Has Andy Burnham stopped caring what Donald Trump thinks? | The News Agents

Is there something going on now with Burnham's new administration where he just doesn't actually feel the need to ask permission? I said to him, have we broken with America now on foreign policy? And he just, he had a twinkle in his eye when he said this. He said, no John, we haven't broken with America, we're just differentiating. Does Trump actually feel relieved by the position that the UK and other governments have taken? It was a good political operation. The News Agents podcast is brought to you by HSBC UK, opening up a world of opportunity. This is a global production. Well, I would say that the president has not commented on this. As I said, neither have I at this point. We were made aware that they were going to make this decision. We heard their arguments as to why. But look, we share the goal of stability. We don't want to see some uptick in violence or an uptick in conflict or tensions in the West Bank at a very tenuous time in the region. There's always tenuous times. But beyond that, I don't think as of this moment, we don't have any further comment on the UK decision that I think was announced just a few hours ago. That was Marco Rubio, US Secretary of State, telling us bluntly that they don't really mind what Andy Burnham has decided to do in his sanctions against Israel. Presumably, he's speaking for Trump there, too. So is the anger being felt about what is happening in the West Bank as keenly felt in America as it is in Europe? And to say it quietly, does Donald Trump approve of what the British have done? Welcome to The News Agents. The News Agents. It's Jon. It's Maitlis. And I think it's fair to say that yesterday, around this time, we were expecting the actions of the UK government to have serious repercussions with Donald Trump. We thought there might be a bust-up. We thought there might be an incoming row. And Jon is checking his Truth Social account on a minutely basis. But so far, there has not been the outrage or the slapdown that we were expecting over those sanctions on Israel. Now, Israel itself is furious. We know that. The foreign minister, Gideon Saar, has announced the closure of the British consulate in Jerusalem. He's put countermeasures in response to new sanctions. He's called it anti-Israel. And he's also talking about the termination of British activities, trained Palestinian Authority forces in Judea and Samaria. And he's denying entry to 12 British elected officials. Jeremy Corbyn, Zahra Sultana, top of the list. You can probably work out the sort of flavour of the others. I think it was pretty unlikely they were going to be taking their holidays in Eilat anyway. We don't think they were heading off to Tel Aviv in the near future. The point is that Israel's ire was kind of bedded in. But Trump's ire was expected and hasn't come. So today on the episode, we're asking two questions. Does Trump actually feel relieved by the position that the UK and other governments have taken? And is there something going on now with Burnham's new administration, where he just doesn't actually feel the need to ask permission? In the same sense that British governments have done of their American presidents for decades and decades. Yeah, it really is interesting what's happening with British foreign policy that's taking place now. I mean, look, when we recorded yesterday, I think we did anticipate that there was going to be some kind of thermonuclear blast from Donald Trump at Britain for this latest egregious act that the United Kingdom had taken without US authority. And the reason we thought that was that Donald Trump's ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, you know, former kind of presidential candidate back in the day for the Republican Party, had come out and kind of warned, talked about Jew hate in Britain and the anti-Semitism that was right here. Well, it looks like Mike Huckabee was acting without the authority of Trump and that they were blindsided. I mean, he also threatened. Do you remember you talked about this yesterday? He also threatened that Florida might take unilateral action against the UK, that Florida would stop doing business with the UK because it broke Florida laws to sanction Israel. Exactly. So, you know, Mike Huckabee went way over the top and also had gone way off the reservation in making those remarks. But the very muted response you got from Marco Rubio was interesting and telling in itself. This morning, Emily, I bumped into someone on the Tube who is a very, very senior former foreign office mandarin. And, you know, we discussed in our kind of chat early morning about what we were going to talk about today. And I said to him, have we broken with America now on foreign policy? And he just he had a twinkly desire when he said this. He said, no, John, we haven't broken with America. We're just differentiating ourselves from America. And I thought that sounded like a perfect yes, minister cameo response. And I think he said it semi-ironically. I, you know, I'm hamming up the Mandarin's response. But I think that's how they feel, that they feel that over Greenland, over Ukraine, over all manner of