As Europe looks on in disbelief, Donald Trump has been throwing his geopolitical weight around. A monumental meeting with Russia to discuss ending the war in Ukraine was held without Ukraine or Europe.Trump then branded Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy a “dictator” and accused Ukraine of starting the conflict.

Keir Starmer has said he is “ready and willing” to put UK troops on the ground in Ukraine. But is this the answer? And as shares in major arms manufacturers soar, who’s profiting? Nish and Coco chew it over.

And from war to love – loneliness is on the rise but according to journalist and author Shon Faye, the problem isn’t us, it’s capitalism. Phew! She joins Nish and Coco to discuss the highly politicised terrain of modern romance – and why it eludes us.

Later, Tortoise tech reporter Patricia Clarke calls in to discuss what the government can do about our unhealthy social media habits and if the Online Safety Bill holds up.

And Starmer has been ambushed by tractor-driving farmers blasting out… “Sandstorm” by Darude. Yes, Darude.

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Love in Exile by Shon Faye https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/453476/love-in-exile-by-faye-shon/9780241605981

Guests

Shon Faye
Patricia Clarke

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The White House
UK Government

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TRANSCRIPT

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

Coco Khan And I’m Coco Khan. Today, Trump’s foreign policy shift has left Europe reeling. But is Starmer’s vision of sending peacekeeping troops to Ukraine the answer?

Nish Kumar I don’t know about you, Coco, but I would say troops on the ground in Ukraine doesn’t sound particularly feasible to me.

Coco Khan I know I’m hearing a lot of the word frontline on the radio today, which doesn’t make me feel great. And also, immediately after you hear these words Frontline, you hear this tidbit from a former military chief who basically says, we don’t have enough money, we don’t have enough resources in the Army to actually run a frontline.

Nish Kumar All of it’s adding up to me holding a gun, which no one.

Coco Khan Wants to say no, let me feel secure. On a national level, Nick.

Nish Kumar Although I don’t look great in green.

Coco Khan But elsewhere, a petition to ban children under the age of 16 from social media is doing the rounds. Tortoise tech reporter Patricia Clark is here to tell us whether this will really Save the children.

Nish Kumar And we’ll be joined by author and journalist John Faith to understand why so many of us feel unlucky in love and to ask who’s profiting?

Coco Khan Now this week has seen a monumental meeting between Russia and the United States to discuss the future of Ukraine. It was held in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, blindsiding leaders in Ukraine and Europe who were cut out of the negotiations.

Nish Kumar And earlier in the week, Donald Trump suggested European security can no longer be the primary focus of the American military and in doing so plunged the future of the transatlantic relationship into question and undermined an 80 year long military alliance. European leaders hastily convened a meeting to discuss their response. Here’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer speaking after the meeting.

Speaker 3 I’m prepared to consider committing British forces on the ground alongside others if there is a lasting peace agreement. But the must be a US backstop because a US security guarantee is the only way to effectively deter Russia from attacking Ukraine.

Coco Khan A good system, a suggestion of a US backstop to deter Russia. Wasn’t quite explained there, but we might find out next week when Starmer meets with Trump in Washington.

Nish Kumar However, some European leaders weren’t quite ready to make the same commitments for boots on the ground, with German Chancellor Oliver Schulz saying it’s inappropriate to discuss sending troops in at this stage and that he was a little irritated by the suggestion. Following the meeting between Russia and Ukraine, Trump is given a press conference where he seems to have blamed Ukraine for the war, saying you never should have started it. And if anybody needs a reminder, just to be clear, Ukraine did not choose to invade itself. He also said that they’d had three years to end the war and this just a half baked negotiator could have settled this years ago without the loss of much land. Very little and without the loss of any lives and without the loss of cities that are just laying on their sides. And he’s also demanded an election in Ukraine before any peace deal can be reached, which would naturally be a sort of prime target for Russian interference. One of the potential objectives that various experts in the region have always stated was at the heart of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is to essentially replace Selenski and install a kind of pro-Putin puppet, in effect, bringing Ukraine under Russian control a little bit like what Lukashenko has done in Belarus. Obviously, we will be discussing this through the frame of British politics. And the challenge here is that next week Starmer is going to have a meeting with Donald Trump and Starmer’s trying to position the United Kingdom as essentially a conduit between Trump’s America and the European Union. And what I would say is that. It’s about time that people wake up and smell the dog shit because there’s this idea that the US and Europe are mutually aligned in their values. But that does not hold water under the Trump presidency. Okay. There is a reason that they had peace talks and did not invite Ukraine. I have no idea how we steer a course through this, but the very fact that the peace talks happened with Russia and they happened in Saudi Arabia should be a clue to where Trump sees American alignment. America is no longer aligning itself with Europe, is aligned with these kind of despotic ethno nationalist sites. He has much more in common in terms of his outlook on domestic and foreign policy. With Mohammed bin Salman, with Vladimir Putin and with Benjamin Netanyahu.

Coco Khan He loves the idea that superpowers can just do whatever they want. And the superpowers are America, China, Russia, Saudi, I guess, because they’ve got loads of money. Europe is not a superpower in his mind. And so that really tells you his his bully Boy mentality that there’s a natural order to my is right and bigger gets whatever they want. Right. Yeah. And so where does that leave Britain, where we’ve so ruined many alliances after Brexit? Okay, so maybe we align ourselves more with Europe. I’m not convinced that we can be this conduit. I think we might have to choose a side a bit here. Maybe this is a time for us and Europe to kind of reconcile and work together to face this kind of large, looming economic threat.

