The News Agents: So, how do you catch a prisoner on the run?

This is a global player original podcast we understand he was dressed as a chef

so yes he was wearing red and white check trials as a white t-shirt and brown

boots it does sound very much like that was kitchen wear that he was wearing

and that was what he was last seen in clearly he might be wearing something

different now which is why we've provided the public with photograph of

Danielsley. Imagine being dressed pretty much like Ronald McDonald and still

thinking you can make a run for it the prisoner 21 years old who may by the

time you're listening to this have been caught managed to make his escape by

clutching on to the underside of a truck in Wandsworth prison when he was

working in the kitchens there and today we're going to be asking how he did it

and what happens next welcome to the news agents the news agents it's Emily

and it's Lewis and later on in the show we are going to be talking about what is

perhaps the biggest piece of our post-Brexit architecture with Europe

that is coming back into place we are joining or rejoining the horizon

program Europe or indeed the world's biggest collaborative international

science program worth a hundred billion euros a year we're going to be rejoining

we'll be talking about how that is going to be a template for our further

engagement with Europe in the future. But we're going to start with the escape

of Dan at Leaffer and not just what it says about this extraordinary manhunt

that it's kicked off to find a man who were told poses a low risk to the public

and yet is literally charged with terror offenses we know that this has caused a

certain amount of mayhem in government in the prison world because questions are

now being asked about why on earth this man this terror suspect was being held

in Wandsworth prison which was not that high security where he was allowed to

work every day it seems in the kitchens and had the latitude to be doing

whatever he was doing for an hour before anyone even realized he was gone

and people are now starting to ask why he wasn't being held in a more secure jail

and what on earth the ramifications are for a government that can't even keep

hold of its convicts and its prisoners it's literally a metaphor for things

starting to fall apart but today we also want to dive into the mechanics of how

you escape by holding on to a truck of what happens when you get out of the

gates and what the police and security services and investigators and

surveillance operators will be doing to try and track down a man who for 24 hours