different things, you know, Britain has been able to say, I'm sorry, no, don't agree with this. And so, you know, you do have a position now where Britain is not saying, oh, God, we've got to go along with everything. You don't want to start a fight with Trump, but you do want to say quietly, we disagree and we're going to pursue a slightly different policy. I mean, I think that takes you back to the King's speech back in the spring, where the sort of rule that he delivered by was we have no argument with America. We don't always see eye to eye with Trump. I mean, that has been the sort of the position, hasn't it? America and the UK are staunch allies. We've been through, you know, hell and back together, but we don't necessarily see eye to eye with Trump. And we like somebody who respects the Constitution. We like somebody who respects the rule of law. Two things have occurred to me. You mentioned the Huckabee comments. The White House has slapped him down. And I think that's really important to sort of understand. They have said these are not coordinated with the White House. In other words, he's on his own. Rubio sounds pretty statesman like. I mean, I know he is Secretary of State, but he sounded pretty calm in that delivery just now. I'm going to give you one other theory in a moment. Go on. Well, I wonder whether this is also part of the sort of the Rubio positioning himself, not just as Secretary of State, but as a sort of a putative president, as the person who takes on from Trump and who manages to do things slightly differently. Because Trump, we know behind the scenes, is angry with Netanyahu. I mean, he has sworn at him. Apparently, as reported in a phone call, told him to, you know, whatever, stop ******* around. And so I don't think Trump or Rubio likes the scenes that are coming out of the West Bank settlers. I mean, what Ed Miliband yesterday called settler terrorism, settler terrorists. I don't think the White House finds them particularly useful either, but it's much easier to get the Europeans to fight that battle. I mean, let me just give you the one other theory, which is that Marco Rubio made those comments very neutrally because he just doesn't, Donald Trump hasn't applied. He didn't know what Donald, he doesn't know what Donald Trump thinks. And he's waiting to see, like us, what Donald Trump posts on Truth Social to find out whether Donald Trump does have a settled view. Because you never know, Donald Trump might get a phone call now from some, you know, very wealthy pro-Israel donor who says it's disgraceful what Britain have done, you've got to do something about this. And bang, there'll be a post on Truth Social. Except that Burnham talked to Trump ahead of this. I mean, that was what Rubio made clear. We think the phone call between Trump and Burnham happened sort of a week earlier. I don't think Burnham would have gone out there or let his foreign secretary, Ed Miliband, go out there and make that statement to the Commons if he hadn't... Pre-warned America. And so, you know, it is not unusual for Trump to use that pre-warning and just get straight on social media and decide, you know... Remember, he pre-announced Dahmer's resignation, for Christ's sake. So he's not a man who sort of stands by protocol and waits for the Commons to sit or to stand. He would go out there if he didn't like something and do it or say it. And he hasn't. So I do think something is going on here. And I think that there may be more of a coordinated response. I mean, something we've definitely learned is that Burnham had the support of a hell of a lot of other countries before he let Ed Miliband stand up in the Commons. And in a sense, this is part of, I think, British leadership in a way that we haven't always felt. You know, we haven't always felt that we've sort of led the way. We have on Ukraine. Maybe we have in parts of NATO discussions. But I think this is something where we can be quite proud that we're getting out there and we're going first. Look, maybe it's that Andy Burnham is a more sophisticated and adroit political operator. And, you know, it was a good political operation. Now, look, there are people who disagree profoundly with what Ed Miliband has announced. And, you know, the chief rabbi has made clear that he thoroughly disagrees with the policy. But if you look at the operation that Andy Burnham had pre-warned Trump, had kind of made sure that that had been neutralized, had presumably knew that all these other nations were about to follow suit. So it was a good political operation. The one, you know, Starmer, kind of, obviously, at the start of the Iran war, where Britain had no pre-warning that America was about to start bombing with Israel and said, you can't use our air bases and then sort of changed it. Well, you can use our air bases if it's for defensive purposes. Yeah. Yeah, that was that was clunky. It was terrible. It would look clunky. Just say your line and walk away. I mean, the thing, you know, going back to the Israeli foreign minister, Gideon Saar, he's called the Labour government guilty of blatant interference in the affairs of a sovereign state. Now, that is categorically not untrue, right? Because the