Trump’s ‘bribe’, Miliband’s sanctions, Met investigates Reform – Weekly Wrap-Up with Rafael Behr and Zoë Grünewald

0:00Support comes from wise, the smart way to manage the currencies you need around the world. Your life is global, your money should be too. Some providers promise no fees on overseas transfers. Don't be fooled. Extra costs often hide in bloated exchange rates. Choose wise. You can send, spend and receive money in over 40 currencies. Count on the exchange rates that you'd usually see on Google. That's how millions save billions on hidden fees. Be smart, get wise, visit wise.com, season C's apply. Hello and welcome back to the weekly wrap up from the bunker I'm Zoe Grunovald. Every Friday we recap the biggest stories, the weirdest stories and the news that's gone under the radar over the last week with some of your favourite bunker personalities and maybe even some panellists from O'God what now. But before we introduce them, today marks the 25th

1:02anniversary since 9-11 changed the world forever. Our new three-part series, Terror Century, is out now and traces the legacy of the attacks from the war on terror and the erosion of civil liberties to the political forces that ultimately helped elect Trump. Link in the show notes. But what about the weekly wrap up? Well today we're joined by Guardian Colomis and leader writer Rafael Bear. Hello, Raf, how are you? I'm pretty well under the circumstances. Hello, Zoe. I know it's been a busy week. Before we get into the various litany of terrible things that have happened over the past week, let's talk about the strangest story you've seen. Well the thing that caught my eye and probably would have also caught my nose if I'd been near it was the enormous football field sized heap of rubbish that has been festering in Oxfordshire near Kilimanster. Actually since about November of last year, so it's not a new story, but the new element of it. It's two more people have been arrested for flight-tipping, dumping stuff. You've got to presume they didn't do all of it. I mean this thing is sort of 23 tons of trash

2:03and 10 meters high. I mean 10 meters high. That's like you wouldn't jump off a 10 meter diving board without at least some trepidation. And so apart from just being gross, it is sort of baffling. I think the weird part of this is you just think how did this go on so long? And that again, I mean it does give you some insight, I think, into the reasons why our politics is so messed up. Because presumably if you live anywhere near this thing, you are thinking why is no one doing anything about this? Why is local government doing nothing about this? Why is the environment agency doing anything about this? It seems to me slightly emblematic, microcosmic of things that make people feel this country just doesn't work. Apparently the area was larger than a pitch at Wembley Stadium and took more than five months and six million pounds to clean up. I mean when we're talking about flight-tipping, this is kind of beyond the realms of what we understand as flight-tipping, right? Yes, it's not shocking to pack your empty cigarette packet out of the window as you drive down the

3:04A34. Or you'd have to like drive up and down the A34 to lots of times to fill up an entire Wembley Stadium. And also, I mean the money, that's kind of presumably the entire so-called council budget for that and lots of other things, but yeah, there is pretty grim when you think about it. Okay, onto the lead story of the week. Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband outlined his trade ban on Israeli West Bank settlements, marking a historic policy shift. Miliband told the commons this week that Jewish settler terrorists were guilty of ethnic cleansing and occupied Palestinian territory. And as a result over the next six to nine months, he says the UK will introduce a new comprehensive sanctions regime. Raf, take us through this. What's actually going on here? Well, what's going on in the West Bank is that the these settlements have been there for many years. They are illegal under international law, but this is not new. The UK government's position on this has always been that it doesn't like them, but that it doesn't want to

4:09impose any particular sanctions because the legal situation has in theory been complicated, distinguishing between economic activity and settlements and in the rest of Israel. And the UK government has changed that line. And Ed Miliband has pushed the line very substantially forward in terms of saying, no, we will sanction businesses that contribute to the construction of these settlements. There will be an import ban on things coming out of the settlement. There's a adjustment to arms licenses, which I mean, it gets a bit complicated here, but essentially there will also be personal sanctions, I should say, for individuals who promote settler violence. I mean, some of this stuff you want to get into the details of how it's actually going to be implemented, but as a broad shift of the UK's stance towards what has been happening on the West Bank, this is a very dramatic dialing up of diplomatic pressure on the Israeli government to signal very clearly that UK things, this is illegal, it shouldn't be happening,

