Pod Insights The Rest Is Politics 310. The rise of Germany’s far-right About this episode Who will be the next French Prime Minister? How serious is the threat of Germany’s far right? Should school inspections scrap single-word reviews? Join Rory and Alastair as they answer all these questions and more in today's episode of The Rest Is Politics.
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Transcript 10,687 words · 8 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:04 Rory Stewart? This episode is brought to you by NordVPN.
0:06 Alastair Campbell? And I must thank NordVPN because on my grand European tour with Fiona, I was away from the Hawthorns for West Bromwich against Burnley, but I managed to watch it. There you go.
0:19 Rory Stewart? I actually had a NordVPN thank you. I was in the new Starbucks here in Crete. And of course, the thing flashed up, saying this is an unsecured public network. And I was able to go to my VPN. It was a little reminder of something we often forget when we're in all those cafes and things, which is actually genuinely, people can do all kinds of weird cyber attacks and spying if you don't have a virtual private network when you're sitting in that Starbucks.
0:42 Alastair Campbell? Well, I think, are you not really sort of proud of me that I managed to do this? Or should I say Fiona managed to do this?
0:49 Rory Stewart? I'm incredibly proud of you. That's a tech transformation. So to get the best discount off your NordVPN plan, go to nordvpn.com/risterspolitics. That's nordvpn.com/risterspolitics. And the link is in the episode description.
1:12 Rory Stewart? Welcome to the Rest is Politics with me, Rory Stewart.
1:15 Alastair Campbell? And me, Alastair Campbell. And we're going to go European, Rory.
1:18 Rory Stewart? Absolutely, Alistair. So we are going to begin with Germany, Austria and France. So Germany and Austria headline news is some big advances by genuinely very disturbing far-right parties. And we're going to get into what that means. France, the battle for a new prime minister. And then in the second half, we will look at Israel, Gaza, the killing of hostages, the protests, the ongoing war. And then we will finish with a bit of discussion of domestic UK politics and school inspectors. But over to you firstly on your sense of Germany.
1:52 Alastair Campbell? So Björn Hucker.
1:55 Alastair Campbell? Is the leader in Turingia of the AFD, Alternative for Deutschland. And as expected, he came top in the regional elections. The Lender, there are sixteen Lender, which are their states. And they have much, much, much more power than, say, like France, where French regions have far less power than the Lender. In fact, under Germany's constitution, all lawmaking rests in the hands of the state, unless it's actually otherwise stated in the basic law. So you're talking about, in Turingia, one of the smallest Lender.
2:30 Rory Stewart? Turingia, about two million people, a state including Weimar, sort of right in the very middle of Germany, but former East Germany, is that right?
2:37 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, so but where these elections were at the weekend, Turingia and Saxony, former East Germany, the hard right has always done proportionately better there than the rest of Germany, but this has taken it to a level it's never reached before. So over thirty percent, unlikely that Hucker, who is a very, very, very hard right guy, I mean, even Le Pen finds him sort of detroit. Be interested to see whether Nigel Farage has anything to say about him and his politics. This is a guy who basically thinks that Germany should stop being ashamed of its past, that there shouldn't be a memorial to the Holocaust in Berlin, disabled kids shouldn't be taught alongside able-bodied kids. I mean, he's got some very hardline views.
3:20 Rory Stewart? And there's also been some interesting research by German journalists suggesting that a series of neo-Nazi articles written about ten years ago under another name look very much as though they were written by Hucker. And it also seems at the moment to be legal in the German courts to basically call him a Nazi. I mean, he's tried to challenge it and the courts have upheld this.
3:42 Alastair Campbell? You can call him a fascist without the court coming back at you. He also, we talked about him before, I don't know if you remember, because there was, he was sort of. Confronted in an interview with a load of statements, some of them came from his book and some of them came from Hitler's Mein Kampf. And even he seemed to struggle to differentiate between the two. So even though they try to, like the hard right parties everywhere, they try to sort of pretend that they're just about, you know, health and education and immigration and all the sort of day to day issues. You're talking here about something really quite, quite serious. And I think that, given that we've later this month, we've got an election in Brandenburg, another of these 16 states, which is also in the east, it's the one that kind of surrounds Berlin. Berlin is a state on its own.
4:27 Alastair Campbell? And that also looks like it could go the way of the AFD. Now, they probably won't form a government because to do so in their PR system, they will have to form alliances with some of the other parties. The main parties have made it clear they won't do that. The one I think you've got to watch is because the other, they're the populist of the right, there's also a populist party of the left. And that is something called the Bundestag, Sarah Wagenknecht. And this is a party named after an individual, Sarah Wagenknecht, who was in Die Linke, the very hard left party. She set up her own party, literally in her own name, and she's come third in both elections. There's one possibility is that she forms an alliance with the Christian Democrats,
5:09 Alastair Campbell? which would be very weird because Christian Democrats are basically like our conservatives, a bit more sensible. And she's very hard left, anti the war in Ukraine, basically pro Russia. There's, there's a line running in some of the German media that if you put the AFD and the BSW together, that you're talking about Putin's fifth column. I mean, that is a line that gets run against them.
5:31 Rory Stewart? Yeah, the numbers together, Astrid, are very striking. So if you put the, the two of the votes together, it's a very substantial vote. So 33.5% for the AFD, which as you point out is a neo-Nazi party. And then you add her vote on to that, you're looking at about half the vote in the state going to those parties. And again, for listeners, the reason why that's important is that often the far right parties in Europe have been down at the sort of 15, 20. Percent of the vote and people have tended to say if they're being optimistic. Well, yes, there's always fifteen, twenty percent of the population prepared to vote for these people. But in the end, it's never quite enough to to really form a threat. Once you start getting to a full third of the population.
6:16 Rory Stewart? And then the other thing, I mean, I shared an article with you just before we got on this morning. Looking at the youth vote, I mean, the
6:22 Alastair Campbell? Yeah.
6:22 Rory Stewart? Almost twice the number of people eighteen to twenty five are voting for these far right parties, voting for almost any other party. And you you're seeing something which I think is much more worrying. And I think just to follow up again on this point about Ukraine. The leader of the AFD in Saxony is on record giving interviews back in twenty sixteen, saying he doesn't believe Ukraine is a real state. Putin, of course, has made very favorable comments towards the AFD. And somehow this issue of Russia, Ukraine has got tied in with immigration, has got tied in with anxieties about employment. Anxieties about a sense that East Germany is being colonized by West Germany.
