 For months now, MPs have been hearing evidence from a variety of politicians, public health experts and scientists on the response so far of the government to the COVID-19 crisis. We've shown you some of those evidence sessions on this show before, for example with Dominic Cummings or Matt Hancock. The Cummings one obviously particularly dramatic. Those select committees, the Health and Science Select Committees have now published that report. It's a big deal. We're going to go through the key parts of it today to do so. I'm joined by Dalia, Gabrielle. Dalia, how are you doing? I don't want to say that we told them so, but we kind of did, right? Like we've been saying for so long, all of the things are in this report. If only we had some kind of, you know, influence over the people that matter. No, there are lots of parts of the report where you're reading here. This is what, you know, I don't want to say we've been saying it for a while, but you know, people like Independence Sage have been saying it for a while. All sorts of experts have been saying it for a while. So it doesn't actually tell us much that's new, but it is interesting to have this all written down so clearly. And that's not the only story we'll talk about tonight. We're also discussing the latest action from Insulate Britain, Sally Rooney getting smeared after taking a very brave stand in support of Palestinian rights. And finally, an entertaining Keir Starmer video to show you. It's nice to have at least one of those, one of those every week. The first official investigation into the UK's COVID response has determined that the decision to delay a lockdown in March 2020 will rank as one of the most important public health failures the United Kingdom has ever experienced. The assessment was made in the Coronavirus Lessons Learned Report, which was produced by the Health and Science Select Committees. The report is damning in many respects. The delay to the first lockdown, which the report said led to thousands of unnecessary deaths, is blamed on groupthink among scientists and politicians, as well as a failure to learn from other countries, particularly those in East Asia. It's also critical of programs such as Test and Trace and the failure to offer financial support for people to self-isolate. Nothing too surprising so far. However, the report does find other areas where the UK excelled, including on vaccines and therapeutics. This is how Jeremy Hunt, who chairs the Health Select Committee, summarized the findings. But what we conclude in this report is that the national response to COVID was a bit like a football game with two very different halves. And in the first half, we had some serious errors. We could have avoided a lockdown, but having gotten to the position where we had to have one, we should have locked down earlier. But in the second half, we had the vaccine rollout, which we describe as the most effective initiative in the history of UK science and public administration, the discovery of treatments which have saved a million lives around the world. And the fascinating thing, and the thing makes it very difficult to sum up in one clean sentence or instinct, how we did, is that it was very often the same people who were responsible for both sets of decisions. That was Jeremy Hunt, who seemed to be going to great pains to suggest no one person should be held responsible for the COVID disaster, as everyone's record was mixed. He is, after all, a Tory MP producing a report on a Tory government. Yet the commitment to pulling punches wasn't the only criticism made of Hunt's intervention. Lindsay Jackson is a member of the group COVID-19 bereaved families for justice. If I can just make a mention of what I find to be a despicable remark this morning from Mr Hunt, the former Secretary of State for Health, that this is a game of two halves. This isn't a game. My mother didn't lose her life in a game. I think she lost her life because mistakes that were made by the government. And I want to know about that. I want to hear about it in a full judicial inquiry. And I don't want political decisions being taken now, which are not based on the best advice. And we know from this report that in autumn last year, this time last year, a bit later than this last year, the government did not follow scientific advice. And that seems to me to have led to a larger loss of death, a larger loss of life, sorry, in the second wave than even in the first. And I fear those mistakes are being made again. That was Lindsay Jackson highlighting the problems with calling the COVID response a game of two halves. It's a very good point she made there, not least, as she said, because more people died in the second half of our COVID response than the first. It also happened to be in that second half that Boris Johnson holds personal responsibility for the deaths which occurred. If March 2020 was a collective failure of Britain's elites, in January 2021, tens of thousands of people died precisely because Boris Johnson ignored the science. He ignored his advice and his advisors. Dalia, we're going to go through some parts of this report in a bit more detail. First, what's your initial response? What's the big picture here? I mean, as I sort of mentioned at the beginning of the show, it reiterates a lot of what we have said. And as you mentioned, we're not epidemiologists, we're not experts in public health. And yet, even we could see, we would meet every Wednesday at the beginning of the pandemic and our mouths would be on the floor just absolutely confused about what the government was doing. But obviously more importantly, what they weren't doing, if it was clear to us, then it should have absolutely been clear to those who were being briefed every day by public health experts and who are being paid inordinate amounts of money to run our government. And I remember at the time, I actually remember looking at it through a sort of failed state lens. It felt that years of austerity, decades of austerity meant that even if we wanted to, we didn't have the kinds of public health infrastructure and communications infrastructure which would enable us to take the kinds of measures that we need to take. A lot of the things that we needed, things like rudimentary health equipment, trained health care staff, all of these kinds of things were not things that you can kind of magic up in a second, they have to be things you've invested