 Welcome to a Wednesday night edition of Tiskey Sour. We have five big stories for you tonight, the climate and COVID doesn't get much bigger than that. Drink spiking, Nigel Farage and Focus Groups about Kier Starmer. They don't say what he would want to hear. I'm joined as ever by Dahlia. How are you doing, Dahlia? I'm doing all right, Michael. How are you doing? Very well. I'm glad. I feel like we've got a nice sort of bright color scheme today. Navarro, we always used to wear black. We're a more approachable crew now, I'm hoping. Yeah, yeah. I prefer it this way. Before we get started, you know the score. Hit the subscribe button to get your comments and questions on the hashtag Tiskey Sour or in the comments box. Let's get started. The UK government has for a while now been committed to achieving net zero carbon emissions by 2050 and to reducing emissions by 78% by 2035 compared to 1990 levels. However, they had taken much longer to set out a plan to achieve those goals. Yesterday, the release of a long-awaited net zero strategy was supposed to change that. This was Boris Johnson speaking on the release of the document. The market is growing, is going green and people know that we have the technological solutions to these problems and they want to go green and they know that we'll be able one day to bring down the prices of green technology, EVs and heat pumps and solar panels in a way that we so rapidly made microwaves and mobile phones affordable and they can see that we can do it. When I was a kid, 80% of our energy came from coal. When I was mayor of London, it was down to 40%. Today, it's less than 1%. And at the same time, we're turning this green industrial revolution into sustained economic growth because we've cut CO2 by 44% on 1990 levels in this country. And yet the UK economy has grown over that period by 78% to adapt Gordon Gekko, may or may not be a hero of anybody in this room. Green is good. Green is right. Green works. That was Boris Johnson arguing that green is good, green is right and green works. We're not just going to talk about the bluster though. We want to see what's in the actual plan. It is hard to summarize as on Tuesday, the government released 21 documents in total combined. They add up to 1,868 pages. So there's a lot more detail than we are going to introduce you to now. And we can go through some of the top lines though. So on decarbonizing electricity, there was already a pledge that electricity generation would be carbon neutral by 2035. The recently published strategy commits to investing more in renewables and nuclear power. The government plan to roll out carbon capture and storage for any remaining gas power plants. On hydrogen and carbon capture and storage, there's a pledge to expand the use of hydrogen for domestic heating, transport and industrial processes and £1 billion to fund carbon capture and storage to make the production of hydrogen carbon neutral. When it comes to the crucial areas of heat and building, there's an ambition, so not a commitment, just an ambition to end the sale of gas boilers by 2035 to help along the way up to 90,000 households will be offered grants of up to £5,000 for heat pumps. That's over the next three years. There are also plans to introduce a requirement that new mortgages include incentives for new homeowners to increase the energy efficiency of their homes. Apparently that's going to encourage banks to lend people an extra bit of cash on top of their mortgage to do up their house. On transport, car manufacturers are to be required to raise the proportion of electric vehicles sold each year, so that would be a percentage that increases over time, ultimately with a plan for no new petrol cars from 2035. Other plans include extra cash to fund tree planting and restore peatlands and £100 million to fund the development of new technologies to remove carbon directly from the atmosphere. To discuss whether the government's plans for net zero will get us to net zero, I'm joined by Alice Bell, co-director of the Climate Campaign Group possible and author of our biggest experiment, A History of Climate Change, A History of the Climate Crisis. Alice, thank you so much for joining us this evening. To begin, I don't know if you know who Gordon Gekko is, but more importantly, what's your analysis, your top line of what this document suggests? Is this a government that's now taking climate change seriously? It's something, and that's not nothing. I mean, that's one of the things about climate change is it happens by degree. It's not one of the, it's not, there's a climate scientist in NASA called Kate Marble who says it's not a cliff you fall off, it's a slope that you slide down. And so this is helping us maybe like make the slope a little bit less steep, but it's not enough. It's really not enough as well. We've been procrastinating, particularly on issues like heating for so long that the to-do list has got very long, and there's just a huge amount of work that needs to be done very, very quickly. And this touches it, it's something, but Guy Schrobscholl, who's a rewilding campaigner and author, was just looking through the detail today and posting on Twitter. He's like, this is talking about restoring 20% of our heat. That's not enough. It's just not enough. So it's something, and we have been waiting for it for a long time. That heat and building strategy, I do quite a lot of work on heat possible, and we've really been waiting for just something on heat. And we're hopeful that this means that we can finally press go on some projects. So things will happen. And that's positive. I mean, just also the release of all of these things has created a bit of a buzz, and I think that's been quite good. There's loads of people all over the country that a week ago wouldn't have known what a heat pump is. We've seen like Google searches of like, what is a heat pump? Has gone right up. Loads of newspapers are having explainers on what they are. And I think in a year or so, we might start to have neighbors and family members who've got a heat pump, and we'll start to get more used to this new technology. So these things are good, even if they're not quite enough. It's funny you say that I actually was last night googling videos of how do heat pumps work. I'm still kind of non the wiser. I just know that they're more green than a boiler, and we want them to get cheaper. I want to talk about money because one common criticism that's been voiced about these plans is that while the ambitions are good, the money coughed up to fund them is not nearly adequate. On this topic, there was an interesting exchange on Radio 4 between Ed Miliband and Evan Davis. That was, again, with reference to funding for heat pumps to replace gas boilers. Problem is, I think there are massive holes in the plan, and I think it goes, Evan, to something you said in the introduction, which is, is government the active ingredient or the catalyst? There's just to be full sort of nerdtastic on you. On pay 328, there is a table which says, what are the costs of going to net zero in different sectors? And one of them is around heat and buildings, which obviously is of concern to all of us. And it's around about 100 billion pounds this decade, the cost. Now, this is a plan that says, here's three or four billion pounds for the public sector's contribution. That is an awful lot of heat pumps, retrofit insulation, which we are leaving individuals themselves and potentially the private sector to cope with on their own. Yeah. And the government would say, well, at the moment, obviously, the private sector paid for their private sector heating. The government doesn't buy me a boiler usually. And so that's the appropriate way to go. If you can get the price of the heat pumps to come down and hopefully a kickstart to the market will make that happen. But that is magical thinking, you see. And I think this is the danger of this plan, which is that it isn't a recipe for the urgent and fair transition that we need. Because the average cost of a heat pump at the moment is somewhere above 10,000 pounds. It is very, very heroic to think that the costs are going to come