5:13and there are consequences for doing it. So it's big. Obviously, we've got a new prime minister. We've got a new foreign secretary. Is that the reason why there is this stark tone shift? Is it just new personnel or is there something else going on here? Yeah, very obviously. Yes, this is the changes because there's been change of government, I think the conservatives wouldn't have done this. They didn't do this. What Ed Miliband's team say about the timing and what was said in the House of Commons is that the current Israeli government has dialed up ramped up the settlement building very dramatically compared to everything that happened before. There is in particular a large project of expansion, it gets a bit technical, but in the zone called E1, which would effectively separate cut off East Jerusalem from other bits of the Palestinian Authority, and the point that Ed Miliband makes is that this would essentially undermine any feasible viability of a two-state solution, and therefore if what you

6:16really want, even if you know, people who broadly support Israel in some respects and many respects would say they want a two-state solution, the fact that these settlements are changing facts on the ground so dramatically and so aggressively because of the behavior of a lot of the settlers who are militants, terrorists, depending on what term you want to use, and interventions required to just stop that happening somehow. What skeptics would say in response to that is, well, you might have waited until the outcome of Israeli elections, which are coming in October, this seems to be very politically motivated, and is the timing perhaps not unconnected to the fact that you've got a Labour Party conference coming up, you've got a bi-election in Kistarm, a Zold-Seat, Holmonson, Pancras, where the Greens are a bit of a threat, and are you not perhaps Ed Miliband actually also addressing a domestic political problem, which is that Labour's position

7:19on Gaza, on Palestine, on Israel, has alienated a lot of people, and politically the government wants to show that it's switched on that. And obviously both of these things can be true. It can be true that it's from a foreign policy point of view because of the behavior of the Israeli government, it's a rational shift, and also that the other Labour leadership is not going to be unaware of the domestic political implications of this. And obviously the decisions caused quite a lot of backlash internationally, obviously with Israel and its allies, including the US. What's been said there? Well, the US reaction has been quite interesting. I mean, so we're starting with Israel, predictably the Israeli government is very angry about this, that's no surprise, there has been this some, I would say actually, relatively to sort of measured but clear retaliation, so the UK consulate in East Jerusalem has been closed, the UK participation in a program to train Palestinian authority forces has been curtailed 12 Labour MPs from the left of the party,

8:20been banned from entering Israel. These are not small things, but they are still in the realm of diplomatic gestures largely. The US ambassador to Israel has spoken out very firmly, he says the UK government Labour party is consumed by Jew hate, I think, were his words, and he said there will be sanctions, repercussions, retaliations. Now, first of all, that's Mike Huckabee, he's a pretty fanatical guy anyway, he's also the ambassador in Israel, so he comes at it from a particular angle. The US administration, a Trump administration actually has been a little bit more circumspects, and that's quite interesting. So Marco Rubio, Secretary of State, he said, we're not going to do what the UK has done, and I think I've got the quote, he said, obviously we're not going to do what the UK did. We saw their announcements today, but I don't have any comments on it right now, that was his first response. And Trump similarly has said, well, that's kind of interesting, bit fruity, but whatever they could move on. And the reality is, from Donald Trump's point of

9:25view, he doesn't really want to get into this right now, I very much doubt that the UK foreign office would have just completely landed this blindsided the entire US administration with this stuff. Notably, France and Canada have rode in behind it, and they're also doing similar measures. So actually, although I think Labour's opponents in domestic politics on the right, Tories would like to say, this is a diplomatic outrage of squandering the UK's reputation, you're annoying, that doesn't appear to be actually true. And certainly from Trump, Trump's relationship with Netanyahu hasn't been brilliant since he kind of got a little bit, he didn't get entirely so bamboozled into starting the war in Iran by Netanyahu, he wanted to start the war and he accepted Netanyahu's arguments, it would be a brilliant idea and it would work, but it wasn't, it didn't. So I think he's probably pretty frustrated with Netanyahu. And so the diplomacy of this is a little bit more subtle and complicated than I think Mille van's critics

