76. Question Time: Food banks, ageing populations, and 'virtue signalling'

Can cabinet ministers be charged for economic mismanagement? How will low birth rate affect the economy? Do Rory and Alastair really travel for weeks at a time with just hand luggage? Join us for this week's Question Time episode where Rory and Alastair answer all these questions and more. Become a member of The Rest Is Politics Plus to support the podcast, enjoy ad-free listening, and receive early access to live show tickets and Question Time episodes. Just head to therestispolitics.com to sign up. Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @RestIsPolitics Email: [email protected] 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.

• 1:13Rory Stewart?

  Hello, welcome to the Rest is Politics Question Time with me, Rory Stewart.

• 1:17Alastair Campbell?

  And me, Alastair Campbell.

• 1:19Rory Stewart?

  And tomorrow, Friday, the 18th of November, 9am, is the general sale for tickets to our Christmas live show at the Royal Albert Hall on Tuesday, the 13th of December. As usual, I'm afraid these tickets can go very fast, so do please sign up quickly. The link for the tickets is in the description of this podcast. And we'll also tweet it from the Rest is Politics Twitter account at 9am tomorrow morning, Friday, 18th of November. Right then, what's the first question, Alastair?

• 1:47Alastair Campbell?

  The first question, Rory, is do you think that we can fill the Albert Hall? I'm panicking already.

• 1:52Rory Stewart?

  I'm panicking a little bit too. We may have overreached ourselves. We had a moment where we thought we could do Wembley Stadium and now we're thinking it's just going to be a bit embarrassing. It'll just be my, my mother and your, your son sitting in the

• 2:03Alastair Campbell?

  Is your, is your mother coming?

• 2:05Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, she'll definitely come down and I hope your Rory will be there. So at least we'll have two people.

• 2:09Alastair Campbell?

  Can't she bring a bus down from Crete or something like that?

• 2:11Rory Stewart?

  She can definitely bring a bus down from Crete. I think that's good.

• 2:14Alastair Campbell?

  Now, first question, we sort of touched on this yesterday, but given that it was a question from one of our wonderful listeners, Shannon Kyle. If Trusson Quateng's economic policies caused thirty billion pounds' worth of the current black hole in finances, shouldn't there be a charge of misconduct in public office? What does someone have to do in order for this charge to be brought? Or is it now meaningless?

• 2:37Rory Stewart?

  Well, certainly you can't be, you can't be sent to jail for, for economic mismanagement. And, and I guess if one was going to be cheeky, which obviously I would never be, I think, let me just put it on the record. I think Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng's decision was absolutely catastrophically disastrous. And Gordon Brown was a much more responsible chancellor than they were. But if you were a Tory, you might point out that Gordon Brown's sale of the gold reserves probably lost the country about nine billion pounds too. And nobody's suggesting that should send him to jail.

• 3:07Alastair Campbell?

  Right. So if we're now, we're now into economic tennis. I, I will hit back. The debt losses under Rishi Sunak, and I think I might, with Hancock's eating his worms and his rats and whatever else he's doing in the jungle, I might throw back a bit of sort of multi-billion pound PPE fraud. So yeah, okay. That's your answer, Shannon. That's your answer.

• 3:28Rory Stewart?

  That's your answer. So Lisa Hinton, pretty straightforward. Can the UK government do anything to deter Iran from carrying out mass executions? Something we touched on Iran in the, in the last pod, but I suppose that's trying to tempt you into thinking more about the question of how much influence the world can have on human rights. And one of the things that I'm a bit gloomy about, I guess, and I think the world has changed a lot since the nineties and 2000s, is that liberal values, democracy, human rights, even openness to immigration, which we used to see as universal and which our governments and our people were happy to talk about more broadly, now seem to have become more insular, more contained in a single country. And people are much more reluctant to speak out. So

• 4:10Rory Stewart?

  do you think there is much the UK government can do to deter something like Iran from carrying out mass executions?

• 4:15Alastair Campbell?