down to the price of a boiler, a couple of thousand pounds in the time that we need it to come. That was Ed Miliband, giving what I thought was a very good explanation of the difference between the ambition in the government's document and the funding for it. He was saying that by the government's own account, if we are to phase out gas boilers by 2035, we need to invest £100 billion in heat pumps this decade, yet the government has only pledged £3 or £4 billion. Alice, is the big problem here money and maybe Richie Sunak? Is that what's lacking? Yeah. So part of it is money. I mean, part of what you saw with that earlier quote from the Prime Minister earlier, that clip, your first clip, he's kind of working on the market will save us. And the theory is, is that you pump a little bit of extra money into the sector, giving a few people who are eager, who are like, do I want to be an earlier doctor? I quite like heat pumps. You just give them that sweetness, get it going. And that feeds the market. There's a little bit more money circulating for the companies like Octopus that want to be market leaders on this, that they can bring down the technology, the prices, the price of technology to the price that's more every day people can afford. But I don't know if we've got time for that. So maybe we need a little bit more money. The other thing that's missing, it's not just the heat pump installation, it's the energy efficiency stuff that goes round with it. And we know that the government needs to be investing billions on energy efficiency anyway, for all sorts of other reasons, like they need to be doing it to stop us wasting crime, or the heat that we're generating, whether we use that, whether we generate that heat through electricity, like heat pumps or from burning gas. We all spend a huge amount of money on our energy bills, the heat that just escapes through our windows, doors and floors. And we need to stop that. It's one of the reasons so many people in the UK live in fuel poverty. And it causes a huge health problem. It causes huge mental health and physical health problems. Just to put the strain off the NHS, we should be doing this. And we should be doing it to save lives. Also, investing in energy efficiency could boost a lot of jobs. It's one of those things that like if the government put a bit of investment in, it would really boost the economy and it's really worth doing for financial reasons, as well as all of the other ones. So there's those all that sort of work that is just the emissions a bit lower on. I mean, maybe if we're talking about 20 years ago, when that Wall Street came out, 30 or 40 years ago, when Wall Street came out, where he got his Gecko quote from, if he'd been starting then, maybe he could have had this idea of this kind of factual approach of the market will do it with maybe a little bit of help. But I think we could probably do it a little bit more. We need rocket boosters on these kind of policies. And what we've seen from the net zero approach this week, it's not really quite paying rocket boosters on the app. You did you did know what the Gordon Gecko quote was? That was a cultural reference that escaped me. Sunail Basu with a fiver also tried to save me. Michael Douglas played Gordon Gecko in Wall Street, but he said greed is good, instead of green is good. So I missed that pun, unfortunately. Let's look at some headlines because as we've spoken about the money coughed up here does seem to be insufficient. However, the right wing papers are coming at this from a different angle. They're running some scary headlines about potential spiraling costs when it comes to these plans. The Daily Mail called the plans Boris Johnson's trillion pound green gamble. And the Times warned that Britain's face higher taxes to pay for eco pledges. Alice, what do you think about the politics of this? Because from the perspective of what is what does climate change demand of us? It demands more money, probably going to demand some more taxes down the line. We know that the government is going to lose loads of fuel duty, I think 37 billion pound a year once we go electric. So, you know, there's a possibility for a big political backlash against this, like the kind you see in the United States. Or do you think that the fact that this is being put forward by a Tory is going to keep a lid on any sort of anti green backlash we might see? Action on climate change will be disruptive. It's going to change how we are expected to live our lives and it will be expensive. It's nowhere near as disruptive or expensive as climate change itself. Like the cost of not acting is so much higher. Just so much higher, even if you're going to look at it in a narrow, simply economic sense apart from talking about people's lives. So that's something we need to remember. But yeah, we know it's going to cost. And that is one of the understandable concerns. I would say that this the policies that being put forward, they're clearly very worried about backlash. There has been a bit of kind of laying the ground on that from particular parts of the Tory party in the last few months, kind of pushing this idea that the Greens are coming after your boilers. They're going to ban your boiler, kind of trying to move to generate a bit of a cultural war about some areas of green action. We've also seen some stuff with things like low traffic neighbourhoods and active travel areas of policy. You could see that the government really worried about that. So, you know, Boris started yesterday with a letter in the sun saying the green police are not coming to steal your boiler. I mean, he actually said the green shirts, which I thought was quite crass, because ecofascism is an actual real thing and a present threat. And if left unchecked, could really be a real, like could dominate economic and environmental politics in the next few decades in really quite terrifying ways. And to make a glim-joke about that, I thought was just, I guess, typical of our prime minister. But, you know, they're clearly worried about that and they're managing expectations. And in some respects, they've got quite a good policy without this. They're talking about thinking about engaging the public, thinking about how they can meet people partway, not pushing things too fast, too quickly. The other thing they did, which is really noticeable today, was they published, in this huge, like, chunk of documents they published yesterday, there was some research into how the public will engage with these things, how behaviour change can work and how can you could do this without necessarily causing a huge backlash, which is a sensible thing for them to research, to commission. But it mentioned how to help the public move towards low carbon lifestyles, like not flying so much and not eating so much meat, which they were clearly worried about the backlash around. And so that document disappeared. It didn't disappear very quickly or very well, because it wasn't long before everyone noticed that it disappeared. So there's been various reports in papers today, and I think we might expect a bit more tomorrow about the government trying to cover up discussion about our diets. And I can see that spinning out in the next few months, like, oh, the government is secretly coming for your hamburger that they didn't want you to know. So we might see some of that. But if anything, in the UK, we know that the British public kind of want to see this with huge appetite for things like the changes like heat pumps. People want to make that change and they want to see the government take more action. So if anything, we're more likely to see backlash about the government being complacent rather than that they want you to buy a heat pump. I suppose that the way to resist a backlash would be for the government to stump up more of the cash as well. It just seems like the five grand isn't going to be enough to get many people heat pumps. So if you if you scare people that their boiler is going to get removed, but you also don't give them the money to insulate their home, then you are, you know, they're not being that reassuring to people who are worried about heating