what that means in terms of social exclusion of already very marginalized groups. So as tempting as it is to keep, you know, the really hardcore anti-vaxxers out of the pub, that would be fantastic. What I worry about is that that would mean that people who have less access to healthcare, who've got precarious immigration status, people who have, you know, no fixed home or accommodation, all of those people who tend to fall through the safety net when we're talking about other healthcare measures will be the ones who are most affected by this. This is less about going to, you know, the pub and stuff like that, but you know, supermarkets or accessing other really essential services. So that, for me, is the thing that worries me. It's not necessarily that, you know, me and you are going to have to be getting drunk on the sofa for a couple of months longer. It really is about... What have we been doing that, by the way, because that would be... No, not together on our own respective sofas. It's actually, you know, like those scenes where you've got two, you know, people in separate houses and it's just like intercut together and doing the same thing. That's me and Michael, you know, drinking from a two litre bottle of white ace. But for me, it's the implications for people who are already very, very marginalized and already very vulnerable. Susan, what's your take on that question, vaccine passports? And I suppose also, what's the word on independent sage on questions like this? I absolutely agree with everything Ash said. I don't think we've had a big discussion on independent sage on this issue. There's so many different issues to discuss and we've all got very busy full-time jobs, you know, we have spare time in the evenings. But... I wasn't going to judge you for not having a policy document on vaccine passports yet. Don't worry, you can get away with that one. I'm sure it will come. I totally agree with what Ash said. I think she said what needs to be said very well. And I do think we've got to keep on reinforcing this point that there isn't the evidence that vaccination will make you less infectious. You know, it will help protect you, but you may still be protected by spreading, you know, spreading the virus on to other people. So it can give this sort of false reassurance that somehow there's a certificate of health of you or certificate of not being dangerous, but actually, you know, I think it could really feed into the narrative that this vaccination is definitely going to stop you transmitting on to other people. I don't think that message has really got across sufficiently yet. I want to look at travel. This is something that did come in today, travel restrictions. You will now have to quarantine in a hotel for 10 days, isn't it? 10 days, if you come from a red list country, you have to pay for it yourself. There was some controversy because you still get to mix in the airport. There'll still be people from red list countries coming in on planes with people that aren't from red list countries. So you could have some transmission on the plane here, especially because direct flights have been canceled from those red list countries. So everyone will be coming via a second place. But this has caused some controversy. And I think understandably because of which countries have been put on the red list and sort of how this seems to, I suppose, compound other inequality. So I want to get up this map. It's this is from the Metro, actually, so it's showing you there, the countries which are on the red list. And these aren't the places in the world with the highest levels of coronavirus, but they are apart from Portugal in the global south. So you can see the whole of South America there and most of sub-Saharan Africa on the red list. And I mean, also, I think when you think about what it's actually like in the airport, if you're coming from one of those countries, you have to go get taken into your own little mini bus to get taken to a hotel while everyone else gets to walk home like a normal traveler. Susan, I want to go to you on this because some people I think are understandably suspicious that it's not coincidental that it is countries from the global south, countries where the majority of people aren't white that have been put on these lists. What do you make of that? Do you think that it's almost like an unhappy coincidence that it just so happens that the variants are in countries which are also in regions of the world which are discriminated against by our border regime or is there something sinister going on here? Well, one thing I think is important to think about is that we only have got the countries on this list where we have genomic evidence of variants, but there are many, many countries that don't do this kind of sophisticated genomic sequencing. And so there may easily be variants that we just don't know about, which is one of the reasons why independent sage and many others and including the Scottish government are saying that the restrictions should be blanket, should be for all countries, both because people come via other countries, but also because just because we don't know that the variants in other countries, it doesn't mean it's not in other countries. So I think a universal border controls is what's needed and then that takes away the whole basis of your question also. Yeah, it takes away the discrimination issue because it's universal, a bit like vaccine passports, right? If you make the situation safe anyway, you don't have to distinguish people in that way. Susan, Mickey, I'm going to have to let you go, but that was so insightful. As always, thank you so much for coming back on. I'm sure we'll be reaching out to you at all the different phases of the unlocking as it continues. Pleasure. Always a delight to be here. Thank you very much. So that was Susan Mickey's take on how quickly we should loosen the lockdown. What about you guys? Well, we did ask a bunch of you on our YouTube community page. Obviously, this is an unscientific poll, but it is potentially representative of Navarra media viewers. So we asked you, should we only loosen the lockdown once everyone has been offered a vaccine? And it was close. So 49% of you thought that we should only loosen the lockdown once everyone has been offered a vaccine, and 51% of you thought that no, we can loosen the lockdown before everyone has been offered a vaccine. Ash, are you surprised at that breakdown among our audience? They're very, very evenly split. Well, I think one thing to point out is that what it means to loosen the lockdown is very much in the eye of the beholder. So for lots of people voting, yes, it won't necessarily be along the lines of, should we have the exact present conditions we have right now, we can only meet one other person from a different household in the context of exercise. There's absolutely no indoor socializing whatsoever. There's no schools, nothing like