interference has only been in whether we want to trade with the people that are committing atrocities in the West Bank and Burnham's government has decided no. So I don't see how you can, for a moment, call it interference in the state, in a sovereign state. And actually, if that is sending out a message that they are taking as interference into a sovereign state, then, you know, you just think they are. What else are they going to push back on, right? If the tiniest bit, because really what he's done, you know, sanction on goods, which amounts to what we said yesterday, about two million pounds is nothing, right? So if you can't even take that without seeing it as interference in the state, then where do you start, you know, having those proper grown up conversations? Well, let's speak now to Ben Judah, because he was special advisor to David Lammy when he was foreign secretary. He's now a visiting fellow at Chatham House. And Ben, thanks for being with us. The Mandarin who said to me, we haven't broken with America, we're just differentiating ourselves. Is that about right? One of the things I love about the Foreign Office is that mastery of language there. What's happening in British foreign policy is there used to be an old joke from Dean Aitchison, an American Secretary of State, that said that the UK had lost an empire and not found a role. And what's happened since Trump has returned to power is that as America has abandoned a lot of its old role, leading the West and confederating the West around its foreign policy, the UK has found a role leading these coalitions on issues like Ukraine or now on Israel-Palestine to present America either with a fair complete or to move America. On Ukraine, we saw Britain with France assemble the coalition of the willing. And what that did was pull the Americans away from really the position that Trump came back to power with, which was wanting to do a quick and dirty deal with Putin in 24 hours over the head of Zelensky into a common position that's better for UK interests and for European security. And now we see on Israel-Palestine that beginning when David Lammy was Foreign Secretary and Keir Starmer was Prime Minister, a series of coalitions have been built up with France, first to put sanctions on extremist Israeli ministers, then to recognise Palestine, and now to put this wider sanctions regime on illegal settlements. So it sounds from what we're beginning to hear, Ben, as if Andy Burnham had a phone call with Trump. We were kind of expecting it to be fireworks, explosions, and Trump wasn't actually that unhappy with the position that Burnham said he was going to take. Is that right? Well, one of the things that we've seen consistently since Labour came back to power is a wild overestimation in the press of potential American reaction to the UK taking a different point of view or a different course of action than the United States. And we've seen each time the UK assembles a coalition and presents the Americans with a fait accompli, the Americans see which way the wider Western community is going and don't want to be seen to trash that or to clash with that. We've seen that on a few instances. We've seen that with the Coalition of the Willing, at moments when Trump wanted to meet Putin and was planning to meet Putin in Alaska. You see Macron and Keir Starmer assembling a squad of Western leaders with Zelensky to go to Washington and say, no, this is our position. You saw that over Greenland, where Macron and Starmer got a team together to tell Trump, no, Greenland is a red line for us. And you've now seen that steadily, steadily, steadily, but subtly build up on Israel-Palestine. Now, what's going on here? And to come back to that sort of wonderful comment from the old Mandarinet that you began with is you've got to be subtle with the Americans. You don't want to be locking horns with them and clashing with them the way Spanish foreign policy led by a more sort of leftist government has been. You've got to make it look as if they're backing the proposal or they wanted it all along, and then you can swing them behind you. And that's where the art of British foreign policy has been played rather well here. And I think you've seen three successive foreign secretaries do that now. Just explain then, Ben, when we went on air yesterday and we were talking about the sanctions against Israel, we didn't then know just how wide that coalition of countries would be. Was the UK the pacesetter for that? I mean, were we absolutely the first out of the traps? Was Carney always going to come on board? I mean, how did that sort of come together? Do you know? Well, what we've seen consistently as Britain has taken a post-American turn in its foreign policy is the UK is not sitting around waiting like it used to to know which direction Washington is going. And it has found that the old, what used to call the hub and spokes alliance systems around America are dissolving. It's that other countries that previously felt, well, I'm just going to do my geopolitics with Washington and it's nice to see the Brits sometimes, are actually coming to us to try and build coalitions of the non-American West. And the role the UK has