147. Drought and About

Summary

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Podcast Summary: "Where Politics Meets History"

Episode 147: Drought and About

Date: July 31, 2026
Host: Iain Dale
Guest: Dr. Tessa Dunlop

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Episode Overview

This episode explores the intensifying impact of climate change—specifically drought and wildfires—on Europe and the UK, examining these issues through both scientific and historical lenses. Broadcaster Iain Dale and historian Dr. Tessa Dunlop bring their contrasting perspectives, mixing sharp debate, historical anecdotes, and wit. The hosts also discuss the political responses to environmental crises, infrastructure failures, Andy Burnham's early days as Prime Minister, and the challenges of leadership in an era of ecological anxiety.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Climate Crisis on the Doorstep

[00:02–04:28]

• Tessa opens with urgency about climate change:

  “The rate at which the climate change breakdown is happening is faster than the climate scientists initially predicted… Democracy is not the best system.” (00:02)

• They discuss climate anxiety as a real and growing mental health issue, especially among the young and among French children due to harsher temperatures.
• The magnitude of recent wildfires is underlined:

  “Last year wildfires, the equivalent of the surface area of Greece was burned… more woodland lost to wildfires than to logging.” (06:21)

2. Societal Fragility & Infrastructure

[00:25–09:46]

• Iain expresses concern over the fragility of society—not just environmentally, but in terms of resilience to major disruptions (banking, internet, etc.)
• They reflect on historical approaches:
  • Victorian Britain built infrastructure more effectively than modern governments, particularly reservoirs and water systems.
• They critique recent decades’ failures to keep pace with population growth and climate predictions:

  “Since 1976, [farmers have] gone for drought resistant crops… but all that we’ve done is nowhere nearly sufficient.” (09:12)

3. Climate Anxiety: Demographics and Debate

[04:28–07:59]

• Tessa: “There’s a new diagnosis… climate anxiety. It’s more prevalent among women and among the young.”
• Iain pushes back, calling it “mentally weak,” sparking Tessa’s rebuttal that empathy correlates with anxiety and that privilege allows some to ignore problems.
• The scale of wildfires in Europe is discussed, with sharp increases in events in France (from 15/year to over 340/year).

4. Holiday Anecdotes & Societal Memory

[09:46–13:12]

• Tessa recounts her holiday in France where wildfires and climate made a sharp contrast to the traditional British “holiday high”.
• The story of Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman’s “leave on a high note” approach is related to both personal memory and broader society’s tendency to remember crises when they end dramatically.

5. Franco-British Relations & Responses to Crisis

[13:12–18:47]

• Tessa laments the UK’s poor diplomatic tone during France’s wildfire crisis (“All we can do is send this thin-skinned politician to have a go at them”).
• Iain and Tessa debate helpfulness and symbolism, touching on the limits of actual UK intervention capability.

6. Media Coverage & Political Distraction

[18:47–20:31]

• Iain criticizes British media priorities:

  “We've really got to look at ourselves in how we prioritize stories… massive wildfires on the Suffolk Downs… and you’re talking about football again.” (19:30)

• Tessa notes that the irrepressible pace of global crises means attention spans and leadership suffer:

  “There's always another story, always another distraction.” (19:30)

7. Political Leadership & Net Zero

[20:31–26:36]

• Kemi Badenoch’s stance on net zero is analyzed:
  • She calls the 2050 target “arbitrary” and potentially destructive for industry but acknowledges the reality of climate change.
  • Both sides dissect political triangulation: dealing with environmental goals without alienating industry or the electorate.
• Labour’s Andy Burnham is critiqued for signaling “drill, baby, drill” (North Sea oil) to win over certain voters, despite his past green stance as Manchester mayor.
• Iain and Tessa engage in a sharp on-air debate on whether local oil extraction is better climate policy than importing fossil fuels.

Notable Quote:

“The rate at which the climate change breakdown is happening is faster than the climate scientists initially predicted… now looking like it's going to be 2 [degrees].” —Tessa (26:04)

8. The Need for Resilient Infrastructure

[26:36–32:22]

• Tessa champions historical examples of building for resilience (reservoirs), contrasting today’s population growth and planning inertia:

  “Between 1992 and 2029, we haven't built a single reservoir.”

• They debate whether democracy’s slow processes are fit for existential challenges.

Notable Exchange:

Tessa: “The planning system will make sure that they're delayed.” (29:42)
Iain: “And I think when you drill into, forgive the pun, what's going on, it's the danger of the democracy vis a vis the existential crisis that's coming down the track. Democracy is not the best.” (30:01)

9. Resilience, Public Behavior, & Societal Collapse

[30:23–31:49]

• Iain imagines a society on the brink if digital or banking systems collapse, referencing “28 Days Later” to illustrate how quickly order could break down.

Notable Quote:

“We have no comprehension how fragile the society is that we've grown up with… it could all shatter within a few weeks.” – Iain (00:25, 31:35)

• Tessa counters with lessons from Covid and collective action in France, suggesting most people are “biddable” and rally in crisis.

10. Wildfire Management Past & Present

[34:03–40:39]

• Both share anecdotes:
  • Ian's childhood straw burning on an arable farm.
  • Tessa's heather burning in Scotland for grazing and as firebreaks.
• The controversial SNP policy requiring licenses for heather burning is dissected as an example of policy complexity and unintended consequences.

11. Andy Burnham, Leadership Styles, and Political Branding

[40:41–49:06]

• Burnham’s transition from green-leaning Manchester mayor to his first days as PM is analyzed, including his “prop politics” (T-shirts, wardrobe) and social media presence.
• Comparison to Trump and Farage:
  • Bypassing mainstream media.
  • Using TikTok & Instagram to control narrative.
• Concerns are voiced that his approach might backfire when difficulties arise.

Notable Quote:

“The strategy he’s adopting… is out of the Donald Trump playbook. Make yourself the story and talk about it relentlessly.” —Iain (43:41)

12. North-South Divide & Historical Parallels

[48:11–48:51]

• The persistence (and political exploitation) of the North/South divide in Britain is discussed, with historical context about industrialization and current voter perceptions.

13. Listener Questions (Timestamps Vary: 49:59–62:23)

• Taxation: Should Labour raise taxes, and which types?
• Wealth tax and assets: How to fairly tax billionaires and address inequality.
• Impact of millionaires and billionaires: Do they drive growth, or stymie fairness?
• Clarification and humorous debate over the word “onanistic”.
• Podcasting tips, interview style, and listener engagement.

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• On the tense pace of climate change:

  “This climate shit, this clusterfuck is happening. So much quicker… it's Dante’s Inferno, but with fangs in it.” —Tessa (33:04)

• On infrastructure failures:

  “We haven't built a single reservoir [in decades]… the system is at breaking point.” —Tessa (26:36)

• On society’s fragility:

  “If the internet was unavailable for six months… society just breaks down.” —Iain (00:25, 31:35)

• On Andy Burnham’s approach:

  “Make yourself the story and talk about it relentlessly.” —Iain (43:41)

• Comic sparring:

  “He's a shit, isn't he, Corey?” —Tessa (01:24)
  “You started it. You were talking about hot French firemen…” —Iain (12:21)

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Segment Timestamps of Interest

• Climate crisis context and rising anxiety: 00:02–06:40
• Wildfire statistics and historical comparison: 06:13–07:59
• Holiday psychology, Kahneman anecdote: 09:46–10:48
• French wildfires, British response: 13:12–17:03
• Political leadership/net zero debate: 20:31–26:36
• Reservoirs and infrastructure planning: 26:36–32:22
• Wildfire and heather burning debate: 34:03–40:39
• Andy Burnham’s leadership and branding: 40:41–49:06
• Listener questions (tax, wealth, podcasting): 49:59–66:43

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Tone & Style

• Spirited, irreverent banter laced with sharp analysis and historical anecdotes.
• Tessa is passionate, anxious about climate, and often challenges Iain’s pragmatism.
• Iain is skeptical, pragmatic, and eager to debate forensically and humorously.
• Both use storytelling to tie past and present together, providing context and argument.

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Useful for Listeners Who Haven’t Heard the Episode

This summary covers the urgent themes and major arguments of a lively, sometimes contentious, debate on how climate anxieties and environmental failures collide with politics and history. Key exchanges about climate anxiety, infrastructure neglect, fire management, and political leadership are highlighted, along with the humor and rapport the hosts share—even when sparring. The episode is a rich resource for anyone seeking to understand the challenges of managing existential risks within democratic systems, how history informs today’s crises, and how leaders (past and present) rise—or fail—in the spotlight.

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Transcript

[Tessa]

This is a global production. The truth is the rate at which the climate change breakdown is happening is faster than the climate scientists initially predicted. When you drill into, forgive the pun, what's going on, it's the danger of the democracy vis a vis the existential crisis that's coming down the track. Democracy is not the best system.

