Page 94, the Private Eye Podcast
. Hello and welcome back to another episode of Page 94.
My name's Andrew Hunter Murray, and I'm here in the eye office with Helen
Lewis, Adam McQueen and Matt Muir.
I'm thrilled to be back.
Cut that
fact check.
Come.
Yeah,
sorry.
Yeah, and we're delighted to have you know really?
Oh, thanks.
Yeah.
Great.
Yeah.
Okay.
So we're here to talk about lots of stuff that's going to be, or has recently
been in the news in between mags.
But first there is a nice update to the last episode, which covered a
lot of ecclesiastical matters and, there has been a victory for the Eye.
No, in fact a victory for page 94.
We never have victory for Adam,
almost personally, I would say, on this one.
Okay.
so the Archbishop Of Canterbury resigned, which you covered on the last podcast
he did.
You mentioned that, he was still doing the Christmas services,
still planning on putting on the nice frock and doing the Christmas services.
Yes.
Which he since dropped out of doing.
He has.
And the last issue of the magazine mentioned that the, Archbishop
of Canterbury Teddies are still available in the Canterbury Gift Shop.
in the trademark Welby specs and, with the trademark, Eton, history, That's, that
was just a lovely little story, but there has been a further development since then.
Is that right, Adam?
Yes.
He made his resignation speech in the House of Lords because as Helen
pointed out, all those bishops still got a say in our government.
he made the most.
Extraordinarily Tined resignation speech, didn't we?
no.
He said the thing is, if you wanna make God laugh, and I know a lot about that
as an archbishop, then you make plans.
So I had a lot of plans for next year.
Actually.
They won't be happening.
this is honestly genuinely the tone of it.
He said, the person I really feel sorry for is my diary secretary,
if you are going to pity anyone, pity my poor diary secretary.
The crashing sound of no violins, breaks out in sympathy.
Just the extraordinary.
And then he, kept saying things like, someone was technically in charge.
He's the phrase, technically in charge.
That's what you are.
If you're Archbishop of Canterbury, now you're technically in charge.
Wow.
yeah, and said someone's head had to roll.
I suppose it had to be mine.
it was all the way through.
It was a basically like.
I'm annoyed about this.
I actually had a lot of exciting frock wearing planned for next year.
It's been ruined by you people, but I guess someone had to take responsibility.
I guess it had to be me.
It's
very, it is very Greg Wallace.
It's per spectacles, bald man.
not really apologizing.
And then it was
an absolute Greg Wallace because he then, just as Greg Wallace did, the
very next day, he had to apologize and say he'd got the tone of it wrong
and he was extremely sorry and, He might be showing some repentance for
the first time in this entire affair.
Okay.
Yeah.
And there was a
bishop sitting next to him who had her head in her hands, who
I believe Adam, is this right?
Is she the bishop of London?
It was only the Bishop of London because, Welby didn't get
Paula Nels as the first, second
choice to Paula Vennels.
you might well have your head in your hands.
Yeah.
That, so what was that as in Vennels was, nailed on for the job?
He wanted to give the job of Bishop to London, where he wrote about
this at the time, to Paula Vennels, head of the post office and chief
villain in the post office scandal.
Which I mean, give you an early, a early measure of HR competence.
Anyway, he's gone now.
He's not gonna be on your telly over Christmas.
He's not gonna be doing the New Year's message.
So I think the rule of this is don't mess with Page 94.
Fantastic.
Okay.
And if you want to deliver the Christmas message, you can apply now.
we'll do details at the end of the show.
let's get into the business of this week's podcast, and we're gonna
start off from Canterbury to crypto.
Seamless, Matt, there have been a lot of stories about crypto recently.
there's been a huge scandal in the UK this week about a, money
laundering, crypto gang that has been smashed and it's got roots
stretching all the way back to Moscow.
But one of the main reasons people are interested in it at the moment
is that crypto is suddenly back in an enormous way because Donald
Trump is going to, I believe, establish a US Federal Reserve of.
He's gonna turn Fort Knox into a bitcoins, we're all
going to be using imaginary internet money in the future.
that's basically that, Andy, that's all you need to know fundamentally, I suppose
we need to start with a basic explanation of what we mean when we say crypto.
most simply.
It's a bunch of different currencies, and I use this in inverted commas
because they, as a general rule, are not backed by any bank or government.
as Helen said, generated through the cryptographic process and
which exists on the blockchain, an immutable, decentralized ledger
of transactions, which means that a, you can own them anonymously.
B, you can transfer them anonymously.
And c in theory, every transaction that is taken using, money that's
on the blockchain, cryptocurrency can be tracked and is there forever.