that. If you phrase the question is, should we keep all those measures until, say, September or the autumn, then maybe you would get a different answer. So I think that there's an element of that in it. That's not to criticize your survey methodology. There's only so many characters, Ash. It's just worth bearing in mind. But I do think that people are really split on this. And I think the reason why is because we have a government which has shown that it's really incapable of making decisions that keep us safe in a strategic and a coherent and a consistent way. And against that backdrop, do you think that there is a real lurch towards just going for the most uncompromising, rigid lockdown measures overall? Because, hey, we know that works. The really complicated and difficult question is to start thinking about, well, okay, so how do you manage variants and roll out a vaccine and maybe get kids back into schools? Or have some level of socializing and mixing, even if it's just outside? Measuring these things up against each other, because we haven't seen evidence of that being done well in our context at all. When we reopened schools again last year, it was when you still had new infections in the hundreds. When Denmark reopened, it was when new infections were around 10 per day. We had a government which completely ignored schools as vectors of infection right up until just after the new year. And I think against that backdrop, that is why you have, I think, a surprising amount of people entertaining the notion that we should stay like this until absolutely everybody has the first dose. I think it's quite a high proportion. I think it's probably reflective of our audience and where they stand on the zero COVID issue. Because like you said, it has become a kind of defining cause and demand for parts of the left. But it comes from a deep place of mistrust of the government. You know, one of the reasons we are right to mistrust the government is because Boris Johnson, well, I suppose he had all of the wrong intuitions until it seems very recently, although on schools it seems like he's being led astray. As I say, his words seem to be more in line with what I'd like a Prime Minister to be saying, his actions less so. The people who have been consistently lobbying quite vociferously for incredibly irresponsible policies are a group of MPs known as the COVID Recovery Group. Now it's a bit like the European Research Group because it doesn't do what it says on the tin. The European Research Group didn't know anything about Europe. The COVID Recovery Group don't know anything about recovering from COVID. But one of their number is Steve Baker. He was speaking to Nick Ferrari this morning and this was his response and when asked what timetable he'd like to see Boris Johnson adopt. Well, the timetable is intimately connected to the vaccination rollout. So we now know that we're hitting the top four groups. That's 80%, 88% of the people who've died previously have been in those top four groups. So that means when they're protected from 8th of March, then it's the onus is on ministers then to really justify any restrictions that remain in place to show that they're proportionate to the harm that COVID can then do. When we get to Easter, we'll have vaccinated about two thirds of groups one to nine. That includes people under the age of 50 who are vulnerable. And of course at that point, for hospitality, Easter is a very big deal. They're either open or they're not. So we're saying that at Easter, venues, pubs, restaurants, hospitality should be open in a COVID secure way. What do you mean by that, Steve? What's COVID secure? It's the investments that people are familiar with. People who went to restaurants last year, they'll be familiar with what happened in restaurants, people wearing masks to move around, perhaps screens between tables. And then come 1st of May, well, we know that the government is promising to have vaccinated groups one to nine by then. So really, we think the starting point must be that all legislative restrictions should come off then. And really, if ministers want to keep restrictions in place, the onus is on them to justify restrictions at that point. So the answer to what is COVID secure, all of those things that don't actually make a building COVID secure, we know that that was always a joke. It's an airborne virus. It doesn't care if you're walking to the toilet or if you're taking a mouthful of your meal. If you're not wearing a mask, it can get out and other people in the restaurant can catch it. Ask my question for you, though, is a political one, like Boris Johnson does. When you see him speak now, he does seem like kind of a different man to how he did last year. And some people are speculating, is this because Dominic Cummings is gone? He's got a new situation or just because the January lockdown, sorry, the January, I mean, the lockdown, but also mainly the spike in deaths and hospitalizations. Do you think he's kind of learned his lesson? Or does the schools thing show us that essentially he's going to end up following what Steve Baker says? So the strategy for the government from the very start was vaccine or bust. And I think that Susan was completely right when she identified a fundamental lack of strategy at the heart of the government's pandemic management. And now that there's a vaccine in play, it would look so doubly trebuchet to have to go forth national lockdown, just because you've come out too early and you've completely buggered it up again. So I think that that's why you're seeing a more cautious Boris Johnson and perhaps even a more unequivocal Boris Johnson when he says that, you know, the loosening of lockdown measures now will be irreversible. So it's not going to be that kind of reactive, obviously not reactive enough when it comes to swiftness, but reactive way of going in and out of lockdown that we've seen over the past nearly a year. And I do think that he's sincere about that, serious about it, even if he's not fully cognizant or taking seriously the risks which are still involved with opening schools in three weeks time, opening all of them in three weeks time, which is what people are talking about. You've also got this matter of dealing with the anti lockdown contingent within his own party. Now these aren't just backbenchers, although we all know the damage that a rowdy Tory backbencher can do. It's something which completely hamstrung and hemorrhaged Theresa May's premiership, and it's something which Boris Johnson being, you know, one of the sort of ringleaders of her demise isn't going to be keen on repeating, but it's also coming from within his own cabinet. So we know that there is a lot of distance between, say, Mahancock and Rishi Sunak on this issue of when to open up, how quickly and under what circumstances, with Rishi Sunak taking a, you know, much more cavalier approach to the prospect of rising infections because