Environmental Neglect and Water Privatization

Thanks for listening to The Rest is Politics. To support the podcast, listen without the adverts, and get early access to episodes and live show tickets, go to therest ispolitics.com. That's the rest is politics.com . It's been so catastrophic for Trump not to have had a very clear objective about what he was trying to achieve. You don't have a moral obligation to do what you can't do. If you can't fix it, then don't try, because you'll often make things worse. Most leaders in the world trying to do statecraft, but Trump only does stagecraft. Iran has now demonstrated that it can at will shut down neighboring economies, close the straits and four moves. Iran in a sense now feels more powerful and that means there'll be pressure on Israel and the US to just This is going to be terrible for the economy in Britain and in Europe and around the wor ld. Welcome to the Restless Politics with me, Rory Stewart. And with me, Alistair Campbell. And Rory, today we're going to talk about Iran. But unlike recent weeks, not the whole program, we're going to talk about two catastrophic failures of regulation of our water on the back of an astonishing TV programme, Dirty Business, and also Ofcom, who I've tried to give the benefit of the doubt to, but their total blind eye to GB News becoming what even Andrew Neil now calls reform TV, in I think total breach of the law that Ofcom is meant to uphold. But Rory, before we start, you know how your mum is like the big influence on this podcast in your family. Well with me it's it's it's my kids, the younger generation. Very good. So Grace sends me this message, Dad, podcast is fab mainly because of Rory OVS, but you guys need to do more small talk. It's all so heavy. Trump, trump, trump, war, war, war. You need a bit of bants at the start, like, hey Rory, how you been, what you been up to? Anything weird going on in your life. Otherwise, she says you'll have people jumping off bridges before they get to the break. LOL. So FFS lighten things up a bit. Laughter emoji, love emoji. But I think she's got a little bit of a point. Let's get to you and what you like listening to. Let's say you went to something and you were looking for an update on Iran and the news and you heard two middle-aged blokes talking about their holiday. Absolutely right. Absolutely. It's true. I l the podcast that I listen to, where they do that stuff, I do go 20 seconds, 30 seconds, 30 seconds. That's true. But I think for younger people, because people go on about you know this because we get stopped and people talk to another, they're interested in our relationship. Yeah. Right? Yeah. So I think that's what she means. Do you think we could do a very, very short one? So it's not too self indulgent. Because to be honest, what's happening in the world's a little bit more interesting than you and me. No, but but but for example, she was saying like this week, talk about whether you like you're happy with the Oscars. So I'm I'm very happy that uh one battle after another one. Okay, I'm very happy obviously that Jessie Buckley won Best Actress for Hamlet. And that the Irish government flew out of her family. That was nice. Very good. I was very happy with Sean Penn that he went to see Zelensky rather than go to the ceremony. Grace probably thinks that's me being too political already. I think she's got a little bit of put a bit of a point. And also, here's one for you. So as you know, I'm obsessed with music. Yep. And I've given up on ever, ever, ever trying to persuade you to get into football, but I I''m stm stillill hopeful. We were talking about it this morning. We were, because your son's uh getting a bit interested, which is good. But I want to give a big plug to two things that have I've been following this week. One is Louis Thoreau, he's done this amazing documentary on the manosphere. And he's got such an amazing kind of earnest manner, isn't it? He's brilliant. He's just brilliant at getting people to dig their own grave. But the manosphere is so interesting because these are horrible views that a lot of young men now hold, partly because of these incredibly wealthy uh influences who've been able to monetize misogyny and hatred of women and sort of male supremacy. So I want to give a shout out to that. But I also want as the antidote to get you into music, promise me that you'll listen to a new album by James Blake called Trying Times. It's quite political. James Blake, Trying Times. Trying Times. And it's the antidote to the manifestation. What is this like folk music? He's almost unique. He's been around for a long time, but it's like he's got a very, very interesting voice. The lyrics are quite political when you listen carefully. But the the reason I say it's the antidote to the manosphere, and I've met him a few times, I know him quite well, is because it's really about men respecting women and men understanding the importance of their emotions and stuff like that. And it came out this week and went straight to number two in the charts behind Harry Styles. Okay. So I think if our listeners got involved and engaged, I think yeah, James Brain's a number one. Actually I I saw a lovely head teacher who uh she's actually the headteacher of a school you disapprove of called St. Paul's Boys School. Oh my lord. But she was the head of Is that where Osborne went? Yeah, exactly. She was the head of a girls' school before. Okay. And she's an extraordinary headteacher. And she said that everybody when she moved to this school with fifteen hundred boys said, Oh, poor you, being stuck with all these boys. And she had a lovely phrase. She said, having run an all-girls school before, much though I admire the sophistication of young women, I actually really, really enjoy being in a school full of boys. And one of the things I really loved, I did a little conference with her on educating boys. And it was really interesting. There were people from co educational schools, boys' schools, but just talking about young men and how they worked. Is how much uh it's possible for good teachers to develop real um affection and enthusiasm for the strangeness of boys. Yeah. Acknowledging you know their risk taking, acknowledging their adrenaline, acknowledging their competitiveness. There was one interesting phrase, one of them said,'s Th noere problem with aggression as long as it's not violent. I mean, there was a lot of interesting ways of talking about what Modern. And I thought it was quite and she said, you know, if she'd been doing it three years a go, it would have all been about Andrew Tate and toxic masculinity. And now people are beginning to to try lean into how you talk a little bit more about the kind of positive wandering. This episode is brought to you by Fuse Energy. Energy policy rarely stays in Westminster for long, usually arrives with a bill. And from the first of April, 75% of renewables obligation costs will come off electricity bills and move into general taxation. So if bills are meant to fall from April, why would anyone bother switching? Because policy sets the floor. The saving itself is automatic. What suppliers offer beyond that isn't, and that's where real competition operates. Fuse goes beyond the mandated saving. Customers who switch save around an additional £200 on average. In the Fuse Energy app you can see exactly what you're using and what it costs with 24f-our-seven support if you need it. Listeners to the show will also receive a free Trip Plus subscription when they switch. Get more than just lower rates. Switch today at fuseenergy.com slash politics using the code politics and save around £200 on your bills. Visit FuseENergy.com for full details and terms and conditions. This episode is brought to you by ServiceNow. AI is only as powerful as the platform it's built into. That's why it's no surprise that more than 85% of the Fortune 500 use the ServiceNow AI platform. While other platforms duct tape tools together, ServiceNow seamlessly unifies people, data, workflows, and AI, connecting every corner of your business. And with AI agents working together autonomously, anyone in any department can focus on the work that matters most. Learn how ServiceNow puts AI to work for people at serviceNow.com . This episode is brought to you by Adobe Acrobat Studio. There's a lot of data in today's game, but chaps is it all waffle? A lot of it is, yes. No, it's now come on. XG, pre-assists, pockets of space. Hold on, you started using that terminology. Hypocrisy. Come on. Well, if your role involves working through reams of information and data, take a look at Acrobat Studio. You can create a PDF space, an AI powered workspace that turns documents into summaries and insights, and even generates reports or presentations out of it, so you can cut through the waffle, work smarter, and save time. It's easy to create something amazing, all in record time. Plus, because we know working as a team is always better, you can work on projects together without having