535. The Ebola Outbreak and the British Far-Right’s Next Move

Are Xi and Putin playing Trump? How serious is the new Ebola outbreak, especially after Trump's and Britain's severe cuts to international aid? With Tommy Robinson explicitly telling his supporters to support Reform UK, the Conservative Party, and other right-wing parties ahead of 2029, is this a deliberate strategy to infiltrate mainstream politics and normalise far-right extremism? Join Rory and Alastair as they answer all these questions and more in this week's edition of Question Time. __________ The National Survey: To have your say on the country you want to see, just head to thenationalconversation.org.uk. Go deeper into the world of The Rest Is Politics by signing up for our free newsletter HERE, featuring exclusive interviews, analysis and weekend reads from Alastair and Rory. Join The Rest Is Politics Plus. Start your free trial at therestispolitics.com to unlock exclusive bonus content – including Rory and Alastair’s miniseries – plus ad-free listening, early access to episodes and live show tickets, exclusive newsletters, discounted book prices, and a private chatroom on Discord. The Rest Is Politics is powered by Fuse Energy. Stop overpaying for energy. Switch at fuseenergy.com/politics and get a free TRIP+ subscription. 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] __________ Social Producer: Celine Charles Video Editor: Vasco Andrade Assistant Producer: Daisy Alston-Horne Producer: Evan Green Exec Producer: Chris Sawyer General Manager: Tom Whiter 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.

• 0:01Rory Stewart?

  How serious is the new Ebola outbreak?

• 0:03Alastair Campbell?

  The answer is very, and the cuts to US global health funding are probably part of the reason why this is happening now.

• 0:09Rory Stewart?

  Elon Musk is worth hundreds of billions. I mean, he could feed all the hungry people in the world.

• 0:15Alastair Campbell?

  Especially as he was the one who cut USAID in the first place. One of my favourite quotes of the whole thing. He's trying to flatter him, but he's basically just abusing the country. Trump said he's very, very tall, especially for this country, because they tend to be a little shorter. As we speak, Putin is on his way to Beijing.

• 0:31Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 0:31Alastair Campbell?

  For his 40th meeting.

• 0:33Rory Stewart?

  And that'll be very interesting.

• 0:34Alastair Campbell?

  40th meeting.

• 0:34Rory Stewart?

  Very interesting watching that.

• 0:37Alastair Campbell?

  This episode is brought to you by Fuse Energy.

• 0:40Rory Stewart?

  Fuse has introduced the tracker tariff, designed to give customers what matters most from their energy supplier. Savings clarity and a bit more control.

• 0:49Alastair Campbell?

  And it guarantees that your rates stay below the off gem price gap, which saves you up to £200. And the tariff updates automatically every quarter.

• 1:00Rory Stewart?

  Energy prices don't move in straight lines. Global events and market pressures you can't predict and certainly can't control still find their way onto your bill.

• 1:08Alastair Campbell?

  And if you're on the wrong tariff, you can be stuck with higher rates after the pressure has ended.

• 1:14Rory Stewart?

  With Fuse Energy's tracker tariff, that changes. If prices fall, your rate adjusts at the next quarterly update.

• 1:21Alastair Campbell?

  And it's automatic. No switching, no trying to second guess the market. You're protected while prices are high and ready to benefit when they fall.

• 1:28Rory Stewart?

  Switch to Fuse Energy's tracker tariff at fuseenergy.com/politics and use code POLITICS to get a free trip plus subscription.

• 1:38Alastair Campbell?

  Visit fuseenergy.com for full terms and conditions.

• 1:46Rory Stewart?

  This episode is brought to you by NordVPN.

• 1:48Alastair 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 Managed to watch it. There you go.

• 2:01Rory Stewart?

  I actually had a NordVPN thank you. I was in the new Starbucks here in Creve. 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.

• 2:24Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I think you're not really sort of proud of me that I managed to do this. Or should I say Fiona Fiona managed to do this?

• 2:31Rory 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.

• 2:47Speaker 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.

• 2:58Speaker 03

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

• 3:04Speaker 04

  What would happen if I stopped going? You start, you freeze in there. That's what.

• 3:08Speaker 03

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 3:11Speaker 04

  I'm not the first nanny.

• 3:12Speaker 03

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17.9 minutes without parent.

• 3:26Rory Stewart?

  Welcome to Rest Politics Question Time with me, Rory Stewart.

• 3:29Alastair Campbell?

  And me, Alastair Campbell. Now Rory, we managed to get through the whole of the main episode without mentioning DJ Trump, but we're not going to succeed this time.

• 3:39Rory Stewart?

  No, we're not. So we're going to do, we're going to do US-China to follow up on the episode we did. What actually happened in that summit? What came out of it? What does it mean about the new world? We're going to look at the Ebola outbreak and what that means to the world. We're going to look at the question of the far right in Britain. And we've got a rather interesting question about communities. So a lot of things to get through. So Alistair, starting on this, I'd be absolutely interested whether you think we got what we got right, what we got wrong. But Evie's asked, are Xi and Putin playing Trump? And Roy, not Rory, has said, has Trump's visit to China shown that China has trumped the USA and that USA is now subordinate to China on the world stage?

• 4:20Alastair Campbell?

