Pod Insights The Rest Is Politics 94. Police power, gender recognition, and women in Afghanistan About this episode Join Rory and Alastair as they discuss anti-strike legislation, the right to protest, the battle between the Scottish and UK government over gender recognition reform, the plight of women in Afghanistan, and more.
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Transcript 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/rustaspolitics. That's nordvpn.com/rustaspolitics. And the link is in the episode description.
1:43 Alastair Campbell? Hello. Welcome to another episode of The Rest is Politics with me, Alastair Campbell.
1:48 Rory Stewart? And with me, Rory Stewart.
1:49 Alastair Campbell? And there is a lot to get through, Rory. I don't know quite where we start. You've got strikes, you've got the teachers joining in, you've got this massive row going on between the UK government and the Scottish government over gender laws, you've got the government bringing in more curves on protest. We just had last night another Sunak climb down on the Online Harms Bill. We've got another crisis that the Met, we've got some progress, I think, on the protocol in Northern Ireland, but with the ERG still on manoeuvres. And we've got the dumping of a tonne of legislation in the retained EU law bill. And we've got the little matter of Nadeem Zahawi's tax affairs.
2:25 Rory Stewart? And that is just the domestic UK. Because for our many listeners around the world that are interested in other subjects apart from these, there's amazing things going on. There's Biden with his papers. There's Afghanistan, where the crackdown on women is getting more and more extreme. There is the resignation of the German Defence Minister, slightly hapless figure. And indeed, new news on Chinese demography. So where would you like to start this?
2:49 Alastair Campbell? Well, they've just announced the new Defence Minister in Germany. What a name, Rory. He's called Boris Pistorius. Now, that's a very, very unfortunate Christian name, obviously Boris. Anybody who's called Boris in politics, that's an immediate advantage and Pistorius as well. But yeah, we can maybe do that. We can talk about the defence. I know a little bit about the outgoing German Defence Minister. It's not a happy story. I'm amazed that she's lasted so long.
3:14 Rory Stewart? Just very quickly, because we don't want to spend too long on it, but it sounds like, from your perspective as somebody who knows a lot about politics, she seems to have made an incredible number of sequential mistakes. She put her son on a Ministry of Defence helicopter, she gave very unfortunate speeches, she boasted about sending 5,500 helmets to the Ukrainians and got mocked for that. But that was just the beginning of it, wasn't it?
3:36 Alastair Campbell? I know, and it's really strange that, I mean, obviously, Olaf Scholz caused the shots in terms of, you know, this big defence stuff. But, you know, it is important to have somebody, particularly when you've got a war going on, to have somebody who's deemed by the political establishment to be competent. And she just isn't and wasn't. And I'm surprised that Scholz let it linger on.
3:59 Rory Stewart? And this Boris Pistorius, who they've brought in, again, seems to be very much a professional politician. Somebody who worked his way up local SPD party structures, was a local mayor, not somebody with any particular background in international relations or defence.
4:14 Alastair Campbell? No, so we'll see. But I suspect he will be, I don't know anything about him at all, but I suspect that he will be better than Lambrecht. Now, listen, shall we kick off with strikes? We've now got the teachers joining in, very big turnout. There's the big teaching union, some of the unions are not striking. Nurses keeping going, civil servants, more civil servants strikes down the track. I just get the feeling this is slightly getting out of control and and the government are not. I don't know if they even have a strategy for public opinion because if they if they do, I can't quite work out what it is.
4:53 Rory Stewart? But it's it's I mean, we we keep sort of coming coming around this and one of the questions is what the government is supposed to do. Because they're now between a rock and a hard place. They assumed that the teachers might not go on strike because you'll remember that the teachers actually got a much larger award than other people earlier in the year, earlier end of last year. And in fact, the increases that the government committed, there was another 2.3 billion put into education. So per pupil spending is one of the few areas where the government's about to get up to the 2010 Labour levels again in a couple of years. So they were hoping, I think, that whereas there's been huge pressure on nurses' pay
5:35 Rory Stewart? and these big strikes around the RMT, they thought that the pay awards, which was the biggest cash increase in 15 years, which were given to teachers a few months ago, might mean that they weren't going to face a strike. But in fact, what's happened, of course, is inflation.
5:50 Alastair Campbell? Yeah.
5:51 Rory Stewart? Which means that even though it was this between 5 and 8.9% pay increase, in real terms, teachers' salaries, of course, are dropping like everybody else's.
5:59 Alastair Campbell? And I mean, I saw a tweet from Robert Peston last night. He said, here's why more than 90% of the teachers voted to strike, this is the any union, why there are such desperate shortages of teaching important subjects. At the end of the Labour government, 28/9, teachers were paid 1.67 times the national average salary. Today, 1.4. So they are seeing a pretty catastrophic, real terms drop in their in their living standards. And, you know, Rory, sorry to keep banging on, but I think we have to go back to austerity. This is a big factor.