to worry about privacy or security. So whatever you want to do, do that with Acrobat. Learn more and try it out on Adobe. com The other thing is I've been reading this book by uh Liam Byrne about populism, and it's really interesting how within that, with all these right-wing MAGA, Farage, Orban, a lot of that is a cut the m the it's the sort of it's the manosphere arguments that they play out all the time. And of course a lot of it is related to the whole muskification of the world, you know, because this manosphere thing, it's it's big money. It's big money for the people who are driving this stuff. So I think it's interesting. And then there you go, Ruy we've we've done about four different political issues since Final one for me. Uh Jack Watling, um who I often talk about Russie, the Ukraine uh analyst, has just got a book coming out this week called Statecraft and he's written a great article in The Guardian about the Straits of Four Moose, but he's really, really good about trying to provide a formal analysis of how you do strategy. And so for people who are interested in kind of big politics, big strategy, Jack Watling's new book, Statecraft, I highly recommend that. I can't remember I read I read something this week where somebody was saying that most leaders in the world Okay. So I was thinking one of the fundamental things I I'd like to say in my analysis is the MT and C, MTC, right? So M is morality, T is threat, C is capability. Okay. And my point is this we confuse when we think about invading a country like Iran . Morality, our moral judgment, right? This is an evil, horrendous regime that's killed tens of thousands of its own people and is profoundly unpopular. That's the m M. T, threat. This is a regime that may or may not pose a threat. You know, what kind of threat? Who is it threatening? Is it able to threaten the US? Does it have nuclear weapons? Is it only able to threaten Israel? And then the C, which is the most difficult thing of all, which is capability, what can we actually do about it? And we tend to conflate these things. We tend to think it's enough to say, if you really think this is an evil, horrible regime, therefore we should be intervening. And the assumption is if there's a problem somehow we can automatically fix it. And I think the depth of the problem we're in now is about our inability to move clearly between these categories. We get stuck in say ing this is a very evil regime, so surely you can't be against intervention, or getting very confused about threat. You know, is it a threat to Israel? Is it a threat to the US? Is it a threat to Europe? What kind of threat? Is it a threat in three years' time if it develops nuclear weapons? What kind of threats are these proxies? Is it a threat to the Straits Forms and are we making it worse threat? And then finally this question of capability. What can you actually do about it? Yeah, you can bomb it, you can take out missiles, you can flatten it from the air, you could even invade the country. But is that going to change the moral nature of the regime? So is it going to produce a more liberal regime? Is it going to make it less of a threat? And what what what leverage do you do? What knowledge do you have? What power do you have? What capacity have you got? I would add a P. Okay, go on P. Planlanning.ning See, I think you've got to have all four. Okay. So you've got to have a moral case. Yep. Otherwise, you're not going to particularly in democracies, you're not going to take people with you. There has to be at least an understanding of a real threat, and you have to have the capability and the capability depends on the planning. As well as the you know, who's got the biggest thing I be more just push back for a second, because this was slightly the conversation we had with Jonathan Powell where I got in trouble with him and he said You didn't trouble you just got angry. He just I got angry and he said he was used to dealing with terrorists. But Jonathan Powell was trying to make the case that the problem in Iraq was absence of planning. And the kind of implication was that if we planned better, we would be able to do these things. I'm more pessimistic. I think that there are certain kinds of things that we cannot do, regardless of how much you plan. And I have this sort of idea that we live in too optimistic a world where Americans in particular think, if there's a problem, there's a solution. And if you haven't got the solution it you just have to spend more money and plan more. My catchphrase I'm gonna throw back at you is ought implies can. You don't have a moral obligation to do what you can't do. So it's not enough to say the Iranian regime is horrible and a threat. If you can't fix it, then don't try because you'll often make things worse. Yeah, and right I mean historically and definitely right now with Trump, Trump thinks he can fix anything, which is why last night he was blathering on about. I can do what I want with the Cuba and I'm going to do it soon. But I think on the on the planning, Rory, my son, sent me a clip of Trump because I I I can I can I can't watch Trump at the moment, so I have to rely on other people to tell me what he's saying. He just riles me up so much. So Peter Ducey, who is from Fox News in the White House, and he said this to Trump You said they hit Qatar, Saudi Arabia, UAA, Bahrain and Q eight. Nobody expected that. And then he went on, are you surprised that nobody briefed you ahead of time that that might be their retaliation? Trump, nobody, nobody. No, no, no, no, no. The greatest experts, nobody thought they were going to hit. Everybody thought they would do this. And what's more, the Ayatollah himself, the now dead one, quote, the Americans should know that if they start a war this, time it will be a regional war. And then get this. I've been reading, I know you read Foreign Affairs Magazine, I read it very, very closely, particularly when stuff like this is going on. And I don't know if you've been reading this guy, Nate Swanson, who's written some interesting pieces. And you know, he's one of the leading experts on Iran in the world. He was director for Iran at the National Security Council between 2022 and 25. He was Trump's chief negotiator on the negotiation team, and he was sacked not long ago because Laura Loomer, MAGA cultist influencer, she he was on her list. He wrote a piece in Foreign Affairs Magazine on February the twenty-fourth, four days before the invasion, headline US military strikes and the risk of a quagmire. And we talked about this when the thing started, because he was the guy who was saying, Trump will think that because he's done Venezuela, and everybody said it would be a catastrophe and it's not, because he moved the embassy in Israel to Jerusalem and it'd be a catastrophe and it wasn't. And he and he says on this, it's easy to see why Trump would believe the warnings about another attack on Iran over aught, he can repeat his formula. This time is different. I spent eighteen years working on Iran with Biden and Trump. From that experience I see that Trump fundamentally fails to grasp that Iranian weakness will not lead the country to capitulate. On the contrary, Iran's present fragility narrows the space for meaningful compromise. Nor does Trump understand Iran faces entirely different conditions than june twenty twenty five when it chose to de-escalate. The Islamic Republic now believes that Israel and the US intend to strike repeatedly its ballistic missile program and that it must be more aggressive to forestore the kind of perpetual assault that could topple it all together. And then goes on to say, Tehran could target global oil flows and international shipping, sending energy prices up and creating a serious political liability for Trump. Iran may well encourage the Houthis to resume attacking ships. The country's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has also been preparing to seize adversary ships in the Strait of Holmous. If conflict with the United States deepens, Iran may consider targeting the Gulf Arab States energy infrastructure directly. This is Trump's advisor saying it four days before. Okay, that that's brilliant. Really brilliant because it's very rare historically that you can have such a clear example as somebody who is in the National Security Council saying something in the back of mine. I mean I, like you, occasionally am asked to go and to talk to businesses, corporations, governments to give geopolitical advice. So I was at an event recently in a European country, sitting with the CEOs of a number of companies, and they were all talking about, you know, what's the point of people like you and me coming in to give geopolitical advice? And I said it's a really good question. Let me just take one example, right ? Let's say we had said to you, Alistair and I, that back in November, December, Trump is building up a massive flotilla of ships near Iran. Let's say we'd said to you in December, and by the way, that when he built