362. Question Time: Labour’s education error and Blair’s mistake on mental health

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Welcome to the rest is politics question time with me, Rory Stewart, and me, Alistair Gamble. And we ended the main podcast story by saying we were going to talk about Serbia on question time. And we have had questions about Serbia, and maybe the best one, this is one from Marco, "please can you explain what's going on with the student protests in Serbia?" These are big, these protests. Have you been following this?

"Yes, I haven't. I think there's a couple of interesting things going on, but maybe tell us first about the protests themselves, then maybe we can go back to why Serbia matters and what's going on in Serbia more fully."

"So, essentially, what's happened is that an awning at a railway station crashed. 14 people were killed instantly. This is in a place called Moby sad. 14 people killed, three others severely injured, and a 15th person has died since. And the accusation is that the reason was shoddy building work because of corrupt deals, and the public have got very, very, very angry about it. So what's happened, these student protests that are taking all sorts of different forms, and quite interesting, a bit like some of the protests that we've seen here, no sort of no leader of the protest movement, lots of democracy within the protest movement, they have votes about what what to do next and where to protest and how to protest and so forth. And actually, Alexander Vukic, the the president who's a you know got this reputation as a very strong man leader, follows a lot of the kind of the Putin way of doing things, it feels like he's very much on the back foot. He's been making all sorts of offers, he's talking about sort of you know, so loans that can be done for students who are struggling with their finances. Also, they've been demanding that all the papers related to these contracts are published. Some of them have been, they're now going through them all, really, really in fine detail, and demanding more. So this is a very, very interesting protest movement which does seem to have caught them pretty much on the back foot. And the reason, obviously, why it matters is Serbia was right at the center of the Balkan Wars, and there, in the center, Yugoslavia as it splintered apart. And as Croatia and Bosnia, Montenegro, Slovenia, all broke away, North Macedonia and the question of what..."

What happens in Serbia really matters because with Trump coming in and suggesting he doesn't really care about countries breaking national borders and reinforcing nationalist rhetoric there is the fact of repeated statements by Vucic who is the Serbian leader about his claims to re-annex northern Kosovo which became de facto independent from Serbia after the Kosovo wars and in order to do that he is relying on about 50,000 Serbs in northern Kosovo who have withdrawn from the Kosovo institutions they're refusing to vote refusing to participate in the police and in these demonstrations some of the people demonstrating are actually further to the right than Vucic. There's a lot of complicated things going on you can't see European flags for example in these demonstrations or people protesting against the lithium mines in Serbia which Germany wants Serbia to invest in

and we now also have in Croatia the election of a very very eccentric far-right populist who was previously the prime minister, now back as president, Zoran Milanovic and I just don't know quite where this happens you you had that lovely moment in yesterday's podcast where you talked about how quickly things can change in 10 years of the scenarios we might look at there is a very likely scenario that we end up back in conflict and the ball comes again and why will it happen it will happen and I suppose this is probably true and in all none I think in 1967-68 nobody predicted that Northern Ireland would collapse in the way that it did and it can happen very unexpectedly

if Vucic starts threatening Northern Kosovo or Republika Srpska there are now 200,000 Bosniak Muslims now scattered back and living within Republika Srpska mosques are being rebuilt their refugees have returned if they start arming themselves because they're worried that this thing is going to start off again you get the tit-for-tat taking off.

Is that right that some of these are the far-right that are protesting so when we think of is this me sort of you know I think of students I'm assuming we're talking here about broadly anti-government because they're more to the left is that wrong?

I think some of these people are to the right and some of these people are anti-european and some of these people are curiously more pro-Putin than Vucic. I mean it's one of these situations where you you sense a bit like um you've pointed out with Putin that that however right-wing he is, there are people further to his right. And some people are saying Vucic hasn't gone far enough in defending Serb interests.