their homes at the moment, are they? No, and there's a lot of social justice issues that we need to be a bit more mindful of. And that's another one of the documents that disappeared, seemingly. I was looking forward to reading it. So I hope it arrives again. I need to go searching for it, which was looking at sort of more of the it's more of the how some of these changes might intersect with issues to do with justice and thinking about people who marginalize in different ways. And we need to think of things like heating. Like this is a life or death issue. Like heating keeps us warm. It keeps us alive. It allows us to keep our house sanitary, you know, wash clothing to wash food to wash ourselves. We all know how annoying it is when our boiler breaks and how nerve wracking it is when we can't afford to pay our heating bills. You know, this is something that is a really important issue for people and we don't want the most vulnerable people in society to be stomping up. The other thing is like, a lot of this stuff about changing stuff in houses, it's fine if you've got your own house, but for a lot of us, we're renters. And I've had loads of people emailing me going, Oh, I really want to do this, but like, my landlord's not going to do anything. I'm like, of course your landlord's not going to do anything. So how can we have policies that's going to help all of our housing stock be comfortable, safe, cheap to keep warm and not get killing the planet in the process? And that's something that some politicians are thinking about, but we're not really seeing that kind of breadth of vision yet, I think, from the government. And finally, I mean, it's not a coincidence, this was released a couple of weeks before COP26. The government would like to suggest that this shows they're taking climate change seriously. They're in a good position to go up to that meeting in Glasgow and demand action from everyone else. Is that a fair summary? Has this made the UK a climate leader who can ask other people to join them in the fight against climate change? Well, as I started this, I said it is something. And there are some bits of this policy where government is world leader in. It's not necessarily saying much though. And I'd like them to show a bit more leadership. They're kind of leading with not very much ambition. And what we need right now are leaders who are going to be raising everybody's ambition. And Britain is quite culpable in all of this. We're going to be having these climate talks in Glasgow, which is a city that has its riches based in slavery, that birthed the industrial revolution or the fossil fuel economy of part of that of steam engine with James Watt, who was the son of a trader whose family was involved in making money from slavery, who worked on to invent the steam engine, which is kind of what kicked off this whole fossil economy and this whole problem in the first place. We're going to be coming together to talk about this and talk about the huge global injustices in terms of who has caused this problem and who is suffering from this problem. Meanwhile, Britain is like, oh, well, we're doing quite well. We're a world leader. We're talking about getting some people some heat pumps. Well, that's not good enough as a world leader. The other thing, which is not in this policy, and we all need to be talking about is things like cuts to the aid budget. This already was not nearly enough for all sorts of other reasons, but particularly in terms of climate change. Because we've caused this problem, we need to help other people deal with the effects of climate change, which because of kind of quarks of geography, actually Britain gets off quite easily. Because of centuries of exploitation and the way that our economy of the rest of the world and the way our economy is set up, we have a lot of resources to protect ourselves from climate change. We can build things like the Thames barrier, but also we just don't get hit so bad as a lot of other countries. I think these same countries that we spent centuries exploiting, extracting riches from are some of the ones that are being affected the most by climate change. We're going to rock up to this climate change talks and go, oh, well, we've got some heat pumps. We're like, and we've cut our aid budget. Big parts of rich work, climate work, which will work. So we're going to help countries decarbonize alongside with us that we're going to be able to have access to the kind of technologies that people in richer countries have, but everyone should be able to have and also protect people from the worst bits of climate change that we've already caused. Because this isn't something that's happening in the future. This is something that has been happening visibly to all of us for a long time. We are already at a bit over a degrees global warming. We've already had a terrifying summer of fires and storms. People need to be protected now as well as making sure that we can limit how much the impacts will be in the future. There's stuff that they can bring to Glasgow and I'm still hopeful that we will see a bit of global ambition raised, but it's really not the kind of package of policies that I wanted, a country that wants to position themselves as a global leader to be kicking things off with. Alice Bell, thank you so much for joining us this evening and for your insights on the net zero strategy. And we'll speak to you soon, I'm sure. Thank you. Now is a perfect time to plug the second episode of Planet B. That's Navarra Media's Climate Change podcast hosted by Dalia Gabriel. The next episode is out tomorrow. It features Noam Chomsky. Dalia, very briefly, tell us what's the themes of that podcast? What can people expect? Yeah, so it's actually really well connected to the story that we just talked about. We're going to be talking about land. So that is the theme. So the first episode, the theme was work. This episode, the theme will be land. And it will be looking at how the way that we use land has been accelerating the climate crisis and also how visions of land use and land sovereignty and ownership under the banner of net zero might not actually be all it cracked up to be. So we'll be talking to a range of experts, including Noam Chomsky, about how reframing our relationship to land is absolutely essential to making it out of this crisis. Okay. Incredible. I'm very excited for that now. We could talk more about that, but I don't want to give any spoilers for that podcast. So we're going to go straight on to our next story. Coronavirus cases across the UK continue to be uncomfortably high and citing pressure on hospitals. The chief executive of the NHS Confederation has now called for the government to reintroduce modest restrictions to slow the virus's spread. There has also been pressure from a number of members of SAGE to implement the government's so-called COVID plan B, which would see mandatory face masks and a request to work from home, both come back into effect. This was the context for the first Downing Street press conference we've had in over a month that happened this afternoon. But health secretary, Sajid Javed, was clear that he had no intention of reintroducing new restrictions, saying the NHS was not yet overwhelmed. In this clip, you'll also hear from Stephen Powis, who is the medical director of the NHS. We don't believe that the pressures that are currently faced by the NHS are unsustainable. Don't get me wrong, there are huge pressures, especially in A&E, in primary care, for example, as well. But at this point, we don't believe they're unsustainable. And Steve can answer a bit more about that in a moment. But I will say one of the reasons I think the NHS is able to do what it does still. Number one is, obviously, thanks to everyone that's working in the NHS. But the extra support we're providing this year, for the second half of this year, we're providing an additional £5.4 billion, which is certainly helping. And that's what we hear. And we will absolutely keep it under review. If we feel at any point it's becoming unsustainable, then the department together with our friends at the NHS, we won't hesitate to