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A world leader has been assassinated, schools and hospitals have been hit, and Donald Trump thinks that Keir Starmer is no Winston Churchill. It’s all kicking off as the US and Israel’s illegal war escalates across the Middle East. All of this with the open admission of no real plan for what comes next.

Struggling to absorb it all? Wondering if there’s another way? British-Iranian peace strategist Sanam Naraghi Anderlini MBE is here to fill us in. She joins Coco and comedian Sophie Duker, who is in the hotseat for Nish this week.

Soaring oil prices was not the backdrop Chancellor Rachel Reeves was hoping for ahead of her second Spring Statement. Finalised before the conflict broke out, her economic plan was “Trumped” before it was even delivered – so where does this leave the UK?

Plus – just as the UK gets dragged into this latest destabilising conflict, Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood rips up the rules on UK asylum.

Got a burning question for Nish or Coco? Big or small – they will be answered in a special episode! Email: psuk@reducedlistening.co.uk

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GUEST

Sanam Naraghi Anderlini MBE, founder and CEO of the International Civil Society Action Network (ICAN)

USEFUL LINKS

Sophie Duker
https://thesophieduker.com/

If You Were In Charge with Sanam Naraghi Anderlini and Kavita Nandini Ramdas.

CREDITS

Sophie Duker – Live at the Apollo / BBC One 
Keir Starmer / X
Parliament TV 
PBS News Hour / YouTube
BBC News 
Zoe Gardner / IG
Manchester Evening News

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TRANSCRIPT

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

Sophie Duker And I’m Sophie Duker.

Coco Khan So attentive listeners and watchers will notice that Sophie is not, in fact, Nishkumar.

Sophie Duker No, but I am still a black slash brown person that makes bigots angry.

Coco Khan We didn’t want to lower the diversity count, you see.

Sophie Duker Oh no, of course, yeah.

Coco Khan No. Kaliha?

Sophie Duker Big thoughts.

Coco Khan So Sophie is stepping in the hot seat this week while Nish is off having a break, which is good because he doesn’t take breaks and aside. Sophie is a comedian and writer. She’s performed at the likes of Live at the Apollo Mock the Week, and she’s actually won both Taskmaster and Celebrity Mastermind. Here’s a taster of Sophie at work.

Sophie Duker I know some people don’t like it when you talk about identities, they don’t it when gay comedians talk about gay stuff, or women comics talk about girl stuff, or Croatian comedians bang on about Croatia. But if I don’t talk about my pain on stage, how else will I make my therapy tax deductible? What a little cutie, monetize the trauma.

Coco Khan Right. So Sophie, brace yourself. It is not a light week to be cut on your teeth on a politics podcast. On the show today, we’re asking, genuinely asking, is this World War as conflict escalates across the Middle East.

Sophie Duker Yes, it’s bleak, and as oil prices surge because of this conflict, inflation will too, which is bad news for a Chancellor who has just delivered her spring statement on the economy.

Coco Khan Okay, so first up, the small task of catching you all up on World War III. So on Saturday, all eyes turned to Iran after the United States and Israel launched a full blown attack on the country. The Ayatollah Khomeini, that’s Iran’s supreme leader for the last 37 years, was killed along with senior figures from the regime.

Sophie Duker Before the world had time to absorb that shock, Iran retaliated, launching a barrage of strikes targeting Israeli and American bases across the Gulf, including Qatar, Kuwait, Jordan, the UAE and Bahrain, as well as some civilian locations like hotels.

Coco Khan So far, the Iranian Red Crescent Society has estimated that more than 1,000 people have been killed in Iran since the conflict began. Among them were 165 schoolgirls and staff after a primary school was bombed, the worst mass casualty so far. Meanwhile, influences in Doha and Dubai turned war correspondents, capturing bombs raining down over luxury skylines. This situation

Sophie Duker is moving extremely quickly. As we record on Wednesday there are overnight reports of explosions across Iran and Lebanon from Israeli strikes and Iran has continued to carry out drone attacks. An emergency evacuation flight is due to leave from Oman tonight but thousands of Britons are thought to be stuck in the region and as we’ll discuss later the economic consequences of this war are already being felt.

Coco Khan So initially, Keir Starmer had refused to let the US use British bases to bomb Iran, but on Sunday, the Prime Minister changed tack, posting this recorded statement saying that there would be some support, but only in a limited way.

Clip The United States has requested permission to use British bases for that specific and limited defensive purpose. We have taken the decision to accept this request.

Coco Khan My God, I mean, it’s like describing specific, defensive, limited. I was like, are you talking about how you speak? You speak to us, to the public.

Sophie Duker It’s specific and very precisely.

Coco Khan And extremely defensive because you know this is very bad what you’re doing.

Sophie Duker I mean, it’s him doing a U-turn and being like, yeah, well, we will actually. Yeah, well, yeah. Now they’ve asked twice, we’ll just allow them to use British bases. I mean obviously this is something that pleases no one, but he’s just, he’s not managing to stand strong against Trump. He’s not fulfilling, like Trump’s disappointed with him because he’s out to destroy all of the Middle East and giving him carte blanche and everything. It just feels like a sort of tail between his legs admission that he’s essentially being. Pressured into something that is abhorrent.

