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BBC sounds, music, radio, podcasts. Have you heard? I want to go further and faster on delivering growth and getting stuff built in Britain. For too long, we've been in the slow lane of growth and it's working people that pay the prize. Yes, that was Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor, saying she wants to go further and faster on growth again and saying it on this occasion too. Justin, Justin Webb, on Thursdays today program, after she'd just given a major speech. So what does growth
mean for that other big pledge of this government to be green. What does it mean for energy prices? What does it mean for bats? And we'll all this talk about what might happen in five, 10, 20 or 30 years time, turn into results that voters care about. Voters worried about paying the bill. Amals away this week. So I'm talking to Justin about all that in this edition of the Today podcast. Let's do it.
Hello, it's Nick in the Today podcast studio, but no amol with me this week because he's at the commella, the world's largest religious gathering. The heart of some sad news as well as much celebration this week. He's making a BBC One documentary about that. We'll hear much, much more about his experiences when he gets back next week. But the good news is, Justin is with me? Well, not quite with me, Justin, where are you?
I can't say, it's an undisclosed location. These things are like, so I've come up to East Yorkshire, basically. I spent quite a lot of time in Hull, fascinating time in Hull with a load of businesses, talking about Rachel Reese's growth speech and then talking to her at a factory near Hull that makes modular furniture. So one of these kind of, you're going through the countryside and suddenly there's a sort of industrial estate thing and then the factory and that is where I was this morning and it's where she was too.
Yeah, and you're there, not only because it's interesting and useful to talk to businesses, and not just those in London and the Southeast, but also because it is a pain for us, isn't it, when we hear a senior politician at a big moment like this, and they're down a line, as we call it, in the business, and it's much harder to have a proper conversation.
In many respects, I think, and you pick this up when you talk to people, and today podcasts listen, and I'm sure we'll feel this, the difference between a conversation that you have about politics, and you know this from your other podcasts, for goodness sake, the difference between a conversation
that is face to face, and a conversation that's down a line, there's maybe a delay, you're interrupting, then you're not interrupting, then they can't hear you, they don't really know who you are, is it really Nick Robinson, is it someone else? The whole vibe of it changes so completely that I think it actually does interfere with that kind of political conversation as a nation, if there's not too highfalutin' the way of putting it. I think it's a real
problem. I don't know what the solution is, but luckily that's above our pay grade, I guess. But I mean, it is. And you talk to Polymer, you definitely do. And I have it in the past as well. Talk to politicians who all say, yes, I love it when I'm face to face with you. And then of course, you say, well, can you be face to face with this? And the answer is usually no, though on this occasion, it was yes. But of course, we have to come to her, which is fine. But we need to do more of everything. Yeah.
There are two problems with it for the politicians, which loyal listeners to the today programme might not understand is that in recent years, of course, there's been an explosion of news outlets and they feel they've got to do them all. Some ministers and shadow ministers tell me they do 10 interviews in a row. They barely have time to take breath. So they just sit there. That's why they sound like robots.
Yeah, exactly. And you're not joking when they think, I don't even know which network I'm on or who I'm speaking to. I'm just going to repeat this line that's written on a piece of paper. And the other thing is, Telly drives everything. So no doubt Rachel Reeves was at that factory because she wants to be seen to be at a factory. Yeah, no, exactly right. It was very good to talk to a face-to-face. And it led to a conversation, I think, which has had a different tone than possibly some of the others do. Well, let's talk about the content. Because the big news in the speech, even though it had been,
the drum roll had been happening for many, many days, was the announcement that she and the government and even the Prime Minister who in the past had been a clear opponent of a third runway at Heathrow saying in 2018, there is no more important challenge than the climate emergency. That was the key stammer himself, have changed his mind and they're now in favour of it. What did you make of what she had to say to you in that interview?
And a big takeaway from me, I think she said earlier on in the morning, she said to someone when she's asked why she had changed her mind about airport expansion, she supported Heathrow in the past, but she's opposed it locally around her constituency in Leeds.
And she said, well, I did that at the time because it was during the pandemic and, you know, things were different. But actually, by the time she got to me on the media, she sort of honed her answer to say, it is all about sustainable aviation fuel. It is your case, is it? And Kirstama's case now, that sustainable aviation fuel and the advances made in it completely change all the arguments that used to be made about airport expansion.