6:31 Rory Stewart? I think that's important because I think this is important in asking what Keir Starmer would do in this situation. Are we really saying that he would meet all these demands for pay increases? Is that's what you'd recommend he do?
6:42 Alastair Campbell? No, and he didn't say that in his interview. At the weekend, but he did say that you'd have to sit down and and have a proper sensible negotiation.
6:51 Rory Stewart? Isn't that waffle? Isn't that what everybody always says?
6:53 Alastair Campbell? Well, it's not.
6:54 Rory Stewart? Because he's just avoiding the question, whether he's actually going to give them pay increases or not. I mean, he's in the same problem, isn't he?
6:59 Alastair Campbell? He might inherit the same problem. He made a point, the sorts of strikes that happen now, there were no nurses' strikes while we were in power. That meant that the nurses broadly felt happy. Likewise, the teachers, most of the time, yes, we had, you know, we had some difficulties with the teaching unions, but actually the teachers, by and large, most of the time felt that they had a government on their side. And I think that what I think Labour are being, have to do is set out how they're going to have a strategy to grow the economy and make clear that they're going to support, you know, investment in in the health service and in in education. But the big thing that's been lost here, I just don't understand, I keep going back
7:42 Alastair Campbell? to what the government are trying to achieve, because they've got a massive recruitment and retention problem. Right? Is it going to be helped? Let me just ask you this, Roy, this question, Roy. Do you think it is going to be helped by them now rushing through, ramming through at sort of absolute breakneck speed, this legislation that effectively is in some circumstances for some people going to going to take away the right to strike? That is what they're doing. Is how is how is that going to help?
8:12 Rory Stewart? Let's explain that legislation first, so people can can understand what they're doing there. And then then let's come back to this question of what you think Starmer's going to do. If we're going to be fair on the government, we've got to understand the context, which is obviously huge pressures on public finances, rocketing inflation, and a very difficult question when you've awarded between five and eight point nine percent pay increases to teachers, whether you're going to give them more pay increases. When there are many other people in the public sector asking for it. We had this, we launched our new series last week with our interview with Michael Heseltine. And he was very interesting about this.
8:44 Alastair Campbell? You didn't say what it was called Rory.
8:46 Rory Stewart? It's called leading.
8:47 Alastair Campbell? Was the listener who didn't know about it supposed to know that or will we have to tell them?
8:52 Rory Stewart? I'm going to give you 10 seconds to promote this and then we'll come back to Heseltine's point.
8:56 Alastair Campbell? Okay, it was, the rest is politics has branched out with a new podcast called Leading, in which we interview leading figures from politics, sport, business and elsewhere.
9:08 Rory Stewart? I was really taken with the interesting question of, you know, saying to Michael Heseltine, what would he be doing in this situation? And of course, he's often seen because he was a big remain campaigner, as somebody of the centre, but he's not really. He's in many ways a right wing conservative. And of course, his initial response to this is, there is no way that the government can give in to these demands, because if they do, it ripples across. It's often, if you read the articles in newspapers, they say, oh, it wouldn't cost the government very much just to give this to the R and T or just to give this. But of course, Heseltine's point and his experience goes right the way back to the 60s and 70s. It's when this gets rolling, once you make a concession to one group, you end up making concessions to everybody else.
9:49 Alastair Campbell? He was basically saying tough it out.
9:50 Rory Stewart? Basically saying tough it out, yeah.
9:52 Alastair Campbell? I think that's becoming unsustainable. And I think that, it was interesting, your friend, your friend, the one you think should be Prime Minister Gillian Keegan was on the, on the radio this morning. I didn't think she was very effective, I have to say Rory. She was terrible on the gender stuff. She was awful on Deans and Zahawi's tax affairs where she sort of pretended to know what was going on. And on this, and on the strike, she was really just saying, well, it's all very difficult. It's all very unfortunate, but they are going to have to concede something, somewhere in this. Otherwise, because they're not winning the battle for public opinion on this. To go back to this legislation thing, I think this is making it worse for them. First, I don't think it's necessary. I think it's a huge distraction.
10:33 Alastair Campbell? And they keep making this point. They're saying that we're only, we're getting in line with France and Germany and, and other European countries. No, they're not actually, because they may have. Minimum service level agreements, but what none of those countries have is legislation that says if you don't abide by the minimum service levels, then you are going to lose your job.
10:55 Rory Stewart? Can I just, just for listeners, explain what the legislation is? So the legislation is saying that for blue light services, particularly fire, ambulance, there needs to be a minimum service level agreed. And this is something that already exists, for example, it was something that exists in relation to prison officers.
