226. Question Time: Google vs OpenAI, the new Portuguese populist, and why do dictators hold elections?

What happened with Google's AI chatbot 'Gemini' this week? Should incarcerated people have the right to vote? What is the point of dictators like Vladimir Putin or Ayatollah Ali Khamenei holding elections? Rory and Alastair answer all these questions and more in this week's Question Time. TRIP Plus: Become a member of The Rest Is Politics Plus to support the podcast, receive our exclusive newsletter, enjoy ad-free listening to both TRIP and Leading, benefit from discount book prices on titles mentioned on the pod, join our Discord chatroom, and receive early access to live show tickets and Question Time episodes. Just head to therestispolitics.com to sign up, or start a free trial today on Apple Podcasts: apple.co/therestispolitics. Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @RestIsPolitics Email: [email protected] Producers: 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/restorspolitics. That's nordvpn.com/restorspolitics. And the link is in the episode description.

• 1:06Speaker 02

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• 2:09Alastair Campbell?

  Welcome to the Rest is Politics question time with me, Alastair Campbell.

• 2:12Rory Stewart?

  And me Rory Stewart.

• 2:14Alastair Campbell?

  Now Rory, you're interested in this and you understand more about it than I do. So let me kick off with one for you. Jason Palmar, Google's AI Gemini has proven very divisive with its altered history. Do you think these AI large language models from Google, OpenAI and X will have a positive, neutral or negative impact on the 2024 elections here and around the world?

• 2:33Rory Stewart?

  Well, let me first do Google Gemini and then I'll hand to you on elections. So story basically is that OpenAI released in November 22 and now has a very close relationship with Microsoft. And all the time while OpenAI was bringing together this amazing thing, ChatGPT, that everybody's been using, Google was developing its own model and it was slow to get it out. And there was huge recrimination because basically OpenAI launched, got 100 million users very, very quickly. And Google felt slow and behind the curve. Finally, it released a product called Bard, which was pretty underwhelming. And when it was released, there was a drop in the Google share price. It then spent nearly a year scratching its head and has just released in February Gemini,

• 3:19Rory Stewart?

  which was its new improved version, which was supposed to challenge ChatGPT. And the scandal that immediately broke out is that the guardrails put around it, the way in which it had been protected, meant that if you asked for an image of a medieval British king or a pope, it would show an African American. If you asked for an image of a German soldier during the Second World War, it would show black people in Nazi uniforms. When it was asked, who was worse Elon Musk or Adolf Hitler?

• 3:57Rory Stewart?

  It said, well, that's a very difficult question to answer because Elon Musk has sent some quite offensive tweets. And on the other hand, Adolf Hitler did kill millions of people. And when asked whether it would be okay to misgender Caitlyn Jenner in order to avert a thermonuclear war, it said, under no conditions can you misgender Caitlyn Jenner. So in other words, the scandal was that there is what people have referred to as sort of extreme woke setting. And it led essentially to the product being withdrawn, Google's share price again dropping, and huge recriminations within Google, leaving ChatGPT with a pretty open field at the moment, as people struggle to develop challenges. Over to you on what

• 4:41Rory Stewart?

  impact you think any of these AI platforms might have on elections.

• 4:45Alastair Campbell?

  I think they're already having an impact. And the truth is that we don't, we don't necessarily know what it is, because a lot of it is happening away from the public gaze. But I'd be, look, we, this is going to be the first election year where AI is a kind of a factor in these elections. And it's happening at a time when, you know, in many of the countries that are holding elections, we don't have necessarily politicians who will want to sort of stand up against this together. We have a lot of politicians who are going to, are going to use and abuse any possible opportunity that they, that they have. So I think that there will be an impact. As to whether it's positive, neutral

• 5:28Alastair Campbell?

  or negative, I suspect unless it's all done out in the open, it will, it will be negative.

• 5:32Rory Stewart?

