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This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the Ukrobecha. Los ahoros de Memorial Day in Los y compra los vasicos pare logar pormenos ahoro centadolares en la parria gas de cuatro que madores char Royal Performance Series.
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Liberty Mutual customizes your car and home insurance. And now we're customizing this ad for your morning commute to wake you up, which could help your driving. Science says that stimulating the brain increases alertness. So here's a pop quiz. How many months have 28 days? What gets wetter as it dries? What has keys but can't open? Locks? If you don't want to hear the answers, turn off this Liberty mutual ad now. 12 months. A towel piano. Enjoy being fully alert.
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Liberty. Liberty.
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Liberty.
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Liberty. Hello. We are at the Hay Festival, where we're surrounded by bookworms, book writers, and we're here in a tent with some newscasters. Hello. I'm glad you said hello, but I knew you would. So just to set the scene for those of you who are not here, we are in a tent. This is the BBC's tent here at this festival. Loads of other BBC programs are here. So the Today program was broadcast live from here on Saturday morning, and then Adrian Childs was in here, and then Mariana's coming to do Conspiracy Land, and all sorts of big BBC programs are happening here and this small BBC outlet as well. So we're here for a couple of days. Today we'll do a kind of classic episode of Newscast where we talk about some of the day's news and some of the themes that are in the news with some friends of the podcast. Then on Sunday, Alex Wasyth will be here, and we're going to be interviewing Baroness Casey, Louise Casey, who has done so many reviews and looked at so many complicated issues for various governments, and we'd love to hear your questions for her. So you can email us newscastbc.co.uk, or you can WhatsApp us on 033-01-239480. And then we will do another episode of Newscast on Monday. Now, here in the tent, there's a QR code so that members of the newscast family who are actually here can ask us some questions. And so if people have any phone signal, we will then go through the questions and hopefully they will be able to pose some of them and you'll be able to hear the answers that we come up with. Right, that's the. Do you know what that's Giving you a real sense of being at a live event where the person stands at the front and says, here's what's going to happen. But first of all, I've got to tell you where the fire exits and the toilets are. That's the newscast at HAY equivalent. So let's get on with an episode of Newscast, Newscast, Newscast from the BBC. Humanity's next great voyage begins. We are in the midst of a rupture.
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D
Nostalgia will not bring back the old order.
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A
Six, seven. Yeah, it's supposed to be me as a doctor. Daddy has also a special connotation.
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D
Ooh la la. Thinking about it like a panto helped.
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A
Do we play music now or what do we do? Hello, it's Adam in the newscast tent at. Hey. With lots of newscasters. I'm gonna make you clap a lot. Cause normally I just sit in that studio by myself. So this is like Christmas New Year, the Oscars, the baftas, everything rolled into one for me. And we're joined by some friends of newscast here. Please welcome Zanny Minton Beddoes, who's the editor of the Economist. Hello, Xanny.
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E
Hello. Very warm in there.
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A
And it's gon warmer.
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E
Very, very warm in here.
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A
Yeah, that fits in with our episode about climate change we did the other day there about adaptation. So, like, make sure your tent has got removable walls, I think is what Emma Pinchback would say. Also, Zanny, when we were chatting beforehand, I think I called the Economist a magazine.
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E
That's okay.
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A
What did you do?
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E
We call ourselves a newspaper. Yeah. It's a slightly bizarre thing, but in 1843, when we were founded, we were. We looked like everything else and we were a newspaper. Now we still call ourselves the newspaper because we believe in tradition as well as looking forward. But it's okay. You call us whatever you like.
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A
And also, please welcome. And it's so nice to see her in person rather than down the line. From the Cardiff newsroom, it's Felicity Evans from Wales. Cast.
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D
Hello. Thank you very much.
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A
Thank you, Felicity. I'm going to sound like a minor member of the royal family, but have you come far?
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D
Not very far at all. I've come from Cardiff and it was a beautiful day for a drive. I did drive because it's. The train station is so far away that it's actually easier for me to drive from Cardiff than to get the train to Hereford and then come over. So. So, yes, it was a beautiful day for it, so I enjoyed it.
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A
And Zanny, you're from sort of around these parts as well. We've already had a long chat about transport and logistics around it.
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E
We have, we have. I came from South Shropshire, where I grew up probably slightly less far than Cardiff.
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D
Yes. Yeah. You're on the doorstep virtually just over
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an hour and gosh, it was beautiful. Oh, my God. The drive from Craven Arms to here on a morning like this was stunningly beautiful. One of the most beautiful drives I've done for a while. You live in a fantastic part of the world.
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A
Those of you from here and Felicity, for people who've never been to the Hay festival, just conjure up the vibe for us. What's it like?
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D
Well, Bill Clinton, when he came many years ago now, called it the Woodstock of the mind, which is a pretty good description, I guess you can bank on.
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A
Because he's smoking.
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D
I know, right? But it's okay because he didn't inhale. He did if I remember.
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A
Of course, of course.
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D
But and I think that does sum it up, I mean, whatever your intellectual or cultural interests, there is something for you in the two weeks here at Hay. It's absolutely fantastic and even better when the weather's like this.
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A
And then one of the other good things about being at Hay is just the huge number of interesting people who are here. And I bumped into Emma Freud who presents the Archers podcast and she also listens to newscast. So hopefully she is gonna pop in towards the end of this episode and sit in that spare seat where there's just a lonely newscast cushion at the moment. So that's two things to think about in future. Now here's a segue. Thinking about things in future. The front page of the Guardian and the BBC are reporting this morning on Saturday that the government had an idea for the next phase of their so called reset with the eu, that you could create a single market for goods that spanned the EU and the uk. So not the UK rejoining the single market that we were in as a member, but creating a sort of new Frankenstein's single market Zanny. What was your.
