393. Question Time: America’s last ally, Japan in crisis, and Netanyahu on the brink?

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• 0:00Rory Stewart?

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• 1:12Rory Stewart?

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• 1:14Alastair Campbell?

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• 1:26Rory Stewart?

  I actually had a NordVPN thank you. I was in the new Starbucks here in Creve, and of course, the thing flashed up saying this is an unsecured public network. And I was able to go to my VPN. And it was a little reminder of something we often forget when we're 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.

• 1:50Alastair Campbell?

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

• 1:57Rory Stewart?

  I'm incredibly proud of you. That's a tech transformation. So to get the best discount off your NordVPN plan, go to nordvpn.com/restispolitics. That's nordvpn.com/restispolitics. And the link is in the episode description.

• 2:20Rory Stewart?

  Welcome to the Restless Politics Question Time with me Rory Stewart.

• 2:24Alastair Campbell?

  And me Alastair Campbell. And Rory, we did a fair bit on Israel, but we also unsurprisingly got lots and lots and lots of questions about Israel this week. So let's just start on a couple. Reza, it's already been established that attacks on medical facilities in Gaza are counted war crimes. So why is there still so much protection of Israel? And here's what I'm saying, in light of Kemmy Badenoch attacking the two Labour MPs who refused entry to Israel, would Rory nonetheless expect her to condemn the Russians for refusing him entry into Russia? Did you see her? Her response was very, very odd.

• 3:02Rory Stewart?

  It was odd. Let's just remind people of the story. So Yuen Yuen Yang, who is, I know actually a bit, and actually advised a bit when she was running for Parliament. I mean, not in a grand way, she would have got advice from lots of other people, but she was the FT correspondent in China. She's a really smart British economist from a Chinese background. And she is a real coup for the Labour Party. I mean, it's part of Keir Starmer bringing in some very, very talented young people. Anyway, she and Abidin Mohammed went to Israel in order to do a visit.

• 3:35Alastair Campbell?

  To the West Bank.

• 3:37Rory Stewart?

  Somewhat to their astonishment, they arrive at the airport in Tel Aviv from Luton at 2.30 on a Sunday afternoon. And suddenly find they're denied entrance to Israel. And they try to say, well, but we're British members of Parliament, we're coming on a visit. And they're told that they are there to spread hate and disinformation. And they're not allowed in. I mean, it is really interesting, this question of why the Israeli government thinks that's a smart thing. Can I just sort of start with that, from the communications point of view? Because obviously, I'd normally say to you, if you were Netanyahu's press spokesman, are you insane? Why do you need more trouble? You know, what possible trouble

• 4:20Rory Stewart?

  are these two female parliamentarians going to create for you? Surely it's much more comms trouble for you, denying them entry, getting 70 MPs, including Hamish Fulmer on West Streeting to be photographed in Westminster Hall, make yourself look like an autocratic regime that has something to hide and doesn't let in members of Parliament. What's the counter argument if you were trying to make the argument for why actually denying them entry is no bad thing?

• 4:45Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I'd say there are only two. One, one you might admit and the other one you'd probably be less willing to admit. I mean, I actually think their basic case that the idea, I know that they're both very, very strongly pro Palestine, but actually, as you say, she was a journalist, Yang was a journalist for the Financial Times, did some amazing stuff about human rights abuses in China. The idea that this is somehow she wants to pick on Israel, I think is nonsense. But I think two things. One would be because they can. And just as Trump is testing the whole time, can I get away with stuff? I think partly it's that. Let's just do it because we can.

• 5:25Alastair Campbell?

  And I think the second thing domestically is to try to generate this sense that we're on our own and the world is all against us. And so you create enemies and I don't know how big a story it was there, but not as big as it was here. And frankly, not as big as I think it would have been if we weren't living through this era of impunity. And I'll say, you know, I've just, I was in, I was in Paris the other day. I went to see Notre Dame, or you've got to go to see the restored Notre Dame, it's fantastic. Almost found God. I mean, it was all, it was that good. I mean, I always thought he was creeping up on me at one point, but I managed to get out just in time.

• 6:05Rory Stewart?

  Alasdair, this is the thing, we're gonna, this could be the great, this could be a great admission of the podcast over the next two years. We can, we can get Alasdair to find God. This could be amazing.

• 6:15Alastair Campbell?

  But I, I went into this, this bookshop near the Pontyot and I found this book of a guy you may know, Gerard Arrol, who I know because he and I have done stuff together for Portland and he basically, he was the ambassador to Israel. For six years, and it's a really, really, really interesting book. Most ambassadors memoirs are, you know, they're not, they're a bit too diplomatic, but this is, this is quite diplomatic in that he tries to be nice to both sides, but he's also very critical of both sides. But one of the, the points that he makes is that, you know, a bit like you, you, you, you've been accused by all sorts of rabbis of being antisemitic. And he makes the point that they, you know, they will

• 6:56Alastair Campbell?

  take any criticism very, very seriously and they'll relate it to the existential threat that they fear and that, and if you like, gave rise to their existence. He's a very, very interesting book. I've got to tell you by the way, one of the best bits, you mentioned Ben Gavir and Smotrich on the main podcast. He, he, he makes no bones in saying that we're talking about fascism. But he gives this extraordinary account of his first meetings with Jared Kushner, when Trump was first appointed Jared Kushner. He said he's intelligent, he's arrogant, and he's ignorant about the issues. And he, he concocted a plan that was so Israeli, pro-Israeli,

• 7:38Alastair Campbell?

  it was a caricature. And Gerrard asked him whether he'd talked to the previous people who tried to bring peace to the Middle East and to Israel Palestine. And he said, no, because they failed and I'm, I'm an innovator. And, and he asked him what he'd done to prepare then. And he said, oh, he'd read about 10 books. And he seemed very, very, very proud of himself. Given you read 10 books in a flight, Rory, I don't think that, anyway, but, but the point related to the

• 8:02Rory Stewart?

