Britain Could Face Food Crisis As Droughts Spread

0:00Welcome to Univara Live, coming up tonight. UK farmers have warned that food shortages are likely following very poor crop yields caused by droughts. And student loan holders face a ticking time bomb of debt and higher taxes. Alexandria Acasio called TES ways in on work 1.0, which she says was crazy. And several football federations are calling for fee for President Gianni in Fentino to resign. I'm Michael Walker, and today I'm joined by the original work 1 was crazy. Finka, Ashaka, I don't know maybe you don't like that description. You know what, I'm just so happy to be here. Call me what you like, just call me. I love it. Before we get started, oh, tickets are on sale for our next downstream, IRL event at the Earth Theatre in Hackney. Ashaka and Aaron Bostani will be joined by cultural theorist, Catherine Lu and writer, Darym Agave, which is on the 21st of September. Darym Agave, I understand, is the name of Loki, L.O.K.I.

1:03Ashaka, we expect from that event. Basically, this is going to be a mega blockbuster event digging into the commodification of trauma, and the way in which institutions, as well as cultural changes and the attention economy and all this kind of stuff, incentivizes a way for us to lead with the worst things ever ever happened to us in a sort of race for resources or funding or even just attention and status. Where Aaron Agave is coming from, and I think this is a really interesting thing, is that he's looking at the way in which systems, including recovery, rehabilitation, welfare system, the way in which it sort of makes you perform a certain kind of trauma in order to navigate access to care. And Catherine Lu is looking at it much more in terms of the way in which, I suppose, therapy speak and a sort of misapplied culture of self-diagnosis,

2:04and this sort of relentless interest in the self, is a part of neoliberalism. It's a part of a way in which people navigate neoliberalism. So I'm really excited. Me and Aaron Bistani will be interviewing Catherine and Darym. I had the pleasure of speaking with Darym when I was on my first book tour and he's just, he's a really rigorous thinker and Catherine's book is phenomenal. So, get your tickets. I think you can get tickets at dice, I think. I mean, that's presumably going to be a link in the description. There will be a link in the description. And the event is at Earth Hackney. I believe on the 21st of September. So, get your tickets. I think it'll be good. Fantastic. It sounds brilliant. Berners-Faussing, it's 50th-Hitwave of the Year with temperatures expected to peak at 35 degrees Celsius on Thursday. Now, this year is already the first time ever that a temperature of 35 degrees has been recorded somewhere in the UK in three consecutive months. So, obviously, May, June, and July. All of them had a day that was 35 degrees or more first time ever.

3:09But, of course, if we hit that threshold again this week, free and a roll will become four and a row. So, completely unheard of. Of course, just as significant as the record temperatures is the drought across huge parts of England and Wales. This afternoon, the government's drought group have updated their analysis and declared that more than two-thirds of England is now suffering from drought conditions, about 70 percent, I think. We can all see, just by looking at the window, basically, the consequences. This weekend drone footage showed parched, parkland in Bristol. And as well as the yellow grass, you can see the river AVE on under the Clifton suspension bridge looking extraordinarily low. This is something I hadn't even heard of before, like a lone scene. So, it's called a dust devil, which is a small whirlwind visible because of the dust it picks up. Now, they're typically found in deserts and semi-arid areas. This was in Greenwich parks, kind of got crashed bandicoot vibes. Meanwhile, over 125 fighters have been deployed to tackle a fire in the new forest in southern England. The fire was

4:12started when a van set a light. It has burned a section of Heflin the size of 140 football pitches. Police say 23 cars were abandoned on the A31 after the fire broke out on Sunday evening. What might have even longer lasting consequences, though, are the effects of this drought on food production. The National Farmers Union has warned food shortages are likely. Their president has said yields of wheat and oats were, quote, very, very poor this year. They warned that livestock farmers have had to use their winter feed rations because they have been unable to grow grass. Because of difficulty planting in dry land this year, this is a key bit. The drought this year could affect the food supplies next year, so in 2027. For today's show, I wanted to focus on the drought and food production because I think it's under-discussed and also because food prices have the potential to be so politically explosive. And so I caught up with someone who has fought a lot about the impact of climate change on our food

5:14supply. Paul Barons is the British Academy Global Professor at the University of Oxford's Martin School, where he studies food system transformations. I spoke to him earlier today, and started by asking him to lay out the challenge this summer's drought poses to the UK's food supply. It's really a challenge for so many different farmers in different areas, so you've got the cereal farmers who are really struggling with the drought, making that harvest, bringing it in it's lower than we expected. The yields per hectare is much lower than we usually get. It's a struggle for the people growing fresh fruit and veg. We need lots of water for that, and obviously that water's not there. And that's one of the main reasons why we're seeing price, price is increase now for things like potatoes for veg and will continue to do so into the into the summer. And it's also a struggle for the livestock farmers, because there's been such a little grass that's been growing, we're way down on what we normally have. And now the farmers are having to open up the stores that

6:14they normally feed their livestock during the winter, and they're doing that now. So they're storing up a huge problem for themselves in the future as well. So across the board, the lights are turning red, I'm also very worried about what this means for next year, because actually a lot of arable and crop farmers should be bringing in and putting in their seed for next year's harvest for some crops. And it's going to be so, so dry, it's going to be difficult to get that seed in. And is the problem the heat or the lack of rain? Because both of those have been exceptional this summer. It's actually both. It's the combination of both that really hurts the yields. So the heat can cause damage to the plants themselves, things like the grass they stop growing over about 29, 30 degrees. And then that drought, we really rely on water availability to get us through bad temperatures. So that's one of the main ways in which we can help the crops out, it's like giving them a lifeline. But if you don't have that water in the soils, if you don't have that water on the land even,

7:15because in the UK we don't do a lot of irrigation, we've not needed to do an awful lot of irrigation, then you're really in a sort of danger zone. And what are we talking about here in terms of the risk? Are we imagining supermarkets with empty shelves at some point down the line, or are we talking an increase in food prices, but basically the supply holds up, it's just sort of eats into everyone's income. Predominantly eating into people's income, so prices will continue to go up. And we know this is the case, this will continue with climate change. So the academic studies on this show that we will have acute sort of sort of and chronic inflation over time, as climate impacts hit around the world. I think some areas of the shelves might get a little bit patchy, but we're not going to see empty shelves. And what we will see is we'll see smaller versions of the fresh fruit and veg, especially, as that comes through to the stores, because those plants won't have grown as much. And I'm not going to be able to offer a citation here, but I have a vague memory in the past of reading all hearing about people saying that actually climate change in Britain, sort of a temperate

