 Good evening and welcome to Tiskey Sour. I'm joined by Ash Sarkar as ever on a Monday. How are you doing, Ash? I'm good. How are you? I'm a little bit groggy, I have to say. It's not. I've got a non-COVID bog standard cold. So, I'm hopefully not too drowsy. And if I sound nasal, it's not because I've been taking elocution lessons from Kirstama. It's just because I have a slightly blocked nose. We have very important stories for you tonight. And they're going to be a surprise for you. I'm not going to introduce them at the beginning. You can take them as they come. As ever, we do want to know your comments and your questions. Do please tweet them on the hashtag Tiskey Sour or put them in the comments box. And do hit subscribe if you haven't already. The brutal killing of David Amis has provoked a national conversation about the safety of MPs in Britain. Commentary on the topic can be separated into three broad categories. The protection of MPs by police or security. The radicalization of potential attackers. And a clunky mishmash involving questions of civility and online anonymity. Tonight, we're going to take those in turn. So, as we discussed on Friday's show, David Amis is the second MP to be killed in six years while attending a constituency surgery. And the third, in 11 years, to have been stabbed at one. On the Andrew Marsh show on Sunday, Pretty Patel was asked if MPs, when they are seeing constituents at local surgeries, should have protection from police or security guards as standard. There are a whole suite of measures. And many of these measures came together post Joe Cox's murder. So, we have something called Operation Bridger that was stood up after the tragic, tragic murder of Joe. And with that, protective measures based upon MPs' engagement with the police, sharing information about, you know, your whereabouts, what you do, where you're going, events, surgeries, things of that nature. But also making sure that your risk is assessed in a thorough and practical way. There are a range of measures in place. So, this isn't about just saying, you know, let's just go for option A, have bodyguards or security. There's a panoply of measures and we have to be proportionate in terms of the risk individuals are subject to. And that is based on one-on-one engagement with the police who do those assessments. Now, if I was an MP, I'd have a couple of concerns with what Pretty Patel said there. The first would be that she is saying, oh, we've got all of these new measures which were introduced after the murder of Joe Cox. Well, five years later, another MP was murdered. So whatever was introduced, it wasn't good enough. The less obvious concern is that the reliance on the police to make assessments only works if you trust they'll take threats seriously. We have reason to doubt that. Paula Sheriff was the Labour MP for Dewsbury until 2019. It's a seat which borders Batley and Spen where Joe Cox was murdered. Sheriff told Sky this weekend how the police responded when her office was daubed in swastikas and she was sent death threats. When somebody was leaving swastikas at my office door, the police took several weeks to actually view the CCTV that we had managed to obtain to establish if we could see who was actually doing it. And then they wrote to me to tell me that the man who had been doing it was having trouble sleeping. When we received a death threat at my office by telephone, it was somebody who had left a message on the answer phone. The police came to my office and they laughed. And then when a man was continually harassing me over a period of months on an incessant basis, the police went out to see him and told him that they sympathised with him. So that was Paula Sheriff describing how swastikas were left at her office and the police took weeks to view the CCTV. Now remember this is in a constituency neighbouring one where an MP had recently been murdered by the far right. She then went on to say that the man who daubed the swastikas had trouble sleeping. That's what the police told her. And when she got a death threat via answer phone, the police laughed. They told her another serial harasser. They told another serial harasser that they sympathised with him. This is, you know, shocking on so many levels. Ash, what is going on here? I think what we see in the experience of Paula Sheriff is unfortunately symptomatic of a wider institutional problem with the police. So let's take the CCTV issue, not accessing the CCTV for weeks. This is a pattern that you see across forces across the country. So when it comes to burglaries, robberies, even hit and runs, police are either slow to investigate, they don't investigate at all, and they certainly don't follow up all up and use them in a timely fashion, which means that they could solve the crime. You know, we've seen an increasing proportion of crimes not being solved by police. And so I think that this is a kind of nationwide problem. And if an MP is being treated in that way, then, you know, for the ordinary person, making reports to the police, expecting them to be actioned, what hope do they have? But I think the more chilling aspects here, and this has got very little to do with resources, manpower, time or capacity, is this very callous attitude of, you know, laughing when a female MP gets a death threat, telling a serial harasser that you sympathize with him. I think that, again, this is symptomatic of a wider attitude amongst the police, quite frankly, not taking violence or threats against women particularly seriously. There was a report which came out today in The Independent that the Metropolitan Police sent along the address and full personal details of a woman who had complained about a police officer's conduct with regards to a different woman, a vulnerable woman in the course of attending to a domestic violence complaint. So I think that this is something which expands beyond the topic of violence, threats and harassment against MPs and speaks to that attitude, I think, of callousness and casualness when it comes to dealing with women's experiences of violence, threats and harassment. That's a super important point because, I mean, I'm sure we can assume that however callous they might seem to a female MP, they're probably going to be more callous to female non-MPs. So we are hearing, I mean, over the past weeks and months just so many examples of how the police, well, that wouldn't have been the Met Police. Paula Sheriff is, I think she was an MP in New Yorkshire potentially if it was next to Batley and Spen. It's clearly a situation where they aren't fit for purpose when it comes to people asking them for support on issues such as this. I want to move on to the second issue I mentioned at the start. That was radicalisation. The man suspected of murdering David Amis is Ali Harbi Ali. He had been referred to the anti-radicalisation programme Prevent five years ago. The right-wing papers are predictably asking why more wasn't done to stop him. I think we all expected to see headlines