TRIGGERnometry - "Andy Burnham Is Away With The Fairies" – Andrew Neil

Episode Date: October 3, 2026

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If the country does vote for the Andy Burnham prospectus, that's it. We are a socialist tax and spend future. There's no going back from that. He believes that a bigger state means more growth. He's away with the fairies. But that's his belief. Why don't you think it's going to work? Because I don't see anywhere in the world wherever has.

So a crisis in the bond markets can force this government into doing things it doesn't want to do. I think we are heading for some really tough times. A you too popular is life too easy? Then head over to our merch store and change your life forever by telling the world you watch Trigonometry. You'll be able to buy hoodies, t-shirts, caps, stickers, posters, and of course, the world-famous Trigonometry mug. Go to shop.org.com.org.

That's shop.triggerpod.com.ukau.uk. And we're going to Trigionometry. Lovely to be here in the heart of Westminster. Exactly. Thanks for giving away our location. Thank you. Now we're going to get docksed and protested and attack. Westminster's a big place. Yeah. And we're right next to Pimlico, as you know.

Exactly. Thank you. Strong star. Andrew, what a pleasure. We've been meaning to have you on for a long time. We want to talk to you about the BBC later on. But actually, I think with your experience and with the sort of serious commentary you provide, we'd love to just hear a very broad sweep of your thoughts on actually what is happening in our country. Okay. Well, there's a lot happening, but not much of it very good.

I mean, I think politics has gone through a major change. The story of 2025 was the rise of the insurgents on the left and the right, reform doing well, taking a lead in the polls, the Greens coming up fast, causing labor palpitations overtaking the Lib Dems. And so by this time last year, the Greens are well ahead of the Lib Dems, labor is really worried about them, and reform is ahead in the polls, over 30%. And when they get over 30%, a lot of seats start to fall their way. And that was then.

Now, here we are a year later, and it's gone into reverse. The greens have had a bad year, though not as well covered as the bad year that reformers had, and Mr. Farage in particular, and the problem with a one-man band is if the one man has a bad year. Well, if the one man is out of tune, the whole band's out of tune. And that's been a problem for reform. So you've seen, to my surprise, in a way, the reemergence of the two legacy parties. Labor has had a new lease of life under Andy Burnham. They're now ahead in the polls, though not by much, they're still in the 20s.

Kemi Biedenoch, I think, has come through as a formidable conservative leader. Her problem is to get her growing popularity to rub off on her party, which is a very tarnished brand, and that hasn't happened yet. But it is now down to reform Labour, Tory, the three, they're all almost with Labour that better head, but they're almost all within statistical shouting distance of each other. And that's a big change, and that's a return to a more familiar politics. In the meantime, as that political change has been going on, the British economy has turned

out to be much more resilient in the face of Trump's war than I thought it would be. It's nothing to write home about, but then there's no economy was right home about with a possible exception of America before the war. And we've done not badly, just that the growth figure is redone again. I think that's about as good as it's going to get. I think we are heading for some really tough times. I think this is going to be a difficult winter, a winter of discontent, not in the old-fashioned way of strikes,

but in terms of we head into winter with rising inflation, rising interest rates, rising mortgages, no end in sight for Trump's war, a new cost of living crisis coming down the pike with energy bills, and with a political system that really does. doesn't know how to handle this. We're speaking in the week of the Labour Party conference, in which neither the new Chancellor John Healy nor the Prime Minister, Mr. Burnham,

had anything to say about the winter in store for us. Nothing. It was all about the next manifesto and all, looking back, I've got a miners' lamp on my shelf and, you know, this curious mixture of nostalgia and folklore that still dominates the Labour Party. and how to deal with the cost of living crisis, how to deal with other things that are going to be difficult, was rising interest rates, how are you going to ever hit your housing target

if mortgages are rising? None of that was done. So we still, to me, clearly, have major economic problems in a political system that is not up to providing the solutions. Well, like you said, there was a lot of very pleasant-sounding optimistic promises about things that will be done primarily after the next election.

So it didn't seem like there was much a substance, but the one thing that was completely missing, and appears to me to be completely missing more broadly from the conversation outside of a few people, is the debt, and the deficit, which is continuing to increase it, and the fact that the yields are now higher than they were under list trust, if I remember correctly. They are indeed. So we are now in a position where we're spending huge amounts of money paying off the interest on the debt we already have, continuing to borrow more.

And now you have a prime minister who says we must undo everything that was done in the last 40 years, which means to go back to bigger government and more government intervention. What does that mean for us economically? It means that we're in trouble and that it means he wants a bigger state and higher taxation at a time when we have the highest tax burden in peacetime already. And the state already accounts for about 45% of our GDP, which is also high by modern times. So he wants to build, instead of saying, well, taxes are too high, the state's too big. It's not very good at what a lot of it does. Let's pay it back. Let's have lower taxes.

Let's have a state which concentrates on doing what the state can do and do it well, rather than trying to do everything. He wants to move in the opposite direction. And no politician is very keen in talking much about the national debt or about the budget deficit, which every year adds to that debt, because they don't know what to do. about it. I mean, in America, fiscal conservatism is dead. No one talks about it on the Republican or the Democrat side. And their national debt is now 40 trillion. Nobody even knows what that means. I just think it's a lot. Ronald Reagan one said to me, he said, you know, Andrew, a billion here,

a billion there, it soon adds up to real money. Well, it's now a trillion here, a trillion there. And we've got a developing fiscal crisis on the other side. side of the channel, Francis. Got some real problems at the moment, which haven't been much covered. So Britain's not alone on this, but Britain is peculiarly vulnerable to it. We still pay

a moron premium thanks to the brilliant work of Liz Truss during that short period that I call the Cluster Trust. I could call it something ruder, but I know this is a family show. So I think the Cluster Trust will do and rather than

take steps that would recognize that. Rachel Reeves, a Starmer, and now Mr. Healy and Mr. Burnham, are going to add to that. They're going to add to the amount of spending. They're going to add to the amount of debt.

