 the driest january of your lives is thankfully over unfortunately february might not be much better although the surprisingly successful roll out of the uk's vaccine gives us at least a little hope that march could be. Moist i don't know is that is that how i should put it ash you're joining me for tonight's show we're gonna be talking about less so much the roll out of the vaccine but the one thing that potentially could undermine our route out of. This pandemic which is new strains emerging what does that mean for how we should manage our borders in this country how what your predictions for february do you think there is any sort of you know silver linings or do you think it is just going to be like the last month. Again i think it's going to be like the last month because mid february was the government's reassess date for this lockdown with hospitalizations and deaths being where they are i don't foresee that there's going to be any significant changes to what we are and aren't allowed to do schools aren't going to come back any time before march and that's the government's first priority so if you like me hoping to get back in the pub and you know drink your emotions away again. You might have to wait quite a bit longer just getting pissed in front of the telly still i watch the mass singer for the first time this weekend so it does feel like lockdown has dragged on a while on tonight's show we will also be discussing labours proposal to vaccinate teachers and the pushback they're getting for that. And paul decker who is being lined up for a pretty significant job you'll find out about that at the end of the show and very significantly the coup which is going on in my and my we've got a great guest. To make sense of that story for you and before we go on to our first story you know the score do share the show link. I'm tweet on the hashtag tisky so put your super chats in the comments and comment on the twitch stream. Today it was announced the South African strain of coronavirus has infected at least 11 people in Britain with no known connection to people going to and from South Africa that suggests community transmission in the UK is taking place. The news is worrying as there's reason to believe this strain will be more resistant to existing vaccines than the strains we have already for example. The Novavax vaccine which reported 89.3% efficacy in phase three trials in the UK was shown to be only 50% effective in South Africa when it comes to the Johnson and Johnson vaccine. That was also shown to be less effective in South Africa than elsewhere overall that vaccine has an efficacy of 66% reaching 72% in some regions but only 57% in South Africa. Now new variants constituted 95% of coronavirus cases in that South African trial. So it's pretty clear that there's a relationship between this new strain and the vaccines being less effective. However in today's Downing Street press briefing Dr Susan Hopkins of Public Health England suggested there's no need to despair. So three of the vaccines that are that have been used to date in trials have shown that they've been effective against the South African variant at a level greater than was set as the minimum standard by WHO and the US FDA. We expect all other vaccines to have a similar level of effectiveness, particularly in reducing hospitalization and death. And we're doing detailed laboratory studies at the moment with the South African variant growing in the labs so that we will be able to estimate that with greater robustness over the next couple of weeks. So some good good perspective there are less effective vaccine does not necessarily mean an ineffective vaccine this would not take us back to step one if it were to become endemic. But it is obviously less than ideal, which is why in areas where it has been found all over 16s will be offered the door to door or postal test in a bid to try and route out this new strain, which apparently is more transmissible than the original strain. We had similarly transmissible to the new strain, which is currently endemic in the country. The difference between the new strain, the UK strain and the South African strain is that the South African strain is, as I've said, less or that the vaccines are less effective against it. Let's get up the areas where people will be getting these universal tests in London. They are in Ealing, South Tottenham and Mitcham in the West Midlands in Warsaw in the Northwest in South Port in Hertfordshire, Brocksbourne and in the Southeast Maidstone and Woking. There are around 80,000 people that live in those eight neighbourhoods and this is, you know, this is quite proactive from the government. Matt Hancock was asked how confident he was that these actions would prevent the strain becoming endemic in the UK. So on all of us to contain this new variant, of course, in lockdown, when the number of cases overall is coming down, we hope too that we can bring down the number of cases of the new variant. And we're sending in the extra surge testing and the enhanced contact tracing to try to stop those chains of transmission to stop the spread altogether of these new variants. But it is not straightforward and as you say, there may be further cases that we don't know about yet and our genomic sequencing is in place to try to spot them. The most important thing is that people in the postcode areas that I've outlined need to take extra special precautions. The stay at home message is there for everyone, but in particular in those areas, it is absolutely vital that people minimise all social contact and get a test when the opportunity arises. And we're going door to door to ensure that people have the chance to get those tests in the in the postcode areas that we've described. I think probably the most interesting, the most important part of what Matt Hancock said there was that basically the existing conditions we have, the existing rules we have to stop the spread of COVID-19 is also going to work for these different variants. So whilst we're in a lockdown across the country, it's quite unlikely actually for these strains to spread in the same way that the Kent variant did. Remember at that point in time, we weren't in a lockdown. That's why it exploded in a way that was out of control. So these variants are going to be especially problematic when we start to come out of the lockdown. If we start to come out of the lockdown because we have enough people vaccinated that we think if there's some COVID moving around the working age population, that won't be the end of the world. In that situation, if a new strain comes in, which is vaccine-resistant, then that could cause real, real problems, which one might think should be a wake-up call. If we're celebrating a successful rollout of a vaccine, should we not be guarding more heavily against the one thing that could stand in the way of a route out of this epidemic? New strains even more resistant to the vaccine than the one in South Africa. Now, that's the argument Labour are making. They scheduled a debate in the Commons today on strengthening travel restrictions to Britain to keep out new strains. They're proposing an extension to the existing government policy, which is hotel quarantine for people coming from red zones, their places where new strains have already been identified. So currently South Africa, Latin America and Portugal. It's worth noting that in most countries, we're in one of the red zones because we've also got a more transmissible COVID strain. So this isn't just something about other countries, we're very much in that category for everyone else. That debate on travel restrictions, Labour saying let's make the hotel quarantine broader, that's going on right now or starting any moment. So we don't have a clip from that for you, but we can take a look back to last week's PMQs where Starmer made the same argument the party are making today. We've known about the variants to the virus since early December when it was announced in the House of Commons. We know some of those variants are coming from abroad, but we don't know the route. Surely the Prime Minister can see that what is required now is that everybody coming into the country from anywhere in the world should be tested and subject to quarantine in a hotel. Why can't that be put in place today? Now that seems like a sensible policy to me, I support the motion that Labour are putting forward in today's debate. I think the idea that you only quarantine people from red zones doesn't really understand the nature of the virus or the extent to which we could lose everything. From what I'm seeing, from people I'm talking to, from what I see on Twitter as well, it's kind of almost as sort of regardless of your politics, people seem to look at Australia, look at New Zealand and say, look, do we really want to risk another summer of restrictions, another winter like the last one, just so people