Assange free in US plea deal & London’s soaring beer price ...The Standard podcast

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WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has left London after agreeing a US plea deal that will see him plead guilty to a criminal charge and go free.

Assange was locked in a lengthy legal battle in the UK over his extradition.

It saw him claim asylum at the Ecuador’s London embassy in 2012 to avoid rape and sexual assault allegations in Sweden, which he denied, before Assange’s detention in Belmarsh prison on spying charges.

His legal battle with the US followed publication of hundreds of thousands of secret documents relating to the Afghanistan and Iraq wars.

Assange left Britain on a charter flight from Stansted after being granted bail by the High Court and released from Belmarsh following negotiations with US authorities and campaigning by supporters.

Assange will return to his home country of Australia after appearing in court in the Mariana Islands, a US territory in the Pacific, to plead guilty to an Espionage Act charge of conspiring to unlawfully obtain and disseminate classified national defence information.

Evening Standard home affairs editor Martin Bentham examines what’s next in the legal case and Assange’s timeline of being locked up in London.

Plus, in part two, we look at the increasing price of a pint of beer in London, now at an average £6.75.

Evening Standard business editor Jonathan Prynn discusses soaring costs hitting the capital’s hospitality sector that are being passed on to the consumer.

You can listen to the episode in the player above, find us on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Here’s an automated transcript:

From London, this is The Standard podcast and I’m Mark Blunden.

Coming up on today’s show.

“The pub chains and the brewers would say that is what is needed to cover the costs of operating a pub chain in London”.

£6.75 for a pint of beer in London.

How has it come to this?

But first, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has left London after agreeing a US plea deal that will see him plead guilty to a criminal charge and go free.

Here’s his wife, Stella Assange, who led the campaign to free him, speaking ahead of his release.

“It’s exactly 12 years today since Julian went into the Embassy of Ecuador, which granted him political asylum.

“Protection from persecution, from torture, from a life imprisonment of imprisonment.

“And 12 years on, I’m visiting Julian in a high-security prison.

“But this period of our lives, I’m confident now has come to an end.”

Assange was locked in a lengthy legal battle in the UK over his extradition, which saw him enter and live in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London in 2012 over alleged sexual assaults in Sweden, which he denied before detention in Belmarsh on spying charges.

It followed the publication of hundreds of thousands of leaked documents relating to the Afghanistan and Iraq wars.

Assange left Britain on a charter flight from Stansted after being granted bail by the High Court and was released from Belmarsh following negotiations with US authorities.

He will return to his home country of Australia after appearing in court in the Mariana Islands, a US territory in the Pacific, to plead guilty to an Espionage Act charge of conspiring to unlawfully obtain and disseminate classified national defence information to discover more.

We’re joined by the Evening Standard’s Home Affairs editor, Martin Bentham.

Martin, what were the series of events led to Assange’s release?

As with all these things, it’s slightly unclear because it’s all been conducted privately.

But according to his wife, Stella, she believes that the recent High Court’s decision to grant Mr Assange a further right of appeal on this occasion in respect of his first amendment rights in the US, the freedom of speech rights, and that he could challenge his extradition on the basis of that.

She believes that that’s what’s prompted, you know, this fairly extraordinary plea bargain deal that suddenly emerged overnight and led to him on the plane and the whole saga coming to a conclusion.

We don’t know any more than that at this stage.

That’s her version of what seems to have prompted.

It’s unclear if something has prompted this.

And it didn’t seem likely that anything like this was going to happen because up until now, the US authorities have been resoluting in wanting to pursue the prosecution of Mr Assange, of course, from their point of view.

From what we understand, the terms of the plea bargain deal, he’s now going to admit to an offence.

So they will secure their conviction, but he’s clearly going to be allowed to become a free man on the basis of his time served.

So what happens next?

He appears, and again, we don’t know precisely this because the plea bargain details haven’t been officially released as yet.

Again, his wife says that they will be published, but obviously it depends upon him.

He’s got to go now to Saipan Island in US territories to sign this deal before a US judge in effect, or a US authorised judge, and to finalize the deal.

So that’s the next stage.

That will happen late tonight in our time, UK time, and early in the morning in the time of the relevance, US territory.

So that’s the next stage.

That will be the final termination of the legal process, as far as we understand, and then he’ll be free to fly on to Australia, which is obviously where he’s heading to now because those islands that he’s going to are near to Australia anyway.

He’s on route there.

And it’s an idea that he apparently was reluctant to go to the US itself to plead guilty.

So he’s gone somewhere that’s the US territory on route to Australia.

It appears that that is the schedule, and then we’ll find out exactly what he’s admitted to.

But it appears to be one offense under the US.

Espionage Act of disclosing national security information.

You’ve been reporting on this case for over a decade.

What was the timeline of how Assange ended up jailed in HMP Belmarsh?

In essence, what happened was that there were some allegations of sexual offending in Sweden, one rape allegation, and one sexual offence allegation made against him in Sweden.

He’s always denied those allegations.

So he’s always denied those.

There were these allegations that were made.

He feared extradition to Sweden, and he and his supporters claimed that extradition to Sweden would be a sort of cover for extradition to the US.

So, he went into the Ecuadorian Embassy to avoid being extradited to Sweden over those sexual offence allegations.

And that was in 2012.

As a result of that, he had failed to turn up a court to answer his extradition warrant.

So the Metropolitan Police had to stand outside or decided they were going to stand outside to enforce his extradition warrant, which we as a country have a duty to enforce when a neighbour, in this case, we were in the European Union at the time with the European arrest warrant, but it might have been an equivalent one if we weren’t and the current situation, to enforce the arrest warrant by one of our ally countries.