  It will be negative, won't it? And we, we've talked about this a little bit, haven't we? The, that I, I remember, you know, I particularly talked about my experience running to be Mayor of London and seeing these companies come and pitch me on all the tricks they could get up to with social media, and all they'd done for elections in the past. And the sense that if you're really behind in the polls, or you're not even behind, but really struggling to win an election, the temptation. If somebody comes along and offers some fancy AI package as a way of negative campaigning against your opponent, besmirching them, or developing your own group of fanatical supporters, it'll be very tempting for people to say yes. And we are in this, not just the big year of elections, we're in this absolutely

• 6:16Rory Stewart?

  critical year between the moment where AI has been developed and the moment where regulation will actually come into force. Real regulation on AI is not likely to come into force till 2025. So this is almost the worst possible year for this stuff.

• 6:29Alastair Campbell?

  Well, and also, if you think that, one of the panels I was at at the Adelaide Festival, there was, somebody was speaking about this issue in relation to the American election. If you think that Trump has been able to persuade, kind of roughly sort of four out of 10 Americans, that something which you and I know to be completely untrue, namely, the election was stolen from him, just by the sheer force of his kind of communication skills and personality and endless repetition through social media and so forth, he's been able to have that level of persuasion. What these large language models give you is the ability to do, the elements of persuasion that you're using them are done on a completely different scale.

• 7:09Rory Stewart?

  And with a much more personalized, much more precise, you can really tailor the conspiracy theory to the individual. You can adapt and create a huge, I mean, Yuval Noherari, who we interviewed on Leading, says AI is the perfect way of creating a sort of QAnon conspiracy to the power of a thousand. And QAnon being this conspiracy that kind of links Hillary Clinton to child sex abuse and all this kind of stuff in that, which is important in bits of the far right in the States. But ChatGPT can really generate conspiracy theories because it will know for each individual what our vulnerabilities are, what kind of weird information and footnotes we'd like to convince ourselves of it.

• 7:49Alastair Campbell?

  I heard, my favorite German podcast, Achim Leaden, this year, this week, they were talking about Chinese cyber hacking and all these major, major private companies that are basically engaged in, you know, stuff that we would define as espionage. But they're sort of doing it as private companies, but they're doing it as it were on, as patriots on behalf of the, of the state. And interestingly, I, before I came out to Australia, I was speaking at the launch of this thing, the Soft Power Index, and US is still number one, UK is number two, but the big shift has been China. Displacing Japan and Germany, and this is a big, big survey around the, done around the world of how other, people in other countries see every country in the world.

• 8:34Alastair Campbell?

  And what's interesting, I think, is that, and this is what we talked to Jamie Rubin about, is that essentially the, the success of China's diplomatic rise, which we argue would be related more to soft power, actually is a form of hard power because they're using a lot of this, you know, very modern systematic propagandizing for their own policies and values and against those of America and the other democracies. And it shows that, that this showed to me that it's, that it's having an effect, that you'd think that the, the sort of sense of China around the world maybe wasn't that positive, but it's actually they're going up while Japan and Germany are going down.

• 9:12Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, and really investing, I mean, all these countries investing strongly in traditional media, I mean, in foreign language broadcasting, but as long ago as 2017, an investigation in the US suggested that China employed between 50 and 100,000 personnel in the government just to do cyber attacks and cyber warfare. And AI essentially provides the potential to mount those attacks far, far more quickly to learn from every attack what defeated it and to adapt and do it again. And, and it'll also change the shape of politics because we haven't begun to talk enough on the podcast, but just the profound implication on employment, just all the jobs which are going to be replaced by AI.

• 9:56Rory Stewart?

  Just to give, you know, one, one small example, we often talk about the obvious places, so, you know, software development is now takes 95% less time than it used to. So you'd either employ one twentieth the number of software developers or you'd make 20 times as much software. Call centers will go, but it, but it's also things like, um, Shishana's working, as you know, in Afghanistan on doing traditional craft stuff and.

