 Borders and the movement across them have been one of the most mismanaged aspects of this pandemic. At the start, when countries like Taiwan and New Zealand were closing their borders to keep out the virus, the UK decided against control, suggesting the virus would inevitably get here anyway. Then this spring, when the need for travel restrictions had become universally apparent, Boris Johnson left India off the red list in the hope of getting a post-Brexit trade deal. And that's how we got the Delta variant. Now, the government have decided that they are going to loosen entry requirements for people who have been vaccinated in Europe and the United States so that they don't have to self-isolate on arrival. Do vaccines fundamentally change the equation so that this is a sensible idea, or are we looking at another monumental cock-up? I'll be speaking to an expert from Independent Sage. I'm also joined tonight by Dalia Gabriel. How are you doing, Dalia? I'm OK. I'm trying to ignore the fact that it's clearly the end of times, given the absolutely apocalyptic, chaotic weather that we are having. But, you know, just trying to pretend that that's not happening and doing my rituals, like sitting here with you every Wednesday to just make it seem like, you know, it's all going to be OK. It's balanced out because while sort of the coming apocalypse does seem more apparent with the weather, I have now got a canal outside my front door, which is very relaxing to look at as the sun comes down. So, you know, swing some roundabouts. Also tonight, we'll be talking about whether refraining from washing dishes can stop the climate change that's given me a canal outside my house. Why the Royal National Lifeboat Institution have been forced to release a video defending their work and Piers Morgan's latest attack on a young woman of color suffering with mental health difficulties. I also speak on the show to Ellen Clifford from DPAC about the government's damp, squib disability strategy. As ever, if you have any comments about what we're discussing on the show, do Tweet on the hashtag Tiskey Sour. And if you haven't already hit that subscribe button. Ever since the 19th of July, those double jabbed in Britain have not had to self-isolate on returning from countries on the so-called amber list from next Monday. If you've been fully vaccinated in the EU or the USA and you're travelling to England, those same rules will apply. The Transport Secretary Grant Shaps today confirmed the move on the BBC. We've already enabled people who've been double vaccinated here and we could prove that quite easily with the NHS app to travel and come back and not need to quarantine even if they're coming from an amber list country. Well, today, we're expanding that to all of Europe, including countries like Norway, for example, in Switzerland, outside of the EU, and also the United States of America, which does, of course, cover a very large number of people who come to this country and will then look at what to do with people who have vaccinated outside of those areas once we've got this pilot successfully up and running. The thing that struck out about you there is you can't just keep calling everything a pilot, right? If you're letting everyone in from Europe and the USA, that's not a pilot. That's probably most people who've come to this country. Anyway, health is devolved, which means that Grant Shaps only has authority for policy in England, but both Wales and Scotland are expected to follow suit basically for practical reasons. If Wales had a different policy, you could just travel to England and then take the train to Wales. So this does look like it will be a UK wide policy, like those vaccinated in the UK, Europeans and Americans will still need to take a pre-departure test and a PCR test on or before day two after arrival. France is still excluded from the scheme because of the presence of the beta variant in that country. For their part, Labour have opposed the move speaking to Sky this morning. Labour's Angela Rayner called the changes reckless. I think actually at the moment, everybody wants to go on holiday and get back to normal as quickly as possible. But this is reckless. We know that the Delta variant came into this country and delayed the lifting of some of the restrictions and caused infections here. We need to make sure that we've got proper data driven analysis and that we look at an international passport for vaccines. And we also know that people who have had the vaccine, of course, can still get the virus. So a testing regime is very important and crucial as well. So I'm very concerned about the government's announcements by the press this morning. So is allowing vaccinated Americans and Europeans to enter the UK without self-isolating sensible or, as Labour say, reckless. I'm joined by Gabriel Scali from Independent Sage to discuss. Thank you so much for joining us this evening. And let's get straight off. What do you think of this move? I think the government doesn't really know what to do about borders and COVID and hasn't done from the very beginning. They made a mess of it on several occasions now. And this seems to be a really strange approach they're taking. But it's it's in keeping with their liberalisation of absolutely everything and their policy. Remember, remember, the policy is to have cases during the summer and admissions to hospital during the summer and deaths during the summer so that we don't have to have those cases, deaths, hospital admissions in the autumn and winter. So you could look at it as part of that overall policy. They don't really mind having cases now. And therefore, they're probably in favour of liberalisation of everything. It's certainly, you know, it's a double vaccination as you pointed out. You can get the virus and you can transmit the virus and you can bring the virus in. And then, of course, there's children and young people to be considered as well, who are not eligible for the vaccination and who undoubtedly are exempt from all this anyway. So they can carry the virus if they go off on holiday and come back. And there does seem to be enough evidence that European holidays, Mediterranean holidays at the moment are acting as a sort of mixing pot for the virus and the sort of place that if you're going to bring variants back, you might bring them from last summer. We had a Spanish variant which came back and became very dominant. It wasn't much different from the one we had at that point. So it didn't do much damage, but it was certainly present and became very, very prominent then. And that only came from one place and one route. So this this permeability that the airlines want it, that even the European Commission want, the European Commission, remember, being very against any restrictions on travel. And if any of the EU member states are going to put restrictions on the border, they get a ticking off from the European Commission because they think it is in conflict with free movement of labour. And they equate that, you know, apparently there's no difference between freedom of labour and free movement of the virus for many people in power. And so you'll have gathered, Michael, I'm not very impressed about this. But then what is there to be impressed about in terms of the government's handling at the moment? There have been points in this pandemic where all scientists seem to have agreed that the government strategy was was wrong. And it was Boris Johnson, who was very pick-headedly ignoring them. Think January, for example. This time around, it does seem to be the case that there is a bit more disagreement, at least from from what I've been reading and listening to. So I want to show you a clip right now from Sir John Bell, who is Regis Professor of Medicine at Oxford University. And he was asked on the BBC's World at One, whether he was concerned about the changes today's or the changes made today to travel restrictions. This was his answer. No, it doesn't. And the reason is that I think the one thing we've learned in the last three or four months is certainly with the existing variants, Delta in particular, that the immunity you get from both the big vaccines, Pfizer and AstraZeneca, is pretty profoundly effective against severe disease and indeed death. And you know, that's what we need to focus on. So if people are double vaccinated, they're protected. I mean, it's as simple as that. And on the back of that, I think we're not talking about sniffles and headcoats and a bit of a cough. We're talking about stuff that really matters. We should be pushing to open the door much more widely quickly. It doesn't matter what border controls you put up. You will not stop the arrival of variants that you made to lay it a bit. I think it's a bit self-indulgent, to be honest, of Western countries fretting about