Russia’s war with Ukraine is escalating dramatically – as we record reports have begun to emerge about Ukraine firing British long-range “Storm Shadow” missiles into Russia. Nish and Coco are joined on the couch by Stephen Bush, associate editor at the Financial Times, to discuss the chance of…World War Three?

 

Meanwhile – closer to home – we find out why farmers are descending on Westminster. How big a blow is the Government’s budget for farmers and will Labour face a wipe out of rural supporters?

 

And as Elon Musk is summoned to testify about X’s role in the UK summer riots, we’ll be speaking to Jamie Bartlett misinformation expert and host of hit podcasts “The Missing Cryptoqueen” and “The Gatekeepers” about Musk’s influence in politics and if we should all be quitting X.

 

Guests:

Stephen Bush

Jamie Bartlett

 

Useful Links:

Jamie Bartlett’s Substack – How to Survive the Internet

https://substack.com/@jamiejbartlett

Jamie Bartlett’s BBC Radio 4 podcast on the rise of social media’s power – The Gatekeepers

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001w207

 

Audio Credits:

Sky News

BBC

Instagram / Rebecca Wilson

ITV News

 

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TRANSCRIPT

 

Coco Khan Hi, this is Pod Save the UK. I’m Coco Khan.

 

Nish Kumar And I’m Nish Kumar. Are you feeling a bit on edge, Coco?

 

Coco Khan Why because of all the nuclear war chat in the air?

 

Nish Kumar Yeah, just a little soups on of nuclear war chat in the air.

 

Coco Khan It does feel like a good reason to be on edge, doesn’t it?

 

Nish Kumar Yeah. I mean, I’m not not Googling bunkers.

 

Coco Khan You know, it’s so funny you mentioned bunkers because I did have a thought the other day. Which of my friends would be most likely to have a bunker and should I become closer to them? Weird that you don’t often rank your friends by bunkers? But, you know, these are the times we live in.

 

Nish Kumar Fascinated to know where I can go. In any case, we’re going to try and separate Putin’s rhetoric from reality and work out what the UK’s next steps would be with Stephen Bush from the Financial Times.

 

Coco Khan Yes, And meanwhile, close to home, thousands of farmers have turned out to protest changes to inheritance tax. The question is, have the government picked the wrong fight?

 

Nish Kumar And later, we examine Elon Musk’s influence on British politics with misinformation expert Jamie Bartlett.

 

Coco Khan This week. The G20 was held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, amidst a backdrop of escalation in the war in Ukraine. As we record 1001 days into the war, US President Joe Biden has authorized Ukrainian use of American made long range missiles for launch into Russia. It’s been reported that the UK is likely to follow suit, allowing use of our own long range storm shadow missiles.

 

Nish Kumar Overnight, the Biden administration went even further, approving the supply of anti-personnel landmines to the Ukrainians, with the aim of halting Russian troop advances. The Kremlin described the authorization of long range strikes as throwing oil on a fire. And on Tuesday, Vladimir Putin signed a decree lowering the threshold for the use of nuclear weapons, which is very scary stuff. A few hours after signing the decree, the first US missiles struck Russian soil.

 

Coco Khan Meanwhile, Prime Minister Keir Starmer has been attempting to reset our relationship with China as Donald Trump’s proposed import tariffs threaten the UK’s prospects of economic growth. Here to make sense of all of these battlegrounds, I think we could call them geopolitical battlegrounds is Stephen Bush, associate editor at the Financial Times. Welcome, Stephen.

 

Stephen Bush Thanks so much for having me.

 

Nish Kumar Steven, how do you feel about us wheeling you out to talk about War three?

 

Stephen Bush Well, I guess the thing which is oddly reassuring about talking about World War Three is that anything you say about it, if it’s overoptimistic, no one’s going to know.

 

Nish Kumar Yeah, yeah.

 

Stephen Bush Yeah. Ultimately, people can take it up with the shadow of me on the wall, right? But so in some ways it’s kind of like the easiest one. If you get something wrong about the economy while people will actually be around to notice that right.

 

Nish Kumar Yeah, it’s a it’s an interesting thing. People keep saying, you always think about it with the climate crisis where they’re like, history will judge us. So do you like what history is going to be like fighting in a road war? Like, I don’t remember a Mad Max film where they stop for a sort of history lesson. And yeah, how big a deal is yours? Resumption of long range missile strikes into Russia?

 

Stephen Bush Well, it isn’t. It isn’t. It’s a big deal. And then is the thing that for a long time the United States and many in Europe have been reluctant to do because of the fear of escalation, giving Ukraine further capacity to attack into Russia rather than simply trying to repel them. Is a step change in what we’ve done there. It’s a step change and we’ve been gradually ramping up throughout the two years because of Ukraine’s success in holding off on repelling the invasion. We’ve given them more and more kit to do more and more damage. Obviously, the the the big difference now, though, is that everyone assumes that when Donald Trump becomes president, he will try and seek a peace deal on pretty favorable terms to Russia, not least because at the moment, given the state of the conflict, it would be a favorable, yeah, favorable peace settlement to Russia. And then the United States will draw down the level of support in terms of material and weaponry that it gives to Ukraine. So part of the thinking why the departing administration is doing this now is you go, well, Russia’s not going to escalate all the way onto this because they know full well that there is going to be a change in the United States position on this conflict in in by the end of January. But it does give the Ukrainians the hope at a moment to change some of the realities on the battlefield. And they would, in the event of those negotiations happen, going to tend to them into a more favorable situation.

 

Coco Khan That does make sense. But where does that leave the UK? Because imagine America leaves the playing field and we’re still on the playing field. Am I unreasonable in thinking we might be like, God, what’s happening now? Where does that leave us?