Nish Kumar Yeah, I mean, Simon needs to look at who Trump is and what he’s done. Yeah, it feels like he’s trying to do a deal with somebody that has no interest in doing a deal with him. And as if to underscore this idea that America is no longer aligned with Ukip, the UK in Europe, JD Vance launched a barrage of criticism towards the continent and our country last week at the Munich Security Conference, suggesting that European values suppressed free speech and questioning whether our values are worth defending. Here’s a clip from the man who is, let’s be clear, the vice president of America.

Speaker 4 If you’re running in fear of your own voters, there is nothing America can do for you. Nor for that matter, is there anything that you can do for the American people.

Coco Khan What an absolute joke. This posturing of, like European values, a censorious sign that they are the true flag bearers of free speech is completely ludicrous. I don’t know if you saw Newsnight last night, but there was an Ex-trump adviser arguing with Victoria Derbyshire on there, and she actually said, well, you know, something to the effect of Britain can’t talk because you’ve got more people in jail for expressing your opinion than Russia. You are What are you talking about? Let’s just completely made up nonsense. It sounds like the minister is coming out pretty strong, maybe even stronger than some European leaders. Do you think at the minute this is good, This is a good moment for Starmer to be doing this? Is he showing leadership? Is this going to work well for him?

Nish Kumar I think this is an incredibly precarious moment for him because he’s really stressing this idea. You know, our whole government’s domestic growth agenda is tied up in our trading relationships with the United States. And I think his an unenviable position to find yourself in, to have snookered yourself effectively to having to deal with Donald Trump. Yeah, I will say that domestically, in terms of this phrase about boots on the ground, if it were to be put to a parliamentary vote, I don’t suspect domestically he would face a huge amount of opposition to that. I think there would be political pressure on him to not do that. But I think given that the former prime minister, Rishi Sunak, has already backed Starmer’s plans, I’m not sure that there would be a huge amount of opposition internally to it.

Coco Khan I think there might be some from the public, though, because, I mean, you know, there’s just the top line piece in Bloomberg that was saying that, you know, they worked out and the the cuts to public services to fund defense. Yeah. Would be up to 11%. Yeah, 11%. I mean, that is a lot. And there will be sections of the general public that are like, I’m sorry, why are we cutting all services for a wall that’s really far away in a completely different, you know, where are your priorities? Starmer? And I think on part me think so this is, you know, he’s really showing his leadership a bit here and maybe he’s this is going to be good for him. Another part of me thinks this is this is terrible for him. Morality is clearly no longer a factor in any of this. And you kind of see you see the narrative changing even like, you know, some of the comments that Trump has made. Being out protecting Europe’s no longer are our main priority, as though all these things were done out of the goodness of America’s heart. And actually, you know, when you look at the money that has gone in to support Ukraine, Europe has given more than America collectively, not one individual nation. Sure. So, you know, again, so cutting them out of the talks is this really horrific thing to do and unfair thing to do. But you could just get this sense of like the wheels turning, the narrative turning. And and part of me is like, this is the new allegiance. It’s Trump and Putin and, you know, whatever other. Other dictators, despots, whatever we want to call them. But then I also saw a comment in the released earlier where he said it would be fine for any European countries to continue to buy arms from America if they do want to choose to progress this conflict. And you just think, okay, maybe this isn’t about alliance, this is just about money as it was all along.

Nish Kumar I think you’re exactly right to point that out, because at the same time, as European leaders gathered in Paris to respond to Trump’s actions, shares in major arms manufacturers Salt Valley Systems UK’s largest defense company, saw its stock climb 9% in London. In Paris, sales jumped at 7.8%, while Rhine Metals surged 14%. In Frankfurt, the Stock X and European Aerospace and Defense Index hit its highest level since the early 1990. So investors are certainly seeking to capitalize on this period of geopolitical instability. And and it therefore follows that from an American perspective. Whilst Trump may not have any interest in being part of any peacekeeping in the continent, he’s certainly very, very happy, as you point out, to sell us weapons.

Coco Khan So in the end, who are the losers? Is this going to be normal civilians? Yeah. Who are caught up in this mess? Yeah. And who are the winners? The arms manufacturers.

Speaker 5 Asked me.

Nish Kumar Look, if you’re following the latest on starmer’s Ukraine boots on the ground comment and the European Informal Summit, you won’t want to miss this week’s Pod Save The World it breaking down the start of the US-Russian negotiations, which happening without Ukraine at the table. The Trump era shift in US foreign policy and what it all means for Europe.

Coco Khan Plus US President JD. Violence and Elon Musk meddling in the German election. Austria’s far right flopping and more.

Nish Kumar For the full global picture, check out Pod Save The World new episodes every Wednesday wherever you get your podcasts.

Coco Khan So back to the UK. I have a clip to play for you. It’s not just Ola Shults that has been more than a little irritated with Starmer lately. While out and about a development in Milton Keynes, the Prime Minister’s trip was cut short after an intervention from farmers. They were protesting the Government’s inheritance tax plans. In this clip from The Guardian.