And that's a pretty dangerous thing to do, because at the moment the bond markets, which is where governments go to borrow, are pretty skittish about everybody, which is why there is a global rise in the price.

have to pay if you're a government to get your debt away. The 30-year bonds in America this year just reached a new record, the highest since 2002. This year are 10-year bonds. The government yesterday in Britain borrowed another $4 billion, and it had to pay, it's a 10-year bond, it's a guilt, as they're called in Britain. It's a 10-year guilt, and we had to pay the highest interest rate since 1999. So you can get the debt away. Are you having to pay? Are you having to pay? You're more, and of course down the road, you have to pay more on debt interest all the time, and it's already 110 billion. If debt interest was a government department, it would be the third biggest government department

in Britain, and you have to pay it, and you have to find the money for it. And we're particularly vulnerable because the bond markets are already making us pay more for our debt than any other G7 country, and we still have more inflation built into our system than Europe or the United States. And it's that inflation that nudges up interest rates. Because, you know, if inflation's 3%, and you're being asked to lend the government money, you're going to want a lot more than 3% to get a... I mean, 3% just keeps...

You don't make any money out of that at all. And so that combination of our past record, the size of our debt, the size of our deficit, and the fact that inflation is kind of built into the system in Britain now means that the bond markets have us in the crosshairs more than anybody else. So come the budget, this government better be very careful what it does if it tries to fiddle or be smart with the fiscal rules. They will pay a big penalty. And as will we all.

But I think it's inevitable that they will do that, given what we've already talked about, the tack towards more government, more spending, et cetera. And I've been a bit of an accelerationist on all of this for a while, which I think it seems to me the British public are not willing to make the adjustments that we're going to have to reckon with the massive debt and the deficit. And a Burnham-led fiscal crisis is as far as I can see, the only way that we're ever going to get back to some sanity.

Is this a bad theory, a good theory? Well, I think you're right. that no one's going to do very much without a crisis. And people are only going to tinker. And although the government claims that the deficit is on a downward trajectory, not quite clear that it is. I mean, we've already overborrowed in the first five, six months of this fiscal year. And we could end up borrowing as much this year as we did last year, which would be about

$130 billion on top of the $3 trillion. So that doesn't send a great signal. And no one's got much appetite to do it, because they're all between a rock and a hard place. Cutting public spending seems to be beyond the pale for this government, even though that would be a natural way to start. They're on backbenchers won't let them. They won't let them, because you kill Starmer, tried in a minor way,

one of the reasons why he's no longer prime minister. British government now spends about $1.4 trillion a year, but we're not going to start spending. And there was no mention at the Labour Conference of any kind of spending cuts at all. So what do you then do? Borrow more? The scope for borrowing more is going to be very, very limited, if anything, because it's not a case that you can't borrow, but the more you borrow, the more the markets will demand a risk premium. So you'll end up paying more and more and more interest in your debt service costs will rise and rise.

So where does that leave? Well, it leaves tax. And at the moment in the Treasury, they're scampering around trying to find various ways of increasing taxes. Because the government has ruled out an increase in income tax, VAT, and national insurance contributions of employees. These are by far the three biggest tax revenue sources. So if you haven't got access to them, you start to look at all sorts of other things. and it's the worst possible way to handle taxation because small tax rises by definition don't raise much

and they're nearly all bad. They nearly all screw things up in ways you didn't foresee. They complicate what's already the biggest tax code in the world. Our tax code is longer than anybody else's. An accountant who wanted to print it out and bring it to you, you would need a wheelbarrow. That's how big it is. So the more tax cuts you have, small, tinkering here, there, mansion tax. Remember, George Osborne's pasty tax, all the rest of it.

It's the worst possible way to raise money, but they have no money, they won't cut, they can't borrow, and so that's what we're going to have, and that will set the economy back even more. So there may come a point. I don't think it would be triggered in Britain, but it could be triggered by a loss of faith in America or by a bond crisis in France, and that will wave up against us. And just as the IMF forced the government into drastic cuts in 1976, when we last had a tax and spend labor government, so a crisis in the bond markets could force this government into doing things it doesn't want to do. And, Andrew, we went around at the time of the last one. What does that look like for ordinary people? People watching this and listening to this, what does that mean will happen for them?

What happened last time was that the British government ran. out of dollars. In these days, it borrowed in dollars. We don't have that problem today. We borrow in pounds. So there's no exchange rate exposure. But it borrowed in dollars, the pound collapsed, and it couldn't raise the dollars to pay back in dollars. So it had to go to the IMF, the International Monetary Fund, essentially American run, for a dollar loan, which was about three billion pounds worth of dollars to pay back the dollar loans. But the price the IMF said for that was that we want major cuts in public spending right across the board.

And so it was two things. It was humiliating that here was one of the great countries, great economies of the world having to go to the IMF to borrow. IMF is meant for third world countries and places that needed help in difficult times. And that at foreign demand, we had to take huge chunks out of the budget. It was a very, very humiliating time for the country, for the Labour government. And it never really recovered from it. It never really recovered.

I mean, look, we can blame politicians all we want. But there's the adage, which we all know, is that you get the politicians you deserve. How much do we all have to take responsibility for it? this because we all know that Burnham, it doesn't matter who it is in charge, once they start implementing these kind of cuts and the state starts shrinking, there's a very real risk they'll get voted out. Exactly. It's the people who blame.

It's British attitudes to blame because the British people think they can have Scandinavian levels of cradle to the grave welfare on kind of middle. Atlantic taxis, you know, higher than America, but a lot lower than Europe. And here's the thing you can't, particularly once you've run out of space for borrowing. And in a way, the European left has always been more honest than the British left. The European left has always said, look, if you want all this welfare, that's fine, we're in favor of that. But everybody's going to have to pay higher taxes.

not just the rich, everybody's going to pay higher taxes, from low to middle earners onwards, because that's where the real money is. The British left says, no, you can have all of that, and we'll only tax the top 5%. Even Jeremy Corbyn, he said, we'll just tax the top 5%. We'll just get the non-doms.

We'll just get these rich millionaires that don't pay any tax. Two things, or three things, the problem with that is, One, the affluent in this country actually pay a lot of tax. The top 1% account for almost 30% of income tax receipts. So they're already paying quite a lot. And the top 10%, I think 60%.

That's right. So if you tax them too much and they walk out the door and there is nobody more mobile than a well-educated English-speaking professional, if they walk out the door, your tax base walks out the door with it, We have a tax base more skewed to the rich paying tax than any economy in Europe. So that's your tax base that you risk walking out the door. And yet we think that it can all be financed by not us paying more tax. Somebody else would pay more tax.