played is bringing together two sets of countries. It's not a generic list of middle powers. What you're really seeing is the UK bringing together with France, European Union countries and their associates. Not all of them, only some of them. And then a group of countries that the right in this country like to call the Canzic countries, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the UK. So we've been a linchpin in making these slightly bigger than a European coalition and a sort of more global coalition. But it's quite different from saying this is a generic list of global middle powers like Brazil or Thailand or Vietnam or Japan. It's still a Western grouping. Ben, are you surprised at how little reaction there has been from the States over this move about sanctioning products from the West Bank as was announced yesterday by Ed Miliband? Because, I mean, is it that the Americans actually might be quietly supporting us as the outriders on this policy? You know, we can't be leading the charge here, but it's quite helpful for us that you're doing this because that means that we can apply some behind the scenes pressure on Netanyahu to deal with what's happening with the settler violence. So I don't think they view the UK as an outrider speaking for them, but I do think that part of their system is quite happy this is happening because they're so fed up with Netanyahu's outrageous behaviour not just towards the Palestinians but towards the United States. And you have people like J.D. Vance that I saw a lot in government with David Lammy who are really frustrated and on the record of being deeply frustrated at how Netanyahu has treated the United States in that alliance and will view this action as helping the United States, just as you said, put a bit of pressure on the Israelis to follow US interests. Just one other question. Do you overstate our influence? I'm kind of struck by, you know, reading about what's happening domestically in America where no one stands up to Donald Trump, no one acts as a brake, no one tells him he can't do this, no one says this is dangerous or unconstitutional. And here you are saying, when Macron and Starmer or Macron and Burnham club together, they can alter the president's direction. What I saw, you know, seeing the operation of the White House close up and being at events like the NATO summit in The Hague is that Trump likes being king of the West. He likes being the Western emperor and having all the Western leaders around him and seeing them genuflect to him. And he knows that if he really clashes with them over an issue like Greenland, they'll stop doing that. And I think that we benefit in this situation from his psychology of wanting to be seen as the centre. He's not anti-European in the sense that he wants to push us all away. He wants to feel that he is the ruler of the West. And what the UK has worked out how to do is to, within the context of him still feeling like that and him still being able to get that photo, assemble these coalitions that go, we love you and we love America, but actually we'd like to do it this way. What do you think? We think this is actually your idea, by the way. Ben, you were at David Lammy's side for a long time. I know there was a little bit of discomfort amongst those around Starmer who didn't really like the way Burnham was getting the credit they thought for something that they actually put in motion months earlier. I mean, is that the sense that you were getting? Was this ever part of David Lammy's plan? Well, you've got to remember that when Keir Starmer's government came in, it was a very different moment. The main phase of the war in Gaza was not yet over. The priority was getting the Americans to a ceasefire, was making sure the Americans didn't do what could only be described as a new Munich with Putin over the head of Zelensky in Ukraine, and then getting to a position where we'd broken the seal on putting sanctions on extremist Israeli ministers and, of course, recognising Palestine, which is an important first step to get us to where we were. In that year we were in the Foreign Office, I remember David Lammy very clearly telling a group of assembled officials that we were at three out of ten on settlements, and he wanted to get to eight out of ten within the year. We were focused on recognising Palestine. That was the context then. That was the international coalition. So bluntly, I mean, you must be thinking this is a government now that's sort of, that's just moving a bit faster, that's kind of, to be fair, getting its ---- together a bit more quickly. Well, if David was still Foreign Secretary and I was still in the Foreign Office, we would have taken measures like this. I can't say they would have been exactly the same but more or less we would have done the same thing. Ben Judah, thanks so much. Thanks for joining us. Thank you. You're welcome. Well, joining us now is Ed Conway, who is the Sky News Economics and Data Editor, but also author of this phenomenal narrative history, really, of the goods that have made up the world of trade. And what you do in this, in trade world, Ed, is take us through, for example, bread, wool, cotton, these sort of