So it's a way of authenticating, , ownership.
Or purchases or something like that.
okay, so we have this Anonymous, slightly sketchy pseudo currency
whose value fluctuates wildly.
And there are many, different variants of them.
The one that everyone has heard of is Bitcoin.
Yes.
that was the original one that was invented by the mysterious Satoshi
Nakamoto but various things have, as the terminology goes, forked off that.
So there's Ethereum, which is very big, which is what tended to be used to
by all of the NFTs that listeners may remember were briefly very buzzy around
about the time of lockdown and NFTs, just to quickly bracket in that non
fungible
tokens.
And they were pictures of monkeys,
which were among subtle things, which were largely, but not
exclusively, pictures of monkeys.
Yeah,
you're paying a lot of money for a jpeg.
All of this is.
Completely mad to it.
I know, I'm sure our listeners to the podcast will be deeply invested
in the meme coin scene, but it's, very hard to understand why this is
relating to the real world and to
American fiscal policy.
The thing that's important to remember about cryptocurrencies as
they currently stand is that they are, whilst they can be used for the
storing of large volumes of money, et cetera, they are in the main used as
incredibly volatile gambling tools.
Okay.
And to launder money, as you mentioned, at the top, as was revealed
in the, in the ft of the weekend and, and very often to buy drugs.
the, main reason back in the early days of Bitcoin, why anyone would invest in
Bitcoin was to be able to, yeah, buy.
By drugs on the dark web.
So football trading cards, you're like, panini stickers don't
have any inherent value, but everybody together decides to that.
Some like the special golden one is going to be worth 10,000 pounds.
And as long as you can find a buyer for that special golden one.
But what happens is there are these things called meme coins.
So Doge is an example of that.
Everybody who likes a certain meme gets very excited about them.
They sell a coin related to it.
And as long as you can find somebody who is willing to keep buying in and
keep buying in, the price goes, oh.
Up and up.
So they've become the site of what is called pump and dumps, which is when I
say I'm issuing Helen Coin and everyone needs to get on the ground floor.
'cause this one's going to the moon.
It's gonna be massive.
And then all the, let's be honest, thousands and thousands
of Helen fans buy my Helen coin.
Yeah.
I sell it off, make a massive profit.
I've pumped it up by talking about how amazing it is.
And then I dump all of my stock in it, all of my investment
in it, and the value crashes
and all of the Hellen fans lose their shirts.
Yeah.
But I still get that money in, real actual money.
and why is America now going, hell leather on this, please?
so partly because of the Donald, despite having previously
indicated skepticism as to the,
it's all a scam.
Yeah.
he said literally it was used to buy drugs and the Donald famously
does not like drugs and used.
He's right about that though, right?
A hundred percent right about that.
A lot of it is a scam.
except, weirdly, that's the
answer I was looking for.
That's what it is, right?
Okay.
Yeah.
It's a scam.
Okay.
except, weirdly, over the course of the past four years, pretty much
since effectively covid, Florida.
Has become one of the intellectual centers of, Bitcoin, a lot of the people
that are heavily into cryptocurrency, the speculation around cryptocurrency
and promoting it as a viable financial alternative system who congregate in
Florida, which is coincidentally where Donald Trump has spent a significant
portion of the last four years.
Now, if you are someone like Donald Trump who is fundamentally
at heart, something of a larger than life huckster personality.
what better vehicle for someone than a currency that is largely mimetic based on
nothing more than vibes, and which can, if you treat it properly, stand to make
you as the person at a top of a pyramid of it, quite astonishingly wealthy.
He did a lo-fi version of this and that he sold actual, like digital trading cards.
So they were essentially NFTs featuring very him in various AI
generated poses looking butch.
And then if you bought the full set, you got a piece of the suit that
he was wearing when he got shot.
So
this was like panini stickers that we used to trade up still.
But that's how I just,
honestly, that is the way to think about all these things.
Okay.
They like all money really, unless it's backed by a government, they
have no value apart from what someone will agree that the value is right.
It's a kind of collective agreement about it.
The market decides what the value is.
This is taking me back to a very upsetting time for me in 1997 trying
to get the entirety of the Liverpool football squad in panini sticker form.
Do the words gots got
needs still fill you with a terrible sense of anxiety.
They
certainly do.
I, yeah.
so this is.
I'm starting said it.
T the problem about it is that obviously lots of people bought in Bitcoin 10 years
ago when it was valued much less and have made whopping great fortunes in it.
Yeah.
