this is bbc news. the headlines: rival protests by far—right and anti—racist groups are being held in several cities across the uk. there are pockets of disorder, with several police officers injured. the unrest comes on the heels of a third consecutive night of violence in sunderland. at the paris olympics, julien alfred of st lucia wins gold in the women's 100 metres, securing the first—ever olympic medal for her country. world champion sha'carri richardson of the united states takes silver. now we have newscast, the uk's flagship daily news podcast from the bbc. newscast — from the bbc.

hello, it's adam in the newscast studio. ah, but it's notjust us. i'm paddy here in the newscast studio. we've also got dharshini david, who's our chief economics correspondent. hello, dharshini. hello. so, do you know the deal here? so basically, newscast, which you're used to being on every day as a podcast on bbc sounds, as a special summer treat, as an experiment, is live on radio 4 every saturday. now, i call it an experiment, paddyjust calls it radio. i think we should... we're here with the patience of the listeners who think, "what have you got? "have you done any work?" oh, the pressure, the pressure. i've got numbers. i've got spreadsheets. yes. so, later on in this episode we're going to talk about the black hole in the public finances, as rachel reeves, the chancellor, would describe it, and you can tell us whether it is a black hole or what size it is and whether a black hole can be filled. and whether we need to worry. exactly. and also, other economic news that's been happening this week. but first of all, we're going to focus on the disorder

in various english cities throughout the week. we saw it in a few places, for example, the vigil in southport that then turned violent on tuesday night after the stabbing incident in southport on monday. and then what happened on friday night was it seemed to have spread to sunderland, where there was a protest about various things that turned into a riot that saw the police being pelted by beer bottles and bricks. a police station was set on fire, a citizen's advice bureau was ransacked as well, and we're going to talk to our home and legal affairs correspondent, dominic cassiani, about it ina minute. but paddy, you actually went to one of the places where, earlier on this week, something very, very similar happened. just explain where you were and what it was. yes. so, there was a protest called in aldershot, with the destination being a hotel where asylum seekers are being housed, on a road about a mile and a half outside the city centre. aldershot is famously the home of the british army. there's been a lot of immigration over the years. in fact, i grew up near

there and there is a lot of change i've seen. i saw it for myself. however, on facebook, a peaceful demonstration was called to highlight problems over housing, problems about integration, and it grew very ugly. there were bricks thrown, there was racial abuse shouted and it was very frightening to be in the hotel, as i heard from one family who are seeking asylum here from afghanistan. we're going to hear two young sisters who i met. it's quite a rare interview to get this. i got it on the pavement outside the hotel. they tell us how cars drove up to the hotel, how violent men started shouting at them. and you can hear, i think, in their voice, people who fled war do not feel safe on the streets of this protest. they come, like, suddenly, they park their cars here, . and they were trying i to climb into the hotel. they even break our wall at the gate and the windows were also broken. i

it was really scary. how old are you? i'm 22. and are you the sister? yeah. and how old are you? i'm17 right now. were you here? did you witness...? yeah. can you tell me what happened? they were abusing us, they were making videos and, like, not a good behaviour. like, we just love them, they are so polite, some people. but some people are very aggressive towards us, and racist. that feels very bad. and listening to thatjust really reminds me of a similar incident in knowsley on merseyside earlier on this year, where a hotel housing asylum seekers was attacked by a group of people who turned up for a protest. and itjust is a reminder that this phenomenon has been bubbling away and brewing for quite a long time, actually. it seems like it's just popped up from nowhere, but actually it's a phenomenon that's been around for quite some time. right, our home and legal affairs correspondent, dominic castellani, is here. hi, dom. hi. good morning. i hate to use the word context

because it's just such a, like, a pretentious word, butjust put what happened in sunderland last night, what paddy was seeing in aldershot earlier this week and then what happened in southport on monday, just try and join all the dots for us about what we think this is. it's very complicated, _ what's going on at the moment. so, on one level you've got a lot of individual and disparate - groups with no guiding hand, according to all the evidence we've seen so far, doing - their own thing. so, for instance, there's no suggestion we can see - that the people who were committing l acts of violence in sunderland last l night are directly connected - to decisions to attack the police in some other parts of the country. however, what is clear is beneath that is a series of ideas _ and conspiracy theories which have been spreading for years _ among the new disparate formsl of the far right, which effectively informally organise via social media or come together- through these ideas.