in in a long term way. And the absence of that came into sharp relief during the pandemic. But it was also deeply ideological and down to very specific decisions, which is what this report outlines. This report is an absolute affront to all those people in the beginning of the pandemic and even throughout that try to portray this as some kind of natural health crisis, which we couldn't really do much. It was a natural disaster, almost in the way that we talk about natural disasters and the way that it unfolded was somehow inevitable. But actually, the problem was that the kinds of measures that we needed and that we still need in order to tackle this pandemic, which is things like adequate sick pay so that people can isolate if they need to, prioritizing our care system over economic growth, giving people furlough, allowing people to work from home. These are all measures that fundamentally go against the grain of the conservative ideology. We saw at the beginning of the pandemic, Ian Duncan Smith, when we first started hearing that a furlough scheme would be arranged, Ian Duncan Smith was against it because he believed it would disincentivize people from going to work, which tells you exactly what these people prioritize and exactly what these people make decisions around. It's around this notion of the economy, which is not about economic well-being for us all, but is about a very tiny group of people being able to continue to make money off of everyone commuting and going into work every day, even in the middle of a pandemic. This ideology still underpins how this government operates. We saw it last week when Universal Credit was being cut in the midst of, again, an ongoing pandemic which will impact people's ability to do what they need to protect themselves and their community, all in the name of incentivizing people to work, as if people aren't already being overworked in the system that we have. I think that the woman that spoke in the previous clip is absolutely right to say that the worry is that these very ideological decisions are being made again. You have to only look at the winter plan, which was barely a plan. It was a haphazard, poorly messaged set of measures that the government says that it will fall back on at some kind of arbitrary point, even though many of those measures like mask wearing, working from home, are measures that, if you can work from home, are measures that should absolutely be intact right now and should have been intact all throughout the summer. I think it's totally right for this report to call out the ideological decisions that were made at the time, but also it's important for us to understand how that logic is still underpinning the way that this government is approaching the pandemic now, which is to say, let's go back to business as usual as quickly as possible, let's prioritize economic growth over people's well-being, and let's just sort of pretend like this isn't really happening as much as we can. I think you articulated so well the ideological elements of these mistakes. I suppose, in a way, some of those punches are pulled in the report because you've got who's writing it, Jeremy Hunt, Greg Clarke, but they're naming all of these mistakes, which are clearly ideological, but they're naming them all and they should have been named a year ago and many lives would have been saved. We're going to talk about who wrote the report in a little moment. I first want to start by going to some quotes, and as I say, they do point out some things which Britain did well, which we should recognize, they're genuinely significant. The first of these, as you can probably guess, is on vaccines. They write a significant part of the success of the Oxford AstraZeneca, which originally started with the UK Vaccines Network set up in 2016. That investment and support through successive governments has clearly paid off, so they are rightly saying it is very significant that Britain not only rolled out the vaccine well in the early days of this year, of 2021, but also it was thanks to research which was largely done in Britain that the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine was created, which will benefit people all over the world because it's the only vaccine actually which is being sold on a non-profit basis, something that should genuinely be celebrated. They also celebrated Britain's role in developing, and in fact, especially testing, therapeutics, so treatments for COVID-19. So on that, they write, treatments for COVID are an area where the UK's response was genuinely world-leading. The recovery trial had, by mid-August 2021, recruited just over 42,000 volunteers worldwide to mount randomized trials of COVID-19 treatments, establishing the effectiveness of dexamethasone and the ineffectiveness of hydrochloroquine were vital contributions to the worldwide battle against COVID-19 and estimated to have saved over a million lives globally. So again, clearly that's massive, massive deal. I presume they've worked out that million lives by saying it reduces the chance of dying by about a third, I think, dexamethasone. So if you look at all the people who've been given that when they go into hospital, you can sort of deduce or infer that a million lives were saved. So thank God for that recovery trial and free cheers for UK medical science. Both examples, though, show why it was silly for Jeremy Hunt to call our COVID response a game of two halves because the story of vaccine development, as that quote suggests, goes back to 2016. And the recovery trials were launched at the start of the pandemic by a bunch of very smart scientists. In short, there were people doing good things at every stage of the pandemic and people doing bad things at every stage of the pandemic. It wasn't a temporal distinction. It was a distinction between different groups of people. It was usually medical scientists doing the good things and it was usually politicians and their crony pals doing the bad. Talking of cronies, let's look at one final area where the UK failed. This is on test and trace. The learning lessons report here found the test and trace operation followed a centralized model initially, meaning assistance from laboratories outside PHE, so that's Public Health England, particularly university laboratories was rebuffed. The same was true for contact tracing, where the established capabilities of local directors of Public Health