Pod Insights The Rest Is Politics 183. Israel-Gaza: What Happens Next About this episode What is the next stage in the war between Israel and Hamas? How important is Joe Biden's impending visit? Is it possible to be both victim and oppressor?
Join Rory and Alastair as they answer all these questions, followed by a discussion of The Voice referendum in Australia and the election results in Poland and New Zealand.
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Transcript 10,182 words · 9 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:04 Rory Stewart? This episode is brought to you by NordVPN.
0:06 Alastair 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.
0:19 Rory 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.
0:42 Alastair 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?
0:49 Rory 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/rustispolitics. That's nordvpn.com/rustispolitics. And the link is in the episode description.
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2:11 Rory Stewart? Welcome to The Rest Is Politics with me Rory Stewart. And me Alastair Campbell. And a lot to be getting on with. Of course, we're going to focus a great deal on what's happening in the Middle East, but there's also been a series of very remarkable events around the world. So in the second half, we will touch on an incredible result that seems to be emerging in Poland, where the right-wing populist government that's dominated Poland since 2015, looks like it's been pushed out. New Zealand, where Chris Hipkins, who we interviewed on leading, lost the election by a pretty large margin. And the Voice referendum, which we've been hearing a lot about in Australia on rights for Indigenous peoples,
2:52 Rory Stewart? which has also been lost. But Alistair, a quick reminder of people where we are. So we're talking on the 17th of October. On the 7th of October, Saturday, Hamas crossed the border from Gaza. It now appears that 1,300 people were killed, many of whom were civilians, and 199 hostages were taken. Then Israel began to respond with bombardments. 6,000 bombs were dropped in six days on Gaza. So to put that in context, that's 7,700 were dropped in the whole Libyan war. So 6,000 bombs in six days. If you see the footage which CNN and others are producing, that means that you're often seeing bomb
3:35 Rory Stewart? after bomb after bomb, if you're sitting in Gaza, just going off in different buildings and getting, it's a colossal number. To put another fact in context, when the UK was talking about being the second largest contributor to air operations in Syria, the UK was flying two bombing missions a day. This is 6,000 bombs in six days. And then October 12th, Israel told 1.1 million people in the northern bit of Gaza that they had 24 hours to evacuate. And very difficult to get figures out, but there is a total siege. So the water supply for Gaza comes from Israel. The electricity for Gaza comes from Israel.
4:16 Rory Stewart? That's been cut off. So people are reliant now on trying to find what water remains. In some cases, that is dirty water, that can be water which people are trying to that's bottled water smuggled across borders. That's in some cases apparently salt water. The generators are now what people are relying on to keep hospitals going, but of course they're running out of fuel. And according to the government in Gaza, 2,750 people have been killed since the bombardment started and 9,700 wounded. Over to you on what you're picking up in terms of conversations around the Middle East in Britain at the moment, for example?
4:57 Alastair Campbell? Well, I think maybe we should start with some of the things we've been talking about on the podcast with the interviews we've done, first with Yuval Noah Harari, and then most recently, went out yesterday, the Palestinian ambassador. And I think what I'm getting a sense of, both in that region and here, is how quickly this issue has become so polarized, how hard it is for people to get a sense of what's really happening. I think that we're seeing some really bad stuff on social media in particular. I think
5:41 Alastair Campbell? the mainstream, a lot of the mainstream media as well, there's been some great stuff from places where you might expect it, but also some pretty bad stuff as well. But I think in the UK context, I think Rishi Sunak started out in a very bad place. Kind of Israel, right or wrong? I think Keir Starmer reflected that a little bit too much as well, but I thought by yesterday in the, in the statement in the House of Commons, they were in a, in a better position.
6:06 Rory Stewart? You mean that both Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer started by sounding as though they were not really pushing for restraint in Gaza, and now they've moved to a position where they're saying, we absolutely recognize Israel's right to defend itself, but we call it to uphold international humanitarian law in the way it deals with Gaza. And Rishi Sunak, I guess, has announced over £10 million worth of humanitarian relief now to Gaza. The European Union's now announced over €70 million of humanitarian relief from Gaza. So that, that's what you're talking about, right?
6:39 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, I, I think, I think at the start, it was, it was last Saturday, it was so horrific, it was so awful, the, the, the, the, the scale of terror was, was so horrendous, that I think that the politicians around the world felt the need absolutely to be with Israel. But I think one of the things that came through, actually with Yuval, but also certainly with the Palestinian ambassador, was the worry that Netanyahu would take that and only hear the bits that said, essentially, green light for whatever you do. And I think what's happened over the, the last few days has been a recalibration. And I do think a lot of that was down to the fact that Joe Biden and Antony Blinken,
7:21 Alastair Campbell? the Secretary of State, have been so much more balanced and, and shown in a way that it's possible to be unequivocally supportive of Israel, whilst at the same time pointing to the need for restraint, the need to obey the norms of international law, the need not to, to, to go to the depths of the, of the terrorists, as it were. And, you know, maybe a good point to, to kick off is, is the fact that Joe Biden, when our podcast, which we're recording today, Tuesday, goes out, Joe Biden is likely to be either on his way to or in Israel itself.
8:00 Alastair Campbell? Now, it is so rare for a president to go to a war zone, but he, he did go to Ukraine as well. Honestly, we've talked before about, about Joe Biden, and you've been saying for months that, you know, we think he's too old and. But I really think the guy's got incredible leadership skills and his experience in this area is, I think, going to be absolutely vital. And I think we should also give a little, you know, word of praise to Antony Blinken as well, because the guy is, you know, he's been touring the region, he's working really hard to get humanitarian routes opened into Gaza. He's absolutely supportive of the Israelis, but at the same time cognizant of all the
8:43 Alastair Campbell? other tensions in that region, the need to, you know, to keep, they've got so many pressures on them, so many balls in the air. But I think they, I think he and Biden did a pretty good job so far.
