376. Aid vs Defence: A Livestream Special

Sir Keir Starmer has unveiled plans to increase defence spending by 2027 - redirecting funds from foreign aid. What does this mean for the UK and its global role? Join Rory and Alastair as they discuss this and more. The Rest Is Politics is powered by Fuse Energy. Fuse are giving away FREE TRIP+ membership for all of 2025 to new sign ups 🎉 TRIP+ gets you ad-free listening, discounts, and early access to episodes and pre-sale tickets for live shows! To sign up and for terms and conditions, visit GetFuse.com/Politics ⚡ Get our exclusive NordVPN deal here ➼ nordvpn.com/restispolitics It's risk-free with Nord's 30 day money back guarantee ✅ Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @restispolitics Email: [email protected] Assistant Producers: Alice Horrell + Evan Green Social Producer: Jess Kidson Producers: Nicole Maslen, Fiona Douglas Senior Producer: Dom Johnson Head of Content: Tom Whiter Exec Producers: Tony Pastor, Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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• 0:04Rory Stewart?

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• 3:21Alastair Campbell?

  Welcome to a Restless Politics livestream with me, Alastair Campbell.

• 3:25Rory Stewart?

  And me Rory Stewart.

• 3:27Alastair Campbell?

  And Rory, yesterday, when we were recording the main episode for this week, we started, as we started, Keir Starmer stood up in the House of Commons and announced an increase to 2.5% of GDP on defence spending. And if you remember, and I said, and part of that is going to be funded by a cut in aid and development. What I hadn't realised at that point is the whole thing is being funded by that. And you and I have both since been absolutely inundated with people who work in the aid and development sector and quite a lot of Labour supporters as well, saying that, yes, we agree, we're in very dangerous, difficult times. And maybe we need to up defence spending, but surely they could have found other ways to do it.

• 4:12Alastair Campbell?

  So what sort of feedback have you been getting?

• 4:14Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, well, so I was talking this morning, I'm in the US, to the former administrator of USAID, who came in to see me for breakfast, completely shattered because...

• 4:26Rory Stewart?

  If you put the clock back 10 days ago, the United States government announced that it was stopping all USAID funds worldwide, cut all its contracts and laid off staff. I mean, it's not a sort of temporary halt while they look at things. What they've actually done, and I was yesterday talking to a lot of USAID staff who'd lost their jobs. As you pointed out, I think on the show, we've gone from thousands of USAID staff focused on programs in Africa, and it's been reduced to 12 people. And that's just the core of USAID. The entire rest of the American aid infrastructure is collapsing along with it. So a lot of the development aid in the US was delivered by

• 5:10Rory Stewart?

  these big partners. It's not relevant for listeners, but people like DAI, Comonics, and thousands of other partners, but also huge numbers of partners on the ground. So there was a big under Samantha Power, who was the head of USAID, big localization agenda. So there were enormous numbers of local NGOs and people employed on the ground. Also enormous numbers of people employed in other governments who were funded by American taxpayer money. Now, that all stopped. So that removed about $40 billion overnight from the international development system. But the hope was that Europe, and the UK in particular, would step up to fill the gap.

• 5:52Rory Stewart?

  Because when I was in charge of DIFID, which was the UK development thing, we had a budget of about, in US dollar terms, about $20 billion a year. And as the man I had breakfast with this morning pointed out, it was the US and the UK. If you remove the US and the UK from the international development system, there's not a great deal left. I mean, there are other bits. European Union does stuff, Japan does stuff, Germany does technical assistance. But as you've often pointed out, it was one of the few ways where the US, the UK was really... Punching above its weight, where it really was a development superpower.

• 6:33Rory Stewart?

  And we were the first really big country to make it to 0.7% of our GDP on international aid spend. And we did it cleanly. We didn't do it by re-describing in those days in the way that Germany was doing a lot of internal programmes as being external aid. We did it with relatively few staff. Now, I can talk about what that then means, but what we're really talking about is that Keir Starmer, based with the collapse of the old US-based system and all that meant for some of the poorest countries in the world and what it meant for climate and crisis, instead of stepping up with European partners to fill that gap, he's decided to cut.

