First the good news: we might just manage to build a lot of new houses. And the bad news? Millions of people will be worse off and about fifty thousand children will be pushed into poverty by welfare reform.

Nish and Coco unpack Rachel Reeves’ Spring Statement with the help of economist James Meadway, former advisor to John McDonnell. It was pretty bleak stuff from Reeves: the world is scary, growth is low, and cuts are coming. All with a strong whiff of austerity 2.0.

The Chancellor says her fiscal rules are “non-negotiable”. But James has an alternative Spring Statement to banish the gloom and challenge the way we think about growth.

Plus, as the great Signal security cock up rumbles on in the US, Nish and Coco wonder why they’ve never been included in a top-secret military chat. It’s just not fair.

And it’s got the UK talking, but will the Netflix drama ‘Adolescence’ make a difference in the real world?

CHECK OUT THESE DEALS FROM OUR SPONSORS 

SKY SPORTS F1 https://www.sky.com/tv/sports

Guests:

James Meadway

Audio Credits

Parliament TV

Pod Save the UK is a Reduced Listening production for Crooked Media.

Contact us via email: PSUK@reducedlistening.co.uk

Insta: https://instagram.com/podsavetheuk

Twitter: https://twitter.com/podsavetheuk

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@podsavetheuk

Facebook: https://facebook.com/podsavetheuk

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@PodSavetheUK

TRANSCRIPT

Nish Kumar Hi, this is Pod Save the UK, I’m Nish Kumar.

Coco Khan And I’m Coco Kahn. So Nish, you ever accidentally ended up in a top secret military messaging group?

Nish Kumar Who amongst us has not accidentally added a journalist to a top secret military messaging group where we’re discussing plans to bomb another country? Let he who is without sin launch the first missile.

Coco Khan I can’t say it’s happening. I’ve been in some hen party WhatsApp groups that feel like you’re in the military. Do you know what I mean? 10 a.m. Rosa, you will enjoy it. I can say something I particularly relate to.

Nish Kumar Oh, 200 hours, you will be wearing a hat shaped like a penis.

Coco Khan Exactly, exactly.

Nish Kumar What you’re talking about is the biggest security fuck-up in the US where a journalist was invited into a group chat where Trump officials were planning airstrikes on Yemen.

Coco Khan It’s just mad, isn’t it? And not just that, can I say, they were also slagging us off, saying that we’re freeloading Europeans. Vice President JD Vance said that he hates failing Europe out again.

Nish Kumar and Secretary of Defense Pete Hexis replied, I fully share your loathing of European freeloading. It’s pathetic. And pathetic was in capital letters, which I think we can all agree is really cool.

Coco Khan Still a bit of an ouch. But anyway, dusting ourselves off on the podcast today, we’re finding out what’s in Rachel Reeve’s spring statement, or in other words, just how fucked are we?

Nish Kumar And we’re talking about the Netflix show Adolescents and whether we need a minister for men.

Coco Khan Now before we get into Rachel Reeve’s spring statement, Nish, I really want to know how that leak of secret war plans is going down in the US.

Nish Kumar Well, I’m not currently actually in America. I have, like a lot of people have threatened to do, I have fled north of the border to Canada, but it’s not part of any fleeing plans for me. It’s part of a pre-agreed and pre-booked tour schedule. But I was in the States when the story broke. Obviously I am speaking to a very specific demographic of Americans, but they are obviously horrified at what’s happening in their country and the things that their country is doing on a foreign policy level. But last week that horror shifted to just pure shame, just pure shame. And, you know, it’s a shame that you can absolutely relate to. When there was a period where our representative on the global stage was successively Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, we all felt the heated flush of pure embarrassment whenever we spoke to somebody not from our country. And I think last week, the main overriding emotion was deep embarrassment and also genuine concern because this is like a huge, this is a huge security breach. Mike Walz, the national security advisor, has claimed full responsibility for adding the editor in chief of the Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, to the group chat on the messaging app Signal, but still can’t seem to fully explain how it happened. Why they aren’t using the secure messaging service that exists for military communications in America is the biggest most important question. Trump downplayed the blunder saying there was no classified information. He later called the Atlantica magazine with over 2 million followers on X a failed magazine and Goldberg a total sleazebag. Why he didn’t text Goldberg that information directly is beyond me.

Coco Khan I think of myself as that I’m at this point, unshockable, that nothing would surprise me. But this story did surprise me, even there’s not, as you’ve outlined, you know, there’s lots about it that’s really concerning. And maybe this is the least of the worries, but it was something about the emojis that I found particularly just gross and crass. So special envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff used two prayer emojis, a flexed bicep and two American flags to react to the update about airstrikes on Yemen. in which 53 people lost their lives. So that’s great, isn’t it? That’s classy.

Nish Kumar we all find it quite strange when our parents use emojis. That doesn’t quite feel appropriate. So if that doesn’t feel appropriate, what American governmental officials using emojis to discuss the bombing of the country feels like is beyond my understanding. We should also say from a kind of British and European perspective, the points of interest here really are, as you say, Coco, the disdain expressed for Europe. JD Vance called Europe a bunch of freeloaders. and Trump said that he agreed with that. That’s good to hear. And over in the UK, the Lib Dem leader, Ed Davey, who’s been outspoken critic of Trump has said, JD Vance and his mates clearly aren’t fit to run a group chat, let alone the world’s strongest military force. It has to make our security services nervous about the intelligence we’re sharing with them. Yeah, fair point, Ed. Absolutely fair point.