Nish Kumar If you can pick out that tune, that was Sandstorm by the Road. And I don’t think I ever thought I’d be saying Kiss Thomas in the same sentence as the vote. To borrow a phrase, the comedian Maria Bamford. I’m actually surprised that Sandstorm is still speaking to people.

Speaker 5 Yeah. Trying to say.

Coco Khan It’s an absolute classic club classic. Well, I’m genuinely very impressed. I’m just impressed that they did that. Do you think it was a pre-record? No, it couldn’t have been.

Nish Kumar No, I think they’re playing live. I think there’s.

Speaker 5 No I think there’s no that’s just brilliant.

Nish Kumar Milli Vanilli situation.

Coco Khan Are you a farmer? That can do both.

Nish Kumar Now, look, last week we had our say on the government’s latest moves on immigration, including denying citizenship to asylum seekers who arrive outside of legal channels and grossly showing footage of people being deported. We called it Performance of Cruelty, and it turns out loads of people within the Labour Party agree. A group of over 900 Labour members and trade unions have signed an open letter decrying the Government’s latest moves, including MPs and former guests. On our show, Nadia Whittome, Bell Ribeiro, R.D. and Clive Lewis.

Coco Khan The letter said, and we quote These measures mimic the performative cruelty of the failed Tory governments rejected by voters last July. They also breach Britain’s international obligations to respect the right to claim asylum and guarantee safe routes. Far from being a drain on this country, migrants from all over the world enrich our society in every sense. Anti-migrant politics will not build a single house, staff, a single hospital or raise anyone’s wages. Instead, by echoing its rhetoric, the government is simply fueling the rise of reform UK socialism. That was good. Pulling no punches there either. Yes. Legitimate concerns. You don’t see that sort of language in their system of saying this week? You know, we we have to accept that there are legitimate grievances. Well, every time I read these things, I’m like the way the picture that is created is so that everyone’s got their fingers in the air going, La la la la la la la. We left the EU, we sabotaged our economy. We took away the sort of opportunities for the young. We’ve left ourselves in the desert. What do you mean? Why are you acting? We’ve done it. We did the thing to play this narrative.

Nish Kumar Yeah. And you know, again, like I said it last week, I’m sure I’ve said about 100 times, there are wealth extractors bleeding our country dry. But they are simply not immigrants and asylum seekers. Yeah, it’s easier to rhetorically whack the powerless. The more complicated thing to do is to go after the people actively responsible. The wealth extractors who for the last 15, 20 years have bled this country dry.

Coco Khan Now, after the break, we’re asking what’s love got to do with it? We’re speaking to Shon Faye.

Nish Kumar [AD]

Coco Khan Loneliness has been declared a growing epidemic across the world and is now regarded as a global health threat by the World Health Organization. Men are faring the worst in the UK and US. 1 in 5 single men say they have no close friends, and men make up 61% of users on dating apps, with more and more becoming unintentionally single long term in.

Nish Kumar The age of dating apps and social media where more connected than ever. So why are so many of us feeling socially isolated or struggling to find love? And what’s more. Who is profiting from the disconnect? Here to help us understand is Shon Faye, journalist and author of the best seller The Transgender Issue, which is a rigorous and precise intervention into Britain’s anti-trans backlash. Shon Faye spent years dishing out life and love advice via her Vogue column on and building on this. Her new book, Love in Exile, explores the highly politicized terrain of modern love and why it eludes us. Shon, welcome to Pod Save the UK.

Shon Faye Hi, Thank you for having me.

Coco Khan So often when we think about love, we think of it outside of politics. You know where politics podcast. Why are we having a conversation about love? And I guess I wanted to ask you, why do you think love is a political issue?

Shon Faye I mean, I think it is a political issue. If you think about how often even just politicians mention the word families, right? Like there’s an implicit judgment about the way that we lead our lives and what’s politically significant. If you think about our laws and our tax system, the fact that if you are not a citizen of the UK, there are certain kind of relationships that means that someone could join you here. And there are certain kinds of relationships where someone can. And I think a lot of us five years ago, it feels like a long time ago now, can the pandemic even realize that when we were making kind of these emergency laws around the risk of coronavirus, again, there was a lot of assumptions made about how people conduct their private lives. And also, I mean, like, I’m a member of the LGBT community, right? Like time also to me, I’m acutely aware that for some people that love lives have been highly politicized, criminalized by the state, denied the opportunities for legal equality compared to other people. So when we don’t normally think I think of our love lives, particularly romantic love lives as political, we think of them almost as a refuge. Like this is my private life. You closed the door and you know, the political world shut out. But that’s I just don’t think that’s true.

Nish Kumar You argued that under capitalism, love is also privatized. The private companies influencing our sort of love lives of romantic lives, but maybe now, more so than ever, because of things like dating apps. About 4.4 million in the people in the UK use them, and about a quarter of the users pay for those services, generating around £150 million in annual revenue for the companies behind them. I understand that these companies exist as private companies that make a profit, but there is something us like Mr. Burns. How big of profit from people trying to find a partner?