can travel internationally? No, why are we leaving these holes in the defence system of our pandemic response? So I think this idea of having mandatory hotel quarantine for everyone coming into the country, just like they do in Australia and New Zealand, is much more sensible than the Tory approach, which is to say, if you're coming from these particular zones where we've already identified a new strain, then you'll be quarantined because, as we know, people can go via third countries, but more significantly, we could have new strains developing in places where we haven't yet identified them. Anyway, on a policy level, I haven't seen that much pushback against what the Labour Party are demanding. However, on the side of messaging, more people are concerned. So in the run-up to that debate, Labour have been promoting this particular advert on social media, and according to Eleni Correa, who is a journalist at the Times, it's being promoted specifically to people living in the red wall, which is those seats in the Midlands and the North of England, which were traditionally Labour voting, but fell to the Tories after Brexit, after Labour backed a second referendum, and these were people who had consistently or in that referendum had voted Brexit, so turned to Boris Johnson's Conservatives. Ash, I want to bring you in at this point. So both on a policy level, do you think what Labour are proposing is the right thing? Is it better than the current policy? And on a messaging level, do you find the sort of imagery and the language they're used by the Labour Party worrying, or do you just think that is the punchiest way, basically, to argue for what is a good COVID policy? I mean, so first on the policy itself, I agree with implementing some temporary travel restrictions, which would also mean you could have a fairer approach in terms of who could actually come here. So you could have a system of prioritising, so for family reunification, for people attending funerals, or to be with desperately ill family members, you could prioritise them coming to this country. So if you were allocating hotel quarantine spaces, you could do it in a fair way. It wasn't just who happened to be able to pay top dollar for airfare. So I think that there are ways in which you can do this, which obviously makes travel a lot more difficult. Obviously, there will be a lot of cases where it will severely impact people's ability to be with the people who they love the most, but you could do it in a way which doesn't just let the rich have a carp lunch to do what they like. So I do actually agree with the policy. What you can see with how it's being messaged is that the policy, which could be just named temporary travel restrictions, could be named hotel quarantine, is being framed as closed down our borders. So it's being used as a proxy for anti-immigration politics, because this is what Labour thinks they need to do in order to sell themselves to the so-called red wall seats, those seats in the North and the Midlands, which they lost in 2019, in no small part because of their Brexit referendum position. And that's a really dangerous thing to do, because one, it's not something that Labour are really going to be all that willing to back up when it comes to reducing immigration numbers more generally. That's not something that Keir Starmer particularly wants to do. It's not something that the party faithful want to do. It's not something that they are ever going to be able to play into as well as the Conservative party. And two, by making this connection between sort of protection of the borders and disease, it does play into xenophobic sentiment. And that is a really bad thing. What Labour had an opportunity to do was talk about temporary travel restrictions in a way which wasn't xenophobic, which put the policy first, which made a sensible case to the country and said, hey, you know what, you can decouple this from xenophobia. Instead of doing that, what they've done is just play lowest common denominator politics. And whenever Labour has tried to play into anti-immigration sentiment, it's always come back to bite them on the arse. I mean, on one level, I definitely agree with you there. I think it's clearly opportunistic what the Labour Party have done here. When I saw that advert, I thought, look, that's a punchy advert which potentially could actually shift government policy because the Tories aren't going to like to see something like that. But it is interesting that there are so many good COVID policies which the Labour Party haven't put punchy adverts in favour of. And that's precisely because this is the only policy where they thought, aha, we can back a policy which is both good in terms of managing coronavirus and ticks exactly those boxes which we want to tick to appeal to redwall voters who in their mind are prioritising mainly immigration. So like, ah, policy, we can back. That's actually electorally worthwhile. Let's put some energy into this. And I would have liked to have seen the same energy going into money for people to self-isolate, the same amount of energy going into a right for people who are shielding to have furlough money instead of them just being able to request it and then it being in the power of the boss whether or not it's granted. So I think undeniably, it's opportunistic what Labour have done here. I do also think in a way though that epidemiologically it's most understandable if you're talking about borders because in this one moment in time what you want is to have borders between epidemiological units so that you don't allow strains to travel between one and another. And that's not actually purely to protect this country. It's also means that strains that emerge here are less likely to go elsewhere. The fact that New Zealand and Australia have had no cases over the past 12 months or whatever it is is not just helpful for them. It's also helpful to us because it means we don't have to deal with a potential Australian strain or a New Zealand strain. So travel restrictions in the middle of a pandemic, very, very helpful. And it is one of the moments where borders are good. The thing is, I'm not disagreeing with you. What I'm saying is that the aesthetics are being presented in a very particular way. And I said this about the advert that they put out which looked like one of those Channel 5 daytime TV UK border force type things. Really, the focus was on immigration almost a proxy for immigration. Then it was really about disease. It was kind of playing into these quite established visual cues. But also if Labour wanted to decouple temporary travel restrictions from xenophobic policies, one is that they could make that clear. And two, one of the things that they could do is go equally as hard on the situation. Let's say Napier Barracks, which are asylum seekers are being held in dreadful conditions. There's a mental health crisis at Napier Barracks. There's a coronavirus crisis at Napier Barracks. And one of the things that the government has said, what Pretty Patel has said, the Home Office has said, is that they've been given shitty accommodation because anything better would be an insult to the UK taxpayer. Now the situation there is a danger to those asylum seekers. It's a danger to the people that work there. And it is potentially quite a significant vector for infection. So if you wanted to make a case for a non-Xenophobic approach to travel restrictions without affirming the idea of toughening up our borders at the expense of migrants, you could do those things at the same time. Holly Lynch has put out a statement. She did write a letter to the Home Office, but you don't necessarily see it front and centre in terms of Labour's talking points for the week. Ash, I think we're having a few problems with your connection. So we're going to try and sort that out while I explain to the audience the ins and outs of the Australian policy. So we talk about it a lot. I often see people on Twitter say, oh, no, it's not actually about close border. It's just about mandatory quarantine. In fact, actually, the Australian policy is quite explicit. So this is from the Australian government website Information for People Who Want to Travel to Australia. So it says, Australia's borders are closed. The only people who can travel to Australia are Australian citizens, residents, immediate family members, travellers who have been in New Zealand for the previous 14 days. So not including time in managed quarantine. So that reference to New Zealand, there is quite interesting. That's because both Australia and New Zealand have the same zero COVID policy. Both of them have the same restrictions on travel from anywhere other than each other's countries. So they've created a bit of a bubble, a COVID free bubble. They're the only countries you can travel from without restrictions to Australia is New Zealand and vice versa. There's no point