So everybody thinks that they can be the person that does that now, and this
is technically known as the Greater Fool theory, I believe, where you're
trying to find someone who's a bigger muppet than you to take these,
overinflated things off your hands.
And there's something really interesting about the extent to which this.
Plays into a wider set of themes in American and frankly
broader Western culture.
Again, this feels very much like things that have happened since 2019.
It feels like, things that fermented during covid that bubbled
up as a result of people having a lot of time on their hands.
Some people having a significant amount of disposable income because
of reduced cost during that time.
Deciding that they were going to use those to speculate and invest wildly in these,
at the time, excitingly frothy things.
it was NFTs then now it's meme coins.
And, it's also linked into things like the deregulation of online gambling
in the states, which has created a frankly terrifying situation of,
Fairly febrile speculation, around sports betting, which, if you're
not in sports, you don't need to be.
If you're in celebrities, just buy your favorite celebrities meme coin
and hope that in 24 hours you've multiplied your investment by a hundred
rather than lost your entire house.
And the reason that there's a political angle in it is that all of the big
established banks have been, to some extent, creeping towards investing in it.
So Howard Lutnick, who was the Trump transition chair and will be a Secretary
of Commerce, he is invested in a fund that has a holding in, I think Tether,
which is one of the stable coins.
and Trump now has, David Sachs, who was in the All In podcast.
He's one of the PayPal Mafia, along with Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, that
kind of group of investors that got very big at the end of the 1990s.
He's now gonna be Trump's crypto czar.
There's a huge amount of pressure from people in Silicon Valley who
like this deregulated finance that's outside the traditional financial
system for it to become accepted.
The problem is that, they've got fortunes to lose and gamble, right?
The reason that we have, for example, things like deposit
protections is because for.
People lower down the chain.
If you put 40,000 pounds, if you put your kid's college fund, if you put,
your mortgage payment, you don't tell your wife about it into a meme
coin and suddenly it turns out it's not as funny as you thought it was.
Yeah.
No one comes to save you.
And this is what, I think is interesting in terms of the British,
aspect to this, which is that obviously legislation lags quite.
A long way behind the reality of what people are doing.
So Parliament have just legislated that Bitcoin and other digital assets
are considered personal property.
But that was this year, that, so that's, they are having to catch up quite fast.
And I think it's 12% of British adults now own Crypto in some form or another.
And a third of people who own Crypto who were surveyed said, if, something
went wrong, I could raise a complaint with the financial conduct authority.
Really?
Yeah.
And that's the problem.
You can't, because they're not regulated.
As you say by the Financial Conduct Authority.
do you want to allow people to do this but regulate what they're doing?
Or do you just simply want to say to them, look, this is really risky.
You stand to lose everything,
Yeah.
My bank, when, in my banking app, when I pay people, I dunno if you've seen this,
but it has a popup and all the popups of all the things you might be doing.
One of them is, are you paying for cryptocurrency?
And I did press that once and it was like, it went, woo.
Are you absolutely sure you want to hand over all your money to
someone that you've just met on the internet that often turns out badly.
It's interesting the extent to which this is also a very much a,
young people thing and one might argue a young people problem.
Oh, a young man problem.
I think a young man problem that it's part of that we're talking
about kind of culture of you listen to these podcasts that are very male
and not these, not this, podcast.
Oh, this process is quite male,
I disagree
actually,
but, but it's like a, it's a whole life.
'cause it's seen as being risk taking.
And the whole Trump thing is very much like we are men.
Men take risks.
Women are like the HR department constantly going Uhuh.
But that's what men do.
They put their money into Hawk Tuah . Girl's meme coin.
Now I think for Adam's benefit we should explain what Hawk Tuah girls meme, coin.
'cause all of, see, imagine having this conversation in 2015.
It's ridiculous.
You could, I know what a girl is.
Okay.
I think Should we, I know
what a coin is.
I'm okay with those two minutes.
So do we start with Hawk Tuah
? Hawk Tuah Girl rugged.
A meme coin Adam.
Oh
dear.
Okay.
There's an Adam.
I'm just gonna zone out this for, there's a new American celebrity
whose name is Hailey Welch.
She's known as the Hawk to a Girl and I, here's the BBC explanation of who she is.
This is from the BBC News website, known online as the Hawk Tuah . A girl, Ms.
Welch, went viral after speaking.
The ONA matter appear Hawk Tuah imitating the sound of someone
spitting during an interview.
In June, it made the 22-year-old from Belfast, Tennessee an overnight sensation.
So why would someone be spitting during an interview in June?
There's, context here.
It was, the answer was about whether or not well wanted to
perform a sex act, which cannot be described on a family podcast.