Coco Khan Oh, goodness me. And, you know, like, he cannot pretend that he wasn’t to know how controversial this would be. He’s being hammered in pretty much all directions. So the Greens, Lib Dems and some Labor backbenchers have been saying quite vocally, quite publicly that all of this should have been put to a vote in parliament. Donald Trump slammed him for not moving fast enough, though. And it sort of seems that despite those, those plethora of voices versus the single voice of Donald Trump, we sort of get a sense about which was more powerful. So in an interview with The Sun. Trump lamented the fact that the special relationship was not like it used to be. And he later said, this is not Winston Churchill we’re dealing with.

Sophie Duker Starmer is feeling the pressure, however, as Trump threatened to cut all trade in Spain after, unlike the UK, their PM Pedro Sanchez refused to let the US use its air bases. In response to the president’s catty comments, Starmer had this to say at PMQ’s.

Clip What I was not prepared to do on Saturday was for the UK to join a war. Unless I was satisfied, there was a lawful basis and a viable thought-through plan. That remains my position.

Coco Khan Now, Stama has been at pains to insist that the UK involvement in US strikes on Iran is defensive. Now, this is obviously an extremely blurry line. What is clear, though, is that like it or not, Britain is now very much involved in this chaos. So on Sunday, a British RAF base on Cyprus was struck by a drone. And on Tuesday, the government confirmed it is sending a Navy warship to defend it.

Sophie Duker Now, if like me, you need just a moment to figure out how we got here in the first place, our special guest Sanam Narghi-Andalini is here to help.

Coco Khan Sanam is a peace strategist, founder, and CEO of the International Civil Society Action Network, or ICANN. She’s Iranian-British, she’s a commentator on Iran, and has spent nearly three decades working on global conflicts and peace building. She was awarded an MBE for her services to international peace building and women’s rights, and was an architect of the UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on women, peace, and security. She also has a podcast, by the way, it’s called, If You Were In Charge. So she’s basically a classic woman underachiever. Welcome to Pod Save the UK.

Sophie Duker Welcome!

Sanam Naraghi Anderlini Thank you very much.

Coco Khan I really wish we had you on this show in better circumstances. There’s clearly so much you could talk about. I do just want to ask you, how are your family? I know you still have family in Iran. This must be scary.

Sanam Naraghi Anderlini Thank you very much for having me. We have a little meme going around in Farsi that says, I’m OK, but don’t ask me how I am because I will cry. And I think that that’s really the state that we’re all in. You wake up in the morning and you go on your social media and you hear the B-52 bombers, which are these gigantic monsters of planes that drop. I don’t really understand the military, you know, 170,000 tons, you know, like these things that it’s all the military gizmo stuff, but it’s these gigantic planes dropping gigantic bombs that are now they have shockwaves in a city of 15 million people. They’ve bombed 10 hospitals already, neonatal units, schools, 181 kids under the age of 10 have already been documented as having died. Over a thousand civilians have already died. We don’t know how many soldiers and in Iran, you know, Iran has the old fashioned draft. So it’s just, you know if you’re 18, 19 years old as a boy, you get sent off to the barracks and we don’t how many of them have been killed. So this morning I woke up and I was like, I wish it was yesterday morning and the day before and the before. So that’s how it is for us right now.

Coco Khan We have the comfort in the UK of not having necessarily felt war directly, but what you’ve described there is that essentially every single citizen will know someone affected by this.

Sanam Naraghi Anderlini Absolutely, because this is an illegal war, whatever that means. No war is ever good, but we’ve had situations where the Security Council gets together and they make some determination that we have to go to war. Often very circumspect and dodgy, but in this particular case, there is no agreement. It was a preemptive strike, there was no reason for it, that all of the rationale that they gave of nuclear weapons, it’s all false, and everybody’s coming out and saying it was false. And there were in the middle of negotiations between the United States and Iran with the Omani foreign minister and the night before the bombing started, in a very unprecedented way, he came out on American television to say, we’re very close to a deal. They have made concessions. You know, we’re just ironing out the details. And then the next morning, the bombing’s started. So that’s one side of the story. And then, the other side of it has been that the Israelis have been working with the Shah’s son, Reza Pahlavi, who lives in America. He’s 66, he’s actually never had a job, but you know, what’s that, yeah, who needs qualifications to run a country? But he has been almost like a Pied Piper for Iranians to say, you know we’re gonna have freedom, we need the West to come and help us, we need this military attack because we’re going to have freedom. And so you know lots of people who are desperate and you know both in Iran and outside are like, yes, yes, we rally around, we want the military attacks. Assuming that they would be sort of targeted at the heads of the regime, you know, a little bit like kind of Venezuela-style kind of decapitation as they call it, completely a misunderstanding the nature of the Iranian state, which is much more complex, but even more so completely being hoodwinked by what the Israeli agenda was and has been for many, many years in the region, which was expansionist. And so four days into the war, we’re now seeing that they are targeting things like police stations and the infrastructure of. Governance of the state, so banks are closed, people can’t get their money out, a passport office is closed, people are trying to leave, can’t, you know, it’s, yesterday we heard from someone saying they’ve hit the police station, so the policemen are out in the streets. So you’re creating a sense of statelessness, right, of absolute chaos, because they want the country to be fragmented. And this is just four days in. So that’s one side. And then the Iranian. Regime has been retaliating and they are fighting the might of the American military power. And so their strategy from the beginning, and they said, if you come at us, we will come at your bases. So they’ve been targeting the American military bases. Some economic infrastructure, like the Americans moved their soldiers from bases to hotels. And they targeted the hotels, right? So they’re trying to inflict both economic pain and militarily kind of cause some damage. And then our government suddenly gets involved. And this is where I’m like, what are we doing? This is an illegal war. There are war crimes being committed in Iran by the Israelis and the Americans. We are putting our own troops at risk. For what? Why, you know, why are we signing up to this nonsense and this travesty? Because this is, this is just, as I say, four days in and this is the situation where

