Warning: this episode contains descriptions of sexually explicit and sexist song lyrics.

 

While we wait to see if Trump’s tariff juggernaut is going to squash our fragile economy, Nish and Coco count the cost of the “bill-mageddon” we already face. It’s a perfect storm of steep rises in household bills and a bonkers global trade war.

 

While we’re staring economic apocalypse in the face, we seem to be losing our rights to protest. If the Quakers get raided, who’s safe from heavy handed policing and draconian laws?

 

And have you prepared yourself for food shortages? Your stash of beans might not cut it. Professor Tim Lang – author of a major report on food security- has a plan we all need to hear.

 

On the bright side, 2025 is the year the Labour Party has decided to embrace social media and podcasts. What can possibly go wrong?

 

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Guests

Tim Lang

Zoë Grünewald

 

Audio Credits

C4

Garys Economics

 

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TRANSCRIPT

 

[AD]

 

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

 

Coco Khan And I’m Coco Kahn, today the UK is bracing itself as Trump unveils his trade tariffs and in the face of economic chaos, we’re chatting to food security expert Tim Lang about how we can shore up Britain’s precarious supply chain.

 

Nish Kumar Then we just stop oil putting down the tin soup and saying goodbye to direct action. We’re talking about the future and the right to protest.

 

Coco Khan First though, do you want to hear a big news, Nish?

 

Nish Kumar What is the big news, Coco?

 

Coco Khan This is our 100th episode, it’s our centenary, the PSUK centenary. Aww, that was God Save the Queen, I don’t know why that came out. Yeah, why is that? I donno, I didn’t know any of the horn music, do you know any other horn music?

 

Nish Kumar I’m trying to do what has become my sort of speciality in the last couple of years, which has become a kind of interpreter for Coco Khan’s outpourings, given that her mouth is completely directly connected to her brain with no filtration system whatsoever. I think for people outside the UK, if you live to a hundred, the reigning monarch sends you a letter. And so I think Coco’s mind has jumped through that.

 

Coco Khan Yes, that’s exactly right, and you know what was really great is I didn’t even know that’s what had happened, but you did!

 

Nish Kumar To celebrate the 100th episode, I am actually coming to you from the mothership, from deep inside the hub of Crooked’s actual office in LA, and it’s a real relief for everybody, especially if you’re watching this on YouTube, because the last few weeks it has been like getting a FaceTime call from your uncle who doesn’t fully know how to use his Bye-bye, folks.

 

Coco Khan It’s like, you know, when you see the Attenborough or like a sort of BBC spring watch and they got the camera traps and then the little badger comes out, like it’s now first, it’s a little bit like that. Like night watch niche. Actually, that’s not fair. You look great anyway.

 

Nish Kumar From next week, we will be back to Webcam in the Face as I continue my world tour through to Australia and New Zealand. My body does not know what time it is anywhere. I think bits of my body have now got stuck in different time zones. Right so the news juggernaut heading towards us as we record is US tariffs. Now it’s not clear what impact they’ll have but I think we can safely predict, not good. It’s an economic kick and in the same week millions of people in the UK will see their bills go up.

 

Coco Khan That’s right, this month is being dubbed Awful April, I can’t believe it, we’ve got a new name for it, as households are hit by a wave of increases to their bills, so energy, water, council tax, all going up as are mobile and broadband bills, as well as TV licenses and car taxes.

 

Nish Kumar This painful jump in household bills comes less than a week after Rachel Reeves announced welfare cuts. But for a Labor government still reeling from accusations that their policies are more Tory than the Tories is a further twist of the knife for Britain’s poorest families.

 

Coco Khan For sure, for sure. And, you know, even just the fact it’s being called Bill Hike Day, you don’t land on a day in the first year. Do you know what I mean? Like, this is something that has now become part of our lived experience year in and year out after a cost of living crisis has been going on for, what, how many years now? It feels like at least five, something even more. There is some good news here though. For workers aged over 21, minimum wage has gone up. The state pension is also going up at the end of the week. But is this really enough to counteract these tax and bill hikes, especially alongside the havoc wrought by Trump’s tariffs?

 

Nish Kumar They’re calling it Liberation Day here. It’s hard to say what is being liberated from what, apart from economic policy being liberated from the shackles of basic common sense.

 

Coco Khan What is the feeling there, just out of curiosity, on Liberation Day? Is it that you turn on the television and people are saying, it’s Liberation day?

 

Nish Kumar I would say the mood here based on my interactions with Americans is one of deep and profound shame. It’s like if somebody comes around to a family dinner and your family is absolutely acting up. That might be something very specific to do with me and my family.

 

Coco Khan No, no, no. I can relate. It’s the sort of opening the door and just saying, I’m so sorry before they come in. I mean, it’s been liberation day is all across the press here, all across the world, I would imagine. There’s been a real scramble from leaders to try and get exceptions, right? We don’t know at the time of recording, whether there will be one, one rule for everyone, or whether there we’ll be on individual nations basis, there will be exceptions, obviously the UK wants something favorable. We want a special exemption. So Keir Starmer has pulled out all the stops. He’s even included an offer for Trump to visit Britain in June to sign an agreement, which was actually turned down.

 

Nish Kumar There is logic to these exemptions being sought after by the Labor government because forecasters have said that a 20% tariff increase, which is one of the figures that’s being bandied around, it would cut the size of the British economy by 1% and force the Chancellor Rachel Reeves into tax rises this autumn. So I guess on the one hand, you look at it and you say, well, when the numbers are of that size and given also what we’ve just been talking about in terms of Bill Armageddon day, however you want to brand this fucking nightmare, whatever way round you go, it’s a terrible thing for the British economy. So now the question becomes, what should Britain be willing to do in order to compromise with Trump.