  It's interesting how those questions, I think, reflect most of the questions that came in about this, which suggests that most of our listeners and viewers do think. That if there was a winner or loser, then Xi was the winner and Trump was the loser. Look, I thought it was fascinating to watch, I really did. And I've got to obviously try to park my Trump derangement syndrome.

• 4:41Rory Stewart?

  And before the TDS, give us a sense what it looked like and felt like.

• 4:44Alastair Campbell?

  What stood out to me was, to go to Evie's point, I did feel that he was being played. Because he loves all that stuff. He loves all the children waving their flags as he came off the plane. The MAGA crowd was saying this is a bigger reception than Obama got when he went there. I'll tell you what I found the most interesting thing was that right at the top, President Xi said something really tough about Taiwan. He basically said, if we get this right, that will be great for relations. If we mishandle this issue, it will affect American-Chinese relations at every level. And then the other thing I thought was stunning was when he basically said, it was this one phrase.

• 5:28Alastair Campbell?

  I mean, in English, on the translation, it came over in five words. And it said, century-long transformation is accelerating. And what that said to me, I'm not a China expert, but what it said to me was this was him to Donald Trump's face saying, we are overtaking you.

• 5:49Rory Stewart?

  It's an amazing moment. I was struck by the fact that it's, there's this famous story and detective story, if you remember, of the dog that didn't bark. So the coverage has been about what didn't happen.

• 6:00Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 6:01Rory Stewart?

  But I think that's very significant. So we go back. The last 20 years has really been about America and China pumping up for a new Cold War. Started with Obama, talking about pivot towards Asia. During Trump won, we had his secretary of state, who we've interviewed, Mike Pompeo, lacerating China as a dictatorship. And then actually even on-

• 6:22Alastair Campbell?

  And Marco Rubio does the same.

• 6:23Rory Stewart?

  Marco Rubio.

• 6:23Alastair Campbell?

  Did the same.

• 6:24Rory Stewart?

  Yep. And even Biden.

• 6:26Alastair Campbell?

  Yep.

• 6:27Rory Stewart?

  You remember when we were recording podcasts, some of the very tense meetings that Jake Sullivan was holding with his Chinese counterpart and Biden not visiting China and skirting around the edge of each other at Bali and trying to read this. So you would have expected until this year, one of two things, right? Either that narrative, which is the narrative that Rubio was pushing, Elbridge Colby was pushing, who's the deputy Secretary of Defense, and he's written a whole book about this, which is, how is this used to really put China back in its box? So their dream would be, number one, you reinforce deterrence on Taiwan. You really

• 7:08Rory Stewart?

  signal to China, we've got Taiwan's back, we've got the back of Japan and South Korea, and all of the US military is concentrating there, not in the Gulf, not in the Middle East, not in Europe, it's all there. Second thing, you'd probably lean very, very hard into unequal balance on trade. So let's say you really felt, as many, many people do, and particularly Republican voters, China's hollowed out American industry, cost millions of American jobs because they've unfairly manipulated their currency, subsidized their industries, stolen our intellectual property. This is a summit in which you really stick it to China on that. Or you do something else, which is you do the G2 model. The G2 model says, the rest of the world doesn't really matter now, we're 50% of the world

• 7:51Rory Stewart?

  economy, China, which was smaller, smaller than the British economy in 2004, right? So about seven times larger than us. So it is a G2 setup in this world. So you might say, okay, let's sort out the world's issues, right? We're going to sort out AI safety, we're going to come up with agreements on global development, global trade.

• 8:12Alastair Campbell?

  That's all the stuff we said they might do.

• 8:14Rory Stewart?

  Environment, climate, whatever, right, whatever you might do. None of that happened. But what's interesting for me is that it could have been worse, right? Trump, I mean, I don't know whether he gets a cookie for this, but he didn't really say very much about Taiwan, which was a turn up for the books, because pretty much anything he said about Taiwan would have gone wrong. And the summit ended really with these two big superpowers circling around each other, a bit suspicious, but they haven't upped the ante either in trade wars or Cold War.

• 8:41Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. Should tell listeners, we've interviewed this week Rah Emanuel. Who was Barack Obama's Chief of Staff and he's now putting his toe pretty deep into the water to try and become the next American president. He's still very hard over on China. We've also had quite a lot of feedback that we weren't hard over enough. Very, very interesting how we sort of quite liked him, but our team really, really didn't. So I'd be fascinated what listeners and viewers think. They're two, when you said what was it like to sort of watch them, they're two such different people, but actually they've got, they've got similarities. One of my favorite quotes, favorite quotes of the whole thing was Trump said this, Xi said, he's very, very tall, especially for this country. He's standing

• 9:25Alastair Campbell?

  there. He's very, very tall, especially for this country, because they tend to be a little shorter, which is the kind of, he's trying to flatter him, but he's basically just abusing the country in his own sort of, his own pre-racist way.

• 9:37Rory Stewart?

  Do you know, do you know that the height of Chinese teenagers has increased something like five inches? And, and a lot of this is to do, you know, we're, I don't want to turn this even more into a health podcast, but it's almost entirely about protein. The same happened in Japan after the war. Incredible expansion height. I was born in Hong Kong.

• 9:53Alastair Campbell?

  Yep.

• 9:53Rory Stewart?