in pretending that this wouldn't have costs. There are obviously people who have a much greater need to travel than others. The Australian system, even though immediate family members are allowed to travel into the country, it's still expensive and it's not easy. You have to pay for your own quarantine, you have to pay for your own hotel quarantine, which can be up to £1,600. And also, they have quite a strict limit on the number of people who can come every week because they don't have the capacity to do an effective hotel quarantine if numbers go beyond that. So there are real downside. You've got Australian residents and citizens or family members who are out of the country and are really struggling to get the right to return. But if you compare this to the number of deaths we've had, if you compare this to the possibility of our vaccine rollout ends up being ineffective and we have to develop a new mRNA vaccine and give everyone a booster and go back into lockdown, to me, it seems like it is probably worth it. Some people might disagree. For me, it probably is. One place where we did see objections though, which is interesting, a newspaper which doesn't normally ask for fewer travel restrictions or fewer controls at the borders was The Sun. So the reason they have found to oppose what Keir Starmer is demanding in the House of Commons is that it could affect England's qualification to the World Cup. I think we can get the headline here. Keir's own goal, England risk being kicked out of the World Cup under barmy labour border plans. The argument here is that if the Labour Party or if the government were to adopt this particular policy and it had no exclusions for elite sports people, as the proposal has put forward by the Labour Party doesn't have, then England would not be able to attend various qualifying matches in other countries. And that would throw the match. That would mean that the other team get to win. I can't remember what three countries it was because I don't follow football closely enough, but they are arguing that if this was implemented then it could cost our qualification to the World Cup. Now, maybe that stream, maybe a workaround can be found where elite footballers live in some sort of bubble where they don't actually come into contact with anyone else in British society. So it's almost like they're permanently in quarantine, perhaps based on their, based by their football teams. I don't quite know the practicalities of that. What this more says to me though, is when you've got people making up sort of these minor reasons for opposing what is actually a much broader, much more important policy. It was a bit like at the start of this pandemic where the government said, oh, we can't close pubs. No, we can't close football matches or rugby matches because then people will watch it in the pub. It's all like, why are we having this discussion? Just close the pubs as well. It really reminds me of that. It seems very overcome-able, if that's a word. It also reminded me of this great clip from Australian news, from a different world at the moment, about tennis stars quarantining before this month's Australian Open. Not wearing a mask in the player's minibus, the world number one issued demands on behalf of all quarantine players as he trained in Adelaide. He wants tennis Australia to move some to private homes with courts, to reduce the days in isolation, to let players visit coaches and to provide better food. People are free to provide lists of demands, but the answer is no. So that was the premiere of Victoria and from what I've read about Australia, he has been very, very effective in almost ignoring the business lobby. Basically, just like in this country, you've got the airline industry, you've got various tourism businesses who are saying, look, in the short term, we don't want these restrictions. So let's be super lax. He was like, your short termism is not the right policy for Australia. It turns out now that most businesses in Australia are happy with the government because they're looking at what's going on elsewhere and they're like, oh, it probably was worth taking that initial hit to get down to zero COVID. But I really like that you've got this politician who's saying these elite stars, they're complaining. I'm saying no. There was also in that report, we're going to watch more of it because it had some complaints coming from the girlfriend of a tennis star called Bernard Tomic and this is hilarious really. Let's take a look. When you do order your food, they have to inspect it and I don't know what the hell they do. By the time the food comes to you, it's so cold. But they and other players can expect little sympathy from Victorians. This is the worst part of quarantine. I don't wash my own hair. I've never washed my own hair. It's just not something that I do. I love the lack of perspective where you've just arrived in a country where they have a COVID policy which is the envy of the world because in the rest of the world, you've got the whole population like in this country, we're locked down in our houses, hospitals are piling up with people on ventilators, doctors and nurses are getting PTSD because they're dealing with so many patients in such a stressful situation. Yes, tens of thousands of deaths in this country, 100,000 deaths. The reason Australia and New Zealand aren't seeing these scenes is because they've taken strict public health measures including hotel quarantine when you arrive in the country. Now you've got this rich, wealthy celebrity married to an elite tennis star on social media saying the biggest problem here is I have to wash my own hair. I never wash my own hair. I also don't know how, Ash, I don't know if you know about this. How would it practically work for someone to not wash their own hair? Who does it for them? It would mean that a hairstylist would come in and blow dry it every single time. So she's probably used to having her hair styled from wet all the time. Once a week or what would it be? I mean, I don't know, she might wash her hair, depends different hair types. Some people wash their hair once a week, some people wash their twice a week, some people wash their hair every day. No matter how often you wash your hair, it's not actually that difficult. It needs the most basic of motor skills, running water, some shampoo, conditioner, if that's what you're into. If you want, you can use a hair dryer. If not, you can let your hair air dry. That's personally what I do. It's really fucking easy. I've been doing it since I was six years old. I don't know. I know that we like to dunk on these kind of vacuous, spoiled social media addicts. I love doing it. You love doing it. And I'm not going to stop now just because it's politically meaningless. I'm not going to stop. I understand where she's coming from because I don't wash my hair. I haven't washed my own hair in about five years. Right, let's go back to that clip because it is fun to mock the rich and famous, but I do think there was some more sort of quotes and comments in this segment from Australian news that I thought were very telling about the attitude of the Australians to public health. Four more from the tennis entourage tested positive, including for the first time, a player. 72 players deemed close contacts are now in hard quarantine. Almost a quarter of the Australian open field, not allowed to leave their hotel rooms for two weeks. Among them, some big names. The tone of most players' social media posts today more about coping than complaining. The Premier insists they knew this could happen. The notion that people weren't briefed, I think that argument really has no integrity whatsoever. And once again, no apologies for the hard line. Whilst the event is very important, nothing is more important than making sure that we follow public health advice. While the event is important, nothing is more important than us following public health advice. Now, how much would you have loved that to have been the rule of thumb, which Boris Johnson operated by during this whole pandemic? Because it's the complete opposite of what we've had in this country. In this country, Boris Johnson was like, well, I would like to follow the public health advice, but pub landlords are telling me this. I would like to follow public health advice. But the airlines are saying that they're going to go out of business if we don't allow international travel this summer. It doesn't matter. I'm not saying it doesn't have real victims. We should massively be subsidising those people so they can get through this period in a reasonable way without becoming destitute. But the idea that it's a price worth paying to have a winter like we're currently having, because some people wanted to go for a meal out, and this isn't to blame the public because restauranteers wanted people to come into their businesses and the government didn't