How would you make that good?
And she said 'you would hawk tuah and spit on that fang'.
And that was enough to, now she has a podcast called Talk Tuah,
which in fairness is a very, good.
Titles.
Great.
Can't argue that.
But obviously she's got some very smart people behind her who have
worked out all the ways that you can make money outta the kind of modern
internet, one of which is having a podcast and adverts and all of that.
She's
got a dating app that she released last month, which is in no way special, but
requires a subscription to use because her fans might want to meet other of her fans
via an officially sanctioned dating app.
Great.
It's like the Matt Hancock app.
it's like the
classified ads in Private Eye.
Okay.
Yeah.
You can put it that way.
And she recently, in fact, within the last week I believe,
launched, her own crypto coin,
right?
We had this podcast for quite a while now, guys.
And we don't have our own dating app or our own Bitcoin.
So what are we doing?
The hell are we doing with our, I dunno.
You're absolutely right.
We
could have Page 94 coin, but who, I'd like to think that our
Herbert would be so, Herbert Gusset
would put absolutely everything
gusset coin...
into the gusset coin.
Oh, gusset coin.
Come on.
That's good.
Come on.
We were doing memes before the internet, and
the problem was that after Welch launched this cryptocurrency coin.
various people piled in and then it lost 95% of its value, right?
So everyone who'd invested lost, lost their, guesses on it.
All that one
assumes that Ms.
Welch hasn't.
Probably not.
I think her lawyers suggest that she, with any such suggestion
would be deeply defamatory.
But yes, I think someone, someone has clearly been on the right side
of this trade for all the people who've been on the wrong side of it.
Yeah.
It speaks to something about how modern fandom works and how there are now so
many creators who build direct these parasocial relationships and you become
a kind of figure through having your own podcast, through having your own.
Dating app, every sort of, all the brand extensions.
Yeah.
And we hear about Hawk Tuah Girl.
'cause it's amusing to explain to your parents who that is.
But there are, I'm not your dad
for the purposes of this conversation.
That's the thing.
Official podcast dad, when Ian's not here.
Yeah, great.
Exactly.
what's fascinating about that, that this is a story that will have
been repeated all over the place.
Elon Musk used to pump Dogecoin all the time.
I just think we should put down a marker now that unfortunately people are gonna
be hearing a lot more about this because it's going to become deeply involved.
there not, Andy, we've talked about government regulation things, but
I remember you doing a couple of stories a few years back when Rishi
Soak was in the treasury about launching an official British crypto.
The idea was discussed and then I think it was kicked into the longer, I think G GB
coin, as I believe it was g possibly coined coin.
That's right.
Yeah.
is still theoretically floating about as a potential idea, Michael, the
other one's theoretically floating.
But what's, what is also interesting about this is the.
As he was saying, this is driven by US culture and US politics, but it is
very much a problem over here as well.
Or it will become more of a problem over here as well.
because whilst the main markets for these things, the main people who
create these coins are often these very, big high profile international
celebrities that come outta the US and who are very mimetic.
There is then this secondary layer of grift, which is all of the people who are
attempting to make a living by attempting to sell information about this stuff and
sell the get rich quick schemes, right?
And to get a little bit of side cash for promoting these things.
So the number of influencers.
Influencers, again, use the inverted commas, in the UK are making a lot
of money out of promoting Oh really?
A lot of these schemes.
So last month alone, the FSA, which as of last year now regulates,
advertising around this space.
they've had, interviews under caution with 20 influencers for
misrepresenting crypto deals, not being accurate about risk, et cetera.
But I think it's, fair to say that 20 is a drop in the ocean
if it's very easy to go on.
I briefly went on.
Reluctantly went on X this morning.
Okay.
and just have a quick look at the sort of people who are currently, as
of today, flogging this stuff on X.
And what's fascinating about it is that all of them have in
their biographies words like.
Definitely not advising consumers in the uk.
Definitely not giving financial advice.
Proceed with caution, but also wow.
Book a free strategy call with me.
So what's fascinating about this is that a lot of these people are
avoiding regulation by a, putting disclaimers on stuff that they.
Put on social media whether or not the disclaimers you might think are
adequate is open to debate, but still they are at least ostensibly attempting
to abide by the lesser of the law.
But then at various other points, directing, people who follow them to
channels on Telegram or channels on Discord, which the regulator can't see.
Oh, wow.
And which is basically a small closed community where one bloke at the top tells
a load of people, Hey guys, why don't you chuck a few hundred quid into this week?
That's why I'm interested
when you say 12% of British people hold crypto.
