Is Reform happy for its supporters to assault people?

0:00This is a global production. You cannot have it both ways. You cannot be the party that says I've had death threats more than any other politician, any other leader in the UK and then turns around and allows your own supporters to crack on an assault whoever they want around them. There is still a huge number of questions swirling about reform and finances. Physical, visual, hard to deny confirmation that this had gone right to the top of the party. These are the benefits of a university education, folks. Yeah. I bet she's studying. Tell us, love, is it sociology? Is it? Yeah, I bet it is. That poor young girl, she looked like she was going to do herself with injury, didn't she? Well, there's a saying I've got for that. You know what it is, don't you?

1:00Boring, boring, boring. That is Nigel Farage at the Reform Conference dealing with a heckler. Fine. The trouble is that reform activists in the hall were giving this woman a real going over, hitting her over the head, pulling her hair and pushing her to the ground. And this is how Robert Generick reacted this weekend. There was some very disturbing video that came out of your conference about a woman being dragged out by a hair and being hit over the head. No boohoo. Well, I am not... What are you, how are you? Come on, if you try and wreck someone's speech a party conference... Political history is from the fair. Well, I'm not afraid of that. A woman is getting lamped with a crutch. And the man who would be reformist chancellor says, boohoo. He is so relaxed about their own supporters assulting people. Welcome to the news agents.

2:01The news agents. It's John. It's Mayless. And obviously the reason you're tuning in today is to find out more about Emily Maitlis's trip to Venice and dinner with George Clooney. That will come later in the podcast but there are other issues we need to deal with first. And I was kind of filling in on Sky yesterday after the reform conference, when there is still a huge number of questions swirling about reform and finances principally, but also about the way kind of those hecklers were dealt with. And I was really struck by what Robert Jenrick said because it seemed like more or less you are condoning an acceptable level of political violence. Oh, come on, if you're heckle, you can expect to get a good kicking. And that seemed to be a viewpoint that I found strange when reform had made such a big deal about the dangers of political violence and the risk and the risk that reform leading figures face.

3:02Well, as we are talking another video from ITV has just surfaced. And this shows one of their reporters who was filming that incident of the protest to having essentially dual pushed. He himself ends up getting punched. Just have a listen here to the sequence of events that he filmed. The reporter is standing behind filming on his mobile phone when one of the people we can't really tell if it's part of the security team or another supporter of reform comes over and essentially socks him in the mouth. You cannot have it both ways. You cannot decide to be the party that has to take a five million pound donation because you're so concerned about your own security. You cannot be the party that says I've had death threats more than any other politician, any other leader in the UK.

4:05You cannot be the party that invokes the horrific death murder of Ann Widdickham, one of those reform spokeswomen and then turns round and allows your own supporters to crack on an assault whoever they want around them and end up with a words boohoo. There is something that is just not right about trying to claim the moral high ground in this whole question of political violence and then just turning round when it happens to people that you don't particularly agree with. There's something else that happened over the weekend that I thought was really fascinating and we're going to talk about that quite a bit later on. But it was about the protest that took place in Dover when a group, a few hundred strong, all in black wearing Mabala clavus and masks, catching everyone by surprise and laying siege to the port of Dover and stopping people going on holiday and stopping the people of Dover from going about their business

5:07all in the name of, you know, stop the boats and Robert Jenric to that, of course, condemned the people wearing masks and condemned the behaviour. But kind of I understand their anger. I understood their anger, which was something else he said to me when we spoke yesterday. I assume you condemn the scenes of what unfolded in Dover yesterday with these kind of gangs of masked men and women marauding the port and stopping people going on their holidays. I do. Absolutely. Look, I've always hated people obstructing other people doing their daily life, whether it's just stop oil or whatever. And I don't like people going around in Bala clavus, which is obviously very intimidating. In fact, our party's policy is to ban face coverings like that. But do I understand why people are extremely frustrated? Yes, absolutely. This needs to end. This farce of the small boats has been going on for far too long. And in fact, you saw at our conference Nigel Farage and Jordan Bardella, the likely next Prime Minister of France signing an agreement

