Donald Trump has left the world reeling with a plan to turn Gaza into *checks notes* “the Riviera of the Middle East”. He vowed that the US will “take over” and “own” the Gaza strip, effectively endorsing the ethnic cleansing of 1.8 million Palestinians who would have “no alternative” but to leave. With rumours circling that his inner-circle are calling him an “HR manager” rather than a leader, in classic style, Keir Starmer has pushed back but avoided directly criticising Trump.News Agents co-host Lewis Goodall joins Nish and Coco to discuss this latest tidal wave of horror and whether Starmer has it in him to stand for something.On a more hopeful note, the decision to greenlight the giant new Rosebank oilfield off Shetland has been ruled unlawful by the courts. At the forefront of the fight has been Uplift Director Tessa Khan, who calls in to celebrate this major win for climate action and let us know how we can stop this oilfield for good.Later, Coco sinks her teeth into our household waste, after Green-led Bristol Council unleashes the wrath of local residents. CHECK OUT THESE DEALS FROM OUR SPONSORS Shopify: https://www.shopify.co.uk/podsavetheukAura Frames: https://www.auraframes.com Code: PSTUK Useful LinksGet involved with the Stop Rosebank Campaignhttps://www.stopcambo.org.uk/https://www.parliament.uk/get-involved/contact-an-mp-or-lord/contact-your-mp/GuestsLewis GoodallTessa KhanAudio CreditsThe GuardianPod Save the UK is a Reduced Listening production for Crooked Media.Contact us via email: [email protected]: https://instagram.com/podsavetheukTwitter: https://twitter.com/podsavetheukTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@podsavetheukFacebook: https://facebook.com/podsavetheukYoutube: https://www.youtube.com/@PodSavetheUK
Hi, this is Pod Save the UK. I'm Coco Kahn.
And I'm Nish Kumar. Once again, we can't escape Trump. The president has unleashed a tidal wave of incredulity around the world from backflips on tariffs to Elon Musk's interventions in the apparatus of American government. And just this morning, as we record, announcing a completely insane plan to take over the Gaza Strip.
Absolutely insane, incoherent and obviously terrifying. You know, in my naivety, I woke up really early this morning before the news was circulating and thought to myself, oh great, on today's episode we can talk about the Grammys or something nice like that. Do you know what I mean? I was like, oh, there seems to be a natural pause in the devastating, horrifying news.
No, there's no pause. There's not even time for us to make fun of Drake. That's how serious the situation is. To discuss these waves of chaos and, back in the UK, the salacious allegations that his inner circle describe Keir Starmer as an HR manager, we'll be joined by a very special guest, the newsagent Lewis Goodall.
Let's start on this Gaza news. Here's President Trump announcing his plans. We'll understand if you skip the next 30 seconds if you can't stand the sound of him.
The U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip, and we will do a job with it, too. We'll own it and be responsible for dismantling all of the dangerous unexploded bombs and other weapons on the site, level the site and get rid of the destroyed buildings, level it out, create an economic development that will supply unlimited numbers of jobs and housing for the people of the area.
That's Trump announcing his plans for Gaza in a press conference alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Just to summarise some of the other headlines coming out of these announcements, Trump said that the Palestinians would have no alternative but to leave Gaza. The US would own and develop the Gaza Strip.
He's called Gaza a symbol of death and destruction and that the only reason people would want to live there is because they have nowhere else to go. And he spoke about it in chillingly cold terms. He spoke about it as the real estate developer he always has been and said that he envisions Gaza as a Riviera of the Middle East.
Thank you.
So in terms of what this means for the Palestinian people, he suggests that the 1.8 million Palestinians living in Gaza should move to neighbouring countries with humanitarian hearts. So this is ethnic cleansing. This is, you know, the use of violence and force and intimidation to essentially drive a community of people out of their homes.
If you watch that footage of Trump giving the press conference, Netanyahu is stood next to him on a lectern and it's sort of nodding approvingly throughout. What you're seeing really is the realisation of Netanyahu's ambitions for Gaza, which is effectively to drive the Palestinians out of their homeland and make it a part of Israel.
This is why Netanyahu has been so open in his support for Donald Trump, because he knew that Trump would open the door for exactly this happening. But if international law is to mean anything anymore, then the international community has to stand strongly and the United Nations has to stand strongly against this plan because it is ethnic cleansing.
And I know that there are people who are going to accuse me of naivety for even asking questions like this, but this is a defining moment in the history of these institutions. And if they are unable to enforce the laws that they themselves have laid down, then there's simply no point in them continuing to exist.
I'm sort of slightly lost for words to articulate how significant this feels at the moment.
