Was it easier to deport migrants to France before Brexit?

Summary

More or Less: Behind the Stats

Episode: Was it easier to deport migrants to France before Brexit?

Date: September 24, 2025
Host: Tim Harford, BBC Radio 4

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Brief Overview

This episode of More or Less, hosted by Tim Harford, dives into debated statistics and policy claims surrounding four timely topics:

• Whether deporting migrants to France was easier before Brexit under the Dublin Convention
• The facts and errors about the UK’s ageing population statistics
• Why beef prices have surged far ahead of general inflation
• An investigation into the rise of Americanisms and possible ChatGPT authorship in UK parliamentary speeches

Statistics are carefully dissected with expert guests, myth-busting analysis, and the program's trademark wit.

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1. Was It Easier to Deport Migrants to France Before Brexit?

(Main discussion: 01:07–09:15)

Key Points:

• The UK government’s post-Brexit struggle to deport illegal migrants to France has been in the spotlight, with the Lib Dem leader Sir Ed Davy claiming it was simpler pre-Brexit due to the Dublin Convention.
• Peter Walsh, Senior Researcher from Oxford’s Migration Observatory, explains the Dublin system’s operation when the UK was part of the EU.

Insights & Data:

• How the Dublin System Worked
  EU members (including pre-Brexit UK) could request asylum seekers be “transferred back” to their first EU country of arrival.

  • Ultimately, the requested country could refuse (“that option was always open to them.” – Peter Walsh, 06:43).

• Actual Numbers and Trends

  • 2008–2015: UK was a net sender (transferred out more than it took in). In 2008, UK transferred out 1,200, received 403 (net 814).
  • 2016–2020: Trend reversed—UK received more than it sent. Numbers were “quite small.”
  • Conversion rates plummeted: 2008—54% of requests to transfer out successful; 2020—only 1% (8,500 requests, ~100 transfers out).

    “In 2020 … the UK made 8,500 [transfer out] requests, but only transferred about 100 people.”
    (Peter Walsh, 05:01)

• Why Did Effectiveness Drop?

  • Possible dysfunction within the Home Office unit overseeing transfers
  • UK’s stronger access to legal challenge for asylum seekers
  • Recalcitrance of first-arrival countries with high asylum numbers

• Very Small Impact Overall

  • From 2008–2020: “UK actually sent out about 2,000 more individuals than it received. But in the grand scheme of things, that’s not very many.”
    (Peter Walsh, 07:10)
  • Example: In 2024, over 108,000 asylum claims. Dublin transfers constituted a “tiny fraction.”

• Deterrent Effect?

  • Very limited. Asylum seekers rarely cited Dublin as a concern before Brexit.
  • Now, the fact that the UK isn’t in the EU’s system is perceived as an advantage by migrants (interviews post-Brexit).

Notable Quotes:

• “So, Sir Ed was not wrong that the government had this tool … But was the Dublin system a powerful tool?”
  (Tim Harford, 03:45)

• “The numbers … don’t sound very big compared to the total volume of asylum seeking.”
  (Tim Harford, 06:55)

• “When we speak with asylum seekers and ask them — why the UK… Dublin was never mentioned in the pre-Brexit period, which is understandable because the numbers are so low.”
  (Peter Walsh, 08:04)

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2. UK’s Ageing Population: Sorting Fact from Fiction

(Main discussion: 09:15–16:25)

Main Story:
An incorrect statistic—“by 2040, 40% of the UK population will be over 64”—was erroneously attributed to the Bank of England Governor and picked up by leading papers.

Key Insights:

• Correct Numbers:
  • By 2040, actual ONS estimates show 22.6% will be 65 or over (not 40%).
  • Present level: ~18.9%
  • 40% is a projection for 2121, not 2040.

With: Professor Jennifer Dowd, Demographer, University of Oxford

• Why Is the Population Ageing?

  • Main cause isn’t just people living longer, but lower birth rates and the demographic “bulge” (e.g., post-WWII baby boomers now turning 65).

    “Population aging really reflects changes in how many babies we’re having.”
    (Professor Dowd, 14:18)

• Long-term Outlook:

  • Aging intensity will eventually level out:
    "Eventually things kind of even out … especially if younger generations are more similar in size over time."
    (Jennifer Dowd, 15:27)

Notable Quotes:

• "So the claim 40% of the UK population is going to be 65 or over by 2040. True or false?"