10:26on the right like to make out. And of course, even news junkies like us, Mr. Storiotto, what do you think has gone under the radar this week? Well, I'm always fascinated, slash appalled by developments in the world of AI and it seems to happen so thick and fast that you can miss the subtle tease, but there's quite an important one in the, in the Geopolitics or which is that anthropic, one of the big AI companies behind Claude appear to have with hell's their latest model, Mythos 5.1 from the UK's AI Safety Institute. Now the Safety Institute, it's actually something probably the kind of one thing that Rishi Sunak's time in government will be remembered for as an actual achievement legacy maybe, but anyway the AI Safety Institute they did it it works it seems to be a good thing. It's actually quite well leading people

11:27respect it, but it's based in the UK and what appears to have happened is that the Trump administration things well, AI is geopolitically for us and why on earth would that go to some stupid European country we don't trust them we don't like them. We regulate and deal with the stuff entirely on their own terms. And that is worrying in all sorts of ways is worrying for the integrity of the AI Institute, the Safety Institute if you wanted to really set the template for global AI regulation it's worrying if it means that the Americans basically don't care about AI safety and AI regulation and it's worrying because it means we don't really know what Mythos 5.1 might be capable of and there's a lot of evidence that these models are capable of doing some pretty scary stuff. One of anthropics top safety researchers Evan Huber I think it is says he believes as a 10% chance AI could kill all humans by 2030. This isn't the first of such similar warnings we've had from people who worked in artificial intelligence or people who look at it

12:30and try and regulate it for a living. Do you get a sense that some of this is a bit of a PR move? You know some of them want regulation for some reason others don't. Is this a web drawing attention to it and asking for businesses or the government or whatever to take it more seriously? This is a really interesting question so yeah I think this is and no one seems to be entirely clear there's a few threads going on here I mean anthropic also has an IPO coming up and a lot of these AI companies they're raising money they're very very deep in debt and they seem to be experiencing this tension between wanting everyone to realize that they're at the frontier they're totally transforming humanity literally the world economy or some of the US economy depends on their success and they can do awesome stuff so actually if you say oh my god we can do some crazy stuff that actually boosts the valuation a little bit because it means they're leading the world but as you say you also have people behind the scenes going yeah but you're awesome stuff my killer for one so maybe that's not so awesome and it has been suggested that sometimes the companies themselves

13:33ramp up the anxiety kind of as a way of saying but it's cool as well you know in a perverse sort of way I'm quite persuaded by the arguments from people you know in Silicon Valley and others you say that's really not what's going on they are genuinely scared and they they do want regulation but they feel trapped in a number of ways they feel trapped because from a geopolitical point of view there's the sense that the Chinese are doing this stuff as well and if the US goes well let's say everyone's low down with a moratorium do we really want to do this now at this pace all that happens is trying to beat the US in the race to AI and that makes people very uncomfortable and also it's a private sector business everyone as I say piling up debt they're in competition if you imagine there were 10 private sector Manhattan projects all working in different bits of the desert in the 1940s would the nuclear weapons profile of the world now be better or worse I'm going to say it would be much worse and they probably

14:34had a lot more nuclear accidents and probably a lot more nuclear weapons around so my reading of it I don't know these people personally is that the top people at the AI companies are genuinely torn between thinking this is cool we're ahead we're at the front line of humanity we're basically leading the space rates of the 21st century and thinking someone please stop us without of control support comes from wise the smart way to manage the currencies you need around the world your life is global your money should be too some providers promise no fees on overseas transfers don't be fooled extra costs often hide and bloated exchange rates choose wise you can send spend and receive money in over 40 currencies count on the exchange rates that you'd usually see on Google that's how millions save billions on hidden fees be smart get wise visit wise calm season sees apply