Of course, these institutions are deeply, deeply problematic, but do we want to do away with them entirely, i.e. they don't exist, we don't have anything like that, or do we want to improve them so that they are more fair? That point about naivety, I feel that as well.
I was thinking about Donald Trump, as I do every minute of the day, but I was thinking about how he's so naked in his ambition and the way that he speaks, and he kind of reveals the problems with the machine, right? Yeah. Actually, all along, it's just been about money and power and who has the biggest guns. All along, it's been might is right, investors interested, all along.
But this time, he's not keeping it quiet. He's proud of it and he's showing it. And there's something about this as well in this situation where I just was thinking to myself, well, I suppose if it has felt like in a way that we're all in this... through the looking glass when we talk about Gaza and that Israel's response has been, I don't know, proportional or something ludicrous like that.
People are still saying this thing. And if you follow that to the nth degree, if you take that logic where we're just going to completely forget all of the history, all of the occupation, we're just going to only think about the last however months long it's been. Well, obviously, this is going to be the logical conclusion, isn't it?
This is the logical conclusion of like dehumanising Palestinians, them not having a voice, of the only thing that matters is Israeli security and about ultimately securing a kind of Western presence in the Middle East.
The Turkish foreign minister has described Trump's Gaza plan as unacceptable. And Hamas has said that the Trump plan will pour oil on the fire. From a British perspective, our foreign secretary, David Lamy, was at a press conference this morning with his Ukrainian counterpart. And he said that we have always been clear in our belief that we must see two states.
We must see Palestinians live and prosper in their homelands, in Gaza and the West Bank. I'm pleased to hear the unambiguous language from Lamy in that moment. If they stand aside and allow this to happen, then where is their moral authority to criticize Vladimir Putin? Really, I'm asking genuinely.
I don't see how we can continue to maintain this kind of strong line on Putin whilst also allowing Trump and Netanyahu essentially to run right in the Middle East.
Yeah, even just listening to Trump earlier then when he talked about, like, we will own it. So I'm like, OK, so we're going to go from an Israeli occupation to an American occupation? Like, he went from crony capitalist to crony imperialist in, what, two weeks? Something like that? I'm still processing it and I still feel... like angry and shocked and confused.
And there's a part of me, a negative part of me that's like, well, what did you expect, Coco? What did you expect was going to happen? Did you really think that this relationship between Trump and Netanyahu, which has been signposted for a long time, was going to come out?
You know, ever since he, while Barack Obama was still president of America and Netanyahu didn't meet with him and instead met with Trump when Trump was a candidate for the 2016 election.
You know that phrase, when someone shows you who they are, believe them. I mean, these people have been showing us who they are for such a long time. And there's a part of me that thinks, well, what did you think was going to happen? Like really, Coco, what did you think when they announced the ceasefire deal? And even the fact that like, you know, the UN... Aid agency weren't allowed in there.
In a way, there's part of me that thinks, well, this was inevitable. This was going to happen. I hope for God's sake that the governments around the world have had this conversation about when this happens and have a plan. You know what I mean? It's a horrible, horrible day. Yeah.
The global fallout of the US elections keeps happening because this week Trump also announced and then deferred tariffs to Canada and Mexico, as well as applying a 10% tariff on some Chinese goods. But what about the United Kingdom? Sorry, here is another, unfortunately, Donald Trump clip in regards to our government.
So the UK is way out of line, and we'll see the UK, but European Union is really out of line. UK is out of line, but I'm sure that one, I think that one can be worked out. But the European Union is... It's an atrocity, what they've done.
I mean, that made almost no sense. If you can try and sort of extract some coherence from Trump's word soup to the BBC from that clip, he's described the UK as way out of line, but maybe OK. We don't seem to be directly in the firing line, but the EU, which seems to be very much firmly in his crosshairs...
That's a hostility that also aligns with a lot of the tech companies that have been outright supporters of him because of some legislation that he's trying to look at in terms of online safety. But anyway, that's a separate conversation. But in terms of the way out of line comment, our government didn't agree.
A spokesperson for Keir Starmer said, we've got a fair and balanced trading relationship and that our trade is worth about 300 billion pounds. The spokesperson also noted that we are each other's single largest investors with 1.2 trillion pounds invested in each other's economies. Thank you.
Like the Gaza situation, this is definitely a sign of things to come in terms of US foreign policy. Trump will probably keep throwing his toys out of the pram and world leaders will at least partly acquiesce.
But look, that's the obligatory US update done. But if you want the US perspective on Trump's delayed trade war or Elon Musk's growing grip on the government, Pod Save America unpacks it all. How Musk's handpicked crew is dismantling key agencies, why Trump's trade deal changes little and whether Democrats can stop the chaos.