• 10:21Rory Stewart?

  There's not much use anymore for shooting shots for interior design or fashion magazines in the way that you used to with studios and photographers, because actually the AI can now simply generate itself the images that you need for your brochures. Whole elements to creative industry are going to go very quickly. And the implications for developing new drugs, new medicines, because AI will be able to experiment with different chemical formula far more quickly than anything in the past. But not just drugs and organic chemistry, but also inorganic. It'll be able to generate new materials, both negatively, you know, new weapons, positively, new materials that could be lifesaving.

• 11:02Alastair Campbell?

  Now, maybe related to the whole misuse of these new technologies. Portuguese far-right Marcos Reid, what do you make of Andre Ventura and the Chega party in Portugal? Is this yet another European country where the far-right are on the rise? Well, he does seem to be. This is this guy Ventura, 41, pretty colourful past. And this is an election in Portugal caused by the resignation of the... We'd just been talking about how he was sort of bucking the trend on all the difficulties that most European leaders were facing, but Antonio Costa resigned over a corruption scandal. He wasn't personally necessarily the central, but he felt he had to take the responsibility. He's resigned, they've got an election, and at the moment Chega, which is Portuguese for

• 11:47Alastair Campbell?

  enough, are riding pretty well, they're in third place in the polls, and using a lot of the right-wing tactics that we've seen.

• 11:56Rory Stewart?

  Well, the amazing thing about it is that I was on record on the podcast saying that I thought Portugal was the exception to populism in Europe. And partly because Portuguese population's traditionally much more relaxed about immigration. I mean, there've been polls suggesting 80% of the Portuguese population in favour of immigration, complete outlier in Europe, and it hasn't really had a populist tradition since the 1970s, since its democracy got going, since the Salazar dictatorship went. And suddenly this thing has emerged. So he founded the party in 2019, he had 1.9% of the vote then, by 2022, 7.3%. Now it looks like he's going to be getting over 20% of the vote, so that's from a standing start.

• 12:39Rory Stewart?

  In four years and, you know, he's Christian, anti Islamist, eurosceptic, part of this international group. I mean, he's reaching out to Matteo Salvini in Italy and it's really making me think that no country is really immune from this. And I'm afraid Ireland too, where we also, you know, often partly because you're very fond of Ireland and I really enjoyed going to Ireland with you, praise its politics, praise its sort of apparently sensible moderate politicians. But there too, Sinn Féin, which is very much a pretty radical populist party, is on the rise and looks like it could well sweep these guys aside in the next election.

• 13:18Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, I wonder whether, we've talked before about Morgan McSweeney, who's running Labour's strategy and he keeps sending these graphs around to candidates and campaigners which show how volatile polls can be. I don't know if you can see Rory, that's a tracking poll on the Portuguese scene. And if you can see the line there of the Socialist Party, since the scandal, it's gone down and down and down and down. And it hasn't really been at the benefit of the main Conservative opposition. It's the Chega line that is going up and up and up and up. So yeah, Portugal, one to watch. Rory, what about this one? Giving the vote to prisoners, Mrs H. I've just, she's obviously a teacher. I've just taught my year 12 politics class about extending the franchise and particularly

• 14:01Alastair Campbell?

  giving the vote to prisoners. And I said I'd ask, do you think this should be considered? And if so, why?

• 14:07Rory Stewart?

  100%. I have always thought the prisoners should vote. I believe everybody should have the vote. And I think one of the reasons is that our conditions in prisons are disgusting and inhumane. And if prisoners don't vote, you're removing one of the main mechanisms for accountability to make politicians focus on those conditions. I never understood it. I mean, David Cameron was completely against votes for prisoners and said, I think in the House of Commons that he was kind of sickened to his heart because the European Court of Human Rights was suggesting that prisoners should have the vote. I don't get it. I don't get why any citizen should be deprived of the vote.

• 14:44Alastair Campbell?

