Pod Insights The Rest Is Politics 313. Why Starmer needs to be unpopular About this episode Can Labour make the unpopular popular? Will any change come from the Grenfell inquiry? How worrying is China’s influence in Africa? Join Rory and Alastair as they answer all these questions and more in today's episode of The Rest Is Politics.
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Transcript 9,780 words · 10 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:04 Rory Stewart? This episode is brought to you by NordVPN.
0:06 Alastair Campbell? And I must thank NordVPN because on my Grand European Tour with Fiona, I was away from the Hawthorns for West Bromwich against Burnley, but I managed to watch it. There you go.
0:19 Rory Stewart? I actually had a NordVPN thank you. I was in the new Starbucks here in Creef. And of course, the thing flashed up, saying this is an unsecured public network. And I was able to go to my VPN. It was a little reminder of something we often forget when we're in all those cafes and things, which is actually genuinely, people can do all kinds of weird cyber attacks and spying if you don't have a virtual private network when you're sitting in that Starbucks.
0:42 Alastair Campbell? Well, I think, are you not really sort of proud of me that I managed to do this? Or should I say Fiona managed to do this?
0:49 Rory Stewart? I'm incredibly proud of you. That's a tech transformation. So to get the best discount off your NordVPN plan, go to nordvpn.com/rustispolitics. That's nordvpn.com/rustispolitics. And the link is in the episode description.
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1:58 Alastair Campbell? Hello, welcome to The Rest Is Politics with me, Alastair Campbell.
2:00 Rory Stewart? And with me Rory Stewart.
2:02 Alastair Campbell? And a rare outing for us on a Tuesday. We normally put out our main podcast on a Wednesday, but that's because tonight, Tuesday evening, US time, is the first Donald Trump Carmella Harris debate. And Rory and I on Wednesday are going to do a bonus episode reacting to the debate. We'll put that out on Wednesday afternoon.
2:24 Rory Stewart? Right, Alistair, and on with today's show. So I think this is a chance for us to get a little bit into the new government in Britain, which hasn't quite hit its 100 days, but has now been in a couple of months. Talk about the Grenfell report, so the report on the horrible tragedy in which 72 people died in 2017. Talk about the water industry and some of the things they're trying to do to sort out the big, big problems in the UK water industry, some of the comments about healthcare, and all of this leading into a budget. And then later, we'll talk about China. But before we get on to that, Alistair, I'm going to appeal to your non-trivial side, ask you to tell us what you think's been going well and less well in the last 60 days of the, our new government.
3:06 Alastair Campbell? Non-trivial, okay. What's going well? The Tories have gone. Keir Starmer looks and sounds like a prime minister. I thought that at the weekend when I watched him on the BBC. I thought that when I saw him in Ireland with the t-shirt. I thought that when he did the report on Grenfell. I think he looks and sounds like a prime minister and he's settled into that role. And the ministers seem to have settled into that role pretty quickly. They're busy, they're doing lots of things. There are lots of announcements today, stuff on knife crime last week, Hereditary Piers, future of railways, smoking, all the different things. And then later this week, massively important, this review of the National Health Service. I think what I'd say at the moment is that it's, it's quite hard to see a narrative that's joining all of those things together. I think in large part because of the riots, even though, again, I thought he
3:51 Alastair Campbell? looked and sounded like a prime minister and handled the riots well. I think that did sort of destroy any sense of a honeymoon period where they were going to really, you know, get a lot of wind in their sails and a lot of credit at the bank and, and really look like a government that was, that was kind of motoring. And so you've had a King's Speech, which they're now starting to to roll out. What I worry about is whether the scale of the challenges that are now being faced is being matched or can be matched by the scale of the policy responses that they've allowed themselves access to. So, for example, you mentioned the budget. When the budget comes, they clearly are saying that, you know, the mess we've inherited
4:33 Alastair Campbell? is worse than we thought it would be, tough choices, they've already made a tough choice, they're going to have a big rebellion this week probably on the winter fuel payments, taking those away from all pensioners. And they've decided that's a fight they feel they have to win. Keir Starmer, one of the lines in his interview over the weekend was, we are, you know, we're kind of prepared to be unpopular. Now, my my experience of government, it's possible to do unpopular things, but stay popular, provided, provided that you are giving this very, very clear sense of direction about where you're going. There's a real risk that the budget becomes defined as a kind of Labour version of austerity. I think they've really, really, really got to be careful about that.
5:14 Rory Stewart? Yeah, that's right.
5:15 Alastair Campbell? How non-trivial was that?
5:16 Rory Stewart? That was very non-trivial. That was a huge, many, many points for non-trivial. Will Hutton, who we've talked about a bit, who's who's also somebody who has to struggle sometimes to be non-trivial, said at the end of a recent article in The Guardian that he's very much focused on making sure that the government doesn't come across a sort of austerity light. And that's something that I've been worried about for some time. It's something that you can see the SNP are slightly leaning into in their criticisms, Labour and Scotland. For very understandable reasons, Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves ruled out tax rises and talking about growth. But as as we pointed out many, many times before the election, that implicitly assumes that they're going to have to cut public spending in order to meet their targets on borrowing.
6:01 Rory Stewart? And the problem that you've just pointed to is that there are huge issues. They're not all about spending, but a lot of them are about underinvestment in public services. And the challenge is going to be, how are they going to get on top of those things? Let's take, before we get on to Grand Let's take the water industry. So fundamentally, the problem in Britain is that we've not invested properly in the water industry for many, many years. And the result of that is that we are in real danger of facing shortages of drinking water. And that's partly because we use drinking water for things like washing our cars and watering our gardens, rather than focusing on using drinking water for drinking it.
