 Hello, welcome to the fix. My name is Aaron Mestani. I'm James Butler and we're gonna be talking about the biggest stories of I think not just today, but my adult life the weirdest wackiest stories. I think we could possibly imagine really incredibly strange It's been such a strange few days. So we're talking about firstly The remarkable story Uncovered by it seems much of the British print media that Jeremy Corbyn was in fact a Shekka Slovak asset during the Cold War With the codename Cobb agent Cobb I mean, that's pretty big story, right? And you would think and then and then in addition that we'll be talking about these We will be we'll be talking about Theresa May's conversion to the cause of education. What Theresa May a work Theresa Wait may but maybe not Right so starting with agent Cobb as he's called Really remarkable story. This was broken initially by the Sun wasn't it last week? And then I think a lot of us wrote it off We thought of you know, it's just the Sun and then it was picked up by the Telegraph by the mail And then you had some pretty impressive influences Repeat it. So if we can just get these up now Ferguson Who's actually pretty decent historian? Wow who might have once been a pretty decent historian It's a Harvard historian. He was a decent historian back in the day before he started writing trash for money Right, but those photos Ferguson and then we've got Dan Snow did that just come up a second ago? That's I think the history guy. He's called Yeah, what historic like historiographical schools says you use the Sun as a source The yellow press history tradition of the late 19th century I mean, it's a really curious thing to work You would imagine that anyone who was familiar with British history would at least think hmm This looks like a Zinoviev letter situation. Yeah, I mean, this looks like you know, there is a long tradition here of smears made up by the British press particularly with left-wing labour leaders But yeah, no the the the kind of histrionic response from people like this not historiographical Histrionic that's really important to say, right? That's really important to say because this is what I want to talk about always talk about confirmation bias and bandwagoning bias And these people want to pass themselves off as ultra rational ultra objective and yet somebody's a Harvard historian Well gleefully gleefully if you actually read Ferguson's tweet Reference a story by the Sun newspaper. And I mean this really just does I think the token a certain kind of like I say confirmation bias within within the mainstream media now Why would they do that? Why would he so happily make an idiot of himself? Well, because a central Jeremy Corbyn government doesn't just Conflict with his political values it fundamentally undermines his material interests as somebody who's now in the The bourgeoisie middle class. Okay, although he will say I came from a Glasgow councillor state. Well, you don't anymore. Yes. Yes So that's what matters And then we've got the Sun's Tom Newton done. What'd you make of this one James? This is what he said here. There is little hard evidence Corbyn was a paid-up spy But he admits meeting a Czech intelligence officer who he says he thought was only a diplomat to talk And this happened four times over 18 months in 1986 to seven. This question is his judgment, right? 1986 to seven not the height of the cold war perestroika underway by this point really thawing really going on when was red October The film later I think all right. I'm but but you I'm no cinema buff I mean the cold war is affected me over by the release of red October. Yeah, kind of joke. Yeah, Sean Connery is now You know, the Soviets are no longer these very scary people. They're now Ivan Drago in Rocky 4 and Sean Connery as some guy who's got a speech Impediment and Scottish action accent as a Russian admiral Clearly the Cobb was over by then right? Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And I mean, I think you know the other thing here Is that these people are trying to whip this up into into a kind of story about you know, as if it were You know the the you know, Kim Philby Sort of This is Ben Wallace just just a couple of just a couple of hours ago on Twitter Following in the on the heels hot on the heels of Ben Bradley MP. Yeah, so Ben Wallace compared Corbyn to Kim Philby is one of the Cambridge spies of course went and lived out a miserable existence in the USSR after selling British secrets to to to the USSR as was at the time I mean, this is you know, this is laughable. It is laughable and the thing if I think that it's really key here Is to just maybe pick apart this guy a little bit this what's his name this? Sarcot she's our cozy. I don't know how you know, you know This is a this is a guy who seems to believe that checker slow back spies helped fund and organize live aid Who who but nonetheless, I mean even even he at first in the first version of this story that he told the sun Says that the you know, the knowledge couldn't be utilised because the knowledge they gained from Corbyn was of a limited nature He was negative towards the USA Yeah, very important very unpatriotic. He also keeps dogs and fish And also he's he