Shon Faye Yeah, totally. I mean, I think it goes beyond even dating apps, which which are obviously the most visible spearhead of that. But I would go so far as to say that a lot of consumerism, the message vis attached is you will become more lovable or at the very least more desirable. So for women, it’s kind of obvious it might be the cosmetics industry, various other things and beauty, fashion. But for men too, and I think increasingly for men and younger men, that there’s a whole kind of influencer infrastructure. You know, some of it quite misogynist, some of it less so about, you know, go to the gym. This is how you eat a life. This is how you access sex, this is how you access desirability. And a lot of this is designed to sell people stuff and to make money. And it’s selling people. The idea of you will access this thing called love.

Nish Kumar I love the book. And I thought it was so beautifully written. But one of the things I thought was really interesting about it specifically was the like. Idea that male loneliness is a huge driver in massive societal problems. And, you know, part of that is the way that capitalism is kind of taken a cleaver to lots of organizations like unions and community centers and social clubs that would have normally been places for men to socialize. And in that void, the kind of money sphere sort of stepped into it. And that has massive. Political ramifications for all of us, Right? Like, it’s a really interesting thing to talk about because the fear now is like a massive political problem for us. It’s a driver behind Trump’s election in the States. It’s it’s not really something people want to talk about. Male loneliness and the political consequences of it.

Shon Faye Yeah. And I think it’s a difficult conversation to have because like, you can look at it with different lenses, right? And I think it can be quite antagonistic to look at it sometimes from a feminist lens, because quite rightly, a lot of women will be like, Well, I’ve been lonely and I don’t overcome this like raving misogynist. And I guess it’s a valid point, right?

Coco Khan And also, sometimes it can feel like implicit in that is that therefore, women should pair up with these men.

Coco Khan But you don’t want to.

Shon Faye Yeah, exactly. No, I think that’s so true. And and almost. Yeah. That, like, women are almost like a patriarchal spoil, like, where, you know, they’re not getting the partnership they want. I tend to think the differences between men and women in a binary are not due to, you know, there are some aspects of biology, but like a lot of the behavioral stuff is about the social experience. And I think we’re not so different. But one of the things I always think about masculinity and being raised male being raised, boy, is like how much pressure there is to cut off parts of yourself that are vulnerable. And I think that really inhibits like because the answer isn’t just that men are only because they’re not having enough girlfriends or sexual opportunities. It’s also that, like a lot of male friendships are under nourishing or nonexistent. I mean, I have this particular experience, right? Like I went to an all boys school, which was pretty traumatic, to be honest. But one of the things that I kind of remember so much about, like being like 13 or 14 in this very crucible of mass of like sort of emergent masculinity is you’re only allowed to take the piss out of each other. You’re only allowed to like that’s how friendship is expressed. There isn’t much space for a lot of boys and men to be like, vulnerable and to actually talk about their internal worlds with each other. And then when you combine that with this idea that status and power and domination and and sex are the ways that you show you’re a man, I think you have a real recipe. So the trouble is, is I think the heart of the problem is how we raise children to be boys of men, because I think we societally can do a lot of damage.

Coco Khan I just come back to this point about the business and the capitalism of love. There’s something about this particular moment, and I don’t know if I’m right about this, where, like, it’s not in commercial interest for people to actually find love. Like it’s better for them to remain lonely, to feel that it’s their fault so that they buy more cosmetics or they do, you know, have more whatever juices. And for the apps point of view, the more uses, the better, right? So despite the famous slogan of hinge designed to be deleted, that’s not necessarily the case. Does that sound right to you?

Shon Faye Yeah, I mean, that’s certainly the business model, right? Okay. Isn’t designed to be deleted. And in fact, you know, there is also a gamification like, you know, I’m I’m on dating apps at the moment and it is like I’ve just written this book and then I’m sat there being like, maybe if I pay for the upgrade, I’ll be able to go through and I’ll get a backdrop for that because I’ll be able to see like me and then I can, because the more you pay, the more filters you got. Yeah, I’m like, Well, if I pay an extra for quite a month, I can filter men that only want a relationship, not ones that just want casual sex. Right? So there is it. There is a gamification where it’s like, well, you know, in for a penny, in for a pound, literally. Sure. It’s built in and I’d, I wouldn’t deny that. I do think I have to sort of factor in here though that also we’ve experienced huge societal change around relationships. And while dating apps, certainly there is a commercial incentive to keep people lonely. I also think it’s broader than that. I think it’s the fact that, you know, our working lives, the cost of living, the precarity of the way that we like work and the jobs market and the instability of even like housing. I think about London, where we all are for young people. I mean, is it actually forces these extreme choices where I either know people that are living with a partner after knowing them two months because you can’t afford to not or you know, there’s also the kind of anxieties that come with you don’t have this road map of like, you know, then I’m going to be stable in my job by the time I get to my late 20s and I’ll be able to buy a house or whatever. And so people are potentially in a permanent state of adolescence to a certain degree by the economy. That’s one other factor. On top of all the tech that we use around dating. The other is, I think, is this changing expectations of women around partnership? What you touched on earlier about why do I think we should have to date these men? And I think that that’s the point, right? Is that like my grandmother, she once you got married, that was a good or bad, you stuck with it like and if you marry my mum said that you married a wrong and you know it would be like that. That would be a. Would be till someone dies. Yeah. And then. And then, like, you know, for my mother’s generation, my mom was a single mom and divorced my dad in the 90s. And there’s a peak of divorce in the UK from the 70s to the 90s and now divorce rates have actually fallen, but that’s because less people get married. And now I think what we’re left with, perhaps the Millennials and Gen Z, particularly, you know, in heteronormative dynamics with women, is women, you know, for a long time now have not needed financial dependance on a man. And there isn’t the same level of social pressure on you need to be married and in this established kind of partnership.

