Trains, planes and autocracies – The Starmer World Tour

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Welcome to Oh God What Now, the politics podcast that has joined Blue Sky. So do follow us there. I'm Ros Taylor. On today's show, Keir Starmer's nonstop foreign diplomacy is under attack from people who want him to stay at home. Is he getting distracted from the problems here or busy rebuilding Britain's reputation abroad?

Plus, who cares about local journalism these days. Well, Jim Mortensen does. He left his job at the Guardian to set up London Centric, a modern outlet for London, as he calls it. He joins the panel to discuss what would get people reading local news again.

And in the extra bit for supporters, as we wait for Trump 2.0, the sequel none of us wanted, let's distract ourselves with some other sequels. No spoilers for Gladiator 2 or Paddington in Peru, we promise. Let's meet today's panel. First, it's political historian and author of Behind Closed Doors, The Secret Life of London Private Members Clubs. Seth Tevels, hi, Seth. Hello, hello.

I'd normally hesitate to return to Rudy Giuliani after you mentioned him extensively last week, but I see he's been forced to hand over his Mercedes Benz. Why is this unfair?

Well, not only does he argue that it once belongs to Lauren Bacol, which must be akin to some form of immunity, when they seized his 36 luxury watches, he argued that every last one of them had either been given to him by his father on his deathbed or else handed to him by 9-11 survivors. He's had a bit of bad luck on this because if there's one person I find more fascinating than Rudy Giuliani, it's a gentleman named Ted Goodman, who is, for want of a better word, Rudy's gopher.

And Ted has just been accused by a court in a new filing of squirrelling away assets on Rudy's behalf. Surely not. And he wants his trial date in January postponed so he can go to Trump's inauguration purely so he can be there, I take it. Absolutely, I'm sure there's no other reason.

Next up, it's Guardian columnist and author of Politics, a survivor's guide, Wrath Bear. Afternoon, Wrath. Hi, Ross. You've written today's Guardian about the changes to farmers' inheritance tax. The government says relatively few estates are going to be affected, but the farmers aren't having it. Do they have a point, or are the changes fair enough?

Well, both of those things can be troops. They can have a bit of a point, but the changes can still be fair enough. I mean, there are some very divergent numbers going around. So the Treasury says around 500 estates will be affected by the change, and the farmers' lobby and the Union say it's more like 70,000. Now, there are a couple of ways of accounting for this. I mean, I think it's possible the Treasury has slightly undermodeled the way two different reliefs that they're reforming work.

agricultural property relief and the business property relief, and we don't need to get into details, but it's possible that they have slightly undercounted the number of farms that will be affected. But it's also quite clear that farmers, they like to talk about who will be affected by a tax change, and being affected by a tax change doesn't necessarily mean you're going to be paying the tax.

And also, if one farmer dies, the legacy, the estate, could have many descendants and if they're not direct, if not a spouse or a child, the tax situation is slightly different. So look, the short version is whenever you take away tax relief, there's going to be some marginal cases of people who actually

You know, really, even if they've got valuable farms on paper, farms worth millions, perhaps, their margins are tight. They really don't feel very wealthy. And so, you know, they were expecting one thing and they're getting another thing and they're really angry about it. Those cases obviously make for a very good sort of lobbying material to say you're treating farmers very badly. There are also a bunch of people who have plowed a load of money into agricultural land thinking it was a tax avoidance vehicle. And it's not anymore.

They don't really have an answer to that. They don't have a better way of dealing with that problem. Having had a fair amount of sympathy with those farmers in those marginal cases and who feel a bit ambushed by this, my sympathy has slightly drained away when you drill into the detail of it, just because the wider issue here, there's a fiscal consolidation that's going to go on, public services have got to be funded, someone's got to pay.

Well yes and Labour really had to do something like this because it promised not to raise taxes on working people. Is that looking like a mistake? Well we don't have the counterfactual where they ran a a braver election campaign with better communicators in charge who could make an overarching case for a progressive taxation and you know us all clubbing together and paying out a public subscription for wonderful public services.

So we don't know what would have happened if they tried that. Obviously, we know all the reasons and discuss them as podcasts many times, the reasons why they felt they couldn't do that. My instinct now, looking at how hard it's going to be to start scraping together pots of money from lots of different people. You had the withdrawing of the winter fuel payment for lots of pensioners. Again, a similar thing. Lots and lots of people can afford that. They don't really need that money. But there are going to be people who really, really do need that money who are going to lose it. And those cases,

really get amplified in the anger and the frustration so there's going to be more of this stuff and actually would labor be in a better position if they just gone into an election going you know what Jeremy hunt was really responsible to cut national insurance the way he did in the Tories.

were just making up numbers they didn't weren't interested in the NHS they weren't interested in funding public services we would love to cut those taxes too but you know what we'd also love to have an NHS that works and so maybe cutting taxes is something we can do after we fix the public realm would they have a majority of 170 I don't know would they have a majority of work or majority also we don't know I think they would be glad of that mandate now if they had it.

And finally, joining the panel is Jim Waterson, who left his role as media editor at The Guardian to create a new outlet called London Centric. Jim, welcome to Oh God What Now? Thank you for having me. I confess we are going to be talking a bit about London journalism later on, but not too much, I promise. So just to prove that we're not all about the capital. Tell us about your favourite place in the UK outside London.