up a massive amount of ships off Venezuela, it led to a strike against Venezuela. So there's a decent chance that there's going to be a strike against Iran, right? And that's why, you know, we were trying to get Rob Malley on the show and all this kind of thing, because we were trying to get it done before Trump struck, right? Let's say we'd also say that every expert in the world had spent the last forty years saying one of the problems with Iran is the Straits of Formuz. I mean we weren't remotely original in that, right? It's completely obvious. It's their territorial waters, and you stop the Straits of Formuz, you stop 20% of global oil. And let's say we then explained that that would lead to a spike in global oil prices and actually a spillover that could be really catastrophic for the Gulf economies. That was pretty predicta ble that that would happen back in, I suppose, December, January. We also knew that Israel wanted to strike Iran, because Netanyahu had said it again and again, and we knew that Trump had historically come along with Israel. So let's say you had said to these businesses four months ago there is a 70% chance that Trump will hit Iran, global oil prices will go up, all these countries are going to be destabilized. Did any of you do any contingency planning? And the answer was none of them did. Now what was really interesting is I pushed harder and said, well why not? And one of them said, well all that happens is that we have as senior American generals on our boards who've been banging on about China-Taiwan for the last four years and telling us China's about avoid Taiwan. And they've very large checks. And they haven't been telling us about this at all. The second one said, Well, we calculated that Trump was kind of a bluffer. The historical record is he'd do something for a couple of days and then he'd stop. And we didn't really believe he would keep going in this way. I guess look, they're entitled to think people like you and me don't don't actually know that much more than they do. Uh we could argue well actually we do talk to lots of people and we can maybe assess things and what have you. So I get that. But I think the other thing they're probably speaking to is that Trump is so unpredictable. I think with most American presidents, you've always had a sense of what they might try to do. So like yesterday, when he suddenly starts going on about Cuba, I think before Venezuela, I'd have thought, oh, this is just a kind of distraction to try and get you off talking about because he realizes it's not going well. But actually, it could mean that's n that's the next lot. I I I look I think there's a sixty percent chance he goes into Cuba. I mean again what's weird about it is w we're not in a world of there's a hundred percent chance he's going to Cuba, but I would say it's more likely than not that he goes into Cuba, given that he said he was gonna go into Venezuela, he signalled he was gonna hit Iran, he did both those things, he he signal on Ukraine. So I think Cuba is very likely. Um listen, can I just also lean into something that isn't discussed maybe quite enough in the Western press, which is the way in which this is shattering the economies of the Gulf. We we see it with Dubai. You know, everyone's noticing what's happening there. So think about the fact that in Dubai a lot of people are living in huge skyscrapers. Think about what you feel if you're high up a skyscraper, if you think the electricity is going to be cut off and your elevator isn't going to work and a drone might strike the sodium assuming. Are you, if you are somebody who's moved to Dubai, going to think that's a safe place to be? You didn't move there actually thinking this was a place that would be hit by Iranium cells. So I imagine the property prices are going to collapse in Dubai. I also imagine its status as a financial centre is going to drop quite quickly. But in the short term, Qatar is currently exporting close to zero liquid natural gas. That means that going they're going from billions of dollars of revenue a day to zero. UAE is probably down at about a third of its exports. The spillover effects of this will be unbelievable because actually countries like Qatar have become central to the global aid environment. As USA ideas cut and stop putting money in, and the UK and Germany and others, Qatar has stepped up and is funding UN agencies, non profits, charities all over the world. A lot of the money that's supposed to be going into Gaza reconstruction is supposed to be coming out of the Gulf. And all those countries are not just hit in the short term, they will be very worried about medium term because a lot of the people who are buying from them will begin to think, well, maybe I'm going to diversify my contracts. May be I thought this was reliable. It's not quite as reliable anymore. Insurance values are going to go up. These are countries which have spent an absolute fortune developing the image as safer business, safer tourism, based on their alliance with the United States. And I think it's heartbreaking. Look, I know there are many people who listen to the show who are not very sympathetic towards places like Qatar. I I really am. I felt that actually in many not perfect, but in I think where people are unsympathetic is people like Isabel Oakshot, who emigrate to Dubai with Mr Richard Tice, the man with the interesting tax scam that most of the media seem not to be interested in. And yesterday was she's back in London posting pictures of how awful things are because she took a picture of somebody Aaron Powell But these countries have done an incredible things over the last forty, fifty years, just transforming their economies. And they've become really interesting places. And it's tragic what's happened because they didn't sign up for this war. You know, it certainly Qatar was not driving this war. In fact, if anything, they were trying to dissuade Trump from it. And they now find themselves in a completely impossible situation, which is every day that Trump continues to bomb I ran, and more missiles coming to them, more disruption to the Straits. But even if he stops , Humpty Dumpty's fallen off the wall because now everybody can see for years to come that Iran in a sense can blackmail everybody. Iran has now demonstrated that it can at will shut down neighbouring economies, close the straits of four moose. So Iran in a sense now feels more powerful and that means there'll be pressure on Israel and the US to just keep going, trying to chase this very, very difficult idea that they can somehow topple the regime. I think close to impossible idea. I guess also that one possible outcome in terms of this thing ending is if Iran basically says to the Americans, well okay, we can call off what we're doing. And we don't have to bomb the whole time. We just have to take out a few Americans every now and then. We just have to close down the straits of all moose, we just have to do cause you a lot of trouble, which we can do, and we've shown you we can do that. So you need to get a guarantee from Israel that they're gonna stop. And they, the Iranians, if Trump were to do that, then can say, Well actually we've won. And that's why I think it's been so catastrophic for Trump not to have had a very clear objective about what he was trying to achieve. He's a rambling sort of changing goalpost, moving objectives. The other thing that uh this guy Nate Swanson said in the piece he's written post, so he's written another piece for affairs magazine, and he he he made that point. He says Iran doesn't need to score major military successes every day. The regime only needs to inflict enough periodic damage to keep regional partners, markets, and the American public jittery. They can do that easily. optimistic line which is being sold by American admirals is if we just keep going for another four weeks, we can degrade Iranian capacity so much that at huge expense we can safely escort some vessels through the Straits and then we will have won. Because we will have proved the Straits are open and Iran can't shut it. My response is that doesn't make any sense to me at all. The US may in four weeks' time be able to take a vessel through the Straits at huge expense with aircraft carriers and destroyers, but they're not gonna want to do that every day forever. And Iran doesn't need to demonstrate that it can hit a hundred percent of vessels going through. Doesn't even need to hit one out of a hundred. People just need to believe there's a possibility that it might be able to hit one out of a hundred next time the next six, twelve months in the US have lost. So there isn't a clear point at which they will be able to say the Straits Maybe that's a good point at which to turn to the whole kind of big political picture and Trump' s attempts to persuade other countries to get involved in sending warships, sending destroyers, sending mine hunters, to get the Straits of Hormuz operating again. And one by one , every single one of