#116 - Jamie Jenkins - Why the UK Is Failing, The Data Doesn’t Lie

Summary

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The Peter McCormack Show #116 – Jamie Jenkins: Why the UK Is Failing, The Data Doesn’t Lie

Date: September 26, 2025
Host: Peter McCormack
Guest: Jamie Jenkins (Statistician, Former ONS, Substack Writer)
Theme: An unflinchingly data-driven diagnosis of the UK's economic, social, and political malaise—and how narratives often obscure uncomfortable truths.

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Episode Overview

Peter McCormack sits down with Jamie Jenkins, a former Office for National Statistics (ONS) manager and now an independent commentator, to dissect the current state of the UK. Focusing on objective data rather than partisan narratives, the episode tackles government debt, public sector bloat, economic stagnation, energy policy, immigration, crime, and the ever-contentious NHS. Jenkins insists that the numbers don’t lie—and that both political classes and much of the media routinely mislead or blunt uncomfortable realities, knowingly or not.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Introduction: Who is Jamie Jenkins? [04:50–08:38]

• Jamie outlines his background: always passionate about numbers, top of his class in maths, degrees in stats and economics.
• Early experiences at the ONS and pushing for public-facing statistical storytelling instead of dry data dumps.
• Frustration at how politicians and journalists misused or ignored statistics, especially during COVID.
• Left the civil service to voice his opinions and began highlighting discrepancies during the pandemic.

Quote:
"We would publish data, stick it on the website, but I would say, well, what’s the point? … I want to start writing stories. I don’t want to just put numbers on a website with a very dry statistical release, 15 pages long that nobody can see anything." [06:03] – Jamie Jenkins

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2. Beyond “Left” and “Right”: Is It Really the Divide? [08:38–10:32]

• The labels of left and right are less relevant as parties mix and match policies.
• Rise of the Reform Party shows old dichotomies breaking down.
• Jenkins: “Is there a left and right anymore? This is just right and wrong.” [08:47]

Notable Quote:
"The strongest argument for socialism is that it sounds good. The strongest argument against socialism is that it doesn't work." [09:02] – Peter (quoting Thomas Sowell)

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3. The UK’s Economic Predicament in Numbers [10:32–16:34]

• National debt now at £2.87 trillion—near 100% of GDP.
• Borrowed £150 billion in last fiscal year alone.
• Businesses are investing less due to increasing taxes and labor costs.
• Public sector jobs growing while private sector jobs (especially hospitality) decline.
• Politicians only think in the short-term; long-term consequences ignored.

Notable Analysis:

• Jenkins: “You cannot fund the public sector without the private sector. Where does the money come from? ... It comes from borrowing.” [13:31]
• On tackling inflation: “The main driver … was energy, because everything in the economy uses energy to some extent.” [15:01]

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4. Media & Statistical Literacy [19:24–22:04]

• Jenkins’ stint at the BBC reveals news agenda shaped by editors, not just events.
• Journalists, even many political editors, often lack skill interrogating numbers—so government data goes unscrutinised.
• The BBC’s narrative often dictates public discussion, with a leftward slant.

Memorable Moment:
"How do you prepare the news? … 'We make the news.' That was a bit of an eye opener for me.” [19:24]

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5. Tax, Redistribution, and the Limits of "Tax the Rich" [22:04–23:12]

• “Problems can’t be solved by taxing the rich more.”
• In reality, wealth taxes and new duties only ever cover a sliver of new government spending.
• Politicians say what’s needed to win votes, not enact sustainable policy.

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6. Small Boats, Asylum, and the Immigration Debate [23:28–27:13]

• The dominant narrative about “small boats” ignores the larger system: majority of claims from people entering via legal means and then overstaying visas.
• Largest group: Pakistan; most did not arrive by boat but by air.
• Starmer’s and other politicians’ responses are spin, not substantive solutions.

Memorable Data Point:
"110,000 record asylum claims ... 32,000 in hotels. £4.7 billion spent on asylum accommodation alone. That’s the tax of 600,000 people." [00:00, echoed at 119:02]

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7. Energy, Cost of Living, and “Price Controls” [28:51–37:29]

• Introduction of price caps has killed competition in the UK energy market.
• Energy bills soared from ~£1,100 (2019) to ~£1,765 (2025); peaked over £3,000.
• Government overreliance on imported gas, especially from Norway, makes UK vulnerable.
• Poor planning re: net zero, lack of domestic nuclear build, and regulatory capture blamed for high bills.

Quote:
"The simplest way to make people richer is to get the energy price down." [37:29]

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8. The Public Sector, Pay, and Unsustainable Government [51:54–56:18]

• Public sector wage bill: £288 billion—about a quarter of all tax receipts.
• Public sector pay has been rising faster than private sector; increase cost of £15.3 billion.
• Growth driven primarily by health and administration while hospitality and private jobs vanish.

Host Observation:
"So a quarter of our tax receipts is us paying the unproductive part of society." [53:00] – Peter

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9. Tax System & Disincentives for Wealth Creation [65:04–68:25]

• Progressive tax rates discourage “wealth generators” and entrepreneurs.
• Calls for a flat tax, or at least a less punitive structure, to encourage productive work.
• Discussion of China's role in global trade imbalances and the logic of tariffs.

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10. Immigration, Employment & Demography [69:04–83:04]

• Despite mass immigration, employment growth is not keeping pace.
• Many new arrivals (especially pre-Brexit) “overqualified” for low-wage jobs; Brits pushed out.
• Population growth far outstrips infrastructure (housing, NHS, water).
• Fewer young people, collapsing fertility rates, more elderly—a “demographic time bomb.”

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11. The NHS: Sacred Cow or Failing System? [85:29–94:14]

• NHS spending at record highs, but waiting lists and outcomes worsen.
• Jenkins: No comparable country runs a health service quite as the UK does. Suggests more private sector involvement, with NHS focusing on true essentials.
• Nurses especially poorly treated—salaries grew 27% over two decades vs. 44% national average/CPI far higher.
• Hospitals overcrowded, ambulances delayed, middle management bloat evident.

Quote:
"Government policy or inaction is killing people ... government should be investing in those hospitals now. If you think it’s bad now, it’s going to be a whole lot worse in 2040." [93:43] – Jamie Jenkins

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12. Crime: Facts vs. Perception [98:28–107:32]

• Official stats say crime overall is down, but survey data and anecdotal evidence show increases in antisocial behavior, shoplifting, sexual crime, and “public order” arrests.
• Significant rise in public order prisoners—65% increase since Starmer came in.
• Jenkins: Shoplifting under £200 effectively decriminalized; police focus on “online hate” over real crime.

Striking Chart:

• Sharp, unprecedented jump in public order offenses since 2024’s general election. [Referenced: 106:24]

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13. Government Waste & Public Trust [112:57–116:48]

• Government and councils spend lavishly on PR, diversity managers, and additional politicians while core services atrophy.
• The productivity of the public sector is critically questioned.
• UK debt now at 96% of GDP; Alden’s “event horizon” of 135% default risk noted—Britain’s trajectory is perilous.

Quote:
"If you buy a failing business, the first thing you do is look at what savings you can have ... the Labour Party came in, first thing they did: spend more." [112:56] – Jamie Jenkins

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14. How Did We Get Here? Solutions & Political Cynicism [117:10–127:56]

• Neither major party is trusted; both driven by short-termism and narrative manipulation, not reality-based reforms.
• Peter: Policy change must be tied to budgets and taxation must be subject to referendum.
• Jenkins: Tony Blair’s only enduring positive legacy—Freedom of Information Act.

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15. Memorable Quotes & Summary

• “We’re stealing from the future” — on debt, house prices, and NHS decline.
• “Virtue is the easiest thing in the world. It’s just words.” [121:24]
• "The facts don’t care about your feelings." [27:43]
• “If you want to know who’s funding asylum costs: it takes the tax of 600,000 people.” [00:00, reprised at 119:02]
• “What has got better in the last 20 years? ... The only thing is Tony Blair’s Freedom of Information Act.” [128:19]

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Important Segment Timestamps

• Who is Jamie? [04:50–08:38]
• Left vs Right? [08:38–10:32]
• National Debt & Borrowing [10:32–16:34]
• Media’s Statistical Blindness [19:24–22:04]
• “Taxing the Rich” Fallacy [22:04–23:12]
• Small Boats & Asylum Claims [23:28–27:13, recap at 119:02]
• Energy Price Madness [28:51–37:29]
• Public Sector Pay Explosion [51:54–56:18]
• Risky Taxation & Tariffs [65:04–68:25]
• Population/Infrastructure Mismatch [79:23–83:04]
• NHS Troubles, Waiting Lists [85:29–94:14]
• Crime Waves & Policing Failures [98:28–107:32]
• Debt Crisis, GDP Warning [111:20–113:58]
• What Has Government Improved? [128:06–131:27]

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Conclusion

This episode is a sweeping, numbers-first diagnosis of the UK’s woes. From broken economics and housing shortages to energy boondoggles and creeping public sector bloat, Jamie Jenkins delivers hard truths, consistently referencing real data and highlighting where the narratives—on both left and right—very often diverge from reality. McCormack provides a platform for these insights with matching candor, pressing for clear answers and actionable solutions.

Both agree: the future depends on confronting these issues honestly, moving beyond tribalism, and putting numbers before narratives.

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Resources

• Jamie Jenkins’ Substack & X/Twitter: @StatsJamie, statsjamie.co.uk
• (For full charts and data breakdowns, visit Jamie’s website and social media.)

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Summary prepared for those wishing to understand the data-driven reality of Britain’s predicament—and what politicians and pundits won’t tell you about the nation’s direction.

Transcript

[A]

All the people coming over on small boats. And then we've had the issues with the Bell Hotel and then Starmer this week saying, I want to get everybody out of the hotels. Well, is the government gone to court last week then, to stop people being taken out of hotels? You know, we want action rather than words. And that's where they kept talking about is we're refugees, welcome. We're a nation of sanctuary. And the thing on, just as we brought that point up, that. And I got the figures here, so we had 110,000 record asylum claims. If you look at the latest figures now, I think we've got 32,000 asylum seekers in hotels. How many people need to go to work to pay for the asylum accommodation? Okay, so it was basically when you add the numbers, 4.7 billion pounds was spent. 4.7 billion on the asylum accommodation alone. So if you then work out what the average wage of the economy is and you look at the national insurance and the tax, 600,000 people. I've got to go out and get out of bed every single morning. All of the tax for those 600,000 people has to go to just pay for that 4.7 billion.

[B]

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[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And I, I don't like, got. Got your interviews. It's not me, it's. It's more Paxman style. So hold on, you are a chairman of football club?

[A]

Yes, Brynner Junior's football club. Not as glamorous as Bedford, but I still probably get a lot of the, the hassle dealing with all the coaches. Fallout. Coaches arguing, parents, player selections. Parents, the whole lot. Yeah, yeah. And treasurer for our county football team as well. Which is, which is kind of good because you get all the, the top talent from where I am in South Wales in Ron McNataf we do all our trial. The schools nominate the children, some treasure for that, coach one of the teams as well. So you get to coach the kind of the grassroots level and chairman of that and then the more elite level of footballers who hopefully one or two might go on to big things in the future.

[B]

Have you got teams in the JPL in Wales?

[A]

We don't. We don't tend to have the jpl, but a couple of teams now kind of Newport, the. The far closest to English areas tend to play in the JPL as well.

[B]

We've launched four teams this year. We under what we call Rail Bedford Elite, which is the. The best teams, the best players. I think I. I can't remember if they're JPL or eja, but it's a mix. It's a mix. It's a mix. Is it? Yeah. Youth football's hard, is harder than adult football. I mean, for different reasons. But I, I give so much credit to the people who run youth football teams because keeping parents happy, keeping coaches happy, keeping discipline, ensuring these young. And the problem is usually on the boys side, not the girls. But ensuring these young men have the right role models and behave correctly on the pitch is hard.

[A]

Oh, definitely. My, my mantra on this is pretty much that we are trying to create young adults. Football as a sport, for example, is a good way of teamwork, getting them together. But the biggest thing I've come across is the parents.

[B]

The parents. That's the biggest problem. Yeah, Parents yelling on the sideline. I remember when Connor was playing, so that's my son, by the way. I remember when he was playing, we had drummer and Georgie was a ref. Yeah, they didn't have a ref. What was he, 15 at the time? The parents are yelling at him for decision. I'm like, what are you doing? I also remember a fight breaking out. Get a grip. This is kids. Yeah, well, I could talk to you about that forever, but this is probably the biggest set of notes I've ever had for an interview.

[A]

It's going to be a lot of numbers.

[B]

Probably. Probably. Jamie, obviously I discovered your Twitter recently and fascinated it by. And your substack. Please go check out Jamie substack. We'll put it in the show notes. Fascinating stuff. And I think. I don't normally do this, but I think it would be useful if we start by. If you explain your background, the jobs you've done and then talk about why some people need to hear this, why statistics are probably more important than emotions.

[A]

Yeah. So it all started when I was a really young child, because my mother bought me. This is back in the day before. See, kind of one of realize the days before the Internet, where we were growing up. I remember, yeah, there were those days I always say to my sons when they say, oh, the Internet's not working. Said life was like, you know, we had life before the Internet.

[B]

Do you know what I always say to people? I said, when you used to organize to meet someone, you had to turn up on time. Yeah, if it's like, I'm going to meet you outside WH Smith's at 2 o'. Clock, you had to be there at 2.

[A]

Yeah, no, definitely. My mother bought me this mad professor. It was called, I think, a calculator type thing where you just play around and he was archaic, but it would give you some answers. So I was always good at maths in school, so top of the class in maths, did my A levels. And then you've got to choose. Do you want to go down the, like, statistical side of things, become more of an engineer, more mechanical side of things, or all that abstract pure mathematics with algebras and equations that people think, what the hell are you talking about? So I went more on the stats route and did well on that, went to university, got that. And then I fell kind of into working for the Office for National Statistics. So I did that and one of my bosses said to me at the time, I was there for two years and we might dip into about public sector and private sector. We said to me, you're far too good to work in the public sector.

[B]

Go and get a real job, make some real money.