8:18climate, might increase crop yields, sort of increased temperatures, increased carbon dioxide in the am I imagining that? Or is there something too that people had imagined that climate change wouldn't be such a problem for UK agriculture? Yeah, there were those studies looking further into sort of the higher latitudes in areas like the UK and Northern Europe. The issue with those studies, there's a number of them. First of all, it turns out that we've been underestimating the damage from climate on food systems over time. So the crop models, which we're used to explore that, have typically underestimated world actually happened. And the community is very clear about that. That's something that the scientific community is underestimated. There's things like the idea that CO2 is plant food. So CO2 levels go up. Surely the plants are able to grow faster. Turns out that's not so true in practice either. There's other limitations for that. Also, the nutrients go down in the crops as the CO2 levels go up. So you sort of double amy really, you're not getting the extra growth that you thought

9:20into the same amount, but you also reduce the nutrients in the foods as well. So for all those reasons really, there's been this underestimation of how much climate change can impact. And broadly, it's because we typically estimated on annual averages over countries in big scale models. And then not realize quite how much seasonal impacts, quite so much the climate impacts can act together to bring down yields. And in what sense is this a transitional problem? I know you said to a previous question. You said, we don't do much irrigation because we haven't needed to, because we've generally had quite rainy summers. Now, presumably there are lots of adaptations we could make. Now we have this different climate, as well as more speculatively. There are countries which are much hotter than our own that do successfully grow crops. So I presume they just grow slightly different crops when you go to Spain. It's full of olive trees and almonds. Is it the case that farmers just need to get used to the fact that we now live in a different

10:24climate, change the types of crops they plant and invest a bit more in, well, as a society, we'll have to invest more in reservoirs, but then also invest a bit more in irrigation. I mean, that's part of it. We're going to have to get used to an ever-changing climates. This idea of a new normal is one of the most upsetting to climate scientists that we hear, because there is no new normal. It's a new abnormal, because every year gets stranger and stranger and harsher and harsher. And it's a question of whether we're going to keep up with that. So to some extent, farmers are already running to stand still, if you like. So they're putting in more effort and more investments to try and deal with some of these effects. But then the climate and past will get worse and worse. So definitely we need some of this. It's going to be very expensive. That's one of the issues. And ultimately, one of the biggest issues that I see is that as things get more expensive, you're going to have to bring cooling for livestock, for example, you're going to have to bring in those on-farm reservoirs for the water. And they're, you know, the on-farm reservoirs, that's an important intervention, but it's going to get very expensive. Now, one of the ways we can

11:28deal with this is actually thinking about food and farming in a bigger picture. And there we like to talk about the great food transformation, which is not just about changing what happens on the farm. It's about changing what we eat, what we waste, and how we think about food as a whole. What is the food system revolution that you're talking about? Give us sort of the basics. Yes, there's four main pillars really. There's a shift to eating far more plants in our diets. We're actually eating too many animal products for our own health, and definitely for planetary health. It's reducing the waste that we have in the system, the food system. It's improving the production. So we talked about some of the things that you might want to bring in on the farm. You might also want to have precision agriculture. You might want to also have lots of different interventions on the farm itself in more nature, bringing in multi-cropping, intercropping where you bring in different crops to grow together, and they all benefit from the diversity. And we really need to address this community resilience. So the food environment at very local level, so that people have

12:31good nutritious food available for them, even when climate change hits and make these costs higher. And I've watched a talk today as part of your national emergency briefing, which we'll actually talk about a bit later in terms of what that is. But one of the things that stuck out to me there is you really do think that us moving to a more plant-based diet, not necessarily all becoming vegetarians or vegans, but eating much less meat is essential, I suppose because meat uses up so much land, so much water compared to vegetables and grains and whatever. That is, there doesn't need to be any politician in the world actually that wants to stand up and say, you guys need to less meat. It seems to be so politically toxic that no one will go there. I wonder what your analysis of why that is? Why do you believe that this is something that no one wants to touch? Well, I think, first of all, it's important to sort of mention that it's not just myself, it's not just all sort of the consensus of the science out there about where we need to go. It's also people like MI5, MI6 and the Joint Intelligence Committee report earlier this year that

13:34actually found that we could no longer feed ourselves with the amount of livestock in the country and that a wholesale change in consumer diets would be required. When we do our modeling, just to put that in perspective, what kind of diet that looks like, that's a beef burger once every two weeks. It's chicken fillet once a week. It's a bit of dairy a day. We're not modeling any sort of vegan diet here. We're modeling something that is a big reduction red meat for sure. But something that I think people can get their heads around. If we were to do that, we would reduce our dietary emissions of our 61% in the UK. We would save an area or more exercise of Scotland, and we could bring that back to nature and then be able to absorb some of the climate impacts that we're seeing in terms of flooding, heat and drought. It's a little bit of a no-brainic, set, as you say, the fact that the politics on this. One thing that I should also mention is that these reductions in livestock are actually part of our carbon budget system. We actually need

14:39these reductions as part of our climate targets as well. If you think about the areas of the government talking about it, they're all talking about it, except for the politicians. I think there's a couple of reasons. One is that we seem to have this idea that the food system is providing food that we have some sort of free choice over, that is down to personal choice. But I don't have the personal choice to go in and choose any one of the 150 types of potatoes from my chips in the evening. I've got the choice of maybe two types if I'm lucky. It's the supermarket. None of us have free choice. That's never been true and it never will be true. Actually, it's heavily shaped by all of the vested interests, the different groups that are involved in producing this food system. When you think about that, then the politicians are also having to grasp not only with what the political pushback might be, but they're also having to grasp with all these different interests in the system as well. That's a real challenge. But what we do know, report after

15:44report after report shows, is that we are able to grasp onto this to do some joined up assessment and joined up policy across food and health and farming, that we'd actually all be a lot healthier for it. Actually, the country could be more productive. It would save us a huge amount of money if we were able to do this. I don't want to go a really big picture. I know you're at the Oxford Martin School, and that's all about big picture, global challenges, sometimes from a historical perspective. Food is one of the issues where if you look at the 20th century, it's a real success story. There were lots of people saying, with this kind of population growth, we're not going to be able to feed anyone, then what comes along the revolution of the industrial production of nitrogen. That was in the first half of the 20th century. In the second half, you get the green revolution where more productive plant types are being cultivated. So there was often people saying, God, the future is going to be terrible. Then some kind of ingenuity comes along and makes it all okay. I suppose I want to know from you, it's a big question. Is that a