6:07which has the prospect of ending this once and for all. But you don't go about it in this way. I suppose you look, of course, and people understand the frustration. But you either condemn it or you don't condemn it. And I think that the condemnation is sort of then, yeah, but I understand why these people are angry, which is a sort of a nod to those people who are doing it, saying, look, you know, yeah, you shouldn't be doing it, but we're kind of, we're kind of with you on the frustration levels of it. I thought he actually made sense in that. I mean, which is, if you don't like people disrupting your conference, then you should be condemning the people on the street. If you don't like people in Berkers, then you should equally condemn the Bala clavus. So I do think that there was an intellectual coherence to what he's saying there. But this is a complicated question because in the politics of our age, you don't yet know whether these groups of Bala clavus protestors are people,

7:07because they've all got Bala clavus protestors, are people who are actual reform supporters or whether they are rival restore supporters of this sort of group. Oh, they're not going to be pulled together. Another sort of Tommy Robinson adjacent group altogether. And so what I think is funny is that from where we're sitting, yeah, you broadly lump them all together, which is you don't really like what's going on. And this is what you think is an acceptable way to protest. If you're generic, you kind of go, I don't know whether I'm condemning people that actually vote for us. So I have to be careful or I don't know whether I should be kind of more condemnatory because I don't like them going to the rival group who might be cutting down our position in the polls by eating into some of our vote shares. So we are now at the slightly ludicrous position where, you know, if you have 400 people in Bala clavus and we literally don't know, in the olden days, you would have assumed that they were fringe. Right now they might actually be supporting one of the parties of a future government.

8:07I mean, that's mental, isn't it? And I think that is the absolute tension that we get to at the end of the reform conference. And it's highlighted as well by the rule breaking and, you know, the kind of what was going on in that concealed video that Channel 4 recorded, which is, is reform a mainstream political party playing by the rules in the same way that the Labour party and the Conservative party is, or does it think it is a party that is an insurgency and that it can do what it like and act almost like a guerrilla army? Because it can't be both. And I think that that tension is being played out where you see Robert Generic on the one hand thinking, OK, I need to keep that far right because those are supporters. They're my boys. They're my boys. And if we don't have them, then Restore will have them. Or Tommy Robinson will have them and we need them on our side. And then you have those in reform who are also, and I think Generic is part of that as well, which is the sort of, you know, the split personality, if you like, of this,

9:08which is I need to get disaffected Conservatives, who are mainstream, disaffected Conservatives will have seen those scenes of people marauding around that poor in black masks and been absolutely horrified by it. And I think that so the party doesn't know which way to go, whether it needs to broaden its appeal and bring in disaffected Tories and, you know, the people in the commuter belts of Surrey and Hampshire and wherever else, or whether it needs to be going towards the hard right of Restore and the Tommy Robinson Brigade because they think there may be votes there. Well, let's dwell a little bit about, well, let's dwell a little bit more on that breaking story from Channel 4 from verbatim because actually I was sitting on my easy jet flight to Venice when I got easy jet to Venice, only flight left. When I got the press release, I got the first indication that this story was breaking and what I subsequently learned was actually how watertight Channel 4 had to make

10:09what they were going to report because, I mean, they were, I think, locked in an edit suite for about a month prior to the story being on air on Friday, locking down every single bit to make sure the story stood up. And what was interesting about that was we have had, let's say, a summer of reformed donation confusion, right? Forage trying to explain why it's okay to take 5 million, why he might be able to spend it on forays if he wants to. It might be about to go as if he wants. And I think the Sunday Times and the Times has been very instrumental in bringing us those breaking stories. But until this point, we never had the visuals. We had, you know, I'm going to say it again, the vertical content, easy to watch, sort of Instagrammable post, which said, this is what this guy said. Then you have this guy and then you have forage coming in. And so what you had at the end of that report essentially was physical, visual, hard to deny confirmation