  UK on its own, very little. UK as part of broader international partnership, and we talked yesterday about the UK and the EU putting new sanctions on in relation to the Iranian response. But I think we've got this, we're back to one of our regular points about the dividing line between democracies and the dictatorships. I don't think they really feel that heat without China indicating something other than support. I think we've seen the same with Putin. I think although President Xi was fairly measured and balanced in his meeting with Biden, I think Putin would look at his relationship with China

• 4:55Alastair Campbell?

  and say that was net gain for him in relation to his handling of Ukraine. So I think the short answer is not much, and that of course is very, very depressing. But the other thing, Rory, is that the reason why, I'm glad we've talked about this two successive days, you know, people used to talk about the CNN factor in global diplomacy, that issues which fell off the news radar, suddenly governments felt less pressure to maintain a stance and a position and at least addressing a problem. And I'm afraid, I think, for all the horrors that are happening in Iran at the moment, it's kind of dropped off the radar. And while it drops off the radar, governments feel less pressure.

• 5:35Rory Stewart?

  Well, this is general fatigue point, isn't it, which is horrifying. But I'm afraid the truth is that it's, I mean, I find this at the moment, trying to get people to focus on giving money to end extreme poverty, which was something that in the 90s was very, very central. Remember, there was the Millennium Development Goals, Sustainable Development Goals, we were going to end global extreme poverty. And now just sort of people wince away. When I put out a little tweet on it, 90% of the responses will be, we've got enough to worry about at home, we shouldn't be worrying about poor people abroad. And that extends to everything.

• 6:05Alastair Campbell?

  But that's a product of nationalism, isn't it? That's a product of people thinking that actually it's all about looking inside to our own affairs. Here's one, Rory, from Becky Canreiter.

• 6:14Rory Stewart?

  Oh, yes.

• 6:15Alastair Campbell?

  What is stopping the government from being honest with the public about the financial impact of Brexit? What is also preventing the Labour Party from doing the same? It feels criminal when some solutions to our financial woes can be found there. So what's your answer to that?

• 6:27Rory Stewart?

  Well, I guess we sort of know the answer because it's the same presumably for Keir Starmer as it is for Rishi Sunak. In both cases, Labour and Conservative calculate that a very important chunk of their voters that they're particularly fighting over these floating voters, the Red Wall voters up in former Labour seats in Northern England, are pro Brexit voters and they think that nothing would anger them more than saying that Brexit is responsible for all of the flaws that would remind them of what they saw as Project Fear in 2016, 2017. And it's interesting that Keir Starmer, I mean, Rishi was a Brexiteer, Keir Starmer wasn't, but even Keir Starmer's not prepared to do this.

• 7:08Alastair Campbell?

  And that's, you know, I think that Becky's question makes the observation. I mean, I was in the so-called Red Wall at the weekend, watching Burnley's wonderful hammering of Blackburn Rovers. And I can't pretend that I went around doing focus groups, but this idea that places like Burnley and Blackburn are monolithically full of people who are saying, if you dare mess around with my Brexit, the voices I hear there and elsewhere are, if there's a problem and you know that problem is damaging our standard of living and damaging our economy, you can't fix the problem until you've admitted the problem. And that's where we are with this. I mean, Hunt will do his statement on Thursday, okay? And even Hunt, who like you, like me, like Keir Starmer, voted Remain, Hunt all over

• 7:52Alastair Campbell?

  the airwaves at the weekend, saying, you know, Brexit's not doing any damage to the economy. He knows that's a complete fantasy. We're talking about 4% taking out the economy year on year on year on year, minimum.

• 8:03Rory Stewart?

  I agree. I'm absolutely with you. I think that it has done a lot of damage. I think that it wasn't even necessarily a binary choice between staying or leaving, although we would have done better economically to simply remain. But I also think that a form of customs union Brexit, which Theresa May was trying to push with a much closer relation to the European Union, would have been much, much less damaging economically, would have reassured manufacturers, markets, farmers, much more. And it's been made cruelly worse by things like the catastrophic Australia free trade deal, which I'm very pleased to see George Eustace, who was the former. Environment Secretary, Farming Secretary, who wasn't able to.