Coco Khan Israel and the US have said that the strikes were preventative, meaning that they were to prevent Iran from developing a capacity to be a threat. There used to be claims about the country’s nuclear capabilities, but what is the actual truth about these threats?

Sanam Naraghi Anderlini From Iran? I am no fan of the Iranian regime. I mean, I came to England because they were persecuting my family. So it’s not that I have an affinity at all with the state. I just think that when you go to war against a country of 93 million people, you need to understand, first of all, what is the nature of the state and why? And what is it that you’re doing? And what are the consequences of that? And the question of the nuclear weapons was they didn’t have it. They haven’t had it, the IAEA, the UN body that deals with atomic energy and weapons, has again categorically come out and said that they didn’t have anything. And frankly, if you remember, in June, the Israelis and the Americans bombed Iran, and they said, you know, whatever capacity for enriching uranium, et cetera, et cetera, has been disabled. So that’s the basic, there’s a lie that is being floated around, and it’s very similar to Iraq 2003. But even if that was true…

Coco Khan And thinking that waging war to prevent something happening, that’s not allowed. That’s not allow, no. It’s getting a bit minority report that, isn’t it? Like, oh, you might commit a crime, so now we will inflict harm on you and all your That’s right.

Sanam Naraghi Anderlini That’s right. You might come and rob me blind, so I’m going to come and kill you first. I mean, that’s not really how it works. The other thing from a UK standpoint, which really upsets me, is that we sit on the UN Security Council as a permanent member. There are five permanent members and ten that roll in every two years. It’s the UK, the US, China, Russia and France. The United Nations was created at the end of World or two with the. The premise of keeping giving us some international infrastructure for international law, prevention of war, to prevent the scourge of war for future generations. That’s what the essence is. The Security Council is the body that’s meant to do it. We sit with the greatest responsibility for the prevention of war and upholding international law. We’re meant to be the firemen, not the arsonists. And what are we doing, kind of enabling all of this? You know, the UN didn’t come out of just, oh, somebody had a good idea at the end of World War II. It was 500 years of human history of thinking about how do you, you know, put guardrails around how we treat each other and nations and powerful nations and war, you know sort of might versus law. 500 years, millions and millions of people dying to World Wars to finally get to this international system that we’ve all benefited from. The level of irresponsibility is just extraordinary and we have to ask, why? Why are we doing this? Who’s benefiting? What’s the end game? What are the risks? And let’s talk about it before we just make the decision to join in.

Nish Kumar [AD]

Coco Khan I had the misfortune yesterday of having to, I don’t know why I do this, I’m clearly a masochist, but sometimes I go into right wing spaces to talk about the news. I’m there talking about international law, good isn’t it? Isn’t it good that we have it? We should try and stick to it. And people talking to you like you’re a hippie idiot who doesn’t understand the way the world is and actually by the time you go to the security council, how bad people could have come, and, ugh, anyway. And it’s really made me. Feel that we’ve lost sense about the world that we want to live in. I don’t want to live in a world where might is right. I mean, we’re a small nation. It’s not a good look for us to live that world because we will be kicked around. You could argue that we are being kicked around at the moment anyway. It is the same with the situation of Gaza. I went to go see a talk by the writer, the political thinker, Eche Temelkuren. She talked about Gaza being a rehearsal. They want to see what they can get away with. It sort of coming true, isn’t it? They got away with that. They’re going to get away with this.

Sanam Naraghi Anderlini What do we do about it? It’s interesting. Yeah. Etch is a good friend of mine. And so we talk about all these things and it’s true, you know. So what we saw in Gaza is now being played out in Iran. So day one, they targeted a girls school, an elementary school, you know, little girls, 108 little girls were killed. Immediately, they said, oh, it wasn’t us. It was a failed Iranian missile, right? And the journalists and all the investigative folks are now clued in. So immediately people were doing geospatial things and saying, no, that missile that you’re showing is thousands of miles away, it’s got nothing to do with the geography of this place, essentially disproving them. So then they said, oh, it’s somebody else. And these stories get circulated that it was themselves, they did it deliberately, it wasn’t us, but it was them. And then they did 10 hospitals. And at some point you’re like, either you have sophisticated targeted weapons. That can target, you can explode whatever, beepers in the pockets of Hizballah guys, right? Either you have that sophistication or you don’t. We suspect that you do, and therefore you are targeting these sites. They targeted a heritage site. We have the Golestan Palace in Tehran. It’s got this hall of mirrors. It’s from the 18th century. It’s been destroyed largely, right. So they do this deliberately. They did it in Gaza. And the other thing that we saw in Gaza, which is now being practiced in Iran, is that they will hit a civilian site, people will come out to help people, and then as people come to help, they drop another bomb. And it’s got a name, it’s called Double Tap. So this is what is going on. The reason why Gaza is so important is that we fell for the propaganda, and it’s drawn us into being aiding and abetting and enabling genocide. And I don’t want to be that. I don’t want to sort of say, I came to the UK, I had to become a refugee when I was a kid, from a revolution, and I’ve gone from having been a refugee to now enabling an aiding genocide with my taxes or here in America or wherever it is. I think we should, at least let’s have a vote. Let’s have referendum or something to say, do we want to or not? Something like that, because these are also all of our resources that are better going.