[A]

Yeah, make some real money. So I moved to Birmingham, actually, I was in Wales doing this. Moved to Birmingham, did a year as an actuary and I was looking around and you've got to do more and more studies. I was looking at everybody thinking, it's quite boring, this. Everybody's studying. I think I've just been studying all my life, done my university degree. So I thought, oh, bugger this, go back. So I went back to the office for National Statistics and then spent 15, 16 years doing data, government data. But the mantra I had was we would publish data, stick it on the website, but I would say, well, what's the point of doing that? What is literally the point of just sticking numbers? When I took over, I got to more managerial role. I said to the team, I want us to, to be having an impact, you know, influence in policy. And you can see all the data which we'll get into today is all really important. Stuff. So I said, you know, I want to start writing stories. I don't want to just put numbers on a website with a very dry statistical release, the 15 pages long that nobody can see anything. So I said, let's write some short stories and headlines, be like press releases. And I said, the aim now is that every single thing we write is covered in the media. And the press office worked with me on this. So I started getting a role even whilst in the Office for National Statistics, going on to the BBC breaking the latest figures and stuff. But what you find then is because I was doing that, the politicians up in Whitehall were thinking, oh, the media are picking up on what they're talking about, so we need to make sure we're engaging with them on what they're talking about. So you get a seat at the table trying to influence the policy as well. So. So I did a lot of that. Left the Civil service, I moved around different government departments, left the civil service because obviously if you're in the civil, I can't have a voice on Twitter or X or a substack because you, you know, you just got to toe the line. You can't. You're impartially. Got no opinion. Left the Civil service kind of working on the private sector. And so I've spent since COVID I remember sat there, the COVID period happened and one of my mates messaged me about the COVID data. He said, have you looked at this? It was like two or three weeks in. Said, no, I haven't. So I started looking at it and then you just start realizing the nonsense that was coming out from the government and the data and the journalists. So I thought, right, I'm going to have a bit of a voice on this. And because of my experience of working in the government data on health statistics, I led for a bit as well. I was quite back and forth with the media, giving updates on what was going on. And then. So that was the kind of start of it. And then it kind of evolved then into when Boris Johnson started telling everybody, you've had a vaccine, so you can't catch COVID And I'm thinking, well, you can if you look at the data. That's when I started calling all the nonsense of the politicians and then it's kind of evolved from there.

[B]

Okay. Have you been accused of being right wing because of this?

[A]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I've heard your interviews where you're saying you can't get enough left wing commentators on.

[B]

So it's very hard.

[A]

But you might need to branch back into football and maybe get Ryan Giggs. He was a left winger, you might have to think. But the question I was, is there a left and a right anymore? I did a, A, a blog on this. This is just right and wrong. That's what I pose. Because where are we?

[B]

That reminds me of a. I, you know Thomas Soul? Do you know Thomas Soul? I, I got a thing out for my son this morning. I was looking at some of his quotes. Where is it? Let me just get this one for you. I think you'll like this. Right? He's, he's a very. You're like Thomas Soul. But he said this morning. Sorry. This thing I found the. The strongest argument for socialism is that it sounds good. The strongest argument against socialism is that it doesn't work. But those who live by words will always have a soft spot in their heart for socialism because it sounds so good and it is the kind of the right and wrong. I mean, I don't. Yeah, I mean I consider myself based on what other people think right and left are. I'm probably on the right wing, but there's certain things. I think I'm on the left wing or it's just. Yeah, okay. So I think you're a similar age to me, definitely. If you've lived without the Internet, if you remember those times.

[A]

79. I was born.

[B]

Right. I'm 78. So, okay. Similar. I don't remember the early 80s too well. I remember Thatcher and I remember early John Major. But certainly my adult life. I think this is the most disruptive time I've lived through. Politically, economically, I think we're in strange and dark times. I am an optimist. But looking through the lens of statistics, what would your diagnosis of the state of the UK be?

[A]

Oh, it's one hell of a state. You can just go look at the data. Now. Margaret Thatcher in the 80s, economically, she did sell a lot of the assets off, so there was a bit of a boost in the public finances. But the difficulty we've got, Peter, is if you just look at the last 20, 20, 30 years, the amount of debt the country's built up. Because when you think of politics, politicians get voted in. They've got five year term if they're lucky. And Rishi Sunak makes decisions, Johnson makes decisions. You know, Theresa May, go back to Tiny Bit. They're not here to deal with the long term consequences, which is why politicians aren't thinking. And we might get into the demographic issues that we've got, but they're not thinking about 2040, 2050, they're thinking next week, next year kind of thing. So the debt that we've got now, and I've got a crib sheet of all the numbers when I'm talking in the media, I fact check a lot of people and so I got to make sure I try and get my numbers right. I got so many numbers in my head, but on the debt kind of thing. So we borrowed 150 billion in the last fiscal year. A lot of that is.

[B]

That's about 10% of GDP.

[A]

That's huge. Yeah, huge amount. And our total debt now.

[B]

Sorry, sorry, I should correct myself. That's about 10% of tax receipts on GDP.

[A]

Right, yeah, I'll check, though. But basically, the total 150 billion, if you look at then the total national debt that we've got, that's now running at 2.87 trillion, and that's pretty much the size of the UK economy, it's just below 100% of GDP. And because governments every single year have been borrowing and borrowing and borrowing, leaving it for the kind of the next generation, the amount of money, that debt that we have to borrow, I think we borrowed 20 billion in June just alone. It just sucks a load of money out of the system to invest in the economy and invest in public services. So what the Labour government are coming in and doing, obviously, is let's put taxes up, but let's not forget Boris Johnson did it and the taxes went up under the Tories. So you can't just blame the Labour Party, they're just continuing with what hasn't been working. You take more tax and, you know, as a businessman, take more tax, you invest less. So the latest economic figures that we had out from the ons a couple of weeks ago, the economy's trundling along. That's driven by government spending from the borrowing, but business investments going down because national insurance has gone up, your cost to employ people has gone up with the minimum wage. So the private sector's starting to tank, the public sector's growing, but you can't fund the public sector without a private sector. So these successive governments are borrowing all this money. Now, if I went to the bank and said, actually, can I borrow some money to pay back the money that I owe you last time? At some point they're going to call in, you know, call in the house or something, so we can't continue where we are. And growing up in Wales, where I'm from, is pretty much labor of run Wales for 25 years. I was Shocked when Starmer won because I was at the time saying, if you just want to see what's going to happen to the uk, just see what's going on in Wales. But I don't think Starmer got voted in. The Tories got voted out pretty much.

[B]

I would agree with that.

[A]

That's what happened there. Because yeah, I think it had a lower vote than what Corbyn had. It's just obviously there's a bit more split of the vote with the Reform Party, but.

[B]

Well, there was only 60% voter turnout as well.

[A]

Yeah, the voter turnout was kind of apathetic with the voters. But I think the critical thing is having grown up in the Welsh Valleys where everybody votes for Labour, I must be the only person. I've never voted for Labour in my entire life. My parents did. They all say, oh, my grandparents, you know, everybody votes where your grandparents and your parents did. So the situation is pretty dire. But from a political perspective, I suppose with the emergence you talked about, you agree perhaps with some left sided things and some right side things. That's why I pose, is it left or right anymore? Or right or wrong? Because look at the Reform Party, some of their policies are very left, some of them are very right. So as the dynamic change, and this is remarkable in my lifetime just to see an emergence of a party that means the two party status quo, I suppose could be broken in the next five to 10 years.

[B]

Okay, so your diagnosis is it's bad but recoverable.

[A]

I think so. But you've got government. I don't know. Liz Truss, you've interviewed Liz yesterday and she was trying to go down my route of lower in the state and ultimately, you know, as part I did a lot of. We've talked about my stats and master grievous part of that. I did economics in my degree. I chose economics, you know, and some of the stuff that you see the government doing is just against any basic economic theory. So.

[B]

Yeah, well, what economic theory? Because I did economics at a level and we would talk Keynesian, I didn't discover Austrian economics till I was in my mid to late 30s.

[A]

So yeah, it's true.

[B]

Like where do you sit?

[A]

Well, I sit on the kind of the low state kind of thing and where you give more money to people, they'll go and spend it on the high street. And as I said, the public sector doesn't create the wealth of the country because you need that private sector. Without that to pay the taxes, there is no public sector. So the latest figures on the payroll, for example, We've seen a big drop in the last 157,000 jobs on payroll loss since Labour took office. Now if you break that down between public and private sector hospitality is being decimated. The only growth in jobs in the economy at the moment is in the public sector. But if you've got a shrinking private sector, again, the tax issue. So where does the money come from? It comes from the borrowing side of things. So if you can put more money into people's pockets by lowering taxes, they'll spend it and then you get a boost to the economy. And there's been a lot of discussion on inflation the last few years. Okay, you put more money into people's pockets, then inflation goes up. But I was arguing this for the last two or three years with inflation and the interest rates being pushed up and up and up, that the main driver of inflation during the cost of living crisis was energy. And then if energy goes up, the cost, the food goes up because everything in the economy uses energy to some extent. So I think the solution to that inflation, I think interest rates were probably too low. But the solution of racking them up to take more money out of people's pockets with mortgages going up and stuff, or rents going up because they're linked to those poor economic policy and how the bank of England governor survived and still in power there, I have no idea.

[B]

I had a long back and forth debate on Facebook with somebody regarding inflation and I said to them, inflation, I, I was just quoting Milton Friedman, but I said it's always an everywhere monetary phenomenon in that we only get generalized inflation by increasing the money supply. I said everything else, every other increase in price is just market dynamics. And, and if we don't increase the money supply, just have substitution. So if energy costs go up and you've got to spend more on energy, you're going to. That is a substitution for where else you would spend the money. Do you. Is that correct?

[A]

Well, to some extent it is because it's just all the, you know, all the economy should run pretty much on a simple supply and demand curve that, so if there's a big demand for, I don't know, a brand new phone, people would supply more of it. So the price shouldn't really be affected. But the interesting thing to the money supply angle, you talked about this so moving King, former governor of the bank of England was talking about this and exact thing I was saying as well, with the money supply, what you had in Covid the demand in the economy shrunk because the government shut the economy pretty much. And the bank of England printed loads and loads of money. And it wasn't just the bank of England, it was all over the world. So what did you have? You had loads of money going into the system. People sat at home on furlough. Oh, yeah, you have a bit more money. Have a bit more money. So you had too, you know, too much money chasing the lower demand in the economy. So what's going to happen? You got a massive inflation. So a lot of that, I would say, was caused by the government. But who pays for it? It's the public, because the public then end up with all the costs going up. And the thing I always found remarkable just on mentioning Rishi Sunak there in the furlough scheme is people like, this is brilliant. Look at the government looking after us as if they didn't realize at the time, you can have to pay this back somewhere. So the government has no money. It's our money. So, yeah, have some free money on us, but you're gonna have to pay back. And then that's what's pretty much going on at the moment.

[B]

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[A]

Oh, totally, totally. But it's just so I one of the roles when I was at the ONS, I went on a second to the BBC newsroom. Okay, it was interesting. 2015 general election, they contacted the ONS, BBC, just saying, look, we need some more data, literally, people in the newsroom and help us with the election. It's quite Fun, because I was helping journalists look for data to write questions for politicians. So they were well briefed because what you tend to find is that manifestos come out and journalists won't have a clue how to interrogate it. So it's good fun. My first day there, I actually said, how do you prepare the news for news at 10? How do you do it? Because you have all these packages. How do you know all the news is on Wednesday? I said, oh, we make the news. That was a bit of an eye opener for me because.

[B]

Huh.

[A]

Yeah. So if you think about how the BBC news works is you've got some stories that might land on that day. So the first five, six, seven minutes might be something on Trump. Angela Rain is quite topical. You know, there's always something, so they'll always react to what that is. But then you might see a package on wildfires, climate change or a lot of the other packages are just done and they'll slot them in whenever there's a quiet day, for example, or if there's a, you know, if there's a busy day, they might not get in. So they always have enough content to make the filly because they decide what the news is. And when you think about it, that's probably why people are criticizing the BBC a bit, because they do push a lot of the narrative and.

[B]

Yeah, where does that agenda come from?

[A]

Well, it's the editors pretty much. They decide what they goes out. You know, I've seen it firsthand. I would say there's a lot of criticism on the BBC, kind of to the left in politics, I would probably say, yeah, that would be correct.

[B]

That was your experience.

[A]

My experience there as well. Now, there's impartiality, obviously, when they're trying to present stories, getting balance one person's view, but then it's the topics that you go for. That's the important thing. But. But that's the interesting thing when you talk about, is it a lack of understanding of, say, economics, but just data itself, Just simple questions you're trying to explain to a journalist now, I'm better with numbers than I am with words, but just this, the illiteracy of just using numbers. And I can see why the governments, perhaps over the last 10, 20 years, haven't got much scrutiny because they put a lot of numbers out, but they don't get much scrutiny because journalists struggle to actually interrogate numbers themselves. And having a lot of government data just buried on websites, which is why I was saying earlier about let's tell the public what the Stories are. That's a critical part for me. But I need to think about economics. Definitely. People don't understand. They think, yeah, that's where socialism comes from, isn't it? Oh, that give us money. It's not fair. We, the rich have more money. Give it to us. You just keep taking money off the rich. They'll move abroad.

[B]

They will. But also, so what? I'm kind of deviating from your point here. But yes, if you. They will, they will move abroad. But I think there is this idea that's been become popular, is that that the problems can be solved by taxing the rich more. I mean, the new head of the Green Party, Zach, came out this week and he said the problem isn't migrants, it's, you know, it's private jets. And I don't think what people really, truly understand is that with inflation that you're going to continually make the poorest poorer. And if you raise another 25 billion with a wealth tax or whatever, what happens when that runs out? And this is the question that I feel a lot of politicians are failing to answer when they talk about the wealth taxes is okay, you've raised a bit more. What happens when that runs out? Because they're always gonna run out, they're always gonna spend beyond their means. And nobody seems to want to answer that question, have a clear answer. And I think it's because I'm very cynical about politicians, but I think they just say what they need to say to win votes. I think some of them even know they're bullshitting us. They must know they're bullshitting us.

[A]

Well, just a few weeks ago, you had Lisa Nandi on Sky News saying, we're putting more money in people's pockets by cutting energy bills. And look at the data. Every quarter since they come into power, your average energy prices are higher. So she can't be that stupid. That.

[B]

So she's just a liar.

[A]

Well, she must be lying because. And then she wasn't really challenged on that by the interviewer. So. So you're right. I think they do tend to say a lot. They look at it and think, right, what's the hot topic? Immigrant. The small boat is in. So Starmer saying, I want to clear the hotels, I want to get rid of this, you know, stop the small boats, smash the gangs. But the big story which I was covering a few weeks ago on my, on my, on my website on that was on Asylum. The. We've just had record numbers and all, and even the BBC cash envelopes every single night. Pretty much now is something about small boats. Small boats, small boats. Everybody's saying we've got to stop the small boats. But they're only a fraction of the asylum system. And the biggest group who claim asylum in the UK in the latest set of figures are from Pakistan. And most of them hardly. And if you look at the data, hardly any of those are coming on small boats. They're coming in on visas, flying through the airports, visa comes to run out and then they claim asylum and then they get into the system and then they get all of the kind of the benefits and things of doing that whilst they're waiting for their decision.

[B]

So they've learned to game the system pretty much.

[A]

And then what war is in Pakistan? I looked at some data from the ONS last week on travel trends. Pakistan's one of the most common countries the Brits travel to and from, you know, all the time for holidays and things. So why are the number one country for asylum claims in the UK from Pakistan where there's no war, but there's very few people talking about that. It's all about the small. And it comes back to that point that it's easy to say if some part of the media is saying the small boat is a bad thing. Politicians will say, okay, public opinion now when they do the opinion polls, thinks it's a bad thing. We better talk about that. When I do think that's a problem. But there's another problem here that very few people are talking about and the government could really solve that tomorrow. They issued, I think, 162,000 visas to Pakistan. Maybe let's cut the number of visas we issue in. Or you just basically say if you come from there, you can't claim asylum. You know, those are the things. So you're right. People, politicians tend to say what the people want to hear because that's what gets them on the media coverage and also gets them potentially evoked.