'cause I wonder how many of those percentage think that they hold crypto.
Because you quite often read now in the consumer champion bits of the money page,
someone will get taken in by a scammer.
It says, give me some money.
I'll send you a screenshot showing that I've got it in my crypto wallet.
And how many people actually have the level of sophistication to know
that could just be a screenshot of anyone's crypto wallet.
They never have direct access to it.
So what about these magic beans that I've got?
hold onto them.
Might go into something.
From the giddy heights of meme coins and crypto...
Adam, tell us what's going on at the Observer.
for, to right over to old media, the oldest liberal paper in the country.
Was it 1791, I think for set up?
yes.
it is going, it was confirmed last week, that the Scott Trust, owners
of the Guardian, and as the guardian in perpetuity, but not the observer.
Have given the initial, go ahead to the deal with Tortoise
Media to sell off the Observer.
And they did this on the second day of a strike by Observer and guardian staff,
just to add insult to a lot of injury that was already being felt over there.
So you've covered this recently on the pod, but this is all
development since then, right?
yep.
Yeah,
this is in the week since we were last.
Corot.
This is in the, fortnight.
Since, the last podcast, yes, since the last issue.
It's, last time we had a media misery roundup, and this is Luck.
This now is the very much the flagship misery because they
are very unhappy, aren't they?
This all, this is special
Christmas misery, isn't it?
Yeah.
Last week in Private Eye we quoted, the former guardian critic, Philip Hope
Wallace, and his advice that you should never work for a liberal, employer because
they will sack you on Christmas Eve.
just ahead of Christmas comes the news, that yes, The Observer is being offloaded.
we've, we're talking about this in terms of a sale, actually, still quite
murky a lot of the details on this, but some of the things that have emerged
last week, one is that the, one of the people that the Guardian Media
Group are selling, the Observer to is.
The Scott Trust who are going to, be one of the investors in the new thing.
They're putting in 5 million pounds towards the Scott Trust wait, the
observer is partially buying the observer.
the observers owners, the Scott Trust are selling the observer
partially to the Scott Trust.
Yes.
I, they had
a good price for it.
Quite weird.
5 million, that was, got out them slightly under sance at the meeting of, of,
journalists with management last week.
So
why,
would they do that?
I think that was done because the feeling among The Observer staff
was that they were selling off the paper to a pretty dicey prospect.
And that taught us is a startup and has relied on funding rounds
and there was a feeling that The Observer was therefore gonna back.
This startup by saying, look, we'll give them a cash injection.
they're much more likely to survive that.
The kind of the, the, anger from The Observer staff came from the
kind of, this is essentially softly shutting the observer because, it
staff has been run down for a while.
It hasn't had its own web presence.
So I think their feeling was that this is a kind of, this is you offloading
it, getting off your hands and you don't really care what happens to it.
In order to assuage that, the Scot Trust said, look, we're gonna, we
are willing to put some money in.
It makes it much more likely that this brand will survive long term.
I think that feeling was probably best expressed in the meeting, last week
by Charles Garsa, who's the chair of the, Guardian Media Group who used a
really weird passive voice construction.
He said The reserve a much smaller brand and it's found it much more
difficult to obtain the investment it requires in recent years.
Which why it then has to be, which is a bit like staffing someone for a
few years and they say, gosh, you're looking terribly thin, aren't you?
It's just, okay.
Do you want to know who some of the other investors are who are
piling in two tortoise to put foot up the money for the observer?
Of course.
one is, yellow Wood, which is private equity company, which as far as
I can see, specializes mostly in investing in shower gels and makeup.
And as we all
know.
Private equity makes every business that invest in better.
Oh
yeah, Lovely stuff.
standard investment, who do have some, some media investments, they're behind.
grad cart, remember it?
Vanity Fair Editors Air Mail thing, which is like a weekly newsletter.
That's a newsletter.
Yeah.
he sent out, yeah.
And a few other things.
Malcolm Gladwell's podcast company as well.
They've invested quite heavily.
Kin
Industries.
That's the one.
yep, So there is some reasoning behind that.
This day, which turns out not to be private equity, it's actually
a charitable foundation set up by.
Gary Luner, who is a big, donor to the Labor Party.
And also the last one I've got on my list is Fillion capital,
So all of this money is going into tortoise, is going through the tortoise
actually, and coming out the other end of it through the tortoise to grab.
Okay.
what is the prospect for the actual Observer hacks who are gonna be parceled
up and transported over to Tortoise?
this was the other big development of last week because they are not
necessarily all going to be parceled up.
You'll remember from our last podcast, listeners that we were talking
about the amazing deal that all Guardian Observer staff have with.