Coco Khan And you would hope that you might see more criticism, but actually there’s not really been that much. You know, Downing Street has been much more restrained. I completely understand they’re trying to keep Donald Trump sweet. We’re all very afraid of these trade tariffs. So the prime minister’s spokesperson rejected the idea that Europe was freeloading on defense, but refused to take a pop at the Trump team, saying the Uk remains happy to share intelligence with the US and just generally sort of pant around them and Maybe, like, kiss them when they… need and other such sucking up actions.

Nish Kumar We’re obviously going to go into this in much more detail, uh, in the bulk of what today’s show is about, which is about Rachel Reeve’s spring statement. But one of the things I am finding very funny is the amount, and I understand that the Labour party is in a very difficult and complicated position here because its growth agenda is completely tied to the United States of America. And they don’t want to upset a man who is historically one of the most thin skinned, his skin is essentially gossamer. It’s lighter than silk, that is the extent to which this man is thin skinned, but it is always very funny at the moment when they keep talking about the unforeseen economic conditions and then not saying by which we mean President Trump and the fact that he seems to have done a couple of lines before he banged out his policy that morning. It’s very funny that they on the one and keep going, we are absolutely 100%. solidly committed to our partnership with the United States of America and at the same time keeps saying some weird shit is going down. Rachel Reeves is going to say our commitment to our American relationship is ironclad whilst they move a Trump tower sign onto 10 Downing Street.

Coco Khan I read a piece in the FT this morning that was saying that leaders who stand up to Trump are enjoying a massive pole lift. And they had a picture of a starmer alongside other leaders. And there was a part of me that thought, wow, gosh, news really does move fast, doesn’t it? When they commissioned that illustration, I was like, Oh no, oh no.

Nish Kumar Onto the big UK news of the week, as I alluded to somewhat clumsily there. Rachel Reeves has delivered her spring statement. Now spring statements are not full budgets. They’re not usually a big deal, but this one is, uh, it’s not a budget with loads of detailed tax and spending plans, it it’s more kind of health check on the state of our economy, which Reeves is given us. And basically it’s a sort of how fucked are we on a scale of one to 10.

Coco Khan So what we wanted to know was would Rachel Reeves finally throw off the shackles of fiscal rules so we can dance, you know, like would she surprise us? Would we get some some happy news?

Nish Kumar Yeah, we were hoping for a taxation on the rich, magic money trees galore and a commitment to pacifism.

Coco Khan but let’s find out. So here she is addressing parliament.

Clip Mr Speaker, the world is changing. We can see that and we can feel it. A changing world demands a government that is on the side of working people, acting in their interest, acting in the national interest. Not retreating from challenges, not stepping back, but a Government with the courage to step up to secure Britain’s future. and to seize the opportunities that are out there before us. I am impatient for change. The British people are impatient for change after 14 years of failure. And we are beginning to see change happen. Our plan for change is working. Defense spending is rising. Waiting lists are falling. Wages are up. Interest rates are cut. That is the difference that this Labour government is making.

Coco Khan So joining us to unpack Reeve’s statement and what it means for the UK is economist James Medway. James was the former advisor to Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell and the director of the Progressive Economy Forum. He’s been an important critic of austerity economics and at the forefront of efforts to imagine alternatives. James, welcome to Pod Save the UK.

James Meadway Well, thank you. Thank you for having me and thanks for the invite on.

Coco Khan So what did you make of the speech then? Well…

James Meadway I mean, look, if people have watched it, Rachel Rees is not noted for a sort of levity of delivery and this was even by the standards that she set in the last few years was not exactly an upbeat message. I mean the central part of it people know about which is this almost not quite five billion pounds of cuts to social security, particularly for those receiving money for disabilities that they have, which is Actually, we’ll come back to this. For government, it’s not really very much. But for individuals, it is a huge amount. You’re talking for 800,000 recipients of personal independence payments, which is money you get to basically help you live a more usual life. So you can go about your life and be integrated what everyone else is doing and not have to suffer too much. I mean, it still, frankly, not enough. The average loss there is about £4,000 for people, so it’s really like a huge amount of money that is being taken away from… some people who really actually need that money. This is the sort of cruelty that’s involved here. On the government’s own figures, the scale of cuts means that by 2030, the government own figures say there will be 250,000 more people in poverty, of which 50,000 are children by the end of this decade. So this is grim. I’d assume that this isn’t the message she ever wanted to deliver, but to a significant extent, it is also kind of her own fault. There’s a lot of chat about oh, the world’s changed and everything’s different and now we have to spend a load of money on the Ministry of Defense and the army and all the rest of it, and everything has been shaken up. And it’s like, that is true to some extent, but it is still your choice to do this. There are always other options if you’re the government, particularly if the government are a big, actually rich country like Britain. You can choose to do things that aren’t driving some of the most desperate people in the country further into poverty.

Coco Khan Because when you heard the speech there, she talked about, you know, the British people have had enough, and it made it sound like she was going to announce some sort of change of record, really, just for complete Luddites like me. How George Osborne is this?

James Meadway It’s pretty George Osborne. When you think about what Osborne did when he turned up as Chancellor in, I think horribly a long time ago, 2010 when the coalition government got into office and immediately Osborne, did something that Rachel Reeves should have done but didn’t, which was sort of hit the ground running, do his emergency budget in June that year and say straight away there are going to be big cuts, particularly to social security, to benefits, and that’s what we’re going to go for. And they really jammed that through over the next few years. Now, the figures around that are pretty horrifying. You can see the enormous increase in food bank use over the last 15 years or so as those cuts are played out. And it’s really brutal when a government which offers support, even if it’s, let’s be honest, mostly not great, then takes it away, right? And people suffer very directly as a result of this. So in terms of how it compares to George Osborne, this is very, very similar. The difference is something slightly more technical maybe, but that is Rachel Reeves also announced an increase in capital investment spending, which I think Labour are going to try and talk up. In other words, they say that there’s 2 billion pounds more to spend on the big stuff that government might build. In this case, I think they’re going to go for various parts of the sort of energy system, energy infrastructure, and a few other things. So she’s actually increased that part of government spending a little bit. Again, probably not by really enough to make noticeable differences.