act. Steve? Yes, thank you, Sophie. So I think the first thing to acknowledge, as the Secretary of State has said, and indeed as our Chief Executive, Amanda Pritchard said at the Health Select Committee yesterday, the NHS is under considerable pressure. We've had a very tough summer as we have continued to treat people with COVID, being admitted to hospitals. A society has opened up again, and we've begun to see a return to normal, near normal levels of presentations of urgent and emergent people who need urgent and emergency care. And of course, as we started to make inroads into treatments for patients whose care has been disrupted and delayed during the pandemic, so it undoubtedly feels exceptionally busy in the NHS. And our NHS organisations are telling us that all the time. It's not just COVID, of course. We have one eye to the flu season, and we don't know what's going to happen with flu this year, but there is a risk that we will get more flu back and it will be worse than previous years because we missed out a season last year. And there are other viruses around as well. And of course, we are continuing to do all that work around the recovery of our elective and routine services, so it is very, very busy indeed. We work very closely with the Department of Health and Social Care around the judgment of how the NHS is doing, and we will continue to do that as we go into winter. But I think the really critical thing is that the public can help us here. The public can absolutely help the NHS here. And as the Secretary of State has said, there are things that the public can do that will take the pressure off the NHS. So the first is to remember that for face masks, there is guidance in place. If you are in a crowded environment, a high-risk environment on the tube, you know, a building, a cramped building with low ventilation, then wear that face mask, it makes a difference. It really does. And the second thing, of course, is the vaccine program, because the vaccine program is our best protection against COVID. And therefore, if you've been invited for a booster and you haven't had one, or if you are getting your invitation in the next few weeks, then get that booster as quickly as possible, because we know that the immunity that we get from vaccines will drop off over time, and we don't want that to occur going into winter. So it's a slightly odd press conference. You had Sajid Javed there saying that there are not unsustainable pressures on the NHS, then Stephen Powers listing what sounded like a lot of unsustainable pressures on the NHS, and then a call for people to continue wearing masks. The question to Sajid Javed was essentially, you know, should the government start telling people to wear masks? I don't know why they keep to say, oh, we'll leave it up to you. It'll be personal responsibility, whether you wear a mask on public transport, et cetera, et cetera. I think everyone understands this, that people wear masks when other people wear masks. We're all social beings, we're all kind of sheep when it comes to things like this. I say this about myself as well. I am totally led by what other people in the room are doing, by what other people in the building I'm in are doing. When it comes to buses, because it is, you know, it's legislated, even if no one else on the bus or the train is wearing one, oh, wear one, because that is, like, we're very specifically a rule, but where it's recommendations in my corner shop, the people in there don't wear masks, so I'm less likely to go in there with a mask. If you just, you know, it's such a low cost thing to just say, now, look, there is pressure on the NHS, let's introduce some of these measures which have really few costs, masks in indoor spaces, encouraging people to work from home instead of traipsing in to the office. This stuff would be virtually cost-free and the government is still refusing to do it because they want to wait until the NHS is, you know, completely on its knees, not just kind of on its knees. Dahlia, what do you make of the current state of debate on COVID-19? Lots of people saying, are we going to have a new lockdown? I'm pretty sure we won't, but it does seem like, you know, some further restrictions seem a bit inevitable at this point in time. Things just aren't, they aren't over yet and we know this, we are having around 200 deaths a day that might even, you know, there is early suggestions that the booster vaccine program is not going to be as effective as the original vaccine program, not because the booster itself isn't effective, but for whatever reason the uptake so far has just not been as high and as the efficacy of these vaccines wane, we, you know, that is going to present a problem and yet we're repeating the exact same mistakes and one of those is taking NHS staff for granted and seeing them essentially as the sacrificial lambs of the economy, of seeing their mental health, their physical health as being, you know, things that we just sacrifice in order to keep this mirage of back as normal, you know, back to normal going and, you know, I say this all the time when we talk about the NHS being overwhelmed or the NHS being in an unsustainable condition, we don't mean one day you're going to wake up and, you know, what was once an NHS building is just going to be rubble on the floor. That's not what we mean. What we mean is that staff are so overwhelmed and under resourced that they aren't able to provide the levels of care that you would expect in, you know, a modern healthcare system. And that is the message that we are getting, for example, from, you know, the Chief Executive of the NHS Confederation. It's that we are on the precipice of being back where we were in that peak condition of the pandemic where, you know, I always go back to it because I think it was such a kind of powerful interview. But that interview we did, I think it was last year with Silas Webb where he talked about, you know, he's an A&E doctor and he talked about the trauma and the moral injury of being a, you know, a staff member of being a health worker on an overwhelmed COVID ward. And the fact that, you know, we're sort of playing this game again and we're talking about, you know, not really putting in something so simple as mask mandates, which I don't know anyone who's been on a bus or a tube or a train recently will tell you that the mask mandate on TFL is basically not being adhered to because the message is not coming from the government. The message is not coming from the top. It's coming from the Mayor, but that clearly is not enough to actually get people to take that advice. And so we are looking down the barrel in Christmas with a combination of flu season, waning vaccines, and the fact that people really have received this message from the government that the pandemic is over, that we can go back to normal. We've announced Freedom Day. And so once again, we are putting those incredible NHS staff members on the brink physically and mentally. And it's absolutely shocking that the government after, you know, clapping for carriers and after all of, you know, this lip service about understanding the value of NHS workers, that they would turn around and do that again. And when the winter plan was first announced, you know, from the beginning, I've always said that the idea of scrapping the mask mandate, of scrapping masks in indoor spaces is absolutely ludicrous. And, you know, in Sajj Javid's press conference today, he again indulged this absurd notion that masks are somehow a violation to personal freedom. It's actually the exact opposite. It's masks that prevent us from having to go into very restrictive lockdowns that actually are quite worrying violations of freedom that actually do restrict our freedom and do create, you know, mental and physical health consequences later down the line. It's that low risk, you know, low kind of low hanging fruit that this government is repeatedly refusing to adhere to, not because it's not doesn't make sense or because it's not the logical thing to do, but because instead of being sage medical advice, which is what masks are mask wearing and working from home is, it's been mired