7:02 Rory Stewart? And tell me a little bit about that, because you you get people in East Germany saying, and as you say, these elections, these German elections, that in the end, it's West Germans who are running the businesses, it's West Germans who are running the universities, it's West Germans who are running the military, that that this sort of sense in East Germany that, yes, okay, economically, they've they've benefited a lot since reunification, but they feel they're somehow colonized.
7:24 Alastair Campbell? Well, one of the arguments that's run about these particular results, and of course, you know, you're talking about relatively small numbers, you know, populations. I think Saxony is about four million and Turingia just over two. So you're talking relatively small populations, but I think one of the things that might be happening is a sense of the East asserting its own political identity. The Ukraine issue, I think, confuses things because people imagine that that's to do with a fondness for the Old East. But it's very hard to equate Putin with the Old East because Putin has become essentially a dictator with many, many kind of leanings towards what we would define as very right wing politics. But I think what is happening.
8:06 Alastair Campbell? With this this point that you make about young people, so proportionally, there are fewer young people in the East because a lot of them have moved to the West. But where they are in these towns, and you hear the same phrases we heard during Brexit and as you hear during the American debate as well, about communities which, quote, feel left behind. You have these communities which feel left behind, which are wide open to somebody like Huckabee, who's, you know, he's not the most, I don't find him particularly charismatic. I don't think he's as effective as communicators, say something like Farage or Trump. But he is able to give them this sense that their problems would be it would be eased if only they went with somebody who projects himself as strong, pro-German,
8:50 Alastair Campbell? anti-immigration, anti-climate, you know, the whole climate movement that's that was very, very strong in Germany at one point. Now, I think where this leads is to some real soul searching for the main parties, because the truth is that all three of the governing parties in the coalition, the SPD under Scholz, the Greens and the Free Democrats, all did very, very badly. And there's no getting away from that. Even though they were starting from low bases, they all did badly. Now, where that goes for the election next year is obviously going to be something of concern. I think there's a point just worth dropping in here about UK politics as well, because I think that what it what the German experience, I think, has shown is that people are willing to give you the
9:34 Alastair Campbell? time and the space to put together a coalition to try to make the changes you say you're going to make. But if then you don't deliver, I think modern politicians have very, very little time. And I think they're being a little complacent if they think that this is just a particular problem in the East, and that once they get to the general election next year, a kind of normal politics will resume. As you said, you're talking now about a populist party of the right and a populist party of the left and the centre not holding. And that for Germany is a huge problem.
10:03 Rory Stewart? So let's just jump across the border into Austria, where there's also been very strong performance from far-right parties. And Austria is a story of, on the one hand, incredible sort of success. I mean, I think Vienna's third year in a row most livable city in the world. Its economy is doing very well. But on the other hand, it has been a place where there has been a lot of immigration. There's been a very dramatic change, for example, in the Muslim population in Austria quite recently, partly because I think when people began moving, Syrians and Afghans began moving during the Syrian war. Most of the countries before Austria refused to follow the law on how to treat people claiming asylum.
10:44 Rory Stewart? So Hungarians, Croatians, Greeks either blocked people or moved them on. And it was once they arrived in Austria that they were able to settle. So suddenly you end up with quite large numbers of Syrians, Afghans, Bosnians. And this has produced these strange slogans, produced particularly by Kike, this very, very intelligent, slightly austere, very sinister figure. I mean, he's an odd replacement because his predecessor was brought down with an amazing kind of British fake-shake style sting, where they managed to take him out to Ibiza and pretend to be Russians who were going to take over a kind of newspaper and offer him bribes and
11:24 Rory Stewart? got all of this on camera. The successor is not up to that kind of stuff. He's a really talented communicator. I don't mean, obviously, I agree with his slogans, but a bit like your Qaeda, very, very talented communicator. And produces, he's produced one that I came across, but I think you've come across others, Dahheimstadt Islam, Home Instead of Islam, which has been everywhere.
11:47 Alastair Campbell? The cover of their manifesto for the election is Fortress Austria, Fortress of Freedom.
11:52 Rory Stewart? Yeah. And actually, I mean, really disturbingly, in their manifestos, there's talk of mass expulsion and really clear anti-Muslim rhetoric. I mean, in this case, the Austrians are probably more extreme than almost anybody in terms of what they're talking about. Can I just hand over to you on Austria a bit? And I guess they're too Putin and Russia.
12:10 Alastair Campbell? Oh, the FP ÖR, because they've got an umlaut on, the two main parties have both got umlauts on the ÖR. So we've got the FPO, which is the far right Freedom Party headed by this guy Kickl. I love the way you pronounced Kiecl, it made it sound much more serious than Kickl. And they're governing, the party leading the coalition, they've got some great names, he's called Karl Nehammer. So you've got Nehammer and Kickl kicking lumps off each other. And by the way, they don't get on. It goes back to a time because the FPO have been in government coalition before. They've had three periods in coalition. Austria has got a much more established acceptance, for want of a better word, of far right politics.
12:53 Alastair Campbell? Don't forget that Jörg Heide was one of the drivers, one of the initial drivers of this kind of hard right politics that's spread around the world. If you think, he played a big role. Orban, that we've talked about before, has played a big role. And Kickl is very much somebody who in part models himself on Orban. The election is later this month, it's the 29th of September. And I think it is something that we'll come back to because the rest of Europe is, I think, pretty worried about this, that it is going to take another turn further to the right. Austria is also a place where quite a lot of the kind of, the key hard right Brexit people in Britain, some of the Trump people have, you know, cut their teeth a lot in Austria and the kind of networks that are there. I'll give you another slogan Rory, that they've used during the European elections,
13:39 Alastair Campbell? where the Hard Right Freedom Party came top, not massively, but they came top. And their slogan was "Stop the EU Madness", and it was illustrated by a picture of Ursula von der Leyen and Zelensky kissing. And generally in a kind of sort of, you know, romantic kind of way. Yeah, yeah. And then around them, they had these words "Corona Chaos", "Communism", "Eco-Communism", "Asylum", "The Drive to War", very much, I would argue, some of the sort of Putin AfD talking points. Now, that being said, they're not talking about coming out of the European Union, but they are with Orban, with Fiso in Slovakia. You're talking about this possible growth of a far right ethno-nationalist grouping
14:24 Alastair Campbell? that will become more powerful within the European Union if they win the election.
14:28 Rory Stewart? And as we move on to France, of course, Le Pen, pretty much part of that group. So the the story would be you've got AFD Germany, you've got this happening in Austria. You've got Slovakia, you've got Hungary, you've got Salvini in Italy, but maybe not Maloney. And then possibly Le Pen, not maybe not Maloney, not actually at the moment on this.
14:49 Alastair Campbell? Le Pen, as I said earlier, not, you know, slightly queasy, I think, about some of the AFD positions. By the way, we shouldn't get, you know, before we get ahead of ourselves, the polls are very, very, very tight. So if you go back to the European elections, the far right party won twenty five point four percent. The the more conservative, but still pretty right wing party, the the the OVP, the Volks Parti, they won twenty four point five. And the social democrats, twenty three point two. So they're all in the same sort of place. And it would lead again to some sort of coalition. And the thing is that the conservatives have had a coalition with the Freedom Party before. So that's not, as it were, it's not like an AFD situation this.
15:27 Rory Stewart? Yeah, well, so I suppose as we transition to France, I mean, this brings us to the really big question of constitutions. And a debate that you and I often have about whether proportional representation systems or first past the post systems are better guarantees against the rise of these kinds of extremists. So on the one hand, obviously, if a party manages, and thirty three percent of the vote, which is what the AFD has pulled off in Turingia, is basically what Keir Starmer pulled off and got an enormous majority, if properly distributed in Britain. So if it goes wrong, the the first past the post system could give a party with a third of the vote a lot of power. On the other hand, generally speaking, they've been pushed into coalition. I suppose the optimistic story is the Netherlands.
16:12 Rory Stewart? Heidvilders does well, but in the end, he doesn't have enough votes. So he's part of a relatively strong parliamentary tradition. Austria, where, as you say, they're likely to get a quarter of the vote. And even in in Germany and in Turingia, you know, there are some complicated things that could happen. They could get their hand on, I think, the parliamentary president position, which could give them some indirect leverage over the state premiership. But as you say, very unlikely the AFD will actually take control at the moment in Turingia. It would take quite a lot of constitutional wranglings and oddities. But then you have the completely different question of France, which, under the Fifth Republic, has this enormously powerful kind of monarchical precedent with a very weird relationship to the Prime Minister and Parliament, on which, over to you.
16:56 Alastair Campbell? So monarchical is one of the words that keeps getting applied because so we had the the surprise election when he dissolved the parliament and said that it was going to bring clarity by challenging the country to say whether it wanted a hard right government or not. And we've had the two rounds of the election and there has been no clarity. Nobody, essentially, nobody won, clearly. And since when, I think we're into, we're over 50 days now, since when there has been this sort of, you've got Gabriel Attell is staying as the prime minister as a transitional figure. He is, by the way, the most popular politician in France at the moment. So if only Macron could find a way to say, can't we just keep him? I think the public would quite like that. But the votes just don't
17:38 Alastair Campbell? work for that. So then you had the the left wing, the Popular Front, that came together to try to beat the hard right and did a pretty good job.
17:46 Rory Stewart? Can I quickly do a quick reminder just on the results and then straight back to you? So 577 seats in National Assembly. And there are many different ways of counting the votes, but the Ministry of Interior count, the reason lots of different ways of counting the votes is that who's in a party is ambiguous. But anyway, Ministry of Interior reckons the new Popular Front got 182 votes, so that's a sort of coalition of the left, that Macron's party got 163, that Le Pen's party got 143, and the old right, Les Républicains, got either 45 or 56, depending on how you count it. But the basic point is
18:19 Alastair Campbell? Yeah.
18:20 Rory Stewart? that any of them are struggling to make it up to 200 and they need nearly 300 to have a majority in parliament. Right back to you.
18:26 Alastair Campbell? Yeah. And because the, this kind of left alliance of hard left, soft left, Socialist Party, Greens, because they got the biggest number, I think they then overstated their case. They went out and said, well, that means we have to have the prime minister. And they put forward this woman, Lucy Castet, who's a kind of, a kind of an official from Paris, and I think which was pretty absurd. And Macron just, he went through this process of interviewing various people. He's still going through it now. Interview, he saw three more yesterday. And he was never going to accept her. But since rejecting her, the left had now said, and they're calling for people to take to the streets, this is trampling on democracy, we won the election, et cetera. Now, the truth is, they didn't win the election.
19:10 Alastair Campbell? If you actually look at the numbers more carefully, it would probably be more justified to appoint a prime minister who's slightly to the right rather than to the left. But the politics of that are very, very difficult. So what he's trying to do now is find a prime minister. That he can appoint, and it is his job to appoint the prime minister, find the prime minister that can command some sort of either minority government that doesn't get a budget voted down, and the budget has to be passed early next month, has to be voted on, and is proving very, very, very, very difficult. He even had Sarkozy and Hollande in yesterday, not to offer them the job, but just to sort of try to bind them in to the process he's going through. And all sorts of names have been flying around. This guy Xavier Bertrand
19:55 Alastair Campbell? on the right, Kazanov, who's a former prime minister under Hollande, but who left the Socialist Party. He was the hot favourite of the weekend, went in to see Macron yesterday, then it came out no. And now we've got this new name in the frame, Thierry Baudet, who until yesterday, I confess, I had never heard of. I think I had that in common with a lot of French people. He runs this thing called the Economic, Social and Environmental Centre, very much from civil society.
20:25 Rory Stewart? Yeah.
20:26 Alastair Campbell? He, you'll be interested in this Rory, he was, he was part of the team that oversaw the Citizens Assembly on the right to die. So, you know, he's, he's from that sort of space.
20:37 Rory Stewart? Fascinating, isn't it? Because what, what you've got there is, I mean, you, you were slightly saying it's a bit absurd to think about Lucy Castell. I mean, Lucy Castell is the sort of, as you say, is a director of finance in the Paris municipality, but he also is not a front rank politician. And then there are other people out there saying, you know, they should have, they're never going to do it, but they should think about former PMs like Edouard Philippe and these sort of people. So it's a sort of question of what, what's going on? Why are they having to reach for these relatively obscure think tank and sort of senior official types rather than going for politicians?
21:10 Alastair Campbell? The reason for that, and, and I watched a bit of French radio yesterday and There is, you know, there's a lot of French radio and they talk about politics a lot. Um, but you just have these, the minute a name pops up, you find these different voices coming in to say why they're unacceptable. What was interesting about Baudet yesterday was actually quite a lot of people care. I said, oh yeah, I could see this. But then by this morning, there's one, there's one say that the, one of the papers say that the, the whole Baudet thing is dégonfle, it's sort of the wind is going out of it now. Now, let's see where it goes, but you can't have a, a situation where this goes on and on and on.
21:48 Rory Stewart? Can we just, for British or American listeners, I mean, is this guy like, you know, in Britain, Paul Johnson at the I F S? Or, or in a U S context, I don't know, Fareed Zakaria? I mean, who is he? He's like a, he's not as famous as Fareed. He's not like a big geopolitical commentator.
22:02 Alastair Campbell? No, he, he, yeah, I think, look, he'd be very well known in political circles and it, and it transpires that Macron has been, has seen him a couple of times recently.
22:10 Rory Stewart? Is he the kind of Torsten Bell of your?
22:12 Alastair Campbell? I was, I was going to say maybe more of a Torsten Bell, although Torsten Bell is now an M P, which confuses things a bit. But yeah, he's somebody who, it's not even a think tank. They do very kind of detailed reports on the state of France. I think he's, he's seen as civil society, he's big into the mutualisation movement. He's a sort of policy, a bit of a policy wonk. You look at a picture of him, he's, he's, you know, he's classically kind of, he's not a guy you're going to notice too much if you're sort of walking down the street.
22:40 Rory Stewart? And, and then you've still got this strange thing going on in France of the, certainly from a British eye looking at it, echoes of the old French elites. So Lucy Castet, on the one hand, you can describe her as being a, you know, a senior official in the Paris municipality. On the other hand, she went to these extraordinary elite schools, Sciences Po, the Economie et l'Administration. She worked for the World Bank, she worked in the French Embassy. She speaks Chi, in Beijing, I think, and speaks Chinese or maybe Shanghai. Um, so it's incredibly sort of hyper sophisticated. She's gay, she's a mother, she's in her late 30s. So in many ways, she's sort of central casting Macron style glamorous young person.
23:24 Alastair Campbell? One thing I know is that she is not going to be the prime minister. Um, and that is because.
23:28 Rory Stewart? Doesn't really matter.
23:31 Alastair Campbell? Hollande, Hollande, his view is that Macron should have allowed this front populaire. They should have, he should have said, yeah, okay, let's give it a go. Because on the very, very first vote, she would have fallen. Because Mélenchon, this hard left kind of Corbyn plus figure, who's very significant within the left, he would have made her insist on some of Macron's major reforms just falling immediately. And he's not going to let that happen. So he's trying to find the person, I think a key to this, the Le Pen party have gone very, very quiet. As you say, they've got 143, way fewer than they thought they were going to get. But ultimately, their abstention will become key.
24:11 Alastair Campbell? So if you have a budget, essentially, he's trying to find somebody that parts of the left and parts of the right are going to say, well, yeah, we can live with it. He's not going to get anybody that everybody wants. It's got to be somebody that people are going to live with.
24:22 Rory Stewart? And again, the two of the problems going on here. One of them is that although the far right, Le Pen's party, didn't get as many seats as people predicted, that was because of the two-round French voting system. And the decision of the left to drop 134 candidates and Macron to drop over 80 candidates to make sure that Le Pen didn't make it through. So the result is she probably, you know, in the first round, got about a third of the vote again, a bit like the F D in Turingia now. So, so that's one problem. I think the second problem is, is the question of what all the policies of these parties are, which is why Parliament's so difficult, with so difficult governing for them. I mean, the left really ran on a manifesto platform.
25:06 Rory Stewart? I can hear my bell is about to go behind me, apologies. But they ran on a manifesto platform, which was going to take the retirement age down to 60. They were going to increase the minimum wage by 15%. They were going to recognise Palestine as a state. They were going to freeze prices. They were going to ban bank financing for fossil fuels. And they were going to introduce proportional representation. That was all part of the, of their platform. On the other hand, on the far right, they also are trying to get rid of a lot of Macron's reforms and get retirement age down. But they're very against Palestine and pro-Israel and of course, very strong anti-immigration. So how on earth you hold these people incredibly passionately different views together, I don't know.
25:45 Alastair Campbell? Well, that is, that is why those who consistently have said that this snap election was not a good idea. Now Macron might argue.
25:55 Alastair Campbell? That actually the government is kind of ticking along perfectly well. Atal is popular. The Olympics have given France a sort of, I mean, I was there, as you know, and the Paralympics now, which in some ways look even better. Team GB, amazing by the way, Rory. Second only to China in the medal table. So there is this sense of France has kind of rediscovered a sense of positivity. But one of the reasons for that is that politics has not been part of the debate now. Politics has come back slap centre stage, but in a rather ridiculous way with Macron sitting in the Elise like some kind of latter day, you know, reality TV show host who's wheeling these people in. And then we'll have Operation, he'll have people talking to all the parties.
26:40 Alastair Campbell? It'd be like a sort of classic whips operation. Right, he's talking to Thierry Baudet, what do you think? And then, you know, you'll get the, yeah, I'm not sure about him. And then they'll be literally doing a numbers game because they have to get the budget through. So this is very, very, very, very tough politics. The thing that I think links it to Germany, and it's interesting what you said about about the UK with Keir Starmer getting pretty much the same share of the vote and a massive majority. There is part, a strand of the debate going on about how not long ago, Britain looked like a complete basket case. And now it looks sort of relatively stable, while Germany and France now have this problem where if you have, let's say, you get a situation where
27:19 Alastair Campbell? you appoint a prime minister, they narrowly get a budget through, the politics can carry on being pretty Macronist. Then people are going to start to say, well, why did we vote in the first place? And likewise, if the AFD, if all the other parties continue to say there's this Brandtmauer, you know, this firewall against any cooperation with the alternative for Deutschland. If that carries on, if you had both in France and Germany, sort of people saying, what's the point of voting? That has its own sort of dangerous dynamic as well.
27:47 Rory Stewart? And right at the heart of this is the question of immigration and whether the parties, particularly of the kind of centre right, manage to really provide a credible challenge to these stories about immigration. So in Germany, I think there have been 360,000 asylum claims. Asylum seekers in Germany are distributed across the country so that they do often end up being put in hostels and accommodation in these East German states where the elections are happening. And it's really important, I think, that all these governments balance two very difficult things. Labour shortages. So Germany's really short of labour and it really needs
28:29 Rory Stewart? immigrants in order to keep its economy going. How do you make sure that you bring in not just skilled people, actually, just even people working in restaurants, working in normal textile industries, very short of people. And that's a problem in Britain, too. And that's why we're getting huge amounts of net migration. While at the same time convincing people that we're controlling migration, which comes back to the question of the boats. And, and, you know, we often talk about this in Britain, you know, why is it everybody is obsessed with the boats, which are quite a small number of people compared to the hundreds of thousands that are coming in illegally. But there is a sense right across Germany, France, Austria, and from the right in the UK, that their real problem is with the people coming illegally, that they are able to
29:14 Rory Stewart? understand that there is a need for labour. And the problem for the governments is for the establishment, for the centre left, centre right, not to sound complacent about it, and also sound like they've got a solution, that they really are going to be able to control borders while bringing in the jobs that people need for the economy.
29:31 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, I was glad to see, by the way, I've just got the Economist that arrived today, that they have Sudan on the front cover last week, why its catastrophic war is the world's problem. And in the, they've done several pages on the, on the ongoing horrors in Sudan. But if I can find it, I think they said that something like over half of the, the people who are sort of currently hanging around in Calais, trying to get to the UK are now from Sudan. So I think the other thing is that we have to, politicians have to do, whilst, yes, Tackling, trying to tackle the root causes of immigration, at the same time educate people that these wars, that the climate crisis, that the refugee flows are accelerating
30:13 Alastair Campbell? rather than slowing down. And by the way, in the final point, just maybe before we go to the break, take us back to Germany. One of the factors that probably no doubt did help the AFD was the fact that there was this in a place called Solingen, where a Syrian asylum seeker went on a kind of knifing rampage, and pretty horrific, as a result of which, the government brought forward, our old friend, a package of measures, all sorts of different, you know, tougher approaches on immigration, but also including a flight that took off to Afghanistan with, I think it was 28 Afghans who had been found guilty of criminal offences within the German system, and off they went on a plane to Afghanistan. Now, previously, when people were saying, why can't you just put them on a plane and
30:56 Alastair Campbell? send them back to Afghanistan, there was also, oh, well, that would be too difficult, and that would be this, and that would be that. So I think they were trying to show that they can be tough, that they can take action. But I have to say, it didn't really help the governing parties in either of those elections where they frankly got hammered. So shall we take a break and come back on Israel?
31:13 Rory Stewart? Let's do that.
31:27 Speaker 02 The great game, strategic struggle between Britain and Russia.
31:34 Speaker 03 We assess, Prime Minister, with high confidence, it was Russian.
31:41 Speaker 04 Holding the Russians accountable is World War III.
31:43 Speaker 05 They took down a British passenger jet containing 350 people.
31:46 Speaker 02 Man in the Kremlin is playing, Alex. Got to ask yourself, do you want to play or not?
31:52 Alastair Campbell? You're the Prime Minister. You've done nothing!
31:59 Speaker 06 We would need to understand the policy context.
32:01 Speaker 02 All the relevant context will be structured as a framework today, disseminated into an operation order, or FRAGO.
32:10 Speaker 04 A FRAGO that says to kill the president of Russia?
32:15 Speaker 02 Yes.
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33:02 Rory Stewart? Welcome back to The Rest Is Politics with me Rory Stewart.
33:05 Alastair Campbell? And me, Asda Campbell.
33:06 Rory Stewart? If you haven't subscribed to our separate feed, Leading, I think it's probably one of the things that you and I are most proud of, which are these long-form interviews, some of which I think have been really great. We've got some very unusual ones that came out of the Democratic National Convention. Less big names, but a really good way of getting the colour for different bits of American politics at different levels. Which were your favourites out of that?
33:28 Alastair Campbell? Well, the one that's on there now is a sort of more traditional leading interview in that it's longer form, and that's with Frank Luntz, the Anglophile American pollster, who kept saying how much he loved New Labour and you kept trying to shut him down and get him to talk about other things. Quite rightly Rory. But he is very, very interesting. Funny enough, I was in the... Swimming pool this morning and my friend Jim, the doctor who'd listened to you yesterday, and he made a similar point to you. He said, the guy's full of contradictions. On the one hand, Trump is a great communicator, but he should just shut up and win the election. On the one hand, it's important to be honest, but let's call it a death tax rather than, you know, what it is.
34:09 Rory Stewart? Can I come in on that? How would you have navigated that if he'd been advising you? I mean, as you say, it's some of that stuff is a bit confusing if you're trying to take polling advice from him. He's telling you on the one hand, Trump's great communicator and that and he needs to shut up.
34:19 Alastair Campbell? Well, I think you do what he does, which is actually to say, don't necessarily listen to say what I say about the numbers, just look at the numbers.
34:26 Rory Stewart? Right.
34:26 Alastair Campbell? But I think he, I thought his most interesting example in terms of language was the thing about, you know, how changing decarbonated water to a carbonated water to sparkling water. That was a great example of where a word, you know, one is a process that sounds a bit kind of medical almost, and the other one is a feeling. So I think he gets that in politics. But anyway, there's that one. And then I enjoyed my little encounter with the Trump guy, David Urban. But we had, you know, as you know, we had the veteran Congresswoman, we had the young guy.
34:58 Rory Stewart? I loved Rosa DeLorean, this Congresswoman, who I think is a really wonderful example of people, young people who want to be inspired by politics and somebody genuinely who's a public servant with a passionate belief in child tax credits, who's an incredible local representative. I mean, we often are interviewing people who are the more kind of Machiavellian end of things. She's a real reminder to me that there's still place for kind of idealism and public service in politics.
35:26 Alastair Campbell? Oh, I bet she, I bet she has a bit of the Machiavelli going on as well. I think she knows how, she knows how to get stuff done. And let's be frank, we spoke to her a few days before Vice President Harris's speech, and her whole shtick for being there was about trying to sort of get this child tax credit firmly on the agenda. And I keep noticing how often Kamala Harris mentions it. So she seems to have had a bit of a, a bit of a win on that one.
35:50 Rory Stewart? I think it is a win and a real one because she'd struggled to get there with Biden. So I think that's another reason if one people want to listen. I mean, it's something that will make a real difference. I mean, Brought millions of people out of poverty in the US when it was introduced. It's not a small thing and looks like she may have pulled it off. And we were, we were just before the break, we were talking about the far right. And one of the things that has been true in Germany is that younger people have tended to be much more sympathetic towards Palestine and Gaza, much more anti-Israel. But the German political establishment is very pro-Israel. And the far right tends to be pretty pro-Israel, paradoxically, because of course many of them had an anti-Semitic history.
36:31 Rory Stewart? And in Germany, as I think probably in Britain, the pro Gaza demonstrations have also been used by people on the right to create anxiety about Islam and opposition to immigrants, that a lot of people on the right use images from pro Gaza or anti-Israel demonstrations to stir up kind of Islamophobia. There's a sort of complicated mixture going on there.
36:55 Alastair Campbell? Hmm. Well, what's happening in Israel at the moment, though, when you talk about protests, I think these have been the biggest anti-government protests and a lot of it does seem to focus on Netanyahu. So over the weekend, the bodies of six hostages recovered, including, were you still there in Chicago when the two parents made those incredibly moving speeches about their son?
37:18 Rory Stewart? I saw, I saw the speech, it's now just been killed in a terribly moving speech. And again, to remind people what happened there, Hamas murdered these young hostages who were healthy and well. They just murdered them almost certainly because they feared that Israel was about to rescue them.
37:33 Alastair Campbell? And then, and then put out the line that they'd been killed in a, in a bombing raid. And, and, and the one sort of moderately convincing thing that I thought Netanyahu said yesterday, the attack on Netanyahu now is that he's, he's so worried about losing power because he then might face prosecution for these corruption charges that he's been facing. He's so worried about being forced into, if the government collapses and there has to be an election because he thinks he'll lose. He's pretty much driven by these very, very hard right forces of, of Ben Gavir and Smotrich. Whose reaction, by the way, Ben, I saw an interview Ben Gavir did about the, um, the, the, the, these hostages bodies being recovered.
38:13 Alastair Campbell? And the language was, it was like, you know, scum, it was animals, there can be no treating with them whatsoever. So on the one hand, you have people taking to the streets saying Netanyahu has to do some sort of deal to get the hostages back. On the other hand, you have a very powerful part of his cabinet saying, if you so much as try to do a deal with Hamas, you will fall. And you have a large section of public opinion now, it seems, thinking that Netanyahu is more interested in his survival than the hostages. And it does seem, I mean, just watching the coverage in the last forty eight hours, it does seem that, I mean, these protests have been going on for a while, but they do seem to have reached a new, a new, a new force and a new level of activity that that probably will be worrying him. But at the same time, as we keep pointing out, he is an extraordinary survivor.
38:59 Rory Stewart? Well, it is amazing, isn't it? I mean, let's just step back over, it's now been ten months and, you know, well over three hundred days since October seventh. And what's striking is how sort of frozen and horrifying that conflict's become. So people thought in October that Netanyahu wouldn't last long, but in fact, that coalition has lasted. The elections haven't, haven't been called. There's now rumours they might be called in November, but they may well not. The situation in Gaza has moved over ten months from the very, very extreme destruction of northern Gaza down to the fighting in Rafah and destruction of southern Gaza. I mean, Gaza is now sort of uninhabitable and there's now cases of things
39:43 Rory Stewart? like polio beginning to emerge, as well as obviously tens of thousands of people being killed.
39:48 Alastair Campbell? Just briefly on the polio thing, it did show that there is the capacity for ceasefire in that there was a ceasefire of sorts that allowed the health authorities to go in and administer vaccines. So I think that's the other thing that maybe drove people to think, you know, they could do this if they wanted to.
40:07 Rory Stewart? Then Israeli public opinion, again, in ten months, some of the fundamentals remain the same, which is people very angry with the prime minister, but broadly still in favour of the fighting in Gaza, the Israeli public, that is, not pushing for a ceasefire. The Israeli military, you know, you've had these breaks with Gallant and people suggesting they would like a ceasefire and to get the hostages back. The Israeli intelligence services, Mossad, Shin Bet, tend to be, again, making noises about a long term solution. That you need to have a Palestinian state if you're thinking forward 20, 30 years. And one of the reasons for that is that they sense that public opinion in the West is changing, that young Americans are much less sympathetic towards Israel than older Americans.
40:51 Rory Stewart? Two thirds of Democrats in the US now want recognition of Palestine. So there is a sense in the security forces in Israel that in 20 years' time, there's no resolution and no two-state solution. Israel will not be getting the support it currently gets. But there is definitely no appetite whatsoever from senior Israeli politicians for pushing ahead with a two-state solution. I think the Arab powers basically have been powerless over the last 10 months. Saudi's becoming more and more outspoken, beginning to talk openly about genocide and much more clearly critical of Israel. Netanyahu doesn't look like he wants a peace deal at all with Hamas. Every time it looks like there's one on the table.
41:35 Rory Stewart? And often, America announces or briefs that there's going to be a peace deal. Netanyahu undermines it. And that must be because he sort of feels that actually things are kind of working in the short term for him. Over to you.
41:47 Alastair Campbell? I mean, a couple of points on that. The first is that the other development we haven't talked about is the the increase in military action on the West Bank, where there had been pretty concerted attempts to try to keep that relatively low key. It's now become very, very high key. The point I was making earlier before I went off on a tangent about Netanyahu is, I thought he did make an interesting point when he said, what kind of message would it send? That we did a deal on the back of, a deal on hostages, on the back of them killing six of them in cold blood, as it were, as you say, because it looked like maybe they were going to be going to be rescued. That I thought that was a reasonable point to make.
42:25 Alastair Campbell? But all it did with the crowd, with the street, as it were, was fuel this sense that he's constantly looking for reasons not to bring this crisis to an end.
42:35 Rory Stewart? The cynical view on that is that he keeps it going because so long as the war keeps going, he doesn't have to call an election. And also because if he were to strike a peace deal, he would lose his alliance with Ben-Gavir and Smotrich and his government would collapse.
42:47 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, you mentioned the thing about about Shin Bet. There does now also seem to be quite a divide between, as it were, the the conventional security forces, who are very much under the control of Smotrich and Ben-Gavir. They've got the economy and security. I mean, they've got very, very, very important jobs within.
43:05 Alastair Campbell? Within the Israeli cabinet and Shin Bet, who do seem to be focused on a longer term strategy, but that is a conflict within the security forces that must be very, very difficult to manage. And then you see the same with with Gallant, the Defence Minister, who keeps sort of, you know, definitely his body language and sometimes his real language and sometimes the policy positions he sets out, very, very different to what Netanyahu is saying. One of the latest difficulties has been this point about the security situation on the border between Gaza and Egypt, where Gallant is basically saying, you know, we don't need to be there. And that was part of the deal that Hamas were claimed they
43:46 Alastair Campbell? were they were offering and that Biden also Blinken also support. But Netanyahu in a completely different position.
43:53 Rory Stewart? Yeah, for listeners, one of the big stumbling blocks is that Israel now controls a stretch of territory between Gaza and Egypt. I think final thing before we shift to US UK reactions to this is just, we've talked about Iran and Lebanon and this whole question of whether a ceasefire would lead to Israel going into Lebanon and what that would mean for broader conflicts and the way in which Iran has so far held off from responding to the killing of Ismail Haniya, who was the senior Hamas leader who was killed in Tehran. They vowed revenge, but it hasn't happened yet. And that maybe that slightly more reformist Iranian president is holding back. The other thing to look at, though, is the question
44:35 Rory Stewart? of what happens on Al-Aqsa, the Haram al Sharif or the Temple Mount. So as listeners will know, the old temple of Jerusalem has on the top of it, the Dome of the Rock and therefore a very, very sacred site to Jews and a very sacred site to Muslims right on top of each other. And the attack in October, Hamas's attack, was called the Al-Aqsa flood. So Hamas at least are projecting this as being a fight about Al-Aqsa. And people like Ben Gavir are very, very deliberately pushing to do more and more stuff to try to get towards the goal of Jewish prayer on the temple. Both for fundamentalist views. So there are people who literally have kind of messianic views about,
45:20 Rory Stewart? you know, if we can kill a red heifer and there's all this stuff, we're going to be able to rebuild the temple and the Messiah will come. Through to people who see it as a way of winding up Muslim sentiment. It's very, very inflammatory. So I think we've got to keep looking at that because I think along with Lebanon, Israel, I, I think that, that whole discussion around the Haram al-Sharif al-Aqsa, the Temple Mount is, is going to be central.
45:45 Alastair Campbell? Rory, I've kept my phone by me on silent just in case while we were talking Macron finally announced a prime minister and I thought that maybe that would come up as a newsflash. But BBC newsflash came up and I just clicked on it. Extremist settlers rapidly seizing West Bank land. And there has been some very interesting, there was a very good report on Channel 4 News the other day. Some pretty remarkable interviews with some of the, some of the settlers there. And these are the people who are driven very much by the sort of Smuttrich Bengavir agenda. So as you say, a bit, a bit static. One thing that's not static in this is that yesterday, the Foreign Secretary David Lammy made a statement in Parliament.
46:25 Alastair Campbell? And this is the end of a review that he instigated not long after Labour took office. And this relates to UK arms sales to, to Israel. And that's one of the things you hear on these, these protests that you talk about is stop arming Israel. Now, Britain's arms trade with Israel is miniscule compared to the United States. I think the United States give them something like $3 billion worth of military support. I think our sales amount to about 18 million. So what did you make of this? It's a partial suspension of some arms sales. There's about 30 of 350 arms export licenses being suspended. Israel already saying they're very unhappy about it. Some leaders of the Jewish community in the UK saying they're unhappy about it. What do you make of it?
47:08 Rory Stewart? Well, it is a very dramatic move. Symbolically, as you say, it's not that Israel would be unable to operate. I mean, the only international player which has any real significant material influence is the United States. But Britain doing it is significant, and you can see this in the anger from the chief rabbi and others, because what David Lammy has said is that he cannot guarantee that these weapons would not be used in contravention of international law. In other words, what he's suggesting is that Israel is complicit in, potentially complicit in international war crimes, or at least that's why he's concerned about giving them weapons. There has been a suggestion that what the UK did might have been approved by Washington and be a gentle way of putting pressure without Washington getting behind banning armed
47:53 Rory Stewart? cells, but there have also been reports put out by the presenter of The Rest Is Money, Robert Peston, that the White House feels let down by Starmer and Lammy's decision to revoke licenses for the export of military equipment. In any sense at all on how one would get to the bottom of whether this is something that the US is quietly comfortable with or uncomfortable with, or whether they could be both at the same time with different bits and the US administration feeling two different things at the same time.
48:19 Alastair Campbell? Well, put it this way, I'd be very surprised if the British government would have announced this without the Americans being aware in advance. That's the first thing, not least because some of this does relate to stuff that we do with others, including the Americans. I was struck when we were in Chicago by, first of all, after all the hype about these massive protests that were going to be about Gaza, that actually they were fairly low key. And secondly, although we were, I think, looking for a slight shift in emphasis from Kamala Harris vis a vis Joe Biden, insofar as it came, it was very slight indeed. So I don't think they'll be happy or unhappy. I think they'll see this as part of the British government, a new British government, setting
49:04 Alastair Campbell? out its own position. I didn't see David Lammy's statement, I was tied up elsewhere yesterday, but I read some of the background to it this morning, and there's an interesting, they've sort of put out their arguments, they go over legal humanitarian treatment of detainees and also the conduct of hostilities. And in a sense, what you get the feeling is that they they've found it very difficult to reach a definitive conclusion. And I'll just read you this one line. It's despite the mass casualties of the conflict, it has not been possible to reach a determinative judgment on allegations regarding Israel's conduct of hostilities. This is in part due to the opaque and contested information environment in Gaza and the challenges of
49:46 Alastair Campbell? accessing specific and sensitive information necessary from Israel, such as intended targets and anticipated civilian harm. In other words, I get the feeling that they've instigated a review. They feel that they should do something to signal concern, but they don't feel that they have a definitive judgment they can make, and therefore they've they've done a sort of a partial suspension. So it feels quite political to me.
50:09 Rory Stewart? Okay, well, just just to finish. I mean, I think the final thing that's been the news quite a lot is Labour has announced that they're no longer going to have these sort of one word Ofsted statements. So Ofsted, for international listeners, is the school inspectors in Britain. And when I was an MP, you know, you look around your constituency and this school would be outstanding and this school would need improvement. It's been a longstanding demand from teachers and the trade unions to get rid of these one word judgments. And I suppose it's a bit of a traditional fight between teachers who want to be left alone to get on with things and are very suspicious of external inspectors coming in, often producing brutal judgments on the one hand. And on the other
50:51 Rory Stewart? hand, people who say it's really important for the public and actually for poor students to have accountability and clarity about when schools are performing well and when they're performing badly. Anyway, over to you.
51:02 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, the other factor that became a kind of accelerator, I think, of this process was the the suicide of head teacher Ruth Perry, where
51:14 Alastair Campbell? She was absolutely devastated by a bad, single word, Ofsted report judgment. But this is a debate that's gone on for a long, long time, and I think I am in favour of a broader, richer picture. Yes, parents are entitled to know whether the schools that they might be sending their kids to are kind of up to the mark. And the Ofsted process, although it does cause a lot of stress for the schools and governors and teachers, I think has been a help to drive up standards across the board. But I think the process has become too much about these judgements, not enough about the broader role of education, and also doesn't actually give people the kind of information that they need.
51:58 Alastair Campbell? So I think this, it has been welcomed by the teaching profession, I think, and I think it should be. And I think the idea that you, you know, let's be frank, if you're making a big decision, any big decision, the idea that you do it based on one word, I think people need, want to need something a bit deeper and a bit richer.
52:15 Rory Stewart? Yeah, to be fair to Ofsted, the one word is like a theatre review giving you four or five stars, but then the rich description was always there. And I think parents have always gone beyond the one word and read the rest of the report.
52:27 Alastair Campbell? That's true. I think, yeah, you may be right, but I think what it's done in terms of the impact upon a school, if it falls from one to one below, and I guess positively, the impact if it goes up could be a good thing, but that then has a disproportionately negative impact sometimes on other schools in the area. So I think, you know, on balance, in favour.
52:49 Rory Stewart? I connect to this as when I was working as the prisons minister with the prisons inspectors, and it may be worth looking at a compromise on this. There isn't a one word judgement. Instead, what there is, is judgements on the key criteria, you know, safety, violence, decency, et cetera. But there is still, it is still very, very useful, I found, you know, looking at 85 prisons to have some numbers where I could notice which ones I needed to worry about. And that's the awful truth is that I think if you were managing the system, you'd be very tempted to say to Ofsted, okay, you've produced this very worthy, lengthy report. Can you please tell me which of these schools need improvement and which of these schools are outstanding so that we can really work out where we need to provide extra support?
53:33 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, I suppose another area where that, we did apply that kind of approach was in the delivery unit that. We set up under Tony Blair and Michael Barber was key in kind of introducing and there he ran this sort of traffic lights approach, you know, he had all these sort of metrics for different policies and, you know, it was kind of red, amber, green and, you know, I guess red was a way whenever Tony Blair would be sent maybe weekly or monthly a kind of, you know, an analysis of all these different policies that were being being measured, he probably would want to know in a word, you know, or in this case, in a colour, which are the ones I should be really worried about. So I can get that from a, from a sort of policy development perspective.
54:12 Rory Stewart? The truth is that the ministers in education, the senior officials will basically be asking people to simplify and tell them which schools they need to worry about more and which they need to worry about less. And so even if Ofsted's no longer producing the one word, some other system will desperately be trying to, I mean, I, I found that with prisons that, you know, because they didn't have one word, I was having to work out how I looked at all these different figures in order to say, okay, what are the 10 worst prisons that we really need to concentrate on, one of the 20 worst, etc.
54:40 Alastair Campbell? So we basically, what we, what we're saying Rory is that we basically, we want a shorthand and a longhand and we'd like the public to, to focus on both.
54:47 Rory Stewart? And, and I think, you know, again, this is fine. I think the challenge for the government is getting the balance right. We need accountability and accountability matters actually particularly for poorer students. And it was pretty rubbish in the 1980s when they didn't have proper Ofsted and Ofsted needs to keep its confidence. It shouldn't be too intimidated. It, it does a very important job. But I think this reform is fine, but I think we need to keep looking at this because it would be unfortunate if it got weakened.
55:14 Alastair Campbell? One of the, maybe before we close Rory, one other thing that I've noticed, an article on the, the conversation about the huge uptick in homeschooling and whether this relates to Covid or it relates to mental health or it relates to people's worries about state schools, I don't know. But it was interesting that alongside her comments on the reforms to Ofsted, Bridget Phillips in the Education Secretary was talking about the increase in children persistently absent from school. So you've got a combination here of people who are absent from school just because they're not turning up at school and a very large increase in parents who are, who are, who are taking their children out of the education sector and homeschooling. So. That's maybe something we can come back to, but it does look like a trend.
55:59 Rory Stewart? Right, okay. Well, Alasdair, thank you for that. I mean, that was a lot of stuff we covered all the way through from Germany, Austria, France, Israel, Palestine, through to Ofsted.
56:10 Alastair Campbell? See you soon.
56:11 Rory Stewart? See you soon. Bye bye.
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