  "False."
  (Jennifer Dowd, 10:40)

• "It's also not that different from the 18.9% that we are around now."
  (Jennifer Dowd, 11:10)

• "2121 is a very long time away."
  (Jennifer Dowd, 13:05)

Timestamps:

• 10:24: Interview with Prof. Jennifer Dowd begins
• 11:00: Correct number for 2040 provided
• 13:05: Discussion of long-range projections

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3. Why Is Beef So Expensive Now?

(Main discussion: 16:54–23:29)

Key Points:

• Over the past year, beef prices in UK shops have surged by 25%, far outpacing general inflation (<4%).

With: David Swales, Head of Economics & Analysis, AHDB (Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board)

• What is Happening to Prices?
  • Farmers received ~£5/kg for cattle in January, rising to £7/kg by May 2025 (a 40% increase).
  • Domestic beef supply is down ~4% (Jan–July 2025, year-on-year).
  • Imports can’t fill the gap—supplies are also down in leading exporters like Ireland (down ~4–5%).

Root Causes:

• Reduced Domestic Supply:

  • Dry weather lessened grass growth and slowed production.
  • More fundamentally: phasing out of EU agricultural subsidies post-Brexit (Common Agricultural Policy), with support payments decreasing and to be eliminated in England by 2027.

    “Certainly in England, that policy is probably a little less generous to farmers.”
    (David Swales, 21:56)

• Future Outlook:

  • High prices might incentivize increased beef production, but cattle take two years from birth to steak—so relief is not imminent.

Notable Quotes:

• "When I look at the data … we were having to redraw all of our graphs because the line had gone off the top."
  (David Swales, 19:31)

• "From an animal giving birth to a steak appearing on our shelf is typically about a two-year period."
  (David Swales, 23:06)

Timestamps:

• 18:32: Segment and guest introduction
• 21:56: How subsidies have changed since Brexit

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4. Is ChatGPT Writing UK Parliamentary Speeches?

(Main discussion: 23:29–29:39)

Key Points:

• UK MPs are increasingly using the phrase “I rise to speak”—an Americanism.
• Suspicions abound that AI tools (ChatGPT and others) are behind this linguistic shift.

Contributors:

• Lizzie McNeil (More or Less AI correspondent)
• Anthony Cohn (Professor, University of Leeds)
• Zoe Crowther (Politics.co.uk journalist who analyzed parliamentary speech records)

Evidence:

• Usage of “I rise to speak” in Parliament:

  • 2023 (to end August): 131 times
  • 2024 (to end August): 601 times
  • 2022 (same period): 227 times

    “601 times versus 131 times a year ago, that is a very sudden change in linguistic habits.”
    (Tim Harford, 27:09)

• AI “tells”: use of Americanisms, certain buzzwords (“pivotal,” “intricate,” “showcasing,” “realm”) have spiked in scientific and political writing since ChatGPT’s launch.

Possible Causes:

• MPs may be copying each other or reflecting broader societal trend of AI-generated language.
• Staffers and interns under pressure may be using AI tools.

Limits of Detection:

• Almost impossible to conclusively prove a text is AI-written, though sharp shifts in style and vocabulary are “suspicious.”

Notable Quotes:

• “AI has certain tells that can show its metaphorical hand, for example, using Americanisms such as ‘I rise’.”
  (Lizzie McNeil, 25:16)
• “In the case of MPs, I think it probably is [AI-generated]. But you know, would I want to swear in a court of law? That is, no, I wouldn’t.”
  (Anthony Cohn, 29:19)

Timestamps:

• 25:05: Lizzie McNeil explains AI “tells”
• 26:16: Analysis of phrase frequency in Parliament
• 27:59: Comparison to scientific paper trends

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Notable Quotes & Moments

| Time | Speaker | Quote | |---------|--------------|--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------| | 02:36 | Sir Ed Davy | "Yeah, it's a disaster, isn't it?" | | 05:01 | Peter Walsh | "In 2020 ... the UK made 8,500 [transfer out] requests, but only transferred about 100 people." | | 10:40 | Jennifer Dowd| "False." (on 40% of UK over 65 by 2040) | | 11:00 | Jennifer Dowd| "ONS estimates are that 22.6% of the UK population will be 65 or over in the year 2040." | | 19:31 | David Swales | "We were having to redraw all of our graphs because the line had gone off the top." | | 27:09 | Tim Harford | "601 times versus 131 times a year ago, that is a very sudden change in linguistic habits." | | 29:19 | Anthony Cohn | "In the MP case it probably is [AI-generated]. But ... would I want to swear in a court of law? No." |

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Useful for Those Who Haven’t Listened

This episode separates fact from myth in the heated debate over immigration returns, corrects media misstatements on demography, illuminates the beef price squeeze, and playfully but seriously explores how AI is changing even the language of Parliament. With robust data, impartial guests, punchy quotes, and trademark More or Less clarity, it is a model for anyone seeking to understand UK policy through numbers.