  And my parents lived in Hong Kong till nineteen ninety seven. And when my mother started teaching at Hong Kong University, my mother's very short, about five foot two, three. She was taller than a lot of her students. By the time she left, she was dwarfed by, by her students. Incredible what protein does.

• 10:08Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. Well, he, anyway, he's very, very tall. I was also struck by how absolutely exquisite President Xi's suits were.

• 10:16Rory Stewart?

  Is that what he noticed?

• 10:18Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, I mean, they cost a fortune. They were, they were really, really smart. Trump's, because their styles are so different, Trump goes in, if you remember the last summit when they first met, he said, I'd give the meeting twelve out of ten. We know he struggles with maths, right? But twelve out of ten isn't a thing really. This one, he went in saying the first thing that's going to happen, he's going to give me a big hug. Well, he didn't give him, it was pretty cold. And so you had the situation, particularly as after the summit ended, Trump gets one.

• 10:48Rory Stewart?

  You remember that famous fraternal embrace that, that Brezhnev used to give these German leaders? Yeah. Where they'd kiss them on the lips and there's nothing like that.

• 10:55Alastair Campbell?

  There was nothing like that. But Trump kept saying the whole time, he's a great friend, he's become a great friend. Uh, I get a lot of trouble for saying he's a great friend. He said all this stuff. He was really trying to lay it on. And Xi was having none of it. And then when they got to the briefings after the whole thing, one of the, the Chinese Foreign Ministry guy was asked. Whether they were friends, as Trump kept saying, and his reply was, the two sides exchange views on major issues. So Trump gets on the plane and was, and they were all saying, well, that was all a bit disappointing, wasn't it, Mr. President? He was, he was amazing, did the deals and this and Boeing, Boeing shares fell, by the way, because the expectations were not met.

• 11:32Rory Stewart?

  Incidentally, but just sort of footnote here, Trump has just disclosed his financial investments.

• 11:38Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, I know.

• 11:39Rory Stewart?

  He's a big investor in Boeing. You hear people in the newspapers speaking on behalf of Boeing, saying, if you want to make President Trump happy, buy Boeing. He's a big shareholder in Boeing. He goes around the world selling Boeing airplanes and he's a big shareholder in Boeing.

• 11:53Alastair Campbell?

  He's also done more trades since becoming president than every president in history.

• 11:58Rory Stewart?

  Anyway, so there was, anyway, so he went off, bought lots of Boeing shares, I'm going to sell lots of Boeing's and the Boeing share price will go up and I'll make lots of money.

• 12:03Alastair Campbell?

  Well, in fact, it went down because he oversold how many he was going to sell. And they didn't buy quite as many. He gets on the plane and says that all these amazing deals. So then Wang Yi, the Chinese Foreign Minister, is asked about all these amazing deals and his answer is this, we're continuing to implement all the consensus reached in earlier consultations, agreeing to establish a board of trade and a board of investment, addressing each other's concerns over market access and advancing the expansion of two-way trade under reciprocal tariff reduction framework.

• 12:32Rory Stewart?

  Blimey. So in an age of kind of authenticity, populism and soundbites, basically every quote you're giving me from the Chinese government sounds like some 1990s policy paper.

• 12:42Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, but they're both saying.

• 12:44Rory Stewart?

  No.

• 12:45Alastair Campbell?

  Bullshit. They're both saying bullshit. And here's the other thing, Evie's question, are Xi and Putin playing Trump? As we speak, Putin is on his way to Beijing.

• 12:56Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 12:56Alastair Campbell?

  For his fortieth meeting.

• 12:58Rory Stewart?

  And that'll be very interesting, very interesting watching that.

• 13:01Alastair Campbell?

  I thought the other really interesting thing about, and it was so deliberate, he was doing it so deliberately, was when he talked about all the differences between them. But he then said, you know, the key question is, can we, China and US, can we overcome the so-called Thucydides trap?

• 13:19Alastair Campbell?

  And this, again, I think, was a way of saying, we're overtaking you. Because the Thucydides trap, which was made famous by a book by a guy called

• 13:28Rory Stewart?

  Graham Allison.

• 13:29Alastair Campbell?

  Graham Allison, whose book was called Destined for War. And his thesis is that whenever there has been a rising power approaching a, an established power, a hegemony, that inevitably ends in war. He studied sixteen situations like that, twelve of them ended in war.

• 13:46Rory Stewart?

  So Graham Allison actually was a colleague of mine at Harvard. I know him quite well. And he is pretty amazing because he defines these ideas. And one of the great tricks, actually, in being somebody working on government is he came up with the phrase Thucydides trap, and now you can see Xi Jinping using it. And his, his great friend and colleague, Joe Nye, came up with the phrase soft power. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's a great trick. And you've got to get there with perseverance.

• 14:12Alastair Campbell?

  It's not getting there very quickly, is it? And he's now three years old, I'm banging about.

• 14:17Rory Stewart?

  Xi Jinping hasn't done it yet.

• 14:19Alastair Campbell?

  I mean, Xi Jinping, he is per sevillian.

• 14:21Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 14:21Alastair Campbell?

  I mean, he just, he's just, you keep going. So I think that was him saying, as he was saying with the transformation. By the way, which he said, the first time he said that concept of the acceleration was in a meeting in Moscow two years ago with Putin. So I think what he's saying, and I actually think the timing of Putin's visits deliberate, is basically saying, the state media today in China is saying, this shows that we are now the central global power. We had Trump last week, we've got Putin this week, we've had all those leaders I mentioned last week who are going. So I think they will have felt they got a lot more out of this.