Oh my goodness. Well, I did actually grow up some way away from London in rural North Yorkshire in a very small village. So let's go back up that way to Kirkham Abbey, just north of York. It's a beautiful curve in the river. You've got nice walking territory and there's a pub that will do you a good pint as well. So sometimes it's occasionally good to escape London and see what the rest of the country is like. Not too often though, please subscribe. It is.

Since he was elected, Keir Starmer has been jetting off around the world pretty regularly. And that's drawn criticism from some who say he was elected to fix all the problems in Britain, and he needs to spend a bit more time at home. On the other hand, there's a job of work to be done in re-establishing Britain's credibility abroad, and Biden's decision this week to let Ukraine fire missiles into Russia shows just what an uncertain world we live in.

Raff, judging by a schedule in recent weeks, which has included Rio, a small island of the Pacific, Budapest, Paris and Azerbaijan, the PM must be permanently jet-lagged. Did he have to go to all of these?

you kind of would initially think surely not, you know, they doesn't have to do every one of them. And then when you actually think about what they are, you know, the climate summit, yes, the European political community summit, yes. I mean, Commonwealth heads of government, I mean, frankly, that that's the one you think ought to be disposable. But obviously it's the Commonwealth. It's very resonant. And you know, the UK isn't just another Commonwealth country. And he's rebuilding relations with European leaders. So Paris, Berlin, it is perhaps

A bit unfortunate that these things have all sort of piled up early on in the Parliament. But also, as you said in the intro there, we're living in a time of extraordinary political volatility. You could easily conceive of an argument had he not gone to some of these things. People complaining saying, well, the Prime Minister is not representing Britain. He's not rebuilding Britain's reputation post-Brexit.

He's not taking advantage of the opportunities that Brexit, whatever those might be. It feels a little bit like people are coming up with reasons to give the guy a hard time. I think this is more a function of the very peculiar over-centralization of British politics, the way the role of the Prime Minister is quasi-presidential. It's almost a bit head of statey because actually the monarchy is so removed from

from any of the actual business of statecraft. And he's got, in Rachel Reeves, a very powerful chancellor, and that role itself, that office is kind of dominating domestic politics, especially right now when budget issues are everything. So he's sort of got a domestic prime minister next door in the treasury, and he's being a president out there in the world. So I find it hard to get exercised about this, to be honest.

All that said, Jim, few of us expected Starmer to pay as much attention to foreign policy as he has. Rishi Sunak wasn't that keen on it, and it wasn't much debated in election campaigns, it never is. But were there hints that he would take it seriously that we should have noticed?

Well, maybe this is the economic case, a bit like going to China, and I think this is the first time that British prime ministers met the Chinese president for seven years and maybe shows that we've been neglecting the country a bit. And the fact that he's actually going out there and trying to rebuild and the FT was trailing today, that he's going to go out to the Gulf and to Saudi Arabia and basically go against some of the sort of

to hell with the human rights stuff, let's get the trade going, let's get some investment in Britain, because that's what we're all about now, apparently. So I guess maybe view it through that prism to a certain extent that he needs to get any money he can and any investment he can.

Yeah, I wonder if that's what's partly exercising his critics, the fact that he will be going to Saudi in the near future. Seth, as Jim mentioned, Starmer met Xi Jinping this week. He says he wants a strong UK-China relationship. Plenty of people on the left and the right of politics will point to the illiberal and authoritarian things that China does as a reason not to want a strong relationship with China. What is Starmer's thinking on this?

Well, what is emphasised on this is the need for stability in the relationship with China. I mean, we have robbed from one crisis, particularly espionage crises. Many of them at China's instigation, it has to be said. There are definitely some benefits to just simply having dialogue. Bear in mind that Russia has not been a country we've been doing dialogue with at all, and you can build pressure on Russia via China in that way.

What we're not talking about so much at this stage is around trade agreements and investment. There was certainly 10, 20 years ago, the relationship tended to be, we want to make as much money as possible and we don't care about being overly dependent on China and we'll just ignore our differences. Here he's actually said front and center, we're not going to paper over the fact that we fundamentally disagree on things. That said, they got off to a rather bad start with Chinese security bundling several British journalists out of the room.

So it really is sort of rubbing on the sides of all this. Can I just chip one more thing in there in terms of the relationship with China? I think this is sort of a wrinkle, but I think it is important.

Within Keir Stormer's domestic and economic agenda, the green transition is absolutely central. And Ed Miliband's department is the one that is the flagship policy leading institution that actually has something quite radical and bold to do with Great Bridge Energy. Now, all those renewable energy, the industries, the supply chains run through China in a massive way. And when you've got Trump coming to the White House and all these things, the case for a pragmatic relationship with China,

Anyway, if you consider what the opposite would be, which would be what, a non-pragmatic one, an ideological one, a dogmatic one. I mean, obviously you have to have some kind of pragmatism in that relationship. But then specifically, when you think about the thing that Kirsten feels he has to do for growth, you know, other than just generally hope it happens, that also that road runs through China.