was a very this guy this our cozy guy very close to Winnie Mandela And apparently he knew what Margaret that you had for breakfast every morning. Yes And what she was going to wear that day now this guy after he has had some attention has now Taken to the press and so he's now saying that he has a he's got a he had a he ran a ring of 10 to 15 labor MPs Who have paid 10,000 pounds. This is just this meeting. This is the checker slow backs, right? Yeah Yeah, so how many of the Soviets have I mean, this is a completely ludicrous story And you know, I mean, I think the thing that's interesting is that you know The Sun really knew what they were doing here, right? They did this thing that they always do which is create a little bit of a kind of fake news storm You know among the right-wing kind of debating chambers on the echo chambers Guido gets involved Really stirs it up. You know the Sun drip feeds this stuff and eventually people start talking about it Someone's you know some patsy from the press asked Theresa May a question about it And now that the Prime Minister has mentioned it then it's fair play for the right wing press The more respectable right wing press to go into it probably tomorrow I would imagine that they're going to chase this down You know, I imagine some patsy Tory MP will ask a question during PMQs tomorrow and try and keep the story alive a little bit longer It's a very predictable playbook. Can we get up the tweet from John Hemmings from the Henry Jackson Society? I'm gonna get that up. What does he say this? There's idiots What can you read that for me, James? How could a self-proclaimed human rights champion have found things to admire in police states like Czechoslovakia and the GDR which imprisoned and tortured dissidents a nice photo of Corbin on his chairman Mao style bicycle First of all, that's from a Matthew Dan Kona article in The Guardian. Yeah Here's reality about Jeremy Corbin. He signed a parliamentary motion praising striking workers against what he called the quote Stalinist bureaucracy of the Czechoslovak government He was friends with dissidents in Islington elsewhere in London In the final years of the Iron Curtain Matthew Dan Kona, how many fucking dissidents did you know in the late 1980s? I bet I know. I bet it was none. Okay, so shut the fuck up. And then you had this, it was Sebastian Payne Oh, the little dwee boy who works for the Financial Times This slapstick pop-n-j of the financial press You know, he was he was praising it as well And you just think okay, I understand The Guardian has to cover these things and they obviously need a right-wing journalist in there for balance I think this is ridiculous. I think also then Dan Kona, by the way, compared to Tim Shipman He knows fuck all. He's got zero value. Here we go. Oh my god. Yeah, I mean This is the worst take of all. I have to say that my response to everything Matthew Dan Kona has ever written is who cares? He's wrong about everything. Startlingly dull writer and extremely It's extremely difficult to get to the end of one of the columns without falling asleep I mean you mentioned there the dissidents and I think this is an important point actually, you know This is the you know Corbin is the kind of person who would have been involved and was involved in talking to kind of Charter 77 dissidents That stuff is really really important and also as I mentioned earlier These smears are the kind of things that got trotted out even against right-wing Labour leaders like Kinnock. Kinnock you had described as having Kinnock's Kremlin connection by the Sunday Times in the 1992 election accused of red connections Based on a meeting with a Soviet ambassador in the 1980s Well, let me tell you the number of people in the right-wing press who paled up with Augusto Pinochet right up to the evil witch-queen herself Margaret Thatcher who of course admired and gave asylum to Pinochet when he was You know running away from the consequences of his many many political murders and Executions we also had of course in 1995 the Sunday Times story on Michael Foote Based on Soviet block files again with a headline KGB Michael Foote was our agent and you know, you know by July of that year The newspaper had of course apologized and paid out quite substantial damages now on the question of legal action, of course we had I think Do we have the Ben Bradley tweet do we have that? Get Humpty Dumpty up. Yes. Here we go. So this is Ben Bradley who tweeted this Corbyn sold British secrets to communist spies get some perspective mate your priorities are a bit awry hashtag. Are you serious? What secrets in the late 80s? Well, I think this is how private I had a private eye shit how to sell oil off for cheap. So this is the secret So, okay for one thing. So here's the really funny thing Corbyn in the late 1980s an avowed member of the peace movement the anti-nuclear movement CND Not a privy councillor so the state secrets that he'd been privy to would be questionable But yes, that is a really good question about what British secrets might actually be Well, what are they British secret be born into aristocracy and fail your way upwards to the rest of life study the home secretary That's possible, you know