has been on the run

well Johnny is now is a former prisoner a Wandsworth prison prisoner and we

should put this in context because Chris Atkins is also a after nominated

filmmaker and he's just brought out a book time after time which is actually

it discusses a prison break in Wandsworth but if we can use you Chris to take us

inside Wandsworth prison and to talk us through the whole mechanics first of all

of how you would be working in the kitchen and how much access and freedom you

would have to do your own thing it's weird stories like this they suddenly

shine a light and sort of the hitherto sort of unseen world of the prison

system which most people get no access to whatsoever they're like sort of

hermetically sealed units and the reason they keep it sealed is because

they're so dysfunctional they're so chaotic they're so underfunded they're

so poorly run but i think most people if they

witnessed what was going on inside Wandsworth on a daily basis you'd be

absolutely horrified that what well the the fact is that this came out the

other day that there was 1500 inmates and there were seven officers to look

after them overnight this came out in the house of commons question last year

it's the fact that the officers are minimum wage and they get nine weeks

training they hire school because no one wants to do the job it's such a

pawling conditions it's such a terrible place to work

so stressful huge numbers of them sign off with mental health problems huge

numbers of them sign in sick which is why the officer numbers are so low

they have a certain number of officers supposed to be on shift a third of them

don't turn up and they'll even take people with criminal records

astonishingly into the prison service now they have nine weeks training minimum

wage and i was in a surreal position i was a serving prisoner that these kids

would come up to me looking like a someone dressed as a prison officer for

halloween you know they just looked like they just found the costume and and

they would ask me what time to open up for lunch they'd ask me how the uh the

routine wow how old were they 18 19 wow something didn't look like they started

shaving lewis so you're in for for fraud right attack for yeah yeah yeah

and they start treating you like you're the responsible adult absolutely i used

to walk around and people used to call me gov because they thought i i worked

there i got many many jobs because the way to get

out your cell is to get a job it means you get more privileges and you get to

phone home and shower and do all stuff like that so i did dozens of jobs and

one of the craziest jobs i did was the register so each day i was given a

printed list of paper and i would tick prisoners off as they left the wing

when they're going out to do jobs in education now i was in sight for crime

of dishonesty i could have easily have ticked someone off saying they were

present when they're actually halfway to france but because i so short staff

they rely on prisons like myself to keep the place ticking over so did you know

the kitchens i didn't know the kitchens yeah and how much

access have you got to come and go from the kitchens to the

the full court of the prison it was a very privileged job so they rank

jobs by the risk that prisoner can manifest

if something goes wrong after i've been there nine months i was very well

trusted i could pretty much go anywhere i wanted within the prison

the kitchens were seen as very sensitive because

one they're outside the main block of the prison

so if you can imagine the old spider design of a prison you have the circular

center it's the ponopskin if you want to look it up

and then you have the wings radiating off it in the old days you'd have the

kitchen at the center after strange ways they changed that why

because the prisoners got control of the kitchens they could feed themselves

that's where it went on for weeks so after strange ways one of the things they

did is they moved the side of the kitchens out of the center and they

built new buildings for them and if you look at it on the onesworth map you can

see it there's a new structure of course much closer to the prison gates

so you should only have very very trusted inmates working there now this guy was

up on terror offenses he's facing decades inside very very serious crimes

he shouldn't have been anywhere near the kitchens you've got knives there you've

got hot water and boiling oil and god knows what they hadn't been there that