Nish Kumar We should also say that these benefit cuts are actually more severe than they’d been trailed. I think the hope was that the disquiet caused by the announcement would at least limit it to just being those cuts or hopefully actually scale back some of the nature of some of these cuts. the welfare cuts, the further welfare cuts than they had previously been trailed. amount to about 500 million pounds, because the cuts that they initially projected weren’t going to make the five billion pounds worth of savings that they wanted. So Reeves has added these cuts today. The universal credit health elements will be cut to new claimants by around 50% and then frozen. And as you say, the figures that you’re talking about come from the Department for Work and Pensions, whose own estimate. provided the figures that you’ve quoted, three million families worse off by 2030, amounting to an average loss of £1,720 per year. This has gone hand in hand with the prominence of defense and defense spending. She wants to turn the Uk, Rachel Reeves says, into a defense industrial superpower and confirm £2.2 billion of money for defense, which as we know, is being paid for by reducing the aid budget. She mentioned places that will benefit like of Plymouth and Portsmouth. They’ve confirmed that a two billion pound investment in social and affordable housing is gonna happen. And one good bit of news for the government was that the OBR calculated the planning reforms make Labour’s target of 1.5 million homes in the UK over the next five years plausible. James, I definitely wanna talk to you about alternatives that could be projected, but just sticking with what we actually have in front of us, what’s the political argument for this?

James Meadway If the government has a line on this, and you can kind of see what they’re trying to get to, it goes, and this is their argument, it goes something like, we need to fix long-term problems in the British economy, which is kind of true. There’s a whole stack of things that haven’t worked very well, really for a long period of time. I mean, it’s a low investment, low productivity, still quite rich, but like really low growth, low wage economy. To fix that, you need investment. So their line is, okay, we have the fiscal rules, that guarantees stability. Once you guarantee stability, everyone can see that this is a safe place to invest. Businesses come in, government supports them a little bit. In four, five, six years time, everything looks better because we have loads of growth and that’s when we can start spending. The basic problem here is, is look, this doesn’t really add up. Like if you start thinking about, okay, what is a plausible amount of growth that they can get? The OBR says growth this year, it thinks is gonna fall by about half. In other words, the rate of growth is down by about half to about 1% from what they said last year. And then gross. in the next few years picks up a bit to about 1.8%. Now, 1. 8% historically is not very much growth. Like other big, rich, developed economies, Britain is growing slower than it has done in the past. I mean, this is sort of a universal rule. So if you go back to the 60s, you have 4% growth a year. But at 1. eight percent growth, that doesn’t give you the taxes coming back in to pay for all the stuff you said you’re going to do. Like it just wasn’t plausible to sit there before the election and know that people were voting Labour, expecting a difference to be made to the Nhs, to schools, to actually to the social security system, to a whole stack of things that people anticipate a Labour government’s going to do and try and fix. That’s why people vote Labour. I mean, New Labour, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown understood this. That’s where they went out and spent more money, you know, back in the 2000s. And there’s some sort of messing around with the figures here. The OBR projection, the one that Rachel Reeves was talking about. OBRs, the Office of Budget Responsibility, the official forecasters, they were saying that okay households on average will be 500 pounds better off a year by 2029. Now that number is already quite shakily dependent on the growth that they think will happen, actually happening, but what we know about the Office for Budget Responsibilities is that since it was set up 15 years ago, it always, it consistently is too optimistic. So if it gives you a growth number. it is consistently underneath that. Now there’s a long-term problem there that the OBR kind of misses, but they always do this. If that growth doesn’t come in, that £500 you’re supposed to have more by 2029 disappears. So it’s not just that okay, this is bad for like some of the most desperate and most vulnerable people out there, it’s immediately bad for them. It doesn’t look great for anybody else because everything is dependent on what is not a very high rate of growth. actually being delivered and past experience suggests that that isn’t even going to happen. You don’t get much growth when you don’t have a government spending money. It’s quite simple. The government needs to put money into the economy in order that people have money to spend in order to encourage growth. If you’re doing cuts, that process doesn’t happen.

Coco Khan In terms of people’s lived experience, is any of this going to be an improvement? So, you know, you talked about the capital investment that Labour have said that they’re gonna put more into. That’s meant to go straight into housing. Housing is something that we all feel very, very acutely on our everyday lives. You know, the one bit of news from the OBR is that the 1.5 million homes target is plausible. Surely that is a lot of people who will be feeling that their lives have improved. You know going back to the defense spending and we can talk about the rights of wrongs on that shortly. But for people in places like Plymouth and Barrow and Portsmouth, won’t their lives improve? Will anyone’s lives be improved, do you think?

James Meadway The challenge on what the OBR is saying is that, OK, we think it’s plausible. And it’s like, all right, well, frankly, I think we have to take that with a pinch of salt. The number of houses that they say are going to get built by the private sector in this country is way, way above what the private housebuilders managed in decades. I mean, frankly close to ever has that been done. If you want more houses built historically in Britain, this has been the case over the last 70 years or so, it’s government who has to build them. That’s when you have this peak of house building in Britain. you get a massive expansion of council housing coming out of the 40s, 50s, 60s into the 70s, and then it drops off entirely, and that’s where you don’t get many houses built. Now, if the OBR is then saying, okay, there’s gonna be a sudden rush of private house building, this is kind of unprecedented. This hasn’t happened before, and they’re expecting it to happen without the government commitment there of money, investment, also building houses to make it happen. So it doesn’t look great. It doesn’t mean it won’t happen. It’s just like, this is a stretch. We have to have a lot of faith. the OBR forecasting powers, which have not been great, and a lot of faith in house builders, profit-seeking private house builders. I haven’t built very many houses in Britain for a long period of time, turning around and going, whoopie-doo, it’s all good now, off we go. The planning system has been reformed. We’ve got loads of money. It’s stretching credibility to think that this is going to be delivered under these circumstances. The cost of living crisis hasn’t ended. Stuff is still really expensive and things that people really rely on having to buy all the time food. energy, water, these are the things going up. So that squeeze is still there. There’s not very much in this announcement that’s going to address this. And I say not very, much close to zero really.