And so that went on in fact till 2019, when eventually the Swedish allegations, the first one, the sexual offence allegation ran out of time to be pursued under Swedish law.

So that had to be abandoned in 2015.

The rape allegation was eventually dropped by the prosecution authorities in Sweden in 2019.

He’d been given a sign in by the Ecuadorians, but eventually they appeared to have got lost patience with him and decided that they were no longer going to give him sanctuary there.

So the Metropolitan Police were allowed to arrest Mr Assange first of all, on the grounds of not having answered his bail previously.

And then of course there was the extradition request by the US, which at the time of the initial Swedish arrest hadn’t been made.

And there’d been no extradition request by the US, but there subsequently was an extradition request by the US to face the allegations of breach in the Espionage Act and so on that he’s been facing ever since.

So since 2019, he’s been in prison in this country, in different prisons, I think, but ended up in Belmarsh.

Remind us how Assange drew the eye out of US authorities over WikiLeaks.

We know the broad thrust of what he released.

Some of it was just embarrassing to governments and so on, but the broad thrust was the documents about the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts, some of which showed things like US helicopter firing on civilians in Iraq.

And yeah, his supporters claim that he was exposing wrongdoing by the US military and authorities in those countries and performing a valuable public service in doing so.

Now, there’s certainly an argument that some of that was valid, of course, from the counter side, what the US authorities and indeed others alleged was that some of his disclosures were endangering the sources, in essence, people who provided intelligence to the US authorities and that Julian Assange was not in a position to know what he was doing in that respect and to know that he was, by releasing his data, that he wasn’t putting people at risk because, of course, source of intelligence might not be immediately visible to people like us reading it, but to people who are at the other end of the spectrum, so to speak, who know where that information was held and might be able to work out where the information had come from.

So there was a concern shared in this country as well that some of his leaks had jeopardised people who’d been providing information to the US authorities and whose identity might be uncovered by the release of this information.

Let’s go to the ads coming up.

It’s the soaring price of a London pint.

Why can’t drinkers get a good deal?

We’re joined by Evening Standard business editor, Jonathan Prynn.

Why not hit follow in the meantime to give us a rating.

Welcome back.

Now, summer’s here and the football’s on.

So nice to visit the local for a beverage, but why are beer prices overflowing, and can anything be done to knock the froth off the cost?

Evening Standard business editor, Jonathan Prynn, has been reporting on soaring pub prices.

Jonathan, what are you reporting on Tuesday?

So what we are reporting today, Mark, is that the average cost of a pint of beer in London, or in central London, has risen by 14% over the past year to hit a new all-time high of £6.75.

So how has it got so pricey for a pint?

Yeah, well, going further back, I remember my drinking days starting when I used to pay 35p for a pint.

But anyway, that’s another story.

Well, in the last few years, it’s been really awful for the brewers.

It’s an energy intensive sector.

We know what’s happened to energy prices over the last few years.

The pubs that sell the beer, they’re very labour intensive.

We know what’s been happening to labour costs over the last few years.

And on top of that, obviously taxes have carried on rising.

Not so much actually in the last few years, but generally taxes on alcohol sold in the UK tends to be very, very high.

And then it all sort of adds up to the perfect sort of...

Laying on top of that, of course, in London, you’ve got costs that the rest of the country doesn’t have to bear in such an extreme way, rents, rates, and all that.

So if you put all that into the melting pot, you come up with a figure that feels to you and me like incredibly expensive, but the pub chains and the brewers would say that is what is needed to cover the costs of operating a pub chain in London.

A cider, wine and spirits drinkers also being hit by these price increases.

Well, this survey we’ve been reporting on today is just about beer, but I think it’s fair to say anyone who’s bought a glass of wine in a pub in recent years will tell you that those prices have been rising astronomically as well.

It’s quite hard to get a glass of wine for less than about sort of seven or eight quid now.

It’s not quite the same set of factors, but it’s similar.

Possibly with wine, you’ve got a little bit of Brexit thrown in as well, whereas most of the beer is brewed over here.

It’s not good news for anyone who likes a drink on a summer’s afternoon and sitting in the pub terrace or whatever, which is one of the great joys of the summer.

Unfortunately, the people who have drawn up this survey, a price comparison business called Finder, suggesting that just to add to the misery, particularly on beer, the awful winter we’ve just had with so much rain has been disastrous for the barley crop.

So it could just mean even more cost increases and price increases coming through later in the year.

What do we know about Labour and the Conservatives’ tax plans for beer and the wider hospitality sector?

They both make a lot of noises about the importance of the hospitality sector and how they’d like to help.

But I mean, the things that the hospitality sector has been crying out for in terms of help are quite hard to deliver.

One of them is reform of business rates.

That’s been really hard for pubs in London.

Business rates, there’s been some relief over the last few years, but that’s all run its course now pretty much.

And pubs in London are getting stung with very, very high business rates, very, very high rents.

And the cost of labour is probably the other single most important factor that’s holding them back.

And again, it’s hard to know what the government can do to help because pubs rely very heavily on relatively young workers.

And those workers have been getting huge increases in the national minimum wage over the last few years, almost 10% this year, almost 10% last year.

Obviously, that’s a good thing.

It’s good that people at the sort of lower end of the pay scale are getting good bump ups.

But pub landlords, pub owners are saying it’s making it very, very hard to maintain their profit margins.

And as a result, a lot of them are going out of business.

We know that a lot of pubs have closed in the last few years, but also in order to offset that, they’re having to put their prices up in a bid to maintain some sort of profit margins.

So it’s very hard and it’s hard to see what the government can do easily to make it better.

There’s much more on these stories in Evening Standard newspaper and online at standard.co.uk.

We’re back tomorrow at 4pm.