Coffee House Shots
Keir vs Elon: round II
The Spectatio magazine is the greatest magazine in English language. Subscribe today for just £12 and receive a 12-week subscription in print and online to see for yourselves. Also, against my advice as editor, we're giving away a free £20 John Lewis or Waitrose voucher. Given that you're spending 12 quid, you can do the maths. Go to spectatio.co.uk/voucher but don't hurry because this offer probably loses us money. Hello and welcome to Coffee House Shots. My name's Lizzie Dunn and today I'm joined by Katie Bowles and John McTernan, former adviser to Tony Blair. This week's been dominated by News of the Riots, but things seem to be getting a little bit quieter at this point in time. Summer, however, has been keen not to become too relaxed on the matter. And on Thursday evening, he held his third COVID meeting of the week. Katie, what are the take-home messages that we've had from this so far? It's about the moment you have Keir Starmer, who may or may not be going on holiday yet to be confirmed. We can get John to give a prediction on that shortly. But they're saying, "Yes, things have not escalated in the way that we worried they might when you had reports about 100 potential riots more last night." But this isn't over yet and everyone needs to keep being careful. It's supposed to be very hot at the beginning of next week. That is something which I think for all the great state craft we apparently have is interesting how much we just rely on the weather. And I think very hot weather they worry does fuel this, so not out of the woods yet, but some science. And then I think you're also seeing more of these sentences going out for the rioters who have been taken to court. There's some today, I think, over two-year sentences, publicising those, then you have a former Labour candidate, a spender Labour candidate, who's been charged over cut-throat protest remarks that he made at an London counter-protest. They are disgusting marks. And we need to call their friends and give it a move. And he's been charged for encouraging violent disorder, which is a very serious offence. So I think there is a sense that as more and more people see what is happening to those who have taken part in the riots and whatever capacity that was, there were actors that deterrent going into the weekend and into the coming weeks. But I think there is a sense that things could flare up rather soon, you know, a couple of weeks, a couple of months, because there's a lot of tensions underlying all of this. And John, Kyrstenar has been criticised over the last couple of days about how he's handled the protests. Do you think he could have done things definitely in better or do you think that his swift justice approach is now starting to work? Look, I think Kyr responded to this in the way which he'd expect him to respond, which he's dealt with riots before, from a different position, the London riots, when he was a prosecutor. And so he applied that lens to it, he saw it as disorder. He later came on to kind of it as a discovery of a far-right. If a couper then called it racist, called it what it was, I kind of wish the government line had been from the outset. These were race riots because they were race riots and that's part of what's the shocking nature of them. And the social solidarity showed by so many people doing this week shows you how tiny a minority the rioters are. But I think the processing so quickly of people, the criminals through the courts and the sentences they're receiving is showing really quite quickly what will happen to you. And social media is a double-edged sword in the arena in this bin that telegram and other social media platforms enabled the creation of these mobs. But it also recorded these mobs and recorded them in a way that's usable, as evidence is usable to trace them. And I think there's been a huge boost for the use of visual recognition software, which was a bit controversial, I think, under the last government, the Tory government. But I think here can see the benefit, and the police can see the benefit of modern technologies in prosecuting some of these offenders. So I think the law and order frame was the one we expect from here. He's executed really well. And the fact that we've ended the week without disturbances, but with signs and with big demonstrations of people showing that actually, if there's any group in society that needs to assimilate to being British, being English, is the tiny minority of far-right fascists and rioters. And Katie, as John was mentioning there about social media, we've seen Elon Musk as a concerted campaign against Labour this week on Twitter. He's coming after Starman now for the social media crackdown. The Labour are trying to push going after people who've made social media posts that are controversial in relation to the riots. But how do you think this crackdown is going down with the general public? Well, I think if you look at polling with the general public, there is a sense that they just want most of this to stop. So I'm not yet sure what they think specifically about the online aspect. Obviously, you get under a censorship questions and individual responsibilities. But I think perhaps the more live debate is what does Labour do about social media at the moment? Because I don't think Kizdama meant to have a fight with Elon Musk. Of course, the Prime Minister Spokesperson chose to respond to a question at Lobby, which is where this all began about Elon Musk's comment about how civil war was inevitable, saying that they didn't agree with that, they thought there was no justification for that. And since then, it feels not a day goes by about Elon Musk taking to his own Twitter account, the couple X now, the company it owns, to slag off Kizdama, to tier K, all now to go for other members of the Labour Party. So today, you haven't been going for a Labour bat venture, who's had to apologise for comments think back in 2009, so long time ago, but comments should made, which were pretty offensive about some neighbours from Estonia, and she has come out and apologise. Elon Musk found her tweet quote treated her and put the old comment on top of it. And I mean, I personally wondered, you know, I thought maybe a tech billionaire had more going on, then to focus on the actions of individual Labour bat benches, but it clearly shows that he is quite keen for this fight with the Labour government. And I think that if you look at Peter Kyle, the technology secretary, he gave an interview earlier this week. And in that interview, he was talking about how the Labour government approach is almost to treat tech giants as though they are a form of diplomacy, because you have to be realistic, and these tech companies in some ways have more power than governments, they put more money in R&D, they influence things in a way that if you sit at a desk, whether it's here in Washington, you say you guys have to do X, it's a lot more complicated than to actually get them to do that. And there for