 

Stephen Bush To be selfish for a moment, they say this is actually the biggest question of to the British government, not just in Ukraine policy, but in foreign policy. Economic policy in general is what the fuck are you going to do about Donald Trump coming back? It’s not like the first time around where because, you know, the Trump people themselves want certain didn’t think they were going to win the first time around. They haven’t put much thought into what they would do. There were a lot of kind of fairly regular old school Republican politicians in that set up, many of whom saw their role in it as basically, you know what mental shit can I stop happening this time around? Well, all of the people there are either people who’s been willing to say, I know. I thought that was mad, but I actually disagree. You know, there are people like Marco Rubio who lots of people in this country are getting very excited because, you know, he’s been a Russia hawk for a long, long time. Probably that’s less important than the fact that this year he voted to limit military aid to Ukraine and then a bunch of people who are genuine true believers in the whole Trump agenda, which does then raise this huge question of, well, what does it mean for the United Kingdom, who are. Yes, a defense power in European terms? Yeah, obviously, we aren’t going to nor would we ever be able to, to meaningfully replace the role of the United States. Even in our own neighborhood, to be honest. Yeah. Let alone globally.

 

Coco Khan Well, speaking of the big players, China, where do they stand in all of this? At the G-20. Keir Starmer was making efforts to, I guess you say, cozy up to Xi Jinping. Why is this a priority for the government and and how does it relate to what’s happening in the US? Because, you know, Trump made a lot of noise about putting very strong tariffs onto China. I suppose maybe perhaps that’s an opportunity for us in the UK too, to warm up a little bit more to China. I mean, what what do you think of this?

 

Stephen Bush The government’s China policy has sort of two main rationales. The first is obviously got this very ambitious climate target to switch to renewables by 2030. China is currently the main game in town in terms of solar and many other renewables. So you can basically you can have a hostile position towards China or you can have Labour’s climate target, but you can’t have both. Yes. So that’s one reason for the warming of the rhetoric. The other is a broader desire to attract more foreign direct investment from China to strengthen economic ties. I think this builds on if Rishi Sunak and David Cameron had been given a magic wand and told, you know, you can wave a wand and make all of the Conservative MP disappear, which I suppose in a sense Rishi Sunak did do that, then this is the China policy he would have pursued. Yeah, his view was that we’ve had what, eight years of, you know, suggesting that reform, calling them a threat. It’s been bad for direct investment in the UK. It hasn’t done shit for Hong Kongers or the wiggers or for how China comports itself in the world. So that’s the kind of longer running British interest which the Labour government has put rocket boosters under. Because broadly speaking, Keir Starmer doesn’t have to deal with a strong China skeptic faction on his own backbenches in the way that Rishi Sunak was constrained by China hawks within his own party. But Keir Starmer has about he’s about to acquire a much bigger and much more difficult constraint, which is Donald Trump, who yet sees China as a a great power rival. So we actually at the moment and again, a legacy from the last government are quite far down the league table when it comes to the level of tariffs we’ve already put on China. So to be optimistic, I think the United Kingdom might be able to get away with doing is saying to Trump, look, all these new tariffs we put on China and have a situation where we would still be more open to to China than most of the world. That to me doesn’t seem likely. I think a real difficulty for us is going to be the US is going to do its tariffs. There’ll be retaliatory tariffs from the EU, from China, from around the world. And this dream, and I don’t think it was ever a particularly plausible dream, but the the dream of Brexiteers in 2016 of the United Kingdom as a free trading nation becomes very, very difficult and very tightly constrained when you have everyone else doing protectionism. And that is the central problem with the attempted China reset, is that we want to draw the sting out of the UK China relationship at the same point that the sting is going to be, you know, quadrupled in the US-China relationship.

 

Nish Kumar Starmer said that there was a discussion about China’s human rights abuses. How do you square any kind of rhetoric around China’s human rights abuses with the sort of diplomatic and geopolitical realities of how Keir Starmer has to engage with them at the end of the meeting? Does he just go wounded as a human rights like we brought it up, everybody.

 

Coco Khan I mean, this is the question. This is the big question. With so many of our relationships, our relationships to Saudi Arabia, relationships to Israel as well, you know.

 

Stephen Bush A lot of diplomatic community. So the sort of like and then they also discussed acts are in some cases are actually in the room as transparent as domestically. I have to yeah, I have to mention this right. It’s one of the, I think the biggest bits of bullshit in diplomacy, right? This idea that like, giving is going to be like, do you know what? I am deeply doubtful about the value of liberal democracy. I think I’ve said, you know, millions of times, I think it’s in in decline around the world. And then my model of doing things is better. But now.

 

Coco Khan Now that you saw that.

 

Nish Kumar Now that you mentioned it.

 

Stephen Bush Now, now I hear it from the country, which consciously hooked us on opium. Exploited.

 

Nish Kumar Yes. Yeah.

 

Stephen Bush And it’s now has had a decade of sluggish growth since the financial crisis. Now he’s telling me he thinks his system is better and I should follow. Yeah, well.

 

Nish Kumar Yeah, yeah.

 

Coco Khan Everything. Yeah.

 

Stephen Bush Just obviously not going there.

 

Nish Kumar The 4th guy to do this job in the last 20 minutes.

 

Stephen Bush Exactly. Right. It’s obviously not going to happen, right? I mean, but the thing which is going to be more difficult is I think people and I think this is a little bit about racism, right? Then people kind of accept that. Keir Starmer. Whoever the prime minister of the days turns up in China or in a, you know, or a middle Eastern country and goes, please be more nice. And then goes by seeing as you’re not going to come, we have some trade deal.

 

Nish Kumar Yeah. Yeah.

 

Stephen Bush People people kind of accept that as a as a human rights violation. They’re sort of willing to side on. People won’t, I think, accept that. And I think people aren’t going to expect the British government to be more vocal about democratic backsliding in the United States than they would be elsewhere, because, broadly speaking, the people in the United States are mostly white and people mostly thinking, Yeah, well, yeah, that won’t do. And that’s going to be very difficult because ultimately Keir Starmer saying to Donald Trump, Have you considered not transitioning to managed democracy is not gonna be any more effective in the area than it is today than it is when he mumbles something about it to to the Saudis or to the Shik .

 

Nish Kumar Can I just ask you before we let you go? Well, where on a scale of I and I do apologize for the visceral, disgusting of this metaphor. Where on the scale of pants crapping all the Labour government about the incoming Trump administration, are we on it’s just a skid mark and I can make a home. Or are we on a full. I need a full change of clothes.