these kind of issues when the vast majority of the globe remains completely unvaccinated with massive, massive levels of viral replication sweeping through the population. If you want variants, you've got the perfect storm for that. And, you know, it's not in Watford. It's in Zimbabwe and Rwanda and South Africa. So John Bell, they're listed. I mean, a number of reasons why he's not opposed to this particular move. How would you respond to the arguments that John Bell made there? Well, there are several of them I think I take issue with. Firstly, there are plenty of countries in the world who are dealing really well with the virus, like Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan, China, Vietnam, I mean, the whole string of them. Some countries in Europe dealing very well and have dealt very well, like Finland, Norway and Germany now has an extraordinarily low level of cases. And so it's nonsense to think that it's a free for all. And there's nothing you can do about all of this. That's the first point. The second point is the vaccines are great, but they don't protect you from getting the virus. They don't protect you from becoming ill. He doesn't mention at all long COVID. And I think that's something that some people are blind to long COVID and the disability and the illness that that's producing in a really substantial number of people of all ages. And we don't want a disabled population and anyone who's had long COVID. And you'll have seen, I'm sure, plenty of interviews with people who are really badly affected by it, even though their initial illness wasn't terribly severe. And the final point is the vaccines are great. Yeah, they are great, but they're not the whole answer. We need a vaccines plus answer to this. One of the reasons we need that is because look at vaccination in the UK. The UK started really well, but it's now lagging behind. As a maze this week, we've seen the Republic of Ireland overtake Northern Ireland in terms of its vaccination. And the Republic started really late, a real shortage of vaccine. But they're going really health or leathered on, they're doing really well. And what's more, they're going to vaccinate the 12 to 17 year old group that we don't want to vaccinate for no good reason. We've had the vaccine approved now, it's passed the safety checks. It's been approved and the government isn't going to deploy it for reasons that aren't immediately apparent. Though we do see some members have been a part of that decision making process saying that they don't believe long COVID exists and therefore there's no need to vaccinate young people. So it is a bit of a mess, but it's entirely in keeping with the general mess that has been the handling of the pandemic, I think. And we're still failing to learn from other countries that do it better. And one final point is, you know, it's fine saying we travelers can come in here with a vaccine passenger. But you look at the states and the US has their state department and the Centre for Disease Control are telling the United States citizens not to come to the UK. They've got the strongest possible travel advisories, both those organisations, saying do not travel to the UK because they don't like what's going on here in terms of the virus. So their reason is because of the Delta variant, isn't it? And I suppose I want to focus on this long COVID point for a moment because I'm not clear how it relates to borders, I suppose, because for me, it seems the big worry about having people coming in and out without self-isolation is if they were to bring over a variant of concern, which evaded vaccines. Now we're all vaccinated, even if we get a highly transmissible one. You know, it's inconvenient, but as far as I understand, long COVID is very likely to be protected by vaccines anyway. So the big issue is, do we import a variant which is vaccine resistant? And John Bell in that interview was suggesting, well, if that happens, it's not going to come from Europe or America anyway. It's going to come from somewhere that doesn't have the level of vaccinations that we have to control the virus. And so therefore we should stop talking about minor questions. These are sort of his arguments, these minor questions about travel between heavily vaccinated countries and focus on getting the vaccines to places that need them, because that's where the real problem lies. We're talking about minor issues when we're talking about the West at this point in the pandemic. All of these all of these issues are important. One of the things that's characteristic of the UK response is that they feel to grasp lots of the issues and be able to do things all at once. OK, so let's go through some of these. Absolutely, we need to keep the variants out as long as we can to get people vaccinated and reduce the opportunities for transmission. The best way of reducing the total global risk of variances to vaccinate the population, but the UK is one of those countries that isn't supporting a waiver on the vaccine patent. And it's no good people here making these these statements about how we need to vaccinate developing in developing countries or lesser developed countries or the UK government saying they're going to give some of their vaccine to developing countries. That's good. I'm not saying it's bad. But what the developing world is asking for and it's even supported by by the United States, but opposed by by many of the European countries and the European Union is that we need a relaxation of the of the patent so that countries can make vaccines for themselves. And we shouldn't be defending the the drug industry and the vaccine companies and enabling them to keep control of something that should be a global resource. So I disagree with the overall attitude around vaccines globally and what will answer that would be the the patent. The issue about long COVID is a real issue because we're not going to vaccinate young people in this country. Plus, there are we know the vaccination rates vary in the country and they vary by social class. They vary by factors like people's language skills. They vary by their housing tenure. It varies by their ethnic group. And we are going to, I feel, be really badly affected in some communities by by an ongoing surge of COVID and flare ups of COVID a bit like what we've seen all the way along in that the communities that still had COVID, even this time last year, when when, my dad, we were in a much better position than we are now last July. Those countries, those those local authorities, particularly in the Northwest that had high levels of deprivation, high levels of overcrowding, high that promotion of people from ethnic minorities still had that virus going on, even then. So we need an integrated program and we're not seeing that. We're not seeing the movement on a ventilation is a good one. There is a right in law for people who work in enclosed spaces to have access to fresh, clean air. And no one is enforcing that. No one's saying how that can be insured for people in an era of COVID. And we need the trade unions. We need the health and safety executive to step up to the mark and start talking about making making workplaces, study places and places we visit for whatever reason safe. We're not seeing that the whole policy on masks is outdated. We're still operating on the basis of face coverings very largely. And we know that was from an era when there weren't proper masks available. And when we thought it was predominantly droplet spread, we now know it's airborne spread and we need to improve our masking. So there's a whole string of things that operate together. And one of the failures of government has to be being to produce an integrated strategy. In fact, as you know, there is no strategy. There is no plan for handling COVID-19 going forward. And the government hasn't had a plan for over a year now. Before I let you go, let's have a look at today's cases. Today was the first time in seven days that day on day cases rose. There were twenty three thousand five hundred cases reported yesterday and twenty seven thousand seven hundred and thirty four today. Of course, this still puts us in a position where cases are much lower in general than they were a week ago. Gabriel, you were opposed to the government moving to phase four of COVID restrictions. Has anything changed in your mind, given this, I suppose, unexpected change in changing case rates? Is there any way that this has made you reassess your current prognosis for the UK's epidemic? Well, it's very I'm delighted to see the decline in cases. I hope it's a real decline. And I think everyone has been surprised even even the most optimistic people didn't think the cases would fall as consistently as they have done over the last week. We don't know why that has happened. On Friday, we'll know