• 7:17Rory Stewart?

  And so it looks at the moment on the current figures coming out as though in practice, UK development spend will be less than a third in real terms of what it was when I was running the department as recently as 2019, and because of our multilateral commitments, probably even smaller.

• 7:33Alastair Campbell?

  I mean, the other point I'd like to make, and I think it was Politics Joe, who I follow, and they did a quite an interesting compilation of all the times that Keir Starmer stood at the dispatch box and explained why it is a good thing that we, the UK, invest properly in international aid and development. And he did that against successive Conservative Prime Ministers. And I actually think the arguments he was making are still right. I think that when he made the case, as Tony Blair and Gordon Brown and others had done before him, that investing properly, investing in international aid and development in some

• 8:13Alastair Campbell?

  of the poorest and some of the war-torn and climate hit and all the rest of it, all the problems that these countries are facing, that our investment in them actually in the long term is good for them, but it's also good for us. And I think that's an argument that we were proud to make for a very, very long time. And so we've now sort of upended that. And also, the other thing to say, Roy, is I've been quite impressed by the extent to which the government has actually constantly been saying, you know, we don't want to break our manifesto promises, so that's why we can't think about the customs union, that's why there are certain tax rises we can't make. But this is a manifesto commitment that is fundamentally broken. And I think when people say this is a... I saw Caroline Lucas, the...

• 8:57Alastair Campbell?

  Former Green Party leader being interviewed about it and she said, you know, it's all very well to say this is a tough choice, but actually of all the choices that you could make to find the additional spending, given the way the debate is in the country right now, maybe it's not that tough a choice. Now, you and I, and lots of other people have been talking to us and, and you know, we mentioned David Miliband yesterday. I hadn't quite realised USAID is going to take hundreds of millions out of the charity that David runs.

• 9:29Alastair Campbell?

  That is real money on real projects around the world. And there would be projects around the world that are dependent on UK funding right now that will be frankly in a state of complete panic.

• 9:40Rory Stewart?

  Well, let me return again to the big picture. It's very, very important to understand that as the UK is doing it, other countries are doing it too. So the Netherlands has just announced a radical cut in its own development aid. Sweden has been reducing its development aid.

• 9:59Rory Stewart?

  France has, having been on a path towards point seven, came away from it. More and more of the money that's spent by partners is spent on internal stuff. So we are really talking about something that's really difficult to imagine. Yesterday, we were talking about trying to imagine what Europe and Russia would be like without American security guarantees. I don't really know what that's like. Very difficult to think because it's been 80 years. This thing is equally completely uncharted. Nobody's run the experiment before of what happens if you suddenly stop the two major international development funders in the world from operating.

• 10:44Rory Stewart?

  But let me try to sketch out the different things that these agencies do. So, and maybe one way to do is just to think through the different departments that I had when I was running DIFID. The first obvious one is humanitarian. So

• 11:00Rory Stewart?

  A lot of this money went quite literally to deal with starving people. So I stood in Somalia land, I watched mothers carrying babies for two weeks across the desert and arriving with one baby dead and the other one alive. And that's a lot of what, you know, we, we talk about David Miliband losing three, four hundred million out of the International Rescue Committee. And of course, Musk will say it was a grift and somehow suggests that was his own personal money. No, what I R C was doing was providing plumpy nut, which is a type of nutritional supplement to keep babies alive. So that's the first thing that will happen. When there is a humanitarian catastrophe and they happen quite a lot, let's say there's a tsunami or there's a extended drought

• 11:43Rory Stewart?

  and hundreds of millions of people are on the edge of famine. And the U N go and make an appeal and say, we need the money, you know, this often happened. I, somewhere down at my desk, there's a big one and a half billion pound appeal for a crisis in Somalia. And I was able to say, okay, Britain will contribute. You know, and often we were able to put in, let's say, a couple of hundred million and the U S will put in a couple hundred million. So that's one thing. Um, I'll, I'll accelerate. I got too deep into that one. Second, second thing we did is a lot of economic development with countries, including trade development. So we worked on getting the borders and the customs sorted out between East African countries to create a free trade zone.