8:53 Rory Stewart? Yeah, the problem, though, I guess, is that they really took their eye off the ball.
8:59 Alastair Campbell? Yeah.
9:00 Rory Stewart? The US has massively disengaged from the region. The two-state solution has seemed less and less important to US politicians over the last decade. This started really with President Obama, who wanted to get the US out of the Middle East, focused more on China and Asia-Pacific. It accelerated under Donald Trump, who supported moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem, which was a very, very provocative act, because of course Jerusalem is meant to be an international city and East Jerusalem is very much meant to be part of the Palestinian territories. So that was very provocative. And Joe Biden hasn't really, since he's come into office, brought the focus to the Middle East. And we saw it with Jake Sullivan, his National Security Advisor, who's along with Tony Blinken, the Secretary
9:44 Rory Stewart? of State, and Joe Biden, the President, gave a speech saying that the Middle East seemed to be more peaceful than it had been in two decades, just before this all happened.
9:54 Alastair Campbell? With the caveat, he did, he did have a caveat, Rory. He said, but the one thing you know about that region is you never quite know what's going to happen.
10:00 Rory Stewart? Good, good, good, good caveat. But, but I think that the basic story is that the populism of Trump led to a form of isolationism. And Jake Sullivan wrote a big piece just before they came into office, arguing for a foreign policy for the middle class. And this basically was a foreign policy in the US, which was going to focus much, much more on thinking about American interests. And it was going to be more cautious about global free trade deals. Biden's really backed off a lot of the Free trade stuff, and we've seen that in the Pacific Partnership, but but more generally, the liberal global order that we talk about a lot cannot work without the US. And it's
10:44 Rory Stewart? fine that the US is now getting involved, but the pattern has been with Ukraine, with Israel, with the coups in Africa, with what happened in Sudan, that the US is coming in once the crisis has happened, but it's not leaning in before the crisis.
11:01 Alastair Campbell? No, I mean, look, Trump, as the Palestinian ambassador indicated, and I think we all recognise, and Zaid Rad said the same, Trump is a disaster on so many fronts, but in foreign policy and in this area, absolutely a total disaster. We've also talked before, and this again, I think we're seeing through this lens as well, the extent to which the Middle East has not in recent years been about Israel and Palestine.
11:25 Rory Stewart? And so I'm just interrupting for a second, but but I guess what you're saying is it's more about the Gulf. So Qatar, UAE, Saudi have all become the centre of gravity. That's where the wealth's been. That's where the focus has been.
11:35 Alastair Campbell? That's why Antony Blinken is having to sort of, you know, tick all of those boxes as well. No, you're absolutely right. The there is this has been a failure of global strategic leadership. My point about Biden and Blinken is that now that we are in this crisis, and crisis it really is, that they thus far, I think, have handled it extraordinarily well. And I think that of itself has had an impact upon the other leaders, including our own. We should probably put in the in the newsletter, an interview I saw, I think it was on the BBC, with the mother of one of the Israelis who'd been killed. And we, you know, I think that one of the reasons we've gone to talk to Yuval and the ambassador,
12:20 Alastair Campbell? they both had families who'd been involved in this. And Yuval had members of his family directly caught up in an attack on one of the kibbutzim. And the ambassador, Husein Zomlet, who lost several members, close members of his family, in in the early strikes on Gaza. He told us the story of his sister, who was opened her home to people who were fleeing, and she now had, I think he said, 150 people living there. And I do think these human stories are incredibly important. And the interview that I'm talking about was a woman who said that Even though she'd lost a child, she did not want her child to be used as an excuse for vengeance. And the last thing that Israel needed is war. And I think, I think there
13:01 Alastair Campbell? are more Israelis saying that than maybe we realise from the media coverage, because obviously the political leaders and the military action dominates this debate. And if you look at Netanyahu and you look at Gallant, the Defence Minister, their language is so kind of militaristic. And likewise, when we talked to the Palestinian ambassador, it is so much about what they feel about what's being done to them. And we had a very interesting discussion with him about whether you can be a victim and a perpetrator at the same time. Well, I think he actually was pretty reflective. I mean, it took us a while to get there, but I think he became quite reflective about that. So what's happening inside the
13:44 Alastair Campbell? the public opinions of both Israeli and Palestinian? If you think about Gaza, one of the points that I thought one of the the points that both Keir Starmer and Rishi Sunak made is we we must not confuse Hamas with Palestine. We mustn't confuse Hamas with the people who live in Gaza. There will be many, many, many supporters of Hamas. But a lot of these people who are fleeing, they are as angry about Hamas as many, many Israelis are, because they realise what they're doing to their country as well. So I think that is trying to sort of explain to people the nuances and the complexities in the in the way that people now communicate in politics and the way that the media conducts
14:28 Alastair Campbell? itself in politics is very, very hard. But that's, I think, what we're trying to do.
14:32 Rory Stewart? We we talk a lot about the way in which social media polarises and creates this kind of populist environment. And that's one of the problems here is that X Twitter is really out of control. I mean, one of the things that Elon Musk seems to have done is made significant cuts to the staff when he took over. And part of that has affected attempts to really moderate and put content in context. So I open up my phone this morning and I read. Hamas ripped open a pregnant Israeli woman's stomach, killed the fetus, then killed the mother. Hamas raped women and girls, mutilated their bodies and then shot them. And I then tried to go online to find out whether this is true or not.