16:47reasonable assessment of what happened in the 20th century? Should we not sort of relax and hope that something comes along in the 21st as well? That's a great question. There's a lot to get into there. First of all, this is called the green revolution. This idea that we were able to produce all of this food for a growing population. What we did there was, yes, remarkable. In fact, roughly two out of every fire of us are on the planet now because of this extra fertilizer, often that was produced in terms of artificial fertilizer. What it has stored up for us is a number of different environmental problems later down the track, though. One is, for example, too much fertilizer on the soils, which can run off and kill water life and land life. Another one is the monocultures that we see in different cereals around the world, treating the soil and the land like factories in terms of water, interested in as massive outputs of yield as maximum possible. Then running down the soil quality, running down the foundations on which the food supplies is

17:51based on. Actually, what we've done is we've cut away at the foundations of these systems for us to continue on as climate change, as ecosystem collapse hit. While I'm actually pretty pro-technology, I think things like precision fermentation, basically where we use genetic modifications to produce foods in a brewing type container, a little bit like what we do with insulin today. I think there's huge opportunities for that. I think there's opportunities for technology in the fields. Fundamentally, we've driven this system whereby we are producing too much of the wrong stuff that's bad for us in very monocultural ways. We're going to have to get around that. Just to give you an example, all of that extra yield that's gone in and all of those extra crops that we've gone in, I mean, in this country, we feed about 50 to 60 percent of our cereals through to animals. We're losing the vast majority of those calories and nutrients by going through animals in the first place. I don't think that there's any way that we can really continue without rethinking

18:54what we're eating and the health of what we're eating as well. And finally, you're part of the national emergency briefing on climate change. Explain to the audience what that is. Yeah, so this is a event that we had in November last year. We had 1200 people in Westminster Central Hall leaders from across businesses. We had a cup of the 100 MPs and peers there. And the idea was to have nine experts explain what it is that the UK is facing in terms of climate and ecosystem emergencies. And we had people talking about extreme weather, economics. We had a general there talking about national security. We had an emergency room doctor. And they all made points, I would have spoke on food. We all talked about what it is that we're facing. This has now been turned into a film that people can look up online and go and see in their local community. The interesting thing about this is you can't sit at home and be worried and concerned and just sit there and get really depressed. The idea is that you get to your local community to center your local church wherever it be. And then you watch it together and then you talk about

19:58what's happening in your community and how to address it. And the ultimate call is to have a nationally televised briefing about exactly what we're facing. Because I think right now people are really worried, people are really concerned. And this idea that there's no hope, it's just doom and gloom is really disactivating. And what we really need to do is make sure that politicians come clean and talk about what it is we're facing. Talk about what some of the joint intelligence committee, the military establishment are talking about. Talk about what the people who are running the major supermarkets in the country are talking about. And then give people a plan by which they can be involved and they can be invested in addressing this problem. Because it will get so so much worse. And we need to get ahead of this now so people know what we're facing, know what we need to do. And we can start acting towards it. And that's how you get hope. If you want to have parliament talk about this, then there's a petition online that you can sign to say let's have a national emergency briefing. Let's have experts doesn't have to be the one we were part of. It can be anything. And

20:59let's have parliament talk about this seriously and take people seriously. Because I think there's a lack of trust here. There's a sense that the public don't trust the politicians. But I think that goes both ways that the politicians don't trust the public with this information. And every single time we look at the surveys on this, we know that we underestimate one another and we underestimate the public. The public are often far far beyond where the politicians are at. And so what we need to be doing now is trusting the public and trusted then build both ways. I was food systems expert Paul Barron speaking to me earlier today. We'll link the petition and he mentioned there in the description. Ash, I want to come to you on the policy to this. I mean, in Nevada, in our internal meetings on the show, we've all been talking about climate change a lot more than usual. I think because of the hot weather. In Westminster, still not really happening. So this was what I wrote about in last Friday's courtado, which is Andy Burnham has said that he intends his government to be a cost of living government. And we know that this, you know,

22:03heat wave upon heat wave that we've been experiencing has pretty big possible implications for the cost of living, particularly with food. If you couple that with the interrupted shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, what that means for fertiliser as well as the cost of energy overall, any medieval peasant can tell you price of food going up, baby. And yet, the government has been remarkably quiet about this heat wave. So I did some looking into it first. I couldn't find direct comments from Andy Burnham himself. Angela Eagle went and met with the National Farmers Union, but there weren't any public policy announcements. In fact, you could see about it on the National Farmers Union website, but there wasn't really much public comms that was coming from DEFRA about the matter. And as of last week, when I went to have a look at what me at a fanbiller had been saying, who's the Minister of State for Net Zero, it was sort of look on the bright side of the heat wave, because record levels of sunshine means record levels of solar power. So I think we can talk about,

23:11you know, the sort of dereliction of duty, right, that that implies, right, what you want is a government that's on the front foot that's treating this with a seriousness that deserves. But for me, that tells you that in so many ways, Andy Burnham, despite all of his sort of studied casualness, you know, very buttoned down, you know, happy to chat just like a normal bloke, it's a tightly controlled comms operation. It's a government which really doesn't want to stray very far from the grid. So his, you know, first, however many days in office, you can tell that day by day, plotted out is, you know, a calendar with optimistic little announcements being peppered all the way through. So you had buspers, you had the, that on electricity bills being scrapped. And today, you've got this thing about the subscription trap, which is I think also nicked from some American progressive policies. Now, I'm not saying these are bad things. And I think that they contribute to a changed mood music around the slave government. But I think it's quite telling that we haven't seen

24:16Andy Burnham really tackle any big problems so far. And in fact, when it comes to the biggest problems facing the UK today, whether it's the sort of big geopolitical headwinds or whether it's this drought and the climate crisis, we've really got no idea of what he thinks. I mean, he's sort of left the door open to expanded, you know, North Sea drilling. His spokesperson today to the Guardian was saying, well, you know, we do want to encourage more reservoirs. I think he said, back new reservoirs, what does that mean? What does that mean practically about what you're going to do? So in many ways, this question about who is Andy Burnham? Who's the Andy Burnham that we've got as Prime Minister? We still don't know. It's a good point about the subscriptions because the subscriptions policy, if you haven't sort of read about it, yeah, I mean, we're not really covering it on today's show because it doesn't seem that significant in the middle of a sort of record-breaking drought. Don't cancel your subscription to us, though. Yeah, well, I think we already make it easy enough to count. So the issue, as far as I understand it, is that there are some subscriptions and this has really frustrated me where you can sign up with one click. But to cancel your