• 8:38Alastair Campbell?

  He might have said it when he was in the Cabinet, Rory. He might have said it when he was part of the negotiations.

• 8:42Rory Stewart?

  He did, I think, actually, to be fair to the poor man, I think he was horrified by it and argued very strongly against it then.

• 8:48Alastair Campbell?

  Well, he should have resigned. He should have resigned. I mean, I don't have that much respect for somebody who comes out and says, "The deal that I was prepared to stand by, the deal that I was prepared to support in Cabinet, now that I've left the Cabinet, I can tell you it was a terrible deal for Britain."

• 9:01Rory Stewart?

  Well, I guess the question for all these people, and I have some sympathy about this, but the question is, what is the issue over which you resign? So you're in the Cabinet and you choose your issue. In my case, I resigned over the bigger issue of Boris Johnson becoming Prime Minister and not wanting him to push ahead with this no-deal Brexit.

• 9:18Alastair Campbell?

  It's quite a big deal. If you're the guy whose department is in charge of farmers and you are now saying, "The deal that we did with Australia was a terrible deal for the people I represented," I don't have much respect for that.

• 9:31Rory Stewart?

  It's difficult, isn't it? You can see how people talk themselves around. I mean, look, I'm not trying to defend it, but you can imagine him having a conversation with his family and saying, "Well, yeah, if I go, it's gonna be even worse."

• 9:41Alastair Campbell?

  I can see that. I can see that. Well, Gillian Keegan.

• 9:44Rory Stewart?

  Oh, yes. Yeah, my friend Gillian Keegan. Great fan of Gillian Keegan. Yeah.

• 9:47Alastair Campbell?

  Right. Your friend Gillian Keegan, who I know you are well, I'm afraid, Rory, quite a few of our listeners are not as enamored. Kieran Cox, "Is Rory Stewart pleased with the way Gillian Keegan has started? I had very high hopes after his comments about her. I have been extremely underwhelmed after seeing her on the media." Marian McG, "I'd like to hear Rory's reaction to Gillian Keegan's appalling remarks about nurses and food banks and breakdown boilers after he said he raided her and would like to see her in the Cabinet." Now, in case you don't know, Rory, that's about an interview that she was doing.

• 10:20Rory Stewart?

  With Kay Burley. With Kay Burley, yeah. I watched it quite carefully because I've seen all this stuff on Twitter. So for people who haven't watched the Kay Burley clip, you can see it by typing Kay Burley Gillian Keegan in. Kay Burley asked Gillian, who's now the Secretary of State for Education, whether she clapped for nurses, and she said, "Yeah," she clapped for nurses. And then she's asked whether she thinks nurses should get a. Pay rise and then she's asked what she thinks about nurses going to food banks. And Jillian Keegan says firstly, she says, look, it's very difficult not to feel that nurses and doctors deserve pay rises.

• 11:00Rory Stewart?

  They do incredible heroic work, but she says there are over a million people in the NHS. And we also have to think about pay for carers and others. And I guess that's something I'd be interested in you as somebody who specialise in government and comms. What is she really supposed to say because she does not have the authority as the education secretary. It's very important to understand this, I think, cabinet responsibility. How angry you would have been if your education secretary had gone out,

• 11:27Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, yeah.

• 11:28Rory Stewart?

  unscripted on Kay Burley and said nurses need a pay rise.

• 11:31Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, but hold on, Ray, you're you're up to the point where she talked about respecting the nurses and the doctors. You kind of have to say that. I think a cabinet ministry went up and said, I don't respect nurses and doctors.

• 11:40Rory Stewart?

  No, no, no, no, no, no. The big thing I was pushing out, sorry, is you wouldn't have wanted an education secretary saying they deserve a pay rise. When she's not the health secretary and you're dealing with inflation.

• 11:49Alastair Campbell?