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You can tell that you used to write about Brexit. You've already got a phrase for it, the Frankenstein single market fro.
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A
That sounds quite negative because Frankenstein's monster was a monster. But anyway, Susanni, what was your sort of first impression when you saw those reports this morning?
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E
So I was struck first of all by the fact that immediately the report said the European Union said no. And I thought, oh my God, here we go. We are going to have so many more reports like this because the next few years will be convulsed with conversations about what is our relationship with the EU going to be like? And just to sort of level set a bit. And I know we've all still got PTSD from the previous 10 years of this, but, you know, it's now been 10 years and as you've seen, you've seen the poll results, a majority of people would now regret that decision, would vote to rejoin. And what the government has come up with so far, given its red lines, is a relatively small bore set of things, phytosanitary alignment and so forth.
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A
And that's what plant and animal.
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E
Plant and animal. That's what they're talking to the EU about right now. And as I understand it, there's a kind of range of more ambitious options that they are thinking about. One of them is this single market for goods. And we'll come to that. But in classic European style, the European said, no, no, we can only talk about what is on the agenda for right now and we're rejecting everything else and we're going to have more and more of that. But the. For me, the big picture is the world is completely different now than it was 10 years ago. This country is in a completely different place, I think. And this is not a particularly. I thought it was a very bad idea. We at the Economist thought Brexit was a very bad idea. I still think it was a bad idea. But we're now 10 years on and our economy has suffered. You can debate about how much, and there's lots of studies, but there's no doubt that on net it did economic damage. It also wasn't the catastrophe that some people said. So the City of London is actually still the world's second biggest financial centre. It's doing pretty well despite Brexit. So.
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A
And in fact the City was saying to Rachel Reeves, actually, don't go too far on your reset, because we're quite enjoying our independence.
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E
Exactly. But I think having done Brexit, we then could have gone in lots of directions. Right. There was people who wanted us to become Singapore on Thames, a kind of deregulatory haven, all kind. We didn't do that. We chose actually to not do very much and if anything to become more regulated. So now we're kind of poorer, you know, we have a worse fiscal position and the US has changed fundamentally and we're now. We used to be in this brilliant position that we had the special relationship with the United States and we were part of the European Union. Now we're not part of the European Union and the US has gone off on some protectionist tangent. And I don't think in Europe we can rely on the US for defense any longer. So you look at Europe as a whole, including the uk, and you think, what's the biggest issues actually? What is European defence going to be about? And that's not a narrowly EU thing, but it's an important thing for the future of Europe. The second is what happens with Ukraine. By far the biggest geopolitical thing that's happened in the last 10 years in Europe was Putin's invasion of Ukraine. Ukraine on track to become at some point a member of the European Union. That will fundamentally change Europe too. And then thirdly, the backlash against migration across Europe and indeed here too. And that's the sort of terrain we're on. So in that it seems to me very sensible that the UK has a closer relationship with the European Union. It seems bonkers to have red lines set 10 years ago, kind of defining where this country goes forever.
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Red lines which were in the labor
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manifesto, which were in the labor manifesto again. And labor politicians are all saying, no, no, we can't revisit them. But I don't think this conversation is going to be over in the next year. There's going to be a lot of negotiating and frankly, it's going to require much more imagination from the Europeans as well, because they are very, very rigid when they approach these. You know this better than I do, having cover. And I'm not sure that on both sides we have politicians with the imagination needed to think what is a sensible economic relationship between the core EU countries like Ukraine, countries like the UK that makes sense for defence and economic purposes. I'm sure it exists. Whether it's this single market in goods actually may not be a bad idea or whether it's something more complicated. But this isn't the kind of, not even the end of the beginning. This is the beginning of a long conversation that will go on, I suspect, for the better part of the next 10 years about what is our relationship with the EU.
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A
The beginning of the beginning of the beginning, Felicity.
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D
That's a long beginning, isn't it?
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A
Yes. A never ending story, you could say. Felicity, how does all of this discussion look from Wales where, as we saw from the Senate elections a couple of weeks ago, the two biggest parties were applied Cymrus. Very enthusiastic about the EU and reform. Really not enthusiastic about the eu?
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D
Yeah, I mean Wales at the time of the referendum, a majority of voters in Wales voted to leave the EU at the time, you Know, a lot of people were quite shocked about that, particularly given the amount of aid that Wales had received from the eu, because the EU had a lot of aid that it would give to some of the poorest, poorest parts. Big swathes of Wales qualified for that. And so Wales got a lot of money from the eu. But I think this speaks to kind of the problems that governments are having now, Adam, is it's all very well to have money and then to spend that money, but if you don't spend it in a way where people actually notice the difference and can say, yes, my life has improved in this way, then just having spent the money in itself is not. Is not something that voters are going to give you credit for. And certainly in Wales, I think a lot of the time that was the case that, you know, people in Blyna Gwent, for example, which had received a lot of money, they got a little funicular that went up the mountain. Well, that's great, but, you know, where were the jobs? That sort of thing? And I think, you know, that continues to be an issue in Wales, where it remains a poorer country, an older country, a sicker country, wages are lower than the UK and the English average, and there's a frustration there, I think, with a lack of progress. Now, Plaid Cymru, which did incredibly well, really just short of a majority in the Senate, as you say, is an unashamedly pro European party, but it was fighting head to head with reform and the polls at many stages were suggesting that they were absolutely neck and neck. So what we've seen is that the fissures that Brexit produced around the UK are very, very visible in Wales. And what we have are two blocks, essentially, that have split into the white right wing bloc and the left wing bloc, just to paint in very broad colours here. And the pro European and anti European blocs are reflected in that way too. And so I think it would be a very difficult subject to revisit, to be honest, despite Plaid Cymru's victory.