Coco Khan I mean, this conversation is also tied to the declining birth rate conversation. Do you think it’s the government’s role to get involved with this?

Shon Faye We’re going full socialist now. Like we like the wealth inequality in the UK is like so egregious and it’s only getting worse. And I think one of the reasons for a falling birth rate is the fact that like, younger people cannot see how it’s financially viable for children. And until that changes, you’re not going to change that. There’s also the fact that we’re not doing like even the stuff that we’re not doing anything about the climate. Like, you know, I’m not saying that that that governs everyone’s decision or not, but there is a general sense of nihilism that’s nihilism that has been relentless. Like if you think if you know people who’ve got ten years younger than me or Gen-z or whatever. Like, all they’ve known is austerity and nothing getting better ever, and no input into the kind of social safety net. I was a child of a single mother in the 90s, which basically like it’s so funny now because there’s a panic around the falling birth rate. But like, you know, single mothers in the 90s, it was basically like it was their phone and we should be penalized. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. These irresponsible women own feckless fathers.

Nish Kumar There’s been a few things recently that have reviewed the kind of tenor of cultural conversation, whether it was about gender, race or class in the kind of late 19th and early 2000s that have given me. Like it’s like an acid reflux, like this horrible memory of lurching up in my body. Single mums was almost like culturally, it was almost like a slur to throw around.

Shon Faye Yeah, totally. The other thing to say as well is that we haven’t like remotely addressed with all the whatever feminist progress there’s been things like domestic violence, which is actually so endemic. And I think all of us often forget because it’s so normalized. But how prevalent it is, there has been very little redress of that. And in fact, it’s, you know, again, refuge places, support services around domestic violence and family trauma and social services. I’m from a family of social workers, and I can tell you like child protection, like when the family unit goes wrong, there is nothing there. So it’s all like they’re just fire fighting all the time. So for me, we would need to improve people’s basic income, have like a properly furnished social network, not create socially stigmatizing narratives about alternative family units, whether it’s LGBT people, single mothers, whatever, transpeople, and then alongside that also like provide like actual support for when, you know, love isn’t there in people’s families. And when the society we live in, I say in the book, it’s a it’s a profoundly sick and loveless society. It’s kind of an obvious point, but like hatred is actually is increasingly just very, very validated and like hatred and anger gets you ahead. We’re increasingly losing a space for the idea of compassion. You’re made a laughingstock all for even talking about that as a serious political principle.

Coco Khan Yeah. Yeah. No, absolutely. I mean, you in the book, you devote a chapter to motherhood and you write, you know, as a society, we all love to mothers, but it’s clear that we often despise them. Just thinking about what you’re saying about, like, how much hatred there is. I mean, I also grew up single mum. If anyone see my father, please direct him to child support agency.

Coco Khan I don’t know listeners its 36 years of money I’m owed. And I think you’re right. Like, you know, the villainized ation of single mums is testimony to this, that these are meant to be the mothers that we so we have supposedly love. Right wing groups are obsessed with the mother and they use it to be a weapon of oppression. Yeah. What did you observe in your book around that?

Shon Faye In the book I look at like being a trans woman, right? Like for for most of the 20 tens, one of the kind of online hubs of transphobia, really big mobilization of anti-trans groups and some of the most prominent taking to the streets anti-trans campaigners and actually kind of got radicalized on a website called Mumsnet. It’s a parenting forum and like I think it serves a, you know, a function for a lot of parents, but it’s I think it’s something like 90% women. So mostly mountains. But yeah, like on certain corners of that it became like this hub and like basically any pro trans point was shut down for mums of trans kids basically bullied off the website and it basically became this now. Is that coincidence? And what I was interested in and it’s kind of a for me, like a microcosm of the general problem you’re talking about, because in America, there’s a lot of right wing groups that use moms in the title of Moms for Liberty.

Coco Khan Yeah, right.

Shon Faye Yeah, 1 Million Moms. And they’re like these, like, potentially far right groups. And yeah. Is that is there a link? Why Mumsnet? I guess what they would say is that motherhood is a point where you radicalized and they like, well, we’re not going to accept this like denial of biology by the trans cults or whatever they say. The reality, I think, is that actually you find quite a lot of women on parenting forums who have lost their identity or feeling quite unsupported, often whether they have a partner or not. There’s even these studies that show that men think they’re doing 50% and they’re not. And so so a lot of of women who have young children are on these parenting forums and perhaps I argue for and quite resentful, resentful, it may be suppress resentment of their own partner and resentful like the fact that society does this bait and switch with motherhood where like there’s a lot of pressure on women to do it and then when they do, it is kind of like, well, get on with it. And if you’re a bad mother, that’s your fault. And if you fuck your kids up as your foe. Andrea Dworkin This radical second wave feminist kind of said that like women often can’t express their resentment against the men closest to them, so they deflect it. Right wing women will deflect it onto people of color or lesbians in the 70s, and I think that’s a good example of like how motherhood is used. Like lots of black motherhood was so used in Trump’s recent campaign. Yeah, because it’s this idea, particularly white motherhood, right? It’s like we’ve got to protect white children from the threat. Whatever the threat is at any given generation.

