Starmer finds Farage's Crypto-nite – Weekly Wrap-Up with Seth Thévoz

0:00There's quite a lot of ads on our podcast these days. We need them to pay for our team. But if you find them a little distracting, annoying maybe, there's a simple solution. Backers on Patreon, that means no ads and uninterrupted listening. Follow the link in the show notes to find out more. America leads the world in medicine development. It matters. We get new medicines first, nearly three years faster. Five million Americans go to work because we make medicines here at home. And not relying on other countries keeps us safe. But China is racing to overtake us. Will we let them or will we choose to stay ahead? When America leads, America cures. Let's go to Washington to keep us in the lead. Learn how at AmericaCures.com. Pay for by Farma. Springfest is happening now at Loads. Keep the spotlight on your yard with Stagrin premium two cubic foot mulch five bags for ten dollars. Plus, when you want more help indoors, get up to 40% off select major appliances

1:01that help you supercharge your chores. Our best lineup is here at Loads. Valet to 422 will supplies last. Selection areas by location. See Loads.com for details. Mulch Offer excludes Alaska and Hawaii. Not sure how to tackle your taxes. Are you sweating the small print? You may be experiencing FOMO. The fear of messing up. The answer. Using TurboTax on into a credit karma. They help you get your biggest refund. And then we help you do more with it. With a personalized plan, designed to help you hit your money goals. It's time to take your taxes to the max. Start filing today in the Credit Karma app. Hello and welcome back to the weekly wrap up from the bunker. I'm Jacob Jarvis. Every Friday, we recap the biggest stories, the weirdest stories, and the news that has gone under the radar over the last week.

2:04With some of your favourite bunker personalities and maybe even some panellists from Oh God What Now. Today, we're joined by journalist, author of London Clubland and Oh God What Now favourite, Stef Tevo. Hey, Stef. Hello, hello. Stef, what's the strangest story you've seen this week? There was a very odd interview that Boris Johnson gave for a podcast. It's called The Smokeless Word. And it's actually run paradoxically by British American tobacco. It's all like they're trying to pivot to names and non-traditional tobacco products. And what just made it so weird was the general tone. It was very self-pitying. I was misjudged. Everyone was unfair to me the whole time. He only seemed to have been really happy either as a schoolboy or as mayor of London when he said he was the Napoleon of Notting Hill. Oh, did he sound a little bit? He sounds almost like he's doing a bit of a Liz Trust thing there of suggesting that everyone was out to get him. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting because people used to, by and large, be quite graceful when they gave up power. You know, you look at John Major, he's done the lecture circuit.

3:06You look at Gordon Brown that he's gone on to do a through think tanks and reports. There's this thing on the right to find amongst Boris Johnson, amongst David Cameron, standing awkwardly on a campsite strike cell insurance. You find it with Liz Trust, obviously, her YouTube channel. And Matt Goodwin, who we might find more to say about later, but they all very much do seem to be doing the rounds. And it's not that, you know, we as podcasters have a problem with other people doing podcasts. It's that I do have a problem with George Osborne doing one. That's how I draw the line. George Osborne. Yeah, completely, completely. Yeah, it just seemed very desperate. And there was a bit towards the end where they said, well, and now we're going to ask you for the remaining five minutes about the are they products? And it really was, you know, advertorial writ large. Yeah, there's obviously there's the point, you know, when he went where he suggested he was going to sort of go away and maybe make some sort of sweeping come back. Does how pitiful he feels at the moment make that just seem very unlikely at one point before that seemed like something that might happen,

4:09whereas now I don't think he is a sort of big beast who could come and save the Tories in any way. Yeah, I mean, the time he still still was an MP. He still had a seat. And he was having people whispering into his ear, oh, he'll be back boss. You know, there was a line of argument that was advanced at the time, which seemed ridiculous, that he was only backing his trust as his successor, because he thought she'd be such a disaster that she'd be out within a couple of months. Well, given that's exactly what happened, it doesn't seem so far-fetched. But he was no longer an MP by that stage. You know, he quit in disgrace. Yeah, I don't see a road back. You know, the Tories' safe seats are actually quite hard to come by these days for a start. On to the big first story for the week. And I'd like us to discuss the the Rycroft review. So a government commission review into foreign financial interference in UK politics was published on Wednesday. It was led by former senior civil servant Philip Rycroft. And it warned of threats from hostile states, including Russia, China, and Iran. After the review, local government secretary Steve Reed announced new rules,

