Braverman Defects, Police Reform, and ICE Shooting Fury (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: Hello, it's Adam in the Newscast Studio at Westminster. And Chris in the same studio as Adam. Right, this is getting to be quite a regular thing now, and I don't mean you and me talking to each other face to face rather than down the line. Conservative MPs defecting to reform, because there was another one today, and it was Suella Braverman, former Home Secretary.

[00:00:16] Speaker 2: Yeah, when you and I were talking on Newscast and Five Live on Sunday evening, I was weighing up whether or not I was making a mistake not heading to Manchester to see if I could chase Andy Burnham around. In the end, I concluded I wouldn't because I didn't think he'd want to say very much. Which is true, Joe Pike, our colleague, did some fantastic scurrying about and did get him on camera, but he wasn't keen on saying very much.

[00:00:39] Speaker 1: Including the classic shot of Andy Burnham getting into a lift and the doors closing so that Joe could say the door has closed on him coming back to Westminster. This is how television magic is made.

[00:00:48] Speaker 2: Anyway, I stayed at Westminster marginally concerned I might be in the wrong place, which is a classic journalistic anxiety. And getting on with various other things, not least this trip that's coming up. And then, somewhat out of the blue, I mean it's not that surprising in the grand scheme of things, but certainly as far as it coming today is concerned, Reform hosting a news conference which purportedly was about veterans, and Suella Braverman turns up in quite the moment, quite the kind of choreography around her defection. Yeah, this is the fourth big name this month, the third MP in the last 10 days. It's quite the momentum they've got.

[00:01:28] Speaker 1: My favourite bit of the defection, though, came later on because they then did a news conference, her and Nigel Farage. And after you'd asked your question, the other Chris, Chris Hope from GB News, asked a question, and then Nigel Farage said, well, are you surprised? And Chris Hope said, no. Because actually people had been watching Suella Braverman in kind of defection watch for a while, hadn't they? Yes.

[00:01:48] Speaker 2: So I missed Chris Hope's question and indeed the answer because I had to scurry out in order to get back for the 6 o'clock news. So yeah, look, if you were drawing up a list of likely conservatives to defect to Reform UK, Suella Braverman would have been pretty near the top. But I still think it's quite something. I mean, defections are pretty rare at Westminster, and we've just had three in a fortnight or 10 days. Four if you include Nadeem Zahawi, albeit no longer an MP. So I think that's quite something. You know, former Home Secretary, someone, I mean, I've known her for 25 plus years, and like being a conservative sort of in her DNA, or at least it was until lunchtime. I mean, she would say she is still a conservative. In fact, she said in the news conference about the Conservative Party isn't a Conservative Party. So in that sense, she thinks the party has left her, which is often the mantra of the defectee. But yeah, as I say, still quite a thing.

[00:02:40] Speaker 1: I mean... And in terms of her tone, it was quite emotional. So in the morning when she revealed herself, she was quite emotional. And then in that news conference later, she was using quite powerful analogies, like an unhappy marriage.

[00:02:52] Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, completely. So I mean, in the news conference, you got a sense of the kind of emotion. We've said this before, but I think it's worth saying again. You know, people, a lot of people, when they defect, they're leaving an affiliation, if you like, that they have had for decades, decades and decades. It was on a human level. It's a big moment. I thought you could see it in Sorella Boberman's facial expression when she finds herself uttering out loud words that I don't know, maybe she's practiced in the mirror or whatever, but you're suddenly saying it out loud and you can't say, that's it, that's it. You have crossed, you have done it. And then the emotion that that provokes, and it's a kind of one way direction. Now in that news conference, I'm flicking through my notebook in classic... Your huge notebook. I like A4 notebooks. A4, yeah. Can't be doing with those little reporter notebooks, they're too small. You know, the Conservative Party is a social democratic left-leaning party, Chino, conservative in name only. The fear, insecurity and weakness of Kemi Badanok. That was a reference to how long, in her view, it had taken the Conservatives to come round to the view of leaving the European Convention on Human Rights, which Sorella Boberman had advocated for some time. The Conservative Party is full of craven, superficial careerists. So there's a pattern in these news conferences. So the newly arrived former Conservative goes through a process of publicly saying their previous party was a shower. And then the second thing they do, or at least the last few have done, and Robert Jenrick certainly did, is to paint this dividing line. They're really keen on Reform UK, which is to say that Britain is broken, which is something the Conservatives say is not true. They'll point to lots of what they see as problems with the UK, but they say that doesn't add up to the country being broken, which Reform absolutely are of the view of.

