Pod Insights The Rest Is Politics 354. Nigel Farage, dad-dancing populists, and the worst politician of the year About this episode Who was the worst politician of the year? What was the biggest political moment of 2024? What was the most under-discussed moment of the year?
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Transcript 7,713 words · 13 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:04 Rory Stewart? This episode is brought to you by NordVPN.
0:06 Alastair Campbell? And I must thank NordVPN because on my Grand European Tour with Fiona, I was away from the Hawthorns for West Bromwich against Burnley, but I managed to watch it. There you go.
0:19 Rory Stewart? I actually had a NordVPN thank you. I was in the new Starbucks here in Crete. And of course, the thing flashed up, saying this is an unsecured public network. And I was able to go to my VPN. It was a little reminder of something we often forget when we're in all those cafes and things, which is actually genuinely, people can do all kinds of weird cyber attacks and spying if you don't have a virtual private network when you're sitting in that Starbucks.
0:42 Alastair Campbell? Well, I think, are you not really sort of proud of me that I managed to do this? Or should I say Fiona managed to do this?
0:49 Rory Stewart? I'm incredibly proud of you. That's a tech transformation. So to get the best discount off your NordVPN plan, go to nordvpn.com/rustispolitics. That's nordvpn.com/rustispolitics. And the link is in the episode description.
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1:57 Alastair Campbell? Well, Happy Christmas and welcome to The Rest Is Politics with me, Alastair Campbell.
2:02 Rory Stewart? And me Rory Stewart and me still with a croaky voice and you with a beautiful Christmas jumper, Alistair.
2:08 Alastair Campbell? Well, I think it's the same one as last year. It's my ABBA, part of my ABBA merch. And just like last year, we're going to go through our UK Politician of the Year, Best and Worst, Best and Worst Foreign, Speech of the Year, Biggest Moment, Most Under-Discussed Issue. And then we're going to be back on Boxing Day, no less with similar, kind of looking back. And then in the new year, we're going to start looking forward again. So Rory, who is your UK Politician of the Year?
2:37 Rory Stewart? Well, I mean firstly, just tell me, Alistair, am I allowed to choose a villain in the way that Time Magazine chose Donald Trump as their Politician of the Year? I don't think we're supposed to imagine that they loved Donald Trump. They just were saying that he had the most spectacular result.
2:50 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, I am not going to be choosing a villain, but you're welcome to choose a villain.
2:54 Rory Stewart? Very good. Okay. In which case, I would suggest I've been hovering between Nigel Farage and Ed Davey because they were the two interesting stories of that election. We kind of knew that Labour was well ahead in the polls and Rishi Sunak was going to lose and Keir Starmer was going to win. But it was an election in which Farage demonstrated he could get a lot of votes and Ed Davey demonstrated he could get a lot of votes in the right place. And we've come out with Farage with a lot of votes but very few seats. Ed Davey with fewer votes but many, many more seats. I mean, you know, like 15 times as many seats. And I guess the question then is who has handled it better since then? Who's made most of their ability to get that sort of critical over 10% of the vote?
3:39 Rory Stewart? And probably unfortunately, the story is Nigel Farage has managed with only five members of Parliament to create that momentum in a way that I suspect Ed Davey hasn't. So Farage for me. Over to you.
3:50 Alastair Campbell? Right. I mean, I was hovering with Nigel Farage as my worst politician of the year because of the damage he continues to do to the body politic. But I agree with you that as a political operator, and that- Is not the same thing as a sort of policy ideas operator, but as a political tactician and operator, he's had a pretty good 2024. I'm glad that you've come around to the fact that Ed Davey ran a good campaign, Rory, because you spent most of the election campaign, so how terrible it was.
4:19 Rory Stewart? It was really depressing, but there's no doubt it was immensely successful.
4:23 Alastair Campbell? One trick he missed, Rory, is that maybe he should have become an Ed Davey hologram at Abbe Voyage, wearing my Christmas jumper. That would have been a good stunt for Ed Davey, I think.