Nish Kumar In this instance, the threat is specifically in various forms. The three people currently go kill.

Coco Khan Yeah.

Shon Faye Yeah. I was going to say, when I said in every generation I was like, but it’s using it. It doesn’t it doesn’t feel abstract. As we said this time, it doesn’t feel too abstract to I mean, yeah, very fair observation. But it’s clever, right? Because anyone who’s a parent, you know, the protection of young people is a sort of noble aim. And a lot of parents will have a very real fear, fear of like, children being harmed is like a is a very natural fear, but it’s also one that’s easily manipulated. Yeah. And with far right movements, you know, it has a long history of like, it’s good for, you know, recruiting women and it’s also good for recruiting other men. But like the idealization of a certain kind of puritanical motherhood. I mean, I’m really loathe to invoke Nazi Germany like fascistic regimes have always known that a particular idea of the mother is quite a potent idea in that imaginary. And, you know, that’s not me saying that motherhood or motherly love is always this right wing reactionary idea. It’s not. But yeah, I think it can be weaponized in that regard.

Coco Khan So am I right in thinking that maybe we need to move away from romantic love?

Shon Faye Then at the end of the book I wrote this postscript because I was about to go to the printers and actually whilst I was writing, I, I had like a whole I’m a quiet situation and got heartbroken again. I was like, yeah, this is really getting better dealing with this. And I and I kind of wanted to be like the postscript to the final words of the book I like. I haven’t given up. So I knew I was going into promoting this book and I didn’t want to become like the face of single people. That’s really bad to go in a box myself. And they’re like, you know, No, I think the point being I have this very full life. I’m quite happy, single, and I have like amazing friends and I genuinely, like have, you know, had to accept like romantic love for me. Hasn’t worked out that well thus far. And being trans, it’s a little bit trickier to find it. And I have this great life. But what I do say in the book, right, I’m not I’m because there was the single positivity movement a few years ago, and if you noticed, he was reading that it was quite a lot of like middle class women of means because it’s like it’s easy to have a nice life single when you’ve got enough money. I live alone and work alone. So like living alone and not how sharing into your 40s is quite nice being able to live alone. But that’s, that’s a, that’s a luxury. And then to be able to access the social realm where I don’t get lonely, I mean it’s like every time I step outside my house to do something with a friend -50. Yeah. Just, you know. I mean, so yes, decent, romantic love. But it’s not about saying romantic love doesn’t matter. But one of the things that there’s a whole chapter in the book about friendship is I basically say like, we devalue friendship. And one of the ways I guess we do that is, is that stuff about having people to be able to have an affordable, livable financial life because capitalism doesn’t care about friendship. The reason being families reproduce workers for capitalism. And there is a lot of like tribal bonds in a family that serves that and marriage for that very same reason. Romantic love. The interest of capital, your relationship with your colleagues does friendship. It’s kind of like that’s why we historically it’s been treated as like a youthful pastime because it’s like, well, this isn’t the real, you know, work of love because it doesn’t serve any interests. Like we’re literally friends with people because we enjoy being friends with them. And it doesn’t it doesn’t make any money. It doesn’t serve any aim. And then we’ve got this very bastardized form of friendship now as a result of like tech techno capitalism, which is like a million friends in your phone and no friends.

Coco Khan And no one to ask you when your house has burnt down. Yeah, I do have one last question for you. And you know, we talked about love, but we also briefly touched upon hate. And there’s a lot of hate going around in society. And I think it’s fair to say that there can be, you know, thinking about politics, there can be this desire to just see your opponent suffer, really. And as long as they suffer, you’ve won. Even if you’ve sort of suffering yourself or even just made a change to your own life. But at least you made the migrant cry. Really? See, you know, you hurt somebody else. How do we engage with people we don’t love?

Shon Faye By virtue of being a trans woman right now, there are people that hate me like you. You describe people that hate me, that do not see me as human. There is nothing I can do to humanize myself to them. They are a minority, but unfortunately quite a growing, powerful minority. And it’s depressing. And so one thing I touch on and I talk about spirituality and the rediscovery of like a spiritual life for me, that looks I believe in God, but like, the book isn’t about trying to get you to believe in God. And the reason, though, that helped me is because I realized that probably a few years ago I was consumed with rage all the time and wishing ill on people that wished me ill and permanently in that state of of rage and and kind of hatred and realizing I was being coached into meeting that energy with that energy. And I realized that there’s a reason why it’s destructive, you know, And they say it’s like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die. Yeah, well, why? Like even Martin Luther King said that that love was easier to bear than hate. And that’s how he felt about his enemies, because people often forget that he was a deeply spiritual Christian. And I think, like, yeah, to me, some of that with people really hate me is that, well, they’re dehumanizing me. They refuse to see my humanity. And my way of responding to that dehumanization, I’ve realized, is to always remember people’s humanity. Even people who are doing the most heinous things. Sounds really noble.

Coco Khan Noble. Yeah.