15:15 Rory Stewart? And this is not just, I mean, and that this is, I'm not sort of random posts, it's a post with 1.1 million views, which a lot of people who I know have liked and forwarded and shared, right? So that's on the Israeli side. On the Palestinian side, equal news is going out. Pictures of Israelis using phosphorus bombs, pictures of injured civilians, interviews with Israeli soldiers saying they're going to kill, or reservists saying they're going to kill every woman and child are then posted back to this thing. And there is not any proper content moderation. So, you know, we, we were in a situation in which a story went out, really important story, went out claiming that Hamas had killed and beheaded 40 babies.
16:00 Rory Stewart? And this was five days ago, and this really dominated the news cycle and was a very, very important part of people's perceptions of what Hamas had done. So much so that Joe Biden himself said that Hamas have beheaded babies, which was seen as a US confirmation, official confirmation, from which he's now had to backtrack and admit that actually the President of the United States was going on social media seeing this stuff and not actually checking with the CIA.
16:27 Alastair Campbell? Well, if you, if you remember, when we did our first discussion on this, I mentioned it because I thought it was true and then you, and you made the point straight away, well, that's not been verified. It shows how easy it is to fall into the traps of seeing stuff and believing it. We should also share with people a very long article that I sent you from Bellingcat. They did an amazing job at focusing on specific stories that they have been able to establish were not true. And again, as you say, on both sides, so they're all doing this. And the use of video, the use of old video footage that is being presented as of now. And I think that, I think this is a terrible thing to say because, you know, we, we both argue against being overly cynical. But I think at the moment.
17:13 Alastair Campbell? When we're looking at social media, I think it's wise to start from the possibility that what you're seeing is not often what it says it is.
17:24 Rory Stewart? It's so difficult, isn't it? So when I read this thing, it's got 1.6 million views, it's got, you know, 7,000 retweets. So you sort of assume that it might be true, but then you get into it and there are statements on the web saying that this claim that a woman's stomach was cut open and the fetus was killed is actually lifted from a 40-year-old allegation made in the Lebanon war. And then, as you say, I mean, social media is dominated by reposting old footage. So some people may have seen this, some mesmerizing footage of a man being stalked by a cougar on a run in America, but it then turns out that it's three years old.
18:06 Rory Stewart? Now, that doesn't matter so much for a comical thing as somebody being stalked by a cougar. But what's happening here, and there's been great stuff, really want to recommend BBC Verify, where BBC Verify is taking these videos, using image capture, going back on the web and finding that often this is footage from previous Hamas-Israeli fights from years ago, or it's footage from Ukraine, which people are pretending is footage from Gaza. So the white phosphorus bombs that people were posting on the Palestinian side to accuse the Israelis of war atrocities turn out to be footage from Ukraine being applied to Gaza, et cetera, et cetera.
18:42 Alastair Campbell? The other thing I wanted to do, Roy, you've did a brilliant job in one of your explainers in the start of the thing, but once I got a question this week from somebody who said, please don't read out my name, I'm embarrassed to ask this publicly, but when I hear people say Arab Muslim Palestinian, I actually don't know what they mean. So if I can just give a very brief explainer so people understand the difference, Arabs are people who speak Arabic as a native language. And there are around four hundred and seventy million of those. Muslims are people who practise the religion of Islam. And there are somewhere between one and a half and two billion. That's around twenty five percent of the world. And it's the fastest growing religion in the world.
19:26 Alastair Campbell? But fewer than fifteen percent of Muslims are Arabs. Palestinians are Arabs who live and have lived through time, through history, as it were, in a certain geographical region in the Middle East. And that's something that we talked about to the ambassador. And there are around seven million Palestinians in the area. Five point three in this, what's called the state now, the State of Palestine. That's three point two million in the West Bank, two point one million in the Gaza, one point seven million in what are known as the nineteen forty eight territories, and around seven million in the diaspora.
20:06 Rory Stewart? Of which, sorry, just quickly on that, of which a loss in Jordan. So one of the reasons why people are really nervous about the conflict developing and becoming regional is that by some measurements, almost the majority of the Jordanian population is of Palestinian descent. And the links there are very strong, but also, of course, links very, very strong into Lebanon.
20:28 Alastair Campbell? Many Arabs are not Muslims. Not all Muslims are Arabs. Most Arabs are Muslims, but there also are Christian Arabs, Jewish Arabs. And then if we talk about the Arab world, the Arab world is basically, it's twenty two countries in the Middle East and North Africa. So when we talk about Iran, Iran is not an Arab country. Turkey is not an Arab country. And when we talk about the Middle East, usually includes the twenty two Arab countries. And then Turkey is sometimes viewed as part of the Middle East and sometimes part of Europe. And when we talk about Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, they are basically South Asia.
21:04 Rory Stewart? It's good to do because I think we underestimate this. There's a book, actually, that's just been written by Barnaby Rogerson on the Sunni Shia split, which I think is another very important thing to understand this context. But I remember all the way through, over the last twenty years. Working on Iraq and Afghanistan, how often I was in meeting with senior politicians who didn't know the difference between Sunni and Shia, for example, and would have struggled with a lot of the things you just said. I mean, I think it's, and I, I think finding the space for politicians, many of whom have spent their lives in domestic policy and suddenly find themselves in foreign policy positions to take the time to understand things that of course, everybody in the region understands or takes for granted, but people internationally are really struggling to disentangle.