into a nonsensical culture war, which is so irresponsible for a government to do in the midst of a health pandemic. But culture wars is the terrain that this government likes to play because it's the one that it wins most effectively on. And it's just scary to think about how many lives are actually going to be impacted by this sort of misuse of power. I've got a relevant super chat from Valerie Kamru confirming that people aren't really wearing masks. And buses in the Midlands have loads of people without masks sitting close by. Yeah, I think that will be the experience of most people around the country. And that's not that you know, that's not really to blame those people. We've had completely mixed messages from the government. It was also, I suppose, notable in that press conference that what we were constantly told is basically we're leaving this down to individual responsibility, but we're very clear if you are in an indoor space with with lots of people and wearing a mask is, you know, a practical thing to do. Obviously, you can't really do that in a bar or a nightclub. That's why I'd be in favour of vaccine passports. But that's another issue. If you're in a crowded place where you can wear a mask, you should do so. Well, if you watched PMQs today, what you would have noticed is that all the Labour MPs were wearing masks, none of the Conservative ones were. So you've got Conservative standing up there saying this is about personal responsibility. We're calling on people to take individual action to wear masks. But we're not going to do it. You know, it does just seem completely irresponsible to me. One more thing I do want to mention is that Sajid Javed, I think, very disingenuously sort of suggested, oh, that the NHS is going to be fine because we bunged it an extra three billion or whatever, however much we bunged it this winter. And why that doesn't stack up is because the reason the NHS is at breaking point is staffing, right? We have underfunded the NHS for 10 years, huge shortage of nurses, and you can't bung them three billion quid. And suddenly they employ loads more nurses to get us through this very, very difficult winter. We know why it's difficult flu, COVID, and then also the backlog of operations and the backlog of people who haven't appeared at hospitals over the past 18 months because of COVID. So it's going to be a very difficult winter. And the reason it's going to be almost impossible to get through if we treat everything as if we are in a normal situation is that we have been running the NHS at capacity for a decade called efficiency savings. If there is ever a free bed in a hospital, that means something's going wrong. That's a bed we shouldn't have. We need to sell that bed. We need to reduce that space, get some extra money from real estate by selling off part of the hospital to develop a new block of flats. That has been the attitude of the government over the past 10 years. Any extra capacity is actually a failure. And now when we have a global emergency, they think, oh, we'll give them a few extra billion pounds and they'll get through it. That's not how it works. And that is why we are in, I think, a pretty dangerous situation. That's why you are hearing the people at the top of the NHS saying, we absolutely need the government to take this more seriously. The government, especially Sajid Javid, just saying, no, no, it's fine. We don't think anything is going particularly wrong. The doctors and nurses, they can cope with it. Everyone continues as normal. It doesn't stack up to me. And I think, presumably, we will enter plan B in a couple of weeks or so. I mean, hopefully the booster shots will speed up as will the vaccinations for the teenagers. Fingers crossed. Let's go to our next story. Drink spiking is the grim phenomenon of men slipping drugs into, usually, women's drinks in order to sexually assault them. It's always been a disgusting and brutal crime. And there are now stories emerging of men using new methods to commit this abuse by injection. There have been reports in the past few weeks of multiple women believing they have been drugged via needle when in nightclubs. Zara Owen is one of them. She is a student in Nottingham and spoke to the BBC about her experience. Last Monday night, actually, I went out with my friends to a nightclub in the city. Nothing more than what we would usually do. I remember going in, going to the bar, going to the toilet, going to the photo booth. And then up until that moment, my memory is a blank until I get home and I'm getting my phone charger. I know I didn't drink as much as I usually would on a night out this night. And the fact that I don't remember anything is terrified for me because this is something that is a very rare occasion to me. I've never suffered with memory loss. And then the next morning, obviously, I did with the memory loss. I woke up with a really, really painful leg. So you had, what, you had some kind of bruising, did you? I didn't have any bruising or anything, but I found a pin prick in my leg, well, which was the epicentre of all pain. It made me unable to walk and I was limping around, which was the only form of support I could really have. It was so much agony. That was Zara Owen describing an incident at a club called Prism, the Guardian report of another young woman in Nottingham who had a similar experience. They write, In a separate incident days earlier, a woman who was in a club 10 minutes from Prism believed she was spiked in a similar manner. The woman also 19 and a student felt a pinch on the back of her arm as she left stealth nightclub on the 12th of October, her sister said. She later blacked out and was taken to A&E, where she was put on drip and underwent blood tests. A 20 year old man has been arrested for possession of banned substances. We think in in relation to these, but nothing has yet has been confirmed. As far as I can tell, no one has been found with a needle, but all sounds really horrible. Darlia, this is just hideous, isn't it? Oh, it's horrifying. It's really grim stuff. The phenomenon of women having their drinks spiked in clubs, it's a tale as old as time, unfortunately. Obviously, this is a new development on what is a very old story. I think what this really shows us is that a lot of the conventional wisdom advice that has been given on this particular issue really doesn't get to the heart of the matter. For so long, every young woman, every teenage girl has had it drummed into her before she starts going clubbing or partying or whatever. Be careful of your drink. Make sure not to leave your drink anywhere. Don't leave your drink unattended. Always keep your eye on it. Don't accept a drink from a stranger, et cetera. Now what can the advice be? Don't have legs. Don't have arms. Stay inside of your house. Well, guess what? Your home is actually probably not statistically a super safe place for women either. Really, this really shows us that we have to radically change the way that we talk about gender-based violence. Not only because we know this isn't how gender-based violence operates, you can't game your way out of it. That's not really how it works. It also has this horrible undertone, that kind of advice, where it's like, just protect yourself, just keep yourself safe. The idea then is that if someone is in a club and it's so premeditated that they have a needle full of a substance that is basically only there to spike a woman's drink, or to incapacitate her, then just make sure that you're not the one that gets caught. Just shift it on to someone else, to another woman in the club or in the party. Is that really the message that we want to be sending out here? Or is the message that we need to figure out what is driving these behaviors? What is driving people to do these kinds of things, and starting from there, rather than starting from how women and people have marginalized genders and people who are vulnerable in other ways to these kinds of behaviors can actually, rather than focusing on what they should be doing. It's so gross because it also leads women who experience these kinds of things to internalize this idea that it's bad women, it's