TRASHFUTURE - The Piddington Omakase feat. Nathan Akehurst

Episode Date: September 22, 2026

Editor’s note: this is something of an unusual episode, sorry! It’s just Nate and Hussein, but we’ve brought on journalist Nathan Akehurst, the author of the forthcoming book Along the Watchtower: Dispatches from Europe’s War on Migration. However, we have to talk about the Piddington referendum, the immediate fascist piggybacking that’s happened since, and the surprise discovery that a small village in Oxfordshire has a quite highly rated omakase restaurant. Preorder Nathan’s book here!  Get more TF episodes each week by subscribing to our Patreon here! RILEY ALERT Check out No Gods, No Mayors here! HUSSEIN ALERT Check out 10k Posts here! MILO ALERT Check out Milo's tour dates here: https://www.miloedwards.co.uk/liveshows NATE ALERT Nate's band Second Homes has just released their debut album and you can stream it for free here!

Hi, everyone. Nate here. We've got a number of cast members out at the moment, so this is going to be something of an unusual episode featuring myself and Hussein and our guest hosted by me. I realize it's something of a departure. November and Riley will be back for the episode that comes out next Tuesday. And in the meantime, I very much hope you enjoy this episode. Thank you so much for being a trash future listener. Hello and welcome to Trash Future. So to start us out, for the longest time, it kind of felt to me like the pillar of the UK economy, the pillar, if not just a pillar, but rather the pillar, is scams. Scamming has become so ubiquitous. And we've also, in the kind of Trash Trucher version one, season one style, we used to talk about ghost kitchens. But now we've actually evolved to a new stage of scam capitalism that involves effectively scam, kitchens and scam festivals of a sort. Because there has been a recent story from the BBC that scammers are using AI chatbots and LLMs to basically ingest actual promotional materials and

information from both emails and websites for food festivals around the United Kingdom and basically send extremely convincing-looking invitation emails inviting people to be involved in the festival, however they have to pay a deposit up front. Which they do, and then it turns out it's a scam. Now, normally you'd say, hey, you should check and make sure that doesn't look fucked up. But these apparently are sophisticated enough that they're pulling like the names of the people who work for these festivals off LinkedIn and basically emulating it entirely. And I thought to myself, well, Hussein, I know that you've had an opportunity to live in the scam economy for a while too. And I thought to myself, what this is basically saying is, because there's stories here if people got invited for things like to cook, to brew beer, even like someone who was going to do a knitting class.

class. And what's basically saying is they're targeting you because you have hobbies. Yeah. We want people to not have hobbies. If anyone's inviting you because they like your work, it's actually fake. It's really, well, it's also really interesting because all of these scams and the development of

scams, I think are sort of a really interesting way to like look at how the British economy works. Because this is the issue. Like the UK budget is, budget is coming up really soon. And whenever I've sort of read news articles about like the budget or just the way in which politicians talk about the British economy, it's very weird. It doesn't really make sense. And a lot of the time, like, this is kind of done on purpose to sort of obfuscate how healthy the British economy is. And for a while when, like, we were sort of relying on, like, the ultimate scam, which was British property prices, lots of politicians were very sort of, like, excited to talk about how we were like a really supercharged economy, how, like, you know, we were super productive, how things were going great. You know, just don't, you know, we don't need to look too much into how, like, money,

actually circulates in this economy, et cetera. We covered it a lot in like season one, season two. And obviously now that we actually have to face how our economy works, and there's a lot of people who aren't particularly happy about that, but also economics journalists who for the first time are actually having to figure out how an economy actually works. But my feeling is that actually scams are such a good way, kind of like looking at the health of British society.

And we've kind of like maxed out all the old people now. Like they're sort of not, you know, their money is kind of like going down the toilet. We have maxed out people who have kind of disposable income because most of that now is this kind of going on rent or like not even that. We kind of do like various kind of forms of the loss. But that doesn't really work. But what we didn't kind of realize was that there was a demographic where people were missing out, which is that people who don't just go to work and watch TV, but actually, as you mentioned, have hobbies because they spend disposable income on those hobbies. And the thing about having a hobby is that you love it when people ask you about it. You know?

Yes. Like, if someone was to sort of tell me that, like, talk about fountain pens or bookbinding, I would, I would fucking love that shit. I was thinking exactly that. I was like, Hussein getting invited to like a bookbinding festival, but it's an AI scam.

Yeah, yeah, and I've got to like pay for shit up front. Like, that's the only reason I probably wouldn't fall for it. But like, I also kind of, and this is why I'm sort of really blessed and happy that I can sort of detect AI writing at least now, because I feel like the AI writing that tends to be like very complimentary, always goes way too over the top. And you kind of realize that,

okay, yeah, I'm being fucking scamp because, like, no one in my actual life is going to talk to me like this. Like, at best, my hobbies are sort of seen as, like, an inconvenience and at worst, they're like distractions from things that I ought to do, such as, like, quote, unquote, looking after my child or, quote, unquote, paying my taxes. You know, the, like, I think the best way to sort of detect an online scam,

and I've tried to explain this to my dad is that if this machine is being, like, too complimentary to you, right? You know, if it's making you feel good about yourself, you should distrust it. Because also, this is the cardinal. rule about being online, which is that you are supposed to feel shit every time you're on it, right? So if you find anything that makes you feel good on there, distrust it. So yeah, my point being that British people of hobbies are basically one of the last demographics who have disposable

disposable income left and scammers have naturally kind of realized that, oh, they're like really easy to scam because all you need to do is like blow a little bit of smoke up their ass and tell them about like their nissing patterns are really cool. Well, so obviously we, this is this week's free episode of Trash Rucho, and we are very pleased to welcome our guest, Nathan Akerst, who's journalist, he's the author of Along the Watchtower Dispatches from Europe's War and Migration, which will be forthcoming this autumn. And Nathan, I want to ask you how you're doing, but also, I don't know if you have any opinions on scams, because I got very close to being scammed this past weekend. And I feel as though I almost, I almost got caught in the web.

But then I realized, I was trying to buy a gift for my neighbor who always used to be really nice coffee or really nice alcohol because he's from Rwanda. And every time he goes home, he brings something amazing. And I'm like, I have nothing but shit to offer. And I was trying to buy alcohol like bourbon made in America, which is one thing America does decently well to give back to him. And then I realized it was like, wow, everything is like 70% off on this website. These are incredible deals. But it dawned on me. The URL kept changing to just fucked up letters and numbers. And nothing was out of stock. And I was like, well, this is out of stock literally everywhere else. Let me check. Sure enough, I checked, is this a legit site? And was like, fuck, no, it's not.

They just will take your money. And it was the first result on Google. So I'm Curious, have you engaged with the scam economy or have you been a victim of the scam economy? I can't say I have that recently. I've just, I've got a sudden memory now of being caught in a job scam about like 10 years ago or so. When I was still a student and I got halfway towards working for this, purporting to be strange Chinese businessman who wanted help moving things from account to account. And I probably should have like tweaked and been. suspicious when I was being asked to accept 1,200 mysterious pounds into my bank account and transfer it to another mysterious place. But I needed a job and it was summer and I was poor and I wasn't asking questions. And then the following day, I find my bank account shut down and an email from

the serious fraud office and the cops wanting to interview me. Oh my God. That was probably my most my most exciting experience of scam world. Yeah, I, wow, nothing, nothing so dramatic for me. I just had my business credit card, but they called me and they're like, oh, this is a routine formality. We just need you to approve this transaction that appeared on your card for $8,000 euros at a Louis Vuitton store in Italy. And I was like, the peg wouldn't do that.