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A
More on Welsh politics in a second, because I really want to catch up with what's been happening for the first couple of weeks of, I was going to say Plaid Cymru's reign, which sounds a bit over the top, doesn't it? But I suppose it is because they're in power for the first time. A few things on the whole Brexit thing, I remember during the Brexit days being some blow up about something that probably was massive at the time, but very minor in retrospect. I Remember an EU ambassador texting me one morning going, cui Bono? And of course I had to look that up and it's who benefits? And it was who benefits from this story being out there today at this point point? And it's so interesting looking at this story and reading between the lines of where it's actually come from and what it actually is. So my sense it was, maybe it came from, it was briefed by business. So is it briefed by business who being consulted by government? And is this businesses who don't want this because they think it's impractical or it won't make a difference? Or is it businesses who do want it and are worried the government aren't going far enough, or has it been briefed from the EU side to just as a reminder to the British political system that you can't have your cake and eat it. There are benefits come with costs, or is it useful to the government to have it out there that when there's a by election on and they've just suffered some bad election results where maybe in areas that are a bit more pro European, they suffered, it shows that they're fighting for an even better deal for Britain.
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E
I'm not sure that is fantastic cynicism. I mean,
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well, all stories come from somewhere.
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E
Absolutely, absolutely. And I'm kind of wondering which of those it is. And I'm sure you're right that it's one of them, but I just can't face the idea of having Brexit style conversations for the next 10 years. I do think that I just wish on both sides of the Channel we could have a grown up conversation about what makes sense for us as Europeans and we really are Europeans, channel or no channel, in this much more dangerous, much worse world than we were in 10 years ago. In so many ways we've got the challenge of our defence, which is serious. I mean, we have, we can get onto this if you like, but you know, the uk, you know, we have nothing but admiration for our armed forces, but we have twice as many horses as we have tanks in the British army. We have cut, cut, cut, cut, cut. We have a government, notwithstanding the Prime Minister's promise last week hasn't published the defence investment plan. We've got to do something on defence. So has the rest of Europe. It is crackers that the countries think about this separately. We should be thinking about together. Similarly, how do we cope with Chinese competition? Huge issue for Europe as a whole. Similarly, how do we cope with AI? All of the AI innovation is happening in the United States or a large part of it. What is Europe going to do? And we would be so much better at having those conversations if the uk, which has huge advantages not just in finance but also in tech relative to the rest of Europe, was having those conversations with the Europeans. But instead we're like, who's briefing whom on some tiny proposal? It just kind of drives me crackers, because that is what's happening. And you're absolutely right in characterizing it. But I wish we could stand back and say, what is the right relationship that makes sense for us all right now? And there is one, and it's not exactly what we've got right now.
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A
I'm laughing because the idea that I'm the most cynical person on an episode of newscast is very unusual feeling for me. On defence, it's interesting because actually, you realize the EU is sort of groping towards a defence function which they've never really had before. And it's not worked out brilliantly for the UK so far because of that whole, oh, we'll charge you this much to join our loan scheme. And actually French defense.
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E
Yeah, the French care more about being French than they care about European defence. Sorry.
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A
But at the same time, as you've got that, you've got the coalition of the willing, which is turning out to be quite maybe not effective. It's certainly effective at having meetings and getting pledges out of people and being an alternative way of arranging defense cooperation in Europe. So it'll be intriguing to see if one of Starmer's legacies is creating like a sort of an alternative EU that's for defense and security.
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E
I mean, 1. Having now been rude about the French, one positive thing is that the Europeans have really stepped up on Ukraine. And I think this is something that not enough people have sort of focused on that, you know, under the Biden administration, the US provided huge amounts of financial support for Ukraine. Under Trump, it has stopped completely. To the extent that the Americans are supplying any weapons, they're paid for by Europeans. Europe is paying for the entirety of Ukraine's ability to defend itself. So Europe can step up when it needs to and when it wants to. So I'm not completely kind of down on Europe. I'm just down on our. That if we have years and years of petty negotiations about what a relationship looks like when there are much bigger things that we collectively should be working together on.
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D
And also don't forget that Brexit paralyzed our domestic politics for years and years and years. And we talk about the problems that the economy has now, and the stagnation and the lack of economic growth and so on. Obviously, you know, the British economy didn't recover from the crash in 2008, but it certainly wasn't helped by having a period where our politics stopped working. I mean, it was absolutely astonishing. We've kind of forgotten about it because the trauma of COVID has wiped our memory. But before the pandemic, there was a period when the government couldn't really function. Nothing was getting decided. Parliament was at a standstill. Politicians within parties and with other parties were at each other's throats, and that certainly didn't do anything to help economic growth. Then Covid happened. You know, it's taken a series of knocks and I think a lot of people would fear the thought of going back to that sort of political paralysis, given the challenges that are. That are facing us as an economy and as a country, really.
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A
I'm not sure if the microphones picked it up, but did you hear that noise that sounded like a rocket going off or like some kind of comedy generator being turned up to 100? I don't know if you picked that. The audience. You heard that, didn't you? I'm not going mad.
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D
I thought it was there to add gravitas to my point.
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E
I didn't hear it.