of what he wants to do is get people out and spending again. You know, he's also much more of a deficit hawk than other members of the cabinet also. So without pressure internally from someone like Rishi Sunak, who lots of people have sort of pipped as a successor to Boris Johnson, that is going to be something which is going to weigh on him, which is going to affect some of his decision making. And I think what it's going to come down to is an assessment on where the mood of the country is at. Because what's been remarkable at the Conservatives polling over this last year is that the worst thing Boris Johnson did throughout the pandemic was put Dominic Cummings on tally to justify why he went to Barnard Castle. That was absolutely the worst thing that he did in terms of, you know, Conservative polling numbers. Everything else, it remained remarkably stable, even when, you know, there was the announcement of 100,000 deaths, even when it was clear that we'd fucked up by entering lockdown too late on more than one occasion. Those numbers were pretty, you know, solid. There were a bedrock for Boris Johnson and the Conservative Party. And now with the vaccine in play, even if you do have a rise in infections and perhaps a small increase in hospitalisations, not quite as deep as what we've seen before because of the vaccine, but you do see an increase. And even if you do see, you know, a wave of long term illness associated with long COVID, I think that there is a degree of Boris Johnson feeling quite confident that the optimism that a vaccine brings and the kind of self justification of people going, well, actually, it's completely fine for me to get in the pub or go to the shops or socialise a bit more. You know, I really enjoy that freedom and yet maybe still, you know, coronavirus is out and about, but hey, we've got a vaccine. Is that that mood is something that I think he's confident will sort of take him cresting over any troubled periods ahead. Let's go to some comments. Robin Powell with a £5 Super Chat says, keep us in lockdown until we reach zero COVID. So you are with the 49%, I think. And I suppose we could reach zero COVID before everyone's vaccinated, but it would be it will take a while to get to close to zero. Alexandra Barnes with a fiver, letting it rip, allowing the virus to spread will lead to further mutations and potential vaccine escape. We need to adopt zero COVID strategy. So another one for zero COVID. As I said, I feel like there is actually a bit of a middle ground between letting it rip and zero COVID, but you know, zero COVID legitimate position, letting it rip not is my opinion. Jay Bowman with 20 quid love, Navara any plans to do arts as well as politics? And we've considered it. I am like an idiot when it comes to arts, you know, but just so I kind of liked it is sort of like how I'll talk about TV shows. Also, if you show a clip of a TV show, they take down your YouTube video, which really makes, you know, culture reviews harder than politics reviews. But we'll think about it. Circle of moon music with a tenor, please can you say hello to the wonderful care workers at the Thomas Moore project. Thanks to everyone at Navara Media for all that you do love the show. Hello to all the wonderful care workers at the Thomas Moore project. I'm sure you've been working very hard and we're all very appreciative of everyone working in care throughout this pandemic. And of course, before this pandemic and after this pandemic, there aren't many jobs which are more important. Share the show stream. Go on. Bill Gates is the world's fourth richest man with a net worth of $124 billion. He's also the world's biggest philanthropist, although he's still got a lot of wealth for himself. Now, in the recent past, he's devoted much of his energy and wealth to eradicating diseases via vaccinations. And now he's turned his attention to climate change. He has a book out on the subject this week. It's called How to Avoid a Climate Disaster. And he's been promoting it by telling any big outlet that will listen. I mean, I'm sure there's some he said no to about his ideas for saving the planet. Here he is speaking to the BBC. Well, the pandemic will come to an end because these amazing vaccines were invented in a year. And now we're trying to scale them up and adopt them to the variants. But compared to climate change, that's very, very easy. Sadly, climate change will cause far more deaths over five times as many per year by the end of the century. But it requires innovation across the entire physical economy, changing steel plants, cement plants, electricity, transport. So if we achieve getting to zero, it'll be the most amazing thing humanity has ever done. Hold on. The most amazing thing humanity has ever done. If you look in the history of the physical economy, we've never made a transition like we're talking about doing in the next 30 years. You have to drive the innovation pipeline. So that starts with the government's basic R&D budget. Then you need a form of venture capital that can take those ideas out of the lab and back them even when they're very high risk. And you need partnerships with big companies. And then you need somebody who's willing to buy the products, to catalytically create volume to bring those prices down. What you're talking about is effectively government subsidy, aren't you? Yes. Because of the damage climate will bring, we need to have price signals to tell the private sector that we want green products. Because right now you don't see the pain you're causing as you emit carbon dioxide. So Bill Gates there saying that challenging climate change is going to be an even bigger task than tackling the pandemic. I think that's quite obviously true actually. The focus of how he thinks we should do it is all based on innovation. So he says renewable sources like wind and solar can help us decarbonise. But because that's less than 30% of total emissions, we're going to have to do a lot, lot more. He's particularly interested in getting governments to fund the innovations that can decarbonise the other 70% of the world economy that includes steel, cement, transport systems, fertilizer production, et cetera, et cetera. All based on how do we get these new innovations, which mean that basically we can continue consuming in a similar way to which we are now, but with different technologies. Now, no one would argue that greater investments in green technologies is a bad thing. Though some might wonder whether there's a danger in relying on techno fixes and the advice of multi-billionaires. Alice Bell, co-director of the Climate Campaign Group possible and author of the book, Can We Save the Planet? I think is one of them. So first, I want to ask you, you're part of a climate change campaign group. Does the coalition to avert climate disaster need everyone on board that it can possibly get? If Bill Gates, he's a billionaire, he's got a big platform, he's