21:49 Rory Stewart? Can I, can I just move you on quickly on to the question of the ground invasion? So the question now is, what will Israel do next? The clearing of the, the, the announcement that people had 24 hours to evacuate, move from northern Gaza to southern Gaza, moving a million people, was also combined with hundreds of thousands of Israeli reservists being mobilized and very large Israeli military presence around the Gaza border. So the assumption is that the next stage following the bombardment will be an Israeli ground offensive targeted particularly at the tunnels. Hamas has tunnels running all the way under Gaza City and around,
22:33 Rory Stewart? which cannot really been accessed purely through aerial bombardment and will require special, if the Israelis want to tackle them, special engineering teams going into this very dangerous fighting in tunnels. That of course is also almost certainly where many of the hostages, many of these 199 hostages will be being held at the moment. So this is, I think, something that is at the center of what Joe Biden and other international leaders are trying to get involved in, which is to say, be very, very thoughtful about what the next stage is because, yes, Israel can mount a ground offensive, it can go in, but it will be brutal. Urban warfare, because Hamas has presumably been expecting this for some time and will
23:17 Rory Stewart? have prepared with booby traps that will be like the fight around Mosul. There will be inevitably very, very large numbers of civilian casualties and that won't just be, uh, it won't be because Israel is trying to avoid the rules of war. It's because it's impossible really to fight in urban areas without civilians being killed. And that's partly to do with the way that civilian casualties are defined. During the fight in Mosul after 2014, the RAF, for example, claimed that it only had record of one civilian casualty, despite the fact that thousands of civilians have been killed. Why is that? That's because they define a civilian casualty as somebody who is nowhere near a military
24:01 Rory Stewart? installation or command post. If there's a command post or a military installation, under the way in which wars conduct at the moment, civilian casualties are not counted, it's considered proportional.
24:11 Alastair Campbell? One of the moments at which Housam, the Palestinian ambassador, seemed to me to get really quite angry and emotional was when he was talking about those politicians, including some of our own, who were saying that Hamas hide their soldiers inside hospitals. And the reason that he was so kind of emotional about that is because he said that in the current climate, Israel takes that as, well, if they're using hospitals, that then becomes a military target. And I did think amongst all the messages around the evacuation, when there was sort of dropping leaflets and putting out messages on social media and on television and radio,
24:55 Alastair Campbell? the one that was asking people to vacate hospitals was in a sense the most alarming. But that's what the thinking is, is that they're basically saying, well, if you're going to put people, if you're going to have Hamas soldiers inside hospitals, they become a legitimate target. So I guess you're right that when then that gets bombed and people die in there. That they're not necessarily counted as a civilian in a way that we would we would expect it.
25:18 Rory Stewart? So I was in Mosul a few months ago, and the most striking thing, and this is the second city in Iraq, which was taken by ISIS, the most striking thing that you see there is the hospital on the river, which was hit very, very hard. I mean, it's a kind of shattered building because the coalition, the US, the UK, the Iraqis argued that it had become a bomb-making factory and that ISIS were making bombs in the middle of this hospital.
25:41 Alastair Campbell? The one thing they will not do, I imagine, is launch this whilst Joe Biden is in the region. I wonder if perhaps the most significant reason why Joe Biden himself wants to go there is, of course, to show solidarity with Israel, but it's also that he can be there, he will presumably get pretty fully briefed on exactly what the plan is likely to be, and this will allow him perhaps to influence and shape that.
26:12 Rory Stewart? Yeah, exactly. And the questions that the American administration will be asking is what next? And it will be it'll be influenced also by the experience of Iraq and Afghanistan, which is that they will be saying, look, you can win potentially the military stage of this, but what's the post-war plan? So let's say Israel goes in and it kills a lot of Hamas terrorists and deals with their stockpiles of weapons and gets rid of their command centers. What what happens next? Who's going to govern Gaza? Because Hamas was the government of Gaza. So who's Israel going to bring in as a government? Are they going to try to occupy it and govern it themselves? In which case, Israel would be directly
26:54 Rory Stewart? responsible for the water supply, the electricity, the sanitation, and find itself dealing with a very, very angry insurgent population that will almost certainly be attacking them all the time. And it will then feel very much like an extreme version of the occupation of Iraq. I mean, much more extreme, because the occupation of Iraq, the US and the UK were not did not have the history that Israel has in Gaza. If on the other hand, they're not proposing to do that, then the danger is they leave a vacuum behind. And who fills that vacuum? Is that going to be Hamas? Is that going to be Fatah? And when is Israel going to provide the support to rebuild the infrastructure which is being destroyed? Because obviously, at the moment, Israel is very, very angry. They've cut off
27:37 Rory Stewart? the water supply, they've cut off the electricity, and they've dropped at least 6,000 bombs. But at some point, Israel needs to work out whether they want there to be humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza. And we're in a very odd situation in which, at the same time as Israel is bombing, the UK and the European Union are providing humanitarian support to provide the water and fuel and electricity that Israel is cutting off. So it's a very strange thing. These two apparent allies, one of them cutting off the water and electricity, and the other spending money trying to get water and electricity in.
28:09 Alastair Campbell? And which, you know, we, I think we said in the, in the first podcast on this that we did, that at a time when the Israelis have been quite happy that Qatar has been helping Gaza and life kind of go on. And the other question I think we have to start asking is, what happens in terms of rebuilding the place? Who's going to take, who takes responsibility for that? And the world, let's be honest, the world has had months focused on the war in Ukraine. People were starting to think there about cost of rebuilding infrastructure and so forth. Well, you've now got two parts of the world where you're having very, very
28:51 Alastair Campbell? similar problems that ultimately, the big powers in the world are going to have to come together and have a plan for them.