Well, I believe it is a game changer in the way that we fly and the carbon emissions. We're also reforming how we use air. Really interesting answer, actually, because she really stuck to it. She said everything has changed in a fact because it is going to be possible to have sustainable aviation fuel. This is stuff that's made from
Food waste and a load of other products and that is changing the entire thing when I said to her you know Hang on said he can't probably seen the same Material so why does he not feel as he does she sort of suggested that he hadn't yet come round to a view that is the obvious one now So, you know the big takeaway from me quite apart from the timing of it She said it might get get going in a decade or so which I think a lot of people think is a bit
optimistic but actually the thing that has changed her mind about it and the argument that they're now going to have with environmentalists and with many people inside labour is a kind of almost a technical one actually about whether that fuel is a game-changing. And it won't just be with the environmentalists, it will be with an independent
body set up by government. People chat often about her budget choices and they say, ah yes, but she will need the approval of the OBR, the Office for Budget Responsibility. I was just looking this morning. She will also need the approval of something called the Climate Change Committee, which is a watchdog that itself has a budget, but it's a carbon budget rather than a pound-shilling and pence budget if you know what I mean. And they will have to sign off.
where the government plans for an airport expansion would or would not breach their net zero target that they're meant to reach by 2050. And looking at the last report they produced, they said there could be no new airport expansion, not just no ether expansion, that would be Gatwick and Luton and elsewhere, like Leeds Bradford as well, no airport expansion, unless there were significant reductions in carbon intensity in other areas of the economy, such as road transport and agriculture.
This may be quite a technical argument as well as a political one. Yeah, it is going to be, isn't it? You can see that people are going to get into their camps and disagree about the facts, and that always makes it really difficult actually to ask questions about, because you don't actually know who is right, and there will be people who are serious people who have to suspect on both sides, actually, both the environmental side and the side that the government is now on, who are saying,
We're right. Meanwhile, Sadie Khan, a really senior Labour politician, intending to go on and take the government to court. Rachel Reeves, again in our interview, was pretty calm about. I mean, I suppose she couldn't really say anything else, but she said, yeah, we hope he changed his mind, but I don't think they're expecting that he does. They're kind of in bring it on mode. I felt the whole interview.
I mean, again, this is possibly because of the face-to-face business, but I thought she was much less defensive, actually, than she sometimes is in interviews. She seems to me to have turned a corner and be determined that this is going to be a new kind of sunny, Rachel Reeves, and we did see a bit of that, even when answering quite a difficult question.
I think that's part of the point, isn't it? When people say as they do, well, what's the point of Heathrow expansion because it'll take years, if not decades? Michael O'Leary, the chief executive of Ryanair, said, you know, might not be until 2040, 2045 or 2050. Long after he departed the airline, he said failing to mention that the reason he's not very keen on Heathrow is none of his flights go from Heathrow. They go from other airports instead. But I think the point she
is trying to deal with is to stop being a gloomster and be a boomster in the language of Boris Johnson. And that's particularly important, not just because she depressed people's confidence so much with that budget and the cut to winter fuel allowance, but also because that startling contrast with Donald Trump, where even opponents of Donald Trump instinctively are now saying, was quite nice to be upbeat, isn't it? We could do with a bit of that here.
Yeah, you really see it, and you see it right across the board in politics. Politicians mentioning Donald Trump in a kind of positive way. Politicians who would never, ever, ever have mentioned Donald Trump, including conservative politicians, actually, who mostly didn't like him, certainly the senior ones.
regarded him with extreme suspicion to put it mildly. But all kind of, you know, using Trump analogies now, talking about executive orders, is this somehow they could come into British government? And Prime Minister could just say, this will be done tonight. And there is this kind of sense. Will it last? I mean, goodness, there are all sorts of massive pitfalls that face Donald Trump. And I guess there's a
a problem potentially in getting too close to the idea that Trumpism solves everything because when it doesn't, if it doesn't, then they're going to look a bit silly. But yeah, you're right. I think part of the energy that you see right across the board in the government at the moment does come from this kind of sense of goodness. We mustn't be left behind stylistically from what's happening across the pond.
There is also an actual economic argument as well, not just about big upbeat, but you heard it from Jim O'Neill, didn't you? Which is, if investment in the country, big investment coming from foreign investments is a long-term thing, not a short-term thing, you do have to talk about what you'll do in 10, 20 years time, not just 10 or 20 weeks time to persuade them, oh yeah, Britain's a place to go.