11:13 Alastair Campbell? Yeah.
11:14 Rory Stewart? Prison officers have to abide by pretty clear rules because if they go on strike in the way in which currently teachers could go on strike, you could end up in a very serious situation in prisons where nobody's feeding the prisons. So the question is, what counts as an emergency service where you want to have these minimum service level agreements in place? So that's supposed to be happening around fire and ambulance. They're saying with health and education, they're going for voluntary agreements, which in fact is something that the nurses have already done, although ambulance workers didn't do, which is voluntary agreements on how much provision they're going to provide during a time of strike, otherwise obviously lots of people die or you have no idea whether you're going to get assistance. They've dropped the toughest threshold for strike action, which is something that Jacob
11:59 Rory Stewart? Rees-Mogg wanted to introduce. So this is a more watered down version of it.
12:02 Alastair Campbell? We still do have the toughest of anywhere in Europe.
12:05 Rory Stewart? Do you think public opinion is going to shift on this or opinion will continue to be with the unions? I mean, for example, we got an interesting couple of WhatsApps together from a friend of ours this morning, one of them sharing that thing from Robert Peston, pointing out that teachers' salaries are declining in real terms. And then 10 minutes earlier, he'd been saying, I've got kids in comprehensive school and I'm tearing my hair out at the idea of the teachers going on strike. So how do these two things balance, you think, in the public's mindset in the next few months?
12:32 Alastair Campbell? Well, I think what happens is that people end up making a judgment as to where they see the blame lying. And I think that most people see teachers as being pretty reasonable people. People definitely see nurses as being reasonable people. Every time I see a minister at the moment, they say, all we're doing is bringing this in line with other European countries. The first thing is to say, in France, for example, collective bargaining coverage in France is 95%. In Italy, it's 80%. It's 27% in the UK. The other thing is that union rights, trade union rights are actually contained in the constitutions of France, Italy and Spain. And the other thing, they keep sort of-
13:10 Rory Stewart? But I'll just challenge on that. I mean, without kind of getting to too much to Daily Mail cliches, but I guess there will be many, many voters in Britain who don't see France and its trade unions as a great model for Britain. In fact, many people in Britain would think the trade unions are out of control in France.
13:25 Alastair Campbell? No, my point is, though, that with the government, I'm actually coming at this from a slightly different angle, Roy. The government keeps saying that all they're doing is bringing these into line with Europe. My point is, no, they're not, because we already have amongst the most draconian restrictions on the right to strike. And they have been very vague about how high these minimum service levels are going to be set. So, for example, if they say, okay, well, the minimum service level is going to be 80% of the normal service, then you might as well not have a strike in the first place.
13:56 Rory Stewart? Presumably, you agree that it was right that there's minimum service levels for the police, for prison officers, for the security services. But of course, the prison service used to be able to strike. We had to change that.
14:08 Alastair Campbell? But when we had the recent strikes, for example, I've got, you know, friends who work in the health service, in the recent strike, there was a discussion about minimum service level. You also saw in some cases where people were on picket lines, and they heard about ambulance drivers, and they heard about cases where, you know, and they left the picket line. I think the government is creating a distraction here that it doesn't need to do. It certainly doesn't help them in relation to recruitment and retention. And I think the whole messaging is basically trying to make an enemy of people who are working in the public services. It's a mistake.
14:42 Rory Stewart? Let's move on to devolution. So there's been this very interesting case, which is that Nicola Sturgeon and the SNP in Scotland have introduced legislation which is going to make it easier for people to self-fund- Identify transgender legislation, so self identify on your gender. So they're going to drop it down from eighteen, where it is currently, to sixteen. They're going to take away some of the requirements, including medical examination to do this. And the UK government has stepped in and said they're not going to accept it and that this isn't a power that is devolved. And it's been very interesting, I think, in two ways. Firstly, quite clearly, the way in which Nicola Sturgeon wants to frame this is the fight for progressive Scotland against Rishi Sunak.
15:23 Rory Stewart? So she keeps calling out Rishi Sunak and portraying it as a culture war, being led by Rishi Sunak against her. But that's made a little bit more complicated by a couple of things. Firstly, by the fact that two thirds of the Scottish public appear in opinion polls not to support what she's doing. And secondly, by the fact that Keir Starmer has said that he disagrees with the legislation himself and appears to be taking Rishi Sunak's side.
15:44 Alastair Campbell? I don't know if he's taking Rishi Sunak's side. He said he's got concerns about lowering the age. But look, I think this is so complicated and it is a fascinating area on many levels. The gender identification issue is clearly one of those subjects that arouses real passions on both sides. But I think to be fair to the Scottish Parliament and the Scottish government, and I actually mean the Scottish Parliament here, I think. The Scottish Parliament, I think, did an incredibly rigorous job in the approach that it took to this piece of legislation. And including with input from the Conservatives, from Labour, from others.