long he hadn't been there that long i was there for months before they let me

know the kitchens so what you've got is an absolute failure to risk

assess the guy there are prisoners there who were seen as so high risk they

weren't allowed out their cell others so high risk they weren't allowed off the

wing others so high risk they could do a job but maybe just a bucket and a mop

for them that risk assess process has collapsed in this case and the kitchen

door is close to the prison gates is that what you're saying

it's closer to the prison gate than than the wings how far

i was just there now i should do a piece for itv news and i could actually see

it you actually see the edge of the kitchens over there look he didn't

jump the fence he didn't need to he by the sounds of things he

strapped himself to the underside of a van so there's a bit of planning needed

but not very much the van drives in through the main gate

it goes up there would be deliveries people be taking produce on and off

he'd be one of the prisoners i suspect who was

helping unloaded and then the van should have been driven out

and inspected they're supposed to go under it with mirrors

and look at the underside clearly that didn't happen why

staffing cuts it sounds to me from what you're saying

that in a way it's surprising more prisoners don't escape

such as the paucity of resources now in the system were you surprised when you

heard i wasn't i've said i've surprised it doesn't happen

more often and i i would say this i've written my book time after time which is

out to date amazingly enough and there's a it's a very evolved in this

yeah

people think it's all part of my PR and when the media rounds are over i'm

going to let him out of my wardrobe but no in time after time i look at why

people go back to prison again and again and again

because the big problem is country isn't so much crime you have a problem of

reoffending so 80 of all offenses are reoffences

they've been committed by people who've done it before so rather than looking

individual crime i'm trying to look at the pattern of why

this terrible recidivism problem keeps going on and one guy looked at and he's

had been convicted over 74 offenses called simon mclellan

and one of his earlier offenses was he escaped from winchester

jail and in a very eerily similar circumstances to this he basically

exploited the incompetence of the system and he escaped by pretending to be his

own twin brother simon was facing about four five years for gbh

so he got his brother to get arrested for drunken disorderly

his brother came in and they ended up sharing a cell together and they switched

places it's like something out of a 50s farce isn't it

alec guineas or something and and he walked out the front gate

and when they picked him up as they inevitably do they normally get them

he was prosecuted for a prison break and they had to drop the charges why

because they're non-identical twins and the judge saw the photos of the two of

them together he said this is prison incompetence

this isn't a prison break and drop the charges and somebody who's

facially blind i have a lot of sympathy with people not recognizing brothers

one of the many reasons that you're not involved in that prison system of course

i know i describe it as like a dystopian faulty

towers the chaos of madness was going it kept me going in there my first book a

bit of a stretch was all about my time in prison

and the dark humor was was just so off the chart it just that actually kept

kept my spirits up it was so funny what was the thing which surprised you most

about the experience and the security and the resources we used to describe some

of it but it seems to us it almost sounds

unbelievable it sounds incredible it's astonishing i mean

on a serious note the thing that surprised me most is i went to prison

having never ever been near a prison before i think it was all going to be

like porridge basically it was all going to be full of people

like fletch and cobber and you know the arm robbers and all the sort of old

school crims not in the slightest it is people mostly with very very

severe mental health problems or people with horrendous drug

addictions or both and those the people who are filling

ones with who are filling our prison system it is people who are ill rather

than people who are necessarily bad and when they go to prison all those

problems are just made worse they're not given mental health treatment they're

not given any drug therapy they're given drugs because the places are washed with