• 14:55Rory Stewart?

  Than, than America did. Okay. Well, look, we, we talked about the fact that they didn't talk about the big global issues, global development, Africa, climate, AI safety. And one issue they didn't talk about was global public health. So we've had a question from Ezra Helen. And this relates exactly to this. How serious is the new Ebola outbreak? Should we be worried about it spreading beyond Africa, especially with the cuts to US global health funding?

• 15:22Alastair Campbell?

  Very good question. The answer is very, and yes, and the cuts to US global health funding are probably part of the reason why this is happening now.

• 15:31Rory Stewart?

  Big plug, as always, for leading and people who aren't listening to the back catalogue of leading. Atul Gawande has done some wonderful stuff in this recently. He was the USAID Deputy Administrator who led on global health. This is something that means a lot to me because I was the minister during the last big Ebola outbreak about 10 years ago.

• 15:50Alastair Campbell?

  Divid, a divid.

• 15:51Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, and when that happened 10 years ago, I got together in Paris immediately with Mark Green, who was the head of USAID. We went for a walk over that bridge with all the padlocks on it in the margins of a, I think it was a G7 Development Ministers' Meeting. And we worked out funding and I think we put in an extra 100 million, USAID put in an extra 100 million. Why does it matter? It matters because that allowed us to fund protective equipment, getting the nurses to the frontline, doing the testing, developing the vaccination. I then went out to Eastern DRC. I went into these Ebola centres. I sat with a nurse who very sadly contracted Ebola and was dying in front of me. I saw children whose

• 16:34Rory Stewart?

  parents from the centre dying. We were washing ourselves in this very, very intense way to try to make sure there was no fluids of any sort because.

• 16:42Alastair Campbell?

  Is it through fluid that you get it?

• 16:44Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, and once you've contracted it, your mortality rate at the moment is about 50%. Half a chance, very different to Covid.

• 16:51Alastair Campbell?

  So when you were with the nurse who had it, what was the?

• 16:54Rory Stewart?

  There was a plastic sheet between me and him.

• 16:55Alastair Campbell?

  Right.

• 16:56Rory Stewart?

  We were talking through a plastic sheet. He was very, very courageously talking to me and he probably had two days to live. So it's something where, and people will hear this paradoxically, because it's so lethal, it doesn't spread quite as easily as things like Covid, because so many of the carriers are killed before they can pass it on. But the bigger issue is that global pandemics are, along with AI, probably the biggest threat for the next twenty, thirty years that we need to worry about. And dismantling all the money in the global health architecture that stops not just this outbreak of Ebola, but other forms of pandemic coming out of poor developing countries, overwhelming their health systems, overwhelming their borders and ultimately getting to Britain.

• 17:40Alastair Campbell?

  But if you go back to our previous discussion about the summit, Trump and Xi, given that it's not that long ago since Covid.

• 17:47Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 17:47Alastair Campbell?

  And given Trump at the time was obsessed with the, you know, the China.

• 17:50Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 17:51Alastair Campbell?

  Element of Covid.

• 17:52Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 17:52Alastair Campbell?

  You'd have thought that might have been part of the discussion. What have you learned? Have you studied it? What more can we say? But they're just, because it's not.

• 18:00Rory Stewart?

  Well, it's so weird. It's so weird, because even for Britain or Germany, if you're looking for a type of investment in international development where you can prove that there's a national interest, you're not just, in inverted commas, wasting money giving to people in another country, but you're actually protecting yourself. Global health is the key example.

• 18:19Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 18:19Rory Stewart?

  You know, you spend on the border between Uganda and eastern DRC and you're less likely to end up with Ebola in Britain. Um, I don't understand why people are not making these arguments. I don't understand why we're cutting our global health funding.

• 18:31Alastair Campbell?

  I had a meeting this morning with a guy, a Swedish guy called Carl Skow, who is the COO of the World Food Programme. And this doesn't relate specifically to Ebola, but he was explaining the, what he has already seen about the consequences of USAID, UKDEFID, German, other countries that have cut their defence spending. He literally got back to the, yesterday from Afghanistan. He was saying they've had an earthquake, they've had two floods, they've got 2.5 million refugees that have come back from Pakistan and Iran.

• 19:10Alastair Campbell?

  USAID has cut all, every single penny of funding to Afghanistan, Yemen and Somalia. Okay, he was talking about Gaza, he said basically in Gaza, they are now managing World Food Programme, is managing to get food in, but that is all that's going in.

• 19:29Rory Stewart?

  Okay, can I just interrupt then, because just to make the problem worse. Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, Gaza. When USAID and DIFID took its money out, the only people really who stepped up in significant amounts for that were the Gulf, Qatar, Saudi, UAE. And their economies are now being crippled by the Iran blockade and this war that Trump and Israel have launched on Iran. And Iran's response, which has been attacking them and closing their exports and destroying their economies. So the backup, the Plan B, which was to get wealthy Gulf countries to step up and handle these problems. That's for one side because those wealthy Gulf countries are now freezing their funding

• 20:13Rory Stewart?

  and are struggling to make their payments because they're not getting the income in.