[00:04:32] Speaker 1: And there was quite a lot of activity in Tory land today, wasn't there? Because Andy Street, sorry, Sir Andrew Street, former mayor of the West Midlands and Ruth Davidson, former Tory leader in Scotland, have launched this new group.

[00:04:44] Speaker 2: Yeah, Prosper UK. So I think if we take a little bit of a step back and we can look at some of the castlists in this group, and they're not all of one mind, but if we take a couple of steps back, the Brexit process flushed out in quite a sort of brutal way. Those who might vaguely fall under the label of being one nation Conservatives, wets to use the label of old. The left of the Conservative party. These labels are never perfect. They never quite describe anyone to the full extent. And as I say, in this group, you have Andy Street, Sir Andy Street. I've forgotten about his knighthood, actually. I should have mentioned that on the radio earlier. Sorry, Sir Andy.

[00:05:25] Speaker 1: He doesn't seem like the kind of person who'd be bothered.

[00:05:27] Speaker 2: No, I don't think so.

[00:05:28] Speaker 1: I think Andy is his brand.

[00:05:29] Speaker 2: Baroness Davidson, Ruth Davidson, the former Conservative leader in Scotland. I think you described both of them fairly...

[00:05:36] Speaker 1: Baroness Davidson of podcasting. Indeed.

[00:05:39] Speaker 2: Has been sort of broadly, if you like, of the left of the party. Funny enough, full disclosure, I was just talking about this on the Radio 460 o'clock news and our esteemed fellow podcaster, Nick Robinson, pointed out to me that there are some others within this grouping who, would they fit under that label quite so comfortably? So Philip Hammond, the former Chancellor, Andrew Tyree. So Philip Hammond was very much on the remain side of the Brexit argument, but you might argue economically, he's not quite in the same place as some of the others. Anyway, I think it's fair to say quite a few folk who, for whatever reason, felt squeezed out, either literally or psychologically, from the sort of key tables of the Conservative Party of much of the last, at least half decade, are setting up this vehicle, arguing that there is a chunk of the electorate who currently might feel homeless. And I just think it's quite interesting that they're finding voice and finding expression again. And you sort of wonder, where does it leave Kemi Badenoch, who is simultaneously losing folk, broadly speaking, on the right of the party. Again, these labels are only of so much use, but the likes of Robert Jenrick and Suella Braverman and Andrew Rosindell. Whilst at the same time, you've got these sort of folk who are finding a voice, again, very loosely, broadly, on the left of the Conservative Party. Kemi Badenoch is someone of the right of the party, losing people to her right and then people to her left, if you like, are getting noisy. She's quite discombobulating, I think, for her in the same way that the Andy Burnham stuff, another Andy who is a mayor, the other Andy's a former mayor, is doing his stuff, where reform are often central to that conversation too.

[00:07:22] Speaker 1: Although I wonder, kind of counterintuitively, some people are saying Suella Braverman leaving the Conservatives is helpful for Kemi Badenoch because she's got quite extreme positions that might be off-putting to people who are quite kind of more centre-right. And then you've got the idea that actually this group gives Kemi Badenoch a lot of, kind of, ballast in the Conservative Party to drag that bit, to stop it being dragged to the right by reform and to bring it into a more centrist position where there are more voters, potentially. Well, indeed. So actually my initial reaction was none of these things, neither of these things are helpful for Kemi Badenoch, but actually you can then think of them both being quite helpful.

[00:07:59] Speaker 2: Possibly, but it's the extent to which she would be comfortable with that scenario, given her, you know, her sort of core, how she would see her core conservatism. So I just think it's really interesting. As I say, you've got these contortions being inflicted on the Conservatives. And then a key part of our conversation, which I think is where we left our last episode on Sunday evening, of what's going on in the Labour Party, is that you've got the Labour Party who are horrified at the prospect, the possibility of losing the general election, albeit a long, long, long way down the track, to Reform UK. And that is turbocharging a lot of the conversations about Keir Starmer and his competence or otherwise, as the party has to come to a judgment. And in so doing, given where Labour are in the opinion polls, clearly a factor in where Labour are in the opinion polls is where Reform are, is this speeding up of a sense of asking those big questions about Keir Starmer. And in that context, the potential big name rivals have a greater prominence as a result. You know, as we said, I think on the last episode, if Keir Starmer was hugely popular and was sweeping all before him in Parliament, et cetera, et cetera, West Street and Andy Burnham would matter much less because they would be less threatening. And part of that is because of where Labour finds itself vis-a-vis Nigel Farage and Reform.

