The News Agents: President Trump: Sexual abuser

This is a global player original podcast.

Good evening tonight in the eyes of a federal jury of his peers, Donald John Trump, the

once impossible future President of the United States is a sexual abuser.

That was CNN with the news coming out of New York last night that the former President

Donald J. Trump has been convicted by a jury, a civil jury in New York of sexual offences

against a woman in the 1990s.

And we also heard Donald Trump's deposition by video link, where he was asked about that

notorious tape, Access Hollywood, in which he claimed it was possible to grab women by

the pussy.

It's true with stars that they can grab women by the pussy?

Well, that's what it's, if you look over the last million years, I guess that's been

largely true, not always, but largely true, unfortunately or fortunately.

Unfortunately or fortunately.

So today on the news agents, we thought we'd discuss the ramifications of what this means

for Donald Trump, for the Republican Party, for people who'd like to support the Republican

Party, and whether America is prepared to reelect a president who has now been found

guilty by a civil jury of sexual abuse.

Welcome to the news agents.

The news agents.

It's Emily.

And later on, we are going to be talking about the latest part of the Stop the Boats saga,

i.e. the new illegal migration bill, which has gone before the Lords today, and a set

up yet another clash, not only between the Lords and the Commons, but in particular between

of all people, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Home Secretary, Soella Breverman.

Well, last night in New York, in a civil trial, a civil court, members of the jury found Donald

Trump guilty or convicted or liable of sexual assault and defamation of a woman called E.

Jean Carroll, whom he assaulted in a department store.

She was a magazine columnist, and this happened back in the 1990s, and when she wrote about

it in her book, he denied it and said he'd never heard of her, never met her.

She'd made the whole thing up, which is why the case is also for defamation as well as

sexual assault.

Now we have to make that differentiation.

This is not a criminal case.

It is not a criminal trial, but it is, in essence, a conviction by members of the jury

who have pronounced Donald Trump on the basis of this civil case, a sex offender.

Yeah, we should say as well that she alleged that he had raped her in that department store

as well, and this jury did not find him guilty of that, but nonetheless, the defamation count

and the one around assault were upheld by the jury, and it is just yet another first for

Donald Trump and his post-presidency.

It's a first, and yet it feels just like a continuation.

It feels so familiar.

We've had the Access Hollywood tapes, which was the grab them by the pussy moment just

before the 2016 presidential election.

The moment that many of us kind of watching at home thought would be the game changer.

We thought, I think that was early September, the election was in November, we were like,

oh my gosh, this might spell the end.

And then his advisor at the time, Steve Bannon, a sort of masterful strategist with an evil

brain said, oh, don't worry about that, you can see yourself through this.

That won't put off the voters.

And sure enough, he was right, and it didn't.

And right now, if you look at the polls, albeit in what is essentially a primary race, this

is Donald Trump against other Republicans, he sits around 30 percentage points ahead

of his nearest rival, DeSantis.

So on the one hand, yeah, you can say he's going to be politically safe amongst Republicans

who already like him.

They're not going to turn against him because they've seen all this before so many times.

And on the other, I think it casts a wider question into focus, which is what senior

Republicans or what the hell senior Republicans are saying in response to this now.

And this is Donald Trump's own response to what happened last night.

What else can you expect from a Trump-hating, Clinton-appointed judge who went out of his

way to make sure that the result of this trial was as negative as it could possibly be, speaking

to and in control of a jury from an anti-Trump area, which is probably the worst place in

the United States for me to get a fair trial.

We'll be appealing this decision, it's a disgrace.

I don't even know who this woman is.

I have no idea who she is, where she came from.

This is another scam, it's a political witch hunt, and somehow we're going to have to fight

this stuff.

We cannot let our country go into this abyss.

This is disgraceful.

Leave aside the particulars of this case for a moment, we know there are so many other

cases that are extant against him at the moment for all manner of different things

and all manner of different places.

But this is just, again, in another familiar way, the latest institution that Donald Trump

is breaking.

Donald Trump basically broke the electoral system and huge number of norms in the way

that democracy works, in a way that is still affecting the American democracy to this day

and will have long-reaching effects for many years, nice suspect decades to come.