drugs and they come out and they re-offend all over again so that

was the thing that really shocked me was how it's not your kind of classic

gangsters there are some in there but they're few and far between it's just

very very damaged individuals who've been let down

by the system by this a lot of them have been in care since childhood they've

been abandoned by the education system and they get washed up in our prisons

you sound like a man who's glad to have been to prison

I mean did you get did you get more out of that than you thought it was it

put it this way it was an eye-opening experience and like i quickly learned

that the way to deal with it was to see it as a journalist with remarkable

access that's how i got through if you really

want to know and i thought right i haven't got a camera

but i have a pen and paper because i'm a documentary maker by trade so i'm going

to write down everything i see and i almost became

obsessional i had pages and pages of a4 notes they

look like the writings of a madman because i'd write in block capitals for

some reason and so i kind of documented everything i saw

they always text that way my friends thought i'd gone mad

because i was writing letters home to them in capitals and they thought oh god

chris lost his mind so i kept a diary and i thought

i have a platform when i get out i can talk about it i can come on shows like

this and say look what is happening inside our prisons

is brutal and it's inhumane and it's turning people into

worse criminals you know people commit more crimes because they go to our

prisons how do you think inmates inside would have reacted

to this with glee i suspect we we had this thing in well they'll be

delighted that one of their own got out of course

whenever we were in wandsworth and whenever we saw wandsworth on the news i

suspect sometimes on newsnight with one of you guys reporting and you would say

how we now go to one of the most dangerous and and dysfunctional prisons in

in the country and you do a shot of wandsworth and everyone start cheering and

sort of kicking their jaws so they watched newsnight in wandsworth prison

god yeah there's nothing else to do probably where most of our audience came

from wasn't there anything on a Thursday night

but whenever there was a right or there was ever any reporting on the prison

it was like seeing your house on the marathon you know you go oh look there's

us yay wandsworth going it was never for a good reason it was always terrible

and they'll be thrilled he's got out absolutely they'll be they'll be

cheering him on because i can thank you so much for coming in

thank you thank you for watching us all those years

yes i feel like we're letting you down now

by the time you're listening daniel califa who we should just say

denies all the charges against him may have been caught but we're talking to

you at 238 and it's been 24 hours of him being on the run

and we're starting to ask what on earth the system is

for hunting down and escape prisoner so we thought we talked to nick oldworth

former national counterterrorism coordinator who nick i think i'm writing

saying led the operational security responses to the terrorist attack in

london in 2017 nick there are a couple of things

that we just can't get out of you know the mind

one is this image i mean we haven't seen an image but that

idea of somebody crawling under the van and leaving

the prison gates on the underbelly of a truck in a kitchen uniform now

that wasn't just done on spec was it he would have had to

wrecky that or work with somebody or a truck driver to do that do you think

yeah look i mean we're not so serious it's almost comedic isn't it it's like a

scene out of paddington but it is serious because we expect our

prison estate to be secure i mean what we're dealing with here

as i understand it is a former soldier and of course we train our soldiers to

be smart resilient brave people and there's no reason

suggest that once they stop soldiering those qualities disappear

and so i think it is certainly not beyond the realms of

probability i think rather than possibility that this is something that

he has self-initiated that he has been working in the kitchen he has

spotted a weakness in their security and has possibly exploited it

but of course that doesn't mean to say that he has done it on his own and one

of the really urgent things that will be

investigated now will be first of all has there been help

during the escape has there been helping planning the escape

very importantly has it been helped from the inside of the prison service to

make that happen as well so all those things will be under

investigation but they will be concurrent with trying to find this guy

and one of the things that will be quite simple will be to

spot this vehicle leaving spot the direction that it's traveled

and effectively using the very comprehensive cctv network in london

follow that vehicle's route and a lot of that cctv

is recorded and stored and it would not surprise me if we didn't already have an

image of this guy having left the bottom of the vehicle or

getting to another vehicle or whatever it might be yeah absolutely sense then

where do you think he's gone well i think if you work on the principle

that he's done this of his own volition he's not going to hang on to the bottom

of a truck for very long so i suspect that he will have dropped off the bottom

of that truck and then just made off into what in minutes i mean in like 300

meters or you know how i would have thought so i would have thought so just

think about that hanging on to the bottom of the truck

for speed hump will probably scrape you off so i would be very surprised if he

stayed on there for very long at all you know within meters of the gate i would

have thought but i'm hypothesizing because i've not seen the vehicle

equally i'm also not familiar with whether he's improvised any sort of

attachment to help him do that that's possible and of course

you know the current investigation will pursue all those lines of inquiry

but you know one of the things i always find quite interesting is like i data

