71. Question Time: Elon Musk, Twitter, and regulating 'Big Tech'

Join Alastair and Rory for the latest episode of Question Time where they discuss Elon Musk, Twitter, nation states vs. big tech, Amazon, John Reith, and much, much more. Plus Rory has asked his friend to calculate the number of 'bot followers' Alastair has! Become a member of The Rest Is Politics Plus to support the podcast, enjoy ad-free listening, and receive early access to live show tickets and Question Time episodes. Just head to therestispolitics.com to sign up. Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @RestIsPolitics Email: [email protected] Producer: Dom Johnson + Nicole Maslen Exec Producers: Tony Pastor + Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Rory Stewart?

  This episode is brought to you by NordVPN.

• 0:06Alastair 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.

• 0:19Rory 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.

• 0:42Alastair 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?

• 0:49Rory 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/restispolitics. That's nordvpn.com/restispolitics. And the link is in the episode description.

• 1:05Speaker 02

  Mr. President, my company told me of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me. Tom Cruise is.

• 1:16Speaker 03

  Digger got us into this mess. And Digger's gonna dig us out. From the director of Birdman and the Revenant.

• 1:22Speaker 04

  What would happen if I stopped drilling? You're stalled, you're freezing there. That's what...

• 1:26Speaker 03

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 1:29Speaker 04

  I'm not the earth then.

• 1:30Speaker 03

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17. Not a minute without parent.

• 1:43Alastair Campbell?

  Welcome to another episode of the Rest is Politics Question Time with me, Alastair Campbell. And me, Rory Stewart. Oh my God, Rory, you sound even worse. You sound even worse. I think we're gonna have to... I don't know, maybe only speak, only speak if you really feel you have something very, very important to say. And meanwhile, I always have something important to say.

• 2:05Speaker 05

  You always have something important to say. I tell you what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna, give me one second to get some strepsils.

• 2:11Alastair Campbell?

  I've ticked you off before for eating crisps. I'm not going to tick you off if I hear a strepsil crunch. I know that.

• 2:18Speaker 05

  Thank you.

• 2:18Alastair Campbell?

  I know how. Now, I, I think we, we did, by the way, where we get quite a few, not questions, but statements telling us that last week when we were celebrating the fact of Rishi Sunak being the first Prime Minister in Europe of Asian origin, that we have Leo Varadkar in Ireland and we have Antonia Costa in Portugal.

• 2:43Speaker 05

  Quite right. And including a correction from your friend David Miliband, who came straight in on that.

• 2:48Alastair Campbell?

  He did.

• 2:48Speaker 05

  Leo Varadkar's father, born in Bombay, moved from the UK to work as a doctor, which is true for Rishi Sunak's father too. His mother, Leo Varadkar's mother, born in Dunggung, County Waterford.

• 2:59Alastair Campbell?

  And Costa, I think Costa's father was from Goa, I think. That's my, if I'm wrong about that, we'll correct that next week. Now, let's get on with, we said yesterday that we'd, we'd talk about Elon Musk. Loads of questions about this. We had another one from our favourite Swiss school, Lise Tupfer, I think it's Swiss. Hi, as again, what are the consequences of Musk buying Twitter? Theresa Toohey, I'm concerned about Musk's response to the attack on Paul Pelosi, but I see it as part of how violence is rising along with misinformation with the use of these technologies, not just in the US but around the world. Please discuss. And I don't know if you saw this, Rory, but Musk retweeted a kind of right wing news site conspiracy theory that Paul Pelosi had set up the attack

• 3:43Alastair Campbell?

  on him in his own house, which I, I thought was pretty awful.