  But I agree. I think part of what prisons are meant to be is about, you know, trying to rehabilitate, trying to get people who will at least think about reintegrating into society when they get out. And the other thing is, you know, prisons have a lot of time on their hands. And I've been in prisons where you could have some really interesting conversations about politics. So no, I'd be with you on that. And given that, you know, the numbers aren't so large that you, you know, you're not going to have an election that is at work swung by the convict vote. But I can see why. I don't know why David Cameron felt so strongly. Probably just felt that there'd be a kind of horrible right wing reaction against him, against him if he even thought about doing it.

• 15:24Rory Stewart?

  Donna Mooney, following up on this, prisons.

• 15:26Alastair Campbell?

  Go on.

• 15:26Rory Stewart?

  Can you please discuss IPP prison sentences? Lords will be demating amendments. The victims in prison have been on the 12th of March, decide which ones should go forward. One of the things we'll be highlighting to them is that there have been nine suicides by those serving IPP last year in prison, the highest number ever since the IPP was introduced. So just to remind people of this, this is this absolutely barbaric system, which was introduced, I'm afraid, by David Blunkett under New Labour, and which although the Conservatives stopped sending people convicting them, they haven't released the people under these sentences. These are indefinite sentences. So somebody could have committed a pretty minor crime. And then they're put away, or were put away indefinitely. And when they're

• 16:10Rory Stewart?

  released, they can be recalled at almost any time for a minor breach. And the impact on mental health is very extreme, hence the nine suicides. And we really should, all parties, be committing to getting rid of these sentences. The reason why it doesn't happen is ministers are always scared that one of these people may go on and commit some crime and then they'll be accused of it. Given that this former sentencing hasn't happened for 14 years, we should deal with the historical injustice.

• 16:43Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, I don't disagree with any of that. Okay, Rory, loads more questions to come. Let's have a quick break.

• 16:50Speaker 02

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• 18:52Alastair Campbell?

  PMQs twice a week. Max Pearson, do you think the House of Commons would be better off if PMQs was to return to twice a week? It would take away the need for politicians to use it as their only chance to get a good headline and maybe increase proper scrutiny. I guess I should take that on because of course it was Tony Blair who persuaded Betty Boothroyd, then Speaker of the House, that we should move from two 15 minute sessions a week to one half an hour session. And the thinking genuinely was that 15 minutes wasn't very long and also it did tie up the diary for two days and with all the preparation time and so forth. But you know, here in Australia, it's the same, I think, in Ireland. They have question time every day that Parliament's sitting and the whole Cabinet sits there

• 19:36Alastair Campbell?

  and has to take questions. It's a very, you know, it's a really, really time consuming thing. But what do you think? Did you ever think Prime Minister's Questions was anything other than a bit of a pantomime?

• 19:46Rory Stewart?

  So I wanted really strongly, I don't count it as once a week or twice a week, but I really wanted a strong distinction between what I'd like, which was a serious national, international PMQs, divided from would the Prime Minister please congratulate my local football team on their fantastic performance or say hello to the primary school in my constituency. I got so cross about that. You know, you turn up thinking there's some massive national or international scandal and all you get is, right horrible member would like to know that I visited Twiddle Dum's pet home in my constituency last week and Snooki the Spaniel wanted to say hello. And then the Prime Minister will be like, please give my very best to Snooki the Spaniel. So I'd like to see Keir Starmer say, okay,

• 20:31Rory Stewart?

  let's, we can have one week where you're allowed to do press releases for your constituency of that sort, and then another week where you're only allowed to ask serious questions or we'll boo you.

• 20:40Alastair Campbell?

  Um. It's what you know what's really interesting in I was I watched Question Time in the Australian Parliament the other day. And so they have the chamber sort of different to ours. The speaker sits down. He he doesn't sort of jump up and down. There's a lot of sledging. It's it's less noisy than the House of Commons, but there's a lot of sledging going on. You know, sort of insults, you know, like insults flying around and the speaker gives this constant running commentary. And I will remember that's a warning. That's a warning. One more time and you're out. And that's all going all the time. Meanwhile, the Prime Minister, the Prime Minister sits at one side of a table, the leader of the opposition, Dutton, sits at the other. They're there just for the whole thing. It goes on for ages.