• 12:26Rory Stewart?

  We provided technical assistance to their governments on finance and taxation, which was often revolutionary. I mean, a very small amount of money we spent in Myanmar completely transformed the taxation revenue of the government. So the government ended up getting about thirty times as much money as we'd put in and became more self-reliant.

• 12:45Rory Stewart?

  Civil war, a lot of the money we put in is helping very fragile, poor governments deliver services.

• 12:54Rory Stewart?

  And when that money is whipped away, those governments come very close to collapse. And we've seen this across the Sahel. Migration, right? What were we doing with the money? Well, a lot of the money was making sure that five million of the people who left Syria didn't come to Europe because we funded Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey to host them. And you saw those camps in Lebanon when we, when we crossed that border. And finally, global health. A lot of the stuff that I was doing was around global health. And so when a boma takes off in Congo or on the Uganda border, it was the US and the UK who were funding the surveillance systems, which picked up early signs of it spreading. And what does surveillance system mean? It means people.

• 13:37Rory Stewart?

  It means thousands of Congolese and Ugandan health workers tied into quite complex systems, which ultimately help protect the world from the development of these pandemics. Those have all gone now.

• 13:49Alastair Campbell?

  I was talking to a couple of Labour MPs earlier, and I think the one thing there, just this is on the politics of this now. And I completely agree with you. I think it's really important we don't lose sight of the fact, one, this country has got an amazing record in this field and is recognised worldwide as one of the big four. I think that's, there's a danger that's now gone. And it'll be quite hard to get it back. The second thing to say is on, on the, on the politics of this. One or two of these Labour MPs were saying to me that they actually, that everybody accepts, and you and I have been saying this for quite a long time. We are entering into a really quite fragile, dangerous sort of geopolitical geostrategic space, and we need to improve our defences, no doubt about that at all.

• 14:35Alastair Campbell?

  So therefore you and I would both welcome, in fact even say, maybe should have gone further yesterday in terms of the commitment on defence. But then to say this is a, one of them said to me, it's actually not that hard a choice. A really hard choice is actually to say, do you know what? This is so bad and this is so dangerous that we are going to have to look at certain taxes. We maybe are going to have to think about how we bring in a wealth tax. Now, one of the reasons why, and we should apologize by the way, we were a few minutes late, and the reason, dear listeners and viewers, why we were late is because we were interviewing a member of the cabinet, Peter Kyle, who's a very, very fine man, and it turned out it was a really good interview, but we overran a little bit because we were

• 15:17Alastair Campbell?

  sort of enjoying it, that's why we were late. But he did at one point call me wet because he said that I was constantly sort of standing up for any cause and saying that's what the government should do, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But I think on this, there's a real, there's a real danger that the, the argument that Trump, Musk, Vance, et cetera, are driving, that the AfD are driving in Germany, that Farage constantly drives here, that we should only think about ourselves, we should only focus on our own interests, America first, Britain first, whatever. And there was an element of that, I felt, to the communications around what Keir did yesterday. You know, we've got to think about our own security rather than those people far away. We've got to make a link between the two.

• 16:00Alastair Campbell?

  So I really would have been much happier if they'd have said, look, this is a genuinely hard choice, we're going to have to find more savings in the welfare budget, we are actually not going to be able to do something that we were planning to do because we're now going to have to find the money for this. I think actually going for aid was not the right choice.