a bit more when we see some of the good survey data coming out about cases, whether this is a real fall or whether it's a fall produced by other factors such as a decline in availability of testing or maybe those issues about people being pinged and not coming for testing. Also, schools have broken up and that always produces. So we'll see. But what is very clear is that hospital admissions are still going up and deaths are still going up. So as long as those two features are going up, then we are in difficulty. And as I said, go back to exactly 12 months and we were in a far better state than we are in now. And we should have at that point held on to that and made sure that we didn't get back into these successive waves. So I'm still very worried about what could happen in the in the winter. Very worried indeed. And I think we need to we need to get a shift in government policy on things like vaccination for younger people, on masks, on ventilation, all that all of that. So it's vaccines plus is what we need. Gabriel Scali, thank you so much for for your time this evening. Always an absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Thanks for having me. We'll speak soon, I'm sure. Let's go to some comments. Freya Whiskocki with I hope I said that right with 10 pounds. Please wish a happy birthday to my friend George Grundy. It's his birthday tomorrow. He is a big fan and has been supporting Navarra for years. Thank you for your amazing hard work from Tim and Freya. Thank you for the very kind words and happy birthday to George Grundy. Next story. Allegra Stratton was hired last year by the Prime Minister to be his official spokesperson. The idea was to have daily White House style briefings where his spokesperson would speak directly to the press. Those plans have been dropped. It turns out the government doesn't really like having its positions scrutinized live on television because they often crumble. So Allegra Stratton now has a new role. She is the Prime Minister's cop 26 spokeswoman. Her job is to talk about climate change. It's now safe to say her first intervention on the subject hasn't impressed on Tuesday, she tweeted, could not rinsing dishes before the dishwasher be your one step greener ahead of cop 26. If that's too hard, a habit to kick, pick something else. A cop 26. We have big ass for the world on cash, coal, cars and trees. But the micro matters to change is coming. Yes, this is the person who is charged with heading the most crucial climate meeting in a generation. And her big idea is for us to stop rinsing our dishes before we put them in the washing machine. Sorry, in the dishwasher. I got my white goods wrong. Let's take a look at some of the responses that this provoked. I didn't see anyone respond to this positively. We'll go through some of the best critics. Mike Galsworthy, the anti-Brexit campaigner, tweeted, Sure, how about if I stop pre rinsing plates on my private jet flights from London to Cornwall? Clearly a reference there to Boris Johnson taking the private jet to the G7 in Cornwall instead of taking the train. Asad Rehman, who's director of war on want responded to that tweet. The planet is on fire and underwater and the government is trolling us with bollocks about rinsing dishes. It reminds me of the big NGOs messaging, change your light bulb, not the world. It's intended to depoliticize climate and make it all about individual behavior and not about capitalism. And even Dominic Cummings got in on the act. He tweeted, fact people believing micro matters, orders of magnitude more than micro actually matters is one of the problems with effective communication on climate. It hugely distorts people's scale of what really affects the system. Dalia, Gabriel, I want your thoughts on this issue. Do you side with Allegra Stratton or Dominic Cummings when it comes to rinsing your plates before you put them in the dishwasher? I mean, I'm getting stressed out because between this and Dominic Cummings professing support for the Free Brittany campaign, I'm very politically confused and I don't like it. But I mean, you know, this is the same government that, you know, recently commissioned a coal mine, you know, on the, you know, jumping off from Asad's point. This is a government that's just commissioned a coal mine in Cumbria. It's it's also the same government that, you know, has done very little to challenge the power of the city of London in the fossil fuel industry, where, you know, so many of the insurance companies and the finance institutions that basically make the fossil fuel industry and the projects around the world possible. That's where so many of those institutions are concentrated right, you know, right in London. You know, climate change is as as we all know, it's a large scale problem. It's one of those things where actually every little doesn't really help. Every little kind of actually makes not really much difference. You know, whether it comes to preventing further impacts from climate breakdown or or mitigating against the impacts of climate breakdown that is already sort of underway, you know, we really need large scale interventions. And the thing is, is that it's not really rocket science. There are so many things that could be done. You know, whether it's a mass transfer of wealth to the global south to support mitigation efforts, whether it's, you know, open sourcing technology that helps in the fighting against, you know, the impacts of climate change, open sourcing that so it's not patented in the way that, you know, the vaccines have been and we've seen how the impact of unequal intellectual property, the impacts that has on trying to tackle global crises, it also probably does include a reduction in energy use, as well as obviously a shift in energy source from, you know, carbon intensive industries to alternative sources. But that reduction in energy is not, cannot just happen. I mean, it's not relevant for it to just happen in an individually sort of meated out level. It's rather about stopping, you know, companies and industries like our agricultural industry, for one big example, from engaging in very wasteful practices because under capitalism, it's often much cheaper to overproduce and then waste than it is to sort of reduce or redistribute. So it involves these kinds of rewiring and systemic changes that, you know, focus so that our energy system is focused on what is sustainable, what is necessary, what is sort of meets people's general needs rather than than profit. And Allegra Stratton's approach here basically is the equivalent of like looking at the Australian wildfires that happened and being like, well, maybe if we all just like pull our pants down and piss on it, then maybe we'll get somewhere like that's literally the equivalent. And it's and I'm glad that, you know, everyone across the political spectrum has united to say that this is so so laughable. But it also goes a lot further beyond her because it really makes me think about the idea of the carbon footprint, which is sort of so endemic in our understanding of what it means to fight against climate change, what it means to sort of mitigate against climate change. It's sort of in our everyday lexicon. It's key to how we understand climate change. You know, this idea of everyone reducing their carbon footprint was seen as a sort of progressive thing, but it was actually a quite frankly, manipulative marketing tactic that was developed by the fossil fuel industry in order to, as Assad said, individualize climate change to portray it as, you know, something that everyone is equally responsible for and that we can approach it by taking these sort of like minor individual behaviors. It was literally cooked up by BP to stave off efforts to hold the company and its other sort of colleagues accountable because, you know, in some parts of the world, like in the U.S., we had the lobbying efforts going towards, you know, climate denialism and climate skepticism, where in countries like, you know, the UK and in other countries in Europe where that wouldn't really fly because, you know, most people sort of like believe that climate change is real. They just have they just innovated a different, quite effective strategy of, you know, taking the fact that people people's real concerns and sort of assuaging that concern by giving them the sense that they can do something to to impact the thing that they are worried about, you know, giving them something meanie or so that they can feel like they're doing their bit. And that way, not only is our anger and our scrutiny not directed to the institutions and the companies that are like responsible, but in fact, our scrutiny is deflected towards each other as we like become curtain twitchers on whether or not people are like composting right or, you know, recycling