incompetent women, it's women who didn't take enough measures, who were reckless, who were drunk. It's those kinds of women that get assaulted. It's those kind of women that experience violence. Good women, cautious women, women who follow all the rules, don't get assaulted. We know that that is not how, we know that's a lie. We know that's not how this works. It's clear that we need to shift this conversation on to what actually is driving people to do these kinds of things. That doesn't mean more cops and bars. We know that's not going to make people safer, especially when the cops are not exactly liable for no kind, the cops are implicated in certain kinds of gender-based violence, but it actually gets to, we need to go to the heart of this matter, and it starts from a culture that uses sex and sexuality as a weapon, as a weapon of power, as a weapon of power against women, as a weapon of power against gendered minorities, and even as a weapon of power against racialized men or men who are vulnerable to these sexualized violence in other kinds of ways. Obviously, it's an obvious one, but the kind of culture that trivializes things like getting people drunk so that you can have sex with them, that's kind of a different sort of scene as a more acceptable end of this kind of logic. But this is the kind of culture that means that this is the kind of behavior that people think that they engage in. So what this showed to me really is that the conversation around contamination and drug being drugged in clubs and in bars has always hit the wrong note because it's always focused on the wrong person's behavior, as it were. Because it's focused on policing the woman's behavior instead of asking what the hell is going on with men. The reason this is headline news at the moment is because of this suspected new phenomenon of people being injected with the drugs. Everyone seems to be suggesting that it's incredibly rare. I mean, there are many reasons to think it would be incredibly rare because it's quite risky going into a club with a syringe. If you get searched and that gets found looks pretty dodgy, doesn't it? This has raised a, I think probably a well needed conversation about the extent of abuse which young women face right now in this country. One of those experiences was shared by Lucy Ward. She's a journalist who had a viral tweet yesterday with a screenshot of a message from her daughter about drink spiking. The daughter is in her first year at a UK university and we can have a look at the tweet here. So some of the key bits in that message were, I know by name about half a dozen girls who have been spiked and more who suspect having been. All others have horror stories, some so gruesome they only share the mumps or years later. One guy recently bought my mate a drink then refused to give it to her until she kissed him. And when she said no, he poured it all over her. The injection thing is the most recent thing they're now doing and people are more scared than ever but the scariest thing to me is how unsurprised we all are. We go out in groups, we refuse drinks, we keep our phones on and in our hands, girls are wearing denim jackets because the material is harder to piece. We simply accept the latest horror and come up with new ways to protect ourselves and of course remain weak and vulnerable anyway. Now I do recommend going to that tweet and reading out the whole message because it is really, really horrific the terms in which this is all spoken about. I also now want to look at some potential resistance to this because the Guardian reports that women are organizing in response to these incidents. So they report groups from more than 50 universities around the UK have joined an online campaign calling for boycotts of nightclubs. Campaigners say they are seeking tangible changes to make nighttime venues safer such as covers or stoppers for drinks, better training for staff and more rigorous searches of clubbers. A petition to make it a legal requirement for nightclubs to thoroughly search guests on entry has gained more than 130,000 signatures since last week. I want to go back I suppose to those screenshot messages and I suppose how awful that made it sound to be a young woman at university right now. And I mean it was not that long ago since we were undergrad so I was wondering did that sound familiar to you when you sort of read that or do you think the experience has got worse? Oh absolutely and way before university I mean this was my experience from school I would say from the age that I turned around probably 11 or 12 was the first time that you started to get it would either come through you know things that would happen in the classroom or things that would happen in the street or it would be the way that older women would talk to you. So things like you know being told don't go home in your netball you know uniform after school be careful of you know make sure that you do this make sure that you do that you know suddenly you start to get all those messages and you don't really understand them at the time but you start to get these messages from the top that you know the world out there is really unsafe and you it's your responsibility to protect yourself from that really unsafe world which obviously massively reduces the quality of your life and your ability to feel free in the world that you you live in and that's something that begins way before undergraduate. I think obviously you know the beginning of university it's a vulnerable time it's you know everyone's sort of hashing it out on their own for the first time but I would say that there is a kind problem here where we sometimes exceptionalize these kinds of spaces we exceptionalize like the club or the bar is like the place where sexual violence happens and obviously there are particular risks and there's a particular way in which these risks unfold in nightclubs and bars but this isn't the only place where women experience gender-based violence it's not the only place where women experience sexual harassment which is why again I just think that things like calling for more searching of people before entering a bar it just it doesn't really get to the heart of the issue because it still concedes that it's okay that our broader culture operates on these logics where you know sexual harassment is just part of the course of growing up as a woman around the world and I think that we really need to take a much more cultural and sort of systemic look on this and not just try to kind of tinker around the edges of individual spaces or even act like there are you know as I said earlier the home is one of the most unsafe places for a young girl or for a woman how you know you can't really be frisking you know your dad or your husband or your uncle or whatever before every time he comes into the house even though that even that wouldn't really make a difference it's about the mentality and it's about the cultural logic that you know equates things like sexuality with you know exerting power over someone that looks at women's bodies as something that is you know essentially a public commodity a public resource to be commented on to be judged to be to have expectations around and that is the thing that needs to change not bumping up security in a club because the club is not the only place where these things happen and it's just not it's just putting a bandaid on you know a shotgun wound essentially doing that you know I mean all very important points I mean it seems like you know it's good there is a public debate happening about this because I do think that it's been you know it's been taken for for granted or brushed under the carpet for a really long time maybe they'll manage to do that again I don't know we've got a comment Phil H of a tenor since my Navarra hoodie arrived in record time communism works I no longer need a heat pump but I did spill Big Mac sauce all up it earlier up the villa don't worry you can work they're washable and they're very high quality so they won't they won't fade in the wash so so don't worry about that let's go on to our next story since leaving politics Nigel Farage has taken to reading