 

Coco Khan I had no idea you had a full scale. I do want to ask about three four five those levels.

 

Nish Kumar Listen, when you play it as fast and loose as I do with street food. You know, it’s always in the back of your mind.

 

Stephen Bush So I would say people in the government are divided about the extent of the you know, the damage to the trouser leg, as it were.

 

Nish Kumar You’re a respectable journalist. I’m sorry I’m dragged you down to my level.

 

Stephen Bush As you would suspect in some ways. I actually do this when the metaphor becomes troublingly. Actually, to the extent there are some people who really wanted to buy new trousers anyway. Right. And there and so I think there are some people who are kind of like, you know, well, you know, this would mean we could get closer to Europe. And this is like, well, that would be nice, but it doesn’t actually fix any of the security issues. So, yeah, it doesn’t it doesn’t actually fix any of the underlying Trump problems.

 

Nish Kumar It’s very easy to say we should get closer to Europe, but how does that actually mechanically manifest itself? Do they reopen conversations about the single market? I don’t know the customs union. What’s the next phase of that? Yeah, this is one of.

 

Stephen Bush Those things where it’s also people do kind of treat it like it’s going to the shops and like buying a pair of trousers and it’s like, no, actually it involves like taking 27 countries with 27 different sets of politics, some of whom, for their own reasons, would want to veto any UK going, Hey, I know you’re dealing with the fact that Trump’s back and all has a little on fire, but would you like to talk about an economic relationship with us as well?

 

Coco Khan Just continuing with the pants scrapping, I was just curious how much should the average British citizen be crapping their pants? I was saying to me earlier, I’ve got a pal who works for CND Campaign for nuclear Disarmament, and he was saying how it’s interesting because no one’s really interested in the threat of nuclear war at the moment. When we think about apocalyptic events, we think about the climate. Yeah, obviously I’m like, get you a doomsday. That can do both. But I mean, realistically, do you feel that, you know, these tensions that we’re seeing mounting as average citizens, should we be getting more concerned about this? Should we be moving peace higher up on our agenda alongside cost of living and NHS and those traditional things that voters care about in the moment?

 

Stephen Bush I don’t want people listening to this podcast to, you know, spiral into anxiety or, you know.

 

Coco Khan Don’t worry, too late. .

 

Stephen Bush Yeah.

 

Nish Kumar The hosts have already done it.

 

Coco Khan Exactly

 

Stephen Bush But yeah, I think look. One of the things that we’re going to have to accept is that the most powerful country in the world has made a decision in an election that is going to make the lives of. Every American and basically everyone else in the world. Slightly worse, right? And that’s like the optimistic end of the stuff. Yeah, That’s the scenario in which he only like does the tariffs, doesn’t try and deport 20 million people, doesn’t, you know, strike a peace treaty then doesn’t retreat from NATO in a way which causes Russia to go, so great, we’ve got four years to to make a bid for Estonia and doesn’t have a miscalculation between the U.S. and China.

 

Coco Khan Don’t forget climate.

 

Stephen Bush Yeah. And a manifestation of the way he’s going to make everything worse is that, yeah, we are going to have to care and spend more money on. Defense and foreign policy than we’ve had for a very long time in a situation in which we are a society that is getting older, that voted to make itself poorer in 2016, where most of the state doesn’t work anyway. Yeah. So it’s bad.

 

Nish Kumar Crap away folks.

 

Coco Khan Crap away. Well, thank you, Stephen Bush for joining us on Pod Save the UK. We won’t be saving the UK cause we’re all fucking doomed. I think that’s. That’s that remains clear.

 

Nish Kumar Thanks, Stephen.

 

Nish Kumar [AD]

 

Nish Kumar After the break, we’ll be hearing why thousands of farmers have traveled to London to protest in Westminster.

 

Coco Khan Now, on Tuesday, an estimated 13,000 farmers from across the country gathered in Westminster to demand that the government rethink a planned hike in inheritance tax for some farmers. Now, I don’t know if we’re necessarily the best people to be commenting on this. I don’t own a waxed jacket, and I often want just as an aside, I always wonder, like, is Tweed really the right material for you guys? There’s so much amazing new technology in textiles. Someone get them some north face anyway.

 

Nish Kumar Yeah, I mean, sure, I’m a sort of cartoon of that sort of flat, white drinking metropolitan left winger. And also, I don’t stand to inherit a huge amount of land. So I don’t know whether I’m the necessarily the most qualified person, but this is political podcasting being underqualified is, if anything.

 

Coco Khan Part of the job.

 

Nish Kumar Prerequisite. Yeah, to just apine wildly.

 

Coco Khan Formed an opinion in 15 seconds. Here we go.

 

Nish Kumar But anyway, why are these people protesting? As announced in Rachel Reeves Autumn budget from April 2026, the government wants farmers to pay 20% inheritance tax on assets worth more than 1 million pounds. This is less than the 40% than most others will pay. Yet before the budget, they actually paid nothing on land due to agricultural property relief.

 

Coco Khan The government’s sticking to its line, arguing that only the biggest farm estates will be affected. Here’s Environment Secretary Steve Reed speaking to ITV News on Tuesday.

 

Clip The only ones that will be affected and it will be around 500 will be the very wealthiest or the biggest farms. They can plan their tax affairs just like any other business plans, their tax affairs as well. But I would point out to them, again, this government is on the side of farming. We’ve just allocated 5 billion pounds to farming. That’s the biggest budget in our country’s history for sustainable farming. The vast majority of farms will not be affected by these changes to inheritance tax.

 

Nish Kumar So the figures for exactly how many farms might be affected each year are contested. But for reference, they’re round 209,000 farm holdings in the UK. So if the projections are accurate, that’s around 1% of farms being affected each year. Now that might not seem like that many, but given the scale of demonstrations, there’s clearly something bigger going on here.