  Also, I think you and I would spend an enormous amount of time talking to people who'd done it before. I mean, I think there's, there's so much to be learned. But can I just sort of quickly, just to develop this comms question. Let's imagine Trump had denied access to two British members of parliament who wanted to visit the United States. How would he spin it? And how do you think that would work with the MAGA base and Fox News and Tucker Carlson? Would it actually, you know, could he even argue that it might benefit him to deny access to visiting British parliamentarians?

• 8:33Alastair Campbell?

  Well, there is form. He got the British ambassador expelled. Kim Darak said something in a private message about Trump. And Trump didn't like it because it became public and he got Boris Johnson to kick him out. I wonder, I mean, let's just say, I was meant to be doing a speech to an American bank. Uh, it would have been this week, I think. And I got a call, was it last week or the week before, saying, oh, the, um, the event organizer, they have a sort of bit of a, they're having a change of direction for the event. You, you won't, you won't be required. And I said, oh, this wouldn't be politics, would it? And they, no, no, no, no, no. It's just having a change of direction.

• 9:15Alastair Campbell?

  And I've got to be honest, I was quite relieved because I thought, God, would I, would I really want to go the whole way and then suddenly get dragged into immigration to be shown everything I've said on the podcast or everything I've said on social media? Because that's kind of where it's heading. And what, so I, I think that's what they're saying with these two Labour MPs is basically, you know, think twice before you criticize us. So I think Trump would, would, yeah, definitely, this is right out of his, of his book.

• 9:41Rory Stewart?

  Of his playbook. Um, so can I just, just tackle Raisa's question, which is this question about humanitarian workers? Um, because the way the news comes out, we, we get it in little packets and we don't put it all together. But if you look at what's happened over the last year and a half, there has been a very, very large number of attacks on NGOs and humanitarian workers by the Israeli military. So if you take MSF, Medicine Sun Frontier Docs Without Borders, who are these very courageous doctors who travel around the world trying to provide emergency medical help in serious war zones? It's a dangerous job. Um, they had to withdraw from Afghanistan after, uh, some of their doctors were, were killed.

• 10:22Rory Stewart?

  But generally speaking, that when you go and work for an international NGO in a war zone, you wear high vis vests, you have huge signs around your vehicle. And generally speaking, you relatively safe. That that is not true, unfortunately, in Gaza. So let's just take MSF. Their convoys have been attacked and people have been killed. Their clinics have been attacked and people have been killed. Their guest houses have been attacked and people have been killed. A guest house is where the international staff sit, live, eat. And, you know, we've had a recent case, for example, where a Bulgarian health worker sitting in the UN Office for Project Services has just been killed.

• 11:06Rory Stewart?

  More people have been killed in the last three months of last year in Gaza than three times more than an entire 12 months of normal killing of NGO workers in these kinds of environments. And of the 573 suspected cases in Gaza of illegal killings, only one Israeli soldier has been prosecuted, successfully prosecuted, out of 573. And you can see the pattern here. So what happened? You're driving up in ambulances, your lights are flashing, you're driving very, very slowly. You're driving up in an ambulance and paramedics because your previous ambulance has been attacked

• 11:49Rory Stewart?

  and you're trying to work out, can you get people in? It's not an exclusion zone. And suddenly people open fire on you. And then the official Israeli spokesman comes out and says, the lights were not on, they were a suspicious vehicle, the Hamas and Islamic Jihad, they name a Hamas individual in the thing. And the evidence is hidden. I mean, it's not just pushed off the road. Instead of the bodies being returned to their families, they're put in shallow graves, the vehicles are covered over with dirt. And it takes almost a week before the UN is actually even able to access the site, dig out their colleagues. At which point, the head of UNOTIA then has to make a public statement

• 12:33Rory Stewart?

  in a video saying he's he's never seen anything like it. But It is astonishing how, if you think back to Kosovo, you mentioned the attack on the refugees, or you think back to Iraq, Abu Ghraib, you know, that story came out of people in hoods being tortured, how these things completely undermined, Abu Ghraib in particular, I remember, I was on the ground, I was dealing with Iraqis then. It was the biggest news internationally imaginable. It completely discredited the American government. Huge investigations took place. All those people were prosecuted and it was still not enough. It's like the My Lai massacre in Vietnam. These things burn into the consciousness. But somehow what's happening in Gaza doesn't feel like this. Stories which

• 13:19Rory Stewart?

  in the 1970s in Vietnam, or in the early 2000s in Iraq, would almost have brought down governments. Happen, are denied, cover-ups happen, no prosecutions happen, and it doesn't seem to have any consequence.

• 13:31Alastair Campbell?

  That's why I said on the main podcast that I thought it was incredible. It wasn't even raised with Netanyahu in the White House. But one of the reasons he'd have been quite comfortable and confident that it wouldn't was because Trump was never going to raise it. I suspect if that had been Clinton, Obama, even Reagan going back, if you'd have been there and this was the big thing going on, the big, one of the big sort of events happening in Israel at that time, I think that I raised it. And just go back to your stats, Ray, 1% of unrest staff in Gaza have been killed.

• 14:06Rory Stewart?

  One out of every hundred.

• 14:07Alastair Campbell?

  One in every hundred.

• 14:08Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 14:08Alastair Campbell?

  One out of every hundred has been killed. And also the media can't get in there. So that's the other thing. We don't see it. That's why the Israelis were probably quite confident in saying, it was only because one of the, one of the Red Crescent workers happened to film it. And then another of them who was killed happened to have his phone still on. That's the only reason that we've actually got a semblance of the truth of what's of what's actually happened.

• 14:33Rory Stewart?

  Two other eyewitnesses and then I think, I mean, it's been very impressive, the way that Sky and the New York Times and others have tried to cover this because they, as you say, they can't get in. I mean, the journalists get to Jerusalem, they get to the crossings, they're not allowed, the Israeli government won't allow them in. So what they're relying on is local Palestinians to tell them, but they are able to build it up from video footage, satellite footage, lies about the timing of when the exclusion zone was put in place and they've managed, rather unusually in this case, as you say, to to prove that the Israeli government was completely lying. But it raises the question, what happens in all these other incidents when we're ensured that, you know, these were actually Hamas people, you know, they weren't following

• 15:15Rory Stewart?

  proper procedure, the Israeli army acted entirely in accordance. When we don't have the video footage, we don't have the satellite footage, we're not in any position to actually challenge it.