And here, once again, he is stretching the judicial system, which was already under enormous

tension and strain, preceding Trump, and it will be after him.

But once again, he's exacerbating those trends and making yet another key tenet in the institution

of American democracy, the rule of law, and the American judicial system, bringing it

into enormous disrepute.

But then again, I suppose, the people who allow him to do it, same old story, other Republican

party itself.

Yeah, and I almost think that's where the story is today.

It's the response of other senior Republicans, Marco Rubio, a senator from Florida who stood

against Trump in 2016, who has come out with exactly the same line, calling the jury a joke,

the whole case a joke.

Another senator from Alabama said, it makes me want to vote for him twice.

What you're hearing now is senior Republicans who are willing to say that a jury made up

of members of the American public doesn't count, that their findings don't count, that

the rule of law in a civil trial doesn't count.

And it's a really big question for how long they can carry on saying that any of the things,

any of the places that try and indict or hold Trump to account, whether it is the Senate,

whether it is an impeachment, whether it's an investigation by Robert Mueller, whether

it, you know, head of the FBI, whether it's a civil trial or whether it's a criminal trial,

and there are four of those that are carrying out inquiries at the moment, whether it's

a criminal case and there are four or five of those carrying out investigations at the

moment. At what point do they say any of it matters?

Who's the con denominator here? Who's the guy who keeps, you know, he's always the victim,

no matter what the arena, no matter what the theater, no matter what the process, funnily

enough, extraordinarily enough, Donald J. Trump is always the victim.

But we wanted to hear from inside a Republican mind. And so we asked the vice chair of Republican

overseas, who is a Trump supporter then and now, and he's Errol Moore coach, and he joins

us to talk about whether this will turn the dial.

I certainly think that Donald Trump as the figurehead for the party, if you're not willing

to, let's say, accept him with all of his flaws, he wouldn't have even been welcomed

in the door in 2016. Now, he would just to be to be clear, this was a civil court case

in Manhattan, which is 88% Democrat control. You actually the judge, it's an interesting

thing because he didn't show up is able to tell the jury also that that's, you know,

a bad thing for him doesn't look good for him. This was not a criminal trial because

it couldn't have possibly passed the muster.

So the situation is, yeah, it's embarrassing, but it doesn't define the party and it doesn't

define who his supporters think he is. In fact, it reaffirms their belief that he's

being unduly and unfairly castigated by a political apparatus that's especially in the

district of Manhattan that's been going after him for, you know, for years. And for seven

years, this has been boiling and boiling and boiling. And, you know, I'm not here to comment

on her experience. They've made $5 million and it seems like a good distraction for right

before what comes out tomorrow regarding the Joe Biden and Hunter Biden web of financial

documents. So a little bit of misdirection, but yeah, it's embarrassing. I admit that.

Just to go back, so when you mentioned his flaws, he is now convicted, albeit in a civil

court, and he's a sex offender. That's his flaw. His flaw is being a sex offender. Are

you still happy to see him as a Republican nominee for president?

Well, the implication there is that of course, that we believe he's a sex offender. And just

because a civil court in Manhattan said that and it's going to go to appeal doesn't mean

that the supporters like myself or any of his other 80 million Americans see him as

a sex offender.

Okay. So just to clarify, you don't believe in the findings of a public jury. You don't

believe in the rule of law of a public jury.

No, it's not necessarily that. No, no, no. It's a bit unfair. It's a civil court, right?

And so in a civil court, it's not exactly this serious process where once adjudication happens,

you know, beyond a reasonable doubt, you don't need that in a civil case.

As members of the public, we thought Donald Trump loved members of the public who had

been forgotten by the establishment. Now you, as the establishment are saying, oh, well

those members of the public just got it wrong and we're happy to ignore them.

Not that they're not entitled to do what they do, but this is a place that 88% of the people

would hang Trump by his neck if they could in the pearl of Manhattan. So nobody in the

rest of the 50 states across the contiguous U.S. believes that, you know, he got a fair

trial in that situation.

And that's just the way that it's viewed. We're not looking at it like, oh, now the president's

a sex offender. We just don't see it that way. We see a very calculated political hit

job that couldn't have gone to a criminal trial because it didn't have any of the ability

to do so. It didn't have the gravitas to do so. They found a friendly judge, a friendly

jury in a place that's trying to take down the president. And on top of it, this is political

gamesmanship. So no, we don't believe that the president is literally a sex offender.

