Artificial intelligence will be “mainlined into the veins” of the nation, Prime Minister Keir Starmer has declared, with a multibillion-pound investment and huge public rollout. Amid bond market chaos and a falling pound, the Government is pinning its hopes for growth on the AI revolution – what could possibly go wrong?

To unpick the technogobledigook with Nish and Coco is technology journalist Chris Stokel-Walker. They drill into the Government’s AI action plan and the potential pitfalls of this silver bullet for society, jobs and the environment.

With the far right surging across the world – it’s important to know when you can call a fascist a fascist. No one knows this better than Nafeez Ahmed, investigative journalist and author of “Alt Reich: The Network War to Destroy the West from Within”. He breaks down the scale of the threat we are facing and how we can fight it.

And with so much Billionaire BS flying about, we debut “Facts versus Fuckwits”, debunking some prime fuckwittery from a painfully out-of-touch Tony Blair.

Useful Links

“Alt-Reich: The Network War to Destroy the West from Within” by Nafeez Ahmed

https://www.waterstones.com/book/alt-reich/nafeez-ahmed//9781916754140

Mental Health Services:

https://www.nhs.uk/mental-health/

https://www.mind.org.uk/information-support/guides-to-support-and-services/seeking-help-for-a-mental-health-problem/where-to-start/

https://www.samaritans.org/

https://www.youngminds.org.uk/

https://www.rethink.org/advice-and-information/

Guests

Chris Stokel-Walker

Nafeez Ahmed

Audio Credits

Sky News

Jimmy’s Jobs for the Future Podcast

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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. On today’s show, can I save the UK?

Coco Khan So I’ve just asked chat and apparently it can I can revitalize the UK by driving economic growth, improving public services and advancing sustainability through innovation, efficiency and strategic investment in technology, digital skills and arsenic. I made that last bit up. Just played with the point that like, you can’t trust you.

Nish Kumar I’m not giving enough credit for the quality of your voice work. Your voice is beyond what.

Coco Khan I actually had say to me recently. You should just be careful about the range of actions that you do because you might start to offend people. So I think I think I’m safe with this one.

Nish Kumar Well, write in and let us know about this. How happy were you with that set? To find out what this means to the United Kingdom, we’re joined by technology journalist Chris Stoeckel Walker.

Coco Khan And with the far right searching all over the world will also be chatting systems theorist and investigative journalist Nafiz Ahmed about how to fight it.

Nish Kumar And later, we’ll be sharing your thoughts on Elon Musk’s unwelcome interventions into British politics.

Clip AI isn’t something sort of of the future over the next hill? It’s the present. It’s already here in Britain. Changing lives. A chance to turbocharge growth, create the companies of the future, and radically improve our public services.

Coco Khan Prime Minister Keir Starmer announcing his gambit to the media. So what’s the fuss all about? The government is calling it the Air Opportunities Action Plan. And as we heard there, Starmer is hoping artificial intelligence will turbocharge growth, which is a marked evolution from last year’s rhetoric, where former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak was most focused on air safety.

Nish Kumar And of course, this song and dance about growth and opportunity conveniently comes the same time as the government is staring down some grim economic forecasts. So joining us now to make sense of what the AI plan actually means is technology journalist and the author of How I Hate the World, Chris Stokel-Walker. Welcome, Chris.

Chris Stokel-Walker Thanks, Nish. Thanks, Coco.

Coco Khan So, Chris, what do you make of this? In the face of UK policy? Last year we were hearing that AI is going to kill us all, take our jobs, marry our spouses, and now we should stop worrying. Yeah.

Chris Stokel-Walker A weird U-turn, isn’t it? Yeah. We had this Bletchley Park summit around about 18 months ago where we were told the Terminator is coming to life and we should all prepare for it. And now suddenly everything is rosy. Safety has turned into opportunities. But let’s also really quietly whisper about the jobs that are going to be displaced and we should all embrace if we’re going to become aid junkies. According to the government, we were meant to be mainlining air into our veins as a country or something weird like that. So we’re going to be shambling from one thing to another, seeking the next buzz from artificial intelligence, it seems.

Coco Khan I think too many people watch Trainspotting in Cabinet and that.

Nish Kumar You can’t spell Trainspotting without a.

Coco Khan Very good, very.

Nish Kumar Good. Just start us off here. What is the government actually announced in terms of this A.I Opportunities action plan? What’s the protein?

Chris Stokel-Walker Yeah, sorry, I was busy making jokes to actually not answer the question, which is.

Nish Kumar I’m basically too busy making jokes to ask the question. Chris I like actually this is the absolute perfect guess.

Chris Stokel-Walker I will share the load across all three of us. Yeah. Basically what happened was back in July ish last year, the government commissioned this guy called Mark Clifford, who is this venture capitalist. He’s kind of the go to tech person when the government wants to solve the problem, because obviously one of the issues that we have is government work is incredibly slow. It is incredibly sclerotic. It doesn’t necessarily always get to grips with the latest technologies. So they have to bring in people who do understand this and are at the cutting edge of this. So they asked Mark Clifford to basically come up with a plan. They said we don’t currently have a plan for what to do about A.I.. We’ve heard about GPT. We know that it’s going to be this huge technology that is going to change our lives. And we know that other countries around the world are making big inroads on this, but we’re kind of stuck. So give us a plan for what we can do to try and meet this moment, to adopt this technology and to benefit and kind of become one of the best in the world. We’re already around about number three by most rankings in the world in terms of AI behind the US and China, which isn’t barred, by the way, for a country of our size. So Mark Clifford goes away. He he pulls together this plan and it has 50 recommendations that were published mid-January this year that were almost fully adopted. And the idea is basically that we’re going to go full bore into supporting AI, using its benefits to all of our society. And the government has kind of just gone through a check box exercise, said, Yep, will do this, we’ll do that, we’ll do this. So basically all the recommendations have been adopted in full.