He's also got another problem which is really interesting. Europe has refused to impose sanctions on Serbia, but the US now has. The US has now imposed really strong sanctions to try to force Serbia to leave the Gazprom, the Russian state gas company, investment in Serbia. And just at the moment as that's crippling energy supplies for Serbia, Azerbaijan has announced it's no longer going to be providing gas to Serbia, possibly because it's had its arm twisted by Russia. So Serbia, whose economy is in trouble, whose population is collapsing, it's losing a lot of young university educated people. Almost everybody in Serbia gives the impression that they want to kind of move to Germany. Hmm, is finding itself facing big energy problems.

And this is where the European Union needs to step up. To keep coming back to this, that if we're to avoid a war in the Balkans, we need to restart engagement and give ultimately in the long term, political hope to countryside Serbia that they have a future. Otherwise, we're going to get into a dark place. Hmm.

One of the factors in this, the railway renovation that's being done with Serbia, the deal that was done was with Chinese firms. So whether that is what sort of fans, if you're saying that nationalism is involved in this. I the students that I've seen being interviewed are very much what I would identify as kind of traditional quite left-wing students who are basically saying we're fed up of corruption, we're fed up of a government that is, you know, basically just expects the people to do as they're told the whole time. And they are, you know, they are definitely having an impact.

And I guess the point that you're making in relation linking this to Kosovo is, your thinking that what sometimes leaders do when they're under pressure over an unrelated issue, they go to the issue that they know will always fire up their nationalist base. Particularly I think in the case of Serbia, with the Trump government coming in and Trump signaling that he doesn't have much sympathy for all these old international rules. I mean if a conflict were to start again in the Balkans this time, the US is very unlikely to participate. And a loss of the security infrastructure was based on US intelligence, a small number of US troops, British presence. Britain was quite important in K4. I mean, you were right there on the ground during the initial Kosovo intervention. So it's one of these things that's worth watching.

It doesn't mean that we can say that there's any more than the twenty thirty percent chance of it happening, or even be that precise about what the chance of something like this happening is. But in all the risks we're looking at around the world, this matters. And it's odd because you if you go to Mostar, which is in the old Croatian Bosnian disputed areas of Bosnia, it's remarkably successful. There's a good mayor, you can go there, he's not traveling around with bodyguards, since the institutions are working. As I say, you've had two hundred thousand Muslim refugees returning to Republic of Serbia. So, there's a lot of positive stuff on the ground. But it is, it's fragile.

It's fragile, yeah. I suppose, in the same way Northern Ireland was still pretty fragile after the Good Friday Agreement, and in some ways, may still be so.

Alistair, here we are, this is a very good question for you. It's from a man called Tom Holland, who I believe presents a podcast called the rest is history. I have heard of it, he may have had a role in establishing the rest is politics. Yeah, that's that's the guy, the very same guy, Spider-Man himself. So, question particularly f

or Alistair because I always look to him for an insider's perspective on the government's thinking good luck with that what justification could there possibly be for Bridget Philipson cancelling the Latin excellence program an admirable initiative which over the past couple years has been funding over 8,000 students at a range of state schools across the country to study the language of Cicero and Virgil wasn't the government's justification for charging VAT on private schools that it would enable precisely such schemes to be funded and why cancel the funding in the middle of school year so that students hoping to do GCSE that in the summer will be left without teaching in February it seems to me both cruel and Philistine all the more so because the scheme only costs 1 million pounds a year but maybe I am missing something

that's that's a very clever Tom Holland desk he doesn't think he's missing anything does he I can't ever say that I recall the government saying that the justification for charging VAT in private schools was so that they could enable such schemes and by the way this is what he doesn't ask there is what do we think I actually think that any one of the things I criticize the government I work for for in relation to was that the downgrading of modern languages and I also am a great I do actually think I did Latin at school I'm glad that I did Latin at school and I think Latin was one of the reasons why I became interested in in other languages so I am also a fan of Latin however the thing I think he is missing is that this was one of the programs that the conservative government had said they were going to extend without actually having any funding for it and as I understand it what the current government is doing is currently looking for some sort of philanthropist to fund this now that is not a good way to fund an education system I completely agree with that but that is I think the thing that he might be missing