Coco Khan Yeah, and it’s not just the moral repugnance of genocide, obviously, you know, they trot out this line that, oh, Iran’s a hotbed of terrorism. So it’s like, you bombed a little girl’s school, you just made a load of terrorists, you know.

Sanam Naraghi Anderlini Who is the terrorist? What is terrorism, right? If it’s about invoking terror, what are we doing? And it all goes back, literally it all goes back to the question of Palestine. Because while all this is happening, in the West Bank, they have been terrorizing people. And the settlers are there, and they’re trying to take that land, and then they’re trying to annex it. So making us chase over here and seeing this sort of horror show, meanwhile they’re doing something else over there. And it’s been framed as… Anti-Semitism, if we criticize it, this has got nothing to do with Judaism. This is about a political ideology of what I call extreme Zionism, of an expansionist state, political ideology. It’s got nothing do with faith. We have Jews living in Iran, 50 synagogues that have been always active. You know, it’s got to do nothing with that. But they framed it like that so that they scare us into being silent. And at some point You just can’t be, you have to speak up. We have a responsibility to say. What is going on and why are we getting dragged into this?

Sophie Duker What you said about terror and who is the terrorist and also about international law, it feels like the strategy has no end game other than to cause that sort of destruction and chaos. It feels like it’s almost desirable to kind of like bypass the formalities and exercise that strength. And here in the UK, when we’re being like, why is our government involved with this? It doesn’t feel like there’s any sort of resistance to that ideology. It feels that Starmus put up a pretense of not going along with it for a while, and then now it’s just kind of like, okay, as long as there’s the flimsiest convenient lie for why we should be associated, we’ll go along with it.

Coco Khan If I put aside my ethics, love saying that, put those aside for a second. Britain not standing up to America and saying, we don’t want to be dragged into another illegal war. We’ve already done this before. It played very, very badly for us. In fact, it kept our government, kept our party out of office for nearly 14 years. And we’re in a really bad place. We’re not gonna do that again. But there’s this idea that we have to do it so that we get special treatment. But then you look at the tariffs and we didn’t get special treatments. And then you looked at big tech and how it’s destroying our country. We don’t get any treatment where we can try and legislate or regulate against them because we’re told that we can’t do that and we should sit down and behave. Is this just a rack all over again? Is this a repeat of history.

Sanam Naraghi Anderlini It’s a combination of things. From the Middle Eastern standpoint, it is absolutely Iraq all over again. I wrote about this in 2019 because every once in a while there’s the drums of war of going to war with Iran. I lived in America and I was like, lots of voices pulling it back and saying diplomacy, et cetera. But imagine this. Imagine that Iraq had turned into a viable democracy, governance. They had the oil. They would be a rich country. They had educated people. It could be a powerhouse in the region, legitimate political powerhouse. What would they do on the question of Palestine? Would they turn a blind eye and say, oh, we don’t mind what Israel is doing, or would they actually stand up and stand as a kind of bulwark against what Israel was doing? So it’s to their benefit that Iraq turned into a mess. Same playbook in Syria, same playbook and in Libya. And in a way, it’s been three countries that have benefited. So Israel, because it can do whatever it wants. UAE which became the economic powerhouse and then also militarily they started to sort of push their weight around in places like Yemen. And then Saudi Arabia has been interesting because Saudi Arabia for a number of years was exporting really extreme Jihadi Wahhabism, basically. The Saudis then have decided, have realized that this kind of extremism isn’t to their benefit. So now they’re trying to reform and go in a different direction. And being in the region. They understand that for them to prosper, the neighborhood has to be prosperous as well. So there is an alignment between Iran and Saudi and the Gulf states and so forth. I also worry about the fact that we are in debt right now economically, and we have housing problems, education problems, health care problems, all sorts of things that relate to our human security as a nation, right? And instead, we are… Borrowing from the future £60 billion to build up weapons, most of which are only genuinely useful if they remain useless. Because if we start 40 new nuclear warheads, how many of them do we need to use before we’re all obliterated? So we’re putting our money there. It’s in private hands. We don’t really know. Public money is going into private weapons companies. And we’re just being told, you know, this is national security. But nothing is being done for climate resilience, for environmental resilience, as I say, for healthcare, for kids that are coming out of COVID with mental health issues and insecurity in our communities. But we’re just being told to stick with it basically. And that bothers me because who’s gonna pay the cost of that in the future? And global military budget this year is around $3 trillion. That’s how much we’re spending on weaponry. But the cost of violence, the actual, like all this devastation that’s happened in Ukraine and Gaza and now Iran, it is something like $19 trillion just last year. $19 Trillion of destruction.

