Hello and welcome to rock and roll politics, the podcast with me, Steve Richards.

Thank you for tuning in.

And as ever, we've got a lot to cram in, our time together.

If it's okay with all of you, I will reflect briefly, hopefully briefly, on the probably in a competitive field, the thornyest issue of the lot,

which is immigration stroke asylum, two of course entirely different forces at work,

but ones that tend to be conflated in some respects anyway, these people coming over here kind of thing.

And looking at that in the context of what's happening in Syria, the immigration figures from which Kirstama responded with that dramatic statement about the an experiment of open borderless

has failed the Tory experiment. In the context again of Labor's ambitions for economic growth,

not least for house building, where people are required to build

the houses, amongst other things. So anyway, we're going to take a look at all of that because

it touches so much, both globally and domestically and in terms of economic policy too. Then we will go to your

brilliant questions, some of them, and then we'll all go and lie down in a darkened room and recover.

So if you're about to go running or start baking, let's go for it. Syria is an extraordinary story on so many levels.

There was a brilliant documentary a few years ago on Assad and the family and his wife,

the English wife and so on, which was completely gripping. I don't know how many of you

saw it, whether I think it was a BBC program and it might still be on YouTube. It was compelling

because it, in a way, highlighted the complexity of a tyrant.

Here was someone who was a relatively mild-mannered student in London, doomed to become a tyrant.

That's not excusing him in any way at all.

But he was apparently a relatively self-effacing character when in London.

And there he, I think it already met his wife to be, but that's when the relationship was formalized and they moved back to Syria because his brother died and he was then in charge,

inheriting the power of that family's rule over Syria. The father was a tyrant, and he too had no choice but to become one.

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