[Ian]

Well, you may be right there, but also, I'm really worried that we are going to get to a point in our society and this is not just about climate change. This could be in all sorts of other ways, all sorts of other threats to our system. The banking system went down. If the Internet was unavailable for six months. I mean, society just breaks down and that could ease so easily happen. And I don't think that we have any comprehension how fragile the society is that we've grown up with, that we've got used to, and it could all shatter within a few weeks. We're late. We're late, we're very, very late. Why would that be, Tessa?

[Tessa]

Too much gaiety and fun in the green room chatting about the economics of a good holiday versus climate anxiety.

[Ian]

That's one way of putting it. The other way of putting it would to say we've just endured 40 minutes of Tessa giving us a monologue.

[Tessa]

You are a shit. God, he's a shit, isn't he, Corey?

[Ian]

Anyway, it's good to have you back. We had a lovely episode with Natasha, but it's always good to see you again.

[Tessa]

Oh, the Barbs.

[Ian]

It was a very nice episode, which I'm sure you've listened to.

[Tessa]

I've bought her French wine.

[Ian]

She said she didn't need to have any more presents.

[Tessa]

Okay, you're going to tell me next that after giving her a fourth bottle of wine, she doesn't actually drink wine.

[Ian]

I think she does.

[Tessa]

I've got some pressing issues that we need to address today.

[Ian]

Oh, God.

[Tessa]

What? Well, I don't know in what order to do them. We can have a standoff about why we were better at building environmental infrastructure during the Victorian period than we have been in the last 30 years. That's one thing. The second thing, there's a new diagnosis, a mental illness, which may be exacerbating the number of NEETs we have. Do you know what it's called?

[Ian]

I'm imagining you're going to say climate change anxiety.

[Tessa]

Just climate anxiety, actually, because the change is happening. It's real. And in fact, not just climate change Brits, but the French. French children have it particularly badly because it's actually even hotter over there. As we know, they are literally burning. I've decided, and we'll come to this how you can lead Chemy like Tim Stanley, who's sort of like the vicar, isn't. He's like the vicar of the conservative movement. I realized, by the way, for those of you who don't go anywhere near

[Ian]

the telegram, he's not actually a conservative.

[Tessa]

Well, what is he then?

[Ian]

He. He was a Labor councillor in Seven Oaks.

[Tessa]

He. But he writes for the Telegraph.

[Ian]

Yeah. It doesn't mean to say that you're necessarily a down the line conservative. He's a very. I think he's a very interesting sort of intellectual type and you can't typecast him as a down the line conservative. But I would say he was broadly on the right. Yes.

[Tessa]

Yeah. I mean he's one of the biggest Telegraph columnists and generally writes and a thoroughly nice guy, I'm sure, but he writes to his audience. Not saying that he writes for an echo chamber, but there is something of a republic repeating message going around the cave in which he occupies. However.

[Ian]

Bit like you then.

[Tessa]

No, because I cross the boards with you, you big climate dinosaur. Do you know what? It was just to jump around a bit. We try not to do that. Let's. Let's stick with Stanley briefly. He said something so controversial as a right wing commentator that he spilt onto my timeline. He basically said that Kemi needed to embrace climate change and actually recognize that climate change is destroying all that conservatives love. Green cricket peaches, warm beer.

[Ian]

Did he do that? I thought his message was to the online right, not to Kemi.

[Tessa]

Oh, I very much read it as this is the third way Kemi, and you can walk it. And he also of course began by scolding the left for turning this into some sort of nasty political argument when really there's just a godly light shining down on us. That says the right way, in fact is to address the change that's coming towards us and not just build in the infrastructure which we've patently failed to do, but also to address what's happening in the first place. If it's not too late, of course.

[Ian]

Well, we'll talk about that a bit later.

[Tessa]

Yeah. Climate anxiety. Who or what is the most likely category to experience climate anxiety?

[Ian]

Do you really want me to answer that question?

[Tessa]

Yes. There's actually a BBC bite size on climate anxiety.

[Ian]

Is there online? I'm sure there is that.

[Tessa]

Could you a clue as to the demographic?

[Ian]

You see what I want to say. You're going to just bite my head Off. If I say it, there's a lot

[Tessa]

of head to bite. What do you want to say, darling?

[Ian]

The mentally weak

[Tessa]

in France or actually just the thick skulled rich are the ones who can afford to ignore it. And that does seem to be a correlation between empathy and experiences of climate anxiety. It's more prevalent among women and among the young.

[Ian]

Well, I can understand why it's more prevalent among the young because it's been drilled into them that the end of the world is nigh.

[Tessa]

I think you just need to look around. I mean, do you know last year the wildfires were as such, we've always had historically wildfires. We know that. And we're going to come on to Scotland, by the way, and the dissembling of the snp. We can agree, we can slag off the SNP and we'll agree there. Ian. So there is light at the end of today's tunnel. More on the Scottish wildfires in a minute. But there's always been wildfires. Guess the size, what country's worth of wildfires were that last year? So the size of what country was burnt?

[Ian]

Switzerland?

[Tessa]

No, bigger.

[Ian]

Austria?

[Tessa]

No, no. I wish I had a map. Romania begins with G. Smaller than Romania.

[Ian]

Guernsey.

[Tessa]

Greece. It's a large surface area.

[Ian]

It has a lot. Well, in the whole world, you mean?

[Tessa]

Yeah, woodland. Last year wildfires, the equivalent of the surface area of Greece was burned. We are now losing more woodland to accidental or non deliberate wildfires than we are to logging and environmental destruction through agriculture.

[Ian]

I'm not minimizing this, I promise I'm not. But wildfires happen a lot in the United States and always have done, and they're regarded there, or were maybe not now, but were regarded as a natural phenomenon and it replenishes the woodlands and it's actually a good thing that they happen. Obviously when they happen, it's not a good thing for anybody that's caught in them. But from the, from the land point of view, there is actually a positive

[Tessa]

to them and we can come to that. We'll come to our communal childhood when we used to heather burn and I

[Ian]

used to straw burn and I'm sure you loved it.

[Tessa]

And we'll come to those two practices later on in the pod. The wildfires in France, how many were there in past times on average every year? How many wildfires in France?

[Ian]

12.

[Tessa]

15.

[Ian]

Yeah, very near 340. I know this. 342 so far this year.

[Tessa]

Yeah. So that's 15 versus 342.

[Ian]

If the same thing happens over the next five years, which I suspect it will.

[Tessa]

It did. Last year. We had the equivalent of Greece.

[Ian]

But you take my point.

[Tessa]

I do take your point, but I think the problem is when you look and see that we've had the worst harvests we've had in the last 10 years.

[Ian]

Yeah. For farmers this is a nightmare disaster.

[Tessa]

We've had three droughts in the last five years. So actually you've wonderfully undermined your own point, which was really generous of you to give me that easy win. Thank you. So early in the pod, Corey, do

[Ian]

we think you missed me? How have I undermined my point? But just going back to the farmers, obviously I spent the first 18 years of my life on an arable farm and we would test the moisture of the corn each day to check that it was fit to combine. And we had a sort of like a coffee grinder thing that you would put some of the wheat in the coffee grinder. It would then grind it to a powder. You'd then put it in a little implement which told you what the moisture content was. And if it was over 14 or 15% moisture, you couldn't combine that day. And it was always very exciting when it was under 15% because I, I loved combining.

[Tessa]

There's a wonderful smell.

[Ian]

Yeah, it was just amazing. And I, I used to have my own combine, a Massey Ferguson 500, bright red at the age of eight and. But of course, nowadays you test that moisture and I suspect it's probably about 8%.

[Tessa]

They're small. The worry is the size of the harvest.

[Ian]

Exactly. So whereas in 1972 we might have had, say, 200 tons of wheat, 1976 we might have had 150. Well, think what that does to farmers incomes and we've got that in spades this year.

[Tessa]

Yeah, to be said. So since 1976, we've, we. I say the farming community has irrigated in a very different way. It's preserved water in a different way. It's gone for drought resistant crops and heavily leaned into them. So we are more drought resistant, but really worrying. Statistics about the impact of drought and the yields over the last 10 years suggest that all that we've done is nowhere nearly sufficient. Let's come also to reservoir building and the status at the heart of government and why I think we're going to get buyer's remorse over Barnum.

[Ian]

But before we do all of that, what everyone wants to know is how was your holiday in Dieppe?

[Tessa]

Well, I would like to share with you that we didn't stay only in Dieppe.

[Ian]

You little rascal.

[Tessa]

We travelled around. I've been listening on the BBC to the economics of a good holiday. And there is. There was actually an individual who won the Nobel Economic Prize and some of his thinking went into this, called Dan Kahneman, and he was experiencing a very good holding on the third day. He rushed home early because he believed that you needed to end on a high. And one of the most important aspects of feeling you had bang for your buck. It's all psychology, by the way. He won a Nobel Prize for economics, but he was a psychologist, was feeling you'd had a good time because how do you prove.

