Tax hell: How Andy Burnham’s £10bn black hole will hit your wallet

0:00The Telegraph Pessimism It's never going to improve a disconnected healthcare system. Next! So what will? At Optum, we're working every day to connect primary, specialty, and pharmacy care, and tell lower prescription costs. Will we fix it all overnight? No. We'll pick up trying again and again until healthcare works as one for everyone. That's Healthy Optimism. Learn more at Optum.com. Summer's still going strong. Make a stop at Total Wine and More for White Wines Beer and Ready to Drink Cocktails. Just know you're getting the lowest prices. Keep the Summer celebrations going at Total Wine and More. Spirits are not sold in Virginia and North Carolina. Drink responsibly. The Prime Minister is being told to stop spending rather than raise taxes as he stares

1:02down a £10 billion black hole and a soaring welfare bill ahead of next month's budget. Labour's client, State Agenda, has come back to bite it once again. So what is the solution to trigger economic growth? Welcome to the daily team with Meekhamil Atomini and me, Jacob Reesmog. What do you make of this absolute unwillingness? You can't. This bill and indeed government spending per se. Well, it's what you would expect of a socialist government. What the Labour Party wants to do is create a client state that votes for it. So it wants people to get independent on welfare. The problem is it can't go on forever because you've got a smaller number of people actually working who hate for it all. There's one civil servant in Daffra or a satiety body for every five farmers. One for five. Why? What do you have the nose? Five are a lot of them. Clays down Daffra and tell farmers to get on with it. It's madness. Welcome to the daily team.

2:02Morning, Jacob. It's very good to see you. As always, now you're getting off to the socialist conference and there is going to be a battle off to giants or giant s's. You are taking on old sourpuss herself, Bridget Phillips. Now, hang on. I don't want a cruel word said about our bridge who is my girl crush in the Labour Party. Well, there's no counting for taste. Head to head. The two of you. It's going to be like suma wrestling. It could be. It could turn into descendant of wrestling, although I'm not sure Bridget is somebody that would want to start wrestling a fellow female at the Royal Lever Building. Do you know what's important to note about this event? I think people are thinking they need to be Labour delegates to attend. No, you don't. You can just get a ticket through the telegraph website and we're going to put the details in the show notes. So outside the secure zone, anyone can go, you've got to pay £12 for the privilege. Cheap at twice the price. It's a mark, isn't it? It really is. I'd say much more to see this if any I were in Liverpool that day. Now we've had some wonderful messages from our loyal listeners and viewers on your singing,

3:05which there's some admiration and some not so admiration. This is me trying to give you a clue as to who are Waces were yesterday. That's right. I'm not blaming ignorance, but I think you did deep down. Ignorance is bliss. Roist and Grange says no more singing, please. My cat just jumped through a window which was closed and Matt Boyne's two-one-seven-nine says Camilla, I adore your interviewing style. Witty, playful and occasionally appropriately, Serbic. However, I would suggest not giving up the day job for singing career. That rendition of Don't Look Back in Anger was quite something. I'm sorry to end bracket's bad. Yes. I've worked best wishes and Scarlett Conway, two eight eight one says, and this is the best of them all. Camilla singing Oasis this year was not on my bucket list, but it cheered me right up. Well, thank you very much. So it worked for some people. You've got a 33% success rate. Love that. You're also getting glazed if you're familiar with that phrase. Well, I thought it was something that was done to pastry. No, but it's also done to people who people admire in the public eye.

4:07And some glazed here from George Martin who says, JRM is so eccentricly cool. Have you ever been described as cool before? No, no, no. Only that to my children. No, indeed. Now, we've got a really interesting letter from Maria and I thought I'd ask you about it. She says as follows, I want to say how much I enjoy your podcast and watch it every day. Thank you, Maria. I was wondering if during the day, you can discuss and give definition of what is actually middle class versus working class, because those terms are widely used by politicians and yet in my opinion, people who might have considered themselves middle class 10 years ago may not feel the same now. I regard myself to be middle class because, although I'd say my grandparents were working class, my grandfather ran an ice cream company. My father was educated to degree level and beyond, because he's a doctor and his gut. Lots of qualifications to his name. I was privately educated, brought up in a detached home in a leafy heart for