  Agreed. So she has to give the kind of general line on that. But she then went on to say that in her experience, when she's been visiting food banks, and the question was about nurses visiting food banks, it's usually it's about people who've got a broken down boiler or their relationship has broken down. It was just a weird, weird thing to say.

• 12:08Rory Stewart?

  It's a strange phrase, isn't it? So, so, yeah, so, so what, what, I, I, let me continue my defence. So what she says there is the average salary of nurses is about thirty three thousand pounds a year, which is not anything close to the minimum wage in Britain. So what she's answering is the question, why would somebody on an average income of thirty three thousand pounds a year be going to a food bank? And food banks are very, very different, different parts of the country, many different reasons why people go to food banks. And I went through this again and again, as you can imagine, as a Conservative MP. This is the standard question from many interviewers, many constituents, what's happening with food banks? The answer certainly when I was an MP is that the reason why most of the people are going to food banks is a temporary problem in their life.

• 12:53Rory Stewart?

  It's not fundamentally that their salary or in many cases benefits are inadequate, particularly with benefits that that are very, very bad breaks between people's benefits. Month delays where people are not getting the support they should and that's the government's fault and they should be sorting that out. But I also think it is probably true that if you're on an income of thirty three thousand pounds, then the reason you'd go to a food bank is because of some unexpected crisis or catastrophe in your family.

• 13:20Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm. Well, I thought it came across as being deeply lacking in political guile, skills and empathy.

• 13:27Rory Stewart?

  How would you have answered?

• 13:28Alastair Campbell?

  Well, probably much closer to how you just did. No, I think you just said, look, I've visited food banks, I've talked to people who visit food banks and all sorts of people and all sorts of backgrounds. But you wouldn't say, I mean, what she was basically saying, she was opening the door for her critics to say that she was disrespecting nurses. And I think that that was just a silly thing to say. So I guess I'd say I wouldn't have said that. I would have, I think, making the framing argument about nurses and about the respect and there are processes, that's all fine, even if it's a bit kind of political waffly. But I think you then go on to say, I'm not going to comment on every single person who visits every single food bank, I am saying, and you go back to your main point. I don't think it was, I just think she was very, very lucid language.

• 14:09Rory Stewart?

  Now, I was trying to think on that, we're supposed to go to a break and let's get back again soon.

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• 16:00Rory Stewart?

  Welcome back to the Rest is Politics Question Time with me Rory Stewart. I'm your host Campbell. Got his big question from Epu McConan. It's quite a, quite a big question, maybe it's unfair to throw it at you because it's it's an eight billion question. So cheekily repeating my question because Tuesday is eight billion. I think what he means is the world population hits eight billion on Tuesday. How do you think China is preparing for its population to probably halve in size during this century? Also, why do you think overall preparation for global aging is still such a blind spot? It will transform societies completely. So this is a really interesting thing, obviously in Japan's getting very old. Africa, on the other hand, one in 10 children born in the world will be born in Nigeria

• 16:42Rory Stewart?

  by 2050 and then places like Mali, average family size is seven. And on the other hand, in many European and developed countries, and including in China because of their one child policy, populations are about to crash, which will mean that you'll have, well, here's a little stat just before I turn to you for your answer. I believe when Lloyd George introduced the old age pension in Britain, there was something like 12 working people for every retired person. And today there are about two and a half working people for every retired person and it's going to drop down to two.

• 17:16Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I read some guy called Thomas Sabokka, who is from the Vienna, because I saw Elon Musk. I hate talking about Elon Musk because he just likes us to talk about him. But Musk is on record as saying population collapse due to low birth rate is now a bigger risk to civilisation than global warming, which is quite a big statement. This thing about halving of Chinese population, is that remotely right?

• 17:39Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, I think probably is true because the one child policy basically made, yeah, one child policy was very, very strictly enforced. So parents had one child and in many cases, very sadly, that became a male child because people found ways of getting rid of female children. So I would have thought that's probably right.

• 17:56Alastair Campbell?

  Okay, well, the Thomas Sabokka at the Vienna Institute of Demography says, even the most pessimistic projections put world population in 2100 at around 8.8 billion.