Plus, former Obama adviser Brian Deese breaks down just how bad things could get.
Listen to the latest episode now on the Pod Save America feed or watch on YouTube. But back on our home turf, we have some news that will give us a little bit of hope in this. It's been hard to find reasons to be hopeful recently. But we have a victory for the climate.
The Rosebank oil development, given the green light by Rishi Sunak's government, was ruled to have been unlawful due to a lack of clarity on just how much CO2 would be emitted by the project. A couple of months ago, we spoke to Tessa Khan, one of the lawyers leading the fight against the proposed development, and she sent us in an update.
Hi, everyone. Some good news for a change. Last week, a court in the UK agreed with us at Uplift and Greenpeace that the last UK government's decision to approve the massive undeveloped oil-fueled Rose Bank was unlawful on the basis that the government's
hadn't taken into account the really significant climate harm caused by burning Rosebank's hundreds of millions of barrels of oil, which would create carbon emissions that are equivalent to running 56 coal-fired power stations for a year.
There are also a bunch of other reasons that Rosebank is a terrible proposition for the UK, including the fact that most of Rosebank's oil is going to be for export, so it's not doing anything for our domestic energy security. It's also not going to take a penny off our energy bills.
And what it will involve is giving billions of pounds in tax breaks to already incredibly profitable oil and gas companies like Equinor who want to develop the field.
Listen, there's not much to celebrate at the moment, but it is really, really worth highlighting when this kind of stuff happens, when positive things happen through specific actions by activists and experts like Tessa. It's really, really good news, but the fight might not be over.
There's speculation that the government might attempt to reissue licenses and the oil companies can continue work on the developments and gather further data about just how much CO2 it might emit. But for drilling to happen, they would need to be issued a new licence from the government.
And, you know, we were talking about Heathrow just last week and how frustrating it must feel to feel like so many decisions, particularly in terms of the environment and the ecological damage, are already made and there's nothing you can do about it. But you can, as they've proven. And these are victories that, of course, we should be celebrating.
By the way, guys, if you're listening and you know of any other victories, let us know. I think we all need... some hope and optimism. So if there's something giving you hope at the moment, if there's some grassroots activism, if there's a case that isn't actually being spoken about enough, but it's really meaningful to causes of the environment or social justice, just let us know.
We'd love to hear about it. So email us at psuk at reducedlistening.co.uk and we'll aim to share some of the light around.
For now, let's be positive and take the wins where they happen. And this is a huge shout out to Tessa and all of the people that scrapped together to fight this. You can still write to your MP and let them know that you oppose Rosebank. And if you want to do anything to help kick this oil field to the curb for good. then head to the Stop Rosebank website. That's stoprosebank.org.uk.
There's loads for you to get involved in.
Now, after the break, we'll be chatting with the news agent, Lewis Goodall, about some damning Labour leaks from Keir Starmer's inner circle and the fallout from Trump.
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Now, it's been a tricky week for Keir Starmer. In between dealing with Trump and the EU, revelations from a new book, Get In, The Inside Story of Labour Under Starmer, have put his leadership style into question. It claims that Tony Blair said he's too soft, not tough enough, inexperienced, and that the PM's chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, described him as acting like a HR manager, not a leader.
Now, is Keir from HR what the UK needs to reset our relationship with the EU? Is it enough to ward off strongman tactics from Trump? Or is he deluding himself? To set the record straight, we jumped on a call with Lewis Goodall, journalist, author and co-host of the News Agents podcast.
Lewis Goodall, welcome to Pod Save the UK.
Why, it's my pleasure. It's nice to be on a proper show for once.
That's extra funny, that quip, because for listeners of the podcast, you can't see that Lewis is talking to us from the newsagent studio. He looks very, very professional. Me and Nisha are at home. The bottom half of me is tracksuit bottoms. You've got it right.
You've got it right. John Sopel, you do not know how much John Sopel would love to do everything from home. Honestly, if he could do everything in his boxer shorts, he would. And frankly, sometimes he does.
I'm just glad you didn't say, is boxer shorts in that studio? Because that seems like a HR situation.
Yeah, well, John, one walking HR situation, I think, no, it's only a joke. It's only a joke, don't worry.
I could tell you from personal experience, Lewis, that doesn't matter to them. Yeah, well, quite.
Disclaimers need not apply.
It is fitting to have you in your studio because, you know, the newsagents has become a fixture of Westminster political journalism. I bet you spent many hours in there. How is it going for you, 2025?
Well, today I started the day by doing, because I was filling in for James O'Brien on LBC.
So I spent three hours talking about the reordering of the international political order, redrawing of the Middle East map, and listening to a man, honestly, who was actually Trump's ambassador to Israel in his first term, playing a clip, earnestly discussing whether or not Gaza should be called Gaza-Lago or Mar-a-Gaza.