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A
I think that's actually a shepherd tone, which we did an episode of Newscast about many years ago and I have fond memories of. Right, Felicity, let's zoom in on what's happening in Cardiff Bay, then. What have the first couple of weeks of Plaid Cymru In Charge been like?
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D
Well, the most striking thing about it has been the sort of messaging that we've been hearing from Plaid Cymru. It's because the new government faces quite a challenging fiscal landscape, given the Treasury's spending plans for the next few years. Now, obviously they can change, but we can only deal with the plans as they. They've been currently set out. And they are exceptionally challenging, more challenging than faced the previous government. Plyda's got all sorts of spending commitments, the expansion of free childcare. It wants to pilot a Scottish child payment to address the issue of child poverty, which has been a stubborn and pretty poisonous problem in Wales for decade after decade, really. They're modelling that on the Scottish child payment. Oh, and there's another sound effect coming in right there. I don't even know how you'd describe
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A
that one, but it's like being in a cartoon.
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D
Yeah, it is, really. So we're still waiting for some clarity, really, from Plaid on how they're planning to pay for that. I mean, there is talk of reprioritisation. Translated, that does normally mean cuts. And they. They talk about getting rid of things that didn't work. You know, Srinath Yardworth, the new first minister, during the course of the election campaign, was talking a lot about how Labour had boasted of spending £7 billion to try to get to grips with child poverty and saying, well, you know, spending the money isn't the issue, it's outcome that counts. So, you know, it may well be that they're going to identify programs they feel haven't worked and try to get rid of those, but because they're a minority government, they will have to get budgets passed. And so there could well be some pretty difficult negotiations coming through on that. In terms of the messaging, it's very, very hopeful. So despite all of those challenges, the word hope has been used countless, countless times by all of the new cabinet. They are deliberately positive, deliberately upbeat. And one of the reasons for that, I think, is that they say behind the scenes that they have learned from what they see as the mistake of the incoming Starmer government in 2024, when the Prime Minister, the chancellor, spent a lot of time telling us how terrible everything was. And Clyde certainly feels that that was a mistake. It's a mistake that they are determined not to repeat. So we've had very, very upbeat messaging. Things haven't really started yet. It's been a couple of weeks where they have to do things like swear everybody in, vote in the slave, who's the presiding officer, the equivalent of the speaker in the House of Commons. They have to get the business committee set up. They haven't yet allocated who's going to sit on which committees and all that sort of stuff. And now they're breaking for half term. So really, we've had a busy couple. I know. So nothing, you know, the train hasn't really left the station yet, if you like. But that is the flavor that they want to give people, that this is something where they can make good changes and where they feel that they will be able to make a difference. We'll have to see whether they're right.
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A
And in terms of having to get the opposition party support for some things, does that mean some days they might trend a little bit to the right, and on other issues they might trend a little bit to the left, to use very broad political labels.
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D
The maths of this is really interesting. So they got 43 seats and they needed 49 for a majority. The Greens got two seats the Lib Dems got one seat, so those two together are not enough to get plied over the line for key things like the budget. The Conservatives got seven seats, Labour got nine seats. Labour and plied have a history of working together. When Labour was in government for 27 years, prior to now, a lot of the deals that they did were done with Ply Cymru to get their budgets through. At one point they were even in coalition and government together in previous Senate. So it may well be that despite Labour having been absolutely obliterated, I mean, you cannot overstate what a terrible, terrible, terrible result this has been for Welsh Labour. They may well be able to negotiate some deals here because they've got nine Ms. And that would get them over the line. Now Reform, they have 34. I think they are by far the biggest opposition. An extraordinary result for. For a party that was basically nowhere in 2021 at the last Senate election. Absolutely extraordinary result. They have said they will not oppose for opposition's sake. So it remains to be seen whether agreements can be made there. But certainly, I think Srinath Yoroweth would not want to be seen to be cultivating reform or doing deals with reform.
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A
Not good for his brand. And the issue of independence and it also, I mean, it's. I'm a bit loathe to say that word because Plaid Cymru aren't sort of going head first for independence. It's a sort of long term ambition of theirs. And also equally, I don't want to be, as a journalist who spends a lot of time in London going, oh, the only reason Wales is interesting is because of independence. So I sort of want to put those little caveats out there. But then equally, Renap, you'reworth, in his first call with Keir Starmer talked about independence and he's got a commission set up to look at it, hasn't he?
- [24:42]
D
That's right, yes. So there was quite a big to do about that first call with Keir Starmer and what got mentioned. And at first there was briefing. Some Welsh Labour MPs were tweeting about their feeling that it was inappropriate to bring up independence in that first call with the Prime Minister, a call, it's worth saying, that was delayed by some considerable time, possibly because of the shenanigans that were going on in Downing street at the time. But Srinath Horwath confirmed that he had brought independence up and whenever he gets asked about the issue, he always reframes the question and talks about having ambition for Wales. So, you know Whenever anyone is throwing it at him, he always says, you know, I make no secret of having ambition for Wales. However, I accept that this is something that has to happen according to the timetable that's decided by the voters. They are committed to this, spending half a million pounds on this commission that would basically look at the case for independence and how Wales might get there. And the findings of that commission may well subsequently form a white paper with a view to that. Although he has also said that he would not try to, you know, engineer a referendum in the life of this sened, which ends in 2029. But a lot of the opposition parties, including Reform, were very keen to point out that there is still a Unionist majority in the Senate, if you look at the number of seats held and vote share as well. So, you know, I think this is something that is going to continue to be a theme and that a lot of the Unionist parties do feel is a stick they can beat plied with. Certainly that's the way they seem to be behaving at the moment. Whether that's true or not, I'm not sure. It didn't work well for them during the Senate election campaign and they did try to use it quite a lot to raise that specter of independence. I think that's not necessarily because the majority of the electorate wants independence. Certainly the polling doesn't suggest that. But people have seen what's happened in Scotland, right? You've had a nationalist government in power in Scotland for many, many years and Scotland has not gone independent yet. So, you know, I think people also, they just wanted to try someone else. And Plyde was the alternative party of the left and certainly they benefited from a big sort of stop Reform message during the course of the campaign, too.