them was given in the bombs rush, which makes him angrier. So he's lashed out again at Gearshar mer. Mark Carney, who sort of was quite welcoming at the start, he's been absolutely clear we're having nothing to do with this. Pistorius was very clear. He said if the US Navy can't do it, what Maert said last night this is not a job for NATO. Nick Carter, former senior military guy in the UK, he said yesterday Trump's suggestion that NATO should take this on completely misunderstands why people are in NATO in the first place. It's a defensive alliance. If you think of the principle of what Trump's saying, any NATO country could say, right, we're going to war over there, and we then expect you all to come and help us when we when it fucks up. Because that's all that's happened. All that's happened is all these things that Nate Swanson said to Trump, one presumes, which is why he got the boot. This will happen. Trump wanted to ignore it to have the war. And now that it's happening, he's basically saying Britain, France, Germany, Japan, South Korea, Australia, you've got to come in and help me. I think look it's terrible what's going on. The as you said last week, this is going to be terrible for the economy in Britain and in Europe and around the world. But I think in terms of getting America under Trump, hopefully for some time back into maybe just getting a few grown-ups around him to say, listen, we've this has gone far enough. My really, really, really big worry about what's happening at the moment with the kind of, you know, Star, McCartney, Macron, Melts, all pushing back on Trump, is he's just going to one day wake up in the middle of the night and do a truth social post saying we are pulling all support from Ukraine because the NATO countries have not been there to help us in our need. Yeah. I mean I I think that's a real risk. But equally we couldn't be in a position where that blackmail threat meant the vote to sign up to everything. And that was where I disagree with Mandelson. Mandelson was continuing even after he'd been fired from Washington to write articles and give interviews saying things like basically we should let him have Greenland because the only thing that matters is U.S. support for Ukraine. There were people in our own intelligence and security establishment who were very critical of Starmer's line, saying, What happens if we go to war and we need the U.S. to help us and we've got to go with them. People saying when we went to Spain, you know, what happens when Spain gets attacks? And I think the problem with that idea is the idea that Trump does favours or feels loyalty or because you've helped him out here, he's going to help you out there as for the birds. So the reality is that actually US support for Ukraine has been reduced to basically zero dollars. So we've had to step up, fill in a f Europe fifty billion dollar. They're still doing a lot of the intelligence. They do a lot of the intelligence to security and they sell us stuff that we buy, although a lot of the stuff we're trying to buy, they've now blowing in the Middle East, so it's not even available to buy. But the main thing for which Trump was always given credit was putting sanctions against Russian oil and driving down the price of oil. He's now lifted those sanctions and put up the oil price. So it's basically down to the intelligence and security enablers. Yeah. And that that is very vulnerable. It's a big problem. But the bigger problem he's done, he's done much more damage to Ukraine than helped it, in particular around oil and the Russian economy. Of the argument, so is Wikov. Kirill Dmitriev, who's Putin's kind of Witkoff in this equation, and he did a post on Telegram. He said the United States is effectively acknowledging the obvious. Without Russian oil, the global energy market cannot remain stable. EU bureaucrats will soon be forced to recognise this, acknowledge their strategic blunders and atone. Russia is I'm afraid, hate to say it, but I think it's true, Russia is the only power that has won out of this whole thing. He because of the lifting the sanctions on oil, driving the price of oil up through what he's done in Iran, he is basically putting very, very large sums of money, one point six billion per month for every ten dollar increase in the price of crude. I mean that is a lot of money. And this is one of the things that's gonna uh uh fuel the the fund next stage of the war. And this is why all the uh sort of you know, I have friends who are like to poke Europe and the UK and say it's all our fault. And one of the great things they like to say is it was all Europe's fault for continuing to buy Russian oil. And that at least Trump had called that out. Well, now it's quite clear that Trump is on the other side. My my final thing before we maybe take a break is my biggest fe ar is that this could continue for a very, very long time. I mean the optimistic idea is that Trump somehow declares a victory. And we know that Trump is able to declare apparently a victory out of almost nothing. But his ability to do that feels less than it was before. Because if he was saying, you know, what what he would have wanted to say before, which is, you know, I've destroyed their nuclear capacity, so I've won. You know, I've taken out their ballistic missiles, I've won. The problem is the whole world can now see that Iran has choked the Straits of Hormuz, driven up the oil price, and basically is now holding all the Gulf countries to ransom. If he says tomorrow, I've won and I'm stopp ing, the Gulf countries and a lot of the world will be like, You you what? Excuse me? You you you're leaving these guys in place. They can now fire missiles at us whenever they want, they can close the straights for moves whenever they want. You you you you've declared victory, right? So one of the real risks is that actually places like Saudi that might have been a little ambivalent about this may now be pushing him to keep going. And you'll start seeing this. I'm beginning to see this from some of our own British diplomats, generals, intelligence people, who say to me,, Well Rory, you know, uh, you know, I uh I didn't agree with the war in the first place, but now it's happened. We've got to finish the job. We can't leave these people here because actually they're too much of a danger to the world. To which I have to keep saying, what does it mean, finish the job? How do you finish this job? Because another problem is all the experts on I ran put so much emphasis on the fact that the regime only had 15% of the support of the population, was very weak, was very unpopular. And they thought that would mean it would collapse like a pack of cards. In fact, I think there were optimistic Israeli analysis. I had one of them saying to me yesterday, a Brit saying, I thought Israel understood Iran better than anyone else. And what he meant by that is Israel was always much more cynical about Iran, much more aggressive about Iran. But Israel was wrong. Israel thought this regime would collapse immediately and it absolutely did not. They it's proved much more resilient. So the options are now I don't know how you avoid two completely horrible outcomes. Horrible outcome number one, this war continues indefinitely because you never get anything that you can describe as a victory. Horrible outcome number two, you stop Well before we go to Bray, which is that tomorrow for question time, we uh as you described as you describe it, we can show little humility. We put out an appeal to listeners and viewers for questions on Iran. We got tons of them. And we uh we've got a guest for question time, which is one of the world's leading experts, genuine leading expert on Iran, that's Karim Sajapur. Um and he's hopefully people enjoy that tomorrow. We'll take a break and we'll come back and talk about how useless our water and media regulators are. Very good. Looking forward to it, Alistair. Good break. This episode is brought to you by NordVPN. Spring is the season of movement, travel, shared networks, systems that aren't ours. When you operate inside infrastructure you don't control, your vulnerability increases. Mobility increases exposure. A cyber attack happens every 39 seconds. In the UK, hundreds of cyber-enabled crimes are reported daily with around 4.5 million pounds lost each day to cybercrime. Frictionless systems tend to hide their weaknesses. Bank details, passwords, boarding passes, sensitive data moving across networks we don't control. 