5:07to give you a village and I am, quote, professional class. So I've never been working class, but I think I'm middle class. What do you think you are? I'm good to sum a certain yeoman stock. I'm not convinced that these class classifications are particularly useful because they become very politicized. It's hard to believe that the deputy prime minister is working class just by office. Now, I'm thinking of the current one. I'm thinking of Angela Rainer. I'm thinking of John Prescott, but they all wanted to go back to their labor roots. But the class voting has broken down completely. If we were talking in the 1950s, class voting was absolutely rigid that working class people, 75% of them voted labor. And that was a kind of blue collar, white collar distinction, right? Absolutely right. And that gave you clarity on what class was. Now, some people in blue collar jobs are incredibly highly skilled, paid hundreds of thousands of pounds,

6:12but they're on a shop floor. They're not working class. Some people in professional jobs are very poorly paid and are living in bedsits with three other people. What class are they? So I think it's much more useful to think about economics and how well off people are, rather than to try and stratify them in terms of class. So I always avoid these terms as a way of discussing how people react and think about things. But do you think you're up a middle class and I'm middle class? Do you think you're poshier than me? Oh, gosh, I think I'm good, some say. You're in stock, I refer the Honorable Ladies to the answer I gave some moments ago. Well, because you're the son of a journalist, which is professional class, and I'm the daughter of a GP, which is professional class. So even though you're double-barrelled and frightfully more poshier than me because of your e-tun upbringing, actually, I think we're on a level. I actually think that you are not as poshier as your wife. Oh, I'm definitely not poshier than my wife. Yes, definitely not. Your wife is a class above you, would you say?

7:12She's an aristocrat. I'm married up. But my maternal grandparents, grandparents, yes, were all four of them, are as you left off potato famine to go to America. Oh, so you're coming as Mark. So we are all very mixed in our lineage. Right. All of us. We're not fortunately continental, so obsessed by these things. But I went to the College of Arms, and they were showing me the courtrooms of a very prominent and distinguished person. In the continent, all his ancestors would be armidrus. Are you talking in a foreign language? Whereas in this country, we've always been much more like that. For the communist amongst us. I think telegraph readers completely understand what I'm talking about. Come on. If you're bear arms, you are armidrus. On the continent, the continental aristocrats will not marry beneath them.

8:13They will not marry people who do not hold arms. No. In this country, we have had a much greater tendency, not fuss about these things. Yes. And therefore you will find that even the most noble families have within them ancestors who were not armidrus. Because we've been much more relaxed about it, and it's a thoroughly good thing to be relaxed about it. Yes. Because you then allow social mobility and social mobility goes along with prosperity, because you want able people to be able to climb to the top. Did Helena know she was marrying a scratcher that was well beneath her when he met her? When I first taught Helena an adulthood, I was going on about her most interesting ancestor, who Thomas Wentworth, who was ex-cution 1641, and she thought, who is this funny fellow who knows more about my family history than I do? Really. But I'm glad to say, our eldest son is now just as interested in his family history as I am, if not more so. Now, it's an interesting anniversary today. We managed to look up in the archives, the front page back in 1992.

9:15A date you will remember very well, Jacob, Black Wednesday. And we found the copy, and it's got two extraordinary bylines on it, hasn't it? So it's about Norman Le Mans, day of absolute shame and woe. Well, it was a great day of the country. It wasn't Black Wednesday, it was White Wednesday. It led to years of economic growth. It freed the economy from the crazy European, exchange rate mechanism project, which would have led us to the euro. It got rid of an absolute disaster. It exploded, John Major's terrible, terrible economic policy. Yes, it always didn't think of it like this at the time. Well, Norman Le Mans was never very keen on it. He was compelled to do it by Major. Sure. But an interesting, his special advisor at the time was David Cameron. And you see a very white face, David Cameron, standing behind Norman Le Mans in the TV footage the day before when it's announced that we've come out of the exchange rate mechanism. And the copy for the telecom? And the copy is done by two Johnson's. One Boris, one Philip.