• 3:47Speaker 05

  Really big news because Twitter is such an important political platform, probably more than Facebook, actually, because it's what all the journalists follow. It's where all the 24 news cycle comes from. It's where a lot of the fake news has happened. And as we've discussed before, the algorithms of Twitter are set up to intensify confrontation. I sometimes feel that you and I have learnt this too, that when I send out a little tweet saying, you know, fascinating piece about a maiden oak aged 400 years found in a field and, you know, wherever. I get twenty likes and if I say Boris Johnson needs to go to the International Criminal Court in The Hague, I get like ten thousand likes. So Twitter is an algorithm that intensifies

• 4:28Speaker 05

  polarization and rewards people for making angry, extreme comments. So the way in which those algorithms are governed really will define the future of our democracy. And so Elon Musk has taken on a huge responsibility. And of course, the early signs are pretty eccentric. He seems to have pointed himself as sole director, got rid of the board. So we're gonna have to watch very, very carefully what's going on.

• 4:53Alastair Campbell?

  There does seem to me to be a very, very strong narcissistic element to him, which I think happens to a lot of people who think that because they become very, very, very wealthy, it means that they think they could actually do anything very, very successfully. Now, a lot of people in the tech world who think he's may have taken off more than he can chew, that actually this idea to how you actually in practice manage the tensions between a real belief in free speech, which he claims to have, and the fact of this incredibly important, as you say, platform where the previous board got into a lot of trouble a lot of times, but did at least give the impression of taking seriously things like

• 5:34Alastair Campbell?

  the spread of hate, crime and racism and so forth. And I just think to see some of the stuff that you don't have to look very hard to see LeBron James, for example, the basketball player was tweeting the other day about, you know, the upsurge that had been in the use of the N word on Twitter, some of the very, some of the banned far-right accounts in the UK that have suddenly come back. I just get the, I just worry the guy is, he strikes me as very Trumpian in the way he kind of makes things up as he goes along. I've never also worried, do you know how he became the richest man in the world? And is he really?

• 6:10Speaker 05

  It's a combination of Tesla and SpaceX. I mean, he, the reason that he's the wealthiest man in the world is that he's set up these very, very successful innovative companies. But in particular, he bet an enormous amount of his wealth on them. He's somebody who's a great innovator, but also an enormous risk taker. He's backed his ideas by going all in. And they've paid off enormously. Um, one, one thing to say is that Twitter was in trouble before Elon Musk took it over, in particular with bots. And there's been some extraordinary articles. There's a guy called Jeff Goldberg, who's written quite a good article on Medium, on Big Tech's accountability problem, which is arguing that Twitter was

• 6:54Speaker 05

  well aware of a lot of the manipulation taking place across their platform, yet refusing to address it. And often when he raised with Twitter, the number of bots that were operating his, his account would be frozen by Twitter and people wouldn't follow up on it. Now, admittedly, that article was written some time ago. So I think things may be improving a little bit, but even before Elon Musk took over, this question of bots, I had a friend look at the number of bots that seem to be following both you and me. And the number is actually quite terrifying. And the number of bots that follow people like Boris Johnson are terrifying. And it's extraordinary, these factories of creating these accounts which follow each other, generate very similar sounding messages. One of my friends, looking

• 7:36Speaker 05

  at Alistair's account, reckoned that nearly 20, 30% of your followers could be aggressive bots being set up to attack you.

• 7:42Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm. Well, I very rarely look at the responses. So I wonder if they shouldn't have a day off. I don't know. That book I mentioned, by the way, Christopher Wiley's book, and I know Carol Cadwallader, I've heard her say this as well, that the concern that actually whether it's even possible to have what we would define as fair elections, because so much of this stuff is happening, we don't really have a way of assessing the, the impact. But I, what I don't like about Musk is he just, he just strikes me as being very cavalier about what are serious issues. And I think to have retweeted that thing about Paul Pelosi, I mean, you know, whatever anybody thinks about Nancy Pelosi, if the

• 8:22Alastair Campbell?

  idea of her 81 year old husband being attacked in his bedroom by a guy with a hammer who's trying to kidnap his wife, and the right wing so hates Nancy Pelosi, that they spread this story that the guy, that Pelosi was staged it and he was drunk and so forth. And Elon Musk retweets that story with the thing, maybe there's more to this than meets the eye. Now, he probably thinks he's just being mischievous, but I think he's being a complete... I know, I wouldn't say the word.

