But this country is in debt.

James because we have such a weird political system Andy Burnham is sort of both being the leader of the opposition and the government at the same time when you're in opposition at the beginning you basically set out directions of travel and you say these are the things that we should focus on and here are the problems in society that I want to look at but he's also already the Prime Minister so he's got to do things which are in the grand scheme of things small and Of course, they cost money, but in the grand scheme of things, small in order to show change.

My worry is that, as Hassan the caller said, the direction of travel on the major issues doesn't look like very much change, not only from the Starmer government, but from the Sunak government and those beforehand on travel.

wealth inequality, which is sucking capital away from the productive parts of our economy, let alone make it harder for people to buy a home.

We're in this insane heat wave with people being burnt out of their homes across Europe with fires taking down farms here in Britain, in Wiltshire, but instead we're going to drill more in the North Sea.

Our relationship with the world appears completely unchanged.

We're going to carry on being a US vassal, carry on arming Israel.

And that has to be the real focus.

Is there a relationship between what is happening in the streets of, say, Minneapolis right now and American foreign policy over the last few decades? And if so, what is it?

It's a very good question, which I think gets, uh, right to the heart of what kind of power structure it, is the US ruling class operating.

And, uh, Trump has not...

It's both, uh, it's both a rupture and not a rupture from what came before.

It's a rupture in its form.

Uh, it is clearly much more crude and doesn't try to dress anything up in the language really of values or law or justice.

But it isn't a rupture in that it continues fundamentally what many, many decades long policy, uh, from the US has been in the world, and what centuries long policy has been in the US internally.

Or is it just the, um, we've used these techniques abroad, the people who come back from, um, overseas invasions were trained in a very specific way, they have a very specific ethos, and they're now in our militarized police forces or that kind of stuff? How, w- w- where do you reckon does it lie?

Why?

I think because they don't hear, in part, anything else.

Our defense establishment is hugely Atlanticist and is greatly tied into the, uh, the US-led military industrial complex.

Let's take Lord Robertson there, who's not a neutral player in this game.

He was the defense secretary, uh, back in the late '90s, and he authored the Strategic Defense Review then in 1998, which said that Br- Britain would have an expeditionary-Military, I will go abroad to fight, and we would do so in partnership with the United States.

The aim was to be the primary partner of the United States.

Only a minority of the spending would be spent actually on national defense.

Why on earth are you going on television saying we should spend more money when it's just, you know, money down the drain?" So first off, why is procurement so bad with defense in this country, and why aren't more people speaking about it publicly?