[B]

I think anyone listen is going to go, are you saying that politicians lie? Well, duh, it's, it is a weird. I mean, maybe it's always been that way and just as I get older I become more aware of it. But if it does feel like we're in this kind of almost like post truth world, it's a, it's a battle place for narrative. And spin is more important than policy. Well, spin is the policy. The policy is to spin your way into winning votes and winning the public voice. But it's, it's fracturing us as a society.

[A]

No, no, definitely. And, and back to the, you know, the politicians and so just politicians, I guess I'm saying so doing. I suppose where my following grew on social media was, was during the pandemic where I was one of the voice because I'm. I understood where all the data was coming from. I was calling out a lot of the nonsense that was being spouted around. So you, you wouldn't think Dr. Hillary Jones and Lorraine Kelly would be getting into data and a bit of a spat on things. So there was a line going around that how many people were in hospital were unvaccinated and all these kind of stuff and, and Hillary Jones was talking about her and like the mouth of, of Lorraine Kelly. Gosh, pretty much really. But it was. All the numbers were wrong but he said it. So then another person says it because they heard them say and it just spirals and spirals out. So I was fact checking all this thing Ofcom, the amount of complaints that went into Ofcom about that following me fact checking it. And that's part of the narrative more the public believe in you is pretty much they hear politicians or the media talk about stuff and it can be wrong a lot of the time. And that's where I really get frustrated is what cuts through isn't always the truth.

[B]

You must have a strong bullshit detector.

[A]

Oh definitely, definitely. And I think there's a, there was an account set up on social media fact checking me as well. Anything I tweet, they got fact check me. So you know, I tend to make sure I double check everything I'm tweeting because the last thing I want to be doing is double standards, isn't it? I'm fact checking people, but then I'm getting all my facts wrong myself. But yeah, there's some absolute nonsense.

[B]

Who runs the account? The facts checks you?

[A]

No idea. I have no idea who's running it.

[B]

I wonder if that is a government goon.

[A]

God knows. God knows. But then a fact is a fact, isn't you can't deny a fact. So people arguing with what I'm saying, when you can argue with an opinion of what a fact is, but the fact is a fact itself.

[B]

What's a bit 1984?

[A]

Yeah, definitely, definitely.

[B]

So I think what we should do, I think we should work through some specific sectors and start giving people the data. I've got some of it here, but you might know it. And just to help people understand exactly where we are because like I say, I think the country's not in a good place. There is a massive divide between what is the left and the right, but the new left and the new right. There's nothing we seem to be able to agree on. But I think ultimately we're all being damaged by this economically, socially, the fabric. I think the social contract is broken. I think the fabric of society is broken, being a torn apart. But hopefully with good data and statistics, we can actually explain to people what's going on. So let's start with energy and the cost of living. So I've got it here. You wrote that bills have never been lower than July 2024's level.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

And so can you explain what's going on with energy prices and help people understand that the truth of what's happening?

[A]

Yeah, I suppose you've got to go back a little bit first. So we talk about. You've done some great podcasts talking about like free markets and things.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

And Offgem's got a lot to answer you because if you. I remember about 10 years ago, you would all be shopping around lots of different energy companies. What kind of deal can you get there? And then it was deemed possibly by the socialists, I don't know, it was deemed unfair because, oh, there's a lot of people in society who don't know how to do all of that. So they're getting ripped off because they're subsidizing the people who shop around. And you get people who just stay on that kind of, that kind of cap that they had. So they brought in this price cap. So there's hardly any competition now in, in the energy sector. It's pretty much everybody's got very similar rates. And you go back to 2019, I think of the numbers, you.

[B]

Hold on, hold on. This is insane. So because people were shopping around and getting good prices, this was unfair on lazy people?

[A]

Yeah, pretty much.

[B]

And so they've tried to equalize the prices with the cap. Yeah. That's fucking insane.

[A]

It is. It's insane. And no other. You know, it was. Because a lot of elderly people don't tend to do that. It's not fair on that group and of course. But maybe you should have a go at the energy companies. You say, look, the higher rates, let's not have them as high. But that's what was going on. So that's where this price cap started to come in, because it was to make it a bit fairer and everybody would pay a fair rate rather than some shopping around, getting a good deal and then some. And then obviously we had a lot of dodgy companies. You could argue as well who were literally hand to mouth in terms of the supply they were buying in and a lot of them went bust and then our bills went up to kind of COVID the cost of that. So competition has gone down a little bit from that, but the price cap is absolutely bonkers.

[B]

But these are price controls.

[A]

Pretty much, yeah. Because when they say the price cap's going up, everybody's. The government and the OFGEM are pretty much setting what the energy price is. And that is bonkers as far as I'm concerned. You know, the market is clearly not working properly with energy. And then. Yeah. So 2019, just before COVID and the pandemic, so the average house was household was paying about £1,137. So that's. And just for people. So some people would pay a lot more, some will pay a little bit less. That's just a typical average household. That's what it is now. That's gone up today to 1765. It's lower than those peaks because it was, I think it was going over £3,000 during those kind of. The cost of living deep in the cost of. So that's where the government literally, bit like the furlough scheme came in and say we'd put a cap of two and a half grand and you think, wow, the government's being nice. They're not. I'm going to pay more than two and a half thousand pounds. So what went on? I think the first bit, I was calling this out a few years ago as well, because Sunak, everybody was talking about the Ukraine war. But if you look at the gas price and the price per third, three quarters of that increase in the gas price happened partly before the Ukraine war. So I wouldn't put the Ukraine wars as one of the main, main factors. It's a factor. Putting sanctions on Russia, where our gas come from, is a factor. But we had this huge, huge rise and it's no surprise as well when you lock the whole world down and then you open up again. It takes time to get everything working in the economy. So that's another factor in terms of what happened. So with energy, we're paying some of the biggest prices in the world, in part because of the mad rush to net zero that we've got. And I was looking at the figures this morning, actually. So in the 1980s, okay. I think everybody can agree having loads of coal in the country and pumping all those emissions out isn't great, maybe for the environment, but also for the local communities. Okay. But 0.6% of the electric we generated came from gas in the 1980s. It was driven a lot by coal. So we obviously have reduced coal over the last 34 years. We've put renewables into the mix, but we've increased gas as well. But the interesting thing is, in the 1990s, all of the gas that we used came from the North Sea. It was all domestically produced gas. But because governments are trying to be, oh, we don't want to be using fossil fuels, we import more gas now than what we use domestically.

[B]

But that's just substitution.

[A]

Exactly, exactly. And the bonkers thing is you import it from Norway, from the same North Sea is where we've got gas ourselves. And you can't tax that, you can't tax the Norwegians.

[B]

Was it Catherine Porter who raised that? So do you know Catherine Porter?

[A]

Yes.

[B]

She's brilliant. And she was saying that by importing it, you allow yourself to hit your net zero targets. But. But it's a lie. It's a big con because you're just bringing it in for somewhere else. It's actually worse because you are. You've got the cost of the import.

[A]

You've got the cost of the import.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And obviously, if you're not using your gas in the North Sea, the supply of gas globally is lower, so the price of gas is higher. So that's obviously going to be an issue. So we've added more renewables in. We should have done a lot more like France on nuclear to replace the coal. So we're exposed on the gas because of the import of gas, we've got less control over that. Because even if people say the wholesale price of gas is set globally, well, if you've got more coming from within the uk, you could tax it more as well. So that's a big part of it. But the bizarre. I think the big issue we do have with the energy prices is the renewable sector. I don't think anybody would disagree that having renewables is a bad thing.

[B]

A bad thing. I think a lot. A lot of people would say it's having renewals.

[A]

Yeah. But overall, having some form where you guess they do look a bit of an ISO. And I do not think it's a good thing having solar panels all over farm fields. What's the point of that when you can. They're not putting them on new build houses, so why are we putting them on farms? So that's absolutely nonsense. But having some form of renewable in the mix. Yeah, in the mix, yeah. But relying on it completely. So I was looking at the the government's own data again, itself hidden away somewhere in a government energy report. Last winter, we had to ramp up the gas because the amount of wind that was blowing in the UK was going down. So if you go to a system where you rely on solar and you rely on kind of the wind that Miliband's got this mad rush to go to. Well, at night there's no sun and if it's a quiet wind time, there's no wind. So you need that more gas now.

[B]

But we're going to invest 20 billion in batteries.

[A]

Possibly, you know, with our work. Who knows? Who knows? But the critical thing with the energy bit is then, so we've exposed ourselves. It's government policies. When people say, why are my bills so high? It's the government's fault. It's the government basically over. Not just this government, it's the last government, it's every government for the last 10 or 15, 20 years. And famously, didn't he. Nick Clegg was saying. Or somebody in the. In the. In the Lib Dems was. Was complaining back into it, saying, 2011, no point doing nuclear. It won't come online till 2025. Back to your exact point. They only think short term.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And they should be building now for the next 10, 20, 30 years. So the energy crisis is being caused by the government. We've got some of the biggest prices in the world because we rely on imported energy and, you know, we're one of the richest nations in the world, they claim. But you can't produce all your energy. I'm one of the believers that all of your energy should come domestically because that's pretty much, you know, security of energy is one of the fundamentals you should have.

[B]

Yeah. And high energy costs push up the cost of business. I mean, I mean, I know with mine, the. I think my electric electricity costs are £1,000amonth. With my cafe, it's a big cost.

[A]

And you have to pass that cost on to the consumer.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

And that then pushes their domestic, you know, the income they've got left for other things down.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

So this is the. The big thing that people were really talking a lot. So when the energy prices were going up a lot during the pandemic, after the pandemic. Sorry. And you were paying more, so there was less money to go around to invest in hospitality and going to your cafe, you had that impact. But then, because everything else went up because of the energy prices, you've got a double whammy. So it's not just Your household bill. So if the government, you talk about, the government wants to put people, you know, money into people's pockets. You've got a welfare state, you want to raise wages. The simplest way to make people richer is to just get the energy price down. Because if they're paying, if they can get that 1,700 down to, say, 1,300, that's 400 quid a month in people's pockets for a household, they'll spend that, get the economy going. So that's the critical thing that you need to work on. But you can't just switch a nuclear power station on overnight. So you've got to really blame. This is going back to George Osborne and David Cameron and probably back to Tony Blair as well.

[B]

15.6% last year through interconnectors. What's that? 15.6% we had to get off other countries. Wow. Last year. Yeah. But I wonder what that equals as a percentage of the cost. Because as a percentage of the energy, the actual cost, because we will pay a premium on that. So I asked Catherine Porter that and she said they're not allowed. There's like a set limit. The other countries can't say. Yeah, I'm pretty sure if we're buying gas from Norway, it'll be more expensive than if we were drilling. That's why I asked. But.

[A]

Well, it's bound to be. And the thing with Norway, which is interesting is that I looked at this, I thought, well, Norway must have really cheap energy prices because they've got all their own gas. They don't use it pretty much. They are nearly a thing, 100% renewable energy up in Norway because they've got so much water in all of the kind of the lakes and the dams up there. So they actually sell all the gas they don't generate, use much of it to generate electricity.

[B]

Put it in their sovereign wealth fund.

[A]

Exactly that. And the difficulty I think we're having is that there's. Because of droughts and so the water supply in Norway is affecting their electricity. So they might be having to import, export a bit less, which puts obviously more pressure on us, so our prices could go up. So a country that cannot sort out the basics, which is the energy supply and getting, you know, reasonable prices. And don't even get me started on the water supply, you know, that. That one's even worse.

[B]

Go on.

[A]

Well, you think there's some certain things. This is probably where I, if, if I'm more to the right in terms of a lot of my beliefs, I do think the state does have some role. And if you think about water and basically selling off all these water companies to foreign companies who've literally just saddled all of these water companies with debt, huge debt. Thames waters in one hell of a state. And that's not just the only one.

[B]

But, but somebody did, it was said to me, one of the problems with privatizing the water is they didn't allow a proper free market for pricing.

[A]

Well, there is no market in, in water because you've got Thames Water covering their area, Welsh water covering there, you know, so, so you can't decide, well, I don't like the price of my water, I'm going to go and get it off somebody else like you can with say, your broadband or other things which come down the same kind of pipes. So that's part of the issue, isn't it, that there is no market and allowing foreign companies to say, buy them up, saddle them with debt, take loads of dividends out. I'm a big believer in private companies generating wealth for the economy, but I think there's certain things which are basics and a necessity for a human water energy now wouldn't have been obviously 300 years ago that there needs to be some factor where this needs to be reasonably priced for people because you can't really live without.

[B]

Well, so this is where I'll agree with you in that I don't think Saudi is going to open up a free market for their oil. You're going to protect. That's one of their resources. Well, we don't have, I mean, we do in the North Sea, but I think the nation's water is one of its resources and I would have thought a UK company or the government in charge of the water, hopefully and should be more protective about the quality of that water because that goes through our pipes and, and that we drink it. And I would assume, and I could be, you know, generalizing here, that a foreign owner is going to be less concerned about the quality of the water and more concerned about the money. I think there would just be a swing more towards the quality of the water if it was domestically owned. So that's where my, you know, where I, as libertarian as I want to be. Yeah, I, I think I would disagree with some libertarians because I think it should be, it should be domestically owned. Yeah, I would prefer privately. Yeah, it's a bit like, you know, how we wouldn't allow China probably to buy one of our newspapers and the US wouldn't allow China to provide certain mobile phone chips because you want to protect your country. I think water is one of those.

[A]

Things, I do think. And water is a tribal thing as well. So I'm from Wales, and it was things more mid and north Wales that they flooded a lot of mid Wales to provide water to Birmingham. So there's a lot of pipes that go down there.

[B]

Right.

[A]

And I think the same was for Liverpool. But you get a lot of tribal people in Wales saying, this is our water. But I always argue this went back to say, we are, you know, uk, United Kingdom. So if you argue that all. Because it rains a lot in Wales, that's why it was raining when I left this morning. And it rains a lot in Scotland and it doesn't rain as much in London and the southeast. So that's just a fact. That's just the geology of the uk. But there's a lot more people in density in. In London, in the southeast, so the water needs are bigger. So having pipes and networks to channel water from Scotland down to London or Wales to England, what's the problem with that? I always argue back to say, well, if you want to be tribal on that, a lot of the tax revenue comes from London and the southeast, because there's a lot of wealth. And so maybe they should turn the taps off of the tax coming back to Scotland and Wales, because what's the difference, you know, you need the money to survive as a nation, they need the water to survive as a human. So having the tribal wars about water had some fun debates on that.

[B]

We went on holiday to Wales at the after Covid, just as we were allowed to first the first movements we were allowed in, and that summer we couldn't travel abroad and we went on Airbnb and we found in the whole country, we found two places to go and one was one of these, you know, static caravans in Wales. We had a good time, didn't we?

[A]

Yeah. You're lucky you came across, because that was another bonkers thing during the pandemic.

[B]

Where you couldn't go across the Seven Bridge.

[A]

Well, yeah, but I just. I don't know if the politics probably kicked in a lot on this, but it was a global pandemic, it was a national issue, I suppose. But why you had different rules in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland and the in England that to the point that, yeah, you can't do this year. You can do this. I remember once it was a Saturday and it was the Saturday before Christmas, and Mark Rakeford, the first minister at the time, he does one of his regular announcements he says that from 6pm this evening, we're closing all the shops. No shops are going to be open for Christmas. Literally everybody thinking all their click and collects. The amount of people I saw that evening all congregated in massive queues and trying to get all. This is the biggest mixing event I've ever seen during the pandemic.