• 8:51Speaker 05

  Well, one of the great things that we discussed a couple of weeks ago is that the courts are beginning to fight back. You remember Alex Jones being ordered to pay nine hundred and sixty five million dollars for his lies about Sandy Hot?

• 9:02Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 9:03Speaker 05

  And I also think there's going to have to be government intervention and regulation on the algorithms around these platforms ultimately.

• 9:10Alastair Campbell?

  Didn't Musk say that he was going to be more open about the algorithms and how they work? He said that.

• 9:15Speaker 05

  Yeah, he said a lot of things which are quite encouraging. We're going to have to watch where that goes.

• 9:20Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm.

• 9:20Speaker 05

  There's a lot of great questions coming in this week, but here's one for you. Robin Hall, off the back of the President Hollande interview, struck by the fact that he stated that nation state's power is waning to corporations to operate with no borders. How do nations address this power shift? Why are few democracies so reluctant to take on this corporation? So many elements there, elements around climate, but also this extraordinary question around tech companies not paying tax. The fact that Amazon is this huge trader in the UK, yet they still seem to pay a tiny fraction of the tax that high street retailers would pay.

• 9:56Alastair Campbell?

  I thought it was, I was really chuffed, actually. I mean, I sent Francois Hollande a message saying that his interview and his English and what somebody described as his cute accent were going down very, very well. And we actually got a lot of listeners for President Hollande. And I thought he made some really interesting big points, and that was one of them. That question about whether the nation state is now more or less powerful than the big corporations. Now, he said that he still felt the nation state did have that power. But I think if you're in politics, you feel you have to say that. But he said that the public, for a lot of the public, they respect the power of the nation state a lot less than they respect the power of some of these big corporations. And of course,

• 10:41Alastair Campbell?

  the reason, one of the reasons why they have that power is because they do operate multinationally at a time when nations, the nation states themselves, are becoming more inward looking and not operating in such a multilateral way. You can't operate the legal framework that we talk about for some of these companies unless you do so on an international basis.

• 11:05Speaker 05

  So just very quickly for people who are interested in this, Amazon is a key example of one of these companies that. There's very little transparency around the tax it pays. There was a good Guardian article, Sarah Bartlamark Sweeney looking at this, but basically they won't declare what their profits are. They keep insisting that while their revenue is going up, they're making losses and as a result, they pay very little tax for a company their size.

• 11:29Alastair Campbell?

  Let's just have one quick one, another one on Musk here. Peter H, as highlighted by Musk taking control of Twitter, can the big social networks be trusted not to fuel hate, divisiveness, extremism and being used as a tool for political manipulation? Can and will governments prevent this? Well, of course, the Chinese would argue that they do prevent it and they prevent it with complete control, which would not be acceptable to people in Britain, people in Europe, people in the United States.

• 11:54Speaker 05

  You could imagine a regulator, couldn't you? You could imagine a good equivalent of a sort of Ofcom or an off-gen for all their flaws, but strong independent regulator trying to look at those algorithms.

• 12:06Alastair Campbell?

  The thing about Twitter and Facebook and these, they operate across borders. They don't, it's not like a newspaper that is published in a country. They, you know, if you or I do a tweet now, it goes to anybody who follows us, follows us anywhere in the world.

• 12:22Speaker 05

  So the only hope would be to get the US government and the European Union to do it together.

• 12:27Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 12:27Speaker 05

  That would be the only scale at which you'd have any hope of being able to regulate.

• 12:31Alastair Campbell?

  That was the answer. Somebody called Grant Beiling, he answered, we now get people answering questions for us on Twitter, Rory, because the question that you put came of a Robin Hall and Grant Beiling answered on Twitter. The answer is there are only two who can challenge with any clout, the US, which is the reserve currency holder and the EU, which is the largest trading bloc on the planet, UK, not a chance. So I think we are, we can't do this without going in with other countries. Nathan Wilkins, here's one for you, Rory. First of all, just want to say the pod is brilliant. Thank you. As an A-level politics student, that's Nathan. Question for Rory, how difficult is it to become an MP? How many different processes do you have to go through? Is there an induction day for new MPs after an election?