[Ian]

And he went home after the third

[Tessa]

day, went home on day three when they were meant to go home on day four because he wanted to leave on a high. And it's about the memory bank. So if you can pull from the positive memories, then you've had a win for the team.

[Ian]

So you came back after one day.

[Tessa]

We didn't, but I would have, I think, like to have. Because economics of scale, it would be more practical to go for seven days. But obviously you might have had a little moment not seeing me. I know you get quite bad withdrawal symptoms and so forth, and I understand that's common.

[Ian]

She genuinely believes that, by the way.

[Tessa]

Genuinely true, by the way. And so I knew that there was an also another. An economic reason to return. But my friend, because I always believe in deleting your gene pool when you go on. Hold it. Not deleting it, sorry, diluting it. Diluting it. So we went with a friend. Divorce dad. And there's several advantages to going with friends. You have to pick them really carefully. One is either you get on with them really well and that's a win, or they annoy you quite a lot and then you prefer your gene pool. And either way it's positive because either you lean into your own and feel good about it.

[Ian]

You're overthinking this a little bit.

[Tessa]

You have to. You have time on holiday to think. That's the great thing about the holidays.

[Ian]

Well, you didn't. You were writing book proposals.

[Tessa]

I did do that, but also I tried to stay away from the news in case I heard your voice burn. And so I kept on putting on French telly and of course, the calcoul. Everywhere there were fires, like. Because we were in the north, in Normandy, but the fires were ripping through and they were belle France. I mean, it was a. It is a massive tragedy. And then I found myself going to the QR code on their television sets, not to go to the Instagram accounts, by the way, of the extraordinarily hot firemen. I mean, I'm just telling you.

[Ian]

So shallow.

[Tessa]

Aren't you just an object to the fact that French firemen, they look.

[Ian]

So why are they different from English firemen?

[Tessa]

It's less soft looking, sort of pudgy. I mean, they're just very well honed. They've got those lovely.

[Ian]

I thought you'd say something else.

[Tessa]

I can't believe you asked me. Can you cut that bit, Corey? Because he actually deliberately led me into an objectifying trap.

[Ian]

Well, no, yeah, hang. No, no, no, hang on. You started. You started it. You were talking about hot French firemen. I want to hear more about you speaking French. Break.

[Tessa]

Pausa. How do you say that in French?

[Ian]

Pausa is German.

[Tessa]

Afternoon.

[Ian]

I'll go for a break, then. So did you parley beaucoup de francais while you were there? And what was the reaction?

[Tessa]

Mon marie romain icy. Voila, mont Marais en francais. Je suis. Je suis. I'm always Scottish in France because they like the Scottish more than they like the English. And I posit down as Romanian because even though they don't really like the Romanians, there's too many in France. I reckon that it kind of waters down my Englishness somehow. It makes me. Triangulates things a bit and then. But the most fun I have, and I definitely. And it is grist to the mill, actually, of me pushing forward with this remaining GCSE campaign. Definitely. If you have a second language kicking around in your house, which we do now, which I didn't when I. When I formally went to France. I haven't been to France for many, many years. It gave me the confidence to go into Google Translate to listen to how to say something and then just to bowl up to reception and go for it. And I had so many great exchanges. I had, you know, little Instagram interactions with boutiques where I, you know, did a bit of. No, no, madame can't remember the word for young anyway. But I just found they were so welcoming and, you know, that old school kind of idea that the French are dismissive of the English and don't really like us. If you bowl up with your arms open and, you know, a great big smile and lots of effort, they are never going to knock you back. And my experience was they're fighting these terrible fires and I expressed, always shared their pain, showed them the pictures of the Scottish fires that made them panic even more. The idea that there was nowhere to run. But they. They just I just thought, why don't we make more of these great neighbors who we have so much in common with. And then the first thing when I get back and log on to you and the world that I live in, the little cesspit that I swim around in, there's Chris Phipps on the Calais beach, whatever he's called, I'm pleased to not know his full name. You know, poking them with a stick. All the other countries are delivering to France air bombing helicopters, even Romanian fire rescue vans are trundling across Europe to arrive in Bor. So. And all we can do is send this thin skinned politician we'll have a go at.

[Ian]

Hang on a second.

[Tessa]

I was embarrassed.

[Ian]

I don't know that we've sent water helicopter. In fact, I'm not even sure we've got any water helicopters. If we did, I'm sure they would be sent because we often send British firemen to help in other countries. So probably don't trust your own country when you don't.

[Tessa]

Not trashing, but I didn't see anything

[Ian]

but Chris Philp, I mean, to be, to be fair to him, what you probably don't know is the, the day before he was on the beach and spoke in the French policeman, which I think he had every right to do, by the way, because they were, he, I mean, he did actually attempt to speak French. It's very funny. Je suis depute du la parlement Britannique or something. And anyway, so they were speaking to him in very broken English, so. Because he was saying, well, why aren't you stopping all of these people? Look, they're going, why, why don't you sort of stop them? And they were trying to explain, we were only orders, we have been told that we must not do that.

[Tessa]

And so is that how they spoke?

[Ian]

Well, more or less.

[Tessa]

Sounds like they come from a sitcom in the 1970s.

[Ian]

Marie, hello, hello, hello. What a brilliant sitcom that was. I shall say this only once. Anyway, his point was that the French government are not living up to the deal that Shabana Mahmoud did with Shabzi Moody did with Emmanuel Macron.

[Tessa]

And I think it's just the timing was really unfortunate because as Macron has been explaining, the French, French are facing the biggest crisis that they've confronted since the Second World War. And I was in Dieppe and you

[Ian]

know, they didn't confront that one very well, did they?

[Tessa]

No, well, no, they didn't. And actually they're ill prepared for this one. But we've talked about this.

[Ian]

But nobody could be prepared for something like this, to be fair.

[Tessa]

I think to be fair, we've been told this would happen for the last 30 years and we've all chosen to ignore it.

[Ian]

Well, we have. It is anyway back to Chrisfield. The reason why he was there the day before he was on a boat in the middle of the channel with Michael Keon who used to work with me at lbc. He's now the BBC Southeast reporter.

[Tessa]

And why was the BBC giving this airtime?

[Ian]

Well, I, I think it's perfectly reasonable if, if you have a senior politician trying to investigate what's going on on the French coast with, with the boats, I, I can see why they would do that. But anyway, they, they started being fired on by the French navy and the French navy said, oh, this was just a training exercise. But I think they genuinely felt rather anxious because the bullets were whizzing past them.

[Tessa]

Nothing like provoking your allies.

[Ian]

So Chris Phillips goes on the television saying where the French navy are shooting at us when they should be stopping the boats. And I mean that's a good story for like a summer story. That's not a bad one.

[Tessa]

It would be if we were in a normal summer. But I think, and I hate to bring the mood down and I don't want to depress our listeners and I don't encourage people to switch off. Obviously we look after and treasure all of these. You. But I think these aren't normal times we're operating in Ian people. You know, nearly half a million people are on the move, on the run. Not just in France and Spain but last night I texted a friend saying oh sorry, I'm just back from holiday, I'll do the article. And she said oh don't worry, we've been totally distracted because our daughter in law's been trapped in a Turkish forest fire in Greece in an hour from where I grew up in Scotland in the Kangorms. And then oh, a rocket, I know, is it a ballistic missile lands across from Russia and Poland. It didn't even make my news stream because I so focused on the fires that the Romanians repelled three Russian zones since the last time we talked. So this is normal times and then

[Ian]

the news and this is where I think, and I said this on the program last. I think the, the media have, we've really got to look at ourselves in how we prioritize stories because everyone's going on about Trump bombing Iran. Again, totally legitimate story. Did you know that the Iranian regime publicly executed three protesters yesterday in a market square? And then started shooting at the crowd that had gathered. They thought the crowd would have gathered to cheer on the executions, but they weren't. They were outraged by the executions. This hardly got any mention at all on the British media. So I did an hour on it last night because I was just so outraged by this. But again, nothing. I couldn't see anything in the media this morning about it.

[Tessa]

Yeah, I would. It's not that I don't think we should focus on global stories, but. And annoyingly, I sent a core. Dear Corey, all these articles to print out and none of them sent. And the one that I really needed was on Victorian reservoirs, because. I know, I know this sounds like a long way off from Iran, although Iran, by the way, before the war, the main news stories come out of Iran, except for them crushing their own, was the appalling drought that it was facing, which presumably hasn't gone. So they're not only facing a war and Americans and the Revolutionary Guard, but also desperate water shortages. But I do think there are reasons why we're poorly equipped for what's confronting us, and that's because we dissemble. We get very easily distracted. I don't want to point a finger at you, Ian, but today we've got massive wildfires on the Suffolk Downs that are taking out a huge nature reserve, etc, and campfires and caravans have been evacuated. And you're talking about football again on your radio show tonight.

[Ian]

We're spending the first hour talking about Net zero and climate change.

[Tessa]

In what context are you going to be talking about that?