• 20:16Alastair Campbell?

  That's absolutely right. He said there are four key areas, themes that are directly related to making their life much more difficult as a result, specifically, we'll come back to the cuts, but the Iran war. The first is they're having to step up their operations in Lebanon and to some extent Gaza as well. The second is the cost of operations have gone up 25% because of the rise in the oil price. There are currently 300 million acutely hungry in the world. And he says, he said if the oil price stays above $100 for any considerable period of time, they've calculated another 45 million will be pushed into acute hunger.

• 21:00Alastair Campbell?

  And his final point is fertilizer. All of Africa's fertilizer comes through the straits of Hormuz. So that's going to put prices up and supply down.

• 21:07Rory Stewart?

  I think huge credit to the people who are desperately trying to fill some of these gaps. When these governments are falling aside and when this chaos is happening, huge credit to governments like Qatar, which is still trying to support communities in these places. Huge credit also to the private philanthropists. I mean, I think it's it's wonderful that you do have private individuals being unbelievably generous, stepping in where governments are falling aside, but it's not, it can't carry it. You can't, you can't deal with Ebola on this basis. You can't deal with vaccinating people. You can't deal with malaria bed nets. You can't deal with the really big, multi-billion dollar things.

• 21:46Alastair Campbell?

  Well, hold on. Some of these guys, the guys you talk about in your AI series, they could. I mean, this, he, Carl said it would take thirteen billion dollars to feed the hungry of the world today. Okay. And the war in Iran is costing two billion a day.

• 22:03Rory Stewart?

  So stop the war in Iran and Elon Musk is worth hundreds of billions. I mean, he could feed all the hungry people in the world and it would be a rounding error and it would be nice to see him do it. So Elon, if you're listening.

• 22:14Alastair Campbell?

  Especially as he was the one who cut USAID in the first place.

• 22:17Rory Stewart?

  Absolutely. If you're listening, step up. I know you're very, very anxious about global population collapse. Fantastic opportunity to support some of the countries in the world that have the strongest population growth and maybe invite them to the United States, where they can provide that labour that you're so worried about.

• 22:32Alastair Campbell?

  I can see the sincerity with which you're putting that. Final word from me on Carl. He said this, this thing was really kind of hitting to me. He said, we have been cut. And by the way, UK hasn't got a great story to tell here. The funding from the UK to the World Food Programme has been cut from six hundred million to two hundred million. That's two thirds gone. And he said, he put together all the big countries that have pulled back. We've been cut to the bone. And he said this, we are taking from the hungry to feed only the starving.

• 23:00Rory Stewart?

  Great. Okay, let's take a break and back for the break.

• 23:04Rory Stewart?

  This episode is sponsored by Starling, the bank that helps you organise your money, build great habits and stay in control of your spending. Plenty of us have strong opinions on how to run the country, but knowing how to manage your own day to day can be more of a challenge, especially when it comes to being good with money. That kind of self-assured self-governance could start with just checking your balance daily. And yes, it can feel like opening the books at the treasury, but eventually you'll feel like the Chancellor of your own ideallix checker.

• 23:36Alastair Campbell?

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• 23:56Rory Stewart?

  A bit like having a select committee in your wallet.

• 23:59Alastair Campbell?

  Search Starling Bank to find out more. Good with money. Starts here.

• 24:05Speaker 02

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

• 24:16Speaker 03

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

• 24:22Speaker 04

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

• 24:26Speaker 03

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 24:29Speaker 04

  I'm not the first nanny.

• 24:30Speaker 03

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

• 24:41Alastair Campbell?

  Welcome back to the Rest of the Podcast. It's Question Time with me, Alastair Campbell.

• 24:44Rory Stewart?

  And with me, Rory Stewart.

• 24:46Alastair Campbell?

  Now Rory, somebody here with a wonderful name, Josh prose as opposed to Josh poetry. At the Unite the Kingdom rally over the weekend, Tommy Robinson, aka Stevens Yaxley Lennon, explicitly told his supporters to join right-wing political parties ahead of the 2029 election. Given recent revelations about Nigel Farage's funding and Reform UK's growing profile, how concerned should mainstream politics be about far-right street movements transitioning into the ballot box?

• 25:15Rory Stewart?

  Well, I think the first thing is that one should be disturbed and disturbed by the number of people that are supporting them. I mean, I was out, as many other people will have been in London, and I saw the edge of both marches and I saw a really impressive police deployment. That was not, not an easy thing, right? You've got a Nakbar march happening on one side, you've got Tommy Robinson's march happening on the other. That could have been really horrible.

• 25:38Alastair Campbell?

  How close were they?

• 25:38Rory Stewart?

  Well, they were, one lot were mostly around, when I saw them, around the edge of Hyde Park, the other were around Trafalgar Square. So I suppose the police were keeping a distance between the two. But anyway, it was, it was impressive, impressive policing. But it's pretty scary. I mean, it's, yes, the numbers were down. But there was all this business, which I guess you wouldn't find, I'd actually, I, I, I'm sorry, you, correct me if I'm wrong. One of the things that kept happening is people kept picking up wooden crosses. And Tommy Robinson sent out a tweet with the Lord's Prayer in it. So there's all this kind of leaning into a Christian nationalism. Would Le Pen's party or the AFD be going so strong on Christian symbolism?