crime writer and she will tell you that it's an absolute nightmare writing

books now because of cctv it takes the mystery out of

everything and particularly now that we also have not only cctv but we have

video cams in cars doorbell cams and you name it it becomes we are

surveillance city we are surveillance more than any other Europe

more than any other place in europe you know london so we were all remembering

of course the happy valley moment where james norton

disappears out of the court and turns himself into a cyclist

right because he's got his getaway you know sort of you know news agents

and all you need i guess is my point is all you need is to not look like

yourself you don't really need to hide

you just need to have a cyclist helmet on or something right yeah you know how

many chefs go to work in london of course of course today how many utility

workers how many service sector workers do we see walking over london

you know it's very easy to blend into a busy london borough

very easy people don't return ahead for people who just look like they are

normal workers now if he's wearing something that is ostensibly

visible as prison service uniform i think that perhaps changes slightly but you

know we're also a bit of a society doesn't ask enough questions these days

finally how easy would it be for him to get out of the country because that's

presumably his aim or objective right how easy will that be for him

so i don't mean you've traveled recently but personally even the passport i find

it quite hard to get out of the country sometimes so

it's not easy to get out of the country it's easier if you're supported

and there have been lots of cases of fugitives being flown from private

airstrips out of the country and then we you know we chase them across europe

quite often but without support really difficult

because you do need a passport to get out you do need the passport to get into

whichever country of origin you're going to we are very effective at searching

at borders aviation borders in particular maritime borders are as

challenging things like euro tunnel euro star

great processes down there you know i have a relationship a commercial

relationship with some of these sectors and you see how they conduct their

activity it is very very difficult and but he

could stay inside the country but get outside by going to an embassy that was

something that you yeah so i think it's interesting isn't it

so there are dynamics here around this individual and you know without

talking about the case the official secrets act charges that you face is

our in relation to passing information to iran

now government rather sensitively no longer refers to

iran as a hostile state it refers to i think it's a state with hostile actors

within it but what's the possibility of this

individual moving to an embassy and seeking asylum

we've certainly seen that happening in london with julien assange

um so you think he could be going straight to the iranian embassy

i would rule it out and i've got no doubt at all that the metro and police

service want to rule that out either fascinating

nick thanks so much

so emily started the show talking about the political impact

or referring to it and there has been a pretty unfortunate symmetry

in the way government ministers have been talking about

this escape with how they were talking about the concrete crisis in schools

earlier in the week so michelle donald and the science

secretary told sky news earlier today she said

prisoner escapes like this remain very rare just like

concrete collapsing in schools is very rare or you're very unlikely to be

affected by it if you're a school child and again i mean or whilst both of

those things are true it doesn't do much for a government

when it is in a position of ending the week which is supposed to essentially

be a relaunch week having got to the end of it and

been unable to assure the public that all school children

will be safe and protected from literally falling concrete around their

heads and that all prisoners can be guaranteed to

remain locked up like that is a problem it started to remind me of

when you get to the sort of cascade of kind of catastrophe

sort of day after day after day do you remember gordon brown back in 2007

he had that week where you know he canceled the election

that never was and then day after day it seemed like there was it was going to

be like the plague of locusts by the end of the week you know midweek

they lost the tax disk which contained the records and tax records of 14

million people you know it was like disaster after disaster

and it just gives the impression of a government which is losing control

and they've got to again have a better narrative other than oh this doesn't

happen very often i think there is no way that you can turn

a man on the run into something that doesn't sound like utter chaos

even if it wasn't directly the fault of the prime minister or of the government

the way that kia starmer is playing it today

is by calling it a pattern of behavior and it's just what you're saying as

soon as you start to make as it were a listicle

you can create the sense in the public's mind that this is more of the same

and what he's done is he's pointed to the fact that

we've had 10 justice secretaries i'm going to say that again

we've had 10 justice secretaries over the last few years

so how on earth do you get stability how on earth do you know who is being held

where how on earth do you decide which prisoners should be allowed to work in

kitchens and which should be held at category b

prisons versus category a prisons if you're constantly shuffling the personnel

who are in charge of this and i think that kind of takes you

to the heart of what you're saying which is a government who just

constantly feels now it's on the back foot things are happening that it can't

quite lock down yeah and although of course it's not

the prime minister's fault or justice secretary's fault directly this guy is

escaped and there obviously will be bigger questions

for the prison service and ones within particular

there is a real public policy question which is