28:56 Rory Stewart? And the costs are unbelievable. You will have seen some of the estimates out of Ukraine, which were well into the hundreds of billions of dollars. The estimates on rebuilding Afghanistan were very high. But this is much more extreme because the amount of heavy explosives that's being dropped, cost of rebuilding is going to get well beyond any conceivable international development budget. To put it in context, the whole world overseas development assistance a year is about 200 billion a year, and that's covering all the extreme poor in Sub-Saharan Africa, in parts of Asia. That's all the health programs, education programs. Almost certainly, we will end up with comparable amounts of damage done in Gaza and Ukraine, and where that money's coming from, I have no idea.
29:38 Alastair Campbell? I thought that one of the most impressive parts of the interview that we did with Yuval Naharari was when we talked about Ukraine and President Zelensky. Yuval had been very, very pretty damning about quite a lot of the prominent leaders in the world, notably Netanyahu, but also Trump and others. But the way that he spoke about Zelensky and the leadership he'd shown in Ukraine, and now the leadership that he was trying to show in support of Israel, but as a Jew. But I also think that part of that with Zelensky must be that he and the Ukrainians will be
30:21 Alastair Campbell? worrying that the international eye is taking off his struggle. And you can see that happening already. You can see almost a sense of fatigue around the Ukraine situation in a way that there isn't currently with the Middle East, because the Middle East feels less normalized, it's more of a shock, and there is this fear that it's going to develop into something even worse, even bigger, and quite quickly. But I think that does put Zelensky in a very, very vulnerable place.
30:54 Rory Stewart? And this is why I think people do worry that we're getting into a situation that we haven't seen for 70 or 80 years, haven't really seen since the end of the Second World War, because of course, this is now the moment where nobody's going to be paying attention to the fact we've had seven military coups in Sub-Saharan Africa. There's going to be very little appetite to respond to the famines that are inevitably coming. Martin Griffiths, who's the UN Assistant Secretary General, who we're going to be interviewing on leading quite soon, is in the region now, moving between Egypt and Israel.
31:27 Alastair Campbell? He's been very, very strong in his statements.
31:30 Rory Stewart? Yeah, but he will be very worried that he's also the guy who's responsible for trying to mobilize billions to try to deal with the forgotten conflicts, with what's happening in Congo, what's happening in Yemen. And as things spiral out of control, you get to a place, unfortunately, where if China were to invade Taiwan, people simply don't have the bandwidth all the time to think about how to respond. So anyway, a lot, a lot to keep discussing.
31:56 Alastair Campbell? Let's take a break, and then we'll come back and talk about. Happy news in Poland from the progressives' point of view. Thank you.
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33:24 Alastair Campbell? Welcome back to The Rest is Polities with me, Alastair Campbell. And me, Rory Stewart. Now, Poland, Rory, I'm going to give a shout out to my book publicist, Isabel Ralfs, whose parents are Polish and who was so mistrustful of the PIS government that she travelled to Poland to vote. Oh. Because there was all these stories doing the rounds that the Polish government were going to make it difficult for the diaspora. To vote. So the results are, you know, the PIS remain, they are the the right wing law and justice party. They've been very right wing. They've done all sorts of stuff on abortion,
34:05 Alastair Campbell? on judicial reform. They've got an incredible grip on the media, including the state broadcaster, whose coverage during the election, according to Isabel, has been so biased as to be absurd. And although they're the biggest party, they did not get the sufficient votes, them plus the Confederation, the very hard right party that we've talked about before. So it looks like Donald Tusk, who was one of the key figures at the European Union when during the Brexit negotiations, it looks like he's going to be able to form a government. His party came second. And with two of the other smaller parties, it looks like he's going to be able to form a government and get rid of this right wing Polish government,
34:50 Alastair Campbell? which has caused an awful lot of celebration in most of the capitals of the European Union.
34:55 Rory Stewart? Unbelievable. Because anybody wants to read about this in detail, there's some wonderful work by Anne Applebaum, who's a Polish American journalist, who's been brilliant on populism in Poland. But essentially, the PIS got in in 2015, so right at the beginning of the age of populism, just after Narendra Modi in 2014 had been elected in India and before Donald Trump got in the US. And it very much was part of the central populist playbook. It was all about the people against the elite. And then as soon as it was in power, it started trying to make sure it would never ever be removed from power by changing the constitution of the rules. So it basically, as you said, turned the whole of state television, their equivalent to the BBC, into a government propaganda machine. It used state owned companies
35:40 Rory Stewart? to fund its political campaigns. It totally tried to politicise the civil service. It did horrifying stuff on the judiciary. So obviously, normally in a country, the judge is supposed to be independent. But in the case of Poland, they managed to use commissions and other ways to make sure that they had judges who were favourable towards them. They then tried to change electoral laws, leaked top secret military documents in order to try to win this election. So it felt, from the opposition's point of view, as though it was impossible, as though this was almost a Zimbabwe situation, where the thing was so rigged against the opposition. They'd never be able to win, but they did it and it's really encouraging. And of course, the it makes many polls remember nineteen eighty nine, where the Communist Party tried to rig the elections and were defeated.