6:42 Rory Stewart? We have a real problem with our sewage system, a lot of inappropriate stuff going into our sewage. And we have a real problem with sewage overflow going into rivers. And fixing those problems doesn't really matter whether you're privatizing or nationalizing involves money. But governments haven't done that because they've wanted to keep bills down. I remember when I was the Water Minister that everyone was very proud that the cost in and out for the customer was about a pound a day. And that seemed to be the big thing when the water regulator looked at pricing on water. What they cared about was keeping costs down for customers, not putting the costs up in order to make these big, big, multi tens of billions investments in really sorting out the water industry. So let's take that as a little example.
7:22 Rory Stewart? How would a responsible government deal with a problem where there's a cost of living crisis? People feel short of cash, but on the other hand, we know that over the next 10, 20 years, unless we start putting a lot of money into our water infrastructure, we're going to be short of water and our rivers are going to get more and more disgusting and more and more polluted. Over to you.
7:41 Alastair Campbell? That's one of the things I had in mind when I talked about the scale of the challenge up against the policy levers that they've said they're going to use. So, I mean, you say it doesn't really matter whether it's nationalized or privatized. I think most people would accept that water has been the least effective privatization. I think water and railways are the two, the public field have just been absolute disasters. Water companies getting very, very wealthy, lots of money for shareholders, massive salaries. And the quality of the service just simply not up to scratch. And you probably would have to look at some kind of new funding model. Some of the numbers that people are looking at in relation to what government, if government was to put in the investment that we're talking about, you're talking again about sums of money currently unaffordable.
8:25 Alastair Campbell? When we talk about housing in relation to, let's just, you know, now go to Grenfell. So I would argue that the Grenfell disaster, tragedy, call it what you will. I think you have to acknowledge that austerity played a role in that. Austerity and also the kind of obsession, which we still have, by the way, of talking about red tape, all regulation is bad. I don't know if you read the full report or it is utterly horrific, the extent to which the local government, national government, these companies, companies which are still making loads and loads and loads of money out of the same business. And what you see, as the inquiry chairman said, that this was not just incompetence, it was dishonesty and it was greed.
9:07 Alastair Campbell? And then along comes a public inquiry and Keir Starmer stands up, does a perfectly good job in saying it's terrible. Rishi Sunak stands up and says it's terrible. And they all do that thing of saying, you know, we'll have to learn the lessons and make sure it doesn't happen again. I was checking out some of the other inquiries. And here's the thing about public inquiries, there's another one today about the Lampard inquiries is on today about mental health failures in Essex. You've got the COVID inquiry continuing. I heard an interview yesterday with the chap who did the Alderhey inquiry, which was a, you know, when children's organs were being misused. And he pointed out that I think it was a 57 recommendations, I could have got the numbers wrong, but it was several dozen recommendations, only four have been implemented. So the inquiries come along, and this is what I mean about whether this is a kind of failing of our state infrastructure.
9:52 Alastair Campbell? Charlie Fortner, the former justice secretary, he made the point that these inquiries, when they're running, they have enormous power. They can summon ministers, they can. Put Cabinet Ministers absolutely through the wringer. They can put permanent secretaries through the wringer. The minute they've published, they hand the inquiry over to the government, and it's then up to the government to decide what to do. So I just feel that you take housing, Labour, if they're going to meet their growth mission, and maybe we should tell listeners, Rory, about we did an event together with some business people the other day, and you asked them, rather cheekily, I thought, how many of them thought that Labour would deliver on their number one mission, to have the biggest growth in the G7. And you might like to tell our listeners what the result was.
10:32 Rory Stewart? It's not very plausible. No, they didn't think it was likely to happen.
10:35 Alastair Campbell? It was zero. And let's just, we can come back to Grenfell Mill. Let's just talk about the growth thing in a minute. So we've been through the experience of Quarteng and Truss, where they just decided, well, the rules don't matter, smash through the rules, and let's see what happens. And what happened was a complete, total disaster. So all governments have to have sensible, sustainable macro policies that the public and the markets think they're serious. You can't just run up debt forever, and you do need rules. But that being said, if I go back to Gordon Brown's time as Chancellor, there is always a bit of wriggle root. And I think what's happening at the moment, so we talked about the winter fuel payment. The other big decision that was made at that time, when they're talking about the black hole, was about this
11:19 Alastair Campbell? supercomputer up in Scotland. And that can't be afforded either. But that surely would fall under investment. And you can borrow more to invest. And that's what I think we need to hear about in the budget.
11:31 Rory Stewart? No, but that's right. That's right. So I think where it is a bit worrying, even within the framework of being sympathetic to the new government, is that sense that maybe less on salaries for nurses and teachers, because I think people feel that those bits of the public sector, people deserve to be paid more. But things like putting up rail workers' salaries by 16%, when that wasn't a union that was very friendly towards Labour, and at the same time, cutting down on investment promises on things like supercomputers, looks strange. But I think there's a bigger thing, maybe, at the back of this, which is, in order Really run public services in the way that Britain wants. Yes, there's a question of reform,
12:15 Rory Stewart? but there are also some very, very basic questions around money. And we pointed to them in terms of water. And Paul Johnson from the IFS has very much been saying that there's no other country at the moment in the world that tries to run generous public services in the way that Britain does without raising significant taxes on people on middle and low incomes. Britain is an outlier, not in its taxes on people on high incomes. It's an outlier that over the last 15 years, the tax burden on lower middle incomes, which is where most of the revenue of the government inevitably comes from, has been reduced. So if you were just forgetting about the election, logically, the Labour government in the budget
12:57 Rory Stewart? should be saying, listen, we want to run decent public services. And our only way that we're going to be able to do that is by raising either VAT or income tax on median earners.