and their teams were not effectively harnessed during the initial response to the pandemic, despite local approaches proving effective in places where they were pursued. It is now clear that the optimal structure for test and trace is one that is locally driven with the ability to draw on central surge capacity, but it took the best part of a year to get to that point. Reading that, my initial thought was this could have been written by independent sage, and it could have been written by independent sage a year ago. I say it could have been that they were writing very similar things a year ago. It does seem ridiculous that this has only been realized now. This was very clear at the time and we wasted so much time and lots of lies were lost because that simple advice wasn't taken when it was being given by independent epidemiologists and public health experts. I mean, I say independent, I presume, I doubt it was sage that told Boris Johnson to hire Dido Hiding. So the test and trace for me, that's the most obvious example of ideology completely undermining our pandemic response because they wanted to outsource it and they wanted to outsource it to one of their chums who works in big business because they're the people who think, you know, can get things done. They thought, well, public health, they can't possibly handle this. We can't give this to local public health directors. They'll be overwhelmed. We've got to give it to the boss of what mobile phone company was she? Talk talk, I think, and it all went terribly. The report again, unsurprisingly, also agreed that not paying people to self-isolate was a mistake, though I probably would have liked it to go into more detail about why this Tory government refused to do that. As I say, Jeremy Hunt, Greg Clarke were the two bosses of these select committees, which means it's probably not that much of a surprise that the ideology wasn't going in, you know, wasn't developed on in the same depth that we would have liked to see. I want to talk a bit more about who wrote this report because there was a massive disjunct between who collated this information, who is going on the radio to talk about this information, which is Jeremy Hunt, who chairs the health select committee, and Greg Clarke, who chairs the science committee, and what they've found. Because there are some really powerful passages in this report about how one of the things that hindered Britain's response to the pandemic was the massive inequality that we have in this country, the massive poverty that we have in inequality, poverty that we have in this country, and the under-investment we have had in public health, all sensible points. The problem, as I say, this was written by people who were in government in 2010 to 2015, or longer actually for both of those chairs, and who still don't seem to have learned from their mistakes because this isn't the case of them saying, oh, we throw our hands up. Yeah, we did austerity because we thought it was necessary. Now the coronavirus pandemic has shown that it wasn't. No, these are politicians who are still backing the policies which led to this disaster. This is a chart from another report which was out this week, this time from the Institute for Fiscal Studies. And what you can see here is how the budgets for various departments have changed over 10 years, so since 2010, as you can see the Department for Health and Social Care is up, although when you take into account an aging population it represents a real-term squeeze, but other departments such as the DWP, which is in charge of benefits, and the Communities Department, which funds local government, they're still over 50% poorer than they were in 2010. This is not a graph that shows a government taking inequality and poverty seriously. So if Greg Clark and Jeremy Hunt really believe what they say in this report, it's not only high time to apologize for the past 10 years, but to start voting against this current government. Darli, I want your thoughts on this because there were moments at the very beginning of this pandemic, and we talked about this on the show, and I was actually quite optimistic in a way. I was like, this is the kind of shock that is going to make people realize the value of public sector workers, the value of investing in public health, the disaster that is our incredibly unequal society, and maybe we'll come out of this a stronger, better society a bit after the Second World War. Maybe we'll realize that we have to listen to scientists and take climate change seriously. Since then it's just been lots and lots of disappointment, especially last week, the universal credit, 20-pound cut, that's the kind of thing that I thought at the start of the pandemic. Maybe we're not going to do such sadistic things anymore, but has that all been forgotten? Well, I mean, whether or not it's forgotten is down to us. I don't think that those are lessons that the Conservative Party are ever going to learn. I don't think it really, that's really how they treat it. I think they're well aware of the impact of all the things that you've just said. But COVID-19 was kind of like an x-ray. It took all of these things that we've been talking about for many years now, things like you said, a global inequality, things like lack of public infrastructure, lack of health infrastructure, and it sort of exposed it in full technicolor in a way that it was very difficult, despite as much as the media and the government tried to, it was very difficult to explain it in any other terms what was happening. And it gave us a lot of very clear reference points with which we can kind of make serious interventions, not just in terms of domestic policy, so things like discussions around work, around who is essential, what work isn't essential, and what conditions is that essential work being done in and by who. It also showed us, also domestically, that outsourcing those vital services to private companies is detrimental because when that happens, you get visions of tuna in coin bags being given to children over the summer holidays. It also showed us that the kind of global dimension, though, we saw how patents and intellectual property and our global trading regime basically make it impossible for vital medications and vaccines to be produced and distributed for the whole world. And so, you know, it kind of, it made it, the pandemic should make it essentially impossible for anyone