but I agree you know broadly I do agree that if you if you're studying something and you're taking it through to GCSE but then you suddenly live with you know with no teaching and that is not a good thing I mean is it that Latin is seen as a bit elitist because it's only 8,000 students Richard Phillips and doesn't really care I mean there's a part of her that was a bit like that people listen to the leading interview but there was a strange moment in that when I was challenging her around what would happen to children who left private schools and returned to the state sector and she said I don't care about the top 7% I care about the other 93% I mean is there a bit of that going on in this?

I don't think so but put it this way I saw the reports about it and I actually started to make inquiries off my own back and and that is what they said it is look this is not something we necessarily set out to do but it sort of falls into which one of those programs for which there was no proper funding going forward and that's what they said to me and I think by the way you're broadly you're slightly exaggerating I think the tone of her interview she didn't say I don't care I think she said that her focus was on the 93% and so I think you should see this slightly separate from the VAT question I think the answer to the VAT question by the way not least in part of the world where I live in London Southeast there is plenty of capacity right now within the state sector lots of state schools are under pressure to shut just because of the falling rolls but I think on this I hope and this is definitely what they were saying to me and maybe Tom should you know make contact with them and get in touch as to as to how he thinks might work but they are looking to keep this going but not under the current spending envelope.

Right okay well here's another one for you Ruben Baxter what does Alistair think about his old boss's comments on too many Brits self-diagnosing themselves for depression feels a bit off-brand and perhaps even dangerous in the current climate.

Katrine, what do you think of the comments made by Tony Blair questioning the amount of money being spent on mental health and the perils of losing agency to govern your life when someone translates their problems into a mental health condition? As a fellow sufferer from depression, I wonder whether you would have advised him to address this issue differently.

Can I just do the rather odd thing of sort of defending your boss for a second, and then give you a chance to maybe disagree with him a little bit. Yeah. So Britain is facing an incredible explosion in the costs of disability benefits to the government, and there are nearly 900,000 people in Britain, almost a million people who are out of the workforce and part of this seems to be I think a 50% jump since COVID in the number of people who are being diagnosed and receiving benefits for different forms of conditions when there's no particular reason to think that there's been a 50% increase in the number of people who are ill.

And part of that is maybe that the Conservatives cut down very hard on other forms of benefits for that during their time in office, which made the disability benefits that much more lucrative comparable to other forms of unemployment benefit, and and that Rachel Reeves is facing having to manage a country where she needs to do two things: she needs to cut spending and she needs to get people back into work and increase productivity and she's going to struggle to do that and I think this is what Tony Blair was trying to say unless she can face up to the fact that something very strange is happening with disability benefits in Britain and the disability benefits bill which isn't happening anywhere else in Europe. Over to you.

I mean it won't surprise you to know that I didn't actually like what he said, and and I think at a time when we're struggling to keep mental health properly on the NHS agenda and and I think where it's going we're going backwards in terms of the media debate around mental health as well I'm not sure that it was it was very helpful.

I'm going to read you a couple of things the first is from page 7 of Tony's biography autobiography where he says this now he says very nice things about me says I was like a rock through the campaigns blah blah blah then he goes on to say in my experience there are two types of crazy people those who are just crazy and are therefore dangerous and those whose craziness lends them creativity strength ingenuity and verve. Alistair was of the latter sort, the problem with them is that they can be mercurial, difficult, and on occasion erupt with damaging consequences. Above all, we must realize you can't tame them, you can reason with them, but the thing that makes them different and brilliant is the same thing that means they don't conform to normal predictable modes of behavior. And I called him out for that at the time because I think that under... I just think it misunderstands what we mean when we're talking about mental illness.