 

Coco Khan Sometimes it can sound like the UK doesn’t really have any options. I mean, lots of leading economies, including the EU, are expected to retaliate, that we’re not making that threat. What do you think, Nish? Do you think this pragmatic middle way is going to save us from this, as you put it, Bill, Bill Mcgeddon? Bill McGeddon sounds like a person. He’s like an actor that I watched on Amazon Prime.

 

Nish Kumar Bill McGeddon sounds like he did some time in the Royal Shakespeare Company in the 80s before playing a James Bond villain.

 

Coco Khan We like a man with a character arc, we do, Bill McGeddon.

 

Nish Kumar I think that one of the key things we’ve learned in the near full decade of the Trump epoch is that constantly trusting Donald Trump to behave in a steady and consistent manner is an absolute fool’s errand. The idea that Starmer can sufficiently placate a man as volatile and as thin skinned as Donald Trump. Is actually incredibly naive. And whatever the government is saying to us publicly and whatever it feels obliged that it has to continue saying, I absolutely hope to high heaven that behind closed doors, they are having much more practical conversations. The most practical things Dharma can be doing and the Labor government can be at this point is to plan for total volatility. That is just a simple reality. And I’m only basing that on all of the things that Trump has said and done.

 

Coco Khan It is hard to imagine the UK doing anything else though, isn’t it? I know we’ve been talking about getting closer to Europe, especially over our shared defense aims and the situation in Ukraine, but come on, Labor’s not going to try and get back in the Eu. It’s just not going to happen. That’s gone, that’s dead in the water. So we’re out here on our own. I mean, you know an argument might even be perhaps even if rejoining the EU was on the table, maybe that’s not something we should be doing. It’s not like the EU isn’t without its problems at the moment, particularly if these tariffs come on. And also, there’s a lot of stuff going on across Europe with the far right as well, over across in France. I was listening to Pod Save the World. Please do listen to our sister podcast. And Ben was reflecting how, like… Hear this news about Le Pen not being able to run in the French elections, and you might understandably say, yeah, hey, because of course, you know, the far right are really scary. But also we need to remember that the left have been pushed out in France as well, and they’re being alienated. And so there is a problem of this kind of centrist mush in France and in other countries as well. You know, as progressives, maybe we shouldn’t be looking to them anyway. Maybe those are old solutions from an old time and now is a new world order. And perhaps this is the the right way.

 

Nish Kumar Nobody wants to relitigate Brexit, even for someone like me, who, you know, was very much in favor of us remaining in the European Union. It’s very hard for me to make a democratic case for us revisiting that decision. However, there are elements of the deal that I think it would be practical from a trading perspective to re-examine, because, you, know, the British people are suffering, okay? And these kind of tariffs are going to hit a population that I don’t know how many more hits it can actually take financially. And so if Starmer is a ruthless pragmatist, as he continually maintains, then one of the things he’s going to have to do is re-examine our Customs Union relationship with the European Union. And that even if we don’t have a conversation about rejoining the EU, which again, none of us wants to have, there are elements of the Brexit deal that I think it would be worth re- examining specifically in terms of a Customs Union.

 

Coco Khan So one of the side effects of constantly reacting to what the US is going to do next is that it skews our own news issues that really matter. Don’t get the same attention that they would have done before Trump 2.0. That’s partly down to all of us, isn’t it? So we’ve got to turn away from the sound and the fury and look at what’s happening under our own noses.

 

Nish Kumar Yes. So the big domestic use in the UK has involved our right to protest and the future of direct action in the U.K. There’s a couple of things to flag up here. The environmental activist group Just Stop Oil announced last week that it’s stopping disruptive protests for now. And police raided a Quaker meeting house and arrested six activists from Youth Demand, a group protesting arms sales to Israel and climate change, who were organizing

 

Coco Khan One of our listeners emailed us about the raid. They said, I assumed this undemocratic bullshit was America, but it appears upon three readings to be the UK. This feels like a perfect, what the fuck. The fuck indeed. Let’s hear what Ella from Youth Demo had to say.

 

Clip You know we’re six young women sat in a circle talking about the state of the country and our responsibility at this time and dozens of officers fully suited up some with tasers swarmed in within about two seconds we are all under arrest and it’s an incredibly violating thing you know while we were in the cells they went and raided our homes.

 

Clip Let me just read to you what the Metropolitan Police have said. They said whilst we absolutely recognize the importance of the right to protest, we have a responsibility to intervene to prevent activity that crosses the line from protest into serious disruption and other criminal activities. So they’re saying that you were planning, you were plotting public nuisance basically.

 

Clip What we are doing in Youth Demand, what the police could have come to the publicly advertised talk and heard the plan of, is engaging in a proud British tradition of civil disobedience. And these actions are necessary and proportionate to the times we live in.

 

Nish Kumar Thank God, Coco, the police are going after the Quakers, the real troublemakers in society. Could they not take a truncheon to the head of some kindergarten students? I can’t fucking believe this. I really, really can’t believe that they’ve gone in with tasers to a bunch of kids meeting in a Quaker meeting.

 

Coco Khan I know, I know. Did you see the quote from one of the Quakers that was in the house at the time? They said, the only resistance I could put up was to make tea and drink it in front of them without offering them, which I thought was like a beautiful bit of light in this quite dark story.

 

Nish Kumar That’s the Quaker equivalent of giving somebody the finger, but also it’s draconian and it’s Orwellian. You know, there is an element of the Minority Report about this, the sort of pre-crime division, like they got a tip off from Samantha Morton in a big bath of milk that these protesters were about to do some future crimes and burst into the Quake-er Meet. I can’t get over this. I really feel like it’s worth restating as many times as The Quaker Meeting Hours with Tazers.

 

Coco Khan This has been a total fumble, even this even the spectator we’re talking about.

 

Nish Kumar Even the spectator.

 

Coco Khan Even the spectator!

 

Nish Kumar What are we now going to deem the spectator to be a rabble of leftist, Marxist agitators? Again, for listeners outside the UK, The Spectator is the most squarely conservative publication, I think, in the entire UK press, and even they have been heavily critical of the police’s actions here.