• 18:08Rory Stewart?

  Which is higher than it is today.

• 18:10Alastair Campbell?

  Which is higher than it is today, but it is not the explosion that we're talking about. So we've grown from a billion in 1800 to 7.9 billion in 2020, okay?

• 18:20Rory Stewart?

  And as our questioner points out, eight by Tuesday.

• 18:22Alastair Campbell?

  Right, so that is then going to carry on rising, but at a much slower rate. Now, are we, I guess what you're asking, Rory, is how bad does the state of the world have to become before it becomes politically acceptable to start talking about diminishing our global population? Is that what you're asking me?

• 18:43Rory Stewart?

  Well, I think it's actually very, I mean, it's very interesting. So I've generally been on the side that population is a bit, is damaging and damaging for the environment and that we can't sustain the levels of population growth that we have. And I've been actually quite impressed by how well Japan has dealt with the declining aging population. But it's certainly true that there are many people out there who do argue that this is very, very difficult and dangerous for our conscience. Because the point I was trying to make, I guess, about the young people supporting the old people is that you end up with a very few working people producing all the taxes, paying for an enormous number of retired people with very expensive medical needs. And that puts more and more of a burden on future generations. And that's where I think you have to hope robotics and AI are going to come in.

• 19:27Alastair Campbell?

  But are they going to make us live shorter or longer lives? They're going to make us live longer lives, adding to the burden, adding to the problem. How many of us today are going to live to a hundred? Back when, you know, when you and I were growing up, reaching a hundred was like a huge thing. It's now, it's not commonplace, but it's, it's kind of, it's not a massive event every time.

• 19:48Rory Stewart?

  Does that mean I'm going to have another 50 years of this podcast to go?

• 19:52Alastair Campbell?

  Well, that would mean that I'd be 115, which I think is, I think is probably pushing it. You're going to have to get another partner, Rory, at some point, but you know, that's just.

• 20:01Rory Stewart?

  Well, maybe I have to go to the next generation of Campbell's. Am I going to sign up with Grace or Rory?

• 20:06Alastair Campbell?

  You could do Rory and Rory. You could do Rory and Callum.

• 20:08Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 20:09Alastair Campbell?

  But we did have one question, actually, Rory, that said, if we didn't do this podcast with each other, who would we like to do it with? Yours has to be Labour and mine has to be Tory. You first.

• 20:20Rory Stewart?

  Oh, blimey, gosh. God, that's a really difficult question because it's got to be somebody who's got, where there's enough disagreement. I mean, I couldn't do it with someone like Tristram Hunt because I'd just be agreeing with him all the time. I need a bit, bit, bit of, bit of, bit of edge to the whole thing. Somebody keep me on my toes. Somebody have mocked me.

• 20:36Alastair Campbell?

  What about your friend Stephen Kinnock?

• 20:38Rory Stewart?

  Ste- well, but he, he and I agree too much. How about the Deputy Labour Leader? That could be the answer, couldn't it?

• 20:43Alastair Campbell?

  You and Angela?

• 20:44Rory Stewart?

  Angela, yeah.

• 20:45Alastair Campbell?

  That'd be good. That would be good. Yeah, that's good.

• 20:47Rory Stewart?

  You know, who, who would you choose as your Tory?

• 20:48Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I think I'd quite like to natter away with Ken Clark.

• 20:52Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, that'd be good.

• 20:53Alastair Campbell?

  He's even older than, than I am. Yeah, I think I'd go for Ken Clark.

• 20:59Rory Stewart?

  You need a bit more friction. I think you and Ken might agree too much.

• 21:02Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, okay. I maybe go, I'll tell you what, I might go for Johnny Mercer, actually.

• 21:06Rory Stewart?

  You and Johnny Mercer, that could be the one, couldn't it?

• 21:09Alastair Campbell?

  We do disagree. We do, we do disagree about quite a lot.

• 21:12Rory Stewart?