[Ian]

Kemi Badenok, her letter to the Telegraph today.

[Tessa]

And what did it say?

[Ian]

It said. It was explaining why she thinks that the Net zero target of 2050 is arbitrary and it's going to collapse British industry. And she actually used the phrase climate change is real and we need to deal with it in an appropriate way. But I think it's perfectly legitimate for politicians to say, well, I accept climate change is happening and this is the way I think we should deal with it. That's what politics, political debate should be all about.

[Tessa]

Yes.

[Ian]

So don't accuse me of ignoring it. We're doing that in the first hour, which has a larger audience than the last hour, because basically by the last hour they've all got tired of listening to my voice.

[Tessa]

I don't believe that could ever be true. I find you incredibly appealing even when I don't agree with the word you're saying once you've done Net zero. And Kemi Badenoch and her triangulation of the subject, because presumably what she's going to say is, I believe in climate change. It's like you can't not believe it. The whole of Europe's a tinder box is flooding elsewhere in Asia and I think Canada's still burning. But she's going to dissemble about the Net Zero targets, isn't she? That's what this is all about.

[Ian]

Well, you say dissemble, it's. That's a pejorative word. She is saying that I believe we should approach it in a way that doesn't harm the economy. Now, to be fair, Andy Burnham's government is saying exactly the same thing. I told you just before we came into the studio that Miyata Van Buller, the new Net Zero secretary, she is tomorrow going to announce that they're going to water down the targets on electric vehicles. Now, I'm not particularly in favor of that, I have to say, because I. I do believe that that transition needs to be done, partly because that there's got to be certainty for the car manufacturers and the car dealers, because

[Tessa]

if

[Ian]

one country does one thing and another does another, like Europe, the EU has now delayed their targets till 2035, so new diesel and petrol cars will still be sold up to 2035 in this country, it'll be 2030. Now, I suspect what she's going to do tomorrow is go back to 2035, which, given that she's supposed to be even more of a climate change zealot than Ed Miliband, is interesting in itself. You've had Andy Burnham tell Donald Trump in terms that he's going to open up the North Sea.

[Tessa]

Yeah, And I can honestly say I feel desperate about Andy Burnham and how weak he is, because I understand that he's looking for the north of England Red Wall vote. He's gone in hard on care homes, on building projects, on getting Neets back to work. But. And likewise, I presume what he wants is the right mood music so that he gets across Donald Trump's radar. And he' he's understood that if he says drill, baby, drill, which is effectively what his top line has been to Trump, he will then have an easy win and get on the right side of him quickly. I'm just assuming he's not going to execute that, because all the evidence tells us as many fossil fuels should remain in the ground, that can, especially those. We can't quantify their value. We don't know how much there is and we don't know how much to extract them. We don't.

[Ian]

We Absolutely do. I think what they're going to do is give the open up the jackdaw and rotate. Is it Rosebank oil fields? But the problem that people who articulate what you're articulating have is that they cannot explain why it is better for climate change to have ships traversing halfway around the world with oil and gas when we've actually got it next door to us.

[Tessa]

Do you know what's interesting? First of all, it would take answer that point, take 10 years to extract and like I said, it's the heart is that we've taken one of these.

[Ian]

No, again, you're completely wrong. One of these fields can start almost immediately. So why, why, why answer that question? Because I don't think you can.

[Tessa]

I, I think one of the bigger issues with the climate.

[Ian]

Again, you're deflecting no answer.

[Tessa]

You know what, Ian? I, I genuinely believe that neither of us to really understand cost versus effect of extracting what fossil fuels.

[Ian]

I'm not talking about exact costs or exact.

[Tessa]

And therefore I don't think we're best placed to discuss.

[Ian]

Well, but you, but, but do you understand my point?

[Tessa]

I think the bigger point.

[Ian]

No, no, no, again, don't try and deflect onto a different argument. Is it just logically forget all the economics of it. Is it logically better to transport oil and gas halfway around the world with all the emissions that these big ships make than to take it out of the North Sea where we already have it? That logic would dictate that it is not sensible to do that.

[Tessa]

It wouldn't. But, but we also know that, that it's not just about logic because what we drill and extract from the North Sea doesn't immediately belong to us. So it's more complicated than that, Ian.

[Ian]

And you know, I'm not pretending that this is in any way simplistic, but I think the problem is that because you have decided that you have this climate change anxiety, you are obsessed with it in a way that comes across as zealotry. So therefore everything has to be about renewables immediately. Therefore we must ditch all oil immediately. And life doesn't work like that.

[Tessa]

I get that. Funnily enough, I don't think that. I think first of all there has been in the last 20 years deliberate kind of watering down or reducing or breaking up the messaging for fear of scaring people. The truth is the rate at which the climate change breakdown is happening is faster than the climate science scientists initially predicted. So we're now on the outer limits of that 1.5 degree heating by 2050, it's now looking like it's going to be 2.

[Ian]

Well, in Europe at the moment it's 3.5.

[Tessa]

There you are. Thank you. And that would take us by the end of this century to an equivalent change if it carried on at this rate, to crushing the ice age from 5,000 years into 100 years. And so the economic impact of what's happening is so monumental that whether we drill a pocket of oil in the North Sea or not, I think is neither here nor there.

[Ian]

Well, glad, I'm glad you agree with that. Where I think therefore you'll have no objection when we do it.

[Tessa]

Where I think the money and the infrastructure, the investment in the infrastructure would be better spent and where the heat of the debate should sit is building preventative infrastructure. And I include in that these reservoirs. So between 1992 and the, and I think 2029, it's when it's going to open. We haven't built a single reservoir. We built continually reservoirs during the Industrial Revolution, particularly in the north, because of the growth of those cities up there. Again, we built continually, not just in the north, reservoirs in the wake of the Second World War. What we've had since the 1980s is a quickly, a rapidly rising population. We've had a big migration influx and extended life. And we've also, this predicted climate change. We're going to have these hotter summers, we're going to have these droughts. It's all come home to release.

[Ian]

We've done absolutely nothing as part of your argument. You've just argued for zero immigration, but

[Tessa]

we've lowered our immigration. But no, what I'm saying is I don't, but I don't have an issue actually with the immigration.

[Ian]

The more immigrants you have, the more, the more they contribute to climate change.

[Tessa]

No, no.

[Ian]

Well, you just said that. No, you did. You said with population growth and most of our, virtually all of our population growth has been due to immigration. With population growth, you. More climate change.

[Tessa]

No, you don't have more climate change.

[Ian]

But you just said that.

[Tessa]

No, I didn't. You have more stress on a system that's impacted by climate change. So we have water shortages we never previously had and we have excessive water demand because there's more of us. And therefore.

[Ian]

So if we didn't have more of us, we wouldn't have that demand.

[Tessa]

No, but obviously if you have more people, you need to build more infrastructure. So I would argue absolutely.

[Ian]

But that's, that's happened on all, in all sorts of ways. Roads, doctor Surgery, schools, The whole of infrastructure, not just reservoirs.

[Tessa]

Although, and I thought it was brilliantly put by someone from the environmental agency last night, there is not a single foodstuff that you consume which doesn't require water. So it is H2O is the essence of life.

[Ian]

I'm trying to think of one now.

[Tessa]

So while you don't want a pothole for your electric vehicle and I want my HR2 patches, I would argue neither are as important as making sure we all have safe water, and particularly we are able to give our agriculture the water they require. And actually the system is at breaking point. And Keir Starmer, to be fair to him, he couldn't sell. He was a manager, he couldn't deliver the message. He signed off 10 reservoirs prior to leaving office. Yeah, we've got 10 now in the pipeline, but most of them aren't going to bear fruit until about 2050.

[Ian]

No. Because the planning system will make sure that they're delayed.

[Tessa]

And that is where. And I think when you drill into, forgive the pun, what's going on, it's the danger of the democracy vis a vis the existential crisis that's coming down the track. Democracy is not the best.

[Ian]

No. Well, you may. You may be right there. But also, and this is what I fear, and this comes into something we've talked about before. I'm currently writing a book proposal on resilience and part of one of the chapters on this is going to be about water resilience. Why are you laughing?

[Tessa]

Just. Just wonder what you think that most 10 important things are for a Resilient life.

[Ian]

Well, that maybe that's the subject for another podcast.

[Tessa]

A Hot French Fireman in the Basement. Anyway, continuing.

[Ian]

Don't judge others by your own standards. Wouldn't say no, though. Now you've put me off my stroke, as they say. Oh, don't laugh at your own jokes, Ian. No, we have got to be resilient in all sorts of ways. But one of the issues with resilience is public behavior. And I'm really worried that we are going to get to a point in our society and this is not just about climate change. This could be in all sorts of other ways, all sorts of other threats to our system. The banking system went down if the Internet was unavailable for six months, that the human being is programmed, or some human beings are just programmed to then cause trouble in society. And we've seen it happen before. It's often depicted in movies. You look at 28 days later. Have you seen that? I know, it's a zombie movie. But I mean society just breaks down and that could ease so easily happen. And I don't think that we have any comprehension how fragile agile the society is that we've grown up with, that we've got used to and it could all shatter within a few weeks.