like that when the identity of the person emerged. The other issue with regard to radicalisation is the internet. Friends of Ali told the Sun that he had been radicalised watching online videos of the hate preacher Angem Chowdhury, former Met Chief Superintendent Dal Babu, told Good Morning Britain that internet companies do have a lot to answer for. The internet companies have a lot to answer for. Effectively, they'll need their tobacco movement where they're hauled in front of the courts and held to account. You can still access horrendous videos of extremism on the internet. We really need to be looking at why that's still allowed to happen and people have been radicalised during the lockdown. We need to make sure that we identify who these individuals are and deal with them effectively. An interesting point. People were radicalised over lockdown when they spent a lot of time just themselves and their computer. Ashley, I want to know your thoughts on this. How should we respond to violent extremism, whether that be of the far right, who killed the MP in Batley and spent, or Islamist versions which seems likely that's what happened here. Joe Cox was the name that obviously skipped my mind very briefly. What do you think about the solutions to this? Is it the radicalisation programmes? Is it regulation of the internet? Is it none of the above? Well, I think it's important to say, as you've said, that there's nothing solid yet about what specifically motivated Ali Harbi Ali. So there were reports in the Times suggesting that it might have something to do with David Amos' connections to Qatar. Qatar is obviously very involved financially and politically with Somalia. It might have been that he was radicalised online. Those were the reports that came out in the sun this morning. They'd been watching videos by Anjum Chaudhary. And then there were also reports in the telegraph that there weren't any particular reasons why Sir David Amos was targeted at all. It could have been any MP who just happened to be a national figure. So I would always be wary of saying, well, how could we have prevented this specific instance when we don't know for certain what it was that motivated this absolutely dreadful slaying of an elected representative in broad daylight. But in terms of how you take a step back and think about the failures of the government's counter extremism programme, it's interesting to me that when you've got this case of Ali Harbi Ali, who seems to have been known to prevent but wasn't known to MI5, you've also got the information which came out shortly after the Manchester Arena attacks and in a slightly different way, what gave us the in-cell shooter from Plymouth is that in some way they were known to the authorities, whether that was prevent, whether that was the local police or whether it was something else. So I think that one of the things that we've got to say is that while this kind of mass surveillance clearly isn't doing the job, it's able to identify vast numbers of particularly young men who have potentially been radicalised, potentially become very involved with extremist ideology, but they weren't necessarily able, perhaps because it's collecting so much data, to distinguish between those who are likely or unlikely to commit an act of violence. So something's going deeply wrong here. I do think that what's going on online is part of the conversation. I know we're going to talk about social media in a second so I don't want to get too deep into it. But one of the things at this point we just have to recognise, admit and get our heads around is that extremist material on YouTube, Facebook and also algorithms which serve people more and more extreme conspiracy theorists or violent material, is that this isn't an accident of these platforms. It's actually central to the profit model, which is one, you antagonise users enough so that you keep them in an addictive relationship with social media, and then two, you serve them progressively more extreme material so that they're drawn into these communities which they want to participate in more and more and more. There was testimony offered at the commerce subcommittee in the US, I think last week or the week before by a former Facebook developer who said, look, of course Facebook is well aware of all the problems with its apps, whether that's mental health issues, whether that's hate speech, misinformation or indeed extremist ideology. They're not doing anything about it because they simply don't want to. So I got ever so slightly distracted because I suddenly realised, I don't know where one would look to find a video of Angem Chowdhury. As far as I know, that's not being suggested to people in the Facebook algorithm or the YouTube algorithm. I just searched it on YouTube now. There's lots of news articles about Angem Chowdhury but I haven't seen any of his teachings. I don't know if you have any idea of what are the websites where people are watching this because obviously if we regulate Facebook and then they're watching it on a completely different dark web website, then regulating Facebook and the YouTube algorithm isn't going to do much, is it? Like I said, I don't know much about the specific case and not being funny or anything but my algorithm doesn't really serve me much Angem Chowdhury, it's mostly Doja Cat. I'm not sure if that's something which the more you look at this material, the more it gets served to you or if it's something which is happening on Reddit Fords or whether it's happening in terms of subterranean closed groups on Facebooks or forwarded videos and what's happened, that kind of thing. That I don't know. But what I do know is that particularly with incel and far-right ideology, that is very much something which just gets served up by the algorithm. So you start with the light stuff, a tiny weenie little bomb of Jordan Peterson and then suddenly it's like, you're just that main lining, I hate women because none of them want to fuck me. It's like the alt light and the alt right. I feel like we understand that pathway a bit more because I mean, a lot of that is on YouTube, I know that. Let's go on to the more, I suppose, ridiculous I think is one way to put it. There are some points of it which are reasonable but others aren't, which is how this has become a conversation about civility. It seems likely that the man who killed David Amos was a violent Islamist extremist. However, in the wake of Amos' death, political conversation has once again returned to one of Westminster's favourite topics. Civility online. This was Dominic Robb speaking to the BBC this morning about threats to MPs. I think a lot of people will be surprised at how widespread it is and not just, you know, abuse but serious concerted threats. And we do see the constant vilification of politicians and MPs particularly online but the culture, frankly. And I think it's incumbent on all of us as politicians to measure the language we use in debates particularly passionately held ones. I think the media