Now, the other thing I want to read you is is the letter that mine, the charity of which I'm an ambassador, sent to Tony. "Dear sir Tony Blair, we agree we do need a proper conversation about mental health. Mental health problems are just as real as physical health problems and we are in the middle of a mental health crisis. Change is possible and the solutions are out there but we must start from a place of understanding and face the reality of what's happening. This is the key point, the reality is that mental health accounts with 20% of all health issues but gets 10% of NHS funding. 2 million people in England currently sat on waiting lists for mental health support. Now if we think that mental illness is, you know, when you see somebody who's hearing voices, when you see somebody who's kind of on the streets and behaving strangely, then that's mental illness. That you know somebody who doesn't necessarily get mentally ill and I think Tony, one of Tony's great strengths is a kind of optimism and a vibrancy in the way that he looks at life but I think there's a danger that he doesn't understand that for a lot of people depression is real, anxiety is real. And I think that particularly with the numbers now, people living in poverty and millions of people now that we would say are living in pretty difficult economic conditions. I think it's just too dismissive to say that these are people who are kind of self-diagnosing."

So yeah, I is very very rare as you know Roy that I criticized my old boss but I I didn't really like what he said there. There's a very good book just coming out by Hillary Cotton on the work we need and she would add into this that part of the reason why we have so many people not in work is that work in Britain is often less dignified, longer hours, more poorly paid, in worse and more demoralizing conditions than in other European countries and that addressing this problem of getting people off benefits into work is partly about increasing the quality of the work that we offer people compared to other countries. There are many reasons why people are reluctant to go to work when the work they go into is depressing but also I think you have to... you know there may be all sorts of reasons for it but it is a fact it's an empirical fact that the number of young men taking their own lives is higher than it's ever been. You go into schools now and talk to teachers and headteachers about young girls and anxiety and social media. I mean Tony's a massive believer in technology, we talked about AI on the main podcast, you and I support that notion that technology is going to lead to a lot of problem-solving and solutions to challenges that the country and the world faces but there's definitely something going on with young women that may relate to social media may not but that there is more anxiety out there.

By the way I saw an amazing speech the other day. I was I was just scrolling through I think it was Instagram and somebody posted the speech at Sandhurst of the outgoing head of the army who was speaking to officers and if we ca

This is General Patrick Saunders talking about unusual capacity for violence. What was great about it was, you know, he was basically challenging this notion that the younger generation, with this kind of woke generation, actually, there were a lot of tough young men out there. You get them in the army, and your job as officers is to shape them and so forth. But I think, we on the one hand want to be very dismissive of our younger generation, but on the other hand, though, I see this every time I go into schools. There is something real going on, and I don't think we're even making the effort fully to understand it.

I think, I mean without being unfair to General Patrick, I think he's also talked openly about some of the mental pressures that he felt in the job. It was an extraordinary speech. I mean, his line was, "British soldiers are often scrawny, ill-educated, and underprivileged, but they have a nobility of spirit, a streak of cheerful and irrepressible defiance, a joyful wildness, and above all, a capacity for sudden violence that, when tempered by disciplines, value, and esprit de corps, makes them amongst the most hard-to-beat soldiers anywhere in the world." Whatever nonsense you hear or see written about a woke generation, I don't recognize it. The soldiers, the friends I've been privileged to serve with these 40 years in whom you're about to command will scare you to death, under pressure and under fire, and sometimes in barracks too.

Well, that's the great thing about this politics question time. We can start with me criticizing, very rare criticism of my old boss about mental health, and we end up with you really out a speech from the head of the armed forces he leaves his job that I spotted on Instagram.

Should we take a break? We'll take a break.

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Rory, as you know, this episode is powered by Fuse Energy. So, I was going through all our questions, and my favorite energy-related question came from Jeff Spink. Yes, does Donald Trump not have a point in trying to get his hands on Greenland given that the natural resources they have are going to be of enormous benefit to whoever gets their hands on them? I mean, that is a kind of pretty Trumpian transactionalist way of thinking about it, but maybe he does have a point.