[B]

So do they think this super spreader event.

[A]

Super spreader event. And they brought them. I remember those vaccine passports that they brought in saying, you need to show your vaccine passport to go to a nightclub. And then the next thing they did was so you could only go in if you had a vaccine. But then they said, but now we close in the nightclubs because people are mixing with COVID And you said, well, you're already confirming what you're saying, that the vaccine obviously didn't stop the spread of the virus. Obviously has an effect in terms of the impact it might have if you're elderly and things in terms of when you catch it, but the inconsistencies that people used to come up with. So you're lucky you've managed to find a holiday at that point.

[B]

You. We had a good time. I was surprised how many people speak Welsh in Wales. I didn't realize we were in North Wales to begin with. We went out to the pubs and everyone was speaking Welsh. I didn't know you wouldn't find many.

[A]

Speaking Welsh in South Wales. It's pretty kind of west, more towards the north, pretty much.

[B]

I'm surprised. Let's talk about cpi, because I feel like that's one of the areas that the areas that government bullshits us most, I think they choose the figures they want, which allows them to imply that inflation's as low as possible. And I think most people's gut instinct is that inflation is much higher than the government ever declares.

[A]

Yeah, well, so there's different measures. You've got what used to be called the Retail Price Index and then that changed to the Consumer Price Index and I could bore you and it's very complicated. The difference is there's lots of different formulas and how you calculate them. So internationally it was deemed that the Retail Price Index methodology isn't ideal, it's not great, it's not fully sound, but they still have to produce it, even though people say it's not very robust because there's historically a lot of things linked to rpi. So if you just stop publishing it, people who've got kind of pensions or contracts will say, well, hang on, we need this number. So they said, produce It, But I suppose the big one is you've got CPI and then cpih, which is basically the consumer Prices index or one where you include housing costs in there. The ons tend to, I think, lead on the CPIH when they put their numbers out. But the media all focus on the CPI and that one does tend to be a bit lower, especially in the more recent times where housing costs have been a big driver of higher inflation. So just in terms of how do they calculate it? So what they will do is they'll get a basket of goods. So they'll decide what are people buying. They get a basket of goods, which just literally it's not a case of going to the local supermarket and sticking a load of baskets, but they'll choose a range of goods and over time they'll replace them. So if you go back to the 80s and 90s, they would have put a, probably a VHS cassette player in there that would have gone out. Now might be replaced with a Netflix subscription, but they'll look at a basket and they'll only track those goods and how they change from one year to the next. So that's how they calculate it. And then they'll work out from retail sales the relative weight of different things. So it could well be, say for example that food inflation might be 10%, but the headline measure might be a lot lower than that because food might only constitute X percent of the economy. So it's all in the mix in terms of how they do it.

[B]

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[A]

I think so. That's a fair point. And when I was looking at the energy prices over the course of the year when it all started to shoot up and they were talking about the caps, the proportion that poorer household spend on the likes of energy and food, as you said, is significantly higher than the proportion the richer households will pay more because obviously they got bigger houses and stuff, so they'll pay more for their energy, but the percentage of what they totally have, it would be a lot less. So when you saw those huge increases, the inflation for the poor households, their personal inflation was significantly higher. And so. So I think that's a fair point.

[B]

They also, they're tracking what people are buying and weighted. But what about what people want to buy here? They might remove, I don't know, ribeye steaks from the basket because people can't afford them anymore. But, but ribeye steaks are getting inexpensive, people do want them, they're having to substitute it with things they don't really want. I just feel it's so misleading.

[A]

Yeah, it's a fair show. But you can also, I suppose because they track the same products, you can influence your own personal inflation as well. So when some products do become more expensive, you might down trade to a cheaper version. So like the retailer's own brand of baked beans rather than say a leading brand of baked. So you can offset, it's not easily to do that, but you can offset a little bit of it. But the inflation in terms of just on the point of inflation. Where are we today then? So inflation in the UK is creeping back up and it's important because inflation has a massive knock on effect to not just what you're paying on a day to day basis, but what the government pays. Because if inflation's going up, all the benefits that are linked to it, all the pensions are linked to it, the public sector pensions. So inflation goes up, government spending has to go up to react to it. And I think inflation's currently running at around 3.8. Yeah, 3.8%, it's a lot lower, but 0.9% in France, a lot lower in Germany. So what is the government doing which is causing us such a mess.

[B]

And so are you tracking wage. The change in wage growth alongside this. Because if wage growth is ahead of inflation, for those who are not the nurses, sadly, but for those who've seen wage growth above inflation, they're on the right side of this.

[A]

So this is an interesting one. When Cameron came in and we had that famous there's no money left. The public sector. I was working in the public sector. Time did have austerity kicked in. Wages didn't go up much in the public sector. And there is a link between public and private sector wages because companies are competing for the same labor ultimately. So if public sector wages aren't going up much, then private sector wages will tend to come down as well. Otherwise people just leave the public sector and go over vice versa. So if you look at where we are currently, because we had that massive spike in inflation, you then had this huge discussion around, well, people are going back and forth. The unions will be going back in the public sector and in some of the private sector demanding higher wages. So you saw there that wages were tracking behind. Wages are tracking above inflation at the moment, but there's always that lag because as inflation comes down, the wages that you negotiated is still slightly above.

[B]

Right.

[A]

But I suppose the critical thing from a. What should we care about this is what's going on with public sector and private sector wages at the moment. So public sector wages annually are going up about 5.3% is slightly higher because perversely, there's still some of those banks included in the public sector when they got a bailout. They haven't got rid of all of them yet. And their growth in wages is slightly lower than the public sector overall, but it's about 5.3%. The public sector wages are going up, private sectors running around 4.7%.

[B]

So it's the public sector driving this.

[A]

So it's going up higher at the moment. Right. And what is. Why does it matter? So the whole public sector pay bill just got to be. You have a guess. If you can guess. What do you think the government spends on the public sector? Just their wages.

[B]

What, the total number or the percent annual?

[A]

An annual number in pound value. Go on, see if we can get anywhere near.

[B]

I would have said so. Tax receipts are 1.1 trillion. And I would estimate the public sector is now must be near 50, about 500 billion.

[A]

Well, it's. You've gone in high, but then also. But that's probably public spending wouldn't be far off that because they're spending on not just wages Sorry, that's.

[B]

Yeah. So, okay, wages. Half of that 250 billion.

[A]

I pretty close. I give you, you know, you should get a gold medal for that 288 billion.

[B]

Well, so I mean, most, most of the businesses that I know, labor costs can be about half of your actual costs. Labor costs, you know, are hard and they're high at the moment.

[A]

So 288 billion pound is the public sector pay bill.

[B]

So that's a quarter of our tax receipts, essentially huge. So a quarter of our tax receipts. So. So a quarter. About a quarter of the. Of our con. Well, of our tax receipts is. Is us paying the unproductive part of society.

[A]

And if you think of that's the pay bill, there's pensions on top of that. And when you see job adverts and what they equate to. Because obviously you. They've got a lot of the career average schemes. And for full transparency from working in the public sector.

[B]

Public sector pensions are great.

[A]

Yeah, I've got one when I retire, I'll get. Well, I'll get one when I get to that age. But so that normally when you see the adverts, they reckon it's about under 28% on top. So you could think in terms of the total renumeration package for the public sector, you put another 28% on top of that 288 billion, that's annually because that's a liability obviously for the future with the public sector pension. So huge amount of money. So that 5.3 we talk about, that works out the, what is it, £15.3 billion extra? So, but if you look at that difference between the 5.3 that the public are getting at the moment and the 4.7%, 0.6%, it's about 1.7 billion pounds. And people think, well, what does that matter? You talk about government policy. That 1.7 billion is more than what they were looking to say. From scrapping the wind to fuel allowance. And it's three times more than what they would annually estimate to get from the inheritance tax on farmers. So you just think all those negotiations, the unions and the resident doctors saying we want more money and things. So these are why these things matter. Europe public sector strikes on the news. But that money, so that we haven't got that 1.7 billion. Remember what we talked about, we don't generate enough money in this country. We have to borrow every single year. So that's another 1.7 billion onto the tax bill from. Sorry. Or you borrow more. And because we don't get enough. We're having to borrow more for it. So it's just unsustainable.

[B]

Well, we want to move as many people from the public sector to the private sector as possible.

[A]

Yeah, totally, totally. But that's not what happening. So we touched on it. 57,000 loss of payroll jobs. Public sector, health, social work, public administration and defense going up, hospitality going down.

[B]

So you know how much it's gone up in the public sector.

[A]

So overall, I think it's close to about 100,000 when you look at the figures. So 200,000 would be down in the private.

[B]

Hold on. So that 156,000, is that net?

[A]

That's net.

[B]

Is it really 250?

[A]

I think it's close to that from the top of my head. About 60,000, I think, extra in health because they're trying to obviously get the NHS backlog down, so they're recruiting a lot more people in health and social care and stuff. And I think public administration, education's seen a bit of an increase in. It's a. It's usually what happens when labor come in, isn't it? They say everything up. We've inherited a mess from the Tories, but we're going to put. They put money into the public sector. No coincidence. The unions dominate in the public sector. They fund the Labor Party for a lot of things. So, you know, it's no coincidence that these things go on. But you. Yeah, you know, I keep banging on about this and I've written about this many a time. You cannot fund the public sector without the private sector. So where we are currently at, you need to. You need to fix that badly.

[B]

But. Yeah, but that feels so unhealthy that we've got public sector jobs going up, private sector jobs falling, a stagnant economy. I mean, it's all. It's all very obvious.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

What's wrong?

[A]

So you're a businessman.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

If. If I said to you, I'm a politician, I'm going to put national insurance costs up. What's going to be the obvious thing you're going to do next?

[B]

Well, I'm either going to put my prices up.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Or if I can't put my prices up because I'm already at my limit on prices, which does happen. I'm going to. My profits are going to be here or I'm going to be funding. Operating at a loss and thinking, how can we expand the business? And this is why you see a lot in the hospitality sector now. The hospitality sector is having to evolve so much you know, the nightclub scene has been decimated. So they're doing day parties. If you're like a cafe or something, you might have to do more in the evenings. You're doing everything you can to get enough money and just, just to survive. They've decimated the hospitality sector because if you look at the taxes and the energy costs, they are taking businesses that should be profitable to unprofitable, small, local middle class mom and dad businesses are.

[A]

Really, really hard and 108,000 decline in hospitality jobs since they've come in. So what you said you could put your prices up. So yeah, you put your prices up. That pushes up inflation, which is what we're seeing. So consumers will think, oh, I haven't got as much in my pocket now. So they fill a lot of them come to you. So they might only come to say, the cafe say they were coming three times a week, they come twice.

[B]

Substitution.

[A]

Yep. And then you might think, well, I don't need as many staff so I have to lay off some staff. So that then means that the state has to pick up because they're not getting a wage from you. So it's not hard. We talked about economics earlier. It's not hard that putting national insurance up would increase inflation. And what's happened, inflation's gone up. It might risk jobs. Jobs are being cut.

[B]

But there's other factors as well. So minimum wage is a tricky conversation to have as somebody who financially I'm okay, but the minimum wage, what that does to us. There's different minimum wages.

[A]

There's.

[B]

If you employ people under 16 legally you can do that, you can set the wage so you can pay them a pound an hour if you want. I wouldn't do that, but.

[A]

And on that, my first job was before I was 16. I was a milkman back in the day. So when people actually had milk delivered to the house, literally it was good days.

[B]

I've done that job.

[A]

You've done that job.

[B]

That's why I'm laughing. Yeah, but so I helped the milkman. So I used to get up at about 4:30 in the morning, get on the milk float.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And I loved it because you'd always get that fresh glass bottle of milk. And I weirdly like the blue top, the skim. Yeah, I'd have that and we'd go around and I'd be done by like 8:30.

[A]

Yeah, brilliant days. Back in, back when I was a.

[B]

Young lady, I reckon I got less than £2 an hour doing that job.

[A]

I got paid, it was a Saturday morning. Well, I would have probably been in the late 80s, early 90s.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Five pound for the whole of Saturday morning. And then I'd go to the cafe afterwards and spend it all on my breakfast. So I wasn't earning any, but it was, but it was part of like getting out and going to work and learning about life.

[B]

So my first actual job in a shop, a little local. It was called M and W. It was like a little Tesco's local. That was 2 pound 37 an hour. Yeah, 2 pound 37 an hour. So if someone's 16 to 18, I think I have to pay them 8 pounds 60. You could probably fact check this con. 18 to 21 I think is 10 pound 50 and then over 21 I think is something weird like 11.23. I'll have some of these wrong. But what ends up happening is if, you know you can pay someone 18 to 21 less and 16, 28, you end up trying to get younger people here who maybe can't provide as good as a service. But also we have, because the mandatory holidays, we have to. We could provide the holidays. We do it differently. We up their wages by 12.07% which is the mandatory holiday amount. And they can't take holidays. It's a more efficient way of doing it, but that pushes up our costs even higher. And the weird thing on these mandatory holiday things is like, I understand why they want to do it, but you have a choice when you go and work for a company, what is my package? Oh, you provide no holiday. Oh, I don't want to work. That. Or you provide 20 days. Okay, that's. Yeah. Oh, you provide 30 days. Whatever you provide, you get to choose. But these are teenagers with a teenage, with, with a weekend job or their second jobs. Yet they're pushing all these extra costs on us. That's why the hospitality sector is struggling. I mean, I think I would say over 50% of my costs is. I'm pretty sure it's wages. I'm pretty sure it's wages. Over 50% is wages and it could be 30% with a bit more of a free market approach to it. And that would take us from being like about we're about break even to profitable. And what happens if I'm profitable? I invest more. I maybe open a second. Like these are all the basics of economics that I think people don't understand.

[A]

And that's why the business investment in the latest figures is down 4%.

[B]

4%. Yeah. Quarter on quarter.

[A]

Yeah. And so that's down so you're investing less. And if you look at why is the economy trending long? Government's borrowing money. Is the government propping up the economy? I think we get some figures end of September. I'm going to look into a little bit more detail because the three ways of measuring how the economy is going is the output measure. So what are we creating? There's how much income are people getting and there's expenditure. So they should all equal each other. But it's difficult to get all the data sources to kind of correlate. So. So output and what we produce is generally what the ons lead on. But the government doesn't really produce any output to measure properly. So what you can then look at is expenditure. And I think end of September we get a bit more detail on that. So I'll dig into that a bit more. But the evidence is looking at. It's the only the government spending is what is problem with the economy and on those jobs and you talk about hospitality and young people, they are the biggest group that's been hit, these young people, you know, and ironically, you know, younger people tend to vote for this socialism only and Labor Party and they tend to move more to the right as they get older. But they are being hit hard.

[B]

I think that's changing.