• 13:15Speaker 05

  Well, the answer is you have to jump through an enormous number of hoops. But it doesn't matter whether you're talking about the Conservatives, the Labour or the Lib Dems. The fundamental truth is it's all controlled by the parties and a lot of the power rests with the local parties who ultimately choose who their candidate will be. I've got a friend running to be a Labour MP in a London seat. He's an incredibly strong candidate and I think the Labour Party would be very lucky to have him. Global experience, he's incredibly intelligent, diverse background. But in his case, his local association is controlled by a group of quite left-wing Corbynistas and it's very difficult to break through. Same problem for my friend Tristram Hunt when he was trying to hold on in Stoke.

• 13:59Alastair Campbell?

  Yep.

• 14:00Speaker 05

  It's the same in some of the Conservative seats too, which is that some of those seats up in the Red Wall will be controlled by very, very strong Brexit-supporting members who won't want to have more Remain-minded Conservative MPs. So it's a brutal system. You know, we've talked about the fact that MPs are disproportionately still privately educated, university-educated, and that's one thing, that many more university-educated MPs than the population as a whole. But there's another problem going on, which is the grip of these parties and the way that if you haven't been a local councillor, you haven't delivered leaflets when you're in your teens, if you haven't been in your university club, it's surprisingly difficult to break through.

• 14:42Speaker 05

  And that's before you get into all the micro-politics of the way in which local parties can be taken over by factions in the way that some of Corbyn supporters took over Labour factions, making it difficult for good candidates to come through.

• 14:54Alastair Campbell?

  I'm guessing that it's probably best if you don't name the Labour friend. I'm getting the feeling from his local party that support from centrist dad Rory Stewart is not going to help him. Would that be right?

• 15:06Speaker 05

  That would be correct.

• 15:08Alastair Campbell?

  Andrew Newsom.

• 15:10Alastair Campbell?

  Has any other Prime Minister in British history prior to Rishi Sunak had three previous Prime Ministers of his own party sat on the back benches? Does the fact that he does put any extra pressure on Rishi Sunak? I'm guessing it must be the first time because we've never had such a churn.

• 15:28Speaker 05

  First time for a very, very long time. One of the things that's changed, of course, is we've got used since Tony Blair and David Cameron and Gordon Brown to, and John Major in fact, to MPs leaving Parliament when they ceased to be Prime Minister. But of course, in the old days, and Ted Heath was an example of this.

• 15:44Alastair Campbell?

  Stayed on. He sat there growling at Mrs Thatcher.

• 15:47Speaker 05

  Exactly. So in the 19th century, you had a lot of ex-Prime Ministers sitting around on the back benches, and they remained in Parliament almost until they died. So, but you have to go back a long way to have that number of previous Prime Ministers. And of course, they do put pressure. There's been some lovely articles about it because they tend inevitably to think their successors do nothing but problem. People who haven't heard our interview with William Hague, he's very funny and reflexive about the problems of having former Prime Ministers sitting behind you, thinking that everything you're doing is wrong.

• 16:19Alastair Campbell?

  All right, let's take a quick break there, Rory, and we'll be back in a minute.

• 16:23Speaker 02

  Mr. President, my company told me of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all keep the blame on me. Tom Cruise is.

• 16:33Speaker 03

  Digger got us into this mess, and Digger's gonna dig us out. From the director of Birdman and the Revenant.

• 16:39Speaker 04

  What would happen if I stopped drilling? You stop, you freeze to death, that's what.

• 16:43Speaker 03

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 16:47Speaker 04

  I'm not the first then.

• 16:48Speaker 03

  Digger, see the trailer online, only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R, under 17, not a minute without parent.

• 16:53Speaker 06

  Priceline Negotiator.

• 16:55Speaker 07

  It's me, the.