 

Coco Khan And it’s worth saying as well, these arrests came days after Just Stop Oil has said that they’re ending direct action. They’ve said it’s because they’ve been successful in their aims and they have been, you know, the government has ended new oil and gas licenses, but that’s not the whole story.

 

Nish Kumar Yeah, successive laws introduced under the Conservatives have been making it more difficult to carry out disruptive protests like these. In particular, peaceful tactics, and we should continually restate, none of these protests are planning or executing violent protests. The property damage is minimal and tends to be easily washed off, whether it’s paint or fucking baked beans. Peaceful tactics like locking on tunneling or causing it this is a sort of language in which the laws are all being framed. Serious annoyance have been criminalized. This has resulted in Justopoil activists facing much longer jail terms. Last summer, five Justoppoil supporters were given multi-year sentences for planning roadblock protests. These were the longest ever handed down for non-violent civil disobedience.

 

Coco Khan Arrestable protests are really scary for most people. They are, and you know, they’re designed to be, they are designed to put people off. So, you know when people go ahead and do these things, they are acting in their conviction and they act in great risk. But things are getting even worse for them. So the crime and policing bill is currently making its way through parliament. It’s the fourth anti-protest bill in four years. Organizations like Amnesty are warning of further erosion of our rights to peaceful protest. The bill will ban face coverings and pyrotechnics at protests. It will criminalize climbing war memorials. The police will also be given powers to force protesters in the UK on limited visas to leave the country if they get a caution.

 

Nish Kumar Now we covered the crackdown on protest rights on Pod Save the UK’s second ever episode a long 98 episodes ago, way back in May 2023. Paul Powsland, a barrister who represents environmental protesters, warned us specifically that changes in legislation were leading to a situation where police can arrest people on increasingly thin grounds. Here is a quick throwback to that conversation.

 

Clip There’s different circles, if you like. The first circle is the kind of conduct which, if it goes forward to a court, the court will convict and say that is a breach of the law and a criminal offense. But beyond that circle is a whole extra circle of conduct, which can be brought in by the police’s reasonable suspicion to arrest you for the thing. So there’s loads of conduct that wouldn’t actually be found to be a criminal offense if it is enough to give you reasonable suspicion. To arrest. And every time you expand the circle of things that are actually criminal offenses, you also expand the cycle of things the police can reasonably arrest for.

 

Nish Kumar We can’t say, and when I say we, I don’t even mean why does society, I mean, literally the hosts and listenership of this podcast can’t say that we weren’t warned about this, um, from the very beginning. So it is something that we should be incredibly concerned by.

 

Coco Khan I think it’s worth mentioning that Labor had committed to scrutiny of these laws when they were in opposition, but now it seems like they’re on board taking it further. Where does it end? It is genuinely quite scary.

 

Nish Kumar I think one of the biggest problems we’ve had politically in the way that we’ve talked about these issues are there has been this kind of weaponization of a moral panic around freedom of speech by the political right. And progressives, a lot of us have bought into this argument and engaged with it, even though it is happening in bad faith. And now we’re actually seeing genuine real threats to people’s free speech. In the Okay, we’re seeing police raiding Quaker meeting houses. Quaker Meeting House, I don’t know why, but that has really stuck out in my head. It’s like, you’re going off to the Quaker. Are you all deranged? Anyway, we’re seeing actual restrictions on freedom of speech, and this isn’t something that’s come out of nowhere. We’re seeing the consequences of changes in the legislation made within the last two years and how they impact on people’s day-to-day lives and democratic right to engage in peaceful protest. It is a really, really chilling thing that we’re seeing actual threats to freedom of speech by governments around the world. Just this week, Marco Rubio’s department said it was concerned about freedom of expression in the UK because of a case involving an anti-abortion campaigner accused of breaching an abortion clinic buffer zone. It’s even been reported that this has been a factor in trade talks, which has been denied by the UK’s business secretary. We’ve allowed in the last decade, the conversation around free speech to become so corrupted that you have on the one hand, conservative governments bringing in legislation that clamps down on freedom of speech. And the other hand, you’ve got a bunch of people going on Twitter and saying, I’m not sure that you should be saying that in public. And we’ve allowed those two to be treated exactly the same. Actually, it’s not even exactly the same. We’ve allowed a moral panic to develop about a group of people that are, and I count myself as one of them, inconsequential and annoying. But that’s not the same as governments restricting people’s freedom of speech and rounding up students for protesting. And I feel culturally, we’ve all been taken for fools here. And it is a source of deep and profound frustration, as you can tell, from the escalating anger that is building in my voice. I am totally fucking sick of it.

 

Coco Khan After the break, we hear from food security expert Tim Lang about Britain’s precarious food supply and whether, as Trump wreaks economic havoc, stockpiling is really the solution.

 

Nish Kumar [AD]

 

Coco Khan Now another subject of growing importance in the UK, which doesn’t always get the attention it should, is food policy. In recent months we’ve seen farmers protesting over inheritance tax and cuts to agricultural subsidies. Trump’s tariffs, global instability and extreme weather all risk affecting our agricultural sector and raise the question, how resilient are the UK’s supply chains to sudden

 

Nish Kumar What makes us particularly vulnerable is that the United Kingdom is not self-sufficient in food production. Around 40% of our food is imported and that figure is rising.

 

Coco Khan In an effort to increase food resilience, last year the government advised all households to have three days worth of tinned food and water. Not sure if you got that message Nish because I definitely did not. But is stockpiling really the answer?

 

Nish Kumar I definitely did not get that message and hearing you say that has filled my body with chills. I don’t know.

 

Coco Khan It makes you nervous. You’ll be like, oh, wait, the government advised us to stop and nobody got the message. It doesn’t fill you with confidence, does it?