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[End of summary]

Transcript

[A]

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[A]

Hello and welcome to More or Less, the show that takes the M and the B and the S out of numbers, leaving us with no still workshopping this. We will get there eventually. Send in your suggestions to More or [e-mail] hi, I'm Tim Harford, by the way, and this week we follow a tangled trail of confusion about the UK's ageing population. That trail begins in Jackson Hole and ends well. No spoilers yet. We ask where's the beef and why is it so expensive these days? And while ChatGPT isn't writing our scripts just yet, some people think it is being used to write the speeches of parliamentarians in Is it? Can the numbers tip us off? But first, thousands of illegal migrants are arriving on the British coast in small boats. On some days more than a thousand arrive. On some days there are none at all. The government would like to send more of them back to where they came from and have done a deal with France to that effect. The one in one out policy. On the latest reported figures, this seems to have been taken almost literally. Three people have so far left the UK on the scheme. Why is the UK finding it so hard to deport illegal migrants to France? This was Lib Dem leader Sir Ed Davies response on GB News.

[B]

Yeah, it's a disaster, isn't it?

[A]

I go back to the time before we left the EU when under the Dublin Convention we could deport people.

[B]

There was no questions asked, there was.

[A]

No legal cases, it was all legally fine and we had the deterrent. So is this true.

[B]

In a sense?

[A]

Peter Walsh is a senior researcher at the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford.

[B]

What he's referring to is the Dublin system, of which we were a part before Brexit, when we were a part of the eu. And that allowed EU member states to transfer asylum seekers between each other. So EU member states would, if they believe that an individual had arrived in their country from another member state, could ask that initial member state, that first country of arrival, to take the asylum seeker back. So that would be a Dublin transfer out request. And then it would actually be up to that country, country, for example, like Italy, like Greece, like Spain, to decide actually whether they wanted to take the individual back. And they did have the option to do so.

[A]

So, Sir Ed was not wrong that the government had this tool at their disposal. But was the Dublin system a powerful tool? Were large numbers of illegal migrants sent back to the EU countries they first arrived in?

[B]

The data that we have on Dublin transfers goes back to 2008. So there are, broadly speaking, two phases. The first, from 2008 to 2015 inclusive, where UK was a net sender of people under Dublin, so it transferred out more than it transferred in. In 2008, there were 1,200 transfers out of the UK and 403 transfers in. So the UK transferred out 814 more people than it received. But in the last five years that the UK was a part of Dublin, so that's from 2016 to 2020 inclusive, the UK received more asylum seekers under Dublin than it transferred out. And the numbers were in fact quite small.

[A]

From 2016 to 2020, then under these Dublin arrangements, the UK took in more extra migrants than it returned to other countries. And while Ed Davy said that the Dublin arrangements applied, no questions asked, that doesn't seem to be how the system actually worked.

[B]

The reason that the UK was a net recipient in the last five years of Dublin membership is because a declining share of its requests to transfer individuals out. So requests to send asylum seekers back to other EU member states did not result in an actual transfer. And there's a big shift here. So in 2008, the UK made around 2,250 requests to transfer people out, and it actually transferred out around 1,200. So it's a 54% conversion rate. But that fell substantially after 2013 to a low point in 2020, where the UK was really hyperactive in making transfer out requests. It made 8,500 in 2020, but it only transferred out about 100 people. So 1%.

[A]

Why were the percentages of successful return requests so low?

[B]

Well, the short answer is I don't know. But there are two explanations that have been floated and the first is related to poor management at the Home Office. And lawyers would report that the third country unit was what it was called, that was responsible for Dublin transfers. They would say that actually it was a fairly dysfunctional unit. Another explanation is that it might be related to better access to justice in the UK than in other countries. Meaning that asylum seekers were better able to challenge their transfer elsewhere.