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We think of security risks as big and dramatic, but increasingly not. They're creeping in through the ordinary, an email that looks plausible, a link that feels routine. That's why I've been using Nord VPN to close the gap. NordVPN encrypts your internet connection, hides your IP address and protects your bank details and passwords so you're not assuming everything online is safe. To get the best discount on your NordVPN plan, go to NordVPN.com/slash restispolitics. You'll get four extra months free on the two-year plan plus a 30-day money-back guarantee. The link is in the episode descrip tion. This episode is brought to you by Whoop. And I'm speaking to you. I'm wearing a whoop device on my wrist at the moment. Politics teaches you fairly quickly that attention is finite. When attention is drawn to the loud and urgent, it's easy to miss the deeper patterns shaping outcomes. And that applies to health as well. You keep going, you meet demands, you get through the day without noticing that the cost is quietly all adding up and taking a toll. Whereas Whoop exists to bring the background picture into focus. This thing on your wrist is there showing you how your body responds to everyday life, to sleep, to recovery, to strain, and how those rhythms and trends emerge over time. If you want to better understand how you can feel and live at your best for years to come, head to join.whoop.com slash You can sign up for a free 30-day trial so you can try woop risk-free and see what you learn . Welcome back to the Dresses Politics with me Anister Campbell. And with me Rory Stewart. Now Rory, you probably know I do occasionally weave in little plugs for my newspaper, The New World. But today I am doing so underlined ten times because they've done a a piece this week written by Alan Rossbridger, who you thought should have been director general of the BBC. Probably because I'll tell you why it wouldn't happen. It relates to what we're going to talk about because they would have thought, Oh, we can't possibly put somebody in who's perceived as being left wing. I had a moment where I suddenly thought I should have applied for that job. I mean somebody needs to do that job. Well the guy who seems to be in the frame for the job that you wanted Alan Rosbridge to get is a guy called Matt Britain. And the job I've now decided I wanted to get. Yeah, yeah. Which is a great name for the BVC. His background is Google. Google Europe. Do you think it would be a great job or do you think it'd be a nightmare of a job? I think it'd be both. Most great jobs are nightmares. You know, if I was manager of Argentina when Maradona was playing, I mean absolute bloody nightmare. Well, what a great job. Um but no, so what they've done, and it's it's really, really interesting. I do love the new world, and it's so it's not many newspapers do twelve they call themselves a magazine now, twelve pages on one story. Well okay. And well with the front cover three by Alan Rustfordshire. All written by Alan Rustburgshire, yeah. And it's an analysis of GB News. And just quickly remind listeners, GB News. GB News, a right-wing TV station founded a few years ago, funded very, very heavily by this guy, Paul Marshall, Christian right-winger, used to be a Lib Dem. Andrew Neal, very well known journalist, was the kind of founding driver of it. He's quoted in Russ Bridges' piece as saying, it has basically become reform TV, reform Nigel Farage's party. But what Alan does, he he put together a team of quite a large team of journalists and people who had experience of regulation. And not just kind of left wing people. There were people who worked for the spectator, for the Tegelraph, as well as for the Atlantic, for the Washington Post, for Tortoise, and so lots of different journalistic people. And they sat down, I think in pairs, and they watch ed a lot of GB News, and they were asked to score these programmes that they watched for Argy's programme, an interview that Beverly Turner did with Donald Trump, Matt Goodwin, his program, some of the the sort of chatty programs, and they asked him to score them against Ofcom's own guidelines. And the Ofcom guidelines, just to come in for a second, if I'm right, a lot of them are about broad Correct. Is about impartiality, is that right? It's about impartiality and fairness and and uh accuracy. Okay. And the idea if we go back to the beginnings of this are that whereas newspapers were allowed to endorse political parties have their political champion bias, broadcast was supposed to be this is going back to the days of the founding of the B BBC I andTV in Channel Four was supposed to have balanced points of view, were supposed to be impartial, were supposed to be objective. And the idea of that was you didn't want streaming into people's living rooms propaganda. Completely biased propaganda. Yeah. And if you didn't abide by the Ofcom rules, you did not get a license. So GB News have a license to broadcast around the clock, which they do. The team that Rustbridge put together. They include people who were the for Sunday Telegraph, The Spectator, The Times, The Observer, BBC, ITV, The Daily Mail, The Mirror, Prospect, The Economist, The Guardian, BuzzFeed, The Washington Post, Tortoise Media, GQ Magazine. So they put a lot of people and sat them in front of television and said, You watch this for hours and hours and hours. And what they've got, both in Allen's report and in the New World's um account of it, they've given their explanations as to why Ofcom rules were being broken. Okay, give us some examples. So for example, Donald Trump, interview with Donald Trump by Beverly Turner, he says in the interview climate change is a complete hoax. An interviewer who's governed by Occo Ofcom should at the very least say, Well that is disputed. Right. Okay. Or have somebody who comes on afterwards to say why that's completely wrong. Instead of what she said, it was so amazing to see you drop all those truth bombs at the United Nations. It's propaganda. Okay. Matt Goodwin. Matt Goodwin is an academic who did research on immigration, has become increasingly right wing, and then managed to run as the reform party. Your famous generosity there, Rory, in calling him academic. And what's more, he had a program and has a programme. And guess what he wasing discuss four days before it was announced that he was going to be the candidate in Gorton and Denton. Did he? He was discussing Gorton and Denton. And he was discussing these were the subjects he chose. Is Europe falling apart and becoming unrecognizable? What is the risk of Islamist fighters arriving on small boats? Why are Cowbra residents up in arms over a local camp for asylum seekers? And finally, on this fair and balanced programme, sexual assaults by refugees in the Netherlands and the UK. So that Matt Goodwin programme was scored by these guys at one out of five for being in keeping with the Ofcom guidelines. Okay, so just to put it in context, when I in 2010 showed uh the then Prince of Wales around my non-profit in Afghanistan, and uh BBC News showed a couple of images of me pointing to things. Gordon Brown, then Prime Minister, made a formal complaint to the Palace and Ofcom saying it was it would help me in my election in Penrith and the Border. Gordon Brown. Yeah, yeah. Because I appeared with the king and was shown on television showing him around the project. So to see how far we've come, in 2010, it was considered for me to be in the edge of a shot with the king as a parliamentary candidate about a stand for penetration border was in Gordon Brown's views breaching impartiality and putting election compared to what would have happened if I'd actually presented my own programme on the Pend of the Border election every night about all the issues that I was campaigning for as a main broadcaster, let alone on the margin of appropriate. Exactly. And so for example, Andrew Neal in the interview he does with the New World with Russbridger, he says that when he was starting G B News, he said that, you know, there's no way that we I would have allowed Nigel Farage to have his own programme. Nigel Farage now has his own programme. Jacob Rees Mock has his own programme. Lee Anderson has his programme. Matt Goodman has his programme. And they all get financed too. That's the other thing. So one of the interesting things here is about conflict of interest and the funding of members of parliament. So as people will be aware, members of parliament often feel underpaid. A lot of the population disagree, other bits of population agree. But they are allowed to have second jobs. But they have to declare quite carefully what those incomes are. If you are a presenter on GB News, or if you are as Boris Johnson was when he was an MP, a columnist for a newspaper, or indeed actually some of the Labour MPs who presented LBC radio programs, you can end up earning literally hundreds of thousands of pounds a year. But I think Boris Johnson was in the hundreds of thousands, certainly Farage seems to have been in the hundreds of thousands, of income. And those are, in effect, or can be indirect donations coming from the owners of these media corporations. So the Barclays brothers, I think, owned the telegraph and he was getting this money. Marshall, as you say, uh have been a big funner of GB News, and so a lot of the thing that's maintaining the lifestyle of uh Nigel Farch is not being declared as a direct donation from an individual with a political cause to Farage, which