Shon Faye But even at the psychological level, that doesn’t mean I’m going to be friends with them. It doesn’t mean that I’m going to be, you know, DMing with the Monarchs or whatever. But like people throughout human history, oppressed groups have had to find ways of dealing with oppression and not being consumed by rage. And for me, it’s what works. Now, there’s also a category of people who I disagree with who are not like me, but perhaps on full of hate. And I have been quite bad at engaging with them and even people quite close to me on the political spectrum. I talk about the kind of Wild West of the left wing Internet in the 20 tens when everyone was calling everyone out. And I mean, I was engaging in that too. And I sort of say in the book, like, I have regrets about that. And in some cases I’ve apologized to people directly for like the ways in which I was quite unforgiving and quite self-righteous, as many people in my 20s are. It’s easy to love people that are like us. Yeah. And that we would pick as friends sometimes in progressive movements were very quick to tear each other down, and that’s actually replicating the tactics of our enemies. So it’s much harder to be loving to everyone. But I think for me that’s like the challenge of the work of being a progressive.

Nish Kumar Shon, thank you so much for joining us on Pod Save the UK. Love in Exile is a fantastic book and it’s out now. And if you’re listening to the podcast, I’m holding up the cover next to my face. Now, after the break, we’re going to be looking into another area affecting our mental health, social media. Should the government be getting tougher on regulating it? Now the scroll is something we’re all afflicted by in our modern age. But how much damage is actually doing to us? Reports vary, but one thing’s for sure it’s proving very difficult for governments around the world to legislate against the effects social media is having on all of our lives.

Coco Khan But what do you do about it? Last year, Australia introduced the world’s strictest laws against social media giants banning children under the age of 16 from using their services. Questions about as to how this might actually work. With the law set to come into force at the end of the year.

Nish Kumar Here in the UK, next week, Parliament will debate a petition that has received over 100,000 signatures that requests we follow suit and introduce similar restrictions for our young people. Joining us now to discuss what our government might do to make social media safer for all of us is Patricia Clarke, technology reporter at Tortoise Media. Welcome to Pod Save the UK.

Patricia Clarke Thanks so much for having me.

Coco Khan So let’s be real. This petition has no real chance of becoming law, does it?

Patricia Clarke No. There was a moment when the.

Nish Kumar Sorry is really my view off the web. No.

Patricia Clarke I sort of pause because there was a moment where the tech secretary sort of said, okay, we’re going to try and put pressure on Ofcom, who’s a tech regulator, to put pressure on the tech giants to do this. And if they don’t do it, then maybe we’ll consider an Australia type ban. And then a week later, he’s actually that’s not in the cards at all.

Coco Khan Right.

Nish Kumar Why did the Government backtrack so quickly?

Patricia Clarke I think they’re in a really difficult position right now because they are pushing this idea of growth. You know, we don’t want to be like Europe, which is currently got this reputation for being stagnant and regulatory and boring. So maybe Brexit provides an opportunity for us to be able to say, actually, we’re the place where innovation and growth happens. But then equally, the UK has been a country that’s actually been really forward thinking in terms of its online safety laws. So the online safety bill is the first of its kind.

Nish Kumar From your perspective as a technology reporter, do you consider that to be useful and good piece of legislation? Because to be honest, the rest of us a lot of the time don’t know what the fuck is going on in these conversations.

Patricia Clarke There are parts of it that are really, really, I think, positive and exciting. For example, you know, we’re going to be the first country to look at actually prosecuting people for creating deepfakes, not just distributing them. There are going to be fines levied against big tech companies. That’s the first of its kind in law in this space. And it could mean that other countries follow suit. And that’s all really positive. But there are other things that have come under criticism. You know, one of the things that’s on the table is age verification, for example. And we know that I think it’s between 5 and 7 million people in the UK alone don’t have I.D. So what would that actually look like? There’s a lot of kind of things that could go wrong, but I think it’s an interesting starting point. And I think it’s equally though it’s cornered people like Pizza Kyle, because it’s they’re saying on the one hand, we want growth and on the other hand, we’re this kind of bastion of regulation. And where do we find something kind of in the middle?

Coco Khan I think it’s worth saying that the stakes couldn’t really be higher, though, right? Like, I mean, it’s now indisputable that there is harm that is happening through online platforms and that children are being affected.

Patricia Clarke Yeah, Ofcom has really good data on this. So, you know, they say 9 in 10 children own a mobile phone by the time they reach the age of 11. That’s obviously very young. The House of Commons report found that children between the age of 13 and 17 have encountered one or more potential harms online that can be violent, content that can be content that’s pornographic. And 3 in 5 secondary school age children have been contacted online in a way that potentially made them feel uncomfortable. More than that, we have, you know, Francis Horgan, the Facebook whistleblower, leaked that Instagram had data that young women’s mental health was being harmed by the kind of content that they were seeing. And it was that whistleblower that forced the matter to take some form of action against this. The problem with this is that we don’t have sort of big longitudinal studies that tell us exactly how linked to these harms off to social media. And I kind of think both things can be true. We can see a trend. We know that young people’s mental health, anxiety, depression and suicide rates are all going up. And we know that smartphones came into the picture 15 years ago. We can see that link. I don’t see why we can’t start taking protective and decisive action.

Nish Kumar What does practical action look like in this instance? Because I have two cousins that are themselves Australian children. They’re 18 and 20. And when I.

Coco Khan Say I think 20 is not a child.