11:18that this had gone right to the top of the party, that Nigel forage had known about it, that he had signed it off, that he had come and sat down and had his sort of oyster lunch with the guys who were essentially pretending to be the donor, the American donor and his son, who were offering not only to do the polls, that reform had commissioned to make them look better than they were, but also to siphon money into forage's reform party through a back door that was allowed. And what you had in that video was something that, I mean, let's be frank, even a die hard reform voter reform supporter couldn't deny in terms of what they had to see, what they saw, who they saw there. You couldn't kind of go, oh well, you know, is it the mainstream media fudging this? Is it people making things up? Is it is it the establishment against us? No, it's your guy. He's sitting there. He's in a little cabin. He's had his oysters. That's Nigel forage. Do you recognize him? It's not a deep fake.

12:22That is what happens, right? Honestly, them saying it's an establishment stitch up. What is more establishment than a couple of posh boys meeting in Mayfair Gentleman's clubs to try and arrange half a million pound deals, which will then be sealed over champagne and oysters with a helicopter to collect you, to take you to Clackton. I mean, my God, please spare me the absolute bullshit that you are an anti-establishment party. It was all laid bare in that film just how establishment you are. And you're trying to cut corners. Now, in fairness to reform, they were saying, no, no, no, we didn't commission the poll. We just suggested that that might be a poll you get done, which to my mind is sort of angels dancing on the head of a pin. I mean, you know, no, okay, just falling off the head of a pin. Yeah, okay, fair enough. You didn't commission it. You just said to the channel for undercover reporter or the verbatim person, this might be a good thing for you to do because that would help us.

13:24And no one comes out smelling sweetly of that from reform or from the pollsters over what they did, because it was terribly duplicitous and underhand. And the fact of the matter is, yeah, there was no 500,000 pound donation at the end. But are you telling me they wouldn't have taken it? If a check had been written by the fake American, of course, they'd have taken it. They knew exactly what they were doing. And they were trying to guide the two key people. I mean, I loved, loved Nigel Farage called them contractors these days. Right. The one who is the academic and theologian. Right. And the person who is the de facto chief of staff and has been his right hand for absolutely years. These were contractors. They were at the heart of the reform party. So this, the question that we're still left with and the one that Lewis and the team tried to answer at the reform conference on Friday was, are his supporters going to be at all moved by what they've just seen,

14:24by what they've witnessed with their own eyes now? This is clearly the party that try to sell itself as different to all the others. Right. We're not interested in big money. We're not interested in establishing them. We don't like the elites. Well, what the hell are you doing with these putative five million pound donations, half a million pound donations? Is it going to change anyone's minds? Right. And what is fascinating is that you are getting still so much pushback from people who just don't want to see what's in front of them who don't want to believe it. Who I was watching that film, Bagonia, Bagonia, at the weekend. And it's about the conspiracy theorists who are the... You know, the CEOs and alien. And what you hear there is how impossible it is for two narratives to meet. That if you're a conspiracy theorist and you're going down the rabbit hole, you will stay down the rabbit hole. And if you're the CEO and you speak kind of CEO jargon, you won't be able to meet these people. And actually, I sort of think that's where we've ended up.

15:26At least in terms of the hardcore supporters, because you are still getting people who say, I don't believe it. Well, what don't you believe? I don't think Nijelsson and thing wrong. I don't think he's broken the law. I don't think there's any criminal activity. Well, do you not want to believe it? Do you not want to see it? Or have you just decided that whatever happens now, nothing can disturb the decision that you have come to in your own mind? I think that's absolutely right. I think that if you are one of those who is attending the Film Conference in Birmingham, you are there all in with Nijels Farage. And you're not going to believe and you're going to think it's entrapment and you're going to think this is all fake. And the initial response from reform was that it was a hoax. A hoax. What a weird word. Is a hoax but we're firing two of our top team anyway. Yeah. And also, I mean, look, it was just so perfect as an investigation. Because as you say, Emily, it was made for the day that we live in, for the age that we live in. That there, it was all Instagrammable. The clips are there.