It's a lot of he said, she said, and Donald Trump's worst enemy is himself because he

didn't do himself any favors in his deposition or anything like that. He's made a lot of

comments that I'm sure you guys are all aware of that aren't, let's say they're not very

cool.

I've never heard that word.

He's not viewed by the American voter in the Republican Party as a sex offender and this

event isn't going to change that. If he had been convicted in a criminal trial, absolutely.

And he'd be also out of the party, I'm sure.

But Errol, there are lots of states which are likewise Republican dominated like Alabama

or Mississippi or anywhere else in the deep South. Would we take it from this that in

similar circumstances with a Democrat in the South, you wouldn't accept any findings from

a civil court in those states because basically they're all politically dominated?

I absolutely agree with that statement. If, for example, a 99% Republican county decided

to drag President Biden down there and accuse him of any mis-number of misdeeds and then

find him guilty, not in a criminal trial, but in a civil trial, I would say the exact

same thing.

So the American court system is just kind of bust then because basically with any political

plaintiff or any political person who's in the dark in a particular state, the opposing

sides, no one is sufficiently committed to the actual justice system to give that a chance

of working through and accepting it. The American justice system is just broken then.

We're in agreement and the only caveat there again is to keep repeating. It's a civil court

and in a criminal case, this wouldn't be the same thing. But yes, it is an example of a

sort of failing state. Banana Republic tactics have been started to become commonplace in

the United States.

Well, no, but you're doing it slightly the other way around. Like it's possible. You

could say, okay, your contention is that this is the courts and the people involved

or organizing these things, which is the Banana Republic. You could look at it the other way,

which is to say, no, it's the Republicans fault for making this into a Banana Republic

because a crucial part of any functioning democracy is that both political parties and

everyone accepts the due process of the rule of law. It's you guys who are making the country

into a Banana Republic, not the other way around.

Can you describe how you... Give me some more detail exactly how weird the one...

Because as with any democracy and in any justice system, it is reliant on particularly political

elites accepting the outcomes of the justice system on a consistent basis, unless they

have extremely good reason to say otherwise. And yet it doesn't matter what happens with

Trump. It doesn't matter what the case is or what the court is. It's always that he

is the victim. He's the one who is being persecuted. He's been hounded and it wouldn't

matter what it was or who it is. He's always the one who is the victim rather than actually

the system itself functioning correctly.

Well, if it seems interesting that a man who's been investigated more than anybody in American

history, who's apparently so guilty in your opinion, has never been found criminally guilty

of anything. Moreover, he's been the subject of scurrilous accusations. He's been taken

lawsuits for a number of things, FBI raiding his house, all of these things. And at no

point do we... Does my side of the sort of perspective see it like that? We see definitely

that there's a political, I would say, hit job going on on a former president. Donald

Trump is his own worst enemy, like I said. But if he was guilty, he'd be guilty of a

crime. Being civilly held liable in America, that's not the same thing. And the fact that

they're trying to put him in prison for actual stuff like the Mar-a-Lago thing, and now if

you find out Biden has documents, Obama has documents, some people took this and that.

They're trying to get him for criminal things. They can't do it because he's not guilty.

So they go into the civil system, and they can forget their judgments, and they can

get their $5 million. But to me, that's the Banana Republic part of it. It's not Donald

Trump defending himself.

It's interesting. You've just said they can't do it because he's not guilty. So you've already

decided that in any criminal case, he won't be found guilty either.

Oh, no. In this case, they couldn't take him to criminal court. They wanted to.

We know that actually he has already been indicted for a crime, and it sounds as if

you're saying that he won't be found guilty of that either. Let me just broaden it out

into where other Republicans are standing on this issue, because Marco Rubio, you'll know,

Florida Senator and a lawyer said the joy is a joke. The whole case is a joke. Tommy

Tuberville, who's the center of Alabama, said, it makes me want to vote for him twice. Lindy

Graham has said the New York legal system is off the rails. Also, a lawyer, senior lawmakers

in your party who don't seem to believe in the justice system, the rule of law, or the

voting system. How do you feel about that?