• 15:24Alastair Campbell?

  I'll tell you the other thing that I think is worth maybe reflecting on this, is the the political of history of Israel as a whole. If you go back, so David Ben-Gurion, the first Prime Minister of Israel, and the leader of the Mapai Party, which essentially was a left wing party, it was the Workers' Party, the full name was the Workers' Party of the Land of of Israel. And they governed more or less till 1968, early seventies, and then they merged into the Labour Party. Then you had Golda Meir, you had Yitzhak Rabin. So that's the first 30 years of modern Israel was essentially left of centre. And but the last Labour, and I'm not making a Labour Conservative point here, I'm just making the point that the last Labour, you had Netanyahu in for his first term, the

• 16:09Alastair Campbell?

  last Labour Prime Minister was Ehud Barak, who was out by 2001. Now, you have had the centrist liberals, Ehud Olmert, who we talked to, and Bennett was another right wing, and Lapid, but then Netanyahu back again. So you've you've had you've had decades of Labour.

• 16:26Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 16:26Alastair Campbell?

  And then decades of essentially what will become known as the Netanyahu era. So they've moved to the right.

• 16:31Rory Stewart?

  And I think this is important, which is that Israel is often presented as though it's completely homogeneous, you know, Israel does this, Israel does that. The reality is, it is a right wing government, Netanyahu, Smotrich, Ben-Gavir, doing these things. They do not speak for all Israelis. And and your point about the difference between Labour and the right wing Likud is really interesting. I was looking at settlement maps. And one of the differences is that, yes, under Labour settlements happened, but under Labour, the settlements tended to happen around the edge of the Green Line or in the Jordan Valley. But under Likud, starting with Ariel Sharon, the settlements were put right in the centre and the heart of Palestinian territory.

• 17:15Rory Stewart?

  You can see settlements all the way around Nablus. And I think Sharon is famous, saying, "We're going to grab every hilltop." So I think getting into this and being able to explore the differences within Israeli opinion, not seeing it as a sort of single homogenous bloc, and having some hope in the Labour tradition, what remains of the Israeli left, different ways of doing things, is vital.

• 17:42Alastair Campbell?

  A couple of things I learned from Gerard Aauw's book. One is, I didn't realise that the word for settler in French is colon, C-O-L-O-N. So the settlers are called les colons. And the politics of settlement is the politics of colonisation. And the point he makes is that it's illegal, it's against the Geneva Convention, there've been lots of United Nations resolutions against it, but the European Union doesn't speak out against it. He actually makes the point, the European Union funds schools in the West Bank, funds wells, funds infrastructure, the settlers then move in and bulldoze them, and we sort of say nothing.

• 18:24Alastair Campbell?

  Anyway, I know you claim your French is not very good, but I think you'd enjoy Gerard.

• 18:28Rory Stewart?

  Good. Let's go through. Okay, here's a question for you. Becky, and we're going to come to the UK because we've been doing a lot of international stuff. The Birmingham bin strikes have become a symbol of, I know how this is going to sound to international listeners, the Birmingham bin strikes.

• 18:48Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, believe me, they know about it.

• 18:49Rory Stewart?

  Broken local government finance. But who's to blame? It's the result of reckless council mismanagement? Or is it a symptom of deeper structural problems with how local authorities are funded in the UK? And what would either of you do to fix the system? Would you mind just doing a little explainer on the Birmingham bin strikes, please?

• 19:07Alastair Campbell?

  Well, first of all, Roy, I'm going to take your side and say, the world, I think, does know about this story. And I was looking two days ago at my Der Spiegel, and there was headline, I can't remember the exact words, but it basically said, Birmingham, England, the stink is terrible. So they sent somebody to find out what is this all about. So this is a strike that's going on in Birmingham where Unite, the union, claim that Birmingham Council, which is under massive financial pressure, essentially bankrupt, has imposed what they call cuts, real cuts, to their pay. And they have gone on strike, they have

• 19:52Alastair Campbell?

  been negotiating, those negotiators have gone nowhere. The question there about why doesn't the government get involved, I think the government is trying to get involved to get this resolved, but it is truly horrific. There are parts of Birmingham where they'll say, well, it's actually, we're not feeling it that badly. But you've got, you know, there's been infestations of rats and all sorts of stuff that are really, really horrible, terrible for the image of Birmingham. And also, they've now set up these sort of places where you can take your rubbish. But there was a piece on the BBC News last night of a mile long car traffic jam of people with their cars full of all their rubbish, trying to take it to these temporary refuse centres. I mean, it's bloody awful. A lot good for the local election campaign, I have to say.

• 20:33Rory Stewart?

  No. So politically, I guess this echoes, or sounds like this, a bit of echoes of the ways that the Conservatives were able to weaponise these strikes, the late 1970s of things, you know, the bins out and famously the dead going unburied and all this kind of stuff. I suppose that takes us to the question of Labour itself. So Angela Rayner comes from a trade union background. Many of the Labour MPs come from trade union roots and backgrounds. Unite was a big supporter, I guess. In fact, tell me a little bit about the history of Unite's relationship to Labour. Big funder? And how did it break with the Corbyn-Starmah division and?

• 21:10Alastair Campbell?

  Historically, Unite has been a big supporter, but the current leadership is quite critical of the government and is playing into this idea that they're moving too far to the right on certain issues. And just on that, Roy, by the way, today, there is a poll.

• 21:26Alastair Campbell?

  A YouGov poll and you know Labour in the lead just ahead of Reform. But the thing that I found most interesting is that they've done an analysis and this is something you and I have talked about before, but I think it really is worth bearing in mind because I think that because Trump is so dominant in the global debate, because Nigel Farage has always been one of these people who's able to get frankly more media attention than the leader of a party with five, now four MPs ought to. We assume that all the Labour's troubles are coming from Reform. The analysis of the Labour vote from 2024 as to where it's going according to this

• 22:05Alastair Campbell?