[A]

It's change. It is changing. Is it? I think Farage is getting a lot of support amongst young people. My son was. He's. What is he, 13? He was. He said, I've seen that guy on the. He was. He saw him on the telly, he said, I see him on my tick tock. So he said I liked him. That's what he said when he was just. He doesn't know much about politics, my son, but. But obviously these politicians are playing a clever game with the likes of TikTok. But that Saturday job I had, it set me up for life. I weren't earning a lot, but I was learning about getting out of bed, going to work. I'd love to know how many the current cabinet and how many Labour MPs or anybody in Westminster did a proper get up and do a Saturday job or I was doing it.

[B]

How many shitty jobs did you have? I bet you had loads.

[A]

No, that was. I did that and I did. So I did it when I was in school, when I grew up, old enough to go to university, to drive, I would do it during all the school holidays.

[B]

You didn't do a factory job? No, I did.

[A]

Oh, good. Was that good?

[B]

I did two factory jobs. One was a company Called BTB Mail Flight in Kempston, near where I live. And most young people work there. They used to do the magazine deliveries and we used to put the ins. Oh, here we go. Sorry. Connor's just bringing up the rates. So over 21's 12, 21, 18 to 20 is tenor and 755. Yeah, so that kind of adds up because if you have the 12.0% on that we give them. Yeah, that gets you to the numbers that we pay. Yeah. So we used to put the inserts in the magazines and so they had these machines called the Sipmas. And you said the magazine would come down, you put the inserts in and then it will wrap it. And it was. And then another one I did was. I used to hammer. I used to put handles on umbrellas. So a factory that made umbrellas. And it was. I always tell the story of this place because it was split into two down the middle and one side they used to print the umbrella and that was all the young lads. And the other side was where the Indian ladies used to stitch them together and that's where the handles went on. So I was in the side with the Indian ladies and I could just hear all these lads having a laugh and I was there. Another handle.

[A]

It was so boring.

[B]

I used to make up games like, how many can I do in an hour? How many can I do in a. I hate that.

[A]

But you. But you've worked hard to get where you are today. You haven't been handled all of. And that's the thing, you know, people who generate wealth and create jobs are being hammered and you think, well, you should be promoting it. We were more. The one thing I always find perverse with the tax system is you, how you pay 20% on the first amount, then. Then it goes up to 40. And then they always thought, oh, we want a 50% rate. I'm sure some of the Labour politicians would like a 99% rate, but if you pay 20% on all your income. So as you know, if you earn a million pounds, you. You'll pay £200,000.

[B]

That's what they do in Estonia, they have a flat rate tax.

[A]

So I've never understood why that's not discussed a lot. Because rich still pay more. So why marginally take more and more? As you get richer, you may as well just have a flat rate, have a higher ceiling at the bottom so that you basically, you've got a mug that you need to live on and then everybody pays the same. It incentivizes people to earn more money.

[B]

And the jb, they send government. It's like they're constantly. Or maybe it's within the treasury, I don't know. But they're like, how can we get more? Where can we get more? Where? Where can we get, like, Rachel Reeves right now? I'm sure she sat there. November 26th is coming up. Where can I take more? It's not where can I cut? It's where can I take more? Now, you and I know we don't always go through good times. And when times aren't good, whether it's a business or your house, you think, where can I cut? Maybe I don't have Sky TV anymore. Maybe I don't go out to the pub as much anymore. I don't think, what can I steal off my neighbor? I don't go next door and pipe his electricity in my house and go, I'm having that. And I think this is a deep problem we have in the country is this politics of envy, this demonizing the rich, demonizing billionaires, saying, oh, you should pay more, pay your fair share. Well, what is. I mean, how do you even define fair share? If I've got a successful life, I mean, I've worked. How many hours a week do you think I've worked on average, kind of the last 20 years.

[A]

Probably.

[B]

15 hours a day. Yeah. I've worked my bollocks off. Like, you can't say to me that, oh, you're not paying your fair share. I am paying my fair share. But it's that politics of envy. It's almost like a litmus test for somebody. Is a good question to be, would, do you think wealth is a good thing and do you think it's a good thing that we have rich people? If you say no, then I think I don't have anything to discuss with you. Because what you want is the money that is created by wealth to fund the things you care about. But you, you. It's like you're you. It's like you're slapping somebody in the face as you take from them.

[A]

Yeah. I think part of the problem we've got in society because of globalization, so Trump's tariffs, if you think about it, if when you look at the. The balance of trade, it's not good. It's not good for a country, say, like the uk, to have an imbalance where we generate some money, but then we import loads and loads of things because we're just giving our money to other countries. And so you think of what's happened pretty Much over the last 34 years is most of the industrial part of the world, and manufacturing has all gone to China. So a lot of our money goes to China because we have to buy all the goods in from China. And what Trump's pretty much doing is saying that, well, we'll put tariffs in to try and protect jobs. So. But it's difficult from a consumer perspective because, say you're running a TV manufacturing company, you might have a, A unit in Liverpool, the wage costs are going to be higher, obviously, because of the. Relative to China. And then if you go on Amazon and then you're selling a TV for £400, but the exact same TV is £350 from China, people will buy the Chinese one.

[B]

So.

[A]

So I think the point, what Trump's trying to do with tariffs is to say, okay, well, you can still do it, but we're trying to equalize the playing field to get jobs in this country. We'll put that 50 pound tariff on that telly. So it's the exact same tally, but because you had an advantage in terms of the labor costs, you've got to pay 400 pound. And then if you buy the domestic product, produce TV generates more money in the economy, that wage, that job creates other jobs in the supply chain.

[B]

So I can kind of.

[A]

I know Trump's getting a lot of criticism. So you want the markets to try and determine things. But there are some things where there's distortion in the markets just in terms of the evolution of where an economy is, and one country's a lot cheaper to do something than another. So that's one thing where I do think I do support Trump a little bit on that.

[B]

You'll get hammered for that. Just going back to the payroll data. You wrote a piece, you said 10 monthly payroll drops in a year.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Six in a row since labor took office. I feel bad just staying on this point, but I think people need to really understand how bad this is for the, for the country.

[A]

Yeah, it's a clear trend, as you can see, six months in a row. And you need the economy to grow because you've seen payroll jobs come down. This is off the back of mass immigration that we've seen the last couple of years. So I did read, obviously, the Tory Party in a bit of a crisis, and they were saying, Kemi Beaton. There were some people calling for Boris Johnson to come back. And you just think, hang on a. Boris Johnson's the reason taxes are so high, immigration so high. I know he's got a personality which Cuts through to a lot of the public. Maybe that's what the Tory body was looking for.

[B]

Exactly what they're looking for.

[A]

And that's what they're looking for. But the kind of the shit we're in now is pretty much partly to do with Boris. So you can't have this high levels of immigration coming in. And one of the things on say jobs and losing jobs. One of the first stories I did when I was at the ONS looking at, because I used to run the labour market team there looking all the job stats was it was around the time so we had the expansion of the European Union and we didn't put a kind of a temporary pause on who could come here. So we saw a huge influx from people from Poland and Romania. Other countries didn't see as much because of the limits that were put on in some countries. So I did a kind of an article back in 2011. I think this was looking at the skill level of the jobs that kind of immigrants were coming into the country and doing. And he was just seeing a lot more of them coming over doing low skilled jobs because the wages relatively were better here than they were say back in Poland and Romania. So the skill level that they were qualified for the job they were doing, they were overqualified, but they were happy to take the wage. But that then had an impact of pushing say people in the UK who would have done those jobs. You always hear the stories and you, oh, just doing the jobs that Brits don't want to do. There's a little bit of that, but it's not fully there. But yeah. So where we are now, when you get a lot of immigration coming in, you'd be looking for employment numbers to be going the other way. Yeah, because they keep saying, don't they, that immigration's good. The date there's jury's out on that. I think there's high end immigration in terms of the tax, but you look at the skill level of some of the people that are coming in, some of them are coming in on such low skills. They then obviously at some point after they get to a point where they can claim benefits, they probably get tax credits. So it's a 6 monthly falls in a row, 10 in the last 12. On my social media feed, you can see clearly the data is going along. Growth, growth, dotted line, general election, let's start putting taxes on jobs. Bank goes the other way. It's not rocket science.

[B]

I also think that argument about the they're doing the jobs the British don't want to do it. It's such a privilege point when we have so many unemployed in this country. It's like, I know, I know my dad, he would do any job if it came down to it, because you've got to put food on the table. It's a very privileged way to look.

[A]

When you're living off the state. Totally. Totally. And a lot of arguments have said as well, the NHS would collapse if we didn't have immigration. Now, again, talk about energy is a problem because of the government. That's a government issue as well. We haven't had the training places and I think personally.

[B]

Well, there's a restriction in the number of doctors.

[A]

Exactly. Exactly that. So I personally think that it's immoral to steal healthcare workers from other countries.

[B]

Well, I've had that conversation with other people as well. If you are. If you are taking healthcare workers from Africa or from Eastern Europe, well, who's doing the healthcare work there?

[A]

I've got no issue with people coming over. It's great if somebody in the health system is treated by somebody, but for me, the argument never gets discussed around. Yeah, we've just gone and done a recruitment campaign in a foreign country. So that country's invested in the skills of that individual and we've just stolen them.

[B]

What is the unemployment rate? Do you know that off the top of your head? Off the top of my head, it's a few million people unemployed. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. 1.7. 1.7.

[A]

1.

[B]

7 million people unemployed. But what we do now have it. There's a. And I see this. There's a shop around there. We see at the top of our high street, you now get a congregation of Deliveroo drivers. They all sit there together and I'm not before somebody jumps down my throat. We order food from Deliveroo, we talk to the drivers. There is a low grasp of the English language. Often Asian men, pretty much all Asian men. And they're choosing. No, by the way, I commend anyone who works, but they're on electric bikes or bicycles and they're out there and they're working hard. They're delivering the food. Are people unemployed, refusing to do those jobs? And it's. I. I fully empathize with Connor's position here because we're now subs. Conor, freshly into the work system is subsidizing people who are choosing not to work.

[A]

Yeah, totally. And more unemployment. That number you talked about is. Is only people who are actively looking for work. So the way the data is collected, because this is one of the things why I kind of led the team when we were doing this. You ask the question in the survey and you've got to be 16 or over and are you actively looking for work today? So there's a huge number of people who are in the figures who aren't in work, who are economically inactive. Now, the big chunk of them who are retired generally aren't a massive drain because they've done their work over time. But you've got students, obviously, at a university. But the amount of people who are actively not looking for work, they won't be in the unemployment figures. So.

[B]

Well, we had it the other day, I think it was 54% of people now take more from the state than they give in tax receipts. 54%.

[A]

Ridiculous. And a lot of people think they should be even higher. The state should provide everything. The bonkers one about the trial list, I think, in Wales. But the universal basic income. Just have money, just have it.

[B]

But how does that carry on? You can't work at 54%.

[A]

No.

[B]

Daniel Priestley, you know Daniel Priestley?

[A]

Yeah, yeah.

[B]

He explained. I'm pretty sure he put a tweet thread, explained it in a really brilliant way. He said, there's four people in this room. You, me, Kurt and Connor. If you choose not to work, the three of us can carry. Sorry, if you can't walk, the three of us can carry you. If you and I choose not to work, Connor and Kirk can carry us on each other's back. But it's hard. But three of us are not working. There's no way one of us can carry the other three. And the trajectory is we're asking more and more people to carry, people who aren't being productive and aren't providing the economy. And I know some lefties will lose their shit. And we sound like, well, we're not empathetic or you don't care about these poor people. It's like, no, I do, I really do. But we have to just be honest about the data and what it means. And I just think this. I think there's enough books, historical books, that will tell you exactly what's going to happen to this country if we continue on this trajectory. And it's not good in terms of borrowing. You said 20 billion in June, just in one month. When do we get the August figures? Have we got those?

[A]

July's come out. That was quite a low, but July's always a quiet one, so the. It'd probably be the next two or three weeks we get the August figures. But. But some months are high, some are low. But over the course, say over the last year. Another interesting stat on the borrowing, actually, is because when you try to assess this government, so the OBR do forecasts and sometimes, bit like the weather forecast, nearly all forecasts are wrong. That's one of the things you can.

[B]

Say, what's the point of evidence?

[A]

I know, and I heard Rachel Reeves yesterday because somebody, I think on the BBC, I think it was Faisal Islam, was talking to her, saying about there's a 50 billion black hole coming through. And she just said, oh, I think that's from an economist who's not very good at forecasting. And I'm thinking, well, play the sound.

[B]

Play the sound.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

We bought this for Rachel Reeves.

[A]

Oh, gosh. Gosh, yeah. And so. So if you take. I think they came in in July, didn't they? They came in in July last year. So let's give them a month to sort things out. So, because you can literally, if you take over the government today, I think, gosh, the things. The finances are much worse than we thought. You could have an emergency budget within a week or two.

[B]

Well, Liz tried that.

[A]

Well, sure did, yeah. But you could literally have one in a week or two. So they came in and for the period I've just got written down, you know, so from August to March. So they came in in July. So from. So the rest of that fiscal year, August and March, the obr. So this is a forecast before Labour came in. So some of this might be attributed to the Tories, but let's just look government overall. So they were forecasting that we would be borrowing, what was it, £40 billion between August and March. So that's what the OBR was saying we would need to borrow. Labor come in, we need to borrow £40 billion.

[B]

Seven months.

[A]

Seven months, yeah.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

The actual amount the Labour Party borrowed and that budget was involved as part of this is almost 95 billion pounds.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

So 55. More than the 40. More than double.

[B]

About 100. What's that about 115, 120.

[A]

Huge, huge amount more. Yeah.

[B]

So that's more than that. It's about 130%.

[A]

Yeah. So. But. But we talk like billions are talked about in the news and when you talk about statistics as if like a billion is nothing. And so the tax on farmers will raise 500 million. Not a lot. The winter fuel allowance was about just slightly, what, shy of one and a half billion? So just. Yeah, let's borrow another £55 billion on top of what we were going to do. And again comes back to does Rachel Reeves, Keir Starmer care that that bill has gone on to the national debt? Because in five years time they won't be in power.

[B]

They don't care. No, but this is the thing, these people do not care. They don't what I think there's a combination. There's people within the government who hate this country and they hate themselves and they hate British people and they hate British culture and they do not want to see a success. I also think these people would lack backbone and integrity, unable to make tough decisions. But I also fundamentally think we've got labor at the worst time to have a Labor Party, you do. What you need right now is a Thatcher. A Thatcher will say, look, we need a recession, we cannot afford this. We need austerity. But austerity at a level that way beyond what happened under the previous Conservative administration. And we need to lower taxes, we need to drive investment, we need to rebuild our economy. Labor as a party ideologically cannot do this. It will not get voted through. And so we've got a Labor at the worst fucking time for this country.

[A]

Oh, definitely. And I viewed you on some previous. Yeah, well, definitely. And I think, Connor, you trying to get a house, you want to buy a house. And that's another challenge that we've had for the last 30 years. So the biggest problem I've had with immigration, I say immigration, overall, you're going to need. Every country needs some people coming in, some people come out because you're always going to get. Some people want to leave. But what's going on? I look at housing on this. So we've had mass, mass population growth over the last 30 years. So I think in 19, since 1990, one extra 11 and a half million people.

[B]

So that's about a 20%.

[A]

So we're about 67 million people now in the UK and we've had 11 and a half million increase.