Coco Khan So does that mean anything changed on the safety front then, from, you know, the concerns that we had last year?

Chris Stokel-Walker Yeah. This is where we get really kind of complicated coker, which is that things have changed enormously. But the government wants to say they haven’t. We can’t go through a kind of 180 degree turn from AI is going to kill us all to is going to save us all without asking those questions. And the government really doesn’t want to talk about it, not necessarily in terms of the safety of like the existential risk. Truthfully, the idea of the Terminator, even frankly, of her becoming a reality, is very much science fiction. But there is, I think, a kind of set of other concerns that we have to be aware of, including the environmental impact, including societal impact, including this job displacement that we’re going to see. And also for people like us who are in the creative industries, a real concern around copyright, actually. Of those 50 recommendations, 47 were fully accepted as kind of just yet. We agree there were three that weren’t. One didn’t have a comment on it, which was a kind of one around copyright. One had a partially agree, which was another one around how do we deal with the copyright regime in the UK because. Data that we produce is being used to train these AI models and often without any sort of semblance of acceptance of copyright law. Then the other one was about how do we get international talent into the country around kind of relaxing the visa rules to ensure that we can get the best in the world to come here, which many Brexit people do not like, of course. So there were huge announcements unveiled at the same time as the AI opportunities planned for new bits of infrastructure. Truthfully, lots of these were already in place and in in progress before the plan. So we’re getting kind of new data zones where there will be high tech clusters of bits of infrastructure. Many of them actually already focused around Oxford, which is where we already see large numbers of AI start ups emanating from.

Nish Kumar A big part of this push is to do with Labour’s plans for the economy, which sort of solely center around growth. Do you buy this idea that this is a sort of magic bullet that can create the sort of economic growth that Labour needs to finance its medium to long term spending commitments?

Chris Stokel-Walker Yeah, probably not in time for the next election. So I think that is one of the issues that they have. And it was one of the things that was really interesting to pick up on in the immediate aftermath of those words that we heard from Keir Starmer, who gave his speech. And that obviously opens it up to questions and lobby correspondents from across Westminster then peppered him with questions of, Yeah, but there’s no money here and we know there’s no money and you’re not going to be able to find the money to do things like improve the NHS, to help social care, to do all of the other things that we need. So why are we spending what little money we do have on this in the hope that in the long term we’ll see benefits? I think we will see benefits. You know, many of those who have studied the potential impact of I see productivity benefits. They see benefits to global GDP, 1.5% percentage points, productivity increase in the next decade or so, according to your Goldman Sachs and others like them. So I think what we will see perhaps is kind of short term pain a little bit in terms of all of these job displacements and challenges that we’ll have and the money that we’re gonna have to spend in order to get the long term gain. And, you know, I don’t know whether or not that will come in time for Keir Starmer to point and say this is a system that I decided on in January 2025 has magically improved our economy and our society.

Nish Kumar How much of an impact will this have in terms of the job market? I mean, for under 25? At the moment, the employment prospects are already fairly bleak in terms of short term pain. Is that going to disproportionately affect that generation?

Chris Stokel-Walker Yeah, I mean, I think it will make it more difficult because we already know that there are really tough times out there to try and find jobs. And I think that this won’t be made any better by AI, because the whole premise of that is that it’s going to make us more efficient. And so we need fewer people to do stuff and we need to reskill in order to work with AI. You know, I interviewed a guy called Geoffrey Hinton last month. He’s commonly called one of the godfathers of AI. He’s often asked, as someone who knows more than the average person about AI war children should be doing, because obviously anxious parents are always worried. And he said train as a plumber. So that’s kind of the thing that I think we have to bear in mind is those manual Labour jobs I think will be more in demand at the same time as those kind of traditionally white collar jobs will be less in demand. The IMF put out a recent study that said 40% of all jobs worldwide could be affected in some way by air. Doesn’t mean completely replaced, just means changed. But it’s at 40%. And most of those, ironically compared to the industrial Revolution, were sort of blue collar displacement will be white collar jobs and will be in more economically developed countries, including the West and a global north.

Nish Kumar I’m instinctively a Luddite with these kind of things, and I’m trying to push back against that and be open to this. However, there is this huge elephant in the room, which is the environmental impacts of rolling out air. There’s the obvious energy cost in terms of running all of these data centers, but there’s also hidden costs as well. Water is increasingly becoming a scarce resource in the world. Building the chips uses a huge amount of freshwater and cooling. The systems uses a huge amount of freshwater. One of the data sites is being proposed is sort of seven miles from the Abingdon Reservoir in Oxfordshire, as you’ve already mentioned, which is an area that’s already struggling with water shortages. How much of that has been factored in to the government’s thinking about this?