 

Nish Kumar A major new report from the National Preparedness Commission has warned urgent action is needed to develop the UK’s food resilience. Coco and our sometimes co-host of PSUK and good friend, journalist Zoe Grunewald, caught up with the author of the report, Tim Lang. Tim is a professor of food policy at City St George’s University of London.

 

Coco Khan So I take it you are a stockpiler.

 

Professor Tim Lang Well, it depends what you mean by stockpiling, let me just be very pompous right at the outset.

 

Coco Khan Okay.

 

Professor Tim Lang Because a stockpile, well, Switzerland has three months of stockpiles for the country and it’s talking about raising that to a year’s supply. That’s a stock pile. If I keep or you keep four tins of beans, is that a stock pile? When I was young, which is a long time ago, that was just called having a good larder. But do I keep some? My wife and I do. Yes, we do. Am I conscious of that? Yes. But do I think individual stockpiling is the answer to the… Fragility of the food system or the capacity of it to break down or get tumbled by shocks. No, I think it’s community stupid. That’s actually what gives you security, not if I or you have 10 tins of beans under our beds.

 

Coco Khan So when you talk about food security though, what actually does that mean, food security?

 

Professor Tim Lang Good point. The UN system to find food security is when you’ve got affordability being met, accessibility, availability, and desirability. But then it got sort of over time with experience looking in the developing world, let alone the rich world, stability, security, and confidence, and it starts getting multifactorial. You need to tick lots of boxes for a population to feel food secure, or even a group or a family or a household to feel the food And what I did in this report for the National Preparedness Commission was to say how prepared is the British public, not Sudan, not Gaza, the British Public, the sixth richest economy on the planet, how prepared is it for the possibility of shocks, and what sort of shocks could hit the British food system, and are we prepared for those? What would it take to get the British public more engaged with its collective security? Well, it took me two and a half years, and I think I’ve barely scratched the surface, to be honest, because what sort of shocks? It can go from climate change, which is creeping into us already, one moment drought, one moment disruptions. It could be another pandemic, which the government’s risk assessments think is the most likely shock coming our way. It could ransomware, taking out the big food companies. Imagine if Tesco, which sells one third of all take home to cook at home food, one third. Imagine if its systems were knocked out by some sort of ransomware. But the core fact that I came up with was almost all of the experts I spoke to, some inside track in government, big head honchos in the food companies, little people, small people, civil society, everyone agreed from different starting points, the food system is much more fragile than we like to think. Because the last 60 years it’s been based into and developed around the concept of just-in-time delivery systems. There is no storage. It’s all on the motorway. One fifth of all lorries on British motorways are food. The supermarkets don’t have storage. You don’t storage. So if something gets knocked, it’s dead easy for moral panics and disturbances and disruptions to begin to get people worried and… Then suddenly it can get a lot worse. And we’ve seen in the last two years how food can be weaponized. It’s a horrible word for a horrible reality. You know, why should Britain think it’s on its own and doesn’t need to think about these things?

 

Zoë Grünewald Um, you spoke about pandemics as a big risk factor, and obviously we had one fairly recently. What did we learn from that? Did we come close to food insecurity then? I mean, how did that impact us?

 

Professor Tim Lang No one starved, no one died of crushier core in COVID. Some emergency systems, a parcel system worked, but it didn’t work well. I sit on the mayor of London’s food board and we noted that parcels of food that bore little resemblance to what one should get were delivered. And it was all very ad hoc and went to the wrong people and people who needed help didn’t get it. The systems of support weren’t there. Infrastructure wasn’t there. There were lots of lessons from that, and yet the Hallett inquiry into Covid isn’t even looking at food.

 

Coco Khan But wait, hang on a second. Am I right in thinking that you’re saying there that like in terms of food insecurity, COVID had an impact, but not so much for us to provoke any cell searching. But I was under the impression that food insecurity in the UK is quite rife. That because of poverty, that many, many households experience it. In fact, my little stat here says 14%, that’s 7.3 million adults experience food insecurity. Is there a disconnect then from a person’s experience of food and security and what is defined by policymakers?

 

Professor Tim Lang It was actually the deputy prime minister of the previous government who announced on the morning of the election, he announced to a defense industries conference, not the public, a defense industry conference said, dear British, will you please store three days of food? I mean, that sent me apoplectic, I will freely admit it. I couldn’t believe this stupidity of saying something like that. And some people said why is that so stupid? Because it was taking no account of differences in people’s circumstances. You’ve said the 14% who can’t even afford to feed their children themselves well. We’re not talking about the demographics. What’s a good diet? What should people do? If you go to that government website, it just said store food and store water. How much? For how long? The harsh politics is the closer to the former Soviet Union you get. The more people take this seriously. I interviewed people in the Latvian, Baltic states and Sweden, and they just say, you know, we’re next. You know, if Ukraine falls, we are next. The government is taking that food security and engaging with their public much more seriously. And we should do better. We could do better and other countries are doing better.

 

Coco Khan I feel a bit bad now because when I got married, my mom was like, I’m going to get you a chest freezer. And I was like mom, I live in a flat, like I don’t have space for a chest freezer. She just looked at me with these eyes being like, you don’t understand that you need a chest. Freeze.

 

Professor Tim Lang You’re both right, your mum was right to be thinking about your storage and security, but you’re right because what’s the first thing, most likely thing to go out in a crisis facing Britain? What is it?

 

Coco Khan The chest freezer?

 

Professor Tim Lang Electricity. The biggest exercise the British government did behind closed doors was a year and a half ago did a three-day exercise of what would happen if the electricity system went down. Bang goes your storage. So just tell your mother I laughed and I was rude But you were right, Mommy!

 

Zoë Grünewald Because obviously when we talk about food, we talk about farming, agriculture, inevitably the conversation often comes back to Brexit. Are we more food insecure now we’ve left the EU? I mean, how did that relationship and that severing of that relationship impact our food?

