Edward Miliband

And I think if we have more of these kind of warnings from industry without any responsibility about what to do about it, we're going to find ourselves, I think, turning back in on ourselves as a society rather than feeling like we've actually got the powers to take it forward.

One of the AI debates sort of bubbling away and it sort of comes up and then fades away but it's been quite consistent is net zero versus data centers and you have the likes of Ed Miliband in the government you know expressing doubt about data centers behind the scenes then you have the likes of Kanishka Narayan the AI minister really wanting to push ahead and you know be at the forefront of this digital revolution and not let the country fall behind should Burnham tell Miliband to shut up?

I want us to be at the forefront of AI.

I think we've got loads of assets in this country which are already showing that we can be an important player, if not a big player, an important player, both in terms of the development of the technology and the safety aspects of it, which we have led on, thanks in large part to Rishi Sunak's leadership on it.

And I think that rather than having a binary debate of, you know, net zero versus data centers, let's get real.

We are going to win if we have the energy that we need.

But we all know, and actually Ed Miliband has been the chief proponent, we all know we need to make that energy cheaper, more readily available, more accessible.

So how do we make sure that we are bringing industry in to be able to push forward rather than getting ourselves involved in a binary debate in which meanwhile, you know, the world moves on and we get overtaken? Should

He made huge waves in the 2015 election where he first said he didn't want people to vote.

Then he back said Miliband, et cetera, et cetera.

So there's been that.

aspect to the backlash.

Well, friends on Facebook, they're not huge fans of me.

of uh of my evolution since we knew each other but nonetheless um and you know i see lots of women going like of course we all knew and in fact female comedians in the uk have a whatsapp group in which they share things of this nature to warn fellow female comedians of potential risks and potential predators so this was something that was an open secret and that put a lot of people in a big dilemma as they saw it was never a dilemma for us russell brand invited me on his show many times i i never wanted to have anything to do with him because it was clear to me that all of this would inevitably happen and also it was just the wrong thing to do to associate myself with somebody about whom i knew this kind of thing but a lot of people were not in that position where they knew somebody who'd been affected or whatever and so And then the other thing on top of this is you had COVID, which just totally broke everybody's brain, made everybody extra conspiratorial, extra suspicious.

And one thing I will say is I do think there is some truth to the argument that people have made, which is if Brand had remained on the right side of the political tracks, if he continued to do those beautiful pictures that have come out in the last day of him having his arm around Owen Jones, doing conversations with Ed Miliband, being this sort of communist adjacent lovey.

If that had continued, there's a possibility that he actually would have been allowed to get away with this for longer.