now to say in a public forum that nurses, that delivery workers, that, you know, truckers are low-skilled workers, which if you remember, you kind of cast your mind back to like January and February 2020, we were having a lot of discussions about changing visa systems where people who were considered to be low-skilled workers, i.e. under a particular income threshold, which would include all of the people that we now consider essential workers were not to be given work visas. So, we have to make sure that it is impossible for that argument to ever be made again. We have to use this to make sure that no one can ever, with a straight face, be allowed to say on public media that the private sector is more efficient and effective at providing infrastructural services. What you mentioned earlier on in the show about the fact that vaccine development and, you know, treatment development is one of the ways in which Britain has actually done quite well in the pandemic. That was because of a logic of public investment into research, into medical research that wouldn't necessarily generate an immediate financial return. And that is not a logic that is compatible with the private sector. But also, this pandemic, we should also make sure that no one can deny that Europe and North America build their development, build their well-being off the backs of the lack of that well-being in the global South. And as climate crisis begins to descend on us, it is really important. And, you know, we're essentially living in the last decade that we have to make the radical shifts that we need to avoid the worst excesses of climate breakdown. As that is looming, it's important that we, as journalists, as political commentators, as everyday people, make sure that this pandemic is, you know, to use Arundhati Roy's phrase, a portal into the system change that we need in order to protect us from the worst excesses of climate breakdown. Because the pandemic showed us what happens when crisis hits a world that is not prepared. So we won't see those changes happen overnight. We're not going to see this government accepting those changes. And the government is going to do all they can to pretend that the last 18 months never happened, you know, with things like Freedom Day, with things like declaring business as usual or going back to normal. But it's up to us, in a sense, to make sure that those lessons are never forgotten. If we leave it to the government, absolutely they will be. But it's also provided us with quite an undoubtable, you know, demonstrative example of what will happen if we continue to prioritize this very unsustainable and exploitative model of economic growth. Over the infrastructures that people need to survive, particularly in a time of crisis. I wish that was the executive summary of this report we're covering now. Unfortunately, you know, the commitment of Jeremy Hunt and Greg Clark to all of that is limited. But that was, yeah, I wish that was the reports that our MPs were coming up with. Let's go to a couple of comments, Comac tweets on the hashtag Tisgisau. It's actually telling that Hunt led this, the man who was health secretary when an NHS preparedness test flagged up that it would not cope under a pandemic and he did nothing to mitigate or change those issues. No wonder he held back and sugarcoated his own report. I think that's a very, you know, insightful comment. It's interesting, actually, one of the things the report said is, oh, the problem was we prepared for flu instead of a coronavirus. And to me, this just seems like one of the most ridiculous getouts that I've heard, because the plan was that we would not lock down and we just have to have naturally, naturally induced herd immunity. Now that plan is no better for a really, really deadly flu. And the flu pandemic in 1919 was more deadly than coronavirus. So we could have had a super, super deadly flu that if we'd gone for the same herd immunity strategy that we'd had, it could have killed even more people than COVID and could have killed people from in different age brackets, right? So this idea that, oh, if only a flu would come, we would have been fine. I don't buy it. And I think that is kind of Jeremy Hunt covering his back. He said, oh, I left it, I prepared for flu. I didn't prepare for the coronavirus, but you didn't prepare for even mate. One group who the report from the health and social care and science committees doesn't interrogate is the media. Now we like to talk a lot on this show about the complicity of the media in the UK's disastrous pandemic response. And you'll remember back in March, 2020, we were very critical of the media's failure to challenge the herd immunity strategy. However, now that group think is belatedly being criticised, some in the press are attempting to rewrite history. There was a great example of this on Tuesday reacting to the government's response to the report who said it was all very well to complain in hindsight. That's what Steve Barkley was talking about when he was sent out on TV to represent the government. The political editor of the Daily Mirror said the following. This was the Daily Mirror front page on the 13th of March, 2020, 10 days before Boris Johnson announced the first lockdown. It is just not the case that nobody publicly questioned his failure to act more quickly at the start. And you can see the headline there says, is it enough? So the suggestion from Pippa Kararra is we were challenging the government at the time. It's ridiculous for the government to say no one had that foresight. Now, clearly there were people who had that foresight. Now you can think of some of the people who went on to join Independent Sage, the editor of the Lancet magazine, lots of people who were going out and saying this is ridiculous what you're doing. Unfortunately, for Pippa Kararra, she wasn't necessarily one of them. So when she tweeted out that headline, many people, and this was pointed out in the replies to her, she didn't necessarily give a fair representation of her reporting of the crisis at the time. So this is how Kararra annotated that headline on the 12th of March, 2020. So this was in a tweet back then. I think it's wise to admit none of us know the answer to this question. This is in reference to the is it enough headline? But for what it's worth, I've now been at several briefings with the Chief Medical Officer and the UK Chief Scientific Advisor, and