10:15Philip's still writing for this paper. We mentioned him yesterday. We mentioned him yesterday Boris now writing for the Daily Mail. He's done one or two other things in between. Up, how are we? So he was writing it from Brussels. But just fast forward, because a lot of people are talking about, I know it was 92, but when people try and mark sort of historic economic landmarks in living memory, they talk about the horror of the 1970s, the great wealth exodus, bin bags, piling up in the streets, and then obviously the Ascent of Margaret Thatcher. They talk about Black Wednesday in 1992. They talk about the global financial crash of 2008. And now, of course, we've got the same sort of rhetoric around some of these calamitous economic markers that have been revealed in recent hours. So we've got inflation up to 3.2%. We've got Andy Burnham apparently facing a 10 billion pound black hole. Why is it always 10 billion pounds? Nobody knows. We've got the Labour government resolutely refusing to cut spending. We've got warnings from everyone saying,

11:16don't put taxes up anymore. And of course, what's the response to all this? It's global headwinds. It's the Iran war. It's Ukraine. There's nothing we can do about this. Actually, it's thoroughly bad policy making in this country and spending too much money and taxing too much. And that is having a bad effect on economic growth, ties in with very bad energy policy that has us having very high electricity prices, four times those in the United States that are bad for business, bad for individuals, make them less able to spend on other things. So bad policy making has led to an inability to cope with the headwinds that always exist in global economics. There's always something going on globally that is difficult. And we are less able to deal with it because of really poor policy making, especially in the Reeves' healy era. And healy is repeating Reeves' mistakes

12:16that he isn't being clear about what he's doing with taxation. People are therefore leaving the country along with that chap who paid $30 million worth of tax. Yes. Because they're uncertain about how he will tackle taxation and expenditure in the budget. So what are we thinking about the rhetoric around all this? We had stories yesterday involving the business secretary, Jonathan Reynolds, refusing multiple times to rule out taxing pensioners. And we've got this extraordinary situation, haven't we, that the triple lock is meant that the state pensioners are now worth around 13,000 pounds a year. That is obviously over the personal allowance. And therefore, there's a squabble going on as to whether we should get OAPs to file a tax return, basically, for the difference of about, I think it's 80 quid or something. Should they be taxed? And then, Rishi Soonak, I think, came up with triple lock plus, whereas well as being insulated by those three measures, pensioners should also be excluded from any tax returns.

13:19Well, you can't exclude all pensioners from tax returns. No, sorry. Pensioners on the state pension only. What the government seems to be saying is that if your only income is the state pension, then you will not pay tax on the little bit above. But if you've got any other income, you will. This has two effects. One is it undermines what was done by the conservatives when the thresholds were increased, because when the thresholds were increased in the collision period, the age-related allowance was removed. They used to be a specific allowance for pensioners that was higher than the base allowance for non-pensioners. That was removed as the allowance went up and absorbed it. So that's been taken away and doesn't seem to be coming back. The other thing is it means the triple lock is dead. So take the turn a half percent, minimum increase. If you take 20% of turn a half percent, what is that? Oh, don't ask me these mathematical questions. It's half a percent. Thank you. So the triple lock is no longer for anyone

14:21who isn't purely on the basic pension. Yes. Turn a half percent, it is 2%. Right. And all the way up, the triple lock has now been reduced by 20% unless the government reverses this. So we can announce today on the daily tee, that the triple lock has been smothered, murdered in its sleep, in the hope that nobody would notice. It's as always that we have. So assisted diag is happened in secret for the triple lock. That's right. But were you pros crapping it or not? Or you're saying, well, it's inevitably gone anyway? It's ultimately, it had to be a matter of timing. At what point would you need to stop increasing pensions? The triple lock had a very sensible purpose, that is to say. And this is really good conservative economic management in 1979 and 2010. In 1979, the country has no money. And so Margaret Thatcher changed pension increases from wages to inflation. That saved billions and billions of pounds cumulatively.