Look, it's terrifying. I mean, you've seen what's going on with him saying he's gonna make Canada into the 51st state, he's gonna grab the Panama Canal, he's having a go at Greenland, and it's very difficult, actually, to understand what he's doing. And even his supporters struggle to work out where the line is between humor and whatever. But I suppose it's an opportunity to talk a little bit about Greenland.

So, Greenland really matters. It's a massive US airbase, it's sitting on top of a lot of rare earth minerals, and with climate change and the ice sheet melting around that, it's going to open up new routes between effectively Russia and the United States, with massive strategic importance. And in fact, this whole question around the Arctic is something we haven't talked about enough. We should do maybe a quarter of a program of the main pod on the Arctic someday.

Yeah, so, yeah, he's totally right that if he's thinking about what matters in the near proximity of the US, Panama, Canada, and Greenland are absolutely central. But equally, when you're dealing with a special relationship with your nearest ally, doing that kind of stuff, and then having Elon Musk, your wingman, following up by calling Justin Trudeau a girl because he's tried to step up to Canada, and saying “you're not the governor of Canada anymore, girl.” I mean, I was really quite taken with the fact that The Economist, for example, wrote an editorial “Greenlanders should sell-up to Donald Trump,” and had some really interesting facts in there: largest deposits of crucial rare earth metals outside China, estimated 52 billion barrels of oil reserves relatively untapped, and as you say, the climate change is meaning that they're going to be more accessible.

So, we shall see, but every country in the world is going to be looking at how they meet their own energy needs, and it's a very Trumpian way that he's launched this debate. Anyway, all good conversations around energy, because this episode is powered by Fuse Energy, and you should sign up for the Fuse Energy app which will allow you to get, if you sign up before the end of January, get so much from you and me, Alistair. Download it now, use a referral code politics, have to sign me up, visit getfuse.

com slash politics the terms and conditions and to learn more okay Rory one of the big things that happened last week Mark Zuckerberg and his questions of Sander in Canada with recent developments a meta brackets Zuckerberg rollback on fact-checking I'm curious to hear your reflections and some of the things you discussed with Nick Clegg when he joined you on leading how should we interpret his nonchalant attitude on the show towards social media's polarizing role in its large political influence what do you make of the met Zuckerberg thing it's completely shocking I mean it's it's beyond imagining what Mark Zuckerberg has done it's not just getting rid of the 40,000 odd fact-checkers because they're not the key to the whole thing the most desperate thing he's done is to get rid of the basic algorithms which were in place to try to reduce hate speech and he's also reduced one of the things that Nick Clegg has said which is few years ago they were saying well nobody on our feed really is that interested in politics anyway so we're going to tamper down the politics he's reversed that as well so he's basically said that Facebook can now become again a highly politicized unregulated space full of much more extreme hateful views and it's a complete reversal of the last nine years of policy at Metta.

Nick Clegg I think is resigning I don't know whether it's connected with this but I would be fascinated to hear what our friend the former Danish Prime Minister makes of this and I wonder whether the board that she serves on for Facebook is even going to continue to exist.

Helen Schmitt has been out and about saying she's not a spokesperson for Metta that the board will continue to monitor what Metta does that she did express some concerns but it was you know broadly supportive I'd say.

I think Nick Clegg I think we agree that we should probably should have pushed him harder on the whole when he did say that social media there's no evidence that social media has contributed to polarization. I mean even if you could say that before Musk he definitely can't say that now and I think it has I don't think there's any doubt about that.

What I thought about the Zuckerberg thing was it was pathetic to watch and he was basically saying if you boil it down the strategy at the heart of it was like you know well we thought Trump was finished after the first election when he lost to Biden so we sort of felt it was okay to kick him around the place but now he's won and Elon Musk has got really in with him so I've got to be careful I've got to get in with him as well and Bezos is the same and we mentioned that cartoonist who got fired from the Washington Post or resigned from the Washington Post because they wouldn't allow her to do a cartoon that showed these guys just giving money to this enormous Trump up on a pedestal but that's what's going on this I'm afraid is oligarchy.