5:10including a cap on donations from Britain's living abroad, and a moratorium on cryptocurrency donations over concerns they can be used to obscure the source of political funding. The government says it will bring forward retrospective legislation to enforce the changes immediately. What were the most interesting things from this review in your mind, sir? Well, I think you've actually flagged up both of them, which are the temporary ban at this stage on crypto, which is not something we've really grappled with. Yeah, that's the first of two. The crypto thing is interesting because it just didn't register in politics until a few years ago when the then Brexit party in our reform UK started bringing substantial sums from crypto, which of course you can do quite easily. But one of the whole points about our electoral system is that when you're registering large donations with the electoral commission, you need to stay where they're from. Yeah. And you need to make sure that they're actually from a permissible donor. And given that the whole point of crypto is that it's anonymous, you can't perform those checks. And actually, they had to give back some of that money initially.

6:11But there is still the scope for that. And given that there's nothing structural to stop the money from being accepted, you can only maybe find people 18 months later. That's the kind of process we've been looking at. That'll be big. The issue then as well that even with cryptos, even if you can find who made the crypto donation, you can't work out where they got that crypto money from. That's the other concern thing is that crypto we know is used to sort of launder all sorts of dodgy finances. Yeah, and that's a bit of a wider weakness in our political funding system already, which is that the donation source of the money. So theoretically, somebody who is based overseas but has a UK company, as long as the money is sourced from their UK business, that's legal. However, there aren't really that many checks that you can do to check on the ultimate source. You don't know about their internal accounting procedures. I mean, the electoral commission can investigate, but that's the only power they can have. They can investigate and then refer it to the police and ask them to investigate and notoriously, they don't like to do that. The other thing which is really, really important is this idea of a cap

7:14of I think it would suggest the £100,000 on donations from overseas. That is huge. We have never in history accepted before the principle of a cap on donations. If you speak to democracy campaigners who actually have a real understanding of the problems with our funding of our electoral system, there are two major problems. One is a relative absence of the state funding of political parties. The parties hate this idea, but actually I think this is essential, particularly because we already have tens of millions of pounds of state funding of political parties that already goes on. Just no one ever seems to notice things like short money and cramble money and money for the opposition parties in Scotland and Wales and so forth. So you could fund the entire party system in the UK, frankly, out of short change, no one would notice. But the flip side of that is that no one's talking about banning donations overall, stopping people from donating to political parties. But if you cap donations, so you end the big money, so people have to raise lots and lots of money from lots of people, rather than just depending on we have 19 individuals in the UK

8:15who account for 75% of the donations the political parties. You know, you can literally get the people who pay for politics in this country into one room. And although this is looking at a different thing, the right cross review, I think, is very, very important because it's paving the way to starting to think about this in a different way, looking beyond and certainly looking at the damage limitation of contaminated money. Of course, dodgy money can come domestically as well as for a broad. Of course, so it's expected to hit reform in particular, which is relied on large overseas funding and also crypto contributions as well. Yeah, that sort of backing. How much can we link that to having fueled the rise of reform? And might this legislation stop us seeing these insurgent parties be able to move us swiftly as reform has in the future? Yeah, I mean, the reformist who is a particular cogent when you look at one chap in particular, Christopher Harbourn, who is based in Thailand, and has given 12 million pounds to reform UK.

9:15He's by far their biggest donor in recent years. He's also the biggest founder donor originally. Indictively, a lot of his money is in crypto. So you can see how all of this is converging around a blatant loophole that's there, and there are questions because he hasn't been based in the UK for a very long time, indeed, as the whether he should be allowed to donate so much to a political party. Reform UK hasn't actually raised that much money amongst its donors generally, apart from Harbourn. Yeah. And that's really, really important because if you take Harbourn away, you find that reform's fundraising is actually not that remarkable, and they consistently underdeliver. It's only the fact that they've got Harbourn in there, one donor that allows them to flout that. Now, that's important because I would say as just a caveat to all this, as somebody who thinks this is a very, very good thing to be having in terms of donation cap, laws introduced with one person in mind tend to be very bad laws. Yeah. And this is not a good thing to be proceeding with for the government out of self-interest, which dare I say they might well be doing consciously.

