Book your ticket to happiness with Sun Express Airlines. Hello and welcome to the spike podcast I'm Fraser Myers and with me this week as ever we have Spike's editor Tom Slater

Hello and Spike columnist Ella Whelan.

Hi.

Coming up on the show The Global Revolt Against the Elites, the Tory Leadership

Contest and the Gro grooming gang's scandal.

So people have seen some of the footage from Cyril Anka at the weekend

with hordes of people essentially storming the presidential palace, taking selfies, jumping in the pool.

There's also a very serious side to this of course. The country has essentially collapsed. The president has fled to Singapore. I mean, Tom, how does this play into a kind of broader trend? This is not just about

Sri Lanka. No, I think there's a really international dimension to this I mean Brendan wrote about this on spiked this week

Where as you say the situation there is very very serious the economy is really in the toilet

About half million people have been plunged into poverty and it seems like the two big factors that are worth talking about here get to what you're talking about one of which is of course is the impacts of the COVID lockdown.

This is something that people were saying from the very beginning was that

the impact of turning off the world's economy would have a particularly pernicious impact on the

third world, on the developing world, on countries that couldn't rely on the kind of economic relative

strength of other nations and we've seen that play out in Sri Lanka

it obviously hit their tourism industry terribly which they're very reliant on but

also just the knock-on effects in terms of production and

trade have been dreadful for it and then the other thing is is eco-author doxy

because the leadership of Sri Lanka had become particularly kind of keen exponents

of a lot of those sorts of green policies

banning things like fertilizers and pesticides coming into the country which has had a

disastrous impact on domestic agriculture.

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