as well and the social media as well. So if you like it's a team effort but the coursing of debates since 2010 when I first became an MP and the polarisation and that has led to much more personal attacks on the individual rather than just passionate debates on the issue. I think that's partly where we've just seen something go wrong over the last 11 years. Dominic Robb connecting the threats received by MPs to the more general vilification of politicians. It might seem like a somewhat reasonable point to make if you hadn't seen what Dominic Robb had been doing for the past six years. Namely comparing someone who wanted mild social democracy in Britain to a terrorist. In 2018 Robb shared a Times story and tweeted the following An appalling indictment of Jeremy Corbyn I feel for the party, for the many Labour MPs and supporters who will be just as sickened by what is tolerated at the top of their party. Corbyn joins Mass Killer on Global Antisemitism Index. Corbyn joins Mass Killer on Global Antisemitism Index. That list was collated by the Simon Wissenfall Centre. It's a joke by the way, that list in 2018 had Jeremy Corbyn alongside mass shooters and Germany's ambassador to the United Nations. The latter was condemning both Hamas Rockwitz and the illegal demolition of Palestinian homes. Don't take that list seriously. Another tweet from Robb about Corbyn compared him to Robert Mugabe and Ratko Mladic. As you will probably know, Mugabe has sent out violent mobs to fix elections. Ratko Mladic has been convicted for genocide. Corbyn just wanted to increase taxes. So these tweets are not the sign of debating ideas. They are the tweets of an opportunist willing to use the most misleading and extreme slurs to try and delegitimize an opponent. By the way, an opponent for whom there were many violent attacks against him. There were many violent attacks planned. In both of those cases, Robb was boosting articles in Britain's mainstream press. And this weekend we've seen a hell of a lot of hypocrisy from the journalists who work in that sector. A male on Sunday columnist Dan Hodges wrote a piece arguing the following. So he says, It's not okay to hate Tories and it's time for the decent people on the left to say so. In that piece, Hodges calls on the left to recognize that Tories are good, honest, decent committed public servants who just happen to have a different political philosophy. Now we could have a philosophical discussion about whether pushing 300,000 kids into poverty through a cut to universal credit or giving immunity to border guards if they drown migrants in the channel amid differences in political philosophy. However, we don't need to engage in such highfalutin discussion. As it's enough to point out that Dan Hodges has not come close to living by his own advice. This was an opinion piece published by Dan Hodges in the days after the Brexit referendum, which was, by the way, also just days after Joe Cox was killed. So you can see that Labour must kill vampire Jezza and Jeremy Corbyn is in a coffin. We can also take a look at a piece from Hodges in 2017. Dan Hodges, if you're still a member of Labour tomorrow, you are racist. Again, this is not someone who is recognizing that his opponents have a different political philosophy. This is someone trying to delegitimize them in the strongest possible terms. Ash, I want your thoughts on this. It's incredibly frustrating seeing all the politicians and journalists who spent five years demonizing a peace-loving social democrat as a neo-Nazi come out in support of civility and proportion in politics. I mean, look, when it comes to credible threats aimed at MPs, Jeremy Corbyn is a core part of this conversation. The Finsbury Park mosquitacker Darren Osborne said that he turned to the mosque attack only after not being able to get at his preferred targets, who were Sadiq Khan and Jeremy Corbyn. Jeremy Corbyn has also been attacked in public. He was the subject of an awful lot of harassment from the far right, and that's before you get to his characterization in the mainstream media as a terrorist sympathizer, as a Czech spy, as somebody who is the kind of demon offspring of Osama bin Laden and Pol Pot. And of course that characterization in the mainstream press and that kind of vilification had a direct relationship not only to the far right and kind of stirring that angry nest of hornets, but also then had an impact on ordinary Labour canvases who during the 2019 election were punched, assorted. That was one woman who ended up with broken ribs. None of that was covered in the mainstream media because what that would do is upset their preferred narrative which is about the unique nastiness and violence and agginess of the so-called hard left. I've told the story multiple times, but when I was on politics live and the whole discussion was about the nastiness of the hard left. So they got me on the panel and then they had a ton of people who weren't at all sympathetic to the left or to tell me how scummy my bit of the movement was. And then as soon as we stopped rolling, one of the other panellists literally started screaming and swearing at one of the other ones and nobody even blinked an eye. And I was like, what the hell is going on here? So there really is from top to bottom in the media. And when I talk about the media, I'm not just talking about senior journalists and producers. I'm also talking about those politicians who are deemed to be sensible or you can work with this person. Is that part of how they police the line between legitimate and not legitimate bit of politics is by selectively acknowledging and condemning harassment, threats, violence in moderate language or violent language. So this is a key part of how the machine operates. Now, I am absolutely not saying that abuse and harassment, threats of rape or violence, any of that is legitimate in any context. However, what is going on is a certain amount of filtering out depending on who the victim or who the perpetrator of that behavior is. And that's not right. I mean, it's totally that, isn't it? It's all like, who is a legitimate target? Oh, I was allowed to call Jeremy Corbyn a terrorist and a vampire and an anti-Semite because he was, he was all of those things. He was outside the boundaries of normal politics. You can't say that about Pretty Patel even if she does want to give immunity to border guards who want to drown people in the channel. No, because she's a, she's a mainstream politician. It would be very uncivil of you to use such coarse terms as racist when speaking about her. One topic we haven't covered directly yet is mentioned in a tweet. Nobody have no tweets on the hashtag Tiskey Sour. The notion anonymity plays a major role, is horribly damaging and bordering on religiosity. Anonymity can be shown not to be a large factor in this and it's not only whistleblowers who need a degree of anonymity. For some, it's a necessary protection for mental health. Ash, I want your thoughts on this. I'm sure you are subject to a lot more