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