get you know this Conduct partition and brutal oppression across the world including on your next door neighbor and somehow managed to have an International reputation as anything other than a rogue state based on liking gin and tea. Yeah, that's true You know how the fuck anyone thinks something called bread sauce is nice You know this is what middle-class up in middle-class people put on food I have tasted it once it actually looks like kind of vomit It looks like the kind of thing that you know as a baby throws up after how can bread be a source Well, God alone knows these days people buy it in a packet Water onto it and then take the gray vegetables and cover it in that no It's it's really kind of sweet tasting kind of gruel like quite revolting. Yeah, no No, no, no, no, let me tell you it's really not you really don't want it But no, I mean so to be serious for a moment, though This is so Ben Bradley put this tweet up about an hour before we came on air tonight I spoke to him for Jeremy Corbyn said we have instructed a lawyer to send a letter to Ben Bradley to instruct him to delete His libelous tweet Ben Bradley has deleted his libelous tweet Now you might think it's done the kind of work that he wanted it to do You might also think That that this kind of thing Is it strange for a leader of the opposition shouldn't a politician expect to be slandered and libeled maybe that's true But this is exactly the kind of political signaling that led to a man who was obsessed with you know far-right Conspiracies against the British people Fashioning or buying a gun off some source and assassinating Jo Cox in the run-up to to the election last year This is exactly the same kind of paranoid enemy of the people enemy of Britain's scare mongering That led to that murder and I think it's absolutely right to come down hard on it And I think it is frankly fucking disgraceful that people who are supposed to be Public servants are engaged in exactly this kind of red scare baiting which includes by the way Paul Steins who has described himself as you know a fanatical Zealot-like anti-communist you know who gladly participated in running guns to the Contras he writes about this Yes participated in in raising funds for Unitar in Angola sort of murderous anti-communist anti-socialist anti-left Guerrilla group, you know has defended as recently as just a few years ago has defended the regime of Augusto Pinochet and Chile These are the people You know who are behind? You know these these storms who are behind this kind of despicable behavior and we shouldn't give them time of day Frankly, they should be handed out of public life entirely I cannot believe that we are now You know that the agenda for the media to be set by people like Paul Steins who has blood on his hands. He's a murderer He's amazing. Paul Steins is a murderer He writes about going into the Contras and firing off AK-47s He says he was firing off AK-47s in Joberg, I believe while you know Paddling around with these kind of people, you know, he says he never wore a hang Mandela badge But he hung out with people at the Federation for conservative students who did so that's Paul Steins He's quite upfront about it. He says look, this was just cause these were politics. It's a civil war And you know, he says he has no regrets. He says he has no regrets I'm sure none of it was I'm sure that was illegal But you want these people like you say setting the press agenda in a liberal democracy. I certainly don't yeah I mean, I think the other thing that Ben Bradley is trying to do here Which is connected to this kind of stoking up of these right-wing fears is Exactly, you know the kind of cultural strategy that we've talked about a bit before Both on the fix previously, but also on Navarro FM that these people really want because it's the last thing they have Now Ben Bradley also applauding a Conservative activist for calling Owen Jones a little fag on Twitter the other day This is a guy who's really Getting behind this kind of cultural stuff and I think it really has to be stamped out as soon as possible But he's also really stupid. He's also really Can we get up this this tweet? Well, we'll go to a break in a bit, but we'll get at this tweet where I Tweaked it earlier on today. It's from the Stephen Nolan program. If you guys could pull it up I Mean, it's remarkable. I mean he's new and he's one of the most promising. He's not 30. Is he a God alone? I see 29 28 29 MP for Mansfield majority of about I think a thousand and fifty eighty in in our sights for next time You know, I mean, you know, there's got to be a campaign there to unseat this guy This guy is real real poison. Well, this is why him and Anna Subri in particular. I'll work soon every time Owen Jones does this unseat thing. They get like really triggered, you know, and they start spewing nonsense on Twitter The snowflake right and you know, and they start saying oh this abuse cut What abuse can't carry on what campaigning to win a parliamentary seat in a democratic manner where the political party? I mean, it's just a nonsense. Have we got that tweet yet with Ben Bradley This is remarkable if you can't then I'll just this is not it's not it. It's not it It was my tweet. It was with Stephen Nolan and Stephen Nolan says, you know, what's going on? Brexit this is the week when we found out there was no plan in regard to Irish border And that they were talking to the Republic without, you know, processing things to DUP and he said we're making up as we go along You know, I mean that's when it hit me. I got it was like a ton of bricks Actually, this guy's just really thick. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely. But yeah So these are these are the people who want this kind of right wing media storm They want these these things about this we'll hear more about it. It's such a bullshit story The other thing I would say before we move on to Theresa May's conversion to to the cause of Free well not free somewhat reduced education. She's not NCASC member She's now got a position on fees to the left of much of the parliamentary Labour Party The the the thing I would say just before before we move on to that is that this is a prime case For the need for leveson to yes Now it's in the manifesto of the Labour Party It was also I believe in the manifesto of a small party which no longer has any relevance whatsoever They're yellow and support Tories wherever they can so I won't talk about them But you know, it is worth just mentioning that this was an inquiry that was supposed to feed on from from the previous Iteration for leveson, which is going to be a wider inquiry about the kind of criminal behavior of both news of the world and other Papers as well as corruption in the police around these things around kind of these source the sourcing of these stories and and you know These people the people who own these papers and people who edit these papers papers like the Sun Papers like the Telegraph are running shit scared of leveson to really really don't want it And whereas Theresa May has announced her inquiry into the sustainability of the press with a whisper that in order to keep quality journalism like Check spy Corbyn alive. She might think about subsidizing the dead tree press So there you go. Those are the two things on offer bungs for Murdoch Or actually having this stuff come to light. I mean, I think that's quite a stark choice very stark choice We're going to talk about fees in a minute. I think we're going to go to a break We're going to a break Right Ben, let's start with you How has your government demonstrated that you're capable of delivering Brexit given the absolute Shambles we've seen over the last couple of days This is a completely unprecedented thing isn't it? This is what people seem to forget. There is no rule books to follow There is no You know history of this happening that you can go out and find the best practice and go and do it You know One way or the other they are both sides you UK government essentially having to make it up as they go along because there is no example of this So it's not surprising that it's difficult. It's not surprising that You know everything doesn't go perfectly to time into plan. Have you just heard yourself easy thing? Have you just heard what you have just said of your mouth? You're working it out as you go along. Well, what's the other option alternative? What plan do you follow? You're into this a plan a thoughtful plan the greatest minds in the UK sitting down and over the last 12 months thinking to themselves Oh, I wonder how the DUP might react if we do a deal with the Irish government and don't tell them the Irish border We were talking about for you know We've been talking about for nearly every day for a year and yet you've let the camera by the top of the interview Ben You're making it up as you go along So it's Theresa May time and now fees were good Now they are bad, but also good So Theresa May has experienced a kind of conversion to something you and I could have told her seven years ago, which is that Universities are going to will act like cartels when it comes to being able to set their own fees The market doesn't work And that we live in well, let's hear it in her own words. Shall we we've got a video of Theresa May giving her speech today in Darby about tuition fees Through education we can become a country where everyone from every background Gains the skills they need to get a good job and live a happy and fulfilled life To achieve that we must have an education system at all levels which serves the needs of every child And if we consider the experience which many young people have of our system as it is today It's clear that we don't have such a system today The competitive market between universities which the system of variable tuition fees envisaged has simply not emerged Or but a handful of universities charge the maximum possible fees for undergraduate courses Three year courses remain the norm and the level of fees charged do not relate to the cost or quality of the course So we now have one of the most expensive systems of university tuition in the world So now is the time to take action to create a system that is flexible enough to ensure that everyone gets the education that suits them And that's what the review which I'm launching today sets out to deliver So we have her announcing today that we have the most expensive or one of the