earlier in the week, there was a real sense of, yes, we're going to speak to all these tech giants, and they had these meetings with Twitter and so forth, other companies, Facebook, but we're not saying they have to come in here so we can tell them off, it's a constructive discussion. I think the fact that Ena Musk keeps tweeting at his time, I mean, so you know how someone Labour's saying, well, we're trying to have a constructive discussion, but if we have this person who's continually stoking this online, don't we then have to do something? And now you have Labour politicians talking about reopening the online safety act, legal but harmful was something that was dropped by the Tories when they're looking at the safety act in the sense that you could have, if the content is not actually illegal but it's harmful, then it can stay. But I think Labour now want to switch that around potentially and reopen it. And then I think it's questions of what more can they actually do in the face, because I think the risk with the Ena Musk his starma rift is that, yes, everyone can Labour can say Ena Musk looks like a very bad man and saying all these things, but it can also potentially make the new government look a bit impotent, because it's not quite clear what levers they have to pull. And John, on that note, I suppose going back to the flashpoint of where the riot started, we've heard this week from one of the adult victims of the South Port stabbings, talking about how cure starma needs to better listen and understand voters' concerns about immigration. Do you think that Labour could be doing more to prove that the government is serious about protecting Britain's borders? So I don't believe these riots were about concerns about immigration, they were race riots, they were people attacking people because they colored their skins because they were black, because they were brown. There's no space in Britain and British political discourse for people who think that there are legitimate questions to be asked about whether black or brown people should live in the country. And I think that, for me, is an absolute term. There has been unity across the parties about that. We live in a multi-ethnic, multi-faith country, and if you don't like that, you need to adjust to it. In terms of the broader politics of this, all riots have a politics to them. Michael Hasseltowen famously went to Liverpool after most riots and he wrote his cabinet minute. It took a riot from that moment sprang a whole set of tactic strategies, developments which have defined what modern urban regeneration is. It led to the transformation of Auckland, it led to the transformation of Liverpool, which is so successfully regenerated. Now that it is hosting Labour's conference this year, it has been for the past few years. So there is definitely a politics there, but the people who should be listened to are all the people in the country, the people who are terrified by the riots, the people who should social solidarity by standing outside mosques to stop them being attacked. The people who are on the streets of Waltham so if there's a listening project, which I think it probably should be about the government, a constant listening project, it should be a listening project to the British people. And I think that we've touched on that way in discussion this week on the rundown of public services, the fact that there's not enough money in the police, there's not enough money in the courts, there's not enough money in the prisons service. We've never actually drawn these things together, something about the decay of the public sector and the public sphere, which has made it seem at times that it might be hard to respond to the riots actually. It's been done very well, pulling the resources together, but this is part of the broader debate on public spending on the shape of the budget that Rachel is going to bring for. I think there's a big debate here, but to narrow it down to immigration is to ignore the fact that these were race riots, which should be condemned. The thing that Katie was touching on, I think it's really interesting because there is a huge question, I think in my mind, as to whether or not you can legislate for tech or not, I think too many politicians for the last few decades have taken big techs propaganda, you can't legislate for us, we're global. Every government is stronger than any company, you can always legislate against a company, and if Twitter doesn't like the legislation in this country, it doesn't need to be in this country. That might be a minor in convenience, but I'm not sure it would probably be a great increase in British productivity if Twitter was banned in the country or if Elon Musk withdrew from the country. I think Labor needs to understand the big tech likes to say it can't be regulated and it's a big dispute so they're going to be coming up. You've got Angela Reynolds Department working with Johnny Reynolds on making work pay the new deal for workers, but that's kind of like looking backwards to sorting some of the balances in the past. The big tech thing coming is AI and the idea that we should back off AI, back off regulating AI, there's loads of loads of laws around already around employment law, which apply to AI. There's loads of approaches of government to consumption of electricity, to greening the technology of the network that apply to AI and its use of data centers. It's kind of like at some point Labor's got decided, is it going to just count how to pick tech or is it going to call big tech's bluff? I think the best way to deal with business and Labor should know this more than anybody else is yet. We've got a mandate and we have to say to business, you have to do things within our mandate and in the case of Elon Musk, you don't have that. Free speech is not the right to shout fire in a crowd of theater. Free speech is not the right to try to platform for racial hatred, inciting racial hatred, and free speech in the UK is not protected in the same way as it is in the United States. That's because we're a different country. So I think there's a whole set of complex issues here and I think are rich. There could be a rich debate around the politics and the policy implications of all of this because, you know, we have to, we know, all of us I think were shocked by the violence. All of us were shocked by the images and by the attacks on the police. We do have to think hard about what is it apart from evil, apart from thuggery, apart from criminality, the least people do this because in the end, you can't imprison everybody. You've got to imprison the ones who quit the crimes. You've got to split and divide the far right away from anybody who feels simply following. I think this has been a great week for showing a starting government can police the country. You've got to see future reasons as to whether or not the starting government can build on this in all aspects of public services. Thank you, Katie. Thank you, John. And thank you for listening. [Music]