got a lot of money. If he is interested in tackling climate change, is that something that we should be celebrating essentially? I mean, yes, I guess so. I feel like the fact that this is a story today and people are arguing about it is a sign that we have at least moved on from arguing about whether it's happening or not. You know, I'd much rather be arguing with Bill Gates than be arguing with Donald Trump. So that is a movement at least. And yeah, I think we do need everyone. I'm not sure whether we should be listening to him first just because he's got a lot of money compared to lots of people who we might be wanting to listen to who are suffering from climate change a lot more than he is. But he's a voice. He certainly knows tech. He's not a stupid man. And I think the fact that he's putting an emphasis on innovation isn't necessarily a bad thing. You know, I don't think I'm certainly not one of the people in the environment movement who's going to hear the word technology and go, you know, like, this is something that we need to be talking, we need to be talking about other things. I definitely agree with him that we need a huge amount of investment in R&D. I don't agree with him that this means that he gets a gel-free card when it comes to his private jet habit, for example. And it was interesting in that clip he had just there where he said, you know, we don't see the damage that we're causing. And I'm just thinking, you know, are you not seeing the damage you're causing with your private jet? You know, he's talking about changing the fuel to a different type of fuel. Okay. Well, that's one. I want to interrupt you because I've got some quotes of Bill Gates in defense of his private jets, because one of his big claims was that he can care about climate change and still be flying around with a private jet. So this is what he told the BBC. He said, they are powered by biofuel instead of fossil fuels. And he says, I pay three times as much now for my aviation fuel, you know, over $7 million or £5 million a year in all my offset spending. So he's spending above the odds on biofuels, asked whether it's appropriate to be using private jets as an offer on climate change. He says, I don't think getting rid of flying would make sense. That type of brute force technique won't get us there. And he says the answer to the problem of aviation emissions has to be, and this is Graphic HC Fox, a type of aviation fuel that doesn't cost much extra and is zero emission, and that's got to be biofuels or electric fuels, or perhaps using green hydrogen to power the plane. So those are Bill Gates's sort of defenses of his use of a private jet. Now, I suppose I want to put to you, Alice, because I can see why, you know, lots of people will look at that. This is a guy who's saying, let's tackle climate change. And he himself is, you know, pursuing pastimes, which are, you know, even if he's using biofuels, it's very carbon heavy, biofuels take up a lot of energy, et cetera. But he might argue that what he's doing that's important is investing in the kind of consumer products which ultimately will become cheaper that everyone else can use. So if he's saying there's no way that actually, you know, given that, you know, everyone in the world is going to want to fly more. If you think at the moment it's only done by rich people, and ultimately you're going to have people from all countries across the world wanting to fly at least once a year, say, then what we're going to need to do is invest in green technology and what he's doing is being a sort of, you know, a consumption leader and investing in these new technologies that can ultimately green that sector. Do you buy that justification? I mean, I'm all for everybody being able to fly, you know, in theory, like flying is one, I don't know, I like flying, and I want everyone to be able to fly. I don't want it just to be something that people who are rich like Bill Gates can do. But the thing about the kind of the advances he's talking about for flying, they're still too far off. So we should totally be investing in this because maybe in the future, and it could be something that we can still do in our lifetimes, I'm not just talking about, you know, our children or children's lifetime, but in the future, people will be able to fly and they'll be able to do it without damage in the planet. And that's what we should, you know, be aiming for. But we've left it so late. So like, I saw an climate economist quip on Twitter earlier that like, ah, Bill Gates has written the climate book from 2005. I was thinking, yeah, maybe this is like the climate book though from like 1975, you know, like if we have been thinking about what we could do for R&D to be able to get off oil based fossil fuel based aviation fuel decades ago, then maybe we would be able to have time to still be flying at our current rates while we pay catch up with the R&D, but we haven't. We are at such a disastrous level of climate change. You know, this is we are living through the kind of dystopias that people in the 60s were thinking, you know, if we don't act now, then maybe someone will end up like that. And they would, they didn't think that was going to happen, but we're living through that now already. And it's on course to get so much worse. So what we need to do in the short term is just dramatically stop how much flying means. That doesn't necessarily mean everybody, nobody can fly. It does mean that somebody has the flying habit that he has, doesn't need to curtail it. And it was really interesting in like, you're saying that he's he's talking about maybe he could invest in this technology so that it'll become cheaper. Well, he's also in that clip you got from the BBC talking about how the government needs to be having subsidies. And maybe that that's the sort of way we need to do that. But even then, because you know, this will work for some technologies, like maybe some things like heat pumps and stuff, we need better subsidies to support that so that we can get there in the in the we can get there fast enough because we need to decarbonize faster than currently the technology is necessarily economics, the technology is letting us. But for something like flying, we kind of we need to stop as well, or we need to stall it as well. And you see like that reference to you had that quote up about how much it costs him because he offsets. I mean, the thing about offsetting is it feels good, but it's cheating. It really is it's cheating. It's just moving the problem. And the thing that things precisely that he's talking about investing in this climate works project, which is kind of carbon capture. So I mean, it's this is amazing sci fi stuff, they capture carbon dioxide out of the air, and then they can turn it into things. The idea is to be able to turn it into like a sellable product. So you might have actually drunk a can of a fizzy drink where the the carbon the bubbles