  You know, I think a better show, though, I'm, I'm with you that you want to do Johnny Mercer, but I think a better show is you and George Osborne. Right now, here we are, or you and Michael Gove. Here we are. I've got Johnny sells hand luggage only for weeks on end, wearing suits. I mean, how? Hand washing every night in the sink, plus laptops, books, and then Emma Gletto. And hand luggage is more difficult for women who need to carry their makeup and wear it to be deemed properly groomed. Hand luggage is then difficult with the restrictions on liquids. So what do you say about all that?

• 21:41Alastair Campbell?

  Well, first of all, about a suit, okay. The maximum number of suits you ever need to take to any other country is two. You take them in a suit carrier. Okay.

• 21:51Rory Stewart?

  Very good.

• 21:52Alastair Campbell?

  You have a suit carrier which you clip over your moderately sized wheelie bag and you get on the plane, you smile nicely at the steward or stewardess and you say, do you have a place to hang a suit? And nine times out of 10, they do. So they hang your suit for you. Then you put your thing. Now, the thing about women and makeup and all that. Now, I take all my.

• 22:17Rory Stewart?

  All your makeup.

• 22:18Alastair Campbell?

  I take, I take it all, all my overnight stuff in one of those plastic bags that you get to go through security. It's all in there. Now, if you need more than that, in my view, you're worrying far too much about how you look. So that's all you need. So don't take anything that you can't fit into one of the plastic bags and that becomes your overnight makeup bag, ladies.

• 22:37Rory Stewart?

  Very good.

• 22:38Alastair Campbell?

  And then the thing about books, buy books. I'm sorry, this may sound, you know, a bit kind of, you know, well, what about the cost of living crisis? But I believe in buying books. You take one on the plane. If you need another one when you land, you buy it on arrival. Support local authors, support local bookshops.

• 22:54Rory Stewart?

  And here's, here's, here's my answer on this one, which is I am the world's biggest Kindle fan. And I used to travel with 12 books in my bag. I now travel with a single slim Kindle and I've got the latest Kindle, which has got an incredible battery. And I think I have at the moment, two and a half thousand books on it. So I'm never short of a book.

• 23:13Alastair Campbell?

  How many of those are you rereading, Laurie?

• 23:15Rory Stewart?

  Exactly. Every single one. I had this amazingly slightly charming, slightly fraudulent Scottish dean at my college in Oxford, who had a lot of books on shelves. And I said to him, my goodness, you know, have you read all those books? And he said, some of them twice, which sort of avoided the question, I thought quietly.

• 23:32Alastair Campbell?

  Now, listen, Laurie, I'm going to say something moderately supportive of a Conservative minister, even though I don't support him much in what he does at education. But your friend Nick Gibb.

• 23:42Rory Stewart?

  Oh, yes. Who, incidentally, incidentally, on all the notes that they took for the formation of the new ministerial thing, they also listened to us on that, remember? I was pitching him to get back into his position.

• 23:52Alastair Campbell?

  That's true. That's true. So good old Rishi. We, we need to think about things to tell Rishi. So we got lots of questions this week about languages, foreign languages, and Nick Gibb, I see. Put out a thing saying that he thinks that there should be more learning of German. Well, I totally support that. And the numbers now doing German A level are so small, it's kind of embarrassing. So lots of questions. Here's one from Martin Caldwell. I live in Berlin, I speak German. How do we change the culture in the UK to value learning a language? Freya Goldschmidt, as an ex-head of languages at state school, I think we need to reform the teaching of languages. It's just not working. Beth, I remember you saying, that's me, your father was a Scots Gaelic speaker. Can't remember if Rory's family were, I don't think so.

• 24:36Alastair Campbell?

  My grandfather was Welsh monoglot until middle school. With education being so topical, how do you feel about mandatory Gaelic and Welsh being taught in schools there? And then a final one, Dennis Richards, former head, French teacher. Please ask Alice to explain Braverman's views, given that she lived in France for two years on the Erasmus programme, then wrecked the opportunity for my students. What do you think happened? What happened, Dennis, is the old story about climbing the ladder and pulling it away.