[Tessa]

Two points on resilience. One is, I think Covid showed us that most people are biddable actually. They like rules and they tend to obey rules. People who weren't obeying the rules were invariably number 10. So I'm not, I'm forgive that that cheap throwaway, but I think actually I'm not worried about the majority of people doing the right thing when push comes to shove. You see in France at the moment, actually what's been really heartening is the way everyone's pulled together, have given up being a spivy lawyer or you know, running a hotel in Bordeaux and they've gone back home and they're doing what they can. And there is something about the human spirit that rallies.

[Ian]

No, I think that's right.

[Tessa]

I think one of the worries, and we see this as one of the reasons why we can't make peace with any leader we're given is how slow the system is. So you're right about planning holding up, for example, reservoirs. This actually was a Reservoir act, it was called the Reservoir act, passed in 1975, which regulates their safety. But to get reservoirs through one, bypass that. And by the way, the current reservoirs that are in planning, some of them bypass Parliament. The requirements of Parliament have been upscaled to Steve whatever, he's lost his job. So who's his replacement? Yeah, I don't know, whoever's Angela Rayner. Yeah, Angela. Well, she's going to be just ticking those boxes because she's going to be wanting reservoirs for all those new houses she's building for her chums in the north. But the point is that you can then get disaster masters because there was a large reservoir built in Wales. This was when demand was growing in Liverpool in 1995 and a Welsh village was earmarked to serve the city. A decade later the village was flooded. 75 people had to leave their homes, etc because the planning actually wasn't as tickety boo as far as it needed to be. So while on the one hand a benign dictatorship works, or in theory it should, like a sort of Victorian equivalent, if you like you do need checks and balances and checks and balances take time. And what scares me and the reason I'm genuinely anxious is this climate shit, this clusterfuck is happening. So Much quicker. And the problem is, Ian, why do I worry about my wood burner in the winter if the size of Greece is burning every year? You know, we are releasing because of these fires. It's like the vicious circle. It is Dante's Inferno, but with fangs in it. Because actually, we're exacerbating climate change at a rate that we didn't. We didn't anticipate.

[Ian]

Well, I hope everyone isn't climate changed out, because we're going to move on to talk another about. Well, an aspect which Tess has already mentioned. We're going to talk about burning Heather and burning straw from our. From our childhoods, and then Tessa's going to explain to me why she is suffering from climate anxiety. And how does that work?

[Tessa]

I've done that.

[Ian]

Have you? Oh, I thought we hadn't really got.

[Tessa]

I think we've done that. I think we don't want to scare people. I'm sure that a lot of people will be feeling the same as me. And like I say, I'm sure that.

[Ian]

I'm sure there are some people that feel the same as you. But the trouble is, is before you sort of got me off on French fireman, so to speak, so easily distracted, the point I was going to make is that you have to take people with you.

[Tessa]

Yes.

[Ian]

And that this is where I think people on your side of the debate go so over the top that it doesn't take people with you.

[Tessa]

But this, this is. I know Corey will be itching to get in with this razor blade here, but this is. Is where climate change really scares me. Because I'm not trying to convince you, Ian, that we need to build more drones for a possible Russian attack. I'm not even trying to convince you that we need more council houses for your great Aunt Mabel. I'm telling you that. That something's happening that's out with human control. And actually, it's not about taking you with me or not. It's just, what the hell are we going to do about this?

[Ian]

And that's fine, but there is a way to have a rational debate about this, a rational argument about it in a way that doesn't catastrophize, really sort of seek to scare people. And I think that's what you're doing.

[Tessa]

And I would argue that I'm scared precisely because. And millions like me are scared because we don't see any leadership. Burnham's come to power in the middle of a flash drought, the third drought in five years where the whole of Europe's a Tinderbox, where you've had fires from the Cairngorms to Arthur's Seat to the Suffolk Downs, and I've not once heard him mention climate change or the Green agenda. All I've seen is him saying drill, baby, drill to Donald Trump and rescinding on electric vehicle deadlines. I'm sorry. Forgive me for having no faith.

[Ian]

And, yes, I'm sorry, I forgive you for everything. So you have revealed that you were a champion heather burner as a child. I used to love stubble burning. And when John Gummer, when he was Environment secretary in the 1990s, banned stubble burning, my father was apoplectic with rage because. Because he understood that, yes, obviously if you burn stuff, the carbon emissions sort of go into the air. Completely. Got that. But as we said earlier, there is a benefit to burning and it sort of slightly replenishes the soil in ways that I don't begin to understand. So. And we used to either bale straw for, like, litter for the cows and pigs and whatever, and we would sell it to other farmers, or if we couldn't, then we'd just burn it. And it was one of the delights of my childhood to do stubble burning. And I would be doing this at 10 years old, literally doing the burning, not on my own, because I'd have kids from the village with me in my Morris Minor pickup truck. One of them would be sitting on the back with a bit of cloth, which was a light, which had been like petrol had been poured on it, drag it behind, and I would be driving, drag it behind the thing and it would set fire to the field. And there was one time, I remember having about eight kids in the back of this pickup truck. And I suddenly realized that we were surrounded by the fire. And I said, right, get down, we're driving through it. And I was thinking, I hope the bloody petrol tank doesn't catch light. And it was very exciting.

[Tessa]

See, you literally had your wildfire moment, didn't you? You had your Armageddon.

[Ian]

Absolutely.

[Tessa]

You were Will Self. No, not Will Self, was it?

[Ian]

No, not Will Self. Will. I know who you mean.

[Tessa]

Good looking. He saves the world every time.

[Ian]

Will Smith. Yes.

[Tessa]

Take somebody under 40 to get there at the end. Few.

[Ian]

Although Will Smith Must be Independence Day, my favorite film.

[Tessa]

Thank you.

[Ian]

Take that.

[Tessa]

Ian Dale.

[Ian]

Yeah.

[Tessa]

In the 70s in a pickup truck. I only know about heather burning. And just really briefly, because I want to get on to Andy Burnham and Prime Ministerial props. But in Scotland, in the Highlands, you looked forward to Heather Browning because you got paid for it as a child and you'd have your, your heather beaters to put it out and you'd go and light it and it'd be quite controlled.

[Ian]

You never got really big FL through it.

[Tessa]

Did you know the reason you heather burn is because after a couple of years of growth, heather gets these woody stalks and it's less nutritious for the sheep because it's sheep grazing their hill sheep farm. And so if you burn heather, you then get the much more green succulent shoots coming up underneath. And the second reason is as barriers as wildfire barriers. So if you've got a strip of heather that's been burnt, then the next year the flames won't cross that barrier. And the, one of the issues with the SMP is they're saying to preserve the peat, you now have to have a light license. And this is, I think, being introduced in September, you have to have a license in order to be able to heather burn. Now, just knowing that some of the nature of farming is. Oh, what way is the wind blowing? Well, we're going to do a bit of heather burning today because it has to be done a safe day and it can only be done from October to April for obvious reasons. Now, if anyone, if any farmer is like my father, he wasn't big on paperwork. So as soon as you have to have a license for it, that's off putting. You either don't do it or you do it illegally, so. Or you, of course, fill in the paper.

[Ian]

Quite difficult to do it illegally though, isn't it? Because everyone can see you're doing it.

[Tessa]

So I just think they're making it harder. And it's a nice nonsense to say you're preserving these carbon capture peat bogs and you don't want to damage them by burning the heather. When in fact we know that the equivalent of 10 square miles of the Cairngorms going up in Flames for 12 consecutive days puts everything else, a little bit of heather burning or not, into the shade. Heather burning for centuries has been a way of controlling fires and for controlling livestock and what they eat on otherwise.

[Ian]

But bad for climate change?

[Tessa]

Well, no, it's not bad for climate change.

[Ian]

It is because the, there must be sort of carbon emissions from that.

[Tessa]

But if you, if you'd had effective heather burning, for example, I don't know to what extent the Cairngorms that went up, how much of that was heatherland moorland. But if you have breaks that have been burned, then the fire can't cross them and that's One of the issues is because we've been so proficient at putting out fires and controlling fires over the last century, that's exacerbated fire's capacity to overtake us. The Dantes Inferno that everyone's talking about in Europe, it's partly about the wet winters meeting, meaning this extraordinary growth. These warm, wet winters mean that the amount of combustible in a wood, but also we're burning our woods less and therefore when they go up, we can't control them because there's no barriers, there's no burnt barriers.

[Ian]

Talking of burnt, let's go to Burnham.

[Tessa]

Yeah.

[Ian]

You don't really like him, do you?