15:22But by 2010, there was quite a lot of pensioner poverty. And the easiest way to remove that was through the triple lock. And that's been successful. It has removed a good deal of pensioner poverty. But it can't go on forever, because somebody's got to pay for it. So it's a question of how long it could run for. It's not something people could promise indefinitely. Should wealthy boomers just be allowed to opt out? What do you mean by opt out? Well, I mean that I understand the need for the triple lock or at least some kind of insulation against inflation, busting, pension rises, that mean that people who are literally on 13 grand a year in retirement don't get shafted. But at the same time, it doesn't make much sense when you hang up your double-breasted suit and perhaps wear some sort of cardigan in later life that you should get the state pension. Well, the issue there is that the state pension is technically a contributory pension. Yes, you've paid. That's right. That's right. A national insurance contributions do relate to pensions.

16:23That if people haven't made them, they don't get the pension. So I don't think it would be reasonable to say to people, even though national insurance is a fiddle, even though there is no segregated amount of money that is kept for it. There is a national insurance fund, but it's not segregated exclusively for pensions. It's in a sense fictional, but nonetheless, it's a fiction that the government has sold taxpayers. Yes. And I think it'd be deeply dishonest to change it. But if I do get a state pension that's late to date, I'll still be taxed at 45% on it. Yeah, that's true. But then, aren't you concerned as a father of six about the many molsters and how they're going to get on in life? Because it's hard enough for the younger generation. This is younger people, the gen Zedders and the Alphas, of which you have a collection, are saying it's all very well going back in time and remembering the era where our parents could buy a house for a hundred grand. We're now going to be really under pressure. We're going to be landed with a load of student debt.

17:24And meanwhile, the boomers and the Gen Xers continue to get richer. Yes, we need to look at the things that are creating obstacles to economic growth. We need to look actually at the 1945 to 51 settlement. Because there are bits of that that are proving very expensive and don't actually work. What are the three big bits of that? The Tan and Country Planning Act, which stops sensible development. You then get the welfare state that has become unaffordable and you get the National Health Service, which doesn't work and costs a lot of money. As we see with these endless inquiries into hospitals where babies have been killed. And so what you need is not to say, well, we must squeeze the pension and so on and so forth, we must grow the economy. But to grow the economy, we need to reform the socialist agenda of Atley. Atley's decisions underpin so many of our costs and problems today, economic growth strangled by planning,

18:27which of course got worse since his day. I'm not saying it's all the same, but those are the three great underpinnings of our economic inhibitions. Outdated technology isn't going to improve a disconnected healthcare system. Next. So what will? At Optum, we wake up every day and work for better. We call it Healthy Optimism. It's how we use insights and technology to help providers focus less on paperwork and more on patients. Will we fix it all overnight? No, but we'll wake up trying again and again until healthcare works as one for everyone. That's Healthy Optimism. Learn more at Optum.com. You're either all in on this model or maybe you're building with another. You're either speed or is it security? You're either custom or are you ready to use? Or your AWS AI with hundreds of models, ready to use agents, speed and security built in?

19:30You don't have to pick a side. You can have them all. How will AI revolutionize your business? AWS AI is how? There's a fire inside you you can't ignore. Stand still, not a chance. You're a lifelong learner who's come this far. Now we are here to help you keep going further. Capella University, what can't you do? Visit Capella.edu to learn more. Well, on welfare, these are the latest stats. And this is depressing, frankly, more than four million people are now getting disability benefits after PIP claims, that's personal independence payments, surged by almost half a million to a record high under Labour. We've now got, I think, nearly a million young people, 18 to 24 claiming disability benefits. We've got a couple of people who are now 24 claiming disability benefits. We've got a government that is seemingly unwilling to cut the welfare bill.