Nish Kumar I was just gonna say a lot of politicians this week have got themselves in a bit of a twist about whether this is going to be austerity 2.0 or not, but that doesn’t really matter does it James? I mean, if you’re leading with five billion pounds worth of cuts, whether you call it austerity or not people are going to think of it as austerity.

James Meadway Exactly. If you’re saying that you’ve got 250,000 people going to poverty as a result of your decisions to cut benefit spending, that is austerity. That is the austerity that people feel. That is not having the lives that most of us are leading looking much better at this point in time. This is the other problem we’re talking about growth. It’s nice to get it, but it’s a long term process, right? So even if the government really pushes on house building and stuff, yeah, you start to see houses being built, but is a long process to turn things around. And if you start saying, as the government, growth is the key to this, then politically, you’ve got a problem if you don’t deliver it in only four years’ time.

Coco Khan Earlier, you outlined what the Labour government would be saying. And the first thing you said was like, they will say the fiscal rules are important because it shows that we’re a stable country to do business. Do you agree with that?

James Meadway It’s not necessarily a bad thing for you as a government to lay out and say clearly so that everybody knows, whether you’re some bond trader, whether you like looking to buy a house, whatever you might be doing, everybody knows what it expects to be happening in five years time or 10 years time. It’s a bad idea to lay that out. That’s the sort of reason you might have fiscal rules of some sort. So you give everybody a sense of where the government needs borrowing and spending and all the rest is going to end up. That’s not inherently bad thing to do. The problem is Labour’s particular rules is that they were written a few years ago in a time when interest rates were lower, inflation was lower and actually suddenly you’ve got a lot of room. You can borrow a lot because it’s dead cheap if interest rates are low through the government. You’ve got loads of room inside your fiscal rules and as interest rates have gone up and as inflation has gone up across the world, I mean Britain isn’t alone in all of this, then suddenly your space inside your own rules is a shrunk and that’s kind of the problem that Rachel Reeves keeps bumping up against. This is why. we’ve had this business today of saying we’re going to have to significantly cut benefit spending. You do have the option of saying, okay, the world has changed, we need to change the rules. They could have done that. And you might start to say in addition, hey, we’re also going to ask some of the very wealthy people in this country to pay a bit more into all this. That’s actually quite a credible place to get to. It makes sense. The sums add up. You can see what’s going on. So that’s Rachel Reeves’ problem is that she’s the cell to these specific rules. that are really tight now, that are really difficult to meet. And if you’re going to insist on meeting them, and you’re also going to say, we can’t actually increase taxes on the wealthy, for instance, then you’re gonna fail like this every time and go and look for other, frankly, victims of your economic policy. And that’s what we’ve seen happening today.

Nish Kumar Even the Institute of Fiscal Studies has said that a slavish adherence to a fiscal target is not sensible. You know, this is not exactly a bastion of leftist political thought. Even they’re saying that these rules, it’s not sensible, what would have happened if she relaxed her fiscal rules?

James Meadway It depends how it’s done, I suppose. I mean, why didn’t they think through? Because again, we had a year, really, of opinion polls saying Donald Trump’s gonna win. Why wasn’t there a contingency plan for what happens when he wins, and there’s a certain amount of chaos introduced into the world, right? That’s their big reasoning behind all of this. Chaos in the world. Growth, the targets have changed. Needs to be more in defense. Okay, why wasn’t their plan to do that? If they’d had a plan, they could have gone into government that says the world has changed, we’re gonna change our rules. They could have done that. They could’ve done that straight away. That’d be a serious, credible thing to do. Everybody would understand it and they’d be in a better position now. I think there’s a couple of things in that. One of them is it’s, it’s a sort of genuine fear, but you can manage it, which is that they think that if they change the rules, this will be treated by financial markets as the government is now no longer credible in its promises, and this will spark off a kind of list trust style meltdown. And that would definitely be bad. And that would definitely be bad But if you tell everyone well in advance you want to make this change, then you can just do it. This is what happened in Germany, right? You can act like this if you want. There are more constraints in Britain. The economy’s in a worse place in many ways, but you still have a lot of room for maneuver there. Instead they’ve stuck to these things doggedly. The only way it really starts to make sense in its own terms is if you have a very sincere belief, and I have to assume that Rachel Reeves does believe something like that, and the Treasury believes something like that. Above all else, financial stability from the government is what matters. And if you get that right, everything else will fall into place. But really, if your financial stability is only there on the back of you doing big cuts, and you actually introducing serious instability into people’s lives and leaving the economy exposed, because that’s what’s happening now, exposed to what happens in the rest of the world because there isn’t that basic security about government spending and investment because it’s not enough, then you’re not doing financial stability at all, you’re just kind of exposing the whole economy to wider problems in the world that’s increasingly unstable.

Coco Khan [AD]

Coco Khan What could you do instead of austerity? Is there another way? Because honestly, for my adult life, it seems like it’s always been austerity and we can rebrand it in different ways, but you’re consistently told that this is the only way. So what are some other ways?