• 25:00Rory Stewart?

  Just stats on languages quickly. So across the UK, German was taken by 36,000 teenagers at GCSE, down from 58,000 2012. And by only less than 2,000 state school students took it at A level.

• 25:14Alastair Campbell?

  Fewer, fewer, Rory, fewer.

• 25:15Rory Stewart?

  Sorry, 800 private schools. So that's only 2,800 people. I mean, it's a tiny number speaking. And of course, you'd presumably say that to actually have any hope of speaking decent German, you need to do at least A level, if not a degree. But that's only 2,000 people in the whole country who are speaking even moderate German a year.

• 25:33Alastair Campbell?

  And I do think, even though English is recognised as kind of your, you know, the language of the world in so many ways, it's not always going to be like that. Where I would disagree with Nick Gibb, I don't know whether he broadened it. I remember when I was growing up, my mum saying, oh, we're going to the common market, you should learn languages and all that. And I kind of did do that.

• 25:49Rory Stewart?

  You listened to her?

• 25:50Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I didn't, I've always loved learning languages. But I think today. I would be learning Chinese and Arabic. I think they're the languages that we should be we should be focused on. But at the same time, there is such a value in learning another language regardless, this idea that you only do things so you then go and do jobs where you use them. It's such a good thing per se to learn a foreign language, to go through the process of learning, to enjoy a different language, to enjoy the cultures of different country. And I think it's sad that we've just allowed that to to fall off. And I don't criticise the Labour Government that much, as you know, Rory, but I do think that we made a mistake in in downgrading the significance of languages within our education system.

• 26:29Rory Stewart?

  Well, the Chinese Chinese is something that the Scots have made a real effort to invest in. And actually, my father spoke very good Chinese. And as an old man in his eighties, was allowed to teach Chinese a little bit in Scottish schools. But although Scotland's had a huge decline, like England, in the number of people doing language hires, there's been a big increase in the number of people who are doing Mandarin. And I think that's a that's a smart investment.

• 26:53Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, yeah. Now, Rory, we are getting so many questions because we get them on Twitter, we get them on Instagram, we get them on email. I now, when I'm going through the questions, and I have a special category, which I put under the headline, people accusing us of ignoring things. I'd just like to say to those people, we are getting well over a thousand questions every single week. Not answering your question does not mean that we disrespect you or that we're ignoring things. It's just that we can't get through them all. But here's one criticizing us for things we don't talk about. Ash Cartman, you still haven't talked about local government. Is that because you both find it boring and not as sexy as talking about international affairs? To most people in the UK, it matters

• 27:37Alastair Campbell?

  much more than what's happening halfway around the world. So I think we have talked about local government, sort of, but not maybe say now let's talk about local government. We do talk about local.

• 27:46Rory Stewart?

  Well, and another question, I think, from Julie Hudson on on the same thing. Well, then let's let's maybe finish on that, if that's right, because I can come towards the end. And I think I I'd say my start before I hand back to you that it is very striking how much local government matters to people, but also how little people know about their local representatives. I mean, I was struck that people can often name their MP but struggle to name local councillors, local mayors. And that's very frustrating because often the things that mattered when I was a constituency MP, people wanted to talk to me about very local issues, could be even parking, planning, things that I actually, as a member of parliament, had no control over. They were run by the district or the county council.

• 28:26Rory Stewart?

  But they didn't vote in local elections, didn't know the names of their district and county councillors. And we had this very sad thing in Bristol, which is they just voted to get rid of a mayor who I thought was doing quite a good job.

• 28:37Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, he was terrific, yeah.

• 28:38Rory Stewart?

  So I, I think it's, it's very sad that Britain seems to have this allergy towards local. I'd like to be like the French, where you have a, a mayor in each small village and town, who you can meet in the supermarket, poke in the chest and hold accountable for what's happening. Anyway, over to you.