• 21:21Alastair Campbell?

  And they and the the MPs can ask questions of any minister who's in the House. So they all sort of troop up. The Prime Minister doesn't actually answer that many questions. But the other thing that goes on is on the Labour side and and I've I'm I'm I'm seeing some of the Prime Minister's team tomorrow. And I'm going to say it honestly, they they all they do is these kind of, you know. Uh. My question is for the Minister for Work and or Minister of Employment. What will the Albanese tax programme do to benefit the women in my constituency? And then the minister, the minister stands up and says, well, I know she cares about this issue because the reason she won her seat is she campaigned so hard on this issue. She really cares for the people, their jobs, et cetera. And what our tax cutting agenda is going to do is da da da da.

• 22:04Alastair Campbell?

  And then the other side, the other side, they had a they had a message that they wanted to get over. They've got this campaign going, which is, I'm afraid, it looks to me like a bit opposed to truth. But they're basically saying that it's back onto the kind of net zero stuff, that that the government is going to force up the price of a Toyota or a Hyundai or so and so. So they all get up and ask the same question. Very good climate change minister, I have to say. He got up and sort of smacked them all around the place. But it's just sort of, I after a while, I was thinking, God, is it like this every day? So I asked some of the MPs, is it like this every day? And they said, yeah, it is.

• 22:41Alastair Campbell?

  So definitely not, not every day. Like we're doing, I mean, once a week, twice a week, but please not every day.

• 22:46Rory Stewart?

  No, no, I think they're so, they're absolutely, absolutely terrible. So why do dictators have elections? Chris Salmon, why do dictators like Putin feel the need to have general elections? Well, the, the first thing to say is that Putin came in with an election and usually with most authoritarian rulers, their first election is, is fairer than their later elections. But once you've come in, like it's pretty difficult to stop holding elections. When you keep rolling with them, even when you're pretty authoritarian, you do it partly because there is a shred of legitimacy. It's quite difficult to just refuse to have any elections at all. So let's shred of legitimacy. Gives you an opportunity to go out in public, the campaigning allows you to mobilize a bit of public support.

• 23:29Rory Stewart?

  Allows you to do a little bit to discredit and screw with the opposition. So you can usually use an election to disqualify opposition candidates, humiliate them in public. You can use it to split your own supporters in weird ways. But it's, it's not obviously about you risking losing power. It's about you doing a sort of strange pantomime bit of mobilization. But the thing that you mustn't, nobody must ever forget is that in a way, an authoritarian state is equally worried about public opinion because of course they're terrified about revolutions and koudetas. And so this is part of their general process of trying to make sure that they're not toppled.

• 24:08Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. And also, you know, we've just, one of the elections that we've had this week in, in Iran, which is a, you know, theocracy, a form of dictatorship. And it's interesting, even though, you know, the hardliners have won a massive majority, as was completely expected, because most of the people who weren't hardliners weren't allowed to run. But there was, the turnout was the lowest it's ever been, which of itself is quite interesting. So there is a significance to that. And also, there were apparently 5% of the ballot papers were spoilt, which again is sort of interesting.

• 24:43Rory Stewart?

  I'm glad you raised that. We should do a little bit on the Iranian elections because actually Iran is unusual there. The elections in Iran often do throw up strange things. And sometimes the clerics have been defeated and more liberal candidates have come through. I mean, every different regime has a different attitude towards these kinds of things and how much freedom they allow. And that's partly to do with how confident they're feeling. I mean, I remember when the Emerson Manungagwa, who took over from Mugabe in Zimbabwe, held his first elections, he was pretty confident that he was going to win, but he still really went out of his way to make sure that the opposition was disadvantaged in every way they possibly could be.

