International Justice?

[00:00:00] The Why Curve with Phil Dobbie and Roger Herring

[00:00:04] What is International Justice?

[00:00:06] Our leaders who start wars or allow the killing of civilians, ever made to pay for their actions.

[00:00:11] The International Criminal Court's been working for more than 20 years, but there have been very few successful cases.

[00:00:17] Only a few leaders have gone to jail, almost all of them are from Africa.

[00:00:21] There are warrants out to arrest Vladimir Putin, and now a request for one for Benjamin Netanyahu.

[00:00:27] But will they ever appear in the dock?

[00:00:29] Is the system just a cover for our inability or unwillingness to enforce human rights rules equally across the world?

[00:00:36] And do dictators take any notice?

[00:00:38] The Why Curve

[00:00:41] So you do have to wonder, don't you, whether the International Criminal Court is actually doing any good.

[00:00:45] How many people are there resting? I mean, how many people are facing trial and actually being charged?

[00:00:51] Some people have been put in jail, it has happened, mainly in Africa.

[00:00:55] And people are appointed and said, oh, they're just the weak ones who can't push back, essentially.

[00:01:00] But maybe in Africa there are warlords who say, well, I better not do that because I might end up in prison.

[00:01:05] But you kind of wonder.

[00:01:07] But you know, they've issued...

[00:01:09] I suspect it's one of those after-the-event things, isn't it?

[00:01:12] Is it actually going to be something that prevents a behavior?

[00:01:16] Well, I just don't know. The value of deterrence is an interesting one.

[00:01:20] And Netanyahu, for example, is thinking, well, maybe I won't go into Rafa because I might be found to be a war criminal.

[00:01:26] Well, I think the one thing about Israel, it is a democracy and potentially people might...

[00:01:31] His own electorate might be thinking, hang on a second, maybe, maybe not.

[00:01:35] And he hasn't actually had an arrest warrant issued yet. It's potentially there.

[00:01:39] There has been one issued, of course, Vladimir Putin.

[00:01:41] But chances of him ending up in the Hague, I think, are pretty thin just because, well, why would he?

[00:01:47] But I suppose maybe he can't travel places.

[00:01:49] So there's lots of reasons why it might work.

[00:01:51] But a lot of countries are not signatories to the International Criminal Court.

[00:01:55] The US, for a start?

[00:01:56] Well, yeah, the big is Israel, obviously, isn't it as well?

[00:01:58] Israel, definitely.

[00:01:59] And then you get...

[00:02:00] We've also got the debate going on locally as well about the European Court and human rights as well.

[00:02:06] There's lots of international courts.

[00:02:08] I mean, the International Court of Justice, there's all kinds of different sectors.

[00:02:12] But the interesting thing with this one is it's almost deliberately set up to go after leaders, heads of state, people who make the decisions, trying to make them accountable.

[00:02:20] That was the original idea back in 2002.

[00:02:22] Right.

[00:02:23] But accountable for something that's already happened.

[00:02:25] By the time the decision has been made, it's all too late, isn't it?

[00:02:29] Well, yeah.

[00:02:30] Because you're charging people for stuff that has already happened.

[00:02:33] But there is the sort for justice.

[00:02:35] People who have suffered and their relations, they want justice and want to see it.

[00:02:38] Let's dig into this and see how we can make decisions.

[00:02:41] Let's see how effective the ICC actually is.

[00:02:44] Dr. Claire Francis Moran is a lecturer in public international law at Aberdeen University.

[00:02:48] She also wrote the book The Authority of International Law, A Controversial Concept.

[00:02:52] And she joins us now.

[00:02:53] So Claire, does any international law really have any sway on a sovereign nation?

[00:03:01] I mean, certainly very much the rhetoric in the UK at the moment is we don't want anybody else determining our laws.

[00:03:08] We want to be governed by ourselves.

[00:03:09] And I'd imagine that that is pretty much the same around the world, isn't it?

[00:03:12] Yeah.

[00:03:13] I suppose that is not a feeling or approach confined to United Kingdom.

[00:03:19] Every state is sovereign and most states want to maintain that sovereignty.

[00:03:26] But international law in many ways doesn't necessarily undermine that sovereignty because it's built on the principle of consent and also on the principle of consensus.

[00:03:37] So states would not be able to be bound by international law unless they wanted to be bound by it.

[00:03:43] Right. I mean, the founding of the the International Criminal Court, which is, I suppose, the most obvious forum for criminal proceedings in international law, that goes back more than 20 years now.