So three richest men in the world are now swinging in behind Trump and Zuckerberg is is just giving Trump everything that he wants and Trump believes that he won the election partly fueled by the hate on Twitter and he'd like Facebook to become like Twitter, a sort of fantastic echo chamber for his own views. He's also jumping on this masculine bandwagon thing that you were talking about as well you know saying that we've got to kind of you know get the masculine thing going back in the workforce and all this stuff. I mean it's honestly it's pathetic to watch. I hope Nick Clegg has resigned because he couldn't stomach it but you know definitely when next I see him I shall hopefully find out more and report back Rory.

Well there's something I'd love us to do maybe to talk about which is to get someone really good to interview on the way in which social media is polarizing. There's some fantastic books that have come out over the last four or five years on exactly the subject we should lean into a bit more.

Just on this one though before we leave Rory, Andrew I applaud Rory's perseverance in refusing to call it X and sticking with Twitter. However is it not time that Rory switched to blue sky to make a statement that I'm sure rest his politics listeners would appreciate and they would follow. Now I'm on both. You haven't migrated yet. I haven't gone on to blue sky. I'm so worried because I'm worried that you go on blue sky and basically everyone on blue sky is the sort of progressive centrist liberal and everyone on Twitter is going to end up being from the right and we'll just end up in two completely excluded echo chambers. It's kind of the worst of everything and part of the problem is the way in which social media just drives polarization and creates chambers where everybody agrees with you and you have no idea what the other half of the world thinks. So now I'm digging my heels in the moment.

Question to you from Nicole. How significant is Tulip Sadiq's resignation? Is it going to damage Keir Starmer and should she have done it earlier? Any ministerial resignation is not good. I suspect what Keir Starmer's approach will be is that he brought in, when he came in, he campaigned on integrity in public life. When he came in he strengthened the powers of independent people to investigate. She referred herself when this thing came up. I sort of felt the skids were under her in the last 24 hours or so because I just sensed that I noticed she wasn't on the front bench when Rachel Reeves was doing questions today. If she was I didn't see her and normally the ministers would all sort of sit alongside. You know I think in the end these sort of personal scandal type stories they're very very difficult for leaders to to manage because on the one hand you want to be fair, you want to be reasonable, you want to allow them to sort of make the case, get the facts, but ultimately when if and when they do go you don't want it look like they're being driven out by the media.

So what do you think? I think it was damaging I'm afraid. It's always difficult because Tulip, who I like very much, her aunt was the leader of Bangladesh and a pretty autocratic leader of Bangladesh. When I went to Seashake Casino in Dhaka we talked about Tulip Sadiq quite a lot during our conversation. It was no secret that her niece was a British Member of Parliament but it does create tensions, does raise issues, this kind of stuff. I talked to you again about the fact that Mohammed Salwa, Anas Salwa's father who was a Member of Parliament with me, went back to be I think the Chief Minister of the Punjab in Pakistan, joined the Pakistani government as a politician. It is always strange that and I think in this case probably she needed to be, not probably, she definitely needed to be more careful in accepting things that were linked to her aunt.

Okay now here's a question from Daniel McGuinn which is my last one. Perseverance here, by which I think he must mean that he's asked this question a number of times and hasn't managed to get it answered. Why does national insurance exist? Surely it's fairer, easier to understand and not an unfair tax on employment to have just a single and higher income tax. Plus it should bring more revenue to the exchequer. Now I completely agree. Do you know as you read that question out Roy, I thought the reason he's asking this question is because I've heard him say before that this is his view. This is my view. I am in fact Daniel McGuinn. He is my sock puppet. No, that's not true, that's not true. No, national insurance is a total fraud. When we introduced it, the idea was supposed to be it was a pot set aside specifically to pay for our health and social security. But the government never treated it as that. It just raids it and puts it straight into the general income of the government. So it is a form of income tax.