• 16:56Speaker 06

  Priceline Negotiator.

• 16:58Speaker 07

  We don't need the jingle twice.

• 16:59Speaker 06

  What about a third time?

• 17:01Speaker 07

  Stop it. This is about vacation inflation and how Priceline negotiates amazing deals on hotels, flights and rental cars.

• 17:08Speaker 06

  Seems like they decided.

• 17:10Speaker 07

  Yeah, but I didn't mention that you can save up to 60% off hotels in the Priceline app.

• 17:15Speaker 06

  Time to read the tagline.

• 17:16Speaker 07

  Fine. No one deals more deals than. Priceline. Please stop. Priceline. Touche. Priceline. Priceline.

• 17:24Speaker 08

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• 18:23Alastair Campbell?

  Barbara Kemp, let's completely change the subject here. I recently found out that one of my children is trans. I was never particularly interested in the gender wars until now, and I fear for my child in this hate-fueled environment. How would you take this in your family? And how can the debate be made more humane, in your view?

• 18:43Speaker 05

  It's a very tough one. We've discussed this a little bit before, haven't we? And the truth is that when I discussed it before, people said I got a lot of very negative comments. My general instinct on this is very pro-trans, and I have a lot of friends who've got children, particularly teenagers, who are identifying with many, many different types of gender identity. But the pushback that I got is that I'm also underestimating the fact that other groups feel that some of the campaigners in favor of trans rights can themselves be unbelievably aggressive and hateful. And if we were to get, obviously, JK Rowling on this podcast, she would say that she feels that she's been the victim of very unfair abuse.

• 19:28Speaker 05

  It's an unbelievably polarized issue, even more than our conversation about the National Trust last week. This is something where both sides feel very, very righteous and very, very angry.

• 19:38Alastair Campbell?

  But I think that's why when you get that from a parent who, as she said, I was never particularly interested in the gender wars. And I suspect that's the majority of parents. I think most people probably wouldn't, if they're asked to list their three biggest issues, it's unlikely that this would be there. But then if one of your children is trans, then obviously it's going to become a big issue. And then, you know, she talks about the hate-fuelled environment. And that's why I do think our political leaders of the, you, you talked about the word polarization there. Any issue at the moment being seized upon. I saw some of the comments that were being made by some of your former colleagues, Tory MPs about Eddie Izzard recently. And I thought, okay, they want to have a pop at Eddie Izzard, you

• 20:21Alastair Campbell?

  know, because that has, that allows them to have a pop at Labour. But actually, it's also having a pop at Barbara Kemp's child who is going through this process. And I just think that given that trans people are amongst the most discriminated and abused anyway.

• 20:39Speaker 05

  Just for people who haven't been concentrating, the reason they've been talking about Eddie Izzard is that Rosie Duffield, who is the Labour MP for Canterbury, won't call Eddie Izzard a woman. And there have been a number of Labour groups have called for her to have the whip removed, said that she's bigoted and transphobic. But of course, she's also attracted quite a lot of sympathy. And the reason why the Conservatives, of course, have been exploiting this is that there are many, many people in the country who, of course, sympathize with Rosie Duffield. And it's probably not a position that Labour wants to get itself trapped in, fighting that particular war.

• 21:15Alastair Campbell?

  No, and it is, as Barbara says, it is the, you know, the, the culture, I think the culture wars. And, and I was very disturbed to read the other day that Rishi Sunak apparently has some unit, same as Johnson did. That's, I don't know if this is true, but I read it in one of the broadsheets that he's got this unit that's there to sort of try and stoke a few more culture wars and get Labour on the wrong side of some of these cultural arguments. What about this one then, Rory? Fox, are women's reproductive rights safe in the UK? Sunak has appointed Maria Caulfield as Minister for Women. She voted against legalizing abortion in Northern Ireland. She supports cutting the abortion time limit, and she belonged to a parliamentary pro-life group. If that is true, that does seem quite an extraordinary appointment. Do you think he didn't know?