This is a little bit shady. And I finally hung up on them. But like, they were quite both, how do you, persuasive and energetic, but they had the sort of customer service guy voice. and they had it down. I was just like, man, they probably have like a dark kitchen. They've got a dark call center

where they train people to be really good at scamming. Like, they've got to make them do like scamming brown bag lunches on how to cold call people and do this. I had my debit card stolen once by a guy who then proceeded to, well, I presume it was a guy I don't know, who then proceeded to pay for about 10 rounds at Weatherspoons that evening before if I get the card shop on,

which you've got to attack. See, that's the kind of low-sakes, British crime and fraud that we really love hearing about. I don't want to hear about getting arrested for money transferred, money laundering crimes because, you know, someone's like, oh, yeah, you know, this is just a routine process in terms of that you're actually giving money to the DPRK. Like, I, I just wanted to be like, oh, yeah, they went down the pub. They bought 18 little pots of mushy peas for some reason. I won't even dispute this charge. I've had a

better night than I did. But, you know, speaking in that kind of ambient misery, I would like to talk first about a recent headline story that made us, well, in general, I don't know about you guys, but for me and for people I've talked to, aware of a small village in Oxfordshire called Pittington. And I imagine you're familiar with the headlines. Do you have any connection to Pittington whatsoever before? Were you even aware of it? No, I've never heard of this place.

I kind of know the structure in the sense of like, it's like a bit like a small village with like a parish. And it's like kind of similar to the place that my parents now live in where it's like it's kind of, you know, I don't quite, I don't exactly know how like a parish works compared to like a council, like in specific terms, but it's kind of very quaint and small,

and that's also the reason why they sort of act like kind of quasi, like many states within the county. I feel like I might have been there. I used to do a lot of cycling around the general Oxford and surrounding villages area, and so I've definitely been through villages that were either Piddington or identical to Piddington,

but everything is so much the same, especially in a hazy afternoon of riding from place to place that I couldn't really tell you. Yeah, for me, it's almost analogous to, I stayed in a town called Ditchling when we were working on our record in East Sussex, and it's identical to this small village with one pharmacy, two pubs,

basically nothing but houses otherwise, pretty much no footpaths outside of the major cities, like the village center high street. And yeah, I can visualize it. But the reason why we're talking about it is because Bittington, which is a small village in Oxfordshire, decided to have its own referendum to vote

to leave the United Kingdom to secede because they don't want an asylum center, or rather a detention center for asylum seekers, built at the former MOD Bister site A barracks. But their opposition, in general, is not really for humanitarian reasons. Because the vote itself is an obvious force. I mean, I don't think there's any way you could actually,

there's no mandate for it. But there's an element of what I can only describe as like the Tweed carnival-esque in the way that it's been covered in British media, which is paying attention to it following the story. But it's also caught the attention. attention by happenstance and by deliberate action of various fascist elements in the United Kingdom, as well as through X slash Twitter online in general. There's been an appearance by Patriot platforms,

Danny Tomo and the guys in Black Mask. They're also the bottom ranked league fascists of the British Security Project also went out there. Basically, you'd be like, hey, we're, we want to defend the women and children of Pittington against asylum seekers, et cetera. It's not subtle. And for example, talking about the deliberate action, there was a recent Guardian article by Amelia Gentleman, who, and we're going to quote that here, where she mentions the leader of the parish council, Tim McNally, who led the independence movement, said that he was happy that the village had, quote, sent a message to the political jugular, unquote, adding that he was now talking to other village leaders elsewhere in Britain, sharing a blueprint with advice on how to object to unpopular decisions imposed by central

government. It interviews earlier this week, he said he would consider renaming the village Trumpington if Donald Trump agreed to adopt the principality as the 51st U.S. state. Since June, he has been filming video appeals for support, speaking directly to the camera as he walks around the village on his at Pittington Roars' X account. The campaign has attracted Elon Musk's attention, prompting the SpaceX CEO to tweet to his 241.6 million followers. Soon this will happen to your town, above a description of the plans for housing asylum seekers in Oxfordshire. McNally responded, thank you, Elon, for help our little village roar loud in the world, unquote. There already is a Trumpington. It's in Cambridge.

Yes. Trumpington, too. Alternate Trumpington. It can be upper-trumpington, lower-trumpington. You know, they do it all the time. There was the time where there's the dicker, upper-dicker and lower-dicker. It's like the one town that Americans who find British place names funny know about.

Well, it could also operate like Oxford colleges, right? Because you've got like Christ's college or like, what is it like? Christ Church College. Yeah, yeah. There are some like colleges in Oxford and Cambridge that have the same name and they're kind of twin or whatever. you could basically have like Trumpington, Trumpington, Oxford and Trumpington Cambridge.

What kills me about this is just like, the whole sort of like, this is a meaningless gesture, but it's a gesture. And what is the gesture surrounded by is just like, dudes being as racist as possible. It's like, I find myself, I don't even know if cringing is the right word, but it feels like when those people,

remember during COVID, when people did the like, we're going to celebrate victory in Europe day and they like, you know, made like the fake by planes or the fake spitfires or whatever and did like tie themselves in ropes. and ran around with fake. You're like, what the fuck are you doing?

Like, are you on MDMA? Like, what is there a gas leak? Like, I just, what about it is you have so much free time? You're like, you know, I'm going to do a referendum to leave the United Kingdom because we're going to create our own currency. We're going to have, I don't know, Trump duckets. Come up with something. I mean, it's kind of what happens when the sort of endearing,

slightly silly, stupid kitsch of the Botechmoot-Bow-based referendum runs headlong into the fascist project. isn't it? That's what you get. But yeah, I mean, I think it's a good place to start because as, as you pointed out, I don't, I don't like the asylum center being placed there either. I don't think any of us do. You know, if you're the asylum seeker, you're getting corralled into this probably deeply uncomfortable place. The conditions are always, always have been awful in these facilities. And if you're the locals, yeah, it's disruptive to have a camp full of people who aren't allowed to work, who are living in limbo, who are probably traumatized for a whole range of reasons and definitely aren't going to be. being adequately looked after by the stay, stuck down the road for you. I mean, I don't want to hold too much of a candle for the legitimate concerns argument here, not just because of the immigration issue even,

but because before you can get to that, our entire country is held hostage by a thousand pittington's that refused to let us build trains or hospitals or anything else. And that's part of why we're sinking into what Kirstama wants memorably if disturbingly calls the tepid bath of managed decline.

But I think at least in one sense, they've got a point about it being disruptive. And I think this is a way in which Britain always lags about a decade behind everything else. This is one example of it. Anyone in mainland Europe will be, or anyone who's been following this stuff in mainland Europe will be looking at us losing our shit over asylum hotels and asylum centers and thinking this is quite a familiar story, right? You go back to Greece 10 years ago and you have the same thing.