James Meadway I think you’re absolutely right, right, because it is 15 years now. There have been points where austerity has slowed down and governments have spent a bit more. This has happened. Racial resource budgets, you did spend more. So we’ve kind of seen bits of what might be different. The bit that I think we could do now and the bit that seems most obvious for an economy in Britain’s kind of somewhat shaky position, we import a lot from the rest of the world. Government debt is quite high. There is an exposure to what people and financial markets think about us that’s. probably worse than other similar economies around the world. But what we also have is a lot of inequality. And that means there’s quite a few people are put at the top end of society with a great deal of wealth, which we could start to think about taxing properly and putting that wealth to use. And that would provide the basis for going out and making spending decisions. And that will be how you start to end austerity. And that once you start think about, okay, we’re ending austerity in a serious way, we’re going to think the real economy, the places where people actually live, the day-to-day lives we lead. get these questions right, you know, get the high streets that we have to walk down every day that are not just full of closed shops and maybe betting shops and the chicken shop if you’re lucky, that sort of thing. Get actual investment going in there. Start to spend money in the day-to-day lives people lead. Start make the economy people live in work. That has to be the basis then for everything else you want to do. And that has to start to look like spending going into, for instance, local authorities So they now have after 60% cut, so a lot of 15 years or so. would now have a bit more money to make towns and cities up and down the country look a bit better, start to work a bit better. Get those building blocks correct, right? And do it in the first instance by saying, we are finally going to do something about soaring rates of inequality in this country. So whether it’s a wealth tax, whether it is increasing capital gains tax, so it’s the same as income tax, where it’s closing some of the more obvious loopholes that very, very wealthy people use to sneak around and the tax that we do have, whatever combination it is. That’s what you start to do instead. That will be your starting point, I think.

Nish Kumar What does a wealth tax actually look like? I mean, is there also an opportunity maybe not to have a wealth tax and maybe one of the two things that you’ve alluded to that’s left in the British high street, apart from chicken shops, which I’ll accept no slander against justice for more loose, but the betting shops that exist in the high street is there maybe a more specific and targeted taxation we could execute on the gambling industry? And what also specifically does a well tax?

James Meadway Almost certainly, right. You can think of things that are significantly undertaxed in various different ways scattered throughout the economy. I mean, one of them that’s quite striking that we did start to do something on, but has fallen into this discussion with the Donald Trump administration, is the digital services tax, which is a tiny, it’s like 2% of revenues that the big US tech companies generate here. So, you know, Facebook can ever make a lot of money in this country. That money basically disappears back to the and the former profits for Facebook and the rest of them. The previous government introduced a very small tax in some of those sales. Britain’s in about 700 million a year, right? Now, you could increase that tax. You could say, maybe we want a bit more. The discussion that the government is having with Donald Trump and his administration right now is about scrapping that as a kind of sweetener for a deal, a trade deal. So at every point, there are decisions being made that kind of work in the wrong direction, all this. In the case of the proposal doing the rounds in Britain, the one that’s gaining a bit of momentum, people like Gary Stevenson are talking about, is saying, OK, it’ll be an annual tax, 2% any wealth you have that’s been assessed over 10 million pounds, which is a tiny fraction of people right at the top of society. It’s actually quite a small part of their wealth. You say every year you pay your 2% and that’s just the extra bit of tax you’re going to pay for being really incredibly wealthy. I think there’s a solid argument for saying you can do something like that, raising this case 24 billion pounds. If you didn’t want to go that big, if you thought this is going to be a big old change, you could start to think about equalizing capital gains tax. In other words, the tax you supposed to pay if you… sell some shares or sell an antique, you know, this is a capital gain you make if you make a profit out of it. At the minute, that tax is lower than the tax you pay if you go to work and earn money, right? Which is weirdly unfair, right, it’s just an obscure, slightly odd thing that’s happened in the tax system. Close that gap, you get at least 12 billion pounds extra in a year. Right, so there are things that can be done if you have a government with a bit of backbone, a bit a political willingness to go out and make some of these things happen.

Coco Khan politics of it is really fascinating because as I understand it all the polling is saying that wealth taxes would be quite popular. Do you think this could be a tipping point? Do you see this this statement here is enough to make other Labour politicians, Labour members, even just the general public say right that’s it you lot you lot have lost the plot.

James Meadway I think so. This is the politics of it, but it feels like that. We haven’t had a Labour government like this before that’s acted like this. Think about New Labour. People criticized Gordon Brown and Tony Blair for all stack of things, Iraq war being the most obvious one, of course. But if you look at what they did domestically, Gordon Brown, after a couple of years of sticking to Tory spending limits, really started to spend money on the Nhs, on education, opening Sure Start centers, improving. people’s benefits if they’re in work. There’s a whole stack of things that new Labour did at the time. That’s partly why there’s a bunch of people who look back at it now with some affection. They’re not completely delusional about this. This is what Labour governments do. They spend more money on the things that people who vote Labour want to see them spend money on. So to have them turn around and basically say, okay, actually one budget push and then everything else is austerity from here on inwards, that’s what we’re getting with Rachel Reeves, this is weirdly unusual. This way out of what Labour does. And that’s going to start to niggle, I think, in Labour Mps’ heads, Labour members’ heads, certainly Labour voters’ heads. I mean, the polling for this government now is pretty shocking if you look at what they’re on relative to reform, for instance. But in Labour Mps’ heads I think it’s going to rattle around. They didn’t go into politics. So you can sit there and go, do you know what? What did we achieve? 250,000 more people in poverty. That’s not what you’re going to do if you’re a Labour Mp. So I think there’s going be a lot of pressure building up in parliamentary terms about that. But I think everybody else can see the problem beyond that, which is that you are doing these things whilst allowing. For example, some of the biggest, richest companies on the planet, you’re handing a massive tax cut. That’s what’s being proposed at the minute. You’re not going off and taxing wealth. You’re actually reducing taxes on wealth. You’re making it easier for the super rich. So I think that’s gonna really start to gel with people. That kind of basic argument of fairness is one everyone can see pretty rapidly.