• 21:59Speaker 05

  I think he probably is reaching out. I'm afraid this is a bit like Suella Braverman. Ria Colfield is a key figure on the on the right, the Christian right of the party. And he may be trying to create this broad coalition and hold all these people together. I mean, remember, at the heart of this is Rishi Sunak is in a real problem. I mean, nobody really wants to be Prime Minister at the moment. They blew up Liz Truss.

• 22:21Alastair Campbell?

  Go on, Rory, you do. You'd love that.

• 22:23Speaker 05

  Well, you know, if he if he if he'd liked to step aside and allow me to be Prime Minister, I would, you know, very reluctantly lay down my plough and get my voice back. I'd come in with a few strepsils and sort it all out. But but anyway, so the point is, at the heart of the problem is obviously Liz Truss mismanaged the different factions in the party, as did Boris Johnson, and they were both taken down in quick succession. So he's in a very yucky situation. I don't think he's somebody who supports regressive views on women reproductive rights. I don't think he's going to allow legislation to go through changing the UK's abortion position. But I do think that he feels forced to bring in people from the right of the party to try to hold the party together after what's just happened. As we move towards the end, here's a more serious one for you.

• 23:05Speaker 05

  Maybe give my voice a rest because it's something that you've got a lot of thoughts on, and I'd like to hear you on. So this is from Colton Richards. Colton Richards has just been reading an article in the New York Times by a man I know quite well called David Brooks called The Rise of Global Sadness. And his question is, in what feels like a suffocatingly negative age, how can we push back against worrying trends of people seeing sadness and emptiness in what should be happy and fulfilling lives? So on that cheery question, over to you.

• 23:37Alastair Campbell?

  I suppose the first thing is you've got to keep laughing whenever you can. So I guess I'm laughing now because I'm I'm feeling that you're thinking Alistair's the one to talk about sadness, Alistair's the one to talk about depression, and I can take give my voice a bit of a rest. So I'm happy to do that, Rory. Look, I think these are incredibly. Dark times in lots of ways, but I, I, I think that one of the reasons I'm writing this book, you know, what, but what can I do is because I think it's at times like this that people, we all need to think about our own answer to that question. How do we find purpose? How do we find motivation? And I think that one of the things that keeps

• 24:19Alastair Campbell?

  me going on the, on the political front is the fact that I can't imagine that things won't at some stage get better. So you always have to have that hope, even if everything around you is screaming at you. Well, there's no logical reason to believe that because we are on our fifth conservative prime minister in six years. Donald Trump is still stalking or stomping around the place in America. Bolsonaro did get forty nine point one percent. The climate is at risk of going up in smoke. Ukraine, we haven't really talked much about Ukraine in recent weeks because it's become so normalized as to what's happening there. I meant to mention this on the, on the main podcast, but there's, there's a great podcast

• 25:01Alastair Campbell?

  that's done by Spiegel magazine in Germany called Akt Milliarden, which is their foreign policy podcast, which if you spoke German, or you would absolutely love. And it's usually quite heavy foreign policy stuff. But this week, it was an interview with their correspondent, a Spiegel correspondent, a woman who'd been working in Ukraine, covering the war. And she found this picture of a family and there were five in the family and she learnt that four of them were dead, the two parents and two sisters and the son had survived. And she became obsessed about trying to find this son who'd survived. And she did. And she did this interview with him. And honestly, it was absolutely extraordinary. He was sixteen

• 25:46Alastair Campbell?

  year old Ukrainian boy who had survived because on the night that the bombs fell, he was actually with his fifteen year old girlfriend. To, to get the story of, he was in Mariupol, to get the story of the war through his eyes, through what he'd been through was just extraordinary. And do you know what? At the end of it, I felt, I don't know why, but it just, I felt hopeful.

• 26:13Alastair Campbell?