Yeah, we'll talk a bit about what Britain was called climate leadership in a couple of minutes. But Seth, how much does Trump's election and his enmity towards China, and of course, the threat of huge tariffs that he's making to China? How much does that play a role in Stalin's calculations? I think a very big role indeed. I mean, I alluded to using China's pressure on Russia. I remember that something that was characterized a lot of diplomacy towards China since the 70s has been the idea of triangulated diplomacy, the idea that the West

would play off Russia and China against one another, who's interested in not necessarily aligned. And one of the big dangers in Ukraine is actually China coming in on Russia's side in terms of supplying not just weapons, but also key support, logistical things. Everything from electronics all the way through to maintenance of cars and things like that.

So the way that you can try and bring about at least some reticence, at least trying to thinking, OK, maybe we can play off the West against Russia in this sort of way. Maybe we don't need to take sides quite as strongly. That can actually play quite a key role. Raph, we heard a lot about global Britain in the years after the Brexit vote. And it seemed to me at the time, a tilt towards the Asia-Pacific region, and especially India and Australasia. What's happened to global Britain, that whole aspiration?

I mean, a lot of that was built on a very shallow and fragile foundations just economically, but you know, propped up by the rhetoric or the Eurosceptic rhetoric, which reviewed the European Union as this sort of sclerotic geo strategic corpse of a thing that, you know, a shrinking portion of our trade that we should really be breaking away from.

And even if it is a slightly diminishing portion of our trade, we do know that it's still half of it, all the whole. So it's so important. But if you ruled out the single market for ideological reasons, you necessarily had to look at other markets. And so you had the sort of absurd situation of, I mean, Liz Truss, who let's face it, her reputation as some of great statecraft will need some rehabilitation.

desperate to get trade deals done, things that weren't necessarily, didn't either account for very much economic activity or weren't necessarily in the interest of British farmers, for example. And so I think it's just been a slight recalibration of reality in terms of actually geography matters, Europe matters. This idea that there's a sort of an angler sphere that everything can work around the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand.

it all feels a bit vintage, Euroscepticism, which just isn't the way the current government thinks about it. I mean, bear in mind also, though, that actually David Cameron and George Osborne talked up a golden age of relations with China before Brexit was even a thing or even a word. So, look, as I say, geography matters and Britain is a European country. And although other markets matter too, and trade with other countries matter, especially the United States, who just

Keeping the globe in the proportions which it was created and looking at economics and therefore trade diplomacy in those terms, we're back in reality on that front, I think.

So does that give us a clue about what stammers real attitude towards Europe is beyond the allergy to rejoining the single market and the customs union and all that that we already know about? What's his real feeling about what our relationship to Europe should be given that we're outside the EU? That is a magnificently difficult question to answer because it is so unclear. I mean, it is genuinely mysterious and no one seems to know because

I think intuitively the position that he had before 2020 was a very sincerely held one, which is this is a terrible mistake. We shouldn't do this. A second referendum might be a good idea. Can we change our minds about this? I think the political understanding he has acquired that that was damaging in lots of ways really forced people to double down in their resistance to it, cost label on the votes in 2019, all that sort of stuff. He also understands very well

and the political difficulty of taking a very strong remain position. I don't think he is deeply engaged in the economics necessarily of how important the single market, even just the customs union, might be to a growth agenda. I think the hope that there is some third way where you can use a bit of outside the EU agility to push ahead in certain industries. All that whole argument, I don't know how hard he's interrogated that.

Um, it is clear that there are, there are splits at the top of the government, you know, so you have Nick Thomas Simmons, yeah, the cabinet office whose job it is to try and sort of really negotiate what the reset will look like in practice. So I think he's a very sincerely pro European and you have a vet Cooper who's at the home office who perhaps necessarily perhaps overly dogmatically sees everything through the lens of what is this going to be configured as more immigration? Is this going to literally boost? Are we going to sign up to something that literally means the net migration numbers go up in which case, no,

effing way, are we going to do that? And you have Morgan McSweeney, who I think tilts very much towards the Yvette Cooper view partly because of how the politics of immigration play out and partly because I don't think he's a massive, intuitive Euro file the way other people are. So, Stommer's got some choices to make on this stuff. And David Lamby, much more Euro file. So, yeah, Stommer, he's got some choices. And one thing we know about his Stommer is you don't know which way he's going to jump until he does it.

We just heard reports of course that Britain has given permission for storm shadow missiles to be fired from Ukraine against targets in Russia. And Joe Biden has just relaxed a similar red line. Seth, how big a deal is this in our support for Ukraine?

It's a big deal in that we've shown as Britain that we go to the very edge of what we can do to support Ukraine. But I actually slightly disagree with a number of colleagues who I very much respect have said it's a huge escalation. I'm less sure about that. Firstly, as you say, Joe Biden relaxed his red line on this and the two are tied because where Britain uses these things

it follows very much America on that. And one of the bits of small print that's been less discussed on this is so far by the said that he's only actually authorized use of long-range missiles in the Kursk region where there's the Ukrainian accursion. Now, yes, these are technically classified as being long-range missiles. They have a maximum range of 155 miles.