they're very reassuring. I also believe Boris Johnson is right to follow the science on this. That's good leadership. I don't want to single out Pippa Kararra here. All of the journalists, especially the political editors, were taking the same position back in March 2020, which was essentially where Boris Johnson says it's the right thing. The Chief Scientific Advisor says it's the right thing. So even if all of the other countries in the world are doing something completely different, even if a back of the envelope calculation would show that this plan is going to lead to half a million deaths, we should basically just believe them because they've told us in a reassuring voice that this is the plan and there's no alternative. It wasn't just Pippa Kararra who had that position. It was Laura Koonsburg, it's Robert Peston. It was all of them. My question for you on this, Dahlia, is there are calls for a proper public inquiry into the political response to this. We've seen here the MPs talk about the public health officials and the politicians. Is it time for the media to hold its own inquiry into its behavior in the early months of the coronavirus crisis? Oh, absolutely. It wouldn't have been possible for the government to do what they did or did not do if the majority of the press wasn't feeding into this notion. There were two things that I think underpinned how the media enabled this to happen. The first one was to back up this idea that what was happening was natural. It was inevitable for a country of Britain's size or Britain's population density. There's nothing that we can do. No one could possibly know how to deal with this. The Prime Minister is doing the best that he can in the context that he has and the tools and information that he has, which, like I said, even two sort of lacky political commentators like us knew at the time that you don't need a degree in epidemiology to be looking around the world and thinking, okay, if this is happening in Italy now, what's going to happen when it gets here? And what should we be doing to prepare for that? So, you know, there's that kind of element of treating it like a kind of natural overwhelming thing that, you know, there's nothing we can do about it, which Kirstama also propped up by refusing to oppose the government in any way for fear that it would be seen as capitalizing on the crisis. So he put his PR and his optics about what the country actually needed. But also, a lot of it, to me, was channeled through this kind of British exceptionalism that underpins so much of the media and the kind of the places, the educated, and we have to look at the sort of makeup of who makes up the press. You know, they are often reared in these institutions that are based in this notion of British exceptionalism. When East Asian countries were sort of immediately going into a pandemic response plan that involves, you know, how are we going to make sure that people stay in their homes and most importantly that they have the resources to lock down. And, you know, these are countries that have experience of dealing with epidemics of this nature. And, you know, instead of looking at that, the UK response to that was to either say, oh, you know, well, we're fundamentally different. So you can't compare the two or to say that, you know, the only reason that East Asian countries have been able to have a hold on this crisis isn't because they are prioritizing their people or isn't because they have a well invested in infrastructure. But it's just because they're naturally authoritarian countries. And, you know, we wouldn't be so uncivilized as to do such measures. And so these kind of when the reason I bring this up is because the reason that there was such synchronism between the media response and the political establishment response was partly because, you know, they're all mates, they're all chums, they all see, you know, we have a kind of positive coverage in exchange for access model that our media is based on. But also because a lot of them just think the same things, a lot of them do genuinely agree in the similar in same things, because they all come from the same kinds of institutions, they all come from the same kinds of socioeconomic backgrounds, they all come from the same sector of society. So it's not so much that the government is sort of top down telling them what they should and should not write about. It's that it kind of naturally comes about because as sort of known Chomsky sort of rephrase a really famous known Chomsky interview, many of them wouldn't be where they are now as, you know, head of various media divisions or, you know, having being political editor of all these major media institutions, many of them would not be in those positions if they didn't think the way that they thought. So it was a fairly seamless line between the destructive political action and the ways in which the media was sort of justifying these unjustifiable practices by the government. You've talked about a seamless line. You've also given me a seamless segue into something we're about to promote because before we move on to our next story, we need to let you know about something we at Navarra Media are releasing tomorrow. We're going to show you a short clip and then I'm going to get Dahlia to talk in a bit more detail about it. We need to save the world from climate breakdown. But with growing inequality, democracy and retreat and the far right on the rise, do we really want to save this world or do we want to change it? Planet B is a six-part podcast series which imagines a world that isn't just saved from climate breakdown but is renewed and transformed by the fight against it. Join me, Dahlia Gabriel, my co-host Harpreet Paul and an array of amazing guests from around the world as we tackle these six big issues facing a world on the brink. Work, land, infrastructure, water, migration and debt. The climate crisis presents us with an existential threat that requires a global response. But it also presents us with an urgent opportunity to remake the world into something better. Join us as we begin to imagine life on Planet B. It's an incredibly exciting and enticing little promotional video. Dahlia, tell us what we can look forward to from tomorrow. Yeah, so we are working on, well we finished working on and we are releasing a six-part podcast series. It's called Planet B. It will be coming out every Thursday for six