But you also then come across this big contrast between what's happening in Trump's America and what's happening here, which is fuel prices, specifically electricity prices for industry, where the cost in America, roughly speaking, is about a war about four times more than what it is in America.
you know, for a large, for an organization using a large amount of electricity and you think of the chemicals industry and you think of, I don't know, any kind of big industry that uses large pieces of machinery. The issue for them is you look across at the States and you look at the things that Trump is doing and the drilling for oil and gas and all the rest of it. Actually, the things that Biden was doing to be fair as well. And the contrast with energy
Here is huge and it was really interesting talking to businesses in and around how particularly the the bigger ones the more kind of labor intensive ones the more more machinery intensive ones they all mention energy and when I bring it up with with Rachel Reeves she she
suggests that there isn't an alternative to what we're doing and that there is no trade-off between, as she said in her speech, no trade-off between net zero and energy prices. But actually, of course, there is. If you reduce the amount of subsidy that there is
for less carbon intensive energy production. If you reduce that, take it away from bills, you could bring energy prices down. But again, she is not willing to even conceive of doing that. So the companies that complain that she is actually in her policies, anti-growth,
and Ed Miliband in his policies as Energy Secretary Antigro. They are not going to be persuaded, I think, by anything she tells us or said in her speech. Yeah, she is able to say, well, hold on, this was happening under the Conservatives. Boris Johnson was very keen on solar. Didn't he say we'd become the solar and wind equivalent of Saudi Arabia from a Saudi Arabia? And I was just looking at the figures here that the cost of power for industrial business
has jumped 124% in the past five years, according to the government's figures, that the UK chemical sector has had a fall in its output since 2021 of 38%, cement manufacturer down 40%, basic metals, 35%, electric equipment manufacturer, 50%. So it's not so much that this government have created the problem. It's just that this vast gulf, isn't there now,
between Trump saying drill baby drill let's get cheap energy and the government saying one day maybe you'll get cheap energy because of an investment in green power sources but we're going to keep all that energy supply off the north coast of Britain in the ground.
And she wouldn't say when it was going to be that prices would come down. When will all of this work bring our industrial energy prices roughly down to what other big industrialized countries have? I'm not going to put a date on that. But that's what we are doing, isn't it? Because without you putting in... Because I think the expert analysis, you know, talk to people like Dieter Helmerd also at the University. The expert analysis is, well, no time soon if you carry on
like this and that's the problem that the businesses face and I did ask a when okay if this wonderful green revolution is taking place and if it is the kind of economic shape of the future and people want to invest in it and it makes sense in terms of energy sustainability etc etc when is it going to be that prices come down and she didn't say there is another aspect of environmentalism that you pushed her on bats
But which are already, I mean, that today's program listeners, you know, of course already are going to be keen on bats. They're keen on all wildlife, but bats particularly seem to get people going and it's really interesting. I actually had a message and someone saying, why didn't you concentrate more on bats? And I was thinking, well, I don't know how long the interview lasted, 20 minutes or so. I've got three minutes, it was probably on bats, which was probably
fair enough, but perhaps not fair enough. Well, they came to you by the way, big pro or anti-bats. Is there a bad bias in your question? I think they felt that I was just was not sufficiently informed about bats. But basically, I brought up this thing that has been around for a bit, and you know, you look at civil engineering papers and things about the Oxfordic Cambridge Railway.
And people say there is a similar issue there that has been with HS2, which is that there are some very rare bats, and in order for them to be protected, you think of the £100 million bat tunnel for HS2, which I think has yet been built, but is in line, and Rachel Riese actually mentioned in her speech,
as if to say for goodness sake, we can't do that again. So I said, well, are you going to do that again with us at Cambridge? And actually, she was pretty plain that in her view, they should not. There are trade-offs. That's the point, isn't it? There are trade-offs, and the balance has gone too far in the direction of always protecting every bat and every newt. And as a result, the costs of infrastructure
are significantly higher in the UK than pretty much any country around the world because they do things differently and we need to do things differently if we actually want to see the benefits of these projects. One of the reasons why HS2 is not going to go further than Birmingham is because the costs got out of control. Sure. The reason they got out of control was because of things like 100 million pounds on a backed tunnel. Yeah, so it's interesting. You're very clear and we will of course be out.
finding the facts to ask them whether they want to be moved in the next few days. But the serious point is she was pretty plain that she had the balance has changed in her view and that protecting wildlife is no longer going to be something that costs money, those kinds of sums of money in these projects. And of course, if that is true, then it does mean that some big changes are in the offing.