[00:09:26] Speaker 1: Have you been picking up any consequences among the Labour Party for Keir Starmer's decision to block him on Sunday?

[00:09:32] Speaker 2: I think broadly speaking, Downing Street will be happy in that the alternative scenario would be one where Andy Burnham was heading towards becoming Labour's candidate. It wasn't guaranteed. There was other hoops to jump through, et cetera, et cetera, with all of the hullabaloo that would have followed. I mean, unquestionably. Versus what they've done, where Andy Burnham has gone back to doing his day job. I mean, I'm sure he'll have something more to say in time, where his immediate path to Westminster is blocked, where the potential oxygen grabber of his candidacy in a by-election that would have stolen attention from all of those other elections in Wales, in Scotland, in local elections in England, at least for the next month or so. And indeed after that, because the assumption at the moment is that by-election could happen in about a month, but let's see. A lot of the bandwidth for a conversation about who people might want to vote for would have been soaked up by the Andy Burnham conversation in one constituency out of 650 when there's all these other races going on. And that's not going to happen. So I think in the short term and even into the medium term, Downing Street will be pleased with what they decided to do and had the willingness to do. But as we said before, it is symptomatic of their underlying sense of their own weakness, which we'll see manifest itself down the track, particularly, by the way, if Labour lose the by-election. Because if Labour lose that by-election, which Andy Burnham hinted at the prospect of in that social media post midway through our last episode, then obviously the alternative hypothetical won't have happened, which is what would have happened if Andy Burnham had run. But people will say, I mean, not least Mr Burnham himself quite possibly, but it might have been different if I'd run. And then does it stick to Keir Starmer in that scenario that he would have rather Reform win than Andy Burnham win? Now that might be a gross simplification of what led to his judgement.

[00:11:35] Speaker 1: Keir Starmer would get blamed for it in that case.

[00:11:37] Speaker 2: That argument would be made.

[00:11:38] Speaker 1: And also that by-election is going to be in a couple of weeks, last week of February. Now, the story the government wants to be talking about today, kind of like their official business, if you like, is the unveiling of those reforms to the police in England and Wales that Shabana Mahmood, the Home Secretary, was kind of previewing on LK show on Sunday. And so I've read the white paper now and watched her statement in Parliament while you were off doing other things. So to my mind, it seems that there's three main things here. There's the reorganisation thing for police forces in England and Wales. And the idea there, I think, is that the right type of crime gets dealt with at the right level. So there's going to be this new National Police Service, which will deal with national crimes like terrorism or fraud. Then you have police forces at a regional level who will have the clout and the expertise to investigate things like murders. And then you'll have your local police forces within that who will deal with local crime, like burglaries and things like that.

[00:12:32] Speaker 2: And do we have a number? No.

[00:12:34] Speaker 1: So there's going to be a review done, classic Labour, there'll be a review, which will report by the end of the summer. So I think that gives us to what? Mid, late September, maybe? End of the summer in political terms is like November. Exactly, exactly. The autumn budget in December. And so I think, so we'll now have a good few months of speculation about, well, which forces will be merged to become a regional force. Then you're only sort of two and a half years or under three years away from... No, this document is explicit that it's a two parliament process that will have to be continued in the next parliament.

[00:13:09] Speaker 2: And therefore, I just wonder, so when did you, when did you and Westminster first entangle? 2006.

[00:13:15] Speaker 1: OK, so this is about the right kind of timing. When Charles Clarke was resigning as Home Secretary.

[00:13:20] Speaker 2: So one of the things I remember doing when I was working on the regional desk here at Westminster for BBC Local Radio was the whole business, when Labour were last in government, of police service reform, as they called it. And this was about police mergers. And it never happened. Because it was so controversial. In England and Wales. It did happen later in Scotland with the formation of Police Scotland. But yet it didn't happen. And what intrigues me here, whatever the case that might be made for or against this argument, is that given its time frame, what are the chances that come the next general election, opposition parties could run on a ticket, I'll vote for us and save your local force. Now, whether that is a good idea or not in crime prevention, crime tackling terms is one thing. The other thing is, is a kind of local affinity thing. That sort of sense that I live in Cheshire or Gloucestershire or wherever it might be. And that sense of closeness and proximity and history and heritage.