individual materials. If people have read Material World, they'll know your style. But essentially, you take us into the world of trade through these sort of really benign, everyday articles like the wool trade, right? And the idea is to say that trade is, the way it's depicted so much, and we're going through these trade wars and everything that we're living through right now, it's often quite abstract or sometimes it's about the geopolitics, but you kind of forget about the extent to which literally everything you pick up on a daily basis, and something as simple as a kind of sliced white bread is a function of trade and is a function of all these relationships that goes around the world. And often the degree to which we are in this amazing, but also quite scarily interconnected world, that's kind of invisible from us and it's kept from us. And the example I sometimes give, which is kind of a useful way of anchoring it, is if you think about buying a pack of fish fingers, you know, in the supermarket, often the fish finger packaging may say that the fish was caught in the North Sea and that it was maybe breaded or packaged in the UK. Often, in between those two things, it was caught in the North Sea, it was put into a shipping container, it was frozen, and then it was sent all the way to China to be processed, to be kind of filleted, to be put into a kind of block of frozen fish before being sent all the way back to the UK to be breaded and then put into a supermarket. And if you look at the label on the packet of fish fingers, invariably it doesn't tell you about any of that stuff. And it's the same thing for bread, it's the same thing for clothes, it's the same thing for cars. We do that with pharmaceuticals, right? Totally. Even the drug companies aren't actually making the drugs. No, the drug company doesn't make the drugs, the car company doesn't make the car, you know, the clothing company does not make the clothing. And part of the point of this book is to say, that's a very different way of thinking about the modern world, isn't it? To the version that is the conventional wisdom and the version that most politicians are thinking about. And therefore, if you're thinking about kind of going in there and trying to, you know, to mess with it, trying to impose tariffs, trying to do whatever, trying to re-industrialise as Andy Burnham is, then oughtn't we to start by thinking about what is the world that we inhabit? So let me do this as a quick fire. Globalisation, yes or no? I mean, that's sort of where you end up, right? Is it a good thing that we are all so interwoven and interconnected? Or is it a sense that we've actually lost control of everything that we try and do and everything that we make? Well, it's both. It's the world. That's the thing. It's not an abstract topic. It is the way we've arranged the world. And the way we've arranged the world is, but, you know, basically we like cheap things. And in order to make your fish fingers cheaper, or indeed your kind of, you know, bread or whatever it might be, the efficient way of doing that right now, because it is so cheap to get room on the shipping container and send it across the world. I mean, it's got a little bit more expensive recently, but it's nonetheless, it's a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of the eventual cost. Which by the way, is a total shift from the world, you know, two centuries ago. It used to be so expensive to ship anything from the other side of the world that it was only luxuries. Now it's so cheap to do it, that it makes economic sense to not employ people in Grimsby to do that and to get them to do it in China instead because they're just much cheaper. And we like cheap things. And, you know, we like cheap things. Companies like to reduce costs. And the net result of that is this world in all its magnificence, but also all its complexity and all its compromises because the people doing the gutting of the fish over in Shandong, a lot of them, you know, the labour standards, that's questionable. You know, a lot of these people come from Xinjiang province. Some of them are Uyghurs. So the fish finger might have actually been partially made in Xinjiang. It's labour might've come from there. So the people might've come from there. And, but the key point here is no one is entirely sure. And even the people, you know, people working within the, it's not all about fish, but like working within that supply chain or working within the clothing supply chain or working within the car supply chain, often the people working in those worlds, they're not entirely sure where things began. And that's kind of amazing, isn't it? It's quite vertiginous. Well, that's how the financial crash happened, of course, because nobody actually, there was that whole metaphor about how the sausage meat, right? It just sort of went out into the world and we couldn't work out where all the credit default swaps came from or went to. It was kind of lost in the ether, right? It's exactly the same for trade, except that it is far bigger. Yeah. It is far bigger. I mean, obviously on this podcast, we talk an awful lot about Donald Trump and we don't talk a lot about supply chains. And