16:23 Alastair Campbell? And then in relation to the devolution question, and this is called a section thirty five, which has never been used before in the two decades since the Scottish Parliament was created. And this is where the UK government sees, if you like, a conflict between the devolved administration's law, as passed, in this case, a devolved issue, gender recognition, and sees a conflict with the Equalities Act, which is a UK matter, reserved for the UK. Now, I think when you were in government, if I'm right, or it may have been post your time, but I think it was when you were in government,
17:06 Alastair Campbell? this issue was being looked at closely by the UK government. It seems to have been sort of parked for some reason. And meanwhile, the Scottish government was going ahead with doing what is now done. And I just find it odd that it's only now that this has become such a big deal for the UK government. Why it couldn't have been resolved while this was going through the Scottish Parliament?
17:29 Rory Stewart? There's the fact that people like Keir Starmer genuinely disagree with it. So Keir Starmer said that he doesn't think that you should be dropping the age from eighteen to sixteen for transgender identification. So he disagrees with him in principle. But I think there's a bigger subject, which is the question around whether there should be the same political and civil rights throughout the United Kingdom. What do we mean by devolution? Do we want to end up with a situation like the United States where every state has a different set of political and civil rights? Or do we want to be in a situation where a citizen in the United Kingdom has equal rights across the United Kingdom? And I think that's quite an important thing to think about. I think I would argue that I would like a situation where citizens across the United Kingdom have the same rights,
18:11 Rory Stewart? where it's not that you end up being able to do something at sixteen in Scotland, which you can only do at eighteen in England. I'd like the civil and political rights to be the same.
18:18 Alastair Campbell? But that's because you're a unionist. Now, I'm a unionist, but I also think that the point of devolution is actually that in some circumstances, they should be doing things differently. Now, I suppose because the devolved issues that are most focused upon, crime, transport, health, education, it's obvious that if you're talking about the education system, there's a Scottish school and that's, the Scottish government is responsible for that, there's a Scottish hospital. With this, it's because we're talking about an individual, something that affects an individual, who might move between the two.
18:52 Rory Stewart? Yeah, and I also find it a bit frustrating because I think one of the things that is grace about devolution, and one of the reasons I believe in local mayors, is I like the idea of people being held accountable directly by citizens for their performance. So what I love about devolution is exactly things like education. And I think the debates ought to be, why is Scotland performing much worse than England on education?
19:15 Alastair Campbell? Oh, but really, that's just a political point, that's not a principle point.
19:18 Rory Stewart? Yes, it's a political point, but it's a point about performance. And I think one of the things that's interesting about Nicola Sturgeon is that she often wants to shift away from the question of how education is performing or health is performing or drug rates are performing in Scotland, off the stuff that she's actually responsible for administering, onto questions like transgender.
19:38 Alastair Campbell? You say that the thing you love about devolution is that things can be done differently. And we have the political system that we have. For the Greens, for example, in Scotland, this was an absolute red line for them to get into the coalition. I also think it's fair. I mean, Nicola Sturgeon is really quite passionate about this issue. Well, I think that's fair enough.
19:58 Rory Stewart? But she's passionate also about independence, which I disagree with. She basically thinks she should be able to do everything in Scotland. She doesn't believe in devolution at all. She wants to push the envelope on everything. So you've got to draw the line sometime. And the fact that Green Party has made a red line of something which they may not have the legal power to do, isn't a reason to concede it to them.
20:15 Alastair Campbell? No, I'm not talking about concession or not. I'm simply saying that is the problem that you're wrestling with here and that sometimes I wrestle with, simply not the fact that because we're against independence, we're not settled in the way that we adapt to the fact that Scots do want to do things differently. And the fundamental point here, and this will be resolved in the courts, obviously. I can't see how this is going to be resolved other than the courts now that the government has announced what it's going to do. So the question then simply becomes, what do you do when you have an apparent conflict between an issue that the Scottish government said is devolved and which the UK government says is reserved? That's where we've got to. And I guess I do think there's an awful lot of politics here.
21:00 Alastair Campbell? I think the government is slightly playing politics with this.
21:03 Rory Stewart? You've got to think about it both ways. So here's a case where they're doing something progressive. Imagine if the devolved government started doing something regressive, right, which was curtailing rights. Imagine they wanted to lift from eighteen to twenty-one, the age that you needed to be to self-identify to transgender. You'd be much more uncomfortable with that. Or imagine they wanted to restrict abortion rights. Now, this question of how much is devolved or not is at the heart of Roe versus Wade and that Supreme Court decision in the United States about how much states have the right against the federal government to determine the political and civil rights of their people. I would much rather that those things are held at a federal.