25:19subscription, you have to call up the provider like on a real phone and have a real human conversation and then they say, well, what if we gave you half-price? I think I'm Darni did this first, actually. I think this is a Mam Darni policy that they've taken on. And again, not saying it's bad, and I think that that feeling of, yeah, that is really annoying. That is annoying. Yeah. You're doing something about it. That's exactly what Burns government wants. I just don't think it's the biggest issue facing us. So it's clever in terms of strategic comms, but strategic comms alone won't, won't, yeah. It's completely exclusive. I mean, we could maybe deal with the oncoming food crisis as well as making it easier to cancel your time subscription. Luxury. Yeah. Maybe we can have it all. Maybe we can have our cake and eat it. The first day is they'll have what results. Day-meaning university will be on the minds of hundreds of thousands of young people across the country as they find out how they've done. But unless your resident in Scotland and paying to go to a Scottish university, lucky you, the cost of your education will likely be weighing pretty heavily too. And that's with good reason. Analysis for Fink Tank, the Intergenerational

26:22Foundation, has suggested students face a ticking time bomb of debt and higher taxes. We have successive governments increasing the share of the cost of education that young people are expected to shoulder. All that's happening through student loans, of course. There are two different post-2012 student loan plans in England. We have important differences between them. So if you started your degree between 2012 and 2023, you're on plan two, students starting degrees after 2023 are on what's called plan five. I think three and four were variants on plan two that you paid at the same time, but if you sort of had different characteristics. Both plans take 9% of your earnings, so after a certain amount. But if you're on plan five, you start paying it off when you're earning £25,000 a year. Those who took out plan two loans in 2022 only started paying their loans off when they were earning a little over £27,000 a year. So the threshold has gone down.

27:23The interest on plan five is low. So that's where plan five is a little bit better. It's pegged to the retail price index. That's a measure of inflation currently at 3%, so it's the higher measure of inflation, which is always very frustrating for students. For plan two, that's the interest rate. If you're below the threshold, but as soon as you start repaying the loan, the interest rate starts going up rising to as much as 6% for those earning over £53,000. Crucially though, and this is a big difference between the two. Plan two is written off after 30 years, whereas plan five isn't written off until after 40 years. So potentially on plan two, you have a higher interest rate, but on plan five, you will be paying it for longer. Now, the older plan two were the ones that caused lots of controversy earlier this year. That was because lots of young professionals, so potentially people on hiring comes, realised they were paying off lots of their student loans, or while the interest rate meant the total amount owed was going up. Because if you've got RPI inflation, which for a while was about 20, 12%, it wasn't it? Then you add 3% on it, just

28:24your amount, your principle, as it's called, is just going up by extraordinary degrees. There was one positive aspect of that older system though. It meant that richer graduates paid much more than poorer ones. So you can see here that between 2012 and 2023, so that's people on the plan two. The cost of university education over one's lifetime was much higher for high earners, so in dark blue there, and that was due to the higher interest rate on those on high income. So an upper earner could expect to pay 80,000 pounds over the course of their lifetime to pay down their loan. For those on lower incomes, they'd only pay 20,000 pounds. So very progressive, even if it was very expensive. The introduction of plan five in 2023 radically changed things. So the cost of a higher earners degree suddenly dropped by around 20,000 pounds, so just under 60,000 pounds, whereas the cost to low earners, the brown line, and rose by the same to just over 40,000 pounds. Media earners in light blue saw the cost of their degree go

29:25up by around 15,000 pounds, making it actually slightly more expensive than a high earners. That's because the high earners will pay it off quicker. And the key difference here, as I said, because the interest rate is no longer progressive, meaning high earners can pay less in total if they pay it off quickly. And because the right of date has been extended many more low earners than before will pay off their loans in full. So when it was a 30-year cutoff, hell of a lot of people don't pay them off in full. I'm not even sure I'm going to pay mine off in full, actually. But there are lots of people now, if you're paying for 40 years, you probably will. Now, when the current universities were introduced by the coalition government in 2012, one argument for them was that graduates earned a significant premium as a result of their degree. And so they should bear the cost of that education. You've got something which means you get a higher income later in life. So you shouldn't force non-graduates to pay for it. That premium, so the graduate premium does still exist, but it isn't nearly what it once was. So this is a graphic which, so when first look,

30:28looks very confusing from the FT, but it's actually quite simple once you get a hang of it. So in 1997, graduate salaries in the UK had an 80% premium over non-graduates. Back then, though only around 20% of the workforce had degrees, but as participation in higher education increased, that premium dropped to about 45% in 2022. So lots of people thought that's just because there's more graduates. That means there's a lower premium. However, and that's why the other countries on this graph are sort of relevant is because the same pattern hasn't held in countries like France, Spain and the US. There, the graduate premium has increased even though, just like in the UK, lots more people are going to university. So this is the John Burmard graph and he's sort of saying something else is going on, which is that there aren't the jobs there for graduates to do. The government is also paying a smaller portion of the cost of higher education than ever before. In 2015, the government's combined contribution was almost half of the total cost of a graduate's education, but now just 8% of that cost will be met by the government. So basically, all of it is

31:34paid for by the students before a lot of it was paid for by the taxpayer. Student loans operate on terms as well that might make a payday lender blush. So according to the telegraph from 2017 onwards, interest began being added to loans faster than people were able to pay them off. And over the last two years, almost 30 billion pounds of interest has been added to the country's collective student debt with those holding managing to pay off only around 10 billion pounds in the same period. So the total amount owed is constantly going up even though people are paying it off, of course, the interest compounds over time. So there's no one the students are starting to conclude. It's just not worth it in June. A survey conducted by the National Centre for Social Research found that a third of people thought a university degree wasn't worth the time and money. That's a proportion that's just about doubled in the last seven years alone. So we're pretty depressing so far. For hope, we're going to look to a former education minister under Theresa May who would believe it. He was also a cabinet minister under Boris Johnson, a man called Lord Agnew. So referring to the