  YouGov poll, 64% say they would still vote Labour, 14% Lib Dem, eight Conservative, seven Green and Reform 5%. And I think this is where I keep saying that this sort of sense that Labour thinks it has to appeal to the right a lot of the time, I just think strategically maybe, maybe wrong.

• 22:26Rory Stewart?

  Let's develop this for a second. So Unite traditionally gave, you know, when I was in Parliament, £5.7 million a year to Labour and it was the biggest single, I guess it's the biggest union in the country and it was the biggest single donor. And more recently, what you've seen is Unite giving a lot of money to individual more left-leaning Labour MPs. So 80 MPs, if you look at their declarations, are getting money from Unite, but central headquarters isn't. As I think you've reminded me in the past, Unite emerged from TNG, Transport and General Workers' Union, which merged with something called Amicus in 2007. So during your time, it was TNG, which was at one point, I think, the largest trade

• 23:10Rory Stewart?

  union in the world, you know, reached 900,000 members. Tell us a little bit about that. Was it a good ally, a difficult ally? How do characters like John Prescott pray into this? Tell us a bit about the unions and Labour politics.

• 23:24Alastair Campbell?

  I would say, when you say was it a good ally, was it a difficult ally?

• 23:27Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 23:27Alastair Campbell?

  It was both. It was both, as I understand. There's no doubt that they knew. That the whole of Tony's leadership, ninety four to two thousand and seven, the Transport General Workers Union, which everybody called the T and G, that was one of, if not the, most of the time, the biggest union. He had people like, Bill Morris was the General Secretary. And actually, yeah, I'd say a good, difficult ally is a very good way to put it. They didn't always have the same agenda. They did sometimes worry that Tony was moving too far, too fast in modernising the party. John Prescott's role often was to be a bridge.

• 24:08Rory Stewart?

  Remind us about Prescott's background. He'd been a big trade union leader, hadn't he?

• 24:13Alastair Campbell?

  John was not necessarily a leader in the trade union movement, but his background was in the trade unions and then became an MP. But, you know, and John was very close to Rodney Bickerstaff, who was one of the big union leaders. And he was certainly somebody who ensured that their voice was heard. But at the same time, I think sometimes the unions felt that John, once he'd made the move to support Tony, sometimes they felt he'd moved too far as well. But I think that the, the relationship was, was difficult at times, often on policy and often on strategy as well. But Tony was, I think, one, the reason why Tony maybe had a better relationship with some of these trade union leaders than people realise, because he was actually pretty straight with them. He would tell them when

• 24:55Alastair Campbell?

  he thought that they were wrong about what they, they thought the Labour Party was for. And so our relationship with the trade union was never, I think I've said to you before, the only time he ever got a standing ovation at the trade union congress was when he made the speech on September the eleventh, two thousand and one, to say that he wasn't going to stay to make a speech because he was going back to London. That was the only standing ovation he ever got. So they were always a bit grumpy with him, but I think had a sort of grudging respect.

• 25:22Rory Stewart?

  Did you have any strife, I mean, did Tony Blair ever have bins uncollected on this, on this level? Anything like Birmingham being a

• 25:29Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, we, we, I don't remember something like this, but we definitely had strikes. Um, and, and when we did, we were always, we tried to, to broker, but without necessarily that being seen as our role. It depended, it would depend what the issue was. But Tony was not somebody who, I think on something like this though, because this is, you know, we talk a lot about the image of the country or what have you. This is bad for Britain to have, you know, we may think that Birmingham is, you know, just this is where a local regional story is not. This is a, this is something that is projecting an image of Britain. And I, I think that's why it's more important than just a sort of local dispute. It's got to get sorted out.

• 26:09Rory Stewart?

  And presumably, maybe I'm wrong about this. If you're on the left of the Labour Party in Parliament and you're already pretty unhappy with Keir Starmer, you're unhappy about what's happening with child benefit, you're unhappy what's happening in international aid disability cuts. This contributes to the sense that, that Starmer's betraying you and contributes to trouble in the ranks or not.

• 26:30Alastair Campbell?

  Keir did get directly involved, or I think it was a number 10 spokesperson. I saw a story saying Unite attacked Starmer because Keir or somebody on his behalf had said that Unite should accept this. Um, now it seems to me, this is a classic dispute because it does seem to me that they have a point. You know, if you're asking people at a time of really difficult financial, uh, situated circumstances to take what is amounts to a pay cut, that is bloody difficult. So, but then at the same time, there will be a counter argument, which I haven't really seen. I can identify the people who are arguing this for Unite. I've not really seen anybody from the council that has convincingly explained

• 27:11Alastair Campbell?

  to me why this is being allowed to happen. At those moments, I think sometimes government does have to step in and say, right, we're going to get people, quotes, around the famous table and we're going to bang heads together. We're going to get this sorted.

• 27:23Rory Stewart?

  Last one from me, just on internal level is a question from Joe, which is what's happening to where MPs come from? What social backgrounds they come from? And one of the things that struck me. Is that in the early 1980s, there were well over a hundred MPs who came from blue collar backgrounds, steelworkers, aluminium workers, coal miners. The unions were feeding through these people and it had been a hugely strong tradition. I mean, I guess the real hero of all this maybe is characters like Ernie Bevan after the war, who come in, take over from the kind of central casting, super posh Anthony Eden as Foreign Secretary and prove as a really effective trade union man that he can be an unbelievably good Foreign Secretary.

• 28:08Rory Stewart?

  So there was this huge cadre of people who were charismatic, incredible communicators, who'd grown up in the trade union movement and who were able to connect their social background to being really effective public figures, right? And that's massively died off. If you look at the figures now, more and more people are basically professional politicians. You know, we, you feel it a little bit, I'm afraid. You know, we interviewed Rachel Reeves, we interviewed Bridget Phillips and we interviewed Wes Streeting. In many of these cases, these are people who've been members of the Labour Party since they were quite young. They've often got parents who are councillors or who are involved in the Labour Party.