anonymous trolls than I am because I'm a white guy and also you have a lot more followers than me. Also, I'm your only anonymous troll, Michael. All my autocrats are telling abuse at you. Just make you feel included. Any tweet from you, I appreciate. Whatever, whatever the content. What do you make of the debate when it comes to social media anonymity? It is a bit odd that we're having it now because I don't think this alleged murder, killing, has much to do with social media anonymity but you can also see why it's coming up because clearly MPs are thinking we feel threatened in this way and that and quite reasonably they're now sort of linking together all the things that make their job feel threatening. What do you make of the anonymity element here? I mean, look, while I don't think that there is hard evidence yet to suggest that social media was central to this murder, I do understand MPs and journalists talking about it a lot because when you're subject to that kind of abuse online and your phone, it's like this little portal to hell and every time you open it, you're seeing the worst possible interpretations of who you are as a person being thrown back in your face and being muddled up with very credible threats. That is one of the most tangible ways in which you perceive and understand your own vulnerability. So I do understand why the conversation's gone here. I don't think it's all bad faith. I think it's kind of natural. But again, I don't think that there is enough evidence right now to suggest that that necessarily had something to do with the murder of Sir David Amos. Now, when it comes to the issue of anonymity, this is where I differ a little bit from some of our comrades on the left, which is I do think anonymity on social media creates certain issues. But from my own vantage point, one of the things that I see a lot is the same handful of users cycling through multiple accounts because one after another, those accounts will, you know, racially abuse me, call me all sorts of misogynistic names or make threats. I'll report them and they get suspended and I see them pop back up again and I can tell that it's them because they either have a kind of play on their previous Twitter handle or I can look through their tweets and see them like finding their other anonymous mates and bragging or complaining that they're on this new account. So I think there is this problem about the cycling through of accounts which maybe would be dealt with if you either, I think, had some kind of technology to pick up users creating multiple accounts or if you, you know, took the much bigger step of banning anonymity. I do also think that it's not easy to differentiate between the anonymous abuse which doesn't matter and the credible threat that does and I always was quite, I think, complacent about my ability to tell the difference until in 2018 I got an email from a CNN journalist who said, hey, had you seen these tweets, these like quite menacing, threatening tweets, they involved like images of mutilated animals and stuff like that, had you seen them? Because the guy who sent them to you was Cesar Sayoc, who was the guy who sent pipe bombs to progressive figures and organizations in the United States and I hadn't seen them. I'd barely glanced at them. I think I can sort of remember like my eyes like kind of grazing over them and thinking no more of it because when you get that sheer volume of abuse, it's really hard to tell who the properly dangerous person is and who the really dangerous person isn't. Now, again, I think there's lots of social media platforms can do in terms of the powers that they have already that they're not doing to, you know, clamp down on that kind of behavior. But anonymity I don't think is the core problem. When you look at the abusive tweets sent following England's exit from the Euro switch by the way still hurts, 93% of those tweets came from accounts which weren't anonymous. So it was possible to correctly identify who it was who sent those abusive tweets after the Euro's final. So small proportion of them anonymous, you wouldn't deal with the core of the problem if you got rid of anonymity. Also the tenor of the discussion on social media it doesn't exist in an isolated bubble away from establishment media. Now, I think this connection can be quite complex I think it's oversimplified. Because yes, it is I think shaped by disproportionate focus on certain groups of people, certain kinds of crime and those things then add up to a climate of hostility if you come from one of those identity groups. So for instance being Muslim, whenever I tweet about anything one of the most immediate and common responses is ah, what about the grooming gangs? Now, of course like any right-minded person I think group child sexual exploitation is an abomination. I want to see the perpetrators caught. I want to see them punished. I want to see children kept safe. The only reason somebody is saying that to me is because I'm Muslim and one of the most common races you'll see in the media for this kind of crime. This doesn't actually bear out in terms of convictions but in one of the most common ethnicities you'll see for this kind of crime is of course someone who's Muslim or could be racialized as Muslim. That's why it's being said to me. But another one is when there are gaps or perceived silences within the establishment media and I think that this is where if we're being honest with ourselves some of the actually shittier behavior on the left can come from. It can come from this real sense of oh my god, I'm being gaslit by the media I'm being lied to. My sense of reality is being taken away from me. I want to express that frustration with people who I see being involved in that game. Now again, that's a feeling which I perfectly understand. I also don't think that a lot of what is called abuse. For instance, somebody just saying like mixing up the letters of your name or shit like that, that's not abuse. That's annoying maybe but that's not abuse. But the small proportion which does tip over into being abusive, it is wrong even though I understand where the frustration is coming from. So to sum up, I know I've just been rambling for a really long time but it is because this is something I feel really strongly about. I do think there are problems with anonymity. I don't think that you have to ban anonymity in order to deal with those problems and even if you do ban anonymity you're not dealing with the core of the issue which is how is it certain kinds of people become hyper-visible and demonised online and why is it that the majority of abusive tweets are coming from people who are perfectly happy to be identified as the source of those tweets. You have to deal with those problems if you want to have any hope of tackling threats, harassment, racial abuse, ableist abuse, misogynist abuse, transphobic abuse, homophobic abuse online. I'm incredibly grateful you gave a very comprehensive answer to that because I have a great deal of admiration for