 

Professor Tim Lang We’re definitely more food dependent than we were, because if you erect barriers between where you get 30% of your food, you’ve just made your life more difficult. And we have. Small companies are having great difficulty exporting and importing. Companies in the European Union that even Dutch, Netherlands, where we get a lot of our fresh vegetables from on those huge greenhouses, they’re saying, why bother? Why should we send it to the Brits, you know, more than it’s worth? But what we’ve got, the frustration of politics at the moment, the farmers, actually, I think are not seizing their opportunity here. They’re fighting over land and inheritance taxes. Actually, what they should be talking about is, can we be producing more food? How could a Labor government start growing more food here? What would that mean? And in my report, I go into that and said, actually if there’s one thing the government should be doing, it’s rapidly increasing horticulture, because that’s what the Brits don’t eat enough of. And that’s what we have the biggest import bill on, and that’s the thing that’s most vulnerable. We should be diversifying what we do in order to have a diversified diet.

 

Coco Khan Maybe this is a bit too philosophical, but the idea of like food as the foundation of economic growth, food as a foundation of education, sort of disconnected food from lots of other political conversations we’re having. I mean, this was some years ago now, I wrote a piece about could Britain be self-sufficient, mainly because I got into gardening, I’m not any good, but I had a little moment where I thought maybe I could be this person, I could do some spuds or whatever.

 

Professor Tim Lang Is this your mother again?

 

Coco Khan Yeah, maybe actually, maybe.

 

Professor Tim Lang Does she give you a fork and spade?

 

Coco Khan Oh, I wish. Anyway, we won’t get into my mom’s chili plant adventures. So I spoke to a food expert who said that Britain, just the size of our population and the size our island, we could never be fully self-sufficient. And so therefore, you know, our resilience is based on our trading relationships and of course, Brexit damaged those and now there’s obviously environmental problems across the world and more X, Y, Z. And it made me think afterwards, I was reflecting on it, that it made it feel that food is the role of the market. It is a business arena. But actually hearing you speak now, that’s a new idea. That’s a New ideology and is one that’s not necessarily serving us. And when you look at places where you do see where policymakers and governments are directly involved with food, for example, serving food in schools, in hospitals, in prisons, Marcus Rashford’s campaign about free school meals. It makes so much sense. So why not extend it out to everything, every person? Do you think that’s too much or is that like, call me pinko madness?

 

Professor Tim Lang No, I don’t. You’re absolutely right. We’ve tended to buy the Thatcherite language of markets can sort everything out. Actually, markets have to be framed. You’ve got to frame markets. The whole language of neoliberal thinking is based around agriculture. Of course, markets, freedom, trade, you know, investment, growth. But the point is, what sort of growth? Where do you want to grow? What do you wanna grow? One of the things I did was look at the official government. Resilience policy, there is one actually, you probably didn’t know that, but there is. It’s actually pretty good. It says principles should be based on prevention is better than the cure, take a whole of society approach, get everyone onto the same page if you want them to do something. And I thought, great, this is fantastic. What do they say about food? One risk out of 89 that face the country as an official risk list. Only one is food related. I like to think of all these people working out this risk assessment and going off and having nice meals and just think, oh, we did a good job there doing it. Just not even thinking about food as a source of risk or as something that could be intrinsically risky.

 

Coco Khan So let’s think about some of those solutions then. You were saying your report’s quite optimistic about things that can be done. What are they? What are some low-hanging fruits?

 

Professor Tim Lang I was interested in the public. There are lots of things that people can do. We have a history of people digging, digging for victory. I have a whole page, indeed a whole chapter, looking at what citizens can do, and it ranges from growing more food, audits of our community to say, You know, here we are in West London. What assets have they got? They’ve got lots of eateries, they’ve got lot’s of big kitchens. So if your kitchen is taken out, Coco or Zoe, there may be others who can cook at a mass scale. That’s a community food asset that’s really important and potentially good for resilience. What did we do in COVID? Closed it all down. Just when those sort of facilities shouldn’t be used. And I looked at examples of where people are doing. Community gardening, 200 households. Sharing some land, even in cities, there’s a lot of land where food could be grown, and it’s where people are. So I turned around the what could be quite scary report into a very optimistic report, saying, look, there are things we can do. Why am I confident in that? Because when I looked at other countries, that’s what they say too. They don’t say just store food, even if you haven’t got any storage or can’t afford it. They say… Do something, know your neighbors. As one military person said to me, it’s a fantasy, this American prepper nonsense where you get a gun and Coco has a store and puts locks on the doors and said it’s mine. And then she’s completely lost if it’s gone. Actually strength is in community.

 

Zoë Grünewald I mean, it’s funny you talk about solidarity because it feels like the conversation about food security recently has become kind of wrapped in division. And I’m particularly talking about the debate around farmers and farming and what labor is doing for farmers. Labor obviously recently caused outrage by introducing the agricultural inheritance tax for the first time. They scrapped sustainable farming payments. TV farmer Jeremy Clarkson has declared it is without a doubt the end for British farming. Do you agree with that? How devastating this for labor and how devastating this is for farmers.

 

Professor Tim Lang I will choose my words very carefully. I think the Treasury played a fairly, I’ll be hard, dirty trick on DEFRA by announcing that and basically pushing it through. I can understand lots of people in the Labor government would say, well, it’s time we started taxing. Why shouldn’t farmers pay taxes? Indeed, the public partly thinks that, but how it was done was cack-handed politically. And set a hostility among farmers that was politically stupid. But farmers, having said that, really do need to start thinking much more, what are they for? They say all the time they’re about producing food and feeding people. They actually feed markets. That’s a very different thing.

 

Coco Khan Why don’t we curb the supermarkets because the farmers had real grievances. You know, I really stuck in my head. I had one, uh, chat talking about, um, uh the, the flour in a loaf of bread, a loaf of breads, obviously the price of that, absolutely nothing. And that’s a whole year of their lives that they are working on tending to these.