Sophie Duker The kind of psychological landscape of people both in the Middle East and in diaspora has completely decimated. The infrastructure is in tatters and the real cost and the real wins are so minuscule compared to, yeah, the overarching devastation.

Coco Khan But yeah, but it’s the people who devastate rarely feel these.

Sanam Naraghi Anderlini Yeah, exactly, exactly. I mean, somebody said today on, I don’t know, I was reading something and they say, the cost, you know, it’s going to be a high cost for this. And I’m like, what cost are you paying? The first people that paid are the 108 little girls who died and their families. Like, you make a decision over here and people are dying over there and generations are impacted. And we move on. You know, maybe this war will last 10 days, maybe it’s two weeks, the new cycle will change and. Yeah, so these are the kinds of things that keep me up at night and make me really…

Coco Khan Oh, I know, I’ve been feeling really raging recently. I also just like, this is a slight sidebar, but I really had enough of just men who think about geopolitics like it’s football, stop war gaming, just stop sitting around being like, well, actually, I think this, stop it, it’s not you who’s going to get shot, is it? Anyway, it really… Unfortunately.

Sanam Naraghi Anderlini It’s also it’s also really sort of extraordinary that that that you know leadership is kind of you know it’s as if if you go and bomb you’re a leader but if you sit down and talk oh you’re you know you’re weak and I’m like you’re sitting behind your desk ordering a bunch of kids to go and kill and be killed and maim and be maimed you know how strong Who is that? Like what kind of strength is that. It’s like a truss. What kind of strength is that?

Sophie Duker It’s like Trump was saying that Kirsten, it’s not exactly Winston Churchill we’re dealing with. It’s, like, why would you want to be like Winston Churchill? Why is this the icon? Like, I mean, not luckily, like Kirstammer is not a Winston Churchill, but, like you want be like this sort of, like callous, arguably white supremacist man, like just for his

Coco Khan I mean, I can’t even begin to start scratching the surface of the white supremacy that is involved in this. But before we let you go, there is this, these war gaming men, they trot out this line, which is that fundamentally it is America that keeps us safe. So to stay safe, we must follow America, which I find a very depressing thought and also feels a little bit almost like defeatist in many respects. I understand that there actually a number of roots. That could be taken to de-escalate this and the government are choosing not to. I wonder if you could just outline some of those so that the next time we are confronted with this argument, we can say, well, actually, no, you could do this, this, This, this.

Sanam Naraghi Anderlini So first of all, the question of America leading, and again, like, is America leading for its own interests or is it being dragged in by various other interests? That’s important, but let me give you an example. So they went into Iran, either the Americans or the Israelis, that they’re now arguing about who did it, but they go and they assassinate Tomené, the Supreme Leader, in his compound. He sat in his component and knew that this was gonna happen. This is a man who didn’t have much of a, genuinely much of a stature and aura in life, 86 years old, has cancer, would have eventually dropped off somehow, you know, like you do. By assassinating him, they sort of elevated his status to imamhood, to martyrdom. What happened there? In Iraq. And I work with women peace builders in all these places. So as the men are going rah rah with their guns, I’m dealing with the women who are actually dealing with consequences and trying to mitigate these. Immediately we heard in Iraq, in Pakistan, in Kashmir, in Lebanon, that people are rallying because he was a figurehead for them. He was some kind of spiritual leader. And because he assassinated, it’s almost a sense of revenge. So you have all these people now who are, to new generation. Who is anti-American. If we join in, they’re gonna be anti-British. They have, in Pakistan, they’ve already gone and raided the American embassy in Iraq as well. And the ripple effect of that, right? That’s already happening in one, but it’s spread, so the consequences of our actions aren’t being considered. The second thing is, if you are worried about a country having nuclear weapons, We have the systems in place. To monitor. We have something called the NPT Non-Proliferation Treaty. Iran is actually a signatory to that. Israel is not, by the way, right? So we have that. They had an agreement, the original nuclear deal that was signed in 2015, they had inspections on a regular basis. The whole thing was under surveillance. They have cameras. They had people going in to observe and so forth. So we were actually using the of law. Contain and it was much cheaper than going and bombing. Iran is a country of 93 million people. You do this, you don’t think that we’re going to have refugee flows coming out. You don’t that the remnants, whatever the regime is, as they fight, like the Taliban did for 20 years, you do not think that they’re going, I don’t know, start producing opium that’s going to hit our markets here and cause also another opiate crisis. I mean, it’s not a vacuum that we go into. I think one of the things that really gets me is that there is always a perception, I think it’s laced with deep racism in some ways, that we look at these countries over there and we just think that they’re stupid brown people or stupid mullahs, whatever the tropes are that they use. We seem to sort of lurch from war to war. And as I say, each time this happens, there’s an uptick in the profits of the weapons industry. And that… And it’s like, how much is that tied with our politicians these days? I don’t know, but I do know that the lobbying that the weapons industry is doing here and in Europe and in America.

Coco Khan Do you think it could spread to, people were saying World War Three.