this question that Emily you've already referred to is why was he a category b

prison rather than a category a and there have been people familiar with the

prison service taking to the airwaves this morning saying well

you know what the capacity issues within the prison service are well known

i mean we've had real examples in the last few months and years

of you know prisoners having to be kept in police prison cells

rather than actual prisons such are the capacity and over capacity problems

within the prison service so that is a really legitimate question

to be asked of the government and of course it hasn't really i mean we're

only on thursday in terms of the week from hell for sunak there's more news this

morning as well about another mp resigning and another critical

by-election to come in probably just six weeks time or so which will create

another big political headache for the prime minister

that's all coming up after a break

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this is the news agents

welcome back so as we were saying there is yet another

and it's very exciting this by-election which has been announced today and this

follows the other two of course which are coming up one in rather glen which is

first in scotland crucial labor smp battle and the

other in mid-bed for true of course nadine doris old seat

alas not lady doris but maybe one day this one is in tamworth and this relates

to chris pincher who in a way you'll remember was basically

the straw which broke the camel's back of the johnson government

because it was the allegations about him and a particularly unfortunate

evening in the carton club and his groping a young

conservative male aid which eventually started the

chain of events which led to borris johnson's resignation he has been

fighting or taking it to appeal a privileges committee inquiry

into him or standards committee inquiry into him i should say

which he has lost and so he's decided rather than

inevitably having a recall petition which would be

triggered against him he's decided to throw in the towel which will lead to

a another by-election in his tamworth staffer to constituency

where there is a conservative majority of about 20 000 but which label will be

the hot favourites to take the seat so yet another headache for rishi suena

yeah it was interesting the arguments he was making because

unlike sort of many others at the time he didn't

actually deny his actions he was quite apologetic and i think he

didn't remember he blamed the booze didn't he he said that

and then he said that the suspension was disproportionate

and then he tried to argue that he hadn't damaged parliament's reputation

because the events happened at a private members club it was very tenuous

argument i have to say but the idea being that he wasn't really there in

his capacity as an mp he was just there at a private

members club but anyway the independent expert panel

sort of stroke their chins thought about this for a while and said

i'm not sure about that we think that the appellants arguments are

misconceived or erroneous and the sanction is far from being arbitrary

or disproportionate it is interesting though that

pincher has this place in history as being as you say the straw that

broke the camel's back i mean when we look back

i don't think we will think that was the thing that brought

borris johnson down i think that will be the thing that kind of

kicked him out the door finally and actually

pincher has become i think slightly totemic in this

as not exactly for his own actions if this makes sense

but for what people knew about his behavior

but were not prepared to say in other words people turning a blind eye

to the pincher like behavior that was going on in parliament

that then became intolerable or impossible to stomach

johnson lied about look at as a leadership role

and i think that was why pincher and johnson's fortunes became so meshed

but i love the way you say we've got two by elections of course

because actually we've just had three yeah and at some point you've got to say

you know the trickle down effect is not really what you want

in your possibly or almost certainly final year

of being prime minister before the election because it is

naturally very hard for the party of government the party in power

to win by elections we know that it is more unusual for them to

hold on to sit or to win seats when if you like the current or the tide is

against you and so to have this endless drip drip

effect of people leaving many of whom are leaving and writing

terrible letters when they go aka nadine doris makes it much harder for

rishi sunak to turn around and say don't worry i've got a grip on all this we've

got plenty of others well and indeed it's so much worse as well for sunak

to have them not just happen on the same day i mean in a way doris has really

wounded him for a final time in that you know had she gone

when say nigel adams went to sell bmp you can contain the damage you can put it

all in one day you split the day in three yeah exactly by having a drip drip

drip so you've got october the 19th will be midbeds

and then you'll have this probably they'll move through it i would imagine

sometime in november early november mid november that you'll have this by

election so three weeks or four weeks maybe between them

that again it allows the labor party to do is not only have two potentially

exceptional news days two terrible days for sunak

where he's got to justify the fact that he's not turning it around even in these

really safe conservative seats i mean in both cases we're talking about

majorities of nearly all over 20 000 you know these should be safe as houses

seats but also that the labor party is able to

split its resources it can focus on one seat entirely for that period

or on a bit of a roll having had some momentum look we did it in mid beds if

we can do it in mid beds with a 25 000 majority which we've never held before

my work of course we can do it in tamworth we had it as recently as 2010

so it's really bad spare of thought as well for poor old eddie hughes