  Not because it wasn't a terrible, terrible, terrible story. He actually found, he went back and he found his own father's body. He found, he saw this bit of hair through the rubble and he found his own father. And then, you know, it was just horrific. But at the same time, there was something about him and the way that he told his story and the way that he articulated himself, that I thought, well, my God, whatever he does in his life is going to be special. I'm absolutely sure of that. So I, I think you have to find hope even in these awful, awful, awful situations. And so I guess the moment I find hope in seeing Labour twenty odd points ahead in the polls, but then I feel despair when I see that Rishi Sunak has taken over, has overtaken Keir Starmer in economic management,

• 26:57Alastair Campbell?

  which says to me the public maybe think that Rishi Sunak had nothing to do with the last few years of Tory government. But what about you? You've got, but you've got, you can do a very short answer on this, Rory, because, you know, I know you've got the weak voice, but don't you agree? You've just got to try to find hope.

• 27:12Speaker 05

  Yeah. So I, I mean, I, I'm very hopeful. I mean, I'm, obviously, the reason I've lost my voice is I've, I've been doing a lot of work with GiveDirectly recently, and I think we can end global poverty in our lifetime. There are 700 million people in this world living in the most abject conditions, barely able to get a meal a day. And it would cost 0.1% of global GDP to lift those people out of extreme poverty, and we can do it. And despite all the problems with climate, which is making the problems worse, with conflict in Russia, Ukraine, with the recession that's coming in the United States and is already biting in Britain, we can do this. And we just have to recover a sense of generosity

• 27:54Speaker 05

  and optimism. So I'm at the moment quite fired up, even if my voice doesn't sound like it.

• 27:59Alastair Campbell?

  Now, here's, the, the, we're recording on Tuesday, Rory, and I know you've not been in the UK much. You've probably not seen my TV series, maybe Prime Minister with Saedra and I. But it's the climax tonight. We have three women in the final. But Robert at Euston Bob did Labour take their energy policy directly from an idea and make me Prime Minister. And it's quite a good question that because it was recorded weeks before Keir Starmer actually unveiled the policy. And I did not pass it on to the Labour Party.

• 28:33Speaker 05

  What is the energy policy?

• 28:34Alastair Campbell?

  It's basically a sort of nationalised state green energy policy. In other words, it's a national entity that has that takes control of the energy market. It's not dissimilar to what Keir Starmer set out.

• 28:47Speaker 05

  And which of your which of your competitors came up with the idea?

• 28:50Alastair Campbell?

  It was a guy called Adam Kirby, who's who I'm afraid did not even make the final. The final was three very good women, Natalie and Kelly and Holly. I can't tell you who won, even though the podcast is going to be out before the final screen, because, you know, for all I know, Roy, you'd you'd send a little message.

• 29:08Speaker 05

  I'd put it straight on Twitter and you'd be like, listen, what we've just to pick up next time, I do think you put your finger on a big issue which we need to discuss in much more detail, which was this quite good question from Robert Bush, where he says as Conservative PM, Sunak's pulling ahead of Starmer's on economics in a recent poll. When previously he'd been responsible for economics briefing as Chancellor. And the Conservatives, Robert Bush says, have a decade of austerity's records to show for their efforts. How, why and what must Labour do to cut through? I think that is a really important question. I think Labour is in a strong position. They're 20 points ahead. And John Curtis, the great pollster, Sir John Curtis, says that it's difficult for them to lose when the Conservatives

• 29:51Speaker 05

  have such a reputation for incompetence. But I do think the Achilles heel of Labour, if we go into a prolonged economic recession, is going to be whether the public think that they have the economics management skills to come out of it. So maybe that's something we could do in a bit more detail in the future.

• 30:06Alastair Campbell?

