Europe's on fire - so why are politicians scared of green policies?
The News Agents
Global
4.1 • 5.4K Ratings
🗓️ 24 July 2023
⏱️ 52 minutes
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Summary
The pictures from Greece tell a horrifying story of people running for their lives from the wildfires. Southern Europe is locked in unprecedented heatwaves across the continent.
But the headlines tell a different story - of our two main parties starting to shift the narrative about net-zero policy - after what seems like a singular By-election upset in Uxbridge.
The British public - according to recent YouGov polls - are firmly behind green policies - as long as it doesn't personally hurt too much. So why are politicians behaving like it's something we can all 'put off until later' when the crisis is clearly on our doorstep and our own economy depends upon us getting it?
And - we report from Spain on the election that has left the country in political stasis and questions about whether the far right Vox party has peaked.
Editor: Tom Hughes
Senior Producer: Gabriel Radus
Producer: Laura FitzPatrick
Planning: Alex Barnett
Video producers: Rory Symon & Will Gibson Smith
Social media editor: Georgia Foxwell
The News Agents is a Global Player Original and a Persephonica Production.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The Newsagents podcast is brought to you by HSBC UK, opening up a world of opportunity. |
| 0:09.1 | This is a global player original podcast. |
| 0:12.6 | The smoke was covering the sun at this point, so there was just this really scary orange hue over everything, |
| 0:16.9 | and there was ash falling, and people were just carrying whatever belongings they had on them. |
| 0:21.3 | That was Robert Sladen, who should have been on holiday in Rhodes this week, |
| 0:25.2 | celebrating his fourth wedding anniversary with his husband, Jordan. |
| 0:28.8 | He's speaking to us from Toulouse, and he's actually so grateful that he made it there. |
| 0:34.7 | He is, to all intents and purposes, in evacuee, one of those many |
| 0:39.0 | thousands who had to flee roads, often in the middle of the night, or with very little notice, |
| 0:45.8 | to trek across the beach or to trek miles up a main road without having any sense of the |
| 0:50.7 | direction in which they were going to escape the wildfires that are engulfing |
| 0:55.1 | parts of the Greek island. And it is extraordinary to look at the front of the times today |
| 1:00.4 | and to see many people like Robert fleeing one of the resorts with this extraordinary |
| 1:05.7 | orange hue. The sun has been masked by the burn and the fire smoke. |
| 1:12.1 | And on the right, we hear that 19,000 people are fleeing roads. |
| 1:15.9 | And on the left, the main headline is the Tory retreat from green policies in order to woo voters. |
| 1:24.7 | How on earth can we be looking at this picture and these words side by side and simply |
| 1:31.5 | not getting it? Welcome to the newsagents. The news agents. It's Emily and it's Lewis in |
| 1:41.5 | Seville and later in the show we're going to be talking about what was a really exciting, extraordinary election night here in Spain, where everybody thought, not just in Spain, but in Europe overall, that the right and the far right were about to enter government for the first time since 1975, since the fall of Franco's regime. |
| 2:01.2 | And the Spanish voters, well, it looks like they've had other ideas. |
| 2:03.8 | But we're going to start in Rhodes and Corfu and Evia, for that matter, |
| 2:07.7 | because the scenes there are thousands of Brits who are trying to leave. |
... |
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