15:40in other news it's been just over a week since channel four aired its bombshell investigation which saw reform splurged £32,500 on opinion polls using overseas money and mooted 500,000 from fake foreign donor ex head of policy james awe and senior a dan jukes both stood down and the electoral commission said it was in touch with the police now the metropolitan police have launched a criminal investigation into claims that reform breached party donation rules raf we've talked a lot about the latest donation scandals since the sting ed but what is the latest on this well all we really know as far as i can tell is that the police have picked it up there it was referred to them obviously when the documentals air they've looked at it and said yeah this looks like there might be a case to answer and they'll they'll take the the channel for footage it's significant in a couple of ways i mean first of all it's worth saying this stuff is hard to prosecute really don't get convictions generally i mean all of the the policing of democracy

16:47whether it's in donations or other types of fraud whatever it is it's just something that please a really reluctance get involved in and so it is quite remarkable that this was this looked on the surface of it and obviously reformed deny everything and say that they've been fitted up or that they were in court entrapment so however they they phrase it you know with those caveats aside on the face of it it looks really bad and everyone who's watched the documentary will see those senior reform people proactively it appears suggesting ways that you could circumvent the laws on donations and so i don't think i mean it would have been a bit weird in that context if the police had said well that's fine isn't it i mean love this just a bit yeah it's such as a rough and tumble of politics and but we don't know yeah there's no one's been arrested we don't know what what how where that goes from here but it does also mean it's just going to be in the news for longer the smell around forage gets stronger and although he can probably get fair amount of traction

17:52from with his core supporters saying well this just proves even more that the establishment is trying to get us i think that that very crucial bit of the electorate that is kind of a likes roughly the sort of culturey vibes of what reforms has about things like immigration and then you know the the sort of the tone of forage is policy message but think he might just be a bit of a spiv and a bit dodgy those people are now available to the Tories again and that actually changes the calculus of British politics quite a lot yeah i mean there's an interesting question here isn't that because of course the head of policy james all went dan jukes went a lot of people weren't really have heard of dan jukes or james or but everyone's heard of niger frarge in many ways niger frarge is the reform party there are now suggestions and rumours that maybe reform could be looking at succession plan you know is frarge about to step down this has been doing the rounds for some time ever since we started talking about money around reform uk but i guess my question to you would be does reform exist can it exist without niger frarge at the head yeah that's also

18:57really interesting question and i think a couple of years ago i might have said no you know he was mr. brexit he built up uk he turned into the brexit party and then you know when he stepped back and and Richard Tyson was running reform i mean they were negligible but if you go back to that July 2024 election the difference between that election before niger frarge said oh go on then i'll throw my hat in the ring entirely unrelated to the five million pounds by the way that he got from a crypto billionaire but that says another whole story anyway but the difference here before he got involved and after the did turn the election upside down or they didn't tell upside down that labor was still going to win but it it transformed the dynamics of the election now is that still the case now it's changed a bit because first of all frarge has now got this this threat even further to his right he's also drawn in a lot of Tory defectors

19:59and you know if there are people there's a nameless sources saying oh well frarge he's looking a bit tired maybe he's fed up you know maybe actually it's time for another generation to come on and there are people who are experienced in conservative party politics who have leadership ambitions who aren't afraid to wield the knife and generally mashing it in that way but now they are on the front bench of the reform party you know i would be looking in that direction some of these for the origin of some of this chatter frankly i mean i'm talking about Robert Generic obviously like this is someone who yeah he wanted to leave the conservative party he lost out to kamey bade not he was apparently incredibly bitter and upset and disappointed about that he slightly botched his jump to reform because he got bounced into it a little bit if he wants to because there's a weird story about his resignation statement being left on a photocopier so yeah there's a lesson in competence for for Generic you know would he now like to be leads something else i mean you know you've got to assume that he would at least