[Tessa]

Well, I get the social care stuff. It's a nettle that needs to be grasped and I get that that speaks to his heartlands and it speaks to him personally, suddenly speaks to his background, where his parents are at and where potentially his voters sit. But I want him to do more than that. He's now the Prime Minister. And if you look at him posing as the Mayor of Manchester, he was famously beyond carbon neutral. He absolutely led the way. And there's. I know you don't like letters in the Guardian. I know they bring you out in hives.

[Ian]

I don't read them. That's been a letter given up on the Guardian. I'm. Some of their headlines recently are just unbelievable.

[Tessa]

There's been a letter in the Guardian from the previous. Previous men and women who drew up this kind of carbon neutral city that he lorded over and owned, by the way. He was the Green Mayor and how that they feel he's on the brink of letting them down nationally rather than upscaling this nationally. He has effectively left the room and he's busy talking out the other side of his mouth. But what I was interested in, Private Eye, he's really always quite quick to hold the Prime Minister to account, I noticed. Got very distracted. A bit like you with football. In Ian, they were talking about Andy's wardrobe.

[Ian]

Private. I was, yes. Okay. I haven't read this week's issue yet.

[Tessa]

The Prime Ministers.

[Ian]

I sometimes am. I was in the Coleman Balls column once for something I said. I can't remember what it was. That's one of my proudest moments.

[Tessa]

I didn't get into the small print, which is where I think you may have been.

[Ian]

No, that's one of your problems, Tessa. You never get into the small print.

[Tessa]

But Barnum was the head headline, right. And they were talking about this very expensive suit jacket and the Daily Mail saying, oh, how much he's Speaking. Well, at least Lord ali hasn't bought £499, I think. But he's bought it himself. He's. That. He's the headmaster of Britain, for God's sake. You know, he's allowed a nice jacket. But they were saying how clever he's been with his clothes, that he's kind of owned the T shirt. He did that retort when Kemi was saying his white T shirt or his black T shirt says blue, actually, and. And the history of the Prime Ministerial prop and how advantageous it is, whether it's Churchill's cigar, Chamberlain's umbrella was a bit more unfortunate. But Wilson's raincoat, Wellington's boots. And the problem with Starmer, he didn't have a prop. He was so nothing. He was so kind of grey. He had no usp.

[Ian]

I think that's right. I mean, you've been away for half of Burnham's 10 days as Prime Minister. But I have to say, I'm quite impressed in a way that I didn't think I would be. He is a. He is a great communicator. He's very natural. I mean, I do sort of clench my buttocks a little bit at some of his TikTok videos. I think he's doing far too many of them.

[Tessa]

Are you watching him ticking?

[Ian]

I'm watching his videos. I'm not quite sure what you mean by that.

[Tessa]

Well, you know, Tiktoking. You know, I don't go there. I mean, it's.

[Ian]

Well, it all goes on Instagram, so I. He's always coming up in my feed. In fact, I had three Andy Burnham videos in a row last night.

[Tessa]

But see how he's talking to you.

[Ian]

This is a little bit more much now.

[Tessa]

What? But, no, but, Ian, he's talking to you.

[Ian]

The strategy he's adopting, and I think it's very clever. This is out of the Donald Trump playbook. Make yourself the story and talk about it relentlessly. And he's very good at talking. And like, have you seen that clip he did in the care home yesterday with the guy who says, well, who are you? Then? He's. And he gets all bashful and he says, are you. Are you. Are you the local candidate? And Andy Burnham says, well, I was a candidate, but I'm the Prime Minister. He goes, well, it's a new Prime Minister. And Andy Burnham says, yeah, there's been quite a few, haven't there? And laughs. And it, it was. It was just very natural. And he, He. He wasn't putting on an act. And I thought that's going to go down well. But then he does a few of these other things where this is on the number 10 account. I can't remember what the subject was now, but someone throws him a football, it suddenly appears in his hands, I think, I mean, you've got to be a bit, you've got to ration these a little bit now in the first couple of weeks you want to make your mark, you want to show hyperactivity, that you know what you're doing. You've got lots of policies that you want to announce. And from that point of view, he's been quite successful. But I just wonder at the first sign of difficulty, is this strategy going to work?

[Tessa]

Well, I think the key there is he's opened the channel of communication, he's hitting you on TikTok, he'll be hitting thousands.

[Ian]

And he's not playing the mainstream media game. I mean, he did an interview with Laura Kunsberg which I still haven't watched, which I must. He's done answered a few questions from journalists, but he's going over the head of the mainstream media. Now that in some ways is probably a good thing. But that might come back to haunt him in times of difficulty when he really does need to be scrutinized as Prime Minister. If Parliament's not sitting, who's going to do that? That it can't just be these sort of cozy little sit downs with an unknown podcaster.

[Tessa]

I agree, but he is. It's a leaf out of Farage's playbook, isn't it? It's about setting your own agenda to an extent, establishing your own channels. So when it goes Pete Tong and the mainstream media aren't saying what you want to say, you can actually directly address the electorate. I don't blame him on any of that. I just. And I understand why he's myopically focused on the, you know, the number 10 of the North Forth care homes. You can only do one thing at a time. So I'm waiting for the environmental agency to have a turn next week. I mean it, Ian. I feel like he mustn't forget that actually the majority of Labour MPS in Parliament at the moment sit in seats that are from the metropolitan areas and the metropolitan areas are full of young people and they're full of young women. And we care. And we don't just care, we do care about social, social care and we occasionally log on to football. Not in the way that the mainstream media seem to think it should be preoccupying us. I mean, If I have to hear one more story about that FIFA narrative and whether FIFA's got. I mean, FIFA's corrupt, we know FIFA's corrupt, but I don't give a monkeys. The amount of energy and time we've spent talking about football this summer. It will go down into World cup in 20 years time as the biggest distraction. When you look across the map of Europe, what's happening, I'm telling you now, it's scary.

[Ian]

Oh, but I think we've got that.

[Tessa]

Yeah, we've got that message. But I'm just back to Bar Burnham. He's clever. He's clever at the one note stuff, he's clever at what he wears, he's clever at having a prop and also he knows that you have to repeat a message and go at it and go at it and go at it. So if we talk about his T shirt again and again and again, if we see him with a football again and again and again, if we remember that he's from the north again and again and again. It's like Sadiq Khan when he was up for election and the media said, you keep on telling us your dad was a bus driver. And Sadiq Khan turned around and he said, well, maybe that, that means one person who's voting will remember it.

[Ian]

Well, I think on that point, which I've now forgotten what I was going to say because you. What was I going to say? Oh, I know about the, the north south thing. I think I said this on the last podcast, but you weren't there. So let me, let me tell you because I think this is quite important on the Saturday before he became pm, or maybe I have said this to you before about John. John. When I told John.

[Tessa]

Yes. That the ID excluded, he said he's not talking to me or something.

[Ian]

Well, no, he said, when I told, I told him the digital ID cards thing was being canceled and he just immediately said, oh, I thought he was canceling the south of England. And I, I think that narrative is catching hole in a way that he won't be able to control.

[Tessa]

Let's see, there was a big program on the BBC about the history of the north versus the south and why the south always carried the clout, political and otherwise. Quite interesting actually. There's one of the very rare times when that narrative was slightly flipped or rebalanced was during the Industrial Revolution when the minerals, the textiles, the workforce, that the muscle, if you like, the economic muscle, sat in the north. But somebody texted in and said, well, if you draw the map from lizards Point to the Shetland Islands, you will discover that Manchester's in the south of the British.

[Ian]

No, that is true. That is true. And of course, if you live in Newcastle, you don't consider Manchester the north. So he's got to, he's got to be careful about that.

[Tessa]

And, but, but, but, you know, it's early doors. Of course I'm never going to be happy, but I, I remain, I remain hopeful. But I need him to talk to me. He's talking to you but at the moment. Well, you said he keeps on appearing in your feeds. He's not.

[Ian]

Well, yeah, I mean to say that he's necessarily talking to me as a person.

[Tessa]

No, but the algorithms are feeding you him. They're not feeding him to me. Me. And I've got lots of French firemen in my.

[Ian]

Maybe you. Maybe you.

[Tessa]

That's all.

[Ian]

Maybe you're a lost cause, you know.

[Tessa]

You know, with the algorithms. Up until now I've had sort of Nicole Kidman, scary looking 50 year old women with facelifts looking at me, trying to sell me kind of products to make me younger and suddenly it's just fire because I must have gone on with the qr.

[Ian]

No, I'm not getting any of that. I'm getting a lot. I'm getting a lot of Iranians at the moment and I'm getting a lot of. How should we put it? Scantily clad young men.

[Tessa]

Jesus.

[Ian]

Bizarre. I don't know what I've been looking at to provoke that.

[Tessa]

I can't think. Ian, will we go to questions?

[Ian]

I think we should. Have you got some? So hit me with a question.

[Tessa]

Well, first of all, this is from Yilmaz. He says, listen to your latest episode while baking and lemon drizzle.

[Ian]

Cake.

[Tessa]

Cake.

[Ian]

That's one cake I don't like.