Between their union and management there, where there can be no
compulsory redundancies whatsoever.
So they run a, that's a fantastically cushy agreement, which is,
unusual for most workplaces.
They have managed to get written in as part of this deal.
the fact that all existing terms and conditions of employment will be
honored by Tortoise, but also the any Observer staff who don't wish to go,
and, work for Tortoise will be offered voluntary redundancy on enhanced terms.
And that was one of the things that was causing.
Particular fury at the Observer because, there was a voluntary redundancy round
earlier this year, which quite a lot of high profile people took and jumped ship
closed just before they discovered that.
In fact, their management had been in negotiations to flog off their
paper for some months before that.
that makes, to me, makes a lot of sense.
I think that's, again, I think torts have got a really.
Brilliant deal outta this in terms of what they got from The Guardian, because
you have to think if you are a nimble startup, you might not necessarily need
absolutely everybody, particularly, long established and therefore quite
well paid writers and columnists.
And if they can.
if they can get, if they can, what they seem to actually want is the branding and
the news, like the newsprint presence.
They don't necessarily want Absolutely.
All of the staff, although they've agreed to take them on in principle.
So that bit looks slightly good and, as you say, good for the
staff that they can also exit on pretty decent, generous terms.
the people I'd be a bit worried about as well is the existing Tortoise staff,
because it does seem that tortoise, which has already pivoted from being
a slow news organization, which was the idea behind the name Tortoise.
Yeah.
To a kind of podcast producer now seems to be flipping over
completely to being, uniquely, the publisher of a weekly newspaper.
So all of those people who joined thinking it was gonna be one of those
things before in a slightly odd position.
Now, do we have any feel
for how readers of the Observer might.
Feel these changes.
We know
we, have a little, and we have that from the edition of The Guardian,
which, which came out the day after the two days of strikes last week.
for those people who are still buying a paper, they may have felt
rather shortchanged by two very thin editions of The Guardian last, last
Wednesday and Thursday, which, They managed to fill out the entire feature
section with just a very difficult quiz from some school in the island.
Man.
Nice.
That they publish every year.
I never get any of those right.
No, it's impossible, isn't it?
Completely and
utterly impossible.
but, most other things were missing and almost every byline in there brilliantly.
We just said guardian staff.
Guardian staff, which I guess was just cath finer and, oh, I was gonna
say, and her husband, but even Adrian Giles did not turn up for work.
He was absent from the pages of the Guardian, last Thursday.
So, that was yet another delight that Guardian readers was missing out on.
But on Saturday there was, a letters page, and that did have some fairly
excoriating letters from readers saying, if you think it's such a great case to
be made for selling off the Observer, why don't you tell us what it is?
And certainly in that meeting last week, the council I, I hear from speaking
to various Observer and Guardian people, is that they remain very,
unconvinced and extremely angry as well.
So it's not a happy Christmas coming up over at the Guardian and Observer.
our third section today is about something called the ZEV mandate, and
this is something that was actually in the latest issue of the MAG.
It's a piece by Hedgehog, who is one of our most secret correspondents.
Hedgehog writes all about matters of road transportation, and this
piece was about the very confused and conflicting signals that are being sent
on the matter of electric vehicles.
Not only the signals being sent To the British car
industry, but also to customers.
And firstly, what is the ZEV mandate?
Earlier on I said those words to Helen and Adam, and they both
looked at me like I'd grown horns.
I think that's fair to say.
I
thought it was a sanctioned oligarch.
Genuinely, I
just assumed it was another Bitcoin.
So
well, so the Zev mandate, zero emission vehicles mandate Is the mechanism by
which the government is trying to get Britain to switch over from petrol and
diesel, two electric cars, and they're trying to do it in relatively short order.
And there has been a lot of discussion in the press recently about whether
this is feasible, whether the timescale is reasonable, whether the
mechanisms being used are reasonable.
Am I right in thinking that it was supposed to be by 2030 and
it's been pushed back to 2035?
you'll be staggered to hear it's been completely hashed around
with it almost every stage.
Theresa May, who let's not forget, introduced, the, idea of, net zero
by 2050 and brought it into law in one of her final acts in Parliament.
She said, let's do 2040.
And to be clear, that data is, all new cars being sold will be electric, right?
It's not to do with, you won't be, you'll be able to drive your petrol car.
You'll be able to drive a secondhand and buy a secondhand petrol car.
It's about new cars all being switched over, Cleaned up, on dirty
tap off by that point, 2040 fine.
Boris Johnson then said, I think we can do it by 2030.
Have a crack.