Chris Stokel-Walker I really do wonder whether when they were discussing and signing off this plot in cabinet, they just kind of looked at Miliband and separately, because this is like. Yes. You’re right, there is a huge environmental impact towards air. And one of the challenges that we have is the air companies hold the information about how much environmental impact there is, and they don’t tell us at the minute. We have best guesses by academics, but they all just that gases. And yeah, it doesn’t take a genius to realize that if a company isn’t willing to kind of tell the whole truth about something, then perhaps there might be something that they want to hide a little bit there. So, you know, one of the things I think that companies do say is, well, and this is a common refrain we’ve talked about this already with jobs is, yes, there is a short term environmental impact, but in the long term, if we get this right, then air systems can find better, more economical, more environmentally friendly ways of powering our energy systems, of doing all of this stuff, we can better use the energy that we do have provided that we use the technology that is currently draining our energy system and causing such high demand on our water supplies and elsewhere. Whether you choose to believe that is kind of, I guess, your tolerance of belief in tech companies to do the right thing. I’m a tax skeptic, tech reporter, and I speak to this a really interesting expert called Sasha Luciani. She works for a company called Hugging Face. She’s air and climate lead. She has tried constantly to get these numbers out of those companies and they just won’t give them. And that gives her real concerns in the long run.

Nish Kumar A Cornell University study, I mean, this is one of the sort of best guess estimates that you’re referring to. Cornell study estimates that globally I could account for six point 6,000,000,000m³ of water use by 2027, which is the equivalent of nearly two thirds of England’s annual consumption. So the best guess estimates that academics and experts in this field are making seem potentially catastrophic. We almost expect this kind of behavior from the tech sector. They fought regulation tooth and nail in a number of different areas, not just AI, but especially from a, you know, a government that has a point touted its green credentials. We need more protection from our policymakers, right?

Chris Stokel-Walker We do. And, you know, in order to start, that might be useful to try and bring it home to our listeners is that, you know, every time that you interact with church HPT and ask it 20 questions back and forth, that’s equivalent of pouring a bottle of water that you would get from sort of a down the drain. The reason why this water usage is happening is because essentially every query that you make for a GPO or similar tool goes to what’s called a data center. They produce heat and energy and it needs to be cooled down. So water constantly has to flow across them in order to try and take away the heat. Yes, you would hope that the government will take action on this. The problem, of course, is that if we take a stronger stance on the environmental impact, that other people will say, well, we’ll have more lax regulation come and work with us. And one of the things I think that was really interesting about the opportunities plan is almost the messaging behind it wasn’t designed fully for us as individuals. It was actually Keir Starmer kind of standing up in front of glitzy robots behind him to try and signify new technology and saying the world’s investors, we are open for business, come to us. We will welcome you with open arms. We will potentially bend our rules a little bit and our principles perhaps as well in order to get you here, because we know that this is the competition, this is the race. One of the things that actually Keir Starmer said constantly in a speech kept using this word race, and he kept saying, it is a race to be first. It is a race to get this interest. If we don’t do it, someone else will. And in terms of the environment, he also kind of gave away the game a little bit when he used a kind of unfortunate image in terms of trying to produce a metaphor In his speech right near the end, he said that we have to grasp the battle of AI. And I was like, why did he use nettle? Because Nettle stayed, right?

Coco Khan I mean, you know, perhaps I could imagine if there was some some system in which, you know, the uses of AI in medicine, for example. Okay, that seems justified in logistics. Okay, that seems justified. But if it’s like I was reading a story the other day about how a number of the top cookbooks on Amazon are actually written by AI, and the faces in the names are created by AI. And if you actually cook any of the recipes, they’re all disgusting. They’re all like sushi shepherd’s pie, and they require 50 sticks of butter or whatever. That doesn’t seem like a good use of a bottle of water. So yeah, I would be very open to seeing something very tight in how we use it. But I just I don’t feel confident that will happen, given everything you’ve said.

Chris Stokel-Walker Yeah. And this is one of the problems is that big tech moves fast, government moves incredibly slow. One of the fundamental. Principals of big tech companies is a 2012 manifesto put out by Mark Zuckerberg, the owner of matter, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, etc. It’s called the Hacker Way. And one of the things that was enshrined in that and is kind of the common mantra for basically every tech executive and anybody working in the tech industry now is a really simple phrase move fast and break things down. That works fine if you’re a tech company, but if you’re a government, the last thing you want to do is break things. But you do need to move fast nowadays. And the challenge we have, unfortunately, Coco, is that these tools are already out there and people can make money by producing eye drops, generated cookbooks and selling them on Amazon for a couple of quid’s profit every single time. And even if the tech companies were responsible actors in a way of saying we should limit this use, and even if there was regulation by government, the tools are now out there in people’s hands. And so, you know, if you take a principled stand and you say, I’m not going to buy these cookbooks, I’m not going to use AI to just ask inane questions because of the environmental impact, Unfortunately, other people will say.

Nish Kumar Well, look, this is a conversation we’ve just scratched the surface of. Chris, we hope you’ll come back and follow up further on this. But in the meantime, thank you so much for joining us today on Pod Save the UK.

Chris Stokel-Walker Thank you.

Nish Kumar Now after the break, we’re going to find out how the far right has spread its tendrils across the world and wedged itself firmly in the UK. We’ll be speaking with journalist Nafeez Ahmed. With the reelection and imminent inauguration of Donald Trump, the rise of hard right parties across Europe and Elon Musk blasting disinformation, diarrhea all over the UK press. It feels like the long standing effort to keep extremist forces out of the government is unfortunately over.

Coco Khan Musk has thrown his support behind far right politicians across the world, praising Canada’s far right populist candidate and openly endorsing the far right AfD party in Germany, to name just a few. But aside from Musk, who else stands to benefit? And what is the risk to our democracy?