36:25 Alastair Campbell? One of the best things about this election was, and it shows that when when people realise that elections really have something important on the line, they turn out. And for the first time ever, the youth vote was larger than the in terms of a share of the population was higher than that of older people. And, you know, it's the same in Poland as historically is is is in most democracies, that the older you are, the more likely you are to vote. And in fact, the younger voters were above seventy percent turnout and older voters below that. And one of the other things that they did, Rory, I think we talked about this briefly
37:05 Alastair Campbell? before, the government added these four referendums to the to hold on the same day as the election. And they weren't really necessary from a constitutional point of view, but it was a way of getting more money into the party machine. And it was also a way of sort of, they were almost like leading questions in the political debate. And so people went out to vote in the general election, seventy three percent, armed with all these other ballot papers, which most of them then just ignored. So I think the turnout for that was was around forty percent, which meant that they, even if they'd won, they would have had no no standing because it's below the threshold for it to be valid. So I think this, I think there's a lesson in this for all politicians around the world
37:50 Alastair Campbell? is the the elections, people have to feel that there's something really important at stake. And I think, you know, that that maybe there's a lesson in there as well for for Labour at the moment in the UK context, that, you know, that people want to know the differences as well as the similarities. And it's on the differences ultimately that you will be able to motivate people to. To get out and vote. Now, they will, by the way, they will try, I think, to hang around. There's now quite a long process to see what happens. We'll wait and see whether the PIS will just sort of go gracefully, or whether they'll try to delay things and form their own coalition. But I think, you know, we've talked about so many votes and so many elections,
38:35 Alastair Campbell? in fact, we're about to talk about, to, you know, maybe didn't go the way that certainly I would have wanted in the antipodes. But this, I think, is a very, very significant moment. And it is a real, it is a, to be fair to Donald Tusk, that is quite a thing, to have fought in that environment and to have kept his head up and kept going. And it would seem, now coming back as Prime Minister, that is quite a coup.
38:59 Rory Stewart? And actually, he did it in a rather wonderful way, too. I mean, one of the striking things, just to remind people a little bit who Donald Tusk was. Donald Tusk is somebody who represents the, I guess, the liberal centre-right. He's the kind of hero for people like me and David Gork. And he ran the European People's Party, which is the right-wing faction in the European Parliament. And he then became president in Europe. And in that context, he was very central. People remember him during the Brexit negotiations, because he was there from 2015 onwards. And he ran a campaign which was rather wonderful. He
39:40 Rory Stewart? made a lot of use of some very incredibly talented women candidates at a time when the right-wing populists were trying to weaponise the abortion issue, because, of course, Poland is a Catholic country with quite a lot of conservative views. He didn't get down to polarising politics. He had a pretty impressive, kind of unifying, moderate message. And as you said, he mobilised a lot of young people. So it was quite an idealistic campaign in some ways. And it's rather sort of wonderful. It wasn't a sort of cynical, brutal, bare-knuckle fight. It was a, it was a campaign appealing to people's better nature. And really matters, because, of course, Poland is the giant, in population terms,
40:23 Rory Stewart? economic terms, of Eastern Europe, will be very central to the future of the European Union, and was being locked out of a lot of European Union funding because of its attacks on the rule of law and judiciary.
40:34 Alastair Campbell? And of course, what Vladimir Putin was hoping... Having Orban in Hungary, we just had the election in Slovakia, which went to another populist. And then if you get Poland in there as well, that locked in, as you say, into a third term and then possibly a fourth term where they, I think Zimbabwe might be overstating it, but certainly that they become almost like sort of, you know, one, one party state. That has been halted for now. There's no doubt they'll come back and it will be, the other thing we should say about, about Donald Tusk, it will be, it will be difficult to govern because the PIS remain the most, the biggest party, they will be the biggest party in the
41:17 Alastair Campbell? parliament. So he's going to have to use all the political skills that he's developed. But I agree with you, it was a, it was an example of Michelle Obama's famous, you know, when they go low, we go high. But happily, this time it seems to have worked.
41:31 Rory Stewart? Well, really, really exciting. And, and the other thing, of course, he'll be dealing with, and we talked about this a little bit on some of the interviews this week, that one of the things that populism is associated with is, is corruption. Because when you start taking out the independent judiciary, silencing the media, you inevitably end up with corruption. And, and that's definitely been true in Poland. And one of the things that's driven voters out, it's the sense of just how corrupt this government is.
41:54 Alastair Campbell? Yeah. Now, less happily, Australia.
41:58 Rory Stewart? Just to remind people, and then you, you've been following it much more closely, but just to remind people, the voice referendum was a referendum to give Indigenous Aboriginal Australians a voice in national events. And it was a relatively moderate proposal, which was that there would be a body set up, its power not entirely defined, but the idea was that these people who were the original inhabitants of Australia, who from the late 1700s onwards, when essentially the British Empire took over Australia, found themselves more and more marginalized and have found themselves in much more difficult poverty statistics, health statistics, marginalized in what was originally their own country, should have more of a voice in the way things are run, in a way that actually Maoris do much more in New Zealand. Anyway, over to you on the result.
42:43 Alastair Campbell? Well, I think one of the, one of the reasons why I think a lot of Australians are feeling very, very down about this now is because New Zealand, Canada,
42:54 Alastair Campbell? Other countries do appear to have been able to handle much better their relations with indigenous populations. This is the forty-fifth referendum in Australia's history, and only eight have been successful. And when they have been successful, it has always been because there has been unity between the government and the opposition. Now, when Anthony Albanese was campaigning to be Prime Minister, he was very clear that this referendum was going to be part of his programme. And at the time, it seemed that he had the opposition broadly on side. And I think in the reckoning and the sort
43:35 Alastair Campbell? of soul-searching that's going now, obviously, the opposition has the benefit of being able to say Albanese called his referendum and he lost, and it was divisive, it tore the country apart, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. On the other hand, I think the opposition leader, Peter Dutton, is playing quite a dangerous game, not just for the country, but I think for his own political strategy as well. There's an element of Trump and Brexit to what he's been doing. And part of the soul-searching has also been about the way that the media debate developed in this referendum. So to give you one thing, Dutton, at one point, for example, he put out this statement that the referendum was
44:20 Alastair Campbell? being rigged because they were going to accept ticks as well as crosses inside the ballot box. Okay. Now, it sounds sort of relative, well, so what? The so what around that, that I think is important, is that it wasn't true, and yet it became, it just got fed into this whole thing about the confusion about what was going on. And the media didn't really challenge him over it. They sort of covered it as a big row. And a little bit like we had in Brexit, where You know, lies were told and the lies then become part of the narrative and the media is no longer part of that self-writing process within politics.