• 25:26Alastair Campbell?

  But I mean, the Iranian elections is interesting. So the president went out and talked, said thank you and said what a passionate turnout and said that the result was overwhelming, massive blow to opponents of the Islamic Republic. But then immediately, and even though, you know, you might worry, think that there's no freedom of speech and so forth, but there's this thing called the Reform Front Coalition, and they refused to take part in the election because they said it was utterly meaningless. And she, her line was that she hoped that the low turnout and the spoilt ballot papers were a lesson for the state. And she talked about a silent majority that is not happy with what's happening in the country. So it was, I guess, you know, the question is right

• 26:09Alastair Campbell?

  that there's a pointlessness on one level, just that it takes, certainly when we see Putin's election. I mean, he will have all the panoply of a normal election. He'll have rallies, he'll have, you know, he'll probably throw up some puppet to have a debate with. He'll pretend to be questioned by sort of independent media. And it'll just be a pantomime, but and then he'll win and the world will move on. But I think actually what's happened in Iran in recent days is is more significant just than the oh, look, they won because they were always going to. What about this one, Rory? Mark, does Ofcom need reforming?

• 26:40Rory Stewart?

  Well, we know what you think about that one. And I think what part of this is is about the story around GB News. So can I tell us, tell us about your views on GB News and Ofcom?

• 26:49Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I don't really like talking about GB News because I think on one level they're absurd, but I I think I think they are. They are part of the undermining of the democratic institutions on which our democracy depends. And, you know, we always prided ourselves. We used to look at American television and think, you know, at least we're never going to go down that track. And they're taking us down that track, but they're only doing it because they can. They're doing it because the government is enabling them. You know, the fact that Jeremy Hunt, and as you said earlier, Jeremy Hunt's sort of one of the serious people, as it were. But, you know, he did his first big interview as Chancellor on GB News. You have Ofcom saying it's not a news channel and it's called GB News, for God's sake.

• 27:27Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. And the reason they say that is that that avoids them regulating, isn't it? If it's a news channel, it has to be regulated in a different way.

• 27:33Alastair Campbell?

  Exactly. So they they can pretend that it's something else. And, okay, it's not a news channel and it's not telling the news in the way that BBC, Sky, et cetera, do. But it is a news channel. It exists to.

• 27:42Rory Stewart?

  And it's also providing six hundred thousand pounds a year of salary increases to Tory MPs. So it's also a sort of strange way of providing subsidies to to Tory MPs who tend to be from the right of the party. Yeah.

• 27:55Alastair Campbell?

  Where it's positioning itself, and of course it has Farage on there as well, where it's positioning itself is assuming that Labour win and the Tories lose as a big player within the leadership contest to follow. So they're all sort of parading their goods on there. And we had a lot. We had a lot of feedback last week after the, we discussed very briefly Paul Marshall, the guy that's in, you know, one of the big, the big funders of this thing. And it is interesting, a bit like Lee Anderson, the, it's weird, isn't it, how the people who travel from left to right often are the kind of most dangerously anti-democratic people in the, in in their actions. So there's Anderson, who was kind of militant Labour, and he's now right out in the far right. And Paul Marshall, who wanted to be a Lib Dem MP, and now he's funding these things.

• 28:38Alastair Campbell?

  He's also, he's, he's involved in schools, he's involved in the church. You know, the, these are, these are people who operate under the radar. And I think we need to get them out above the radar so that people can really know who and what they are. So Ofcom, I don't know what they do. I don't know what Ofcom does, but it is clearly. Not operating in a way that it should be and it is not fit for purpose.

• 28:59Rory Stewart?

  And possibly, you know, one of the allegations in the past has been that it's sort of frightened and intimidated by government. Boris Johnson tried to leverage in your, your old friend, the editor of the Daily Mail as the head of Ofcom, didn't he, at one point?

• 29:10Alastair Campbell?