[00:03:56] Would you say it's been successful in the way in which it was envisaged in terms of, I suppose, holding leaders to account?

[00:04:04] I think that it's had a measure of success for certain.

[00:04:07] It depends on the measurement of success that you want to ascribe to it.

[00:04:13] The International Criminal Court has secure prosecutions for a number of different or what are referred to as aimed situations, so different conflicts around the world.

[00:04:24] But there haven't been that many, have there?

[00:04:26] I mean, you know, I was looking through some of the statistics and the number of actual convictions, particularly of anyone outside Africa, has been very small.

[00:04:33] The number of convictions is still quite low for certain. That's the case.

[00:04:37] And the other thing probably to note is that it takes a very long time to bring a case to fruition, to prosecute a case.

[00:04:46] So it can take place over several years, if not a couple of decades.

[00:04:51] So it does depend.

[00:04:54] But for those who were victims of, for example, Dominic Ongwin's field judgment was heard last year, for those who were victims of these crimes, then they would probably measure it as a success because it offers them justice that they might not have otherwise had.

[00:05:08] So I suppose it depends on the perspective taken.

[00:05:12] There has been a degree of success in some respects. In other respects, one of the examples I was thinking of is President Alvishan of Sudan.

[00:05:21] There's been an arrest warrant out for him for a number of years and we've not managed actually to secure a prosecution at least for him.

[00:05:29] Why is that? Because we don't know where they are or because they're just avoiding going to the countries where they know they could be arrested or even if they do go to those countries, are they managing to get in and out without being arrested?

[00:05:39] I think for sure a combination of all three, it's hard to erase the leader, erase someone who travels with diplomatic protection who is visiting countries in which they will be hosted by different agencies and things like that.

[00:05:56] It can be really hard to secure their arrest. So I think it is a mixture of these things.

[00:06:01] And also you are aiming for the head of a state as well in that respect, in that particular case. So it's always been very difficult to erase that particular individual.

[00:06:12] The basis of it all, Dr Moran, is that there is this law which has been accepted or an idea which has been accepted by a certain number of countries that they will allow the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court.

[00:06:26] But can it be imposed on countries that don't accept its jurisdiction? To what extent can they be, can their leaders be held accountable by the ICC?

[00:06:37] I mean how does this actually work?

[00:06:39] So an example would be Netanyahu wouldn't it?

[00:06:41] Yes because Israel has not signed up to it.

[00:06:44] So to use that particular example, it's because the crimes alleged have taken place on, and alleged to have taken place we should say as well, on the territory of a state party.

[00:06:56] So if you are committing the crimes on the territory of a state party, in this case Palestine, then that would also allow the ICC to have grounds for prosecution, grounds for jurisdiction, etc.

[00:07:08] So it's because Palestine is recognised as a state party in itself, that's why it would be appropriate. I mean because Palestine is only recognised as a state by a certain number of countries in the world.

[00:07:19] It is but it has been recognised as a state party to the ICC for the purposes of jurisdiction as well. So it is possible for the ICC to have jurisdiction over.

[00:07:32] So what are the laws? Where is the law book coming from? I'm assuming that this all sort of emanates from the Geneva Convention, but has that been built on? What are the laws that the ICC is upholding?

[00:07:45] So the rules come from the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, which is a big treaty, setting out things like the jurisdiction of the Rome Statute when the ICC has, or the Office of the Prosecutor has grounds to prosecute.

[00:08:00] And setting out what we call the subject matter jurisdiction, so the crimes themselves, what it has jurisdiction over as well in terms of the criminal act.

[00:08:10] So it's a subject matter being, I mean if it's a crime against humanity or if it's a war crime or if it's waging aggressive war, those things have different areas. Is that what you're saying?

[00:08:20] There would be four main areas over which the ICC would have jurisdiction. Those are, as you said, crimes against humanity, war crimes, aggravation and genocide. Those are the four main areas.

[00:08:32] And the gist of a war crime would be that you are, for example, killing civilians rather than aiming for military targets. Let's just go back to Harry Truman.

[00:08:44] I mean he killed many thousands of civilians in Japan. So would that today, if that had happened to them, assuming that would be seen as a contravention, and Harry Truman would be seen as being a war criminal?

[00:08:57] I think again that goes back to the idea of whether or not it is seen politically or whether or not you can actually prosecute someone.