 

Coco Khan Yeah, and I think it’s worth mentioning that the National Farmers Union have said that the 500 number that Steve Reed is quoting there is is vastly underestimating it. And that might explain the scale of these these demonstrations. There’s been comparisons drawn to the winter fuel allowance when the Labour government said it will only affect this small minority of pensioners. But already we’re seeing more and more information coming out that more pensioners are being dragged into it and facing poverty. It’s worth mentioning, though, that over recent years, especially since Brexit, we’ve heard how British farmers have been on the frontline of the the climate crisis. They are expected to do a lot to protect the environment, as rightly they should, and also our national mental health crisis. The British Association for Counseling and Psychotherapy has found that male farm workers are three times more likely to take their own lives. And extreme weather caused by the climate crisis is only adding to this stress.

 

Nish Kumar So it’s tough out there. And there have been a number of stories over the past few weeks making the case that farmers are asset rich but cash poor with low profit margins. Here’s a post from Rebecca Wilson, a fifth generation farmer from Yorkshire who joined the protest on Tuesday.

 

Clip On paper, our farms, which include land buildings, things like tractors and livestock, have assets which can definitely amount into millions. However, when it comes to return on investment and our ability to make profit, farmers have a very, very poor return. According to the government, average farm income from mixed farm in England in 20 2122 was 74,000 pounds. Now, if we remember that this is income and not profit. So there are still costs to be removed from this figure. You can see that many farmers will not be breaking even, let alone making a profit.

 

Coco Khan Rebecca Wilson also addresses claims that farmers should just sell up if their farms are unprofitable, stating that if they were to do this, it would likely go to mega-corporations or what she calls green washing endeavors.

 

Nish Kumar Now, of course, there are more dramatic and some people may included would say less helpful interventions. Here’s Jeremy Clarkson in this clip from Sky News.

 

Clip How bad could this be from the end? And how can you stop and pay attention? It’s the end. Of great heartbreak.

 

Coco Khan It sounds pretty dire, doesn’t it? I should mention, though, that Clarkson’s motivations might not be quite so pure. Here’s another clip of him being interviewed by the BBC’s Victoria Derbyshire.

 

Clip So it’s not about you. It’s not about your farm and the fact that you bought a farm to avoid inheritance tax. Well, sort of a classic BBC classic. Yeah. It’s not the fact that the fact that I bought a farm to avoid inheritance tax. The fact. You told the Sunday Times in 2021, that’s why you bought it. You people. Sorry. BBC

 

Nish Kumar We should also say for international listeners, Jeremy Clarkson was employed by the BBC for many, many years. Until his relationship with that corporation ended after he physically assaulted a coworker. So let’s let’s just take some of his moralizing around the BBC with a blood pressure endangering quantity of soul. I look that Clarkson clip and also the interventions of the guy who wrote Cats, Andrew Lloyd Webber. Probably don’t help the cause because it’s clear that there is some for sure vested interests in this debate. And it does make you wonder why the government weren’t smarter on this. Surely there was a more targeted and efficient way of directly targeting people like clerks and buying land to dodge inheritance tax whilst also avoiding hitting family farms. Last night, Keith Thomas said that the facts speak for themselves, but clearly there is an issue here. 13,000 people have signed up to this march. It’s also important to note that also on the march were representatives from just up oil. This thing pulled in a huge and complicated group of people.

 

Coco Khan Yeah, absolutely. And you know, when you hear some of the struggles that farmers face, it’s very hard not to be moved. I I’m very aware that sometimes when I hear about farmers, it tugs at my heartstrings. And apparently there’s an old Westminster adage that government should avoid messing with any workers depicted in children’s books. You know. I think there’s a point there.

 

Nish Kumar And listen, the real issue at the core of a huge amount of this is that farmers and farming communities have been left poorer since Brexit. So going back to April of this year, farmers were actually demanding a universal basic income from the government because of how badly they were out of pocket, because of the money that they lost from the Common Agricultural Policy. So that was a direct subsidy from the European Union that helped keep farms afloat post 2016. All of the schemes that have been offered, the farming groups said don’t make up the shortfall that they’ve lost from the Common Agricultural Policy. I’m not demanding that we reopen the conversation around Brexit, but how do we have that conversation?

 

Coco Khan Yeah, no, I agree. And I also don’t know the ins and outs of it. I think that there are clearly some people who will buy land as an inheritance tax dodge. I don’t know the numbers on that, but that definitely exists. And there are also people who will, you know, buy some land and grow some bits as a kind of lifestyle business. But like, there are also numbers of family farms who are working hard and it’s graft and it’s not only a job for them, it’s also a way of life. It’s also a tradition. And it is really hard to get younger workers into it. And there’s a concern that they keep making it this hard and the returns are so poor and then they have to pay this inheritance tax, which makes it harder to run, said Farm, that there are problems with it. I’m open to hearing the arguments on both sides. But one thing that really stood out to me is that during the process of the coverage of this march and interviews with farmers, they keep talking about the low returns and farming. So, you know, I saw one interview of a guy who was like, I don’t know, a loaf of bread from Hovis. He’ll produce the ingredients for that. He’ll probably say of the 1.50 pound bread, less than £0.10, what is what he’ll see. So there seems to be an also a massive frustration with supermarkets, supermarkets, can I just say posted enormous profits in the last ones. You know Tesco, I think it was 2 billion over 2 billion and all these middlemen. And so I wonder sometimes if this fight with the government is not so much about the inheritance tax thing, then that’s just the straw that broke the camel’s back. But really, it’s an argument with a system that exploits these workers and doesn’t pay them well. But you can’t protest Tesco, you can’t protest corporates, you can protest the government. It’s an exploitative system. It’s a ploy, exploitative supply chain. And when it comes to food production, I think we can all agree that we want that to be fair. And also we want to shore up our food production in the country. So, yeah, anyway, I do wonder if this is like a proxy or, or an expression of grievances are not just about this.