Nish Kumar To help us understand how the far right has taken the world by storm, and what can be done about it is Nafeez Ahmed, a systems theorist, investigative journalist and the author of “Alt Reich: The Network War to Destroy the West from Within”. Thanks for joining us Nafeez.

Nafeez Ahmed Thank you.

Coco Khan You observe there was a system cultivating this far right moment quite some while ago, right?

Nafeez Ahmed I think so. I think it was in 2010. I actually said that I think the far right as a network is going to essentially explode. And not in the sense of exploding and disappearing, but exploding and essentially at risk of taking over the Western political establishment.

Nish Kumar Boy, it must be a real mixed emotions for you right now because everybody likes to be, right? Yeah. Obviously don’t want to be.

Coco Khan Yeah. Years ahead. Yeah, Yeah. Yeah. Well done on this. Terribly wrong.

Nafeez Ahmed Yeah. It’s like. It’s pretty, like. Shit. Why did I get that right?

Coco Khan So just. Just briefly, Ulrike is part of the title. I must confess, I hadn’t heard that phrase before. What is it? When we say, All right, what do we mean?

Nafeez Ahmed So it’s kind of a play on words. Obviously, we’ve got the Third Reich, which was the the Nazi rule over parts of Europe during obviously the 1930s. And the idea of the strike, the reason I’ve come up with that term is, is to kind of convey what’s going on with the more familiar term you might be hearing about alt right, which is the idea there’s this. The alternative, Right. And that’s the term that was actually coined by people in the movement. So Richard Spencer, a neo-Nazi, first came up with this idea, we are the alternative, Right. And Steve Bannon took it up and said, yes, that’s the alt right. And, you know, they kind of have tried to rally around a set of ideas around the problems with liberalism, the problems even with kind of kind of mainstream conservativism, and to say we need dramatic change, which essentially is tearing down a lot of the checks and balances of democracy, they want more authoritarian government. They don’t like immigration. They don’t like the idea of multi-ethnic societies.

Nish Kumar They have a fixation with these I mean, we would call them conspiracy theories, really like cultural Marxism and the sort of great replacement theory, right?

Nafeez Ahmed That’s right. You’ve got these two grand theories, I think, which encapsulate some of these ideas. You know, again, and these both were rooted in actually quite neo-Nazi anti-Semitic ideologies. And Russia originated by Nazis like cultural Marxism, was the idea that basically left wing Jews are infiltrating our societies to pursue this kind of flamboyant, super liberal thing and undermine Western institutions in this way that we’re going to fight culture wars. It was an idea that Nazis were promoting and it came from them and they promoted it, and it was taken up by quite mainstream right wingers in the United States and they thought, this is actually quite an interesting way of seeing things. And the great placement theory, of course, is the idea that there’s a horde and a conspiracy from outside the West to kind of bring and kind of export millions of immigrants, predominantly Muslim immigrants from all over the world, but primarily Africa, the Middle East, and put them into the West and replace white people. I think what’s ironic is that the people who are promoting this idea. They’re the ones that actually want to take down. Fundamentals of democracy based on justifying or based on this thing that’s happening. So we need to tear down democracies as we know it now.

Coco Khan I mean, I’m really glad you said that because, you know, we mentioned earlier about the AfD. And I remember reading about a chilling story regarding them this week about how their they would call them provocative leaflets for the upcoming election are plane tickets and their address to the an illegal immigrant. And it’s essentially like a promise of deportation. I grew up in Barking and Dagenham, where there was a really strong BNP moment. We never got leaflets as powerfully horrible as that, but we did get BNP listening. And I remember the feeling of being a brown British person and getting a leaflet like that and then going to a mixed school. And that feeling of separation had been sparked up by this. And it reminded me like, okay, that’s a really good reminder. These people are not far right. They’re white supremacists. Because you say far right sounds. Do you know what I mean? It might sound like a legitimate part of democracy, but what we’re actually describing is, is fascists, Nazis or a genus of anyway.

Nafeez Ahmed Yeah. I think what I’ve come to realize in writing the book and I’ve been tracking these groups for the last 10 to 15 years and even having tracked it, didn’t quite begin to see how they’re working, how they’re working as a network, how they work together. And this is not a want to be clear, this is not like a homogenous network. It’s not like everyone’s a Nazi. But what’s really fascinating is how there are there are core groups of people who are Nazis. And a lot of the people we’re talking about are neo-Nazi parties that even colLabourated with the Nazis during the Second World War. And these these are parties which are now active in Europe, in European elections. You know, whether it’s the the FPO in Austria or the Vlaams Belang in Belgium, the French national rally, all of these parties have got actual historical Nazi roots. And I think what’s interesting is to see how the last few decades they’ve deliberately attempted to to rebrand themselves.

Coco Khan Now they say they’re about integration, but a leaflet like that’s not about integrating is about dividing. Well, I do think they are toning it down. Is it because they know no one vote for it?

Nafeez Ahmed So here’s the thing. I mean, after we defeated the Nazis, it wasn’t fashionable to be a fascist. It was a tactical shift. And with some of these organizations, they even talked about it. So like the Vlaams Belang party I mentioned in Belgium, I think it was the 1990s where their leader, Phillip de Winter wrote an op ed in a Belgian newspaper after they rebranded, I think they were originally called Vlaams Bloc, and they were very well known as a Holocaust denying organization. And he wrote and they rebranded Change their Name, Change their Party goals. But you wrote an op ed where you said this. This whole shift is all about tactics. As you said, it’s all about tactics. Fundamentally, we are the same party. You’ve got the same goals. And that kind of really kind of let the cat out of the bag that a lot of these organizations, it’s all about tactics.