[00:09:04] So you can be prosecuted at the ICC for a war crime if you are carrying out any of the acts and to sort of use the phrasing, the statute, if you're doing it as part of a plan or a policy or part of a sort of large scale commission of these crimes.

[00:09:19] So that would be the first element as it were of a war crime. And then the war crimes that you mentioned earlier, the Geneva Conventions, a lot of the war crimes are taken from three features of the Geneva Conventions themselves.

[00:09:32] The Geneva Conventions are agreed to by the vast majority of countries. They constitute therefore what we refer to as customary international law in which the law itself is considered to be accepted by everyone as it were.

[00:09:48] And therefore you can argue a case on that basis.

[00:09:51] But I suppose the nature of this argument is that a country like the US, even if there were Harry Truman now figure carrying out a nuclear bombing and one can take into account whether there were justifications or not, that's another debate.

[00:10:05] But the fact that it's America, which is not signed up to the ICC, but also the fact that someone looking at the history of the ICC, the International Criminal Court, say the prosecutions have dramatically been clearly in one particular part of the world, most of them in Africa, where there are weaker countries politically who can't say no.

[00:10:27] Is that a distortion of reality or is that actually what's happening?

[00:10:31] I think there's two points to make there actually which are quite interesting.

[00:10:34] The first one is that if you are trying to indict the head of a state, which is not a state party to the ICC, then yes, it's not going to be that easy to indict a head of state, but also you're not going to have jurisdiction unless the crimes are taking place on the territory of a state party or unless there's another jurisdictional link.

[00:10:55] I think the kind of second point that you're making there about the targeting over a particular group of countries, in particular in Africa, a lot of atrocities that occurred in Africa in which the individuals wouldn't have been able to get justice unless the ICC had taken up the prosecutions for a variety of reasons.

[00:11:17] What about this case about Benjamin Netanyahu and indeed Hamas, both of which where the prosecutor, the chief prosecutor has asked the judges to issue arrest warrants.

[00:11:26] They haven't been issued as yet, but they may well be.

[00:11:29] But with the case with Israel, it is a very, very different situation than we've seen before.

[00:11:36] The arrest warrant out for Vladimir Putin.

[00:11:40] It's a dictatorship, pretty obviously not a democracy with what we would see as a fair justice system of its own.

[00:11:47] But Israel is different. It's seen as being a semi-western democracy, certainly democracy, with a functioning justice system of its own, its own Supreme Court.

[00:11:57] Isn't a line being crossed in all this, perhaps that might be interesting, perhaps even very challenging?

[00:12:03] In terms of the country being democratic and therefore being able to launch their own prosecutions, which is one of the key parts of their own statute.

[00:12:12] The ICC is supposed to have court of last resort, wherein it only gets involved if there's no likelihood, again to use the language of the statute, if the country is unwilling or unable to prosecute.

[00:12:22] So in this case, they would be able to do so, but they would definitely be unwilling to do so.

[00:12:27] And that has been made very clear by the Israeli government. There's no prospect of that happening.

[00:12:32] So it may be democratic, but there is no virus, I suppose, in democratic countries committing more crimes than crimes against humanity.

[00:12:41] It's possible that the acts themselves are keen not necessarily who commits them.

[00:12:46] And that, I think, when we're talking about the prosecution of the convictions that the ICC has secured, that's one of the most interesting things it has indicted and convicted leaders of non-state actor groups.

[00:12:59] And by that I mean non-governmental groups, so our brigades and things like that, rebel groups, rather than focusing on governments alone.

[00:13:06] Whereas if you look at the prosecutions that took place after the Second World War, which is where we've got those sort of roots of international criminal law.

[00:13:13] It was all state actors that were indicted, people who were affiliated to government.

[00:13:17] So it is all political though, isn't it? That is the difference between, for example, a domestic court trying criminals where you could argue that it should be distinct from politics.

[00:13:27] This does get into politics at almost every level.

[00:13:30] So, for example, going back to Harry Truman again, I'm sure he would say, well look, we bombed two cities in Japan because we wanted to bring a quick end to the war.

[00:13:39] In the same way that I'm sure Israel would say, well you know we are killing civilians in Gaza.

[00:13:45] But that is unfortunate, we're trying to bring an end to Hamas and to end attacks on Israel.

[00:13:51] So the same argument, we're trying to expedite a war.

[00:13:54] So there's the case for and against on both sides.

[00:13:58] But in each case it's political, isn't it? It's not black and white.

[00:14:03] The ICC has got that problem that they are dealing deeply with politics, geopolitics.