Sanam Naraghi Anderlini Do you think that’s a reasonable… So your question about de-escalation, I think. So I think that we’re at this bizarre crossroads because the Israeli agenda is to cause chaos and the fragmentation of Iran and to be able to expand regionally. They’re also about to send something like 100,000 troops into Lebanon at the moment. So that’s their interest. The American interest, it keeps changing. The Iranian logic It’s asymmetrical warfare and asymmetrical warfare, you know, they’re fighting the regime. They’re fighting an existential fight. So for them, so long as they survive, and so long, as they’re doing some harm, they are winning, right? So they might escalate. The Iranian people want a different government altogether. But in the meantime, as the war started, it’s been hardened. So Khamenei gets killed. The assembly of whatever clerics get together to vote in the new Supreme Leader and guess who they bring? His son. His son, he is the most despised person in Iran, and he would never have gotten this position if things had gone the natural political course because he had many adversaries inside the system. But they’ve just voted him to be the guy. At the moment, we’re in this fervor of, like, the fever rising, and the consequences are really, really profound.

Coco Khan Sanam, thank you so much for joining us on Pod Save the UK. So if you want more on what is going on and what the hell are the US and Israel up to, head over to our sister podcast, Pod Save The World, where Tommy and Ben break down the latest. After the break, has the Middle East conflict made Rachel Reeve’s spring statement even more obsolete?

Speaker 6 [AD]

Coco Khan Now, chancellors don’t tend to be a very cheery lot. Even when the news is good, there’s never quite enough money to do everything the country needs. But Rachel Reeves must have been feeling quite chipper while preparing for her spring statement over the past few weeks.

Sophie Duker Headroom was up and there was generally less fuss and bother about its content compared to last year’s autumn budget, which was, if we’re being totally honest, a complete mess from beginning to end.

Coco Khan So as she stood up in the Commons, she must have been absolutely cursing Trump, who managed to ruin all her nicely prepared facts and figures with his ego war in the Middle East.

Sophie Duker It all happened too late to include in her statement. There just wasn’t enough time to rip it up and start again. So she still had to go through with it and in true Chancellor style, delivered her speech with all the energy of a deflated balloon.

Clip This is the right plan. A plan that is more necessary than ever before in the world of uncertainty. A stronger and more secure economy. Inflation and interest rates falling. Resilient public finances. And in every part of Britain working people better off.

Coco Khan Did you still move?

Sophie Duker I felt stirred. I felt shaken and stirred by her saying absolutely nothing.

Coco Khan Is it time for the news klaxon? Sound of our life leaving.

Sophie Duker It’s just sort of conveniently ignoring the reality of what’s happening, it only does it not take into account the biggest news story of the week, but also she just sort of edited it to be like, oh, unemployment is on the run, but we’re just not going to talk about that. There’s nothing to pick her up on because she doesn’t talk about anything that’s actually currently important to people.

Coco Khan Yeah, exactly. I mean, there were no policies for us to even really dissect. It almost felt like she was just essentially verbalizing a graph. And what she wanted us to take from the graph was that things were getting better. But I think that it forgets the fact that things are really, really bad. So yes, OK. The analysis says that the families will be better off to the tune of 1000 pounds a year, which don’t get me wrong, 1000 pounds is a lot, but also families are really struggling by significantly more than that. Even when she talks about inflation rates and that it’s not rising as fast as people think. I mean, you know, the average person doesn’t want to see any inflation at all. Economists are happy with 2% because they’re like, oh, that won’t spook the markets. But fundamentally, like, you don’t want see anything go up. I expect that the Labor Party will feel positive about this speech because it’s the first time in a while they’ve been able to say anything that’s vaguely good. But I did wonder if actually even us as journalists tuning in for it was pointless because the whole speech was actually just about her talking to her backbenchers saying, stick with us, we’re not so bad. She made a couple of digs at Reform, which you would expect. There’s a lot of unrest within the Labor party and I wonder if, actually, it probably wasn’t for the public, probably wasn’t for journalists, there wasn’t much to say. But saying to other labor people, stick with us kid, it’s going in the right direction. And then of course, we have this background note of doom because of gas and oil prices. So everything she said and all the plans could be turned completely on their head because of what’s going on. So here’s a lovely question for you for your debut on a politics podcast. Why are oil and gas prices surging, Sophie?

Sophie Duker Ugh! Why are oil and gas prices surging? Are you familiar with the Strait of Hormuz? Oh! Because I was not priced coming on this podcast, but it is where 20% of the world’s oil and gas passes through, so it’s a key route for this. And Iran controls the land on the north of the narrow sea passage, has already attached ships in the area. So yeah, this entire oil and gasoline route has immediately become incredibly spicy. Ships in the area was told that the strait was closed after the first Israeli attacks. And this didn’t count as a legal formal notice, but the risk of attack means that all ships have just stopped where they are. So that’s at least 150 tankers at anchor in the Straits of Hormuz area.

Coco Khan I like you did not know that much about the Strait of Hormuz. I was joking with Nish in a couple of episodes ago where I like, because we live in such political times and obviously doing this job, I see politics everywhere. I went past a wine bar that said free Prosecco on the chalkboard and I thought, who’s in prison? Is Prosecco a political prisoner? There was a time in my life someone would have said Strait Hormouz and I would have been like, great drag name. But now, sadly, I know it’s the center of a political crisis that could draw us all into World War III. I miss the innocent times. I I miss it.