21:41 Rory Stewart? United Kingdom level than devolved down because it sounds fine when these governments are doing things that you broadly agree with, the devolved governments that are progressive. But if they started doing things that were conservatively regressive, I think you'd be much less comfortable.
21:53 Alastair Campbell? Every time I say anything about this trans issue, I've noticed this particularly on social media, it's so difficult to have a kind of nuanced, balanced debate about this. And I think when you throw something as provocative as the devolution settlement into that mix, I think it becomes, it becomes very, very difficult. And she's got this whole sort of thing because J K Rowling is up in Scotland and a huge figure up there, she's, she's a big part of this debate now as well. But that's why I worry that what the, what the UK government here is doing, when it could be resolving the issue, that process within the UK government debate just seems to vanished. What is actually happening within the UK government about resolving this issue?
22:34 Alastair Campbell? I can't remember, I can't, it was several ministers ago with the equalities, I don't know whether they maybe got rid of the equalities minister, I don't know. Wasn't it meant to be that Badenoch woman, isn't she meant to be in charge of all this? She's vanished.
22:46 Rory Stewart? But by resolving the issue, you mean dropping the age down from 18 to 16?
22:50 Alastair Campbell? No, I mean by resolving this question without necessarily going to court.
22:55 Rory Stewart? I'm not sure it's resolvable.
22:57 Alastair Campbell? Well, maybe that's the problem, maybe that's the problem.
22:59 Rory Stewart? I, I think as you discover every time you tweet about it, this is not an issue where there's an obvious solution where everybody's going to agree.
23:04 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, yeah. Well, shall we, on, on that unresolved issue where we both feel, we've both felt a bit uncomfortable in the debate, shall we go to a break?
23:13 Rory Stewart? Very good.
23:51 Rory Stewart? Welcome back to The Rest Is Politics with me Rory Stewart.
23:54 Rory Stewart? And me Alastair Campbell. Where do you want to go Rory?
23:57 Rory Stewart? Afghanistan, I think. I mean, I think it's something which has been a slow burn horror. When Kabul fell, which is now about 18 months ago, August of 2021, people were surprised that things were not more horrifying. Taliban took over and broadly speaking, there weren't that many replies or killings. Security in many ways improved. You could travel up and down parts of Afghanistan that I hadn't been able to travel through for 15 years. Many NGOs were able to operate well on the ground and were able to access areas where previously there had been checkpoints they could go to safely. Then Afghanistan went through a horrifying winter where people were on the edge of starvation and selling
24:39 Rory Stewart? their own organs in order to pay for food for their children. But by the middle of last year again, things seemed to have settled down and the Taliban, although theoretically were meant to be cracking down on these things, in practice, women continued to work in NGOs, women continued to be able to go to university, although there were problems from going to high school, they continued to be in primary school. And suddenly, since December, things have got much, much more conservative and aggressive. So first it was announced that women could no longer be in university and there were some very courageous walkouts, both by women but also by men, walking out of university exams, ripping up their diplomas on television and protest at this. Then an announcement that women couldn't work in NGOs,
25:24 Rory Stewart? which has now caused another problem, which is a loss of the big international NGOs and aid agencies have stopped operating in Afghanistan, meaning that aid spies aren't getting through. And at the heart of this is a fight within the Taliban government, a fight between the more sort of military faction, which paradoxically turns out to be more moderate. So that the guys that were going around shooting the guns and blowing up the bombs over the last 15 years have tended to be the people more open to talking to foreigners, more open to making concessions on women. The real conservatives are not the military leaders, but the clerics, and in particular, the Supreme Leader, who, a little bit like the Supreme
26:05 Rory Stewart? Leader in Iran, has representatives in every ministry, isn't the Prime Minister, sits in Kandahar, not in Kabul, so a long way south. Is prided on his religious education and has basically, it seems, overruled the cabinet and the prime minister to push through these unbelievably conservative policies.
26:25 Alastair Campbell? What do you know about this MP who was who was killed and what was the what was the background to that?
26:29 Rory Stewart? Well, we're still still trying to look into this. So this is Mursal Nabi Zada, who was a female MP elected in 2019 under the the last dispensation, one of the very few female members of parliament to remain in Afghanistan, which was a very courageous thing to do under Taliban rule. Some people have done it. Former President Qasai, for example, is still in Afghanistan. Very brave thing to do because the last time the Taliban took over, they hung the former president from a lamppost. So it's a it's it's there are these very courageous people doing this and he's he's, you know, he was a very controversial man, but it the courage he's showing and indeed that that Mursal Nabi Zada was showing is remarkable. And now she's been killed. She was killed, her bodyguard was killed, some of her guests were injured. But what exactly this attack was and why it happened is not clear.