20:30And they are saying that rhetorically because we had Andy Burnham in PMQ's the last one he did saying, well, we're not going to compromise on social security to pay for national security. So no cut in welfare to pay for warfare. Fine. If you want to find a tool, almost stupid things you could have said. Sorry, I mean, okay. Fine and how express it. But I totally agree with you. And I think how do you have welfare if you're at war and you can't defend yourself? But second of all, the truth of the matter is that regardless of any Labour-backed bench rebellions, the welfare bill is going up by the end of Parliament. They're trying to cut a cut, but they're not cutting the actual substantive numbers. They're conservative pledged to trim the welfare budget by 23 billion, reform is saying 50 billion, so they're in a competition as to how to get this bill down. But what do you make of this absolute unwillingness to cut this bill and indeed government spending per se? Well, it's what you would expect of a socialist government. What the Labour Party wants to do

21:31is create a client state that votes for it. So it wants people to be dependent on welfare and look at the figures and think, well, if we vote reform, if we vote conservative, will these cash and they want two groups of people to be dependent upon Labour and then vote for them once people in the public sector. So why are they giving so much to the public section times to pay rises and the incredible increase in the numbers in the civil service? And then they want to give more money to welfare dependency. They like this because it's seen as their voter base. The problem is it can't go on forever because you've got a smaller number of people actually working who pay for it all. And they then run out of money and then every single Labour government, other than the one that lasted nine months in 1924, has had a financial crisis where it has had to cut spending dramatically. Andy Burnham is facing significant deterioration in the public finances that will leave him needing to find about 10 billion pounds and either tax rises or spending cuts in his first budget.

22:32Now, Andy Haldane, a former Bank of England economist and an ally of Burnham, has come out and said, off those things, cut spending or raised taxes, can he cut spending please? He said this and he said it to the LBC program presented by Andrew Ma. The market now suspects that this is a traditional tax and spend socialist government with better TikTok videos. The Achilles heel of this government thus far has been its unwillingness and or inability to cut public spending. Mr Haldane said the government faced a choice between raising taxes and cutting spending but insisted ministers should not impose further taxes on businesses. Now, this makes perfect sense to the likes of you and I. However, that doesn't mean that John Hilly's going to do anything of the sort on October 28th. No, I mean, I hold Haldane in very high regard and he's pity he didn't come Governor of the Bank of England, but there we go. What he's saying is extremely sensible. Labour only cuts in an emergency, which it's going to find it faces.

23:33However, 10 billion is neither hand or there that the government spends 1.3 trillion and we get hung up on remarkably small amounts of money in relation to government expenditure, which will be swallowed up by marginal changes in interest rates, in economic growth, in inflation. So it's not really the 10 billion that we should be fussing about. It is the overarching approach to economic policy. The overarching approach to economic policy is wrong and is not allowing economic growth and this includes the extra regulation that they are imposing on businesses, having posed on businesses, which are stopping people employing the employment right. Angela Rainer and Louise Hague have been at the Trade Union's conference, banging on about this employment rights bill. The Trade Union's who bribed them for these policies. Yes, you would love this though. It's goodching, put the money and you get the policy. You'll love this because you go around when you were Minister for Government Efficiency. No, I was. You went around saying, where are you

24:34to serve as servants who were absent? Louise Hague has now said that as part of this legislation, if anyone does want to work from home, a boss can't say no, I'm sorry, you're needed here for productivity purposes. They need to have a sit-down meeting and the boss has to give proper justification for why that person must return to the office. This strikes me to go back to the question we had from Aureda. There's very classist. Why? Because the cleaners and the people working on the factory floor cannot work from home, can they? It's the boss class who can work from home. So they are feather bedding the boss class when the people doing the hard manual labor can't get away with working from home. Why do you think, oh, I said it was 3.2%, it's actually 3.1% the inflation rise. Obviously the target set by the Bank of England is 2%. Petra and diesel prices have increased this. I mean, I've noticed that. My daughter and I had to drive to Cambridge at the weekend and we were driving around using the petrol prices app.