You have the hotspot approach where you deal with a spike in applications and the state's inability to get its grip on, well, actually should be quite an operationally manageable problem by just caralling people into a place, preferably somewhere out of sight and out of mind, and hoping that the issue goes away. The Moria camp in Greece,

where people landed on the island of Lesvos and then just kind of didn't get to move on and was stuck in a holding pattern in an informal camp for years until it finally burnt down is probably the most famous example. And yeah, dare to, no one was happy. The refugees, the aid workers, weren't happy. The right weren't happy. The locals became increasingly unhappy. And after it eventually

burned down, there was this shiny new detention camp that Priti Patel actually taught about a month before it opened. And when the Greek states started trying to build it, they sent the bulldozers to the islands by boat. And a bunch of people began defending the beach and refusing to allow the bulldozers to disembark. And there was a mixed bag of people there, right? You had the refugees who didn't want to be kept in another camp. You had the right who didn't want the refugees on their territory and you had this weird moment of horseshoe theory unity between everyone who didn't want the cops to come ashore and build this detention center, which lasted for all of about five minutes. But the point is, no one's benefiting from any of this, apart from outsourcing

companies and landlords, I guess, which maybe gives you some clue as to what's really going on here. So much of it does remind me of that kind of weird sort of post-Brexit period where we sort of entered COVID, just kind of how, like, how strange all about was. And also how, like, I guess for some of the right, they had kind of felt at the time, but like, the sort of victory that they envisioned had so not necessarily been taken away from them, but had been delayed. And I think, I wonder whether parts of there are also to do with the fact that, like, the kind of vision of victory for the right has sort of become more and more elusive as years have gone on to the point where, like, it's not that they ever sort of had a succinct idea of what, like, a successful Brexit look like,

but more just this case of, like, oh, like, the world that we exist. exist and is not the one that I want. And as that kind of becomes more apparent, but there's not really any type of alternative or competing vision of what, like, success for them looks like. Things kind of just get weirder as they hark back to this, like, increasing forms of nostalgia. And I wonder whether, like, the Piddington secession is like,

just kind of, like, is just another attempt to do this? Like, the idea of sort of being able, like, ceremonially breaking off the UK appears to be a victory for, like, you know, for them, least I got sort of on the surface, but it doesn't really mean anything. But in the same way that, like, okay, well, you left the European Union and you were promised this type of victory in this emancipation, but like, it didn't really mean anything. And it still doesn't mean anything. And so, like, all these things are like victories without meaning. And you are now having to face even greater challenges with fewer resources because of the world that you have created. And instead of, like,

basing that and taking responsibilities for it, you are sort of escaping further and further into your own fantasies and your own neuroses and it just becomes stranger up to the point where like you have a small village that's begging to sort of join the United States at like the worst possible time to do it like even strategically speaking it'd be like this like I would probably

say if I was on the council and like even if I supported this I'd be like yeah this probably isn't like the best time to be joining the US for right now. You guys get to have American cops on the two streets of your village like oh we've tactically astrotain that there's a naked man in the Tesco. We're going to take

out. Also, like, you don't want the stuff that America. Like, there are, you know, if you go into London, like, you will see Popeyes. You'll see your Shake Shacks. You'll see your, like, fucking I don't know if there's an I hop. Like, I'm sure there is one. We will see all the five guys. There's not even five guys in Pittington. There are not even five guys. Multiple, multiple branches of five guys. I've got the US Airports down the road coming through Bryce, haven't they? So they could still stay on the same as island there on the, on the base. I was, I was just looking at like what is there to actually do in Pittington. And surprise, surprise, there is not much.

There is a smash burger place and there is a tapas grill and there's a Japanese and there's actually like quite a nice looking like Japanese Japanese restaurant but it's like supposedly does Omikaze.

The rest of it is an interesting concept. That's right. But the rest of it is this like sort of like gastropubs that kind of like are sort of between two to four stars. There's like a lot of like pubs that are sort of shut down or like it's like sort of one of those places

where they don't want anything built. And it's insane to me to sort of be like, okay, you want your town to just sort of be unchanged and like protected. You produce nothing by way of like an actual economy. You exist primarily to like house pensioners who have lived off like increasing property prices for like the past few decades. And now you want to be tied to the U.S. dollar. And now it's not you don't even want to be tied to the U.S. dollar. You want to use the U.S. dollar as your main currency to buy Pittington or Makaze.

like, okay, fine, all right. You're allowed to have a vape shop in Pittington, but it has to have lead glass windows. It has to be in a great listed building. I mean, I was thinking to myself, like, what would be the most niche complaint where a person is opposed to the refugees or the asylum center?

But it's like, guy who's furious that the asylum seekers who are housed there will get to live in buildings with asbestos because it's now illegal for him to live in an house with his best dose and he really misses it. He's like, it was actually really good insulation. And so he's like, they shouldn't be allowed to live in it either,

so I don't want it. They should not be, yeah, they should not be allowed to go out for a nice on my carza. To come back to your scams for a second, they're down the road from Bista, right? Yeah. You know, in Bista Village,

there's been just like international investigation into the international money laundering scam that's caught in the outlet mall. So if they want, if they want to complain about, you know, the ill effects of the free movement of foreign resources into the area,

they can do that. Yeah, my buddy was telling me about taking the train he says you go past Bister that like there's a Bister village stop or it announces Bister Village on the train. He's like, it's the only time I've heard an announcement on a British rail train in English

and in Mandarin and in Arabic. He's like, it's something about like Marcosal Bister. And he's like, apparently it's a huge operation. People come there for the outlet mall. And I mean, yeah, that's just right down the road. I mean, thinking about these kind of niche complaints or the kind of the line that seems to be getting repeated over and over again,

I think it's worth mentioning that Reform MPs Suella Braverman and Sarah Pochin went to Pittington and then put out a statement basically I think you guys will recognize exactly what it is that they're putting down here. To quote Braverman, the people of Pittington are terrified, they're angry, no one is listening

to their voices. That's why Sarah and I on behalf of Reform U.K. stand with the people of Pittington, the women of Pittington and the children of Potton said mothers were deeply worried about their own safety and that of their children. Some local women have even begun taking self-defense classes while residents police have advised them to, quote, take precautions.

They also claimed they wrote a letter asking for comment about this issue to every single woman MP in the Labor Party but didn't get a response. And we're not idiots. This is basically, we know what's happening here. Britain's most charismaist politicians are trying to make their own like barista blend of dog whistles. And they're blowing so many dog whistles all at once that at this point, Penn Farthing is circling overhead in a C-17 with cages full of dogs, trying to do an airborne insertion,

but the home office isn't letting him in. because they're like, no, we're going to be racist against dogs now. We realize British people are kind of uncool about that, but we're still going to do it. Like, I know exactly what they're saying here. It's turf shit and it's great replacement theory shit. And it's just all of that. And it's like, I guess there's a part of me,

I realize there's whatever about pointing out hypocrisy. But it's like, oh, all these fighting age males are going to house here. It's like, oh, you mean on the site of MOT Bister? The fucking army base? Where up until recently there were lots of actual fighting age males because they were in the fucking army? What about that? You know, those were British soldiers.

we hated. You know, that's the thing that drives me nuts about this is, is, it's like all of this, the rhetoric, whether it's people just repeating dumb shit they saw offline or they're actually really fully invested. I don't know, like, I'm deeply uncomfortable with how blatant it is, but then also with the kind of like, we're just a quirky English village. Like, it's, it's like Camp of the Saints, but you're doing an Instagram filter so everything looks like an Eden, Enid Blighton book cover. Like, but at the same time, like you said, Nathan, we talked about this earlier. Some of the complaints they make are are valid. There is no footpaths. People have been hit by cars and killed. There's no services for the people that they were going to be in detention. And like, I, as you said, they shouldn't be putting asylum secrets and detention centers in the first place. So I agree. Don't put them there, but don't put them in any detention center in the United Kingdom. And I don't care if there's this public display of outrage about it. I don't care if the, you know, the Bacolic Hamlet of Witherspoons on chagrin is upset about this decision. I don't care at all. But I do agree that like it's a bad policy, not because it's there, it's a bad policy in general. And that seems to be the part that's that's being forgotten. We're not discussed at all.