Nish Kumar Well, they’re children from my perspective. Anyone under the age of 12, from my perspective at this point. So they’re exiting the period that we’re really talking about the vulnerable teenage years and they are now voting age adults. And I asked them about this bill, and I was quite surprised how in favor of it they were really. Yeah, yeah, they were very much of the opinion that they had observed harms done to them and their friends by being exposed to these things at younger ages. But the point that they then raised is. So much of their social lives are now driven through these apps that. There’s a danger if you just suddenly remove the of. Of actually isolating children. Further, if we’ve come to the conclusion, as we all have, pretty much that these things do harm to children, what are the actual practical measures that governments can take?

Patricia Clarke So just on the Australia ban. What’s kind of interesting is that they’ve just done a blanket ban and some of the critiques are, well, you know, people will find ways around. Yeah. Norway social media for children under 13 And there was a study that found that 72% of 11 year olds had found a way around, which I felt was amazing. But I think it’s I think it’s a broader cultural conversation which needs to be had. In terms of practical measures, I think you need public health campaigns. Yeah, I’m still pro things like algorithmic transparency. I think that’s something that you could push on the companies to try and see how this data is being used and how they’re targeting children in that way.

Nish Kumar To move on to a different area of online safety, last week there was a multinational A.I. summit in Paris where 60 countries signed a declaration of inclusive and sustainable artificial intelligence for all two countries were notably missing the US and the UK. A spokesperson for Downing Street said We weren’t following the US’s lead. This is about our own national interest in sharing the balance between opportunity and security. Can you wade through that word soup to discern what the fuck that means?

Patricia Clarke I mean, the UK has a point in that it’s slightly Kumbaya. It’s like we’re all going to be open and transparent and ethical and it’s got these six points and is not very specific. Yeah, and the UK actually did say it didn’t provide enough clarity on global governance and the national security challenge that I poses. And to that extent, they have a point. Equally, I think it does go back to what we were talking about earlier, which is this idea of of growth and yeah, that this feeling of they they don’t want to be lumped in with Europe and one of the countries that are pushing for regulation and they want to look like they’re doing innovative things.

Nish Kumar My concern here is that Elon Musk and Google have all of all warned that tech companies might choose to not launch products in the UK due to the funding structure for the Online Safety Act. And there are Ofcom plans to charge tech giants fees equivalent to about 0.02% of their global revenue to enforce the laws, which would generate around £70 million a year. Since the first discussions about the Online Safety Act, Musk has turned a huge amount of attention and hostile attention to the United Kingdom. Now am I being why usually Am, which is a profoundly paranoid man here to say that Musk’s threats and saber rattling from those tech companies is something that maybe is coloring our government’s actions in this area? And is that why potentially they might not be willing to sign up to the A.I. thing as a separate issue from it being a bit kumbayah, which is a wonderful turn of phrase?

Patricia Clarke I think some of the figures there have been a little bit misreported, so they want to raise about 70 million pounds from the big tech companies. They’re saying this is 0.02% of global revenue. It’s about 10 million pounds each, which if you think of a company like Apple, that’s sometimes that’s like one penny for most of us. Yeah. And so they’ve put out these statements where they’ve said, you know, Google said it could disincentivize people. They said that as well. Said that as well. But they want very strongly what and realistically, the amount of money that they’re going to make from staying in Britain is going to be much bigger. And 10 million. And so. I’d be surprised if they’d left. Equally, I think you do have a point that, you know, Musk has obviously spoken out against the UK. Ofcom, Interestingly, the regulator said that there was a clear link between what happened on AX and the discourse on X and the actual violence on the street. And I think the implication was, although they didn’t say it, you know, we could fine for something like that, the maximum fine there again is 18 million, which for Twitter isn’t a huge amount of money. Yeah, the optics would be so bad to say that as soon as a country tries a little bit of regulation which is pulling out of it entirely. That would look for Googles. Tick tock the US. It would look so bad, but I do think that they would do that.

Coco Khan The skin is very in fashion with their current leadership.

Nish Kumar Thank you so much for joining us today on Pod Save the UK, Patricia Clarke. And listeners do check out her work on Torch this slow newscast in the latest episode. Are you actually talking about how Silicon Valley billionaires are trying to live forever, which aligns with one of my personal obsessions? Brian Johnson. He’s in it, I think, one of the strangest men who ever lived.

Coco Khan Is he the guy who he’s got a chip in his head or is he injecting a son, son’s blood?

Nish Kumar Son’s blood. Son’s blood. Son’s blood, we should say, for legal clarification. He doesn’t do that anymore. It’s. It’s fucking way.

Coco Khan And that’s it. Thanks for listening to Pod Save the UK. Don’t forget to follow Pod Save the UK on Instagram, TikTok and Twitter. And we’re on Blue Sky now to follow us at Pod Save the UK dot Crooked dot com. And if you want more of us, make sure you subscribe to our YouTube channel. We’ll have exclusive cuts on their extended interviews and you get to see Nish’s face in full color.

Nish Kumar Terrifying. Full color.

Coco Khan Angry. Disgusted.

Nish Kumar Full color. Disgusted. Disheveled. Finished. Camo Story.

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

Nish Kumar Thanks to senior producer James Tindale and assistant producer Mae Robson with additional research from Isabella Anderson.

Coco Khan Our theme music is by Vasilis Fotopoulos.

Nish Kumar Thanks to our engineer Jeet Vaswani.

Coco Khan The executive producers are Anushka Sharma, Tanya Hines, Madeleine Herringer, and Katie Long, with additional support from Ari Shwartz.

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