45:04 Alastair Campbell? And this, I'm afraid, has been one of the consequences of Trump, Johnson, Burlescony, et cetera.
45:09 Rory Stewart? Presumably, you are now really reeling from referendum. I mean, you were obviously heartbroken by Brexit. You were thrown off balance very much by the referendum in Colombia, which was supposed to confirm the peace deal, which was then lost. Now the Voice referendum in Australia. I mean, are you coming to the view that you are not a great fan of referendum?
45:30 Alastair Campbell? Well, I never was, but I think you have to have them for major, major, major constitutional change. But I think they're becoming impossible because what happened with this one? If you look at the polling graph on the Voice, it started, when the debate started, there was a overwhelming majority in favour. And it's just gone steadily down, down, and down, and down, as it's been taken over by other issues and then by social media and then by lies and then by social media which ventilate the lies.
45:58 Rory Stewart? So what do you do about it? I mean, if you were called in for a referendum in the future, I don't know, some other country asked for advice, how would they do it better? How do you win these things? How would you have won the Voice referendum?
46:11 Alastair Campbell? They could have done it differently. And in fact, there was a very, very strong possibility at one point that they might have done it just as a legislative change. We are campaigning on this and if we get elected, we are going to legislate to have a voice for the Indigenous people in our parliament. The reason why Anthony Albanese didn't want to do that was because of his worry that a future government would get rid of it, which they could. So that's why he felt he had to have a referendum. But the other thing, I don't know whether they could do this, this would also require a referendum, I guess, but the rules of referendum in Australia, you have to have this double majority, you have to have a majority of the votes and you have to have a majority of the six states, which means you have to win 4-2. Well, on this one, they lost 6-0, so.
46:56 Rory Stewart? The reason they've got those rules, of course, is to stop things like the Brexit referendum of a 52-48 victory changing something dramatically. So it's setting a higher bar for what you need for a referendum. It's also very relevant to us in Britain because you and I think, I'm certainly passionately in favour of changing to something more like a New Zealand electoral system. But when the Lib Dems tried under the coalition, Nick Clegg tried to do it when he was deputy prime minister, of course, it went to a referendum and it lost. The only way that we'll really be able to get that change through is to get parties campaigning in a manifesto to say, if we're elect, it will change the electoral system and then taking it to a legislation.
47:35 Alastair Campbell? I agree. I don't think you could do it with a referendum. I really don't. I think it would be, I think it would. Look, what happened with AV is that once it got into a referendum, one, you had the Conservatives in the coalition who didn't really support it. So they weren't putting much energy into it. It was a big thing for the Lib Dems, but the, you know, so the Labour Party didn't particularly want to help the Lib Dems out too much. And the media sensed that it wasn't sort of cutting through with the public and, you know, it just didn't become a big thing. I always say, when people say to me, you know, why can't we change the electoral system? I say, well, did you bother to vote in the AV referendum? And most people say, no. But I think the other thing, this is just the nature of what our politics is. Maybe our politics has always been like this,
48:17 Alastair Campbell? but I think it's been exacerbated. What you've seen with the way the Australian opposition has approached this, this guy Peter Dutton, it has been, you know, he's been working out how this is going to help him build a bigger base as he goes into a general election. There is a massive lesson in that. Of those eight referendums that have been successful, they've always required the government and the opposition to be in the same place. Getting the government and the opposition in the same place on any major issue at the moment in pretty much any democracy in the world is very, very hard.
48:47 Rory Stewart? Well, to then go on to, I guess, a story that's disappointing for you, but I think actually is quite a good sign for New Zealand democracy, which is the New Zealand election. And one of the, the good things about the New Zealand electoral system, which I'm a great fan of, as a friend of yours pointed out in an email that she shared, is it's led to a much more even balance between the parties.
49:06 Alastair Campbell? Five all.
49:07 Rory Stewart? That's right. 10 elections, five all. So this time, the, the National Party, which is the equivalent to Conservative Party, has won. Been a big swing. Our listeners will have, many people will have listened on leading to our interview with Chris Hipkins, who was the New Zealand Prime Minister going into this election.
49:23 Alastair Campbell? Do you remember, Rory, I pointed out to him that there were five prime ministers, I named them, who had taken office in the middle of, the middle of the term, and every single one of them lost at the next election. And he said, well, I intend to reverse that trend. And. I'm afraid he hasn't.
49:43 Rory Stewart? I mean, I thought he was very, very likeable guy, but boy, did he get a trouncing. So the National Party increased from 25% of the vote to 45% of the vote, 34 seats to 50 seats, and his party, Chris Hipkins' party, had a collapse from 50% of the vote to 31% of the vote, from 62 seats to 34 seats.
50:04 Alastair Campbell? Yeah.
50:05 Rory Stewart? So it now looks like Chris Luxton, who we have a promise, and I hope to be able to deliver him as the next New Zealand Prime Minister, to be interviewed on leading.
50:16 Alastair Campbell? Not quite as impressive as the Conservative that I've delivered this week, Rory. Tell our listeners who I've managed to persuade to come on the podcast very soon.
50:23 Rory Stewart? We haven't even discussed this. I can't believe you're asking these people on without asking me.
50:27 Alastair Campbell? Do you not want to?