25:35Someone was trying to charge something absolutely ridiculous, like £1.98 for a litre of unleaded, not even diesel. You weren't going to a service station. Well, I was on a motorway. To be fair, I was. Never going to a service station on a motorway. No, no, no. You can't even buy a sandwich, sir. They mark up even the sandwiches in the coffee. No, it was a bit of a kind of, oh, no, we're running on fumes. Where do we go, types? Oh, OK. And even she had observed as a new driver that when she passed her tests several months ago, she was getting petrol for £1.49. Yes. And we couldn't find anything cheaper than £1.68. OK, I got £1.64 on Friday. Oh. In a petrol station where I went to the thing to fill up and an announcement came over the Tannoy and it was, woo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo. I had no idea what was being said. I mean, those Tannoy say useless. I went to the chapter. What was that? He said, our car machine isn't working. Can you pay in cash? And fortunately, I'm old-fashioned, so I could buy my petrol with cash. Did you already filled up by that? No, I hadn't, because he wasn't switching it on

26:36until I'd worked out what on earth. And how much did it... What is it you're driving around in these days? A Bentley. I wasn't Bentley, no. Anyway, fortunately, it's a reason why people should carry cash because sometimes things don't work, but cash is always there. You should go electric, Jacob. We should go electric. Go electric. Yes. Have an electric car. Yes. They're dreadful. Raw. I like that raw that car makes. But do you think, then, that the government can turn around and say, well, listen, inflation, once again, rampaging upwards isn't our fault. The straight of film moves, Donald Trump, Iran, Ridley, Gaza, blah. I mean, they probably can't, can't they? It's a very difficult conundrum for the Bank of England. I don't actually know what I would do if I were on the monetary policy committee, because the inflationary pressures are external. I outside the government's control. But those inflation pressures feed through to the domestic economy, unless you take steps to do it. I think the monetary policy committee should focus more on monetary policy

27:39and its monetary policy levers. And I think it is going to stop bond sales, which were tightening monetary policy in one direction. If you're loosening monetary policy by not selling bonds, you may need to tighten it a little bit on the interest rate level. On the other hand, the economy is pretty anemic. So you might squeeze out economic growth with an interest rate increase. I would be minded to give it a little bit more time. They've got another meeting in November, so a couple of months off. And then you could see whether the straight of film is reopened, whether the Saudi pipeline can be mended, whether the hoot is can be dealt with. The thing is, it's another reason it's extremely difficult, is that if just a few things go right, we are on the cusp of a collapse in the oil price. So if Iran comes to an end, and oil flows from there, the oil price comes down,

28:41it goes back probably to $60 a barrel. If Russia and Ukraine find some accommodation, then we get Russian oil on the stream again. And Venezuela is now potentially coming on the stream too, with its admittedly very heavy crude, which takes time to get the refining capacity up, but nonetheless is there. For those three come on, you could have the oil price down at $40 a barrel in your inflationary pressure gone, and that could all happen within a year. I know, but then does the shopflation come down? I think from a punters' point of view, we're speaking as a mother who occasionally takes the whole family out to the pub. You can just see the prices and how much they've risen just in the last year alone. So if you do the beef burger test, if you can get your child a adult's beef burger in a pub for less than 15 quid, you're doing well. Those prices are now closer to $18, 19, 20 in the southeast and certainly in London. You're then a public in facing all of the pressures that they're under. I think Kate Nichols of UK hospitality said 75% of anything we earn in hospitality

29:42goes back to the government anyway. People are looking at those prices and thinking, well, they're not just going to come down because the straight-of-horn moose is opened in the same way that I do my haribo test at the supermarket, haribo will have quid for a long, long time. Now they're 125. That's 25% of inflation, not 2%. I think that's right. I think inflation has been much harder than the official figures are showing. Everything like the haribo test is much more expensive. It's sort of thing where you don't notice that prices have changed and suddenly you look at something, you realize, oh my goodness, that's much more than it used to be. You must notice it taking the whole family out. Well, I try not to take the whole family out. Like fair or not. So I think that is a problem. And in hospitality, energy prices feed through to absolutely everything. Our green policies are madness and are making everything very expensive. The straight-of-horn moose is making it worse. But food is more expensive because fertiliser is more expensive. Distribution is more expensive.

30:43If energy prices come down, if we would use some of our own energy, if we would reverse the green madness, then we could see some strong economic growth and low inflation. The public is divided on how the government should approach balancing the budget. You gov asked what the priority for the government should be when balancing the books. Avoiding tax rises, avoiding spending cuts or avoiding borrowing too much. 29% of Brits say avoiding tax rises. Another 29% say avoiding cutting services. And 20% say avoiding borrowing too much. So Brits in Kekeneetit shock. I don't want the tax to go up, but I don't want the spending to go down either. Up to point, I took that. You see, there's 20% don't want borrowing to go up. 29% don't want taxes to go up. That's 49% who are against higher expenditure with only 29% who want to spend more money. But it's interesting how they've been asked. If the question had been loaded, would you like to see a return to austerity?