I kind of read the book and I was thinking, yeah, Donald Trump is right. No, Donald Trump is completely wrong. Because on one level, when Donald Trump says, right, we've got to re-industrialise America. And you made the point, you know, people want to go to Walmart and pick up five pairs of trousers for their kids for school for $50, made wherever they are in the world, rather than one pair of trousers that cost $50 that are made in America. And so you think, well, he's completely naive. There's never going to be a re-industrialisation of America. Those steel factories will remain shuttered. Those textile firms, those textile plants that were once in Georgia have gone forever. But on the other hand, he is right to be concerned about the fact that these supply chains are just ludicrously long. And we saw the limitations of that when there was the war for PPE during COVID. Yeah. And think back, I mean, take back control. What does that remind us of? But what was that speaking to, to some extent? And what is Donald Trump speaking to, to some extent? It's the sense for people that what was once a tractable world around them, that they used to make steel here and they made it into products. And those products enhanced people's lives and you felt like you were part of it. And lasted a lifetime. I mean, my parents emigrated from Canada to the UK with their fridges, stoves, dishwashers. And they had them for like, they brought them over on the boat and they lasted 25 years, right? And that world has gone. And the world of making clothing in these countries for the most part has gone. And that process, offshoring, outsourcing, whatever you want to call it, I would say that is one of the most consequential things that's happened in our countries, particularly in the West in the last kind of 20, 30, well, kind of 50 years. Because the jobs that were, like you say, the jobs in Georgia have now gone to China. And yet our understanding of kind of how that happened, like I say, it is to some extent what lay behind Trump and what lies behind Brexit and what lies behind the rise of anti-establishment politics. Our understanding of how that happened is really primitive. And so the point of this book is to go back and say, how did that happen? Who were the first pioneers, inverted commas, of that moment? And there's that history. But then there's also the present day issue, which is you can't put that back in the box very easily. And if you are going to put it back in the box and try and get more manufacturing in America or Europe, like Nike tried to do it, Adidas tried to do it. They tried to bring back manufacturing to Mexico, North America, Mexico into Europe. The trainers were way too expensive. And also people have forgotten how to make trainers. So the Chinese and the Vietnamese are better at making the trainers now than we were. Ed, I want to turn a corner and do everyone listening a favour, who keeps hearing about the state of debt, national debt, international debt. Guilt yields. Guilt yields, and wants to sound clever about it and can't quite work out what on earth is going on. Well, I feel like one of those people who, I just, I lose my footing a bit where people start talking about bonds and yields and why debt has grown so much and why we are so nervous about it, apart from the cost, obviously. I mean, I think that's a reasonable place to be, to be honest with you, because of all the stories I cover, and I spend a lot of time covering kind of economic stories. This is really, it is actually complex. It's actually complex. And even people who supposedly understand the bond market are still trying to get their head around the explanation for this. But I mean, my best shot at it, you know, and people will have their own views, is that a whole load of preconceptions about the way the world works and the things we thought we could rely on are kind of breaking down a bit at the moment. So, you know, the conventional example is you've got governments that are borrowing enormous amounts and no one's quite sure at what point you can kind of keep on borrowing. You've got central banks. They're borrowing, you know, every day there are millions of people out there, pension funds, hedge funds, investors making decisions about where to allot their money. And they decide, you know, OK, some of it's going to go into equities, so shares, some of it's going to go into bonds. And I kind of prefer putting my money into this country to that country right now, because I'm a bit worried about what the government's going to do or what the central bank is going to do, because, you know, I don't know if they trust that they're going to keep control of inflation. So all of those kind of allocations are happening at the same time. And the net result of all of them, and on top of this, by the way, is things like AI. So right now you have this enormous flood of money going into building data centers, which all else equal should push up interest rates because it's kind of, you know, that's more money trying to chase for investment. So all of this stuff is happening at once at the same time as you're having kind of global conflict. And for me, you know, the thing that kind of