in the fizzy drink have come from a project like that because they're already selling carbon to make our drinks fizzy. But that currently is not you know, there's only so much carbon you can put into a fizzy drink, and that's not going to solve our aviation fuel carbon emissions problem yet. And actually, we're going to need those for things like cement. So one of the things that he's been talking about today, and it's really good for him to see him talking about is those tricky, really hard to decarbonize areas, things like cement making. And we are going to end, you know, the flights that we cannot cut things that people really have good reasons for wanting to and needing to fly those sorts of things. We're going to need to to have things like carbon capture technologies for and we can't be using them just to allow a rich person to have a private jet habit. And actually, he's showing today and that the BBC made a really good showcase of it. And this is something that a lot of us have learned through COVID is that the kind of things that people said, oh, I had to fly for before, they don't necessarily have to fly for like he's brought out a new book, he would usually have been flying all over the place, giving talks about his new books. No, he's doing it from you know, a nice well presented studio that he's got set up. And you know, the BBC made a feature of it with his face beamed in under the whale at the Natural History Museum. I thought it was so clever, you know, let's make a big show and tell of the big PR launch for the guy with the new book, but you know, he doesn't need to actually travel anywhere. So I think maybe after we have to lock down and it ends, Bill Gates might find that he is flying less, but I would encourage him to think whether he could fly even even less than that, because yes, in the future, we'll be able to fly around in amazing electric planes like Jetsons and not worry about it. But we just don't have time. We've got, we've had someone else who's who's noticed the setting of that interview, Michael Drury with a five that says can someone tell me why that journalist needed to be in a fancy hall to have a zoom call with Bill Gates? What's wrong with the dude's bedroom? If I could come in, maybe we should see his bedroom, you know, maybe it should be like, if I could conduct Tiskey Sauer, not in my bedroom, but in a hall with a big, you know, ancient whale, I would, it was hilarious. I do think wonder if this is going to be the book launch in the future. And I guess it's a way of using the Natural History Museum when it's empty. I want to go to a Guardian interview that Bill Gates did because he did quite a lot of trash talking of the actually existing climate movement. So he sort of dissed everyone. The article in the Guardian is very interesting. I recommend you take a look at the interview, but these are the sort of choice quotes we've got for you. So on divestment in fossil fuel companies, which is I suppose one of the big priorities of climate activists at the moment, he says, it would be tragic to have this whole generation behind the cause and then you just do the easy things like divesting securities. You can say, okay, I don't want any more of those evil oil company stocks. Yay. Well, how many tons of carbon did you avoid by doing that? That was kind of catty, kind of mean. On Extinction Rebellion Gates says, well, what we need is innovation. So if they're really strategic about what street they can cut off and some poor guys blocked in traffic and he sits there and says, God, I've got to figure out a way to make steel carbon neutral. I was being lazy, but now that I'm sitting here in traffic, I'm going to go home tonight and figure how to do this. Then it's a very direct connection between blocking the traffic and solving climate change. Again, it's a very underhand, well, it's not even an underhand compliment, it's just underhand. Now let's go on to AOC's Green New Deal and Bill Gates says, well, it's a fairytale. It's like saying vaccines don't work. That's a form of science denialism. Why peddle fantasies to people? Let's finally go to his one. He's also not keen on vegetarians particularly. So asked about veganism, he says, I mean, these are good things. In fact, buying Beyond Burgers, a plant-based meat company that Gates invests in, actually drives demand, which will get the quality up and the rate of premium down. So consumer behavior is important. But unless you replace steel, it's a joke. Just forcing companies to report their CO2 is a good thing. But when you open that steel company report, you're going to go, oh, this is shocking. They have emissions and what? Are we not going to build buildings in India to provide people with basic shelter? Obviously that comment on vegetarianism moved into a broader comment on the kind of commitments that climate activists have at the moment. Finally, what he is interested in, which is not any of these climate movements, is hydrogen. The guy's obsessive hydrogen. So he says hydrogen is super, super cheap and totally clean hydrogen that helps a lot of industrial processes. You could use that to make fertilizer in a clean way to help make steel in a clean way. That alone would help with about 30% of emissions, which is pretty amazing to have one thing that can do 30%. So Alice, is the solution here, or the answer here, to dump activism and invest in hydrogen? I mean, I don't see why you can't have both. I mean, I think a lot of the stuff in his Guardian article, I mean, obviously he's not going to like divestment because the Guardian themselves ran a campaign, a divestment campaign against him not long ago. A few years ago, there was the Keep It in the Ground campaign that the Guardian ran, and they targeted Bill Melinda Gates Foundation as one of the trusts that they said they needed to divest. So he's, you know, understandably, he's maybe still feeling a bit hurt by that. But there's a lot of that it seems. It's not really attacking what they're saying. It's kind of like, oh, well, you know, I just don't want you talking about this. And it reminds me a bit of, there's this really big speech that Margaret Thatcher gave on climate change in 1989. I should give several speeches on it. And one of the things she does in these speeches when she's talking about climate change is she says, we must not let climate change be just something of the left. And she really dismisses kind of the left wing arguments for tackling action action on climate change. And she's trying to reclaim it for the right. It's really interesting speech. And it's sort of kind of discourse about climate action from the right that then kind of disappeared for several decades. And I think we're starting to see the reemergence of. But a lot of this is just like, oh, we agree we want action on climate change. It's just not like you. And I don't want you setting it. When it comes to hydrogen, I mean, it is again, one of the