Coco Khan I wanted to ask you James, because you know, everything Labour saying is about one day, we’re going to achieve growth. I don’t know, listen, I’m a high consumer of Instagram wellness content, you know growth, personal growth, spiritual growth, you know, growth, I don t know if they’re on the same platforms as me, maybe. You know, great is good. I get it. We all get it, but I’ve previously heard you say that like, this pursuit of growth is just it’s ridiculous, because we kind of are at the most growiest we can be. I don’t think that’s a word. It’s a bit Donald Trump there, isn’t it? Bigly rowiest. We’ve exhausted lots of things. And really what we should be doing is saying, oh, how do we make what we have? How do we make that fairer? And I was thinking to myself about that. And I thought, oh god there’s something about that that’s quite bleak because it makes it sound like this is the best britain can ever be and i think a lot of people will say well this is rubbish and i was curious but how do you reconcile those two things where you believe that growth is not the right goal but also you you have hope for a better country

James Meadway Because you’ve got to say like, growth, what for? I mean, this seems to the question that the government don’t really answer and who’s going to get the benefits from it and how? Right, we need a slightly more sophisticated conversation about what kind of economy and society we want to live in. Like, what do we actually value here? What do we want work? Do we want people who are elderly or sick or needing hospital treatment to be looked after? Do we wants schools that, you know, we aren’t seeing kids once again go into ported cabins that are falling apart? Do we want these things to happen? Yes, we do. So then how do we design an economy that delivers that is where you start from? And growth can come into this, but you can’t just start with growth and say, right, the thing to get is growth. And then we’ll somehow cascade this into everything else that happens, because there is a problem here.

Coco Khan Because they would say they don’t have the money in the economy to do that, to build that Britain. But we do have.

James Meadway We do have, I mean this is the two issues here. One of them is that growth is slow. If you have to fix a load of things quickly, you’re saying, okay we’re going to get growth, fine. Come back onto like how much growth we’re actually going to gain in the future, okay, we’re gonna get growth in the future. But it’s in the feature, right? There are school roofs falling apart right now. The NHS is creaking right now, you need to deliver the resources this right now so that’s either the government borrows or you go and tax or you do some combination of both. That needs to happen now and that’s where you start from. Because the other bit is this, the bit that’s slightly mad in some ways, is if you go, okay, we have a society that’s more elderly than it was, it’s going to get more elderly into the future. It’s actually a good thing, by the way. It’s good that people are living longer. We should stop treating it as such a terrible, terrible burden.

Nish Kumar I’m really glad you said that.

James Meadway It’s like, oh, we’ve got to deal with all these pensioners. Great. Well, isn’t that nice? Isn’t it nice that people are living longer than they used to? And let’s like start from how do we manage that? Not like, well, this is a problem, isn’ it? Maybe they should make it work until they’re 80, right? Let’s try and get this the right way round.

Nish Kumar It’s all got very Logan’s run, like the rhetoric around it, it’s all got a bit like, we’ve got this aging population who we should probably be bumping off.

James Meadway Exactly. It said something quite fundamental about a real problem with framing how we think about the economy. It gets presented like this. Rachel Reeves was doing it today. It gets presented as this big separate thing, like some terrible god that we have to make sacrifices to, and maybe they’ll smile and deliver something to us. It’s not like that at all. We produce this. The economy is what we all live in. So if you start from what can we do to make people’s lives better on a day-to-day noticeable basis? That’s a whole bunch of things you have to do quickly. But that involves a conversation about the distribution of resources, not saying in the future we will have more resources to distribute. Does that make sense?

Coco Khan That makes sense. I’m also still reeling from your comment that the government’s waiting for 2006 to come back. And I just kept thinking 2006. Yeah, when the Kaiser cheese were good. Yeah. It was it’s never it’s never gonna happen care. It’s over. That moment’s gone.

Nish Kumar We all want it to be 2006 again, we all, I would love to be 21 again, it’s not going to happen.

James Meadway Can we somehow build a time machine? That’s the investment plan for the government. Get us all back there.

Coco Khan Listen, new rave never dies.

James Meadway If I went back to the 2000s now I’d probably be slightly horrified by a whole bunch of things.

Nish Kumar Yeah, I mean, I see the teenagers wearing the baggy jeans again. You’re getting mud all over your trousers. Not everything that happened in the early 2000s was good. You were just statistically further away from death.

James Meadway Which is no slightly further away than it used to be, which is a good thing.

Coco Khan Well, thank you for ending this on a positive note, James.

James Meadway Yeah, sorry, I got a bit bleak, but you know, you asked me to talk about Rachael Reeves’ spring statement and it’s not great, but there are moments of hope here. Look, honestly, I think people are genuinely starting to ask the right questions about what’s going on here, like why do we have the fiscal rules being so important? Why can’t we do something about inequality? Why do we just have to accept another round after almost 15 years of austerity? Why do you have to except this forever more? We don’t need to. Things could be different.

Coco Khan James Meadway, thank you so much for joining us on Pod Save the UK. Now if you’re only listening to our podcasts, you’re missing out because we’ve got full video episodes and a ton of exclusive content on Youtube.

Nish Kumar Like the Pod Save the World and Pod Save UK bonus episode where Tommy Vietor, Ben Rhodes and I discuss how the Labour government is doing the Farage Musk drama and what Trump’s America looks like from the outside.