13:08 Alastair Campbell? Which they've emphatically ruled out.
13:10 Rory Stewart? But is there no way that they can say, listen, the situation is so much worse than we thought and we really need to do this. And I know this is going to be unpopular and I know people will say we're going back on our word. But really, there's no alternative because my fear is if they don't do that, they're simply not going to be able to deliver what people expect in public services.
13:31 Alastair Campbell? So you are strongly advocating an even more dramatic version of the Australian Albanese strategy of.
13:37 Rory Stewart? Yeah, remind people, remind people of that.
13:39 Alastair Campbell? Well, he essentially promised not to follow the tax plans of his predecessor, but then brought in some pretty hefty taxes, particularly on the well off. And I think the mood music around the tax debate is if there are going to be tax rises, they will be more focused on the well off. So I think that would politically be very, very difficult to do what you're suggesting, really difficult.
14:01 Rory Stewart? But it might pay off if people felt that in four years' time when the next election happened, public services had significantly improved.
14:08 Alastair Campbell? Let me just, before that, do you think Labour have won or are winning? The argument about the economy and the public finances being worse than they expected, this £22 billion black hole, do you think they're winning that argument?
14:21 Rory Stewart? I think they're definitely winning the argument that we're in a mess. I think there are two things that I'd like to see, but maybe I'm being naive about this. One of them is they need to become crisper and clearer about what it is that the Conservatives did wrong, because they're a bit vague about that. Sometimes they seem to be saying it's basically that the Conservatives are kind of nasty and incompetent. It would be good to see a real analysis of what they did wrong. In 2010, unfairly, from your point of view, but very clearly, the Conservatives in 2010 defined what they thought Labour had done wrong.
14:55 Alastair Campbell? There have been these specific projects that they say were not accounted for, and they've had support from that, from within the Treasury and the OBR. I mean, I think the 2010 example is interesting for all sorts of reasons, but to me, it's a good example. This is why Labour have to be so careful about this Labour version of austerity attack, because Osborne's austerity strategy was very, very deliberate. He used the fiscal rules and his political motivations to have a political strategy because he wanted a smaller government, he wanted lower taxes, he wanted lower spending. That's what I mean about you can do unpopular things if you are explaining and you build an argument. Now, I think he got away with murder in terms of the argument.
15:40 Rory Stewart? Yeah.
15:41 Alastair Campbell? But he did get away with it.
15:42 Rory Stewart? Exactly. And just to expand on the argument for a second, people in 2010 understood what the Conservatives were claiming. I mean, everybody would have been able, whether they agreed or not, would be able to repeat that the Conservatives are saying that Gordon Brown basically spent too much money and therefore we're going to have to reduce spending. It's not clear what Labour's big argument is about the Tories. Are they saying that the problem is that the Tories spent too little money? Is the problem is that the Tories kept taxes too low? What is it they're saying that problem is?
16:14 Alastair Campbell? I think they're saying that in order to try to give themselves a chance of winning the last election, they brought in more tax cuts, which because of Labour's Promises not to put those reverse those tax cuts as they bought into. And then when they got in and examined the public finances, there were various quite big projects, including cost of asylum and others. That meant that the situation was even worse than they had been expecting. And what they're trying to do with that is basically do two things. One, try to, as the Conservative with Labour, have a message that they want to go right through the Parliament with, that you can't trust these people because they left us in a mess. But secondly, give themselves some cover and justification for what they keep calling tough choices.
16:56 Alastair Campbell? Now, the problem that they've got politically right now, today, this week, is that the tough choice, their tough choice of choice, right at the start, has turned out to be very unpopular with the left and the right. Now, the right purely opportunistically, as you say, several of the Tory contenders actually support in their hearts what Labour are doing on the winter fuel payments.
17:18 Rory Stewart? Yep.
17:19 Alastair Campbell? And then the left, you're going to have, I don't know how many Labour MPs will rebel or will abstain, but I suspect it'll be, you know, a fair few, will not like to go through a lobby voting for this. So that being the first thing that they've sort of identified as a tough choice. I mean, I've got to be honest, Rory, if I was, if I was them saying, right, we're going to have to do some really tough choices, the first tough choice I'd have made is say, to get our economy in shape, we'll probably have to look at rejoining the customs union. That would have been a tough choice.
17:45 Rory Stewart? Yep, yeah.
17:45 Alastair Campbell? But they, they could definitely have won an argument for that.
17:48 Rory Stewart? Just before we move on, it strikes me that it's like getting a new plumber into your house. And what they say, when they look at the disaster and your water tank's leaking, they say, well, you know, the last guy was a cowboy, is an idiot, right? But you probably want two more things to be convinced. You want them to explain what that last person did wrong in a little bit of detail. And, and maybe to be even more credible, to quote your friend, Peter Malinoskas, the Premier of South Australia, on leading, that they also need to be able to say, these people did some things right, but they did three very fundamental things wrong, so that you believe their analysis. And then you need the optimism. Then you need, and by the way, I'm going to come and I'm going to fix it and your plumbing
18:33 Rory Stewart? system is going to be really good in the future. If you can get that right, then I do think it's possible to say, and unfortunately it's going to cost you, unfortunately, I'm going to have to put up taxes because that's what the new water tank costs.