Oh, my God. Oh, my God.
So I would say, yeah, just another normal day, really. I mean, not so different to 2024. You know, I mean, basically now I suppose the difference now is now that we we all have to inhabit, don't we? The burning hedge maze that is Donald Trump's brain and try and each day see if we can navigate our way out of it and always fail.
Most of your career has been spent covering, sort of looking directly into the heart of darkness. Let's be honest here, Lewis. You've come of age as a political journalist in, I guess we say, sort of an interesting period of the history of this planet and I guess this country as well.
Yeah, I sometimes wonder, and I suppose I could, again, ask our boxer shorty friend, John Sopel, about this. I sort of wonder, like, what did political journalists kind of, what did they do in, like, I don't know, 1999? You know, they sort of like, they're just like, are we going to join the Euro? No, we're not. Next. Like, you know, it's all very, very odd. I mean, yeah.
And obviously that is a challenge, right? And particularly with Trump. It's like putting back on a kind of particularly, I don't know why I keep sort of, reaching for the kind of below the waist kind of metaphors. But like, you know, it's like putting on... Well, you correctly assess the tone of our show.
Yeah, exactly.
It's just an instinct. You know, it's like wearing a particularly sort of comfortable pair of trunks that you haven't worn for a long time. It's like you've got to try each and every day to try and differentiate... like what matters and what doesn't matter and try and raise the kind of hysterical bar, right? Because the problem is, this is his great genius, right?
His great genius is that he makes all of his enemies seem hysterical, even when there is loads to be hysterical about. Every day is a challenge.
Well, let's stick with Donald Trump before coming back to some of the big domestic political news. He's just declared today, as we record, that the US is going to take over the Gaza Strip, hence his former ambassador to Israel's Gaza Lager, whatever it was, remarks to you this morning, and relocate Palestinians to neighboring countries, which would amount to ethnic cleansing.
It certainly has put Keir Starmer in a tricky position. Here is Starmer's response to all of this at PMQs today.
They must be allowed home. They must be allowed to rebuild. And we should be with them in that rebuild on the way to a two-state solution.
What do you make of the government's response there, Lewis?
Well, you know what? As the response to various sort of madcap things that Trump has come up with sort of day by day goes, it's probably the strongest and most strident kind of point of disagreement that he's had. I mean, obviously, he didn't say, you know, Trump is wrong.
They will do everything that they possibly can right now to avoid saying the words Trump is wrong or what the hell was he talking about or whatever it happens to be. So, you know, it is a qualitatively kind of different stance. But I mean, I think, you know, you look at Starmer right now and his biggest problem is, I mean, you can feel how utterly buffeted, you know, he finds himself being.
Being in government, you know, you finally get the bully pulpit, right? You finally get the ability to command. You finally get the ability to be able to set the terms of political trade, right? You basically say what's happening every day and everybody else responds it, particularly in the media, right? That's one of the great kind of convening powers of being in government.
He doesn't have that right now because every single day, Westminster and British journalism wakes up and doesn't actually think at the moment, like what is Downing Street saying about something? It's what is the White House saying about something? And then like paragraph B is this is what Downing Street is saying or often like not saying in response to what Trump has said.
He's a figure who, at the best of times, Dharma, struggles to command the narrative. And right now he is basically being completely and utterly removed from it by force, by the kind of Leviathan that is Trump.
Well, I mean, that seems like a good time as any to talk about this ongoing conversation about what sort of leader Starmer is. So I'm sure you saw the news over the weekend. There was an extract from Gabriel Pogrens and Patrick McGuire's new book, Get In. Yeah. The kind of most spicy claims in it are that Tony Blair and Morgan McSweeney have questioned Starmer's look of politics, his leadership.
I mean, I don't know. There's a part of me that notes that it's often in the right wing press that we see these stories. But look, you're close to this. How much credit do you give these rumours?
Well, I don't think it's a secret that that. there's been a lot of people within the Labour Party who are very uncertain about what Starmer's politics are, right? He is quite Sphinx-like about it. He is somewhat, I mean, the Labour Party, right, loves to, its principal activity, right, is to over-intellectualize. right?
Like it constantly, and this is one of the reasons probably it loses by comparison to the Conservative Party a lot, you know, it constantly engages in self-reflection. Like if they are good at one thing, right, it is beating themselves up and thinking about all of the different things that kind of are making up their politics at one given time.
The Tory party just tends to sort of go on and crack on with things and do it, you know, like the Labour Party could win 649 seats of 650, and it would be really worried about not winning the 650th, right? That's what somehow it would really sort of start thinking, oh God, but we might lose next time. We might lose next time, you know, right? So that's the difference.