10:16However, I think it's important because of the broader issues at stake, because actually this is precisely the kind of behaviour you don't want, you don't want the Tories to be overly dependent on one of those donors either, similarly. Does it feel in some ways just a little too late for this? And also, people have dodged rules already. People are just going to find loopholes here. For example, rich people giving 10 people a hundred grand each to then give to a party seems like a quite straightforward one. Yeah, I mean, the thing about doing something like that kind of a wheeze is that it leaves a very, very obvious money trail. You know, you can't hand out 10 grand without there. Sure. It's not easy to do in cash without there being a very obvious paper trail. So actually, I'm skeptical as to whether that kind of evasion activity would happen at scale without, you know, immediately being discovered. It's been a problem for quite a while. And, you know, actually, the Tories used to clean up amongst the expats. Bear in mind that there used to be no restrictions on overseas money at all. The way it now works is that certain number of years after you leave the UK,

11:20you can still be a donor as long as you're on the electoral register. And actually, the Tories in the last government extended the number of years on the electoral register, which obviously had an impact on donations. But they've traditionally raised a lot from British expats in Hong Kong, British expats in Spain, in Australia, in a Lord of Macauapa and used to be Margaret Thatcher's treasurer, but then he moved to Australia. He remained a big, big donor long after he'd left the country. So this has been something where we've tended not to really care that much because it was just seen as part of the rules of the game. That's changed a lot with the behaviour, I think, of Russia and the behaviour of China. The amount of money sloshing around from regimes that do not wish as well. And we know for a fact that the Russian state has been backrolling the far right in just about every European country from France to Hungary. It will be very, very strange if the UK was the only European country they haven't been doing this in. And we know that Chinese influencing operations at Target, UK political parties, which we see in the espionage scandals that periodically break out are there.

12:22That tends to be less about party funding, though. They tend to more be interested in, without naming names, finding retired party officials, retired senior figures, politicians who've gone to seed a bit, giving them a company directorship, giving them a cushy overpaid consultancy and then keeping them on side. But it's all a symptom of the wider problem, which is a gaping security problem. We've been warned about by the security services pretty openly for the last 10, 15 years. Labour seems to have done a lot of things kind of quite piecemeal in this term so far. This might sound like a stupid question. Why not just make it zero? Why not ban this? Why not ban foreign donations? Because to me, I don't see much justification for them on any level. Because to play devil's advocate here for a second, it's not a crime to live in a foreign country for a while. And we live in an increasingly globalised world where actually people do move abroad for a job for three years, for five years. That's a very different proposition to having moved to another country 20 years ago and having no intention of coming back and also not paying taxes in the UK

13:24all of these sorts of things are interlinked. So I think there is actually a perfectly reasonable case for people who aren't always in the UK or who've been abroad for a couple of years, that kind of thing, that shouldn't. That's an eyelid for anyone. Where it starts to get really problematic is where people have links to interesting regimes start to be bankrolling, political parties that aren't necessarily always seen in national interest. What does this mean for the other parties and more broadly of the reform seems to be the focus? It feels like they're the target there. Forage seemed quite annoyed by all of this in PMQ's walking out at one point, though it's kind of unclear what it was exactly he walked out over. But what does it mean for everyone else? It means that they should really be more cautious in their due diligence. Now, the big parties already have this. You know, they have a compliance department where when a generation comes in, they need to check, is this person incredibly dodgy? There are several problems here. One is that small parties just don't have the resources for this. So, for example, if you tried donating, offering a million pounds to the green party tomorrow,

14:24firstly, they say that's a little unusual. We don't usually get these sorts of offers, but secondly, they don't actually probably have the mechanisms because they don't have the funding in place. It's kind of a circular argument. But even then, the parties that do have these mechanisms, it's not that they don't care, but it's that they have a very strong incentive to not care, you know, to not ask too many questions. And every time we've had a donor scandal of someone who looks really, really dodgy, who's donated money to a political party, well, the fact that they've donated in the past tense, that money means the money wasn't rejected. You know, what we don't often see are the news of people who get rejected by political parties and they say, we don't want your money. That does occasionally happen, but it's pretty rare. It reminds me of the line in the wire from Clay Davis, where he just goes, I'll take anybody's money if they're giving it away. So, what else would you want to see urgently sort of beyond this, sort of, is this the, was this the complete looming thing or when it comes to the funding and finances are there, are there gaps when it comes to legislation? They're looking, I mean, there are loads of gaps. And actually, to be fair, the review's pretty good in saying