Sophie Duker That’s so beautiful. I’m just thinking about straight up all these and like, they’re at sashay away, sashay down the stra- It couldn’t be so good. It couldn’t be so good. RIP, straight up. One of the big questions hanging over these forecasts and financial planning is with an aging population. How many people will actually be working and paying tax, because we’re told that the recent fall in net migration and the decrease we are expecting this year could derail all of the Chancellor’s nice little sums.

Coco Khan Net migration is the level once everyone coming to the UK and everyone leaving the UK is tallied up. So we will get the numbers for 2025 in May, but experts are predicting that it could be well short of the level that fed into the economic forecast that the Chancellor was talking about this week.

Sophie Duker What this essentially means is we don’t have enough working age people. If people want to have a richer country, then we need to have an active workforce. And unless all the boomers start working into their 80s, that means migrants. I can’t believe you crossed your fingers at boomers.

Sophie Duker I want to see some boomers earning they pay. Hey, I love a boomer in the workplace. They’ve never been responsible for any complications whatsoever.

Coco Khan It would be very challenging for me, because obviously, you know, being of South nation heritage, there’d just be this really uncomfortable moment where I go to a coffee shop and I ask this pensioner to make me a coffee and then they make it wrong. Then I’ll be like, sit down auntie, I’ll make the coffee and I’ll go back there. It’s not going to work. Let them rest. Let them let them rest, let them. So what makes it even more infuriating is that Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood seems to have decided… That the only good migration figure is zero, maybe even negative zero if she could get away with it. She’s pushing on with her crackdown, this time announcing new measures to the asylum system, which kicked in on Monday.

Sophie Duker Basically, the length of leave to remain for successful asylum speakers has been cut in half from five years to two and a half. It sounds straightforward, but as friend of the pod, the immigration expert Zoe Gardner explained on Instagram, it really, really isn’t.

Clip It’s actual impact is going to be disastrous and stupid because when a country is dangerous dangerous enough that you have to escape it and you would qualify as a refugee that means it’s probably going to be dangerous for a while that’s that’s usually just how things are.

Sophie Duker Give it 2.5 years. It’ll calm down

Coco Khan God, I find myself, you know that meme of the woman doing maths? Oh, yeah. The confused woman doing math. Yeah. I’m the confused woman, doing math all the time. And I think also part of it is, you must forgive me because I do sound like I’ve been smoking something, but like it’s all connected, man. It’s all connect it. In this show, we’re talking about Iran and obviously there’s going to be a influx of Iranian refugees. And they’re doing all these political theater of saying, like, we’re trying to liberate the people of Iran, but you haven’t given them refugee status, so what’s happening?

Sophie Duker Yeah, you’ve given permission to destabilize thousands of people, a conservative guess, and then you’re not going to let them in. And it sounds good to be like we’ve cut it in half, or a wonderful 50%, but it doesn’t take into account any of the logistics of actually living or settling or recovering from fleeing a country.

Coco Khan Yeah, absolutely. And obviously, part of us all accepting that other human beings live in a way that none of us would find acceptable is because we essentially have to swallow this idea that certain groups, certain races deserve less, are barbaric, they are from chaotic places, they can’t run themselves. Anyway, it’s been stressing me out, mate.

Sophie Duker Mahmood is also this month going to stop all student visas from Afghanistan, Myanmar, Cameroon and Sudan this month due to what she calls widespread abuse.

Coco Khan I wasn’t aware that there was widespread abuse of student visas from students from Myanmar. That feels like that’s just, anyway, let’s try and remember that sometimes good things do happen. It feels like a long time ago, but last week, Hannah Spencer’s Green Party, I know, that feels like ages ago, doesn’t it? Hannah Spencer Green Party victory, they had victory in the Gorton and Denton by-election. So that’s great. We love to see a progressive win here on Pod Save the UK. And Hannah really does seem to offer something distinct from the usual run of politicians. So please do make sure you check out her interview. We interviewed her on this show. It was amazing. It was so great to speak to someone who’s clearly authentic and so passionate about the local area. We hope she can bring her energy and enthusiasm for making life better for her constituents.

Sophie Duker Accompanied by two green MPs, she was sworn in as an MP in the Commons on Monday, and this bit is not important at all, but her colored suit was amazing.

Coco Khan So recent Sky News and YouGov polling carried out after last week’s by-election, put the Greens in second place after reform ahead of Labor, who sadly had dropped to third. I mean, obviously it’s amazing that the Greens are proving themselves to be a challenge to Labor because those of us who felt very disappointed by Labor might start to see Labor hopefully changing a bit of tack, although very devastating to see reform at top of that pole, I think that is.

Sophie Duker Yes. Yeah.

Coco Khan Yeah. Not making me feel great, that bit.