[00:14:09] I think that speaks actually to a really sort of interesting point that Kareem Khan made about the conflict in which he said that as he didn't begin the investigation in Palestine,

[00:14:22] he was talking about the idea that he inherited this investigation in the state of Palestine.

[00:14:27] And he said that it lies in the San Andreas fault of international politics and strategic interests.

[00:14:34] That's a lovely phrase, that the San Andreas fault of international.

[00:14:38] I mean, that's not wrong. Yeah, it is. It's a very clear point, isn't it?

[00:14:41] Yeah, absolutely. And I think he realized how difficult it would be.

[00:14:45] I don't think he realized at the time how difficult it would get, but I think he realized at the time how difficult it would be to commence any movement in that particular area.

[00:14:55] But there will always be with international criminal law, there will always be a degree of political, not quite involvement, but I think interplay,

[00:15:05] because you are arguing and you are alleging effectively that you will prosecute or that more crimes have taken place, crimes against humanity taking place.

[00:15:14] And you're then labeling the charge that you intend to prosecute.

[00:15:17] I mean, I suppose looking back, there were two separate tribunals that were set up to deal with Bosnia in one case and the breakup of the former Yugoslavia and another one with Rwanda.

[00:15:28] And in both cases, I suppose perhaps the international community had already decided pretty much who the bad guys were and who the good guys were.

[00:15:35] And therefore it wasn't as hard to push those things through.

[00:15:40] And I suppose picking up on Phil's point, because of the political nature of this, even if an arrest warrant is issued and even if if Benjamin Netanyahu one day goes into the dock in The Hague,

[00:15:53] it's going to be extremely difficult.

[00:15:55] I mean, the San Andreas folder of of of court sessions of trials, it feels like because of all that that's happening and the fact that it is such a debate that divides the world.

[00:16:06] I agree. I think it's really hard to have even to a certain degree, a sort of a degree of fairness in these things when so much is obscured by politics and whereas you see people feel as though they have the perhaps feel they have to take a side and they have to sort of argue one side is right and one side is wrong.

[00:16:27] And I think what the release of the application or the indication that they are looking purely at the acts that have been committed, they are not particularly bothered about who they are, who the people are as long as they are the people who are the most responsible.

[00:16:45] And that's another thing that the ICC was set up to do. It was set up to identify the individuals who bear the greatest responsibility for these acts and then to indict them.

[00:16:55] And that is what is happening here. So this is in some ways an entirely likely conclusion of the intended creation of the court or the intentions behind the creation of the court perhaps a clearer way to say it.

[00:17:09] It's one thing they intended to do. So it's evidence based rather than politics. It's hard though isn't it? Because that evidence is interpretation of evidence. That's the problem.

[00:17:18] Yeah. And the people who make up the ICC, and I'm imagining it rotates to a great extent but the people who are there, the judges who are determining the outcomes, I mean it's going to be hard for them to remain politically unbiased.

[00:17:34] I wouldn't have thought so. I think all judges have a situation in which they will probably have personal feelings about things and they will set up for cases that they again have feelings about but that is not their role.

[00:17:46] Their role is to make a decision based on the evidence and to apply the law. That's the critical thing that they must do. And I think they take, at the ICC they seem to get really seriously.

[00:17:55] They do a lot of research recently on the Dominic Ongman case and the way in which they have taken such care to apply the law and to be very clear about things in their judgments is exemplary.

[00:18:06] So I don't think that it would be a problem that they would encounter on a daily basis. I think the difficulty is that a lot of these problems because they do seem political, there's a tendency to, particularly in the reporting, to focus on the political issues.

[00:18:25] Whereas again if you look at the sort of the detail on the application for the rest warrants, it's all about the crimes that have been committed, the places that they have been committed and those who are alleged to bear responsibility for those crimes.

[00:18:40] And for really, and this is again one of the purposes of a trash criminal law, the failure to suppress the commission of those crimes where you are a commander, where you are part of a war cabinet or in charge of a government, in charge of a country.

[00:18:55] You're not only supposed to not direct people to do these things, but if they are behaving in a wrong fashion then you're supposed to suggest that. You're supposed to take measures to avoid that happening.

[00:19:05] Is there not though another issue here which is in a way the legitimacy of the ICC in this regard? There have been stories in the last few days about pressure coming from inside the Israeli Secret Service in fact on the previous Chief Prosecutor.

[00:19:21] That's unclear whether that how true that is, but suggestions that there was that happening in the background.