Starmer is quite different in the sense he doesn't like to over-intellectualize anything. As far as I can tell, he doesn't really like thinking about much at all. I mean, this is a guy who was asked not long ago who his favorite authors were or what his favorite films were. And he looked entirely blankly. He said, I don't really read stuff. I don't really read novels.
I don't think he has a very broad kind of intellectual life beyond what is right in front of him. That's not to say he's not intelligent. He clearly is. But he doesn't have a very broad sort of intellectual life. And so I think, and I've asked him about this, You sort of ask politicians, who are your political heroes? Or who are you more like? Are you more like Harold Wilson?
Are you more like Tony Blair? And normally, Labour leaders in particular really enjoy talking about that stuff. They might sidestep the question, but on some level, they kind of enjoy it. Starmer recoils from it. He hates it. He actually eschews and is distrustful of political ideas, full stop.
And so that can be helpful sometimes because it means he's quite, let's put it this way, intellectually nimble. He can kind of move quite easily from kind of one area to the next. But what it does mean is that your troops are kind of like uncertain about what we're actually fighting for here. What are the things we really, really care about?
and crucially, in an era which is actually being defined by big ideas. And those ideas right now are coming all from the right. You know, they're fighting a war of intellectual aggression day after day after day, painting very clearly exactly what is going on, why they think is going on, and what should be done about it. Starmer has very little to say.
I'm not entirely certain, really, what it is that Labour or Starmer conceive even the question of politics right now to be, let alone the answer.
Does that explain the slight lack of initial direction in the Labour Party as a party of government after the election? Because they've talked a lot about the nebulous idea of economic growth. They've had various economists question whether that's possible. They've talked about, in terms of the NHS, opening a mass public consultation. What hasn't happened is an imposition of...
a actual cohesive vision for the country, which is only a surprise insofar as they've been in opposition for so long. And I think a lot of us assumed that they were fighting an election campaign in a kind of defensive mode in order to guarantee an election win.
But then once you've won an election and you arrive in office, is that sort of absence, that kind of intellectual nimbleness, actually a bit of a problem and leads to a slightly directionless party of government?
I think you're right that the problem is with that is twofold. One is Labour leaders are expected to actually provide a lot more intellectual justification for what they do than others, than conservatives, partly because the media environment is so hostile to them, partly because, as I say, the Labour Party actually is a much more kind of like over intellectualizes things generally.
But I think it's important for another reason, which is that the Labour Party, I mean, Harold Wilson once famously said that the Labour Party is a moral crusade or it is nothing, right? The whole point of the Labour Party is that it isn't supposed to just be a party of the status quo. It's supposed to be a party which offers a moral and political critique to capitalism, right?
And the thing about Starmer is, and what he's offered, is that everything he talks about It's great. I mean, of course we want growth, right? Of course we want the trains to run better. Of course we want the economy to be better. Of course we want more investment. All of this stuff, any party would want that. The Conservative Party would want that. Rishi Sunak would have wanted that.
And if your politics is simply... a politics of delivery, if your politics is just, okay, we might want the same things, but we can deliver it in a way the other party can't because we're more competent. Well, there are two problems with that. One, what happens if you fail? You're left with literally nothing in terms of your politics.
You have no kind of adhesive which binds together your political coalition because it was one based on efficacy and delivery. And the other problem with it is that in an era, as I say, defined by
very big ideas, which we got at the moment, these sort of intellectual ideas from the right, which are being fought out every single day, you're basically taking a water pistol to a knife fight because you're not really engaging with them on the actual substance of the politics itself.
And for me, the parable of this, which I'm surprised Downing Street is less concerned about, the parable is Joe Biden. Joe Biden, who actually did deliver quite a lot was overwhelmed by the intellectual force of the attacks from the right because he was unable or unwilling to communicate exactly what he was doing.
So you can make, and I think in the era of the smartphone that we're in and the era where, and I don't like saying this, but vibes are basically dominant in politics. I think you could deliver all of the things that Starmer says he wants to deliver in
and still lose because people actually are more likely to recognize what they see digitally on their phones than the stuff in their actual lives around them. That's the kind of weird sort of meta reality, political reality we're living in. Let's assume for a moment that reform is actually going to be the main threat to labor or where the main oppositional energy is.
It's certainly true that they're defining the terms of trade, for sure. I'm not clear what labor thinks whether they're willing to articulate what the clear difference is in terms of how they see society as opposed to reform. Now, I think I know what they think privately, but what sort of society is it they want to defend? Is it the liberal society? Is it the multicultural society?