15:25that the landscape is constantly evolving and we need to stop doing this piecemeal, everyone, it's every 10 or 20 years. I would go back to this question of party funding, state funding of political parties. You look at any parliamentary debate on a topic and an MP will invariably start with the sentence, well, of course, nobody wants a state funding of political parties. Well, I do. And lots of other people do you have any enough. And I think if you want to look at something like a system of taxpayer matched funding, so it's tied to private donations, but it's caps as a certain level. And this is where I get all right winged about the political parties, learn to live within your budget, live within your means, stop spending money you don't have. This is why the parties are so desperate for donations. It's because they're so terrified of being into disadvantage that they spend money they don't have. They're constantly in debt and they're constantly trying to raise money that they've already spent. And then you just get out of that habit and I think having an element of state funding is a much, much stronger part of it that would help them to plan financially. Would the issue there just come though then from when parties like the Greens, so I don't think anyone for sore getting

16:26as popular as they have and reform jumping up and I suppose unfortunately people like restore and whatever else. How do you ensure there's that level of playing field when it comes to state funding? So it doesn't make the state look biased almost. Well, this is why I say you tie it to donations of the big raise because if they genuinely are raising lots of money from small donors and that adds up more or less the same thing. Yeah, sure, there's a large effect and so they may well be at an initial disadvantage but they're also utterly utterly done for under the current system anyway. So I think if anything they will do very well under this system. You did a start of business just to keep the lights on. You're here to sell more today than yesterday. You're here to win. Lucky for you. Shopify built the best converting checkout on the planet. Like you're just one tapping, ridiculously fast acting, sky high sales stacking, championed checkout. That's the good stuff right there.

17:26So if your business is in it to win it, win with Shopify. Start your free trial today at Shopify.com slash win. This episode is brought to you by Welch's Fruit Snacks. Big news for your kids lunch box. Welch's Fruit Snacks are now made without any artificial dies. A snack parents can feel good about and the same delicious taste kids can't get enough of. All made with no artificial dies. Try Welch's Fruit Snacks today. Now let's look at our winner and loser of the week then. So first off, Seth, who is your winner of the week? My winner is a gentleman named Nathan Newby who went into a hospital in Leeds with a chest infection and became a hero. He's just been given the medal by the king because he stopped to suicide bomber. And his heroism was just by talking to the guy. He went out for a cigarette, probably not the wise thing to do when he's got a chest infection. And he noticed the man looking very nervous and fidgety and distressed,

18:28keeping his eye on the big bag. And he spent the best part of an hour and hour and a half talking to him and talking to him about his problems and talking to him about how distressed he was. And eventually the man gave himself up and said, I think you should call the police now while I'm still in this mindset and while I'm still be talked out of it. But he put himself huge at risk. It's the kind of everyday heroism that heroes don't wear capes is the saying. And it's wonderful when you read a story like that. It also brings to mind the humanity of even the villains in this case are human beings as well. Even they are deeply conflicted about this. And somebody who's thinking of inflicting pain and misery on others was still receptive to talking. And I think that's a wonderful, wonderful story. Yeah, there's an amazing story. Who's your loser? It's got to be Matt Goodwin. We might as well just reserve that for every week for really at the moment. This has been an interesting story. I mean, he's written a sort of anti-immigration

19:31freed book, all stuff you might expect him to write about. Sure. And I think it's credibility lasted all of about six hours after release before it's actually a guy who was tweeting. Yes, some people still use Twitter. A gentleman the by the name of Andy Twelves who got five chapters in and started to notice some very strange things about the use of AI. Now, it's not like he was stupid enough to copy and paste citations, including the URL containing chat's GPT within the source code. But that's actually exactly what he did. So the very least he's got a couple of footnotes in there. There are only a dozen footnotes in the whole book and two of them are generated by chat GPT. That's irrefutable, that's in print. But there've also been suggestions that AI may have. And this is what Andy Twelves wrote in that great left-wing magazine Spectator. There's a suggestion he might have actually used AI to write a decent chunk of the very least for the rest of the book because there are a whole lot of fabricated quotes,

20:31hallucinated instances, things that Roger Scruton sounds like he might have said. Actually, he never said. I've used AI occasionally to help on research of things or I use it as almost like a search engine. And I think if you have any wits about you, the secondary thing you do is, say, give me the sources and prove this to be true. Because, yeah, it was once just inventing completely made up stats from the spectator for me because I essentially wanted to suggest that there was some right-wing talking point. And it just didn't happen. I had to ask it five times to say, give me the link to that article. And until eventually when, I'll actually, as you can see, the dates are off there. It's from a data set that is beyond my reckoning. I basically thought that sounded like what you wanted to find out. So, you know, you can make when it will just try and please you. It's what it tries to do. And if your instructions to AI