[Tessa]

Oh, it's delicious. If my mum makes it, it's exquisite. If it's done homemade.

[Ian]

You said something nice about your mum.

[Tessa]

I'm very fond of my mother.

[Ian]

I know you are.

[Tessa]

I can't believe you let me down like that. Hi, Mum. Found your heated debate on taxation really interesting. And this was when we were discussing the wealth tax and once again, it was like you, a slightly sort of similar space to where you are with climate. Anyway, maybe it's me that's wrong. If you. This is his text. Now, if you were a labourer pm, putting aside your own political views, which tax would you raise and why? Every tax rise is going to have people who lose out in some way and it's easy to point this out. But more challenging to propose plausible alternatives. Listen to tax expert Dan Needle call for replacing council tax with a land value tax. He says around 80% of people would benefit while 20% of people would pay a lot more and scream loudly about it. Thank you, Yilmaz.

[Ian]

I have a very simple answer to that. I don't believe in putting up taxes, so I wouldn't put up a tax. I would be looking at either reducing taxes or lowering or abolishing taxes because that's the way that you get economic activity. It is a proven economic fact. I accept that in the short term for, for example, I mean social care, possibly you might have to fiddle with tax rates, but there are all sorts of different ways of funding social care from existing budgets. If you actually look into it quite deeply. Who was I talking to the other day? Anyway, we don't get into social care but defence spending. I mean there, I think there might well be a case for doing something as a one off over a period of four or five years. But we've got to the point where taxes for just ordinary earners are so high now that I think the pips are about to squeak because the tax thresholds have not been raised for years and I do blame the Conservative governments for that. They should have never frozen the tax thresholds in the way that they did. So if you're a middle income earner with a young family, you are paying percentage wise a far higher proportion of your income in tax than you were 10 years ago ago.

[Tessa]

Dear Ian, I know at the moment you feel quite warm towards Andy Barnum and that's deliberate. He's gone out there, jazz hands being the mayor, promising. But he's already alluded to the fact and I've picked up on this just in the last 24 hours return from France, alluded to the pain that will follow to pay for what he's planning. Particularly with social care, there will be tax rises. Yeah, that's for sure.

[Ian]

I'm absolutely convinced you're right on that. I mean, ducks quack, Labour governments put up taxes. That's always been the way.

[Tessa]

And if it's to pay for infrastructure to save us, I'm all for it. Jack McCarthy says Dear Dr. Tessa and Uncle Ian. Ian appears to say that if a billionaire's tax affairs are legal, then there isn't a problem for politicians to solve. But that's exactly what politicians are elected to decide. If the law allows some people to pay a relatively low effective tax rate brackets all their economic gains divided by the tax they pay, the question of whether it is fair is a political issue, not an enforcement one. Ian is using income tax figures to illustrate his point. But we all know that the exponential increase in the wealth of the richest is coming from assets rather than earned income. Wow, he's putting this so much better than I did. I continue. Yes, the wealthiest are able to hold on to assets. If they don't sell them, they pay no capital gains. They're able to borrow against their own assets and pay the interest rate rather than paying tax. We're all for people making money. That's what pays for all of the services that we depend on. We should tax people on how rich they become, though, not just on what they earn.

[Ian]

Well, that's okay as long as you've actually got the cash to pay a tax. He's right in saying that a lot of people have become rich through assets. A lot of ordinary people have become rich through assets, mainly their home. But you can't say to somebody, well, through no influence of your own, your house has increased in value by 10 times over the last 20 years. So therefore, we're going to charge you an extra tax of £5,000 a year because of that. Because I wouldn't have the 5,000 pounds a year to pay it. Because you have that asset sitting there, it doesn't provide you with any cash. For example, land value tax. I don't quite know how this would work. So people can feel free to contest this. My house is on a 12 acre redundant farm. I derive no income from that land whatsoever. Now, I'm pretty sure that under a land value tax instead of council tax, the amount I would pay would have to rise by quite a lot. I don't know how much, but say it was ten grand a year. Now, okay, you can say, doing what I do now, I could pay an extra 10 grand a year, but a lot of people wouldn't be able to. So what do you do then? Do they then have to sell up with the home that they've lived in for donkey's years? All of these reforms have consequences. And of course, there are always winners and losers to any reform of the tax system. But there comes a point where people think, no, it's completely unfair. There is that you?

[Tessa]

Yes, I tried to turn it off. I don't know what's happened.

[Ian]

Sorry.

[Tessa]

Oh, no, I know what it is. It's on my. No, I know what's happened. It's. My computer's open. Sorry. It's not my phone, it's my computer. Oh. Literally, I'm having A climate meltdown. I've overheated.

[Ian]

That's the red card from Corey.

[Tessa]

There we are. It's amazingly. It's also stopped it on my computer. Oh, cut that Bitcoin.

[Ian]

Anyway, I won that argument. So let's go to a question from Nikki Larkin. Dear Ian and Tessa. Nikki is a super fan, by the way.

[Tessa]

I know who Nikki is.

[Ian]

Did you meet her at the book launch?

[Tessa]

No, but I know who she is because we relate to each other.

[Ian]

The number number of millionaires in the UK is shrinking. This isn't a good sign for us economically or for confidence for growth. We have also fallen out of the top 10 for billionaires now at 12th in the world. Reduced business confidence stops the 5.7 million business owners in the UK from pressing ahead with hiring and investment decisions, which PM in history gave the biggest comfort to business owners. And how well do you contest any of that?

[Tessa]

I just think that the idea that billionaires drive wealth and employment, actually, when we're talking about the sort of nature of the super rich, the untouchables, the Jeff Bezos, there's very few of them. They number hundreds.

[Ian]

We haven't got any of those.

[Tessa]

We do. That's not true. We do. In Our Times Top 100 list, there are a few you seriously rich individuals who evade normal taxation. And they're not the sort of person,

[Ian]

again you say that word, evade. If they evade it, they presumably are taken to court for evading taxes.

[Tessa]

This tax system doesn't address their wealth.

[Ian]

There are 157 billionaires in this country now, apparently far fewer than I would have thought. A lot of them, not all, but a lot of them, do provide the seed capital for new businesses. They invest in new businesses. That's how they've actually accumulated their wealth, wealth over the years. And if you drive those people out of the country, and I'm not just talking about billionaires, I'm talking about multimillionaires too. If you say to them, look, you're not really welcoming, we don't want you, you're not paying enough tax. So if you want to go, that's fine. And that's the Gary Lineker view of the world. Gary Lineker, who the day is about,

[Tessa]

he's not a billionaire.

[Ian]

No, he isn't a billionaire, but he tells us he wants to pay more tax, yet it turns out that he's trying to pay less tax in negotiations with the hmrc. I regard that as complete and utter hypocrisy. There's a simple way for millionaires to Pay more tax, write a check to the treasury, because they can pay it directly into a Treasury account. So I don't want. I'll give you an example. When I started buyback in 2008, I had no money to start the business. Who did I go to? Michael Ashcroft, a billionaire. What did he do? Put, over the next five years, close to a million pounds into the business. Now, that business would not have existed had he not done that. I couldn't have borrowed the money from a bank. I wasn't going to put my house up as security. So when you slag off these people for being filthy rich or whatever, you never sort of take into account that they do actually often do some very good things. Do you have a response to that?

[Tessa]

No, it's just I think that one of our most outstanding arguments was about Lord Ashcroft and me questioning his political influence. And now I realise that when you stood up him so vociferously, there was more to the relationship than initially met my eyes.

[Ian]

It's no secret that he provided the funding for Bite Back to start.

[Tessa]

No, I'm sure, but I just didn't.

[Ian]

You've always been open about that.

[Tessa]

I know. I never thought to ask, but. But also, I. I'm not asking that we chase them out of the country. I'm simply saying some people are. They need to be taxed at a commensurate level with the rest of us, and they're not. Their wealth isn't taxed to the degree of even 2%.

[Ian]

No, but. But my point. My point was that Michael Ashcroft and his ilk, they are clearly very rich people. Do they automatically have millions of pounds at their disposal to pay extra tax? Because most of their money is tied to up in companies like mine and other assets. So just because someone is filthy rich does not mean that they have millions in their bank account.

[Tessa]

No, that's true. But given we don't want to deter people from work, because that's an issue we've got in this country, actually diminishing tax returns from income and actually a diminishing employment pool, where do we get our money from? You have to tax assets.

[Ian]

Assets.

[Tessa]

And I'm sorry, if that means Michael Ashcroft has to liquidate a couple of assets to make sure that he pays his 2% threshold, then so be it. And if that means, by the way, he's so deterred he's going to leave the country, which I don't believe he will, because he really is sort of England personified, then we continue taxing him. Even when he leaves the country because he's enjoyed being English for so long and his identity revolves around it and all his connections and money have been made here, and I don't have any issue with that. Several people have had an issue with our discussion about the word onanistic, Ian.

[Ian]

Have they?