 

Nish Kumar Well, whatever it said, whatever it is, is pulled in a very, very wide group of people. Ed Davey, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, was there. They’ve been supportive comments made by various Conservative MPs. And it does present again this is not the important issue here, but it’s definitely one worth raising. It does present an electoral complication for Keir Starmer. We talked a lot on this show about there being a large Labour majority, but often being shallow in quite a few seats. How will this affect the Labour rural vote? That’s something that remains to be seen. But the one thing I think we can all agree is that Jeremy Clarkson is not the person you need to have front and center for this. Just so that we’re clear. Victoria Derbyshire, he’s a BBC journalist that he sort of scorning, is referencing an interview that he gave to The Times newspaper in 2021 where he said that avoiding inheritance tax and this is a direct quote was the critical thing in his decision to buy land. What has he done with that farm? He’s used it to make an Amazon television show called Clarkson’s Farm, which I assume are meaning that he is not affected by these very. Very thin margins and low rates of return. So maybe the guy who, by his own admission bought the farm to dodge inheritance tax and he’s using it to make an obscene show isn’t your best fucking spokesperson for this course.

 

Coco Khan And on that note, after the break, we’ll be asking, should we all be leaving Twitter? We’ll be joined by misinformation expert Jamie Bartlett.

 

Nish Kumar Now. The day after the US election, formally Twitter suffered its biggest exodus since Elon Musk bought the social media platform in 2020 to hundreds of thousands of people and organizations have quit, including The Guardian, a friend of the show and occasional host of it, the political journalist Sophie Groeneveld. And even this is a big one. Bristol’s Clifton Suspension Bridge.

 

Coco Khan Oh yes. Save the best for last.

 

Nish Kumar Clifton Suspension bridge has left Twitter.

 

Coco Khan How will we know when it is closed? But the reasons given for burning bridges. Yes, we like it. Okay. Anyway, reasons given for burning bridges with X included warnings from anti-hate speech, campaign groups and the EU about misinformation and extremism propagating on the platform. But many others say leaving the site will just amplify social tensions and divisions.

 

Nish Kumar Joining us now to understand just how social media is, I guess, euphemistically doing interesting things to our world is Jamie Bartlett, a journalist who’s written for years about technology, politics and society. He’s the author of several books, including The Darknet and the host of a podcast series, The Missing Crypto Queen and The Gatekeepers. Jamie, welcome to Pod Save the UK.

 

Jamie Bartlett Thanks for having me.

 

Nish Kumar You get wheeled out for the most fun discussions.

 

Jamie Bartlett I’ve tried to avoid this one, to be honest, because I have done I’ve written about this stuff for ages and it just I feel like I’m not sure what else I’ve got left to say about it now, you know, because the sort debate we’re having now has been going on for quite a long time. And I just wonder whether we’re getting anywhere with it.

 

Nish Kumar This is the thing.

 

Jamie Bartlett Negative start, isn’t it?

 

Nish Kumar Well well, listen, we’ve just been talking about nuclear war. So, I mean, come on. Perspective. This is a huge upgrade, positivity wise. Just before we get into the really serious concerns here, what do you think of people’s position on leaving Twitter? Like, do you think do you understand why people have just decided and not just people, but as we say, news organizations like The Guardian have just decided that it’s now no longer a place to engage in.

 

Jamie Bartlett Yeah, I do understand and I’ve thought for a long time that the truth.

 

Nish Kumar Still, as you say.

 

Jamie Bartlett I’m still on. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, the reason I’m still on there is because it’s just partly just to pump more stuff out and spam people with it. Yeah, selfishly, but partly because it’s just an important place for me to see what’s going on. But I’ve also always thought that the digital choices each person makes now are really important. If you want to be an active citizen in society. What do you choose to share? What do you click on? Who do you give your data to? What privacy settings do you have? Are you feeding an algorithm constantly with your own post that’s churning it up? These are important things that each of us have to decide on as important in some ways as voting in the papers you buy and the groups you join. So I understand when people think it’s an important political statement I’m going to make to leave this platform and join that platform. It’s totally legit and more people should think like that because it is important.

 

Coco Khan I guess the thing that I’ve been wrestling with is, you know, I’ve heard a lot of people say I’m not going to abandon a site like Twitter that has so many uses to the far right. I’m not going to abandon it. Like, if anything, there needs to be more progressives on there pushing back on this stuff. But my my my concern is when we describe that as a sort of arena, it makes it seem like it’s fair, like it’s a level playing ground. And my feeling about it is that the algorithms favor the far right and favor certain ideas. So it’s not like, if more of us shout back, then that will be helpful because we have our mikes turned off, if that makes sense.

 

Jamie Bartlett Well, yes, but I think more fundamentally as well, I think that position is based on a premise which is there is just an an open marketplace of ideas who go on there and argue and debate and it’ll be useful and valuable. But forget X and algorithmic bias one way or the other for a second. I’m not sure whether the entire structure of digital communications actually helps create an open marketplace of ideas. Now, there’s just been so much research about how hard it is to get two opposing people in a room to discuss things and see each other’s perspective. That’s hard when you’re in a room with people for hours when you’re like blasting out, you know, 280 character missives at each other, or you’re just seeing snippets of an argument that’s been cut up and edited. It’s almost impossible to sort of create a really valuable, useful, open marketplace of ideas. And maybe there is currently, since Elon Musk has taken over a sort of algorithmic bias towards a particular position. But I think just beyond that, it’s a noise. It’s a machine that we’re just all churning sort of voice into, and it’s not actually constructive or helpful. You are just overwhelmed with information constantly, and I prefer to see it that way than saying it’s biased this way or that. I think we are all just struggling with the sheer volume of information we receive all the time and it’s making us struggle to make sense of it. And when that happens, we fall back on more emotional sort of juristic ways of all these guys are in my tribe. These guys are the enemy. Like, this is my team and that’s your team because I cannot make sense of the noise. It’s too.

 

Nish Kumar Much. In terms of Twitter, yes. Musk makes his purchase now. Trump’s won the election. Musk is now the sort of head of a department who’s been created. And for him, essentially and the acronym is the same as his fucking crypto currency.

 

Not his cryptocurrency. Doge

 

It’s not his cryptocurrency

 

Jamie Bartlett A crypto a meme cryptocurrency.

 

Nish Kumar That he may or may not have some not necessarily financial stake in, but some financial interest in the success of. So now do you think that this is validate it his decision to buy Twitter because obviously though he bought it for $44 billion I think which even at the time most reasonable financial analyst said was an overvaluation of. Is it is it possible for us to measure whether that had a discernible impact on the US election?