• 16:17Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, and you know, we've often said that it was regrettable that Labour tied its hand on taxes before the election and then forced Rachel Reeves to raise employers' national insurance, which was probably the worst kind of tax she could raise, when in fact the big taxes, VAT, corporation tax, income tax, were the ones where she should have been working. And this could have been an opportunity to do that. We could do wealth tax, and I think, I agree with you, there's a big argument for targeted wealth taxes, there's also would be a very straightforward argument for saying to the British people, the world's changed, we're in a much more dangerous world, and there are other forms of taxes we put up.

• 17:00Rory Stewart?

  I think the other thing that we're missing here is that... Development is not totally separate from defence and security. Diplomacy, defence, development.

• 17:13Alastair Campbell?

  Which is, which is the argument, which is the argument that Keir Starmer used extensively in those clips that I mentioned over the recent years.

• 17:19Rory Stewart?

  Exactly, because these three things completely go together. It's extremely foolish, in fact, to put all your money into building weapon systems. If a much smaller amount of money spent in the right way can actually stop the conflicts breaking out in the first place, right? So a lot of the differed money, it had pretentious names, governance, conflict resolution. But broadly speaking, what it was about doing was working with partners to try to reduce the likelihood that states collapse into conflict, reduce the likelihood they become failed states, reduce the likelihood that they start harbouring terrorists, reduce the likelihood that they collapse and migration starts spreading.

• 18:04Rory Stewart?

  In other words, reduce the things that are going to make you have to use your weapons in the first place. You're spending upstream on prevention. This ties in with West Streeting's theories on the NHS, right? What they're doing is the equivalent of putting all the money into fancy hospital treatment and doing nothing in public health, right, at the other end.

• 18:22Alastair Campbell?

  We've been getting lots and lots and lots and lots of comments. Thank you for all of those. Dan O'Neill echoes the point you just made. Money to aid and spending on defence do not have to be exclusive. I think Dan may be an American looking at the spelling of defence. Those two things aren't a zero-sum game. In fact, more spending on aid often reduces the need for defence spending. Serious Business says, getting Amazon to pay some tax, any tax would be a start in paying for all this sort of stuff. Somebody else, Urbane Legends, capital gains tax, FFS. So I, I just, I just think that this is, the other thing on the, on the politics of this is that.

• 18:59Alastair Campbell?

  When Keir Starmer was talking about it at the press conference, I didn't see the his statement in Parliament because we were recording, but I caught part of his his press conference. A lot of the questioning was about, come on, fess up, be honest, you wouldn't be doing this if Donald Trump hadn't, you know, been making all the noises that he's making about about Russia and Ukraine. And John Healy, the Defence Secretary, had a conversation with the American Secretary of State, the the Fox News guy, Pete Hesketh. Is it Hexeth or Hesketh? Hexeth.

• 19:27Rory Stewart?

  Hesketh.

• 19:28Alastair Campbell?

  Hexeth. And he was sort of putting out tweets with, you know, stars and stripes and Union and flags and you can rely on Britain, etc. So I think from the perspective of what is going to be a very, very difficult meeting tomorrow, I think this this makes absolute sense. I think the politics that flow from it, beyond what happens tomorrow and beyond the relationship with the US over Ukraine about aid, we've said in the last two or three episodes that the Americans getting rid of USAID gives the UK a huge opportunity in the field of soft power to increase our soft power. And I fear that we've just sort of 86ed it.

• 20:11Rory Stewart?

  Big strategic mistake also because what we're doing is we're giving a huge space for China and Russia. So when I was the Africa Minister in 2016, nine years ago, British investment into Africa was still a third higher than Chinese investment into Africa a very long day. And US and French investment was ahead, right? Today, Chinese investment completely dwarfs. We have had a situation where, as we've talked about, in Chad, Niger, Mali, Burkina Faso, Gabon, there have been these military coups right the way across the Sahel. And in almost every case, Western allies like the US and France have been driven

• 20:55Rory Stewart?

  out. And Russian Wagner mercenaries have come in. So the Russians have private security companies now in dozens of countries in Africa, and the Chinese have private security companies in dozens of countries in Africa. China is taking control of lithium, cobalt, nickel, rare earths from places like Congo, which are absolutely vital for the future energy revolution, for electricity, for the future of of computing. And we are

• 21:26Rory Stewart?