want to cough up the necessary cash. It's so refreshing to see a politician who seems like they have a bit of perspective here. It just highlights how alien that has been in this particular country. It could have been so different. I do think here that whatever we think about the messaging the Labour Party is putting forward a policy which would improve coronavirus policy in this country, even if they've only adopted it for opportunistic reasons, I wouldn't necessarily disagree with that particular point. We're going to go on to our next story in one moment. First of all, if you are enjoying the show, please do share the show, stream, give us a like, and I'm going to go to a comment. Luke McConnell with a fiver heads up. There's a possibility Aaron may be a Starmer sleeper agent, but Stani is an anagram of abstain. Very interesting. All the dots are being joined up. I wonder what's going on there. Maybe that will have to be a subject of a Navarra media investigation soon. Next story. In the early hours of this morning, Myanmar's military mounted a coup, arresting Aung San Suu Kyi and other senior members of the country's ruling party. The coup came hours before Myanmar's newly elected parliament was due to meet for the first time since a November 8 election. Suu Kyi's party, the National League for Democracy had won that election by a landslide, winning 83% of the seats available. But despite results being validated by the country's election commission, the military backed union solidarity and development party has alleged widespread voter fraud. And the military have now stepped in, overturned those election results. This is the moment the coup was announced on the military's TV channel, which is now the only station airing in Myanmar. Due to refusing to settle voter list fraud, failing to take actions, not following the request to postpone lower house and upper house parliament sessions, there is a need to carry along with the plan according to the 2008 constitution, which talks about acts or attempts to take over the sovereignty of the union by wrongful, forcible means that can lead to disintegration of national solidarity. The state of emergency is in effect nationwide and the duration of the state of emergency is set to one year. Starting from this date, the order is announced in line with the 2008 constitution, article 417. To discuss Myanmar's coup, I'm joined by Joshua Carroll, a journalist who has spent six years reporting from the country for outlets, including Al Jazeera and The Guardian. Welcome to the show Joshua. Hi Michael, great to be here. I wanted to start with some background. I mean, many of our audience won't know much about Myanmar. I have to admit, I don't know much about Myanmar, especially before reading about these stories today. So the background I want is really the extent to which this is a democracy being overturned. Because as I understand it, yes, this is obviously an incredibly anti-democratic action. But how far had the process of democratisation gone in Myanmar up to this point? I think the military already had quite a lot of power. Is that correct? So Myanmar spent 50 years as a military dictatorship until 2010 when the military held a rigged election to install one of its proxy parties. And that party came to power in 2011. That party was called the Union Solidarity, Union Solidarity and Development Party. And that was kind of the start of this political transition. So, you know, that was a kind of semi-civilian government. It was former generals who had taken off their uniforms and put on civilian clothes to lead this new administration. And they brought in all kinds of reforms. They freed a bunch of political prisoners. They ended pre-publication censorship of the press. And they started bringing in lots of economic reforms that enabled sort of lots of quite real and concrete changes in life. The internet for the first time a few years after this transition began. But while all this was happening, you know, it was clear that the military was not actually ceding power in any kind of meaningful sense. The military installed this government. And before it did so, it wrote a constitution that sort of entrenched its political power. The constitution gives the military a quarter of all seats in parliament. It gave it control of key ministries. So, yeah, around the early 2010s there was this big narrative in the international media that Burma was democratizing. Al-Sansu-Chi was freed from House Arrest. And she was allowed to contest a by-election in 2012, and she won a seat in parliament. And I think that was when, you know, optimism really started to grow and people started to ask, you know, is this a genuine democratic transition that's happening? And then in 2015, the country held its first open election, like openly contested election since 1990. So it was the first election that the NLD was actually contested in. Tsuchi's party, the National League for Democracy, won that by a landslide. And there was a really huge wave of optimism after that happened. This, you know, for the first time in decades, the military had allowed a largely free and fair vote. And there were lots of problems with it. A key one being that the Rohingya were excluded from voting, the Rohingya minority in Rakhine State. And I think you could see some of the early warning signs of the genocidal campaign that happened later in 2017 there with that sort of active mass disenfranchisement. Yeah, so the answer is before this happened, you know, there were some real sort of concrete changes that materially impacted people's lives. Myanmar came in much more free and open society, especially in cosmopolitan areas. People felt a lot more empowered to talk about politics and to criticize people in power and to criticize the military. There were still lots of restrictions. There were still lots of lines that if you crossed, you were likely to land yourself in trouble with the military. And, you know, lots of people were still getting jailed for speaking out against the military and that kind of thing. But overall, materially, it seemed people's lives were changing. And it was definitely, it was definitely a completely different era to the sort of highly repressed society that existed beforehand. Yes. And presumably there's a, can you hear me now, by the way? Can you hear me? I can, yeah, yeah. Perfectly. Perfect. And presumably now there's a danger that all of that goes backwards. So the limited sort of elements of liberalization we saw in the society where people were no longer scared to critique the government in the same way that they were before, we could see a complete reversal of that with this coup. Yeah. So, yeah, it'll be interesting to see how things play out. I mean, the military has already imposed an all night curfew, which as far as I can tell, they, that's going to be in place for the next year in 8pm to 6am curfew. So that does suggest that at least for this, at least for the next year, the tree is planning to run things, you know, rule with an iron fist again, act in a very repressive way. It's still unclear whether they're planning to start rounding up activists and journalists and that kind of thing. A lot of people are still quite scared. Some people are in hiding. Yeah, I mean, I suppose there's a chance they might try and do a sort of soft a coup where a lot of the benefits that people enjoyed under the transition sort of stay in place, people still get into the access and there's still kind of limited freedoms within the country, but maybe there's just a red line that you don't cross. Yeah, but the science so far suggests, I would suggest that they're going sort of the more repressive route at the moment. And finally, could I get you to talk a bit about Aung San Suu Kyi? Because obviously, until very recently, she was a global icon, someone who was seen as this very, very principled fighter for democracy. She sacrificed an enormous amount as a person to fight for democracy in Myanmar, but what a Nobel Peace Prize, in fact. But since 2017, especially has become incredibly tarnished on the global stage because of her role, her defense of the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya people. And that means that that will complicate the international support she can get. But as I understand it, domestically, she's still incredibly popular. So do you think her popularity within the country will mean that this coup might not be as easy as the military would hope? Do you think there could be a movement around her which restores democracy? And also, what should progressives around the world make of Aung San Suu Kyi? Because she seems like a very, very conflicted character. Yeah. So Suu Kyi, her party, the NLD released a statement earlier attributed to her and she was making quite a forceful call for people to resist the coup. It kind of was like she was asking people to go out and protest. And