I feel that they reflect their constituents, and their constituents feel that way. And

it's their objective is their duly elective representatives to speak that way. America

is, as was mentioned here, in a state of decline right now, especially socially and culturally.

Absolutely. I agree with every one of those statements. It's a sham trial, a joke. That's

not a real legal system.

So, let's say there's a new voter, a young person, coming to vote for the first time and

looking at the Republican Party and saying, wow, they've chosen a sex offender as their

nominee, potentially. And senior figures don't even believe in the rule of law and the justice

system. And that's an attractive proposition for me as a first time voter. Is that your

offer?

I mean, obviously, that's not the offer. That's not what we tell young people. Now, granted,

young people go and they vote more Democrat as they should. They should be more left-wing

when they're younger. However, our party stands for core fundamentals of, with the Trump

leadership, anti-war, more of a nationalist, improved infrastructure, focus at home,

the stop all of this sort of nation building abroad. That was what a lot of the people who

were attracted to the party, especially the young conservatives who came into it,

they were the ones who grew up in the perpetual war zone. So, when Donald Trump came in,

keep in mind, he destroyed a Democrat Republican oligarchy. He wasn't a Republican. He was a

registered Democrat until 2009.

Sure. And a bit of sexual abuse here and there. Well, you know, we get on with it, right?

Well, I mean, Joe Biden certainly has a lot of interesting things, too, that people could just

throw sound bites at. But ultimately, we, like I said, we don't really believe that.

It was a jury.

Well, it's a civil jury in Manhattan. It's not a very serious one.

Okay. But, Errol, you also know that there are plenty of other investigations going on into

various other things that Donald Trump is alleged to have done or not done or whatever

over at the moment, you know, ranging from what also those are civil cases.

Well, okay. So this is what I'm getting at. So, but, you know, we're looking at what's

going on in Georgia, January 6, all of these things. Is there an investigation which is

extant, which is ongoing at the moment into Donald Trump that you think is worth a candle?

Is there any one of them you think is fair?

If I was, well, here's the, there's an answer to that question. The answer is that all of these

are designed to build up Trump's support in his base. The Democrats want to run against Trump

in 2024. They don't want to run against DeSantis. So ideally, they can destroy Trump's character

with all of these frivolous lawsuits. At the same time, his own supporters take that as his own,

you know, purview and they're saying, look, they're going after our guy.

The Democrats want that to elevate Trump above DeSantis and then he's the nominee because they

feel like they can beat him. So every single one of these lawsuits is a good idea if I was a Democrat

operative, but they're not legitimate. Is there any court in the United States that you think could

give Donald Trump a fair trial? Is there any eventuality that you could imagine that would

be considered by all sides in America at the moment a fair one? Yeah, I think that if he was

brought before the Supreme Court and... Well, that's dominated by people that he put. I mean,

this is the problem. This is what I'm getting at. Obama appointed many judges too. But that's the

point, isn't it? As soon as you start to unpick all of this stuff, as soon as each side starts to say,

oh, well, look, this can't be fair because they're political appointees. The whole system breaks down.

That's what you're side is at least partly responsible for. Can I just ask, is Donald

Trump still your preferred nominee? For me personally, yes. I've supported him since the

beginning and I'm certainly not going to turn my back on him during this cycle. I don't think

he's actually the most statistically likely candidate to win. I think Ron DeSantis would be

a better candidate. The party definitely could use some fresh blood, but I'm not going to just

throw my president under the bus. For a bit of sexual assault. That's not a bit of sexual assault.

It's a civil case. They didn't find him guilty in criminal court. You're using that term as though

it's cut standard fact and the fact of matters, it's a lot more nuanced than that. We're definitely

not supporting sexual assault. I appreciate that to not be implied. I mean, don't tell me, tell that

to your female voters or any of your voters that if there were a lot of female voters actually,

a lot of mothers, a lot of mothers and people who are really concerned about the way this country is

going are going to vote for Trump like they did last time. It was the female vote that took

him out of office, by the way. White women switched against him in 2020. He lost.

Yes. Just checking. I mean, again, absolutely. He unfortunately lost. We hate to see it, but

ultimately 2024, if DeSantis or anybody wants to beat the candidate, they have to beat him in a

primary. That's how the American system works. If you're not going to run, what can you do?