Now, for context, I mean, Ukraine is a country that's about 500 miles from north to south and 800 miles across. Moscow is 650 miles from the Ukrainian border. These are not going to be taking the fight right up to the very home front. These are going to be a slightly further than the things going 30 miles in, 80 miles in at best. Is it likely that they're going to extend the range towards that

end quite probably, I think, over time. But when we talk about long-range missiles, I think a lot of these are artificial barriers. We're not discussing going nuclear or anything like that. And cruise missiles have already been used in Ukraine quite a lot throughout this conflict. And can I just say something in favor of using cruise missiles on this, which is that these are precision weapons? I'd file rather they're doing that than using imprecise weapons. I'd file rather actually maximize the damage to the Russian military forces and minimize any Russian collateral damage to civilians.

So getting back to the climate, which Raff mentioned earlier, number 10, of course, wants to talk about climate leadership. And he mentioned how that actually means, in many ways, getting access to China's tech and green tech. How much can the UK do about the climate crisis apart from decarbonizing our own energy group, which Ed Miliband is busy trying to do?

Well, I think quite a bit, actually. What the governments just announced is this global clean power alliance, the G20. And they announced, well, they quote 12 nations. It's actually more than that, because as well as some quite big economies, like, you know, Brazil and Australia and Canada, one of these economies is actually the African Union, which feeds directly into what Raf was talking about earlier, because a lot of the technology across African nations being used is Chinese technology that's been installed there over the years.

engaging with China on issues like this, and I'm as robust as anyone on the problems we have with China, but these are exactly the sort of things you need to be doing if you think that the United States is an unreliable partner on this. If we're looking at the US unilaterally pulling out of everything in sight still with the environment within a couple of months, which is probably heading towards, that doesn't stop other economies of the world from continuing to do some work and making some progress.

Now it's time for butt your emails when we answer a question from one of our Patreon backers. If you support us on Patreon, you too could submit a question to the panel. This week's question comes from Fiasco. How can Labor leverage the farmers' protest and get the message out that they are going after millionaires to bring us healthcare, he asks.

Should they be? I feel they should be in a battle posture and fighting tooth and nail to not let the right eat away at them with misinformation and emotional arguments. Fight back, says fiasco. What do we reckon about? What can labor do better to the comms to try and get their message across on this?

Well, if Labor's trying to win over farmers, then they're doomed. As someone who half their family is from a farming background, the odds of Labor winning them over in any case was probably doomed. And the odds of them winning over now is even less so. I find the idea that there's a rational element to this or the response quite funny, sort of all these people on

formally Twitter now, blue sky going, well, you know, actually, if you look at that, no, they just hate the idea of it. They're not going to back down. They're not going to listen to something you say about inheritance trust and all of this. Yes, everyone in the farming community knew that the land prices were over over inflated by James Dyson. That was something people were telling me 20 years ago. But

You know, I love the idea that there is a sort of messaging solution to this. No, you will just have angry farmers for the next few years protesting in any way that they can. Well, you might not be able to win over the farmers, but can you actually win over the people who might be won over by the farmers? Well, unfortunately, Clarkson's farm will be back for a full series and they will need a topic. So you've got that sort of centre. Me and my inheritance tax. Exactly. It will be the entire theme for the full series. You just know it.

I think this race is a really interesting challenge for Labour. I mean, again, it comes back to a little bit of what I was saying earlier. You've got to come out of a defensive crouch you were in for the election. I totally understand why they went into the election in a defensive crouch on budget and fiscal policy. But you have won and you've got a big majority.

I think we know that in the sort of the new labor government, they looking back on it, Blair and Brown looking back and it feel that they didn't move the frame enough. They still governed too much within parameters. They felt were dictated by the other side. And you feel that happening very strongly here. Now, it's not easy. I mean, inheritance taxes are worse.

tax to try and pick a fight on, by the way, because 95% of people are never going to pay a hit or have to deal with it, but they still hate it. People just, it's a death tax. The resonance of it is appalling. So it's the wrong particular tax to try and have a fight. But an argument about reaching over the heads of the Tories and other of the press and going back to, for example, what happened in the pandemic where we all

you know, stood together for universal public services. You know, what I find amazing about this is that, you know, you look at what happened during the pandemic when people really needed the government, the state to step up and help them out. What did the Tories do, right? They raised taxes and they borrowed money, right? Because those are the things you have to do if you want the public realm that's going to look after people, make people secure. They did a social democratic thing. Rishi Sunak paid everyone's wages from the exchequer, you know, so

You know, it is entirely feasible to win that argument. I do think, you know, we can bang our heads against the reality that neither Rachel Reeves nor Kirstalmer is a terribly charismatic or sort of evangelical capable communicator. And that's just kind of annoying. We wish they could be better. We can't change them on that front.

I do, it's almost pains me to say this, I think there is a little bit more left populism wouldn't necessarily go amiss actually in some of this, that actually just going a bit hard on people who have really got absolutely heaps of money and a squirrel that away and are not paying their fair share. And there's perhaps a little bit too much, too much squeamishness about that.

Isn't it fascinating to see the greens coming out very much on the farmer's side in all of this, when you might have them positioned maybe to the left of labor on this? I found that really interesting, because they've now, of course, won these rural seats in addition to their sort of former Brighton and Bristol base. They've got these ones in, I think it's Herrfordshire and either Suffolk or Norfolk somewhere in East Angley. I'm sorry to list us out there. But they've got that new support base of kind of back to the land voters.