18:44 Alastair Campbell? If you want a good plumber, you've got to pay for a good plumber.
18:47 Rory Stewart? Yeah, this is what we're lacking here. And that's why I'm so depressed by the winter fuel lance. If we can't get a cotton winter fuel lance, which is the definitional example of something which is not about investment, it's very short term consumption. How are we going to get people to pay the money that we need to sort out our sewage system, our rivers, our water system, the NHS? And the NHS, of course, everyone says it needs reform, sure. But one of the other things that Lord Darcy will point out on Thursday is this thing about health inflation we keep talking about, which is that because we're getting older, because drugs are getting more expensive, the NHS will continue cost 3% more than inflation every year going forward. And we need to get the money for that.
19:23 Alastair Campbell? But again, to quote Keir Starmer in his BBC interview at the weekend, he was very, very clear that reform has to be the answer. And that what Darcy's, Arad Darcy's report is going to show is that, yes, the, I think he said, I think the phrase he used, that the system is beaten but not broken. And then these are the areas for reform. But when you look at some of the figures that they've been releasing about, particularly yesterday in relation to children, the treatment of children in A and E and in operations that they're having to wait a long time for, it is in a complete mess. And the expectation, this is why I think your point about the money, you know, you can go back and the one argument nobody can really make is that there hasn't been steady increase in health
20:06 Alastair Campbell? spending over, you know, much higher under us, I would argue, but there's also been increases in spending under
20:11 Rory Stewart? Much higher.
20:12 Alastair Campbell? Under the Tories. And your point about health inflation, the point about demographics. And he did, he also did say something, I thought, very, very interesting. It was almost like the Nixon goes to China thing. He said, actually, I think it may be that only a Labour government can properly reform the NHS. He cited the Lansley reforms as having been a complete disaster, COVID being a disaster as well, austerity being a disaster. So there's this sense of, you know, they know how big the challenge is. I worry that the only current answer that they seem to have is we've got to get the economy growing. And that is dependent upon so many different factors. But I think, and I completely understand why Rachel Reeves in opposition, not doing this,
20:57 Alastair Campbell? not doing this, sticking to the fiscal rules. But you do have to differentiate between spending on things like higher public sector wages and by the way, the pensions that then go with that. But then public investment, which you can use to generate economic return, productivity, improve the ability to grow the economy, grow tax revenues. So if you, if you are running up debt, you can build an argument that there is such a thing as productive debt.
21:22 Rory Stewart? Yeah.
21:23 Alastair Campbell? That I feel is currently lost from the debate.
21:25 Rory Stewart? One hundred percent. And I think the logical answer is if they're being responsible, they need to raise VAT or income tax on median earners, or they need to borrow significantly more money.
21:34 Alastair Campbell? I think politically, if they're going to do VAT or income tax, having specifically said that they won't, even though we're, people are cynical and say, oh, well, they will break promises, et cetera. I think they were so fundamental to the win. I think that would become very, very difficult. Couple of other things worth mentioning on this kind of scale of challenge. Very interesting, I don't know if you had time to read it, Rory, I sent you this report that a group of senior judges have published on, on prisons. And this is Lord Wolf, Lord Phillips, Lord Thomas, the, it's the four surviving former Lords Chief Justices of England and Wales, plus Brian Levison, the only surviving president of the Queen's Bench Division. And the title is Sentence Inflation, A Judicial Critique.
22:19 Alastair Campbell? And they have written a really, really measured analysis of why we have got into such a mess on prisons. And it is, you know, they, and they're just being honest with the public. We have been sending more and more people to prison for longer, essentially for political reasons.
22:37 Rory Stewart? Yeah.
22:37 Alastair Campbell? And unless we're prepared to accept that. And face up to the costs that that then imposes upon the public sector. We are, we're not going to get out of this mess. So you, you mentioned sewage, you talked about health.
22:50 Rory Stewart? This is something I'm quite proud on, that when David Gork and I were in the Ministry of Justice, we were very, very good at holding the line on this and not allowing political pressure from either Labour or Conservatives to extend sentence length in this way. But as I said, every MP from all these parties was always coming with a tragic case from their constituency called after the first name of the victim.
23:10 Alastair Campbell? Yeah.
23:11 Rory Stewart? Asking for whole new types of sentence length, for whole new things. And that's what made me worried about Keir Starmer attacking Rishi Sunak, saying that he didn't want to send people who'd assaulted children to jail because he was implying he was going to put another 5,000 people in jail who weren't currently being sent to jail.
23:26 Alastair Campbell? And I think you, I think you and I agree that in relation to the riots, that that sense of, you know, pretty tough and very fast justice was very, very important to try and bring that whole thing under control. But that's going to have long-term consequences. And the other thing I think that's worth pointing out is that there's an example of when the state says, we are going to do something very, very quickly, it can be done. But then you say something like Grenfell, we're now seven years on. And one of the points that comes through the Grenfell report is this sense, they talk about this elitist council and, and also the, a government that didn't really care because, or cared less because these were homes for poorer people.
24:06 Rory Stewart? I think we should do some serious stuff on Grenfell. I've staggered through the report and I, I think we should take a break and come back and do Grenfell properly because I think it's a really interesting issue.