 

Professor Tim Lang Koko, that raises such enormous points about the political economy. If you want a short supply chain where the primary producer gets a good whack of what you and I spend as consumers, where you’ve got to redesign the food system, you’ve gotta reframe the market, literally reframe it. That’s big politics and actually that’s what happens in wars. It does get done very quickly.

 

Coco Khan So Labor has tried to extend an olive branch with the farmers. It’s talking about public sector food targets. Why is that? First of all, what is that, what is public sector foods targets? I don’t even understand.

 

Professor Tim Lang I’m really sorry to interrupt you, but you can tell my frustration, if I get another government that comes in and says, oh, well, let’s just deal with the public sector. The public sector is trivially small compared to Tesco. There are nine supermarkets, dear interviewers, who sell 94%, 94.5% of all food you take home to cook. Mm-hmm four of those sell three-quarters of it This is huge compared to the public sector. To just say, oh, we’re the government, we can only deal with the public sector is nonsense. You can reframe the lot. You can say, we actually want farmers. Why do I say that? Because France did that. It said it wanted to have a certain percentage in every store to be from local suppliers. It set a target. Come on, you can do it if you want to. Food everywhere is what needs to be addressed if you a food secure economy. If you want a food resilience culture, you’ve got to engage the public in that. They’ve got be engaged in skilling themselves and improving their capacity to deal with crises.

 

Coco Khan And what do you think the role for legislation is here?

 

Professor Tim Lang I think it’s central, even Sweden, which is in the EU, said we need to have a new piece of legislation. Out of 55.5 billion pounds you spend on armaments in 2023, guess, Coco and Zoe, omniscient journalists that you all are, how much money was given to civil defense?

 

Coco Khan I’m going to go with zero.

 

Professor Tim Lang You’re a cynic, but you’re close. It was only 65 million. It’s not even a pound ahead, okay? That’s pretty sobering.

 

Zoë Grünewald And are you hopeful that the government is going to take this on?

 

Professor Tim Lang This is when I take a deep breath.

 

Coco Khan The farmers liked your report, didn’t they?

 

Professor Tim Lang A lot of people like the report to my pleasure, there are a lot of people, the industries are actually picking up saying, we’re going to make this our discussion point in our annual conferences and things like that, which I think is terrific. The government in three different parts of it are talking about it. That actually is pretty good for in policy world to get it taken up. But nothing will happen unless the public demands it. You can write the best report in the world and it’ll sink without trace. It’s events that make it. And what we’ve got to do is see the public press, their MPs, their counselors, to say, look, what are you doing about this?

 

Coco Khan At the beginning of this interview, before we started recording, you told me you don’t watch TV.

 

Professor Tim Lang No, we didn’t have a TV.

 

Coco Khan You didn’t have a teammate.

 

Professor Tim Lang Didn’t have a TV for 45 years, yeah.

 

Coco Khan Well, I assume then you never watched the show, The Walking Dead, but if you did, I’ve never heard of it until I watched it. It’s basically all you need to know is it’s a zombie apocalypse.

 

Professor Tim Lang I’d find that too scary.

 

Coco Khan Well, you know, it is scary, it’s scary. But you know the lesson in this, they go for all these, you know, little communities trying to survive in this zombie apocalypse. And all the, all the communities that thrive work together. And, all of the communities that get drawn into infighting die a horrible death. So, you know

 

Speaker 9 There you go.

 

Coco Khan We don’t need a report in some ways great job on the report, but I just mean it’s everywhere isn’t it’s common sense It’s in our literature. It’s everywhere, you know

 

Professor Tim Lang Well, it’s obviously a communist TV program, because most TV would have said it’s the individual hero Arnold Schwarzenegger type Mako man who would sort things out. So you’re talking about the politics there again, which is communities or individuals. I’m aware in that in civil food resilience. That’s what it’s all about.

 

Coco Khan Tim Lang, thank you so much for joining us on Pod Save the UK.

 

Professor Tim Lang Thank you very much.

 

Coco Khan Thank you.

 

Nish Kumar Well, that was a great chat and thanks once again to the great Zoë Grünewald. Coco, I want to ask you a question. Do you feel more or less scared after having that conversation with you?

 

Coco Khan I feel neutral about it, you know, I thought he’s such an expert and that gave me an enormous amount of confidence that there are good people working on this and there are solutions out there and things are being tried out and we’re in a good position to try and make some of those solutions work. However, I did feel a little bit, I suppose, despondent about how it had come to be. This severe, this problem. I didn’t know much about the just-in-time delivery approach that we have to food. You just assume that supplying food is something that the government has under control. And then actually what Tim did is he peeled away that in fact, really it’s private companies that we are placing our food security onto. And that scares me, that unnerves me already, right? Because obviously they have a profit motive. More than anything though, it was just fascinating chat and I feel better about my stockpiling habits. Even if none of them have any nutritional value, I, you know, I’m quite good at it, Nish.

 

Nish Kumar Coco Khan has been stockpiling crisps since 2007.

 

Coco Khan Exactly. I’m single-handedly keeping space raiders. Now with Pope Francis in and out of hospital, Vatican insiders are already scheming over his successor, but decades before Francis worked to rebuild trust in the church, a scandal rocked the Vatican, the mysterious death of banker Roberto Calvi.

 

Nish Kumar Found hanging under a London bridge in 1982, Kelvey’s death was ruled a suicide, but plenty of people weren’t convinced. 40 years later, journalist Niccolo Minoni got a tip that there was more to the story.

 

Coco Khan In Crooked’s newest series, Shadow Kingdom – God’s Banker, Nicola unspools the thread of this immersive true story to answer one question – who killed God’s banker?

 

Nish Kumar Listen to Shadow Kingdom, God’s Banker, wherever you get your podcasts, or binge all episodes now at crooked.com forward slash friends, or on the Shadow Kingdom Apple Podcasts feed.