And I guess the response that has been so maddening to me is that this is treated as kind of like a, I don't know, like a curio. And the one person that the BBC news got to talk who was a resident who was like, I am opposed to this because I think it's racist. They shouldn't be putting migrants in dissension centers in general has basically been docs by Elon Musk. I'm curious if you guys have followed that part of the story. No, I haven't because I've been off X. What happened there? So BBC, I think it was Newsnight, did an interview on site with a woman named Rachel Marsh, who was originally from New Zealand, but has lived in the UK for 40 years. And she's married to a man who's of African-Irabian heritage. They have mixed-race children. They live in Pittington. She said she, I think she's lived there for like 30-odd years. And she basically said that, I mean, obviously she agrees with the reasons to not put this there, but she is opposed to the notion that it's, you know, that asylum seekers are threats and that they're going to attack. women and children and all this fighting age male shit. She's opposed to Patriot Platform

and Danny Tomo and all this garbage. But she became somewhat emotional because people have said stuff that's been shocking. She had never experienced people outright saying racist things and expressing these views. And suddenly it feels like this, yeah, some of your neighbors are really this hateful

and it bothered her. BBC news was like, well, but you can't actually know for sure that they're racist, can you? Like, basically starts interrogating her about it. Like, they're not particularly receptive. And yet, Nigel Farage was showing this footage on GB News and his response was basically, oh, I can't stop laughing.

The BBC finally found someone. And of course, now she's been getting death threats and harassment because Elon Musk shared this on, basically, quote tweeted this BBC, I believe News Night's story that had the clip on social media of her giving that interview. So the one person who's like, hey, I'm also a resident. I don't like this for a different reason. And I dislike this rhetoric is now basically being targeted by like the sort of, darker energy fathers for justice.

So I don't know, this feels like part for the course in a lot of these scandals that lead to harassment online. It's also like another example. Again, like to kind of like look at what British politics is versus like what it is sort of presented to be because I guess like the way that like the BBC and stuff

has framed it in order to sort of appear to be neutral has sort of been like, oh here's like this town that has decided to like succeed from the UK because, you know, lots of people like don't want refugees like to be kind of housed in the military base for lots of reasons. And here is like one reason and here's another. Like, you know, they've sort of framed that as kind of being like, you know, multiple sides, multiple opinions, etc. But the issue, I think, is sort of, you know, number one, I'm sure, you know, Nathan knows more

about like the technical elements of this. But like immigration policy, migration policy, refugee sort of entering the UK, like the system does not work. And it does not work kind of intentionally, like because successive governments have broken it apart because, you know, of racist policymaking, kind of not really wanting to engage with reality, just the general nature of the world right now, the impacts of climate change, the impacts of war, the way in which that spreads, like, you are going to end up having more refugee bottlenecks in, like, anyway. And nowhere in Europe, like, or in the United States is really built for that. But like, you know, in this case, in talking about Europe, like, nowhere in Europe is really

built for those types of changes. And so you've got like a lot of sort of structural problems kind of occurring all at once, followed by like the only policy structure that you're allowed to have, which is kind of increasingly racist as the years go on. And my feeling is that like, you know, your reforms and even your restore party and stuff, like they know all this. Like they know that like whatever talk they have about like, you know, we're going to do mass deportations, we're going to do remigration, all this type of stuff.

They know that like they actually don't, there is no system or mechanism in which this works, right? They're not thinking about it in policy terms. They're not really thinking about it in structural terms. They're not thinking about who finances it. They're not thinking about how it sort of works within the sort of the framework of the law, they're just sort of saying stuff, and they're saying stuff broadly for, like, attention and clicks and so on. We know all this anyway. And what now seems to be happening is that, like, you know, migration might sort of be like the only issue that everyone's allowed to talk

about, but it's less to do with the actual refugees themselves, and it's much more to do with splitting people apart and trying to create new opponents. And in this case, it's like, oh, okay, like, you can't even be anti-refugee or anti-migration for, like, non-racist reasons. there has to be like a specific reason why you are like this. And that specific reason has to be about this phantom threat that these people who are like completely isolated. Because this is like the whole point of military bases. Like, is that they're so isolated from general communities anyway, right?

But like when there were actual soldiers sort of staying in those bases, you would still be really surprised. Like I went to Union, um, a city where there was like quite a big military base in York. And, um, even though I used to walk past this military base every single day on my way to and from campus, it would still be really strange to just see, like, a soldier in kind of, like, fatigues walk down the road, right? Like, that was not an experience that, like, you about occurred every single day, partly because, like, the base kind of, like, creates a structure in which, you know, military and civilians don't really interact together. And so the whole

point is that these structures are designed to sort of keep people out of sort of public life anyway. And yet, even then, the sort of, the only sort of statement you're allowed to make is that, like, oh, no, these military bases are actually, like, really. easy to sort of, you know, they're staying there because they're fighting age men and they're just going to like come and, you know, they're going to take over sort of civilian society, which is like not happened by design. And so like it does, and, you know, I'll on this point there, but I guess like whenever I sort of like read the arguments, but also see what type of argument is becoming the only acceptable one, it's that these people pose an existential threat that we don't have to explain any further because it's just about how they look. And it's just about all the sort of myth making around. that type of aesthetic difference. Yeah, I think that's what worries me about where we've come in recent years with this stuff, right? Because there's always

been for a long time anti-immigration sentiment writ large in the British tablochrist and on the right, right? I grew up in the age of the male attacking Polish Brickies every five seconds. And then the generations before that, wind rush, everything, you know,

nothing has changed in that sense. But I think about 10, 15 years ago, there was this putative argument you had to make that it was about economics and then it was about taking jobs or the threat to public services and so on and the way in which like not only can you get away with much more openly racialized conspiratorial stuff these days it's actively encouraged and you've kind of almost lost any of the the supposedly economic arguments in favor of these these much more insane and spurious ones and then coming to to the Piddington thing it feels like it's, and I don't know if it's intentional or not,

but it feels like the writer trying to create this kind of diversity of tactics, right? So you can be the guy that's standing on the shore, trying to fight an R&Lycro or throwing bottles of piss at an incoming lifeboat or whatever, or the person who's setting fire to an asylum seeker hotel. But if you're not quite down the rabbit hole that far that yet, you can also be the person that votes in the,

in the cutsy little referendum or who puts a flag up on a lamppost or whatever. And they're trying to kind of build out this, this ecosystem and pipeline that, yeah, I don't know and don't really want to think about what the end point of it is. I mean, the other thing that's popping into my head here is that every policy that gets adopted to supposedly be the one weird trick that fixes and depolarizes the migration question just makes it worse. And I think it comes back to something we touched on before about the short-termism of it. And it feels like, you know, there's a set of reform, restore, infiltrators all deep assets inside the last five governments because everything that they have done is just

kind of created spectacles from which the radical Reich no only profit, right? If you had just decided, if you had a more sensible approach to processing claims eight, nine years ago, you wouldn't have got the visual spectacle of like large-scale small boat arrivals in the first place. Then you go from that to spending insane amounts of public money on hotels, which, you know, aren't going to people themselves or making sure that they live decently. It's always getting hoovered up into circle profits, but it looks to, if you're reform and manipulating it in the way that you want, it looks as if given the scale of expenditure that the four-star hotel line that they kept running had married, even though it didn't.