We might as well recognize that it's a form of income tax, be honest about what the real tax rate is and simplifying tax would make a huge difference. The problem is that Rachel Reeves I think is gun-shy. I think she's so scared by the adverse reaction she got to trying to deal with the winter fuel allowance and dealing with inheritance tax with farmers that she doesn't really have the appetite for the kind of tax reforms she should be using her majority to drive through. And I think that's partly about timing. If she had made the winter fuel allowance as you suggested part of a bigger package of measures, if she'd been smarter about you know taxing winter fuel allowance or something that could have dealt with these cliff edges, she'd be in a much stronger position. But what I'm worried about is that there are now things just desperately need to be done in terms of getting rid of stamp duty, reforming our tax system which she's just not going to do because she's had these bad experiences over the last seven months. She needs to be brave.

Yeah the first introduction of National Insurance was in 1911 and it was really about helping people in sort of absolute poverty. There was a gentleman by the name of William Martin Smith Rory. I don't know if you, I know you my National Insurance number off the top of my head. It's bizarre but I do. Don't tell us because we'll all use it. I won't, I won't. But the and it's bizarre. The reason it's bizarre is I'm normally not good at keeping anything administrative in my head. But William Martin Smith, do you know his National Insurance number was? No. A1. Very good. A1. That's very good. But basically the questioner is right. It's the purpose of National Insurance today I would argue is very different. It was, by the way, it was expanded hugely by Attlee as part of the welfare state. But I think you're right that in terms of the overall tax debate that's kind of morphed.

Now my final question Rory, it's a sort of serious subject, serious question. Cian Haynes, if you were Prime Minister what would be your plan of action in response to the grooming scandal? Include response to offenders, family bystanders, those involved in cover-up and rebuilding community cohesion. And we talked about this last week. We actually got a lot of criticism from certain people last week including Robert Jenrick, went on a bit of a rampage, felt we were far too soft and far too liberal I guess. So there you are Rory, you're Prime Minister, what would you do?

RG. First thing is to just be clear with listeners who felt that I had not been brutal and explicit enough about what was happening with the grooming gangs. It is a horrifying, really really horrifying story because it's a story which begins with predominantly Pakistani men targeting young predominantly white girls in many different towns around Britain. And what began with conversations in parks became that individual raping the underage girl and then became that individual then getting other men to rape an underage girl and trafficking girls through these gangs and networks into other towns. And horrifying stories of abuse involving in some cases more than a thousand victims. What I suppose I still though keep trying to say is that the problem is the way that this is being weaponized. This abuse, the majority of it happened between 1997 and 2012. In other words we're talking in the cases that have been well documented in these reports are cases that happened some time ago. There were some very very evil men involved but we're talking about a limited number of men. We're not talking about hundreds of thousands of Muslims in the way that some commentators seem to be suggesting.

And it's unbelievably dangerous because Musk is deliberately stirring up these cases as a way of echoing far-right activists like Tommy Robinson or the AFD in Germany or the Austrian far-right who are looking for an excuse to say that Muslims, all Muslims, don't belong in our country, should be re-migrated, should be sent home. You know we talked in the last part about Martin Sellner who has these theories that there should be only 800 Afghans in Germany instead of 800,000 and actually I've got a lot of admiration for the way that Keir Starmer, much better than I've managed to do, has found how to articulate this, how to articulate real disgust and horror at the way that women, young women, were let down, at the way that evil men were allowed to perpetrate this, the way that the state completely failed to cope, the way that social services weren't listened to, the way that police ignored witnesses, the Crown Prosecution Service didn't take witnesses' statements as credible enough to continue with prosecutions, it was all far too slow and it's a real shame on the state while at the same time saying this must be approached as a criminal issue and be about improving the way that we support victims and target these kinds of crimes rather than turning it into some racist witch-hunt against Muslims.