weeks. So it will take us just before COP26 which is coming up in Glasgow and throughout the conference and a little bit after it as well. So the first episode is coming out tomorrow and we have some amazing guests. The topic of the episode tomorrow is work. It's coming out at midday wherever you get your podcasts and we have some Navara faves. We have Jeremy Corbyn. We have Sarah Jaffe. We also have some people that you might not have heard of, but you know you really should have people like Gabby Geliaskoff who's been working with North Sea Oil workers in Scotland. We have Seb Ordonez who works with mining workers throughout the world. We have Vicente Unai who is the general secretary of the power worker energy, the energy worker union in the Philippines and we have Kavita Naidu who works on women's work, who does research on women's work in Pacific and in Asia. So yeah, so I'm super super excited and it fits in with so much of you know what I've been talking about on Tiske for so long. So if you are interested in checking it out then do tune in tomorrow at midday and yeah, let me know what you think. I'm super super excited. I'm super super excited as well. If you want to know though some of Dahlia's thoughts on climate change, you don't have to wait because it's the subject of our next story. Let's go straight on to that. Insulate Britain have provoked another outburst of road rage after blocking a highway in protest at government in action on climate change. Let's take a look. You heard there a very annoyed mum on a school run threatening to drive through protesters if they did not get out of the road. The clip has sparked debate on a couple of fronts first. The familiar one about weather direct action of this type loses a cause more support than it gains and the second the morality of driving an SUV. Let's focus on the second one because lots of people responded to that clip saying the mum has a right to take their son to school and the protesters were choosing a dud target. Now the mum obviously does have a right to take her son to school but what's less clear to me at least is whether parents should have the right to take their kids to school in a four-wheel drive because I'm guessing that between that mum and her son's home and his school there aren't many muddy fields, ditches or dirt roads to traverse so it seems more than a little unnecessary to be driving such an overpriced gas guzzling monstrosity. The gas guzzling aspect really does matter here as reported in the new scientists the increase in people purchasing SUVs has cancelled out any climate gains we have so far seen from the growing use of electric vehicles. The magazine also reports that between 2010 and 2020 global CO2 emissions from conventional cars fell by nearly 350 megatons due to factors such as fuel efficiency improvements as well as the switch to electric emissions from SUVs rose by more than 500 megatons so in the same period the the benefit from fuel efficiency improvements more than outweighed by SUVs. They go on this trend means that overall emissions from all types of cars aren't falling despite the growth in electric vehicles while the growth in EVs is encouraging the boom in SUVs is heartbreaking says Glenn Peters at the Cesaro Climate Research Centre in Norway. That doesn't sound very good I'm not a good advert for SUVs and we have some more SUV facts for you this evening. So as you can see here this collated from by the Navarra media data team 74% of SUVs in 2018 to 2020 were bought by city dwellers so people who don't need them and astonishingly if SUVs were a nation they'd have ranked seventh in CO2 emissions in 2018. These vehicles are a plague they also happen to be more dangerous if you get hit by an SUV you're a lot more likely to die than if you get hit by you know a reasonable car which was designed to be used in a city I think you should ban them or at least tax them. Look I always make a point and you'll hear in the Planet B podcast that I always make a point of saying you know climate breakdown is a is a systemic issue we need a systemic response you can't have a response that looks to just incentivize changes in individual behavior like you know tempe plastic bags or giving people recycling bins it needs to be sort of much bigger much much strategic we can't focus on individual decisions and individual choices we have to focus on you know marshalling the kind of finance massive financing and political will that we need to you know transition our economy away from fossil fuels and and a kind of carbon growth model SUVs may actually be the one exception just because those statistics are incredible it's so clearly unacceptable to be to drive an SUV particularly in a city given that we are staring down the barrel of three to five degree warming by the end of this century you know if we don't make the dramatic changes that we need to make and it should absolutely not be a decision that someone can make in you know to to to have one passenger in a car in an in an SUV driving to school in the middle of a city and you know there's a lot of talk about insulate Britain's tactics and I have you know spoken before on the show where you know I say that it's really important for your tactics to communicate the politics of what you're doing to target and to frame themselves around the story of power that you're trying to tell which is why you know when they were when them and XR were blocking public transport blocking you know public buses I was like well this doesn't make a huge amount of sense because public transport is exactly the kind of thing that we are going to have lots of in it under a under a just transition but blocking a gas guzzling SUV that's carrying one kid to school in a city actually kind of does communicate the politics because it says that yes you know there are some parts of the green transition that will take you know will take time to unfold you know it will take time to retrofit everyone's homes it will take time to to build renewable infrastructure but banning SUV the use of SUVs particularly in cities is actually something we can and should do tomorrow it's actually quite a quick low-hanging fruit thing that should have been done ages ago and I say this you know as someone who I'm pretty into climate politics as has become clear even I didn't know that SUV if SUVs were a country there'd be the seventh biggest emitter like that's comparable to the global shipping industry so the fact that that was a moment of public education for us all although you know I don't think that the the mainstream media has really been focusing on that part of the story which is why block what the role of SUVs are in climate breakdown but instead you know using this as a stick to beat insulate Britain over the head with you know that's actually kind of what direct action is supposed to do it supposed to make a point and to communicate the politics of what you're trying to do and in that point in that moment educate people and get people talking about something that they weren't previously talking about so you know I think that we can talk a lot about what what climate action should look like but I think it shows a really really it shows that we're really far behind where we need to be when people when the media is looking at that video and holding insulate Britain protesters to far more account than they are holding you know our politicians account who are continuing to commission coal mines and offshore oil and gas fields despite claiming to be you know climate leaders in the in the lead up to COP26 that was that was your taster of Darlia's you know intense knowledge and understanding of climate change for more of that tomorrow make sure you subscribe to Planet B and we have a very kind super chat from John Goodbun who says Planet B sounds brilliant doesn't it just yay let's go straight on to our next story best-selling author Sally Rooney has refused to sell the rights to her latest book to an Israeli publisher it's a decision she made in solidarity with Palestine the move has been welcomed by the boycott divest and sanction movement which pressures Israel to end apartheid as is often the case in these situations her standing up for Palestinian rights initially led to Sally Rooney being misrepresented and smeared that's because it was initially reported in the pro-Israel press as being not a boycott of a country Israel but a boycott of a language Hebrew based on a news article in Haaretz the website forward published an opinion piece titled why won't Sally Rooney allow her latest novel to be translated into Hebrew by an Israeli publisher that piece was then boosted by a number of high follower Twitter accounts in the British commentary at Ben Judah tweeted depressing and unpleasant that Sally Rooney won't allow her new novel to be translated into Hebrew that was quote tweeted by David David Aronovich of The Times who says it's sad when you're unfounded prejudices about someone turn out to be correct a rather nasty response and then Jonathan Green Blatt also tweeted this article he is CEO of the Anti-Defamation League which is the biggest organization committed to fighting anti-Semitism in the United States he said shameful hashtag Sally Rooney is embracing BDS's hateful tactics by refusing to publish her latest book in Hebrew literature is a space for opening minds not closing them she should reverse this decision and find constructive ways to promote coexistence you know at first site you could think they're reasonable I'm in favor of BDS as a tool to apply pressure on Israel to end apartheid I do however think that boycotting a language would be problematic languages don't belong to states or governments they belong to cultures and to ban your book being translated into Hebrew would therefore seem rather anti-Semitic the problem here though that's not what Sally Rooney did within 24 hours of her being castigated online in the controversy appearing on news shows in the UK and the United States Rooney made the following clarification so she said earlier this year the international campaign group Human Rights Watch published a report entitled a threshold crossed Israeli authorities and the crimes of apartheid and persecution that report coming on the heels of a similarly damning report by Israel's most prominent human rights organization Bet Salem confirmed what Palestinian human rights groups have long been saying Israel's system of racial domination and segregation against Palestinians meets the definition of apartheid under international law she went on to say the Hebrew language translation rights to my new novel are still available and if I can find a way to sell these rights that is compliant with the BDS movement's institutional boycott guidelines I will be very pleased and proud to do so in the meantime I would like to express once again my solidarity with the Palestinian people in their struggle for freedom justice and equality so in short Sally Rooney has taken a brave and principled stance against Israeli apartheid and in response her critics have lied about her darlia this is a familiar story isn't it absolutely I think that you are totally right to point out the incredibly you know unfair and misleading way in which this was already originally reported you know the headline as you said was that she wouldn't allow her book to be published in Hebrew which she had already put had her book translated into Hebrew and it was clearly a way to to undermine solidarity with Palestinian people by imposing slippage between Israel and the actions of the Israeli state with the entirety of Jewish culture and history which is of course absurd but by creating that slippage they were able to kind of confuse what was actually quite a clear stance I don't think you even needed her position her terrifying statement in order to understand that her gripe was with the fact that the publisher was not BDS compliant it wasn't because of you know the inherent worth of translating a book into Hebrew but this is you know the literary establishment and I find it so cringy when people sort of try and justify these kinds of things by saying oh you know literature should be a space where minds are opened and things like literature cannot be an apolitical space it cannot be a space where you know people you if you want to find a group of people but don't take strong positions on things you really can't look towards fiction writers particularly fiction writers whose work is so sort of so political but not in an explicit way like Sally Rooney's this whole debacle really actually reminds me of uh in the 1970s when the late John Berger won the manbooker prize and donated half of his winnings to the Black Panther Party and sort of used the his speech you know I'd recommend everyone go and look at that speech it was absolutely incredible he used it to