 

Jamie Bartlett We’ll be studying that for a long time, I think. Yeah, because some people say it was a $44 billion influence operation. Yeah. So and you know, a few different things have gone slightly differently. The election could have swung the other way and we’d be saying, what a colossal waste of money. So I’m not really I’m not really sure. I think what’s important to remember is vast amounts of the look like I’ve struggled to give it the the term alternative, right? The antiestablishment right, the MAGA, right, whatever you want to call it, has over the past several years come to believe in what you could call a kind of machine, a left leaning liberal bureaucracy that controls social media, controls most of the, as they would say, the legacy press has consistently censored and controlled and silenced conservative voices all in cahoots with each other. And as a result, this is Musk’s attempt to overturn the. Yeah. To overthrow the machine. Which is why I think they’re so hyped up about this win. This is more than just an election victory. This is changing the direction of censorship and control. And what is interesting about this, I think, is the evolution of censorship on social media, because it did none of the social media gurus, the big guys, the Zuckerberg’s and now the musk, but the Jack Dorsey’s ever wanted to get involved in censoring what we said. The vision was always like, we don’t want to be have like content moderation teams. We don’t want to deal with that because as soon as you do, you start getting into really thorny issues about what’s harmful, what’s illegal, let’s just let it rip. And then as more and more problems started coming up, 2000, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, they were like, well, maybe we should take off the neo-Nazis or maybe we should actually remove some of the explicit calls to violence. Maybe in Germany we need to remove Holocaust denial. So they were forced into getting more and more into the censorship business. Before Donald Trump’s first win. They were then criticized for not having done enough to control some of the more radical, like fake news stories about the pope endorses Trump and all of this stuff. So post his first win, all the big platforms really amped up their censorship of information. Content moderation teams grew almost exponentially, which conservatives then started hating and maybe controlling the narrative. And this view came out that the machine is big, business is big, tech is big, Pharma is big, everything against the little person, against the truth. I mean, the problem was with things like Covid, they were the tech platforms were faced with very difficult decisions about Covid misinformation. There was some stories they censored and controlled and were under pressure to that they probably shouldn’t have done. And it really fueled the fire. So that’s I think in terms of Musk coming in, he says that’s all over. We’re letting it rip. We’re going back to the original vision.

 

Nish Kumar It’s always worth reiterating with Musk that he has enthusiastically participated in censorship programs when he’s been coerced into it by repressive dictatorships. I think specifically of the BBC documentary about Narendra modi that he participated in active censorship of. So there have always been series. But it’s selective. Yes, it’s it’s free speech for some. Yeah, it’s free speech. As long as Ellen’s not scared of you.

 

Jamie Bartlett Essentially, it’s the free speech that has come from a view that the left in America is controlling everything. So it’s particularly focused against really sort of re-energizing conserve this machine, like I’ve explained, this kind of big, amorphous, fuzzy world that controls everything for a liberal agenda. Millions of people in America truly believe that. And that’s why he’s become such a folk hero to so many of them. And that might explain as well this as some research has shown us, sort of nudging towards pushing more of algorithmically pushing more conservative voices in the build up to the 2024 election.

 

Nish Kumar So let’s focus on the U.K. social media’s role in the UK’s riots. This August was massive. They were partly stirred by disinformation and inflammatory rhetoric. We had mass calling Starmer to take on X in reference to the conspiracy theory that the police were treating White Far-Right protesters more harshly the minority groups. And Nigel Farage claiming that the police were withholding the truth, a claim that he later said was delivered to him by Andrew Tate. So just this morning, as we recalled on Wednesday 22nd November, we’ve heard that a Commons inquiry is summoning Elon Musk to testify about X’s role in spreading misinformation, which is due to happen in the new Year. What do you feel about the role X played in the riots? And also, what are the actual realistic chances of Musk responding to this UK summons?

 

Jamie Bartlett Well, I mean, Elon Musk has a strange interest in UK politics, doesn’t he? It’s I’m still trying to work it out. He can’t read French or German. He doesn’t. Or Spanish, I assume. So he doesn’t get to read all of these things. And there’s a lot of crossover between us and UK media and, you know, so we’re sort of we’re dragged along with all the big American debates in some ways, and we’re getting sucked into them. It’s a hard question to answer because this sort of relationship between online posting and, you know, inflammatory material and conspiratorial material and offline behavior has always been one that’s really quite difficult to firm up to be certain about because of the way people things that motivate people have varied and they’re complex. I mean, we have seen that there was there was a lot of particularly claims in the immediate aftermath of South Pole about this person arriving on a boat, that he was an illegal immigrant. I mean, some of them was that he was a muslim, which was then called a conspiracy theory. And then just a few weeks ago, the Met, police said, were charging him on terrorism charges because allegedly he had an al Qaeda manual, which. Obviously isn’t going to fuel the flames of the BBC and the mainstream press were trying to shut you up and silence you because that wasn’t a conspiracy theory, but you were told that it was. So those groups will cling onto that to say, look, another example of the liberal press lying. And I’m sure Moscow will get involved in that debate as well. I don’t think he’ll turn up. Yeah, Mark Zuckerberg didn’t turn up. If he does turn up, it’ll be filmed. He’ll say whatever the hell he likes. And everyone who are already supporters of him will say, what an amazing guy. So it’s almost bet that he doesn’t turn up. Yeah, because I’m not sure what good it would do anyway. As I said before, I feel like one of the things that has happened with social media in the last 2 or 3 years, you’ve got to try and see this from the perspective of the people that consume this stuff, the rioters and the broader anti-establishment, right. They will see story after story after story pumped into their feeds, shed on their private groups about all the problems that they see of immigrants doing this. And illegal immigrants have done this. And this is how many have come by boat. And here’s this riot in Leeds and no one cares. And there’s a Muslims kicked, a police officer got kicked by a police officer, punched him in the face first and story after story. Often they are not false stories. They are real stories. They have been reported in The Guardian and the BBC and wherever else. But they are one side of a story or they’re very they’re one particular bit of a story they see. They’ve seen that stuff for years, years and years and years of the same thing. So they’ve absolutely got into their heads now that the left leaning press is ignoring all of this, it doesn’t want to cover it is lying is part of this machine and we are being lied to constantly and civilization is under threat. And I’ve seen it again and again from the newspaper articles I keep sharing and seeing, and no one else seems to care. And now we’re just furious and we don’t know what to do.