Oh, more coach. Thank you so much. Great to have you on. Being a good sport and thank you.

Thank you. Appreciate it. Thanks so much. Cheers.

The story of the Trump years for me was always that the reason American democracy ended up being

broken and still remains to a large extent broken isn't just because of Trump. It's because of

American political elites, mainly on the Republican Party, who just stopped wanting it to work.

They became too afraid with a few honorable exceptions for it to continue to work.

That's why you end up with the impeachment process being a complete joke. That's why

you end up with so many of the political processes and the checks and balances not working.

And that is why you end up in the absurdity of an insurrection and everybody could see the

incumbent president generates and supports and encourages, and they literally turn around to

say, white is black and black is white and say, oh, no, that was nothing to do with him.

And this is what we're now seeing, that contagion, that toxin spread to the justice system. And

quite frankly, I mean, there was an extraordinary moment there where he basically said, no, American

senior politicians, which almost senators here and congressmen basically say things

just because their constituents want them to say them. I mean, that is through the

looking glass stuff. No, representatives, political elites have to be to some extent

a custodian of the system, not just a custodian of whatever their constituents happen to think

from day to day. This evening, I'm going to be interviewing Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward,

who are the two great investigative journalists who broke the Watergate story. And I suppose I

started reflecting that if this was now, you know, if Trump was Nixon, then he'd just go,

no, you got your facts wrong and it doesn't matter. And it's a politicized thing. And

probably even Watergate wouldn't have brought down a president in this age. But I think

the ramifications of this politically are probably not as great as we think. I mean,

the thing we forget when we talk about Trump being ahead in the polls is it's only a very

specific set of polls, which is the Republican primaries. Trump won in 2016. He lost in 2018.

He lost in 2020. He did pretty badly in terms of the candidates he supported in the midterms

last year. So I don't think that he is growing his base. I don't think being a sex offender

is growing the Trump base. The question is, what kind of people who just don't want any chaos

do now? And I feel really sorry, actually, for Republicans who do believe in, you know,

a certain kind of Republican fiscal policy or Republican immigration policy who haven't

any choice at the moment, because their party is not giving them any choice except for Donald Trump.

Yeah, but they've been let down by those elites who stopped wanting it to work, right? And you're

totally right about Watergate. What brought Nixon down in the end, it was a group of Republican

senators who go to say, sorry, Mr. President, the time's up. Who the hell would that be today?

Like those people simply do not exist. They do not exist. They do not exist. And you can

keep looking for them and you keep being sort of incensed about it or disappointed about it.

But you might as well not bother, because if we've learned anything over the last

number of years, it's they do not exist. But I think you've spot on in terms of kind of

the wider political impact in the sense that all we're looking at now is Republican primary

voters. And there's nothing, it seems to me, that will have changed the phenomenon that we

saw in the 2022 midterms, which is that your average suburban voter, your average kind of

middle of the road voter, your average mildly politically interested voter who was already

disenchanted with the Trump phenomenon at that time, is not going to be any more enchanted

with him or by him, having heard about this latest toxin and this latest, you know, smell

around him, stink around him, just no way. Yeah. Unless there is an independent third candidate

in the form of a never Trump, which is this group that is talking now of whether they stand against

Trump, they're not going to win. They're not going to do anything except possibly split the

Republican vote even further. I mean, we started off the show today saying, you know, can a sexual

offender become president? And I suppose one thing we should reflect on is the extent to which

previous presidents have skirted up against the law, skirted up against accusations, plenty of

allegations, depending on particular presidents of sexual assault. And of course, I suppose the one

that his shadow sort of looms large on the Trump presidency and how we think about it most of all

is Bill Clinton himself, right? Because who had long been accused by different women of sexual

impropriety of all descriptions, including allegations, including rape, by the way, never

obviously got to a court in this way, civil court. He was certainly never ever found guilty of

anything like that. But nonetheless, we have to say that the way in which at that time,

the Democrats responded to many of those, bear a lot of the hallmarks of the same

thing that we see today, which is to, you know, attack the accusers, attack the system, attack

the institution. And even when it reached the impeachment process itself, again, we see that

same playbook and, you know, is uncomfortable for Democrats. And of course, circumstances are

different and they're very different people in lots of ways. But it echoes of that period. I

think it is uncomfortable for Democrats when they consider just how loud some of those echoes are

and the parallels between those two periods and how the two parties dealt with those two things at

the time and now. Attack the women as well. I mean, Monica Lewinsky wrote a few years ago in

Vanty Fair that it was the humiliation derby. That was the phrase I remember, watching Democrats,

women, feminists, you know, people that she would have aspired to looked up to, protecting the

Democratic Party rather than the woman who'd been at the center of a massive abuse of power.