he has to justify. Instead it's just presented as I have a second job. And I think all these questions around MPs' incomes, conflicts of interest, their future jobs are not being sorted. Personally, to return to my current possession, pay them more and stop them from having these additional sources of income. And also for the backers, the Paul Marshalls, th they are this is the equivalent to funding a political party, because Andrew Neil says this is now reform TV. By the way, fair play to Gordon Brown. Right. In my view. Right. Because if you have rules, they've got to be upheld. Right. One of the things that's happening with this report is it's going to go to Lisa Nandy, the culture secretary, is going to go to the culture committee. Two things should happen in my view. First of all, the Labour government needs to get its head round why this is such a problem for our democracy, and as it happens for the Labor Party as well. But the other thing, you said about how the things changed, let me just read you this line from Russ Bridges' uh piece, to see how far Ofcom has journeyed in the way it operates, it's worth revisiting a meticulously argued 12-page adjudication it published eight years ago, which found the BBC had breached its duty of due accuracy in 2017 by failing to challenge Nigel Lawson's remark on the science of climate change on the Today programme. These guys on on GB News, they don't just not allow voices on to rebut what they say, they kind of almost cartoonise issues like climate change. And so something like Goodwin, he has a program where he literally talks about immigration day and night. And they would say, so they've got Gloria Del Piero, former Labour in Peon. That's balance. They have got so many really right wing presenters. This is why Liam Burns book is so interesting, because this is all of a piece with how Putin corrupted his own media, how Trump is corrupting his own media. You now have Brendan Carr, who runs the FCC, the Federal Commission that gives out licenses to broadcasters, and basically saying, if these guys don't cover the war properly, in Pete Heggs' view, they're going to lose their license. And that is already having an impact. Trevor Burrus One of the things that is also odd, which I guess is going on and off comes head, and some listeners, I think, will already be uh shouting at our podcast, pointing this out, is they will say, Listen, how come uh we can put out podcasts algorithmically streamed on YouTube into people's living rooms and we're not governed by offcom regulations. And you know, you you don't need to be Dominic Cummings to point out that you and I have particular political views. We are rampantly pro-European, for example, and we keep putting out those views, right? So there's a really interesting thing that's happened since these regulations were set up. Now I'm not defending Ofcom, because I think your point is right. These guys get a broadcasting license. There is a law. They're not sticking to it. But just to explain why it's getting more complicated. It's getting more complicated because when these rules were set up, you didn't have podcasts and YouTube platforms. Yeah. And actually our reach is now bigger than these guys, right? So if you look at the figures, these figures suggest that they are getting at one time just under a hundred thousand uh viewers. Now this is a rolling average over a particular period and it's quite difficult calculating. But it's worth pointing out that they will come back and say, hold a second. You know, you are often getting 10 times the number of people listening to your podcast, and they would probably say, understandably, listen, we have our own political view, which is incredibly pro-European, centrist dad, etc. So they would say, how come you as a podcast get to have a pretty clear political view, but we as a broadcast network don't. We're just examples of us, there's news agents. And then there's stuff coming from the States, like Joe Rogan, right, as a client or whatever, coming in, which Ofcom can't even touch. I mean if you to wanted regulate Joe Rogan, uh you would have to deal with the fact that people would start using VPNs to get round governments. Listen, it's a very it's a very, very fair point. And I went in to see Ofcom sometime last year, because I was I was already kind of spotting that. I thought this was a real problem. Yeah. And I went in, and it was before the election, and I was basically saying, look, how can you have Farage presenting this programme virtually daily? It is total reform propaganda. That's all it is. Minute after minute. And and the one thing we know about Farage, he's very good at it. He's a good broadcaster, he's a good talker, he's a good propagandist. So I met these people at Ofcom, and we'll come onto the water in a minute, but one of the best things about the water programme that we're gonna talk about were these the sort of bullshit merchants that they employed to give sort of empathetic lines to take. And one of the things the Ofcom people kept saying to me is, well, we can only take ac tion under our remit if we get complaints. Okay. Well, Matt Goodwin did a poll on his own program on whether Trump was right that Europe was recognizable. Guess what? 97% of the viewers agreed with it, right? Now, even Trump's interview, which was the biggest blowjob you've ever seen on television, I think they got 32 complaints and none of them were upheld on the basis that in other po other times on the channel other points were made. If Donald Trump's on your TV station, you're gonna get a lot of coverage. Rebuttal is not. The rebuttal has to be in the programme. And and I think Labour, the government, and the Conservatives, I think should join in on this as well, and definitely the Lib Dems. I think they're underestimating how serious this. I get your point about the podcast and there may come a point by the way where Ofcom's remit has to be extended. Yeah. But right now, in relation to what Off Ofcom's duty is to see that their own guidelines and laws are upheld. The arey being broken minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day, in a on a news station that claims and boasts that it now has more viewers than the BBC News and Sky News. So that is a real problem, I think, for our democracy. We've got to get a grip of it. Yeah. Also, what an amazing change in the media landscape we've seen. I mean, it's not just podcasts. 1989, something like 30% of the British population every night watched the BBC News for the IT V news. It's now down to about ten percent. The same is true in the US. Gone for about twenty twenty five percent of the US population watching the main news anchors in the evening down to about 5%. We've gone from in 1989, 5% of people getting no TV news to 32% of people. From 2% of people getting no TV or newspaper news in nineteen eighty n toine about a quarter of the population getting new TV or newspaper news today. The number of people using a newspaper has dropped from seventy-five percent in eighty nine to thirty four percent today, and it's only the over fifty five's, where almost half people are actually regularly watching TV. If you get under thirty-fives, fifty-eight percent, their main news source is social media. Yeah. Well it's very complicated, isn't it? So advertising revenue for newspapers has collapsed, which also I think gives the poor marshals this world more control. Because when you were in Downing Street, they were making close to ten billion pounds a year in real terms. They're now making about a quarter of that. Which means that if you're a wealthy person, you can step up, fill the gap, which otherwise would have been made from appetized. So we're in this very, very, very weird world. And then the other thing we've talked about, you were teasing me, you know, what am I doing appearing on Piers Morgan? What am I doing appearing on Today program? Today program's very interesting because that's remained incredibly high. Falling though. Falling but not as fast as you'd think. It's been a seventy-five percent collapse in the TV news today program is pretty pretty constant. And then Piers Morgan, you were saying well nobody watched Piers Morgan. Well the weird thing I was saying what were you doing? The weird thing is that gets picked up on YouTube, which again makes it even more complicated. Which is not regulated either. So Ofcom's in a really, really weird world. But I agree with you. If you are going to say newspapers and podcasts are one thing people expect them to have political views, broadcasting is supposed to be impartial, then of course you can't have Nigel Farage regularly presenting a programme. But I think if you endorsing his own if you read this full report, you will see this is deliberate systemic. They should take it take its license with it. They will be loving this conversation, of course, which they'll say, hey, they're lefty bedwatters, they don't like it when it's the foot on the other boot. Because the other thing that