Nish Kumar So who are the key players now in the kind of international the Alt-Reich, who were the most important figures globally in this movement?

Nafeez Ahmed So it’s difficult to trace it down. I would say you’ve got this interesting mix of these political parties, which were, as I mentioned before, you’ve got these parties which have these historically Nazi roots. You’ve then got slightly newer political parties which are, you know, often called far right, like the Sweden Democrats and the other ones, which, again, they weren’t around during the Nazi era. But when they were founded, they were neo-Nazi sympathizers openly, you know, So you’ve got groups like that and then you’ve got other networks which have organized around them. Some of them are research groups. Some of them are think tanks. And I think some of the most interesting ones that I found really shocking. So here’s a strange intersection where you’ve got groups like the Heritage Foundation who have really established well-known conservative, think that one of the most powerful in America, they work really closely, got really close ties with another bunch of right wing, which I think is pretty mainstream here in the U.K. You’ve heard of people might have heard of the Tufton Street Network. Yes. So you’ve got like the Institute for Economic Affairs, which is one of their biggest ones. They’re very closely linked. Both these organizations are part of this wider right wing network called the Atlas Network. They were founded that network was founded by this guy, Sir Anthony Fisher. What was really weird is that all of these guy, this whole nexus of people, I traced them back and found that many of them were heavily influenced by another marquee group called the Pioneer Fund. And the Pioneer Fund was a New York foundation. There was actually a pro-Nazi foundation with very strong ties to the real. Nazis in Germany in the 1930s. Now, obviously, the Pioneer Fund also kind of has to go underground after defeat of the Nazis. But they continue to operate. And one of the fascinating things they did was work really hard to infiltrate mainstream right wing organizations. And they did it through this lens of anti-communism. There were some problems. There was a Cold War going on, but they worked to exaggerate that to such a point. And they labeled minorities, black people, Jews, and increasingly, you know, even Muslims as agents of this kind of left wing colossal conspiracy. And it kind of metamorphosed from there.

Nish Kumar And one of the key players that you talk about in the book in terms of the alt right network as it stands, is Vladimir Putin. How much connection? Because we sort of I sometimes think Putin seems to sit alone because he comes so specifically out of the kind of Russian tradition and the kind of KGB. He seems like such a specific and singular figure. What’s his interest in the European far right, and particularly in the UK? Because in the book you also talk about Nigel Farage having sort of nurtured a warm relationship with Russia. What’s Putin’s interest in this far right network and why does he have a kind of interest in building a relationship with someone like Nigel Farage?

Nafeez Ahmed So that’s a really good question. And I think often this is understood that it’s misunderstood because there’s an assumption that everyone in this network has to have the same ideas, exactly the same views, and it’s not the case. So how does Putin fit into that? The pattern is kind of really simple. It converges on this idea that in order for Russia to survive and thrive, they need to essentially dismantle the sinews of Western power because they see these key structures that have been created after the Second World War like NATO, as a fundamental threat to Russia. So what do we do? We need to dismantle NATO some of. But how do we do that? They actually talk about fostering culture wars. The one that one of the most well known kind of theoreticians, Alexander Dugin, he wrote like a book that was distributed to a Russian military general staff is widely read, really influential. And he actually talks about this big grand plan of dismantling Western institutions using different groups and ideas. And so they wanted to essentially smash liberal ideas and undermine democracy. They see democracy itself as fundamentally decadent and problematic and is a problem in many ways to destroy it. And within that framework, working with far right groups makes a lot of sense. And it’s not about whether you agree with them or disagree with them. It’s just about how they work. Because if you have all these far right groups who are saying, Well, we’re really Euroskeptic, we don’t like the European Union, when you break your all apart and we want to be very nationalist and we want to fight all of this and have a view on fighting amongst themselves, the more we’re tearing each other down. That’s great for Putin because he’s like, well, you guys are at the throats while you guys are fighting it out. We’re going to move forward. We’re going to expand into Ukraine. Ukraine are going to go further than that. And there are lots of documents which reveal these long standing plans to kind of resurrect the Russian empire, so to speak.

Coco Khan I’m glad you mentioned about how, you know, these disparate groups and these disparate motivations can coalesce around like, you know, these kind of shared aims. You know, not not everyone involved in this network, this. All right. Network will necessarily be, you know, a Nazi. But for whatever reason, they think it’s politically expedient to work together with groups that if they’re not Nazi now and then, they certainly have been Nazi before. I mean, I was definitely when you were talking about Tufton Street there, I thought to myself, I’m sure someone, when they clip this up, they say, okay, what is this conspiracy theory? Tufton Street to all Nazis? I think just the street. We just know neoliberals. But I think it’s fair to say, you know, people can have political expedience and sort of share positions with each other even though they don’t agree on everything, which is a really long way of saying, so what on earth does Nigel Farage get out of this allegiance to Putin? How is it expedient to him? What what does he gain from it?