• 26:17Alastair Campbell?

  I've not seen it. Um, I think, I suspect some of it will.

• 26:20Rory Stewart?

  I mean, in France, this is laïcité, right?

• 26:22Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 26:22Rory Stewart?

  They wouldn't, they wouldn't be going to.

• 26:25Alastair Campbell?

  You'd have thought not, but they might, they might do it in terms of, because I mean, there is a sort of a streak of anti-Islam in all of them.

• 26:31Rory Stewart?

  Yep.

• 26:31Alastair Campbell?

  Well, more than a streak of anti-Islam.

• 26:33Rory Stewart?

  Yep.

• 26:34Alastair Campbell?

  And so it was very, very deliberate. I mean, I didn't go to the march, but I was watching some of the coverage. There were these piles. You know how when you go to stop the war marches, I mean, the piles of, of placards?

• 26:45Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 26:45Alastair Campbell?

  There were piles of crosses.

• 26:47Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 26:47Alastair Campbell?

  Now, I don't see Tommy Robinson as being a very Christian person in terms of the way he looks at other people and the way he conducts himself.

• 26:54Rory Stewart?

  Well, one of the things that's so interesting is of course, all the leaders of the church are expressing serious concern. I mean, sort of Pope expressing concern, but you also, most of the church, I think, the clergyman are horrified by this idea that you're sort of using Christianity to, to chase this. I also, again, talked to people who had relatives on the march. And again, the narrative was, oh, it's all very friendly, they're very normal people. Well, maybe, but the people who were speaking on the stage are, are far from normal. Some people were banned from coming in. But the kind of people he's trying to get speaking are people who claim that Islam is a supremacist religion trying to wipe us all out. There's a particular guy, in fact, wasn't on this march, but who they love retweeting, who's a great inspiration to Elon Musk,

• 27:40Rory Stewart?

  who claims that of the two billion Muslims, the world, hundreds of millions of them are engaged in a genocidal attempt to try to wipe out the rest of us. Many of them talking about expelling Muslims, many of them talking about banning non-Christian places of worship. A lot of this story, which we hear again and again on Twitter, Elon Musk's civil war in Britain is inevitable. Right? And, and when he said that, it got literally millions of retweets and likes. And here's my final point, 26% of UK voters have a positive view of that march. And fifty percent of men aged twenty five to thirty four have a positive view of what's going on.

• 28:20Rory Stewart?

  I was very troubled. I do not like the vision of a bunch of people marching with crosses, swaggering around in the central London, going to hear speakers who want to expel all the Muslims.

• 28:32Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm. The reason why Elon Musk is so important is because his whole platform that he's turned into, what he's done with X is the weaponization of hatred and division. Um, and you see a lot of that. And of course, you will get people saying, well, it's because I'm worried about this, worried about that. This is where I kind of have to have a bit of difficulty with the Gary Stevenson point that we talked about on the main podcast is that you can't not confront this. You can't just pretend that it's part of a, well, the country's not really working very well. This is, this goes way beyond that. People like Yaxley Lennon, they go way beyond that.

• 29:11Alastair Campbell?

  And of course, the whole kind of infrastructure that's developing on the, the, the right of, of British politics is so interesting because he didn't just say, you know, get involved with restore or advance Rupert Lowe and Ben Abib's parties. He said, think about joining reform or the Conservative Party. So they're lumping it all in together on the right as you have to hate everyone else on the left of you.

• 29:34Rory Stewart?

  And one of the very disturbing things for me, as somebody who comes from the Conservative Party and are now seeing a lot of Conservative voters becoming Reform voters. I was talking to a former colleague of mine this morning on the phone, who is a former MP, saying on no account I might have quoted him, but he would be tempted to vote for reform if he thought it would keep Labour out. Two thirds of Reform voters have a positive view of Rupert Lowe. Sixty one percent of Reform voters like Tommy Robinson, like Tommy Robinson, and fifty four percent of them think non-white British citizens born abroad should be forced to leave the UK. That's more than half of Reform voters. So this story that we're getting out of moderate remain voting.

• 30:21Rory Stewart?

  Tories, that this is just the Tory party, it's all fine, there's no problem, they can just go across to reform. They're joining a party where more than half the members think Tommy Robinson's a good thing and think that non-white British people should be made to leave the UK, who are not born in the UK. Anyway, so a huge thank you to Evan, who did a lot of research on it, but also Hope Not Hate, which has done quite an interesting report on the British far-right, from which quite a lot of these figures have been extracted. Now, final question maybe from me, or final serious question, which comes from Brendan Cox. Brendan Cox was married to Joe Cox, my colleague in Parliament, who was horribly murdered, just in the lead-up to the Brexit referendum, and his sister Kim Ledbetter

• 31:03Rory Stewart?

  is now in Parliament, has been leading all the stuff and her sister dying. Brendan Cox is running an initiative with Oxford University, where he's asking people to record 60 seconds on what they think about community, which is then going to be fed into a large AI model, that which more later. And he's asked us to do it. So it's a bit unfair to you, because you've had no prep, but go on, give us 60 seconds on what you think about community. I've got my timer up, ready?

• 31:30Alastair Campbell?