You'll be staggered.
You'll be staggered to hear that.
Might not have been completely worked out, often an ambitious target will get
to the moon by the end of this decade.
That kind of thing.
Spurs action and innovation.
Fine.
Rishi Sak then said, no, let's do 2035.
Actually, it's all been going a bit fast and it was all looking a bit
difficult, so let's not do that.
Car manufacturers must be fuming.
They have,
yeah.
Literally
that fuming is, good
for not for very much longer.
They'll just be overheating time.
They'll
just be gently buzzing.
They are because they have put a lot of effort and energy, although maybe
not as much as a lot of people say they should into this transition, and
they keep getting different signals.
Labor was elected saying we will bring it back to 2030.
Reestablishing Boris Johnson's initial very ambitious goal, they have not
yet confirmed, in a legislative sense.
That's definitely what's gonna happen.
But what they have said is, we are keeping.
We're back to the sanction, oligo, the Zev mandate, and that is the ratchet
mechanism by which you get more and more electric cars sold each year up to the
point of which it's, a hundred percent.
So this year all car manufacturers have to sell 22% of cars.
The cars they sell have to be electric.
Do car manufacturers not like this?
'cause my impression was that actually building electric cars is
good and people do, when they get them, like them, that, people tend to
be worried about the range of them.
people do tend to like them when they've got 'em and say, oh, I wouldn't go
back to petrol, like sort of 97% Car manufacturers have had a nightmarish
time, but it depends how quickly they've invested or haven't invested.
So the cars which have, like Tesla, very happy with the Zev mandate 'cause they
sell a hundred percent electric cars
by contrast.
Yeah.
having famously, recently rebranded and yeah.
With its commitments, goal Electric hasn't, which is one of the
reasons why it's had to pivot.
Exactly.
Okay.
Yeah, And, Stellantis, which is a giant umbrella, which has, Fiat, Pergo, voxel
load loads of different brands under it.
They have been really slow.
So they have been frantically lobbying to go slower and say, oh, we think
this ZMA is a bit, much, bit soon.
But it completely depends how much they have or haven't done.
And how much manufacturing have they got based in Britain?
Presumably that all ties into the political
well,
with SM port has to go all electrical.
That's quite a big deal up in the, Yes.
So Stellantis have said, we're gonna close our voxel plant in Luum, which is
one of their two big plants in the uk.
And they've been trying to link it to the mandate.
They've been trying to say, this is actually thanks to us
being forced to go electric.
And what the problem is, that it's not really, 'cause globally they've
been having a nightmarish time.
They've just had an awful, they've had to recall like 400,000.
Petrol cars in America.
'cause the steering wheels were faulty that like they were, yeah.
They were never, they weren't doing tremendously and
haven't been for some years.
And the sort of shadow under all of this is Chinese cars,
which are increasingly electric.
I think it's half of all new cars now in China are electric, which are quite cheap.
And they're pretty good.
And Western car manufacturers are really.
They haven't responded fast enough.
And so they're now having to rely either on tariffs, which are double-edged because
it means that they can't sell their cars to China if the tariffs are raised on
both sides or, they're having to rely on, very expensive cars that people
buy, but they're buying fewer numbers.
The reason this is on the news at the moment is the big lobbying going
on, seeing will the new government stick to the guns, that it was
handed by the outgoing conservatives or will they water things down?
And Louise Hague, the transport secretary, was one of the two
big voices in the room on that.
RRIP.
RIP
and the other is, Jonathan Reynolds, who's the business secretary.
so the one thing that I keep on seeing said in certain corners of the web about
electric cars is that one mustn't ever buy one because if one does, the battery is
liable to explode and burst into flames at any given moment, and you will be
mated as though you were driving a Tesla.
Is this true?
Mine
has caught fire every single day.
I've had it so far and it's been a flipping nightmare,
but this is why I think to go back to it, is the involvement of Elon Musk in the
Trump and being first body is fascinating.
'cause I know I've said this before, but the Trump speech that I watched
at the rally, he had to reverse out of saying that electric vehicles
were bad when in the late, A neuron sparked somewhere at the back of
course, for people who want them.
They're great.
Yes.
And so I think there is a really interesting counter pressure,
which is obviously that yeah.
That Elon Musky is hanging around the US president lobbying constantly for
his electric car companies completely.
So that of all the bits of the energy transition that I think
might very well happen on schedule this one is, this one's a goer.
Yeah.
But, and environmentally, Andy, what's the, what are there issues with, because
it's lithium batteries, isn't it?
Yeah.
Where are they getting the lithium from?
Oh,
there are a few different battery technologies basically.