you for the amount you tolerate online but also you are probably one of the best positioned people I could be talking to right now on this topic. I suppose just as a question that popped into my mind which is if they did find a way to ban anonymity without catching people in the net who have every right to be anonymous or there's real benefits to them being anonymous how different do you think your experience online would be? Would it be significantly different but you think that the costs of banning anonymity would be so significant that it's not worth doing or do you think that that wouldn't actually make that bigger difference to your life online? Look I think it would make a significant amount of difference particularly when you've got the kind of organized Brigading which comes from FIREI accounts and these are kind of disposable accounts so this is what happened during the Three Oranges incident where I was falsely accused of celebrating the murder of three men because I had posted three orange emojis when I posted a photo of me eating an orange ice lolly. Most of those accounts were anonymous, not all but most of them and particularly the most violent ones and that's because my sense of what was going on is that the abuse and this kind of avalanche was coordinated. So it wasn't simply that this photo picked up and happened to go viral, it was that at that time Katie Hopkins had been banned from Twitter there'd been this kind of big exodus of the far right from Twitter onto GAB, I think it was No, Pala, Pala, that was it, Pala and I think it was there that it was being coordinated so those accounts which were anonymous were intended to be disposable just to like get this wave of abuse rolling, yeah the end of anonymity probably would have dealt with that but I still think, you know and I'm open to being convinced on this issue, I really am I still think that looking at the amount of power that social media companies already have and the amount that they're choosing to turn a blind eye to or indeed actively facilitate that tells me that anonymity itself isn't a problem all we're doing is putting more power in the hands of social media platforms which we know can't really be trusted with our data and saying, you know clamp down on abuse for us, the fact is is that they already had an awful lot of capacity to do that and they're not using it But there are just, there are lower hanging fruit basically where we don't have to make the same, you know compromises about civil liberties that they should do before we start demanding anonymity but we can cross that bridge when we come to it maybe you know, before we move on, just absolute solidarity actually, I'd speak from the bottom of my heart when I say I have absolute admiration for all of the shit you deal with so gracefully online If you are enjoying the show hit the like button, we're going to go on to coronavirus a topic we haven't surprisingly discussed for a while In the last 24 hours 59,000 new Covid cases were recorded in the UK It's a figure that once would have shocked us but we've become used to high rates for a while now We also have a government telling us there's little reason to worry now that vaccines have weakened the link between infection and hospitalisation This was Pretty Patel speaking to Andrew Ma on Sunday I think it's important to reflect as to where we are now compared to where we were I mean, last winter, last Christmas it was difficult, it was absolutely difficult parts of the country were locked down we were taking very very strong measures I think the biggest change of course now Andrew from where we were last year to this year is that we are living with this virus we are all living with this virus and of course this year has been dominated by the vaccine rollout programme which has fundamentally shifted the landscape and where we are literally looking to I think the next few months on the virus That was Pretty Patel saying rightly that the vaccines have transformed the landscape when it comes to Covid That doesn't mean high infection rates don't come with a cost though 869 people have died from coronavirus in the past 7 days 7,000 are currently in hospital Pretty Patel also rightly points out that these are nowhere near the catastrophic figures we faced last winter hospitalisations and deaths are way higher there what we are seeing in a week we saw in a day back then but perhaps the best comparison to present is not the UK 10 months ago but rather our European neighbours right now on this front Britain has become quite the outlier and not in a good way over the past 7 days the UK has had an average of 620 new daily cases per million people that's 6 times higher than the rate in Germany 9 times higher than the rate in France 15 times higher than the rate in Italy and a massive 20 times higher than the rate in Spain this is as you would expect translating into higher rates of hospitalisations hospitalisation rates in the UK are 4 times higher than France 5 times higher than Germany 8 times higher than Italy and 16 times higher than Spain this is not a graph that makes the UK look good we're not handling this well the gap can be seen when it comes to deaths as well daily deaths as a proportion of the population are 2.5 times higher than in Germany in the UK and 3 times higher than Spain, Italy and France so what is going on speculation has focused on the looser restrictions we have in the UK when compared to the rest of western Europe for example in most of Europe mask mandates are still in place whereas in England many people stopped wearing them after the government made them optional there probably is something to that it was always stupid, we always said on this show it was stupid to end masking which is a low cost but effective intervention there are a few downsides however there is reason to think that the impact of masks might be overstated John Byrne Murdoch at the Financial Times has pointed out that Scotland kept mask mandates in many public places yet they have even higher rates of Covid than in England the free chart you see here show rates of Covid in the over 60s hospital admissions per 100,000 people and weekly deaths per million people in each of these respects Scotland is having an even worse time than England and that's with masks so what is going on why are both Scotland and England doing so much worse than countries on the continent when Scotland has masks doesn't one potential explanation involves looking at broader categories of behaviour again, this is from John Byrne Murdoch in the FT these show that while Scotland and England differ in terms of the proportion of people no longer wearing masks in both nations over 25% of the population are no longer avoiding large events that's the third chart you can see there that compares to 15% in Germany and France and less than 10% in Spain and Italy so you can see the real difference between England and Scotland and countries on the continent is not so much masks it seems to be socialising or at least socialising