[B]

Okay, so about 2022.

[A]

So big, big, big rise in the population. But the infrastructure hasn't come with it. So that's the big problem with, with migration is when the government says, oh, we need them to come and do jobs, but you don't bother. Roads and you've had no Reservoir for 30 years. No surprise that, you know, we have more droughts and the reservoirs run take out the leaks. You know, we talked about the water early on, but there's no surprise. The infrastructure is creaking.

[B]

But hold on. But we don't need them to come and do the jobs the market will. If they don't come, the market will respond. The government needs them for gdp. Yeah, gdp. But again, that's another lie, because it's GDP per capita is terrible.

[A]

So you go back to the house building then. So you got 11 and a half million people since 1991, and it was relatively flat. I know we've had huge numbers in the last couple of years. Right. And then in 1997, well, the average house price compared to your salary was three times. And that was all I remember I was growing up thinking, are you going to get on a housing ladder in the late 90s, early 2000s? Thinking, like, I finished uni in 2000, what am I going to do next kind of thing. And he's always thinking, oh, yeah, you need at least three and a half times your salary go to the bank. So it's three times then in London it was about four times. So now nationally it's eight times. So how do you get on the housing ladder? Because. And the reason it's gone up so much is this huge immigration's come up. The houses haven't been built to cope with it. So that's a big problem. And that eight times now is actually 11 times in London. So God help people trying to get a house in London. But the immigration, there's another impact, a demographic impact on this. So what you've had is that these house prices have gone up, so you can't afford, if you're a young couple, to get on the housing ladder probably now until your mid-30s. So if you haven't got a housing unit, you don't have as many children. So the fertility rate's been going down and down and down over this period. Could have got fewer children being born because couples can't afford to live together and have two children. So we don't have enough children to replace people who are dying. So you get more immigration. So immigration's caused a lot of this factor, why people have inferior children. So what do people say? We need more immigration to fix this problem. And then you get more and more immigration coming in. And even the figures of the ONS are projecting, and this is with immigration lower in the forecast than what it currently is running at. I think by 2040, projected to be another 6 million on top of what we got now and the ticking time bomb. And nobody's talking about. And this is why I said politicians who don't care is basically older people. So we've got six and a half million people over the age of 75 now that's going to rise to nine million people, so another two and a half million. That's like a 37% increase in terms of where we go. Where are the hospitals being built? Because those are the people over 75. When you go into A and E or into the. Generally on the wards, they're older people who've, you know, that's what happens when we get older. Where's the 37% increase in hospital beds that we're going to be having? Nobody's talking about it.

[B]

I want to talk to you about one of my sponsors, Incogni. And that means we're going to talk about the weird world of spam. And I don't just mean those spam emails that you get day after day from companies you never heard of and companies you've never signed up to. I'm also talking about those spam phone calls you get from those people who seem to know a little bit too much about you trying to get your bank details. It's all a bit creepy right now. This all comes from the world of data brokerage. There are companies out there collecting your data, building profiles and sending that data to anyone who wants it, which is why when one of those scammers phones you up, they seem to know everything about you. Now, I've tried, I've tried myself to get off these lists, try to get off the phone lists, try to get off the email list. I unsubscribe from every one of these emails that comes in. But this game of Whack a Molecule, it just never ends. And so this is where Incogni comes in. They do all the hard work for you, they reach out to these companies and they will get you legally removed from these lists. And I know because the last time they sponsored my show, I signed up and I didn't take the free option that they offered me. I wanted to pay for it. I wanted to see if you get value for money. And they removed me from 79 data broker lists. And so I've stayed on, I've stayed a subscriber and I have seen a massive decrease in the number of emails and phone calls I've been getting. So it's a great service. I recommend you check it out. If you're sick of this like I was, please head over to incogni.com forward/peter and sign up. If you use the code Peter, you will get a lovely 60% discount. So that's incogni.com forward slash Peter. Yeah, I think there's an easier way to solve that problem is that we have to. We have to have an honest conversation about what the nhs. NHS is, what it means and what we use it for. But if we encourage more people, any method that you choose to use more of the private sector, we would have more of a private sector for health, we would have a less reliance on the public sector. And to me, the private sectoral health works really well. I've used it, it's fantastic. And a lot of people can afford it when they don't realize they can. If you can afford Netflix, Spotify, sky, all those things, you can basically afford private health care. You're. You're choosing to. You're choosing to put your entertainment ahead of your health, but at the time when you need it, you're going to make regret that decision. I just don't. What, what stats do we have on the nhs? Have we got anything that's pretty damning?

[A]

Well, the difficulty with the NHS in terms of what's damning now is if you. The. This is. So West Street's coming a new health secretary.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And he's talking about reforming the nhs. My big. We do need reform. I think everybody but Labor Party. This is one of the things with the devolution. So while I live in Wales, the Labour Party have run the NHS for the last 25 years. Health outcomes are much, much worse in Wales than they are in England.

[B]

But.

[A]

But one thing I never understood is that, okay, if Northern Ireland, Scotland, England and Wales are all got a similar system, but it's not working in any of them, why doesn't somebody try something different and if it works, stops talking sense. I know. And if it works, then you do. So when Starmer and West street didn't get up on the podiums and start talking about. And it comes back to. Politicians will say what they want you to say. Everybody wants some reform of the NHS because it's not working and they've had ample time to do it in Wales and it hasn't worked. And so I think that the problem with the nhs, and you talk a bit about the private sector as well, is that any politician that starts talking about charging for the NHS gets kind of shot down. Oh, this is. It's like a religion. I don't see what the problem is.

[B]

You're selling off to your mates.

[A]

Yeah, but we still pay for parts of the NHS now, so dentistry, that's kind of gone private. Even if you go for a public sector, you know, NHS dentist, you still pay for it. So I think for me, the NHS remarkable thing over time is we get more and more treatments, we get more and more can do things that we couldn't do in the 1980s. But should the NHS do everything that is currently provided?

[B]

Probably not.

[A]

And that's where. If you cut the amount that the NHS does for free, maybe, you know, it needs to keep people alive. You know, those emergency care.

[B]

Probably should be doing boob jobs.

[A]

Definitely not doing boob jobs. No. But if you. If you cut the amount you do in there and I don't know, you've. So how much does your private healthcare cost?

[B]

Do you know what? It's just went up a shocking amount to me, actually. That's. So when I first took it out and I've had it for probably, gosh, I would say 20, nearly 20 years now.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

When I first took it out, it was for four people and it was 150 pound a month and we had the highest level of cancer cover. It's now three people, my son and my daughter as well. And it'd been ticking along for a few years at about 250amonth. Yeah. And then a couple of years ago it went to 320. This year they want to put it up 25, 30. 30 or percent. They want to put up to 420. What I don't know is what of that. Is that inflation or is that because of the age I'm getting to and I'm new risk factors at 420 pound a month was like, whoa, hold on, that's a lot.

[A]

Yeah, it's a lot. But go back to the energy thing we talked about.

[B]

Hold on. Let's compare it to my friends in America, where they're paying 10,000 pound maybe a year for a family three and they've got maybe a 10,000 pound deduct.

[A]

Yeah, yeah.

[B]

My deductible is like 150 pound. So. So it's not relatively. It's worth it because when my back. When I was in surgery, within three days, Connors, when he had his shin splints, he saw the best consultant in London. It's worth paying for and I wish everyone could have that.

[A]

Yeah. But it's a four or five hundred quid a month. So energy is costing us 600 quid, months more now than what it was there. So come back. If the government can get energy prices down, fixing that, that fixes a lot of the problems that we've got. But the NHS generally. Yeah, we should we be doing it. And the big thing with the NHS when you talk about reform, is can you name any country in the world that runs their health system like we do in the uk, because then if they are, if everybody's copying us, we've got a world class system that's top of class. But I don't see anybody doing that.

[B]

No. When, when people talk about where it's from, well, they talk about the Australian system, they talk about the Dutch system or Singapore, they definitely don't talk about the British system. I think us in America has the two extremes that don't work, that fundamentally broken. And the sad thing is it's just another thing which I put into a long list of things where we are stealing from the future of our children. Definitely when they can't buy a house, we're stealing from their future. When we're borrowing too much, we're stealing from their future. When health outcomes decrease, I'm assuming health outcomes are kind of, in some ways probably getting worse because of waiting lists. We're stealing from kids future every single possible way. I think every young person listening to this and any of the ones who are buying into socialism and want to join the UK Communist Party or listen to Jeremy Corbyn, is that what I really want you to understand is that the more socialist we are, the more we're stealing from your future. I think it's a really important thing to understand.

[A]

And Wales is say 25 years of labor rule there, 26 coming up. And a couple of years ago you'd see even the BBC, they were having news packages of people going abroad to get a new knee or a new hip because it's obviously cheaper to even go there. And where, what have we become as a, as a nation where you need to go and do that, it's just ridiculous. And the waiting lists say you bang on the money. In terms of the kind of the health issues that we've got in this country, waiting lists will be an impact. You know, waiting lists have a knock on effect because then people say, I can't work. And locking the country down. It was no kind of, there's no coincidence. Yeah. If you shut the NHS waiting lists were going to go up, but nobody could. Well, I think everybody could foresee it, but nobody was calling it out. Everybody was just enjoying, oh, it's locked down, I'm going to go to the office kind of thing.

[B]

One of our players the other night got injured during a game on Wednesday evening, Tuesday evening, half time, went to the hospital, didn't leave the hospital till 7:20 in the morning.

[A]

Yeah, ridiculous.

[B]

So that's essentially 11 hours 11 hours. 10. 11 hours in hospital to get a hole in his head glued up. I mean, that's insane. There were no doctors. It's is the nhs. It's funny, this thing about the nhs. It has, it has more money than it's ever had and these waiting lists are crazy, but, but people keep talking about how long they're in hospital for because there's no doctors available. Where's all the money going into the nhs? Shouldn't we just be making sure we've got enough clinicians? And I think it's this whole managerial class thing. I'm pretty sure if I saw the statistics over the last 40 years, the growth in clinicians versus the growth of middle management. Middle management, I bet, shot right up. We're going to have DEI staff and translators and all the. We didn't used to have and we're just not going to have enough doctors and nurses. And it's the nurses. This is where I got a ramp. My mum was a nurse and nurses are probably the worst treated people, I think in this country. They've got the worst pay rises, I think. Was it over that 20 year period? I think it was lower. I think it was 27%. I think the average wage in the country was 44%, CPI was 80% but nurses was 27%. It's a hard volunteers in hospital, it's a hard job. They're 12 hours. They're dealing with difficult people, difficult conditions. They're seeing horrific things and they're not being given a living wage. And I think it's. I think it's one of the biggest crimes of this country is what we've done to the nurses. It's horrific.

[A]

Definitely. And my biggest problem with the NHS as well is that government, you could say government policy or inaction is killing people because it's a common thing. And this has been the same now for decades, where you phone for an ambulance, so the ambulance picks you up. If you're an emergency person, takes you down to the A and E department. Oh, there's no room in the AE departments. You sit in the back of the ambulance. So whilst you're sat in the back and this is a common thing, you go down any hospital across Britain, you'll see ambulances outside the A and E department. Whilst that ambulance is obviously stuck there, somebody else has a heart attack, is out of action. So there's. So the call times to get the people. So people will be dying because of this, of course. And my local A E, I was in there, I took My mum in recently and the difficulty, they're thinking, we've had huge, huge house building in the local area. It's massive mass expansion. And not just in my local area and lots of other ones, but the hospital is exactly the same size. So when I went in there, it's not a case of now, oh, we haven't got a cubicle to put you in. Literally there was like six people in a corridor. Somebody's coughing up blood in the third world. Yeah, coughing up blood in the corridor. So the size of the hospital hasn't changed. And it comes back to that. There's two and a half million people extra now by 2040, literally, the bricks and mortar and the foundation should be going in the ground now. Invest in that. Because in 2040, if you think it's bad now in the NHS, it's going to be a whole lot worse in 2040. And I'll be. And you will be knocking on the door towards using the NHS more at that point.

[B]

Yeah. Well, I wonder, did you look it up? It's hard. Can. Can you have a look up and see if there are any private hospitals, accident and emergency hospitals in the uk? Because if there are, I don't know if there are, but we've got a private doctors on our high street. We go there now because it's an appointment, same day, worst case, the next day you pay £50 for the appointment, but you can just get in. And again, I know that's going to piss off some socialists, but the market will respond to people who want to pay for things.

[A]

But if you want to pay for it, what's the problem with that?

[B]

No problem with that at all. But I am worried about phoning for an ambulance and you have to wait half an hour, an hour, and so you need it straight away. That is. That is high risk at the moment. If somebody in London opened up a private accident emergency with private ambulances, there are people in London who would pay for that, knowing that if they phone the NHS. Yes. It's a 45 minute wait. Okay. I found out the private one. Well, it's going to be £1,000 to come and get you, but we can come now. There are probably tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people in London who've got the money to pay for that. There is none. There is none, although there is urgent care, but you still have to rely on the NHS ambulance service.

[A]

Yeah, that's one of the criticism of the private health care, actually, is that the NHS has to pick up all the messages that so if it gets to an emergency state, you have to go into the NHS because that's the big cost to the state is pretty much the emergency care and the private sector. So your, your 450 pound is not going to cover you if you have a heart attack and you have an ambulance and you need to get you down there. But by the end, the NHS does a lot more than just that. And that's the problem with the waiting list. So the waiting lists that are massive aren't the emergency care. So having a sector and choice and doing that and paying a monthly fee for that. But. But you're right.

[B]

Support the economy as well. Can you ask why there are no. Why there's no private ambulance service? Because I wonder if there's a legal reason.

[A]

I don't know.

[B]

That's not. But I'm pretty sure if you. I reckon that's a great business you could open in London if. If you set up a private ambulance service. That said, it is a thousand pound, but we will get you immediately. We. Or we guarantee to get you. We can guarantee to, you know, serve you within minutes. There are people who are going to say, well, this is my health, I don't give a fuck, I'm going to pay that difficulty.

[A]

You get. It might work, but when you get the hospital, it'll be stuck outside.

[B]

But if you've got private urgent. Yeah, you'd have to. And then you'll take the pressure off the NHS again. The commies will hate it, but it will take the pressure off the nhs.

[A]

But if you did and it was successful, they'd probably put your taxes up on you. Yeah, because. Because that's what they've done with the private. The education is bonkers there because you've basically got people paying money to take people out of the education system that we have to fund and taxing them and pushing them back in.

[B]

So there is. Conor. What's that thing? Hold on. Scroll to the top. The UK's best private ambulance services provider. 2024 NHS approved supplier. So that. Oh, that's an actual company. We're on private ambulance. Okay. Are you looking for a private ambulance hire from a qualified and experienced provider here? Okay.

[A]

Namebusiness can see a new business opportunity.

[B]

Scroll to the top. I would. I would brand them differently. About us. Can you click on the about us? Okay, all stay out there. All private ambulance uk. We provide a variety of private ambulance services throughout the UK and Europe. Include private road ambulance hire, air ambulance, medical repatriations and event medical cover. See, I don't think that's the same thing. I don't think that's what I'm saying. It's like you can have an ambulance at an event. Say if you had a concert, you could hire an ambulance. Yeah, I don't think that's a, that's an emergency.