and it's those ideas which are driving it. so just to kind of break this down from the start of the week, - it was apparent to - professional researchers who follow the far right, i as of tuesday lunchtime, that there could be some potential trouble in southport. _ |and they were alerting journalists, | including me, who follow this stuff. they were quite concerned. and what they were seeing is various ideas being shared online, _ ideas such as "save our children", and this is effectively linked | to a far—right idea that elites in the uk — you know, pick an elite and add it to the list — _ are somehow hiding child abuse or covering up the crimes - of "illegal immigrants". so you had this idea kind of being perpetrated. - you had some of these groups -

suggesting this was directly linked to islam in the uk, where, of- course, we know that the man who's been charged in relation - to the deaths in southport is not a muslim, and you have i a confluence of these ideas coming together online. and what it then takes is local groups to organise, combined j with higher profile social media i influencers on the far right to help spread a message. and then the idea tends to go nationwide fairly quickly, - and then it goes back down. to a local level, where you see i individual groups deciding to take. matters into their own hands and go on the streets. now, what we think happened, for instance, last night - in sunderland, was the idea that's has obviously been seeded - that there's going to be protests. by yesterday afternoon, by our estimates, there i were at least 34 proposals for demonstrations over this coming weekend in towns and cities — - actually, in all parts of the uk. it wasn't clear how many of them |would take place, but it appears| that the one in swindon last night, a really important element -

of that is something called the north east infidels, . and they are a extreme right—wing organisation which splintered - from the english defence league - many, many years ago when the edl was still an organised thing. their banner was out on the streets of sunderland last night, _ so a degree of organisation on the ground, but very, . very complicated, overlapping relationships on social medial driving it as well. yeah, i mean, i wonder if i can spool it right back to our society. so, we've done a bit about the last few days, but there is a very genuine feeling among people who are commenting on facebook and notjoining protests that bad examples of integration, that bad examples of reporting on immigrant communities who do commit crimes, that not enough reporting has been put on people who can't find a house because of a large amount of immigration that's come into their area. in other words, there is a feeling from people who don't want to protest that the issues have not been properly aired. and this is dangerous

because it should be something that could be said in our political climate and people feel it has not. if i can give you an example, i told you how i walked to the hotel from the town centre. it's not a long walk. in aldershot. it's not a long walk. so why did people drive there? why did the protesters who wanted to cause the violence drive there? perhaps because they didn't really know where it was. and i spoke to a man who lived half a mile away. he said, "look, i didn't know this protest was happening. "i live half a mile from the hotel. "but i can tell you, living in aldershot, "that i wish the issues in our country were more "properly addressed." and here he is. he's a neighbour of the hotel and he did not know this protest was happening. he does not like violence, but he does want a full explanation of the pressures on housing, on health, and if crimes are committed, by whom? i guess, sort of mixed . feelings about it, really. aldershot is a very- ethnically diverse town. i've not experienced or seen any kind of activity- like that before here. so yes, i guess it's-

concerning, but i think there are underlying issues. i mean, there's a lot - of new housing being built in aldershot, but it looks like there's not enough. i do you think it's a sort of moment in the country? if you follow the news, are you concerned about these tensions between communities? yes, i would say i am concerned because i don't believe - it's just a few extremists. i think that there are simmering tensions. j now, dom, it was interesting when we spoke on thursday on an episode of newscast, after keir starmer had done a big news conference about his approach to all of this, keir starmer wasn't talking about this as a big social issue or something to do with integration, or something to do with tensions over the supply of housing in various parts of the uk. he talked about it pretty much exclusively as a law and order issue, and he was applying law and order solutions to it, for example, co—ordinating police forces better so that more of them can use facial recognition software to identify potential ringleaders,