And it's become a kind of free ride. Plus, there's been a psychological change. we've fallen back in love with big government. You know, it took Mrs. Thatcher quite a while to shake the government's addiction, of the people's addiction to big government. But she did it in the end. And Blair and Brown built on her legacy. And they did not increase the size of the state by very much at all.

And they didn't increase taxes by very much. they didn't increase income tax rates at all until Brown decided to leave a little bomb for the incoming government in the last minute. But that's not what we've done now. I think two things happened in recent history. One was that the previous conservative government under Mr. Cameron and then the shambles of prime ministers that followed actually lost faith with the Thatcher legacy and bit began to move away from it, began to leave less in markets, to believe less in competition. I mean, they stitched up the energy market,

so it's effectively run by government. That was done under them. Now, and then COVID came. And COVID's like a war. War equals big government. It's the only way you can win. COVID was the same. It's a pandemic.

We need big government. We need a scheme to pay people when they're not working. And then Ukraine came. And that was a war. And that had a huge energy crisis. More big government. now subsidies for household energy bills. Boris Johnson was a big government conservative.

Donald Trump is a big government conservative as well. And so suddenly big government is fashionable again. But the thing the British don't seem to realize they rather like big government. They don't say you're doing too much. They say, well, you're doing that. Why can't you do that? Why can't you do that?

That's become the culture. And the problem with that is that in the end, government tries to do too much. and it ends up doing almost everything badly. And the idea that government should do only what government has to do and do it well, which is a kind of thatcheride, Jeffersonian view of government, that's gone by the board. And yet although as night follows day, high taxes follow big government,

in the end you can't have one without the other, But we don't seem to accept that. We think, no, we can have big government, but only that rich guy around the corner. He needs to pay more tax. I don't need to pay more tax. Why should I pay? I'd pay a lot of tax already. And so I think the whole cultural attitude of the country is out of kilter for taking

whoever's in power of taking the right decisions that would get us back onto an even keel. I assumed selling the merch would be the hard part of running the trigonometry store. Checkout is, and Shopify had already solved that before we even launched. I'm not what you call a natural businessman. And yet, the Trigonometry Store somehow works, mostly because Shopify built the hard part before we ever opened it. Because the moment someone's actually ready to pay, Shopify makes sure they can. And if they've bought before, their details are already saved, so it's one tap and done.

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You see it online. There's a real hatred of the top 1%, as if the rest of the people feel that they've been cheated by people earning more money than them. it strikes me actually as quite un-British. Well, it's unbridged, and it's kind of stupid as well, because there's a kind of implication that this person has only become a billionaire by screwing you. Well, where's the evidence for that?

You know, in a way, you would want more billionaires if they're creating more jobs and investing and creating more people. I mean, we're boasting at the moment. Because our high-tech sector is a lot better than we think it is, because we're always so down on ourselves. I mean, we have more unicorns, which is a high-tech startup worth a billion. We have more unicorns than any, than the three biggest unicorn markets combined in Europe, more than the three biggest combined.

That's a success story. But the culture doesn't treat it as a success. The culture is, well, why are you so rich? Why am I not? But then we have politicians who pander to that, and previous Tory governments have pandered to that. And previous Tory governments have pandered to that as well. You want more wealth. I mean, it's very interesting that in Andy Burnham's speech,

there wasn't a single word about wealth creation of what generates wealth. Not a single word about promoting enterprise. Not a single word about encouraging businesses and getting more competition. Everything that gives you the revenue, the resource to then spend on schools and hospitals and better roads and a better health service and so on. And we've got a political culture now, which is obsessed with cutting up the cake. You can adjust that bit, I'm going to have this bit,

you can't have anything, you've got enough, rather than a set of policies that will say, hey, how do we make this cake bigger? And then there'll be more to go around for everybody. I mean, there's one thing that we're ignoring here. There's plenty of people who are watching this who are on the left. And to be fair, they've got a point. And they're going to go, Andrew, come on, be fair.

What about the economic crash 2008? That was a really devastating effect on our economy. Wages haven't really grown since then. That isn't people's fault. They're still going out. They're still working hard. I think that's true. And I think the long tail, the long shadow of the great financial crash of

2008 has been seriously underappreciated. You see, the great fear in 2008 when this crash took place was that that crash, as in 1929, would morph into a great depression as it did in the 1930s. America lost a quarter of his GDP, 25% of the labor force, America unemployed, times of huge hardship in this country. in South Wales, Clydeside, and North of England. And so all of the policy work went into trying to stop that from happening. And the solution, and it was the right solution, was QE, Quantices of Easy,

the printing, electronic printing of money. Not helicopter money that you just drop and you never get back, but money in a way that you put into the system and then when it's done it's bit, you begin to take it out again. sophisticated way. Ben Bernanke, who'd written the definitive book on the crash of 1929, we were lucky he was chairman of the Federal Reserve at the time. That was the right thing to do, but it had a consequence. Because all that money, let's just take Britain, the Bank of England bought 875 billion pounds worth of bonds from the banks and other institutional

investors. It put these bonds onto its balance sheet and it put the money onto the bank's balance sheets. The theory that they'll lend more, they'll get the money into the system. Now, it stopped the Great Depression, and that should not be underestimated. But that money had to find a place to go. And of course, where does it go? It goes into assets. It goes into stocks and shares and property and companies. And who has these assets? People who already pretty well off, who've already got a big house in London, have already got a stock and share portfolio. And you had a situation where, to put it bluntly,

it's a little bit unsophisticated, but it's good enough. The people who had caused the crash, the big financial institutions, were suddenly doing incredibly well again, when all this money was now on their balance sheet. They had to spend. You had a 10 million-pound house in London. It was now 14 million, 15 million. And the people who had done nothing to cause the crash, the workers, people on a wage were seeing their wages not rising at all, and they were living week to week or month to month.

So, of course, resentment was about to burn. And they were right. And we didn't see this happening quickly enough. We downed out in the fact, we've stopped a great recession. Thank God. Isn't that a great achievement? We've done better than the 30s. we didn't see the consequences for quite some time of the resentment that was building up

among those who hadn't caused the crash but were suffering, looking at those who had caused the crash and doing better than ever before. And then you add in mass migration on top of that, which made life more difficult for blue-collar workers as well, and helped to depress wages, which were already depressed badly enough. And you had a situation where the politics of it turned sour. And ordinary people begin to think, nobody's listening to me anymore.