21:31give me a series of anti-immigration arguments, is that fleshed out to the length of a book, for instance? That's more or less the kind of thing that would come up with. What's all the more fascinating is, you know, I can remember once upon a time, all of who two or three years ago, and Matt Goodwin was still an academic, or he's still had a professorship. His job was to watch out for plagiarism. His job was to look out for students who'd use AI on this sort of thing. And, you know, I think it's only a matter of time before some of he runs the manuscript of the book through a anti-plagiarism checker. For instance, I think that could be very interesting. Now, he's put on a brave face about this. He's said, oh, I love the attention. You know, I've got me rocketing to the top of the Amazon book sales chart. Keep on accusing me of all the left-wing haters, etc. But even if it turns out to be the best-selling book in history, which I somewhat doubt is going to be fueled by people who want a bit of a gloat or are just curious about this, is that really worth your reputation?

22:34Let's go on to our next story, and let's check in on the situation in the Middle East. So this week, Iran has received a 15-point peace plan from Donald Trump, and this was delivered via Pakistani intermediaries. With Trump describing it as a very big present worth a tremendous amount of money, the Iranian military has says that the Americans are basically negotiating with themselves here. The plan reportedly includes demands for around to dismantle its nuclear program and halt missile development in exchange for sanctions released. And this all basically resembles earlier proposals that failed before the war even began. Trump seems to have well and truly lost control here. I mean, broadly lost control and of the optics as well. Do you think this could be a bit of a real moment for his reputation even with his supporters? Because I just failed to see even if you've been won over by the Maga Spell. This is just one he's doing something directly.

23:35He promised he wouldn't do, and he has no control of it whatsoever. He doesn't look like the tough guy person you want him to be. I mean, Trump's often doing things that he promised he would never do. And it hasn't broken the spell of his supporters. I actually don't think his supporters care about the issue one way or another. They don't care about Iran's full stop. They do care about gas prices. They do care about the knock on effect. And it's very, very obvious that they went into this without really thinking what their objectives were or what the possible outcomes were. Bear in mind, this was hot off the heels of the Venezuelan intervention, which was more successful than it could ever possibly have dreamed. But it was about six months of mobilization in the making, whereas this was more like two or three months. And it was open-ended. OK, we've killed Ayatollah Hamanay. What next is the regime going to collapse by itself without boots on the ground? And we're seeing the ambiguity on that. The other thing that I found very interesting about the talk of an author from Iran, we don't actually know whether this is real or not,

24:37because the Iranian government categorically denies this. And Trump's not wrong in saying that they would say that publicly, but Trump's not exactly known for telling the truth himself. So it could be completely fabricated. But what in character for Trump is that he responds to big fat bribes. And you see that domestically. Yeah, he will sue everyone in sight, including agencies of his own government, just so he can settle, just so he can get off a tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. You see that in foreign policy, you know, Qatar gave him a jet worth $400 million, which is currently under construction. That was shortly followed by an announcement that Qatar will be defended by the U.S. and that the U.S. would essentially give security guarantees up there with NATO in terms of you attack Qatar, then you've attacked us. Well, guess what? Qatar has just had bombs and missiles raining down on it, just like every other major in the Middle East than country has from Iran. That security guarantee doesn't seem to have actually amounted to that much. And you know, if you look at the way that Trump monetizes the presidency,

25:39you know, the one and a half billion dollar investments in his Bitcoin from Saudi Arabia that's secured early on in his term, the fact that they've just brought back $100 million in gold from Venezuela. I mean, this is 19th century imperialist stuff. Yeah. So it is possible that if the Iranians were making an offer to him, that's exactly the kind of offer they would make. But I know I kind of begin to say whether this is real or not. And it is also the case that Iran is a very decentralized power with many power centers, without the head of everything having been cut off for a dislocation in this way. I'll give you another analogy, which is that the last US president to really be engaging with Iran in a sort of major crisis with Jimmy Carter during a hostage crisis of 1980. One of the reasons why it took them over 400 days to get the hostages out was that there wasn't a centralized authority in Iran. There were loads and loads of groups saying we are speaking on behalf of the Ayatollah as intermediaries. And they were negotiating with a whole bunch of groups of people