• 28:53Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm. No, I, I, I, I think the other thing that's related to that is the, um, the downgrading of local journalism as well, that local papers really, really struggle now. And I, you know, part of that's again, it's people's habits of going online or of, you know, dare I say, listening to podcasts rather than getting their local paper, whatever it might be. I mean, I guess the other thing I'd say, Ash, is that if we were to focus, so we've got the, the Jeremy Hunt statement coming up. I bet there will be, my hunch is that amongst the kind of book balancing that he's trying to do, we're going to see rises in council tax. Councils, I think, get an awful lot of criticism, some of it deserved, a lot of it.

• 29:35Alastair Campbell?

  I think people underestimate the extent to which councils are dependent upon national government. And therefore that explains maybe it's another reason why we do focus more on national government. And also, Ash, I think you know that both Rory and I have got a shared interest in, in foreign policy and foreign affairs, and also a shared belief that our media doesn't focus enough on it. So that may, might explain as well. I'm going to give a shout out to my local representative and tell you, you'll enjoy this Rory. It's an event I attended yesterday. Hosted by Georgia Gould, who is the leader of

• 30:10Rory Stewart?

  Yes, of course.

• 30:11Alastair Campbell?

  Hamilton Council.

• 30:11Rory Stewart?

  Philip Gould's daughter.

• 30:12Alastair Campbell?

  Philip Gould's daughter.

• 30:14Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 30:14Alastair Campbell?

  And she was presiding over the renaming of an area close to where I live, on the edge of Hampstead Heath. And if you go to Southend Green now, you go round this roundabout, you'll see on the roundabout, it is now called Boris Nemtsov Square. And Boris Nemtsov Place. And it's at the bottom of the hill going up to the Russian Trade Delegation, where lots of diplomats and spooks and assorted Putin supporters live, and not to mention the oligarchs who live up the top as well. And what was extraordinary about it, there was the Evgenia Karamotsova.

• 30:49Rory Stewart?

  Very quickly, just to remind people, Boris Nemtsov was the dissident leader in Russia who was assassinated on the Bolshoi Moskva Riedsky Bridge in 2015 by agents of Vladimir Putin.

• 31:02Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, and who was one of the, I actually met him way back with Tony Blair when he was, he and Chabias, Nemtsov and Chabias were the two sort of great reformers. So he's now dead, there was a message read out from his daughter, there was the wife of a guy who's been doing much the same sort of work and who's been poisoned twice, who went back to Russia, he's now in a gulag somewhere. And while this was going on, and lots of people there, your friend Stephen Kinnock was there, and Tom Bray from the Lib Dems, and there was a shout out for that guy, Mark Pritchard, the Tories. It was a kind of all all party thing. And there were these local protesters from Hampstead and Highgate with vuvuzelas, which they hooted throughout all of the speeches, including this woman,

• 31:46Alastair Campbell?

  Evgenia, talking about her husband languishing in jail, having survived these poisoning attempts and so forth. And they were waving banners saying, you know, we demand more democracy. And the democracy they were complaining about was they didn't like the fact that Camden Council hadn't gone with their view on the consultation about whether to rename this Poriznytskaya Square. And I mean, it was just like, it was the parallel universe that was going on there was extraordinary. In fact, there was a woman who came up to me and said, oh, you're here for the virtue signalling, are you? Well, I am 100% behind things like that. I think at a time when, you know, we sometimes feel powerless at what's happening in Ukraine, sometimes these symbolic things and these gestures of support.

• 32:29Alastair Campbell?

  And I'll tell you the thing that really brought it home to me, Rory, you love this. Guess who came up to me and said, in a very Russian accent, I really enjoy your podcast?

• 32:38Rory Stewart?

  Who? Don?

• 32:40Alastair Campbell?

  Marina Litvinenko.

• 32:41Rory Stewart?

  Gosh goodness.

• 32:42Alastair Campbell?

  So there you go.

• 32:43Rory Stewart?

  Amazing. Right, well, let's, let's finish on that and lovely to talk to you and let's talk next week.

• 32:48Alastair Campbell?

  All the best.

• 32:49Rory Stewart?

  Bye bye.