 

Coco Khan Now, after the break, Labor wants to up their Tiktok game and turn their backbenches into influencers. So in other news this week, it looks like Labor is about to have a social media glow-up.

 

Nish Kumar A group of Labor Mps known as the Labor Growth Group wants to increase the party’s presence on social media as a way of reaching wider audiences and speaking back to critics. They want to get Labor voices onto the platforms of popular figures and are keen for their backbenches to become influencers in their own right.

 

Coco Khan Uh, the party has also just appointed a new communications chief, former TikTok employee, James Lyons, who has advised ministers to appear on more podcasts and in lifestyle magazines.

 

Nish Kumar With fewer people watching TV and reading the papers, it seems Labor is starting to view social media as more of a key arena for political discussion. Finally, in 2025, Labor has cottoned on to social media being important. I can’t wait for their next campaign to be entirely fidget spinner based.

 

Coco Khan But is it good news? That’s the question. Is it good for politics? Is it a good news for podcasts? Is a good for us, Nish?

 

Nish Kumar I don’t know how good news it is for us specifically, but I mean, listen, broadly in principle, the idea of communicating about politics and policy is something I am incredibly in favor of and given that the majority of media consumption is now online-based, it makes a lot of sense. My concern is what this is going to look like, right? Given the kind of stuff Labor has been posting on social media, it does suggest There is a sort of. Lack of nows, shall we say. Hopefully the employing of this TikTok guy is actually going to help them understand the mediums a little bit better. I mean, last week they shared a post boasting about the number of people that have been deported during this government, which sort of they made look like this sort of beautiful graphic design generated like writer graph print, which is fine sort of esthetically, but it’s more the There’s a problem right? You really are polishing a turd on that instance. You know, if you’re bragging about the number of people you’ve deported, it doesn’t matter what your font game is like.

 

Coco Khan Yeah, yeah, yeah.

 

Nish Kumar And the target audience for that is still probably going to be put off by it. I mean, that’s the thin end of the wedge. There was the horrendous video that featured AI-generated animals, including a bulldog in a police uniform, a hairdresser’s a nurse, and a bull construction worker, telling us all the ways that labor was going to improve Britain. Social media users quickly flagged that the song used in the video with Portuguese lyrics used sexually explicit and misogynist language. And Labor have since apologized for the post and taken it down. Let’s just put it this way. It was not lyrics you would expect to be in a party political broadcast.

 

Coco Khan So the track was by DJ Helanda. It talks about smoking marijuana and having sex with a bitch. The lyrics urge a naughty young girl to sit on the singer’s pot crazy dick and finishes with the line, just a punch in the young girl’s pussy.

 

Nish Kumar Vote Labor!

 

Coco Khan Vote Labor? What?

 

Nish Kumar My concern is not that Labor ministers are going to be using the internet and social media to communicate. My concern, is what will they be saying and will they doing it badly? I’m really worried that the next budget is going to feature Rachel Reeves doing an unboxing video with a briefcase. That, which I think will not be a good look. Now, it is worth bringing up and this sort of slightly brings us back to the conversation about the beautifully designed deportations poster. Labor Mp John Mcdonnell has been critical of the push for Labor to be on social media. On X he wrote, no matter how many TikTok videos are done, there will never be enough to convince people that cutting benefits to disabled people is the right thing to do. It would be better to record a simple message that this attack on vulnerable people has been dropped. And that is a really important point here, okay, because you can dress it up all you If what you’re currently talking about is disabled people are going to be poorer, We’ve deported another load of people. And we sent the police to a Quaker rally, none of that is going to be helpful, regardless of how you dress it up on social media.

 

Coco Khan It does feel like we live in an age of political communication, where like getting communication right is kind of all that matters and the actual substance of it is being neglected. Um, I don’t think it’s a given that everyone in labor is terrible at communication. They’ve got some politicians who are pretty good on lines. Arasultana is a really good example. She’s, um, always having like really good conversations online. She’s got a sense of humor. I very much enjoy following her.

 

Nish Kumar We should probably flag the fact that Tara Sultana and John McDonnell, two of the MPs that we mentioned, both still have the whip withdrawn. Their status as Labor Mps does come with a heavy question mark next to it at the moment. Specifically, to talk further about podcasts, there’s another angle to this conversation. The former city trader turned economics commentator, Gary Stevenson, who was a guest on this show, was among those who are approached by the labor growth group. In a recent video on his YouTube channel, Gary’s Economics, he laid out the pros and cons of engaging with the party. Let’s take a look.

 

Clip I think if I was thinking purely explicitly about what is best for the YouTube channel, probably I wouldn’t have them on. I think we’ve got a cool channel here. I think make great videos. I think that we make fun, exciting, accessible, educational, informative videos. People like it. We’re growing really quickly. We’re popular. Everybody hates labor. I think they’re gonna do quite a bad job. Their brand is weak. It’s kind of toxic. It’s like purely from a growing the channel perspective. It seems like an unnecessary risk. But at the same time, I think, and I’m kind of alone voicing this in our team, I think it’s the right thing to do. We attack them, we criticize them. I think the right things to do, these guys are literally, they’re the government of this country. Even if we don’t have other parties on, I think we have a kind of a duty to let them come on and defend themselves.

 

Coco Khan Nish, what do you think? Where do you stand on all this?