I think it's one of the things we need in our technological toolkit. I worry when we see people talking about it'll all be hydrogen. Because I mean, you know, we need hydrogen for some very specific things, things like concrete, things like steel, things that, you know, Bill Gates himself is very aware that we need, we cannot be just using it on, you know, for heating is a good example in the UK. People often talk about hydrogen as the way of solving our heating problem. Because so much of our heating is done on gas. And gas is a fossil fuel. And there's a big lobby to make it all work on hydrogen, because that's similar to the gas system. And so it won't be so disruptive to the gas incumbents. But it's probably what we're going to have is some parts of the country will have heating transformed transferred into hydrogen, and some will have to be electrified and work on things like heat pumps. I just walked past a heat pump project near me in Southern that's being set up at the moment. And more and more of us will see that. And what we'll have is a more of a hybrid approach. And that is how we will tackle private change, really. Yeah, we have a bit of carbon capture, we'll have a bit of biofuels, we'll probably try and decrease how much we have of that, because we wouldn't rather use the land for food, growing food. We will have a bit of hydrogen, we'll have a bit of solar, we'll have a bit of wind, might have a bit of nuclear. That's kind of another controversial thing you might want to argue about, whether you're going to have that. But these are the sorts of conversations we need to be having about what percentage of all of these different things we're going to have, not what's all going to be hydrogen, or it's all going to be nuclear, or it's all going to be solar, because that conversation is not going to get us to the net zero that we need, fast enough, frankly. And really, it's just not going to work in terms of having a flexible, reliable energy system either. It doesn't make sense for us to bet all on one horse. Alice Bell, thank you so much for speaking to us on this show. Let's not bet all on one horse and let's not all bet on Bill Gates. Thank you for speaking to us this evening. We have a comment, Henry the eighth is fake, or Henry the eighth fake, the fake Henry the eighth, just so we know that you're not the real one. Bill Gates is to the world what Batman is to Gotham. He's got more personal wealth than some entire countries, less taxpayer subsidies for him, more putting his own money where his mouth claims it is. The people of Gotham, I haven't seen all the movies, they did love Batman, didn't they? Ash, you were tweeting about Batman yesterday, I think. I was tweeting about Batman. What do you make of the Bill Gates Batman comparison? I get what's being said here, which is you've actually got enough personal wealth to do an awful lot more than you are doing. And in fact, the way in which you generate your wealth is probably contributing to the problem. I get that. But actually, can I do just maybe one minute of Batman slander? Just one minute. Batman is the worst superhero. And that is just a fact. One, he's got all of the same powers as Kim possible and Ben 10. All right. Essentially, he's not in the same league as your spy demands and all the rest of it. Two, there's no reason why he has to be dressed up as a bat. He insists that he has to fight crime as a bat instead of just in regular, regular tactical gear. Why? I don't know. Maybe it makes him feel special. Three, through every redesign of the bat suit, he has to insist that he keeps the little ears. Imagine, Lucius Fox comes to you and goes, I've made your suit so much better, it's bulletproof, it's aerodynamic. And Bruce Wayne is like, hold on for where my little ears. And last of all, because it's changed my fucking life when I realized it, Batman always has to do the Batman voice. He always has to think to himself, I have to talk like this. So when Bane is just folding him up like a curly whirley, he can't just go, ow, he has to go, ow, Bane, that really hurts. And that's why Batman is the worst fucking superhero. I'm so glad you gave me the space and the time to explain to the people. Also, he beats up the poor and the mentally ill as his side hustle. That's not cool. He could fund a fully functioning mental health system for Gotham, but he doesn't. He lets Arkham have the sloppy security so he's got people to beat up. And that's bad. I'm accepting all of that. I'm not pushing back on any of that. Batman is bad. Does some decent things. I think I can't really remember if there are any of them good. Right, like the video. It helps on the algorithm. We've got 2,000 of you watching. I don't know how many likes we've got, but it's not 2,000. So hit that like button. We're going to go on to our final story of the evening. Oh, there it is. Keir Starmer is still stuck in his difficult phase as Labour leader. His honeymoon with the press has ended and people from all wings of the party are complaining he stands for not very much. So how have Labour's leadership team responded to the mini crisis? Well, according to the Sunday Times, they've turned to a familiar face in the party's establishment, Peter Mandelson. Yes, the paper reports Tony Blair's former strategist is helping to craft a message that it is hoped will win the keys to number 10. Mandelson has also offered advice on Brexit and how to woo big business as the party prepares to unveil an unashamedly pro business agenda with a commitment to individual prosperity, growth and wealth creation. Now, of course, Peter Mandelson is exactly the person to go to for advice. If you want to see pro business, or at least if you want to see pro rich people, Peter Mandelson is very famous for saying he is intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich. That's the attitude that Starmer wants in the leader of the opposition's office. Once again, let's go back to that Times piece. It says having spent years in the political wilderness during Corbyn's tenure as leader, Mandelson was brought back into the fold by Starmer's chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney. The pair have struck up a close working relationship of McSweeney. Mandelson has said, I don't know who and how and when he was invented, but whoever it was, they will find their place in heaven. Now, that's not a recent quote about Morgan McSweeney. That's something that Peter Mandelson said quite early on. I think it was probably during the Keir Starmer leadership campaign, but what he was very delighted about was that Morgan McSweeney had quite successfully essentially outmaneuvered the left in the party and presented Keir Starmer as a left winger to the Labour Party membership before veering him quite drastically, I suppose one could say, to the right. Ash, I want your take on this. What does it tell us about Keir Starmer that he has turned to Peter Mandelson in this