who is a government minister and currently a walsall mp now hughes is

doing what is called in politics the chicken run

which is that i mean fairness to him his a walsall seat is being abolished as

part of the boundary changes and he may well have lost it anyway

so he's decided he has actually been adopted as the parliamentary candidate

for tamworth for the next election but unfortunately he

can't just do the chicken run now because that would mean that you just

trigger another by election in walsall so he's having to hold on as he's made

clear on facebook today he's having to basically hold on

and the conservatives are going to have to choose another candidate in tamworth

for this by election of course theoretically if they were to win it

that means well you know he's going to have to find another seat or he'll be

seatless but you know i think we're at that point in the electoral cycle we've

talked about it before i think we're at that point

where probably i'm not sure the government could win a by election

anywhere right now which is or it has and you contrast that with

ruther glenn which is going to be a far more competitive

battle between labor and the smp which kind of shows you the two contrasting

fortunes of the two governments at the moment the smp are down but they're not

out they're still competitive the conservatives are down and they feel

like they're completely out which is why if you knew that there was quite a lot

of bad news coming down the track at you you would be extremely excited as the

prime minister if you could announce today something which is

i think we can say unblemished good news and this is that this country

britain is going to rejoin the e u science program called horizon

brexit sort of stuffed our membership of so many

e u projects and communities and sort of collaborations

and now after two years we get to go back in

and you know it's being hailed as a boost for research and relations

with brussels and gives you funding to help collaboration between

countries and if you want to collaborate successfully on science

then you really need to have the collaboration you need to have

the funding the problem i'm guessing with this whole thing

is that much as we love the fanfare and the solution that isn't it great we've

all got this and you look down the list and you know michelle donlan who's the

science technologies secretary now is going it's great news it's wonderful

news we're back in it's great news it's wonderful news what you have to

there for admit is that it was really bad news

that we were forced to quit and it was a really bad move

that we had to leave what could only ever be seen as a helpful and

collaborative program that allowed science and

british research to flourish and so i guess the inexorable logic

of this is that if this is a much better move

then why on earth did we put ourselves through

such a cataclysmic shock that took so many of these collaborations away

yeah and obviously in that time as well

uk scientists who as you said i mean they're thrilled about this announcement

they've been pressuring the government on it month after month after month

basically since brexit happened because it is a huge scheme you know it's the

biggest collaborative scientific scheme in the world it's nearly a hundred

billion euros but of course we've missed out on

three years worth of grants scientists can apply for it

today so there's a literal cost to it it's also going to be more expensive

for us and it would have been had we retained our membership in the first

place and i think that is why actually i think horizon

is a really good kind of parable a microcosm for where

uk-e-u relations are going which is that slowly but surely especially under an

incoming labor government which doesn't have any of the internal

fractures and fishes about this ideological fishes about it the

conservatives do we will slowly but surely

re-engage and reapply to all sorts of different programs which are in essence

always were advantageous for us to be a part of but the difference is

is that we will be doing so not on our terms

not as being able to dictate the terms or at least be a key part of

negotiating the terms but they will be in so many ways imposed

upon us each in different occasion we will find the terms are that little bit

worse than had we stayed in in the first place well i think you'll negotiate as

part of the council of ministers the word that you'll hear a lot is bespoke

yeah which sounds like you've just had the finest tailor made suit

fitted but actually what it spells out is we'll pay a bit more

there will be things going on that we're still not part of but we have to frame

as if we've chosen not to rejoin that stuff

rather than you know the doors of shut or the cost is prohibitive or whatever

because this is a new framework and i suppose the last thing i'd say on this

is that when you hear the rhetoric coming from Rishi Srinak which is still

about small boats and it's about the sort of

culture wars and having to appease the sort of hard right of his party

it is interesting that yesterday he's gone off to India to sort of

Wudnarendra Modi and he's looking for trade deals there

back at home he's actually having to get on with the stuff

that just starts to make people's lives easier yeah and Sunak

in fairness the only reason this deal has got over the line is because of the

Windsor framework so we wouldn't have been the EU had made clear and we

should say by the way EU member states still have to approve our

reapplication as it were but there's no way this would have happened under a

Johnson government because Johnson wouldn't have signed the Windsor

framework and they had made clear the EU that there was going to be no agreement

on horizon unless there was some sort of solution I mean it hasn't been a

complete solution but at least some sort of progress

this is sort of patching up cultures isn't it it's putting little sticky bits

on the tires inside your bike to just get the thing to turn again

and that's the next 20 to 30 years

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commercials this is the news agents