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A
Zanny, is the Economist interested in what's happening in Wales? Because I think you have sections. Well, of course you do, but I just think you have sections called like Asia and Latin America. You on a big scale newspaper.
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E
We are very interested in Wales and I'm very interested in Wales living. I was born seven miles from the Welsh border, so I'm interested in this election particularly because I'd love to ask you whether it's. Whether you think it was largely a sort of expression of frustration about Labour and frankly, I'm generally of the view that change is generally good and the Labour Party has dominated Welsh politics forever. It's the most dominant party pretty much. We couldn't find anywhere. I think that some shaking up is no bad thing. But was the election really about frustration with Labour and then I guess my. Sorry, I'm not taking jobs. But a second question.
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A
Does the Economist have podcasts as well?
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E
Yes, they do. My second question is about what the priorities are and should be, because I was struck. I mean, I think Wales has huge strengths apart from just being beautiful, but it is quite poor. And if you look at, despite spending quite a lot more on health than in England, health outcomes and waiting lists are what, 40% higher, I think, on average. I mean, it hasn't been that successful. And so I'm wondering how much part of the general discussion in Cardiff is what do we actually need to do in Wales?
- [28:25]
D
Yes. So on that Plyde was quite reluctant during the course of the election campaign, if we just take the health point first, to sort of give targets in terms of, of when it wanted to see waiting times reduced. We do now know that, you know, the First Minister has said that he wants to see a return to pre Covid waiting times by the end of the Senate in 2029 and he wants to get the two year waits down a lot faster than that. Now they are going to benefit, at least in the short term, from some of the measures that the outgoing government put in place to drive some of those wait. Waiting list down. They have been falling, gosh, for quite a few months now. I want to say eight or nine months, but I'm not entirely sure of that. But that sort of, that sort of time, really. And you would expect that to continue, you know, in the same way that the Starmer government kind of benefited from falling immigration numbers because of measures that had previously been put in by Rishi Sunak and so on. So they've kind of got a little bit of a fair wind there. But I think the difficulty becomes how much a, how much money do you really want to chuck at Health? Because. Because Health makes up half of the Welsh government's budget, you know, if it keeps putting money into health, it's going to become a glorified health board.
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A
Well, especially with the aging population that's going to go up anyway.
- [29:46]
D
That's right. So, and you know, that is forecast to go up as you know now what the outgoing Labour government would say about the comparisons with England, and it's probably worth saying this just for fairness, is that because the population of Wales is older, sicker and poorer than England, you're not comparing like with like. Because you would expect a country that has those demographics to have more demand on the nhs. They would argue that it's fairer to compare Wales with, say, the northeast of England than with England as a whole, because obviously the southeast tends to have a younger, richer population, so on, so forth. You know, you can argue, you can argue about all of that. The fact is that people are highly frustrated at the length of, of time they're having to wait in Wales for treatment. But you know, Ply talks about wanting to keep the waiting list going down, but at the same time wanting to focus more on primary care and also on health prevention. Can you do all of those things? Is there the money to do all of those things and achieve the other stuff that Plyard wants to achieve? Because as I've already said, it's a pretty challenging fiscal landscape that they're going to be dealing with over the next four years. So I think that's a major problem and they're probably going to have to decide what it is they want to focus on and spend the money on
- [30:59]
A
that Zani, risk of being accused of being a cynic again, I think wasn't the subtext of your second question about shoveling, shoveling money at health and other public services and them not improving kind of getting at that, that question for all center left parties around the world right now that when you've borrowed as much as the markets will let you borrow, you can't just spend more money and cross your fingers and hope that things like the health service or the police get better.
- [31:23]
E
And that's not cynical at all. That's completely correct. I mean, that is the sort of backdrop in some ways it's sort of interesting. You know, Wales is a bit further ahead of the rest of the country on this. Yeah, you can't. I mean, it's the big question, the big issue underpinning all of our political debates right now. I mean, this government has talked a huge amount about getting growth going again. There's been, you know, you all know this essentially stagnant productivity growth since 2008. That's why wages haven't risen, that's why the economy is in a funk. And when you have no growth, then the whole of politics becomes about who gets the biggest slice of a shrinking pie or a flat or pie that's not growing. And so it becomes this kind of do we spend more on this or do we spend more on that? And then the only way out is you borrow. We've borrowed a heck of a lot. We can't borrow anymore. The really interesting thing, and one of the interesting things of the last week was basically that the bond market spoke and some of the candidates for labor leadership realized that the Bond market's actually James Carville in 1992, he was Bill Clinton's consigliere and he said, when I die, I want to be reincarnated as the bond markets because the bond market has all the power. And in this country it's really true. Now, I mean, gilts go up and the government has, and everyone has to say, oh no, no, we're not going to break the fiscal rules. No, no, no, no, we're not going to do that. And that's the reality that Britain's in and the own. And we are, you know, very, very close to a bond market crisis. You know, a few more bad policies and a shock or two and this country is in real trouble.
- [32:54]
A
Just explain what a bond market crisis actually would be.