  Creating a vacuum by the US and the UK leaving. And it's a vacuum that began under Boris Johnson, right? So we went from, in practice, about four billion pounds a year of bilateral aid into Africa, which would mean that in many African countries, we had a hundred, hundred and fifty million pounds to play with when we were negotiating with those governments, supporting those governments, influencing those governments to work with us on global trade, on Ukraine, on health, towards a world in which we will now have five, ten million pounds. And that, that, that sounds odd because people listening will be like, wait a sec, they've just cut the budget by, you know, seventy five percent from point seven. How come you're talking about a ninety percent cut?

• 22:10Rory Stewart?

  This leads to another point, which I'd like to get on to in a second, which is what this means for the United Nations, what this means for the World Bank, what means the IMF. But let me just throw that back to you first. This question of creating space for China and Russia, the way in which actually often this money, and I'll give you the final example for it, come back to you, Nepal. What happened is that the US government said, don't go with Chinese investment. Take five hundred million dollars from the US. We will build an electricity line which will connect Nepal into India. It'll be good for climate because it's going to be hydropower. It'll be good for development in Nepal because it's electricity. But above all, it's good for the United States because it's keeping China out of a key region. All that's now gone and China's just come back into Nepal and say, okay, we'll pick it up.

• 22:53Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, well, it's interesting. For obvious reasons, we have been talking a huge amount on the podcast and in recent months about the United States because of Trump and the election and about Russia because of the war in Ukraine. And actually, China, which does tend to sort of just keep chugging along and playing the long term game, has been relatively quiet. There's all sorts of economic and social and political things going on there, but it's been relatively quiet by comparison. I think at some point, there is a case for us talking to a real expert about the extent of Chinese investment through the Belt and Road Initiative, through their aid and development programmes.

• 23:38Alastair Campbell?

  We've got a question on Question Time tomorrow where somebody asked whether, if Rory was offered a job running the Chinese equivalent of the USAID, would he take it on? And he said, no, but actually, that is how they will be thinking. US, UK vacating this space opens opportunities for us. And when we talked to Franz Timmermans on Leading this week, and you were asking at the end, you know, what are you optimistic about? And he was saying he was optimistic because there's so much opportunity in the global south and because the extent to which African development is taking place, et cetera. Well, we are now, to some extent, pulling away from that at a time when China in particular, and on the military support side, Russia in particular, are stepping in.

• 24:22Alastair Campbell?

  So I think on all sorts of levels, this is one of those decisions that may get decent headlines from right wing newspapers, may make MPs feel yes. And by the way, I support Britain, I said this on the podcast today, Britain showing leadership on European defence, absolutely all up for it. But in the end, where Keir Starmer is absolutely right, it's about tough choices. And I just feel, you know, you and I, we're agreeing agreeably and violently on this. That this is not the choice.

• 24:50Rory Stewart?

  And the sums of money involved are not big compared to other bits of the government budget. I mean, it sounds big, but what had happened is Boris Johnson had already hacked international development spend pieces and Labour didn't put that spending up. So it was already much lower than it was when I was in government. There have been questions here in the thread about, you know, can the UN step up? But the truth is, of course, that the UN is funded by us.

• 25:19Alastair Campbell?

  Yep.

• 25:19Rory Stewart?

  So these UN agencies, when...

• 25:23Rory Stewart?

  Tom, who's now the, who we interviewed on, on leading.

• 25:27Alastair Campbell?

  Tom Ledger, yeah.

• 25:28Rory Stewart?