  As you know, Rory, I am a, for an old man, 69 next week, I am a great believer in young people in this country. So I want to live in a country where we respect young people, and where young people respect each other. And I think that starts by teaching values in schools, by teaching history in the context of how we have become the country that we are, and being proud of that without feeling that we have to own every mistake in our past as well. So I want to live in a community where everybody is well-educated, where everybody is taught values of tolerance and respect.

• 32:14Alastair Campbell?

  And where everybody feels that there is a there is a possibility of them making the most of every inch of every ounce of talent they've got.

• 32:23Rory Stewart?

  So just on your minute, Alastair, here's my fifty eight seconds. So firstly, I think we need to start with a sense of anger and shame at how bad things have gotten Britain. We need to accept that we have levels of poverty which are completely unjustifiable and the country is wealthy as this, that the situation in our prisons with the homeless is solvable by any government that wanted to do it, that our retreat from international development assistance is a complete betrayal of the world. We need to deliver decent functioning services and that also involves radicalism. That will mean cuts to welfare, that will mean unfortunately some civil servants having to lose their jobs, that will mean very radical

• 33:08Rory Stewart?

  reforms, it will mean localism driven by figures like Andy Burnham, and it's going to build towards a positive vision where we know each other, we share values and we have a positive sense of national pride.

• 33:19Alastair Campbell?

  Okay, okay. Was that bang on a minute?

• 33:22Rory Stewart?

  That was bang on a minute. Yeah, it got a bit rushed at the end.

• 33:27Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, well, okay, so to the history point, I thought was interesting. I mean, one of the things that I think reform voters sense is they worry that, I don't know, Labour elite living in London doesn't really resonate with the kind of history that they care about. And I mean, it's striking, David Cameron, when asked what his favourite movie was, said it was Zulu. And clearly, quite a lot of people who are watching, who are conservative reform voters, love watching Where Eagles Dare or The Battle of Britain and this kind of stuff.

• 34:03Alastair Campbell?

  What was yours?

• 34:05Rory Stewart?

  I I love really cheesy action films. I love things like Gladiator. I think it's really cool. Yeah, I think it's really cool. Gladiator. That's really cool. Yeah.

• 34:11Alastair Campbell?

  One's Lady Sings the Blues.

• 34:13Rory Stewart?

  Lady Sings the Blues, yeah. I thought I was gonna say some weird Japanese, black and white nineteen fifty's thing. Um. Do you think there is a question around how you tell a positive sense of history? You know, what replaces, if you're Andy Byrne, you're gonna be like quietly patriotic, appealing to working class folk. What do you do with stories about Second World War, which actually after all look pretty recent? You know, our parents, you know, our fathers were alive as adults during that time. Um. Do you have to abandon that entirely? Can you talk about that then?

• 34:43Alastair Campbell?

  Definitely not. No, one of the things I loathe about the right is the way that they've, they think that they own all of that sense of, you know, the military and war and fighting and fighting for values. Why, what I don't like about the debate about history is this sense that, you know, we have to, as the the statues thing sort of brought this home, you know, we have to, we have to apologize. We shouldn't necessarily apologize, but nor should we pretend that everything's been perfect, that we've always been this perfect country. And this thing about make Britain great again is all about going back to something that we've allegedly lost. Why do I, would I define myself as progressive rather than conservative? Because you want to progress, you want to improve

• 35:27Alastair Campbell?

  from everything that's gone before. So, no, I I think history is incredibly important. So I, I don't know really why. I mean, you sort of, you threw the question at me. I had no idea it was coming. So I thought I did quite well for my sixty minutes. If I had a few minutes, Roy, I'd have made it much.

• 35:42Rory Stewart?

  You, you would have done better. Yeah.

• 35:43Alastair Campbell?

  I thought you were a bit policy heavy.

• 35:45Rory Stewart?

  It's a bit policy heavy.

• 35:46Alastair Campbell?

  Um. So what's happening, Sajid Javid explained it really well this morning. He's been, he's been involved in this with Brendan Cox, is that you record a sixty second voice note saying what you want your community to feel like to be, et cetera.

• 35:59Rory Stewart?

  Hopefully with a bit more preparation than you and me.

• 36:01Alastair Campbell?

  With more preparation, you could even write it.

• 36:02Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 36:03Alastair Campbell?

  And it then goes into some sort of amazing AI thing, and out of that will come a kind of assessment of what people mean by community. And if you want to take part, which we encourage you all to do, then just go to the link in the episode description.

• 36:19Rory Stewart?

  And it's really interesting. We, again, I keep plugging back leading, but Audrey Tang, who was the AI minister in Taiwan, used a lot of AI to do government and consultations. And it's been done to local level at American towns by MES. I think we may find that actually it produces surprisingly interesting things, not boiled down platitudes. But actually, I'm quite confident that these models will produce things which might be quite powerful for politicians.

• 36:47Alastair Campbell?

  Okay, good. And by the way, we're coming up to the

• 36:51Rory Stewart?

  10th anniversary.

• 36:52Alastair Campbell?

  10th anniversary, because we're also coming up to the 10th anniversary of the referendum.

• 36:56Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 36:57Alastair Campbell?