out messages on camera in return for sums of cash it's nice work if you can get it however it has led to some real screamers for the ex-UKIP leader this was Farage being interviewed on Irish TV earlier this week why don't you ask yourselves in Dublin a question why did you fight the British why did Irish nationalists fight the British for 500 years 500 often very bloody difficult years until the 1920s what was the point of it if you're now governed by Europe I think people will be entertained Nigel to hear you talking about this maybe too inconvenient for all of you in Dublin oh I'm sure yes I know that you apologize for the birthday greeting which you delivered in the last couple of days but I want people to see just how much you know about the history and culture on this island now it's a bit early in the day so all I've got actually is coffee but I hope you enjoy a few pints with the lads tonight up the run up the run Nigel I mean I I know that you said sorry I know you get 87 quid it's entirely within your right to do that but come on don't don't don't try and lecture the Irish people about the culture and history and precarious nature of peace on this island you haven't got a clue if you want to be do you want to be an independent democratic national governed by foreign bureaucrats that's the question that island will ask itself you those of you in the national media and national policies in Dublin will fight that as hard as you can because you've all benefited financially do the Irish people wish to be independent or not and that is a debate that will happen in your country in the next few years up the run Nigel well that was such a good interview like the way she talked to him was just so pleasant to watch for anyone who's not aware of the RR is it is a pro IRA phrase which someone asked Nigel Farage to say and you can guess because he's a British nationalist he just didn't know what up the RR meant because I doubt he is the kind of guy who didn't endorse the IRA um Darlia what a great clip what a great interview for me the ultimate part was actually the look I know that you get 87 pounds and it's within your rights is that was just like so shady but honestly first of all what is this website like I didn't know that this is what our you know pound shop fascists were resorting to to make a buck these days it's pretty embarrassing but it's also I mean it's not surprising that he would go on with this kind of goal onto Irish TV and tell them you know why they're fighting the British and because you know if they're just going to be uh and also for me it was the most illiterate part of it was actually him just saying you know oh you know you guys have benefited from being part you know from from the UK for so long but from being and it's just like you have no idea what you're talking about but at the end of the day Nigel Farage was made a long and very lucrative career out of going on TV stay saying a historical nonsense and getting very little pushback but actually having the red carpet rolled out for him by you know big media outlets and I I also think that it's so interesting the ways in which these sort of Brexit types are so opposed to other independence movements you know like Irish unity Scottish independence etc you know in 2018 Nigel Farage lambasted the EU for saying that you know if Ireland was united then the North of Ireland would be welcomed into the EU and you know he lambasted the EU saying oh you're you're stoking Irish nationalism and I just the idea that Nigel Farage of all people could accuse someone else of stoking nationalism is absolutely absurd and it just goes to show how deeply English the sensibilities of many of these high-profile Brexiteers uh was you know we know it from the voting breakdown particularly how Scotland and the North of Ireland and voted in the referendum but but actually the ideology the ideological framework itself so baked in English nationalism and English exceptionalism rather than this kind of abstract idea that every nation has a right to be sovereign and we know that because as you know the Scots and as people in North of Ireland are trying to get independence referendums unification referendums which is fully within their right to do the same people who are calling for Brexit on the basis of sovereignty are in the our first in line to ridicule and diminish and invalidate those calls even though I actually can't see what the difference is the only difference is that one is actually based in in historical some some independence claims are actually based in like historical facts and historical reality and others are based in you know delusions of colonial nostalgia just reminding me actually you're focused on the the 87 pounds thing and that host saying oh it's well within your right if you make 87 pounds for your for your video apparently it's on cameo lots of american republicans go on there for cash as well you can get paid to just say something what that made me think of though is another video I saw recently which is unlisted on youtube and features Nigel Farage it was uploaded five days ago and it's announcing Nigel Farage's new project which is to get people financial independence so it says in the blurb that in this fortune and freedom program you'll get the truth about your money behind the headlines jargon and spin smart ideas about how to invest from real experts whom I trust all of this financial advice from a guy who needs 87 quid to back the IRA on camera are we gonna we're gonna watch some of this video or show them the screen we're gonna watch some of this video let's have a look for almost 30 years I fought a battle for us to get our independence as a country back from the european union it wasn't easy but you know what in the end we won well I'm now fighting a very different battle it's a battle for each and every one of us to have financial independence because there are many of you out there that have given away your savings to other people to manage who've not been happy with the way in which it's been done so what I'm trying to do is to give people knowledge to get them to understand how investments how financial markets work you've nothing to lose by subscribing to this you might just learn something you might even find yourself better protected against inflation which is now back in our economy and it's not going to go away soon so please you can subscribe to this it's free all you've got to do to get a daily email from fortune and freedom is to click the link below darling would you take financial advice from someone who gets paid 87 pounds who's a British nationalist to to endorse the IRA online a lot of people can get scammed man this is not cool not Nigel Farage joining like youtube financial advice financial advice youtube that's just a dark dark part of the internet honestly I mean obviously it's hilarious and it just shows this man for what he's always been which is a total grifter but he's good at it although is he really good at it if he's you know selling his soul for 87 pounds on the internet I don't know I mean that's what because he is he's one of the most effective politicians that this country has had in the last 20 years I don't think brexit would have happened without him but now yeah he is now reading whatever you want him to say on the internet for 87 pounds which doesn't scream success to me let's go to our final story Keir Starmer is known to be a man who takes focus groups seriously indeed he's often criticized for following them too closely instead of taking a policy lead however there was one focus group of swing voters this week filmed for times radio whose advice I don't believe so Keir will be following let's take a look what would you say to Keir Starmer and very quickly Sarah your message to Keir Starmer he needs to give up the ghost and make way for somebody else Des get a personality I will leave Paul uh uh goodbye Vic um same just I think you need to go Vicky thank you if he could come across a little bit more genuine and um yeah maybe find a different role John move over let's someone else take over and Gary yeah definitely let someone else take the reins um just not