Speaker 1: And now on Wake Up Australia. It does have common
Speaker 1: sense from the other side of the world. With Brendan O'Neil,
Speaker 1: editor of Spiked Online.
Speaker 2: HOWO mate, how are you this morning?
Speaker 3: Hey, I'm not too bad. Thank you good.
Speaker 2: I see you're using that app that we've got you
Speaker 2: using that. It never seems to work properly, but that's okay.
Speaker 2: All right, Let's talk about what's going on. Firstly with
Speaker 2: the Israel Iran war.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's pretty scary what's happening in the Middle East
Speaker 4: right now, and I think it's unpredictable as to what
Speaker 4: the outcome will be. It's unclear, particularly whether the US
Speaker 4: and the UK will get involved. I think both Donald
Speaker 4: Trump and Kissed Arma are reluctant to get involved. They're
Speaker 4: willing to help Israel, but they're not really willing to
Speaker 4: put any of their own bombs or feet on the
Speaker 4: ground just yet. Although there is talk about Trump potentially
Speaker 4: using that huge buster bomb to get rid of the
Speaker 4: nuclear facility that's buried in a mountain. So at the moment,
Speaker 4: it's slightly up in the air. It's kind of not
Speaker 4: where it's going to go, whether it's going to become
Speaker 4: one of those big, all consuming wars that we've seen
Speaker 4: over the past few years, or whether it might be
Speaker 4: something quite swift and surgical. So it feels quite unpredictable,
Speaker 4: I think to many people.
Speaker 2: The other thing that's going on is the latest on
Speaker 2: the grooming gangs in the UK. Can you give us
Speaker 2: an idea what's happening there?
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's it's ongoing. It's as you say, this is
Speaker 4: just it's coming back again. It's an issue that just
Speaker 4: will never go away, and for good reason, because it
Speaker 4: is an issue which the government here and officialdom here
Speaker 4: has failed to get to grips with again and again
Speaker 4: and again. What's happened this week is that Baroness Casey,
Speaker 4: a well known peer here in the UK, she has
Speaker 4: published a report saying there needs to be a national
Speaker 4: inquiry and the report says that things were worse than
Speaker 4: even people like she thought they were. So it's now
Speaker 4: confirmed that a majority of these gangs were made up
Speaker 4: of men from Pakistani Muslim backgrounds. A majority of their
Speaker 4: victims were girls from the white working class. There was
Speaker 4: a really powerful racial and religious dynamic to this horrendous
Speaker 4: abuse that was carried out over decades against thousands of girls,
Speaker 4: and she says that officialdom, politicians, the media, academics, basically
Speaker 4: the entire British establishment too often turned a blind eye,
Speaker 4: and so Starma is now under huge pressure to get this.
Speaker 3: National inquiry up and running.
Speaker 4: I think it's going to be the most serious reckoning
Speaker 4: Britain has had with itself in one hundred years. This
Speaker 4: is a scandal that has scarred this country and it's
Speaker 4: really about time we got to grips with it, of course.
Speaker 2: And oh, it seems like I'm able to actually talk
Speaker 2: back to you now. I couldn't talk to you before
Speaker 2: without airing ourselves back. So that's good. We were able
Speaker 2: to to continue going forward in a conversational style. And
Speaker 2: I want to ask you about this, the issue with
Speaker 2: and perhaps the deal that Keio Starmer has managed to
Speaker 2: do with Donald Trump as far as the trade is concerned.
Speaker 2: Is that making much news.
Speaker 4: It's kind of been drowned out by all the other stuff,
Speaker 4: you know, It's been drowned out by war in the
Speaker 4: Middle East, the grooming gang scandal here at home, and
Speaker 4: other things as well.
Speaker 3: But it has made a trickle.
Speaker 4: I think people generally feel that Keir Starmer, for all
Speaker 4: his faults is handling Donald Trump pretty well. I mean
Speaker 4: it's well known and I'm sure Donald Trump knows this
Speaker 4: himself that Kiirs, Starmer and his cabinet are not fans
Speaker 4: of Donald Trump. You know, virtually all of them have
Speaker 4: said really quite shocking things about him in the past.
Speaker 4: So David Lammy, our foreign secretary, once called Donald Trump
Speaker 4: a Nazi and the KKK supporter. So it's always very
Speaker 4: awkward aroun our foreign secretary has to go to Washington
Speaker 4: and talk to the officials there. But even with all that,
Speaker 4: I think Starmer is actually doing a pretty good balancing
Speaker 4: act between pushing back against Trump on certain issues but
Speaker 4: really welcoming him into a better trade situation where we're
Speaker 4: not as punished by tariffs as other countries are.
Speaker 2: And we mentioned before I wanted to talk aback with
Speaker 2: you with the Israel Iran warb and I had a
Speaker 2: little bit of technical problem there too, So now we're
Speaker 2: able to actually have a bit of more of a
Speaker 2: chat about this. What is the feeling in the UK
Speaker 2: about the way this is going.