in large events however if you are a fan of night clubs like me other explanations for our high rates are available that's because as Byrne Murdoch points out Britain's biggest problem is not related to our behaviour but rather our levels of immunity to be precise vaccination rates we have among children and waning immunity we have among our elderly population on vaccinating teens we are way behind our peers so as you can see here England has vaccinated only 25% of those aged 12 to 17 in Spain, France and Italy the corresponding figures are between 60 and 80% on waning immunity the problem is a little more complex that's because on one level here we are victims of our own prior success we vaccinated people earlier than our neighbours which means our collective immunity will have waned more it's also because we used a slightly less effective vaccine AstraZeneca instead of the Pfizer and Moderna jabs which were more universally used on the continent so we now have a population which has less vaccine induced immunity than our neighbours Ash got a tough question for you does this information about immunity mean that I, someone who quite likes to go out to night clubs every now and again am absolved from guilt for having attended them over the past three months or do you think the UK myself included has partied a little bit too hard since Freedom Day I think that you should feel very guilty for what you go up to at night clubs but I'm not sure how much it has to do with coronavirus I think that it's, as you say, it's a combination of factors you've got mask wear in, you've got the waning immunity that comes from having vaccinated lots of people very quickly with AstraZeneca Freedom has got diminished effectiveness when it comes to the Delta variant we've also got low vaccination rates amongst children and yes, we've also got people going out to night clubs but if you think about these as almost like EQ levels and so you've got one of these things being lower and that means that your infection rate is going higher well, it doesn't mean that night clubs are necessarily the tap that you've got to immediately turn off I also think with schools now being in attendance again and you're seeing infection rates climbing up amongst school aged children and of course that's an age group which has got much lower vaccination rates than the rest of the population I don't necessarily think that night clubs are going to be the main site that you want to tackle basically I think that we need to you know get our heads around the fact that vaccinating children is a good thing the risks from vaccination are relatively low, the risks from coronavirus are that much higher and also what that does is that it prevents that sort of first vector of infection you know your snotty school aged kid from infecting the rest of the family when they come home that to me seems to me seems to be the most critical bit of it but maybe I'm just saying that because you know I'd rather you know jab little Tommy in the arm than give up clubbing I should make clear you know if they decided a couple of weeks that night clubs have to close for a couple of months I'm not going to be out protesting in the street if that's a decision that's made fine, so be it but it does seem like there are a number of lower cost interventions that could be made first I suppose it is worth saying that if the problem is immunity in the country while it is disappointing and a massive shame that we dragged our feet when it came to vaccinating teenagers when they rushed ahead on the continent and that's going to you know it means that way more kids have got Covid and some of them will have got long Covid it means more people will have caught it from kids in school and that would have passed up the age groups and you will have had people hospitalised and some people dead the fact that we are low in that respect when we get some easy wins when we increase vaccination among those age groups it was announced on the weekend which is a good thing that instead of having to wait for a whole school visit from vaccinators kids in England it was always the case in Scotland can just turn up to their local vaccination centre they don't have to wait for it all to be arranged via school so we could see a bit of an increase in the speed of vaccinating kids there when it comes to the booster campaign particularly disappointing I think especially compared to our rollout at the start of the year it's been especially disappointing and I'm sure very scary for people who are extremely vulnerable on that front the Guardian report that surveys by blood cancer UK and kidney care UK found that for both groups of patients so that's blood cancer patients and kidney patients between 55% and 60% had yet to be invited to get a third injection seen as particularly vital for conditions which affect people's immune systems as they are generally less protected by two jabs the charity said many of those who responded were desperately worried and were struggling to get information about a third vaccination some people with blood cancer had resulted to going to vaccination centres without an appointment pleading for a third dose blood cancer UK said now this to me just seems like a massive abdication of responsibility from the state we had a system at the start of the year where we were vaccinating 300, 400,000 people 500,000 people a day now I think we're vaccinating 150,000 people a day and one that means that we have higher overall rates of COVID in the country but it also means that you've got as those quotes there indicated you've got lots of people who are severely vulnerable to COVID-19 who are twiddling their thumbs waiting they see that there are almost 50,000 cases of COVID in the country you're not going to feel safe if you have waning immunity because you got vaccinated back in January or February and now you're just you're waiting to receive a letter asking you to get that vaccine so this to me just seems like complete incompetence in the government sitting on their hands we know we have the vaccines right there isn't a shortage of overall vaccines so that to me seems no justification whatsoever that this booster campaign has been so slow I did ask for explanations on Twitter a couple that were mentioned was that they did have to take lots of nurses and get them to do that roll out and now they're back in hospital although I mean we had more people in hospital with COVID back in January and February than we do now so I find it a little bit inexplicable I want to discuss one final potential explanation as to why we might have higher rates of COVID than our neighbours it's less discussed than usual and that's because it's structural for example the UK has some of the lowest sick pay in Europe that obviously means people will be less able to self isolate so that means that even with a similar amount of restrictions we will probably have more COVID circulating we also, and this is something I didn't realise, have the highest levels of pensioner poverty