 

Nish Kumar This is sort of the problem of where we are with the kind of media landscape. The issue with podcasting is that podcasting originally came about as a kind of alternative to radio. And so podcasting in its inception was, you know, more about unedited, unstructured conversations and those conversations would frequently be between friends and there was an implicit understanding that you were effectively endorsing. Or at least showing some sympathy with the views of the person that you had on your show because you were platforming them. It was your hosting. The podcast is your space. Now, we don’t really think about that in terms of old media broadcasting organizations. I think the majority of people understand that CNN or the BBC are not endorsing the views of every single person that comes on there. And largely, you can often tell that if by the tone of the questioning, you know, there is this kind of obligation that proper journalists have to push for accountability and you know that’s a somewhat idealized view of it. Loose principle though is that all media organizations were not endorsing people by having them on the show inherently whereas podcasting, because it’s seen as a cozier medium, there is an idea that it’s always endorsing. Now the problem is we’re now in a media landscape where podcasting is just another Facet of the wider media conversation rather than specific and direct alternative to it. And I wonder if now it’s time to start treating podcasts and podcasters with the same level of scrutiny that we treated the old media and expecting them, if you have a guest on their show who has views that people might find abhorrent, do you have kind of a journalistic obligation to actually push back on this? Now, I’ve got to be honest with you. Gary Stevenson is exactly the sort of person I want to be interviewing Rachel Reeves about the Spring Statement. He worked in the city. He understands the mechanics of how it works. He’s making thought out, rationalized arguments for things like wealth taxes and for things like tax increases for people earning the highest sums of money in the UK. For me personally, he’s exactly the sorts of person. I want interviewing. Members of the Labor government, and I want him to do that with total freedom to ask whatever questions he wants to ask.

 

Coco Khan Yeah, and I agree. And I think that, you know, politics needs to go to the people and that’s where they are. And it’s well, it’s worth understanding from the politicians point of view, or I hope they do understand that it’s a two way street. You know, they don’t know all the concerns about every single demographic and engaging with media that represents those voices, whether they are predominantly for progressives or they predominantly speak for young people or they probably speak for certain regions or You know, this is a fact-finding mission as well as a two-way street can be a really good relationship. So I think they’re missing a trick by not doing that. But the point I wanted to make was that podcasting was meant to be for alternative views because there was a reality that the mainstream press wouldn’t allow certain views. I mean, I speak for myself, I think, you know, I’m a progressive, I’m on the left. Even I have found myself going into traditional press and feeling like, okay, actually, I couldn’t say a word here about like redistribution of You know you have to say it really quickly under your breath and hope that no one catches you.

 

Nish Kumar But I think it’s really important now we’re no longer talking about a kind of cottage industry or a sort of, you know, we’re talking about a multi-million pound industry and we’re talking about people who are getting paid hundreds of millions of dollars every year. Yeah. Who have no regulation applied to them.

 

Coco Khan But no, but like you were saying earlier, when you were talking about free speech, that like, you can say whatever you want, but if it’s putting people in danger, there’s got to be consequences. Maybe it’s not a total ban, but there’s gotta be some process in place. And at the minute there isn’t.

 

Nish Kumar Um, anyway, listen, um, this is clearly a subject that we could talk about for hours and hours and hours.

 

Coco Khan Well, I’ve got the mother of all subject changes because I’m going away for a bit. Oh, I have done it wrong. I’ve done it.

 

Nish Kumar You haven’t done it wrong. We’re in a slightly odd situation where you’re trying to frame this, that you’re breaking news to me that I already know. This is actually more cocoa addressing the listeners rather than a revelation to me of some information that I’ve been privy to.

 

Coco Khan Yeah. Yeah. For some time. Basically, um, listeners, hello. Um, I’m leaving you in the capable hands of Zoë Grünewald for some time because I’m taking some time off to have a baby. I just wish I got to that link quicker. You know, I felt it was there. I’m so glad I’ve been able to get this off my chest. You now how hard it is to hide a baby for nine months? You know? I’ve been wearing extra loud shirts to distract from people seeing, uh, that I have a, a baby

 

Nish Kumar Shows to say, I’m not pregnant.

 

Coco Khan Yeah, exactly, exactly.

 

Nish Kumar To be clear, you are going to come back because we’re doing a mailbag special and that will be out in a couple of weeks, so you are gonna be on there for that, but then you are going to be on maternity leave with your baby.

 

Coco Khan My son Genghis.

 

Nish Kumar You’re muddying the water between conversations you and I have had off mic and on mic. You’ve been referring jovially to your impending baby as Genghis.

 

Coco Khan Yes, because I want to protect his identity. And I think it would be really funny. I’m a Khan. So presumably if I say his name is Genghis, then if anyone decides to be nosy, then they’ll just get a very interesting half an hour reading about the Mongol leader Gengis Khan. And I can, that’s fun for everyone. You know, Genges Khan is also a, you know, a well-traveled man who was a self-starter. So, you, I hope that’s the

 

Nish Kumar One of the things he started himself off doing didn’t turn out so great, especially for, say, the people that he murdered.

 

Coco Khan Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I guess.

 

Nish Kumar Self-starter is not inherently a positive thing. Kengiz Khan had a side hustle, it’s just the side hustle was murdering a load of people.

 

Coco Khan I am really conscious that I’m, I’m probably now going to get a tweet being like, I can’t believe you’re making light of this murder. But I do think that like

 

Nish Kumar Too soon? To make light of Genghis Khan?

 

Coco Khan I feel like 1,500 years, how many years was it? Is it 1, 500? When was Genghis Khan? It’s gotta be at least a thousand years, right? Anyway, whatever, it can’t be too soon, surely.

 

Nish Kumar Anyway, on behalf of the listeners and myself, Coco, congratulations, and we look forward to your return with Tales of New Motherhood.

 

Coco Khan I’m looking forward to being able to moralize with you and start every sentence with as a mother. I’m genuinely really looking forward to doing that. And that’s it. Thank you for listening to Pod Save the UK.

 

Nish Kumar Don’t forget to follow us on at pod save the UK on Instagram, TikTok and Twitter. We’re now also on blue sky. You can follow us there at pod, save the uk.crooked.com. And if you want more of us, make sure that you’re subscribed to our YouTube channel.

 

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

 

Nish Kumar Thanks to producer May Robson, assistant producer and editor Narda Smilionage and researcher Isabella Anderson.

 

Coco Khan Our theme music is by Vasilis Fotopoulos.

 

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

 

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