Why am I being penalized? And I believe that if it wasn't for that long tail, that dark shadow of the great crash, that would not have been Brexit, We would not have voted to leave in 2016, and Donald Trump would not have won in 2016. Both these votes were the revenge of what my old mentor, Alistair, was editor of the Economist, used to call with reverence plain folk in the nicest sense of the world, the plain, decent people of this country. They were the rebellion of the plainfolk of this country against the elites who had caused

So many of our problems, but we're still doing so well. And it has continued since, and it explains the rise of the national rally of Le Pen and France and also of the AFD in Germany, of the Sweden Democrats in Sweden, not the social Democrats, the Sweden Democrats of Madame Maloney's party in Italy. It's had an enormous political impact, which is not over yet, which is still there. Well, as you say, I mean, it's clear we're living in the age of populace. both left and right across the European continent. What's interesting to me about what you were just talking about

is the cyclical nature of things, because people say the great financial institutions caused the crash. But I think it's clear that it was the repealing of Glass-Steagall in the US and also some of the laws around financial regulations in this country that meant that they were able to do the things that had previously been illegal, and those things were brought in after the 1929 crash.

So we seem to go around in circles. And to me, this leap into, I mean, the left used to deny they won socialism, but I think now they're openly champing in it. And that's what you saw at the Labour Conference. Oh, I don't think there's any doubt about that. I mean, Andy Burnham laid out the most explicit tax and spend socialism of any labor leader, other than the brief Corbyn interregnum. And he never really spelled out very well. I think you have to go back to the 1970s. And even the 1970s, they weren't so explicit.

about it. And I think, you know, you can like it or dislike it. But the one thing you can't say is that we don't know what he stands for. We now know what he stands for. It's quite clear. We now know what he meant by rolling back 40 years of neoliberalism. It was kind of unclear if that was just a buzz phrase. What the hell is neoliberalism?

Andrew, have you worked out what that means yet? Because I hear a lot of people saying neoliberalism. What does it mean? It means the end of the Thatcher settlement. Right. So Thatcherism was neoliberalism. And that's what he's calling. No one called it that at the time.

Right. I mean, nobody other than policy won't call it that at any time. But a neoliberalism is a kind of, is meant to be an updated version of 19th century liberal economics of free markets, limited government, and sound money. And it gets neo because in a modern sense, it's always going to be that bit different in a sophisticated modern economy. And he was quite explicit. Today, he wants the state to control housing.

I don't quite know how you do that, but he wants the state to control housing. Do you mean rent controls by that? No, well, he may, but he just, I think he means more council house building, but more control of private landlords. If you're a private landlord they don't like, then they want the right to come and take your property away. He said that explicitly in his speech. He wants to control energy, for the state to control energy,

he wants the state to control water and other utilities. And at the same time, he wants the state to grow in size, and he knows that taxes will have to rise to pay for that. So it's a big change. Now, the fact is that Thatcherism, and the way it was consolidated under Blame, and Brown very cleverly, I think, was already beginning to erode ironically under the previous Tory government. They had lost faith in it. And Boris Johnson, in particular, when he came

belong completely. You know, he was just obsessed with big government. I mean, he wanted, was he wanted to build a tunnel under the Irish Sea at one stage? You know, I mean, just bogus. So I had to tell him there's a really deep ditch in the Irish Sea. It's not quite easy to build a tunnel. So that was already underway. The flood flight from a largely market-led economy with huge social underpinning. Nobody denies that. Social market economy is the best way to describe it. And Andy Burnham wants to finish the job. He wants a bigger state in everything. He wants the state to be the guiding light. He believes that a bigger state means more growth. That's his theory of growth. He doesn't have a plan for growth,

but he has a theory of growth. He believes that a country of growth. He believes that a combination of more state intervention, ideally of state ownership, where he can't afford that, like the water companies, then more state control. More state control, more state ownership, coupled with a dash of Burnham-type devolution, where you empower not just the central state, but the local mayors or whatever the government is, that's his theory of growth. He believes that will bring growth back. My own view is he's away with the fairies. But that's his belief. Why don't you think it's going to work? Because I don't see anywhere in the world, wherever it has. Indeed, the whole lesson of social democracy in continental Europe of the late

20th and early 21st century is that social democracy works works really well in encouraging business and enterprise and of spreading the wealth through the country, provided you don't let the state get too big, you don't let the state become ubiquitous, you don't try to control everything. I mean, if you look at the history of the Swedish social democrats, they did gangbusters as long as they didn't let the state get too big,

and then they lost it. And the state got bigger and bigger. and bigger, they started talking about taking over companies and giving unions at stake in companies and controlling them, and the whole thing fell apart in the 80s and 90s. So I don't go anywhere. And look, I look at a country like France, where the state is much bigger than it is. The state accounts for 56% of France's GDP. It's still only 45 in ours. And I look at Germany where the state is big as well. And if, and if, and I'm a, If state ownership and state control equal economic growth,

Germany and France would be booming. And they're not even growing even more slowly than we are. So I see no correlation. Unlike Mr. Burnham's theory of growth between more state control, more state ownership, a bigger state in economic growth. Indeed, I see the opposite, that there comes a time when the state is so big, It's a dampener on growth. It becomes a hindrance to growth, and that's where we are now.

And what that leads to, as we've touched them before, is the rise of populism. Now, you know, before you could sort of dismiss it, maybe it was just one person here or one person over there. But you're looking at Europe, and there's a very real chance. I mean, the AFD are going to do very, very well. Well, they've already won two states. And so there may be a chance of them getting actually into power, significant real power. Harder to see, because you can't form a government in Germany without doing a coalition, then nobody will deal with them.

But it doesn't mean to say they will not. If an election was held tomorrow in Germany, they would have almost the same number of seats as the Social Democrats and the Christian Democrats combined. And although there would be nobody to deal with them to form a government, they would have huge huge influence on whoever the government was. So they are a rising power, and not just in the east, which is their traditional heartland. So that's what's happening in Europe. Sorry, Andrew, we'll just go back to it. With the AFD, can you just because I don't know, and I want, everybody says they're far right. What actually are they?