There's no way of making a car that it doesn't involve extracting
something from the ground.
The advantage of, I think the electric thing is that you don't have to keep
extracting several billion tons a year of oil to refine and turn into your petrols.
Once you've got the chemicals in your car's battery.
You should be able to recycle those pretty efficiently.
'cause at the moment, not many cars are being recycled electric cars
because they last a very long time.
But once they start being recycled, the idea is that eventually your
car, at the moment, which you've got, you run it for 10 years, you
wanna change it, you recycle it.
The chemicals in there will make a slightly more efficient battery
next time round the same quantity of chemicals 'cause battery
technology would've improved.
So that's the big advantage, which is great.
And the other big advantage is you don't have to keep on buying
petrol for it all the time.
in terms of where those chemicals come from, what are the interesting things
about, to go back to the point about China and the increasing Chinese dominance
of the electrical market, one of the reasons for that is that they have a.
I wouldn't say a monopoly, but they have significant hands on the world's supply
of the rare metals that are required to make these batteries as a result of the
Belt and Road initiative that basically saw them buy up large swathes of Africa.
In exchange for mining rights and things like that.
Which means that now the Chinese market is able to produce batteries scale that Yeah.
Simply isn't possible to other manufacturing bases.
Yeah.
is
that the geopolitics I think are gonna be really fascinating 'cause we're talking
in a week, it has not been a good week for the kind of other block of power.
The kind of Russia, Iran, Syrian access.
Yeah.
Some of which is, backed by, China.
But it's really interesting that you have to, hive off China as being in
a very different situation to all the other bits of the world economy that are
opposed to essentially American interests.
Still, the Chinese economy slowed down, but still in a pretty good place.
But other bits of that axis are not looking so fresh.
No, they're not just thinking
about the knock on effects our economy, we're gonna lose petrol stations.
The wellbeing cafe will be no more.
Where will you
be able to buy?
Where will you able to very enter present for your wife on
Christmas Eve when the pub
closes,
but you still get superchargers that aren't significantly better than
charging your car from your main at home.
And it'll be a long time before you can charge as efficiently at home as you can.
So the, yeah, elsewhere, and this is the thing that actually.
The government really needs to get a grip on because chargers on
a motorway are really expensive compared with charging a home.
They cost 10 times as much.
In a lot of cases, you can charge a car at a on a home supply if
you have a charger for a Fiverr.
And if you get a car that goes 300 miles for a Fiverr, that's nice.
That's good.
People are gonna want that.
Yeah.
Can take advantage of that.
Yeah.
But.
30 or 40% of people in the UK don't have off street access.
I try and get the green Ubers around the place and I always
talk to the driver 'cause I'm a nerd about this kind of stuff.
And they also, yeah, I charge on the expensive rapid chargers.
'cause they don't, they live in flats or they live in places
which don't have their own drives.
So they have to use this system, which is very expensive, so the, government hasn't
really announced what they're going to do on really liberalizing the charging
infrastructure, making it easy for anyone to just bang in charges anywhere.
It's such an interesting story because, so part of it is that
kind of very musk guy, let the free market reign break free or renovated.
Yeah.
But then it's all has to be backed up by essentially infrastructure
that only the government has got the ability to really invest in.
Yeah.
It's gonna be a hassle to do.
Can I just offer a solution?
Yeah.
Milk float.
You don't see them around anymore, so there must be a
load of secondhand milk float.
It's not gonna matter.
The
Sinclair C five,
it's durable.
It's also good.
yeah.
Clive Sinclair and Benny Hill has the fastest moment in the west, I think.
Other way forward here.
that's what we've got time on.
The oldest podcast in the world.
You call me your dad.
Super.
Just going with it.
okay.
That's it for this episode of page 94.
Thank you so much for listening, and thank you to Helen, Adam, and
Matt for being here in the room.
We hope you've enjoyed it.
If you have and you'd like the magazine, go to private hyphen.co
uk and buy a subscription.
We'll be back in a week's time.
and actually none of us will be back in, in a week's time.
Even better
than
but Ian and an All Star cast will be back in a week's time with, the Eyes
Annual Christmas Show, which is live.
It's recorded in front of a delighted audience.
It's all the best bits of the gags from the year.
it's really great.
And that is going out in a week's time as a little bonus Christmas treat.
And then a little while after that, we will be doing our end of year
Christmas quiz, hotly anticipated.
You won't believe what the scores have been like for this year.
It's striking.
so do tune in then.
That's all.
Thank you again for listening and as always, to Matt Hill of
Rethink Audio for producing.
Bye for now.