21:04fancy his chances but that there means you know then you've also got the plenty of people in reform who think they shouldn't have taken all these Tories they think that's contaminating the brand it's a vipers nest and so yeah i think that there is space in British politics obviously like there's for a 20% very radical some would say far right political party would it does it have to have Nigel Frost leasing it maybe not okay well while we're on the topic of the far right this week hundreds of balaclava clad anti migrant protesters in a vertical bus descended on over this weekend blocking roads around Britain's busiest port and trapping families in their cars all in the name of patriotism a day later violent clashes broke up between the far right thugs and police imports myth after a small boat arrived carrying 140 migrants and on Tuesday a mob lured in by online misinformation confronted a bus they believed was carrying migrants it was in fact the under 19 pakostani cricket team raff how do you see these things as being linked who's behind them

22:06well it's interesting is that the police have said of the so the incense and in hampershire as well the process that these were spontaneous at least they originally said this but there's no chance that these were spontaneous they were clearly organized and i think the police have subsequently recognized that and understood that there was a failure of intelligence on this there was even a warning with regards to the dover one which basically been ignored and it does seem that actually what we are seeing now is a step up in the sort of quazai militaristic far right mob organization where you know these people they they they communicate through online channels they all wear the same clothes as you say they they they dress in their black balaclava's and they turn up in lorries but also is what's interesting is they seem quite well briefed in how not to provoke the police into arresting them and not to break the law and they know their

23:08rights to know how to be disruptive without breaking the law so egregiously you end up getting arrested or provoking a riot it is a skill and these people do seem to at least be acquiring that skill which is very worrying in terms of what's behind it that i mean i don't know i the name that has been used a lot that i think will be new to a lot of people is this guy Daniel Thomas Danny Tomo who is a former associate of Stephen Yakiehlin which is the actual name of Tommy Robinson the well-known far right agitator now this guy Daniel Thomas he runs something called patrotic platform which is it's an organizing online arena for for extreme far right agitation he's also it has to be said he's also served time in jail for the for attempting to kidnap someone at knife points so he's obviously not a not a nice man at all he did the in jail he had a conversion to

24:10evangelical Christianity he or he must have missed the whole bit about charity and and the good Samaritan and turning the other cheek but maybe that he's obviously an accolade of a different flavor of Christianity but anyway so to get to your question my reading of this and what i've understood and it seems to police are very slow to recognize this is that yes some people have understood that there is a vacancy even further to the right of organized politics and slightly unruly mob politics into a kind of as i say a pseudo paramilitary far right politics and that we should be pretty worried about so Andy Burnham denounced what he called the politics of poison johnson Reynolds denounced intimidating protesters he said they were dressed in costumes which i thought was an interesting way of describing them what's been your read on how government officials have condemned these attacks the policing minister sera jones was

25:13on her feet in their commons and she was condemning them definitely but there was also quite a lot of well there was quite a lot of legitimate concerns banded around and you know quite a lot of referring to how the government is doing its best to bring down small boat arrivals do you think there's a thin line here that the government is trying to tread do you think they're getting it right i think they kind of got there eventually so and that i think is very revealing as you say that the the first instincts when it sort of happens over the weekend and quite quickly the message you're getting from government was uh well but we are stopping the boats and you know as you say that the sort of if if you notice actually we're doing something about this but there are legitimate concerns we're dealing with those uh and then you know as it became clearer or what the character of this stuff actually is there seems to be a dialing up you know i'm saying this is unacceptable

26:14even so as you say you know it's not that thin a line you know really you want to just be able to say you know obstruct the criminal offenses appear to have been committed just in terms of you know it's always been against the law to just block a major piece of infrastructure it's relatively recently it became against law to cover your face in those sorts of circumstances whether it's an organised official protest or not so there were all sorts of ways in which authorities could have said yeah what these people are doing is just wrong and we're moving them on and then all allowed to do this and then also for politicians to say oh by the way there is a political process for addressing the whole question of asylum immigration all that stuff and what these people are doing and nothing to do with that these are violent thugs and we're against them and they that fundamental ability to summon not just a policy distinction but a sense of moral urgency about you know what is what is involved when people you know dressing you can call it costumes