Oh, you know, people throw around the words hard right in all sorts of things. Reform in this country is called hard right. Le Pen's national rally in France is still called hard right. Maloney sometimes in Italy is still called hard right. The AFD is hard right. That is a hard right party. Can you define the term for us, Andrew? Because here, like you say, I hear conservatives the politicians being described up far right.

It's ethno-nationalist. It basically wants to round up people who weren't born in Germany and get rid of them. It's an ethno-nationalist party with the added tweak of being very pro-Kremlin. Quite remarkable that the right, the people, Populist right has this soft spot for Mr. Putin's Russia. You know, you saw a bit of that in reform. Le Pen's party was pretty close. I mean, she's managed to get away from that.

Mrs. Maloney in Italy has not done that. She's been very solid for Ukraine. But her party, the brotherhood of Italy party, is very pro-Kremlin on that. But the bigger issue, coming back to this era of big government, is that the populist left and the populist right, they both believe in big government. They don't go out, you know, left, right, in a horizontal line.

They come in a circle. If you look at the economic policies of Le Pen and France and of Melancho, who's the populist left equivalent, seems to have been around forever, they're not that different. They want big government. They don't like big business. They want protectionism.

So that means that even the populace, you know, in the old days the radical right meant Reaganite or Thatcheride, and that would take on big government. That would cut taxes, reduce government, get the enterprise animal spirits going again. It's not the populace, right? If you're on gold, you probably bought it for the same reason I did, because you looked at what central banks are doing to currencies and decided you wanted something they can't print. Good reasoning. But here's the thing nobody talks about after you make that decision. Your gold is just sitting there. It's not doing anything.

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That's monetary dashmetals.com slash trigonometry. Well, it's interesting because I don't know what your opinion on this. It would be interesting to discuss this in terms of this country being perhaps the exception because certainly the people at the top of reform, the populist right-wing party in this country, we've had them all on, Nigel Farage,

Suella Brahm, and Robert Jenner, and I've always asked them this question because to me this is fascinating about the difference between all of them who are clearly Thatcherites and believe in small government and low taxes and a lot of their newly acquired voter base who are far to the left of them on economic. On economic matters, that's right. Right. So the question is, are we perhaps the outlier in that we do actually in this country have a populist right-wing alternative,

which believes in small government still? I'm not sure it does, because although you're quite right, Nigel Farage is basically a factory. I think Richard Tice, I think he's the deputy leader, he's a bit of a Thatcherite. But they come up against the people whose votes they need. And so you end up these Thatcherites saying, well, actually, I think we should abolish the two-child limit for welfare. And if I came in favor of abolishing them, which is what Labor did.

You've seen here the triple lock, which Andy Burnham has had the guts to do something about, oh, no, reforms attacking that. You know, they say they're Thatcherite, but they're actually the party of big welfare because the red wall, they're worried that the red wall's in favor of welfare, so they don't want to do anything, piss off the red wall. So although our populist right,

first of all, there's nowhere near as right as anything like the EFD, I mean, I think for that you have to go more to restore parties like that. And it isn't as right on economic. I think you are right. It's not as obsessed with the big government as the populist right in continental Europe. but it's

and its instincts of what you say they are, they are more small government. But at the end of the day, it looks at its potential constituency and so you don't get the benefit of that. Well, this is where we come back to both my and France's point, which is,

it's ultimately up to the people of this country who want big government. And it looks to me like they're going to get it good and hard. And until we all learn the lesson of what happens when you do that, we're going to be trapped in the situation. Well, we're in an interesting time.

We've just come out of the Labour Party Conference in Liverpool, and the Tory Party Conference in Birmingham is going to open in the upcoming weekend and going to the earlier part of next week. And I think now the interesting thing we'll see, how do the Conservatives position themselves? They are now up against a clearly tax and spend socialist government. So do they now say this is our chance to read it. discover our Thatcherite roots. I'd, of course, bring them into a modern setting and modern issues, which I would guess is probably Kemi Bidna's instincts. But can she bring the party

with her? Is she prepared to take unpopular decisions? Even unpopular policies that might not in the short run have a lateral advantage. But I think sometimes you have to have the courage and the faith in your own convictions and in your own analysis. And if you think that given the size of government in Britain already and the size of the tax burden and the scale of the borrowing, that are attempting to do more of the same on a grand scale, which is now the Burnham strategy, if you think that's the route to going to hell in a handbasket, then you need the intellectual courage to lay down the markers, to explain why this is going to happen, to explain what the alternative is, to have the policies ready with the alternative, and to be ready to move when you

approved right. Because after all, that's what happened in the 70s. I mean, I was with the economist in the 70s. It was my first main job out of university. And a lot of the work that was done in the 1970s developed, really. rediscovered the market, invented the concept of privatizing a lot of state-owned services and state-owned industries, of providing a tax system that would incentivize individuals and companies and entrepreneurs.

Now, for a while, and also predicting that what labor was up to would end in tears in disaster. and in particular what had to be done about the unions. That was the single biggest problem in the 70s. Without tackling the unions, you could do almost nothing to build an alternative agenda. Now, for a long time, we kind of felt we were tramping away in the vineyards and many people taking notice of us or over ever coming our way. But it did. We were vindicated by the IMF community in 76.

We were vindicated by a winter of discontent. You go back to the 70s. We were told the only reason the unions are on strike is because it's an evil Tory government and only we had a Labour government they wouldn't go on strike. Well, last time I looked, there was a Labour government in 78, 79, when we had the winter of discontent.

And so all that was blown apart. And here, by bit by bit, it wasn't just the economist, but it played a major part. There were other think tanks, not a thousand miles from where we are. They had the courage of their convictions. They did their homework. They were proved right. And they had an alternative agenda to take advantage of that.

And I think that's what the Tories have to do now and be ready to move when they're proved right. Look, the problem with the Tories is they're so tarnished. Correct. They're so tarnished. There are lots of people, particularly. working-class conservatives more than anyone who will look at the Tories and look at what they have done,

particularly when it comes to immigration, and go, I'm just not doing it. And you can't blame them. I don't blame them because they're right. And I think that is the problem. I mean, it's almost unheard of, given the thumping they got in July 24, It's unheard of for any party like that to recover for the next election.