27:14 Rory Stewart? And somewhere in the back of the story is the Islamic State because if the Taliban are awful, ISIS are far, far worse and they remain the major threat to the Taliban in Afghanistan.
27:24 Alastair Campbell? Do we know whether she was killed precisely because she had been a woman MP?
27:29 Rory Stewart? Almost certainly. I mean, I I think it's possible it's a family dispute, but it's much more likely she was killed because she was an outspoken female MP who remained in Afghanistan.
27:37 Alastair Campbell? No, I think I think what's what's happening in Afghanistan and the fact that there is so there's so little attention on it, we're back to we say this every week, these things, terrible things happening in different parts of the world that, you know, when you think about when the retreat from the withdrawal from Kabul happened, when the whole focus was about, you know, what we were going to do to stay to to help people who'd helped us, most of whom are still there. I saw that the the stats on the ones that we've actually managed to get out into the UK, it's it's minimal. It's pathetic. And, you know, and there was, if you remember at the time, Johnson, you know, sort of making,
28:18 Alastair Campbell? doing it endlessly in front of sort of military settings, saying what he was going to do and how we're going to be there for the long haul, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And, you know, does he give a moment's thought to what's going on in Afghanistan? I very much doubt it.
28:31 Rory Stewart? No, it's heartbreaking. You also, I think, were looking a bit at China.
28:35 Alastair Campbell? I think it's the New York Times today has got a piece sort of focused on what it calls a kind of sense of multiple crises that are happening. The economy not growing in the way that they'd been wanting and hoping and expecting. Population down for the first time in several decades. They're going to have the same problem that we're facing of how do you kind of look after aging population with when you don't have the birth rate to match. And then the other thing I noticed was this protests by people who had been employed as part of the COVID testing. Because, of course, when we had the zero COVID policy, that was a pretty big labor market. And now it's gone. And it seems to be that they've
29:19 Alastair Campbell? just sort of, zero COVID is gone. And, you know, we're now doing what they do. So there's an awful lot of people who suddenly find that they don't have a job to go to. So I think we sometimes have a sense of China as being this kind of just power that's just going on and on and on. But I wonder if, you know, given that it's very hard for the media, for our media to sort of genuinely to let you know what's happening there, I wonder if the fact that there's so much of this stuff sort of seeping out, whether things are maybe worse than the Chinese image.
29:48 Rory Stewart? 100%. And growth in general slowed, as you say, down to 3%. And even that's probably pretty optimistic.
29:54 Alastair Campbell? Yeah.
29:55 Rory Stewart? And this story on population is amazing. For the first time, China's population is dropping. It's dropped by nearly a million people in a year.
30:02 Alastair Campbell? Yeah.
30:03 Rory Stewart? And this is 10 years earlier than it was supposed to happen. It's made a complete mockery of all the demographic projections from the 1970s onwards. Put it in context, over the next 10 years, as the Chinese population will continue to fall. The British population is likely to grow by about 2 million people. But that is because the Office of National Statistics is predicting that we will have 2 million people immigrating to the United Kingdom over the next 10 years. So almost all the growth in the United Kingdom will come from immigration over the next 10 years. Our population will go up to 69 million from 67.
30:36 Alastair Campbell? Is there going to come a point when India becomes the most populous country on earth?
30:39 Rory Stewart? Going to overtake China relatively soon, yeah.
30:41 Alastair Campbell? Hmm.
30:42 Rory Stewart? Because it's growing much, much more rapidly. It's assumed now, because it's largely dominated by economists, that the one-child policy of China was a disaster and it's caused huge problems. Because of course it causes big problems for growth and productivity because you end up with obviously one person supporting two other people rather than three people supporting two other people. But at the time, I think you could make very, very powerful arguments in the 70s and 80s that population seemed to be a real threat to the global environment, that it would be very difficult to provide and feed for the number of people, and that the world population needed to begin to stabilise, that it couldn't continue growing 10, 20, 30 billion people. And that therefore what China did for the world felt in the 1970s as though it was
31:27 Rory Stewart? a brutal sacrifice, but something that actually felt as though it was showing an example at a time when people really felt population was a major threat.
31:35 Alastair Campbell? We can't get through a whole episode without talking about Brexit. It's impossible, Laurie, it just can't be done.
31:40 Rory Stewart? Impossible, absolutely impossible.
31:41 Alastair Campbell? I think it's just constitutionally offensive for this to happen. Just before we started, I was looking at the latest Der Spiegel and they have a piece about Mr Sunak and the headline is, is he planning the exit from Brexit?
31:58 Rory Stewart? Oh, is he?