24:15 Alastair Campbell? Okay.
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26:04 Rory Stewart? Welcome back to The Rest is Politics. From me, Rory Stewart. And me, Alastair Campbell. So, the report on Grenfell, it's the second report. The first one came out at the end of 2019, which was looking at the immediate moments of the fire. And now we're stepping back into the question of how we ended up with flammable cladding being put on the side of this. This building has now come out. I thought it was really interesting. Like you, I've read the report. It's a long report and it takes a lot of time. And there's a fascinating gap between what the report says and the way that people think about the report and the way people have reported it. So, as you'll remember, the first response, because the people who really, and I remember
26:47 Rory Stewart? turning up at Grenfell just after the fire and seeing the incredible work being done by local community organizations and churches and others to provide shelter for the survivors and this sense of this thing that had gone up like a Roman candle with some of the poorest and most vulnerable people in London suffering. So, there was a lot of early, very, very politicised reporting, saying that this was largely a result of austerity and the government's deregulation agenda. That is emphatically not what this second phased report says. Very little of the seventeen hundred pages is devoted to that. This report is talking about failure at almost every conceivable level. I mean, that's why this is, that's why it's so difficult with these reports.
27:31 Rory Stewart? And in that way, it reminds me a little bit of other famous reports, you know, contaminated blood, post office scandal in Britain, or the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan, or the nine eleven commission report in the US, or indeed the opioid scandal. What happens when you begin to look at how our democracies get things wrong? It's got wrong everywhere. So there's the private sector, who, as you pointed out just before the break, are actually actively lying. So they're testing these panels, the panels are failing, they're then retesting them in fake laboratory conditions by putting in magnesium slices that produce weird results. They're concealing the fact that they failed tested, they're implying that they've got approval they haven't got.
28:15 Rory Stewart? Then, after Arconic and Kingspan and Celotex have been dishonest, and it's amazing to see a judge literally just name these companies and say they've lied.
28:24 Alastair Campbell? He has one of them admitting that they're lying.
28:26 Rory Stewart? Incredible. Then five more organisations, which are supposed to be checking them. The BBA, the LABC, the NHBC, the BRC and the UKAS, all of which completely failed to do their job on doing the checking on these panels. Then you've got, as you said, this relationship between the Royal Borough of Kensington, Chelsea and their tenants' management office, where the tenants' management office fails to disclose failures on fire safety check up to the Royal Borough of Kensington, Chelsea. Then you've got the government itself, the Department of Communities Local Government, where you've got a junior official, very junior official, responsible for this stuff, who doesn't report up to his bosses and the bosses take no interest in what he's doing.
29:05 Alastair Campbell? Yeah.
29:05 Rory Stewart? Put it all together, yes, you could say that what we need is more regulation, but as in most of these cases, there's regulation everywhere. The problem is nobody's actually following the rules. The architects can't be bothered. Nobody takes any responsibility.
29:19 Alastair Campbell? I think that's where the the story of austerity is a big part of this. It's true that he doesn't sort of quotes blame austerity, but I think going through the whole thing is a sense that the combination of lack of capacity meant that the regulations that do exist, it was far too easy for these companies that he rightly absolutely slams to get round systems, frankly, with government and local government colluding with them in so doing. And it's true that the biggest criticism is for the people who made the cladding on the building. And he talks about systematic dishonesty, deliberate and sustained strategies to manipulate, to misrepresent and to mislead. And and as you say, it goes through them one by one.
30:02 Alastair Campbell? So Keir Starmer then, in his statement, said, none of these companies will will get future contracts, which is fine, but apparently they've already had two hundred and fifty million pounds worth since Grenfell. Added to which, they're based in, I think, one's in France, one's in America, one's in Ireland, you know, they're in different parts of the of the world. So I do think there's a thing in here that says, maybe it's not that there are regulation, but it's not just, it's deregulation, as in the regulations don't even matter, they don't count.
30:31 Rory Stewart? So one thing that was similar with this, I was the minister dealing with air pollution during the Volkswagen scandal. And their Volkswagen deliberately fixed stuff to their vehicles when they were doing laboratory tests.
30:43 Alastair Campbell? Yeah.
30:43 Rory Stewart? Which they removed when they went out on the road, so that their nitrogen dioxide emissions in laboratory were much lower than they were in road. And these guys have been doing the same thing. So there's that problem. It's the profit motive. If that was true for the famous BP scandal, where an oil spill was every single contractor and subcontractor cutting costs.
31:02 Alastair Campbell? Yeah.
31:03 Rory Stewart? It's also institutional complacency, nobody listening to people trying to whistleblow. That was clearly true in the post office scandal, clearly true in the contaminated blood scandal. But at the heart of it is a lack of seriousness in government. I mean, just nobody in the system seems to be taking responsibility. I mean, again, I mean, there's a great article in The Guardian attacking the architectural profession. Saying that architects no longer really know about materials or actually care about fire safety and they've become, I think the phrase was sort of experts in rhetoric and jargon and gonzo ideas and the architects and the scheme simply don't seem to have felt it was their job to do the most basic due diligence on the climbing.