• 28:51Rory Stewart?

  The case of many Labour MPs, actually their parents are either councillors or members of parliament. So there's a sense in which, and this maybe is a good transition to Japan, because this is true in Japan, we're beginning to develop a sort of political class. Now, it's not always that they're the kids of MPs, they might be the children of councillors, they might be the children of senior party members, they might be the children of people working in social care, but there's a sense that more and more bits of society don't want to become members of parliament. And the people who naturally think when they're in their teens, wouldn't it be great to become a member of parliament, because that's a way of helping people, and I've seen my mum and dad helping people, are increasingly feel like either the children of clergymen,

• 29:35Rory Stewart?

  like the First Minister of Wales that we interviewed, or Theresa May, or Gordon Brown. Or the children of people who broadly speaking are from caring professions or Labour local councillors or party members. Over to you.

• 29:47Alastair Campbell?

  I don't think that's right. I think, like, for example, we have, we now have the first cabinet in history where nobody went to private school. Not one single member of them, the current cabinet went to private school. I think that suggests that actually, so if you mentioned, you mentioned Rachel Reeves, I remember she made the point when we interviewed, and actually her parents weren't into politics. Wes Streeting, his background is, I think you would describe as working class. I think it's what we think about what working class means that's changed. And I don't, you know, I don't know all of the new MPs, far from it, but, you know, I know quite a lot of them. And I, I think this professional politician thing, I'm not sure. It may be that they're going into politics younger, and therefore we think that's all that they've ever done. And there's a reason

• 30:31Alastair Campbell?

  why they're going into politics younger is because the people who get into positions of leadership are younger. And, you know, when we talked to Simon Hart, the chief whip, your, your former chief whip, who was on leading this week, I thought he made an interesting point. Maybe there aren't enough people who've, who decide towards the end of their professional careers, they'd like to become MPs. And, but I think actually your bigger point is the one about more and more people thinking, God, politics is just not for me. I don't think it's a class thing.

• 30:58Rory Stewart?

  No, I don't think it's a class thing. And I think that's an, an interesting thing, which is that the, as you say, the Labour Cabinet, the problem doesn't seem now, I think it was 20, 30 years ago, that people from working classes and poorer backgrounds didn't feel Parliament was for them. And they felt excluded. I think that isn't true anymore.

• 31:17Alastair Campbell?

  Angela Rayner, Bridget Phillipson, Peter Kyle, who told us his past story.

• 31:21Rory Stewart?

  Or famous Kier Sama's dad. So I don't think the problem anymore is-

• 31:25Alastair Campbell?

  What did he do again? What did his dad do? What did his dad do? He did, I noticed, by the way, in his speech, Jaguar Land Rover.

• 31:34Alastair Campbell?

  He didn't use the T word. He said, my dad worked in a factory.

• 31:37Rory Stewart?

  Ah.

• 31:38Alastair Campbell?

  Toolmaker. What's happened to toolmaker? Now, listen, we've droned on enough.

• 31:42Rory Stewart?

  Can I just sort of finish this? Finish this for a second?

• 31:44Alastair Campbell?

  For God's sake, Rory, honestly, you're obsessed.

• 31:46Rory Stewart?

  So nobody's uncomfortable for you, which is why you want to get off it. So the point is that

• 31:50Alastair Campbell?

  It's uncomfortable. Why is it uncomfortable?

• 31:51Rory Stewart?

  They're becoming from more working class backgrounds, but they're less and less big charismatic figures. They're more and more people who've become interested in politics in their teens, become student politicians.

• 32:04Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, no, no, Rory.

• 32:05Rory Stewart?

  And that's why it's feeling more and more like Japan.

• 32:09Alastair Campbell?

  No, I admire your attempt to make a particularly pathetic, tenuous link to Japan. But let me just close with this. You're becoming like one of those people who notices suddenly that policemen have got younger. Um, this thing about the big characters, okay. When, as you know, I can't stand Boris Johnson. You can't stand Boris Johnson. But in thirty, forty years' time, people will remember that there was this big character in politics called Boris Johnson. They might even remember there was a big character called Liz Truss because she crushed the economy. Kwasi Kwarteng, they might remember was a big character. You've mentioned John Prescott, big character. Tony Blair, big character. Gordon Brown, big character.

• 32:52Alastair Campbell?

  You don't mention the MP for Chipping, nobody's ever heard of it. Because you don't need that many big characters. So I think you're just getting older, Rory, whereas I'm getting ever younger. So Rory, let's, as you age, as you become the person who notices policemen are getting younger. Let's go to a quick break. Make yourself a cup of tea, have a rest and we'll come back and talk about Japan.

• 33:23Speaker 02

  Hello, it's Steph McGovern and Robert Peston from The Rest Is Money here. Now it's absolute carnage at the minute on the stock market across the world, all thanks to Donald Trump and his tariffs. So this week, we've gone daily. We're going to bring you shorter episodes every lunchtime. Just trying to make sense of it all because, Robert, I mean, we've been in crises before, haven't we?

• 33:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I've been at the front line of reporting financial crises for decades, from Black Monday in nineteen eighty-seven through the global financial crisis, through to the Covid crisis. I mean, you know, the list goes on. This is a unique crisis because it is driven by one man, Donald Trump, but it does share lots in common with those sagas we have lived through before. And as we know, although what people see is falling share prices, it is to an extent what goes on in debt markets, financial markets, which is more important to our prosperity. And we are seeing absolute turmoil in bond markets, for example. So this is going to affect every part of our lives.

• 34:23Speaker 02

  Yes. And so we'll be looking at things like, what do we think is going to happen next? How much pain is Trump willing to take? And what similarities are there with things like the credit crunch that you and I covered together? So to try and make sense of all the rest, join us on The Rest Is Money, wherever you get your podcasts.

• 34:53Speaker 04

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• 35:00Speaker 05

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• 35:07Speaker 06

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• 35:09Speaker 07

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• 35:12Speaker 04

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

• 35:25Speaker 06

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• 35:27Speaker 04

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• 35:36Speaker 08

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• 35:41Speaker 04

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• 36:09Speaker 08

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• 36:28Rory Stewart?