moment of crisis? It tells us three things. One is that Keir Starmer is perfectly happy with this sharp tilt to the right. But two, it also tells us that he's out of ideas. And three, perhaps his instincts for political self-preservation are not as strong as we gave him credit for. And all of these things are in fact related. So Keir Starmer, I think, isn't necessarily someone who is motivated by having a really strong set of politics. Jeremy Corbyn was motivated by a very deeply moral sense of socialism. Tony Blair had a vision. He had sincere beliefs which he held. Keir Starmer, I think, just wants to win. He just really wants to be Prime Minister. He's got no idea how he's supposed to do that other than sort of following this quite dull path which has been laid out for him, which is be as inoffensive as possible to win back the votes of five homeowners in stoke. And that's not working. He's sort of hemorrhaging some of that goodwill which he'd enjoyed for the past year for simply not being Jeremy Corbyn. And he's quite happy to sort of tilt towards a kind of blue labor direction with faith, flag, and family, and all that kind of stuff. And doing this tap dance we've all seen before from Labour. But I am ferociously, pathologically, erotically pro-business. So I think it sort of shows the lack of a political centre of gravity in Keir Starmer that Peter Mandel might be being brought in. But this is actually from, I think, a perspective of, well, how does Keir Starmer survive until the next election and indeed win it? I don't think it's by bringing Peter Mandelson back on board. Let's just take, for instance, one of the things that he's supposed to help out with, which is sort of fashion this identity for Keir Starmer as being unashamedly pro-business. The kinds of business ventures that Peter Mandelson's name became associated with are kind of cricket ones. There was all that stuff about him having to step down from his role as secretary of trade early on in the First Blair Ministry because of an undeclared loan from a super-duper rich Labour colleague. It was an undeclared interest-free loan which allowed him to buy a massive house in Notting Hill. After his time as a European commissioner, there was talk of a conflict of interest. He was spending time on a Russian oligarch's boat. There was all sorts of stuff about there being this kind of quite underhand access to power that he was perfectly happy participating in. It was also the expenses scandal. You've got the other time he had to resign, which was because he'd helped along with an Indian businessman's passport. He'd made a very generous donation to the Millennium Dome Project. What Peter Mandelson is associated with isn't helping mum and pup businesses get on their feet, sort of small businesses that we like to see on our high street helping startups get going and all the rest of it. It's actually quite corrupt, big money interests where there's a consensus in this country that we want that out of our politics. There's a consensus on that from voters who vote Conservative and Brexit Party in UKIP all the way to the left. I think that what bringing him in from the cold could indicate for Keir Starmer is that he's going to lose one thing which he had a pretty decent claim to, which is one of kind of general... He had a commissioner Gordon vibe to break another Batman comparison. It's not necessarily that you trusted his politics or it's not necessarily that you think of Keir Starmer as being someone who is motivated by a very deep set of core beliefs, but you didn't think of himself as Keir Starmer as someone who was being close to corruption and close to those kind of dirty underhand financial practices which kind of poison and corrode our politics. It's not something you thought about with Keir Starmer. What bringing Peter Mandelson is I think risks tarnishing that one bit of Keir Starmer's reputation, which is still intact, which has actually been fairly strong. I think that this is going to end up being something of an unforced error. What Peter Mandelson will do being closer to Keir Starmer is use that as a means to further disempower the left and I think kind of prepare the ground for a new Labour leader at some point, maybe before the next election even, who comes from the right wing of the party. I really do think that from all angles this is an unsound decision for Keir Starmer. I like that assessment of Keir Starmer. At the moment, he might be wet. He might be a little bit, you know, snakey in terms of how he's treated Jeremy Corbyn, but he's not crooked. I don't see him as someone who's doing this to get rich or get his friends rich. He seems like a fairly upstanding fella, even if not necessarily as honest as they come. You're watching Tiskey Sour on Navara Media. We go live every Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 7 p.m. and we put out videos every single day, so make sure you subscribe to the channel so you don't miss a thing. I want to talk about another sort of nugget of gossip that was in that Sunday Times piece, which was people pushing for a cabinet or a shadow cabinet, sorry, reshuffle. So let's go back to that piece. So apparently, privately, Starmer has also been warned by allies that certain members of his team are underperforming and near-invisible. Among those who have been identified are Annalise Dodds, the shadow chancellor, Andy McDonald, the shadow employment secretary, and Kate Green, the shadow education secretary. At least one source close to Starmer is understood to be arguing for a reshuffle. Many of those appointed to Keir's team have never served in opposition, let alone government. It goes on. The lack of experience is telling. There are very talented people within the party, and there is a sense that he is not fielding his top team. Another senior Labour figure said, Boris Johnson has got one of the worst cabinets in post-war British history. It is disturbing that some of their Labour counterparts are even worse. Some believe that able former ministers, including Yvette Cooper and Hillary Ben, should be offered a route back. Now, this might seem insignificant because I'm listing a bunch of names who are not particularly outstanding in terms of their politics or their performances. Annalise Dodds seems fairly decent. She seems like her politics are reasonably progressive, but she hasn't really impressed as shadow chancellor. I think that's mainly because she hasn't been allowed to say anything. They'd be replaced by people who are also not particularly outstanding or exciting. In terms of the nuts and bolts of the party, it is quite significant that people like Yvette Cooper and Hillary Ben are being pushed as people who should be right at the top of the party again. This really goes back to the Ed Miliband era, because Ed Miliband probably is to the left of Keir Starmer. He did come to the leadership with an idea, which was that after the financial crisis, the