31:45 Alastair Campbell? If we go back to the point I was making in the first half about public inquiries and there is a sort of performative element to all this. So you have a terrible, terrible event. And you know, we can all remember it and we're all reminded of it every time you head out to West London because Grenfell is still there with the green heart on the top and you know, it's a very, very, very powerful symbol of something that's gone terribly wrong. The event happens, people praise the emergency services, but actually one thing that comes through the report is that the fire service did not handle it well. You have a visit from the Prime Minister, you have people attacking the local council, but the local council comes out and defends itself. And then it sort of chugs along, you go through grief and funerals and all that stuff and people
32:27 Alastair Campbell? tell the stories. Then you have the public inquiry. The public inquiry goes on for a long, long time, rightly, they've got to get do this thing in detail. And then the final sort of often the performative bit is when the inquiry reports and as I said earlier, and then what? And I worry that this has just become what the state does when we have these things, but then the state doesn't necessarily have the capacity to meet all of the recommendations that are probably rightly being made.
32:56 Rory Stewart? And then the media issue too. I was struck by the fact that the BBC report covering it really softballed the criticisms of the fire and rescue service. So one of the central criticisms of the response is that the firemen and women were very brave, but basic procedures were not in place. They hadn't prepared a contingency plan for Grenfell going up. There wasn't proper thought about when to change the stay put advice. So very sadly, people were told to stay put in their apartments when they should have been leaving. They hadn't kept up to date on fires happening in other parts of the world. There seemed to be a real lack of curiosity and professional improvement and working out that this stuff could happen.
33:39 Rory Stewart? There was a real lack of initiative on the ground. So one of the recommendations that have come out of this is about the setting up of a fire and rescue college where you would provide proper professional training, particularly at the mid senior levels for people responding to this. But we haven't seen, sadly, with Angela Rayner's response, her coming out saying that she's going to do this. And we've also haven't seen the media really leaning into this. I mean, I wonder how many journalists have actually read this report. I mean, I remember feeling this during COVID. I talked to one of the most famous BBC journalists who were right at the heart of the COVID reporting and realised quite quickly into the conversation, they simply were not on top of the details. They were too busy to cover the details. So
34:15 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, because what happens on, you know, I've been the subject of public inquiries and seen how these things get reported is that there's a desperation to get your hands on the report, then to decide very, very quickly what the line is. I go back on to this thing about performative. It's almost like, you know, it's like a show that here they are waving the report. Here's the summary. Here's the press conference with the guy who's published this report. Here's the response in Parliament. I mean, that was just a few days ago, but then it just goes away. It goes away. And I do think there's something so fleeting about these things now. I think that I mentioned when we're talking about prisons, about one of the people who's put his name to
34:55 Alastair Campbell? this report that I mentioned on prisons, Lord Wolfe. I can remember the Wolfe Report in 1991. I think it was 1991. That was about
35:02 Rory Stewart? Yeah, it was on prisons. Yes, absolutely.
35:05 Alastair Campbell? People talked about it for days. Documentaries got made about it.
35:08 Rory Stewart? Yeah.
35:09 Alastair Campbell? You know, we sort of, these things come along, big bad moment, public inquiry, and then where does it go? And added to which, of course, the other thing that this puts Labour in a difficult position, and perhaps this is why Angela Rayner is being cautious, I don't know. But if housing is going to be their big thing to get the economy growing, and they then come up with stuff that the housing industry, the construction industry Feels is going to make it harder for them, that becomes a bit of a bind. It's where goals clash.
35:40 Rory Stewart? Final thing before we move on to China, I think before one gets too pessimistic, because it's easy looking at all these scandals around the world to conclude that the cultural problems in modern bureaucracies are almost impossible to overcome. There are examples, Sweden really improved its safety culture, bits of Japanese industry really improved, Singapore, as we've talked about, did amazing progress on corruption. I mean, I think it is possible to feel that if a government really wanted to say, we want to be more serious, we want to give more of a priority to safety and not just put all the emphasis on cutting costs, we're going to listen to whistleblowers, we're going to push for a culture of continuous improvement, you can, almost from the leadership
36:21 Rory Stewart? example from the top, create a more serious, more responsible government. And it'd be nice to see that happening. Okay, Alison, moving on to China, you were very interested in the China-Africa summit, which has just finished.
36:33 Alastair Campbell? Partly because I didn't really see that much about it in a lot of Western media, but I thought it was a really pretty big deal. So more heads of state and government from Africa went to this than are intending to go to the United Nations General Assembly. Xi Jinping literally put out the red carpet, greeted them, the outcome was over $50 billion more support, billboards of welcome all over Beijing with the pictures of these African leaders up there. Only Eswatini, that was the only country from Africa excluded, and that is because they have diplomatic relations with Taiwan. And there was also more in military aid, there was just big, big, big partnership stuff.
37:15 Alastair Campbell? And, you know, I think that at the same time, the other thing that caught my eye in relation to China this week, a survey.
37:24 Alastair Campbell? Done by what's called, is now called the Yusef Ishak Institute. It used to be called the Institute for the Southeast Asian Studies. And Yusef Ishak was the first president of Singapore. It's now named after him. And what this does is it analyzes the opinions of particularly opinion formers, you know, academics, think tanks, politicians, nonprofits, editors, all the big organizations. And for the first time ever, respondents in answer to the question about whether China or the United States matters more have narrowly gone for China. And I think we should just, you know, we've got an interview coming up with Anne Applebaum,
38:09 Alastair Campbell? and she's written this book about the autocracy, Inc. And I think sometimes because China are maybe a lot more subtle about a lot of the stuff that they do, we underestimate the power and the reach and the impact of all the different diplomatic and economic stuff that they do. And this is very much when you see, so this is Africa, that study's about Southeast Asia. But for example, the number of Southeast Asian countries who says that they have become less warm to America and more warm towards China, partly for economic, but also a lot of them talk about Gaza. In relation to Africa, if you see the votes, the way that African nations have been voting
38:54 Alastair Campbell? in some of the big difficult issues in the United Nations, China has been able to pull more of them over as a result, in part, I would argue, because of this long-term economic relationship that they've been developing and of which this summit is the latest chapter.