one of her, a senior figure in the National League for Democracy called Wintain, he told social media after that statement came out that what Suu Kyi meant by that was that she was calling for civil disobedience and nonviolent action. And yeah, as you say, she remains enormously popular among her base in the country, particularly among the Burma ethnic majority. So yeah, I mean, Suu Kyi telling people to go out and protest against the military that there's not really a more influential person in the country. So if anybody can get people doing that, I suppose it's Suu Kyi, whether or not that will result in any kind of, I don't want to say meaningful, that's not the right word, but whether that will result in any kind of effective action is a different question. The last time there was an uprising against the military was in 2007 that was led by Buddhist monks. That was very violently repressed. Soldiers on the streets gunning protesters down and that kind of thing. And before that, it was the 1988 student led pro-democracy uprisings, which was repressed even more savagely. So it's definitely possible that we might see some kind of protest movement against this. I think it's possible that what the military is trying to do by saying, okay, in a year we're going to have another election, they might be trying to, they might be trying to knit that in the bud and sort of send the message to people that if you're patient and you wait and you don't kick up a fuss, then maybe you can have your democracy back in a year and it's not worth getting excited about now. Yeah, as for what progressives around the world should make of Suchi, I mean, my personal read on it and I think it's really, really difficult to, I think it's really difficult to form a meaningful opinion on these kind of things because there's just such a lack of information about the way she thinks and what's going on inside her head. But she definitely seems to have a very strong nationalist ideology. I mean, her father was Myanmar's independence hero. He was assassinated when she was very young. She grew up with this very strong notion that her family was part of the history of Myanmar. And in 1988, when there were pro-democracy uprisings, she very quickly became and the leader of that movement and dispute the association with her father. So in that sense, she's a nationalist. In other sense, she is a liberal. She was welcoming in foreign investment while she was in power. She kind of has a neoliberal bent too. And I think what confuses people about Suchi is they say, well, she was this democracy icon and apparently this liberal hero. And then she went on to support this genocide very staunchly for me. Personally, I don't really see a contradiction there because I think we have lots of examples of liberal heroes from all over the world who support all kinds of atrocious thing and support all kinds of mass violence. I'll leave it to the viewers to think of some examples for themselves. But I think something is happening there with Suchi where because it's kind of a foreign country that is far away for a lot of people and people don't know a lot about it, it's easier to kind of feel alienated from what's happening there. So when Suchi, this liberal icon does something bad, it's easy to paint a very black and white narrative, whereas if a liberal icon like Barack Obama, for example, supports mass violence somewhere else abroad, you have to just do a lot more intellectual work to argue that that's unequivocally evil because there's always lots of people that are going to show up to debate you, whereas that's not really the case with Suchi. Joshua Carroll, thank you so much for joining us to fill us in on what's going on. It's obviously going to be a developing story. So thank you so much for speaking to us today. My pleasure. Let's go to a couple of comments. Julie Bateson with £10. Blinking Super Chat, finally figured it out. Please give shout out for all those with Alzheimer's and carers. Remind, they can get support at Alzheimer's.org.uk. Thank you very much for that. Super Chat, a very important piece of public information there. Let's go straight on to our next story. Keir Starmer's talent for getting his opinion pieces in Tory newspapers continued this weekend with an article on vaccinating teachers. The piece was headlined. So Keir Starmer, let's harness the spirit that has made us the envy of the world to get every child back to school. So in the piece, he argued or he said, I share the government's ambition to make it a national mission to reopen our schools. I will do everything in my power as leader of the Labour Party to make that happen. I have offered to work with the Prime Minister on this, including calling for the opening of Nightingale style classrooms. And I renew that commitment today. He says, I believe we can take a further step towards reopening our schools by getting our teachers and school staff vaccinated as soon as possible, as the mail on Sunday has called for. Now this proposal, which Labour have had since about last week, they've said, to get our kids back into school quickly, let's vaccinate the teachers, has had some pushback from the Conservatives and some people in the media because it is seen as going against the proposals from the JCVI. I'll talk a bit more about those in them in a moment and potentially it would mean pushing down more vulnerable people down the priority list. We'll talk about the details of that in one moment. First of all, this is Stammer's response because he tries to preempt that argument. He writes, this is not about deprioritizing existing groups. That is not what I'm calling for. It is about having the ambition to do both. I've met the staff at the vaccine centres and I know they are up for this challenge. We can capture that spirit by going further, faster and smarter too. For example, we should be looking at how we can use our supply more efficiently. It's estimated that 5% of vaccines are wasted. That could mean more than 120,000 a week based on recent numbers or the equivalent of more than 10% of school staff in England. Now, that last part of the argument I don't find particularly convincing is Kierstammer essentially saying, look, Britain has the fastest vaccination rollout of any major country in the world, any non-very small country in the world. But I think it can get faster. We don't have to make tough decisions because let's just make the fastest rollout even faster. I do, however, think there are some good arguments for vaccinating teachers first. What people have been pointing out, which is very true, is the key reason that schools are closed right now is not because teachers are at risk of getting coronaviruses because of their impact on community transmission. Clearly, with COVID-19 so widespread in the country and with so many people in vulnerable categories not vaccinated, it would not be safe to open schools at this point in time. And vaccinating teachers wouldn't change that. However, I can imagine a time in the near future where there is a non-negligible risk of community transmission by kids going back to schools but us deciding collectively as society that it's worth it. It's worth kids going back to school while there's still some risk of them getting COVID-19 and taking it back to their families, presumably by that point in time you'd have the most vulnerable people have been vaccinated, but still there is a risk of it spreading. Now, in that situation, I would say it does actually, you know, there's a good argument for vaccinating teachers because if we are asking people to go into a situation where they are at more risk of catching it than anyone else, remember there's long COVID, it's not just dying from COVID which is a problem, then I think fairness says we should probably give them more protection. And so if we do open schools before everyone has a vaccine, which most people are suggesting we will, then I think we should probably give that extra protection to teachers. Ash, what do you think about this particular call from Keir Starmer that teachers should be vaccinated as soon as possible? I mean, he specifically said in the February half term. So the reason why I don't think it will necessarily happen during the February half term is because the vaccination priority list has been designed so that you get the biggest impact on hospitalizations and deaths possible, which frees up your vaccination capacity. Because the more you have a health service which is overburdened with hospitalizations and treating COVID cases, the less efficient it is at handling a nationwide vaccination rollout. So that's one of the reasons why it's been designed as it is. So if you want to get teachers higher up that list, say ahead of clinically vulnerable under fifties, then you start slowing down the vaccination of those groups and you increase the risk of undermining the vaccination rollout itself and