26:39who were giving separate demands and all claiming to have an exclusive hotline to the Ayatollah. And did that seem like the exact same thing is happening for Trump as well, though? Like he is behaving as the Ayatollah was back then. Well, except he does actually get out there on social media. He can't get him off the news, frankly, to make a comment. But this is the thing, you'd have the central figurehead in Iran, the spiritual leader who'd actually be quite reclusive and not go on the record. And it would not be unusual for there to be, you know, conflicting accounts, so we say. He's trying to throw people under the bus completely here as well, Trump. Do you think it's just getting a bit, it's just quite rats and a sack? I mean, his whole cabinet must just surely be alarmed every moment for their career longevity in any way. But that's not only speaking to anyone who's ever worked for Trump in government, speaking to anyone who's worked for the Trump Organization over the last few decades. You know, as you say in the last few days, he sort of pointed the finger at Pete Hegseth saying it was very much his idea to go in. The bottom line is they didn't know what they were getting into.

27:41And they've given a continuously evolving set of war objectives, even before it started. You know, we've absolutely had them say several times it's about regime change. And now they're saying it's not about regime change. We've had them say it's about self-defense, where it was going to be an imminent attack on neighbours in the Middle East. Well, it turns out that actually every other government that's independent of this has said there's no evidence of a the Iranian attack that was imminent in any way. We have been told that nuclear disarmament was a major issue. And they've had huge success in taking out their nuclear arsenal twice. Because remember, they bombed around before as well. Now they've had to admit that that's more or less impossible. And there are some nuclear assets that are said where that's really dangerous. Because, sure, the chances of a nuclear missile hitting anyone are really very, very slim. But the chances of nuclear material making its way out of a hostile state that's just been struck, this is not a helpful way of dealing with it. And the other thing they've said several times is about stabilising the oil price. Well, now they seem to be wanting to walk away from that.

28:42And they're yelling at everyone in nature for wanting to have nothing to do with policing the state of hormones. When it comes to us here in the UK, then the impact of this. I mean, how wide are we seeing this? And what have you made to what Rachel Reeves has been saying around the soaring energy builds that we might see? Well, that's it. I mean, inflation is crippling when it's tied to energy, particularly because it's tied to food. It's tied to basics and essentials that affect everybody's lives. And particularly the poor, you are the more likely that is going to be a major percentage of your spending. But the other thing is it does make the whole world less safe. It makes Britain less safe as well. You know, we have been dragged in on this. There was a cabinet rebellion led by Edmila Band against Keir Starmer's original, this has been leaked out from multiple sources. This is original proposals. The cabinet was, we're going to do what Trump wants. We're going to join and support in a supporting capacity. Miller Band leading very heavily on the Attorney General's legal advice and saying,

29:42this would be illegal. And we're not going to do this. And actually, Keir Starmer went along with Edmila. Okay, this is going to be in the legal war. And that's something that made Trump really, very angry. The idea that he was called in the legal war. Well, now Keir Starmer has been dragged yet again by Trump to, you know, some modest deployment to support American bases that are being attacked, that sort of thing. And that itself has made Britain a target. This is not hypothetical. The British airbase in Cyprus has been attacked by Iranian missiles as a direct result of this. Not only British people less safe by this, the Cypriots are rather angry about this as well. Because although nothing hit civilian space since Cyprus, they've now had their president come forward and say, well, we're not terribly happy with this whole Imperial hangover of a British base here from 60 years ago. And this hadn't been a salient issue until now. But once missiles start flying into our country, we have very strong feelings about this understandably. Let's look now at the story of the arson attack in Golders Green.

30:43So two men have been arrested on suspicion of arson with intent to endanger life. After four Jewish charity owned ambulances were set on fire in North London earlier this week with the incident now being treated as an antisemitic hate crime. It's also been investigated by counterterrorism, please, but it's not currently being classed as terrorism, which is somewhat confusing. Two British nationals have been arrested, so obviously this limits somewhat what we can say. But what have you made to the reaction around this attack social media? To me, it seemed like quite the cesspit, but at the same time, a large amount of money has been raised for this charity as well, which shows there's a dichotomy in the way people are talking about it. I mean, the stuff on social media has been really, really nasty, and as much the insinuation as the outright antisemitic hate that's there. Very interesting point about it being investigated as hate crime, because we're in an environment where the anti-woke, moral reform UK, etc. I love to go out and say, well, hate crime is overused.