Coco Khan It’s a great episode, I’ve really enjoyed it. What was that beautiful poetic phrase you had about Nigel Farage? A boil on the state of the nation, was that it?

Nish Kumar It was there was some I

Coco Khan Walking gout. Was it walking gout?

Nish Kumar Yes, I think the phrase is, if Gout was a guy, we had a really nice time talking about some pretty depressing individuals. So just hit up Pod Save the World on your nearest YouTube search bar and don’t forget to hit subscribe so you never miss a beat.

Coco Khan And now listeners, have you got a question for us? That’s right, we’re talking about our upcoming mailbag special. We’ve had some great questions in already. So actually I’m gonna pull one out for you, Nish. What place in the UK do you think is the most underrated to visit?

Nish Kumar I’ll tell you where I do really have a lot of time for that I think people are surprised by is Norwich. Norwich is a great city, it’s a really beautiful part of the world. It’s a kind of cool artsy place. That would be my sort of hot tip. No one’s under rating Belfast. No one is under rating Manchester. No one under rating Glasgow. Those are cities that everyone knows are cool, but I would say as a real gem of a place, Norwich, big fan. Just to be clear, all the places I’ve named are places that I sell well on tour and have good comedy gigs at.

Coco Khan So this is your last chance to send in your questions, leave a comment or email us at psuk@reducedlistening.co.uk and stay tuned for the episode in a couple of weeks time.

Nish Kumar Now after the break we’ll be chatting about the Netflix show Adolescence which sparked a national conversation about toxic masculinity.

Coco Khan So Nish, I know you’ve been busy on tour, but have you watched Adolescents yet?

Nish Kumar I have not watched Adolescence yet, and I’ll be honest with you, the reason I haven’t is because I am touring, I’m moving around a lot, and to be quite frank with you I need to only be consuming very easily digestible television programs or films. And I watched the first two minutes of the first episode of Adolescents and thought, I get to come back to this when I’m on a week off. I’m really excited to see it, so talk to me about it.

Coco Khan Yeah. So for any of our audience who don’t know, Adolescence is a Netflix drama. It’s created by Stephen Graham and Jack Thorne. It tells the story of a 13-year-old boy who’s arrested on suspicion of murdering a girl from his school. The creators were inspired by a couple of real life cases, and there’s been quite a lot of them, I’m sorry to say. And the show raises questions about toxic masculinity and the damaging impact of the girls. And the show has really struck a nerve. I think I saw a statistic that it was number one in over 70 countries. So this is not just a British problem. This is not an American problem. This is across the world. And it’s really captured people, even got the attention of the Prime Minister. So Keir Starmer said he was watching it. He was speaking to BBC Radio Five Live on Monday. He said as a father to teenagers, he’s worried about this crisis in masculinity. He’s also said that he would support it being shown in schools. Got to tell you, Nish, when I heard that I was actually quite angry. I thought, what are you doing? Why are you on the radio acting like, oh God, I can’t believe it. I’m so moved by this. You are the prime minister. You have the power to stop this. You have to power to do things and stop this dangerous material getting into the hands of very vulnerable young boys in a way that nobody else has. I get to be worried. Not you, Mr. Starmer. But anyway, it is what really frustrated me, actually.

Nish Kumar Do you think that this has the potential to be another Mr. Bates versus the post office moment, which was an ITV drama that we talked about extensively on the show when it went out, which actually pushed the government to start compensating the victims of the post office scandal? Is this something that could possibly spark a kind of actual legislative response?

Coco Khan I mean, it definitely could in terms of, you know, reaching the public where they are, making people feel like this is an urgent issue that needs to be tackled immediately. I have to say, I think that Mr. Bates versus the post office is quite unusual because actually something did come of it. And for the most part, you can get a brilliant drama and it raises awareness, but nothing really takes place. So I kind of hope it does do that. But on the other hand, I also think this is not how this should work. It shouldn’t be governance by Netflix or governance by TV drama. Do you know what I mean? Lisa. issues that are based on real life things that should have been corrected anyway without needing to do this piece of work.

Nish Kumar But I just would say as a side issue, this is why art and culture is important to us as a society. The arts and culture does create opportunities to have really important conversations through scripted television programs. And so when people talk about why funding for the arts is important and why it’s important, we support arts and, this, is why this is exactly why it is incredibly important that you actually have a well-funded art sector because there are moments like this.

Coco Khan Because it is a work of fiction, however, it’s very closely based on real life. It’s already been drawn into this culture war issue where people are saying that it’s been manipulated to suit a woke agenda, right? So I don’t know if you’ve come across this and I hope you haven’t, because it’s just another unbearable culture war nonsense thing, but you know, you’ve got the sections of the hard right, far right, whatever you want to call it, saying that actually, when you look at the cases where the perpetrator killed a young girl. they were nearly always people of color, boys of color. And so they said, Oh, but then you put a white boy in the lead character because, you know, you want to please the wokes or something like that. I mean, it’s complete nonsense. There have been examples where white boys have killed white girls. And the whole point of it is saying like, this is a universal problem and kids from supposedly good families can be caught up on it. And it’s the ability to portray it in the television to humanize it and make it universal, so to speak. that I think is what has made it powerful, because otherwise people would look at singular cases and be like, oh, that’s that community problem, or that’s a that poverty problem, or that x, y, z. Actually, it’s not. This is a widespread problem across young boys in this nation, in many, many nations. So yeah, I agree with you. It’s just a shame that we don’t have the infrastructure to be doing it ourselves really.