32:37student debt disaster, he's proposed banning the triple lock to abolish interest on student loans. Present pensions rise annually at the rate of inflation, average wage growth, or 2.5 percent, whichever is higher. Now Agnew wants to get rid of the last option, makes sense to me why should pensions go up by more than wages or prices in a given year? He uses over your projections to say this could save 15 billion pounds a year over the cost of sort of a simple link. So if you move to just a link to wage rises, you say 15 billion pounds compared to the triple lock. Agnew writes this, ending real interest would cancel nobody's loan. Of course, it would freeze the balance in place so that a graduate repays what they borrowed and know more. And no pensioner would be a penny worse off than today. Their pension would still rise every year at a slightly more sensible rate. I am on the winning side of the present settlement. It is my generation that pushed up house prices until our own children cannot buy. We then ran up the national debt and posted the bill to our grandchildren. And although I never went to university,

33:39I saw friends enjoy free education and free living grants provided by the local authority. He goes on, this isn't about pitting young against all but about asking both to pay a fair price for a system, neither of them designed a double lock and a debt freeze would cost pension as nothing and save a generation of graduates interest they can't escape. Ash, all seems very sensible to me. Are we in favor of Theresa May's education, ministers, plan? Well, look, it's a really interesting idea because the UK is pretty unique when it comes to the triple lock. So most countries for the state pension will have some kind of indexing. So tying state pension increases to inflation, sometimes to wages. But from what I can see, nobody has this sort of discretionary 2.5% no matter what increase. No matter what else is going on with the economy, no matter what else is going on with wages, no matter what else is going with inflation, your pension will go up by this much. So the UK is pretty unique in that regard. I don't mind bringing in some sort of age-based redistribution because I do think that while

34:44it's a mistake to look at the economic settlement purely in terms of age because we do have really high rates of pensioner poverty in this country, you do have to admit that for education, house prices, all of these things benefited certain age groups more than others. It doesn't mean that you don't have pretty extreme forms of class inequality within those generations, but it exists. So I'm always in favour of thinking about what is the sweet going the other way. So if you go, okay, you're going to get rid of a triple lock and you're going to go to a double lock. But what you're going to then do is maybe have a social care system which is a lot better and less expensive. You have eradicated the role of private equity in the social care system. We bring costs down that way. Maybe you have more of a prevention based model of elderly social care, which is often what you find in East Asia. So you try and bring down costs by saying, okay,

35:46older people are going to have healthier lifestyles over one of me and to the in early. And so that's going to bring down the cost. You go, well, that's the that's the sweetener. You're going to have to spend less of your savings. You're not going to have to sell your house in order to be looked after when you're an older person. So I don't mind a bit of age based redistribution because I think it is just a fact that if you are part of a post financial crisis generation and in particular if you're post 2012, so I'm pre 2012 because I started uni in 2010. But if you're post 2012 and you went to higher education, you got really fucked. And the higher education system and this sort of separate from the points about being laid in with debt and the state of the job market. Higher education system is in a state of collapse at the moment when it comes to the closure of departments, when it comes to overcrowding of classes, when it comes to this quite like transactional relationship between the students and their lecturers, it's you're being led dry throughout

36:47your life with this experience of having gone to university, which is neither giving you the sort of passport to an echelon of higher paying jobs once you get into the labour market. But it's also not an inherently beneficial intellectual experience anymore. It's shit on both sides. I mean, I think we have a weird sort of, we kind of punish you for being young in this country. And it's strange because you know, my student debt will run out after 30 years. I think since I finished my degree, which is like 2012. So when will that be? When will that be? I should help me out? 2042? Yeah. So at that point in time, I'll get this big boost to my income. But like, I kind of need that. Now, if I want to start a family, I want that money now. I don't want that. I don't need to be a rich 50-year-old. I want to be a kind of guy in my mid-30s who's able to pay my rent without worrying about it or maybe even buy a house. But also the thing is that

37:50you need young workers in the labour market to pay for pensions. And what we have is the system, which is extracting from young people at every single turn. So not just thinking about the interest on student loans, but you're thinking about rent, the cost of housing, cost of transport. When you think about the sort of evisceration of entry level positions, when you think about, say you take the NHS, the reduction in paid training places, so it means that you've got your degree, you've got your qualifications, but you cannot progress through the NHS if you're a doctor. You just sort of think, do you want people to have kids or not? Because I think that people have families for reasons which are both rational and irrational, right? So there are things which are sort of not to do with, oh, reason the South is like, fulfilment, love, etc, etc. It's not just the Royal Economics, but you can't pretend that the Royal Economics aren't important to when you have children, if you have children, how many children you have. And it's no good having a generation of people who are squatting on, you know, million pound properties, and having their pensions protected

38:57in a way that wages never have been, if you end up just absolutely not to sound quite grim about it, killing off the flow of new blood into your welfare system, right? Because that's what workers are. Because also with inheritance, so obviously the big problem with inheritance is how unfair it is because some people get this windfall from their parents because they own a home in a major city and some people don't. So it's sort of especially with house deposits and stuff that's huge. But then also even for people who will inherit at some point, can there's all these people who are going to get this windfall in their 50s? And they're like, oh, I would have really used that in my 30s when I was, you know, I get thinking of starting a family or something like that. I was always going to go on more holidays as well. That's why when I go to my mom's house and I go, are you doing all right? Are you well? And she goes, yeah, physical. I keep loving you. I love you, mom. But we should have a very high progressive property tax. Because obviously people will be watching this. So why are you hitting the state pension against university tuition fees? Which I think is quite right. You know, the people with really good pensions aren't the people on the state pension. The people on really good pensions are the people with these defined benefit

40:02schemes, you know, especially in the public sector, but also if you work for like a big company, which are very generous compared to the pensions that sort of people of our generation will get. So sort of hitting the state pension against student loans is not ideal. Like, ideally, what you do is tax incomes, you know, including pension at income when it's sort of from private pensions, and massively tax property. I would just want to just massively tax property and pay for all of this. But if a choice is between the triple lock and this proposal when it comes to student loans, 100 percent, I would do that. Socialists are proving competitive in a number of democratic primaries ahead of the US midterms. However, some are taking heat because of their past lives, namely, what they tweeted between the years 2020 and 2021. Francesca Hong is the prime example here. She's currently running to be the Democratic candidate for governor of Wisconsin. And networks like Fox News have been highlighting tweets of hers from 2020 and 2021, calling for the defunding of the police,