There was always a bit of a schism in the greens on that, though, isn't there? Because there's ecology and then there's conservation. And there's slightly different things. And so there's always a bit of actually a reactionary conservationist thread through green politics. And it's one of those classic bits where the horseshoe meets slightly in terms of change nothing, keep the soil as exactly where it is and don't do anything. That's why they're like electricity pylons going up, even though they might be carrying green energy.

Okay, Morgan McSweeney, if you're listening, a bit more left populism, please, from your favourite centrist podcast.

Next up, do you have a local paper? And if so, do you read it? Chances are you don't, and that's a problem. If you want to know what your council is up to and get a fairly balanced sense of what's going on in your neighbourhood. Over 300 outlets have closed in the past 20 years. The Shrewsby Chronicle, where I did work experience in the sixth form, is a shadow of what it was. But as Jim Mortis is going to tell us, local news isn't quite dead yet. Jim, you set up London centric on sub-stack after the evening standard went weekly.

Tell us about the state of journalism in London. Why you decided to go alone?

So I'd spent six years as media editor of The Guardian, and one of the things I'd covered during that time was the collapse of the local media industry. Most local titles in the UK owned by three big corporate groups, news quests, reach, and national world. And they've basically adopted a click first approach. How many people can we get on our sites? Oh, well, they're not going to click on Council Story, so let's just write up what's in the middle aisle at Lidl this week, or let's write up, you know,

What Piers Morgan said this week, so you end up with these strange things that are nominally local, that are actually just full of adverts, unreadable and not covering that much actual regional content. And I got so many depressed people from those outlets messaging me and this isn't why I got into journalism.

And I had this moment sort of a fork in the career, you know, maybe I just couldn't bear to share the same pages as Raff anymore. Or maybe it was just that I needed something different to do. But no, so I was going around London and I just felt strangely the Guardian often wanted me to report on news deserts, this idea that places where local news has been left behind. And I kept feeling that London, the city where I was raising a family where I lived,

on a pan city level was almost approaching in used as it. There were some great borough by borough papers, some great hyper local outlets, but there was not that much covering city hall and the big pan London issue. So really, I chucked in a job I loved and thought, let's see if I can make something of this. And I've been overwhelmed both with the reader response and also with the number of people who've come to me with stories that they're just desperate to tell but haven't had an outlet.

And this is a city of 9 million people. And it's almost funny to be making the case as London is the left behind place. But honestly, some much smaller cities in the UK have far better actual scrutiny of the council. I kind of feel London falls between two stalls. It's covered by the nationals who cover it to a certain degree, but then get a bit embarrassed to be going in depth on it. And then the sort of local media isn't there because, well, the nationals are hoovering up the top lines.

What I'm trying with London centric is to go, I'm going to do a few pieces a week. They're going to be in depth. They're going to tell you something new about your city and it's going to break news. And that's the model, really. And I've been utterly overwhelmed by the response so far. People really get what I'm trying to do. And I've got so many things I'm trying to report out that they're just aren't enough hours in the day to do it. So it's been overwhelming and brilliant.

Yeah, well, I wanted to ask you about that, because London is huge. I noticed up on it. It's actually the best estimate. It's just under 10 million people. Well, I love my target. I mean, that's more than Austria. London is bigger than Austria in terms of population. And there are so many stories. So what have you been focusing on so far?

There's a few big topics. There's the mayor and how the city is run. There's transport, so I got hold of the load of documents relating to the congestion charging scheme by the mile that Sadiq was about to put in place, but then pulled out at the last minute.

I've done a big deep dive behind the scenes on the transport for London cyber attack, which really no one was reporting on this thing that knocked out all of their systems. Also been looking at housing over a truly shocking story and housing coming up in the next couple of days. I've just been reporting just before coming on this podcast. But the things that really resonate with people are the ones that aren't the gotchas.

They're the things that tell them something about why the city that they're living in is the way it is. It's not going to change the world, but one of the pieces that had the most impact was explaining why your phone signal is so bad in London. And that lit up so many WhatsApp groups because people finally understood. It's not just the phone networks, it's the planning issues, it's London's physical buildings, it's environmental measures that stop data.

So everything from traditional accountability, journalism of counselors, poor housing, the police, but also, you know, some fun as well and some things that just make you understand the city that you're living in. That's the mix I'm going for. It's a working progress, but people are

really kindly giving me the benefit of the doubt and sort of buying into the idea that this is something can be built over time. And I don't know what London local media looked like in a few years time, but I think there's a few things going on at the moment that are going to be the foundations of what it becomes.

What makes you really different from say BBC London news, which full disclosure I used to freelance for? They cover the news agenda of the day. They will have the big announcement and they also have the benefit of that reach, which I don't have. I'm relying on word of mouth and people hearing about it and checking it out and liking what they see.

What I can do is I'm not going to cover the main stories of the day. There's lots of places like the BBC website that will do that for you. I'm going to go behind the scenes, go in-depth on a couple of topics a week and then give you the in-depth thoroughly reported story because I'm not rushing around trying to

uh, you know, get to every single event that the mayor is at, get to every single TFL launch, get to every single sort of notable thing, because that's covered. That's fine. There's some places that are still doing that. What I want to do is go, here's the story behind the story.