or treating it more like football hooliganism, whereby you can ban people from going to certain parts of the country so they can't stir up trouble there. and actually, the response we saw from the home office on friday night was kind of more of the same. it was things like, "we're going to put loads "of extra prosecutors on standby this weekend "so that the legal process can be used to tackle this phenomenon." yeah, i think actually what's - going on there is partly driven by, i suspect, keir starmer's experience as the director of public _ prosecutions in 2011, _ when we had the absolutely enormous eruption of rioting - and disorder that summer, which, you know, many people will remember. | now, when he was dpp during that period, - what we had was the police trying to arrest and detain _ as many people as possible who were involved - in the looting and the running amok. the question is, how— could you deal with them quickly? and as dpp, keir starmer effectively had to make available _

prosecutors to work around the clock to get these people processed - through the courts . before a magistrate, and to receive some kind of conviction, l if they could do that, i as quickly as possible. now, after that period, - keir starmer said to academics as part of a piece of research, - that he felt that what was important about how they dealt with the 2011 rioting was that they cracked - on with dispensing justice swiftly. in other words, when it became clear to people who wanted to go out - and riot that their chances i of being caught had gone up, and therefore their chances - of getting a conviction within days before the courts was more likely, his view seemed to be that that| acted as a significant deterrent, perhaps more of a deterrent thanl the actual length of the sentence. and that sort of chimes with a lot of what criminals often say, - which is it's the fear of getting - caught that prevents them committing the crime, not necessarily the fear of the sentence. i well, then, dom, we're into the issue about the creaking criminaljustice

system, because how many times have you and i talked about how long people are having to wait for their cases to get to court, and then how quickly people are having to be released from prison because the the prisons are full? but also we're into the issue of keir starmer�*s no longer the dpp, he's the pm, so he's got to behave like one. he can'tjust behave like he's the dpp. he's got to lead the country. and for that purpose, he has had private meetings in liverpool where there has actually been best practice integration, where police kept differing groups apart and where people have reached across the divide. there's a famous sign on twitter, nans against nazis, which is doing the rounds from one of the protests that has been seen at the weekend in one of the cities. so there are places where people are getting this sorted out. the prime minister's job is to say, "dear uk, there are places where we're getting this right — "i've been there. "there are places where we're getting this wrong — "i'm doing that." but he can't be seen to be just being the guy who was the dpp

and has now moved offices. he's got to lead the country now. and this is a severe test. honeymoon — over. well, yeah, i can see two big risks here, where keir starmer�*s strengths can become weaknesses. one is that thing about his background as the director of public prosecutions. if you sell yourself as, like, mr law and order and then law and order breaks down or is perceived to have broken down — eh—ur! and then the second thing is he said, "i am not a showman. "you're not going to get big rhetoric from me. "i focus on solutions." but actually there are times when the country needs some big rhetoric, and needs a big story to be told, because stories are very powerful. and actually, if he maybe fails to tell a great story and he doesn't have his version of borisjohnson with the broom when he was mayor of london, clearing up after the riots, then that's another "eh—uh!" for him. that is exactly where he should be. he should get his broom out. also, we know tony blair was frit about the petrol protests. that was something early on in the blair days. as drivers, tankers blockaded, he wasn't ready for that. so get ready for a moment in the new labour administration and we'll see how well

advised everyone is. there's been a lot of preparation waiting, all these bills coming in the king's speech, 39 bills. governing the country — this is the moment. let's see it. it's a shame laura's not here this weekend, because one of her classic laura phrases all the way through the election was, "yeah, yeah, you can pore over all these pledges and "war—game what you think they're going to do when they're in office, "but it's events that come at you pretty fast "that define administrations." dom, just before i let you go, just a little bit of a side bar here, lots of people seem to be organising these things on an app called telegram. now, i think i'm quite app au fait, right? but i've never used telegram and i don't really know what it is. why is it such a kind of powerful tool in this space? well, telegram is one - of the many messaging apps which is out there. it is very popular with the extreme far right for one simple reason — l you don't really get banned very often from telegram. _ and i can remembera period when lots of people - from the far right were being ejected from facebook- and from twitter when it,