ties it back to the thing I'm obsessed with at the moment is all those preconceptions that you can order something off from the other side of the world, be it fish fingers or whatever else, you can order it from the other side of the world and it will turn up. That's being challenged now, isn't it? Because of what's happening in the Strait of Hormuz. All of that stuff is kind of going on top of each other and it is helping contribute to higher interest rates everywhere because it is to some extent a sign of concern, to some extent a sign of, well, okay, there's a lot of crazy things going on right now and AI and all the rest of it. And everyone gets caught up in it because like if you're thinking of the most important numbers in the world, the yield on, you know, people usually talk about the US Treasuries, but it's the same thing. The yield on government bonds is one of the most important numbers in the world, abstract as it seems, because this is the foundation for so much of the rest of the financial system. And so if that number's going up, then it kind of means the interest rates that central banks start to go up as well, the borrowing costs that we all face start to go up and then that impacts us. And it impacts Andy Burnham, impacts John Healey, because frankly that wipes out loads of the seeming room that they had, you know, against their fiscal rules, which, so it all sounds abstract, but it is, if you think about it as being the cost of having to do anything across the global economy, which is what this is, then that cost has just gone up and no one's, you know, no one is sure when it's going to come down. And the UK, so final thing, the UK is kind of, we are kind of the ugly duckling for some reasons that are fair and some reasons that are not, which is just- That was going to be my question to you, which is that you've explained globally the fact that, you know, people are chasing money and that pension funds are kind of wanting to balance their portfolio between equities and guilts or whatever it happens to be in bonds. Why is it more expensive for Britain to borrow than say any other European country? Well, because, I mean, so again, it is, it's a headache and it's complicated because what you're talking about is a single number that is manifesting so many different rationales, you know, partly it's like down to what the Bank of England is doing versus what the European Central Bank is doing. But I think, you know, the fundamental moment when everything changed and we went from being kind of in the middle of the pack with everyone else in terms of those borrowing rates to being at the higher end, that was the mini-budget. And so there was this moment where a lot of investors around the world- You mean the Liz Trust mini-budget? The Liz Trust mini-budget, which wasn't all, you know, down to her. There was also other stuff going on. The Bank of England was starting to do quantitative tightening, so basically kind of trying to reverse a lot of the crisis era stuff. It wasn't just her, but a lot of stuff was happening at the same time and she did something kind of dramatic. And then the yields in the UK went up like crazy and we all know what happened next, you know, there were lots of parts of the financial system that basically malfunctioned. And someone who works in the gilt market told me, you know, you don't normally see things breaking down like that. But in the UK, it was one of the only times in recent history where you saw what happens when you go off the edge. And that stays in the institutional memory of investors for a long time. So we're not trusted? So you lose that, yeah, that little kind of invisible element of trust. But on top of that, I would say, then, you know, the Starmer government comes in, seemingly they have this big majority, it looks like they have a mandate for reform and they're unable to impose any of the kind of structural reforms, so dealing with welfare, dealing with the country's finances. They're not able to push through the stuff they say they want to. And actually, you then saw the yields going up even higher for the UK. So it's not just a Liz Trust thing. It's not just a Starmer thing. But it has all contributed to the fact that right now, we are just inherently more in the firing line than other countries. And then that feeds into our higher debt levels. And it takes a lot, a lot of work to regain that, the trust which has been lost, basically. How conscious do you think, I mean, you speak to people at the Treasury, you speak to people in government. How conscious are they, the present administration, the new administration, of what to do about this? And do you think they've settled on any answers? Because they're being pulled in a lot of different directions. They're super conscious. John Healey got in there, we all know what he wanted to do at Defence. He wanted to spend more money to try and get up to 3% of GDP by Defence spending. He got in there and almost instantly completely changed his tune. And why is that? It's because he gets in, in the same way that, you know, that people were saying, well, why wasn't Kwasi told not to do some of this stuff when he became Chancellor to Kwasi Kwasi? John