  And then the other person they had in mind was Charles Moore. I mean, you know, it's all part of this. And listen, the one thing the Tories and the right generally around the world have been very, very good at is getting the people that they want into places on quangos, onto commissions and so forth.

• 29:24Rory Stewart?

  So that's really interesting. So just, just on that one, I mean, it's, it was a very live issue when I was a Tory MP because of course what they felt was that Labour had been unbelievably good at getting everyone into the institutions.

• 29:35Alastair Campbell?

  I don't think we were. I think I, I sometimes felt we were far too sensitive.

• 29:39Rory Stewart?

  Oh, well, no, their sense, I remember, you know, people like Matt Hancock talked about this all the time. Their sense was that Labour had been brilliant at it and they would use this phrase, the march through the institutions, which I think is a Trotskyite phrase.

• 29:50Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, right. Well, God, I wish, I wish we had.

• 29:54Rory Stewart?

  And so you, you have this weird world where on the one hand, from your point of view, a lot of these institutions being taken over by right wingers, but of course for the real right, they think that everything from the BBC through to Ofcom or whatever are just run by a bunch of kind of soft lefties. So people like me are very much seen as kind of, you know, if, if I were ever to end up connected to one of these organisations, that would immediately be seen by the right. It's another part of the kind of betrayal to the kind of Blairite blob, which they think runs everything. Okay, aging population, David. With almost every issue in politics, we keep hearing that the aging population has or will have an effect. How big an issue is the aging population?

• 30:37Rory Stewart?

  Is it just a minor issue or is it a huge future issue? Nobody is really tackling it. It is the most enormous issue. I mean, in every conceivable way, you know, when Lloyd George started the old age pension, there was one retired person, I think for something like every 20 working people, there's now three working people for every one retired person. So that, that's the first way that it matters. There's fewer and fewer. Working people paying for older people. And as life expectancy increases, that's what puts the massive burden on the NHS. You know, NHS, somebody pointed out to us was, I think, twenty seven percent of the government budget when Gordon Brown came in and is now forty five percent of the government budget. And Sanjay Javid, in fact, pointed that out to me on leading.

• 31:22Alastair Campbell?

  We discussed this with Sanjay Javid and I think we were making the point that a lot of the reason why we were able as New Labour to get so much money into the health service was in part because the sort of defence peace dividend was playing out. And of course, that's going to be reversed. And the other thing, I just looked at, just after you read the question, where I looked up this, another graph for you to look at. There's a graph, there's the graph of the British, the UK birth rate. So it's gone from three in the mid sixties, late seventies, three births per woman, down to, you know, substantially now below two. So we're talking about fewer people being born and more and more people living to a

• 32:07Alastair Campbell?

  very, very old age with, often with very long term expensive healthcare issues.

• 32:15Rory Stewart?

  And increasingly dependent, obviously, therefore, on younger people to look after them, which, which means immigration and means bringing more people into the United Kingdom in order to do those jobs. And that, of course, touches on productivity because many of those people are coming to the UK as adults. So a lot of the models that we have around the fact that education, vocational training is going to define the new generation may not be true because some people may be coming with that. Housing, again, the old people tend to earn the houses, the young people don't. Voting, old people vote much more, as you keep pointing out, young people don't vote very much, so the politics is skewed.

• 32:52Alastair Campbell?

  Another reason why we should have compulsory voting. Sanjay Javid was pretty clear on the health question, wasn't he? He, he was, I was quite surprised by how kind of out there he was about it, that essentially he thought that the The NHS, the current funding model was going to have to change. And I, I wonder whether he thought there was a sort of Nixon goes to China sense of he thinks that maybe only Labour government could do that.

• 33:14Rory Stewart?