they've done is they managed to persuade people like Ofcom that the rest of the media is really left wing. We've got the most right wing newspapers basically on the planet. The BBC is constantly scared of his own shadow and is neither one thing or the other, you know, rightly in my view. I'll tell you what I would say, if the Today program don't have Alan Rossbridger on at 810 talking about his report. I will say they're all part of the same bloody club. Anyway, listen, I think it's a brilliant The New World is a brilliant magazine, and this is a particularly brilliant piece of reporting, and I'm really, really glad they've done it. And because we're fair, Rory, and balanced, unlike others, the New World actually offered Ofcom an interview or an article or some sort of response, and they they they said they didn't have time to do an interview. They gave a statement which says, O rurules around due impartiality and due accuracy in news are cornerstones of the broadcasting code. They ensure that audiences are not misled and that they're exposed to an appropriate range of alternative views and perspectives. Well, we'll see how that stands up against the excellent piece by Mr. Rosbridger. Um GB News didn't respond to the New World's request for response, but they of course have often said that they call themselves fearless defenders of free speech in the United Kingdom. And the link to water is this. The final line of Alan's 12 pages in the new world is this: clean information is in theory as precious as clean water. We know what happened to water in this country. Is our national news going the same way? What a link. That's good, isn't it? Okay. Well let's go to water and tell us about t dirty business. Well dirty business actually got me even angrier than the post office stuff. Because as you know, I like to swim in cold water. And it made me think, if I funny, I was talking to somebody at the swimming pool this morning who also seen me and said, I don't think I'll ever swim in a river aga in because you just can't trust it. You can't trust what they say about it. So that dirty business is the story of these two middle-aged retired guys who notice that where they live down in near where David Camry's Cameron's old seat, Whitney, that the river windrush is changing colour. And they get very troubled by this and they sort of dig and dig and dig and dig, and essentially what they're finding is the these massive sewage spills. And then woven through the story as they then try to campaign, one to get the truth, which they struggle to get because these agencies just lie to them all the time, but secondly, to get things improved, weaving through this story are two stories based on fact, one of a young girl who walked through some human sewage on a beach in Dawlish which had a blue flag and she ended up dying. She died. She died from infections, contract. And and and people couldn't work out what was going on, but she died. And then another guy who in a different um water incident contracted Meniers disease, which was utterly life changing. What is this disease? You sort of lose your balance all the time and and and and and you have these kind of never ending sort of vomiting But the basic point is that human sewage is a very serious threat to human health. So the Dawlish Beach had a blue flag saying it was clean. Saying it was clean. And the fat you saw the family basically trying to get some sense of justice, or at least to find out why she died, yeah, and constantly being fobbed off and saying, Well, you know, you sure she didn't eat something and and all this sort of stuff. And it's really the what makes it so compelling as television, the first thing is it doesn't hide what sewage is about. Yeah. And what you see is the and I'm afraid this goes back to Margaret Thatcher and privatization. There's just been a complete undermining of this of the of the systems that keep our water clean, whilst these companies are making fortunes. And what's more, you see, one of the worst things about the program is the guy who is in charge of the environment agency, which is meant to be the regulator, which is just in this program just comes over as a complete bullshit industry. He he ends up at the end of the programme working for one of the water companies. So it's the old revolving door from regulator to business. It honestly drives you mad. And I've got to tell you, Roy, you're in it. I'm in it 'cause I was the water minister. Well you you're sitting there's a clip in the co they they mix real footage from policy. So for example there's a speech Keir Starmer's regulation speech, which I didn't particularly enjoy, and but you're sitting behind Liz Trust as she's sort of, you know, doing what ministers do, saying, Oh no, we're dealing with it, dah dah dah. I mean, what was your experience of the environment agents? Because they come across so badly. It they look like a total failed operation. It's awful, right? I mean firstly, I I feel very loyal towards my teams. So I naturally felt very, very loyal towards the environment agency. And I really was proud to work with them during the flooding. I used to go out and you know I walked the super sewer down the Thames with them. I mean I really took a lot of interest. And every week my Monday morning started with a call with the chief executive and the chairman of the Environment Agency getting an update on what they'd done, what was going on, etc. I'd go and visit them in Bristol, I'd go and visit them up in York, I'd go and see them up in Cumbria. And I always felt as individuals they were hardworking, dedicated, thoughtful people. They were very happy to jump in a car with me, go out to see a farmer if there was a protest . And then on the other hand, right, you have the other side of the story, which is every farmer saying to me, This is a criminal organization, when I see the environment agency turn up, I want to hang myself. Really? All the um businesses saying the environment agency's got no idea what they're doing, local residents saying they're dreadful, these stories around the water companies. And then I'd go back to the environment agency and see these very kind of educated, polite, helpful people in their special uh things going around. And you know, a lot of them I'm sure there are good people. A lot of them became friends of mine. And and I I liked a British diplomat who'd been our ambassador in uh India, ended up as as chair of the Environment Agency. And in fact, I was briefly put up to be chair of the environment agency. Fortunately, Boris Johnson scotched it because he hated me. But uh the reason they were considering me is I really was very interested in the subject as watermelon, so I loved it. But all these things were completely true. So your evolving door point. Right. One of the first things you noticed when you were a minister in this is that the water industry was very, very good at entertaining ministers. Very good at suggesting just how much money you could make as a chief executive for water company or how much money you could make on the board of water company. Indeed, some of my colleagues followed that route, right? So that's conflict of interest, right? Number two, getting to the information. So the story that we were told again and again, while this train wreck was happening, right? It's clear now looking at Thames W ater that it's a train wreck beyond imagining disgusting, sewage overflowing, water not being provided, bills going through the roof, bonuses being paid out, private debt companies coming in, KKR you know, being offered three billion quid and then walking away because apparently they can't make enough money off this. I mean, unbelievable, right? But the story that I heard again and again as the water minister, now going back ten years, is water privatization had been one of the great unsung successes of all time. That costs have been kept down. So you spent one pound a day on getting your water in and out. Uh twenty billion dollars of investment had gone in from the water companies, and none of this would have happened if it had been kept in public hands was the argument that the investment wouldn't have happened and the uh costs would have gone up. Anyway, that's that was my experience as Water Minister. And and I I I was the final thing is that when I I think I said this before, when I tried to challenge Offod and say, look, are you su re these water companies are really doing a good job because I keep hearing from different people, right? Their beaches are full of poo, et cetera. You would get these presentations which would say, you know, this is all the improvement that we've done. We're 5% improvement this year, and this is the EU regulation and this is the number of blue flags. So you you're given the blue flag confession, right? As a minister, you have to be really persistent and curious. So okay, you've told me this is a blue flag on I'm going to that beach. Here's a piece of human poo on the beach. Why is there a blue flag? Yeah, but