among the big European countries as you can see here 16% of pensioners in Britain live in poverty that's defined as less than half the median household income or the average household income that's higher than any of our big neighbours we know the correlation between poverty and catching COVID and being hospitalised with COVID obviously if you're short of cash it's going to be harder for you to stay in the house you won't have that extra money to pay for deliveries or the various insulations from the vagaries of life that a decent income provides you and also you're more likely to be in poor health which means you're more likely to end up in hospital Ash, we discussed inequalities actually last Wednesday because we were talking about that MP report and one of the things the MP report recognised is that Britain was particularly hard hit because of the inequalities that are so dominant here compared to some countries on the continent but it does seem like this is something everyone recognises you ask Boris Johnson that oh yes of course these terrible inequalities which mean that we're harder hit by COVID but it does seem like nothing is being done about it and actually we're going in the opposite direction with things like the £20 universal credit cut so I mean I'm feeling a bit depressed about this I don't know if you've got sort of a how the pandemic can be mobilised to actually fight for a more equal country instead of I'm in a zone of disappointment at the moment I mean look I think the best realistically you're going to get out of this Tory government when it comes to dealing with the forces behind those healthcare inequalities is a bit of tinkering around the edges when an issue becomes so politically toxic that they have to then you know make the U-turn you saw this with free school meals for instance but ultimately one of the reasons why they're never going to be able to get to the core of the issue is because that means dealing with and confronting how our economy is organised so there's one way of looking at healthcare outcomes not just simply as a reflection of our body but as a manifestation in the body of what we value and what we don't in society particularly with respiratory illnesses so a friend of mine who's a doctor and also that given to kind of poetic ways of phrasing himself one of the things that he says is like well the lung is kind of the interface between the body and the rest of the world and I think one of the ways in which that plays out is that when you see an over-representation of respiratory illnesses in overcrowded settings in highly polluted settings amongst people who are poor, who are destitute, who are overworked who don't get enough rest all of these things which are socially determined whether or not we're poor, whether or not we live in an area which has got a high amount of air pollution whether or not we live in overcrowded accommodation or a reflection of something that is within our bodies that's a reflection of how society has decided to treat us and so if you wanted to deal with the things which made this country so structurally vulnerable the fact that you had a high number of elderly patients in hospitals because perhaps they couldn't afford the kind of care that they needed either at home or in a residential setting the fact that we have so many people who are in overcrowded housing multi-generational housing where it's likely if a young person has got coronavirus that you're going to pass it on the fact that we have got absolutely insulting rates of sick pay which mean that you can't afford to take the time off if you have this virus or think you might have this virus all of these things have added up to almost a collective clinical vulnerability for society and we haven't dealt with any of those things and that's because this government simply won't Ash I have a quiz question for you news which has broke during the show the new leader of UKIP is Neil Hamilton of what's that documentary maker called God my mind is going blank so often today Louis Faroo Neil Hamilton from my perspective of Louis Faroo fame he's just been elected leader of UKIP how many people do you think voted for him to become leader of UKIP more or less than a hundred it's more than a hundred okay 500 498 very good you win you're two off there were 631 people was the previous guy Dick Brain Dick Brain well that's Dick Brain was I think about two leaders ago he got 3000 votes so it's easier to become leader of UKIP than Dick Brain managed it listen I can see why 3000 people voted for a name like Dick Brain I mean most of them would just vote yeah if I had a vote in that election I would have voted for Dick Brain as well I can't believe they didn't keep that guy I can't remember why he was forced to resign they've had seven leaders since Nigel Farage stepped down in 2016 so it's not a job many people keep for long although I suppose Neil Hamilton is one of the more experienced people to take on the role and what a mandate 498 votes let's go to our final story of the evening a charity has released analysis showing that youth homelessness has increased by 40% over the past five years using data from local authorities centre point found that in 2019 121,000 young people presented homeless or as at acute risk of homelessness that figure is up from 86,000 in 2016 even more worrying this figure won't take into account any extra homelessness which may have been caused by lockdowns that means they could go even higher centre point here have said they have seen a third more calls to their helpline since the start of the pandemic that's an indication of what the next round of statistics could tell us in terms of who this impacts separate figures from the Guardian show that black people are disproportionately affected by homelessness so as you can see here and this is using data from the department for housing, communities and local government the Guardian find that 10% of people entitled to homelessness relief are black despite black people making up only 3.5% of the UK population in London the figure is 30% that's despite black people in the capital making making up only 12.5% of the population the chief executive of centre point that say Oberkin says he expects these figures to worsen again once cuts to universal credit feed into the system something that comes up on so many topics in this show Ash there very sobering statistics what do you make of them well this is again the way in which different areas of policy actually reflect lots of other areas of policy so particularly when it comes to housing homelessness well obviously this is going to reflect the over representation of young people in the private rental sector which is the single biggest source of homelessness most people are made homeless after having been in the private rental sector and then 11% of them simply have been made homeless because the landlord wanted to re-let the property or sell it sorry my cat is playing with the microphone so hopefully you can still hear me you've