most expensive tuition systems in the world system for which Theresa May voted and The objections to which everything she's just outlined in that speech was said to her and said to them and said to the government Well ahead of it happening. It was raised in Parliament. It was raised by students. It was raised during the protests It was raised in lobbying. It was raised throughout now Of course, we don't think that this is all about evidence-based Policymaking and that she's holding her hands up and going oh, I was wrong because she's not reversing the system at all But what is important is that she's announced this inquiry where she says That you know, it's going to be chaired by a city economist Brilliant There might be a little bit of a reduction in fees for some courses Which will inevitably for struggling universities to charge a lower fees for poorer students So you get more striation in the higher education system Astriation which already exists And you know, it's supposed to run for a year report in early 2019 And so it's really kicking the issue into the long grass for a while But it's think it's really striking here actually that she you know She says things like oh there should be greater focus on technical education But she refuses to give a target of how many people are going to go to university It's just a kind of completely baffling failure on her part. I mean politically. It looks really really bizarre She was a senior member of the government that brought in these things. She defended them and she defended them in interviews She defended them in Parliament. She voted for them. It encourages a cartel You know, you know, and one of the places you can see this happening, you know, the gradual, you know Pulling apart the university system is in the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, which are really selling out the UCU strike They're you know, not using their power next week. Well, it's ongoing. So it's a rolling course of series It's not the most fun next week. Yep. Yep. Yep And you know, obviously we support the strike and we would encourage everyone watching to support the strike as well If you're in a higher education institution You can find out more about that at the UCU website. You can find out more about it It's the excellent article in the LRB blog by Wassy Mewkoop from Cambridge But so all the things that we're saying are wrong We could have told her years ago and the economics of this stuff is mad as well You know, the the operating on debt still uses RPI that, you know, extracts more cash from students you know punitive measures such as You get a punishment add-on if you don't notify the student loan company that you've moved house Despite the fact that this stuff is clawed back in PAYE for most employees. Anyway, anyway, it's all technical stuff And this is all good. I mean, I'm not paid back a penny of my students Well, I pay back a very little okay I'm exaggerating. The thing is is that the thing is that three quarters of graduates now will not repay I've not paid the principal, right? I mean, I know I've paid some of the debt Yeah, some of the interest of but yeah, so that this is of course a good reason to abolish all student debt This is a good reason to abolish tuition fees and what's so baffling about this is a political move is that she's come out with this technocratic policy That she already knows won't work The experts in the field are saying this doesn't sound like it will work and will have really deleterious effects on higher education as a whole and It looks much less attractive and much less easy to understand than labor's proposal, which is that they should be abolished I mean God knows what she thinks she's doing well firstly and this is really weird is she's highlighted a problem and Then she's not offered a solution. Yeah, I mean, it's literally the worst possible thing you can do on any policy subject Then she said and I found it's very odd She wants fees to be lower for human humanities degrees and she's saying well They have less capital investment, which is true to train a doctor costs a lot of money, but we need doctors We need engineers, you know, I'm a humanities student myself We also need humanities students But clearly when you've got I think right now A&E's are about I think we need an extra 5,000 doctors in the NHS You know the priority you'd imagine will be on training People that are gonna work in key public service and of course she keeps the tier 2 visa cap on so it's not like you can Anyway, no, so I found this particularly interesting not because I agree or disagree But because it's gonna be out of kilts of what the majority of conservatives think you know I actually think most conservatives if you said engineers doctors stem subjects, they shouldn't have to pay fees They'd go yeah, yeah, and they were self David Beckham studies They should have to pay fees and what Theresa May is actually saying is the opposite. Yeah, yeah, which I just I can't What she's thinking well the thing that's interesting about this is that actually this is a Nick Timothy idea and so the cold dead hand of Crap Rasputin comes back from the grave. He looks terrible. He does look terrible. We have an image of we