then it becomes counterproductive. So that's one issue that I have there. I don't object to the idea that once you have made your way through that rollout, that vaccination rollout priority list that you then move based on exposure. So you've got teachers, you've got bus drivers, you've got security guards, you've got cleaners, you've got people who work in roles where you cannot work from home and you are exposed to other people. I think absolutely you prioritize those who are most exposed. I think that you're right. There is a case to take that risk a little bit more with schools than you would with other settings and vaccinating teachers would be a huge part of it. One of the problems with how Kirstam is framing it is that, well, as I've just said about undermining the vaccine rollout priority list, it risks undermining the vaccine rollout overall. The second thing is when he says, well, look at how much goes to waste every day, it's roughly 5%. It's not necessarily that you can then requisition that 5% capacity in redirect elsewhere. Usually it's from things like missed appointments and so you've got vaccines which have been transported, they've been taken out of the cold storage where they've got to be and then they've got to be used very, very quickly. So maybe you then have some kind of local system based on local authority records about who works and which key worker role and you can informally start ringing people up in the area and say, hey, come get this vaccine. But the idea of simply redirecting that 5%, I don't think it's as simple as Kirstam is making out. But it sounds good, doesn't it? It sounds good where you go, look, 5% goes to waste, it can go anywhere, logistically not really difficult. Yeah, I mean, it's unlikely that no one thought of that already. You can imagine Kirstam going around putting a sort of teacher's jar in every vaccination booth. It's like, if there's anything left in the bottle, pour it in the teacher's jar and then we can give it to everyone at halftime. I feel like the vaccination program is going quite well. I think they've probably done a lot of this troubleshooting. And we're going to go to Rachel Reeves being challenged on this by Andrew Ma. Before we do that, if you're new to Navarra Media, new to Tiskey's Hour, make sure you do hit that subscribe button. We go live every Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 7pm and put out videos every day on the issues that matter in British and world politics. On the Andrew Ma show yesterday morning, so on Sunday morning, Rachel Reeves, who leads on Labour's response to the pandemic was challenged on whether the call to vaccinate teachers was backed by the science. So in his question here, Ma quoted statements from the JCVI, which is the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation. That's a sort of government panel of scientists who advise the government on this and the ONS, which is the Office for National Statistics. The JCVI have looked at this and I'm going to quote from their report. They say they do not advise further prioritisation by occupation during the first phase of this programme. And you quoted the ONS just now. Again, quoting the ONS, rates of death, they say, including COVID-19 in men and women who worked as teaching and educational professionals, such as secondary school teachers, were not statistically significantly raised when compared with the rates seen in the general population. In other words, on both sides, the JCVI and the ONS have both looked at this and they have both concluded that your policy of vaccinating teachers first or vaccinating teachers during the half-term is wrong. No, well, Andrew, first of all, we're not saying in phase one. Phase one should be completed by the middle of February. We're not saying that teachers should be vaccinated in phase one. We're saying in the second phase, can we bring teachers in? And second phase starts at half-term. So we're not suggesting in phase one, we're suggesting in phase two. And second, when schools went back in the beginning of September, within a couple of weeks, 25,000 teachers were out of the classroom having to self-isolate. The only way we're going to get kids back to school is not banding around dates as the government are doing. It's putting in place a proper plan, and that involves vaccinations. And Liz Trusser said that this morning, is vaccinations and testing in schools and the better wearing of masks. So Rachel Ruiz makes one good point there about sort of absences and teachers having to take time off. I'll talk about that in one moment. First of all, I've often said throughout this pandemic, Andrew Maher isn't particularly good at political interviews because he doesn't actually know enough about COVID-19 to hold anyone to account, because Rachel Ruiz there did tell a bit of a poor key because she said the Labour Party will not be proposing that teachers are vaccinated in the period of phase one of the rollout. Andrew Maher there read out a quote saying, we as the JCVI do not think that people should be vaccinated according to occupation in phase one. Rachel Ruiz suggested, well phase one will be over in mid-February. That's not true. She is making out there that phase one is the government imposed target, which is vaccinating the four most vulnerable groups of people before mid-February. Actually, the JCVI includes in phase one everyone who's considered in any way vulnerable. So everyone over 50 and anyone with existing conditions. Let's get up from the government website, what the JCVI counts as phase one, just to prove to you I'm not telling poor keys. So say phase one, direct prevention of mortality and supporting the NHS and COVID and social care system. This is the JCVI advises that the first priorities for the COVID vaccination program should be the prevention of mortality and the maintenance of the health and social care systems. As the risk of mortality from COVID-19 increases with age, prioritization is primarily based on age. The order of priority for each group in the population corresponds with data on the number of individuals who would need to be vaccinated to prevent one death estimated from UK data obtained from March to June 2020. And then you can see in groups one to nine, you have everyone from residents of care homes to everyone over 50 and on the way you have people who are between 16 and 64 with underlying health conditions. So Labour are encouraging the government to go against JCVI guidelines. So you can argue that they are arguing for a position which is not there could be scientific arguments for it, but it is going against the advice of the scientific body that have been set up to provide this advice. So Rachel Reeves was wrong there even if Andrew Marl didn't realize it. On the point about absences, I do think she has a good point. What I potentially would have said if I was Rachel Reeves is that the quote that Andrew Marl read about the ONS is quite misleading. So he was saying the ONS have said, look, there's no extra risk to teachers. In terms of deaths, they have said that. So in terms of deaths, the ONS have said if you look at teachers compared to other essential workers, they've got no more likelihood of dying than people in similar jobs. Infections, though, is potentially quite different. So when it comes to infections, teachers seem to, especially in November and December, get infected at up to three times the rate of the rest of the population. And it makes sense you've got lots of people in a room, very little protection, mask wearing, etc. So she could have pushed back on that particular point. Ash, do you think it is dangerous for the Labour Party to be seen to be contradicting the JCVI, which is the fairly objective and independent scientific body advising the government on who should be vaccinated first? No, I don't think it is simply because nothing the Labour Party does matters all that much at this juncture. So all that they would do is undermine Keir Starmer's position at Prime Minister's Questions. What's more dangerous, I think, is that where the Labour Party departs from the demands of the Labour Movement, i.e. the teachers unions, workers unions and other sectors as well, is that you start asking question of, well, who are the Labour Party for? Who are they supposed to be politically representing? And how are they going to go about doing that? So that, for me, is where the danger is. And it's one of sort of political affinity. But no, more generally, it's not dangerous for Labour to do that at all. It's just that they sort of sacrifice their moral authority to talk about things later down the lines. If they start questioning aspects of the government's vaccine rollout, then Boris Johnson can say, well, I put a user that you rejected the, you know, priority list as put out by the, sorry, I cannot remember the acronym, the JCVI. JCVI. Joint Committee on Vaccinations and