Speaker 4: Well, you know, it's a very strange discussion we're having
Speaker 4: in the UK about this, because some people are in
Speaker 4: favor of Britain and America getting involved. Not many, but some,
Speaker 4: but the general feeling is that we shouldn't get involved
Speaker 4: in You know what, I just feel like there is
Speaker 4: so much gaslighting on this conflict because if you listen
Speaker 4: to left wing voices and anti war voices and a
Speaker 4: lot of the broad cheap media and the mainstream media,
Speaker 4: the way they taught, you would think that Israel was
Speaker 4: the criminal aggressor and Iran was its poor little victim,
Speaker 4: And to my mind, is just that just turns the
Speaker 4: truth completely on its head. You know, this war started
Speaker 4: more than six hundred days ago when one of Iran's
Speaker 4: proxy i e Hamas invaded Israel. It sent an army
Speaker 4: of six thousand men into Israel, where they carried out
Speaker 4: mass slaughter. As everyone knows. Of course, Hezbollah, another Iran proxy,
Speaker 4: has been dropping bombs on northern Israel more than five
Speaker 4: thousand over the past two years as well. And Israel
Speaker 4: itself has fired missile Sorry, Iran itself has fired missiles
Speaker 4: at Israel, hundreds of them over the past year. So
Speaker 4: the idea that Israel is just out of the blue
Speaker 4: launching an illegal war of aggression against Iran, it just
Speaker 4: doesn't stack up. So the gas lighting part of the
Speaker 4: discussion is driving me slightly mad. And I want to
Speaker 4: just grab people by the scruff of the neck and say, listen,
Speaker 4: this war's been going on for nearly two years and
Speaker 4: it wasn't Israel that started it.
Speaker 2: Right, don't go grabbing anybody by any scruff of the neck,
Speaker 2: given the fact that that will require you to to
Speaker 2: probably sweat, and I imagine you're doing that right now
Speaker 2: as the temperature pass is thirty two degree and how
Speaker 2: many times have you had a heat wave like this
Speaker 2: in the UK?
Speaker 4: Well, can I just say what a brilliant segue that
Speaker 4: was from scruff of.
Speaker 3: The neck into hot weather. I know, I know. That's
Speaker 3: why they pay you the big buck. You know what
Speaker 3: I was doing.
Speaker 2: I was doing the week.
Speaker 3: It's it's you're absolutely right. I am.
Speaker 4: I don't want to give too much information and gross
Speaker 4: out your listeners, but I am sweating as we speak.
Speaker 4: It is very, very hot in the UK right now.
Speaker 4: It's now half seven in the evening. Well it's quarter
Speaker 4: to eight actually, and it's still very hot. The sun
Speaker 4: is glaring through my window. It was thirty two degrees today.
Speaker 4: Now I know to Ozzie's they're going to think, what
Speaker 4: a bunch of whimps.
Speaker 3: That's not that hot.
Speaker 2: But that is hot for that is hot, very hard
Speaker 2: for Britain, even by our standards. Thirty two degrees. In fact,
Speaker 2: it's twenty seven degrees at the moment in London. You've
Speaker 2: come to the right guy. Twenty seven degrees at the
Speaker 2: moment in London, but it feels like twenty nine. So
Speaker 2: you have every reason to get hot, mate, And.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's right. I did earlier today. It was earlier,
Speaker 4: it was even hotter than that. But you know, what's
Speaker 4: so interesting to me about this is that we have
Speaker 4: this tendency to pathologize the weather these days and to
Speaker 4: see heat waves as a terrible, terrible thing. Now, of course,
Speaker 4: they can be dangerous for vulnerable people, and we don't
Speaker 4: have very good air conditioning facilities in this country, and
Speaker 4: older people, we should keep an eye on them, make
Speaker 4: sure they're hydrated and they're eating.
Speaker 3: Well, that's a given.
Speaker 4: But you know, I think thirty years ago, when there
Speaker 4: was weather like this, there would have been front page
Speaker 4: pictures of people on the beach and kids having fun,
Speaker 4: and people would have said go outside, put on your
Speaker 4: son's screen.
Speaker 3: Have some ice cream. Now it's very much about.
Speaker 4: Climate change, the end of the world. What does this
Speaker 4: heat wave tell us about, you know, the coming heat
Speaker 4: depth of the planet. It's all a bit depressing and
Speaker 4: I just want to say sometimes, look it's hot, that
Speaker 4: doesn't happen very often.
Speaker 3: Let's enjoy it.
Speaker 2: Well, there you go. That's a good positive way to
Speaker 2: start the weekend.
Speaker 3: Made a way. Is good to talk to you.
Speaker 2: Thanks so much, Brendan O'Neal There in the UK, it's
Speaker 2: fourteen minutes to five