50:28 Rory Stewart? I'm not sure about that. We need to, we need to discuss that.
50:30 Alastair Campbell? Okay.
50:31 Rory Stewart? Anyway, we'll talk about, talk about that, talk about it on another occasion. Anyway, come back. So Chris Luxton, who's the new Prime Minister of New Zealand, who we're, hopefully we'll get on leading soon. Very interesting guy, because like many of the politicians we've been talking about recently, he's very, very recent to politics. He's the absolute opposite of Chris Hipkins. Chris Hipkins been in politics since he was a student there all the way through, much more like sort of David Cameron or George Osborne or Ed Miliband, kind of professional politician. Chris Luxton worked at Unilever, was the CEO of Unilever Canada, and then the CEO of Air New Zealand. Then he only entered politics in 2019, and he's already managed to become Prime Minister.
51:07 Alastair Campbell? Yeah.
51:08 Rory Stewart? New Zealand politics is fascinating. There are two parties that will matter. One of them is the New Zealand First Party, run by a man called Winston Peters, who is a very, very, I think the word is colourful, veteran New Zealand politician, who's been in New Zealand politics since the 1970s, Father Maori, who was initially very associated with the Maori cause and swept Maori constituencies in his early political career, but has since become, as New Zealand First implies, associated with anti-immigration movements, challenging the Maori language, standing up for English as the language, attacking wokeness, despite the fact he's of Maori heritage. And then on the other side, ACT, which is the Association
51:51 Rory Stewart? for Consumers and Taxpayers, which is a sort of Liz Truss-like party, which is all about tax cuts, cuts to welfare, but is also confusing because it's New Zealand, because it was actually largely inspired by somebody from the Labour Party, Roger Douglas, who was a Labour MP, brought in a lot of the economic reforms of the early 90s, right? Over back to you.
52:08 Alastair Campbell? You say that it's sort of like a Liz Truss party. I mean, they're they're sort of arch libertarians, really.
52:14 Alastair Campbell? And it won't be that easy to manage them. There are two views about them. One is that they're, you know, they sort of reflect the modern world and post-globalisation approach to the economy and so forth. The other is that, a bit like, I think, most people in Britain now see Liz Truss, they're kind of a bit unhinged and dangerous. But also that what the PR system has done, and you're a massive fan of the New Zealand PR system, but it, what Jacinda Ardern did at the last election was remarkable by New Zealand standards. She literally, she, you know, the Labour Party got an overall majority. That is why the scale of this defeat is so big, because they've gone from that, as you say, to virtually halving the number of seats
52:55 Alastair Campbell? in the parliament. Yet even with that, the opposition have not been able to get to a majority without the the coalition deals that that Luxton is now going to have to have to do. The mutual friend of myself and Chris Hipkins, who set up our interview with them, Darren Hughes, who's a Kiwi, but who's based in Britain. And he made quite an interesting observation about, we talked about Poland. And he wondered whether actually what's happening here is that incumbents are in real trouble everywhere, in part because of what they had made the countries do during lockdown. Jacinda Ardern got loads of praise globally for her handling of of Covid, including, you know, here and including from us.
53:37 Alastair Campbell? But clearly in New Zealand, it didn't go down as well as we perhaps thought. And the other issue he pointed to is that, we talked about the the voice in Australia, but in relation to the Maori population in New Zealand, there is a view on the right that Labour do too much for the Maoris, and there is a view on amongst the Maoris that they don't do enough for them. And they sort of got hit on that as as well.
54:05 Rory Stewart? Darren also, understandably coming from progressive side, underplayed the significance of law and order and crime in this election. But it was very significant, or at least in terms of the right wing parties and the way that they campaigned. They, because the the Labour Party, the the previous governing party, Chris Hipkins's party, had committed to reduce the prison population by thirty percent, which is something that. You and I broadly favour, and in fact, I think in Question Time tomorrow, we'll go on and discuss a little bit, moves to reduce the prison population in Britain. But this has coincided with a very dramatic increase in certain types of crime. There's been a 533% increase in ram raiding, for example, 42% increase in violent crime,
54:45 Rory Stewart? and well over 70% of New Zealanders, including over 70% of Labour voters, want harsher sentences for young people, want more offenders in jail. And, look, it's uncomfortable for progressives because elections where people talk about being tough on law and order or being tough on immigration are extremely uncomfortable. But there's no doubt at all that these are, I think, issues that do matter to a lot of voters around the world.
55:12 Alastair Campbell? Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime, Rory. That's the approach. Well, there we are. Chris Hipkins, no longer Prime Minister. A debate now, I guess, as to whether he stays on or whether he does a David Cameron and just moves off into the sunset. I suspect he'll stay on. It's always a difficult call after you lose an election, but it was a very, very big defeat. I think it's one of those strange things that he's actually very, he's a very popular politician in New Zealand, but that doesn't always equate to people wanting to vote for you and your party.
55:42 Rory Stewart? No, and I think the scale of this defeat is pretty dramatic. I mean, to have the nationals go from 25 to 45, I mean, it'd be, it's the sort of scale of defeat that, that Rishi Sunak currently looks like he's on course to face. And it'd be difficult to imagine in a British context, Rishi Sunak staying on after that kind of defeat. So I wonder whether Chris Hipkins will survive.
56:00 Alastair Campbell? Well, on the happy note of Rishi Sunak suffering as big a defeat as the New Zealand Labour Party just did, let's say goodbye for now.
56:09 Rory Stewart? Thank you very much. Speak soon.
56:11 Alastair Campbell? Bye.
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56:52 Speaker 07 I'm not the first nanny.
56:53 Speaker 06 Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17. Not a middle without parent.
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