 

Nish Kumar So that’s a sign that they’ve been radicalized. That’s radicalization, isn’t it? Because if we were talking about.

 

Jamie Bartlett But the difficulties, yeah, I totally agree.

 

Nish Kumar Think about a bunch of people in the Middle East who had had information pumped into their feed from ISIS videos and al Qaeda and years of bin Laden. We’d be talking about that as radicalization.

 

Jamie Bartlett And we know. But we are. But it’s very often is the way that this is talked about radicalization on these platforms. But the difficulty is, if you say that’s fake news, that’s lies, you’re being brainwashed, they will say, But it’s all been reported in the mainstream press. So you lot of the idiots, you are the people that don’t understand what’s really going on. Now, this, I think, is a wider thing that’s been going on for a long time, and I think it has created a genuine feeling amongst some people that the whole of civilization is currently under siege is a threat because it was a big change in the far right about 15 years ago that went from pure nationalism to sort of cross-national defense of Western civilization. You suddenly saw far right groups from France and Germany and the UK, you know, hugging each other and working together because the West is under threat. I’ve studied groups like this for a long time, and I’ve always had a view that you’ve got to try to understand the perception people have of the world, whether you disagree with it or not. If large number of people have this perception, why? What do we do then? In that case, if we just scream at them and say, You’re all mad, I don’t think it helps the perception. It all fuels it a little bit. So, yes, social media clearly played a massive role. I don’t think it was just a few bits of misinformation circulating in the immediate aftermath. I think it’s the culmination of years of how the media ecosystem is fundamentally changed in terms of what we see.

 

Coco Khan And the riots, the far right riots. There was some evidence to suggest that it was a channel called Channel three that looks like a news channel but isn’t really a news channel. I know the term fake news is, is, you know, problematic, but I think people use that in regards to this. Is that something that we should also be concerned more about?

 

Jamie Bartlett Yes, But don’t think it is simply a case of encouraging the far right through fake news. We’ve got to remember in the 2016 election is that Russia was pushing out stories of, you know, the Internet research agency that was sort of Kremlin backed, was pushing out stories and promoting groups that was were both Clinton and Trump supporters. They’d be creating fake Black Lives Matter groups who’d be posting quite inflammatory things and pushing that to Trump supporters saying, look at these. So they so the Trump supporters would get wound up, look at these nutters. And then there were people on the on the on the left that were sort of supporting those groups. And the idea, which is to create anger and frustration, to divide people. And they would. Do it by pushing sort of left wing narratives and right wing narratives, which is why it’s important to question yourself. Am I? Am I being manipulated? Am I really sure that my psychology isn’t being slightly hacked here? And I’m getting more and more annoyed with my political opponents because we do all suffer from this and it’s easy to always think it’s just the other side that does it. And the most effective form of fake news is not pushing entirely fake stories. It is amplifying true stories to the right audience. It will be taking something that’s really happened and just pushing it at you over and over and over again, which is which is more sinister and more difficult. And that is one of the reasons why Twitter, before Musk bought it, started deleting true news stories some times on their platforms because they could see there was a coordinated effort from, for example, Russian backed groups to use those true stories using a kind of artificial network of people, fake users, if you like, to sort of interfere with with the US election. But then obviously the the critics like you’re you’re deleting truth. Yeah. And they got themselves in a real Tanglewood this but but that is the nature of a lot of fake news in inverted commas it’s true news being pushed and promoted and amplified and sometimes exaggerated which is really is why it’s often about psychology, really, and understanding psychology rather than just whether a news platform is fake or not.

 

Nish Kumar But if we take you back to the summer in the UK and with some of the right stuff, part of the reason there wasn’t a huge amount of reporting about it is simply because there are legal reporting restrictions that apply to legacy media or mainstream media, whatever term you want to use to them. You know.

 

Jamie Bartlett Just saying it’s a you’re using the influence issue in subtle ways, the legacy media.

 

Nish Kumar But the reality is that like, you know, there are legal systems in place that mean that you you know, you can’t you can’t name a suspect if they’re under 18.

 

Jamie Bartlett This is a massive this is a massive problem.

 

Nish Kumar Also, like even speculating on, you know, where he was from, we now can talk about the fact that he was charged with terrorism offenses. But the only reason we have been able to do that is because they waiting for evidence to come to light. And there are there is some like respect for due process that we probably need to have. But social media companies don’t have any obligation to respect those kind of things.

 

Jamie Bartlett I think this is a massive problem that the I don’t know what you the mainstream, the established press, the respectable.

 

Nish Kumar So I mean, if we if we want to even to be less pejorative about it let’s call it the regulated press.

 

Jamie Bartlett Regulated press.

 

Nish Kumar Regulated press.

 

Jamie Bartlett I’d go for the regulated press.

 

Nish Kumar Yeah and essentially social media is effectively the unregulated press effectively.

 

Jamie Bartlett I think this is a really big problem with legal restrictions. There’s not much you can do. The speed of reporting, the problem is something you can do. I think we’ve got the regulated press has to get quicker because it’s fueling this idea. That only on x and Facebook and tick tock will you get the truth moving forward.

 

Nish Kumar How do we actually?

 

Jamie Bartlett I don’t know. Don’t ask me.

 

Nish Kumar But like even simple things like the Secretary of State for Science, Peter Kyle, told Radio Four’s Today program this morning that he will direct Ofcom to be more assertive in taking on social media. And also refused to rule out a ban on social media for under sixteens like the Australian Government has recently announced. Now is that kind of intervention helpful or is that too little too late? Or a maybe it’s not a question of either or. Maybe it’s a question of and we’ve now got a problem of mass media illiteracy because we don’t engage critically, sufficiently critically with social media platforms, because the language has outstripped our ability to speak it in a sense. But we’re still stuck trying to muddle through in our conversations in.