[A]

Right, so either this is a story about the UK rigorously upholding human rights, or it's a story about UK bureaucrats being a bit sleepy and incompetent.

[B]

Sleepy and incompetent, or just first countries, you know, countries that already have very high numbers of asylum seekers refusing to take anymore. And that option was always open to them.

[A]

Yeah. So I mean, the numbers that you were describing, they don't sound very big compared to the. The total volume of asylum seeking. Certainly not big compared to the total amount of immigration.

[B]

Certainly they're not large numbers. If you look at the whole data set from 2008 to 2020. So in that 13 year period, that's all of the years for which we have data, the UK actually sent out about 2,000 more individuals than it received. So it was a net transfer. But in the grand scheme of things, that's not very many.

[A]

For a bit of context, in 2024, 108,000 people claimed asylum in the UK. That was the largest number since records began in 1979. The previous peak was 103,000. Back in 2002, the numbers were lower in between, mostly between 20 and 40,000 per year. But however you cut it, the number of returns under the Dublin arrangements would constitute a tiny fraction of this group of migrants.

[B]

You know, when we speak with asylum seekers and ask them why the UK or why other countries. Dublin was never mentioned in the pre Brexit period, which is understandable because the numbers are so low. And you could imagine as well that, you know, the handlers, the smugglers themselves, they have a vested interest in downplaying the chance of being returned. And in fact, that chance of being returned was very small.

[A]

So there's not much evidence that the Dublin system acted as a deterrent. However, Peter says that interviews with potential illegal migrants who want to come to the UK now do suggest that not being in Dublin and not being part of the EU's Migrant Fingerprint Database has become one of the many reasons they want to come here.

[B]

A recurring theme has been when they are asked why the uk, they will say, to escape the Dublin system. And they understand that they can claim asylum in the eu, potentially even be refused and that they would get another bite at the cherry if they could reach the uk, because in all likelihood we wouldn't know that they've claimed asylum elsewhere and we would end up processing that claim.

[A]

Thanks to Peter Walsh from the Migration Observatory. It's not every day that more or less spots a factual error from the Governor of the bank of England. Really hope they'd check their facts pretty thoroughly, but there apparently it was reported in black and white on the Guardian website. In their reporting of a speech by the Governor Andrew Bailey at an event for policymakers at somewhere with the unlikely name of Jackson hole in the US, Bailey was quoted describing the productivity challenge the UK is facing, followed by this line in the By 2040, 40% of the UK population will be older than 64. He added. Wow. Just wow. I know all you loyal listeners will have the ONS population projections memorized, so you will know that this is an absolute howler. 40% by 2040. Come on. But just in case you're not absolutely confident in the correct numbers, we found a proper demographer to tell us what was what.

[C]

My name is Jennifer Dowd and I'm a professor of demography and Population Health at the University of Oxford.

[A]

So the claim 40% of the UK population is going to be 65 or over by 2040. True or false?

[C]

False.

[A]

Okay, what's true then?

[C]

Well, it's important to say these are always projections when we're thinking about 2040. We don't have a crystal ball, but the ONS estimates are that 22.3% 6% of the UK population will be 65 or over in the year 2040.

[A]

So 22.6, that's. I mean, I don't want to get super technical. That's a lot less than 40%. So just over 2 in 10 rather than 4 in 10.

[C]

Yes, it's quite a big difference. And it's also not that different from the 18.9% that we are around now.

[A]

But now the bombshell. It turns out that this line in the Guardian story is not a report of what Andrew Bailey said. Thankfully, the Governor of the bank of England is not massively wrong on basic facts about the country whose economy he is governing. Phew. Instead, we have a somewhat less lurid tale of journalists making mistakes. That 40% figure was reported in the Financial Times, and it is at this moment. I should remind you that my day job is working for the ft. The FT journalist told us that this was a simple mistake based on eyeballing a PowerPoint slide that the governor had up on screen, the FT corrected the story to say that approaching 30% of the adult population would be 65 or over by 2040. Which is fine.

[C]

Yes. So the ONS projections estimate that 28% of the adult population will be 65 are over by 2040.

[A]

But how did the Guardian mysteriously make the same mistake? Simple. They copied the FT and it looks like they picked the wrong FT story to copy. The Guardian also corrected their story, but they took a different angle. Andrew Bailey's chart ran all the way to 2121, where the percentage does actually reach 40%. So in their correction, the Guardian changed the date in the story so that the UK population will indeed have 40% of people over the age of 65. As long as you wait until the year 21, 2196 years hence. It is quite an odd correction, but it is at least a correct correction.