I mean, when Labour lost in 79, it was 97 before they got back in. You know, when the Tories lost in 97, it was 2010. And even then, they only got back in with a coalition with Liberal Democrats. There, you look, again, when Labor lost in 2010, it was 24 before they got back. Normally when you get thumped, you don't recover. And the Tories were royally and deservedly thumped in July of 2024. And they did let their own supporters down. They let them down.

You take the immigration thing above all else. They knew that immigration was a really big issue for their blue-collar supporters. They knew it was causing real anguish and pain, not just economically, but for many socially as well. that was changing the nature of the societies that they were brought up in. They said, vote Brexit, and we'll put it right. We'll get it right. People said, right, we'll vote Brexit. And then in 2022, 21, under the great Boris Johnson,

we had a net migration of half a million. That wasn't bad enough. We had net migration of almost a million the next year. And if that wasn't enough, we'd net migration of another million the following year. Mr. Johnson, the only politician ever to have an immigration wave named after him, the Boris wave, you don't recover from that quickly. And ironically, the Tories eventually did put things in place, which have had a major impact on net migration. I mean, this year it will be about 170,000.

Take out students and it's already closer to 100,000 now. And of course, Labour, who opposed all these changes, is getting the benefit of it. So I think you're right. I think Kemi Biedenoch, who, as I say, I think has emerged as a leader of some distinction. But I don't think she doesn't rescue the Tories by the time of the next election. And, Andrew, you mentioned Brexit. The current Labour government are now talking about reversing it, and they haven't, going as far as reversing it. Yeah, one of the options, Mr. Burnham says.

Francis and I both voted Remain, but, you know, we were quite, I mean, not quite. We were outraged by some of the way that that unfolded from there, where people wanted to unilaterally overturn a democratic vote that they didn't agree with. What would happen to this country if Labour tried to take this country back into the European Union? I think if they tried that, at the moment they think it's going to be a piece of cake because the polls say that most people want to rejoin. and that they've got buyers' remorse, and that they wish they'd never voted for Brexit in the first place.

And there is an element of that, which is true. But that changes the moment you start to have the debate. That changes the moment you start to talk about the issues. That changes the moment you're presented with the price for rejoining the club, which will be enormous. I mean, even Germany this week is rebelling, against the size of the next European budget, which is, I think, now over a trillion of which Britain would have to pay a big share.

This time, with no rebate. If that's a rebate, that's never coming back, baby. That's gone, that's history. So that's the price of entry. That would be 20, 30, 40 billion a year. We don't know. A lot of money. And then we'll be raised to the issue.

well, what about the Europe? Are you going to join that? Because we think you should. New members should join the euro. And although we could probably get around that, we'd be under pressure to give some kind of indication that we're prepared to join the euro at some stage and revisit that.

And then you've got Schengen. Well, new members have meant to join Schengen. This is free movement. It's free movement with Belzo. and you start to add all that up and you begin saying, maybe this isn't such a good idea after all. And then the debate will come out because, you see, the argument of the moment, my view is that there were actually very good economic arguments

for not voting to leave. And it's just a pity that Remain didn't make them. I mean, the Remain fought an appalling negative. complacent campaign, and did for many Remainers, like the egregious Alastair Campbell, and so they only started fighting after they lost. And we had that most, in a lifetime of covering British politics, that period between 2016 and 2019, the Theresa May period, was the most miserable time I can remember in British politics. It was just, we were rudderless, we were being buffeted,

by the Supreme Court on one side, Kea Starmus, second referendum on the other, Theresa May, clueless about what to do regarding Brexit as a problem to be managed rather than the only proper way forward, whether you were for or against it, an opportunity to be seized. It was a terrible time. And the one thing I'll give Mr. Johnson credit for was winning that December election in 2019, which kind of ended up. You put Europe back on the agenda. That comes back. That miserable time all comes back. And it sucked the bandwidth out of British politics.

It meant the final, the end of that decade of the Tory government towards 2020. It had run out of any purpose, of any agenda, other than to get Brexit over the line in some way. It was humiliating. The Europeans gave us a punishment beating. having the audacity to even think of leaving and to also to make sure that no one else thought of following us. And they won't. No one else has followers. Even the AFD in Germany, which used to be an exit party, doesn't want to do that.

Le Pen used to be no more. She doesn't even want to leave the EU. So you bring all that back. And then other people will say, well, the argument is this is how we get growth. back into the system and we can join the single market and join the customs union, or get that economic growth. And in theory, that may be the case. But if it is the case, while Germany, Italy, and France, growing more smaller slowly than we are. Because last time I looked, they didn't leave the customs union. They didn't leave the single market. So I think it

starts off with something we're good and I think, it's something that they think, hey, we can do this, the rank and file of Labour, the Lib Dems, the Greens, the media, the chattering classes, the metropolitan white-collar public sector workers who are now Labour's natural base, they're going to love it, let's do it. And it is to use a technical term as all the makings of a shit show. And there will come a point if they get that far down the road, that Burnham will be saying, why did I ever do this? Why did I go down this road?

because I've not got no time to do anything else. I'm knackered trying to get this over the line. And there's all these other things I wanted to do, and I've got no time for them. Do you think a lot of people have said that the next general election in this country is existential? Would you share that opinion, or do you think that's hyperbolic? Oh, we always say that because we want people to take notice of what we're saying. It depends on what it's fought on. It depends on what the dividing line is.

Now, if it's fought on a dividing line, and this could involve conservative and reform on one side, maybe a little closer than they like to make out because it's dawned on them that divided they fall, and some kind of accommodation will have to be reached, but it is another matter. But if it's a choice between returning to a more market economy, more enterprise-driven, more business-friendly, more lower tax, smaller government, versus the Andy Burnham prospectus, which is the opposite, then yeah, that's a big choice. Because although if people vote in a way that results in a right-of-centre government that might not deliver in all these things, if the country does vote for the Andy Burnham prospectus,

that's it. We are. a socialist tax and spend future. There's no going back from that if it votes for it. And with a coalition, he may not go an overall majority, but with a coalition of Lib Dems, Greens, SNP giving them moral support when he needs it, you have locked the country in to a tax and spend socialist future in the 2030s. The people who watch this show have generally done more thinking

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before we had two questions from our supporters is the BBC. Yeah. You were a stalwart for many, many years. Many years. At a time when I would say it was a great institution that I really admired. But for many of us, it doesn't feel like it has remained one since. Do you share that analysis?