Is it a society which traditionally, traditionally for a Labour Party would have been based on equality and fairness? Now, that would be a very clear dividing line in terms of equality between Farage and so on. but it's not something they talk about. You know, what at the moment Labour I think is lacking is what you really need in politics, which is the normative part of politics.
What ought to be, what ought to be, not just growth. So growth is a good example. Yeah, you want growth. What sort of growth do you want? Where, who do you want to favour most? Is it everybody? Is it the poorest? That is, these are the sort of central questions of Labourism, which like go down the ages. And right now, It seems to me that labor is defined by a kind of a politics of nice things.
Basically, they just want everything to be somewhat better. Everyone wants that. Everyone wants that. But in a society and a politics which is increasingly about dividing lines and it's about having arguments about who your people are and who your people are not and which issues you care about and which you don't.
It just feels to me like Labour at the moment just fail to articulate that clear sense. And I think that is without, I think that is a prerequisite to political success.
Well, I mean, I suppose as well that that far right strand have made a really good case of saying it's not possible for everyone to have nice things. It's, you know, some people will, some people won't. That's the natural order of things. And really, it's just about choosing the winning side. Do you think that if they were to ever get in charge, they would just self-implode?
Or what do you think is next for reform?
Look, there is not a great history of populist forces when they take office. I mean, usually, actually engaging with the realities of governing and the trade-offs that are inherent in governing doesn't usually go well. They're very good at critique and they're very good at throwing in grenades from the outside. They struggle. I mean, Trump was the best example of that. He has oppositional energy.
That's the thing on which he thrives. But in terms of what's next for them, look, Farage, I mean, the one thing that Starmer has got on his side, the real, real Trump card, as it were, is time. He's got time, right? He has got, theoretically, if Starmer wants to push this parliament to its maximal extent, he will have seen the Trump presidency come and go.
We'll have a new president by July 2029, right? Lest there's been some, well, if we don't, then America's not a democracy anymore. So we can't put that entirely one to one side.
I keep on feeling the need to caveat when people say stuff like that with we hope. We hope. We hope. We hope.
All being well.
All being well.
If the constitutional niceties are observed, then all being well, we should have a different person.
That if is getting bigger by the minute. As Elon Musk starts trawling through federal employees' emails, that if starts to get bigger.
I kind of feel like we may end up in the sort of Futurama situation where we actually have President Nixon's head in a jar, you know, just the president by that point, or Trump's. But yeah, all being well. And so that means, and Farage's weakness is that His is a politics and political project which relies basically on a sense of constant momentum, right?
It relies on a sense that he's always growing. It's always getting bigger. And that relies on the media buying that narrative. And the media love that narrative, right? Particularly right-wing press, they love that narrative. But sooner or later, they get bored. That's a long time to keep that narrative going, four years, right?
And there are going to be lots of things that tempt him to get interested in it on the way. And there's lots of potential for him to make mistakes. All they need is a few bad performances or a by-election which goes wrong. And suddenly that narrative changes. And because what they don't have is an actual base right now. They don't have a governing base.
Like in the old days, ironically enough, they had the European Parliament, right? 2026 will be the key moment for them. because they will have to do well, and I think really well, both in Wales and in Scotland in the devolved elections of that year, in order to give them a springboard for the rest of the Parliament.
So they're looking very strong right now, and I wouldn't underestimate them for a moment, but it's not all plain sailing between now and 2029.
I'm going to let you go, Lewis, but just before I do... What is there to be hopeful about? Like we did our show today. Genuinely, we did our show today. And finally. Finally. What reason to get out of bed in the morning?
You know, thinking about the politics of Britain and the world, you know, where do we find the green shoots of change that can make certainly our progressive audience feel like, you know what? There's plenty to play for. Let's keep going.
I know things can seem really depressing and relentless, and I get it. Believe me, I get the relentless element of it. But I'm afraid we don't get to just kind of remove ourselves or sidestep from the historical and political moment we're living in. I know we all think, oh God, I wish we were back in 1998, 1999. But that's gone. That political world is gone. And the only way, the only way...
that we bend the arc of history back to something that we might prefer is if we engage with it properly and we engage with the reality of the moment that we're living in. So I think what there is to be hopeful about is that there are millions and millions and millions of millions of people out there who actively reject so much of many of the things that are going on.
It was a bit of a shit sandwich there, wasn't it, though? I mean, I asked you what to be hopeful about. And, yeah, there is stuff, but... OK, it's great. Thanks, Lewis.
Hey, what do you want from me? What do you want from me? Hey, well, maybe there's going to be loads of beachside properties in Gaza. I mean, who knows, you know? It's a great time if you're a Middle East beachside property developer. Yeah, great.
I was just thinking more you might say something about like, I don't know, civil assemblies or something.