  Maybe we should do that as we get closer to Jeremy Hunt's statement, because, you know, reading the, I don't know if you've been able to pick up on the British media today, Rory, but they've obviously been briefed that there's going to be tax rises for all and spending cuts. And I think I'm right that when Osborne was doing austerity mark one. It was roughly eighty percent on the spending side and twenty percent on the tax side, and the word is that Hunt is going to be much closer to fifty fifty. And of course, we talked a lot yesterday about the issues of Manston and the asylum system, which appears to be in a state of pretty near collapse. We're talking about people

• 30:48Alastair Campbell?

  who can't get their passport, people who can't get a driving licence, let alone when we get into the health service, they've got the energy bills for schools that we've talked about. Any cuts are going to be very, very, have an immediate impact on some of our public services, which already feel like they're pretty close to the bone. Our friend The Knowledge, they, on the last one of their thing that I saw, they had this very interesting stat, which they took from a piece in The Economist. What Vladimir Putin, this is me back on trying to be hopeful, okay, amid really bad, bad stuff going on. What Putin is trying to do in Ukraine, invade a country to make its territory his own, is

• 31:28Alastair Campbell?

  very rare, says The Economist. In a typical decade, between eighteen fifty and nineteen forty, around one percent of the world's population saw their rulers change as a result of conquest. In the forty years up to the Ukraine war, the proportion was less than naught point naught naught one, naught point naught naught one percent.

• 31:52Speaker 05

  God, that's great.

• 31:53Alastair Campbell?

  Isn't it? There were no large conquests at all between the late seventies and Russia's annexation of Crimea in twenty fourteen.

• 32:01Speaker 05

  That's an amazing statistic. I think that's a good one to close on, and thank you very much for putting up with my croaking voice.

• 32:07Alastair Campbell?

  Well, listen, Rory, thank you for doing it, because I've got to be honest, if my voice was as annoying as yours has been today, I'd have just stayed at bed.

• 32:14Speaker 05

  Well, there we are. I just couldn't bear the fact that I thought if I left you on your own, I'd have no idea what you were up to.

• 32:18Alastair Campbell?

  And I do what I did at Blackpool, where I pretended, where you had to go and sort your microphone. I pretended to be you.

• 32:24Speaker 05

  Incidentally, on the subject of our Scottishness and our Scottish accents, have you seen the Malcolm Muggeridge interview with Lord Wreath? Where Reeve talks about his Scottish accent. It's a lovely black and white clip from the 1960s.

• 32:35Alastair Campbell?

  No, why? What does he say?

• 32:37Speaker 05

  Yes, so Lord Reeve, who you and everybody listening to this will know, was the great director general of the BBC and is often seen as the sort of quintessential, stiff establishment figure. When you actually see him, is a much rawer, funnier, more eccentric man. Huge scar down his face, deaf in one ear, massive eyebrows, hair like a kind of cockatoo, leaning forward at Muggeridge, saying, what do you call that stuff that comes down the chimney? And Muggeridge goes, soot. And he says, where I come from, we call it soot. And it's a lovely moment because you see that, that this guy who you see as a stiff shirt is, is much more eccentric and much more Scottish than we remember today.

• 33:15Alastair Campbell?

  Actually, Rory, I think you'd be, I think you'd be a good candidate for the Reeve Lectures. They're never going to give it to me because I'm seen as sort of somebody who took on the BBC, but you'd be good at the Reeve Lectures.

• 33:25Speaker 05

  That's very sweet. Well, you know, if, if you don't manage to persuade Rishi Sunak through the podcast to let me have a go at croaking at Prime Minister's Questions, I'll go for that instead.

• 33:32Alastair Campbell?

  I love the way that you think Rishi Sunak sits there listening to our podcast. And as a result, he appointed Gillian Keegan to education, Alex Chalk to defence, Mel Stride to work and pensions. Good old Rishi.

• 33:44Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 33:45Alastair Campbell?

  Rishi, send us a few, Bob, would you? We could, we could do with just a few million at Burnley for, you know, strands in the squad in the window.

• 33:51Speaker 05

  Leveling up.

• 33:54Alastair Campbell?

  See you next week.

• 33:55Speaker 05

  Bye bye.

• 34:53Speaker 10

  Champion of hurling grass and pollen everywhere. And in the blue corner, the challenger, extra strength, Hattie! Eye drops that work all day to prevent the release of histamines that cause itchy allergy eyes. And the winner by knockout is Hattie! Hattie, bring it on!