[C]

So that claim is true. The projection from the ONS for the year 2121 is indeed that the proportion of the adult population over age 65 will be 40%. But we should also say that 2121 is a very long time away. So these projections are subject to a lot of uncertainty because we do not have a demographic crystal ball and generally can't predict how many babies humans will be having 80 years from now or more.

[A]

So, mystery solved. Everything is safely back in the correct place. And yet the fundamental problem remains, namely our aging society, demonstrated by that slowly increasing proportion of the population aged 65 or over seen in Andrew Bailey's graph. Can we zoom out for a second? We hear all the time about this ageing society. The graph doesn't look great in as much as it does suggest that more and more people are going to be elderly. There's obviously nothing wrong with being old. Beats the alternative, but it creates certain pressures. So why is our society aging? What is the fundamental driver of that?

[C]

Yeah, it's interesting because I think a lot of people immediately think about increases in life expectancy, that we're all living a lot longer when they think about why the population is aging. But what's really true demographically is that population aging really reflects changes in how many babies we're having. And it's that kind of demographic echo of changes in fertility in the past that really caused population aging. So, for example, we know that we had a baby boom after World War II, and in the UK there was also a lot of births around 1960, and those generations are now becoming the 65 and overs, and they're a relatively larger generation compared to the people born after them.

[A]

For example, There were nearly 900,000 babies born in the UK in 1961, compared to under 700,000 in 2021, a big difference, especially given the population over that time period also significantly increased.

[C]

And so this is kind of baked in population aging that as those really larger birth cohorts get older, the share of the population at older ages increases. But what's really interesting about population aging, I think a demographer, is that eventually things kind of even out, especially if younger generations are more similar in size over time, then we would expect this population aging to eventually even out. So it can't really go on forever. Some people talk about these really large cohorts, like the baby boom being a pig in a python.

[A]

So once that pig works its way through, the issue of the aging society will become far less acute. It just happens to be the case that the bulge is hitting about now. Thanks to Professor Jennifer Dowd, you're listening to More or less.

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This is Jacob Goldstein from what's yous Problem? When you buy business software from lots of vendors, the costs add up and it gets complicated and confusing. Odoo solves this. It's a single company that sells a suite of enterprise apps that handles everything from accounting to inventory to sales. Odoo is all connected on a single platform in a simple and affordable way. You can save money without missing out on the features you need. Check out odoo.com that's o-o o.com In a world so full of confus, using modernities, TikTok, ChatGPT, those Labubu things, it's good to have a story so old school that it would prompt John Bull himself to pick up a quill pen and write in to complain. And we have one. Namely, what in the name of St. George is going on with the price of beef? Over the last 12 months, the price of beef in the shops in the UK has gone up by 25. Of all the foods and non alcoholic beverages that make up the standard basket of foods that are used to calculate inflation, beef has seen the biggest increase in price. 25% seems like a pretty big number, especially since the most popular broad based measure of inflation, the consumer prices Index is up by less than 4% over the past year. But why is it happening? Who will help us explain these meaty numbers?

[D]

If it's numbers you want, I'm your man.

[A]

Perfect. If you're going to do it, do it right. This is David Swales, head of Economics and analysis for Livestock at the Agriculture and Horticulture development board's the AHDB.

[D]

This 25% inflation figure does seem stark when I look at the cattle prices, which farmers are getting paid. It actually seems like it's quite a low figure to some of the numbers I look up. So if I look at deadweight cattle prices in January of this year, farmers were getting around about five pounds a kilo for sort of prime cattle. And that was a relatively high price. Our prices tend to be anywhere between three and five pounds a kilo on average. So in January, those prices were quite high. Now those prices actually went up to about seven pounds a kilo in May.

[A]

Yeah, so that's up 40% from what was already a fairly high level.

[D]

Exactly, to be honest. Domino hdb we are analyzing this sort of data, looking at it all the time and reporting on this information to farmers so they understand what's going on. And we were having to redraw all of our graphs because the line had gone off the top. It was that severe.

[A]

So beef prices in the shops are up because the supermarkets and meat processing companies that buy beef from farmers are having to pay more for it. Why are they having to do that?