Yes, I do. The BBC still does many great things. But I think the BBC's biggest weaknesses is the idea it can just carry on as it is. You know, the BBC business model, if I can put it that way, was invented when Lenin was in the Kremlin, and Warren Harding was in the White House. And

I forget, and I think it was maybe Baldwin was forming his first government. I can't remember in the early 20s because the government's care. It was probably border law or something like that. And I venture to suggest that this is a different world. And that that business model just can't

play. Look, I don't think young people today given the huge choice of streamers and YouTube and the endless channels on Sky, which I'm proud to have started, launched, are going to pay for something they don't watch. I mean, it's just beyond their cultural recognition. I have to pay for it, but I never watch it.

Yeah, but you still have to pay. And until the BBC gets off that model, I think it's cruising for a bruising. Now, it will be given a new lease of life by this government because this government is nostalgia. It's not just for heavy industry and trade unions and miners' lamps and gravy and gravy and chips or whatever it is, Andy Burnham, eats instead of biscuits. It still thinks there's a Fleet Street Tory press and that matters, which of course there isn't

and the way it did. In the days when the Sun sold 4 million copies had 12 million readers, there isn't a Tory press like that anymore. It's a shadow that's for myself. But it doesn't see that. And it sees the BBC as a bulwark against that Tory press.

So this government will be kind to it in whichever way it renews it. But I don't think, and I think, the BBC is a bit of a death wish too, because as it cuts its cloth to meet its budget, it seems to me almost everything it cuts is actually the public service bit that you can say, well, actually, I'm glad the BBC does that, and not the stuff that the market would do. I don't need to be, I've never watched Strictly come dancing or whatever it's called,

but I don't need the BBC to provide me with strictly. I think the market's pretty capable of doing that. I don't that that recent commercial of what's the BBC ever done for me kind of thing, a piece of propaganda, which I think it ran in the middle of the World Cup in this country. Right. It never mentioned, it was all the things that, you know,

East End does, well, it's a soap opera. Markets can do soap operas. You know, there are plenty of, you know, Coronation Street. I think that's ITV. And it never mentioned, even in the middle of the proms, which had just started, never mentioned the prongs. one of the great celebrations of music in the world of which the BBC is an integral part.

News got a passing glance. News has got like three seconds, whereas, you know, proper public service news is not necessarily the one we have at the moment. So it seems to me it's lost in the plot. So I, there is a Neil plan for the BBC. Do you want to hear it? Sure.

New plan is simple. You divide it into two. The bit that's free to air, available on all platforms is BBC Core. That's the public service broadcasting element. You turn the Arts Council into the Council for Arts and Broadcasting, and you channel about a billion pounds through that council to the BBC to pay for the things that are genuine public service broadcasting,

and that national events are carried there. Everybody can watch them. The nation comes together. Even, you know, quite challenging drama, giving new directors a chance to fail and so on, things the market would be a little bit wary about. It does that. And everybody gets it, and nobody has to pay for it.

And I reckon you could do all of that for about a billion. Everything else is the British HBO. If the programs are that good and people want to watch them and they're that popular, fine, subscribe to the BBC subscription and pay for it. And then, I think, you know, if the BBC is right and how greatest programs are, people would pay for it. And as a kind of, and I wouldn't make it a private company, it'd make it kind of like a John Lewis, a sort of company, a mutual fund. And but because it was now separate entity from the state, still be regulated by offcom, obviously, and so on. Couldn't take advertising. It would be a subscription-led channel regulated.

But it could go to the market, and it could borrow money to make more programs and do deals with other foreign commercial broadcasters. At the moment, two things are killing the BBC in terms of drama. One is it just can't afford the per episode costs now. I mean, the streaming has made per episode cost around $10 million dollars an episode now. BBC. The night manager, which is the most expensive BBC drama for a long while, it was about £3 million. That's a ton of money.

They can't afford to make that many of them. So that's it. And the other thing is that to get its drama off the ground, and the night manager is another good example of that, They need to do co-production deals, usually with Americans or other big broadcasters, to which they sell all the international rights. So they don't get that stream of income coming in from international rights. This would free them up to do it. And hey, look, if the BBC's wrong and they can't get many people to subscribe, well, you should never have been forcing me to pay in the first place.

The market has spoken. But if they're right, then that I think are more... a future, more suited to the environment we're in. And let's not forget that although the BBC has been, is obviously in some trouble, and it's cuts, cuts, cuts. And I can't remember when it last made a decent drama I wanted to watch. Let's not forget that the streamers have been a godsend for Britain.

I mean, this country, you know, we're so used to talking ourselves, Diane. This country is an audiovisual superpower. last year we made more Hollywood blockbusters than Hollywood. We have more in that final segment of the M25, as you look at the map, the final segment from the M4 through to glorious downtown Watford, there is now more studio sound stage space there than in the whole of Greater Los Angeles. 12 billion pounds spelled on production

movie and TV in this country last year. World beat us. Look at the streamers. Everything from adolescence to slow horses to black doves to the agency, which, interestingly, the American version of the French triumph, LeBurro, they're actually based in London. And we have the skills,

the skill base, the technology, our CGI is world beating, We're not as highly unionized as I'll tell you the difference if you go I mean they're even shooting Batman again in Glasgow in Glasgow Batman Well it is similar to Gotham exactly it's me let me assure you it's much more dangerous I mean Batman turned up and said a violent crime-infested city Screw this I'm getting out of here there's nothing I can do about this place And so we make all these things.