 

Jamie Bartlett The big problem and solving it. I don’t I don’t really know. There’s some small things I think that I could imagine being possible and that would help. But they probably won’t solve the whole problem because in the end, I think you’ve got to remember that the entire sort of modern representative liberal democracies was was not built for an era of digital borderless communications. Yes, this is just a fundamental tension between the two things that we might have to quite radically change how democracy works as well. So there’s bigger sort of structural problems, I suppose, and they go far beyond this. But media literacy. I think is without a doubt the most important single thing that anyone can learn today. And I even wrote a paper about this in 2010 saying how important media literacy was. And I think I even went to the Department of Health and said, we got to do something about this. This is a big problem.

 

Coco Khan And they were like, you’re the conspiracy theorist.

 

Jamie Bartlett Laughed me out of the room. Yeah.

 

Nish Kumar And now you’re like, a sort of Nostradamus with a top knot.

 

Jamie Bartlett No, that doesn’t sound good, does it? No wonder they no wonder they didn’t really listen to me. I wouldn’t have listened to me either.

 

Nish Kumar That is not a sort of, you know, doom laden prognostication. What you said in 2010 is correct.

 

Jamie Bartlett Well yeah. But the thing the thing was, it was kind of obvious there was changing. You know, there was a lot of nonsense back then, more than now online. And it was obviously very difficult for people to make sense of it. And it was hard for the teachers because you’ve got to remember, the teachers aren’t equipped to teach this very well. What I would like yeah, I think it needs to be massively ramped up because it is the single most important thing you can study because you can get access to all information. Now, you don’t need to learn it in school. What matters is how do you filter it and understand it. But not enough of it, I think, is about psychology. Like I said, most of this is how can human cognitive biases anchoring effects. Fear of missing out. Homophily like birds of a feather tend to flock together. Not picking why we tend to see the worst in our political opponent. We don’t really teach that as part of media literacy. And I think that’s that’s really important. I think for the regulated press. I think we need to be so much more open with how we edit things and control things. If you look at a lot of the criticism of the regulated, I love this phrase, the regulated press, it is they’re manipulating you through clever editing, like which stories they choose and don’t choose, like how they keep certain bits of the story hidden from you and viewers are now way more sophisticated because we’re all editors. We all publish. We all put things together. We understand it. And I think the BBC needs to be far more transparent about how it edits things. It really frustrates me. I sit through these editorial meetings and these legal meetings are there, so like so much care and attention is taken and money and thought goes into it and no one knows about any of that.

 

Coco Khan And this idea that, like the regulated press is somehow better and perhaps this is a nice sort of lightened note to leave this interview on, but I saw a piece from the Daily Mail, I think it was last week, which was how British people are abandoning traditional sandwich fillings for woke fillings. What is a woke feeling? I don’t know what it is. So, you know, listen, we all got have lasted a long time, so let’s not pretend they’re all new.

 

Jamie Bartlett No, no, I totally agree. And I think but I think this idea that it’s just the other guys is really important. I think we all will We all have that. And I think sometimes understanding that perceptions really matter. You mentioned before about this conspiracy theory about two tiered policing. And when Cake Star came out today said that’s just doesn’t happen. So that’s rubbish. Right. Okay, I agree. But if large numbers of people start to wonder if that is true or not and see clips where it looks online like there is two tier policing, you’ve got to say, okay, a lot of your thinking is right. Let’s really look at this and say, I’m not just going to dismiss you and say you’re mad. I know that you’ve seen this over and over again, and I can see that you probably do now believe this because that’s how it looks when you clip up certain pictures of a riot or a demo. It can look really unfair because it’s cleverly edited. Yeah, let’s let’s actually think about this. I’m not going to dismiss you out of hand. Let’s look at it properly. Let’s say there’s some ways, I think, where the way we talk about this, we could probably be a bit more understanding about it, understanding that perceptions matter as well as reality. Yes. How I’ve always understood it.

 

Nish Kumar What is a woke icon? I’m sorry, I haven’t listened to the last two minutes of this because I’m trying to think of what a woke so often.

 

Coco Khan Consider myself a woke sandwich eater. Well, just because I’m woke and I like sandwiches, but that’s maybe the reason.

 

Jamie Bartlett What would be in.

 

Coco Khan My last sandwich was a cheese and pickle.

 

Jamie Bartlett And that’s old school.

 

Coco Khan Well, exactly, Exactly. So I don’t know what it would be. Hummus.

 

Nish Kumar I mean. Yeah, I guess so. But I can get home as a petrol station now. And I know because I buy them.

 

Jamie Bartlett This is the problem with when you when you so create a cult or perception of a culture, will everything get sucked into it? Yeah, yeah, everything. So sandwich fillings are now parts of it and you know everything. So we’ve got to deescalate that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Let’s just.

 

Nish Kumar Let’s just all agree we like cheese and pickle. Let’s stop. Let’s try it. Let’s get back to that and start from there. Yeah. Jamie, thank you so much for joining us on Pod Save the UK. If you want to read more about this, check out Jamie’s Substack How to Survive the Internet. There’s a link in our show notes and for an extended version of this chat, if you’re listening to the podcast, head straight for our YouTube page. And that’s it. Thanks for listening to Pod Save the UK. And as always, we want to hear your thoughts. Email us at PSUK@ReducedListening.co.uk.

 

Coco Khan And don’t forget to follow us at Pod Save the UK on Instagram, TikTok and Twitter. And if you want more of us, make sure you subscribe to our YouTube channel.

 

Nish Kumar Pod Save the UK is a Reduced Listiening production for Crooked Media.

 

Coco Khan Thanks to senior producer James Tindale, assistant producer Mae Robson and our multitrack fellow Derek Armor.

 

Nish Kumar Our theme music is by Vasilis Fotopoulos.

 

Coco Khan Thanks to our engineer Ryan MacBeth and the head of production is Dan Jackson.

 

Nish Kumar The executive producers are Anoushka Sharma, Louise Cotton and Madeleine Herringer with additional support from Ari Schwartz.

 

Coco Khan And remember to hit subscribe for new shows on Thursdays on Amazon, Spotify or Apple or after you get your podcasts.