[Tessa]

They seem to think that you're correct. Some of them. They believe that onanism.

[Ian]

I'll tell you what, there's no bigger expert on onanism than me.

[Tessa]

Well, I see. And I would argue that both the literal and the figurative meanings suit you.

[Ian]

And I probably wouldn't disagree.

[Tessa]

Right. So Jonathan, among others, that only really is about the literal meaning of onanistic, which is pertaining to the act of masturbation.

[Ian]

Masturbation derived from the bit or the

[Tessa]

origin of the word, which is derived from the biblical figure Onan from the book of Genesis, where it all began, my friend.

[Ian]

Now here's a question for you, and I've only just thought of this. Where does the word wanker come from anyway? I'm sure people can provide the answer to that. I did ask on the program last time night. Where does Mrs. Miggins come from? Who was Mrs. Miggins? Do you know the answer to that?

[Tessa]

No, I don't. Or know where Mac Wanka comes?

[Ian]

Well, Mrs. Miggins was a character in Blackadder the Fourth, but also she was a character in Victorian fiction. So when you talk about Mrs. Miggins from 32 Acacia Avenue, I suspect it comes from Victorian times rather than Blackadder.

[Tessa]

But back to on.

[Ian]

Back to back. Back to Wang.

[Tessa]

If the literal meaning is about masturbation.

[Ian]

Masturbation, it's not. Corey, come on, you're an expert on this.

[Tessa]

Oh, or withdrawal incidentally. So not just the self pleasure.

[Ian]

Corey's gone quiet.

[Tessa]

Yeah, he's gone very quiet this episode. It's because he outed himself as someone who has bottled water delivered to his door. If ever there was a masturbatory act, that is it.

[Ian]

Okay, second red card.

[Tessa]

Withdrawal. So onanism is masturbation and or withdrawal. So not completing the sexual act. Not.

[Ian]

It's not.

[Tessa]

I'm so sorry. This is the literal and sexual meanings. And thirdly, and where I think this is really the slam dunk for Ian, the triple crown. It figuratively means self absorbed, excessively focused on oneself, or unproductive, serving only for emotional intellectual self regard without creating any real external value.

[Ian]

Oh, that's me all over.

[Tessa]

Where's your resilience, my friend?

[Ian]

That next book right now this is one from Hannah. I'm not sure if she's a podcast listener or she's just sent this to me anyway, but I will tell her we're answering on the podcast. A couple of months ago, for my birthday, my dad arranged a cameo from you. I am on cameo, by the way.

[Tessa]

Right. Oh, is that you and Nigel?

[Ian]

Yeah. I'm cheaper than him from you because I'm a big fan of both you and the All Talk podcast. It was such a lovely surprise. I'm a dog trainer and I'm looking to start a podcast interviewing other dog trainers and behaviorists about their journeys and some of the challenges within the industry. I was wondering whether you might be willing to share any advice on getting started. One thing I love about All Talk is its conversational style. We've got an interview with Emily Maitlis on All Talk this week.

[Tessa]

She's been busy.

[Ian]

Well, no. Admitted it was from 2019, but chasing around.

[Tessa]

Mind doing her thing on Virginia Dufresne?

[Ian]

I'd love to know how you balance researching your guests and making sure you've covered the key points you want to explore while still leaving room for the conversation to flow naturally and go somewhere unexpected. I understand you're incredibly busy and I'm sure you receive lots of requests like this, so there's absolutely no pressure. But if you did have a few tips to share, I'd be incredibly grateful. Well, I don't do any research. That's one tip. If you want to have a conversational podcast, have a conversation.

[Tessa]

Don't you have to know a bit about their background?

[Ian]

Well, it. I very rarely interview anybody who I know nothing about them. I mean, often they might have a book out. I'm not necessarily going to read the book, but I might skim through it. But generally they're people I've heard of or I just know. And I think that does apply here where Hannah is an expert dog trainer. So, I mean, what does she need to research? I mean, she's got the experience. I mean, people often say to me, well, how. How do you do your program? You. You don't know necessarily anything about the subject. And I'm saying, no. I spent 40 years accumulating the knowledge in my head, and so I sort of deploy that as much as I can. You don't need to have a list of questions when you're interviewing somebody. If you have a list of questions, you will inevitably answer them in the audience, order that you've written them down on the. On the paper. That destroys a conversation.

[Tessa]

But you can have a list of points you want to hit.

[Ian]

You can have some bullet points about subject areas.

[Tessa]

Yeah.

[Ian]

And I sometimes do that if I'm interviewing a really important celebrity or an important politician. The worst thing you can do is get to the end of the interview and then the person's gone, and then ten minutes later, oh, my God, I forgot to ask them about that.

[Tessa]

Yeah, the most important thing.

[Ian]

Yeah. So I. I do suggest doing that sort of thing and have a structure to the podcast. I mean, I say that we don't necessarily adhere to that ourselves, do we, Tessa?

[Tessa]

I think this one's been a little bit unwieldy.

[Ian]

It's been a little bit unwieldy.

[Tessa]

Unbalanced.

[Ian]

But I mean, in a way, people get used to us. They. They listen to the podcast because they kind of know that we're going to be a little bit like that. We're not producing a radio show. A podcast is not a radio show. It. There can be mistakes. Doesn't matter if the sound isn't 100% as it you need it to be.

[Tessa]

I think it upsets me when it isn't, because I know you that. What I don't like about recording remotely is for some reason, we've both got the exact same microphone, and Ian sounds deeper and louder than me in the

[Ian]

record, and I don't have a loud voice.

[Tessa]

It's weird. It's almost like you've got more authority.

[Ian]

This is going to be the last live podcast for some time, isn't it? Because I'm going to be away for quite a bit and. And then you are. Well, that'll be painted painful, but I'm going to be around for the next couple of weeks.

[Tessa]

We'll push through.

[Ian]

We'll push through. And then Tessa will recruit some live young firemen to take my place for the second half of August.

[Tessa]

We'll find some way of making it work. Au revoir, mon petit chou.

[Ian]

Do you have another one?

[Tessa]

I think that's enough at the moment. I'm going to save some for next week.

[Ian]

Right now, I want you to sit there silently for 30 seconds without interrupting while I plug my Edinburgh shows. Cut this bit, Corey, because next week, well, on Saturday, and there will be a lot of podcast listeners who will want to know this. Corey and I are off to Jackie Smith's wedding to page three Boy, where I've got to do a reading. Corey won't be there for that, which I'm really sad about, because he's only invited to the evening.

[Tessa]

Oh, no, it's sheep and goats is It.

[Ian]

Yeah.

[Tessa]

Which is, Corey, a sheep or a goat?

[Ian]

Well, I don't know what the difference is.

[Tessa]

I don't know. But, you know, you get those weddings where they let some in for one

[Ian]

bit and some in for going to the first bit. I'm happy to be a goat, by the way.

[Tessa]

I think actually you're a sheep. I think goats are the. The finer. Biblical.

[Ian]

On Sunday, I'm flying to Dublin from Birmingham airport. So I'm staying in Dublin for three days, then going down to Cork to speak at the. The West Cork History Festival at a very lovely place called Inish Beg. It's a little island. And then. So that's next Friday. And then I have to fly to Scotland from Cork airport on Friday evening to start my Edinburgh run on Saturday with Nicola Sturgeon. We're streeting and Zach Polanski and 12 other shows. Tickets available at ian.iandale.com forward/events. And if you, if you do come to it, I often get people saying, oh, I came to your Edinburgh show. And I'm thinking, well, why didn't you say hello? Because I'm always sort of available afterwards. And I should be signing books afterwards too, of course.

[Tessa]

Well, I think one of the pods. You could replace me with Nicola Sturgeon. We've talked about her so often.

[Ian]

Well, she was. You remember my slutty summer?

[Tessa]

Yes.

[Ian]

She was supposed to be a tryout for this.

[Tessa]

Why don't you pop her? I will defect to Nicola so long as you ask her probing questions. Oh, one of them has to be, why didn't the SFP procure waterbomb helicopters when they had even worse wildfires last year? Yeah, they didn't have any this year. They had to once again get them off a private company. They asked the UK Army. The UK army don't have water bombing helicopters. They offered them Chinooks for some heavy lifting. And then the national, the Nationalist newspaper, tried to blame it on the UK

[Ian]

government, which I've just canceled my subscription for.

[Tessa]

Right. So I'm happy to delegate my. My seat for a. For a show to Nicola Sturgeon, so long as you push her hard on that kind of behavior where you literally have got a bushfire and you're blaming.

[Ian]

But just remember, Nicholas St. Sturgeon left office in 2021.

[Tessa]

It's the copycat behavior, though. It's always just blame Westminster. It was a bit like when we blame.

[Ian]

No, I have asked about that before and you're absolutely right. So we will reconvene next week, but it'll have to be remotely and we look forward to it greatly.

[Tessa]

Always cheer. For now,

[Ian]

this has been a global production.