16:27You can see the guy trying to school the undercover reporter in how to get posed down so that it's off the books. And you know, he's even introduced Robert Generick at one stage as he's helping us with an important off the book project. I really almost sounded like a class of membership in the reform party. You know, that there are these people who are just doing the secret ops for us. And the other thing I would say is that my understanding is that Channel 4 have hours and hours and hours of recording. We only saw more. There's more. And you saw in the film where Dan Jukes is talking to the guy outside the pub. And Channel 4, a bleeping out a whole series of names that Jukes reels off of people who have given money through secuatist means. Now if those names come into the public domain and it becomes apparent that there are others, and I'm not saying this will happen, but it's possible that there are others who have given money where it has gone kind of been hidden and shielded in a way that gets around the law on foreign donations.

17:32Then reformer going to have another whole pile of questions. And I suspect that part of the reason we're seeing such utter techiness from so many reform figures now is I think the fear that there may be worse to come. In a moment we're going to be talking more about Patriot platform, those men in masks. Who are they? Who funds them? We'll hear from Joe Mohl. So we've talked about what happened over the weekend and what happened in Portsmouth last night. And this was a new far right group or a new one to be called Patriot platform. And we're joining the studio now by Joe Mohl, who is the director of research at Hope, not hate, who monitor quite closely these groupings on the far right.

18:34So we've kind of got used to dealing with Tommy Robinson, we've got used to dealing with restore and other political groupings of the right. So who are Patriot platform? So there's you say that they're a really new organization. They merged mid July mid June sort of thing. Certainly in the middle of the summer. Very, very small numbers. And it's led by you mentioned Tommy Robinson. It's led and organized by Tommy Robinson's right hand man, a guy called Danny Tomo, who's been around for it within far right networks for many years. He was one of the figures that has organized lots of the big Tommy Robinson demonstrations that you'll remember. And he became a much bigger figure through 2018, 2019. But in the last year or so, he started to radicalize a little bit more and he's been talking really openly about more vigilante style activism. And then in the summer of this year, he started to put out calls for kind of a core group of small number of core activists that were going to come together in a much more clandestine way than say the demonstrations were used to though, you know, which would have been a lot more. And I was just do though, you know, which would announce weeks and advance or months and advance we're meeting here on this date. This was much more close, much more secret. They had some vetting they pulled some people together for two events that were secret events in the summer.

19:45And then this is the first kind of big public display that we've seen from the group. I mean, you'd have to say bloody impressive in a kind of weird kind of way that they had managed to pull together four or 500 people all dressed identically. Without apparently the authorities having the vaguest idea of what was about to unfold at Dover. Yeah, there's certainly a discipline to this, which I think makes it more scary. You know, I think we've all become used to unfortunately, either the huge Tommy Robinson demonstrations or these every weekend we're monitoring dozens sometimes of kind of far right protests outside accommodation where asylum seekers are based. And I think we've become used to we know what that looks like, what that sounds like. This certainly feels new. It's it's much more clandestine. It's much more aggressive in form. And as you say, it's much more organized. And the big question is is as you say, no one seemed to know that this was going to happen. Not least the police that were caught on the hop on this where hundreds of these individuals came out the back of vans at 7 30 in the morning on saturday and Dover and managed to block our one of our biggest ports. And it seems that the authorities had no idea this was even coming. So this group sort of came together. You said in sort of June really not wrong again. I mean, there must be quite depressed that those small boat crossings have fallen by 40% in the last year.