41:08the abolition of the police. And there's also one from 2026, so very recent calling for the abolition of ICE. I think that policy she does stand by. Hong has also been criticized for calling for thanksgiving to be cancelled. Because she had quite good reasons for doing it, you know, just think it's celebrating the colonization of this continent, but not necessarily a populist position. And we'll look at how Hong herself has responded to these past tweets in this current campaign. However, first, it's another socialist politician who's response to this line of questioning has gone viral this weekend. What do you make of those controversial statements? I'm sure you see, and I mean, she's, you know, the thanksgiving dust up. She says she doesn't, you know, still believe that, but, you know, the abolished prisons abolished police, which is also positions that have been taken by a lot of the progressive candidate to a one. How do you get around that? Yeah. Which are not positions that are supported by the whole country. Right. I mean, I think that a lot of these races, even right now, they'll have a tendency to be nationalized. Yeah. But these races ultimately are local,

42:14and all politics are local. My understanding is that, is that Francesca Hong has made clear her present stances to her. Yeah, she's moved away from all that. Right. She's moved away from it. And I have a local city councilman that has this saying, woke one was crazy. So Ash, that clip has absolutely divided the internet. So there's sort of one group of people saying, great, you know, this is showing that AOC has, you know, become, you know, she's grown up. She's abandoning some of the unpopular or, you know, not persuasive positions. She wants health. Other people saying this is AOC selling out the BLM movement, or people who, you know, believed in defunding the police. Other people saying, which to be honest, actually is the most common, I think, saying, oh, well, it's easy enough to say this now. In the years 2020 to 2023, there were people losing their jobs for this. And if you said what AOC is saying now, three years ago, then AOC might say that you're not someone who should be associated with.

43:20So I mean, is it how, what's your interpretation of this new position from AOC? Well, look, I think that there is truth in the point that, well, it's easy enough to say it now. But I don't think that that's a reason to necessarily dismiss someone. I think that tells you something about how a particular set of politics operated at that time. Now, I think it's something that you said, which is that when you look at positions like defund the police, and I'm sure that lots of people watching will agree with the sort of slogan and proposition to defund the police. But even if you'd look at African American voters at the height of BLM, it was a minority, a real minority of African Americans who supported defund the police. And because of the way in which movements work, I don't think that social movements do necessarily have to be super representative of the electorate that's never been how they've worked. They were often sort of vanguardist in the fight for social change throughout history. But there was often this sense of invoking

44:22the broader interests and beliefs of black people in the US in the slogan defund the police. But actually, there was always this remove. And what's most interesting about that isn't that it was a minority of people saying something that was unrepresentative of the wider electorate, again, that's movements, is that there was never much interest in building any support for the proposition there was, as you've said before, a sort of mechanism of raising the social costs of disagreement. So what you're talking about in terms of, well, you know, some people lost their jobs or, you know, found themselves very intensely criticised in a way which went beyond a really disagree with this, or I think it's problematic and here's why it was sort of your racist for disagreeing with the premise, is that that was the mechanism of trying to get people on board. And so I think that it's a little bit, it's, you're not actually escaping from the Twitter mind vortex when you say, I'm leaving work 1.0 behind, right? Because that is an extremely online thing to say

45:26and to think about. Like, you're just, you've got brain rot in a new flavour. But I do think that there is something important for movements to recognise, which is the way in which things were done a few years ago. And I think that's because of that sort of like, I don't know, that like hot box sort of, you know, colder and, you know, really intense crucible of politics, where you have movements and then because of the sort of porousness of the, you know, the Democrats than the primary system is that there were expectations to see that being reflected in, you know, national political campaigning is that maybe there is a step in between, which is if you say, okay, we're a street movement, right, we're a street movement that, that are making demands. Maybe before you go and we want that, those slogans who want those demands to be represented by electoral officials, the thing in between is to go, maybe we should stop persuading people of it. But there was a jump without any of that persuasion happening. There was a jump in saying,

46:30we want to see our elected representatives, you know, out there fighting for this, which I think was a tactical error. I've got a lot to say about this, but let's actually first go to AOC expanding on how she looks back at the demands made at the height of the BLM movement. Did the movement go too far with sort of those positions? I mean, you briefly supported the idea of defunding the police. Well, you know, I think that during this time and during, especially during COVID, there was a huge opening of the over-tem window. We were shut down. There was some of the highest unemployment rates that we have seen because of those shutdowns. And I think that the doors were really open in trying to entertain any and every policy that was going to get us to a better place. And I actually think that the discussions that that were had in that time were quite fruitful. I think that when we talk about crime today, it's fundamentally different than the way that we talked about crime and bringing crime down,

47:30right? And I think that we all share in the goals of having as low a crime rate as possible. I think that, you know, during lockdown, of course, rhetoric in that time is not rhetoric that we would use today. And I'm grateful that these candidates have the opportunity to present who they are to their electorate and what they're campaigning on in this moment. I suppose from what AOC says there, I'm not going to make this about me. That would be ridiculous. I just forgot you AOC. But I remember saying at the time like on Twitter, you know, like defund kind of makes sense if you're just saying there are other ways to deal with crime and that America should maybe be a bit more like a social democracy, a bit more European in sort of like how it deals with crime and punishment. And it's good that people have moved away from abolish and they're going to defund because it seems a bit more reasonable. And the amount of people online that would be like, well, how are you talking about? You're speaking over activists, is defund as a root to abolish? Yaddi, yaddi, yadda. Obviously, you know, I didn't do this by job.

