Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hi, this is Pod Save the UK. I'm Nish Kumar. And I'm Coco Card. Reform is on the money this week, and not in a good way. Whether it's energy bills, lotteries, Richard Tice avoiding a big tax bill, or Nigel Farage pretty much saying anything for cash on Cameo.
Chapter 2: What controversial energy bill stunt is Reform UK promoting?
Plus, we're joined by the authors of a new book, which looks at the billionaire man-baby, Elon Musk, in a whole new way. And what with wars in Iran and Ukraine, Keir Starmer was already having a busy week. And then Angela Rayner popped up at a soft labour event. That's right, she's back and she's got opinions. Anne McElvoy from Politico will be with us to work out what Angela's got planned.
Are you worried that your energy bills are about to soar because of the war in the Middle East? Don't worry, Nigel Farage has got you. Just head over to www.nigelcutmybills.com. And if you give us your details on that website... In the next week or two, we're going to draw one of those names and Nigel is going to come to your house and he's going to pay your energy bills
and those of everyone who live on your street for an entire year. Sorry, I'm just having visions of Nigel Farage knocking at my door. What? It's a nightmare. I'd rather paint my streets energy, boss. Yeah. So, as Robert Jenrick explained there, one lucky winner, lucky winner, will get Nigel Farage knocking at their door.
Their energy bills and the energy bills of the whole street were paid for one year. It's the most Squid Game stroke Troy McClure thing I've seen ever. At this point, Adam Curtis documentaries are almost making themselves. I mean, this is a collapsing economic system writ large.
The stunt is being used to promote reform's announcement that the party will be getting rid of VAT and green levies on energy bills. But at the same time, Reform UK is cheering on an illegal war on Iran, which is raising energy bills, but at the same time saying they want to cut your energy bill.
Like nothing about, as always with reform, very little about what they're saying makes any sense whatsoever.
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Chapter 3: How is Nigel Farage using Cameo for questionable promotions?
I mean, I'm not a lawyer, but certainly something about it feels eggy. Sorry to keep laboring on Maya Simpson's references, but you know, like Dr. Nick on the back of it. It's got real Dr. Nick vibes about it. The party insists that the giveaway is allowed because it's open to anyone and the winner does not have to commit to voting for reform.
It's also really worth pointing out that without doing anything systemic to reduce people's energy bills and instead just paying off the streets energy bills, you know, it's really revealing of the way Reform UK sees the country.
And it's an attempt to return to almost like a Victorian system of patronage, where just every so often wealthy people hand the parvos a stack of cash and then do nothing to actually help improve the lives of most of the people living in this country. I think it's quite Trumpy, isn't it? It's that winners and losers thing.
Chapter 4: What implications does the war in the Middle East have on energy prices?
And it's writ large here. It's quite literally a game. What if you don't enter that competition or you do and you don't win? Oh, well, energy poverty for you, I guess. What is this? How is this being spun as being warm or for the people? I find it quite grotesque. It also shows you where we are as a country.
Chapter 5: What insights do the authors of 'Muskism' provide about Elon Musk?
I mean, a couple of years ago in 2022, during the height of the cost of living crisis or that phase of the cost of living crisis, there was a thing on This Morning where Phil Schofield and Holly Willoughby were hosting a segment where it was called Spin to Win, and one of the prizes was paying four months of your energy bills. It is deeply, deeply worrying.
The party is, to be absolutely fair to reform, totally flush with cash after a recent £12 million donation from crypto billionaire Christopher Harbourn. And also, in many ways, this is quite cheap because everyone entering the competition will give over their contact details, and I'm sure that data will be very useful for reform for campaigning purposes. Yeah, it's a data mining exercise, okay?
It's a worthwhile financial investment for them in terms of the... access to information that it allows. At the heart of the policy is cutting VAT on energy bills, which ultimately means less money going into the government's coffers. Nigel Farage is also committing to extra money for defence.
Now, the only way you can square any of this is by his own admission, imposing very, very tough benefit cuts. Call me an old-fashioned progressive, but clearly the best way to raise money for the country is through a fair tax system.