[D]

Basically, a lot of it's to do with economics. It's about supply and demand.

[A]

Of course, the loyalist of loyal listeners will remember that over 15 years ago, a drug dealer gave me the same answer. In this case, there's not that much going on on the demand side. We're not seeing a run on beef. What we've got is a supply problem at the minute.

[D]

What we see happening in the UK is our supplies of cattle have fallen and are continuing to fall. And what you sometimes see is when our domestic situation has a bit of a shortage, we can kind of go outside the UK and import a little bit more beef from abroad. But actually lots of the places we import our beef from are short as well. So there aren't those ready available supplies for us to suck in. So the whole market is a little bit short of beef and therefore the price has started to rise up.

[A]

Let's talk about domestic supply first. Why have farmers been producing less beef?

[D]

Okay, so our domestic supplies in the first half of this year. So this is sort of January up until the end of July are down about 4% this year. So that's quite a drop. We don't normally see drops of that order and I think probably there's a number of factors here. It has been a bit of a challenging year, weather wise, so we've not had as much rain as we would normally have. And maybe grass growth has been probably less good than farmers are used to, which maybe has slowed down animals coming to market. But I think probably the big factor here is over the last couple of years are suckler farmers. So the people focus on producing beef. Lots of those farmers have been struggling to make decent profits from their business.

[A]

David says that one of the chief causes here is the gradual phasing out of the subsidies that farmers used to receive when the UK was in the EU under the Common Agricultural Policy.

[D]

But since Brexit, we've had control of our own agricultural policy. Indeed, there are different policies in different parts of the uk. So there's an England policy, a Scotland and a Wales agricultural policy. And certainly in England that policy is probably a little bit less generous to farmers. There's less support payments and indeed the sort of basic support payments which farmers get are being phased out entirely. So by 2027, those basic payments farmers receive will no longer exist. And those payments have historically helped support incomes in some of these farms. And maybe if a farm might have been loss making in a particular year, the support payments would have helped the farm make money in total.

[A]

So domestic supply is down and imports can't pick up the demand because supply in the countries we buy from is also down. For example, in the biggest beef importer.

[D]

To the uk, supplies are down in Ireland. So it's around sort of 4 or.

[A]

5% down now, economics being economics, the high price of beef is likely to stimulate beef production. But don't get too excited.

[D]

From an animal giving birth to a steak appearing on our shelf is typically about a two year period. So when I look at the data and we've got some really good data, if you go to that age of cattle under 12 months old, there is a bit of an increase there. But the bad news is, as consumers, we probably have to wait a little while before that's going to hit our shelves.

[A]

Thanks to David Swales. This is more or less, and our email is more or lessbc co. Now, if you've ever had the good fortune, nay the privilege, to listen to a session of the House of Commons, you'll be used to it sounding a bit like this. But recently something strange has been Occurring, new phrases are cropping up, phrases more at home in U.S. political dramas. Thank you, Madam Deputy speaker.

[B]

And I rise to speak very much.

[A]

Madam Deputy Speaker. And I rise to speak.

[B]

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker.

[A]

I rise to speak in this debate today.

[C]

Thank you very much indeed. Madam Deputy Speaker, I rise to speak to amendment.

[A]

Mr. Speaker, I rise to speak in support of the amendment in my name. Now, this might not seem newsworthy, but it has sent some members of Parliament into a bit of a tizzy. I rise to speak. I rise to speak. I rise to speak. ChatGPT knows you're there, but that is an Americanism that we don't use, but still keep using it, because it makes it clear that this place has become absurd. This isn't just a complaint that British MPs are sounding a bit too American and talking about elevators and sidewalks all of a sudden. The implication is that MPs are using ChatGPT and other large language models to write their speeches, rather than doing it the old fashioned way and getting an intern to do it. Let us, as ChatGPT would say, do a deep delve into this question with our Large Language model correspondent, Lizzie McNeil. Hello, Lizzie.

[C]

Hi, Tim. So there has been some controversy about people using large language models, AKA AI, to write essays or speeches for quite.

[A]

A while, and now this suspicion has spread to the House of Commons.

[C]

It has, you see, AI has certain tells that can show its metaphorical hand, for example, using Americanisms such as I rise.

[A]

Right. But why would a large language model use Americanisms for a British speech?

[C]

Well, it's all to do with how these language learning models learn. So we spoke to Anthony Cohn, professor of Automated Reasoning at the University of Leeds, about the inner workings of AI.