[00:14:18] Speaker 1: And I imagine in that imaginary election campaign, we've just conjured up out of nothing Shabana Mahmood, who may be prime minister at that point, if the rumours are to be believed, would say, hang on, you can only have the extra police officers that we are promising if you do the work of reforming the police service. So you can see the argument might not just be get rid of police forces or not. It might be more complicated.

[00:14:40] Speaker 2: Yeah, and we've seen similar carrots being dangled, haven't we, in the context of the mayoral model being introduced into local government and other elements, if you like, changes of structures of government, or in this instance, structures of the wider state and trying to either make the case for it or incentivise it amongst those in the thick of it.

[00:15:02] Speaker 1: And the other two bullet points from the three bullet points for these reforms are embracing AI and setting up a new organisation that will, with some big funding, to help the police embrace the use of artificial intelligence. Again, likely to be controversial because look at what people say about facial recognition, which is being rolled out more widely. And thirdly, this idea of a set of new national policing standards so that the public can better hold the police to account and also individual officers will have to live up to so it'll be easier to keep them trained and easier to fire them if they're not living up to those standards. Intriguing. Right, Chris, before you go, quite a few people have emailed us, newscast.bbc.co.uk, asking that perennial question of why does a defection not automatically trigger a by-election? The answer is it just doesn't.

[00:15:50] Speaker 2: The answer, it doesn't. And the reason it doesn't is that it is the person's name on the ballot paper that is associated with the ticket to Parliament. Now, clearly a significant motivator for a lot of voters, probably the vast majority of voters in any given election, is the affiliation of said person. In other words, the party. Now people, you know, individuals might build up a sense of loyalty or the opposite if they've kicked around in a patch for a while. But party affiliation is usually the biggest determinant of success or otherwise. And hence you get this sort of disjuncture, this feeling of, well, frankly, some people just feel let down that you might have faithfully voted Conservative in Sorelle Brethrenman's corner of Hampshire only to discover you've now got a reform MP. And this kind of, this very thought with her defection kind of cuts both ways because the Conservatives are making the point that reform finished fourth in that patch. And therefore there might be a lot of people who voted Conservative who are now irritated and the reform support was relatively small. If you're Sorelle Brethrenman, you might make the argument that the reason for that is that her politics were very clear and she was able to appeal to longstanding, instinctive, big C Conservatives, as well as those recently drawn towards reform, but would happily back Sorelle Brethrenman. So the reason is that it is the name, not the party on the ticket. And the tradition, what has often been the case, but not exclusively been the case, is that when defectors defect, they don't tend to trigger by-elections. There were two examples, weren't there, when by-elections did happen. Douglas Carswell in Clacton, when he joined UKIP from the Conservatives and Mark Reckless in Rochester and Strood in Kent, when he did the same. They both held by-elections and both won them under their new affiliation. But that is not normal, as much as many people might argue that it is the noble thing to do.

[00:17:45] Speaker 1: Which reminds me of going to cover one of those by-elections and bumping into the two of them at the train station. And they then gave me a lift to their campaign event, which was the first thing I was going to film for my piece. And I thought, I just cannot be seen getting out of a car with these two. They're just giving me a lift. So actually it was ultimately saving the licence fee payer because it meant it didn't have to get a bus or a taxi.

[00:18:03] Speaker 2: So I've had two similar incidents to that. So one was literally an hour ago, as we record, which is I went into the Reform UK news conference with Swanna Braverman and Nigel Farage and plopped myself down on the front row and then realised as time went on that the Reform MPs were all sitting next to me. And I was the only journalist on the front row. So at which point I thought I should scuttle a few rows back to, you know, because that was clearly a spot for Reforms MPs. So yeah. And then the other one was Ed Davey once. I was doing a general election piece in Greater Manchester and I was late. And I jump out of the car and start charging to this news conference on the top of a hill where he was painting beakers with the Mancunian bee on it. And this car door flies open in front of me. And I'm thinking, oh, somebody else is late. Thank goodness for that. It was Ed Davey. He piles out. So he was almost late for his own event.

[00:18:49] Speaker 1: Well, there you go. Political history, how it could have unfolded differently. Chris, safe travels. Thank you. Now, before me and Chris were chatting, I recorded a conversation with my podcasting cousin, Sarah Smith from AmeriCast. And we were talking about the wave of protests that has greeted a shooting of an intensive care nurse called Alex Pretty in Minnesota by Border Force officials. This follows a shooting in the same city a couple of weeks ago by officials from ICE, the Immigration and Customs and Enforcement Unit of a mum called Renee Good. And it's caused huge political uproar. And I wanted to catch up with Sarah to find out what is going on. And I started the conversation about the different narratives being put forward by different sides as they watch the footage of this killing online.