Hey, I'll tell you what. Hey, I'll tell you what. I know it's yesterday. It's still light at five o'clock. You can't beat that, can you? You can't beat that.
You can't beat that.
Trump will never be able to change the galactic astrophysics of our movement around the sun, even if he thinks he can. Good luck with that, Don. I can.
Yeah, I can.
You just watch.
What a note to end on. Lewis Goodall, thank you so much for joining us on Pod Save the UK. And of course, you can catch more of Lewis on the News Agents podcast.
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Okay, so we're back in the studio and Nish, I must talk to you about the bins. Must you? I must. You know how I feel about the bins. I just think if I may have a moment to just be like really like deep about bins. Don't you think it's amazing? Collective sanitation. What an unbelievably amazing thing that we did. We all got together as a society and we decided let's just clean this up.
Otherwise before you just threw your shit on the street. Disgusting.
Absolutely horrible.
And, you know, that wasn't that long ago. Anyway, I just think society is great.
Also, we live in London, so there are still people doing that. You know, like I'm not sure anyone who lives in a major city doesn't at some point in the day go, what on earth is the backstory to you just dumping a full soup on the floor and leaving it? Why did you think that was an acceptable thing to do in a public street?
I was listening to, because I sometimes listen to bin-based content. It's a big part of my background. I've always wondered if it's like a particularly British thing to have an obsession with the bins. I don't know. I actually don't know if that's the case.
I think everybody's pretty obsessed with their bins.
Anyway, this has gone a bit too far. But I was listening to a podcast about the bins and about how British people uniquely are a bit obstinate about bins. In other parts of the world, people are happy to have seven bins and recycle. But there seems to be something about the British who are like, I'm not having extra bins. You can't stop me. I'm going to put everything in one bag.
That's my right as a Brit.
Most of us have. Between two and three bins. Basically, most of us now have a bin that's a bin. Then we have a recycling bin. And then we have like a food waste bin.
I've got a bin for batteries, bruv. You've got a bin for batteries? Yeah, well, it's just a bag that I leave on top of the bin. Anyway. Oh, really? Yeah, it's a service that our cancer offers.
This is really boring. This is so boring. I have to take my batteries to Sainsbury's and dispose of them in a special batteries bin in a Sainsbury's.
Yeah, I know. But look, you know, look what the state could do for you. It could help you. Anyway, the reason we're talking about the bins is that Bristol is bidding to become the first council in England to move to a four week black bin collection cycle. So that means they're not talking about the recycling bin, the green bin that will be collected more.
But the black bin, which is the stuff that tends to go to landfill or be incinerated, is meant to be full of stuff that you can't recycle. But in reality, often is full of stuff you can recycle. So that will be picked up every four weeks. It's caused a massive fuss in Bristol and Labour are taking advantage. It's been Labour who are behind a petition to get this policy overturned.
It's still in consultation stage anyway. It's been national news. It's been an interesting thing to see progressives online who, you know, the Greens picked up a lot of progressive support.
Massively, yeah.
Hugely, especially under the under 40s. It's been interesting to see those people online being like, oh, please, no, stop it. This is not the hill to die on, Greens, please. It's been really fascinating to see. So I think this is probably a big test for them. What are you? You four-week, two-week bin? What sort of bin are you?
Obviously, my instinct is we should collect the bins as often as possible. That's obviously my initial instinct. But as the number of things you use in your house becomes more recyclable, as plastic waste becomes recyclable, I know that there are question marks about what actually happens with that plastic recycling. But as that sort of stuff starts to happen...
you would think, oh yeah, the amount of stuff you put in your bin bin should decrease. So in theory, it shouldn't be a problem, right?
Well, I mean, I think what people are finding frustrating is that the Greens have a point when they say that we... don't recycle enough and are putting too much stuff in that black bin bag. And if you're forced to kind of know you have limited space, it might push you to recycle a little bit more.
A number of the recycling rates in Bristol have been flatlining, even though Bristol is famously very good at recycling. So they're giving this ecological argument. But the reality is, is that they need to save money. Like every council in Britain that has come out of 14 years of conservative rule, there's no effing money. And so it will save them two million pounds.
So I think there's this sort of frustration of being like, just be honest. Like you need to do this for cost cutting. But there's a lot of posturing being like, no, no, no, no, no, no. This is a great idea. This is objectively a great idea for the planet. I think people find that annoying.
Here's my question, right? Nappies. So what happens with nappies? Because if those start to build up over the course of a month, that's not great. Listen, I know that children's feces is not as disgusting as adult feces. And I only know this because my nephew took a dump on my hand earlier this year. But like, so as a non-parent, you could sometimes not be aware of this.