- [32:57]
E
Gilts people foreign, foreign, foreign and domestic investors no longer wanting to buy UK gilts unless they get a much higher premium for them. And as a result interest rates go up and that, that hugely affects interest rates throughout the economy and the uk. This is actually, I think, another, another result of Brexit because we used to be seen broadly, we weren't part of the euro of course, but we used to be seen partly sort of big picture as part of Europe. Now we're a mid sized economy on our own, on the edge of Europe with a gilt market and a large amount that we need to borrow. And so we're relying on British investors, but particularly foreign investors buying our gilts. And we have got a huge amount of debt and that's the kind of constraint that British politics is in. And to get around that, I mean, I sound like a broken record and I sound like. But you have to get the economy growing and the ingredients to getting the economy growing are not, you know, they're well known. Both part, both actually all. You can't talk about both parties any longer because especially not in Wales, five parties now or more. Everyone who's really looked at this knows that the keys to getting the British economy growing are planning reform, you know, all of the things that make it easier to do business. I would say, you know, welfare reform is essential, some, some forms of making it more encouraging businesses to invest, all of this. And then there is this juggernaut coming towards us all in the form of AI and the transformation that artificial intelligence is bringing to our economies. I don't see anyone really talk about it nearly enough because it is, it is, whether we like it or not, it's coming towards us like a high speed express train. And that's the environment we need to get Growth. And I'm really optimistic about the UK in the. In the sort of medium term. And I'll give you my 10 second homily on the UK. If you look back over the last.
- [34:49]
A
We set this to music, so it sounds.
- [34:53]
E
If you look back over the past 80 years, twice, the UK has radically reshaped the relationship between the state and the market and led the world in doing so. The first time was the creation of the welfare state, when the UK basically reinvented what sort of social democracy was about and everybody else copied us. And then the second time, more controversially perhaps, was the Thatcher revolution in the early 80s. Radical change, privatization, deregulation, the rest of the world copied. I have always thought that the UK is in the best place to come up with what a sensible state for the 21st century looks like. And we haven't done it yet. I don't see it in this government. I had hoped it might be. Maybe it's the next one, but we ought to be having that conversation. What kind of tax system, what kind of benefit system? What much, much bolder reforms than we're talking about right now? It's a whole kind of different canvas.
- [35:49]
A
And if we don't set that to music, I hope somebody does. Felicity?
- [35:54]
D
Yeah, I mean, I just wanted to pick up on that point, which I think is a really important one. I mean, we hear the Chancellor saying all the time that currently, one in every pound ten that the UK government spends is facilitating the debt. Right. And that is money that cannot be spent on improving public services or whatever else. And although, you know, gilt yields have risen right around the globe, haven't they, because of what's going on in Iran. However, there's a UK premium on that. And I think one of the reasons for that is that there is no confidence that the UK government will get to grips with its debt because the bond markets have seen successive. This is not a party political point. The UK bond markets have seen successive governments of successive colors failing to get to grips with debt. So when a new Chancellor comes in, as Rachel Reeves has done, and said, okay, I'm going to do all my spending up front and then I'm going to start tightening in the final few years of the Parliament, they don't believe necessarily that it's actually going to happen, especially when you think of the raw politics of it. I mean, how many chancellors really want to go into a general election cutting back on things, right? That's when politically they want to be in a position to be able to splurge So I think there's a credibility issue too that's piled up. Would you agree over.
- [37:14]
E
I completely agree, but I sort of slightly tear my hair out when I hear that the latest set of proposals, which are, you know, cutting VAT on kids, kids menus and all of that, I mean, it was, you know, it's gimmick, it's gimmickry. It's not serious fiscal policy.
- [37:31]
A
Well, unless you've got a family of four or you want to.
- [37:34]
E
No, but of course I feel for anyone who has to. I mean, it's going to be a long hot summer and I get all of that, but it's actually not the way that you can really run fiscal policy in a country. You can't just think, I'm going to do three months to make these people happy here. Three months to make money. I mean, she needs to sort of. And she's done it actually on the other side too with a whole bunch of tax policies. You know, whatever you think of the merits of them, VAT on private schools, scaring off the non doms, all of these things, they were sending a signal more than they were trying to raise revenue. They were kind of showing up her sort of left wing bona fides. It was not effective tax policy. Most of them have raised less money than, far less money than they thought. So it's been kind of tax policy by gimmickry because the government has refused to address its red lines of no change on income tax, no change on national insurance, which, well, they changed, they raised employer national insurance. You could raise more revenue if you wanted to quite efficiently by putting a penny on the rate of income tax. It wouldn't be popular, but you could do it.
- [38:31]
A
Oh, it's popular here in this not
- [38:33]
E
necessarily representative audience, but even that won't help unless the economy is growing. That's the kind of bottom line, get the economy growing faster again.
- [38:41]
A
And of course, Rachel Reeves wouldn't be the first Chancellor who had done something that sends a political signal but doesn't necessarily raise a lot of money or save a lot of money, but it
- [38:48]
E
doesn't make it better.
- [38:49]
A
Yeah, we've had a question from someone in the audience who didn't put their name, but they said is the whole problem with the UK's economy that both the country and its population live on credit. So basically the population wants more from the government than it's willing to pay for in taxes. And also you then got everyone's individual credit card bills racking up as well.