centre of political gravity had changed. If he took the party to the left, then that could build a broader coalition for the Labour Party. He was really restrained by having people like Ed Balls and Yvette Cooper in top jobs. They were shadow chancellor and shadow home secretary, respectively. What's happening now is those same right-wing backbenches are saying, look, Keir Starmer, the problem is he has actually quite a soft left shadow cabinet, people like Annalise Dodds who are reasonably progressive. He needs to get rid of them and have another Blairite, Brownite, whatever new labour set of people up there with him who can get rid of any suggestion that this could be a progressive party and would implement progressive reforms that could potentially hold big businesses in this country to account. Ash, what's your take? Do you think we will see Yvette Cooper and Hillary Ben back in those top positions? I think that is possible. I think one of the reasons that makes it possible is that the Labour Party is really bad at dealing with its own jitters. As soon as you have this story brought into motion of Keir Starmer's experiencing a bit of a midlife crisis politically, people are losing faith in him, he comes across as boring, and that becomes a self-perpetuating story. The more it seems to be true, the more it's going to talk about and the less well he did in the polls and so on and so forth. The Labour Party is quite bad at going, well, let's just see out the strategy till 2024 and see what happens. If, after the local elections, there aren't great results which are delivered, or there are results which can be spun into suboptimal results, then I think there will be a reshuffle on the cards. Something which I predicted in my edition of the Cortado a couple of weeks ago, which you know if you actually read it, Michael, that I did think that a reshuffle would be on the cards later in the year, possibly with the kind of resurrection zombie-like of some of these Blair and Brown-eyed figures. What do I think that is? Let's leave aside my political differences with Hilary Ben and Yvette Cooper for a second, because I have very profound political differences with them. Is it going to be successful? It is the dumbest fucking decision ever, because what it means that Keir Starmer is doing is looking at Labour's history over the last 20 years and going, the people who oversaw the decline of Labour in Scotland, the beginnings of a crumbling red wall, the people who had no ideas, who'd lost the faith of their own grassroots, to the extent that Jeremy Corbyn, the back benches foreign secretary, the worthers, originals, grandad of socialism could become leader of the Labour Party. Let's just get those people back in again, because even if you accept all the things that were said of Jeremy Corbyn, oh, he's the worst leader ever, actually, he was able to outflank your boy. He was able to speak to the grassroots, do well, and deliver the largest increase in Labour's vote share since 1945. He was still doing better than this set of horrors. What worries me is that the Labour Party, and I'm talking about this from the party's right, its centre, and its left wing, but is it really difficult to bring in young, new talents? Now, there are skilled communicators on Labour's right. I've always said that Bridget Philipson has one to watch out for, and I think there's a reason why she keeps a low profile, but slowly building up her reputation. And of course, as talented MPs on the party's left, Sarah Sultana carving out a bit of an AOC-like space for herself by being that kind of people's tribune in Parliament. That's what she's trying to do. But because of the way selections work, because of all the fucking backdoor horse trading, and who knows how you become selected as a parliamentary candidate for the Labour Party. You've got to sacrifice 30 goats and, I don't know, give someone a five-inch handshandy at some point. I don't know what you have to do, but it doesn't seem to get really excellent, new fresh blood into Parliament. You often get the case where you've got people who are really excellent community activists or really sort of skilled communicators who, just because of the opaque nature of the selection process, don't make it into Parliament. And that's a problem for the Labour's right as well as a problem for the Labour's left. Because it doesn't mean you've got this whole set of new faces, clean skins, as it were, to come in and say, you know what, we're going to do new Labour sort of tilt towards capital without any of the baggage from Blair and Brown. Here they are suggesting Hillary Benn and Yvette Cooper just bring in all that baggage in with them. And people's memories do extend back to those years. They do remember, you know, the allegations around sort of cash for honours and the sort of overseeing of the, I don't know what you would call it, the like shopping mollification of British politics, a sense of like lost integrity, of lost purpose. People remember that from the Blair and the Brown years. And they're just bringing them all back. Why? Why? It's not particularly imaginative, is it? It's not like, oh, they've really, you know, thought about what are the long term structural problems that the Labour Party has? Oh, let's just get back some shadow Cabinet members who also lost in an election in 2015 and in 2010 as well. A couple of comments so far with Fiverr, how much impact does real-time public sentiment have on leadership regarding tough decisions? Advisors, colleagues, press donors, independent media and masses? It's a very good question. I think, you know, you know, I think what Starmer's team are trying to do is say, look, this is all tittle-tattle. We ignore what happens on Twitter. We're just looking at what the wider public believe. And that's a sensible thing to do actually, I think. The problem is, it's unclear to what end they're doing that. So I don't think that really as a leader of opposition, you do necessarily have to respond to every complaint that's made by a back venture or a comment writer, et cetera, et cetera. But you do have to stand for something. That's what they have to work out what to do. Francesca Facion with a fiver. Hey, guys, please wish my dear boyfriend, Will, a happy 24th birthday. He is a 21st century communist fop. What's a communist fop? And a dedicated Navarra stan. Happy birthday, Will, you communist fop. I hope you have a great day and very glad that you are a Navarra stan. Thank you, Ash. Thank you everyone for watching the show. Thank you for your super chats tonight. And thank you if you are a supporter of Navarra Media. If you are a monthly donor, you are what makes this show, this organization possible. If you aren't already, please do go to navarramedia.com for support and to make the equivalent of one hour's wage a month. For now, we'll be back on Wednesday at 7pm. 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