you you know you're busy, aren't you? They know that you're busy. They know you can't visit every beach. And you're dealing with these very, very charming people. Now here's then push it even further. What would have happened if I'd gone completely ballistic, made this my obsession in the way that I did violence in prisons, and really started saying, I think these water companies are crooks, I think the whole system's screwed, I think our beaches are filthy, right? And I think we as the Treasury need to spend twenty billion pounds more on sorting out the sewage system. Pretty soon, I think people would have been saying to the Prime Minister, whoever the Prime Minister was, I'm afraid your minister's gone a bit Tonto. He doesn't really understand what he's talking about. He doesn't really understand the treasury implications, he's embarrassing the government, he's asking what questions how are we going to get investment in from KKR if this guy keeps suggesting that he's a good idea. Well there was a very interesting exchange that I tweeted about this and somebody sent me an exchange between Barry Gardner, the Labour MP, and he was grilling Emma Reynolds, the environment secretary. And Barry really had his facts on him. He used to grill meat too. Quite a good griller. And he really was going for her. And when you boil down what she was saying, without wanting maybe to say it in these terms, she was kind of saying, Yeah, but listen Barry, the only way to do this is to take it back fully into public ownership and there just isn't the money for that. So one of my heroes, as you know, is Dieterhelm. And I I I might try to see if we can persuade him to do a little bit for the newsletter on this, because he thinks about this a lot. But essentially he says in the end, you've got to bear in mind that someone's got to pay, someone's got to bear the risk and someone's got to finance it. So who's going to pay? Right? Is the government going to pay? Is the person with their bill going to pay? Or are you going to ask a private company to pay? And who's going to take the risk if it goes wrong? I mean, if the sewage ends up on the beach, is it the private company that's going to take the risk? Is it the government that's going to take the risk? England is the only country in the world with a fully privatised water system. Only one in the world. So if we renational ise, we've got to understand that in the end the government's gonna have to take the cost. And there's no desire from the government to do it. In fact, what the government's doing in John Carthage's report, I'm afraid, maybe the worst of all worlds, which is suggesting that offwat's going to be beefed up and interfere even more in a pretty arbitrary way with these companies, which will just drive the cost of financing up. So let's say you're some, I don't know, massive American fund and you're trying to persuade them to come in. And what why is the government persuading mass American funds to come in? Well the problem line is the government doesn't want to pay and they don't want the householder to pay. So their idea is that somehow some complicated international private finance debt structure is going to come in, take over Thames water, and the question is why? Why would they take it over, right? Well, presumably because they think they're going to make money. But in order to make money, that company needs to know there's a predictable revenue stream. If Cunliffe has set off an off wall, which every year or two politicians stand up in the House of Commons or Channel 4 produce the news program saying these companies are horrible, we need to hit their bottom line, they can't be paying their bonuses, they've got to they've got to take the risk. Well, they'll say fine, but I'm gonna charge you more. If you're gonna have an unstable regulatory environment and you're gonna say that I have to take all the risk, well then the cost to the government of me, KKR, whoever producing this three billion, is gonna go through the roof. So uh we we've got to keep coming back to this question that somebody's gotta pay for it. Absolutely and five. I mean Macquarie is the private sector villain of the piece in terms of this this programme on on channel four but it honestly I really do recommend people watch it because it's I mean it's a drama but you've got these two guys who have actually they've done an interview for for our newsletter this week, they called Ash Smith and Peter Hammond. And you can sign up for the newsletter in the description below. They're beautifully played. You've got these wonderful shorts where they go along to these meetings where they're being bullshitted and they sort of look at each other and they're like, this can't be right, can it? And it's then they're not sort of shouty kind of people, but you see through the series, you just see a a system that's broken, and everybody who has a vested interest in the system not being broken, saying that it's not broken. Yeah. But if you just you know the figures are stunning. 585,000 times sewage was dumped into our waterways in 2024. And they have this line that it's only when it's heavy rain, and that is bullshit too. So this experience, though, that you've described of going to a meeting, sitting there and just thinking quietly, this doesn't quite make sense, this can't quite be right is, I'm afraid, the experience of British citizens in so many bits. I mean, if if I've trying to get to the bottom of why my constituents are angry, I don't know whether this is your Liam Burns book on populism, touches on this. The biggest driver of anger, I felt with my constituents was this sense that something was going clearly wrong, right? Something's wrong with their schools, something's wrong with their hospital. I remember, you know, famously this old woman saying to me, I don't need to pay to go to Switzerland to get killed, I can just go into the Cumberland Infirmary, right? Or your fields have been flooded, or people are rewilding. Let's imagine you're a farmer suddenly let's take what's happening actually at the moment today in Cumbria, the whole L the Valley, all the way from Penrith down to Kendall, has got into a government rewilding scheme, which is basically driving sheep off the fells, leading to a lot of farms being closed, and essentially trying to create a native wilderness, right? And it's really disruptive for traditional landscapes, farmers, communities, schools, etc. You turn up to a meeting as an ordinary person, let's say you're a Cumberland farmer, and what do you meet? You meet a bank of people in lovely fleeces, saying environment agency, natural England, National Park. You have people who've done master's degrees in environmental science at Manchester, you have government regulation, you have lawyers, and they're all telling you it's the only thing to do. And they make you feel stupid. You stick up your hand and say, well, this can't make sense because there's gorse and bracken all over the hillside, and how am I supposed to make a living when I'm going to sheep and I'm going to sell my farm, right? It's the same with the inheritance tax. I mean that that was a really interesting one with farmers, right? The farmers are like, this inheritance tax is gonna kill us. And the government says, no, no, no. If you look at the figures, it's not gonna affect any of you. And they're like, Well, well that's just not true. It's affecting all of us. It wiped out. And the government's saying, no, no, if you look at the figures, right? So this really weird world that we've created, and sometimes it's about lawyers, sometimes it's about quangos, sometimes about agencies, but it's also a lot about class. Right? It's about people often from cities with advanced degrees telling people who have less resources, less education, less power to just put up with stuff that they know is no good. Well, I think I think what it is, it's the state through our political system, the way that people get elected, the way that governments are formed, basically saying whatever problem you face in the world, we can fix it for you. But actually once, you've contracted out most of the fixing to people whose motivations are completely different. So I talk about 585,000 sewage bills in 2024. Shareholders, the UK water companies, were taking out a billion in dividends for what surely is reward for failure. And so I think it's that sense of the state fail ing. But the state partly fails because those at the top of it, across all the parties, basically say, we can fix everything for you. And you can't. And I think a little bit more honesty on that front would be no bad thing. But I think this is two cases of I think Thatcher is uh you know Thatcher's a lot of the stuff that's wrong with our country today I think is down to Thatcher. Water privatization to me is absolutely a symbol of it. The Environment Agency was funding was massively cut during the austerity period. And then Ofcom, I mean, you know, God knows what they do. God knows what they do.