Yeah, actually at the time when I was working at BBC in London, they were actively discouraging you getting scoops. That's one of the reasons why I left. Because it was seen as competing with local media and the BBC shouldn't be competing with local media, even though local media was dying. And local media was dying and now it's barely doing anything itself because it's too busy writing up whatever someone has tweeted out this week. I mean, I really do think people don't realise that we're now in the final days of a lot of the old local media outlets. They are not going to survive a few more years.

They've annoyed their old audience base. They can't bring in the revenue from ads and Google and Facebook are crushing their ability to get traffic. Those days where your local paper will be full of reach titles, if your local paper and you're listening to this is owned by a company called Reach, they're asking in their journalist in some cases to do eight stories a day. You cannot physically do that unless you just go flat out, bang a tweet in, publish, bang a tweet in, publish.

Yeah, and GPC would do it just as efficiently, and probably the content wouldn't be dissimilar, and probably already is doing quite a lot of it discreetly. It's good genuinely, as we are not far off that end game. And this means that I actually am weirdly optimistic because

If AI comes along and just makes that churn, that clickbait, pointless churn, completely irrelevant and non-financially viable, that actually means that all that's left is places like myself and London Centric trying to do things properly. And you've seen elsewhere in the country how well that model can work. Manchester Mill has done great stuff up in Manchester. I think of the Bristol Cable was one of the pioneers. The ferret back in the day in Scotland was doing great stuff.

There is a small little network of people who are normally a bit mad, sometimes have left otherwise nice jobs at media organizations and are going, what if we just try to do something different? And the thing that's really changing is I'm noticing that people are willing to take a punt and pay. And they're either paying because they really want the content or they're paying sometimes just because they like the idea of what you're doing. They like the cuts of the jib and they just want to go, I'll give you some money, please go away and look into this.

I'll give you somebody please go away. Well, please go away. I mean, that's the dream for any journalist, but I'm hiring freelancers. I'm hiring illustrators. It's not cheap to run even something that's online only, but I'm able to do that entirely because a not in substantial number of people have already gone. Okay, we see your pitch. We know it's early days, but we'll sign up and see how it goes.

I should point out that, of course, it's not the only site dedicated to London users on London, Dave Hill's London site as well. There's various others. Dave's absolutely brilliant and I'm a subscriber to his as well. I really like the idea that if you subscribe to a few of these outlets about the capital, and if you're listening outside London, there's equivalent springing up elsewhere, but there's a start of a slightly different, more fragmented, but interesting scene.

I mean, I joke, but it's almost a bit more like an influencer culture where you have a few solo operators, maybe with a couple of people working with them doing their own thing. And if you mesh it all together, you get something resembling the old local paper.

So what's been lost as local papers have shut down? I think Jim's already pointed to some of it. You certainly have scrutiny of incompetent councils. I can remember going along to my local council and there were only three people in the visitors gallery and the other two people were a guy writing an insane blog that was fun to read and local journalists and that local journalist would actually share those proceedings with everyone else in the borough and we'd learn about things for that reason.

You also have protection against things like unscrupulous developers. Now, it's very common for us to say, well, I don't like the way that my high street is changing for the worse compared to five, 10 years ago. Well, by the time you reach that stage, it's already happened. It's only if you're actually involved in decisions and you know about them in the first place that you can do something about it.

And I think also, we've always benefited in the past when there was this strong local media culture from correspondence knowing their patch and knowing what was worth covering as a story. And what we have instead, I think it's probably mostly community message boards, whether it's on Facebook or on Mumsnet or whatever's hosting it. And I don't think that's filled the gap. Why don't people seem to miss it?

It's only when something's absolutely gone that you know that it's gone. You know, if I think about how many times a week or any of the month, I would look at the ham and high. It was sort of a shame, but I thought life would go on. And then there comes a point two or three years later when you think, I really haven't had any dose of that whole part of my life about the community all around me. You know, on the other hand, I think the one thing we can take some solace from is you don't have to read the letters page anymore.

So the Joni Mitchell, yeah. Raph, I know a lot more about Trump's cabinet picks than I do about what my counsel is up to. Is that a good thing? No, I don't think it's a good thing. First of all, I've been fighting lots to pay too much attention to the Trump choices anyway, just for anyone's mental health. It's probably a good idea to keep a certain chord on sanitary from that stuff. But no, for the reasons that we've heard already, accountability, understanding what's going on,

You know, being able to be involved and make judgments about where you live, your quality of life depends very heavily on an area from a radius of about 500 meters from where you live. So, you know, that's, you know, that's all local. I mean, the previous question about why don't

people notice. I think, and so touched on this a little bit, there's a sense, I think that people, we get a sort of a pseudo local news stream from Facebook groups and WhatsApp groups. And that's, I think, quite dangerous in the way, because it's a, it's a sort of a synthetic version of, of something that makes you feel your kind of aware, but it's also all the self radicalizing, skewing, warping lenses that

a closed Facebook group can apply to anything, can operate there. So I'm saying very much on things like planning decisions or council decisions. And I know people, for example, who were involved in trying to navigate a low traffic neighbourhood in Oxford.

which became an absolute cultural war, a bit like Ulez in London in the sense that the whole issue got absolutely captured by that segment of people who think that are trying to stop cars zooming down residential streets is actually sort of the Gestapo trying to crack down on the freedom-loving motorists.