can get a picture of Nick Timothy up My god, he really does look awful Anyway, maybe we'll have can I also say there's a big political factor here, isn't there if you're a opponent if this You're the Labour Party He's not 40 yet. Yeah. No, I mean so so the thing that I thought was Was really really striking So he had said he said that this is something that he had wanted to do and he'd been blocked by justine greening and jay johnson So this is Theresa May out of ideas coming back to Nick Timothy Nick Timothy called tuition fees an ultimately pointless Ponzi scheme now obviously she's not she's not courageous enough to go With this stuff. Yeah, but she also doesn't have any other policy ideas. She's floating rudderless. She has no friends She has no advisor. She is a complete concoction. You know, she was Invented by Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill. She was mage. This is a woman who's very introverted Who is not charming who is not a political performer She was invented whole cloth by these two advisors that she's been forced to cut loose And no wonder she's going back to these kind of zombie versions of their ideas But you know, it just doesn't seem to be working and now we're and now she's stuck with the human lollipops That is Gavin Barwell If we could if we can get I'm not joking if we can get Gavin Barwell up He looks like he looks like a toffee apple He's one of these amazing people in politics who managed to look both three years old and 60 years old at the same time Sort of boss baby of the conservative right. Can I say this is this is quite interesting for me is that um What Theresa May is doing at the moment? I think it's sort of reminiscent of um Henry Clinton and a kind of lot of the melt center left So it's identifying a big problem and then offering like a really weird like as Paul Moses says altering the cuff links Yeah, so she's saying you know Henry Clinton was doing this a lot in the campaign trial, right? So she'd say like well actually we want to have a negative income tax And it'll be over three years against the principal on the margin and then it will be inverted to the ratio Which will be relative to future income indexed against age and income inequality. Nobody knows what you're talking about Absolutely, absolutely simple policy Scrap tuition fees. No, that's completely That was bar where I was head flashing up subliminally Like some sort of monstrous Christ almighty. What what a monstrous looking It looks like a lollipop. He does. Um, so but anyway, my point is this politically I mean labor is just so much easier to understand So there is something I wanted to talk about which links to our earlier story Which is to do with fake news on this subject and I for my sins Listen to the radio for bbc radio for today program in the morning. It's on my my alarm goes off in the morning I have an hour Of the today program. This is the catholic in you. Yeah. Yeah. No, I think I begin my day with mortification Rather than the cat of nine tails. Yeah, but so I was astonished this morning to hear john Humphries who's paid 600 000 pounds per annum by the bbc Um interviewing nicky morgan and we have the clip. So let's go to the clip and just listen to it because it's quite amazing There's a big political factor here, isn't there if you're a opponent if this you're the Labour party Jeremy Corbyn says, yeah, this is what we're going to do and we we're and and we're going to offer students maintenance grants as well You've got a struggle on for the youth to vote in the next election Well, I think it's a bit more sophisticated than that and I think pretty soon after the election As far as I can remember Jeremy Corbyn and john mcdonnell both said oh, well, we're not sure we we're going to abolish it It was all you know a promise made in the heat of an election that they knew was absolutely unaffordable And I think young people know that too and the young people that I meet I represent a large university in my constituency and the young people I meet there absolutely understand that it's right that they make a contribution To the cost of their courses. They're the ones who are going to Benefit from it and of course people don't pay the fees up front. It's something they pay back over the course of 30 30 years So it is the right system to have in place. It's the right one as I say to put universities on a sustainable foot And that was nicky morgan who then went completely unchallenged by john humphreys despite the blatant lie She'd just engaged in at no point after the election and this is an important point at no point after the election Did anyone in the labour party row back on the promise to abolish tuition fees? It's in the manifesto it continues to be in the manifesto and John humphreys who you would think would know this quite basic political fact, right? This is the man who is supposed to be the bbc's One of the bbc's top interviewers top political journalists should have looked at nicky morgan and said you are lying And what you're doing here is you know that you probably won't be challenged on this on the show and you can get away with You know ceding this idea Into the ears and brains of the listeners to the today program And