  He's now the head of UN humanitarian stuff. When they make a humanitarian appeal to fund those agencies, they're appealing to the UK and the US to provide that funding. They, they don't have their own money. Their money comes from our development budgets. Um, the World Bank, I mean, you know, people may not be very interested in international finance, but these organizations, the World Bank, the IMF, which are really vital for the global financial system. Right. They're the work with the central banks, make sure that the currency and money flows are working, provide emergency support when the Indonesian economy collapses. And actually, in the case of Britain, provide emergency support when our economy collapsed in the 1970s. These two are funded through our international development budget, right?

• 26:10Rory Stewart?

  They, they have a pot of money, but we top it up all the time. So what's happening now is something that we haven't begun to think through. We, we haven't really begun to think what the implications are of removing what I guess will be, if you take the UK and almost, the US and all of the US and almost all of the UK out of the international development system, you're probably reducing by about 50% the entire size of all international development worldwide.

• 26:42Alastair Campbell?

  You're left, I mean, you, you're left with Germany and Japan as the main sort of drivers of this.

• 26:46Rory Stewart?

  And Germany, Germany and Japan do, Germany and Japan do it in a very different way. So Germany does it with an enormous amount of staff, providing technical assistance.

• 26:54Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 26:54Rory Stewart?

  They don't provide much budgetary support. So, so a lot of the budgetary support, and again, that's the kind of technical word, but that means that many of the governments around the world received from the US and the UK direct assistance for their budgets. So Jordan, for example, you know, 40% of key parts of its budget was directly paid by the United States. Now they're in a situation where Trump is saying, I'm not going to give you money unless you take a million Palestinian refugees. And what he's really saying. Whether he understands it or not, is I'm going to collapse Jordan. I'm going to collapse its economy. I'm going to collapse the monarchy and I'm going to create a failed state.

• 27:35Rory Stewart?

  And this is going to be true in many, many more countries around the world than we recognize. So the risk of global conflict will go up, the risk of civil war will go up, the risk of Russia and China coming in will go up. And then I just want to loop back to this question of pandemics. I worked very closely on the Ebola response and of course, people sort of have a sense of this from Covid.

• 27:59Rory Stewart?

  But there are many, many worse things out there than Covid. You know, Ebola literally is flesh eating and, um, uh, you know, mortality rates could be 50%. I mean, I remember going to see the doctors and nurses in those clinics in eastern Congo and, uh, sitting with a nurse who, who got it treating other people, right? And the children that you see. If we hadn't had surveillance mechanisms in place, paid for by the British and American governments on the Uganda Congo border, that would have spread much, much further. And Ebola luckily is quite difficult to catch, but there will be many, many other pandemics spreading and we just won't have the infrastructure to deal with them. And that will affect us dramatically.

• 28:42Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. Well, listen, maybe close with a couple of, of comments, one which agrees with us and one, one which doesn't. Grumble woof, overseas aid is actually soft power that works all the time. Hard power, i.e. arms, only works when you need it for defence or attack, otherwise arms sit in sheds rusting. The one that disagrees with you Rory, Brendan Tierney, and the more Rory Stewart elucidates on the hold the Chinese and Russians already have on Africa. The more he destroys his own argument. I don't agree with that Brendan. I think it, I think, I think the point is that they, they have got the hold on Africa in part because we've sort of started to vacate the field and now we're vacating the field even more, isn't that right?

• 29:23Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, I would have thought so. I mean, I think that's a recipe for despair. I mean, I know there's increasing isolationism on this thread and in the UK and the US.

• 29:33Alastair Campbell?

  There's a lot of people on here saying they don't buy the line that Russia is a direct threat to the UK.

• 29:39Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 29:39Alastair Campbell?

  Uh, but I, I think that's a, I, I, well, definitely on this thread, it's a minority view, and I think it's probably a more broader minority view. But of course, that's, that is partly the view that Trump at the moment is pumping out and Putin, of course, is pumping out that Russia is no threat to anybody and they didn't start the war in Ukraine. And why would they want to take over Little Moldova and Little Latvia and bladdy, bladdy, blah?