31:43It's a waste of police time. But this is a classic example. This is clearly a hate crime. And this actually shows why we have hate crime laws in this country. And why they need to be treated as such. I mean, there've been quite a few high-profile, ridiculous responses, haven't they? The large one going around being this suggestion that being a false flag. Yeah, that was a post by the mayor of Bath, who's an elected politician, who should really know better, frankly. He's formally apologising and disciplined for it. But yeah, it's just deeply unhelpful when you get this is not only hate crime, this is fake news. I mean, this is deeply, deeply unhelpful. What does it really reveal to us about the threat that is facing Jewish communities? And does it reveal much more than what we kind of knew? It's clearly at this point in time. Unfortunately, there is just a real risk of violence for people within those communities. Yeah, look, anti-osemitism is unfortunately alive and well. It's never really gone away, sadly. It's more prevalent in some areas than others.

32:44But there's long been a resistance to talk about anti-osemitism at home, because part of the definition of anti-osemitism does actually involve exploiting misusing, mischaracterising, criticism of the state of Israel as a stick with which to hit Jews. Now, there's a long history of that, unfortunately. It gets more complicated because, you know, classic point of disagreeing with the Israeli government and its policies is a very, very different thing to anti-osemitism more broadly. And even that, with any number of whizzle words, is often exploited by people with an anti-Semitic motive. That said, that's a very different kettle of fish to hate crimes. That's a very different kettle of fish to just attacking a community outright. There's so much news that goes under radar these days, Seth. So what do you think of the story, in particular, which has gone lesser reported this week than it might have been? Crespin Blunt, the former Tory MP. He ran in some trouble this week.

33:48So he had a bit of an interesting background. He's a sort of archetypal, free marketeering, right-wing, brexitering Tory. You would expect to be very authoritarian. He's actually quite liberal in his social views. And one of them is in the area of drugs. Now we know this because of what Mr. Blunt has told us. In fact, what he's told his fellow MPs when he was an MP, he's hugely into animal nitrate poppers, which he'd said on the floor of the House of Commons on the parliamentary privilege. Now, unsurprisingly, he's also been quite an isolated figure. I mean, we've, you know, just looked at his conviction this week on drugs charges. So this week, he's been convicted of possession of GBL, crystal meth and cannabis. It's a rather convoluted and unusual story because he was actually investigated and his home was searched on a rape charge. The rape charge was actually not born out. And he says that it was, in fact, his drug deal was blackmailing him, whether that was the source of all this. But as a result of this,

34:49the police searched his home. And in Crispin Blunt being Crispin Blunt said, yeah, I'm hugely into drugs. And you found all these things here. And yes, I'm guilty. And I'm not attempting to deny it anyway. It's been a very odd case. I mean, he, for example, featured quite prominently in a libel case recently, not as a participant. But because what the case came down to, was that a due diligence note about someone with some very unsavory facts about them was circulated 12 individuals in public life, six of them weren't identified. And all the six who were identified, five of them said, I already thought the guy was a bit dodgy before I even read the note. And what the entire case came down to was, what does Crispin Blunt think of you? And the point was may, that Crispin Blunt is thought of as a suitably eccentric figure that none of this really mattered to any great extent. So, you know, does this have any great impact on public affairs, probably not? But it does sort of remind you that politicians not are not only human, but they're not terribly predictable. You know, that they don't fit into an identity

35:52thing. And when you think of a sort of head banging Brexit here, like Crispin Blunt, they're just as likely to be an audible, you don't expect with some interesting peccadillos as they are to, um, to be the stereotype. So thank you so much for joining me for the weekly wrap-up. Back to Jeff. And thank you to all of you for listening. Remember, if you enjoy what we do, you can back us on Patreon where you can get episodes ad free and early. Search Bunker Patreon podcast or follow the link in the show notes. And if you can't back us there, we do understand, but please do go rate, review and subscribe wherever you're listening to the show. I'm Jacob Jarvis. Thank you for listening to The Bunker. To Bunker was written and presented by podmasters managing editor Jacob Jarvis with set table. It was produced by Liam Tate with audio production by Tom Taylor, music by Kame Dickinson, an artwork by Jim Parrot. The group editor is Andrew Harrison and the Bunker is a podmasters production.