- [39:09]
E
I'm going to be the kind of Grinch of here. But yes, basically is the answer to that. I mean, I think it is that you have a political system where nobody on any party is willing to say to people that actually some very tough decisions have to be made and we're still in a sort of never never land of politics. And until that, until we're willing to have those conversations, we're going to, you know, end up doing everything on credit. It's the same thing on defense. You know, you. On the one hand, we say we need to increase defense spending because we recognize the threat that comes from Putin and so forth and so forth, but actually no one's prepared to cut somewhere else to pay for it. So, you know, do you do it on credit? Well, some, some labor politicians were suggesting you could until the bond market said, no, you can't. And it's the same with everything else. You know, I just, it feels like a very small bore conversation where people think, well, in the end, we can
- [40:05]
A
just borrow Felicity on another point. Zanny was talking about the AI revolution. And this is an opportunity for Britain to be like, have its third big shift, that it teaches the world how to, how to live in the modern world. I was doing an event earlier on that was sort of a newspaper review with some other journalists and commentators, and we could ask the audience to vote in real time on certain issues. And one of the stories was on the front page of the Times today, and it's this review by Alan Milburn, the former Health secretary, into why so many young people are economically inactive. Is it because of something about the job market? Is it about their mental health? And the line that the Times has picked out from their preview of it is that this idea that social media and phones has rewired young people's brains, so we're obviously entering a new era for work. And I'm just thinking the thing about Wales is Wales has been through that massive change of how people earn a living a couple of times in the last hundred years. And I know you've been reporting on Welsh politics, obviously not for 100 years, just to be clear, just to be clear, but for a good few years. And I just wonder, is there thing. And I know this is, this is almost like setting you an exam in real time. So I'm sorry for like landing you with this incredibly difficult question, but in terms of kind of regeneration retraining, what happens when a town loses its industry and everyone has to think about doing something different, are the things that you've covered over the last few years that speak to that.
- [41:23]
D
Yeah, I mean, Wales certainly in the Valleys, right, is your classic post industrial landscape, isn't it, where the mines fed the steelworks and, you know, all of that for the most part is gone. And we've seen the consequences of that. Where it ended up, certainly with the closure of the mines and the valleys and stuff, basically putting a generation of people out of work, really. And I think it's illustrative really of how we can't avoid change, obviously. And Wales was at the forefront of change in the industrial revolution. I mean, places like Merthyr Tydville was absolutely driving the industrial revolution. So Wales has seen it on both fronts, really. The, the massive sort of being the engine of it and then also sort of being on the tailwind of the end of it. And I think what it is is really illustrative of how do we, how do we be nimble, how do we try to accommodate people whose lives have been upended effectively? Because with the. Especially in the Valleys, with the closure of the mines, it wasn't simply that people, that a lot of people in a locality lost their jobs. It was also sort of a social coherence that went too. And the most recent example of a big jobs low that we've seen, obviously has been in Portalbert with the Tata Steel plant there. Now that is not closing. Tata is going to reopen that as an electric arc furnace. But that employs far fewer people. What we've seen there is, you know, a lot of money going in to try to help people retrain. We've, you know, got examples of people doing all sorts of things, you know, starting their own businesses, that sort of thing, it remains to be seen how successful that will be. But with the AI revolution trying to get out in front of it, I think rather than trying to cope with it as it happens, is probably going to be the key. The difficulty is we don't really know yet what the impact of AI is going to be.
- [43:33]
A
And I didn't reveal what the audience actually was voting on in that to do with that Alan Milburn story. And so basically we said to them, do you have a member of your family or your extended family who's aged, what, 17 to 24, but who's really struggling to get a job? And 55% of people said no, which you might expect from a crowd of people who spend their weekends coming to an event like this. But that meant that 45% of people in that room and there was 100 of people there said, yes, they are And Zanny, that's a lot of probably very well educated, very motivated, very smart, nice people who struggling to get a job.
- [44:09]
E
I was sitting in the front row watching you and that. I was really struck BY that, that 45% of people knew someone who was struggling to get a job. In the audience this morning, just two thoughts on that because I thought the, the, the front page story in the Times and Alan Milburn's report, which I think comes out later this week, it is striking. There are almost a million people aged 16 to 24 who are not in education, not in employment and not in training. They're called NEET. If you're a policy wonk, you call them NEETs. That is a huge number of people and a very large number of them go on to disability roles in some form or go on to welfare in some form. We are, I think we're failing an entire generation of kids if we don't do something about the this. And it's, it's. There aren't any easy answers. I think several ideas of, you know, much broader work experience schemes, much broader ways of getting people into the workforce, and then I think rethinking education itself. And this comes to that 45% from the previous session this morning. You know, the brutal truth is, any of you know who've got kids applying for jobs? The kids use AI to apply for jobs and the employers use AI to read the applications. It's completely ridiculous. Ridiculous.
- [45:21]
A
It's like two smart speakers talking to each other.
- [45:23]
E
So as a result, it's perfectly easy for an individual to send off 500 applications because you don't have to do it, you just get your AI to do it. And it's perfectly okay for a company because they never, no person ever reads these applications, which actually weirdly makes it much harder for people to stand out and get through. And so even more, I think, counterproductively connections, knowing someone, knowing someone at the company is bizarrely and I think really anti. Meritocratically becoming much more important. And that is not the direction we want to go in. So if you step back, I think we are going to have to have a much broader rethink of education where you use AI in education judiciously. And there are certain things, like teaching certain subjects, actually having a sort of personal AI is really helpful. But you then use the time that kids are in schools to learn things like how to get on with people, to learn how to discuss ideas, to learn how to have social skills, because a lot of the reasons Those young people 16 to 24 have mental health issues and huge fractions of them do is because they spend a lot of time on their phones in their own world. Doom scrolling. And I think we are going to have to start using the education system the time that kids are in school. Much more to focus on that stuff than teaching them equations.