Sophie Duker But I think if there is a silver lining to it, I think it’s like the Greens in my lifetime have not really been considered a credible party, a credible alternative, and their rise is not narrativised the same way that reform is, as this kind of like, this juggernaut staggering drunkenly into British politics, absorbing people from parties as it goes. I think the Greens, by having a slate of policies that people really respond to, are having these wins that will be much more concrete and much less, I’m hoping, less like a few years down the line, like subject to politicking and the fact that so many career politicians are kind of joining reform. I’m hope that good people are actually moving into the Green Party who want to make the world a better place and that’s what I think we’ve seen with this election. And I hope to see more of it. So even though it’s not as, it doesn’t feel as, ooh, yeah. Overblown as reform. I don’t know how reform can sustain itself as a functioning party.

Coco Khan I know. I mean, it’s also, it was just nice to have a viable option that you don’t feel bad about after that. You don’t have to be like, say I voted this way, but, and then, you know, explain the reasons. You know, you can just sort of fulsomely say, look, you know they’re authentic. They’re trying to do something new. You know, people put a lot of stuff around this idea or they haven’t had government before. I don’t know. There is a civil service, there is, you know people who understand how departments work. I’m feeling generally positive about it just on this subject though, because I really have to unburden. About this. After the vote, there was all this talk about family voting. The democracy observers who were observing that election said that they saw the highest amounts of cases that they’d ever seen. That amount of cases was 32. And it should be worth mentioning that democracy observers have seen family voting in many.

Sophie Duker What exactly is family voting?

Coco Khan Family voting is where a family go into the polling booth.

Sophie Duker I see, I see my expert, yeah.

Coco Khan And so there’s a concern.

Sophie Duker Oh, to get together? Yeah. OK.

Coco Khan Yeah, so there’s a concern that actually that’s one person applying undue pressure on other family members to do that. And obviously, because we’re dealing with Muslim communities, the assumption there that it’s the patriarch telling the women what to do, the democracy observers didn’t notify the police. I would love to see just a little bit more data and evidence about like, you know, other because they’ve seen them at many elections. I feel but essentially this observation has now snowballed. And I’m having to turn on mainstream media and people essentially saying, you can’t trust the Muslims. They are distorting democracy. I just find it laughable that Matt Goodwin honestly believes that if these male patriarchs didn’t tell these 32 women to vote for Greens, that they would vote reform. I just I just found that absolutely laughable. If they weren’t told by their stereotypical, barbaric partners to vote for the woman who is in a party led by a gay Jewish man, your Islamophobia doesn’t make sense. Just be consistent. All right? That’s all I’m saying. Just be consistently. It’s that time again, by the way, listeners, we’re running a mailbag episode at the start of April. So we’d love to know your questions. Maybe you want to know about my conspiracies or maybe you’ve got a burning question Bye bye. Actual politics, which is what we should be answering. Please do get your questions in. You can leave them in the comments or email us at psuk at reducedlisting.co.uk. And that’s it. Thanks for listening to Pod Save the UK. Sophie Duker, thank you again for being my co-host. And if our listeners want more of you, what shows do you have coming up?

Sophie Duker I’ve got my show, Hot Beef Injection, which will be…

Coco Khan That’s still struggling to get over. Hot beef injection.

Sophie Duker Yes, it’s called Hot Beef Injection, which I do not regret in the slightest. Hot Beef injection, a show about sex and privilege. But funny, we’ll be at the end of a fringe this year in 2026, Melbourne Comedy Festival, New York Comedy Festival. I’m taking it everywhere. And you can always find me online at Sophie Duke Boss.

Coco Khan So hot beef injection, are you talking about sex? Yeah, I’m talking about- Not about big food. Not about Big Food.

Sophie Duker I’m not talking about stop. I’m talking about bat shots. I don’t, it’s, I’m talking about, yeah, I was talking about sex. Yeah. I feel you seem to be like quite essentially deserved by a hot beef injection.

Coco Khan No, I just, I know I’m never gonna forget it now, and now I have to live in one world. And now I have to loop in the world.

Sophie Duker Not everyone experiences hot beef and jet. It could be a loop, corn chip, a lata, however you like to make love.

Coco Khan We’re very open here on this show. We’re very sex positive. Hot beef injections.

Sophie Duker Hot beef injection has made it to Pod Save the UK.

Coco Khan Also, follow at Pod Save the UK on Instagram, TikTok, X, and BlueSky, that way you won’t miss any of us. And yeah, Pod Save the UK, it’s a Reduced Listening production for Crooked Media, bet you didn’t know that.

Sophie Duker I do, because I’ve listened to the pod before, as I’m sure most of the listeners have. And they will know that it is all thanks to lead producer May Robson and digital producer Jacob Liebenberg.

Coco Khan But would they really know that the theme music is by Vasilis Fotopoulos?

Sophie Duker They might not remember that, but they certainly do remember that the engineer, who is wonderful, is Jeet Vasani, and our social media producer is Nada Smiljanić.

Coco Khan Well, brownie points for anyone that remembers the executive producers, who are Kate Fitzsimons and Katie Long, with additional support from Ari Schwartz.

Sophie Duker And remember.

Coco Khan A hot beef injection for those who subscribe!

Sophie Duker A hot beef injection for every subscriber. And you can also get, as well as that lovely meaty insertion, new shows on Thursdays on Amazon, Spotify or Apple, wherever you get your podcasts. We don’t kink shame.

Coco Khan We don’t. I do, yes. sometimes.