when it was then twitter, j and from twitter, when it was then twitter, - and then reappearing on telegram. and we know it's been used - as an organisational space for them. so i'm just looking at it now. i've got it open on my laptop here. and i can see there's a group called "relating to southport", _ which is pretty active - at the moment, actually. there you go, and there's another pretty virulent racist remarkjust gone _ up on the screen as it's - scrolling in front of me now. yeah, don't read it out. none of these people - are using their real names. no, i won't be reading it out. none of these people are using their real. names, but you kind of inferl from the tone of what they're saying that they all know each other or are living locally. _ and critically, they are sharing content from other parts of- the social media space. it's been it's been a really, really important app - for the far right. in recent years, things have changed, though, l slightly since twitter became x, after elon musk, a lot-

of people who were banned from the platform are back on it. and one of the most important l there is stephen yaxley—lennon. and one of the people who likes retweeting him is elon musk. yeah, and, you know, - yaxley— lennon, who uses the alias tommy robinson, he has been repeatedly- retweeting stuff about what's going on this week. and of course, when he does that, his material is shared _ effectively, almost _ exponentially by his supporters. so it's a combination of things. you know, a lot of the organisation seems to be going on in telegraml or in private facebook groups, those kind of things. - but then the push of the message is happening in much more open i spaces and often very carefully with careful language to avoid i any suggestion by the people doing that they're breaking the law. - and just very, very quickly, if there is loads of disorder on saturday night — and you were saying at bbc verify and elsewhere in this building, you've been able to identify loads of potential trouble spots — if it flares up again tonight,

is it then fair to say, "oh, the keir starmer approach of thursday, of treating "this like football hooliganism and like being quite precise "and targeted has failed?" or will there be pressure to kind of up the ante on the policing response and do something more dramatic? i think the plans - announced on thursday are effectively - like a long—term bet. so that's about reshaping the - response so that you can identify these people, you know, and put l restrictions on them to preventl this stuff happening over the long term. j i think the key issue is, if the police believe - there is a risk of serious public. order, which they cannot manage by imposing conditions _ on the process in the days to come, they can apply to the home secretary for protests to be banned. _ i but it's a really, really high bar, i that, and the power is rarely used. and in fact, the last time - i believe that power was used was against the english defence i league when it was still a formal organisation, and - they wanted to march through a predominantly muslim area in parts of london- about ten years ago, and it's quite -

a tough power to use. so, at the moment, the police were saying last night- they had this contained. clearly people are going to be asking questions, given- what happened in- sunderland last night. ok, well, dom, thanks for answering our questions on newscast today. right, dharshini, yourturn to answer the questions now. so, rachel reeves did this big speech in parliament on monday. it was a long time ago now. exactly. a lot of water has flowed under that bridge, or into the black hole. and she talked about this black hole. and what is the black hole in? what is the black hole in? well, it's a black hole, but not as we normally know it. and when we talk about black holes, we normally mean are we overshooting, compared to those fiscal rules we keep talking about? those rules apply to future plans — we're talking about what's happening

in the current financial year. and when you look at what's out there and what the treasury's come up with, yep, it looks like there's a bit of a gap there — £22 billion in total, which we hadn't budgeted for. now that comes to the question of, are we talking about a cover up by the previous government? which is what she would say. or is it a cover for higher taxes by this government, which is what the tories would say. and then you come to the point of, is this something we could have foreseen? and is it down to the policy choices of the previous government? and the answer to both of those is, in part. because if you look at what's in that £22 billion, some of it is stuff we didn't know was lurking, for example, a big overspend when it comes to migration and an overspending that bit you have tucked in your back pocket, in a way overspend when it comes to migration and an overspending of what we normally call the reserve, that bit you have tucked in your back pocket, in a way we don't normally do. on the other hand, about half of this reflects those settlements with public sector workers' pay rises and it's up to governments whether or not they decide to take on those recommendations and how they fund it — do they give departments extra money?