And then you go from that to, oh, you know, let's pick a disused barracks in a random village in the middle of nowhere full of the kind of voters that react badly to literally any infrastructural development whatsoever, let alone a heavily polarized one, what do you think is going to happen? They're just lurching from stupid move to stupid move. And again, where does it end? I guess to me seeing this happen and the idea that there's this notion that Britain shouldn't take any refugees whatsoever, that basically, Britain has already basically made it impossible to claim asylum unless you make it to British territory and to the island of Great Britain. And there's often this notion that, oh, people should just emigrate the right way. They should just claim asylum the right way, however that's supposed to be now.

What I just said is, I think, is one example of the fact that there isn't the right way. But there's also, I'm very familiar with the case of Afghans in particular, which are not the only group of people who migrate, but seem to get quite a bit of hostility being singled out as asylum seekers in the United Kingdom. Because I obviously was in the military and I worked in Afghanistan a long time ago and I stayed friends with the guy who I've been trying to help get out. He and his family fled after the government collapsed. they went to Pakistan. I was actually able, took years, but I was actually able to get him a visa on the Priority One program to the United States. And two weeks before he and his family were supposed to fly, Trump was inaugurated in his second term, immediately paused all refugee and asylum seekers admissions. And then not too long after there was a shooting in Washington, D.C., where it

turned out the shooter had Afghan background. And Trump issued an executive order banning all Afghan citizens from entry to the United States. So my friend is now in limbo. He has two young children because he was supposed to go to the United States. He can't now. And the Pakistani government has got a sort of hostile environment on steroids policy trying to criminalize every aspect of Afghan migrant's lives in Pakistan and actively trying to deport all them back to Afghanistan. And obviously, if he were to go back, having serving the Afghan military for a long time, he knows he would be a target because he's been targeted. His family's been targeted a ton and still is. And the reason I bring this up is that there is no route.

for him to get to the United Kingdom. I've tried other countries, but I have not trying the United Kingdom because there is no route whatsoever. And I know this not just from my own attempts and my own conferring with my MP, but also because through friends, I know some MPs, one of whom was actually a cabinet minister under Starmer, and even they are unable to get their Afghan friends any kind of recourse to get into the United Kingdom. There's a very, very limited and very waitlisted family reunification program for spouses and minor children. does not count. And that's basically it. So what that creates is a situation in which the only way to reunite your family to get to safety is to claim asylum by going in illegally, effectively.

And that brings us both to the small boats coming to the United Kingdom, but in a larger sense, in a greater scale, to migrant crossings in the Mediterranean, which, Nathan, you've worked in the Central Mediterranean on migrant rescue ships. You've had a chance to see that story right up close. you've written some really fascinating articles about it. And I guess I just wanted to let you talk, give you the microphone, about how you got there and also like how this relates to the kind of rubber meeting the road we're describing in the United Kingdom. Well, yeah, thanks, Nate.

And thanks for having me on. Around the same time as the Piddington stuff was happening, there was something else going on on the South Coast, where we had a couple of lifeboats in the channel that picked up 140 people in a boat in distress and they were the lifeboats were refused access to a to the first two ports that they attempted to disembark in causing them to end up at a port where the hundreds of of masked agitators who had been in Dover earlier turned up and spent the best part of a day and a night trying to prevent the disembarkation getting into the water harassing a lifeboat cruise on and so forth and

in the days following you get this um surge of of far right attacks on the on Lifeboat crews, gets to the point where Jordan Wiley, former ambassador for the army cadets and extreme adventure, you know, hardly a sort of open border's radical. It's having to speak out because of the scale of death threats he's getting targeted with. And again,

coming back to what I said earlier about it, Britain lacking behind, this kind of attack on maritime rescue is something, and the basics of life saving at sea is something that's like really taking off now in the last couple of years in Britain, but has been the case in Europe for a long, time. I mean, to start to close this loop in a sort of slightly roundabout way, I was many, many years

ago now as an idiot teenager, as opposed to an idiot grown up, the subject of an R&A rescue myself, not far from where the lifeboats actually would have launched for the rescue in the channel that I was talking about. Me and a lifelong friend were going for a walk down the beach. We got convinced that we could walk out around the cliff and to the next town before the time when the tide came in, turned out that we could not in fact do that and got stuck on a rock with a cliff behind and free sides of water coming in and eventually managed to call the emergency services and we had to be pulled out of the water by a long-suffering R&LI crew. We were fine, we were laughing about it in the pub later, and this is pretty standard

inshore rescue stuff, right? This is what you have to deal with teenagers doing stupid shit, fishing boats getting into trouble, so on and so forth. And I kind of want to foregrounds that anecdote because to get a lot of the same thing, get to understanding what a completely different situation, the central Mediterranean, is to all of that. Because in a normal rescue and the kind of thing that search and rescue crews train for, you're not dealing with a unseaworthy, overcrowded boat, potentially with hundreds of people in it, with people that don't speak the same language as you, who have gunshot wounds,

who have whatever traumas they've experienced on the other side, sometimes who won't have had medical care for years, and with the authorities on both sides of the sea, doing everything they can to make your job more miserable and more difficult. And so when all of this kind of starts, when the Mediterranean's been an irregular migration route for a long time, but when it starts to become the deadliest sea route in the world, or the deadliest migration route at all in the world,

just over coming to a decade and a half ago now, you initially have a quite strong response from the Italian state, You have a life-saving rescue operation run by the Italian Coast Guard that puts the seed that saves, as I recall, I think about 130,000 people in a year. And then they are getting no support from the wider European powers, and public opinion starts to sour a bit. And so they end up pulling back. And then suddenly there's just very little rescue capacity, and there's people dying at insane and horrific rates. And that's the context in which effectively volunteerist moves. from around Europe centered on on Germany at the time,

decides that they should do things for themselves and start putting ships together. And they come from totally different cultures. You can you can get quite a funny scene out of the idea of the middle-aged merchant marine captain or ex-Navy officer who expects the deck to be shined in every order to be followed. And the woke 22-year-old vegan anarchist from Berlin, who both have to learn to work together at sea. And it might be sort of quite heartwarming if it wasn't for the fact.

the thing that's thrown all these people together is the fact that they are trying to solve a situation which is absolutely sucks and is getting worse by the minute. I think things had slightly, you know, not the situation hadn't stabilized, but the structures of civil search and rescue has stabilized a bit more by the time that I first got out there in 2023 as the media coordinator on a ship called CI4. But even then, I think the obvious rebuttal to this idea that you often hear from the right that people are crossing because it's easy, because rescue is essentially a taxi service, is just spending 10 minutes out there. The Mediterranean is calmer, it's warmer, it's smaller than

most of the world's oceans. It's not even the most dangerous. And still, when you're out there, you feel utterly at the mercy of the water. I think anyone who's even just been pleasure sailing will know this. You have to have a profound respect for the water and for your own vulnerability in it. My first head of mission had a good line about this, that, you know, your ship is, it's your home while you're out here, but it's more than your home because if your home catches fire nine times out of ten, you can get out. If your ship catches fire, you're just fucked. The fire department is you. The A&E department is you. And you feel that self-reliance even on a big 50-meter ship like the ones that we have with cabins and running water and

hot food. So I can't imagine how you'd feel on some shitty rubber boat with hundreds of people on it that's been drifting for days on end. But I think there's also something quite, beautiful about the fleet and about parts of this whole situation. You've got these crews from different countries coming together and then you have the rescued people with you on board for a while and you get to hear all of their stories and there's this patchwork of human solidarity you get for a few days on a little shit. And so it's not all completely depressing. What I guess fascinates me about it and what drew me to it is that you have this very basic question. You can disagree on deportation on migration policy, but you would think that everyone vaguely normal in a

civilized society should agree that people shouldn't be left much less forced to drown. That seems to be a basic principle, but in reality, that's not the case, and that's often not how it works, and why. And so from this very basic question of the universal duty to save lives at sea, that's in international law, that before it was an international law is a principle that's been written down in the texts of various civilizations for at least the last few thousand years, you then suddenly find yourself into much more complicated and weird political questions. And that's, I guess, what got me into it as a writer and an activist and what keeps me in it as a practitioner.