  Welcome back to the Rest is Politics Question Time. Me, Rory Stewart.

• 36:31Alastair Campbell?

  And the Alice Campbell. So we said before you had your lap that we were going to do Japan. Joanna, could we see Japan stepping up as a diplomatic leader and mediator in much the same fashion as the UK? Two countries have a lot in common. Both enjoy a fairly good relationship with Trump, relatively independent in their respective areas, while also having an interest in keeping a large power, Russia, China, away from vulnerable countries in their continent, aka Ukraine, Taiwan. Will island nations once again become the pivots around which the world hangs in the balance? Poor, that's a very interesting question. I, I think Japan, the Japanese Prime Minister is seeing Trump soon, I think. I've been looking into this.

• 37:12Alastair Campbell?

  Japan's got a massive problem, and that is the demography. So last year, the number of babies that were born in Japan for the ninth successive year was a record low. 1.6 million deaths, 720,000 births, so two deaths for every new baby born. Thirty percent of the country's population is already over the age of 65, and by 2070, that's going

• 37:42Alastair Campbell?

  to be 40%. Now, these are numbers that really do impact upon your ability to be a strong country. Just take defence. One of America's demands of Japan is that it steps up on defence so that it can do less in relation to China. But they can't recruit at the scale that they need to. So I think this is a great question, but I think it's a real conundrum for the Japanese government.

• 38:07Rory Stewart?

  It's also a conundrum for the US. So Japan, South Korea, to some extent Australia, these are shaping up to be America's last allies in the world. So if you're right, and Yosuke Fisher's right, that basically Europe is beginning to conclude that America is no longer an ally, that it might even be a strategic threat. And as Waltz, the National Security Advisor and others, try to tilt towards China, you know, their justification, from some of them at least, for getting out of Ukraine, Russia, and abandoning Europe and abandoning NATO is because they want to focus on China. They are going to have to rely more and more on this network of allies in Asia, and they're really screwing it up. You know, one of their allies was supposed to be getting closer to Vietnam and exploiting

• 38:50Rory Stewart?

  divisions between China and Vietnam, and they've just hit Vietnam with huge amounts of tariffs, you know, 45% tariffs, almost as bad as China, which is completely mad because the assumption was that they were trying, six months ago, to convince people to move their investment away from China into these other countries, Vietnam, Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, all of which they've now hit with tariffs, meaning that those companies are thinking, what the hell am I supposed to do? I thought I was supposed to de-risk, delever, get out of China, invest in these other countries, and now I'm being hit there. Which brings them back to Japan, South Korea, Australia, who had certainly, of course, they've hit all of them with tariffs as well, which leads them sort of bewildered and wondering what the hell the point of being a US ally is. But you've then raised another question, right?

• 39:34Rory Stewart?

  Which is, and we'll get on to South Korea in a second, these are very, very odd allies to have, particularly Japan and South Korea, as they age so much. I mean, what are they gonna, who's going to war there? They're gonna go to war in a bunch of wheelchairs and walkers. I mean, the South Korean demography is collapsing overnight.

• 39:51Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. And, well, another one, which I saw, I saw the figures for the birth rate in Taiwan. Taiwan has got a fertility rate of 0.87. So that's 0.87 new births for every person that's dying. And they've now, I mean, the Ministry of Defence in Tokyo, they've raised the maximum major recruits, it's now up to 32, it was 26, it's now 32, but they've missed their recruitment goal by more than 50%. And so, these figures are just, they're absolutely staggering. So, over the last three decades... The number of eighteen to twenty six year old Japanese men, which is that that's

• 40:35Alastair Campbell?

  the population that they're trying to, they've been trying to recruit from, it's gone from seventeen point four million in nineteen ninety four to ten point two million last year. I mean, blimey. To meet their recruitment quota, if they don't extend the age of recruitment, they'd have to enlist more than one percent of the entire population.

• 40:56Rory Stewart?

  That's amazing. Just to sort of complete the, the story on Japanese politics. So we covered the election, which was, it seems a long time ago, it was only October last year. And this was the moment where Fumio, Fumio Kishida stepped down and Shigeru Ishiba decided to call a snap election. And a little bit like Macron's snap election, blew up in his face, lost his majority, ends up with a minority government. So one of the problems that we're facing, trying to answer Joanna's question, is that Japanese politics, South Korean politics, which we'll get on to a second, French politics are very, very weak. And of course, German politics is still in this coalition agreement. So it's quite difficult

• 41:38Rory Stewart?

  for these big countries actually to organise themselves, get budgets passed, take radical new decisions, because they're very fragile, I think.

• 41:46Alastair Campbell?

  Well, Kishida, just on that, Roy, Kishida, Kishida tried to get defences up, to pay for defence, more defence, and he failed because of that political job.

• 41:58Rory Stewart?

  Let me, let me sort of finish the point that, that was frustrating you before the break, just to try to develop it. I mean, Japanese politics is very, very much a bunch of people who are a minority of people who want to be politicians, while most people don't get involved in politics, which is what I fear is happening to Britain. We've literally gone from something like a hundred and twenty blue collar working class MPs in nineteen eighty three. A proper, you know, manual labourers, steel animunium, to people who, whatever their family backgrounds are, increasingly spads, political advisers, professionals. And you made the analogy with policemen getting younger. It's also true, unfortunately, with the police.

• 42:41Rory Stewart?

  Increasingly, many, many police officers, the children of police officers, often have two parents who are police officers. So you end up with politics becoming, in Japan, Fumio Kishida's, you know, parents, grandparents, Shigeru Ishiba's father, these are all politicians, right? And my fear is that we're going to end up in a very, very strange world. And it will become a little bit like Japanese politics, because if you don't bring people in from the outside, you can end up with very well-intentioned but quite shy technocratic people who've grown up in, since they're students, sort of geekily interested in politics, but not really having much sense of the outside world, not really having worked in developing

• 43:24Rory Stewart?

  countries, not, you know, certainly not having worked in a steel factory. And I think that this is something to watch for, and will happen more and more in Europe too, where I think many, many countries, if you're an Austrian, you simply don't, doesn't occur to you to become a politician. And I think that's something to watch for in Britain. I mean, just as we're celebrating the departure of the old Etonians, is the group of people from which politicians draw going to become narrower and narrower?