31:59 Alastair Campbell? No, he's not. He's not remotely because of course, unlike Johnson and Trust, he's a true believer. But what I think it reflects, and I've been picking this up elsewhere in relation to Northern Ireland and the Protocol, is that I think Sunak is trying to, he's definitely trying to get on relations on a better footing with the major European powers. He's got his summit coming up with Macron quite soon. But obviously, this protocol thing has to be fixed. And he seems to be wanting to do one or two things, which to us, I think, is going to sound fairly minor, but which do signal an intent to change things in a way that Johnson, the ERG, will not be not be happy.
32:44 Alastair Campbell? And I saw that Ian Martin, who I think is pretty plugged into the Tory party, has had a piece the other day.
32:50 Rory Stewart? And he writes for Reaction, doesn't he?
32:51 Alastair Campbell? Yeah. And he was saying that he thought that the trade deal that he thinks Sunak is trying to put together could be the focus for the next Tory civil war.
33:01 Rory Stewart? Well, this is something we've talked about before, haven't we? And it's something that we often forget, because it's true when we talk about Vladimir Putin in Russia too. But because we see Putin as a figure for the right, we assume that major opposition to him is going to come from the progressive left. But actually, the biggest threat to Putin is now from people who are even more right-wing than him, nationalists who are angry that he's not doing enough. And the same will be true with Rishi Sunak. Many listeners on this podcast, be more from the centre-left, and will see Rishi Sunak as a right-wing figure. But of course, the biggest threat to him is going to come from people who are further right-wing than he is. And it's those people who brought in Liz Truss. It's those people who are going to fight for Boris Johnson to come back. And they're arranging themselves around this sort of weird word, growth.
33:46 Rory Stewart? There are articles beginning to come out from people describing, Katie Bowles in Spectator, for example, wrote one, describing how these little groups are beginning to coalesce even around the discredited figure of Liz Truss, that the ludicrous figure of Liz Truss appears to be gathering supporters again, saying that Rishi Sunak, you know, isn't tough enough, isn't ideologically rigorous enough on pushing through these kind of policies.
34:07 Alastair Campbell? I do think that if Johnson, who seems to still labour on this delusion that he can come back in some shape or form, I think if he remains a kind of prominent figure within the debate about the future Conservative Party, and likewise with Truss, I think for the public, they just are not going to buy either of them on any level.
34:28 Rory Stewart? And on that shocking news, really shocking news, which has been picked up, which is that Boris Johnson somehow appears to have taken an £800,000 credit facility from a friend. And the Cabinet Secretary and his Ethics Advisor decided that this didn't need to be declared. So they said there wasn't a conflict of interest. Regardless of whether it's a conflict of interest, it should be declared. You cannot be in a situation of a Prime Minister taking an £800,000 credit facility without that being made public news. And I can't understand why the Cabinet Secretary and the Ethics Advisor, regardless of the question about conflict of interest, didn't think this should be revealed.
35:03 Alastair Campbell? I also can't understand why. You you you mentioned it. I think it was in the Sunday Times, wasn't it? But it's barely figured or featured anywhere else. And the other story this week that I think we've got more questions on than anything else was Nadeem Zahawi's tax affairs, which I just I I can't get my head around this story. So there's the guy who was Chancellor of the Exchequer at a time when he was being pursued by this tax campaigner, and he was setting his lawyers on this guy and telling him that what he's saying was completely untrue. But it now appears that he's done a deal. He's done a settlement, paying several millions to the taxman to resolve what clearly is some
35:48 Alastair Campbell? sort of dispute. And there's nothing on the news about it. There was a question asked of your friend Gillian Keegan about it this morning on the Today Programme. You know, and you you've made the point before, and I've thought about it a lot since you said it. And I think you're right. There's just sort of such a low level of expectation as to what standards in government are going to be.
36:07 Rory Stewart? There's also, I think, something to do with the weird way that algorithms work on social media. I mean, there are articles about it. I've been reading articles in The Guardian. I've been reading articles elsewhere. But they're not particularly promoted high on the websites. And this is also something to do with this weird system, which I also, when Africa correspondents push back against the saying there's not enough reporting on Africa, they make the same point, that their editors are looking at how many hits and likes they're getting.
36:32 Alastair Campbell? No, but I think what happens is that unless you have The particularly the right wing papers smashing it out on their front page every day. It doesn't get picked up by the broadcasters. If it's not on the broadcasters, it doesn't really connect with the public.
36:44 Rory Stewart? There is another thing we should talk about when we've got a bit more time, which is this whole question of MPs, how much they're paid. So Gary Lineker, who's the man behind our podcast, weighed into the question of whether MPs should or should not be paid more, which is something that really irritates the public. I think he's on the side of them being paid more. In Singapore, famously ministers get paid something like a million dollars a year.
37:05 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, they're over a million, over a million.