  Well, it would be amazing, wouldn't it? I mean, one of the things he suggested, which I'm completely obsessed with, is the idea of Keir Starmer coming in and setting up a proper cross-party independent commission on the NHS, which could come up with some ideas which could last beyond parties and beyond governments, because it really needs to be taken out of the political sphere. It needs to be sorted for 10 or 20 years. There have been, as you can imagine, hundreds of papers written about what to do about the NHS. We've got very, very clear ideas on what kind of things need to happen, but there's just a total lack of political courage to drive it through, because everybody's worried that the other political party is going to stab them in the back if they try.

• 33:56Alastair Campbell?

  Now, what about this one, Rory? Maybe, maybe we can have a guessing game on this one. This is from Andy Jennings. My local MP is increasingly impressive on global and national issues, but is very weak as a constituency MP. How do I handle this ahead of the general election? Who do you think that is then? Somebody, because there are that many.

• 34:13Rory Stewart?

  It's George, it's George Galloway, isn't it?

• 34:15Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, get lost, get lost. I mean, who can we know who's increasingly impressive on global and national issues?

• 34:22Rory Stewart?

  So the Conservative Party, of course, we sort of tend to think of people like Tobias Elwood doing a lot of stuff on foreign issues, but I don't know whether that, I'm sure he'd say that he's a good local constituency MP.

• 34:31Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. But I think, Andy, you have to name names on that one. Write us, send us another question next week and, and tell us who we're talking about. Then we can make a, a judgment. But my general advice, Andy, would be to, if it's a Conservative, vote whoever's closest likely to win. And if it's a, a Labour MP, just, well, you know, just focus on the fact that they're increasingly impressive.

• 34:54Alastair Campbell?

  And vote Labour, surely.

• 34:57Rory Stewart?

  Okay, final question, I think, for me. As we wait for the Academy Awards, what were your 2023 favourite movies? So my favourite one, which I raised yesterday, but I've just been re-watching, is this amazing documentary on Otto Baxter, not an effing horror movie, which is directed and written by somebody with Down Syndrome.

• 35:17Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, yeah. And is that up for any awards?

• 35:20Rory Stewart?

  I don't know if it's any for awards, no, I don't know what it is. But it's just mesmerising that Otto Baxter himself is just such a strange, attractive, challenging character. It's so moving about his relationship with his birth mother, who gave him away for adoption, how he thinks about that. And it's really moving and wonderful.

• 35:39Alastair Campbell?

  But just before I reveal my Oscar choices, we got a lot of feedback from our brief discussion last week about, you were talking about your sister with Down Syndrome and other special educational needs. And I don't know if you noticed, David Davis had a huge piece in The Sun on this very issue, which actually I thought was was pretty impressive and helpful. And also, I've talked before about, in fact, the woman who asked the question last week, Sam Carlisle, she bumped into Ed Balls at the House of Commons and said, you know, you lot don't do enough about Good Morning Britain, you don't do enough about special educational needs. And fair play to Ed. Within a couple of days, there was a there was a big thing there. Because I do think it's an issue that doesn't get nearly enough, nearly enough attention.

• 36:22Alastair Campbell?

  It won't win, because I think Oppenheimer is going to win. But I think Anatomy of a Fall should sweep the board at the Oscars. That, to me, was the most impressive film last year.

• 36:33Rory Stewart?

  Great. Well, Alison, I think on that, we should call it a wrap. And thank you very much.

• 36:37Alastair Campbell?

  See you soon.

• 36:38Rory Stewart?

  Bye bye.

• 37:04Speaker 07

  We assess, uh, Prime Minister... With high confidence, it was... Russian.

• 37:10Speaker 08

  Holding the Russians accountable is World War III.

• 37:12Speaker 09

  They took down a British passenger jet containing 350 people.

• 37:16Speaker 10

  Man in the Kremlin is playing, Alex. Got to ask yourself, do you want to play? Or not? You're the Prime Minister. You've done... Nothing!

• 37:29Speaker 11

  We would need to understand the policy context.

• 37:31Speaker 10

  All the relevant context will be structured as a framework today. And disseminated into an operation order. Or Frago.

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• 37:44Speaker 10

  Yes.

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