48:32My life is fine. I'm not really a bit gay. I tried to get rid of you, but I was overruled. Well, not anyone in the organization, but there are lots of people who are sort of like the number of quote tweets and da da da da da da da da. And the main consequence for me, which wasn't a consequence, was people sort of saying, you know, why do you, why do you need your voice to be heard on this issue? And so I just stopped tweeting about it, which is fine for me. But I feel like both on that debate and I mean, even more controversial one, sort of some of the trans debates. The main consequence for I think lots of people was to just back out of all the discussion. And what that means is that the discussion is only ever dominated by people with quite specific views, because everyone asks, this is not worth it. Oh my god. Should I risk getting in trouble? Go on. All right. So better than me risking it. Something which I've changed my mind on is that, you know, I would talk about abolition and abolition of prisons and abolition of the police because like a lot of people

49:36are coming from that position of having seen the impacts of racist policing, like fairly close up, having also seen the way in which prisons contribute to the social wheels that they purport to be solving, because when you take someone out of their, you know, family unit out of their community, put them in prison, you're sort of creating a tear, right? A tear in the social fabric, which has all of these, these different consequences. And something which changed my mind about it was actually an experience of incarceration within my own family where I actually thought this person needs to be in prison, right? There isn't an alternative to this person being in prison. And in a moral society and in a just society, that's where they should be. And whenever I tried to bring this up with friends of mine who were still abolitionists, they just couldn't wrap their head around that part. And when I would say, but hang on, like aren't we proposing a society where prisons are eliminated, then it would get into these very semantic arguments of, well, no, because whatever

50:43force we have to deprive people of their liberty or separate them off from society, it'd be so different from the police that would no longer be called police, which I just think is a argument about language. It's not an argument about content. Obviously, I want how policing operates and prisons work to be really different, or it would be a setting of homework. Well, if you go and read Ruth Wilson Gilmore. And so I would then start going, okay, but abolition had a really specific meaning, the abolition of slavery meant one day you didn't have slavery anymore, right? It wasn't, well, we're going towards a horizon where there is no more slavery. It's like no, there will be no more slavery. And so I have since come to the conclusion that abolition is often invoked, and I'm not saying this about you know, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Angela Davis, who I'm sure have thought a lot about this, but it's often used by people in the movement to make reform sound spicier than it actually is. And I think that it's got something to do with subculture, I think it's got something to do with the way people turn to politics when what they actually want is either subculture, like

51:47you're not a real punk, I'm a real punk, or religion, which is a certain form of certainty if this is right and this is wrong. Whereas politics is actually about negotiation and prioritisation, persuasion, coalition building, these things which have various forms of compromise kind of built into it, because that's what it means to to negotiate something politically. And again, I just don't think that people, and there are good reasons for this, I think that when you watched the video of Eric Garner being choked to death or George Floyd being suffocated or you hear the 9-1-1 call at Trevon Martin being killed by George Zimmerman, all of these things have very visceral effect, right? You don't really want to think politically and tactically, you do feel so morally outrage and offended, it's very right and it's very wrong. But if you're making

52:47political demands actually right or wrong is just one component of it. Well, I suppose I'd push back, because I never thought the problem with like defund or abolish was that they were politically unstrategic of what they were bad ideas. But both, right? You have to be open to having a discussion. Yeah, you have to be open to having that discussion and then you can hash it out. You can't just sort of be like, mannequin about it, there is good and there is evil and this idea is on the side of the good, but I can understand how you feel that way and how you feel that there is a very clear sense of good and evil. When you watch a video where quite frankly evil is being done. Let's look at how Francesca Hong is responding to the questions about her old tweets. That's not going to be an easy race. It's going to be very easy for people to put up on the board and say, you said abolish the Senate, defund the police, abolish the police. And why should they not believe that you would want to do that? That you would try to do that if you became governor.

53:48I believe that people can evolve. We meet Trump voters from previous elections who now would like to vote for me who have assigned in their yards. So who needs to evolve? The voter or who? Remember, cannot defund the police and I want to defund the police. So I know how to defund the police. The things we know prevent crime like getting guns off of our street, making sure there is victims for justice that there are places where our kids can go after school and thrive. We can't be tough on causes. We have to be tough on causes if we would like to be tough on. And as governor, I cannot defund the police and I've reminded folks that I won't defund the police. So her argument is basically, is unclear if I believe in it or not, but I don't have the power to do it anyway, so don't worry. I mean this, you know, in a derogatory way. She sounds like a politician. Both in terms of her delivery and the sense that she's trying to make you feel much better about

54:48some bad news that she's telling you. And also what feels like a lack of authenticity. I think it's perfectly legitimate to be like, my views have changed and they've evolved. I've become older. I've spoken to more people and understand that there are different solutions to social problems and that's what I'm committed to. But the slogans didn't, didn't really tell us anything about them. So I'm interested in these solutions. That's what I'm clear about. It would also be fine or, you know, honest to be like, I still believe in this shit man. Like disco never died. I still believe that both of those things pull from a real human place. Whereas I just don't think she was getting there. I don't really mind in a way. I think lots of people feel this way is that I've got more time for someone who holds a belief that I don't hold, but they're sincere in their holding of it than someone who is constantly triangulating. All right. That primary is tomorrow.

55:53May I set something right though? Because I saw something in the comments, which someone asked, am I that girl who said that air conditioning was racist? No. That was a different South Asian woman who I constantly get mixed up for. And I would actually say maybe not having air conditioning as racist because I look shinier than you. Shine shows up more on dark skin. So that's work 2.0 fit AC in the office. But you know, I still look pretty shiny. Maybe the contrast is lower. I think my contrast is lower. I was just some comments. I've been really liking some comments today. So Michael went to Oxford and can't add 30 to 2012, which is fair enough. It did take me a few seconds. There was also a debate about why I'm not a vegan and someone kindly pointed out that I had IBS. So I struggle with pulses. So I love that you. I love that. I love you. It's not my dietary requirement. Makes me feel very careful. I'm actually trying to get referred to an allergist because pulses

56:56make me incredibly bloated. Now I know they make everyone a bit bloated, but me really bloated. And I have a kind of not allergy. So I'm really struggling with the whole vegan proteins. But I'm going to try and cut out, well, I'm not trying this week. I'm going to stop eating beef and lamb for a start because they are the ones that are really bad for the climate. Maybe cut down on cheese. Chicken fish, tofu. Any advice you've got? Let me know in the comments if you know a good allergist in the London area. Feel free to let me know. Or if you are an allergist, definitely let me know. If you want to join Michael's support group, Hot Boys with IBS, link in the description. Today I feel Katari. Today I feel Arab. Today I feel African. Today I feel gay.

57:58Today I feel disabled. Today I feel a migrant worker. Today I feel out of a job. That was my aunt. I remember that was feedback. Johnny and Fantina speaking at the guitar welcome. In 2022, obviously a memorable clip. The 2026 world can't brought many more. But despite his masterful way with words, in Fantino's days might be numbered. That's because several football federations, including those for Europe, North America and the Caribbean and Asia, have called for Fantino to quit while threatening to create their own competitions to rival FIFA's unless he goes. In an open letter, the free associations said this. Leadership in football is not a possession. It is not about holding or demanding power to be held.