Immunisations. Brilliant. See, I'm so bad at like remembering letters Vs and Ws, I get like really mixed up. But yeah, it's a political problem, I think, more than a public health problem. Yeah, well, I mean, I think again, this is similar to the question we discussed earlier about travel restrictions. The reason Labour are going hard on this is because they see there is some political advantage for them. So the level at which I think potentially this is quite irresponsible in terms of public health is this is all really part of a manoeuvre by the Labour Party to put loads of pressure on the Conservatives to get everyone back in school. By the 9th of March, you saw that headline from Keir Starmer, which was saying, let's have every child back in school. Now, even if we vaccinated all the teachers, that wouldn't be safe. So, you know, I don't think Keir Starmer should be rushing schools to reopen, especially not without rotors, for example. If you're saying vaccinate the teachers and everyone can go back, that's not good public health. But what people at home are going to hear, and I think this is what Keir Starmer is hoping, you've got lots of people, lots of parents who are like, I want my kid to go back to school. One, maybe they're getting a bit annoyed by their kid at home. Also, they're seeing that potentially they're falling behind or they're struggling. And then they're here on the radio that the Labour Party is saying, we support this one neat trick that means your kids can go back to school. And they're like, well, that sounds good. You know, I quite like the idea that there's this one neat trick to send my kids back to school. So that's where I think potentially you've got opportunism over public health, more so than on them disagreeing with the JCVI. And I think there are lots of good arguments to disagree with the JCVI on this, because I think fairness comes into it, how much risk are people putting themselves in? If you're a 50-year-old office worker, you have the option of staying at home and avoiding risking COVID-19 before you get your vaccination. If you are a teacher and schools are reopened and you're 49, you don't get that choice. So it seems to me that fairness suggests that we should consider vaccinating not only teachers, but bus drivers and anyone who we're asking to go into harm's way to give them extra protection. Let's go on to our final story. And before we do that, let's go to some comments, actually. Jason Halliwell with, I can't see because with 4.99, thanks for all the COVID analysis and perspective throughout this last 12 months. We never miss your show live. If only you had the ear of the PM. If only we had the ear of the PM. Can you imagine? Right, let's go straight on to our next section. Paul Daker is the 72-year-old former editor of The Daily Mail, a paper he edited between 1992 and 2018. Now, Daker at the Mail was a key driver of the country's shift rightward, especially on issues such as immigration and welfare. He was known as this. It was always very well known, very much discussed that Daily Mail was a force dragging the country to the right in the years when he was editor. Let's look at some of the front pages he published over the years. In 2013, in the middle of George Osborne's brutal welfare cuts, we can see here vile product of welfare UK. The language he used about people on benefits is disgusting. Man who bred 17 babies by five women to milk benefit system is guilty of killing six of them. This was obviously after he had killed lots of his kids. I think it was an arson attack and they're associating this with people on welfare. One of the most sort of disgusting, vilifying stories you could put on the front of a newspaper. Also, let's go through some more Daker classics, I suppose you can call them. He was a staunch backer of Brexit. He did more than anyone to turn the issue into a hostile culture war in 2016 when UK judges found that MPs would need to vote on triggering Article 50. He gave this infamous headline, Enemies of the People. When May announced the 2017 election, the paper backed her with this headline, Crush the Saboteurs. For that same election, this was the front page he put on his paper on polling day. Apologies for terror or the day before polling day. My apologies. Probably most sickening during his whole tenure was the way the paper talked about migrants. You can see here the swarm on our street. The most dehumanising language you can put on the front of a British newspaper. Why am I giving you this rundown of the politics of Paul Daker and the influence he has had on British politics? We know that right-wing newspaper editors put right-wing things on their front pages. The reason we're discussing this is because Daker, who is still editor-in-chief of the Daily Mail Group, so no longer editor of the paper, but of the group of the umbrella group, he is apparently in line to chair Ofcom. Now, Ofcom is the supposedly neutral body which regulates Britain's entire press. Now, where are we getting this information from? It was written up in the Observer on Sunday. I can get up some quotes from that piece. According to Whitehall and media sources, Boris Johnson is preparing to announce the controversial appointment soon and will later reward Daker with a peerage. The remit will be to target the BBC. The article goes on. Apologies if I can't get these up on screen. Associates report that he maintains his long-held dislike of the big internet platforms. Organisations such as Google and Facebook have effectively destroyed the advertising market that supports the newspapers in his stable. We have someone who is more of a role than anyone else in dragging Britain's newspapers to the right, who is now under the prime ministership of Boris Johnson going to be given control, not so much the role of regulating. Ash, I want to bring you in on this. This is very clearly, it could almost be seen as a provocation from the Conservatives. Maybe what they want is a big culture war about disappointment. It is also incredibly worrying. If they are putting someone who is such a zealot for writing ideas in control of Ofcom, who are a body tasked with ensuring impartiality and ensuring that journalism doesn't become wildly irresponsible or even more wildly irresponsible than it already is, this is a big and dangerous move, is it not? I have written about this before, which is the new right of this kind of neoliberalism in one country, Brexit set of headbangers, want to embark on a Gramscian project. It is not just about winning an election, even if you win it with an 80 seat majority. It is about taking over civil society as well. That is how you establish a new hegemony. One of the key aspects of that is being able to redefine the boundaries of reasonable and respectable opinion. Trying to redefine where the common sense is. If you have got one of your people in charge of Ofcom, literally the arbiters of broadcast impartiality, you have gone miles ahead in that pursuit, miles ahead in achieving that goal. I really think you have to see that within a context of appointing people who are willing to, if they can't transform the institutions of a liberal democracy, then smash them to smithereens. You can also see that with the appointment of David Goodheart to the EHRC, Manira Merza, who was tapped up to head up another inquiry into systematic and structural racism. These are people who don't believe in equalities, who don't believe in the existence of institutional racism. In a similar vein, Paul Daker doesn't really believe in neutrality. You put these figures in these roles to either change what these institutions are meant to do, to transform them into attack dogs for your political opponents, or simply because they are so ill-fitted to the role, ill-suited to the role, that they completely paralyse the effectiveness of these organisations. In that way, it's a win-win. Ofcom is supposed to do because there's a couple of problems with this potential appointment, not just that he's a rabid right-winger, but also he seems fairly unqualified. This is from the Ofcom website in the section What We Do. It says, we make sure people are able to use communication services, including broadband. A range of companies provide quality television and radio programs that appeal to diverse audiences. They make sure viewers and listeners are protected from harmful or offensive material on TV, radio, and on demand. They make sure people are protected from unfair treatment in programs and don't have their privacy invaded, as well as the universal postal service, which covers all UK addresses six days a week with standard pricing. They're there to enforce that and to enforce that the radio spectrum is used in the most effective way. In terms of the issues about treating people fairly, I think the front pages I've already shown you suggest he's not necessarily going to be the most attuned to giving