And the council that local authorities found it impossible to get any purchase on the debate, because by the time they'd sort of been through their clunky analogue way to try to communicate, the WhatsApp groups and the Facebook groups had already run off in down all sorts of slightly conspiracy theory rabbit holes.

And so that's what happens when you have those news deserts, you know, there's no, the sort of the connective tissue that gets a civic space functioning in a healthy way. Atrophes and mad news silos take the place of actually good news institutions. What's the local media like in Brighton where you are?

Well, it matches exactly what Jim was saying at the beginning. So when I first moved down here, the Argus, it was in decline, obviously. But certainly older generations, people who weren't commuting up to London every day, people who felt much more rooted in Brighton and Sussex. The Argus might have been their first newspaper choice before going to a national paper. And that's news quest. And it still sort of does a bit of

You know, telling people interesting gossipy things about what's going on in Brighton. And then I think it probably covers the football pretty well. I mean, if you care a lot about Brandon Hovabian, you might look at the back pages of the August, but it is not doing what Jim's doing and what aspires to do. So, and to set the point, you know, when you notice it is when, for example, we have industrial action and council strikes.

been strikes, things going horribly wrong, where the intricate local politics of it, you really have to be across, you have to know actually what's gone on, why was that contract signed, why, who's a stupid idea, was it to do that deal, that mean that these are the terms on which the bins are going to be collected, all that sort of stuff.

And we are poorly served for that sort of news. There's been some London councils that I've phoned up in the press office. I mean, genuinely is given the impression of not having had a call from a journalist for a very long time. I mean, it's been very strange to experience it. And it's certainly not something I'm using or plan to use. But there are some interesting people who come to me who are looking at artificial intelligence for reporting on local councils and scraping all of the meetings.

And in the absence of anyone actually be able to go along to the meetings that actually isn't the worst idea in the world to have sort of summaries produced off what's going on there so. I think there will be something that emerges because people want to know they want to know what's being built at the end of their street they want to know why the bins are being collected i think i'm going to do a bin special and London centric soon actually i'm obsessed with everything to do with you.

And that's the other thing, of course. People say that they want to know the local politics, really what they want to know is how is it affecting me and my family on a day-to-day basis. The politics is a side show too. Why is the school closing or why do I still have five recycling bins outside my house? Yeah, school closing. That's a big issue in London at the moment. Lisa Nandi, Culture and Media Secretary, has talked a bit about supporting local media. Do we have any idea what she means in practice?

Well, I hope that some of it flows directly into my account. No, I don't. Jenny, actually, you know what, I'm quite, I really think that the reader support model as this podcast shows and what others have shown is a viable way to something that is more independent and not reliant on grants. I'd be very suspicious of something that relied entirely on government grants or something like that for providing local news because who's marking your homework and who's deciding if you're the right way to do it.

you should be punching quite hard and financial independence lets you punch hard.

In terms of support, there's a very boring technical, can I go boring and technical? Sure, not for long. Really quickly, but every local council has to pay to put adverts in local papers, and that is single-handedly propping up the corporate press. If you took those away, a lot of these outlets would collapse overnight, and you could redistribute the money to more innovative forms of journalism. So there's about 30 odd million of public money being spent propping up papers that no one's reading.

Indeed, that was the Guardian's business model or a large part of it. For quite some time, as I recall, and so the job ads stopped. Jim, what advice would you give to a journalist thinking of setting up a local news site? Just go for it and be bold and start charging from day one. I really think that people get the need for it, people buy into the mission. But you've got to come up with the goods. I am waking up every morning, first thing.

terrified that i'm not providing my paying subscribers with what they want and what they expect so it is full on an exhausting but the best thing is the feedback from people who go i have lived here for you know twenty years and i had no idea that's why this thing was like what it was until i read that thing so you know when you write something like the guardian you're reaching millions of people around the world that is a massive kick.

At the moment, I'm reaching tens of thousands in one city, but they really enjoy and care and I can see the response. So it's much more personal and an individual form of journalism, and it's an interesting change from what I've been doing in the past.

And have you had any legal threats yet? Because of course, that's the big advantage of working for the Guardian. You've got the lawyers. Oh, I have had legal. I've been chased off several doorsteps and an ice cream van depot. So that's for a future story that's coming soon. And yeah, definitely had legal threats. And I think one problem is that I've had the benefit of learning and being trained by big outlets and have gained a lot of knowledge in the process.

you know, that's a massive benefit that I've got compared to someone starting out cold. So we've got to question, you know, it's okay for me to go off and set something up. But how is someone coming in as a 22 year old when there aren't the jobs at local papers or at least nothing resembling journalism on a lot of local papers? How are they going to get into an industry like this?

Before we go, let's find out which important stories have gone under the radar this week. Raph, I understand you've got one about care homes.

Well, it's a bit sad that this counts as under the radar because it was on, clearly on Downing Street's grid as a big announcement at the start of the week. And coming back to, I think we discussed before about why Downing Street comms might not necessarily be as effective as they would like. But the governments, they have announced, so it's British Phillips and his department, and they're going to force the big companies that provide care homes to be more transparent and disclose basically their financial performance metrics and

possibly actually limit the amount of profit they can make. And this sounds very technical, but what it really gets to is something that's absolutely scandalous across various aspects of core service provision. So it's not just children's care homes, also in social care, nurseries, special needs, schools. This happens a lot. Essentially, as council finances get hollowed out, there are too few places.