• 43:50Alastair Campbell?

  There's a bee has arrived in your bonnet here. I'd like to, I'd like to put out a peer or two, somebody who works for the Parliamentary Labour Party. I'd like a data analysis of the economic, social, political background of the current Parliamentary Labour Party. And if there's anybody listening from the Police Federation, I'd like, I'd like a similar job done. I think the idea that all coppers have got parents who go, it's nonsense.

• 44:12Rory Stewart?

  I didn't say all coppers, but I didn't say all coppers.

• 44:14Alastair Campbell?

  No, you didn't, but you said.

• 44:16Rory Stewart?

  But a striking number, a striking number.

• 44:18Alastair Campbell?

  I think it's moving in the other direction. I know police officers, Rory, who say that they, their kids are not going into the police because they've seen that it's not that great a life for them. So anyway, we need data on both of these questions, Rory. Otherwise, it's going to become anecdotal, bee in bonnet.

• 44:34Rory Stewart?

  Let me put on the request on data. How many of the parents of existing Labour MPs were councillors, MPs or very active members of their local Labour parties who were bringing their kids along to Labour Party meetings when they were in their early teens? And how many of them were student politicians? Yeah.

• 44:54Alastair Campbell?

  I think you'd be quite surprised by the answer, but we shall, we shall see. Or we could get the data done by somebody else. But so I'm sure there are lots of, I know there are lots of Labour MPs listen and lots of, but if there's anyone in the PLP, if you've got that data, please send it. And if you're a member, we'll even give you a shout out. Now, Olivia, who is a member and comes from Perth in Australia, was Peter Dutton, that's the Liberal Party leader, the Tory, was Peter Dutton right to backtrack on his working from home policy and apologise? And was he right to drop the candidate who said women soldiers should not be in combat roles? Good question. Was he weak or strong or panicked or principled?

• 45:33Rory Stewart?

  Let me just do a quick explainer and then come to you on the politics. So Peter Dutton, obviously the right wing candidate in the election and Owen Easie was doing badly. He was behind in the polls and people thought Dutton had a pretty good chance of winning. And Dutton presented himself as a slightly kind of radical right wing reformer. And he thought, you know, what I'm going to do is I'm going to call out problems in our economy and I'm going to produce traditional market solutions. So he talked about how the supermarkets seem to be forming cartels and he needed to kind of break them up and create more competition. And as part of that, he's also, you know, talked about Ministry for Government Efficiency. And he's also talked about trying to solve the problem of people working from home. And

• 46:18Rory Stewart?

  it's a classic tempting thing for a politician to do because actually presumably many of the rallies and meetings with this party he goes to, he says, isn't it ridiculous that everybody works from home? And many of his core party supporters will say, yeah, yeah. And many men will be like, yeah, yeah, it's ridiculous. Why are people not turning up to work? Then he launches it into the public and it suddenly turns out that it's unpopular. Women in particular, by a very large margin, end up being really opposed to it. Meanwhile, his position in the polls is falling and he comes out and says, I screwed up. I'm dropping the policy. I'm not going to have that. Okay. How does the politics for this work, Alastair?

• 46:58Alastair Campbell?

  So what it plays into is the idea that the campaign hasn't really been thought through. Our friend James Copsy, who I mentioned, is regularly sending us media reports of what's happening in Australia. The general conventional wisdom was that Albanese, and by the way, Rory, we had dozens of responses to our, how do you pronounce his name? And the overwhelming, including from Albo himself, is it's Albanese. Okay, Albonese, Alba Albanese kind of thing. Was that he won the first week and that Dutton had a few sort of mishaps. One of which, the biggest which so far, was this working from home policy. And I think you're right. I think the politics was, I think this is where

• 47:43Alastair Campbell?

  Trump's shadow, I'm afraid, and the whole kind of anti-woke thing. I'm not saying it's not a thing, but I think if you make it a big part of your campaign in week one, when you must have had, they must have done polling on this, or they must have had some sort of feedback as to why he did it. So I think the politics are bad for him. Probably did the right thing to dump it straight away rather than have it drag on for another week. So dump it, apologize and move on. But then that's why this other thing about the candidate became a bigger issue than maybe it would have been. And this is an interesting one for you because you've been a candidate and lots of candidates get vetted and and what have you. But this, this is a guy who had been in the military. An amazing name, he was called Benjamin Britton.

• 48:28Alastair Campbell?

  And he'd been in the military and after he had been selected, these interviews were dug up where he'd been on podcasts and he'd basically questioned whether it was sensible to have, a bit like Pete Hexeth, sort of his model of military. Women shouldn't really be in combat roles. Now, I don't know. I think there was a bit, a bit of panic. I think if he'd had come out and said, well, that's what I thought then, but now I don't, I think it'd, I think it'd have been fine. But Dutton panicked, is my sense. So they've kicked him out. They've got a new candidate.

• 49:00Rory Stewart?

  Is Dutton panicking too much? So as, as you say, could have apologized on that and kept the candidate. Or the candidate could have could have found a way of reframing. I mean, Heskey gets a lot of support in the US for saying his message is it's on merit. You need the same standards for everyone. I don't have any problem with women in the military, but they've got to be able to run the same distance, carry the same weight. Otherwise, they're not going to be in the US Marine Corps. It's very difficult to kind of disagree with that stuff. I guess the other question, which I never really understand in in politics, which you got a much better instinct on, which is he's obviously calculated that it's better to just say, I was wrong with the working from home policy and drop it, facing the accusation

• 49:41Rory Stewart?

  that he's weak and flip flopping as opposed to holding to the policy, which presumably he believed in and which appeals to some of his base and and and sort of battling it out. How do you calculate when you've actually got to go out there and say, I'm dropping the whole policy, I screwed up completely, we're not doing this?