• 30:01Rory Stewart?

  It's also, it's also amazing that, um, I'd like to come back to you on the comms bit. This, oh, I've got, you know, John Matrix Rory's Wife Earns Good Coin From Foreign Aid. Um, so there's, there's a lovely comms thing going on here, which is instead of talking seriously about what the international aid system is and what it does, um, you do various things. One of them on Twitter is you delegitimize whoever's talking. So you say, you know, Rory Stewart isn't allowed to talk about this subject because his wife runs an NGO that received funding from USAID and therefore I'm sort of conflicted, right?

• 30:38Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 30:38Rory Stewart?

  And the reality is it was a very small proportion of the funding of that charity and the charity's fine. That's not what I'm wound up about. I'm wound up about the 400 million being removed from major NGOs. I'm wound up about, as we've been talking about on the show, the consequence for the entire international system for the fact that Africa, one in 10 children born in the world will be born in Nigeria by 2050. And if you can imagine what the Syria conflict would have meant in terms of migration if we hadn't had aid programs in place in Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey. Um, but the second thing that they do is that they rely on the fact that Aid programs are complicated things being run at the other end of the world,

• 31:21Rory Stewart?

  and therefore the public don't know much about them, right? If I said, you know, your daughter's school is a pile of junk and a complete waste of money, and we should cut all the funding, you would know quite a lot about the school, and you'd be able to say, well, that's rubbish. And if I showed you a one-minute video of some daft thing that a teacher said, and said, that's why we should shut down the school, you'd be able to say, no, no, look, the school's doing all this other stuff, right? But with international aid, it is because it's happening at the other end of the world, because it's, um, there's no media there to cover it, because nobody has the patience to get into the details of it. They can make the most incredible meal out of very, very partial sensational...

• 32:08Rory Stewart?

  The Daily Mail used to specialize in this, but my goodness, Musk and X have taken it to another level. And what they do is they try to discredit an entire system. I mean, it'd be like trying to shut down the entire education system on the basis of 90-second videos of individual teachers saying something that sounds a bit daft if you watch it quickly on Twitter.

• 32:32Alastair Campbell?

  Well, listen, let's, let's close with this, Roy, just to show that we're completely fair. We allow every voice. Ari, Russia never attacked Europe. It was attacked twice by Napoleon, then Hitler, now three times if you count Biden's attempt. So that just goes to show that we have many, many, many really intelligent people sending in their comments and watching and listening. But Ari, I'm afraid you're not really one of them.

• 32:55Rory Stewart?

  Well, can I, can I just reply? Sorry, I'm, I'm just getting on, but Richie, aid is not education. Aid is education, right? Aid is 80%, an increase from 40% of women in school to 80% of girls in school across Sub-Saharan Africa, was aid. Aid is education. Aid is basic healthcare. Aid is children not dying. Aid is government stability. Aid is trade. Aid is support for our allies. Aid is pandemics. Aid is refugees. Aid is all those things. Aid is all the functions that our government does at home. Supporting endeavors abroad and the successes, we don't talk enough about successes. We talk about failure all the time.

• 33:39Rory Stewart?

  Japan, Germany, South Korea, Taiwan. These were examples of USAID transforming war torn, shattered conflict countries, helping to transform them into stable liberal democracies and global success stories. And European Union aid into Central Eastern Europe, its support for Lithuania, for Romania, is an example of aid and development, of European money transforming other people's countries, making them better off and making us better off. We mustn't get into a worldview that somehow Musk is right and everything that we do to connect with anyone outside our own country is a waste of time and a waste of money.

• 34:23Rory Stewart?

  Because if we believe that, we wouldn't make the world better.

• 34:26Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, I think anyway, to the social media guy, the bit where Rory goes, aid is the, aid is the, aid is the, that was the best clip of the day. All right, Rory, thank you for tuning in, people. Thanks, all the best.

• 34:38Rory Stewart?

  Thanks, bye bye.