good enough would anyone say anything nice to Keir Starmer come on someone's got to have something nice to say you've got a cool christian name sorry Sarah what are you gonna say nothing I was thinking I was like I thought Vicky said it nicely you need a new role whereas we were like bye he's got a better man cut them Boris the only good thing they had to say he's got a better cut them Boris and he's got a good first name Keir is a nice name to be fair to him um Darlia he's not going to be happy with that one is he oh god it's it's gonna be it's that hgv thing all over again I feel like he's gonna make the same face as he did when he crashed into that like plant pot behind him um everything about me watching actually say very good very good just like what he failed the test but I mean it's it's honestly it's it's just quite depressing really to watch him consistently fail on his own terms like I don't think Starmer ever really wanted to succeed on on the terms that I would consider success you know which would be shifting what is you know politically possible within the UK through like collaborating with social movements with with organized social organization creating you know pathways to power that are based in in convincing real people and communities and not playing games with the media you know that's what I consider successful I don't think Starmer ever considered that to be his benchmark of success what his benchmark of success was this kind of focus group politics which was sort of invented by by Tony Blair by Alistair Campbell and it's basically replacing like grassroots community organizing campaigning and frankly policy with sort of very carefully calibrated comms and and messaging with this kind of you know these kind of politicos sort of believe that that can be arrived with the very deeply scientific method of focus groups and also being really really friendly with media barons that's also very effective scientific technique to get to to um you know that kind of perfect comms and messaging and obviously comms and messaging is important I'm not saying that you don't workshop your your messages of course that's important but it it can't be the whole sale of your political strategy especially not in the kind of moment that we're in now like there was a very brief moment in history where labor could win on those terms you know a historically specific moment where you know the ability of the Tory party to consolidate and secure business interests was waning the amenability of Blairism to entrenching Thatcher's neoliberalism was was you know ripe for support by the mainstream media so in that moment having you know focus group politics worked because you had a you know very friendly media to to kind of receive that and and sort of broadcast it across the nation to the extent that it became sort of commonsense thinking um but that moment's gone like the Tories have a viable social coalition they are they are deeply connected to the media the pathway to power just can't look like that anymore it just has to be different and do I claim to have all the answers of course I don't but trying to kind of revive the corpse of 1997 and stripping that election of all of its historical context this is even before you get into the politics of Blairism whether or not that was a good thing even if you're just going to look at this purely in terms of electoral strategy it's just not going to work for this day and age and it's really depressing to watch the Labour Party refuse to learn this lesson we've actually got some breaking news from Labour land MPs have come up with a really smart way to try and re take centre stage and set the national agenda regain momentum for the party make it seem uh can convince the public they stand for something you can probably guess what it's going to involve bashing Jeremy Corbyn um these are some tweets from Sam Coates at Sky News so he tweeted today the plan for amongst some Labour MPs to exclude Jeremy Corbyn permanently from the parliamentary Labour Party they want to change Labour standing orders to allow MPs to decide Corbyn's future then vote him out this would spare Starmer from having to own any decision Labour MPs involved in this plan believe the changes made at conference to make it harder to deselect sitting MPs in bolden them to make this change but whips worry about the numbers while others worry about the optics of another Labour internal row taking centre stage I mean darling this isn't a surprise is it whatever the problem is the answer from the Labour leadership and Labour MPs is maybe we could just be horrible to Jeremy Corbyn a bit more maybe then people will like us I mean it's just this is the equivalent of like Nicki Minaj trying to like ring Cardi B out every time she feels like she needs to try and make some cheap like popularity points basically it doesn't work because people love Cardi B and people are like pissed off with this constant like this constant feeling it's it just doesn't read well not only because people the vast majority of people like actually just don't really care about this anymore and it looks disorderly it also that that idea of like trying to engineer it so that Starmer avoids owning any decision is that not exactly the feedback that we've been hearing that Starmer doesn't have any like no one knows what motivates Kirstama no one knows what gets him out of bed in the morning like no one knows what is actually driving him so this is totally falling back into those hands again but also for me it just you know Kirstama cannot deny that Jeremy Corbyn's voter base which within the Labour Party members is considerable are the people that put him into power they are the people that elected him leader of the Labour Party and it just doesn't look good to treat the people that vote you into power in this way it doesn't set a good example to the electorate that Kirstama is hoping will one day put him in charge what it tells them is that he has no loyalty or no accountability to the actual people that you know gave him the you know gave him the mandate that they gave him it's such a bad look and it's it's not going to help at this point it's actually only going to harm because also you can take Jeremy Corbyn out of the Labour Party he's still going to win his seat he's not like he's not going to be defeated in Islington by any Labour MP he's deeply loved because he has been embedded in the community there whatever you think of him as a as the leader of a national party as an MP you can't as a constituency MP you can't you can't question his credentials so it's only going to look make the Labour Party look more incompetent to the general public and it's going to alienate the Labour Party's base as well which still particularly in the membership wants to retain part of the legacy of Corbynism and that's just a fact I would love to see him stand and win in Islington North against the Labour Party it'd be a lot like Ken Livingstone winning originally in London when Labour backed a different candidate and it was all a bit of a stitch up from the top down I feel like this is again Keir Starmer overstepping the mark I mean he's a he's a goner so I can't imagine actually them them doing it even though they know it's going to damage Keir Starmer because they're doing a scorched strategy which is to say how how many of the left can we throw out before this dud stands down which seems to be the overall story at the moment when it comes to the Labour Party they don't have much to say on anything policy-wise they just bash the left over and over again sad mad Sammy with 20 quid happy birthday Toby in central Portugal all the best happy birthday to Toby in central Portugal and thank you for your kind donation Dahlia it's been a pleasure as always speaking to you this evening it's been lovely thanks for having me Michael I'm hoping that by Friday when we're back at 7pm I'm going to be slightly less nasal I'm getting there I think for now if you haven't already hit that subscribe button if you are a regular donor thank you so much you make this all possible we do appreciate it you've been watching Tisqui Sour on Navarra media good night