Yes, we know it was a consensual relationship. But in today's terms, that would not have been

tolerated. One hopes. No, when it comes down to it, we've seen that's the thing when I say about

these things preceding the Trump presidency. Ultimately, there is a much longer story that

long precedes Trump about American politics becoming so deeply hyperpartisan and ultimately

party interest, Trumping almost everything else, that ultimately the health and the probity of

the institutions themselves. And that, as I say, is a long story with origins probably in the 1990s.

The only thing I'd say is, is a place that Republican lawmakers will want to take you to,

the what aboutary, right? And right now, we're in 2023. And actually, what about Clinton,

what about, you know, any of any previous president is not the question. The question is,

Donald Trump is about to stand for president again. Are you going to tolerate it? And it kind of,

it kind of starts and ends there for now. And Trump has intensified and made so many of these

things and these phenomena much, much worth. We're going to be back in a moment. We're going to be

talking about Small Boats and Big Plans by Soella Braverman and the interjection by the Archbishop

of Canterbury, as well as the King, and indeed, the former head of the British Army.

This is The News Agents.

Welcome back. Well, it's Wednesday, so it is PMQs. It's normally the Chamber of Parliament that

gets most attention throughout the week. But today was a little bit different because pretty

much as PMQs was going on, there was a lot of attention being paid to what was going on in

the House of Lords, because in the House of Lords, the illegal migration bill had been returned and

the peers were all looking through it and going through it with a fine tooth comb, as it is their

wants. And there was, as predicted, a great deal of opposition from the upper House about the provisions

in the bill that would effectively make illegal claiming asylum for anyone arriving regularly

in the UK. The government says that it's about stopping the boats, that this will be a disincentive

for people to arrive because they'll be sent to Rwanda. No one, of course, yet has been sent to

Rwanda, but the biggest cheerleader or the biggest opponent, I should say, for this so far, has been

the Archbishop of Canterbury, one of the stars of the coronation, of course, and this is what he

had to say in the Lords this morning. It is isolationist. It is morally unacceptable and

politically impractical to let the poorest countries deal with the crisis alone and cut our

international aid. My Lords, this bill is an attempt at a short-term fix. It risks great damage to

the UK's interests and reputation at home and abroad, let alone the interests of those in need

of protection or the nations who together face this challenge. Our interests as a nation are

closely linked to our reputation for justice and the rule of law and to our measured language,

calm decision and careful legislation. None of those are seen here.

Yeah, we are always reminded that the UK is one of just two countries which automatically puts clerics

in its upper chamber, the other country being Iran. We have 26 Archbishops and bishops in the

House of Lords, and yet I guess this is the point at which the Archbishop of Canterbury must be

thinking, if I don't intervene on this, then what is the point of having a voice in the upper chamber?

It's actually the first time that he's given a speech during a debate on a piece of legislation

in almost three years. This is the second reading on the illegal migration bill, and I think it's

important to understand that the Archbishop of Canterbury joins the former head of the British

Army, Lord Danat. I mean, not a kind of softy liberal, I would have guessed, and King Charles,

newly coronated head of state in finding this particular bit of immigration policy abhorrent.

And in a sense, it's a response to Suella Bravman and her Justice Secretary, Alex Chalk, who were

writing in The Times overnight, and they were urging the upper house, urging the Lords to remember,

this is her words, it is designed to meet the will of the British people. And I do think that's

curious, because we are back to a place of referendum, right? The will of the British people

is a way of saying, I'm not talking to you legislators, I'm not really talking to the peers,

I'm not even talking to the Commons, I'm appealing directly over the heads of elected and unelected

legislators to say, this is what the British people want, and therefore we're going to do it.