39:09 Rory Stewart? So I'm talking to you from States. I'm here at Yale. And these themes are very, very raw in the US at the moment. I'm about to go to teach a class on middle powers and another class next week, which is on the rise of challenges to the US. And when I was discussing this at a big conference with very senior ex-current US foreign policy people, people became very, very angry when I tried to suggest that in Southeast Asia, there were people who were not going to line up necessarily with the US against China. And of course, the US is very cheered up at the moment by the really significant problems in the Chinese economy. I mean, Chinese economy is in real trouble. We'll
39:52 Rory Stewart? talk about that a bit more. But what you've put your finger on is a paradox, which is that there isn't a direct relationship between the slowing of Chinese growth and the loss of Chinese influence. In fact, in some ways, China's economic challenges are leading it to lean ever more heavily into building relationships in places like Africa, partly because as the US leads a move to decouple and de-risk and disengage from China, China's looking for partners elsewhere in the world. So Africa is an obvious place where they're hoping that they're going to be able to get, as you said, critical minerals and resources, but also markets for Chinese goods, also labour for Chinese factories. But as they
40:37 Rory Stewart? look at where they're going to put their electric vehicles, and almost all that's left for the Chinese economy now at the moment, which is really working for them, is export. And they're really hoping that they can get export of electric vehicles. And there's 110% tariffs now imposed by the US against Chinese electric vehicles. They're going to be leaning more and more into Latin America, Asia, Africa's potential markets for these vehicles, and offering very good terms, offering subsidies, offering to bring in Huawei, smart cities at discounted rates.
41:09 Alastair Campbell? One of the guests at the event was Antonio Guterres, the head of the UN. And he did actually make a few comments about the issue of debt entrapment, whether actually China had been over time trapping countries in these debt relationships. And there have been complaints about that. But at the same time, when you read some of the comments of some of the African leaders and foreign ministers who were there, they seem willing to suck it up because they feel there is an ongoing economic and political investment in them. And I think when you tie that to the, I thought, quite startling finding in that survey done
41:50 Alastair Campbell? by the old Southeast Asian Studies Institute, because you've got countries there that you, I think, America would feel were just kind of automatically theirs, as it were. And I think it's just important to to reflect that there is a change going on there. Some of these countries remain, you know, Philippines, Thailand, Singapore, very, very close to America. And, you know, you're less likely to worry about those. But what you might sometimes call the swing states look like they are swinging in a direction that I think America ought to be a little bit worried about.
42:22 Rory Stewart? Meanwhile, just a little bit on China itself. So people will know that the about a fifth to a quarter of the Chinese economy was the property sector that's collapsed very dramatically, leaving tens of millions of people who've paid for homes that haven't been built. Xi Jinping also moved strongly against the tech sector. People like Jack Ma, these great Chinese tech entrepreneurs, were seen as too much of a threat to the central state, and so he's clamped down on that. He's also clamped down on the the financial sector. Significant senior figures have been put in prison under corruption charges, and often that looks as though he's using corruption charges to just consolidate his own position.
43:05 Rory Stewart? He's extended himself from the normal two-year term, which Chinese leaders had, to being effectively premier for life. He's moving for a much more controlled system. So data coming out of China, this was something I think that we were sharing this morning.
43:20 Alastair Campbell? From The Economist.
43:21 Rory Stewart? Yeah, yeah, which The Economist wrote a good piece on.
43:24 Alastair Campbell? They've wrote a really big number on sort of China disinformation on the economy.
43:27 Rory Stewart? Yeah, less and less reliable. But also connected to that was the fact that there are fewer foreigners than China. Many of them left during Covid and haven't returned. The universities now in China are much less open. Journalists now, international journalists, are accompanied around much more closely. People are much more careful about what they say to them. So there's a sense that Xi Jinping is becoming more defensive, more controlling. A lot of the very, very big international firms have massively slowed their investment in China. The Chinese government's state-owned enterprises are having to get rid of some of their international investments to try to shore up their economy. Unemployment is a big problem, you know, maybe forty-six percent youth underemployment, because a lot of people not. And then, how is this interpreted?
44:12 Rory Stewart? So if you're a critic of Xi Jinping, you say, well, okay, this is mismanagement by Xi Jinping. That's why the middle class is suffering. It's why the working class is suffering in China. But if you're watching Chinese state television.
44:27 Rory Stewart? Or going online, you hear that the reason why the Chinese economy is in trouble is that the US doesn't want China to rise, that its deliberate policy of the US can undercut and undermine China's rise. And that, of course, feeds nationalism and increases some of the security risks around the world. If China really begins to get into a cycle of convincing itself that the US is its major enemy trying to prevent it from rising, it then draws closer to the North Koreans, the Iranians, the Russians, this world. We can see signs of China becoming more relaxed about providing material mechanical support to Russia in its fight against Ukraine.