[00:19:26] And now in the United States there's a bill potentially going to go through Congress moving towards some kind of sanctions on the judges of the ICC or the officials of the ICC to try and put pressure on them because of this issue of them issuing potentially a warrant against Netanyahu.

[00:19:44] By making a certain judgment you might then not be able to move your money around because the US will impose something on your accounts or this kind of stuff. I mean that's almost physical pressure on the judges.

[00:19:55] I think it is pressure, but I don't think necessarily one would cave to it. I think there were when President Trump was in office I think there were similar moves to pressurise the Chief Prosecutor Fatih bin Sudha as you said previously.

[00:20:13] And that didn't seem to make much of a difference to the operation of the court. Indeed she did not in any way undermine or remove the investigation of al-Assad and pass it over to her successor.

[00:20:25] So I think that they don't seem, these things must not be pleasant, they mustn't be enjoyable and I wouldn't profess to speak on behalf of either the court or the judges.

[00:20:37] But there doesn't seem to be a consequence openly demonstrated of the pressure being applied.

[00:20:47] But again a lot of this is in a way a bit of a test case in that these motions through Congress I think will probably be the first if not the sort of maybe only the second time, possibly only the first time that this has ever really happened.

[00:21:03] So we need to wait and see to see what happens.

[00:21:06] And is it effective as the other big question as well?

[00:21:10] How many people have actually been brought to trial, prosecuted and as a result of ICC rulings?

[00:21:20] And how much have been declared but never found?

[00:21:25] Just how effective is it as an organisation?

[00:21:28] The question beyond that is do you think there are people who potentially might commit war crimes but think the deterrent effect of the ICC?

[00:21:37] Because I'm suspecting not many, I suspect you know many crazed dictators will say well I'm going to do what I'm going to do, I don't really care about the...

[00:21:44] Because I'll never get to trial anyway.

[00:21:46] I mean I suppose if you're using the number of prosecutions, the sort of cases as it were as a measure of success then there are 31 at the moment so that's not bad in terms of organising an international court which is dealing with a number of different countries, a number of different situations, different languages.

[00:22:06] So there are prosecutions that are taking place, they are managing to arrest individuals and bring them to trial.

[00:22:13] There are other cases as I mentioned earlier with Alva Sherwood where you've had an unsealed restaurant for a number of years and no refraction, no movement on it whatsoever and possibly never any movement.

[00:22:24] So there are certain things that will not work.

[00:22:27] For the victims of those who have been convicted, the conviction of the person who caused them that harm or directed that harm has allowed them a degree of justice that they might not otherwise have had.

[00:22:40] At the same time again if you are a head of state you'll have all of that protection and that protection is not just political as you mentioned earlier, it's not just financial, it's everything that comes with all of that power and the sort of the connections that you might have.

[00:22:56] So to a certain extent it must be very difficult to ever indict someone who is very rich and powerful because you are relying heavily on bringing them to trial and then being able to prosecute them effectively.

[00:23:12] So it's really, it must be very difficult. I think that a lot of the discussion, at least academically in scholarship and the responses to the applications for the rest one, what a lot of individuals have said, a lot of colleagues have said is that they're not hopeful of an immediate or even sort of prosecution soon.

[00:23:35] There is the idea that you're saying that what you've done is not acceptable. These things do have a deterrent effect in that way. So there are, there is a degree of deterrence there through the issuing of if these rest warrants are to be unsealed eventually.

[00:23:54] But is it as effective as for example moves made by other countries? So the United States is obviously not part of the International Criminal Court. If the United States is not happy about the behaviour of a particular country in the world, it's going to impose sanctions on that country which is going to have more immediate effect than any court ruling which is by its very nature sort of like looking back at events that have already passed.

[00:24:18] I mean, it's supposed in terms of international law sanctions can be highly effective. They can be targeted and they can convel people to behave as it were by instructing sort of limitations on their financial movements for example.

[00:24:32] But they are purely political decisions in that case aren't they? You know, that decision being made.

[00:24:36] It's not judicial.

[00:24:37] There's no.

[00:24:38] To an extent if they came from the UN Security Council and I suppose they constitute part of their powers in international law. But from a state perspective, yes, they would be. We're supposed to do so in response. It's supposed to be a response to a breach of international law. So it's not supposed to be just whenever they decide.

[00:24:58] I was watching the reform party on TV this week talking about how they were going to turn back the boats and send them back into French waters. And the interviewer saying we have breaching international law there.

[00:25:09] And he said, well, we'll do we will just do that.