[A]

No. And there's, there's a lot of ambulances who will have to take say frail patients to appointments because they can't drive. So it might be that they're just providing a service as part of that. But you're talking a more radical thing where it's a private emergency health system being run.

[B]

Yeah, that's what happens in the US if you have an emergency. You. I think, I think one of them is called McCormick by the way, coincidentally. But you, you. Yeah, but you get, you can get trapped if you. Some. One of my friends lives out in the us his daughter broke her fingers surfing. They called the ambulance, but they called the wrong one, that's their approved one on their private medical. And they ended up, I don't know, paid thousands of dollars for it. It's. Yeah, there's a lot to look up there. Okay, I want to talk to you about crime.

[A]

Yes, good one.

[B]

This one's close to my heart because I'm recognizing a pattern of certainly low level crime massively on the increase in the uk. I'm also worried about violent crime as well. What's in the statistics on crime?

[A]

Yeah, so crime, you've got to look at two separate things with crime because there's police recorded crime and then there's the national crime figures and there's a lot of debate around them. So there'd be a lot of people who don't even bother reporting crime.

[B]

Yes, but that's true.

[A]

And. Yeah, and they. So they wouldn't be in your police recorded crime figures. If you look at it though. And that's where many years ago the Home Office in the Office for National Services created the crime survey. So they'll do a random survey of households across the country and they'll just ask if you've been a victim of crime. So that's where those figures kind of come from. But you can't get into the granular detail when it comes to a survey. So crime's always thrown around. I, I haven't got the full detail of everything. But with crime it's not generally what the statistics are because it's generally having your own personal inflation. People obviously think about their personal crime and things in terms of have I been a victim of Crime. And would you say your area seems lots because you own private security. So would you, would residents in your area feel safe now, say SAFER now to 20 years ago or worse?

[B]

No, they, they would say. They would say two things that they don't know statistically if crime is up, but their sense of crime is up.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And antisocial behavior is definitely up. Without doubt. Again, not everyone. We have, you know, significant left wing socialist community in Bedford who think there's no issues at all. Well, no, they, they refer to the stats and they say the stats are down as you just said, but we just don't bother anymore.

[A]

And even with a survey. So long term crime is falling. And if you go back when you're taking total crime, it depends what you define as crime, you look at sexual crimes, they're increasing and so a burglary is maybe going down because the value of what you used to steal isn't as much basically. So don't get as many. I don't know. I didn't hear so much about people breaking into people's homes and stealing things anymore. Whereas I grew up in a council estate in the Welsh rallies and there was a lot of crime by that. My bicycles got stolen twice. So that tends not to happen as much now. But certain crimes are on the rise and you go back 30, 40 years ago, I would imagine there was fewer people with knives in London than what there is now. So it's dangerous crime that people are worried about. So the figures are generally crime is declining when you take totality of crime. But the things that people are really concerned about, like sexual crimes that you've got. But there's been more kind of reporting of those. People are encouraged to come forward a lot more on that. And it's those serious crimes that have the longer lasting effect on people though. I was upset when my bike got stolen.

[B]

Yeah, I remember that as a kid. Probably had three bikes stolen. I remember our house was burgled as well, which is actually it happened. It hadn't happened on Brickell Drive. Do you remember it? You're probably quite young, but I don't, I don't worry about being burgled anymore. But Connor's car was broken into on his. On the driveway this week.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

Had about 700 pound of things that he probably shouldn't have left in the car. In the car. Like sunglasses and things. My car was hit in a car park and they've just driven off, left it there. I mean I've not reported that. I'm not sure if I'M meant to report that, but I reckon personally across the business we are the victim of a crime every month. Yeah, I mean, I've so many different incidents and so you just stop reporting it. I mean, I had, I did report one where a guy drove into the back of my car. My exhaust broke. His light, his light was in the piece of the light was in my car. I photographed his car. He then drove off. The shape of the hole in his light was the shape of the piece of plastic in my car. I've reported it to the police. They said there's not enough information. I can't remember the exact terms. Not enough evidence. Not enough evidence. Yeah, and I'm thinking you could have. You've got the number plate of the guy, you will know who owns it. You can take that piece of plastic, you can go to his house and you can put that piece of plastic. You'll see it fits it as light is light. And then you could also question him. But the truth is, on that same point, I have the exact location of my headphones which were stolen the other night. And I was told directly by the police they wouldn't be allowed to get a warrant because it could be one of three houses. Go knock on all three doors. Go knock on all three doors.

[A]

Exactly.

[B]

Or go with Connor, knock on the door. He can make the headphones beep and you'll know the house and then you found a crime hotspot and you'll probably find a bunch of shit there. But I don't think it's really that. I just don't think there's enough police responsibility, resource enough officers and they have enough time to do police work. They're too much time in paperwork and bureaucracy. But they said even funnier one this week there was a grow farm for weed found in the center of Bedford this week. A million pound grow farm. This is. This one made me laugh. So I spoke to somebody. The, the people who were growing the weed were sleeping there. When the police turned up, they ran off and, and I want to know if this is true because I can't believe it's true. But I was told the police didn't chase them for health and safety reasons. Gosh, I'm like, what the, what are you on about?

[A]

Yeah, it's a growing theme here, isn't it? So shoplifting is pretty much being legalized.

[B]

Wait, under 200 pound?

[A]

Yeah. So what does that send a signal out if you can just go and do those things. And the remarkable thing, since Star wars came in, because you Mentioned crime. All these were written down here. So what the public order offenses. So obviously with that tragic incident in South Port and then there were the kind of the riots that going on. We had the Lucy Connolly case and her pleading guilty. We had a similar. A guy in South Wales Valleys, Jamie Michael, he posted something on social media. I believe he was a local politician's office reported him to the police. He was taken in. He held firm and said I'm not guilty. When a lot of people were saying they were guilty, he held firm. I think it took hardly any time for the jury to throw it out basically on that one. But so public order prisoners. If you just track now again, another one on my. On the website, on my X, he'd just track public order prisoners. Just trundles along nice and flat. Another dotted line with general election. And I get that Starmer didn't cause the Southport issue. So that's part. That is.

[B]

Well, which issue didn't he cause?

[A]

Well, that's what he's gonna. He didn't cause the Southport.

[B]

Obviously he didn't cause the stabbing. Exactly.

[A]

But what happened then is then some of the riots started and he did publicly go out and you know, say we will have get a full harm of the law on you.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And so he basically pushed the judicial system into action on this. So we've seen since he's gone in. 65% increase in public order offense prisoners under Starmer. Literally 65. Just if you look at the latest figures.

[B]

Is there a chart for that?

[A]

It'd be on my X feed somewhere. Yeah.

[B]

See if you can find it.

[A]

Probably all stats. Jamie.co.uk, you'll see one of the blogs on there. About three or four down. Yeah. And huge. So he just trudges along and then it just shoots up and over the same period. If you remember, they came in and the thing. Oh, the prisons are full. We can't uncope the prisons gone. So they let out 16,231 prisoners between September and December last year. At the time, these prisoners were all starting to be put into prison for these public order offenses. So the prisons are false. We need to let these people out. And we've seen this massive rise in public order offenses and ultimately that 65 is 1222 people. So Lucy Connolly isn't the only one. I know she's getting a lot of the attention.

[B]

There's 1,222. 22 Lucy Conleys.

[A]

Yeah. They'd all be slightly different things.

[B]

What's the range of things that fall under.

[A]

Oh, here you go. There you go.

[B]

Jesus. What's the range of things that you. For a public order offense, obviously, Granny posting something on Facebook.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

What else?

[A]

I don't know what's fully in there, but it's quite. Quite broad, I would imagine. But it's quite clear what you see in there. 65 increase and look. Yeah. Just massive. It trundles along. It's quite. For 10 years. Looking back to the series. Okay. Crept up a little bit in the last year, but I think West Street's come out today saying we need to look at our free speech laws and. Because we obviously had seen things going on and people being arrested for these things.

[B]

But that is not a 1800 places for people for public order offenses. I'd love to know the makeup of those. But yeah, I mean, again, it's. Oh, God.

[A]

Yeah. So are we. Basically, you talk about the police won't go and look for your headphones or they won't come and investigate your car, but they're more than happy to go and knock somebody's house because of a social media post. So the police. I do think we need more police to have a safer kind of country. But the resources, really looking at this woke nonsense that's kind of been created over the last 10 or 10 years or so.

[B]

I mean, I think if you surveyed the nation and you said, what should be the police's priority? Connor's car being broken into and recovering his goods, or someone tweeting that I'm gonna get arrested for this, probably. But like, a woman can't have a penis.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

I also think if you surveyed police officers themselves, they'd say the exact same. Like, at the end of the day, they're just following commands. Right? Yeah. But I. I'm sorry, I'm gonna push back on that. Sorry. I'm gonna get a little rant here. Every time I see these goons. These idiots turn up at someone's house and they film them and they're like, are you so and so. And did you tweet this? I think you fucking pussy. Like, you need to. You need to stand. The police themselves should turn around and say, we're not doing this anymore. No, I'm not. How. How. If you. If you're going to arrest somebody for a Facebook post, in your conscience you dis. If you disagree with that, why are you doing that? Would you do something like you. That was against your conscience for this job. But then I would have to come to terms with the fact I might not have a job. But that's the problem with the world and society. If we, we should always act with our conscience. I just, I think these police officers, the, the Gestapo of the Labor Party, I think they need to, they need to themselves push back on this.

[A]

No, I agree. And it's the same thing when people complain about, oh, I should have an extra 15 in the public sector pay. Well, if you're not happy with your wages, go and get another job.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

You know, this stuff's a disgrace. Yeah.

[B]

I mean, it's just. But again, signal, signal, signal of what is wrong with this country. And it's going to get much worse. It's going to get much so, so on prison places, we, we're essentially full, aren't we?

[A]

Yeah, we're full. And the solution isn't to. And those, those 16,000 or so prisoners released, one of them went out and murdered somebody, literally when I got released early and went out and murdered somebody. And obviously that's not all of them, but even one is just, it's just too many. So we need more. It comes back to the infrastructure, isn't it? We haven't built enough prisons, we haven't built enough reservoirs, we haven't rows young enough hospitals, and where's all this money going? And that's the thing. What's the pay?

[B]

Public sector workers.

[A]

But also, and it also comes back to if you're, you know, if you've got some spare money in your household, you might think, I'll give a little bit to the guy over the road, help him out. But we haven't got any spare money. But we still dish out foreign aid every single year.

[B]

You know, on that 200, back to that 288 billion. Do we know how much of that is? Police fire.

[A]

We can, we can break it down by looking at the different departments because they've all got their own budgets and if you apply the same thing and they may even publish the numbers by department. But yeah, you can look at that.

[B]

This show is sponsored by Gemini. We live in a really strange time with governments driving inflation with their reckless spending and endless money printing. There is a way out of this. There is a way to protect your money, and that is by stacking bitcoin. I've made loads of shows about bitcoin. You can go and research this, you can go and read the books, but the truth is, it is the hardest money ever created. If you are interested in protecting your financial future, it's time for you to get on the bitcoin train. I have, I've been stacking bitcoin personally and through my businesses since 2017. It's protected me, it's secured my family's future and it also strengthens all of my businesses. So if you want to start stacking bitcoin, where do you do it? Well, for me it's with Gemini. They're a fully licensed full reserve exchange and custodian. So they give you a secure way for you to buy and own your bitcoin. There's no risks and no funny business. So if you're serious about stacking bitcoin the right way, head over to gemini.com which is G-E-M-I-N-I.com. yeah, I mean look, it all points to, we, we, we need a much better functioning economy.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

I really worry about the future of this country, Jamie.

[A]

Well, if you think of the debt that huge, two point, what was it? 2.8 trillion.

[B]

2.87.

[A]

2.87 trillion debt. So it's 96% of GDP, which is quite alarming really. The, the one way of getting the debt as a percentage of GDP down is okay, keep the debt flat, but just grow the bloody economy.

[B]

Do you know a lady called Lynn Alden?

[A]

No.

[B]

So she used to this show, used to be a long time ago, just about bitcoin. That's all we covered. And she is an economist and she always said the 135% debt to GDP, that is, that's where you get worried because she calls that the event horizon. If you go over that, no country of the 51 of the 52 countries have hit that 51 have had a currency default, I think. And the only other one is Japan which has gone through decades of stagflation. That she talks about that a lot.

[A]

And we're heading that way. Yeah, literally we're heading that way. And the only way. So, so the government's current thinking is, and we hear this on a daily basis, right, we need to borrow less. So we're going to tax more. But it just literally, it's just the economy is going to just blow up at some point.

[B]

Well, we need to borrow less and tax less.

[A]

Exactly. That is it. And cut in spending is the only way that you can fix this and you don't need to do it. The government needs to just look at efficiency. So I assume that you buy a brand new business tomorrow, it's struggling, you're not going to buy a successful one, probably because they won't want to sell it. So you inherit a failing business and we've got a failing economy and a failing government. First thing you look for is probably, what savings can I have?

[B]

Absolutely.

[A]

First. First thing you would do. But the Labour Party came in first thing. They did spend more. Let's increase the tax burden, let's increase public spending. And okay, we needed probably a little bit more investment in the NHS quickly to get waiting lists down. That was one of their pledges. But are they really looking at the waste? I don't. You know, Farrar's talking about. Unless they got that Doge thing that they've got in their local thing. People are trying to look at waste and that's ultimately any waste that you've got, just cut it out. I've seen those adverts. £108,000 for a director of diversity in the NHS. Do you want that person if you're having a heart attack, coming to the door or a paramedic. I know what I would prefer. Yeah. Oh, man. And the paramedics on a fraction of the wages, by the way, as well. You might get two or three paramedics for that. 108,000. And they allow, if somebody's on £108,000 to do that job, they'll make sure they've got five or six, seven or eight people working for them because they'll think, oh, I'm too busy to do any work. So that means that 108,000 multiplies up. That's just. Surely that's a waste.

[B]

Well, we have, like, even locally where we are. I keep talking about the Police Crime Commissioner, his office, it's 2.5 million pound budget. They want to increase it. 2.7 million. He himself, the Police Crime Commissioner is weak. He is a pathetic, weak man who is wasting money on PR and social media strategy. I was like, get rid of that fucking office. Give that 2.7 million to frontline officers and give policing over to the police.

[A]

But the police and Crime commissioners are just more politicians.

[B]

It's more politicians, it's more propaganda, it's more bullshit. It's trying to make them accountable. Fuck off.

[A]

Because in Wales we've got Senate elections, so that's our kind of Parliament next year. And the Labour and Applied Cymru have come in. Well, labor being running it, but they've had to be propped up and they voted in. Let's increase the number of politicians from 60 to 96 or more politicians. And do the public need more politicians? You know, I. I'm not so, so sure.

[B]

I saw that Clyde come. One of the Clyde Cymru politicians. On Question Times. I was frightened by how stupid this person was.

[A]

Oh, so. So the interesting thing, I was listening recently to a Welsh podcast about politics and so I don't know if you know Leanne Wood. She was. She was.

[B]

Maybe it was her.