45:09 Alastair Campbell? Maybe this is a good point, actually, to mention. Our latest leading interview is with Audrey Tang, who's the first Taiwanese politician that we've interviewed, who is fascinating about the role of tech in the way that they've regained trust in politics in Taiwan. Quite actually confident, I sense quite confident that she feels that China isn't about to make a move anytime soon, but we shall see. But the other point you're speaking to there in connection to Russia, Rory, is that, again, I said earlier that the Chinese sometimes maybe more subtle, they do things that get less attention because Putin is so kind of, you know, upfront about a lot of this stuff, invading countries, all the information wars, wiping people out in foreign parts and so forth. But the Chinese
45:50 Alastair Campbell? do a quite lot as well. And a lot of this decline in some of these countries, so the increase in support in some and the decline in support from American others, a lot of it will be to do with information wars. They're putting a lot of money into that stuff as well. And just to give you some of the figures, Rory, so Laos, 30 percentage point decline. This is a decline of the US standing in these countries with opinion form as relative to China. Malaysia, 20% decline. Indonesia, 20% decline. Cambodia, 18. Brunei, 15. Myanmar and Thailand, 10 and 9 respectively. So Philippines, 83% pro-American. Vietnam, 79. Singapore, 62. Myanmar, 58. Cambodia, 55. But only in three countries.
46:38 Alastair Campbell? In the last year, has the preference for the US over China grown from twenty three to twenty twenty four over quite a large number of countries? Now, I don't think we should overstate it. You go down into the Muslim countries, seventy five percent Malaysia, seventy three percent Indonesia, seventy percent of Brunei, and that must be related to Gaza.
46:59 Rory Stewart? Yeah, there's an ex-British diplomat called Matthew Henderson, who's been writing a lot about China. And his point is that he thinks China is in danger of becoming its own worst enemy, that there's something, it's not quite that it's setting out to become more of a spoiler, but that because of the internal policies that Xi Jinping is now pursuing, because of the rather awkward relationships that China is maintaining with Russia, North Korea and Iran, it's at risk of being driven down a more and more dangerous path. So it's not quite that he's saying that it's a global security threat immediately, but that its policies are dragging it in a dangerous direction.
47:44 Rory Stewart? And you can see signs of this. You know, we talk a lot about the Wagner Group and the way in which the Russians very explicitly have got into these military coups in the Sahel, where American and French troops have been driven out and military governments taken over and the Wagner Group are behind them. But you can also see Chinese arms militias on the ground, not as publicly. I mean, this is your point about it not being like Putin. You don't see them as the bodyguards of the president. They're often protecting mining facilities. But there definitely is a sense in, well, particularly actually, I think, a sense that they're turning Russia into a sort of client state, that they have the whip hand control over Russia now. Russia is so dependent on China to buy its oil and gas.
48:28 Rory Stewart? China's been very good at diversifying away from Russian minerals into Central Asia. China's got more and more control over northeast Old Manchuria, the area around Vladivostok. But none of this necessarily makes me very cheerful because China's building something the size of the British Navy every two years. They've been investing in magnetic launches for their amphibious craft. They're clearly building up their nuclear warheads in Xinjiang. They've got a plutonium reactor off the ground with Russia near Shanghai. So I think people ask, is China going to attack Taiwan? I think. The problem is that as a regime gets narrower and narrower, as you end up with an autocrat like Xi Jinping in charge, it becomes less predictable because it's not
49:12 Rory Stewart? a Politburo which would say, well, on the balance of probabilities, it'd probably be a bit damaging to Chinese interests worldwide to go after Taiwan. The more it focuses on one individual, they start thinking things like, well, how about my legacy? Or is this the last moment I can move? Or what about internal enemies at home that I have to distract? Or can I get people off our economic problems? And they certainly have the capability for it.
49:35 Alastair Campbell? It may be close on this. There was an interesting event at the weekend. The FT hosted an event with Bill Burns, director of the CIA, alongside Richard Moore, who's the head of UK Secret Intelligence Service. And they both emphasised that the rise of China is their, what they see as the biggest intelligence and geopolitical challenge of the current century. So even with all the other stuff going on, the Middle East, Ukraine, et cetera, it was interesting that both of them said that was the biggest, the biggest challenge they currently face.
50:12 Rory Stewart? And then I guess the question is, is there anything that can be done through really good imaginative diplomacy to reverse this? Because pre Xi Jinping, you could be very optimistic, I think, in some ways about China playing a constructive role in the world economy, being largely interested in trade and export rather than imperial adventures, being a status quo power. There are so many people in China who are heartbroken by what's happened to the economy, who would want to be more friendly to the West, who are very worried about the nationalist turn things are taking. So it's about getting this balance right, because I think there's also a risk that in the United States in particular, people are getting so anti-China that they're going to fulfil their own worst nightmares by creating a Cold War where one might not exist.
50:56 Alastair Campbell? Well, listen, we've only really done two subjects today, but we'll be back tomorrow talking about the Trump-Harris debate, which I suspect they're busy preparing for right now.
51:08 Rory Stewart? Amazing, yeah. The US newspaper is obviously full of almost nothing else, very interesting polls showing... Trump and Harris neck and neck at the moment. So really looking forward to getting into that and talking about the results of that.
51:21 Alastair Campbell? And then on Thursday, our usual question time, where we'll be talking about all sorts of things. Michel Barnier as Prime Minister in France. Success of the Paralympics, I think we should do as well. That's been a pretty amazing, amazing thing. And also, Rory, we're getting one or two questions about your pronunciation, which I'm very keen to press you on.
51:41 Rory Stewart? Good. Okay.
51:42 Alastair Campbell? Bye.
51:43 Rory Stewart? Bye bye.
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