and that is the decision, obviously, of the current government. so it's kind of a shared thing. but yeah, ultimately it doesn't matter whether or not there is a hole. some of us are going to have to pick up that tab. what gets me about this whole process this week is actually, who is telling the truth, and who can you just absolutely blame? and it's quite difficult, because it's things like, ok, inflation ended up being higher for longer than people expected and budgets weren't updated to reflect that. now, of course inflation is caused by global forces. there's always inflation. it always varies. is it fair to blame a government for inflation? but actually, then you rewind the clock a bit and it's like, well, the departmental budgets were set in 2021 with one assumption about inflation. would maybe a more prudent chancellor have updated the budgets to reflect that? so there's kind of... this comes back to that thing we kept saying during the election campaign, right, that conspiracy of silence. and 0k, economists love to say, "i told you so." but in this fact, we did actually say — and i say the economics community — did say, "look, there are things "coming up which no party wants to talk about." and one of those is the fact that, yeah, higher inflation tends to mean

people want bigger pay rises. so, the previous government didn't really acknowledge that. this government perhaps should have seen that one coming, and didn't acknowledge it either. so yes, some of these, we could have seen. in politics, as in economics, timing is everything. we are talking about the transition of 1a years of conservative—led administration into labour. and we said on this newscast, taxes are going to go up whoever wins the election. so we said that and we can go back and find the clip. rachel reeves has now admitted, "oh, taxes are going to go up." but that was not part of the campaign. so that's her saying one thing which she didn't say in the campaign. also, an inflation—busting pay deal to the doctors has been agreed by wes streeting, which is going to cost, i think, £8 billion. now that's policy — he's entitled to do that — but that's a policy which the previous government did not have, and there were strikes as a result. so they're getting out the chequebook.

and furthermore, darshini, had rishi sunak waited, he would have had notjust inflation down to 2%, but he would have had an interest rate cut, which was also predicted on this podcast. by paddy o'connell. well, yes, people said i was ahead on the august cut. there's a rate cut hanging out there, and rishi sunak has delivered these conditions of falling inflation and a rate cut to keir starmer, and now rachel reeves is blaming him for everything going wrong, but actually the economy is growing. it is growing, but ultimately, are we feeling better off? are we going to feel...? of course we're not yet, because there's there's lag and drag. but the economy is growing, and rishi gave that to keir. he did. but are there some challenges coming up that we are going to feel? now, we've been talking about social unrest, right, in the last 15 minutes, and a lot of that reflects what's been happening in the economy. people aren't feeling better off. they're not seeing their public services improve. is that going to change in the coming months? we've got a budget coming up in october. and for all that sort of, you know, tussling in the house of commons this week, we have heard nothing yet about how they're going to tackle that looming problem of the fact that the budget

for public services — take away inflation, take away population growth — it is going to be very squeezed over the next few years. so if you're banking on seeing an improvement to some of those public services, it ain't happening yet. and dharshini, i do want to ask you about the consequences, but first i want to ask paddy what he had for breakfast this morning. that was like the gettysburg address, complete with, like, a little bang of your fist on the arm of the chair. i'm excited by... the public finances? yes. and the freedom given on this platform, in this new—style programme, to fly, to flap one's wings... 0k. ..across the news, across the land... just don't fly too close to the sun or we'll get in trouble. ..across the landscape of the news. anyway, so, darshini, we saw some of the consequences of all of this, i mean, straightaway on monday when rachel reeves did some pretty epic things, like saying the winter fuel payment to pensioners is going to be means—tested, something that i've watched be argued for and against for about 15 years. and shejust did it with the click of her fingers. i just clicked my fingers there to illustrate what that sounds like. it's a good click.