Healey's got in there and the Treasury advisors are saying, this looks worrying and we need to do something about it. And if you don't do anything right now, then the amount of, headroom is such an irritating term because it's become this terminology. It's basically your safety cushion, isn't it? Exactly. Yeah, it's your safety cushion against breaking your fiscal rules. It is a self-imposed thing, it feeds into your credibility. And they will be saying right now, that's basically gone. And it was quite a lot. It was like £24 billion. That's basically gone. Part of it's down to growth, but mostly it's down to bond yields being higher. It's not your fault, but this is the lot that you've been dealt with. And as a result, this budget will probably have to be about raising taxes. And the question to, you know, interesting question is, how much of those taxes can you raise through things like bank taxes, which I think bank taxes will come into it. But I don't think you can fully fill the hole with that. And I find it like, it's a bit depressing, isn't it? Because how many budgets have we been talking about? Headroom and difficult decisions. But also, why would he then, I mean, presumably, he's put the same red lines around himself as Reeves put around herself, as someone put around the government. I mean, he's not going to raise income tax. No. Because he can't. No. And you think he probably should do, right? I think like if you were going to raise a tax, then almost every economist out there would say, like, that is the simplest way to raise quite a bit of money and do it actually in quite a fair way, because it's across- Hits everyone. It hits everyone. But it seems to be politically impossible. Same thing with, you know, we've talked about- The triple lock. Social care. So many of the deep-seated issues in the UK, they never went away. And now is the moment where we find out whether Andy Burnham actually wants to confront it or not, or whether he can confront it in the realms of, you know, given the constraints he's set himself. But I would say, okay, look, some good news to follow that with it, is that the economy is actually- Think about what we've been going through in the last kind of year or so. Think about, we've had a cataclysmic event in the Strait of Hormuz. You've had two of the biggest oil and gas terminals in the world basically going down for a period. In anyone looking at this, and the Suez Canal might not be kind of operational for many shipping. Panama Canal might be down. Everyone's seeing gas prices going up. You would have thought, given all of that, and diesel prices, you would have thought all of that would have precipitated a recession or at least a dip in growth. The economy's been growing this year, at least, faster than people expected. And in the US, it's going gangbusters, partly because of AI. So it's not as bleak a story as it sometimes is depicted. It's just that there's scary stuff out there, and you put it all together. And I think that's, to some extent, what the bond market's telling us. And then on top of that, and I think contributing to it is the sense of, gosh, the entire global trading system that was, for a long time, something we could all kind of just assume was always going to be there. Freedom of navigation, freedom of shipping, like literally one of the biggest shipping groups in the world that doesn't speak, they don't go out in public. For the first time in 60 years since their creation, came out yesterday and said, we are very, very worried about freedom of navigation, about the ability of ships to get around the world. Like I say, if that stuff goes wrong, then the financial crisis looks like a walk in the park. Ed Conway, great to have you with us. Well done on the book, it's brilliant. Thank you. Thanks, Ed. Hit the trail for Republicans hard down the stretch. Are you hoping that he gets out there? I think it'd be great. Yeah, I mean, that'd be spectacular. I invite him to California, wherever he wants to show up. I think it'd be fantastic. It is amazing how everybody's turning their back on him, members of the Republican Party, and how all these off-the-record comments and quotes, they want nothing to do with him. But he lives in that fishbowl. He lives in the bubble of Sean Hannity and a few folks that just tell him how great he is. And he needs to get out. That is a big, warm welcome to Donald Trump from the outgoing California governor, Gavin Newsom. He's essentially inviting Trump to his own party. Trump has created a midterm convention. He's calling it, what are we calling it? The Trumpalumpa, basically. It's the Trump party. And the only problem with this Trump party that he's hosting in Dallas is that none of his own supporters want to come or want him to be there. Yeah, they're actually putting out calls on local radio saying, you know, if you want to come to- Free tickets! It's not exactly the sellout that Donald Trump hoped it would be. And we'll be talking all about it on the News Agents USA. But from us for now, we'll see you tomorrow. Bye-bye. Bye for now. The News Agents podcast is brought to you by HSBC UK, opening up a world of opportunity. This has been a global production.