[00:19:34] Speaker 3: So there are two extreme and opposite stories being told. Very, very quickly, the Department of Homeland Security and Kristi Noem, for instance, the Homeland Security Secretary came out to say that this is somebody who was posing a danger to agents, that he was a menace on the streets of Minnesota and that the agents operated in self-defence because they were in fear of their life. And she mentioned that he had a gun with him, which is true, although in her statement, she made it sound as though he was brandishing this weapon at ICE agents, whereas, in fact, it was in a holster on his hip the entire time. On the other side, his family have asked the administration to stop telling sickening lies about him and his motives. And a lot of people have been able to draw their own conclusion from watching videos from various different angles of exactly what happened. And a lot of people have concluded watching that, that this was somebody who posed no threat to these agents. The only time his gun was removed from its holster was when an agent took it off him and removed it from the scene. It's unclear why they tackled him to the ground in the first place, when all he seemed to be doing was helping up a woman who'd fallen over after being pepper sprayed, why it took so many agents to pin him down on the ground and why they decided whilst holding him down there that he posed any kind of threat and shot him. But, I mean, there were several administration officials rushed to say that he was planning a massacre. That was why he had taken his weapon with him and to very quickly also say you cannot bring loaded weapons to protests unless you expect something like this to happen, which of course is in complete violation of the treasured second amendment, which says that Americans do have the right to bear arms, even when they're attending protests.

[00:21:24] Speaker 1: Yeah, it's interesting that it's become a debate about gun control, but sort of from a different direction from what we're used to.

[00:21:31] Speaker 3: Yes, because this one incident has slightly changed the tenor of Republican and conservative response. You've had quite a few Republican senators and congresspeople coming out and saying that they're very, very uncomfortable about what happened. Several governors, very critical of the way ICE has been operating in the streets of Minneapolis. Some people who are normally unbelievably loyal to Donald Trump, very, very critical about what they've seen. And one of the reasons why is because of this suggestion that Alex Peretti was somehow asking for this because he had a weapon with him. And people who really, really firmly believe in their right to take legally held weapons wherever they want to are pushing back against that notion. Other people are very upset about the first amendment, which is the right to free speech, which gives you the right to protest on the streets. Is that being hampered by the way in which so many protesters are being arrested and detained? And does that breach the fourth amendment? You're right against them, illegals stop and searches and seizure and detention. So you actually have quite a few people on the right for different reasons. Some of them who just shocked by what they're seeing happening in the streets and some of them who are constitutional absolutists think that what you're doing here is seeing federal agents in Minnesota breaching the fundamental constitutional rights of American citizens.

[00:22:56] Speaker 1: And in terms of getting to the bottom of what actually happened in a way that maybe more people could unite around, it sounds that even that, like some kind of investigation into this is quite polarized as well.

[00:23:08] Speaker 3: Oh, yeah. So the ICE themselves will investigate this and a lot of people will have no faith whatsoever in whatever conclusions they come to. And as we were just discussing, a lot of politicians don't feel they need to wait for any kind of investigation to establish the facts before they go out and put their own story out there. State officials working to the Democrat governor, Tim Walz, are also trying to investigate this. They're being hampered somewhat by ICE who don't want a state investigation and say that they've got no right to investigate them because they're federal agents. But nonetheless, the state police are trying to investigate this, get hold of whatever evidence they can that wasn't already swept away by ICE agents. And there will be a real battle over the jurisdiction of this, whether the state can try to charge these federal agents with manslaughter, for instance, if it goes that far. That will be a legal battle in itself. And interestingly, by coincidence, but importantly, a U.S. judge actually has to take a decision today, Monday, on whether or not it's legal for ICE agents to be in the streets of Minnesota at all. The state has taken a case asking the courts to tell the 3,000 immigration agents that there are in Minnesota to go home. And that decision will be reached at some point today as well.

[00:24:28] Speaker 1: And where is Donald Trump in all of this? Because usually we can expect him, and as he has been in the past when it comes to ICE, be quite gung ho about what those officials are allowed to do and very, very critical of the people who are protesting or kind of pushing back against them. But equally, Donald Trump is not always bull in a china shop. He is very receptive to public opinion if he feels it's turning against him.