I thought, yeah, I thought generally that's, like, really interesting. And it's like a subject that I don't know, like, too much about beyond, like, headlines. And, like, you know, a couple of people that I know who, like, volunteered during, like, those early sort of parts of 2015-16 when the refugee crisis was first happening. And I guess I'm, I'm also sort of interested more in like, like, the interaction between people who are like rescuing the refugees and just like the refugees themselves and like, you know, how that kind of like, not only how that sort of like shapes the work, but also like, I guess looking back on that period of time now, why you think there's less interest in like who these people are. Like I think

whether I see it in Europe or whether like, and mostly now seeing it in the UK, one of the things that is really marked to me is the fact that we barely hear anything about the people arriving on the boats. And for me, like, that must be the most interesting part, like, or at least like the part that, like, I would want to be most curious about, which is like, why would you risk your life and sort of like, you know, to sit on these really kind of dangerous, like, you know, rubber boats? Well, like, again, as you mentioned, like, days and days at a time, especially, and, you know, even during, like, the most dangerous situation in order to sort of arrive in safety, like, what are the stories of these people? And that sort of feels like something that I would

one point people were interested in and now they just don't really care or like at least like mainstream media doesn't really care about it. Yeah, I think I agree. There used to be a lot more play, a lot more of a place for telling these stories. You had a lot of culture and media covering the stuff around 2016-17 and then it did just seem to kind of stop as the political mood soured. I guess also part of part of the problem other than the right wing media problem is just that it's, access is quite difficult. Like even when I am trying to record stories, I'm often not going to photograph people's faces

because, you know, you have a lot of people being criminalized as smugglers or just for making the crossing. So there's lots of kind of, if you're trying to cover this stuff in a decent and humanitarian way, and there's a lot of reasons for not pointing cameras in people's faces and pushing them into telling difficult and traumatic stories when they've gotten out of that situation.

So it's quite hard to both cover it well and cover it sensitively, whereas people on the other side of the argument don't have these qualms and concerns and they can just, you know, jump all over the airwaves and start screaming. So there's a bit of a differential in how you communicate these things

that depends on your politics. But yeah, I also think that like a lot of people reporting on this stuff are just utterly incurious and won't go looking for those stories. And I think that's partly a neoliberalisation of journalism, right? You don't have specialised, you have very few specialised immigration reporters. You have general news reporters who've imbibed by osmosis to stop the boatslines in the media over the last few days and still just injured it and half an hour to run out a report based on a number of people,

number of people have crossed or a distress case or whether the government has lost control of the situation or whatever. and they just won't have either the will or the capacity to spend time digging into what I think are fascinating and essential parts of the story. Yeah, I guess I was also thinking because like I keep forgetting that I actually did this. When the refugee kind of crisis first started happening and I was working as a news reporter at the time, my first proper like patch of reporting was going from Hungary, which is where a lot of the refugees were and they were walking towards mainland Europe. So they went through Austria and then like some of them went to one in some.

A lot of them were going towards Germany. And like at that point, at that time, the way that we covered it was like, and the way that lots of sort of new media places were covering it, were to kind of like really sort of hone in on like the stories of refugees. So I spent quite a lot of time, like, talking to them or like talking to sort of like the people who could speak English. Like my Arabic isn't like, I don't speak kind of like colloquial Arabic. So it wasn't.

I couldn't quite work out. But like I was speaking to a lot of, a lot of these refugees. And like, they were telling me their stories and like telling me about kind of the reasons they were sort of like making this movement and like everything that I sort of got was a very, you know, these are all like really reasonable reasons why you would move. And like, you know, if you come from sort of immigrant backgrounds as well, but not like uncommon ones. Like, you know, you move because you want to make a better life for yourself. You want to like have a better life for your kids. You know, you realize that like, you know, the place that you're in is not going to like be kind of

you're staying there is not going to be kind of conducive to your survival. So you move. Like these are all really, really natural things. And like at that time, it wasn't necessarily that there was like lots of support for the refugees, but I think there was at least kind of like more of a recognition of like why this was happening. And I think partly what you said in terms of like the neoliberalisation of media contributing to the sort of like much more vicious approach to refugee and like the sort of like disregard of like who these people are and the stories that they kind of are carrying with them. That certainly contributes to quite a lot of it. But I also sort of wonder whether like this is also reflective of a much broader change, which is less to do with like refugees and migration

specifically, but it's much more to do with how information is disseminated online and the ways in which all of us kind of really, well, there is like a real sort of lack of interest in sort of like people in and of themselves. You know, it is all just about kind of like who represents what me of is sort of like proliferation of images as well. And, you know, people like reading less and people kind of caring less about context and stuff kind of means that like, this is happening across the board and it's very like, you know, and it was always going to like happen in the context of like migration as well. but now you have this sort of situation where like people were already really hostile to refugees and immigrants in the first place. And now they sort of have this kind of visual, digitalized language that makes it not only easier to just sort of disregard the sort of real humanity behind the people

who are moving, but also actually better. Like if you want certain political parties, like you can really benefit from that. You can really benefit from like completely disregarding the fact that these are people and they have families and they have like, you know, complex histories and complex, you know, existing complex societies, a lot of which are made more complicated because of what the West has done to their homelands, right? I was going to say something that I thought was relevant to about the political side and decisions that are made because something you mentioned in one of your articles, Nathan, that caught my attention immediately. That seemed like a broader echo of the same phenomenon like you have in the United Kingdom where someone who has an asylum application pending

is not allowed to work. So even though like these are people who would very happily find any work they could to support their families, they are not allowed to. They legally are not allowed to. You mentioned that the Italian, I believe you said the Italian Navy or the Italian Coast Guard had changed rules so that if one of these volunteer rescue missions rescues anyone, a boat wherever, they immediately have to head to the nearest port or whatever port they're assigned to then bring the people they've rescued for processing, which is very deliberately done to curtail their ability to make multiple missions while at sea to get as many people as possible, which seems like it's intentionally driving up the risk that people who do need rescue will not be rescued and will be left to die. Yeah, absolutely. I just comes back to the hotspot thing I was talking about earlier, except the Italians are trying to do it at sea rather than on an island. So you go back to the late 2000s. There's this case where Italy is trying to transfer the people on a boat in distress back to Libya on the other side of the med, where they're fleeing from. And a few years later, the European Court of Human Rights say,

no, that's not how this works. That's the 2012 Hersey judgment, which makes pushing people back across the Med Unlawful, and everything, at least in the central Mediterranean, and everything since then has been an exercise in trying to find a loophole to that, in trying to prevent people to make it to where they can exercise their legal right to claim asylum in the first place. And so that's why you get initially a withdrawal, a winnowing way of state rescue assets, which is important, because again, I can't stress enough the civil fleets should not be doing this. It should be volunteers stepping into the gap. And then the next step is to that experience of civil rescue as difficult as possible.

And so the thing they start doing in 2017, 2018, is saying two ships, and civil rescue ships, no, you're not allowed ashore. We're just not going to give you a course of this embarking, but the optics of that are bad, because if you have a few hundred people stuck on a rescue ship half a mile outside your ports, it doesn't look like you're in control of the situation, right? And so George Maloney comes in as Prime Minister in 22. She has somewhat more, from the rights perspective, at least brain cells, about this.