[00:25:11] So what would I mean in a situation like that? What happens?

[00:25:15] Well, it's not. Yeah, I mean, it will be more, I suppose civil law rather than criminal law. I don't know how that would play.

[00:25:21] It would just be diplomatic relations would be destroyed.

[00:25:24] As we as we draw this debate to close, Dr. Manow I wanted to say, you know, you I know you're not necessarily a futurologist. You can't predict what's going to happen. But do you think that actually either Vladimir Putin or Benjamin Netanyahu will ever appear in the court in the Hague?

[00:25:40] If you had to say they may or they may not, which way would you tend? Do you think they would ever actually appear in the end?

[00:25:46] I would say never say never. And I think many people would say the same thing on the same in the sense that you would never I don't think if you were experiencing a lemon through the second world war and you were to have thought at that point in time that a lot of people had been very high ranking commanders, very serious players in the government and the Nazi regime.

[00:26:09] You would never have thought they would have appeared before the court and they did. And in that respect, I think that these things can happen. But it would depend very much on how that how that plays out for how the change in international politics takes place.

[00:26:24] And by that I mean how power moves and that is an issue which affects a lot, but it's not rooted in the law of per se. But I would never say never. You just never know what's going to happen.

[00:26:35] Yeah. So politics right to the end. That's the problem.

[00:26:38] That is always the issue.

[00:26:40] That's one of the main problems with international law. We struggle very much a lot of the time to apply the law in a vacuum because it cannot be applied in a vacuum.

[00:26:49] Yeah, but I take your point that there are facts out there. There's lots of people being killed. So this is this. This is the reason behind it. This is the perpetrator. All of that you could argue facts with the argument becomes the reason was there a good reason.

[00:27:03] And also legally, did they break break or did they not break international law? But I think I think you've laid out the case pretty pretty clearly and comprehensively. Dr. Moran on that. Thank you for doing that.

[00:27:15] And we will see. I mean it's going to be a really interesting moment if and when the arrest warrant is issued and what the consequences are and what happens when Netanyahu sets foot in a country where he could be arrested for the sake of example.

[00:27:29] Yeah, yeah. But thank you, Dr. Brown. Really good to talk to you. Thanks for having me on.

[00:27:34] And can you be tried in a court for mismanaging an economy for 14 years? That's not so far.

[00:27:41] Is the implication necessarily of course that we know where you're coming from. Well, we do. We do. I mean, they have been.

[00:27:48] Yes. But the question is how bad is the situation when we get the UK economy? Yeah. How bad is it going to be?

[00:27:54] So it was the Labour Party, wasn't it? Who left a note saying sorry, there's no money left. Yeah. Who was it?

[00:27:59] I wasn't in the country at the time. No, it was. It was one of the I think was the Secretary of the Treasury. Anyway, one of them. But yes, I mean that situation again. Well, you know, whoever, whoever gets into number 10 after the Fourth of July are they going to have any wiggle room in order to do anything that makes any difference?

[00:28:17] They are both there saying, oh, we are fiscal conservatives. You know, we are, you know, there's no debate there in terms of big spending or low spending.

[00:28:25] It's they're all saying, well, we're going to stick by the rules and make sure that we're not getting into another situation where we just go crazy with money spending and then the bond markets go crazy.

[00:28:34] And yeah, but we have another list trust episode. There are lots of jars, little jars with money in them.

[00:28:40] The question is what it goes on. What you take away from, you know, one side saying, oh, well, you know, we'll crack down on tax evasion. That'll give us plenty of money to do stuff.

[00:28:49] No one's able put VAT on school fees that will give us lots of money to do stuff. How real is any of that given the state of the country's finances?

[00:28:56] And can you grow your way out of it as the as the other things? Well, if you do spend a bit of money. So it's sort of like becoming the you know, it's a Milton Keynes versus versus Milton Keynes.

[00:29:08] That's Phil's favorite economist, Milton Keynes. We're definitely right. Find some stuff that Milton Keynes has written and it's just collapsing.

[00:29:18] I know it's a I think we better draw a veil at this point. It's a Keynes argument. But not a Milton Keynes. Not Milton.

[00:29:24] Milton Freeman or John Maynard Keynes. What he was trying to say was is that a Keynes argument versus a you know.

[00:29:30] I think this is definitely a point where we say tune in the day. Tune into next week's podcast and you might get some sense.

[00:29:36] We'll be doing it live from Milton Keynes next week. We'll see you then. Thanks for listening.