4:33 Rory Stewart? Yeah.
4:33 Alastair Campbell? I'm going to go, I think, look, if we'd have been doing this back in the summer, I think you'd be hard pressed not to say that Keir Starmer was politician of the year, because he had a pretty amazing election victory. But I think the event since then, I think people would find it odd if I said that he'd been the politician, as it were, of the year. I'm going to go for Kim Ledbita, who we interviewed on Leading. I think she was a really good example of a politician picking upon a single issue. Yes, with luck, because she came top of the private members ballot, but she picked on an issue that was very difficult, incredibly sensitive, quite tricky to handle in terms of how she projected the issue and herself to the public.
5:13 Alastair Campbell? And I think by the nature of the way that she conducted herself and the campaign and the issue that she was pursuing, I think she helped secure a pretty impressive victory in Parliament for the thing that she was going for. So I'm going for Kim Ledbita.
5:28 Rory Stewart? Very good.
5:29 Alastair Campbell? Worst politician of the year, Rory?
5:31 Rory Stewart? Well.
5:32 Alastair Campbell? You could be really interesting to say, best politician of the year, Nigel Farage, worst politician of the year, Nigel Farage. You could definitely do that with Trump on the international front. But who's your worst?
5:42 Rory Stewart? I would have said sadly, some of that group of Tory MPs who went down for various dubious scandals. I mean, I think there's a whole group of them, if you look over the last three, four years, where there seems to be a kind of horrible coming together of allegations of sexual assault, taking money from dubious people, behaving in an arrogant bullying fashion in the House of Commons. And so I'm going to give the award to, it's actually about nine people, but I'm going to call it the sleazy Tory MP.
6:11 Alastair Campbell? I'm going to force you to pick one.
6:14 Rory Stewart? Well, I liked him, I was fond of him, but my goodness, Mark Menzies blew himself up in a pretty spectacular style. If you can remember, he had to make a phone call, an emergency phone call at half past three in the morning to his constituency party chairman, trying to get this elderly lady to bail him out with cash while he'd been taken hostage in someone's apartment.
6:34 Alastair Campbell? This is the thing that we forget. I mean, you and I follow this so closely, I had completely 100% forgotten about that. I suspect I've forgotten about lots of other scandals.
6:45 Rory Stewart? Yeah, there was some on your party's side too, I must say. But anyway, yes.
6:49 Alastair Campbell? Yeah. It won't surprise you to know, I'm also going to go for a Tory politician, and it's Robert Jenrick. I think Robert Jenrick has morphed into something really quite unpleasant. I think he's a sort of wannabe Farage who doesn't have Farage's political skills or charm or kind of whatever it is that Farage has got. And I think that I really can't abide, we talked about this on one of our podcasts earlier this month, I can't abide the way that they take issues, people like him take issues where they know that the facts that they're spouting are absolute bollocks. But, and particularly in relation to the ECHR, the European Court of Human Rights that we talked about. And also his whole kind of, this sort of way he projects himself, it reminds me of Liz Truss when
7:32 Alastair Campbell? she was becoming a thing, where she basically thought that it was all about pictures on Instagram and all that sort of stuff. And he did one the other day where he was out running and he had a new t-shirt. He was running in this bizarre style, which was obviously utterly posed. And the thing was, you know, it was the campaign to sort of reverse the winter fuel allowance. Now, I just think for a right wing wannabe Farage Tory to be pretending that he's motivated in politics by something that he probably actually deep down believes in and supports. And also the fact that he couldn't beat Kemi Badenoch in the leadership election, I mean, that's pretty great.
8:06 Rory Stewart? Well, okay, so you know, I'm afraid have wound me up to feel that I need to, having charmingly put the boot into my own colleagues.
8:15 Alastair Campbell? Yeah.