everyone in society a fair treatment. Let's put it like that. The other issue though, which lots of people are raising, is that lots of this involves really technical things. So he's responsible for making sure people are able to use communication services, including broadband. That means the rollout of fiber optic broadband across the country. Now, Paul Dacre is someone who very famously didn't use email, right? So Boris Johnson is putting in these very powerful authoritative positions, not only people who are politically unsuited to them because they're completely the opposite of someone being politically neutral, but also they're completely unqualified to do it. There's no justification whatsoever to put this guy in this job. He's not qualified and he's not appropriate. I'm going to go to you, Ash, in one moment. First of all, if you want to support a channel which doesn't put out front pages, which demonize and victimize migrants and people on benefits, and then you can support us at navaramedy.com forward slash support. And just as importantly, you can hit that subscribe button if you are not already subscribed to the show. Tiskey Sour goes live every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 7pm. And we put out videos every day. Ash, I want to go to you now because I know you have an example when it comes to, and again, I'll read out this requirement of OFCOM. We make sure people are protected from unfair treatment in programs and don't have their privacy invaded. That was the fourth point there that you can see. You can also say viewers and listeners are protected from harmful or offensive material on TV, radio, and on demand. I know you've got an example for us of how Paul Dacre in his job definitely took part in activities or published things which did not on most people's understanding, but most people's definitions of the terms comply to those conditions. Yeah, I want to talk about the case of Lucy Meadows. So this was the case of a transgender woman who tragically took her own life, I think about seven years ago now. She was a teacher and she transitioned while she was in her role as a primary school teacher in order to explain to the kids that instead of Mr. Upton, they would be taught by Ms. Meadows, the school sent out a letter to the parents. In general, the response of the parents was very, very supportive and accepting of Lucy Meadows, but there was one parent who lodged a complaint and went to the press. A petition was started to remove her from the school and this was something which was covered in the Daily Mail in a Richard Little John article which I think Fox might be able to flash up for us. It's a really dreadful, awful article, misgendering Lucy Meadows, dead naming her and essentially saying that somebody deserves to be hounded out of their job, a job which they love, a job that they're good at simply because they're transgender. Now the kind of coverage that Lucy Meadows received led to a media scrum outside her house at all hours. She really was utterly hounded and eventually she took her own life. Now at the coroner's inquest, the coroner put blame squarely on the press for contributing to her suicide and the Daily Mail were a part of that and the reason why I bring that up is because there was outcry at the time. I think the case was also taken up by a hacked off, but other than that, you can see Paul Daker escaping scot-free. There are no consequences for him in public life. He still enjoys the year of those in power. The name of Lucy Meadows hasn't been the albatross around his neck that it really ought to be. I think when you look at two of the roles that Ofcom are meant to play, one in protecting viewers from harmful or offensive material and then also to make sure that people aren't treated unfairly, his coverage of Lucy Meadows while at the Daily Mail just completely flies in the face of both of those things. It was gratuitously transphobic, gratuitously offensive and treated Lucy Meadows absolutely appallingly. And I think for that case alone, even if the Daily Mail didn't have a history of xenophobic scaremongering, even if it didn't call judges enemies of the people, even if it didn't have a history of smearing and demonizing welfare recipients by linking them to a family murderer, this case alone should be excluding for him. I couldn't agree more. It's just offensive, isn't it? And it just shows how little respect this government actually have for the independence of the press. You remember when Jeremy Corbyn got attacked because he wanted to suppress the press just because he wanted to fund some independent outlets. He wants a democratic funding model for the BBC. And now you've got a government who is explicitly putting an enemy of the BBC. Paul Dacre is one of the biggest critics of the BBC in charge of an organisation which can then be used to attack the BBC. And also, we're in this situation where we've got constantly politicians saying, oh, we need decency in public life. We need people to be less divisive. We need people to be more civil and respectful to each other. And at the same time, the person who you put in charge of maintaining that environment in the media, which is already abusive enough to people without power, to migrants, to people, to welfare recipients, to people who are trans, for example, you put someone in charge of that regulatory body who is, it's not a secret their views. Their whole life has been dedicated to furthering the marginalisation and the demonisation of the most vulnerable in society. And now they're going to be in charge of it. If I could just directly jump in here, this goes back to the point I was making about it being a kind of Gramscian project. It's about redefining the terrain of what is the common sense, what is civilised debate, what is legitimate. Because if you, on the one hand, keep going on about civility in politics, the need for politeness and debate and hearing the other side. And at the same time, you have the most vicious attack dog being put in charge of setting those limits. What you do is you say, well, the rules of politeness and decorum and all the rest of it, they only apply to my opponents. You kind of rule them out of order before the game even gets started. And you can see that on a micro scale from the way in which Guido Forks talks about left wing activists masquerading as experts, but they have no problem with the IEA or the Taxpayers Alliance, right? That's a micro scale, a really individualised way of doing that. And then the appointment of Paul Dacre is kind of on a much bigger macro scale. So you can see how this relates about the individual and the institutional level. Let's go to some comments to close the show. JTB with 20 quid. Can't express how much I appreciate you guys at Navarra Media for cutting through the mainstream bullsh**. And you, I don't know how you read it. If you've bull, let's just call it bull, bull. You are polite enough to, you know, mark out the swear words. Also, I'm loving the live chat vibes. And yeah, we love everyone. I'm not allowed to look at the live chat anymore. Fox tells me it's distracting. So I only see the comments when they come up in front of my face. A few more on the super chat. Aaron Bell says, happy birthday for tomorrow, Tom Greenwood. Happy birthday, Tom Greenwood. I think that's probably the same Tom Greenwood, who is an old neighbour of mine, who is kind enough to have offered me a bike, because on Christmas Day my bike got stolen. If you follow me on Twitter, you might know this. And Tom offered me one. I still haven't collected it because of lockdown, but I'm coming around for that. Don't think I've forgotten. And also, happy birthday. Sorry, I got a bit of a sidetrack there. The birthday is the most important part. Lola with 4.99 asks, if we can wish happy birthday to her partner, John, for yesterday, we always watch Tiskey Sour. Of course, we can. Happy birthday to John for yesterday. And Mosch Jitsu with a fiver says, thank you for your excellent journalism. Very kind. And please, could you wish my partner Amy a happy birthday for yesterday? She loves a Monday Tiskey Sour. Happy birthday, Amy. I'm so glad to have you watching us every Monday. Ash, pleasure speaking to you this evening. Any big plans for a lockdown week? Oh, you know, just clubbing, raving, being out, doing non-essential activities in a crowd, breathing on strangers, that kind of thing. Charming. I'll be doing something very, very similar. Thank you all so much for watching Tiskey Sour. It has been a pleasure. It's been a pleasure speaking to you Ash Sarkar this evening. We'll be back on Wednesday at 7 p.m. As always, if you want to support the work we do, please do go to NeverRMD.com forward slash support the equivalent of one hour's wage a month. If you already do, thank you so much. You make this possible. For now, you've been watching Tiskey Sour on the Vara Media. Good night.