Yeah, look, and I think that that language is particularly problematic in this context,

which is, yeah, look, if you're going to have a referendum and say, do you want the British

government to stop the boats, that I'm sure it would win overwhelmingly, we could see that in

terms of all of the polling, the British public do not like what is happening on the South Coast,

why would they? I mean, we've already seen the tragic consequences that it could have.

But actually, Suella Bravman and Alex Chalk, the Justice Secretary, are wrong in this respect,

in the sense that all of the polling has also been very clear, which is there is actually no

poll has been found yet, which shows majority support for the government's Rwanda policy.

The polling also shows that the public are very much in favour of the idea of safe and legal

routes for refugees and for asylum seekers, something which still, although has been promised

by the government, has yet to materialise in concrete terms. So the idea that this is,

you know, can be construed as the will of the people is not only potentially a bit of a dangerous

one, as we've talked about before, in terms of what it means for the way parliament operates and

the executive and its relationship to parliament. It's actually just playing wrong in terms of the

particulars of this bill, which are not only problematic for all sorts of reasons as we've

discussed, but, you know, we should never forget. I mean, the public can also see,

thus far, no one has been sent to Rwanda. This just doesn't work. It hasn't worked yet. And the

government will say, well, we need to get it to work. This is partly what this bill is around.

But it isn't. It is an ineffective solution to a problem which continues to exist and which

is certainly not getting any better. And there have been some pretty radical moves by other

peers. Lord Paddock, who's a Lib Dem, has proposed what's called a fatal motion, which is aimed

at stopping the whole thing, the whole bill, in its tracks as soon as it gets into the lords.

And it basically argues that this legislation would see Britain fail to meet its international

law commitments by allowing ministers to ignore the direction of judges, and it would undermine

the UK's tradition of providing sanctuary. And I think that's the other side of it. You can

either argue pragmatically, which is where the Conservatives want the debate to be, and actually,

to be fair, where Labour want to keep the debate. Or you can just go the whole hog and say, as

the Lib Dems are doing, as the Greens are doing, and as the Archbishop of Canterbury is doing,

this is not who we are. Right? This is about international obligations. This is about

how we see ourselves as a country, and whether we think of refugees as an incumbrance,

or a problem, or something that we actually have to work out.

Yeah. And that's basically what the Archbishop of Canterbury is saying, right? He's saying that,

look, if you think we've got problems with refugee flows right now, imagine what it's going to be like

with climate change. You know, we need to, as we did in the 40s and 50s, come together with other

countries, wealthy countries, and just work out what we're going to do about these flows, because

no one suggests that we can take everybody, but there is a legitimate question to be had about

how many we all ought to be taking, rather than have a bit of a beggarly neighbour approach,

which is basically the British government's approach at the moment. In terms of what happens now,

there's going to be all sorts of amendments, as Emily was alluding to, in terms of what they

will be voted on. They'll then be sent back to the Commons, and, you know, we have this thing

called Parliamentary Ping Pong. I mean, look, I think that in terms of the politics of this,

I think Brabham and Chalk and the government, despite what they were saying at the times,

they'd be very, very happy if this gets stymied. They'd be very, very happy if this gets bogged

down in the Commons and the justice system, or generally, as it already has done. Why?

We're 12 to 18 months away from a general election. This isn't going to solve the problem. If it

passed tomorrow, right now, it's not going to solve the problem for all the reasons we've discussed

before. Politically speaking, which is ultimately what this bill is about, about having the politics

and getting the politics ready to say we're trying to do something about it, we're harder and harsher

than everybody else, far better to rally against the sort of so-called liberal forces in the justice

system and in the legislature and whatever who stymied us, who stopped it from happening, than

actually having to face the fact that we had a solution that we kept hailing, i.e. Rwanda,

and it hasn't worked, so what next? It will suit them down to the ground if this gets bogged down

in Parliament and the justice system, which it has already done, and inevitably will do,

because it is so legally complex and problematic. We'll be back in a minute, bringing you some

of the juicy stuff from Prime Minister's questions and also looking at that big bugbear coalition.