And it's not just money, it's also time because what businesses find they have to do is that they have to go through enormously complicated planning processes to meet these environmental targets, which take them time can sometimes be challenged in court as well. And they're not able at the moment, but I think under new legislation is proposed they will be able to.
to sort of say, well, okay, we might damage the bird population here, or the nukes, for example, and the nukes is another serious one that's raised again and again, but don't worry, there'll be more nukes somewhere else. And those sorts of details, which people obviously care about for environmental reasons, they care about that local environment, can really be a disincentive
businesses tell us at least for them to spend the money, which is why she's against it, although she and you both resisted the temptation. Well done for calling the proposals batty.
Yeah, and I also couldn't remember, although Joe, a producer here, has come up with a word for people who love bats. Do you know what that is? I didn't, actually. And I still don't, because I've forgotten it, although Joe and Joe's also forgot this, so we're not going to be able to bring it to you. But anyway, there is a word that describes people who love bats, and the word is not batty, the word is a proper word for bat loving. I suppose it ends in filia.
Yes, beyond that. Now here it is. We will find it. Here it is. It's Kiro... Kiroptorophilia. Kiroptorophilia. Oh, really? It's not a love of people, doesn't it? It's not a love of people. Now just before you've got a dash to get a train...
It's always the case when you do an interview, even a big one like this, even one almost 20 minutes, where the things you think, I really had planned to raise this or raise that. Was there something that you'd heard from the businesses up in the northeast where you are, that you in a way really did want to put to it?
Yeah, and I probably should have done away. I feel that it's a bit backward looking because it refers to the budget, but on the other hand, it absolutely is top of the agenda of all the businesses we talk to. Why, oh, why, they say, did she increase national insurance for employers? And why did she do it in the way that she did it where she also reduced the threshold so that it's paid now on lower paid workers where it wasn't in the past? Why did she do those things?
and they came up with figures about the cost that it would be for them and they suggested various ways in which they'd have to defray those costs including employing fewer people etc etc. It's going to cost us about £20,000 this year which we hadn't budgeted for.
For our business, it is a £350,000 profit hit. Combine that with the rise in the real living wage of 5%. We employ just under 400 people. We are a highly skilled, highly paid industry. And so that's an enormous hit. We've discussed it quite a lot on the programme. She's absolutely made it clear. She is not in the remotest way interested in changing it.
So, we lost it, but it is really interesting to hear the level of concern that there is, I think it's probably fair to say, anger there is, about that one measure that they feel businesses was a mistake. Yes, and in part because for them, they're doing the figures now, we tended news to think the announcement is the moment. Yes, that's so true. It's so true, and we move on, and they haven't moved on at all, because as you point out, he hasn't happened, there's about it.
Yeah, it's happening in April. And for people who either have year-end budgeting, they've just had to make decisions about the prices they charge, their customers, or about the number of people they can afford to employ, or they're doing those sums now because the year-end is an April. One last thing that fascinated me in the interview, Justin, was that she felt the need. And I don't know if you spotted this with your America expert hat on your America cast hat.
she felt the need to explain why growth matters because she talks about growth all the time but there was new polling produced this week by Labor sympathetic think tank that said ordinary voters don't really care about growth.
And indeed, they're rather suspicious of the word. They think it means rich people getting richer, and not then they care about the cost of living. And we've just come out of an election, haven't we, in which Joe Biden was saying, I've got the economy growing and people were saying, well, I'm paying more for my eggs and more for my fuel. Who cares? And GDP, you think of GDP growth, and then the difference between GDP growth and what actually people feel in their pockets. And you can have
fantastic GDP growth and still have, as indeed the United States has over the last sort of many decades, but still have a real problem because it hasn't trickled through the places it needed to trickle through to politically for it to become less of an issue. And it's interesting, Rachel Reeves did, I think in the speech, and certainly speaking this morning, really stressed that what she's talking about is making individual people and families better off. That is the point of growth.
And I think she's, yeah, they've thought about it and know very well that the idea of just saying, oh, we need to grow the economy. It just sounds like, and actually is, remote from all of our lives, and they need to find a way of linking the growth to individual wellbeing. Because, of course, I mean, the other thing, we do get messages from people who say, we don't want any more economic growth. We don't think it makes people happy. We don't like
our national wealth being measured by GDP. We think there are better ways of measuring it. And so the debate about what a good life is, if I put it like that, about how individual lives can be improved is the one that politicians want to take away from growth and to suggest that the growth leads to it, but the growth is not an end in itself. And she's very much on that page, I think.