31:45This is the trouble, the toxification of government efficiencies, which was a great, true and genius move by the left to call it austerity. Not least, when you consider how much George was born pumped into, for instance, Andy Burnham's beloved north. Yes. The northern powerhouse, all those billions went in as far as the labor government are concerned through the entire time that the Tories are in charge, they were literally expecting people in the north to digest paving slabs. It's a quite impressive piece of politically, political chicaneery that, because any notion of any government cuts these days isn't presented as efficiency, isn't presented as balancing the books. It's presented as austerity and making the poor suffer. But all the telegraph readers know that the government wastes enormous amounts of money. There was a wonderful thing I saw that I may just check it. I get on my test. Sure. I got sent this this morning by the great Alistair Jack. Explain who Alistair Jack was.

32:47The Secretary of State for Scotland, and a very important political figure. And there is one civil servant in Debra or associated bodies for every five farmers. Wow. One for five. And the number of people employed by Debra has gone up from about 1500 to about 7,000. Why? Well, you have the nose. Then they don't do anything productive. Fire the lot of them, clays down Debra and tell farmers to get on with it. Have one person who says what the law is and otherwise just get on with it. I mean, it is madness. And everyone in this country knows it's a racket. One civil servant for every five farmers. That's insane. There's bonkers. And this is a racket as well. You know the one-in-one outdeal announced by the House of the British Obama. Exactly. So Mike Tapp, formerly of the Home Office, you know, immigration minister, and then he kind of got shuffled out because he disagreed with Mahmoud about aspects of policy.

33:47And by the way, I have a Sunday showdown with him. It's great fun, right versus left or whatever it is that Mike Tapp is. He's politically confused because he's in Dover. He's trying to be a socialist, but he's trying to be anti-immigration, which is a challenge for the poor chap. That's going out on Sunday, so do look out for it. But you're right. So deporting Channel migrants to France under the one-in-one out scheme has cost the taxpayer 56 grand per person returned. The Home Secretary told the Home Affairs Committee that this was the average cost for each of the 1,400 migrants returned to France since the scheme was launched last summer. 1,400 migrants returned to France. So it's ugly, trivial. Sorry to use the phrase, but it's a drop in the ocean, isn't it? Very good. Goodness me. A final thought. Two big meetings are taking place with some of your favorite figures. First of all, Andy Berner meeting Mark Carney. Now, do we blame the former bank of England, Governor, for any of our economic woes today? Because he was criticized heavily, wasn't he for massively quantitatively easing?

34:49Mark Carney was a disastrous government bank of England. Get off the fence, seriously. Yes, disastrous. He didn't understand monetary policy. And he printed money like that was no tomorrow. And he failed to begin the process of normalizing interest rates when the economy was doing quite well. So, quantum easing that was done to get through the global financial crisis of 2008 was a sensible thing to do, but it carried on too long. It went too far and it wasn't reversed. And that meant that when we got to COVID, and there was more quantum easing, there were no other instruments for the bank of England to use, because interest rates were still zero. So he was a failure as government bank of England on that ground. He also politicized the bank of England and discredited it by being the chair leader for George Osbonomics, that is to say, very anti-Brexit, which was not the business of the bank of England. Oh, yes, he was a key proponent of project fear. Oh, he was. Yes, he was one of the leading figures in project fear. Although he might be able to give our prime minister