[00:24:51] Speaker 3: Yeah, and I think he can sense that he might end up on the wrong side of public opinion if he is as bullish about this as some of his administration officials have been. He's been much more measured in what he's said and talking about wanting to wait for the results of an investigation that they need to review everything. Even in the case of Rene Good, who was shot just over two weeks ago, he wasn't quite as critical or as harsh in his language as somebody like J.D. Vance, the vice president, was. He's been playing it a bit more carefully. But the really interesting development is that he is sending his border czar, Tom Holman, up to Minneapolis to take charge of the ICE operation there. Now, this is somebody who is a real immigration hawk, who has been in charge of a pretty strict clampdown on the southern border, people trying to get across there. But he hasn't been saying the incendiary things that other people at the head of the FBI and the head of Homeland Security have been doing. He's been quite measured in his response to what's happened in Minneapolis. And I think it's very telling that he is being sent to take charge of this operation and to take the heat out of it, I would say, to crack down a bit on the tactics that are being used on the streets. And that's a sign that Donald Trump can see that there is political danger in this because people can look with their own eyes and see these videos that are put up on social media that have been shot by protesters. The video of Rene Good being shot in her car has been seen by more than 80 percent of Americans. And there's no reason to assume that the videos of Alex Pretty will be viewed by any fewer people. This is something that everybody is very, very gripped by. And the administration can tell you as often as they like that this is somebody who was threatening the life of ICE agents. If that's not what you see with your own eyes as you watch this video evidence, then there is a limit to how much you are prepared to believe administration officials, no matter how much they align with your political sentiments.

[00:26:48] Speaker 1: And when I was doing Five Live on Sunday night, I was chatting to a US former military guy, and he was saying maybe one of the ideas could be that you change the rules of engagement for ICE so that the firearms use becomes less central. Can you imagine a world where this big ICE deployment, which is happening in many states, not just just Minnesota, sort of changes or is different or maybe even they're withdrawn?

[00:27:16] Speaker 3: Well, it may be scaled back if the administration sees too much political danger in this. It does appear not just from these two fatal incidents, but from videos we've seen in other states of the way in which protesters are being handled or the way in which raids are conducted, that these are not people necessarily who are sticking to every letter of the rules and guidelines about how they may conduct themselves. So you can change the rules as much as you like, but it's the training of the officers, the number of ICE agents that there are in the country doubled very, very quickly. So I think there are some very significant questions about how well-trained these guys are, about if they even know when the use of force is justified and whether they're just too trigger-happy, whether that's because they're scared for their own safety or because they think they have complete immunity to do whatever they want to. So it will be fascinating to see whether or not anybody does end up being charged for this and also the way in which they try to contain these agents. Well, I don't think anybody wants to see another fatal incident. What are they prepared to do to try and stop that happening? It's both a very, very important practical question, but in America at the moment it's a political one as well right now.

[00:28:32] Speaker 1: And Sarah, you know I like to end on a philosophical note. I notice most news stories in America these days end up being about the fate of the nation or the fate of democracy or freedom, liberty, the end of society as we know it or the birth of a new society that we've never known before. This story, though, seems to have taken those elements to the max really. It's become very existential really for America in a lot of people's minds.

[00:28:59] Speaker 3: It has for two reasons, I think. One, because it's like an inkblot test in terms of looking at the same image and people seeing different things in it, whether they see, you know, ice brutality or whether they see people using measured force that these protesters have no right to be on the streets and are asking for what happens to them essentially. So it's very, very divisive in that way, people looking at the same evidence and coming to different conclusions. But also because of the way in which it is about people's fundamental constitutional rights, as well as about the big political argument of the day, people do see it as rather existential. Lots of commenters over the weekend were saying, OK, this is the point at which we have to say that this is autocratic rule from the Trump administration. Well-known people saying, oh, I never wanted to use the word fascist, because when you throw that around, it devalues the word in itself. And it's a cheap political argument if this is not totalitarian control you're looking at. But now I have to use the F word because things have gone so far. And people getting extremely het up about the way in which they're discussing this and whether it truly is the end of America as we knew it. At the same time, of course, as we're debating whether we've come to the end of the rules-based order in the rest of the world. It's a big week, shall we say, for the Trump administration if people are debating both the end of the American Republic and its place in the globe.

[00:30:26] Speaker 1: Sarah, thank you very much.

[00:30:28] Speaker 3: Lovely to talk to you, Adam. Bye-bye.