[A]

Well, she's no longer kind of leading the party, so I think she's on the Peripherals gone.

[B]

Have a look up from. You might have to spell Clyde Camry for. God, I can't even say it.

[A]

P L A I D. And then Cymru. C Y M R U. So. So Leanne Wood was recently. Question Time, probably it won't bear any. Some of the stuff that they come out with. So she was on a Welsh podcast. I was listening to this a few days ago when I was going for a run. So that I'll just. It was the only thing I could get to download on my watch. I listening to it and she's like, we've really. And she come to prominence because when we started having those leaders debates when the general elections were coming in, she was the leader of Plaid Cymru 2015 general election. So she was on the debates with Cameron and stuff. So she's quite a prominent figure really in the party. But she kept saying because of the Senate elections are coming next year, she's very concerned about the rise of reform. But she doesn't call it reform, she calls it the far right.

[B]

Of course she does.

[A]

Yeah. So anybody the boogeyman? Yeah. And so the way I look, if you've got. If you're polling 30% and you know that you're basically saying, and you're number one in the polls, they're nearly neck and neck. Depends which polls you go. Because labor really tanked in Wales the last 12 months. If you've got a party that's nearly the most common party, it's not a majority, it's not over 50%, the most common party, they can't be far right anyway, can it? So. So I think I saw a lovely graphic on social media today where all that's happened is the right stay where it is and the left's moving further and further to the left. So we're still where we are, but we are now far right. Yeah, I know the graphic.

[B]

So, like, you center, you center right. They go. You become more and more. You're like, what's going on here? But it's. I think Constantine Kissing wrote a great article. It was something like, okay, I'm right wing. Yeah, I accept it. I mean, it's just. I don't Call it right wing. I call it common sense.

[A]

No, that's what, I suppose at the start where we were saying, is it right or left anymore, or is it just right or wrong?

[B]

Chanda. Yeah, she was on Question Time.

[A]

Oh, yeah. So she went on there a while back. But there's. There'll be a lot.

[B]

Hold on, hold on. It's. No, that's not the person I saw. It was a younger person I saw. It's not her. If you, if you just. I mean, I don't know if you can find a reason, but either way, this, this, this. She was stupid.

[A]

Well, but I was watching Newsnight last week, I think, before the Green Party finalized their election for the leader. And they would have been to this one batting off with it.

[B]

Yes. Oh, she is. Who? What's her name? Scroll down. You probably see on one of those pictures. Yeah, Just click on one. It will tell you.

[A]

Los Linos Medi.

[B]

Do you know her?

[A]

I don't know her. No.

[B]

I mean, I have you.

[A]

So. So the Ply Cymru. There's a. There's a lot of debate in Wales at the moment about the nation of sanctuary. And it's a. So for Wales, because it's run by the Labour Party, it's a nation of sanctuary. And a lot of councils have got their own local. Tend to be labor and councils of sanctuary, where obviously refugees are welcome and things. And. And generally, I don't think people have an issue with the Ukraine war and some people. But all the people coming over on small boats. And then we've had the issues with the Bell Hotel and then Starmer this week saying, I want to get everybody out of the hotels. And why have you taken the government. Well, is the government gone to court last week, then, to stop people being taken out of hotels? You know, we want action rather than words. And. And that's where they kept talking about is, we're refugees, welcome. We're a nation of sanctuary. And the thing on. Just as we brought that point up, that. And I got the figures here. So we had 110,000 record asylum claims. If you look at the latest figures now, I think we've got 32,000 asylum seekers in hotels. And it just cost. The cost is coming down a little bit. I was working with the sun newspaper on some figures recently.

[B]

By the Sun.

[A]

Yeah, it was a front page. It was. But it was how many people need to go to work to pay for the asylum accommodation? Okay. So it was basically, when you add the numbers, £4.7 billion was spent. It's come down in the last year. But you take the latest National Audit figure, it was 4.7 billion on the asylum accommodation alone. So if you then work out what the average wage of the economy is and you look at the National Insurance and the tax, 600,000 people, I've got to go out and get out of bed every single morning. All of the tax for those 600,000 people has to go to just pay for that 4.7 billion. And he's talking about getting people out of the hotels, so. But he's not talking about how he's going to stop the boats. It keeps almost smashing the gangs.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And if you look at the figures, drug related deaths in England and Wales, they come down slightly in Scotland, they sell the record in Europe. I think the figures are out this week, but drug related deaths in England and Wales at a record highs. So if we're so good at smashing the gangs, we're not very good at smashing the drug gangs, are we? If you just look at those figures. So. So we're not going to be doing that. So if he's going to get the 32,000 out of the hotels and close them by the end of the Parliament, where are they going to go? Well, they're just going to go into the houses. The Turco and everybody else is trying to. So we got 66,000 people in houses at the moment, 32,000 in hotels. So unless you stop the flow of people coming in, they can say, well, we delivered on our pledge to get rid of everybody at the hotel, but that then just moves everybody into communities and is the integration problems.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

So I don't think it's. It's called racist, isn't it? It's just thrown around if you don't. You're a Nazi, you're a Nazi racist. But I don't think there's an issue of just saying, well, we don't know who half these people are. For me it's more the security issue. If you have no idea who's coming in to the country. Like if you decided to just rock up and go to the airport, fly into France and you've got no documents, you know, lucky thing. What are you doing here?

[B]

Well, I think you can make it really easy. Just make the tax for accommodation of migrants, you make that optional. See how many people want to pay more tax.

[A]

Yeah, yeah.

[B]

And then whatever increasing you get into act. If Del Vince wants to pay for it, let Del Vince pay for it. But people wouldn't when they, when they see virtue's so easy.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Virtuous virtue is the easiest thing in the world. It's just words.

[A]

Nicola Sturgeon said she's not the refugee. Did she ever do it or. She didn't.

[B]

They're all. I feel that this. This woman from CLO Cymrue. Honestly, she was so stupid that I. All I. All I can think is I feel sorry for the people of Wales. How can you have such a stupid person representing people?

[A]

And the most likely outcome next year is because we've got totally proportional representation coming in next year, so no party is going to get more than 50%, so the likelihood is we could end up potentially with, say, reform being the largest party. And the Conservatives have really lost because they're all fishing around for the same voters.

[B]

Really.

[A]

Yeah. So if you take the Reform vote and the Conservative vote is probably projected to come in about 45%, so all the left side will come together. So you kind of have a situation where the largest party can't govern. They all come together and then you'll have a coalition applied Cymru and Labor and that'll be an interesting time to see how that plays out. Because you will obviously have reform politicians in the Senate, but if they're not in power, they'll be the main opposition and then there'll be a good run up to the next general election because I wouldn't be surprised because people talk about, obviously, the Reform Party and where they are currently in the polls that I think the Labour Party got in their manifesto by having proportional representation. So if Star. It wouldn't surprise me if Starmer genuinely pushes that forward before the next general election, because there's no way Nigel Farage, as an example, could be Prime Minister then, because they're. Yeah.

[B]

The whole country is your. Your. Your lefty mates and family must hate debating you because you must be able to own.

[A]

I don't. I don't. So everybody voted labor over the years. I don't see many of them. A lot of them have shifted away.

[B]

Yeah. So you're seeing that trend.

[A]

Yeah. The younger people are voting. Everybody's a bit. So I thought the Tories lost the last election. I think John Major lost that election. People tend to lose. And we kind of got to the point with Blair and Brown that you just want change.

[B]

Yeah. So that.

[A]

I don't think people generally vote parties in. It's just naturally a party comes to its life cycle and comes to an end. And I think that's what's happening a bit in Wales now.

[B]

Right.

[A]

That people are Just fed up of this Labour Party. So somebody else might get in and have a chance and. But I do think if we had a general election tomorrow, people are saying that Starmer will call an early election.

[B]

No chance.

[A]

Why would he do that? He's not going to win it.

[B]

I mean, they sat there for four years. They've called the budget as late as possible. They'll call the election as late as possible because they just don't want to accept their fact. I mean, I think they should go now. I wish there was a way to peacefully and legally remove them from power. Now you can't get a vote of no confidence because they've got a majority. I would fully support national strikes to get rid of this party. I think they're evil. I think they're dangerous. I think they're destroying the country. I don't think anyone says anything else. They're either stupid or they're ideologically trapped. But they are bad for this country. And I can be empathetic to. I would never vote for labor, but I can see during a period of time under Blair that the country felt good and positive. I disagree with almost everything he did, but there is nothing good about this Labour Party. I think they're the worst government we've ever had. I think they're a frontbench of idiots. Angela Rayner is a animal farm pig gorging at the trough and she's been caught and she's crocodile tears in us and she's gotten. Had no tears for all the people's lives she's destroyed. But all of them, Philipson, Cooper, Reeves, they're all fucking stupid people. And I just. I think they're destroying a country. I'm having a. Having a moment.

[A]

It's good to be cathartic, but. Yeah, but you talk about it and you just think where we've got to with this country, with the Labour Party, it is. It's just a travesty. And.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And so if I try to buy a service. So say you offer me a service and I sign a contract.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

And you don't deliver. Well, you've seen. I probably could sue you.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

So they've come in with a manifesto and they've lied and lied. They've just done totally different things. So surely there maybe. Are you not a fan of having more public bodies? But do you need a body that literally will say you haven't delivered 70% of what you said and you've delivered 40% of what you said you wouldn't do?

[B]

So you can't be measuring it those hard.

[A]

I know it's difficult.

[B]

You know, I have a solution for this and I think it's my personal, very naive solution. I think every party should announce its budget.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Before the election and its budget should be fully costed. Fully. And you vote on the budget because if you have to put a budget out before an election, if you're saying you're going to put up tax and others aren't, you might not get that vote. The incentive is to push taxes down is to support the public. But when you can put out in your manifesto vague promises and then lie, you get away with it. I would do that and I also would make any change, any increase in. I would have a list of the taxes. Any increase by government in any tax goes to a referendum. And if you lose a referendum, you go to an election. I think it's then. Then the. Then you're forcing the government. You're allowing the people to choose the taxation they want. Yeah, but it's bullshit the way anyway it is. Jamie, look, your work's brilliant. Everyone should subscribe to your substack and following you on Twitter. We'll put it in the show notes. Anything we've not covered you wish we had because there's a lot.

[A]

There's a lot. We could probably talk another 10 hours, I think looking the one. We could do a show on this. Maybe we'll do it again in the future. But the. The climate and net zero and the environment, there's a huge amount of stuff. It just gets. It's like a daily ritual on the BBC with their climate editor that just one thing I saw last week, which I thought was great. So we've seen record wildfires and they always say it's due to climate change. But then you speak to some of the experts and historically what we've seen is that the number of control burns, fire breaks, in terms of what you can do, that's been reduced by. So again, government's interfering and that's reduced. So the fu load now out in the countryside for fire, for wildfires is more than it probably ever has been. But they don't mention that when the BBC. I'm my biggest bugbear. It's the one thing that I always get a lot of attention on my social media is where. Because I do watch the BBC, I know some people can't stand it, but I like to see what they reported and I literally think, what have they said now on climate change? I clip it up, stick it on social media and everybody's like what nonsense is this? And it's like a, it's like a religion for them.

[B]

Well, maybe we should get you in with Catherine Porter and we'll drill into it. I do have one final question. Name me one thing the government has improved for us over the last 20 years.

[A]

Of the last 20 years.

[B]

What's got better?

[A]

What has got better?

[B]

It's my favorite question to ask anyone.

[A]

Do you ever get a good answer?

[B]

No. No. Nobody's got enough. Nobody can name one thing.

[A]

I could give you one thing.

[B]

Go on.

[A]

That what Tony Blair did from a statistical perspective, he introduced the Freedom of Information act and that is one of the biggest bugbears of government now because they hate it. They hate it because we outdid a fact check on them recently. But Nigel Farage was saying something about Afghan sex crimes and versus British people. And Sky News did a, a fact check of what he said is one of his conferences, I think and he claimed that Afghans were 22 times more likely to I think commit a sex crime than somebody who was born in the UK and they fact checked him. Difficulty you got with this one is that and it was the Sky News. It's very strange for Sky News to do a fact check of it. And they fact checked him and it must have been a political fact check because why else would you delve into it? I get if you're an organization like full fact who does their job but for Sky News to do it and they fact checked. And the difficulty you go with this one is that when you, you know how many crimes there are but you've got to divide by the population because there's far more crimes in the UK committed by British born people, say sex crimes and Afghans. But there's significantly more British people than Afghans. Of course there's going to be more. So you need to calculate a rate.

[B]

Yeah, per capita.

[A]

Yeah, per capita. So you calculate a rate. The difficulty is at what rate do you, what population do you divide by? So the figures. The reason I'm bringing this up under the Tony Blair bit is that the figures came from I think an FYI request that was made by a think tank to the the policy department, I think on this. So they give them the numbers and they said you are the number of crimes by nationality. They then divided them by a population together per capita. And I think they used some figures from the ons by nationality. And so Sky News did all their own analysis but they divided it by country of birth. And the difficulty you've got is over time, your country of birth is fixed. You can't change your country of birth. Where you're born. You're born.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Your nationality does change.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

So the number of national in the UK who are Afghan is lower than the number of people who were born from Afghanistan, because some of them have come over you and they now say they're British nationals and things. But if your figure of a number of crimes is nationality, you've got to divide by the number of the population, by national, otherwise you're comparing apples and pears. So they did all of this and basically calling out Nigel Farage, saying the number's not 22 times as close to three times. Completely got it wrong. I thought, well, I'm going to have to intervene on this one. Got involved, wrote a big blog on it and stuff, and they've edited it. They haven't withdrawn it, but they've edited it to say, oh, yeah, we got some bits wrong and stuff. But those figures, though, so forget the fact check itself, those figures themselves would not be there in the public domain. It wouldn't be a part of the debate, because it's obviously leading into the Afghans coming over on small boats being put into communities and what risk that poses to local residents. But those figures wouldn't be there at all if it wasn't for the Freedom of Information request, because you can literally ask the government for numbers and as long as it's not over a certain cost threshold, they've got to give them to you.

[B]

Yeah, okay, so there's one. I'll give you that one.

[A]

I don't think of any policies apart.

[B]

From that one, but I'll give you that one, actually. I mean, I'm no fan of Tony Blair. I think he should be in jail.

[A]

But I. I think he hates it, though. He did. I think it's one of his threats.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, I've heard that. But. But I think the Freedom of Information act is brilliant. I've used it myself to question my local council and police, although I have also spoken to the council and they've said the pressure it puts on them is insane. And I do have some sympathy for that as well, because they're trying to do their job, but we'll give them that one. Jamie, your work's brilliant. I could talk to you for literally hours. And we should do this again whenever you want. Have an open invite. And I think net 01 with Catherine Porter would be interesting. Tell people your substack.

[A]

Yeah, so it's an easy one. So my kind of social media prices, Stats Jamie, so anybody can find me anywhere on Instagram, Facebook, X with Stats Jamie and the website statsjamie.co.uk so it all feeds off of there.

[B]

So brilliant.

[A]

Get on there, subscribe and I. My mantra is I crunch the numbers so you don't have to. Pretty much.

[B]

It's brilliant work, Connor. Anything? All good. Right, thank you everyone for listening. We will see you all soon.