His buttocks uncovered. I was carrying him and he just decided to unload.
Like, what can you do? He's 14 months old. Respect to the general. But like four weeks of nappies building up would be gross, right?
I mean, yeah, definitely. And I think there are questions to be answered about if this does go ahead, what will happen? Will there be specialist nappy collections, for example? Because you're right, there is just stuff, human shit, that needs special treatment and needs more regular treatment.
Look, I think it's a really difficult position for progressives when they come in to power because they obviously make promises about like, we're going to be the anti-austerity candidates or we're going to roll back some of the cuts. But fundamentally, if from Westminster, there is not money going to those councils and there's just going to be more cuts coming down the line.
We've talked about this before in our previous episode about councils. And so I do understand that the Greens are in this really, really difficult position. There is a part of me that is fascinated with this because obviously Labour want to win Bristol back. It's been a seat for them for a long time. And it's just amazing that this battle will just distill to be about the bins.
I think this is a conversation we should keep an eye on because there's national interest in it just generally because of the conversation around bins. But also I think this speaks to something that Labour will be trying to take advantage of while also not accepting that they do the same thing.
So where do you stand on four-week versus two-week collections?
I'm very pro-collection. I would like more collection. I would like bins taken regularly and I'd like my refuse workers to be paid handsomely.
That's fantastic.
That's my takeaway, yeah. But anyway, Nish, I heard you had a funny encounter with a listener over the weekend.
It was a job application that I have never received before. I don't get I don't employ people, so it's quite surprising to get a job application. But it was also delivered in a way that I had not really anticipated. I have a varied career and an interesting life, Coco. I'm very blessed in the way that my career has worked out. One of the things I could not have foreseen.
is that I'm occasionally a DJ slash hype man for James Acaster when he is DJing.
Yes, and you're very good.
Yes, so on Saturday I was in East London in my sort of capacity as stand-up comedian James Acaster.
As Bez from Happy Mondays.
Yeah, sort of Bez, Flava Flav energy. I should mention for any DJs listening, we don't really DJ. I mean, James is getting better. He's actually learning how to beat match and stuff. I'm just playing songs off an iPad. But sometimes people send messages to us via the Notes app on their phones. They will hold up their phones with a message in the Notes app that they've made enormous.
And generally those are either like positive messages of support for us or specific song requests. And apart from this weekend on Saturday night, when a person... was holding up a sign saying, is PSUK looking for a researcher at the moment?
I mean, I respect it.
We're not actively hiring at the moment.
Yeah, yeah, no, no, we're not.
If we are hiring, we will let you know via the podcast.
And also, those tactics will be appreciated. Yeah, those tactics will be massively appreciated.
If the person who held their phone up saying, is PSUK looking for a researcher? I was trying to communicate, we aren't currently, but I really appreciate job applications coming in this form. And also, if we are, we will let you know on the podcast. But I just wanted to say thank you to that listener.
And I really appreciated it, and I'm sorry that we can't do anything for you professionally at this particular time.
LAUGHTER
James and I DJed at Glastonbury at the music festival last summer and someone from the crowd held up a sign that said, play Hey Ya. Then the phone disappears and then it just comes back and it just says, please. Just the word, please.
OK, well, that's it. That's the end of the show. We always want to hear from you and hear your thoughts. Let us know what you think about Bristol and the bins. Also, maybe you could communicate to us via notes apps for the rest of our lives if you ever see us. Remember, we also want to hear what's giving you hope at the moment. So please email us at psuk at reducedlistening.co.uk.
Next week, we have the amazing Ash Sarkar in the studio with us to discuss her new book, Minority Rule Adventures in the Culture War. So if you have any questions for her, drop us a line. Ash is probably one of the only people who has boiled the piss of more Daily Mail readers than me. So that's something to look forward to.
And some very big news from us. We're excited to announce that we've gone and got our very own Blue Sky account. That's right. You can follow us on at podsavetheuk.crooked.com to stay up to date with all things Pod Save the UK. I'm actually on there too, if anyone wants to follow me, but I don't post anything good.
It's really just sporadic work tweets and just sort of rambling, ageing millennial stuff.
I'm like, how does this work?
I'm on there as well. Are you on there? Yeah, it's just my profile picture is a picture of me with my head in my hands on the Channel 4 election night coverage.
That is so rude. You're not following me. That's so rude.
I'm not following anyone, currently. Yeah, yeah, yeah, sure. I actually need to engage with Blue Skies.
Don't forget to follow at Pod Save the UK on Instagram, TikTok and Twitter. And if you want more of us, make sure you subscribe to our YouTube channel. You get to see us in colour. It really adds a whole new dimension to seeing Nish's disgusted face when he talks about Trump.
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