these are not the people who will be listening 45 minutes later when john humphreys in a very brief and very highly decided Oh, well apparently that wasn't true He should be if he were even halfway Basically journalistically competent and this is important because the today program sets the agenda for the news cycle of the day the most important show on radio right and He is incapable of doing the basic journalistic competence of challenging her. Why is he there? He's there because basically he's not dead yet. I mean a baffling that he's not You know the man should retire really get carry gracey in Carrie gracey The movement starts here. Carrie gracey to present the today program So what I think is important here is it tells us two things one is that nicky morgan Is a snake and knows what she's doing and she's not I mean she's not bright But she knows what she's doing in this circumstance, which is that she's going on there to feed a story Like this into the into you know into the people who are listening, you know Hopefully into the press don't get picked up Um, so so that's important. She knows what she's doing there And the press is astonishingly incompetent. The press is incapable of digging into the most basic story here This is a very very basic You know key fact that you will remember in the difference between the policies of the conservative party and the labor party From the election last year one doesn't want to touch tuition fees. The other one wants to abolish them That is quite basic But also what I think a lot of them don't understand within the media people at john humpfrees Labour's policy has decided democratically Yeah, with the tories therese may sort of write it on a napkin and nick timothy's sort of telling down whatsapp What's a bit in the manifesto on the menshtax for instance? Yeah The labor party manifesto is democratically agreed to it goes through the n.e.c Of some in the national policy forum, you know, you can't just change stuff on the hoof And obviously what she's trying to do here is she's Creating a false ambiguity between liquidating existing student debt and getting rid of the fees And this is a perennial feature of how the tories seek to discredit corbin Is this false ambiguity? It's the exact same with the this cheque stuff, right? So they're saying almost immediately as newton dun did james cleverly said it very quickly Or it's not really true But how can we trust somebody who maybe could have been in such a position, you know talking potentially to a cheque ambassador? He's you know or a diplomat. Of course he can talk to a cheque diplomat. Why not? Yeah, I mean tom newton dun should have ended that tweet there, right? Like that It's not true He said I mean the first bit of the tweet is saying if we can get the tom newton dun Tweet up from earlier on he literally says Yeah, here we go. There's little hard evidence corbin was a painless play. That's it. That's the tweet That's the tweet There you go. There you go. You lying bastard Well leveson too is going to come on and unroll these people and I'm very much looking forward to it Um, so yeah, that that is Theresa May. So she's falling back on timothyism Um, you know, it's what you know, it's worth saying that this is a sign of a really really weak prime minister And someone who is dead out of ideas weakest prime minister over Certainly of the last hundred years. I think it's pretty impressive and nobody has the capacity to act Uh decisively. No, no, no That's it. I think I don't think we have anything more to say about these people I mean, it's just been an astonishing week. I you know, I I continue to be utterly amazed at the state of the british press I continue to be utterly amazed that Theresa May hasn't sort of run screaming to antarctica or somewhere You know, she must feel the knives around her. Um, yeah, no, so this week has been uh, I have just been You know, it's been jaw dropping and my feeling is is that this check stuff is going to run and run and run And it's running on fumes. There's nothing There and I hope I genuinely do hope That if this kind of libel is repeated by mp's absent parliamentary privilege, it can't be sued for libel for what you say now, of course But if people if, you know, tori mp is tweeting this kind of nonsense out and doing this kind of signalling to hard right people Like thomas mayer was I hope corbin does sue them. I hope that he sues them, you know to you know to beggary does the hopkins Yeah, they have to sell their homes go and take ketamine in south africa. That'd be great I mean for me, I couldn't agree more these two stories for me bring together The fact that we have a system in freefall a system of consent as well as a system of politics And you see it with carillion. You saw it with grandfell You saw it with the hdv stuff and actually went right through the labor party as much as being a an issue between the two major parties And now you see it with this check this checks by nonsense and tuition fees this week Near liberalism and the consent that was behind it is gone And we don't really know what's coming next do we? Yeah, but it's an exciting time great Well, we'll see you next monday on the fix. We will indeed. Bye. Bye. Bye