[A]

Humans tend to overuse certain words and phrases too. In both cases, it's a result really of the language being exposed to, in our case, as humans, it's our upbringing, friends, family, the podcasts we listen to, the TV and the radio shows we listen to. In large language models, it's the same, but their training data comes from the vast swathes of text that's been given to them from the Internet and so forth.

[C]

The point being, ChatGPT and the others learn from the Internet.

[A]

A lot of stuff on the Internet comes from America, just because it's a much larger country. But are Americanisms cropping up more in Parliament?

[C]

They do seem to be. So we spoke to Zoe Crowther, a journalist for Politics, who has been using Hansard, the government's archive of all speeches made in the Commons and the House of Lords to see whether the term I rise has indeed increased. It was used 601 times so far this year. I think I did it up to the end of August, compared to 131 times in the same period last year. It was also used only 227 times in the same period the year before.

[A]

Hmm. I mean, I rise to speak is weird and it's hardly a smoking gun. Maybe they were watching US tv or maybe one MP used it and the others all started copying them without realising. We're social beings, after all. Although 601 times versus 131 times a year ago, that is a very sudden change in linguistic habits.

[C]

Yes. And it's not just I rise to speak. So things like it's not merly underscores bustling, just kind of chatgpt buzzwords that the software likes to use. So I think combined with both the statistical analysis and the anecdotal evidence, I think it's clear that there clearly has been a spike that's at least in some part influenced by AI. And these terms have all seen spikes on Hansard.

[A]

It still doesn't feel conclusive. Humans spit out cliches all the time.

[C]

Oh, thinking outside the box, Tim, I like it. Yes, you're right. And also, the increase in people using AI may lead to a general increase in people using these terms independently because they've heard other people using them. But as you say, the speed with which these phrases have appeared is suspicious, and it's not just in Parliament.

[A]

So one paper which analysed the usage of words in scientific papers and looked at their frequency per million words of scientific paper outputs, they looked at four words in particular. Pivotal, intricate, showcasing and realm. And in all these cases, we can see the frequency of their use up until the release of ChatGPT and shortly after was basically bubbling along at about the same level, somewhere between 20 per 1 million words. And then suddenly after that, they really start shooting up to become much, much more likely, like 70 times more likely. So AI being used to write speeches in Westminster is pretty consistent with what's going on in the wider world.

[C]

Yeah, it wouldn't be that surprising if politicians were using AI to write speeches. I mean, they've outsourced that job for decades. Quite often they'll deny direct use of it themselves, but in a way that's clearly suggesting that other people must be using it. But if everyone's saying that everyone else is using it, then, you know, anecdotally, I think it is probably pretty widespread, particularly probably among parliamentary staff, who often also have a really big workload. Anthony says that it's almost impossible to conclusively determine whether a piece of text was produced by AI. But then in the case of MPs.

[A]

I think in the MP case it probably is. But, you know, would I want to swear in a court of law, that is. No, I wouldn't. It seems like it could be a case of overworked and exhausted junior staff drafting speeches with the help of ChatGPT. What do you think, Lizzie?

[C]

Yes. Is there anything else you'd like me to delve into?

[A]

The Honourable Member will withdraw her remarks immediately and she has a week to think about it, because that is all we have time for. Please do keep your questions and comments coming in to more or lessbc.co.uk. we'll be back next week and until then, goodbye. More or Less was presented by me, Tim Harford. The producer was Tom Coles, with Nicholas Barrett, Nathan Gower and Lizzie McNeil. And thanks to Josh McMinn, who tipped us off for that last story. The programme was recorded and mixed by Gareth Jones. The production coordinator was Maria Ogondoly, and our editor is Richard Varden. In the future, will your taxi fly? I'm Greg Foote, host of the BBC Radio 4 show and podcast Sliced Bread and now Dough In Dough. We explore future wonder products that might rise to success and redefine our lives. Might delivery drones make popping to the shops a thing of the past?

[C]

On demand, drone delivery could be absolutely huge.

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Will we really let our cars do the driving for us? If you say this whole driving thing, it's a thing that's only ever meant for humans. That's obviously for the birds. Each episode, I sit down with entrepreneurs and experts to discuss what today's everyday, everyday technology may look like tomorrow. Like tomorrow. Find out on DOE Listen first on BBC Sounds.

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