It's fascinating, isn't it? If it means more airports and fewer bats and newts and other sorts of wildlife, if it means more immigration, because generally economists tend to say, well, if you want growth, you need to have lots of young immigrants coming into full-skill shortages, there may indeed be people say, well, that's not quite what I want. We have to let you go, don't we? Yeah, I've got to go now, Nick, from our undisclosed location to a railway station to explain why it's undisclosed with security.
It is security, which I have to say is intermittent in all these things, but you can see why they do it. They don't want to draw attention to where anyone is, and I'm not going to draw attention to it now, though I suspect that the moment has passed, but let's be safe rather than sorry. Quite. Justin, thanks for joining us on the Today podcast. See you soon.
Now, this flurry of announcements on growth in inverted commas is just one part of what we're going to see in the weeks ahead. And it's meant to provide a positive backdrop to what might be some awkward moments to come. The one that is in the diary
is the 26th of March. That's when the OBR, the Office for Budget Responsibility, that independent body that is supposed to ensure that the numbers that we're provided about the state of the economy are trustworthy and not subject to political spin. That's when it produces something called its economic and fiscal outlook, which basically says, do the numbers add up?
If the government to meet their own self-imposed fiscal rules, which just means their rules about how much they're allowed to borrow, if they don't add up, that would mean that at the end of March, the Chancellor was having to come before people like Justin, me, Emol and others, and explain whether she was putting taxes up, or whether she was cutting spending, how she was doing it, or indeed making some tweak to those borrowing rules to allow her to borrow more.
After that, there's a big spending review coming up at which the government will have to show that it can deliver some of the cuts in spending in certain areas that are needed in order to deliver big increases, and that all leads to a budget in the autumn. But there's lots of things that are not in the diary, but will make a huge difference over the weeks and months to come. How fast does the Bank of England cut interest rates?
If it's faster than expected, that will boost consumer and business confidence. On the other hand, the American Federal Reserve this week did not cut interest rates. That's a sign. Why didn't they cut them? Well, that's another factor. The Chancellor will have to take into account tariffs. We know that Donald Trump says he's in favor of what effectively is a tax on imported goods, but we don't know how he's actually going to do it. And there's an argument within his new administration.
between his political advisers, the White House, who are all in favour of tariffs and his new Treasury Secretary, who's a lot more skeptical. There's also the whole factor of the Chinese economy and how that is doing and how that affects the state of the global economy. And then there are all those things that are the unknown unknowns.
as Donald Rumsfeld once put it, wars, natural disasters, all sorts of things that could make a conversation about Sadiq Khan opposing Heathrow and it being built in 2040 look pretty irrelevant because events, dear boy, events that don't cliche about politics from Harold McMillan, they're the ones, they're the things that often make a difference.
That's it for this episode of The Today podcast. To make sure you don't miss an episode, just search for The Today podcast on BBC Sounds and hit subscribe. Amal will be back next week with some fascinating stories about his time in India, no doubt. We'll be back for another episode then, but check back here on Monday to hear an extended interview that he's done with Bill Gates. Bye for now.
There's a divide in American politics between those who think democracy is in peril and those who think it's already been subverted, hollowed out from the inside. As President Trump returns to the White House, we go through the looking glass into a world where nothing is as it seems. The coming storm from BBC Radio 4, listen on BBC Sounds.
Yoga is more than just exercise. It's the spiritual practice that millions swear by. And in 2017, Miranda, a university tutor from London, joins a yoga school that promises profound transformation. It felt a really safe and welcoming space. After yoga classes, I felt amazing.
But soon, that calm, welcoming atmosphere leads to something far darker, a journey that leads to allegations of grooming, trafficking and exploitation across international borders. I don't have my passport, I don't have my phone, I don't have my bank cards, I have nothing. The passport being taken, being in a house and not feeling like they can leave.
World of Secrets is where untold stories are unveiled and hidden realities are exposed. In this new series, we're confronting the dark side of the wellness industry with the hope of a spiritual breakthrough gives way to disturbing accusations. You just get sucked in so gradually.
and it's done so skillfully that you don't realise. And it's like this, the secret that's there. I wanted to believe that, you know, that
Whatever they were doing, even if it seemed gross to me, was for some spiritual reason that I couldn't yet understand. Revealing the hidden secrets of a global yoga network, I feel that I have no other choice. The only thing I can do is to speak about this and to put my reputation and everything else on the line. I want truth and justice.
and further people to not be hurt for things to be different in the future. To bring it into the light and almost alchemise some of that evil stuff that went on and take back the power. World of Secrets Season 6, the Bad Guru. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.