enough. So really like the government here, despite hosting as you said, these very important climate negotiations in Glasgow later this year, not only are is the government sort of showing us that it doesn't bode well because not only are they not really standing up to the fossil fuel industry in a way that is necessary, but they're actually doing the propaganda for them. They're actually doing the propaganda of the fossil fuel industry for them. And that doesn't bode well, especially as we've talked about it before. These negotiations have historically been hijacked and happened on the terms of companies and states that are responsible for this mess and have silenced the communities that most urgently are most urgently impacted by climate breakdown. And these comments by our so-called climate spokes person suggests that COP this year, you know, the climate negotiations this year isn't going to be any different. That's a very important point. So I want to go back to the issue of Allegra Stratt and some people might be watching you saying you're judging her on a tweet. There was a whole article. Now she was sharing a Telegraph article, which was based on a comment piece she'd written in the Telegraph. So we can go to that for the full context. I'm not sure it makes it much better, to be honest. She writes, but could you go one step greener? Did you know, according to COP 26 principal partner, Wreckett, who make finish, you don't really need to rinse your dishes before they go into the dishwasher. Does your brand of plastic bottle shower gel come as a bar in cardboard packaging? I bet it does. It might be freezing half a loaf of bread when you get it home to get out later in the week rather than throwing half of it away when it goes moldy. It could be walking to the shops, not driving, driving, micro steps, maybe, but all the more achievable because of it ahead of COP 26. Choose one thing, go one step greener. She goes on. On your own, we are not pretending these steps will stop climate change. But here in the UK, you are not on your own. The Prime Minister's green 10 point plan to build back greener means the government is getting stuck in businesses large and small are lowering their emissions and the NHS is two with one step greener, it will add up. The very obvious thing to say is I find it quite worrying that the Prime Minister's COP 26 spokesperson is very obviously putting in basically sponsored content to statements on climate change COP 26 principal partner, Wreckett, who make finish says you don't need to rinse your dishes because their dishwashers are so good. Anyway, the broader point, Allegra Stratton, if you want to be very sympathetic to her, is saying these steps on their own will not stop climate change. And the point I want to put to you, Dalia, is potentially is there an argument that even though these small individual actions that you can take, recycling your glass bottles or what Allegra Stratton wants us to do freezing half your bread, even if that on its own doesn't solve climate change, is there a sense that that could make everyone feel included in the fight against climate change? And so the habit of of trying to be green makes you more committed to the things that matter that are green. Do you think there's anything to that or am I trying too hard to defend the Prime Minister's spokesperson here? I mean, I think that, you know, I'm not obviously, you know, I recycle, I'm not going to begrudge and not going to be like you shouldn't recycle because then you're like being, you know, sort of scammed or whatever. I think that that's not the point. But the point is, is that you would actually be much better off if what you want to do is feel included in the fight against climate breakdown, you'd be much better off being involved in campaigning and political activism to, for example, divest the institution that you work in or institute your pension fund or things like this to divest it from fossil fuels. You'd be better off getting involved in demanding those large scale things. And that's the kind of political. I think it's it's very sad that, you know, we've kind of entered this sort of era where political activity and political consciousness is very much something that we individualize rather than something that we kind of collectively achieve. So obviously it's, you know, I guess it's part of it. And I guess like having an ethic of, you know, redistribution and an ethic of, you know, not wasting, not being wasteful, but frankly, you know, the waste that's done on an individual level, it's just nothing compared to corporate waste. It's nothing compared to the scale of waste that we see, for example, by supermarket chains, the scale of waste that we see in industries like Amazon, you know, that is sort of factored into their business model. It's so minuscule that I worry that any kind of over focus on these individual behaviors allows us to kind of deflect from the real issues and invest in solutions that are just not going to get us where we need to be fast enough. I worry that it's actually it can be a bit demobilizing is what I'm saying. And it can be a distraction because it makes, you know, maybe you're better off giving your money to a campaign group than buying a new, I don't know, green waste paper. But what trends do you think is to buy that green? I don't know. We've got one more climate story for you in case you've been living under the illusion that our establishment are taking climate change as seriously as they should. It's a story revealed by the Guardian today, the Queen lobbied ministers in the Scottish government to make sure she is exempt from climate legislation. So they report the exemption means the Queen, one of the largest landowners in Scotland is the only person in the country not required to facilitate the construction of pipelines to heat buildings using renewable energy. Her lawyers secured the dispensation from Scotland's government five months ago by exploiting an obscure parliamentary procedure known as Queen's Consent, which gives the monarch advanced site of legislation. So the monarch gets advanced site of legislation. She saw there was going to be a policy forcing her to put pipes on her grounds to have a more green form of heating. She didn't want that. There's an opt out in the legislation. Now this does make it seem a bit of a joke when they're telling all of us, you should take individual action because when you add it all up it makes a difference. The people who can make a difference on their own because their consumption habits are so ginormous that personal decisions by them actually could make a big difference. They get to opt out. So this does seem like a complete joke to me and God save us from four degrees of heating because our leaders definitely aren't going to stop that from happening. Let's go to a couple of comments. Paul C with five euros, Brit living abroad here seeing things through my own situation but cannot wait to see family for first time since Christmas. Get the kettle on mom. That is a very important point. As I say, I'm I don't have particularly strong opinions when it comes to this policy about people who are double vaccinated, being able to come into Britain without self isolating. There are arguments, good arguments for it and good arguments against it. The argument for it is, is people like Paul C, people who haven't come into the country for a long time and want to see family and if we can do that in a low risk way, you know, it's obviously nice to do it if the risks aren't too high. Saul with a fiber environmentalism without class struggle is gardening. Difficult to disagree. P Walsh with 499. Hi guys, love all that you do. Keep up the great work. Can I have a shout out for my birthday yesterday, turning 45 years young Paddy. Happy birthday Paddy for yesterday. Thank you so much for your comments and fresh tea with 1420. Thanks for everything, Navarra team. You are priceless. Please can you say hello to my sweetheart, comrade Donnie. Hello comrade Donnie. I assume that was a reference to 420, but then you wanted to give us a bit more money. So it's really 1420. Perfect. Let's go to our next story. The government's national disability strategy was first announced by the prime minister at the general election and was supposed to be a once in a generation transformative plan. However, its release has been met with a muted response by disability charities and criticism from a Tory peer. We can take a look at the measures put forward in the document. They include 300 million pounds to support children with special educational needs and disabilities, an increase in the number of accessible homes and funds to adapt older properties, introducing a UK wide campaign to increase public awareness and understanding of disability. One million pound to recruit