And she says, I have a better idea. What if we, rather than creating these high profile spectacles, what if we just went about wasting everyone's time instead? So now you do get a safe port assigned, usually quite quickly, but only if you proceed to it immediately, meaning that you then aren't allowed to carry on doing any other work in the meantime. And, you know, our ships are old and slow. And our area of ops is a quite specific box, south of Sicily and north of Libya. and if they give you a port that's a long time away, say Ravenna, Jennifer, something like that, you could be up to two weeks non-operational where you're not doing rescue, and that takes up to half of your rotation away.

And if you say no, we're actually going to attend this other distress call, they can detain you. I was on one rotation in this insane situation where we had, I think, about 40 people on board already. We then were attending a second case. We were holding off and we hadn't bought people on board yet because we had to check with the Maltese. And the Maltese had to confirm remotely that they believed it was a genuine distress case. And so they were messing about with us on the phone for a long time until our head of mission was starting to get slightly touchy about it and asking if they could hurry up and make a decision. The guy on the other end replies in the most computer and says no way imaginable.

No, this is this is an emergency line. you're currently clogging it. Could you put it in an email instead? And our head of mission is reasonably like, what is this if not an emergency? We were going through this game because we had to get the, theoretically get Maltese permission for a port of safety, even though we knew they were going to decline it,

in order to then go to the second state, which was the Italians. The Maltese eventually said, you're a German flagged ship, go to Germany. And we obviously responded that an eight-week cruise from the meds to kill or bremen or whatever is ridiculous. And only after that conversation broke down, we finally allowed to go to the Italians.

And then two days later, we get into Salerno, where we have been granted a port of safety, and we are immediately detained for 20 days for doing too many rescues. You also had mentioned that there have been stories, that they haven't held up in court, but that there has this obvious attempt to dissuade people from helping,

where volunteers have been charged with human trafficking, under the allegation that they are coordinating pickups of asylum seekers and people in distress with Libyan militias. But this has never been born out in court. And yet they still keep prosecuting people or trying to prosecute people in order to discourage the rescue crew from from operating. Yeah. So this is actually how I first became involved in this, his whole issue. As a journalist, they went down to interview the crew of a ship called the Aventer who were arrested in 2017. The first day of their trial was 22. They were acquitted two years later, so they basically had to spend seven years of their lives in limbo and uncertainty and chaos

over a thing that they weren't guilty of. And in the meantime, the ship had rotted to scrap and isn't usable as a rescue ship anymore. And in that case, there were these large-scale investigations and prosecutions into multiple rescue ships. Part of them were guided. And part of them were guided by this idea. So you started off this idea that there was a pull factor that the presence of ships led to people making the journey in the first place. At the statistical

level, that was concretely debunked a couple of years ago by a study that was done by nature, but also by the Italian admiral behind one of the earlier state-led rescue operations. It was like that we have no evidence from any of our missions of the pull factor. And then you get from

that to this slightly more hardline position. this belief that you hear on the right that there is direct coordination between rescue assets and smugglers. And in the case of the eventor that the state had put a spy on board the ship who later recanted

half of his evidence and said actually none of this was true. But the evidence usually adduced for the smuggling claim is, oh, you know, there were smugglers on the boat in distress and in taking people on board from that boat, you're effectively acting as a acting to taxi service. Well, you know, if something is approaching you at speed, you know that there are prior cases where smugglers have forced people in the water at gunpoint, potentially to their

deaths, and you've got a bunch of people who are still very much in distress, well, you, and you're there, you take that call. But if you, if you show that footage in the wrong way, and one thing that I find quite interesting is a couple of months ago, this whole issue resurfaced with a ship that had been shot at by the Libyan Coast Guard, I want to come back to. the increasing violence of living militias against our rescue assets. But a ship that had been shot at, and then when getting in support, the captain was detained pursuant to a criminal investigation. And in the process of that investigation, someone, maybe the prosecutor, maybe not, we don't know,

leaked the footage that was provided by a Frontex airborne asset to right-wing media and essentially shows that footage in a way that made it look much more like the rescue ship had been somehow coordinating with the smugglers. So it's kind of like Orgreave playing it backwards, but Frontex video footage to make it seem like this was a coordinated thing. Yeah, exactly. I know what Frontex is, but for clarity for our listeners, as I understand it, Frontex is the European border security cooperation as kind of a funded by all the EU member states.

But it's not, as I understand it, like, correct me if I'm wrong. It's not like completely one government thing. Like it's by country. It's kind of like a participatory basis, but it coordinates all of the border whatever in the EU. It's a weird hybrid structure. I mean, it starts off as essentially this kind of risk analysis unit

of nerds in Brussels and Warsaw who are providing operational intelligence to national border agencies who are basically just like people who make maps of threats and frame things in a certain way. And then when the quote-unquote migration crisis is starting to kick off properly,

in comes a proposal to produce the first European uniformed agency and hiring 10,000 border guards into this thing. And I suspect it's an attempt to build a pathway out to having a European military whilst not treading on the toes too much of Eurosceptics who don't want integrated military guns, but because they hate people migrating would be like kind of prepared to accept a border agency for the time being

and then you have the precedent for people with firearms and gold stars on their shoulders. So they have the standing core of actual border guards and you'll see them at some borders. You'll probably see them at airports if you're traveling around Europe and the airborne units. And then they will also have

national border force staff from EU member states, seconded to them. So some of them are operating in the central med. And then they also act as a kind of shop front for Europe to centrally buy in border tech or equipment or whatever. So they're kind of half a real force, half not. Gotcha.

Hussain, I'm curious also to your reaction because this was the specific case that Nathan was talking about as regards like manipulating footage and using it online to push a narrative. This feels pretty familiar, but we see it not in the seaborne version most of the time. Yeah, but we're also beginning to because like, again, not to sort of anglicize this a little bit. Like, it's also this, like, it's kind of the stuff like, like, Danny Tomo's crew are doing at the moment, but like Tommy Robinson and his crew have been doing it for like a long time. I think there was one like relatively recently. I can't remember exactly what it was, but it was like just, it wasn't even kind of like a manipulated video image. It was kind of entirely artificially made.

The whole sort of point was to kind of like contribute to this affect of like the narrative of invasion. And like it kind of used particular techniques like speeding a video up and sort of like darkening elements of it and everything. and you know, and I think this is going to become a lot more common, at least like in this interim period where like the AIs are not kind of going to, they're not really going to be regulated. I don't know how much of this, how this will also like involve the EU and it's kind of like the speed of which

regulation can and can't happen. But in the meantime, like as regulation is debated, like you're going to end up having more of these types of videos anyway, where like it doesn't actually matter what's fake and what's real or like, you know, whether something's legitimate or not. It's more about adding to that sort of background noise and adding to, things that kind of create the narrative of invasion. It goes right back to sort of like beginning the segment earlier on in the episode,

which is like the shift between how we talk about migrants and refugees, you know, going from like, oh, they're going to like add pressure to our economy. They're going to take away jobs. You know, we're going to like house them in places where they're not going to be able. There's not going to be any opportunity. Things that like are, you know, are roots in racism, but are not sort of directly saying it to one, which is now like very overtly racist. Like this is a sort of racial invasion.