Nafeez Ahmed So Nigel Farage is an interesting kind of character in this whole thing, because from the very beginning he’s played this really interesting game and it’s something that I think has kind of dropped out of the discourse here in the UK on astonishingly, like our media just doesn’t ever remember anything that happened like five minutes ago. So in the 1990s when they founded Ukip, he founded it with Alex said, and he was like a kind of Eurosceptic academic. And at that time Ukip was just pretty much a Eurosceptic party. But then I think it was 97, there was a coup in Ukip and Farage took over. And then said came out and said the party’s just been taken over by right wing extremists. And then what happened later that year? Everything that happened seemed to bear that out. Nigel Farage He’s not chairing this party. And then there’s some scandals where it turns out that some members of the party happened to be basically neo Nazis who were part of the BNP. We didn’t know that. So one guy mocked even I think his name was mentioned in the book. He was BNP head of research. Again, BNP was no neo-Nazi organization. So he was expelled from Ukip. And it turned out that he had written a couple of months before or something or year of we’ve written some horrifying screed about very Protocols of the Elders of Zion type thing about Jews trying to take over the world and blah, blah, blah, blah. Now, a couple of months after he was expelled, he reaches out to Nigel Farage for a meeting. An orgy of fraud says, Yeah, yeah. Cool. Let’s go for lunch. I have a meeting. He meets this guy. He also in the room is Tony Lakemba. He’s a criminal who was convicted of assaulting a Jewish school teacher and carrying explosives. Also BNP member for those for hours. Just has a little lunch with these guys a couple of months later, even writes an article in a far right journal called Spearhead where he says, you know, I think the BNP and Ukip should kind of, you know, work a bit more closely together. And then magically, by some unfathomable coincidence, all these neo-Nazis suddenly start joining Ukip. And at this point in time, the the membership clause, which stops racist people from joining, is not there. It’s not operational for years. And then all these actual Nazis come into the organization. And I kind of trace this process in the book, and it’s astonishing. So you kind of think, what was Nigel Farage thinking and doing as Simon when people asked him about this? He just said, Yeah, yeah. He reached out to me. So I had lunch with him.

Coco Khan I just love love.

Nafeez Ahmed We see so many different antisemite and Nazi reaches out to you and says, Can we meet for lunch? You don’t reply and say, Yeah, cool. Let’s let’s go for it. He was just expelled from the party, but months ago. And you’re like, No, I’ll go meet this guy. What’s going on? Yeah. And that that to me kind of sums up how Nigel Farage has worked this issue throughout his career. When after that, he went on in the European Parliament to forge ties with, you know, he chaired this group. European Parliament is organized by these political groupings of parties. Right. And his grouping, all of the members were basically neo-Nazi parties, all of them. And no one’s talking about this. It’s like, what is going on? That’s what concerns me, is that I don’t really care whether Nigel Farage is the Nazis. You’re not a Nazi. That’s not what this is about. This is about people in this network leveraging and mainstreaming Nazi organizations and acting as a funnel for those ideas and being influenced by those ideas and having their policies and their approaches, and then that becoming sanitized and mainstream. And the general public doesn’t have any idea that that’s where it’s actually coming from.

Nish Kumar And so then you have this kind of alliance between people who are ideologically Nazis. Then you have this sort of group of hyper capitalists that will essentially back any political project as long as it doesn’t regulate them in any way, shape or form. I think that brings in a lot of those Tufton Street guys. Then there’s whole third facet of this is tech companies and you know, the Elon Musk and the Mark Zuckerberg’s. I don’t know if these people have an underpinning political philosophy. I suspect not. But in reality, what’s underpinning a lot of their movements in the last few years is, again, this attempt to push back against regulation. And essentially, if people who are ideologically of the far right promise not to regulate the tech sector, they will give them kind of unbridled support. Now, when you consider that kind of triangle working in Congress, it starts to feel pretty hopeless, right? And now in the UK, we’ve ousted our incumbent government and there are elements of the Conservative Party that I think have mainstreamed a lot of these ideas. Various Jewish groups criticized Suella Brafman very heavily for her consistent use of the phrase cultural Marxism and attempted to explain to her the actual card carrying Nazi roots of that term. So we’ve ousted the Conservative Party. We’ve now got a Labour Party in power. It is Starmer’s tactics to push back against the far right. All seem to be focused on delivery and sort of rebuilding people’s trust in politics. But these are kind of slow burn tactics and in an age of disinformation. Do we need a more rigorous and immediate approach to push back against this?

Nafeez Ahmed I think definitely the first thing that we need, on the one hand, is we need to we need to call out these groups as for what they really are. And I think that’s there’s not enough understanding of why I wrote the book. It’s because I think there isn’t really a kind of understanding, Wait a minute. Where these groups come from, How do they work? The other thing that I think needs to happen is. When it comes to the change that parties like Labour are talking about, the biggest thing that is missing is transformation. Right. We talk about change. I even the language of change has become so stale since like Obama kind of made hope and change. Hope and change. I mean change. Literally, every Liberal party since then has kept used the same language. But do we feel that there is hope and change to ordinary people? Experience hope and change? I don’t think majority of people vote for Trump unnecessarily would identify themselves. I’m a Nazi. I’m a racist. I don’t like anyone. They definitely was weaponizing racist ideas and racist means to push people to take these two to to kind of take those positions. But the reason people I think the biggest driver was, you know, people were living from paycheck to paycheck. You know, they’re not seeing an improvement in their lives. They’re not seeing. And that’s the biggest issue. Whereas when you look at what happened when Trump came back, it’s extraordinary because Trump successfully packaged himself as I’m the guy is going to tear everything up. This system, this deep state, whatever admin, administrative state, as they call it, that big thing that is here, I’m going to tear it all down. And people liked that language. They looked him in thought, you kind of feel like the outsider guy he’s in tearing down. And it made Biden-Harris administration look like, we’re just the status quo guys tinkering with the system, which is insane because you look at what Trump actually stands for and he’s got the biggest number of billionaires.

Nish Kumar Yeah.