before we go we're going to take you to Mexico which is

pretty unusual we don't cover a lot of South America but something is

happening there now which lies in such a stark contrast to its neighbor across

the border we thought we should flag it up to you because Mexico has just

decriminalized abortion in a landmark supreme court ruling it's

literally the mirror image of what happened in America

under the overturning of Roe versus Wade a year ago

yeah this decision comes two years almost two years after the court

unanimously ruled that penalizing and abortion

is unconstitutional that was obviously hailed as a watershed

moment for Mexico but not least when you consider just how

Catholic and religious and Christian in so many ways Mexico still is

nonetheless it mirrors a wider move across

Latin and South America to more liberal policies on all sorts of social issues

which as Emily said contrasts starkly with what has happened in the

United States now to put this in sort of political context for you

Mexico's coming up to an election in which two

leading candidates the presidential candidates are both female

so there are some who are questioning whether this is basically

you know a cynical way of attracting what you might call the woman's vote

but Mexico is a highly dangerous country I mean for many people we know about

how much of Mexico is enthralled to drugs cartels and all the rest of it

but it's particularly it's a very dangerous country for women

and so this kind of move almost seems as if it might be reaching out

to those who are saying we just need to take

some control back of lives that seem kind of out of control and at the

moment in 20 states 11 of the country's states do

permit abortion in sort of certain circumstances

10 can still fight to say no on a sort of state-by-state basis but

they will now have to abide by the Supreme Court's decision

and campaigners say they will fight to get the law changed in every

single state well joining us now is Elena Rodriguez Falcon she's an

academic she's a campaigner for women's rights and

she is in fact the winner of the Every Woman 2020

award which has put women in technology at the forefront

of her campaigning and Elena just tell us about this

overnight decision did it come as a surprise to you and to the people of

Mexico? Well Mexico has been working really hard

to get gender parity and equality for many many years

but just until yesterday there were about 10 states in Mexico that had

decriminalized abortion there are 20 odd more states that

hadn't done that so to me it is a bit of a surprise that it happened

quite quickly. So just unpack that for us you've got

two presidential female candidates but this was presumably done by an

independent supreme court I mean do you think it was politics

behind this decision yes? Mexico has been working towards

gender equality for a long time but it is not

barbie land only 120 years ago Mexican women didn't have a right to vote

and the UN has rated Mexico as one of the most

violent countries for women in the world. Elena do you think that

this is the end of the matter I mean obviously some people listening to this

might be surprised and to the extent that you know

Mexico remains a deeply Catholic country president López Obrador has said that

the supreme court decision should be respected but do you think that more

conservative forces within Mexico will let the matter rest here or will there

be an attempt to a backlash? There will be a backlash I don't have

any doubts about that Mexico is a deeply

Christian country mostly Catholic country and I haven't spoken to my mom

about it because this happened overnight and my mom is very liberal I'm a gay woman

so she's very liberal and yet the matter of abortion is

something that troubles her. I mean when you just look at

not just Mexico but your neighbors in Latin and South America when you look

at Colombia and Argentina and Uruguay and Guyana

who have all moved to either legalize or decriminalize abortion

they're going in one direction perhaps you'd call it a progressive direction

and you look at what's happening across the border in the US which is the

complete unraveling of that movement what do you think? Countries are

evolving in different ways Latin America has been behind

women's rights for many years and I think we are catching up

I do feel that religious bodies are gaining support and therefore

I think there is this movement backwards

Latin America whilst Christian I think is becoming more liberal

and with so much violence towards women

I think there has to be some balance and I suppose we

may well end up in the absolutely extraordinary

situation that I think you know a few years ago no one would have seen coming

of seeing American women from the southern United States in particular

where it is especially difficult to access an abortion post the

overturning of a row traveling to Mexico to get their health

services and to secure an abortion which is legal

I think that's completely possible things happen

already in that vein people travel to Mexico to get

cheaper healthcare and surgeries and particularly

selective surgeries I think that's quite dangerous but

I can see that happening myself as well Elena thanks so much for joining us just

great to have your thoughts on the news agents today

that's it from us back tomorrow yeah unless we find the prisoner lurking in

the news agents HQ mits in which case we will interrupt whatever we're doing

John is away for the next two weeks we do

we've got a spare seat and he's obviously a very very versatile kind of guy

very much so bye for now bye bye the news agents with Emily Maitlis

John Sobel and Lewis Goodall

this has been a global player original podcast and a Persephoneka production

Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.