Welcome back. Right, so since the local election results last week, it has been that the media

conversation that we've been having with the coronation is the interlude. It has been a bit

weird because even though, you know, the Conservatives did very badly, quite a bit of the

political heat, funnily enough, has ended up rebounding on the Labour Party, and because these

results imply we could well be heading for a hung parliament, as we discussed on Friday's show,

the question has turned to, well, who would Labour do a deal with? Would they do a deal with

the Lib Dems and so on? And Stam was asked that question yesterday on Sky News, and he refused

to basically answer seven times. You know, it got us thinking about this conversation about

coalition and hung parliaments and so on. I don't know what you think, Emily. I mean,

having gone through this quite a few times with the number of general elections in recent times,

and we had the 2015 general election in particular, where the question of coalition and hung

parliaments was so prominent. I kind of feel like both politicians and the media, we have to grow up

a little bit on this one, right, which is that inevitably, if we end up with a hung parliament,

of course, politicians will have to do a deal with someone. That will be the will of the public,

and that will be democracy. And it seems absurd to get completely sort of sidetracked in the sort

of 12 months to 18 months before a general election, to constantly go down that route that we did in

2015, endlessly talking about, oh, what deals are you going to do? Or will you do a deal with XY

or Z? Because inevitably, that is the nature of democracy. I mean, the result from a politician,

the answer from a politician really ought to be, well, obviously, I want to have a majority,

and I will campaign for a majority. But of course, if there's hung parliament, then we'll have to deal

with that when it arises. To me, that is very, very simple. A delta poll from last week has

labour on 47% and the conservatives on 28%. And so I think it is a bit rich to keep on putting

labour in the position of being the party that is about to fail, right? Because when the conservatives

won in 2010, and they went into coalition with the Lib Dems, I don't remember that being a question

a lot of the time for David Cameron ahead of it. I certainly don't remember Theresa May being asked

about a DUP coalition or confidence and supply arrangement. I certainly don't remember the

conservatives being asked how they would govern as a minority once the DUP left. I don't remember

people saying, what happens if you get a massive majority, but then find that you have to swap

your prime minister three times in one year? So I do think we're slightly skewed towards this

way of framing the questions towards labour, simply because they do have partners, sort of

political alliances or friends, shall we say, in the wider spectrum that the conservatives

right now lack. Right, exactly. And even though this is basically this idea of a sort of coalition

of chaos and so on, which doesn't really land quite as strongly as it did in 2015, given what

we've seen, you've already alluded to it since 2015 with the DUP and then all of the minority

governments and all the chaos around that. But even today, in the lobby briefing after Prime

Minister's questions with the Prime Minister Spokesman, they were asked repeatedly, would you

do a deal? Do you rule out doing a deal with the DUP or anybody else? And soon next postperson

didn't rule it out either. So this is the point. It's either one or the other. You either rule

it out or don't expect your opponents to rule it out either. And I just think we've got to get to

a place where both politicians basically have a more grown up answer, which is, well, let's just

wait and see to the election. But of course, if there's a hung parliament, we'll have to deal with

that. And we in the media just accept that as well. Because I think the danger is, you remember

this in 2015, in 2015, remember that general election, like the whole thing was the horse race,

the whole thing, because we just had a coalition was like, to the Lib Dems and the Tories, would

you do another coalition? Will Labour do a coalition with the SMP, etc, etc, etc. And we

basically every day was like that. And we missed the story. We missed the story. The story was

that the Conservative Party was the most consequential election we've probably had for 20 years.

The Conservative Party had committed to having a referendum on the European Union. And we all

missed the story because we didn't ask them about that because we were too busy about Lib Dems

and SMP and so on. I mean, it was even simpler than that. We noticed that the Conservatives

weren't very present in many of the seats in the Midlands and the North that Labour was fighting

and they were all in the Southwest fighting the Lib Dems. And what they did and the George

Osborne strategies, we now know it's been well documented, was to wipe out the Lib Dems so

they wouldn't need that coalition. We missed that because we weren't looking the right place

because we kept on talking about coalition. Exactly. We'll be back tomorrow. Hopefully not

missing anything. Nothing. Nothing. And neither will you. Apart from John, who's still not here

and won't be tomorrow either. Missing him. Bye-bye. Bye. This has been a Global Player

Original podcast and a Persephoneka production.

Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.