Has 'Small Boats Week' been a disaster for the Tories?
The News Agents
Global
4.1 • 5.4K Ratings
🗓️ 11 August 2023
⏱️ 30 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
A week that was dedicated to show that the Conservatives have a plan on how to 'stop the boats' has instead been dominated by tragedy - the death of 41 migrants in the sea near Lampedusa while the deputy chair of the Tory party told Channel-crossing migrants to 'f*** off' back to France - and farce - as 39 asylum seekers were removed off barge accommodation just days after moving in due to a bacterial infection in the nearby waters.
Has this week been a major step back for Rishi Sunak in his attempts to fulfil one of his flagship policies? We discuss with Sir Craig Oliver, former director of communications at No.10.
We talk parliamentary standards with Sir Chris Bryant - and Gary Lineker joins us to justify to heartbroken Spurs fan Jon why Harry Kane is right to leave Tottenham for Bayern Munich.
Editor: Tom Hughes
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The Newsagents podcast is brought to you by HSBC UK, opening up a world of opportunity. |
| 0:08.9 | This is a global player original podcast. |
| 0:12.7 | This is Robert Jenrick, the immigration minister on Wednesday, day three of the much-herald stop the boats week. The apparent refusal of some |
| 0:23.2 | people to accept perfectly decent accommodation on this barge. You've got to remember that this is |
| 0:28.4 | a formal accommodation that's being used in Belgium, in the Netherlands, has been used by British |
| 0:34.5 | oil and gas workers. And so, you know, if it's good enough for them, |
| 0:37.9 | it should be good enough for the migrants as well. |
| 0:40.9 | We'll always house people in decent, legally compliant accommodation. |
| 0:45.8 | And this was the breaking news on Sky today. |
| 0:49.5 | Some breaking news relating to the fact |
| 0:51.5 | that all the migrants who had been placed on the Bibby Stockholm |
| 0:55.4 | barch from Monday this week have been removed because of legionella bacteria found in the water |
| 1:02.7 | system there and we've now got a statement. It was only on Monday that a home office minister |
| 1:08.2 | was telling us that the Bibby Stockholm could be full with 500 people |
| 1:13.3 | on board by the end of this week. The way it's looking is it's going to be empty. Welcome to the |
| 1:20.4 | newsagents. The newsagents. It's John and it's nobody else. |
| 1:28.7 | And I've been left all on my lonesome. |
| 1:32.4 | Just a word about later on in the podcast because we're going to be talking to Gary Lineca. |
| 1:36.9 | He's apparently launching his own podcast about football or something. |
| 1:40.1 | And I'll be talking to him about whether Harry Kane is really on his way to Bayern Munich. |
| 1:45.4 | But before that, we started the week talking about small boats. |
| 1:48.7 | We spoke again about small boats on Wednesday. |
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