27:17maybe they did that deliberately to make these people look silly and I can see that there might be an advantage to say that these people are there just they should just grow up but actually those are frightening scenes yeah and I think they're actually it's it's to try and address it by belittling it you don't want to aggrandize these people at Flattestermay it's it's a hard call but I think actually a sense of ethical compulsion to say in a democracy we really do not allow this sort of stuff and no one should in terms that make sure that also you know you're literally opposition and in fact night of fresh also have to say oh yes by the way we are not on the side of violent thugs that that it shouldn't be that hard support comes from wise the smart way to manage the currencies you need around the world your life is global your money should be too some providers promise no fees on overseas transfers don't be fooled extra costs often hide and bloated exchange rates choose wise you can send

28:22spend and receive money in over 40 currencies count on the exchange rates that you'd usually see on google that's how millions save billions on hidden fees be smart get wise visit wise.com season C's apply during his inaugural speech on Wednesday Trump pledged to offer each of America's 270 million adults $5,000 if Republicans could click on to their razor thin majorities in the House and Senate costing the US government $1.3 trillion. Raff some pundits have accused Trump of bribery over his promise of these cash payments do you think this is pretty close to the line in terms of it being illegal or do you think there's a there's a way of framing this I'm not a lawyer so I don't know it doesn't feel right they doesn't self-evidently it's Donald Trump and he doesn't care about protocols rules norms laws self-evidently the the message

29:25generally that is being communicated is vote Republican win $5,000 right that that that's that's the campaign pledge now if you frame it as a campaign pledge and say it'll be some kind of cost of living a swagements in there are all sorts of ways you could describe it as a policy commitment that isn't just a flat out bribe but you know obviously it is desperate obviously it is it is a direct inducement to get people who might not vote Republicans otherwise very Republican now I guess I say I'm not a lawyer I don't know who I mean it doesn't matter because the American equivalent of the plot it's not going to go around to the White House and go that's a criminal inducement you're not allowed to do that so you can say whatever the hell he wants sadly the interesting thing is whether well there are many interesting things about this but one of them is whether Trump's basic judgment here which is that if I made this all about me that helps the Republicans yeah it's that true I mean a lot of the evidence suggests not I mean

30:27a lot of the Republicans would say no that's literally the worst that you can do if you could just go and hold it for the next two months we might actually stand a better chance of at least holding on to our majority in the Senate I think most people think that the the House has gone will flip Democrat I mean I don't want to jinx these things and the American polling has been quite flaky recently but you'd certainly expect it would be very very bad night for Democrats in November if they don't flip the House and actually they could even get the Senate if you look at the polling it's quite interesting his approval ratings have tanked with the ongoing war in Iran and reigniting a trade war with Canada is the admittedly unusual convention just a desperate move from Trump and the RNC or is there some logic to it I don't think there's much logic to it you honest I think it is it is desperate and it is a sign that the Republicans they can't control Trump and he has made slightly lost his populist touch I mean being an unpopular populist is not a good place to be and he will never admit that personally I just observing him I'm again I'm not

31:33a doctor even less than I'm not a lawyer but I think he's the cognitive slowdown or decline it looks pretty pronounced and he goes on about his ballroom and things that literally no one cares about apart from him and also making the horribly out of touch the way when when asked about the the cost of living stuff he he seems to think that the best message he can give out is it's not a real thing shut up you're imagining it which is you know always famously politically it's terrible message to send out to people everyone who's looked at the Iran war for more than half a second and consumes media that aren't exclusively Fox News and even some on Fox News recognize there's a strategic calamity for the US you know it's driven up oil prices people you know what people pay at the gas pump is famously an indicator of how pissed off they are with their rulers in the US so yeah I think it looks like a weird bad judgment by Trump to think that somehow he can just

32:34turn on the old magic and it will happen I mean who the hell knows but but my sense is yeah he's he's lost it okay we're coming towards the end of our show which means it's time to talk about our winners and losers of the week so Raf Hill is your loser first sticking with the theme of far right politicians who are quite obnoxious this time in a different country I'm going to go with Jorgon Mandela he's the young president of Hassan Boulin National the French far right party and he turned up he's only 30 years old this guy's kid child and he he turned up at reforms conference last week very theatrically lending support to Nigel Farage and they signed a memorandum of understanding it was called a deal it's been called under which Baudela agreed to essentially take the the asylum seekers failed asylum seekers they would be that the UK would send back to France