  Which is why, sorry to sort of keep poking Nigel Farage, I thought it was disgusting when he was arguing that these five million pounds was given for his security, when he said he's been the, he's the most attacked politician in the UK, right? Joe Cox was attacked to the point of death. David Amos was attacked to the point of death. So I'll just leave that there. But the, so, so what Joe Cox's politics is all about, and what Kim is trying to do, and what Brendan is trying to do, is this sense that there's more that unites us than divides us. So I think, I guess that's the big point. Where do we find the things that unite us? So on the radio this morning, when I was heading into the studio, they were interviewing people somewhere about, you know, whether

• 37:42Alastair Campbell?

  we can unite, whether we feel more divided. I can't believe that every single person they spoke to said yes to that question. But every single person that was on said yes to that.

• 37:50Rory Stewart?

  So we're more united?

• 37:52Alastair Campbell?

  We're more divided.

• 37:52Rory Stewart?

  We're more divided.

• 37:53Alastair Campbell?

  We're more divided. There's more hate.

• 37:54Rory Stewart?

  Well, it is, it's, but part of it is social media. So we should lean into this a bit more. So question from Jenny, which I'm going to use for a massive tilt to link what you just said to what I want to talk about. She said, why don't you talk more about demography and birth rates? There was an amazing article by John Burns Murdoch in the FT, who does this stuff on data. And he was looking at the collapse in birth rates. So I was teasing Elon Musk about this before the break. But one of the big questions is why are birth rates collapsing all over the world, right? You know, often in some countries, we're down to children having on average a quarter of a child, right? Whole populations are vanishing. South Korea, Japan's collapsing, right?

• 38:36Rory Stewart?

  And there are big ideas, you know, is it affordability? People can't afford to set up a home. And of course, what he points out is that can't really explain it because it's happened so quickly. So here's the key data point. If you compare how quickly you get four G and then five G coverage and the internet and connects it to falling birth rates, there is a direct correlation. As soon as people get on the internet and on their phone, they stop dating, stop going out, meeting anyone, stop having kids.

• 39:01Alastair Campbell?

  But I saw the whole thing about, I thought people were dating all the time by using that.

• 39:06Rory Stewart?

  No, it, all the data suggests that actually what you're doing is you're sitting on your phone, uh, scrolling around when you could be going out, socializing, going on dates, meeting new people and getting new friends. And it's really interesting because it's too sudden, the collapse in childbearing to have anything to do with long-term socioeconomic causes. It's one of the other things for which this machine should be blamed.

• 39:30Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 39:30Rory Stewart?

  And polarization, obviously, which is where you began, is the most dramatic example of talk because these are algorithms of division. They get us all going by winding us up. So we're all seeing images of people picking up crosses, marching on Trafalgar Square, and we're either picking it up because we love it or we hate it.

• 39:47Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 39:48Rory Stewart?

  But it's polarizing us and the division between young women and young men, which is exploding around the world. Well, another reason apparently why they're not dating is young women are increasingly left wing, young men are increasingly right wing, and it's driven by what they see on their phones.

• 40:01Alastair Campbell?

  A lot of these sort of, you know, masculine influences so-called, they are driving men to hate women. You know, misogyny is on the rise in part because that thing, you're absolutely right, by the way, we're going to look back on this as one of the worst social experiments of all time.

• 40:13Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 40:14Alastair Campbell?

  Just, I'll just explain to you, um, the AFD in Germany.

• 40:18Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 40:18Alastair Campbell?

  They say that the low birth rate has been caused by sexual deviation and non-reproductive lifestyles. That is why they intend to ban gay pride flags. So there you go.

• 40:31Rory Stewart?

  Well.

• 40:31Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 40:32Rory Stewart?

  Well, that, yeah, that's, that's tells you a lot about the AFD. There is essentially no empirical data whatsoever to back that up in any way.

• 40:41Alastair Campbell?

  China, China's birth rate is a real problem. Famously, they had the one child policy. And then they realized the birth rate was, um, a problem. So they then said you can have more children, but it's not happening. And thirty-two percent of Chinese people aged eighteen to twenty-four, that's one in three, say they have no desire to have children. In 2012, it was 5%.

• 41:07Rory Stewart?

  So there we are. Okay, that's it, right?

• 41:09Alastair Campbell?

  So when was the iPhone?

• 41:11Rory Stewart?

  Well, exactly. What's changed from 2012 to 2026? It's not. That's a very short period of time historically. Yes, there are big socioeconomic things, but a change that rapid has to be about social media and technology. Well, Alistair, listen, we've covered a lot today, as usual. We've done China and CB. We didn't get on to Russia-Ukraine, which I think we should talk about next week, but we've done the China Xi Jinping Trump visit. We've done Ebola, World Health Organization funding. We've done community. We've done social media and demographic birth rates. Thank you very much indeed.

• 41:45Alastair Campbell?

  I've got, can I just read out, though, the question that I've only just noticed, but maybe we can come to next week when we talk about Russia-Ukraine. Matthew, Trip Plus member from Billingham. I recently watched a documentary that Alistair featured in. It was a clip of Tony Blair and Alistair meeting Putin. I saw that Alistair shook his hand. Questioned both the Rory the Tory and to Alistair. Who is the most evil person you've shook hands with? So we'll both think about that.

• 42:11Rory Stewart?

  We'll both think about that next week. Well, thank you very much. See you soon.

• 42:13Alastair Campbell?

  See you soon.

• 42:14Rory Stewart?

  Bye bye.