Nish Kumar You have to be deluded on a kind of weapons grade level if you think the misogyny is the preserve of one specific culture or a specific community. And part of the problem I think that we’re having in terms of actually having meaningful conversations about misogyony is that bad faith actors are dragging us into conversations about this being a cultural thing and preventing us having an actual conversation about the fact that the problem with all of this is male problem. It’s a crisis of masculinity. And one of the solutions that’s being floated this week is the idea of setting up a minister for men. Do you think that that is a good idea?

Coco Khan I mean, the way it sounds, obviously sounds quite terrible. And I think it is worth noting that when it was put to star on Five Live, he said he didn’t think a Minister for Men was necessarily the answer. But I do think there does need to be some political intervention. I am slightly annoyed by the fact that this television show, and also just in general, we know the names of the agitators online. One of them is Andrew Tate, you know, another one is Joe Rogan. We know their names and yet they’re just walking around free and so you have these conversations that kind of rankle me, where you’ll hear politicians saying, well, something does need to be done. I mean, what could it possibly be? We’ll do a task force. We’ll get a new department, a new government department. And you think, you know what needs to be done, you need to have the algorithms being more transparent so we can be sure they’re not sending harmful content to vulnerable people, to young people. And potentially some of the people who are grifting in this, they need to be punished, you know, at least pulled off the air at the very least. Come on, like, do we need a whole task force for this? I’ve got an idea. Should I just write to Keir Starmer? Dear Keir, I’ve some ideas for you.

Nish Kumar Well, I think also there has to be some accountability for the social media companies because this, this is part of the issue here is that we, we have these huge organizations that operate in every country, but somehow are governed by the laws of none and that have no responsibility legally as publishers, even though that is absolutely what they are and some of things that they are publishing and distributing. actively inciting violence within our communities. Now if a newspaper was doing that and we can get into conversations about whether newspapers are responsible for that, but at the very least newspapers have some regulation applied to them about what they can and can’t publish.

Coco Khan Mm.

Nish Kumar I think also a good thing that the Labour Party have definitely done is invest in mental health support in schools. But as one of our listeners, Elia, has pointed out to us this week, the investment in youth centers isn’t being considered as part of the solution to youth unemployment. We know that the infrastructure of youth centers collapsed in this country over the last decade and was one of the kind of first key casualties of austerity. We really, really need to look at reigniting some of that infrastructure to start having places where young people feel that it’s safe for them to go, to have actual conversations and start platforming some of the discussions that need to be had on this issue. We talked to Matt Shea on the show, which is an episode he can go back to listen to that’s really worth doing about Andrew Tate and the kind of cult that surrounds him. And, you know, my problem has always been since I… was a young man, I’ve heard this idea that young men can be very easily radicalized. We need to be very careful about young men being radicalized, but the young men that that radicalization is being aimed at are young men who look like me and exclusively young men who looks like me. My whole entire life since I was a man, and now even as I reflect at that time as a very, very old man. There has been a long. protracted conversation about the radicalization of black and brown men. That’s the conversation that we have. We have no scope in our hearts to have a conversation that white men could also be radicalized. And again, it returns to the same point that if you perceive misogyny to be a cultural problem, rather than a problem of masculinity and a male problem, you’re never going to get anywhere with these conversations. Whereas actually, what we need to realize is that young men are vulnerable and susceptible to radicalisation and into that void that has been left by the decimation of so many different social structures that previously acted as a safety net. People like Andrew Tate have stepped into that void.

Coco Khan I get really upset because I have this moment where I’m like, how many young girls have to die? Genuinely, what is the number? What is the numbers before everyone is like, okay, right, fuck the big tech, just fuck them and fuck the fiscal rules. This is a crisis. We need to protect these young. I don’t know why that hasn’t come and when it will come. It really genuinely rankles me. In a way, you sort of think, oh, maybe this is something that exists outside of politics, but it doesn’t. It’s a pure. politics story. So, you know, I was talking about some of the posts I saw talking about like the cultural awareness of it. And one of them was saying, it was from Toby Young, if you’re interested.

Nish Kumar I am never, there has never been a point where I have ever thought or said out loud the words, I am interested in Toby Young.

Coco Khan I’m sorry to bring this to you, but he posited his, I would say crackpot theory that this whole endeavor of making this TV show was propaganda to push forward a censorship agenda, you know, presumably to please the woke. So again, and I just thought, oh my God, I mean, do these people have no shame? Like, actual young girls have died.

Nish Kumar Oh, I think the question you asked there that’s the key question is, do these people have no shame? No, they don’t have shame. All of them were born with a terrible disease that makes them entirely immune to the ability to feel shame. And that’s a real discussion we should be talking about. That is the real discussion.

Nish Kumar No one is talking about congenital shamelessness disorder, CSD, no one is talking about it and we need to be talking about it because everyone with CSD there is a 100% take up rate in people born with CSD and people who have stupid opinions that they’re paid for in the press.

Coco Khan Alright, I’m glad we solved it, Nish.

Nish Kumar And that’s it, thanks so much for listening to Pod Save the UK, a reminder that this is the last week to send in your questions for our upcoming Mailbag special, so if you’ve got a burning question, do drop us a line at psuk@reducedlistening.co.uk.

Coco Khan And don’t forget to follow at Pod Save the UK on Instagram, TikTok and Twitter. We’re also on Blue Sky now too. So follow us at podsavetheuk.crooked.com. And if you want more of us, make sure you subscribe to our YouTube channel.

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

Coco Khan Thanks to producer May Robson and assistant producer and editor Narda Smilionage.

Nish Kumar Our theme music is by Vasilis Fotopoulos.

Coco Khan The executive producers are Louise Cotton, Madeleine Herringer and Katie Long, with additional support from Ari Schwartz.

Nish Kumar And remember to hit subscribe for new shows on Thursdays on Amazon, Spotify, or Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts.