Pod Insights The Rest Is Politics 214. Israel in court, attacks on American soldiers, and the problem with polling About this episode What is the significance of the I. C. J. Ruling on Israel? How much control does Iran really have over its proxies? Should Labour brace itself for a sharp narrowing of the polls?
Join Rory and Alastair as they answer all this and more on today's episode of The Rest Is Politics.
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Transcript 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/restorspolitics. That's nordvpn.com/restorspolitics. And the link is in the episode description.
1:13 Alastair Campbell? Welcome to Rest is Politics with me, Asda Campbell.
1:15 Rory Stewart? And with me, Rory Stewart.
1:17 Alastair Campbell? And we're recording on Monday. The news dominated by the death of three American soldiers killed in a drone attack at an American base, either in Jordan or in Syria, depending which reports you believe. But I think the Americans are saying Jordan. And then I think we should talk at some length on the pretty remarkable ruling by the International Court of Justice on South Africa's claim of genocide against Israel. I'm very keen, Rory, to talk about what I call an anti-complacency polling presentation.
1:50 Rory Stewart? Very good.
1:50 Alastair Campbell? That is doing the rounds of the Labour Party at the moment, where they're... Hammering it into candidates that there is no such thing as a foregone conclusion in elections. And I think we should also touch, even though the UK is no longer in the European Union, there is a very important European Union summit this week where the issue of funding for Ukraine and the possible veto by Mr. Viktor Orban, Prime Minister of Hungary, is coming up. So how does that sound for you?
2:18 Rory Stewart? Sounds pretty good. And I think you also passed us some very interesting thoughts on what's likely to happen in the European elections and the likely rightward tilt, which we can maybe discuss also when we're discussing Orban.
2:29 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, well, maybe that's part of the same thing, or it's part of polling, because this is a huge poll that's been done across the European Union, which suggests that there's going to be quite a shift to the right in the European Union elections later this year. So on the overnight stuff, so drone attack, the latest of many drone attacks upon American bases in the Middle East. But this one, the big difference, three American soldiers have been killed, dozens of American soldiers have been injured, and Joe Biden was straight out there saying there will have to be, or there will be, some kind of response. So the question then becomes, is this a kind of proxy? Is this an associate
3:14 Alastair Campbell? of Iran? The Americans are pretty clear that the Iranians are behind it to some degree. The Iranians say they're not. And in the last 48 hours, on the one hand, we've had Donald Trump projecting himself as the Republican leader who will ensure the world doesn't slip into World War III, and yet another prominent Republican, Lindsey Graham, essentially saying that Biden's got to hit Iran hard. So a pretty dangerous moment, I would say.
3:40 Rory Stewart? Yeah, I think very dangerous moment. I think one question maybe in people listening is, who are these Shia militia groups? And the answer is that these are groups that really came to prominence during the US-UK invasion of Iraq. They were groups very closely connected to the Shia political parties. So the Shia are about two thirds of the population of Iraq, concentrated particularly in the south of the country. They were the group that was persecuted under Saddam Hussein, very close links into Iran, which of course is a majority Shia country. And these groups initially from 2003 onwards were fighting off and against the coalition. So when I was being attacked in my compound in southern Iraq, rocket propelled grenades and mortars, that was Shia militia groups doing it.
4:26 Rory Stewart? They then came to prominence again because when the fighting started in Syria, the Shia militia groups got behind Bashar al-Assad, the dictator of Syria, to take on the breakaway groups up in the north and the east of the country. And their cousin is Hezbollah, which is the Shia Iranian funded group in Lebanon. They were critical in 2014 in the fight against ISIS in places like Mosul. And so when I was in Mosul again last year, you can see huge posters to these Shia militia groups all the way up the road from Baghdad to Mosul. They're absolutely central to the modern Iraqi government.
5:08 Rory Stewart? Al-Sudani, who's the prime minister of Iraq, comes from an organisation which is connected to these groups. And there are over 100,000 members of these groups in Iraq, and they are almost part of a sort of shadow army. They receive salaries from the government, uniforms from government, trainings from the government, a lot of support from the Iranian government. Now, this means that when they attack the American bases, and that's been going on in Syria, it's been going on in Iraq, it's now, as you say, happened in Jordan. These are groups which are very, very closely connected to the governments of Iraq and Syria, and which are very heavily supported, as you say, by Iran. So when the US responds, which it will have to do, because it can't allow its soldiers to be killed and not do anything,
5:53 Rory Stewart? it risks being drawn into a much, much deeper conflict with, not just with Iran, but potentially with the Iraqi government that will feel forced to defend these groups, which are very close to their political parties.
6:04 Alastair Campbell? Where do you stand on the relationship in terms of?
6:10 Alastair Campbell? On the one hand, they're always described as as proxies, and that to me says that it's almost like they're operating under the command of Iran. But is it more that the Iranians support them financially, militarily, provide them with resources and supplies, and they then go off and do their own thing? So when the Iranians are denying their direct involvement, is it plausible and is it possible that's actually true?
6:36 Rory Stewart? Well, there's no doubt the connections are very deep. So I remember talking to the leader of political party in southern Iraq, and he said to me, I have 1,250 party members. And I said, how do you know so precisely? And he said, because I've issued each one of them with a Kalashnikov. And he had been in Iran, trained by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, and he and his men had just crossed the Iranian border after the invasion. So many of them do have really deep links into Iranian agents and paramilitary groups and will be armed by them. But maybe an analogy is the relationship between Pakistan and the Taliban. So the Pakistan intelligence agency is always providing funding for the
7:18 Rory Stewart? Taliban, a lot of material support for the Taliban. But when push came to shove, it was never very clear whether they could really tell them what to do. So it's possible, of course, that some of these militia groups are choosing to fire rockets, putting Iran in a position where they're having to decide whether to continue to support them, whether they can really turn them off or not. There's no doubt they have huge influence over them. But whether they can actually micromanage them in a day to day basis, I think is probably perhaps more questionable.
7:48 Alastair Campbell? And I suppose the I suppose the response of the Americans will vary between seeking to identify which groups specifically were involved in this particular attack and trying to degrade them. But if Biden does come under more and more pressure, what are the chances now that because Iran seems like it doesn't want to get involved in a kind of a big matchup with America right now in terms of, you know, militarily?
8:14 Rory Stewart? Yeah, because as you say, I mean, what was striking is that in the early days, what was surprising after October the 7th was that Iran wasn't dragged in more quickly. And of course, the other Arab states didn't get dragged in. It's not like Yom Kippur 50 years ago, where there was literal invasions from Syria and Egypt and Jordan.
8:34 Alastair Campbell? Yeah.
8:34 Rory Stewart? But over the last few weeks, the stories seem to get more complicated because the Houthis, who we've talked about, who are Iranian backed in Yemen, have been firing, obviously, rockets at these ships. Now we have more and more attacks by Iranian linked militia groups against US bases. Now, does this mean that the Iranian government is fractured, that there are factions within the Revolutionary Guard that are trying to stir up trouble and get a confrontation? And what happens when America responds? As you say, Biden will have to respond for domestic political reasons. He doesn't want to seem weak. He'll also have to respond because the US can't allow people to just attack them with impunity. Otherwise,
9:17 Rory Stewart? it's going to get much more dangerous for them. But if he over responds and ends up really creating a huge provocative incident, then it's quite possible the Iraqi government and others will feel forced to then respond again. So will they ask, for example, the obvious thing is the Iraqis might then ask the US to withdraw all their remaining troops from Iraq. And what happens? The US then refuses to do that. So I think what happened in the last 24 hours is probably the most dangerous thing that we've seen in the last two months.
9:46 Alastair Campbell? Yeah. Of course, the other thing that it's done is it has allowed those who want to blame America for everything to say that both the attack by the Houthis in the Red Sea and now this are linked to, if not necessarily a direct consequence of, because you're talking about people who've been anti-American for a very long time, America's absolutely steadfast support of Israel in relation to what's going on in Gaza. So maybe that's a good time to to switch to the International Court of Justice ruling. I mean, I don't know what you thought of it. I thought it was about as strong a judgment as it could be.
10:27 Alastair Campbell? Without the ICJ risking the prospect of being denounced by the Americans and by the Israelis in particular, as straying into, if you like, into politics, I thought it was a pretty damning judgment, stronger than I was expecting.
10:45 Rory Stewart? Yeah, and I think encourage people maybe to skim it, particularly the last half of the New York Times put it on its website in full, you read the last quarter of it. And there's been, as you can imagine, a huge Twitter war with some people saying, oh, no, this completely exonerates Israel, and other people saying this totally condemns Israel of genocide. I think it's devastating for Israel because firstly, they don't throw the case out, they don't do what Israel was requesting, which is to say, this is nonsense.
11:10 Alastair Campbell? And the word plausible is a sort of, it's a very legalistic but slightly understated way of saying that there may be a case to answer.
11:20 Rory Stewart? Yes, and in particular, they cite evidence to explain why they think they may be a case to answer. So they cite the Defence Minister saying that he's going to cut off electricity and water, and that I'm going to release all restraints, that we're fighting animals, we will eliminate everything. So that's an example of one of the things they're saying, which is that there's genocidal language being used by senior Israeli figures. They then quote Martin Griffiths a lot, who we've talked about interviewing on leading, who I think we should get on if we can, but just a lot of it is just him describing conditions on the ground. And they quote so many UN sources and other independent sources
12:04 Rory Stewart? just validating just how many people have been killed, how many people have been displaced, what's happening to the healthcare system. And then their conclusions of these four recommendations. So recommendations are that
12:17 Rory Stewart? The Israeli government should do everything it can to protect the Palestinian population, that it should tell the army to, that it should be allowing humanitarian access and it should be taking action against people who use genocidal language in Israel. And the judge is found in favour of all of this by an overwhelming majority. Two judges voted against.
12:37 Alastair Campbell? Including the Israeli judge?
12:39 Rory Stewart? Particularly on the last two, yeah. He supported the idea they should be calling out people who call for genocide and supported the humanitarian access. It was the Ugandan judge who voted against or for, somewhat to people's surprise. So I think it's very significant and I think it's important not to get into a world in which the US and the UK simply dismisses out of hand the conclusions the International Court, because we are trying to create a rules-based international order. We do need the UN and these courts to function. So I was a bit troubled that the Brits, the Americans, the Germans jumped so quickly to attack the case.
13:22 Alastair Campbell? Well, also, if you have a situation, it's only, what, just over a year ago now that the International Court heard the claim against Russia in relation to Ukraine. I think it's four years now since the claim that the Gambia made against Myanmar of genocide in relation to the treatment of the Rohingya, where the response in those cases of Britain, the United States, several of the other European countries was to say, to stand up for the court and to stand up for their judgments. And there's been a lot of debate in sort of international law circles, particularly in the States, where they're
14:05 Alastair Campbell? essentially saying to the American government in particular, this is an opportunity. For the Americans to continue to be supportive in terms of, you know, Israel's right to defend itself, but to embrace the international law, to embrace the court's judgment and to use it in a sense as a as a further lever to try to get Israel into what I think politically would be a better position as well, which is because their their response was just, you know, we've seen so much of this, the minute the thing came out, these very effective, very powerful voices go out on behalf of the Israeli government. And as you say, essentially was saying, well, they haven't called for a ceasefire and they
14:47 Alastair Campbell? haven't said that it's that it's genocide, therefore, you know, we carry on as normal. And I think the other thing that's important in this is that, you know, the the Americans, there's so much pressure on them to sort of provide, if you like, the global leadership on this. But if they don't side with a body like the ICJ, then there is a real danger that in those parts of the world where they've been losing influence and losing support, that that process is accelerated.
15:13 Rory Stewart? Yeah. One of the things I've been thinking about a lot is trying to understand a little bit more about public opinion in Israel and what Israel and Israelis think they're doing in Gaza. Because obviously, from from our point of view, from a distance, it seems very difficult to understand. We're very, very conscious of just how many people are being killed, how horrifying this is being, how few of the Hamas leadership are being killed. So I mean, it feels like, you know, tens of thousands of people are being killed and there's not much military benefit to Israel and it's just having a catastrophic impact on Israel's reputation in the region and that of the US and UK for supporting them. So I've been listening to these podcasts put out by the Times of Israel. They're called
15:56 Rory Stewart? What Matters Now? And they're interviews with quite interesting journalists and intellectuals. And one of them, which maybe if people want to hear the Israeli perspective, is called very brutally, What Israel Makes of the Suffering in Gaza. And that and its following podcast point out that opinion polls suggest that the overwhelming majority of Israelis are still strongly supportive of the bombing campaign, do not want any form of ceasefire.
16:28 Rory Stewart? And that when asked in an opinion poll at the end of December, whether the Israeli government should be taking the suffering of Palestinians into account in these operations, something like eighty percent of Israeli Jews thought that it either shouldn't be taken into account or not taken into account very much. And of course, as you can imagine, the Palestinian view and the Arab view is entirely the reverse, you know, eighty percent think the reverse. So I thought they were very interesting because what's happening there is you can hear over, you know, forty five minutes or an hour, very thoughtful people trying to explain why they support what's happening and why they feel very distanced from the from the West. But one thing I thought you'd be interested in is
17:13 Rory Stewart? what they were saying about the media landscape. They said that, you know, if you watch Al Jazeera, you see a lot of images of suffering in Gaza. If you watch CNN, you see a bit less, but still a lot. If you watch the Hebrew language news in Israel, you see, they say, almost no images at all of what's happening in Gaza, but a lot of reporting of an Israeli soldier gets killed.
17:35 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, I mean, the thing about, so we talked, we talked a couple of weeks ago about this. So when last week, more than twenty Israeli soldiers were killed, which I think was their biggest single loss of military life since this started, their faces were all over the front pages. Now rightly, I would say. And then likewise, once the three soldiers have been killed and the American soldiers have been killed in the last twenty four hours, once they're identified, their faces will be broadcast and being around the world, I suspect. I think that one of the things that makes the Palestinians feel that they are judged by certain different standards. So we're now talking about more
18:16 Alastair Campbell? than twenty five thousand who've been killed. It's very hard for me to remember the actual face of an individual that I've seen, their face after the event of their death, being put out there as if you like, as a symbol of the Of the loss, we've seen lots of pictures of the aftermaths of the bombing, we've seen lots of pictures of people fleeing, we see lots of interviews and so forth. Now, I'm not criticizing the media on this because I know it's a very, very difficult report from there. And in fact, there was a, my favorite German podcast, Ach Milliarden, they, this week, they, it's all about the difficulties of reporting inside Gaza at the moment. But I do think there's a, it's almost like that they're, they're not treated with the same
18:57 Alastair Campbell? humanity in the way that we're, that we're covering them. And the other thing that, that of course, was a big development this weekend, which again, I felt very uneasy about, was in relation to UNRWA, and I'm sure you know UNRWA far better than I do, but this is the United Nations, essentially the relief farm of the United Nations.
19:16 Rory Stewart? Which is specifically for Palestinian refugees.
19:18 Alastair Campbell? Correct.
19:19 Rory Stewart? So it's, it's a UN agency that exists specifically for Palestinian refugees, set up in, in the 40s.
19:23 Alastair Campbell? Yeah. And it emerges, and this is information which the Israelis provided to the Palestinians, which seems to have been taken at, you know, as face value, that there were people who worked for UNRWA who were involved in the attacks of October the 7th, which clearly is unacceptable, and clearly there has to be some sort of action taken in relation to that. But I thought the fact that several governments, including our own, including the Americans, I think including Germany, immediately pulled the plug on our support for UNRWA, I thought that was, at the very least unfortunate. It's almost like saying that, you know, if, if, if in relation to an organization here, where you get some people within it, say that you get terrible things done by a small number of soldiers or a small
20:08 Alastair Campbell? number of police officers, that you then shut the whole place down.
20:12 Rory Stewart? Yeah. And, and, and, and in this case, particularly important because it's not like a sort of, I mean, it's completely central now in Gaza to running almost everything. I mean, UNRWA is basically the, the only thing, providing services, providing tents, keeping people alive. I mean, it's the center for all the relief operations in Gaza. So removing support has catastrophic impact on people there. I mean, I've also been interested, again, listening to the Israeli point of view, that you made the point quite rightly that there's a A sort of sense of hypocrisy in the way the reporting is done. Of course, Israel feels hypocrisy in a different way. So I was hearing this centrist journalist being interviewed saying how disgusted
20:54 Rory Stewart? he was that the international court was going after Israel because nobody paid any attention really, and they hadn't really gone after Russia in the same way. And nobody cared what happened in Syria and Yemen. And it's only when Israel does stuff that anything, anybody cares. And it was interesting to hear that. But at the same time, listening to it, I thought it was a strange statement, because of course, it's not quite true that nobody cared what was happening in Syria and Yemen. People cared deeply what was happening in Syria and Yemen, firstly. And secondly, you wouldn't want a state like Israel, which has a strong tradition as a democracy with very, very liberal, educated traditions, to start saying, well, how come Bashar al-Assad can get away with it in Syria, and we're not allowed to get away with it?
21:35 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, of course, in relation to Russia, Vladimir Putin is limited in the countries that he can travel to precisely because a lot of the world does take seriously the ruling that was made by the court.
21:46 Rory Stewart? But I think, again, I mean, again, so I'm struggling maybe with this because it's such a difficult situation. But from the point of view of, it seemed from these interviews as though it's sort of nearly 80% of Israelis, they just feel everything that's happening in Gaza is Hamas's fault. And that they have to take out Hamas, and Hamas are using civilians as a shield. And they've just got to cut through the civilians to get to Hamas, which brings, I suppose, to the bigger question, which is, what is this idea they have of toppling Hamas? How does it work? Why do they think that doing this is going to make Israel safer? You can completely understand the trauma. I mean, this is not Russia-Ukraine. Israel was attacked. It's unimaginable to live next to Hamas when you've just seen them commit these unbelievable atrocities and make it very clear they're happy
22:31 Rory Stewart? to kill women and children. But how can it make sense? And that's where I think we've got to get to the nub of it, which is that The Israeli military keep using this analogy with ISIS. They keep saying, well, you know, we went after ISIS and we wiped out ISIS. And therefore, this is the way to go after Hamas. And I think there's a huge difference. And the difference is that most of the fighting against ISIS in Iraq and Syria was led by the Iraqi and Syrian governments, and a lot of it led by these Shia militia and by Iran. In this case, you don't have a situation where the local Palestinian government is leading the fight against Hamas. You don't have the Shia militia fighting against Hamas. Instead, you have a situation where most of those groups are on the other side.
23:14 Rory Stewart? And it's very difficult to believe that there's any stable world, even if you destroyed all the tunnels, even if you killed more of the leadership than have currently been killed, that Israel's going to end up safer.
23:24 Alastair Campbell? I was having an exchange this week with Jonathan Powell, who, listeners of Leading may remember, we talked to a while back, and Jonathan was Tony Blair's chief of staff, but also his main negotiator on Northern Ireland, particularly after the Good Friday Agreement, when, you know, the real kind of hard yards in many ways were done. And one of his sort of golden rules of particularly of dealing with terrorist organisations is that eventually, if you're going to resolve a dispute with terrorism, you are going to have to talk to your enemy sooner or later. And he specifically says you should not let the desire for revenge after an outrage blind you to that reality. Now, I can see why it's very, very difficult in this context to do that.
24:05 Alastair Campbell? And likewise, I heard Mark Sedwell, who was the former cabinet secretary, former national security adviser, saying that in relation to the current situation that's evolved in the last 24 hours with the Americans, that there will, as we said earlier, there will have to be some sort of military response, but it cannot just be a military response alone. There has to be diplomacy, there has to be politics. I think with the politics on this, I think it's that that I think has been so dispiriting and so disappointing is the way that political positions seem to get more entrenched, whatever. I mean, maybe we was expecting too much for us, but I just thought when I read, first
24:47 Alastair Campbell? read the summary of the ICJ report, the judgment, I thought, well, is it too much to expect that Israel could come out and say, okay, we take this away, we digest it, we take it on board, we hear what's being said about the loss of civilian life, and we, you know, we review our practices. Something that suggested...
25:08 Alastair Campbell? You know, adapting to the political realities. Whereas what we've had is, as you said earlier, I don't think a real sense. We don't, I've not seen much of an explanation as to the progress that is being made in taking out the Hamas leadership. I just see the continuing relentless bombing campaign.
25:26 Rory Stewart? Again, I may don't want to put too much emphasis on just these couple of Times of Israel podcasts, but it was a really worthwhile sense how people are thinking. And, and the man being interviewed in the previous one was saying that he'd been in Britain and people in Britain were saying, why don't, doesn't Israel lean into providing more humanitarian support in Gaza? And he said, well, you know, Netanyahu doesn't want to seem too soft on the Palestinians because that's not going to play well with his right wing political allies. And, and then he said, well, but on the other hand, I suppose it might make it easier for the UK and the US to support Israel if Israel was providing more humanitarian support.
26:08 Rory Stewart? But a lot of this goes back to the point, I think, that Yuval Noah Harari was making when we interviewed him, which is this terrible sense of two communities living alongside each other who've really lost a sense of empathy, that the only arguments being really made are sort of practical. They're not, he, he wasn't making first principled arguments for providing humanitarian relief. I mean, it's, I am really worried that, and I'm not, you know, saying this in any way to exonerate Hamas, who I'm absolutely certain would be, if they had half a chance, would be killing tens of thousands of Israelis with rockets and missiles. But boy, oh, boy, is it difficult to, to understand what this is. And I, I think the only way that you can understand it as it continues, week in, week
26:51 Rory Stewart? out, is that they must somehow think that this has a sort of deterrent effect, that by doing this, they will deter Hamas from doing it again, or Hezbollah from doing it again. I just, I just can't quite see that working. I think it's much more likely that it, it actually just increases the anger and increases the number of your enemies.
27:09 Alastair Campbell? Hmm. I mean, maybe briefly before we go to a break, is it worth just talking a little bit about how there was a sort of flurry last week based upon an interview or an article by the outgoing, not left yet, but the outgoing head of the army in the UK, talking about, you know, this sense that actually we were in a very, very dangerous situation. And then you had Grant Shapps talking about we're in a pre-war phase. And it sort of unleashed this kind of, I don't know whether this was deliberate, but it unleashed this sort of debate about conscription. And we, you know, and we had the ludicrous Boris Johnson, I don't know if you saw.
27:49 Rory Stewart? Saying he was going to sign up as a corporal, wasn't he?
27:51 Alastair Campbell? I mean, for God's sake. And he was sort of, he looked, he looked a little bit like, do you remember Benny Hill used to do that sort of salute on his, put his fingers on his forehead? He looked a little bit like that. And by the way, this is a guy who says he's going to sign up, who, who, who, when faced with the combined might of Susanna Reid and Piers Morgan on Good Morning Britain, hid in a fridge. So we should part that. But I'll tell you one thing that I, I, I looked up. So we, we talked about this last week, about this, what the British military now looks like. So since the turn of the century, our army is down by almost a third. The Royal Navy and Royal Marines are down by more than 20%. And the Royal Air Force down by 40% in numbers, we're talking about numbers. Now, I know that, you know, technology is incredibly important. And we've already been talking
28:36 Alastair Campbell? about, you know, this thing in, in, in Jordan was about a, was a drone attack. But the idea that we should, should the United Kingdom be required to take part in a, in a major war, we're, we're just not the force that we were. And I think we, I think we need to be honest about that and have a, and the country needs to have a proper debate about that.
28:57 Rory Stewart? And, and some of the stuff, and we've talked about sort of it with procurement in the M D. I mean, there's been an article in the Daily Mail, just getting again into the scandal of our aircraft carriers. You know, we spent 7.8 billion pounds on those carriers and. As I was pointing out with my colleagues on the Defence Committee back 10 years ago, it was clear from the moment that we were commissioning them that we were never going to have the money to pay for the planes to go on them and the maintenance for those planes or the carrier battle groups and ships to surround them.
29:26 Alastair Campbell? By the way, last week, Roy, lots of people shared my incredulity when you said that the Russian economy was currently a 40% defence economy, but you're absolutely right.
29:37 Rory Stewart? Yeah, and I think Britain has to make some tough choices and we cannot pretend that we can continue to pay for all this fancy kit when we quite clearly don't have the resources or don't want to put the resources into backing it up. There's no point spending £8 billion on aircraft carriers if you don't have the money to buy the planes or put the carrier battle groups around them. And we're repeating the story again and again and again.
29:59 Alastair Campbell? Okay, well, shall we take a break?
30:00 Rory Stewart? Quick break.
30:21 Speaker 02 We assess, Prime Minister, with high confidence it was Russian.
30:27 Speaker 03 Holding the Russians accountable is World War III.
30:29 Speaker 04 They took down a British passenger jet containing 350 people.
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30:45 Speaker 06 We would need to understand the policy context.
30:48 Speaker 05 All the relevant context will be structured as a framework today and disseminated into an operation order, or FRAGO.
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31:49 Rory Stewart? Welcome back to The Restless Politics with me Rory Stewart.
31:52 Alastair Campbell? And me Alastair Campbell. And Rory, how did you enjoy this week's leading with my old Republican mucker, Tucker Esqu.
32:00 Rory Stewart? Well, I thought really fascinating and really good. As we get into the US electoral year, we're going to have to be doing more and more of US politics. And I thought he was a great voice and sufficiently kind of different and quirky with his sort of faith and his admiration for Ronald Reagan to sort of remind us that we're dealing with a foreign country. What do you think?
32:18 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, I thought it was, it was interesting and, and we got very good feedback, a lot of it for his accent. I think people do like a kind of that, that southern draw. But I thought he was measured, given that I've had private conversations with him about just how bad he feels about what's happening in America right now. I mean, Trump, just every time the guy turns on the, you turn on the TV and he comes up, I mean, last week it was $80 million in this case against the woman that he, you know, it's now been proven sexually assaulted by Trump. He then carries on sort of saying she's a liar. She ends up earning 80 million plus dollars. And yet still it seems that those who want to support him, nothing will stop them.
33:03 Rory Stewart? It's amazing, isn't it? Amazing. And which brings us on to polls. So you've produced a really fascinating poll, which I think has been, has it been shared with Labour candidates, just reminding people of how strange and erratic polling can be. Give us a bit of a description of it.
33:17 Alastair Campbell? We should actually put it in the newsletter because I'm glad you like it. It comes from the Labour Party and it's being circulated by the Labour Party to their candidates, to their MPs, to campaigners. And essentially what it's showing is that in many, many elections in recent years, the conventional wisdom risks being turned on its head in the closing weeks of a campaign. And if I just go through them, you know, one by one, Australia 2019, you've got Labour sort of right out in front, massive gap, the... Right wing blue sort of mumbling along at the bottom, that's Scott Morrison. And then literally in the last few weeks, it flips.
33:58 Alastair Campbell? America 2016, you've got Hillary, you know, well ahead in the polls for most of the time. There's one bit where Trump sort of gets back in. And then again, last few weeks, big change. Germany 2021, Norway 2017. I mean, the Norway one's fascinating because the Labour Party is so far out in front. And then just about clings on at the end. Scotland 2015, Labour ahead for a lot of the time, SNP win. UK 2019, UK 2017, big, big shifts during the campaign. And so what this, this last, the last graphic, and you can see these poll numbers sort of going along like sort of snakes crawling along the page. So you've now got this one where Tories are ahead, that's 2019, the election.
34:43 Alastair Campbell? Labour sort of bump up, catch them up. And then in the combination of sort of Partygate and then Truss and all the other stuff, Labour way ahead. That's been maintained. And then there are just these big question marks. And then what it says to the bottom, what this means, polls do not predict the future. Nobody has voted in a general election. Change won't happen unless people vote for it. So I guess what it's doing is saying to the Labour Party and, um, you know, when we say no complacency, we mean that there must be no complacency.
35:12 Rory Stewart? And I guess this polling is something we talk about a lot. And of course, in the popular mind, anyway, polling got a bit of a beating, didn't it? Because polling predicted that Hillary Clinton would beat Donald Trump. It seemed to predict that Remain was going to win in Brexit. It predicted that Theresa May was going to do amazingly well in 2017. It was wrong all those times. And I think the pollsters in their defence say, we're not good enough at understanding margins of error. In other words, when these things are close, you shouldn't really assume because it says, I don't know, 54% are going to vote Remain. That's not a big enough margin to be confident. The second thing though, that's changing in the world and makes it more and more difficult is they're really struggling with turnout. And turnout is absolutely critical.
35:54 Rory Stewart? So a friend of mine who's a pollster, James Johnson, said to me that if the African American vote drops by just 1% in Georgia due to turnout, people not turning out to vote, Biden would lose Georgia.
36:06 Alastair Campbell? Well, look, we, we were talking earlier about. What's going on in the Middle East, African American, Arab American support has been slipping on the back of what's happening there. So one percentage, that's a game, that's a potential game changer.
36:20 Rory Stewart? And eighteen to twenty nine year olds, another thing we've been looking at, eighteen to twenty nine year olds have a higher disapproval rating of Biden than the rest of the population. And this is something, you also sent me something on which I thought was fascinating, which is obviously one traditionally, if you're not socialist in your twenties, you don't have a heart. And if you're not whatever, a conservative in your seventies, you don't have a head. That seems to be flipping because increasingly, particularly young men are turning out to be more and more right wing and young women are quite left wing. So suddenly that younger age group is much more divided in terms of its political ideology than was ever the case in the past, when you could say confidently, younger people were more left wing.
36:58 Alastair Campbell? Every continent in the world, the decile that has the biggest numbers attracted to authoritarian leadership is the young.
37:05 Rory Stewart? And that's troubling for you, isn't it? Because a lot of what can I do and your whole shtick is your incredible hope and optimism about young people.
37:12 Alastair Campbell? Which I still maintain, I do still maintain. I was in, I was at a couple of schools last week and in one of them, I was promoting this organisation called I-Vote, which is trying to increase voter registration amongst young people. Now, most people in this country, I think, do not know that you can register to vote from the age of sixteen, okay? What percentage of sixteen year olds are currently registered to vote? Sixteen percent.
37:38 Rory Stewart? Amazing.
37:39 Alastair Campbell? But then even when you get to eighteen, we're still talking about four out of ten of that cohort who are not registered to vote. So people can complain that they don't like this and they don't like that and fair enough, if they don't want to vote, that's up to them. But we're going to have a lot of people going into the next generation, able to vote technically, but then suddenly discovered if they're not registered, they can't vote. And then you throw in all the other stuff that the government's doing in relation to voter ID and so forth. I think we've got a potential problem with that. And your point about young men in particular, I think it was John Byrne Murdoch in the Financial Times who does these very interesting graphics. And he was showing in different parts of the world where Men moving to more authoritarian politics, women becoming more progressive.
38:24 Alastair Campbell? So I think we kid ourselves when we talk about the young being this emodinous, passionate, care about the planet, all that stuff. It's much more complicated.
38:31 Rory Stewart? Two other polling trends I thought might might interest listeners. One of them is the fundamental change in people's confidence about the future. So I think we've discussed in the past that one of the big changes since the nineties is that fewer and fewer people believe their kids will be better off than they are. But now in all fourteen developed countries, twenty twenty three, less than half people think they'll be better off in five years' time than they are today. And that's that's a real thing that's going to drive into votes for populist insurrectionary parties. Another thing is incumbents. So in the early two thousands, incumbents tended to be reelected seventy percent of the time. You know, when I studied politics A level, I was always told about the incumbency advantage.
39:13 Rory Stewart? And you can see why an incumbent should have an advantage as they get more attention from the media, they're supposed to control the narrative, et cetera. Now incumbents are being reelected only thirty percent of the time. It's an extraordinary drop.
39:25 Alastair Campbell? Hmm. But don't you think that might be because if you take the current government, I think even their biggest supporters would be hard pressed to say that they have fitted the old fashioned political model, which is you make a set of promises, you deliver them in government, and then you get rewarded for that by people trusting you to deliver the next set of promises. What the model is, I would argue for the for the conservative government is, well, soon all Sunak talks about is kind of delivering on things that his predecessors already promised to deliver. So that breaks that model. And that means the incumbency actually becomes a disadvantage rather than an advantage.
40:02 Rory Stewart? The figures are pretty dramatic across the developed world. So in the ten developing nations, all their leaders have popularity ratings above fifty percent. In the twenty major democracies at the moment, no one is above fifty percent. Biden's doing pretty well, thirty seven percent, which is low for the US. Sunak's down at, you know, YouGov twenty five percent in favor, fifty one percent dislike him. Macron varies between nineteen and thirty percent in favor. Shorts very low, Fumio Kishida in Japan, 21.5% like him. But it's also a problem for the opposition. I mean, Keir Starmer is currently only 30% in favour and 42% disliking compared to your your great friend, who, I mean, Tony Blair, shortly after Princess Diana, managed to
40:46 Rory Stewart? achieve 93% favourability. It's a completely different universe and was up at 60% quite a lot of the time in those early years.
40:54 Alastair Campbell? Listen, politics, I think there's all sorts of reasons politics has got harder. I think the polarisation hasn't helped, social media hasn't helped. But I think maybe that model of promising everything and then failing to deliver. That's why I think Labour should be bigger and bolder in their objectives. But I think it's right not to overpromise because that way does lead to possibly disillusionment. There's a very interesting thing going on in Australia at the moment, Rory, where Anthony Albanese, the Prime Minister, has, on the one hand, has broken an election promise in that he has gone back on the commitment he made to stick with Morrison's tax plans.
41:36 Alastair Campbell? But on the other hand, the changes that he's made have turned out to be very, very popular because essentially he's putting a bit more tax on the people at the top and three quarters of the country, I think it is, are going to be better off.
41:49 Rory Stewart? So there's, dare we say, a possible route for Starmer, which is, obviously, he's promised basically to stick to the Conservatives' tax and spending plans. I mean, he's got a little, you know, nine or 10 billion that he's going to get from stuff like private schools. But is it possible then that he could follow the Albanese path, that if he's actually in, he could be bolder than he's saying when he's trying to get elected?
42:11 Alastair Campbell? I mean, it is very interesting to watch because you've got the Murdoch press, which hate Albanese anyway, sort of, you know, trying to kind of doom in left, right and centre. But you can see from the opposition that they're finding it quite hard to attack him. Over the the broken promise part of this because essentially they're making a break with Scott Morrison's test, what they these three-stage income tax cuts as they're called. But they're doing it in a way that one is actually in keeping with Labour sort of values and principles and the whole Albanese life story. And it's helping, it's giving a, you know, a pretty big tax cut to people who are sort of working class and middle class.
42:51 Alastair Campbell? And so it is, it's a very, very, very interesting one, which, and, and the other thing, we talk a lot about boldness, it kind of coming back from the new year break and, you know, bang, change the weather. It was quite an impressive thing to do. I wonder if Jeremy Hunt has any big surprises up his sleeve.
43:08 Rory Stewart? It's also a kind of longstanding thing in democracies, isn't it, of occasionally people campaigning very hard, promising to do one thing and then coming in and doing exactly the opposite.
43:19 Alastair Campbell? Which people hate.
43:20 Rory Stewart? But sometimes some of the most dramatic reforms, so Fuji Moria in Peru ran a whole campaign saying that he was against austerity, he was against the IMF, against the World Bank, defeated his sort of fiscally conservative opponent, came in and immediately embraced austerity, the IMF, the World Bank, the whole lot of it, and turned around the Peruvian economy and therefore was sort of forgiven for it and had a great sort of success the next time around. The example on the other side, of course, is LBJ, who ran a whole campaign, London Johnston states, saying he was going to get out of Vietnam and then was elected and immediately got much, much deeper into Vietnam.
43:53 Alastair Campbell? Now, let's stick with polling and switch to, to Europe. So European Council on Foreign Relations has put out a huge report on the upcoming European parliamentary elections. And as things stand, they're saying that what they call anti-European populists will top the polls in nine, that's a third of the member states, Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, France, Hungary, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, Slovakia, and they'll come second or third in a further nine countries.
44:26 Alastair Campbell? So they're predicting a pretty significant shift to the right.
44:30 Rory Stewart? Yeah. And just to look at that list of countries, because the ones that aren't included, I mean, that's a hell of a lot, right? That's 18 of the member states. The only ones that don't appear on this list are basically pretty small countries: Luxembourg, Malta, Cyprus, Croatia, Slovenia, Ireland, maybe outliers for Denmark, Greece, but all the really big, chunky countries are about to, according to this, find a real shift towards right-wing populism: Germany, France, Italy, Spain, et cetera.
44:57 Alastair Campbell? Yeah. There was a very, there was a, from our perspective, a more hopeful sign in Germany at the weekend, where there was a partial election, a district election, in Turingen, where the AfD are very, very, very strong, and they were expected to win. But they were beaten by the Christian Democrats in a very, for this sort of election, in a very high turnout. And I think the thinking is that that massive protest, the mobilisation of protests over the last couple of weeks against the AfD really drove the turnout up. It was, it was almost 70%, which, you know, as I say, for a, I guess it would be like a very big bilection is how we would look at it. So that was a fairly hopeful sign.
45:42 Rory Stewart? Then, on the other hand, you know, we're often very hopeful about Poland, but the same polls on Europe suggest the Law and Justice Party, which was the kind of right-wing populist government, is going to do very well. It's going to get 31 against 24 for the existing government. So you never count these people out. And that Poland example may suggest that when people like me are saying, well, Poland's proved that the populists can be defeated, and isn't this great?
46:07 Alastair Campbell? Poland has also proved that the defeat, a bit like, you know, Trump not accepting defeat, the defeated party is, is really making life difficult for Tusk. And a lot of it is being played out in the media landscape, where the PIS has sort of packed the national broadcaster, Tusk has tried to get them out. It's led to protests on the streets. So no, it's listen, this is a very, very, very difficult landscape. You know, again, we should put this a very long report, we should put it in the in the newsletter. But it does mean that there's the possibility of a very different kind of configuration. There's a graphic which suggests that the the identity politics, as it were, is gonna is gonna possibly play a very, very big brokering role. And of course, this matters for we're gonna, you know, come on to talk about Orban and
46:52 Alastair Campbell? Ukraine. This matters for some of these bigger global issues because the European Parliament does have is maybe people in the UK never really took it that seriously, sadly, but it does have significant ability to shape some of these bigger strategic debates.
47:08 Rory Stewart? Yeah, just just for regular listeners, because we've touched on a lot of these countries in past podcasts, to make sense of what this means when we say there's going to be a shift to the populist right. What we're expecting is Maloney's party to do well in Italy, in France, that essentially Le Pen's party will continue to do well. And again, the question that we keep returning to is when will a proper successor emerge for Macron, who's going to be able to defeat Le Pen in the presidential election? Spain, it's partly driven by a backlash against this deal that we talked about with the Catalan separatists, which have made the government very unpopular, means that the People's Party and Vox, which is the the right wing Spanish party, are likely to do better. Germany AFD,
47:50 Rory Stewart? obviously, we've talked about a great deal. Netherlands, this is Herd Wilders and his his success, Hungary, Orban.
47:57 Alastair Campbell? They still haven't been able to form a government, by the way, they're still sort of.
48:00 Rory Stewart? No, still haven't formed one. And Austria, it's this very sinister party, the Freedom Party, that looks like it'll go up from seventeen to twenty six seats. And and there's some very, we haven't talked much about Austria, maybe we should do more on Austria, but you know, very disturbing scenes of men making Nazi salutes to the balcony on which Hitler appeared and stuff. And implications, again, the report's very good on this. It says that if we end up with a more right wing parliament in Europe, you can expect it will be slightly more sympathetic to Russia, less supportive of Ukraine, more repressive on immigration, less Concerned about this phrase democratic backsliding, so not likely to take sanctions against places like Hungary. And above all, much more likely to be against climate legislation.
48:43 Rory Stewart? They do a very detailed analysis of the fact that they reckon with this new parliament that's likely to emerge after the June elections. Europe wouldn't have been able to get its nature restoration law through. So it really is going to matter.
48:55 Alastair Campbell? Well, let's let's stick with Europe then. And so we're recording, as I say, on Monday. And on Thursday, European leaders, sadly without the UK president, will be gathering for a summit. And that's because the first attempt to secure 50 billion euro financing for Ukraine for the next few years. Was they failed to agree, not least because of the objections of Viktor Orban. So they sort of blow hot and cold as to whether they think they can get a deal done this time. Orban, whether we like you or not, is a very, very powerful figure within these debates. There is all sorts of talk about punishing Hungary in relation to some of their economic vulnerabilities. Should he block it yet again?
49:40 Alastair Campbell? They've been making, the Hungarians have made one or two positive noises, but these are always matched then by going backwards. And that was that was followed a meeting of, Orban had a meeting of his parliamentary party in Budapest, Fidesz. And they then appeared to have a much more hardline strategy. And I think part of the thinking is that Orban wants to use this. One, I don't think he likes Ursula von der Leyen very much and is trying to sort of, you know, undermine her and possibly stop her being able to go for a second term. And the other thing is he wants this issue of Ukraine. He wants it to become, this goes to the point you just made, part of the debate in the European elections and hopes that it will drive up support of them. Of the hard right, which seems to be fonder of Putin than is of the European Union.
50:24 Rory Stewart? Yeah, it's odd that, isn't it? And it's got a big read across to Trump too, because you can see the Republican base also beginning to feel less sympathetic towards Ukraine.
50:34 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, I mean, the Hungarian economy is not in that great nick. So if if the European Union did play very, very hardball and, you know, Gief Offstadt, who we interviewed on leading a few weeks ago. He is one of the leading voices to say, you know, it's time to stop being so soft with Orban. But, you know, Europe could do a lot of damage to the Hungarian economy with all this money that's being held. They've got this 20 billion euros that's locked up in something called a recovery and resilience facility, there are cohesion funds which they could they could hold back on, but they obviously do want to deal, they want to deal because they want to commit long term to spending for the Ukrainians in their support against Russia. And I think what Orban's trying to do is to sort of block it or slow it down, so that every time
51:19 Alastair Campbell? the spending has to be put forward, you have to go back to have another agreement, which what they're looking for is a kind of three, four year plan.
51:25 Rory Stewart? It's not good news this polling for for Giva Hofstadt, who's the guy that we interviewed, because most of these parties are eurosceptic parties. I mean, they're they're absolutely not on the programme that he's pushing for, for ever closer union. They're very much more state rights, less involvement from Brussels. I mean, it feels increasingly as though Giva Hofstadt's vision of Europe is now feeling very kind of not part of the current moment.
51:52 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, but perseverance, Rory, perseverance. Keep going, keep going. The other idea that's doing the rounds amongst the European leaders, if Hungary really does play hardball, is that you can, there's something called Article 7.2, which means that you can you can suspend the voting rights of a member. Only problem with that is that although the member under examination is not allowed to vote and therefore can't apply a veto, any of the other leaders can. And of course, we talked a few weeks ago about the election in Slovakia, another small country, and it's probable that the prime, the new prime minister there would not necessarily go along with that, should it get to that point.
52:31 Rory Stewart? And I don't think, I'd be astonished if it got to that point. I think it would be a very mad thing to do against Orban. I don't think that's likely to get through, is it? Anyway.
52:41 Alastair Campbell? There we are. Well, I think I think we've been depressing today, wasn't it?
52:44 Rory Stewart? It was a bit depressing. It was a bit depressing. Let's just sort of think of there's a couple of things that are more cheery to finish on. Here's one thing's more cheery. Although Sweden's on your list of places where a right populist party might come second, which will probably be the Swedish Democrats. In fact, the centre left seems to be pulling its act together in Sweden and being a stronger position than than it was. There's a cheery bit of news. And Sweden, of course, got got into NATO.
53:08 Alastair Campbell? Yeah.
53:09 Rory Stewart? The Turks dropped their opposition to Sweden, joining NATO.
53:11 Alastair Campbell? We had the Finland presidential elections yesterday with where it now goes on to the runoff between the final two, and both are. Pretty sensible, pretty good people who are also very, very strong on the Russia-Ukraine question. So yeah, that was okay. And then we had Albanese sort of becoming suddenly more popular than he was, albeit by breaking a promise.
53:32 Rory Stewart? It's very good.
53:33 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, not all doom and gloom.
53:35 Rory Stewart? And instantly, for what it's worth, my friend Pekka Havisto, who's one of the candidates, is a great listener to the podcast, the Finnish presidential candidate, and would love to come on the podcast.
53:44 Alastair Campbell? Okay, let's see who wins. Shall we go for the winner?
53:48 Rory Stewart? We'll go.
53:48 Alastair Campbell? Alexander, I think Alexander Stubb would like to come on as well.
53:51 Rory Stewart? Well, there we are. And anyway, shouts out to Pekka, who's a remarkable person with an incredible backstory, but maybe we'll get on to that if he wins the election and more to come in the Question Time. Thank you.
54:01 Alastair Campbell? All the best. See you soon.
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