Nafeez Ahmed You know, in his in his party. If you look at what the policy agenda they’re proposing, it’s not going to help working people. It’s going to do it worse. But here’s the interesting thing that I see. It’s not going to work, right, because Trump already failed. He came in once we had the pandemic, We had all this stuff. He couldn’t deal with it. He mismanaged these crises. We’re in this new era. If people call it the poly crisis, you know, all the things kicking off climate, energy, food, the economy or loss or getting worse, blah, blah, blah. It obviously shows that the system in itself isn’t working. We need massive change. We need real systemic transformation. And I think that’s where we’re at this point, where people are just fed up and they’re going to vote you out. If you can’t deliver transformation, they can’t experience it in our lives. So my hunch is we’re going to go through this quite dangerous inflection point where a lot of the stale, pale, whatever kind of ways of doing things, they’re going to keep trying to do it in the same old way and it’s not going to work. But when these guys come in, they exploit that. You know, whether it’s Farage, whether it’s Trump, they come in. But are they going to offer change? Wait, Look at what mosque mosque’s proposal. The mosque. A Trump proposal is insane. They’re going to, what, three, three, $3 trillion of the federal budget they want to eliminate from the government. It’s absolutely nuts. When I calculated the GDP implications of that, it’s something like a quarter of America’s GDP would literally be eviscerated. I don’t think Americans are going to sit there and be like, Yeah, that’s fine. People are going to get angry. They’re going to get upset at the government. People are desperate for real change, and that’s an opportunity for Keir Starmer and his government need to be ready to think outside the box to start acting now. And if they don’t do that within this next four years and there is a real risk that they’ll face that at the next election, why do we even want to go through this process of swinging between between a tepid liberal approach and an insane, extreme far right approach until we get to the point where we wake up and say, Guys, that was insane. Can we get off the roller coaster now and do something actually sane? We should just do it now. I think Starmer has the opportunity he needs to act now.

Nish Kumar Face Ahmed, thank you so much for joining us from parts of the UK.

Nafeez Ahmed Thank you.

Nish Kumar Now, clearly the era of disinformation is upon us with matter last week announcing that they’re ending their fact checking program. This week’s episode of Offline. Lena Khan, commissioner of the US Federal Trade Commission, joins them to talk about her fight to break up Amazon and matter. Tune in to this episode now on the offline feed or check it out on their YouTube channel.

Coco Khan And while you’re at it, Pod listeners, don’t forget that you can see our lovely faces on our YouTube page. So last week we had a lovely comment from one of our listeners. Glass Spider wrote in that Knish looks like his night never ended. He just slopped over into the next day.

Nish Kumar I am increasingly aware that I’m looking more and more haggard on these shows. I’ve a busy, personal and professional life.

Coco Khan You don’t have to justify your appearance.

Nish Kumar It’s a real it’s a real kick in the teeth. To get a comment from Glass Spider, who are going to assume is a fellow David Bowie fan. I’m just going to assume that that is a David Bowie reference. Yes. Why not tune in to the YouTube feed to see how disheveled I look on a week to week basis?

Coco Khan I mean, personally, I think it’s a compliment. I mean, these days with the closing hours in London, if you. All nighter. You may share the recommendations.

Nish Kumar After the break, we’ll open the mailbag to hear your thoughts on how we should deal with disinformation.

Coco Khan So something we’ve been wrestling with here on Pod Save the U.K. is how much we should be engaging with the far right rhetoric, bullets, whatever you want to call it, and whether we should spend some time in new facts versus Fuckwit section, which would be designed to debunk the disinformation diary.

Nish Kumar We’ve been flooded with listener responses about this thorny question, and we’d like to thank you all for writing in. Lots of you are on board with the idea of debunking fake news or nonsense, but not all of our listeners agreed. Hannah said that the media should ignore Musk as he’s nothing more than a troll. He needs to go back to the bridge. He crawled out from under straight facts from Hannah. Jason said, I don’t believe that we should give Musk and his far right fuckwit buddies the time of day because he is simply not worth it. However, I can totally understand why people are wanting to engage in it, because the last thing you want is for these ideas to snowball.

Coco Khan Many of you do want us to be careful about giving too much attention to the disinformation. Catherine said it’s a good thing to put sunlight on the things they are hiding. But let’s not do their work for them by repeating their look at me sound bites. Ridley said ignoring Musk makes him seem harmless. Giving him oxygen is necessary, but instead of simply saying he’s lying, this is the truth. I’d like to hear how he benefits from the lie.

Nish Kumar We also had a fantastic response from Israel Butler, who’s the head of narrative and framing at the Civil Liberties Union for Europe, who trains and supports progressive communicators on how to get the public onside. His comment was really insightful. Here’s what he had to say. The way to get people to let go of misinformation is not by correcting the facts for them. It’s by making them realize that the source of the misinformation is not trustworthy. And you do this by exposing that they have hidden motives which actually involve doing something that harms your audience.

Coco Khan So there’s actually a helpful formula that we can all follow, says Israel. It’s known as the truth sandwich. So step one lead with the real story. Step two highlight the problem. Maybe here you can do some myth busting. And step three, come back to the real story and what can be done.

Nish Kumar Listen, I don’t know if I’m just hungry. And the use of the word sandwich has made me think this is a great idea, but that sounds like a great sandwich.

Coco Khan In practice, something of what? What could it be? Okay. Article says Bob Dylan’s never made a bad song. Okay, so that’s the story. Now what’s the problem? However, that article was written by Nish Kummer, who is famously a Bob Dylan evangelist and cannot see clearly on these things. So come back to the Real story. Bob Dylan hasn’t had a good album for many years.