However, some are questioning how fair it even is that reform deputy leader Richard Tice could take advantage of a rare legal status known as a real estate investment trust. According to the Sunday Times, that meant his property company could avoid paying almost £600,000 worth of tax between 2018 and 2021.
Farage was quick to come to Tice's defence, speaking at a reform press conference on Tuesday. Richard Tice has obeyed the law. He's filed his accounts on time. He's obeyed the law in every way. And no one pays more tax than they have to. You don't. I don't. No one does. I don't know how many more times we can say this, but reform are the champions of capital. They're the champions of the wealthy.
They are an instrument of deregulated capitalism and unchecked corporate power. And anyone pretending otherwise is a liar or a moron. A lot of these populist leaders, they ride to power or certainly close to power through this message of, you know, drain the swamp. We're not like the other guys.
And I can't believe I'm saying this, but actually this tax avoidance story in reform is the least of Farage's concerns this week because a Guardian investigation into videos he's posted on Cameo.
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Chapter 6: How is Angela Rayner positioning herself within the Labour Party?
I mean, it's nothing short of skin crawling. I'm sure you're all aware of Cameo, but it's a platform which you can pay celebrities to send you a personalised message. The Guardian has analysed over 4,000 clips that Farage has produced since joining the platform in 2021.
It is a miracle he has time, and I'm sure he is doing this, do his job as a Member of Parliament given the amount of external interest he seems to have. So a lot of the messages are pretty innocuous, really. It's like birthday messages, Christmas messages, thanking people for voting reform. But some of it is really quite concerning.
So Farage charged £155 for one video he made in 2025 for a man named Ben Tavener. He'd received a 16-month sentence for his involvement in a far-right riot. Ben, it's Nigel Farage here. Lossie and your mum have been in touch. They told me all about the summer riots of 2024 and you doing your bit to try and break the whole thing up. Yeah, it all turned very, very nasty.
Now, you clearly got the most incredible prison sentence in, Ben. what for the first time we saw and understood to be two-tier Britain. Absolutely outrageous in every way. In another video for which he was paid £141, he promoted an event by a Canadian neo-Nazi group, which used the clip in propaganda alongside fascist salutes and anti-Semitic imagery. They have to go back.
Now, hello, Andrea Hallworth. It's Nigel Farage here. And we're told you don't like comedy, but your friends are trying to get you to attend Road Rage Terror Tour comedy show, but you're hesitant. Now, look, it's hosted by Jeremy McKenzie, Derek Harrison, and Alex Rend, and it's currently the most talked about show in Canada. So do you know what, Andrea?
Just sometimes in life, we're a bit reluctant, a bit hesitant to go and do things we don't really fancy doing. But for the sake of a couple of hours of an evening, why not give it a go? You never know, you might walk out saying road rage terror tour is the best thing that ever happened.
The premise of that video is that he's inviting the mayor of Ontario to this road rage terror tour, which is hosted by the names that he mentions, Jeremy McKenzie, Derek Harrison and Alex Friend. Now, those men are the leaders of Diagon, a group identified as a Canadian far right extremist group by the U.S. State Department in 2022.
Their website advertises a book alluding to Adolf Hitler called Meme Kampf, and the group's extremist slogan, they have to go back, is a nod to the forced repatriation of migrants. That slogan is what you hear Farage repeat at the top of the clip.
So Farage's spokesperson said he used the platform in good faith and without knowledge of the individuals involved beyond what is written for him in the prompt. They added, if individuals or groups subsequently choose to misuse or repurpose a cameo recording, that is clearly outside Mr Farage's knowledge or control.
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Chapter 7: How does Farage's energy bill competition serve as a data mining exercise?
Now, everything that Trump has done in the sort of ensuing year and a half, none of it's hugely been a surprise if you pay any attention and have basic critical faculties. You know, if you had any sense of Donald Trump, nothing about the ICE raids, nothing about the regime change war in Iran should really have surprised you. But what we've had to see is a bunch of nauseating clips from these men
saying things like, this isn't what Trump promised he would do. You fucking morons. This is exactly what he was going to do. Now, what it would say for us in the United Kingdom, it's that old saying, when people tell you who they are, believe them, okay?