20:58I mean, does this seem in any way connected to the reality of immigration in this country? Or do you think of it as just a vigilante group that is trying to sort of provoke? I don't think the decline in the numbers of boats will be affecting these guys at all really. I mean, for them, this is a longstanding constant. They believe that Britain is being invaded. Right. They're so inculcated with this world view that there is this mass invasion happening. And there is complicity by the state and the police and the French and the British authorities. And that fluctuations in the numbers or relatively dramatic declines and numbers won't really affect their motivation here. I think that's really important Joe actually because for everyone who's saying and generic the weekend was one who said, oh, I do understand, you know, their worries. And you know, I was talking to fairly senior conservatives over the weekend. Where you do have to understand their worries as if what they were talking about was whether the British immigration system was functioning as it's most efficient or not.

21:58You're talking about something on a totally different level. Yeah. And which is invasion in the way that Rupert Lowe talks about who should be allowed to live here and call themselves British. Is that is that where we are? Yeah, I think you met you're exactly right here. It's this isn't about and I think some of the media coverage in the last few days has been unhelpful in that saying, well, are we surprised that we've got here? People are angry. The legitimate, you know, legitimate concerns discussions. We're talking about a group of really hard and well organized and well known far right activists here. And if you live with convictions with convictions, I mean, let's guide. Yeah. Danny Tongaer himself played guilty to kidnap and I hope not hate in recent weeks we've identified a number of other activists in patriotic platform that have convictions for domestic abuse, etc. Which always goes hand in hand. I mean, if you looked at the pattern of violence against women in domestic abuse, you'd probably get to these men at a hell of a lot quicker. We saw that with the riots in 2024. We've seen that with the violence we've seen at protests in the last year or so. A huge chunk of these men that constantly say that they're out defending women, of course, end up having domestic abuse convictions.

23:02But because these are hardened, long standing, well known far right organizers. It's not about have the numbers gone down for them. One is too many. One migrant one asylum seeker. These people believe that Britain has been conquered or invaded. So the numbers of boats arriving. If it goes up might animate them, but it going down doesn't concern them in that sense that one person arriving is too many for them because they already believe there's too many people here as it stands. Joe, do you have a sense that I mean, you know, go back decades and there was the national front, although it was the British National Party or whatever you want to find. There've always been far right extreme anti immigration, anti immigrant parties. Do you sense that they are the numbers have increased of people supporting those groups now and are better organized than they were? Yeah, I mean, I think that's probably the scariest element of this. If you go back to the national front or the British National Party, you know, I think the national front peaked out around 17,000 members or maybe less in the British National Party.

24:04You know, those parties were in the 10,000, 17,000 sort of numbers. If we look at restore, you know, read led by Rupert Low, which the evidence is pretty clear. This is a racial nationalist party or who I would argue politics are very comparable to the British National Party. Their membership is around there claiming 150,000. You know, if we look at Tommy Robinson's last few demonstrations in central London, the numbers were say maybe 150, 200,000 for one of them, maybe 70,000 for another. The largest English defense league protest we saw back in 2011 was 5,000. So the numbers that we're seeing both within these political parties, and that doesn't even include reform, which is obviously a more moderate force than say the BMP was, but as a membership up around 270, 280,000 members. So you put these groupings together, all of which sit within either the radical right or the far right or now some of these groups on the extreme far right. We are talking about a number of activists, which is completely unprecedented in Britain, exponentially larger than the days of the BMP. So does that tell you, I mean, frankly, that as a country, we are feeling like this is an invasion that more people are feeling that, I mean, what I'm trying to work out is have our politics manifestly changed.

25:17Over the last 40 years, or is this just the speed at which you can mobilize people or the attractiveness of which you sort of sell your party story. I think it's a combination right. I mean, one of the advantages say someone like Tommy Robinson or let's take even Danny Tomo, what we've seen in the last few days have over the BMP is the ease with which you can mobilize vast numbers. You know, the Nick Griffin and the British National Party, it was hard for them to reach millions of people. They weren't on television. They wouldn't be put on the radio. Whereas Tommy Robinson has millions of followers on his social media platform. You know, last night in Portsmouth where Danny Tomo, there was only a few of them arrived at first and then puts out a call on social media for more people to join him and dozens turn up within minutes. That would have been physically impossible in the age of pride, pride social media. But a bigger issue, I think, is that there is now just this magma chamber of anger sat underneath British society. I think there is huge numbers of people understandably so that feel that the status quo is not working for them, that their lives are not getting better in many cases that they're getting worse.

26:21And that magma chamber of anger that is that ostensibly politics or the traditional politics has failed them in their lives and their families is exploding out in different ways. In some senses we're seeing explode out through things like riots in 2024. We're seeing more people piling to radical right and far right political parties. We're seeing then more people turn out on the streets in protest. And then for a really kind of extreme call when they say that things are bad and we need to take action for small call like we've seen this weekend, they feel that they have to take things into their own homes. And that's where we see this vigilante style, you know, style of fall activism. Who's funding these guys? Because I was reading that Danny Tom O is he's a church goer, or you know, a formed Christian, they all meet at their sort of a two total group of all sort of say that they're following Christian values and meet at church each time. And something doesn't quite sit with that. I mean, because normally when you when you dig around with Tommy Robinson or with Rupert Lowe or whoever it is, you find vast sums of money coming into their coffers, which is making all this a little bit easier. Yeah, I mean, one of the difficulties with something like Patrick platform is barely existed a few months ago.

27:25So there's a huge amount of work trying to work out. You can't follow the accounts that companies house. Well, no, unfortunately not as yet. But what I would say is that and it goes back to this how far our activism operates in the digital ages. Activism can happen for really cheap now. You know, you can it didn't cost any money beyond the fact that they, you know, a few people then getting over and drive to a certain beach. He puts it out on social media, a time and location and people turn up, you know, doesn't require some big shadowy backer. What I guess I'm trying to say is, is there a monetization scheme in this? Not as yet. I mean, the history, both with Danny Tomo and anyone within that Tommy Robinson ecosystem suggests that it won't be long before monetization begins. But, you know, Tommy Robinson himself, who we know has received hundreds of thousands, if not millions of pounds of donations in recent years, both from huge American backers through to thousands of people all around the world giving small donations. You know, Tommy Robinson was egging on last night and all weekend. He was calling his supporters to go down and both to Dover and to Portsmouth.

28:26And so, I mean, Tommy Robinson's a great example. His last protest, he talked about 300,000 pounds in donations from two wealthy Americans. You know, these, sometimes these into an Elon Musk, of course, paying legal fees for him. We now have a situation where some of this is crowdsourced by thousands of individuals giving small amounts. But we also have kind of multi millionaires pumping money into the UK that is causing disruption on our streets and in our communities. Just going to ask you a question about policing. We've heard the complaints from reform about two tier policing in Britain. I watched the policing of Dover at the weekend. And I thought, I just kind of felt, I wonder if it was just stop oil protestors that had blocked the port of Dover, whether they would have been handled so gently. It was an inverse of two tier policing. Well, it was two tier policing. But I couldn't agree more. I think it was pretty shocking watching some of this. I mean, firstly, there's existing legislation in place to remove face coverings. And that didn't happen in Dover.

29:30That I think there's a clearly a failing that hundreds of men arrived and shut down a port. And clearly the police had no idea this was happening. And then last night, even the amount of time it went on before any sort of action was being pushed. And I think you saw the confidence of the far right in the face of that policing. Danny Tomo screaming at police officer, if you don't put me on the on the phone to the home office, I'll have 10,000 people down here, et cetera. There's hubris within these movements. And partly that is, you know, groups like us and many others have been warning about this rising vigilanteism and rising far right militancy. And whether or not that's the home office or policing itself, they have not got a grip of this. And you say the far right a very quick to moan about two tier policing. But we've all seen the footage of just up oil being dragged off the streets. It was a very, very different approach what we saw in Dover on Saturday. And it was a very different approach last night, where they were giving them blankets and bottles of water. While they were attempting, I would argue that I think they were putting people's lives at risk by getting into the sea at that time of night and those boats. So if there is two tier policing, I would agree with you. It seems to be much softer towards the far right at the moment than it is to some of the progressive groups that have been engaging in activism on the streets.