Yeah, that's twice this week, Roy, that you've said very praiseworthy things about Keir Starmer at a time when an awful lot of commentators are going in the in the opposite direction and I wonder if, I mentioned this in the main podcast, I wonder if Tom Ball runs on to something with this thing about Keir Starmer speaking to the people who aren't abusing and shouting at each other on social media because while you were talking, I mentioned the Robert Jenrick thing. Robert Jenrick has done 11 tweet posts, a thread of 11 tweets going through what we said and I think particularly what you said although, you know, given that I've named him the worst politician of 2024, he probably doesn't like me very much, but so he starts off, for example, he says that the podcast, our discussion, was littered with factual inaccuracies. They downplay the most appalling sexual abuse imaginable. Now, the first point of that, you have to deal with fact. If you're accusing us of factual inaccuracy, then it says they're downplaying, they can say, he's entitled to say that's his opinion, he's entitled to say that. What we were actually talking about was in part the weaponization of this by people like Elon Musk, by people like Tommy Robinson, etc. and I would argue by Jenrick as well.

They claim the abuse only took place in Rotherham and Rochdale, says Jenrick. Well, we didn't. These rape gangs, he says, existed at least 50 towns and cities across the entire country. See this investigation, puts a link to it. They claim these gangs only operated between 1997 and 2013. I can remember you saying, as you just did, that this was, we're going back to 1997. They claim girls aged 13 to 17 were paid for sex. Some were, he said, most were not. You didn't say that every single girl involved in this was was paid for sex, and so it goes on.

So, this is what I mean about you either want to have a serious, informed, grown-up debate, or you want to be one of the 20% of people, and I'm afraid this is where I think Kemi Badenoch is going wrong. She seems to think that Twitter is real life. She seems to think that is where you conduct the debate. It's part of it. So, I think, you know, we should maybe put Jenrick's thing in the newsletter, and people can say, alongside the actual discussion, and say whether people can see whether they think this is a reasonable response.

And also, you and I were not saying every single person who calls this out is, quotes, far right, but we were saying that there are people on the far right who are now determined to weaponize this as a way of damaging Keir Starmer, and one of those people happens to own Twitter, happens to be the richest person in the world, is not saying that every single person who cares about this and worries about this is somehow far right, because an awful lot of people, I think, I think we said a lot of people in the, you know, on the left apologies, just as worried about this.

Yeah, and what is it, what is it that made me angry about what Robert Jenrick said, specifically this, what he had said on Twitter, is this appalling affair is the final nail in the coffin for liberals, who still cling to the argument that Britain is an integration success story. The scandal started with the onset of mass migration, importing hundreds of thousands of people from alien cultures who possess medieval attitudes towards women, brought us here.

Now, I find that chilling, absolutely chilling. This is not about hundreds of thousands of people, and trying to link this horrifying sex abuse and the actions of those individuals to, presumably by hundreds of thousands of people, he, with medieval attitudes towards women from alien cultures, he basically means people from Pakistan, people from Bangladesh, and Muslims in general, and this directly echoes and resonates and amplifies the language of Tommy Robinson and the AFD and the Austrian far-right, and I'm so disturbed that a leading conservative can say that.

But the bigger point is this, do not weaponize the horrifying actions of these individuals and try to turn it into a myth that somehow fundamentally Islam is evil, it's a medieval culture, and still less feed into narratives of people who want to deport, and of course he then goes on to say, you know, he believes that foreign national offenders should be deported, which is fine, but this conversation about foreign nationals deported is getting closer and closer to the views of the far-right in Germany and Austria, who are now arguing that Muslims who are Austrian nationals and German nationals should be deported.

I don't know whether he listens or whether it's just yet another thing that he sort of jumps on because he can use it to weaponize and help his own sort of profiling in this, on this issue and in this area.

There we are, lovely to talk to you as ever Rory, speak again next week.

Speak soon, bye bye.