They're going to attack women and children. basically they're rape gangs, etc. And there's still like a TikTok kind of, there's still like stuff going around on TikTok. I can't remember who pointed this out, but if you're a listener, then like, yeah, make stuff known and also thank you, but like the conspiracy

theory that like the government are bringing in refugees on purpose and they bring the boats in at night time so that no one can see them. And they're training an army. They're like creating a shadow army that will eventually wage war on white people. Yeah. They're

to make everyone cue up to pay for the Pittington Omikaze, whether they wanted or not. In Greece, one of the ways in which the Greek state doing crimes against humanity in the Eugene came out was because it was the right that went down to the beaches and found these photographs of shipwrecks and then assumed that they were the remains of boats that had been imported by the authorities as part of the Great Replacement. And actually it was a complete opposite. it, but that was how the image has gone out there. I want to come back to the other big thing that's been shaping the Central Med for the last couple of years, but I'll have to kind of roll back a second first to, well,

amuse for many of your shows, actually, Naa Mamma Gaddafi, who from the mid-Nauties was trying to say, I can be your partner to Europe in stopping people from crossing. Then obviously that stops. The NATO intervention happens. he is killed in 2011 and the NU get chaos and civil war and anarchy afterwards. And the Europeans are trying to continue to maintain access to lucrative and needed oil and gas supplies from Libya. And so that's the context in which they start forming relationships with militias that later grow into what becomes the Libyan Coast Guard around the same time because partly because of the breakdown of law and order, Libya is becoming more and more. more of a transit point for people moving and moving in the most horrific conditions.

I'd recommend Sally Hayden's my fourth time be drowned. I quote a few of the testimony she takes in my own book for just an insight into slavery, torture, death in the camps there. It's very difficult to sum up quite how bad things are. And in this non-functional state that doesn't have in any meaningful sense a kind of hobbsy and monopoly on force, you do have this one functional form. that emerges, well, it's 10 militias in a trench coat, but it at least appears to be a functional force. It has uniforms and equipment, and it's only there because it's armed and trained by

Europe and put to sea with the aim of preventing people from getting across the mares to where they can exercise their rights. And it's, it and the militias associated of it are profiting multiple times over, and they're intercepting people and taking cash from Europe to do so, their neck deep in the smuggling and trafficking trade too and also in the the detention camps and the economy of slavery and labor exploitation.

Normally it's only the Americans who pay both sides in a conflict. They claim to be trying to win. And most of, a lot of its boats now come from the Italians. In particular, these Caribbean class boats, which are ex-Guardia de Fernanza,

so ex-Police. And one of them famously a year ago, shot at the rescue crew, the rescue crew on board a ship called the Ocean Viking. They had 90 rescued people on board at the time. They were open fire on for like a full 20 minutes. And I remember speaking to one of the crew on board who was a doctor who's worked in Gaza and Ukraine and Sudan and Lebanon. So, you know, no stranger to war zones.

But the thing they were saying was this was more terrifying than any of that because you deploy as an MSF doctor in a difficult place. You know, you have a safety briefing. You know how to react. You, to some extent, can train for these situations. You can't for just being randomly opened fire on an unarmed ship a few miles south of a place that we generally know as being the place we go on holiday to European beach resorts. And it's not the only time it's happened, right? There's been dozens of these incidents now.

Some of them happening to the civil fleet, obviously the violence much more commonly being directed against people crossing. And, you know, you would expect outrage about this. If this was an insurgent group somewhere on the other side of the world that had shot at European citizens, where to be thinking about sending troops in. I mean, I remember Chris Filk, the Conservative Minister being in the channel recently while the French were doing a training exercise and claiming to have been shot at, or this like yachting couple in the channel as well, who seems to be playing chicken of a Russian destroyer and near Portsmouth a couple of months back,

both of those things leading the news for days on end. The Viking incident and others like it, like barely got any coverage. And then afterwards, Cruz and went to the various powers to be and said, could you stop sending our taxpayer money to militias that shoot at us and endanger our lives? And the European Commission response was, well, actually, all this incident proves is that we need to pay them more, because if we pay them more, they'll be better trained and more professional, which 10 years of evidence suggests the opposite. Britain was even even weirder when a couple of the British crew members who had been shot at by the Libyans went to the foreign office and asked, are you going to be having any conversations with your allies in Europe about the people they're funding and the danger they're posing to legitimate humanitarian work at sea?

And we got a one-word answer from a foreign office minister which just says no. So that's the level of contempt we're being held in. I do find it somewhat ironic that while we are getting involved in wars off the coast of Yemen and Iran and wherever else under the framework of maritime security and freedom of navigation and keeping trade routes open and so on and so forth, by creating this violent, militarized, chaotic mess right off our own shores. So in light of all of this, I suppose I would love to know, like, as a closing thought, the situation seems to be getting made more difficult on purpose by, you. European governments and by the actors they pay to enforce this in places like Libya, how do you keep a sense of motivation, optimism about the ability to help? Or is that an optimistic thought that would exist in the first place? Because obviously there's work to be done and I can tell you're very dedicated to it. But like, I can imagine it's also quite distressing and might sometimes feel hopeless.

Yeah, I mean, it is difficult. to be out too optimistic about it. It's a miserable situation. But I think if there is a note of hope to be had, it's that like, well, for starters, the fleet is still operating, right? And there are still more people that apply to be crude. And then there are places for there are, and there's an outpouring. I mean, in the attacks on the R&LI,

we were talking about earlier to bring it back to the British context for a second, There was like an outpouring of solidarity and donations after the attacks. Similarly, in Europe, a lot of ordinary people from all walks of life, often people you wouldn't necessarily expect, crudieships or donate to them or help on land in some other way. And beyond that, throughout the last 10 years, you have this huge and very professionalised and skilled, even if they're all doing it on a shoestring of no money. and multinational structure of, you know, people who are running around the tension camps providing legal advice, people who are doing work at sea, people who've come over and made

the crossing themselves and navigated the system and are now helping others to do it. Some of this stuff through like formalized NGO type organizations, some of it just through ordinary people trying to kind of get stuck in and do stuff. And as we head further into what appear to be an escalating series of like more general crises, the economic, the climatic, the technological, the geopolitical, so on and so forth, the thing that's happened in the Central Med and other European borders, that in response to the collapse of any even pretence at the maintenance of human rights in response to the escalation of violence and that people have continued to organize and mobilize and do stuff

in the most difficult of conditions gives me hope not only that those particular problems can be addressed, but that the lessons from organizing a bunch of different people from very different perceptions of how things work in fast-moving and hostile and often criminalized environments, and the lessons taken from that can be useful for building a slightly better world in lots of other areas as well. Yeah, I'm really struck by this. It's really inspiring, but also like there's a lot of anger behind these stories when you read them about how much easier and much more humane it could be

if it wasn't made as difficult as possible. So obviously I really commend you for the work that you've done and I obviously wanted to bring you on to give you a chance also to shout out your book along the Watchtower Dispatches from Europe's War on Migration, which will be out in November. Thank you so much for making time for this. Thanks for having me.

I've been a long time listener of and fan of the show. So it's nice to be here. Well, likewise, it was a pleasure having you on and thank you so much for being a trust future listener. Riley in November are out right now. They'll be back next week on the free one. Hussain and I will continue our attempts to pilot the spacecraft. I feel like a maritime metaphor feels inappropriate after what we've just talked about.

So I'm like, oh, we're going to guide our rickety boat. It's like, fuck shit, wrong thing to talk about. So we're actually in a spacecraft. We were trying to move it so it's not flying straight into the sun. We'll be back later this week on the bonus. Thank you so much for being a listener and we'll talk to you soon. Bye. Thank you.