30:38I mean, can they tell people to take off their barclavis? Absolutely. Yeah, now they absolutely can hear that the recent legislation means they could you're not allowed to if the police demand you take them off. And they didn't as far as we could see if you know we had people filming it all. No one seemed to be told to remove the things they were allowed to stand there for as long as they wanted. They then walked under their own accord to the train station and go off. And I think if you look at the response within these networks in the last few days, there's a huge amount of excitement. The huge amount of optimism about this is because they're the ones making the threats. They're the ones saying we want this. We're going to do this. And I think this is unfortunately just the start. You know, we're already expecting to see things coming forward in the coming days and certainly next weekend as well. They feel that they have the impetus here and that the police aren't on top of this. And I think unfortunately it looks that's the case. If you're a mainstream government now, I mean, if you're Andy Burnham, what do you think your response to this should be? Well, I mean, clearly there has to be, I mean, firstly, there's obviously more intelligence that needs to be done on these networks. But when they're happening at the very least there's already really robust legislation in place.

31:41It doesn't necessarily require new laws. I think it's about turning around and saying, you're not allowed to turn up and block our port. You're not allowed to cover your face. You're not allowed to engage in this sort of intent. That's it might tap the the MP for David just when all these idiots getting away of the traffic. What is? I think the danger is is that the home office, especially I think in recent months has been very concerned about coming across on soft on migration, et cetera. And actually, we've got to the stage where there've been so placated, plurcated these groups so much that they feel that they have a free hand to act. And clearly these groups in many cases are breaking the law. They're engaging in intimidation. And if we don't grab it now, we're in a situation where we've gone from migrant protests standing outside accommodation to groups of vigilantes that feel that they're going to stop the votes themselves. And that only ends in one really dangerous place. And that's people in the water, votes being stopped. And we have to think about the rights of the asylum seekers themselves who are turning up on these votes. And it's increasingly been found by Black clad, Balaclava, Mesa.

32:42I mean, they would, I guess, you know, these guys would say that's exactly the point. We don't want we don't want asylum seekers turning up on votes, either for their own sake or for anyone here. I mean, that's that's a win, isn't it? That is a win for them, right? And this is part of the issue is that they're being given these wins. They sat a day was a huge win for the far right. They shut town our biggest ferry port in the country. And no one seemed to be able to do anything about it or be willing to do anything about it. And no one seemed to know it was going to happen. This is a really dangerous time when it comes to far activism. This is a world away from Tommy Robinson, you know, while the ideology and the politics is very similar. This is a world away from Tommy Robinson having a protest in Chevalot Square. This is men with violent histories putting on Balaclava and shutting down our history. But the response to that will probably be that the government says we need to act harder and faster on immigration, right? Unfortunately, history suggests the response to this will be to plicate them, will be to say we need to be hard on immigration. And we end up in these really peculiar discussions about legitimate concerns. I think we need to fundamentally separate what's happened this weekend from these discussions about legitimate concerns.

33:46People are allowed to be upset about levels of migration, levels of votes turning up. People are allowed to have those discussions. No one is saying that it's unacceptable or inherently far right to have a discussion or to be concerned about what's going to happen. That is fundamentally different to hundreds of men piling up the back of white vans with their faces covered and shutting down our ports or hundreds of people turning up. And you know, we were going through the footage this morning. You know, there was well-known neo-Nazis imports with last night from a number of groups that we monitor. These are not concerned locals that are fearful about what's happening to their community. These are far right activists that are whipping up tensions and taking existing community fears and exploiting it a really dangerous way. Joe, Marvel, thank you very much indeed for being with us. Thank you. Cheers. And just before we go, let me take you back to last Thursday afternoon when we were recording the podcast and I was making clear and Lewis was making clear that we will be competing for the same guests on our respective Sunday shows.