and it's like, ok, right, massive consequence of this number. yeah, does that sort of pave the way for more sort of, you know, massive changes? now we hardly ever mention the f word, not even on the newscast, and by that i mean... which word? ..fuel duty. don't worry. that's two words. we are on radio four, we are behaving. that's two words, sorry, yes. we don't mention that, and that is something, of course, which no chancellor has dared to fiddle with, actually get back on what we call the escalator, put fuel duty up, for over a decade now. there's a weird accounting trick in there, which means that the public finances assume it's going up until a chancellor says otherwise. is she going to be that chancellor who steps back on the escalator? yeah, so just to explain to people, so when the office for budget responsibility looks at government spending plans and then says whether they're within the fiscal rules or not, they're doing that on a five—year horizon and they're talking about in five years�* time, if everything goes to plan in this plan, will you meet the fiscal rules? and that includes making some big assumptions like fuel duty will increase every single year with inflation, and give

the government more money from fuel duty. billions. chancellors hate increasing fuel duty because it's seen as a big tax on working people, so that's just a little quirk to how our finances work. there's another escalator, which is the threshold, the tax threshold. so, it looks very likely that rachel reeves is not going to tinker with them either, because she'll get billions if she does nothing, which is what all chancellors have loved to do. because they're frozen until, what, �*27, �*28? '28. fiscal drag, our other f word, f phrase, i should say, and we should remind people when we hear that, you know, taxes are not going to go up on working people. many working people will see bigger tax bills on their income next year because this is baked in by a previous government. but no, it's not going to be reversed because — guess what — it nets the treasury's tens of billions of pounds extra by 2028-2029. and i just wonder if what we'll see in the budget, which we're now going to get on october the 30th, rachel reeves announced on monday, is, yeah, an extension of those freezes

of the rates at which you pay the higher rates of tax for another couple of years. it would be an easy button to press, wouldn't it? and also, you can argue politically that it's not a tax rise because you're not really doing anything. what are other taxes that could explicitly go up on october 30th or be announced on october 30th? october the 30th. we've heard quite a few being bandied around. she said she's not going to raise taxes on working people. that's shorthand for not increasing those rates of income tax, national insurance. but there are other things you can do — inheritance tax, capital gains tax, for example, things like that. now they are not, as you say, they're not the biggest money raisers, right? so if you talk to economists out there, they say at the moment the government may have to raise in excess of £10 billion more. so that means that, yes, ourtax burden, as we like to put it, is going to rise. ultimately, people are going to feel the pain of that. and then the big question becomes, are you going to feel the reward in terms of your public service? because, they don't want to tax hard working people, they need to tax lazy people. that would be the answer, wouldn't it? "we're going to go after

badly working people." yeah, but how do you tax a lazy person? they're not generating anything that you can tax. i always think though, i mean, and i'm now probably going to be proved wrong very quickly. i always feel every budget they increase the tax on insurance, the insurance premiums. there's always like, "oh, i'm going to increase "that by one pence." and it's like that's just gone up and up and up and up. but it doesn't raise much money even though it does make headlines. anyway, i was trying to think of like a tax cutjoke about the fact that we're about to run out of time. i've run out of time to make thatjoke. luckily there is no tax on talking. otherwise we'd be very high earners here on newscast. thank you very much for listening to this episode of newscast. thanks for being here, dharshini. and thanks to dominic kashani for taking us through the disorder that's happened over the last few days. and if you like the sound of what you're hearing today, you can hear it every single day on the classic episodes of newscast, which are available on bbc sounds. paddy, i hope you havejust as energising a lunch as you did a breakfast.

i'm looking forward to it. and thanks very much to you for listening. newscast — from the bbc. live from london. this is bbc news.

prime minister keir starmer backs police action against thuggery, after disorder during demonstrations in several cities across the uk. it follows days of unrest after the killing of three young girls in southport. the us and the uk are urging their citizens to leave lebanon amid escalating fears of an all—out war between israel and the lebanese militant group hezbollah. at the paris olympics, julien alfred of st. lucia wins gold in the women's 100 meters, securing the first—ever olympic medal for her country. and us swimmer katie ledecky wins the 800—meter freestyle, becomming the first female swimmer to win four olympic gold medals in the same event. hello, i'm vishala sri—pathma.