also got I think this race angle which reflects lots of things one is discrimination against people of colour in the private rental sector so there have been studies which have been done and also under cover stings which have shown that if you are a person of colour or you've got a name which is red as being somebody who isn't white then it is much harder for you to find a letting's agent or a landlord who wants you to sign their lease so that's going to have knock on effects down the line particularly then when you add to that the over representation of people of colour in precarious forms of employment the over representation of people of colour in the prison system so then coming out of it is much harder to find a home all of these things then add up to inequalities and over representations of particular groups young people people of colour amongst the homeless population and I think there's also a third aspect to this which is disability and mental health issues which I don't think have been mentioned so far so you see a disproportionate number of people who are made homeless yes because they have been placed in the kind of financial precarity which we know disproportionately impacts people with disabilities people with mental health issues but also both of these things are then exacerbated by the experience of homelessness so yeah it's no surprise to me that those figures make for particularly grim reading and that what they show us is that our society makes certain classes of people more vulnerable than others Musa please stop can just sort of imagine them because the wire is moving although our audience is going to be very annoyed that we flipped away from you when the cat was there I did you well I just put it on the floor like mother you've betrayed me well bring her back after we are going to watch a clip now because we should mention that Ash has a brilliant video out today on Navara media about something that of course very obviously impacts homelessness which is the housing crisis in this country and the root of it which is landlords property speculation and landlords let's take a look let's face it landlords are kind of bums you want to buy properties in cheap areas you want to rent them high and you want to have systems in place and property managers that can make it passive income so that you can have financial freedom that's what property investment is that's equity according to shelter 45% of private tenants in England are victims of illegal behaviour one in four have had landlords enter their homes without permission 22% of tenants reported essential safety or household appliances like smoke alarms and competing or even water broken when they moved in and 9% have reported violent threatening or harassing behaviour from their landlords or letting's agent what about us? okay what about you stop relying on me to pay your food we're buying that guy's food well that's tenants we are Ash it's an excellent video our audience can go and check that out watch the whole thing anything surprising you found researching that yeah I mean I guess one of the things that I found really surprising was the sheer number of people who had been victims of illegal behaviour by landlords so that meant 43% of people had experienced key amenities being broken 10% of people nearly 10% of people had experienced harassing or threatening behaviour from their landlords and for me I just don't think that in any other consumer relationship we would put up with that level of maltreatment from the person who's supposed to be selling us a service but because of the structural vulnerability inherent in the tenant landlord relationship this is actually just a feature of the private rental sector so that was the thing which really surprised me it doesn't surprise me because I've known it for so long but the thing that just absolutely infuriates me is how I mean landlords just don't exist it is like feudalism because it is you know in my life I work 60% of my hours and I get to keep the money and I work 40% of my hours which goes directly to my landlord so that is how feudalism worked apparently it was less than 40% I think it was maybe a third of your time you had to toil the land of your again your landlord and you would toil your own land two thirds of the time now I have to toil you know for my landlord even more than the serfs did now I mean my quality of life is probably significantly better than your average medieval serf but still the injustice of it is it's shocking isn't it I'm especially annoyed now Ash because I'm after paying them 40% of everything they get to kick me out because they're selling the house what can be done well look what can be done is that one I think that we need to make being a landlord so prohibitively expensive that nobody wants to do it so you do just have to discourage the ownership of second homes homes should be lived in by the people who are paying for it and landlords aren't the ones paying for it we're the ones paying for it we're paying off their mortgage and so that's the first thing is that actually you know tax them till the pips squeak second thing is you've seen this in Berlin as well you have had legislation come in to essentially expropriate properties from the biggest commercial landlords it is something which can be done it's happened in other countries there's no reason why we can't do it here and then the third thing is well people do need the availability of cheap rental properties they used to be called council housing now in the video I don't take a starry-eyed view of council housing because you have things like the Ronan Point Disaster which were the result of you know criminally poor building standards when it came to some of these concrete prefabs however that wasn't the case for all council housing particularly in London you still see examples very well made very beautiful very pleasant council built homes and that's something which I think could very much happen again if there's political will to do it it is an investment by the state they own that asset and they're able to set rents at social levels at genuinely affordable levels so yeah it's a pronged attack it's expropriate it's tax it's build I wholly agree I suppose the flip side of taxing you could make it more expensive or you could make it less profitable with rent caps rent caps and then like super long term tenants so it's just less attracted to be a landlord and more attracted to be a renter thank you everyone for joining us tonight Ash it has been an absolute pleasure as always I'll let you go have some time with your cat you can let her play with whatever why she wants to about I mean it's a he and I think that this hyperactive behaviour is because he's not been neutered yet so he's got one week left of this kind of hijinks before it's time wow one week left of balls that little kitten thank you everyone for watching we'll be back on Wednesday at 7pm so make sure you hit subscribe for now you've been watching Tiskey Sour on Navarra Media good night