I mean, Game of Thrones and Titanic is now a major tourist asset for Northern Ireland. So we're a huge success in these things. And the BBC's played a part in that. And if it was freed from the current constraints and stop having to do a lot of nonsense that it doesn't have to do, then I think it could flourish. If it doesn't flourish, that's people. have spoken with their wallets. Well, and you make sense because there's no reason these two things should really be tied

together. Current affairs in particular is where I think the BBC lost a lot of people, particularly in the last 10 years. And look, there used to be this critique of the BBC that it, you know, it's not actually impartial in the way that it claims to be. And look at you. I mean, you're clearly sort of sent a right, but when, but there were conservative election candidates who were terrified of you when you were interviewing them. Including Boris Johnson. That's what. He came on, he came on this podcast later, and we grilled them too, but not nearly as hard as you would have done. But my point is, hiding in a freezer. I'm shouting, lock the door. You were as impartial as a person can be,

I think, from the outside. But what you've seen since the BBC has started losing a lot of its key presenters is they've all gone on to have their own podcast. And the claims that people made about these people not being impartial have all been born out by the- fact that these people are now radical leftists, basically. I'm afraid this is true. And, you know, the BBC's not alone in that. There is something about public service broadcasting. There's something about broadcasting in general, probably because it's all metropolitan-based

and big metropolis these days are left-wing. That's a change from times going by. You know, there was a time when Liverpool or Glasgow had as many Tory MPs as they had labor. You're not going to find that now. So they're all big. And it's why I thought it was always a joke that, oh, we move the BBC to Manchester, then that'll change. It's even more left wing than London.

It's all nonsense. So I think there's something kind of systemic that's a difficult. And you hire young university graduates who live in metropolitan areas, who come from middle-class backgrounds. Remember, the one thing of which diversity is not allowed in the BBC is class. Everything else can be diverse, but we're not going to help. poor kids and poor backgrounds get on on that. So there is something, and it's true of ABC in Australia,

it's true of ZDF in Germany, it's true of Ongtongde in France or of PBS in America. There's just something that public service broadcasting on the news leans to the left, which means in the Niel scheme of the BBC on the billion-pound public service broadcasting core of which news would be the Crown Jew, you would have to have special, special emphasis

on restoring impartiality and a really tough internal regulation to investigate every breach and to penalise those who breached it and to keep it real and keep it impartial and keep it honest. Because if you're using my tax money, never mind at the moment my last month,

to provide a news service, you have no right to make it biased. If you won't bias, you know, watch Sky or Channel 4 News. That's not my tax money. Or in America, Fox News, not tax money. MS now, tax money. If you're you using my money,

and I don't object in principle to the use of this for a country, Britain size in which BBC News is, World brand. I can see that there's a role for government to help prevent that. But you have an obligation to make sure it is the most impartial service in the world. And here's a thought. Every piece of media at the moment is looking for a unique selling point, USP, in an overcrowded market. What makes us different? Oh, here's something to be different. You can trust us. In fact, we're going, we are going to fact, we are, we are, we are going to fact

check all the fake news if it goes mainstream. We are the people that are not BBC verified, which just reinforces the existing ethos and culture. But we are going to be, it's our very reason for existing. And I think that would be a great selling point. And you could sell that around the world, by the way. People would love more and more people are thinking, well, what is true?

Who can I trust? these days. So that's the new plan and it will never happen. On that happy now. Yeah. Andrew, final question, always the same. What's the one thing we're not talking about that we really should be? Right. At this stage, right now, being a newsman, let's deal with the news. The really scary thing coming down the pike right now is the prospect of Donald Trump introducing a ban on diesel exports. because if he does that, it'll be very bad for Europe, but a potential catastrophe for Britain.

Why'd I say that? I'll just give you the facts. America is now the biggest exporter of diesel in the world, 1.5 million barrels a day of diesel. They refine the oil, and it comes out as to the refined product. We used to be self-sufficient in diesel, but our politicians, brilliant, brilliant move, closed all of our refineries bar for all. These are politicians that talk about the re-industrialization of Britain while they're closing the refineries. So we only have four refineries left that can produce diesel,

and that means that 55% of what we, of our diesel needs are now imported. And a third of that comes from America. We are the biggest importer of American diesel in the world. Europe imports too, but we import more. And here's the other difference. Closing the refineries, our re-industrialization-obsessed politicians, closed our storage. We have 42 days of diesel storing.

We have diesel stored that would compensate for 42 days of imports. France, 250. Germany, 280. Italy, 320. We have 42. So basically a month. Basically a month. So we are wide.

And there is no question in my mind. If Trump was to do it and the midterms are going so badly for him and he doesn't care about anything else, I wouldn't rule out that he does it. In my views, even for America, it would be economically wrong because I don't think it would. The idea is you stop exporting, you can flood the American market with diesel and the price will come down. And it's particularly hurting in those Midwest states that he's in danger of losing. I see the political logic of it.

But he hasn't quite worked out, though the oil into downtown is that there is no national network of pipes in America. It's regional markets. and California is short of diesel. And when you flood the market, you couldn't get the diesel to California from the coast, the Gulf Coast, where the refineries are. I don't think it would work, but that won't stop him from trying to do it.

And if he was to proceed in doing that, this country will be in recession by Christmas. And we're not talking enough about this. I was speaking to the business secretary. John Healy never mentioned in his speech. Andy Burnham was too busy with his hope. be changing thing to realize. We should be building up.

Because here's the problem. There's no time. The reason why there's such shortage of refining capacity at the moment is that Ukrainian drones have taken out a third of Russian diesel. We used to import our biggest chunk of diesel from Russia. Well, Russia's now importing diesel from India because it can't produce enough itself. And there's not anything like enough diesel getting. out of the Gulf. That was the other thing. I mean, the Gulf used to add value to its crude oil,

these Gulf states. They would refine the crude oil. It's worth a lot more as diesel. It comes as jet fuel. Jet fuel now selling for $180 a barrel in Asia at the moment. So they say, right, but it's not getting out. So we went to America as the big source. And if Trump stops that, we have nowhere else to go. our farming, our construction industry, our road haulage is entirely dependent on diesel. And these three things in many ways are the backbone of our economy. Andrew Neal, thank you so much for coming on. We should mention, of course, you are now a fellow YouTuber and we encourage everybody to. I join the elite.

How far the mighty have fallen, I would say. Andrew, great to have you on. Thank you. Thank you for your time and for your questions. And head on over to Triggerpod.co.uk where Andrew is going to answer your questions. Which has been the worst government you've had the pleasure of holding to account

and where does the current one rank? My name is Siaiaa and I live in the most beautiful place on earth. Seven months ago I blew up my life and a lot has shifted since then. Everyone is moving forward. I'm still working on that. And that's me. Welcome to Icefield.

Cove! Where are the penguins? That's Antarctica. We're the other one. North of North. Stream all episodes, available on CBCJem.