35:50some advice on how to handle Trump, because Berne meets the Donald. I wouldn't take advice from Carney on how to handle Trump. Well, to be fair, Carney stood up to him somewhat, didn't he, with the whole Canada's the 51st state nonsense? Well, he one, Trump, probably won the election for Carney. So Carney is actually. Exactly. But Canada's had a difficult time and very high tariffs downposed by Donald Trump. Right. So I don't, and then... No, so, okay, good point. And Carney has just been snubbed by the European Union. He wanted to bring Canada into a claysetation with the European Union and... What was it with this guy? It's absolutely obsessed with Brussels. He loves Brussels. Why? Has he ever been to Brussels? I don't know. Anyway, that's what he wants to do. Poor old Canada. And Alberta may be thinking of leaving Canada, I didn't know if you've seen that. Yes, I have seen that. That's very interesting and probably lots do with the hostility towards Carney. So now I wouldn't take advice from him. Oddly, whisper it quietly. The person I take advice from on handling Donald Trump

36:52is the carestarma. Carestarma? He did it quite well. Yeah, but do we think carestarma and Andy Burnham are in touch right now? Carestarma... Doesn't cost much to keep in touch, international, direct,iling. No, but carestarma right now, polishing up his CV, maybe putting it through some kind of Claude system, AI-ing it up. Oh, how I might be a good fit for the next leader of NATO. We know he's doing that. He's not phoning eyelash McGraw, is he? Giving him his advice. I wouldn't have thought Mr Burnham would want to care his advice. But he might need it. Why? Do you think Starmer was good at handling... I might let me say that again. Do you think Starmer genuinely was good at managing the Donald? He was all around picking up his paperwork and looking a little bit like... I was going to say his... But he don't like such language. Um, he didn't... do it as badly as most people did. He managed to get some pretty good terms for Britain. He did the Royal visits, which were incredibly popular with Trump made Trump think, well, of Britain. From as you need to keep on doing it, we basically need the King to go out to be his own

37:55ambassador to the United States and keep him present. United States friendly, because as soon as he gets when he lasts for the King relations deteriorate again. But what do we think the US president is going to be making of the UK Prime Minister? They're meeting, by the way, in New York, because they're going to the United Nations General Assembly. That's on Tuesday, one to watch. Not really. I mean, I can't understand why the Prime Minister is going off to the General Assembly. Why? But what's the point? I don't know. I mean, it sounds like a really big importance on it. Why? The United Nations useless organisation. The G7 is quite important, because you talk to people who matter. But the United Nations is a waste of space. And we have to have it, but it's a waste of space. I think Prime Minister has gone abroad far, far too much. They need a bit of home running the country. Starma was a way far too much. It did a lot of damage. Well, it got damaged domestically, but it's now lined up for a plum job somewhere on the world stage. But I'm interested in the country, not as harmless in climates as to it. Me too, but you can see it from Starma's perspective, can't you? I mean, he was basically greasing the diplomatic wheels.

38:56No, but he would much rather have remained prime minister than get an international job. I don't know. He once said he preferred Davos to Westernistan. Oh, he did indeed. Both silly things to have said. Trump has said about Vernon. I've spoken to him. I think he's a really nice guy. He tends to be on the liberal side. Unfortunately, that's priceless. Yes. Trump is marvellous in his way, but he will not... He won't be consistent in his view of Vernon. He's not consistent in his view of anybody. Mm. Vernon's not even consistent in his view of Vernon to be fair. But Trump will do what's in the interest of America, not what's in the interest of the United Kingdom. We should never forget that in a special relationship. It doesn't matter who the president is. They put America first. And we need prime ministers who put the United Kingdom first. We don't always help them. We will be back with more Witten Wisdom together tomorrow, 5pm. Outdated technology isn't going to improve a disconnected healthcare system.

40:15Next. So what will? At Optum, we wake up every day and work for better. We call it Healthy Optimism. That's how we use insights and technology to help providers focus less on paperwork and more on patients. Will we fix it all overnight? No. But we'll wake up trying again and again until healthcare works as one for everyone. That's Healthy Optimism. Learn more at Optum.com. Optum. You just got back to your Toyota truck and you can't feel your fingers. You've been out here for 13 days. Now, 16, 15, you've lost track. You're eating something you wouldn't dare look in the eyes while taking directions from a phone that ran out of signal miles ago. Every bone and muscle in your body has filed a formal complaint. And the only gas you've got left is in the tank of your truck. But you know what? You're the happiest you've been in years. Toyota trucks outlast outlive.