Local government can't provide things but they have statutory obligations to provide certain things, and then so they end up purchasing places from private providers, often owned by big private equity groups for profit, who can then charge whatever they want. So it ends up costing way more than it would have done.

if it had actually been an in-house state provided function. But of course, that function isn't there. And so these private equity-owned private providers can massively gouge the taxpayer and massively accelerate the crisis in local government funding and providing service that might be adequate, might be appalling. It's actually very hard to keep it accountable. So the fact that the governments looked at this and gone, right, no, we've really got to do something about that. Even if it's not yet much, I'm really heartened that they've got it in their sights.

We just need good journalists to actually report on their findings, yeah. Exactly. Jim, go. Yeah. Seth. This week is the 30th anniversary of the Committee on Standards in Public Life. Oh, finally. Very much so. I mean, this was quite a few of these institutions set up during the John Major years because of the huge wave of these scandals that were around at the time. What's made it quite topical, actually, is that having had a bit of a battering during the Johnson years because

to just stop paying attention. It's very noticeable that there's a school of thought amongst many Tories, which was quite vocal during the Tory Party Conference last month, that this is part of a new Labour plot, this device of John Major's, to basically take over the world with a whole bunch of these institutions that should be done away with as a clean sweep. So the Trumpian influence is alive and well in British politics in the sort of backlash against that.

Well, we hear the word quango again.

Jim, do you have an Under the Radar? Yeah, it's a story I would have been covering if I was still in my old media editor job at The Guardian. Yet another load of celebrities have done their phone hacking claims against the sun and the news of the world and have them settled. And it's quite extraordinary this story because it was very much Groundhog Day whenever I did this annual story of another load of celebrities have sued the news of the world for phone hacking.

And the reason I sort of bring it up as under the radar is because people can't actually believe how long this is going on. The first claim was in 2005. We're heading into a third decade of legal claims over hacking at newspapers. And it's still ongoing. And just every single time, another load of people come on and then the claims are settled. And so still Rupert Murdoch's newspaper group is paying out. And there is no end in sight. So the good thing is, this will probably a story you could run again in another year, because at the rate that these things go.

And mine is some news came out today about the cost of private renting. It's gone up 8.7% in the last year. It was 8.4% in the previous 12 months. And you'll note that that is very substantially higher than the inflation rate. So that means that quite a lot of people are paying even, even more for their rents. And the housing crisis is still a thing. And we still have to build these new houses.

And that's the show. Thanks to Rev. Thank you. Seth. Thank you. And our guest today, Jim Mortensen. Thank you for having me. Hang around for the extra bit after Demon is a Monster by Cornershop and a grateful salute to the supporters whose generosity keeps the podcast going. Your contribution is truly welcome and will be well spent. So hello to Bent Samuel, Charles Pope and Ian.

A hearty salute from me and many thanks for your generosity to John Parkinson, Nick and Heather Mack. And finally, hello from me and many thanks for raiding the piggy bank to Rax Lacani, Giulio Gotti and renewing for the third time Chris Wimlett.

Oh God, what now? It was written and presented by Ros Taylor, with Raphael Baer, Seth Tebow and guest Jim Waterson. It was produced by Chris Jones, with audio production by Tom Taylor and Robin Lievan, video by Chris Jones and art by Jim Parro. The managing editor is Jacob Jarvis, group editor Andrew Harrison, and Oh God, what now is a podmaster's production?

Hello and welcome to The Extra Bit, exclusive to Patreon backers. With Gladiator 2 out and Trump 2.0 coming to the White House soon, we thought it might be the time to discuss sequels, which are awful, which are good, and which are better than the originals.

Raph, I understand you've seen Gladiator 2, it's a 15, much to my son's disgust, so I haven't. No spoilers, but were you entertained? I was quite actually. I'm interesting about that, I've pointed about it being a 15, again, no spoilers, but I haven't been to that kind of film for a long time. Don't go to the cinema that often. I'm surprised at how much gore you can get into a 15 these days. I mean, some of those elements of luxury that

what that what we were growing up would have been absolutely the kind of you know schlock horror x-rated 18 certificate movies now you can throw into 15 so that that makes me feel quite commotion it's like really you can do that in terms of sequels look what was the fascinating thing about it is very much in the tradition i would say also of the the last

three iterations of the main Star Wars saga, so sort of force awakens onwards. More attribute than a remake than an actual sequel. So, you know, if you liked Gladiator 1, you'll probably like Gladiator 2 because it's kind of the same film, but the effects have got better. So I enjoyed it. And by the way, if you're going to ask about

really great sequels. Can I just be the first person to say that? Obviously, Godfather Part 2, because that's the one that you obligatory have to cite as the example of the sequel that's possibly even better than the first one.

What about sequels that should not have been made, though? That was a teaser for the bonus bit of this week's podcast. If you'd like to hear the whole thing every week, plus get every episode without ads in a day early, then sign up to back us on Patreon for as little as £3 a month.

You'll also get access to live zooms, advanced tickets for live shows and are exclusive merchandise. And you'll be part of the community that keeps the show going. Thanks for listening and see you next week.