- [46:41]
A
Right, our last few minutes of this episode from Hay. We're going to be joined by someone else who's here at the Hay Festival. Please welcome host of the Archers podcast and behind many, many legendary pieces of cultural content in Britain, it's Emma Freud. Oh, there you go. Hello, Emma. I'll let bring that microphone in a little bit, Emma, so we can. So we can hear you.
- [47:07]
C
Sorry.
- [47:08]
A
Oh, what we. What was your feedback for the panel?
- [47:10]
C
I was just fangirling over your panel.
- [47:15]
A
I won't do what I just did to Felicity and basically make her do an exam question about so 200 years of history in Wales. Don't worry, that's not coming your way. Don't worry. 200 years of the Archers. No. How many years is it?
- [47:25]
C
75. It feels like about 2000, but it's been going 75 years this year. It began in 1951. I've seen the transcript to the very first program. You can't hear it anymore, but in it there's an argument between old Mr. Archer, who thinks we should stick with the horses drawing the ploughs, and young Mr. Archer, who thinks that we might try these newfangled tractors.
- [47:47]
A
Right, which side of the argument won the tractors? And how are you marking the big anniversary?
- [47:55]
C
Well, I present the Archers podcast. So I just have a party every week on the show. That's quite easy. But what we did just now, just we were the slot in just before you is we recorded. Oh God, it was so good. I wish you'd been there. We recorded an episode like the most notorious episode there's ever been and the most controversial one in the 75 year history, which was in 1955 when Grace Archer, who was then pregnant and had just been married for a couple of years to another Archer, can't remember which, Phil, I think, went in to try and rescue her horse from a stable that was on fire. And unfortunately and incredibly shockingly, seeing as how she was the most popular character in Ambridge, was killed. So four years into the show, this woman died and the Archers cast came here and for the first time ever in 75 years, they performed live in front of an audience with sound effects done live in front of an audience of that episode. Where she died. And it was so weird. It was so brilliant watching it. Partly because it said in my script, then Grace Archer dies, but when it happened, I burst into tears.
- [49:06]
A
Wow.
- [49:07]
C
It was so intense and it was so moving. And the girl who was playing Grace Archer, who was pregnant, was Alice from the Archers, who was also pregnant.
- [49:15]
A
Yeah.
- [49:15]
C
So there was. Many people were playing their grandfather. But the reason that it's the most notorious episode is because they planned the death to coincide, maybe coincidence, with the opening night of ITV. And it worked.
- [49:35]
A
Right.
- [49:36]
C
They got 20 million listeners that week. And ITV, have you ever heard of them since?
- [49:43]
E
I grew up listening to the Archers. Did you haven't listened for age, I confess. Don't ask me about what's going on right now.
- [49:48]
D
You've been.
- [49:48]
C
You don't listen now.
- [49:50]
A
This is not a trial. Don't worry.
- [49:53]
E
Not. Not regularly.
- [49:54]
C
Do you have any idea of the joy that you are denying yourself?
- [49:59]
E
I can imagine. I know. And I will start.
- [50:02]
D
What is. What is the joy, then? Tell us why we should be listening.
- [50:06]
C
It was contemporary 75 years ago. It is still contemporary today. The issues that are being discussed in this beautifully gentle but there BBC way, you know, political issues, gender issues, educational issues, class issues, they're all there. They're all dealt with. You can't get away from them. They never cross that imaginary line that is called. The BBC wouldn't really like that. But they all come up to it. They come as far as it. There's a wonderful moment when they discussed Brexit years back. We talked about this in the podcast just now, where the whole of the Brexit argument was summed up by two characters in two sentences.
- [50:46]
D
And then.
- [50:47]
E
Tell us, what was it? Brilliant?
- [50:49]
C
Oh, you know, it was like, oh, that might make a real difference to the farming supplies.
- [50:52]
D
Yeah.
- [50:53]
C
But we might do well out of it as well. Fair enough.
- [50:55]
A
Reminds me of the campaign. Yeah. And, Emma, I sometimes think we do slightly similar jobs in our podcast in that you're the companion podcast to the Archers, this long running, dramatic, amazing piece
- [51:07]
C
of culture and you're the companion to the world.
- [51:09]
E
World.
- [51:09]
A
Well, I wouldn't put it quite as strongly as that, but like the news, like the. The endless storylines of the news. So we're sort of in the same business.
- [51:15]
C
Well, the first title of the Archer's podcast was Archer's Cast, but they didn't think you'd like it. They think. They thought you'd think it belittled.
- [51:22]
A
Never crossed my desk. Never crossed my. I'd be gladly. You can have the title please rename yourself now, even though, you know, massively successful. Right, that is all we've got time for for this episode of Newscast. Thank you very much to everyone who's been up here sitting with me. Thank you to you guys. Thank you.
- [51:38]
D
Pleasure.
- [51:38]
C
You've forgotten their names, haven't you?
- [51:41]
E
Wow. Wow.
- [51:47]
A
On that note is Zanny Minton Beddoes, editor of the Economist newspaper, and Felicity Evans, host of Walescast and also the money editor of BBC Wales. And Emma Freud. And thank you to you guys for being here in the tent with us and for listening to Newscast, Newscast, Newscast from the BBC.
- [52:07]
E
From one newscaster to another, thank you so much for making it to the end of this episode. You clearly do, in the words of Chris Mason, ooze stamina. Can I also gently encourage you to subscribe to us on BBC Sounds? Tell everyone you know and don't forget, you can email us anytime@newscastbc.co.uk or if you're that way inclined, send us a WhatsApp on +4403301239480. Be assured, I promise we listen to everyone.
- [52:52]
A
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