Nish Kumar Well, that’s simply untrue.

Coco Khan Sure, sure, sure, sure.

Nish Kumar But it’s simply untrue. You couldn’t have picked a worse time in Dylan’s artistic output to make that sort of a claim. I just said he’d done it in the middle of the 1980s. You’d have been making an excellent book in the sort of nadir of Under the Red Sky. You’d be making an absolutely fantastic.

Coco Khan Take this route now. I was just trying to make a joke. But anyway, we are serving up off a spicy truth sandwich for you. And as it turns out, the fuckwit tree doesn’t just come from the right, from the Tories, and from reform. So here’s the context and truth of the matter, because we should always start there. So context this. Britain is experiencing a mental health crisis which is particularly affecting young people. NHS data shows that between April and October last year there was a 10% increase in children across England needing treatment for severe mental health crisis.

Nish Kumar So the problem is a big one and we clearly need to add more mental health capacity within the NHS. As if left unchecked, it’ll only fester. Parliament has even taken submissions from mental health professionals detailing why it’s so important to intervene early. Laying out that if unchecked issues can worsen for individuals leading to negative health and social outcomes for society, and perhaps most ironically, for those on the neo liberal bandwagon, it actually leads to negative economic outcomes as well.

Coco Khan But facts don’t get in the way of opinions. For many former prime ministers, it seems. This week, Tony Blair gave his $0.02 on the rising demand for mental health support. On the podcast, Jimi’s Jobs for the Future.

Clip We’re spending vastly more on mental health now than we did a few years ago. And it’s it’s hard to see what the objective reasons for that are. And if if we’re not careful, we’ll get into a position where people, you know. You know, life has its ups and downs and everybody experiences those. And you’ve got to be careful of encouraging people to think they’ve got some sort of condition other than, you know, simply confronting the challenges of life.

Nish Kumar I’ll tell you what’s bad for my mental health. Seeing Tony Blair speak about anything in 2025, I think it’s really important to try and engage with the fact that the crisis in mental health is not the result of self-diagnosis or over medicalization. Many people are living with an undiagnosed mental health condition due to systemic failures to identify and treat conditions early enough. According to bipolar UK, people with bipolar disorder wait on average nine and a half years for a. Correct diagnosis. This delay has profound human and economic consequences. With bipolar related suicides alone costing the UK between 436 million pounds and 872 million pounds annually. If you’ve talking about challenges of life, then by all means let’s have a conversation about the housing crisis, meaning people are struggling to pay their rent or, you know, job insecurity, or the fact that real wages have struggled to increase in the last 15 years. If you’re worried about why people are worried about the challenges of life, maybe look at kind of systemic inequality.

Coco Khan Right? Challenges of life sounds like, I’ve had a few bad dates, you know? I mean, like it’s not like, I live in a country that’s in economic decline and it’s slowly but surely getting taken over by toxic politics. And actually, funnily enough, I feel a little bit down. You know, that’s that’s a logical conclusion to draw in terms of your feeling of well-being and your optimism for the future. You know, to me.

Nish Kumar Is patronizing shite. That’s, you know, it’s sort of pseudo science that he doesn’t actually seem to substantiate with any hard evidence. And meanwhile, organizations stuffed with experts on this issue are saying that, yeah, there is a mental health crisis, this crisis of people actually getting seen for the mental health problems that they have. As somebody who has experienced a certain number of mental health issues that I’ve spoken about publicly in the past. I know the only reason that I’ve been able to see them is because I have been able to pay for private mental health support. Like, that’s just the reality of my life. I know that that’s the only reason I’ve been able to get assistance in this. It’s incredibly offensive to people that are struggling for somebody that we’re constantly told has this incredible political skill and acumen to read the national mood. He’s never sounded more divorced from reality.

Coco Khan Now, absolutely. I’m like, you know, it’s so funny because we’ve been talking about air today and about how, like, you know, this idea is kind of captured our political establishment, if you want to use that language and about how like it can fix everything. But somehow the idea that like there’s been developments in the study of mental health and that people realize now that certain conditions aren’t a fact of life and they can be helped. No, that’s all. That’s why when all the millennials are crying about like, they can’t take any stress. What? What I don’t understand. And do we like science and we don’t like science? What? What do we like? Yeah.

Nish Kumar That’s the really critical thing here is like, do you believe in reason and evidence? Yeah. Or do you want to simply, baselessly speculate? But then I guess Tony Blair has never been a huge fan of evidence, whether it’s, you know, whether it’s the mental health of the UK or the lead up to the war in Iraq. Tony Blair has always had a, shall we say, mixed relationship with a need for evidence.

Coco Khan And just a reminder that if you’re feeling any struggles with your mental health, please don’t listen to Tony Blair. Make the most of the NHS that we’re all paying for and is ours and we should be all fighting for. Talk to your GP. You can receive a referral therapy. We’ve also included mental health resources in the show notes.

Nish Kumar And that’s it. Thanks for listening to Pod Save the UK. As always, we want to hear your thoughts. Email us at PSUK@ReducedListening.co.uk.

Coco Khan Don’t forget to follow 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 Listening production for Crooked Media.

Coco Khan Thanks to senior producer James Tindale and assistant producer May Robson.

Nish Kumar Our theme music is by Vasilis Fotopoulos.

Coco Khan Thanks to our engineer Jeet Vasani.

Nish Kumar The executive producers are Anouska Sharma 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 wherever you get your podcasts.