more disabled magistrates in England and Wales and an audit of mainline railway stations for disabled accessibility. Of course, that is not an exhaustive list but a sense of what is in the document, what is in that national strategy. Work and pension secretary Therese Coffey told Sky News she was excited about the plans. So we're doing more what we can do to help with accessibility to trains, things on buses where we are putting up the audio visual announcements on every single bus. Indeed, the Department for Transport is now going to work on an app where people can contact the guard at any time. Other things like making it easier for people to get into work. We estimate about 300,000 people fall out of work through being disabled or having health conditions and we want people to be able to stay and work and progress in work. So there's aspects like that as well as access to better housing, which is just easier for people's everyday lives. So there's a whole series of commitments, over a hundred and they've been informed. We've been informed by the strategy by the people we want to try and help. Coffee there suggesting this strategy was made in consultation with the people it would affect. But disability charities have complained they were asked for little input. It also appears the government didn't deign to win over the support of high profile conservatives with disabilities. This was Lord Shinkwin speaking about the plans. I'm really disappointed. This missed opportunity. The Prime Minister promised it would be the most ambitious and transformative discipline in the generation. Unfortunately, I think an awful lot of disabled people, 14 million of them, are going to see it as a broken promise. Shinkwin also said of the strategy, it comes across to me more as a PR exercise by the government to make non disabled people aware of the wonderful things it claims it has done or was going to do for disabled people. This is not a document that ministers can claim is owned by disabled people in consultation with government. So why is the Tory national disability strategy so much of a disappointment that even Tory peers are opposing it? I spoke earlier to Ellen Clifford. She is an organizer with disabled people against cuts and offer of the war on disabled people. I think a lot of disabled people were really hoping that this strategy would have something in it to address the many, many issues that disabled people have been raising continuously for the last 10 years about how far their living standards have gone backwards since 2010. The strategy really is very much lacking in substance. It doesn't address any of the key priorities that disabled people have. So for example, the burning issues of disability benefits which everybody I think in the country knows there are problems with those and also social care funding for social care and ever diminishing social care packages for disabled people. These are the key issues that disabled people are facing and yet they barely get a passing mention in the strategy itself. There's actually a legal challenge going ahead against the strategy. So we were wondering if it was actually going to be published at all. There's actually been a long delay due to the initiation of the legal challenge by disabled campaigners. And they're taking that on the grounds that there wasn't good enough consultation on it. How could the Office for Disability issues possibly know what are the key issues for disabled people when they carried out such a poor consultation? There was a survey that was launched and that was generally considered to be very poorly put together, very rushed. The questions weren't in any kind of understand comprehensible order. And there was also some quite offensive questions in there. So for example, there was a question because the survey was targeted at non-disabled people as well as disabled people, there was a question, would you be happy to have a physical relationship with a disabled person in there? So, you know, you can imagine there was quite an outcry about that. And because disabled people felt they weren't able to describe the actual barriers that they're facing. And that's because issues including disability benefits and social care weren't included in that. But they were never intended to be. The government always had in mind, I think, that they would have the we obviously got the health and social care bill going through Parliament at the moment. But also what came out last week is a health and disability green paper. And that's the thing that I think disabled people should be much more focused on and more concerned about. For me, I think that this strategy is just a distraction. And could you talk a bit about that green paper? I mean, of course, your book is about the catastrophic effect that Tory reforms to disability benefits had to disable people. What does this green paper add to that? What direction is the government now now traveling? Is it getting even worse than in those days of George Osborne or is it just not changing as much as it should do? The direction hasn't changed. But they are trying to present it as if they're taking on board. The points that have been raised, some of the the points about assessments that being far too many assessments and the level of stress that causes to disabled people points about advocacy. And also social security under COVID has been really different. They had to suspend the face to face assessments, which meant more being done on the basis of the extensive forms and written information that was submitted. Also telephone assessments. And that's something that will save the government money and is also what disabled people want to see. So the opening chapters of the green paper very much focus on those fairly in the scheme of things. Minor concessions. The really worrying thing is in the final chapter. And what that talks about is making the system more affordable in the future. So it's very much hinting about more cuts to come. Sanctions get hardly any mention in the paper at all. And that's obviously again one of the key issues that disabled people have had and have been raised in continuously given that they disproportionately target disabled people and discriminate against them. But what it does talk about is the as they see it the problem of too many disabled people being put into because employment is all very deliberately complicated. So you can't easily explain it in a media sound right. But employment and support allowance, the main out of workability benefit got taken over by universal credit. So the group that you get put into if you go through your work capability assessment, you're found basically unfit for work. You're you're found that you can't take part in work related activities and search requirements that people on JSA have to do. And if they don't then they get sanctioned. So the group when you're you're safe as a disabled person with getting you out of work benefit, they say there are far too many people in that group. So what they're raising is this possibility of making their eligibility criteria much harder, I think, tightening that and so trying to save save save money on on disability benefits. When the government first introduced personal independence payment, George Osborne said it will save 20 percent of the what was the then disability living allowance budget. What's happened since is spending's just gone up and up and up. And the Office for Budgetry responsibility found that had they kept DLA it would have actually saved the money. They've now overspent so much against their projected savings in this area of the benefit system. And a lot of that is because there has been a huge amount of work by disabled campaigners, public lawyers, voluntary sector organisations to challenge the government when they've tried to cut benefits. And because of that what we're now seeing of course is this idea that judicial reform needs judicial review needs to be reformed, which will stop us from being able to take legal challenges when they try and cut and restrict access to disability benefits. So the government is clearly very much on the same on the same direction, on the same path as they always were. And I think that we need to be really, really worried about what's coming for us in the future. My final question is going to be about the courts and a well I presume a fairly rare victory for disabled activists over the government. This was on the failure to provide British sign language alongside two technical briefings on the COVID pandemic at the end of last year. Could you talk about the significance of that case? So in this case, deaf British sign language interpreters brought the case saying that it was discriminatory how key government briefings on COVID didn't have British sign language interpreters. So for Wales and Scotland, every single briefing that the Welsh Assembly or the Scottish government has done, they will have an interpreter next to the speakers as they're delivering those really important messages for the public about how to keep safe. The Cabinet Office has consistently refused to do the same for England. They said subtitles, for example, and other adjustments meant the deaf people had equal access. But that's based on a complete failure to understand the nature of sign language. So I think it's not as widely understood as perhaps it should be, but that sign language is a completely different form of language to oral written language. And so therefore, deaf people whose first language is sign language find it very difficult to understand written English. So they were a complete disadvantage through this failure by the government. So today it was a victory. The court ruled that at a couple of key briefings in September and October last year when the during the second wave of the pandemic, they ruled that that was discrimination. However, what they've said is that on an ongoing basis, the arrangements that the government has with the BBC, for example, for on their particular channel and their programs to have to have interpreters, they said that's enough. So it is a victory. But also I think this is an example of how the courts are reluctant to bring in any decisions which will have an ongoing implication in how the government works. That was Ellen Clifford, an activist with disabled people against cuts and author of the war on disabled people. We're going to go straight to our next story. This summer, just like the last, the Tory government and mainstream media have put together a joint effort to generate a moral panic about asylum seekers crossing the channel. Of course, the main victims of this campaign, all based on disinformation. We've talked about that enough on this show are migrants. But of late, there's also been another target coming under attack, the people rescuing them. In particular, Nigel Farage, now a host on GB News, has taken aim at the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, whose job it is to rescue people at sea. He recently tweeted, this is the Ramsgate Lifeboat today rammed full. Sadly, the wonderful RN-ILI in Kent has become a taxi service for illegal immigration to the dismay of all involved. What a state of affairs. Unsurprisingly, tweets like these have been followed by abuse hurled at lifeboat volunteers, both online and offline. That included last week when police were called to the charity's tower station at Waterloo Bridge in London where a crew was verbally assaulted while reporting for duty. In response to this harassment campaign, the RN-ILI have released a video defending their work. Let's take a look. Baby. Two children. OK, what's your hands? What's your hands? Children first. No. Snack out. No, don't touch. Don't touch. No, don't touch. We do not judge what we're doing. We're there to save lives. We're there to help people in distress. And I think when you have witnessed that distress first hand, it then makes you realise that you are doing the right thing. That's it, that's it. OK. That's it. Quickly. Quickly. OK, I'm going to lift you up. We're going to take you up there, OK? It's OK, it's OK. Nice and slowly, that's it. Hold on. Careful. The reaction we generally get from the migrants is of relief. It's not jubilation, it's relief. Just have them on the lifeboat deck, actually praying because they're so thankful. Just feel sick. The first job I went to that involved a channel crossing. We rescued this little girl, she was five years old, about the same size as my daughter. She was she was very scared and obviously exhausted, very cold, hungry. I now can't look at my daughter in her life jacket without thinking about that little girl. Dave in Lives at Sea is what the R&I is here to do, and we will continue doing it. If we didn't go out to the migrant boats, would there be fatalities? Yes, there would, without a doubt. Whole families have drowned in the channel, trying to make it from France to England. It's an incredibly dangerous stretch of water. And if the R&I was not rescuing people who have made unsuccessful crossings, then many, many more people would have drowned. Alongside that video that R&I said, we're proud of the lifesaving work our volunteers do in the channel. We make no apology for it. Those we rescue are vulnerable people in danger and distress. Each of them is someone's father, mother, son or daughter. Every life is precious. This is why we launch. The Guardian also report that responding to accusations from Nigel Farage is facilitating illegal immigration. The volunteer lifeboat charity said it was very proud of its humanitarian work and it would continue to respond to Coast Guard callouts to rescue at risk channel migrants in line with its legal duty under international maritime law. Imagine being out of sight of land, running out of fuel, coming across incredibly busy shipping lanes when you're frightened and you don't know which direction you're going in. That is by anyone's standards distress. Our role in this is incredibly important simply to respond to a need to save lives. That was Mark Dowey, the chief executive of the R&I. Dahlia, I want to go to you for your thoughts on this. And I suppose, I mean, in particular, what does it say about our culture that lifeboat volunteers, people who go out into the sea to rescue people at risk of drowning, volunteers are having to actively defend themselves against harassment when all they're doing is trying to save lives. So what does that tell us about Britain? I mean, it doesn't say anything good, does it? It says that, you know, the outcome of decades and decades of dehumanisation of migrants that has been part of the inherent political fabric of this country from, you know, Powell to Patel, it's been a central pillar of how Britain, the British state produces and justifies and asserts its power. So can we be surprised that after decades of that kind of ideological production that it manifests in these ways, right? That the fish rots from the head down. And I think that, you know, firstly, there's two things that strike me, you know, the fact that, you know, I think Nigel Farage said something about, you know, that these lifeboats are being used as a taxi service for illegal immigrants. I mean, it's not relevant, but actually like there's no such thing as an illegal asylum seeker that, you know, it is, but also like being an undocumented person so it doesn't mean that you shouldn't be cared for and shouldn't be looked after. So I don't think that that's, but it's just a kind of functional point there. But it's just, you know, their job is to save lives. But what happens when those lives are not seen as lives worth saving? And I think that that is why we get from this point, get to this point. And, you know, the idea is that if you are, let's face it, a black or brown person, because, you know, we aren't seeing this happening to white Australians or white Canadians. If you are black or brown and you're seen to be from outside of Britain, your life is expendable. It's to be used as a scapegoat or as cheap labor. And, you know, your assertion of your right to things like family life, like healthcare, like safe housing, is not seen as an inalienable right. It's seen as a burden and a nuisance that we want to get rid of. And, you know, that logic is literally coded into our immigration system. Like, our legislation is literally called a hostile environment. Like, you can't promote an immigration system that is called an immigration policy that is called a hostile environment. And then be surprised when your citizens create a hostile environment for the people that you've told them is an enemy of your way of life. And I think that the fact that, you know, obviously we know that people who come to this country, who are racialized outside of Britishness, we know that they receive abuse. The abuse of people who are seen to be helping them is also part and parcel of the far right ideology, the far right ideology that is bleeding into mainstream right wing, sort of mainstream right and center right discourses. You know, let's not forget Theresa May, sort of having that suspicion of people who aren't deeply invested in bordering around, you know, Britain's resources, saying that, you know, if you're not a citizen of somewhere, you're a citizen of nowhere, which is, you know, a dog whistle that's kind of the actually a klaxon, basically. Let's not forget why Joe Cox was killed. It was because she was seen to care too much for refugees. And in a context where migrants and refugees are being conceptualized as enemies of the nation, then caring for those people, being sympathetic towards those people, being generous and inclusive and welcoming to those people is seen as aiding and abetting an enemy of the nation. So I think obviously, you know, it's easy to look at Nigel Farage and to look at these tweets and think, oh my goodness, like, isn't it so bad that some people are so unsympathetic? But when you put it in context, you realize that this is the logical outcome of the ideological work that has been done from the top level of the British state, from the top levels of our media for decades now, it's simply just unraveling. And I think that we need to confront it head on. Oliver Kant with a super chat says solidarity with RNLI. I'm sure that is a sentiment shared by many people in our audience. And that is, you know, there are many takeaways from this story. You've summarized what it says about our xenophobic culture, Darlia, but one thing that really stands out here is, you know, the moral character of the RNLI. Not only going out, volunteers, saving people from incredibly dangerous situations, putting themself at personal risk, but this response to the likes of Nigel Farage, I just think is incredibly impressive and just their moral character towers above Nigel Farage, above pretty Battal and, you know, all power to you. We're gonna go on to our next story and our final story. At the Tokyo Olympics, there may be fewer genuine global superstars than at previous games. I'm thinking Michael Phelps or Usain Bolt, neither of them competing this year. One person who no one can deny does fall into that category though is Simone Biles. Biles aged 24 is a four-time Olympic gold medalist, multiple world champion and arguably the greatest gymnast of all time. However, this year, she got headlines for a different reason than for winning. It was for having pulled out of two Olympic competitions, citing mental health reasons. Yeah, I say put mental health first because if you don't, then you're not gonna enjoy your sport and you're not gonna succeed as much as you want to. So it's okay sometimes to even sit out the big competitions to focus on yourself because it shows how strong of a competitor and person that you really are, rather than just battle through it. I just felt like it would be a little bit better to take a backseat, work on my mindfulness and I knew that the girls would do an absolutely great job and I didn't wanna risk a team a medal for kind of my screw ups because they've worked way too hard for that. So I just decided that those girls need to go in and do the rest of the competition. Now, there has been a lot of support for Biles online, lots of people saying how brave it is to come out publicly and say the reason I'm not competing is because of my current mental condition. Also, lots of people pointing out that this isn't just, oh, it was stressful, so I didn't do it. Gymnastics is incredibly dangerous. If you get those jumps wrong, you can paralyze yourself. So if you go into, I mean, I don't know what these are things that, you know, the multiple twists and they, if you land wrong, really bad things can happen. So there are plenty, very, very good reasons for dropping out at this point. It probably comes as no surprise though that the usual suspects were not so understanding. Piers Morgan wanted some attention this week. So he had to go at Simone Biles. He has an article in the Daily Mail. Sorry, Simone Biles, but there's nothing heroic or brave about quitting because you're not having fun. You let down your teammates, your fans and your country. Much of the article is written as a response to statements Biles made to the press as if it's an interview. As if he's having a conversation with her. This is how he likes to conduct his life because if he's always at the center of the action, he writes, Biles said something really extraordinary and illuminating. I feel like I'm also not having as much fun. This Olympic Games, I wanted it to be for myself, but I came in and I felt like I was still doing it for other people. It hurts my heart that doing what I love has been kind of taken away from me to please other people. Morgan responds, sorry, what? You're not just at these games for yourself, Simone. You are part of Team USA, representing the United States of America and hundreds of millions of American people watching back home. Not to mention all the sponsors who've paid huge sums to support you. And Piers Morgan, they're hoping that we feel some sympathy with Nike in cases, it's caused them any problems. I doubt it has, he goes on. And when you quit, you were performing as part of a gymnastics team, not yourself. It's also not supposed to just be about having fun. The Olympics are the pinnacle of sport, the ultimate test of any athlete. They're supposed to be very hard and very tough physically, mentally, and any other way you care to name. Later on in the piece, he goes on to say, what exactly is so courageous, heroic or inspiring about quitting on your team and country in an Olympics? Simone Biles was so traumatized by her experience that she reappeared all smiles a little later to cheer on the team she'd abandoned as they tried and failed to win the gold. They'd have almost certainly won if she'd stayed and battled on, battled on. That's a weird optic for a sporting champion, isn't it? Of course, no sports writer will dare say any of this because they're all too terrified of the woke mob coming for them. But I know many of them are thinking it because some have messaged me privately to say so. Darlia, what do you make of this affair? Not just Piers Morgan's response, but also Simone Biles decision and the reaction to it. It's just none of his business. It's just none of his business. And I just like, I think that, I think people get very confused when we talk about why this kind of heightened scrutiny by Piers Morgan, but also by the rest of the tabloid media basically with the minute decisions and sort of personal decisions of women and women of color, but particularly black women of why that's racialized and why it's racist. People think, oh, he's not using racial slurs. He's not using epithets that are racialized. So it's not racialized, but it's the hyper focus and the dramatization of what are essentially very uncontroversial things. Like athletes have to be in, especially if you're an athlete who's playing on behalf of a team, you have to be in peak physical and mental condition. And Simone Biles is one of the most highly demanded, highly sought out, intensely, she's the only gymnast I can name and that comes with its own pressures that might not be experienced by other members of her team. And I'm sure that that was discussed. I'm sure that with her coach and whoever else is involved, that was a decision that they came to and it's a decision that they're now presenting. Or, so doing something like opting out of work that either you don't feel up to or that might be harmful to you, or in the case of Meghan Markle, where she has issues with her dad. These are like uncontroversial things and yet they suddenly become these topics of national conversation and these moral referendums on the character of these women. It suddenly becomes the thing that we all have to gather around together to get very angry about. And so that kind of hyper focus, that is where the racial element comes onto because these editors and people like Piz Morgan and these other kind of culture warmongers, they are seen as, they see this as a sort of lucrative and sensational modern punch in Judy where the people who are being punched are the marginalized. And it's an industry that is just guilty of basically making a huge amount of money and a huge amount of capital off of stoking up hatred against people who are cast as society's villains. Even if at one point they were put on a pedestal, that's all the more reason to pull them down because they wouldn't have deserved it. And one of those people are racialized people, black people, brown people, it's what sells papers, it's what people are drawn to. And that is why this obsession with Meghan Markle, with Simone Biles has been so lucrative. It gets them in the press. It's so lucrative for him and for the tabloid industry. And you know what? I actually wish that Piz Morgan would take a few pages out of Simone Biles's book and just take a few more days off, maybe take a few decades off because quite frankly, we're all sick of it. It's just snowflake nonsense. I think you've covered the dynamic of Piz Morgan here incredibly effectively. And especially, I mean, our audience will be aware how often this happens when it's Piz Morgan haranguing a young woman who's obviously much younger than himself and quite often a woman of color. Another angle I want to cover on this particular story is how it relates to what I think could end up being quite a big variable in politics, which is that the right have seen that certain people in the younger generation or across society, expectations have changed somewhat. And we do expect that if we're having mental health difficulties, we can make space around that. And that might be awkward for spectators. It might be awkward for sponsors. It might be awkward for bosses. And they don't like that. They want you to get on with it. If you're feeling down, get on with it. If you're uncomfortable, get on with it. Another example of this, which I think actually sums up this position. I'm seeing it all over the place, but this was quite honest actually, was in the telegraph today. It was by Madeline Grant. And she argued that workers prioritizing their well-being is a threat to the economy. The piece was titled, Indolent Britain has given up on working. COVID has accelerated a shift towards a view that jobs are only worth doing if it's convenient to workers. In this piece, she complains that the end of working from home requirements is encountering major resistance with numerous employees bringing legal action against bosses. Many such as the immunosuppressed will have good reason for wishing to avoid crowded workplaces. Other arguments, as with those bringing personal injury claims due to stress from having to commute seem much flimsier. Calls for progressive IDs fix A such as the four-day week have also grown louder recently, so presumably their proponents do not envisage any loss of pay. In all of this, we can detect an unmistakable cake-ism, not to mention something that was widespread among middle-class professionals before the pandemic, a belief in the primacy of employee well-being. This sense that work is meant to fit around the employee, not the employer, let alone be a compromise between the two. That work-life balance is no longer a reasonable attempt to prevent burnout, but something employees alone decide is clearly feeding into the debate too. Consensus is forming the professionals no longer need to justify working from home, it is for employers to explain why they should return. As I say, one thing that I think you can say in favor of this article is that it's pretty honest. She's essentially saying, workers now think that they're too important, they should subject themselves to whatever bosses want to do, however much it destroys their mental well-being. Basically, people's expectations are too high. Now, I don't know what conditions a professional comment writer for the Daily Telegraph has, but I don't imagine it's as gruelling as most minimum wage jobs in this country. So I don't think she's in particularly a position to talk here, but, Darly, I wanna bring you in on this particular angle of the story as well, which is, I think, a growing rearguard action from the right, be that Piers Morgan, be that Madeleine Grant in the Telegraph, to say, don't you start expecting too much? Don't you start expecting people to take your mental health seriously? Your job is to perform, your job is to work, problems with it, get over it. I mean, I find this moral panic so hilarious, given that I personally believe that the vast majority of jobs in the West, at least, are sort of complete scams. I think that what happened during lockdown was that a lot of white collar workers were like, wait, like, if I just don't turn up, nothing really happens, and I also don't really need to be in the office, nine to five, five days a week to finish my job. And obviously, you know, the other side of that is that we all now know how hard so many of our most low-waged precarious workers who are devalued by these same Telegraph columnists who are criticized, who are kind of, like, spoken down of, how hard they are working and how essential they are, you know, and they're working in risky conditions and explosive conditions. And I think I said this at the time that, you know, the government have been so desperate to get people back in the office and so desperate to get people back to 2019, even when it goes against all sensible public health guidance, partly for an ideological reason, you know, the ending of the furlough scheme is because this kind of ideology finds it so distasteful that, like, the little people could possibly be surviving, putting food on the table, you know, being alive without working themselves to the bone. And I remember at the very beginning of the pandemic, when it was clear that, you know, commuting to offices and, you know, working in offices was gonna be an absolute nightmare. I remember, I think it was Ian Duncan Smith, who at the peak of the first wave was like, oh, you know, I don't think that we should have a furlough scheme because it will disincentivise people from working. So I don't know if his idea of what should have happened is that we should have just, like, stopped everyone going to work and just let them just starve and languish and only those people with savings would, like, survive. And, you know, I think, and then you have, you know, on the other side of it, meanwhile, like, the people who work the hardest, you know, the working classes, single mothers with multiple jobs, app workers who have to piece their work together through a range of, like, side hustles and gigs. Those are the groups that are most disrespected and reviled by the government. So that's what's so ironic about it. But I, so basically, I think that as much as I wished at the idea that everyone was spending more time doing things other than work, that's actually not true. You know, this generation of workers, millennials, et cetera, these are the generations that are most likely to have a second job. We are much less likely to have sources of passive income, things like, you know, asset investments or landlord, or being a landlord. We are working harder and harder for less and less security. We are like the generation that is, that can't escape work because it's on our phones and it bleeds into all parts of our life. We're working on weekends. We're working on holidays. And I don't think that should be celebrated. I don't think that's a good thing. I think it has a corrosive effect on us as a community and also individually, but that is what the reality is. And it goes very, the data goes very squarely against what this columnist is saying. But, you know, a lot of these columnists are working the art of fiction and work in the art of kind of getting, creating generational wars between, you know, and stoking up classic generational wars where, you know, older generations believe that no one worked as hard as they did, even though it's sort of patently obvious on the ground that that's just not the case. Madeline Grant is, she's a young woman. She gets invited on TV a lot, I think partly because she's one of the few young people who have right-wing opinions. And so they're always struggling. Who can we get to defend right-wing positions that aren't over 60? Look, if I wanna work less hard, if I wanna work less hard, I'm gonna make a career shift into a young woman of color who says right-wing things on the TV because that is the easiest way to like a fast, easy check. I'm telling you, what am I doing here? Yeah, you could be on a much higher salary at GB News, I'm sure by now if you just, you know, drop some of your principles. Henry VIII, fake with five pounds says, didn't Piers Morgan quit his whole job at Good Morning, Britain because he took an L in a debate with the weatherman, brave guy he is. Lots of people threw that back at Piers Morgan on Twitter quite rightly. He said in his defense, this shows you how hypocritical you are when I stormed off. You said I was being weak. When Simone Biles steps down from competing in the competition, you say that's strong. The difference is one, she was doing something incredibly impressive. And as I say, if you do that when you're not at your mental peak, you can seriously injure yourself. You just walked off because you felt a little bit embarrassed. Also, she did it in a dignified manner. You know, she didn't storm off. She gave a press conference talking about the importance of mental health. You just stormed off because your pride was damaged for a moment. So they're completely incomparable events. It's obviously not brave to have your pride easily damaged. That's the opposite. It is brave to come out and say, I've got mental health difficulties. So I can't do this particular task in front of the whole world. Gaz Owen with a fiver, shout out to all the home carers. Absolutely shout out to all the home carers. So much respect for people who do that work because it is hella difficult and hella important. Dahlia, Gabriel, thank you so much for joining me this evening. If you are already a regular donor, thank you so much. You make this all possible. If not, please do go to thevaramedia.com forward slash support. For now, you've been watching Tisgy Sauer on Navarra media. Good night.