35:00And Emily Makler said, I'm off to Venice. I'm seeing George Clooney. You saw him for dinner. I saw him for dinner. I sort of feel like I can die happy now. I saw him for dinner. I saw a mile for dinner. She is extraordinary. And I literally landed late, got sort of thrown into a water taxi that went to the back door of the restaurant that they were all kind of meeting in because they were perhaps rounding the front. And this slightly handsy boatman sort of throws me through the door of the like felt like a cupboard into the restaurant. And I look up and there is George Clooney and I'm taking over sat down. Here you are. Motini, my hand. So everything becomes much easier. And honestly, they are charming. I mean, they could not have been more gracious. More. I know you're narrowing your eyes. You think, you realize as you say this, that half the women in Britain and probably half the men frankly are now hating you and jealous.

36:00I'm thinking, I'd give anything to sit down and have dinner with George Clooney. Do you think that's more or less than last week? No, I think probably more. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, so there's this room. The whole room is is film story. It's film people. It's created people. And we're doing this debate on AI and humanity at the Venice Film Festival. And of course, it is that I am. I just sit down. I go, right. So what happened with Joe Biden? So what happened just before the 2020 for a lecture? And he tells me the whole story. I mean, it is fascinating how he's writing the op air, how he's not sure whether to send it. He gets a mile to read it. He brings, he sort of calls a barmer and a barmer is like, well, you know, to be honest, Biden's Irish. I'm not sure that you're really going to move him on this one and clearly just goes, fuck it. You know, press a send off it goes. And he puts in motion essentially the retirement plan for Joe Biden. And they were expecting a contest from what I understand. And then that was kind of quickly eliminated.

37:04And he was just sort of talking through the whole step by step. I mean, we lived it. Right. We lived that debate. The CNN debate. What went wrong? The aftermath of the aftermath of it, whether it's going to be a contest, how Pelosi got in, whether she was going to be, you know, a bit more directional. And so he told me the whole story there. And then at the end, I said, so who are you looking at? Who's interesting for you? You know, what are you? Are you quite positive about it? Because everyone always asks him if he's going to go into politics. He's not. He doesn't want to be president. Doesn't want to go up there. He's 65. He thinks it's time for a younger generation. I mean, all the kind of great right reasons. And he said, really interesting. Jon Ossoff, the Georgia senator, who is, you know, fighting for re-election in the midterms in November. I feel like I've just killed the sort of the glamour of this because obviously a lot of all this is all what to stay with. I'm sorry. The central question is, is he hot still? He's so hot and she is so hot and they do this amazing work with their foundation and in prison journalists.

38:08They really care about, you know, people in different parts of the world who were reporting on the stuff, you know, that they're reporting on and are getting locked up. And so we spent a long time talking about that. They just come back from the Philippines. They were kind of talking, you know, I was starting to talk about Duterte and he was talking about Bam Bam. They're talking about, you know, the horrendous treatment of, you know, journalism covering political stories. So they are honestly sort of hot and brilliant and gracious. I've got two more questions. Question one is if you book them. Are they coming on the podcast? They can't wait to meet you. They actually I think I'm all listens. I'm all I've interviewed before. Yes, she said that. Yeah, it was sweet. Yeah, she listens and so the question is, are they coming on and when? Yes, clearly. What's the second one? Martini's on a espresso. Sorry. I finally got a lot of that. I just got to know what my the stupidest thing ever is.

39:11My favorite film in the world is up in the air. Oh, yeah. Love it. It's fun. I mean, it's the beginning. I'm so glad to find George Clooney. I know you do because you want the gold card. Yeah, I like the gold card and I also want people. Why have you packed so badly that you've found you know, you're at the line to go through security. Yeah, you have to follow the guys wearing the slippers shoes. Remember, so you listen to that bit of the film. Obviously, I should have asked him about that film in relation to the end of the human race in the workplace, which is what, you know, the debate was all about. Anyway, so, okay, headline is he's hot, he's charming, he's clever, he's gorgeous and so is she. I hate you, mate. Let's goodbye. We'll see you tomorrow. Bye for now. This has been a global production.