58:58It is a duty of service to the football family that entrusts it. When trust is broken through deception, when an individual places himself above the collective that entrusted him with authority, that duty has been abandoned. Deception, broken trust, the dereliction of duty. This all stems from Fantino's plans revealed in July to spin off FIFA into a private company with billions of dollars in private investments. The company would have allowed Fantino to claim a massive pay rise. The investment was led by Joshua Kushner, brother-in-law, or sorry, brother to Trump's son-in-law. This all looked remarkably corrupt. It would have taken the World Cup even further from the wishes of genuine football fans. So, Fantino was under pressure. The exorbitant price is charged at the 2026 World Cup. I mean, investors would presumably want them even higher. And Fantino had already proven his unaccountability to member associations by reversing a red card decision given to a star American player after a call from Donald Trump. Selling off the competition to a member of Trump's extended family would hardly provide reassurance

1:00:01that FIFA would act more properly in future tournaments. And amid this revolt from World Football Associations, Fantino now has another headache to contend with. Last week, the telegraph published an exclusive alleging that UEFA paid off Gianni and Fantino's lover, who also worked at the organisation while Fantino was its boss, giving her a six-figure pay-up when she left the organisation and paying for her to do an MBA. UEFA has confirmed the payment to the junior employee, though Fantino strongly denies the allegations. Now, this is, I think this is a bit shady from UEFA, frankly. I mean, in Fantino obviously, should resign. He should not be the head of FIFA. But like, UEFA obviously had this information for a very long time because they did it. All right. And then now they want to remove Fantino, so they're like, oh, should we should we leak the whole thing about paying off the lady? Like, it doesn't, doesn't seem like a particularly, you know, honest and open way to behave. Why are you expecting honesty and ethics from UEFA?

1:01:03I know, it's very nice. I'm like, I'm sorry. Like, do you go to Harold Shipman for a good bedside manner? I sort of, interestingly, this does reveal something about the internal politicking and how things work. It's not that people are blind to corruption when it takes place. It's that people store information in their back pocket. And I think it was Tom Wombskounds who says, you know, information is a broken bottle and you just have to shove it in their faces at the right time. You hold onto it, you tend it, and that's clearly something that's happening now. And in terms of why is it that not every single, you know, sort of regional conglomeration of football associations has parted with Fantino. I mean, first thing to say is that there are levels of corruption and bribery in football, the likes of which we can only imagine, all right? And so whether or not that might have something to do with who's still in alignment and who isn't, I can't say. I don't have that information, but just if

1:02:07you look at the history of FIFA, you'd say likely. And the second thing is that when it comes to the commercialisation of football, and you go back to De Havaland, she was kind of the first big money guy who was the head of FIFA, is that that went hand in hand with developing the sort of football infrastructure in global South countries. So De Havaland is sort of, you know, I think that's kind of the original sin of FIFA, but don't forget in terms of his campaign to lead FIFA, he was partnered with Pele, you know, really this was about why should the game be owned by Europe. So there's always been this thing that commercialisation has been seen to be better for regions outside of Europe when it comes to football. When it comes to UEFA specifically, and you know, the role of Sep Blatter in, I guess, just clawing at Infantino from the sidelines,

1:03:08is that when I first got my head around this story, I thought, well, this is about Sep Blatter being a different kind of crook, shall we say, which is, yes, he loves money, but he also loves football. What I didn't realise is that actually, Sep Blatter has beefed with Gianni and Infantino going all the way back to 2015, 2016, when he was ousted from his role over payments made to Mikael Platini. And he sort of described it as, you know, Infantino told me one thing that, you know, I could always call him, we ate dried meat and we had some wine together, and then he said, no, no, only through my lawyers, he blocked me, he wouldn't even let me collect my belongings from the FIFA office. And since then, it has been like a divorce. So I don't think that people are necessarily insincere when they're saying that this is a horrendous attempt to bastardise the people's game. I also think that everyone's got their own agenda, and that's what's coming to the fore.

1:04:12Yeah, what's so like, I suppose frustrating about it is like, if you run the World Cup, you've got like the easiest job in the world, because whatever you do, it's going to be a success. Like at this World Cup, the tickets were way too expensive, right? Red cards were overturned. That there were advert breaks in the middle of a half. You know, you could do so many fuck-ups that people hated, but then the World Cup is going to be brilliant. Like you can't really ruin it, because football is amazing, and this is like the World Football Tournament. It's going to be brilliant. But still, like just coast, like I'm a big believer in coasting. If your salary is high enough, if the product is fine, just keep doing what you're doing. Why does he need to get private investment so he can get an even higher salary so that Trump's son-in-law blada, blada, blada, blada? Just put on the World Cup every four years, and people will love it, and people will love you unless you do like obviously corrupt fuck-ups like this. I think it's difficult. I think people that don't have this in them find it difficult to imagine.

1:05:14Greed, rapacious greed. I think it's because, both me and you can imagine a level of money where you'd go, God, I'd be happy with that. And that level of money for Jeremy and Fantina would seem embarrassingly low. He'd go, why end there? You can even pay off a office fling. No. No. That amount. You can't even sexually harass one junior stuff or on that kind of salary. I'm sure he's. I'm sure it's. There isn't even a suggestion of sexual harassment. I'm sure it's wholly consensual. I'm just making a joke about how people in big corporate jokes at big corporate jobs tend to conduct themselves. But yeah, I think it's difficult to get your head around that kind of greed if you don't have it. I can imagine a level of money that I'd be happy with. But I think what happens is that you get that kind of money. And then your expectations change. The people whose lifestyle you're comparing yours to changes, power changes. You think you're powerful on this kind of money. What was it? Again, I'm quite in succession a lot. Is that when

1:06:14Tom is sort of deriding Gregg for his poultry, two million dollar inheritance, he says, he'll pour us rich man in America. That's a really good life. Amazing. Okay. I need to raise my ambitions. No, that's what I took from that. That's what I took from that. That's what I took from that. I'm coasting. Ash, pleasure to spend the evening with you. Pleasure is always. Thank you for opportunity again. Thank you so much for, I feel like there is some IBS advice coming through. We'll have to keep this stream up long enough that I can read them all Alex, make notes. Thank you guys for watching. We'll be back tomorrow at 6pm for now. You've been watching the Varmedeer. Good night.