33:35if they tried to cross the channel but you know in the event that both Farage is Prime Minister and about Ella is Prime Minister because he would be the Prime Minister in a French government run by Marine Le Pen also the leader of Hassan Boulin National if she wins the presidency next year now so that's why Alusa well because it seems to backfired pretty badly on Baudela because obviously he goes back to France and literally everyone seems to have said you've done wars you've just agreed to take a load of something for Britain like who started you even on here and like why are you suddenly being as lucky to Le Horsespeef I mean this is insane so yeah I mean I'd slightly struggled to work out what he thought he was doing yeah I mean there's a sort of a 3D chess version I think where he thinks well if you boost Farage it makes Farage more likely to win that shows this momentum and actually you know wouldn't be helpful if we win either the Alusa and I've become Prime Minister next year and then yeah that Farage becomes Prime Minister then there's a brave new future

34:35nationalist in across Europe all over I don't know but it looks like a massive own goal for Baudela is this interesting thing about the nationalist right across Europe which is that you kind of have to be on your own because as soon as you start co-sing up with other parties across the world it kind of undermines your point slightly you know that inward nationalism doesn't look so inward yeah nationalist is going to national right I mean ultimately the point is your interests are by decree of your your creed uh parochial and you don't like your neighbors so much and you define yourself against each other and particularly when it's France and Britain I mean yeah I did that like you have a Baudela you know government Baudela the pen government in France and Farage in UK and what they can agree on fishing quotas because that's easy you know all this stuff is madness there there's just complete fantasy and and you know that that's what gives me some hope that this is a far right capture of Europe for store okay and who's your winner so last week a new book was published by an up and coming rising star of British politics

35:41one James Gordon Brown okay so he's kind of risen and then Sankie again think I heard of him yeah I remember him you remember the guy and but like a Gordon Brown it's got a book out it's called the future starts with us and it's it's an optimistic tome it's it's a little bit chewy in places uh as you would expect from a Gordon Brown book but it's basically about re-weaving the social fabric what's gone wrong how you can actually organize and how politics can change itself to see off the populist and far right threat and I don't know if it's going to be best seller I don't know if it's going to change anything but I know we've had some really tough prime ministers recently and we've had some really tough ex prime ministers recently I mean I list trust David Cameron Boris Johnson what he's people doing not helping are they frankly in Tony Blair I mean he says some interesting things but hopefully he also says some really unhelpful things it's a mixed bag at best uh we did jury still out on what Kirsta almost going to do but yeah ultimately Gordon Brown

36:45is someone who has seem to have committed himself to thinking hard about difficult questions and demonstrating a commitment to public service and integrity and he's a serious thoughtful person and that's a good thing so go Gordon go Gordon Raff thanks for joining me in the bunker today it's been a pleasure and thank you for listening everything we do is down to your generous support if you haven't already and would like to support what we do you can back us on Patreon for early out free episodes among other goodies by following the link in the show notes and if you can't back us we understand but please go rate review and subscribe it's free and it makes a massive difference plus make sure you tune into the bunkers three part mini series terror century I'm Zoe Grunovold this has been the bunker and we'll be back next week for start your week weekly wrap up with the bunker was written and presented by Zoe Grunovold with Raphael Bear the producer was James Lidell with video production by Simon Williams music was by Kenny Dickinson art was by James

37:50Parrot the group editor was Andrew Harrison and the managing editor was Jacob Jartis the bunker is a pod masters production you support comes from wise the smart way to manage the currencies you need around the world your life is global your money should be two some providers promise no fees on overseas transfers don't be fooled extra costs often hide and bloated exchange rates choose wise you can send spend and receive money in over 40 currencies count on the exchange rates that you'd usually see on Google that's how millions save billions on hidden fees be smart get wise visit wise dot com season sees apply