• 49:58Alastair Campbell?

  Instinct. I don't think there's any kind of science to this. I think you have to have you have to have good instincts. And the great thing about political campaigns, election campaigns and Australian campaigns, similar to ours in many ways, is that the reason why they're so testing is because your instincts and your values and your political field do get tested. And I think this is why people are starting to look at Dutton and think, oh, God, he had a bad first week and then if he has another. Albanese Albanese will probably make mistakes as well because that's what happens when you get under pressure. But I think I think in the end, it's instincts.

• 50:31Rory Stewart?

  Okay, Brian, Trip Plus member. Considering Trump was impeached twice, but ultimately acquitted, what does Yoon Suk Yul's impeachment tell us about South Korean democracy? Is it a sign of resilience or deep political dysfunction? How might his removal shape up relations with the US and North Korea? So, quick introduction on this. As you've pointed out, like in Japan, there's been a massive collapse in South Korea's fertility rate from six children per woman in the 1960s to point seven two in 2023. So there's been a nine year decline, life expectancy at 83, proportion of individuals aged 65 and over increasing rapidly. South Korea will be to have the world's highest percentage of elderly citizens within 20 years. And Yoon Suk Yul, from the right.

• 51:16Rory Stewart?

  Anti-North Korean decided to do this extraordinary thing of declaring martial law. Declared martial law claiming that his opponents had been taken over by North Korean agents. He tried to basically shut down the legislative assembly. And this is something that goes back to the old days of South Korea, which of course had military rule in the sixties and seventies, had martial law in the eighties. And he hoped the military would come with him and he hoped that his hard right base would be like, yeah, here we are, you know, asserting control. And actually, the whole thing blew up in his face. His own party turned against him. There was complete bipartisan support.

• 51:56Rory Stewart?

  For blocking him, the military did not come out on his side and he's now being impeached. So it showed two things. It showed first, the South Korea does have in a way that countryside Britain maybe don't, this history of military rule, you know, you couldn't imagine somebody declaring martial law in Britain, I guess. But it also has quite strong democratic institutions because when he tried to do this thing, which seemed like he was travelling back forty years in time, the institutions responded, stopped him and now impeaching him. Over to you.

• 52:24Alastair Campbell?

  The question about, you know, what it shows, it shows that their democracy in a way has worked. He did something that people thought was profoundly anti-democratic and really politically stupid. Still not clear why he did it and he fought and fought and fought and fought and a lot of people fighting for him. But ultimately, the process has led to the fact there will now be another, he's no longer president. He's been removed from office by a constitutional court. And there'll be another election on June the third. And so I, I, I think this is, this is actually, I mean, it's been terrible for South Korea's standing and image in the world, but I think actually it's terms of its political and democratic process, I think they should, they should sort of give themselves a bit of a pat on the back. They certainly don't have a, somebody who's been convicted felon.

• 53:08Alastair Campbell?

  Sitting there sort of, you know, putting twenty-five percent tariffs on South Korea. Now Rory, I think we've sort of run out of time. I'm looking at my laptop charge, which is one of my sort of one of those things that triggers my my sort of edginess in life. Do you want to have a last quick one?

• 53:26Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, last question then for you, Northern Ireland, something you know a lot about. With the anniversary of the signing of the Good Friday Agreement coming up on 10th of April. So we were there, I see. We were in Belfast for the last anniversary. How far does Alistair think that the agreement could be used as a template for contemporary conflicts around the world? So let me sort of frame that. You look at the Good Friday Agreement. What do you think made it work? And is it a one-off or how applicable it is? Do you get inspired by people saying we can repeat Northern Ireland in Israel or Sudan? Or do you slightly shake your head and think, oh, this was pretty special? And the application to other countries is a bit limited?

• 54:05Alastair Campbell?

  No, well, I don't think you'll ever necessarily repeat the same thing in a completely different context. But I think some of the principles are absolutely applicable. Indeed, Jonathan Powell, Tony Blair's former chief of staff, who's now national security advisor to Keir Starmer. In between times, he ran this amazing charity called Intermediate. And essentially what he was doing was going to different parts of the world in very different circumstances. I don't think he went around and said, look, we did Northern Ireland, here's how you do it. But definitely part of the learnings from that were applied. And a lot of these were obvious. They're things like, you know, be clear about what you're trying to achieve, understand when and how to

• 54:48Alastair Campbell?

  engage in real dialogue and when you just kind of just have to go through the motions because you're you're slowly moving to the next the next phase. I do think the strategic picture, so for us, it was essentially there has to be political consent. There has to be a democratic process that people buy into. But there has to be an understanding that there is genuine inequality here that has to be addressed. They were the strategic pillars and then everything else you worked around that. So I think that, you know, and within the middle of the tragedy, we talked in both the main podcast and today about about the Middle East. I mean, the absolute tragedy of that is really you've had a leadership on both sides in recent years that hasn't

• 55:28Alastair Campbell?

  really wanted to do the things that you need to do to get a proper peace process going. That's the tragedy of it.

• 55:35Rory Stewart?

  You know, you know, I don't believe in plugging and I'm definitely not going to mention the fact that that the marches is available for a pound on Kindle at the moment, but I did want to point out that you have just been on our fellow Goalhanger podcast, Empire. Go on, tell us a little bit about what you've been talking about there.

• 55:53Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, Empire. Well, no, actually, people, Empire, which is Willie Dalrymple and Anita Nand, and they've done a, I think it's a three-part series, mini-series on the troubles. So I went on there to talk about, yeah, the Good Friday Agreement and how it all came together and what have you. So if people want to know more about Northern Ireland, and to my mind, you can never know too much, the episode comes out on Thursday, the 10th of April. And if you want to listen to that, you just search Empire wherever you get your podcasts.

• 56:24Rory Stewart?

  Great. Well, thank you very much indeed. See you soon. Bye bye.

• 56:28Alastair Campbell?

  See you soon. Bye.