37:08 Rory Stewart? So I've always been interested in the idea of whether if we reduce the number of MPs from 650 down to 100, whether we couldn't actually pay them more. Because a lot of this stuff is so depressing. I mean, the tax stuff is depressing, the corruption scandals that we've had from every party is depressing, extraordinary behaviour. And I wonder whether there isn't an opportunity at some point to have a conversation about how much people ought to be paid, or if they're not, and that's fine too, whether the public can be comfortable with the fact that they are, will be saying that this is an unusual vocation. It's a particular type of public service that many of these people could earn much more in the outside world. Many of them did earn much more in the outside world before
37:49 Rory Stewart? they chose to become MPs. And that we're asking them to make particular kinds of financial sacrifice and we might end up with very peculiar characters as a result.
37:58 Alastair Campbell? Well, at the moment, we have the worst of all worlds. We've got very peculiar characters, partly because so many people don't want to do it for all the reasons that we often talk about, the way they get treated by the public, by the media, the money, as you say. But it'd be a very, very, very brave politician in the current mood who came out and said, you know what, I agree with Gary Lineker, we need to pay our MPs more. Listen, the last thing maybe we should touch, I wanted to talk about was this, which I think is back in parliament this week, is the retained EU law. I wonder whether Rishi Sunak would be doing this at all if it wasn't for the political forces we've just been talking about. This is the thing that essentially is going to get rid of several thousand laws.
38:43 Alastair Campbell? That have been, they're on the statute book passed by governments of both colours during our membership of the European Union. But these are, these are laws passed by the British Parliament. They just happen to be laws that have been agreed with the EU. But they cover so many important, complicated areas, employment law, environmental law, all sorts of things. You've got organisations like the RSPCA that are against it, the trade unions, the British Chamber of Commerce. And I saw an email this morning from Dominic Greve, former Attorney General, saying he was really concerned about a bill that can literally see thousands of laws thrown away without any parliamentary process attached to them at all. And of course, this was meant to be about taking back control,
39:28 Alastair Campbell? parliamentary sovereignty. But it seems to me that this is the reverse of that.
39:31 Rory Stewart? Let's get into that more. It's because I think it's going to be an issue that will unfold because a lot of money will be spent, a lot of energy will be put into this over the coming weeks. So Alistair, before we finish, you've been, you've been sending me messages about your dream. What's this dream?
39:48 Alastair Campbell? Well, God, it's the first time, Rory, that you figured it one of my dreams. And it was, so basically what was happening, we were at some sort of reception and lots of different people there. The only one I can remember vividly was actually Nadeem Zahawi. And I said to you, oh, it's Nadeem Zahawi, let's go and badger him and get him on the podcast, forget about the leading series. Because obviously, as you know, even in my dreams, I'm thinking about how to keep our podcast right up at the top of the charts. And you sort of said, no, no, no, I've got somebody far better. And I said, who? And you said, Maya Angelou.
40:28 Alastair Campbell? So Rory, where is she? Where is she?
40:32 Rory Stewart? We've got to get her on. But the problem is unfortunately Maya Angelou's died. But it's a lovely, it's a lovely vision. It's great.
40:40 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, but you said you could get her.
40:42 Rory Stewart? Then maybe it's a spiritual thing I'm doing. Maybe it's, maybe it's some sort of medium thing I'm doing.
40:46 Alastair Campbell? I'm in moderately good shape mentally at the moment. When I'm not in good shape mentally, and I'm seeing my psychiatrist quite a lot, he does actually make me write down my dreams and he analyses them. I might just do this one as a one off.
40:57 Rory Stewart? Yeah, it does sound, sounds as though I was being a bit sort of disingenuous and kind of one upmanship, probably trying to defend my friend Nadeem Zahabi, but distracting you with a really cool African American poet as a way of trying to get you off balance. Yeah.
41:13 Rory Stewart? Anyway, there we are. So that's the first. Have I been in any of your dreams yet?
41:16 Rory Stewart? Yeah, no, you definitely occasionally feature in my dreams. Yeah, yeah. But luckily I don't write them down. Next time you come, I'll make sure to share it with the listeners to our podcast.
41:27 Rory Stewart? See you later. Bye bye.
41:28 Rory Stewart? Bye bye.
41:33 Speaker 03 Mr. President, my company told me of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me.
41:43 Speaker 04 Tom Cruise is.
41:44 Speaker 05 Digger got us into this mess and Digger's gonna dig us up.
41:48 Speaker 04 From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.
41:50 Speaker 06 What would happen if I stopped doing it? You stall, you freeze to death, that's what.
41:54 Speaker 04 With great power comes great deniability.
41:57 Speaker 06 I'm not the first daddy.
41:59 Speaker 04 Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17. Not a middle without parent.
Previous Leading: Michael Heseltine Next 95. Question Time: Combatting Andrew Tate, crisis at the Met, and Johnson standing again Page updated October 26, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