If reform do form the next government in this country at the next election, whenever that is, nothing about what they will do should be a surprise, okay? Just follow the things that Farage has said. follow the things that Farage has done and extrapolate outwards from there.
And if there is a reform government and we do see them enact some of the terrible things that they're saying, or they do behave in a policy manner that's consistent with the rhetoric coming out of Farage in these videos, what I don't want to hear is any of you fucking people going on your podcast saying things like, oh my God, this isn't what we voted for. It's exactly what you voted for. Own it.
If you're going to express contrition and remorse, express contrition and remorse. Don't pretend that you didn't know that this was going to happen. I don't want to see any of that. And I will admittedly be watching it from a gulag in Kent, where I have been immediately transported once Nigel Farage is prime minister. I don't know what the television facilities are going to be like.
I might have to hear about it when my girlfriend comes to visit me. But don't, when Amy comes to visit me in the gulag in Orpington, please, please do not have her have to tell me that all of you people that are lining up behind Farage are now expressing surprise at the things that he has done. I don't want to hear about it. I've got enough problems. I'm in a gulag in Kent.
Still to come, the man, the myth, the Musk. We dig into what makes Elon tick and why his rise is about so much more than him being a tech bro with a lot of money. Pod Save the UK is brought to you by Babbel. Why do most of us want to learn a new language? It's probably not about memorizing grammar tables or topping a leaderboard.
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Just 10 minutes a day, and we can all find that, is enough to start seeing real results. Babbel is about more than just lessons. They even offer a large collection of podcasts where Babbel experts reveal language secrets and offer an inside look at local cultures. So how were you with your language skills and your travels recently, Nick?
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Chapter 8: How does the discussion reflect on the future of the Labour Party?
What is the social contract of Muskism? What is the promise of Muskism? And did you get to the bottom of that? Yeah. Not really. I mean, it has different... You mean, there's a lot of sticks, but what's the carrot? Yeah, exactly. Well, the thing is, you know, his public persona is so grotesque and overblown and off-putting and repellent that I think it can be easy to...
to be distracted from the structural basis of his power. I mean, among other things, he's the wealthiest man in history. He will oversee an IPO later this year that will be the largest IPO in history when SpaceX goes public, probably a valuation of $1.75 trillion. So if you look at SpaceX, for example, you start to see What is the thing that he's giving to people in return?
Well, SpaceX has a complete chokehold on getting mass into orbit right now in the United States. So if you want to put a satellite into space, you have to go to Elon Musk. That's true even if you're Spain or Austria wanting to put a communication satellite in space, you have to go to Elon Musk. So he's now controlled this ever more important satellite.
layer that you know is above the earth through which battlefield operations are organized through which soon satellites a handset cellular will be uh transmittable already Starlink is become indispensable in the battlefield in a place like Ukraine so a lot of the things you usually think about the basic functioning of a sovereign state right the ability to send their troops into battle
the ability to monitor communications. Musk is offering that anyway to his government clients and increasingly to consumer clients too. So that's the beginning of, I think, what could be a long story about Musk's services that he offers in return for tolerating what his outrageousness is.
I mean, I think I know the answer to this, but doesn't that render the phrase sovereignty through technology a total nonsense? Because it's not sovereignty. It's actually, he's essentially a kind of baron or an oligarch. The state is sort of subservient to his whims, right? Well, so the concept we use to try to understand this dynamic is state symbiosis, where it's very important for us that
to make the case that Musk is not a libertarian, that he doesn't seek to shrink the state. He really seeks a fusion of public and private power. The U.S. government typically finds it of great value to purchase these services. For instance, in the case of Musk, through SpaceX, he's achieved a more than 90% reduction in the cost of getting mass into orbit.
If you're the Pentagon, that's a very appealing value for you. So it's not precisely that he's completely... parasitize the state. That would actually be a kind of different interaction. It's this more nuanced dynamic where governments increasingly feel that they need to exercise core sovereign functions through the use of high technology, satellites, artificial intelligence, and so forth.
But in order to do so, they have to purchase those services from a private provider, a dynamic we describe as sovereignty as a service. But I think at a larger level, what we're trying to get in the book is something even stranger, which is Musk's often quite fabulous depictions of a coming future are actually also the load-bearing infrastructure for the global financial system.
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