actually point out the colonial wealth upon which the Booker Prize Foundation was built and you know he was similarly hopefully this won't happen to Sally Rooney but he was absolutely ravaged by so much of the literary literary establishment and media establishment who you know found his politicizing of the pure art of literature to be so like improper and uncouth and you know this is always that the battle between the kind of liberal art institutions and the often more radical artists but yeah it just kind of really reminded me um of of that incident in history and I'm really glad that like John Berger uh Sally Rooney stood stood fast and her didn't allow her actions to be misrepresented and stood by what she originally made clear which was this which was that this was about being BDS compliant which is absolutely her her right to do so I mean it's not just her right to do so well done for doing so right this is very very impressive for someone especially you know their career isn't based on having left-wing politics right but she's famously left-wing right but she is not just appealing to a left-wing audience so there will be people who she could sell her book to who are going to be kind of pissed off by this because yeah we know BDS is very controversial so if you are you know a popular cultural figure taking that stance is brave there will be some costs involved including you know being smeared for 24 hours online and so yeah well done very impressive maybe I'll read the book I don't really read I don't really read novels um but I could make a great writer she really is her character's kind of annoy me but I think they're supposed to be annoying but I'm kind of like why would I bring these people into my home so I've like I you know but she is a phenomenal writer so you read it outside yeah because I'm like I don't want these characters are so irritating that I just don't want them in my house with me but they're meant to be that way it's because she's such a good writer that the impact is so strong interesting interesting take on on the books as I say I can't really um interject on this let's go to our final story it's an entertaining one while Boris Johnson is on holiday Keir Starmer has attempted to highlight the shortage of hgv drivers in Britain by going to get himself a test and then when that lines up very good so that's where now you've we've won that angle so uh you'd have failed your test okay very good very good that was you saw the moment his soul just left his body there's so many good bits about that clip he's been first of all he's been told to go left go left because oh I'm not sure I want to go left I'm always told by my other advisors not to go left then it crashes into the bit of concrete body we still you've failed now you could start that out well you say yeah I wasn't here to suggest that becoming a hgv driver was easy right that's why I think we need proper government investment in it of course I can't pass on my first day but then instead he just goes very good you failed very good just I think I think being told to go left refusing to go left crashing into something and then failing is quite a good kind of image for what is happening to the paper party right now but also I just if I was ever if the you know absurd absurd ever occurred and I was hired to do like the PR of a politician I would just be like step away from the hard hat and the high vis it just makes you look like a knob like it just everyone knows what you're trying to do you're wearing a very expensive suit under it people don't like people care about whether or not you're doing things that make their working conditions better they actually don't care if you you know put a hard hat on and look like you're getting stuck in because we know that you're not and it's just so embarrassing but also surely you could have prepared better to have like a line for when you inevitably fail the test like you said you know I mean I actually I'm going to be contrarial and say because I saw lots of people saying what kind of media advisor would put him in the you know the front carriage of a truck and I think that actually you know it could have gone quite well if Boris Johnson had done it it would have been hilarious right but if you're going to do that and it also it is good to get you know the hgv crisis in the news and to make it look as if kistarmer cares about these things that people you know do you really care about but as you say if you are a media advisor really going to put him in that situation he's going to fail the test right they can't have said he's not going to possibly he's going to fail the test so what is your response when you fail the test and maybe someone like Boris Johnson would be able to think of that off the top of his head but clearly kistarmer's not very good at you know one liner so give him one you know give him something to do other than just to freeze and say very good very good over and over again oh god it's awful yeah you could have literally just said you know this shows you like how much we need to value our hgv workers we need to pay them well we need to make sure their working conditions are really good you know it's such a hard job it's essential work there's like a million discourses you could have plugged into and the discourse he decided to plug into was god i'm just a bit crapper well if you wanted to be really really cynical you could say that this is that was part of the metaphor because kistarmer ignore calls to go left crash the vehicle you've just taken charge of fail but ultimately that was very good because at least you didn't go left at least you didn't go left crash crashing and failing that's not really what matters what matters is not going left so very good very good poor succure um we'll leave it there darlia gebrill it's been an absolute pleasure as always being joined by you this wednesday and lovely to join you michael i look forward to listening to your dulcet tones tomorrow as well on uh my on the podcast app that i use um i'm not going to advertise which one uh for in case one of them wants to sponsor us one day i don't know um for now if you've enjoyed the show do please give us a like thank you to everyone for your super chats tonight and for our regular donors you make all of this possible for now we'll be back on friday at seven p.m so make sure to hit subscribe you've been watching tisky sour on the bar media good night