8:15 Rory Stewart? I'm, I'm going to be really mean and upset you by saying, not on a moral level, because I think about worse than moral level, but as a level of political performance in the spotlight, I'm afraid my worst politician is Rachel Reeves. She was handed a very difficult situation, but I felt that she was woefully underprepared. She made a massive mistake ruling out all those tax rises before the election, which totally unnecessarily boxed her in. She then tried to deal with that by raising the worst possible tax, which was the employer's national insurance. And the only reason she did it, as far as I can understand, is because she thought she could weasel out of her commitment on taxes. So that she boxed herself in and trying to get out of the box. She did something that's damaging to the economy. She said that her number one aim was growth,
9:00 Rory Stewart? but most of her investment that she's announced seems to be going at the moment towards the public sector and a lot of it towards public sector salaries, rather than the kind of infrastructure investments you need for growth. Her winter fuel allowance, I agree with, but was terribly badly timed. And although her budget on the day felt as though it was quite skillful, we've now entered the third consecutive month of the economy contracting. And if I were Keir Starmer, I'd be getting rid of her.
9:24 Alastair Campbell? Wow. Okay. By the way, I should say to our listeners and viewers, we have not consulted at all about what our choices are. Neither of us know what the other is going to say. But I'm going to throw in another category here, Rory. Leading interviewee who most irritated the interviewer.
9:44 Alastair Campbell? I think that that is where I think your sort of quasi lot very healthy relationship with Rachel Reeves started. You really didn't like her in that interview, did you?
9:55 Rory Stewart? That's true. That's true. Just to do a little plug on leading, can we just do, I mean, maybe this isn't an unfair category. Can I throw in which interviews this year really stuck with you, really warmed you, really interested you that we did on leading? I'm going to start with. David Blunkett, who I just thought was just incredible. If people haven't listened to that, most people listening will know that he was an extraordinary Labour minister. They'll know also that he was blind, but they won't know much about his family background. I'd add into that some other amazing Labour stories. Alan Johnson, I think, is one. Angela Rayner's another. These are people who have come through pretty horrifying childhoods with an extraordinary sense of perspective, humour, energy, hope, desire
10:39 Rory Stewart? to turn things around. Anyway, over to you on what some of your favourites this year were.
10:42 Alastair Campbell? Rory, just to remind you of how long we've been doing this stuff, I think you'll find Angela Rayner was last year, not this year. But I agree, it was a great interview. And she was actually on my shortlist for Politician of the Year for all sorts of reasons. But Kim led beat her to that one. I've really enjoyed a lot of the leading interviews. I think the one that I was most surprised to really enjoy was Robert Sapolsky.
11:06 Rory Stewart? Oh, good. Oh, I'm so pleased.
11:09 Alastair Campbell? I was at St Paul's Cathedral for a charity carol service for Blood Cancer UK just before Christmas. And Sarah Montague of The World at One was one of the other readers. And she said that she absolutely loves leading, thinks they've been some of the best interviews she's heard all year. And she said her favourite was Robert Sapolsky, since when she's been reading all his books and all that stuff. I think on the political side, I really enjoyed Angela Merkel. I knew that I would, because that's the first time I've ever had a really kind of proper conversation with her. So she really impressed me.
11:44 Rory Stewart? I'm really pleased. So Robert Sapolsky, for people who haven't heard it and want to go back into the leading archives, is extraordinary. He's an American scientist. And Alistair was a little bit sceptical about it, because his claim to fame is that he spent basically 30 years sitting under a tree, looking at a troop of baboons. But on the basis of this, he has developed the most incredible understanding of human psychology, of stress, of Donald Trump as a big baboon and the rest. And actually, I should also pay tribute to Alistair, because quite rightly, you keep pointing out that the rest of politics, leading is a politics thing. But you do occasionally allow us to do people who are a little bit more off beam. So we'll try to keep the Alistair balance, which is, I guess, probably three quarters mainline political figures, but occasionally throwing in others.
12:27 Alastair Campbell? No, we've been very, very lucky this year, the range, the variety and so forth. In fact, when we get on to our Our next category, best foreign politician is also somebody that we we got to know on leading. You remember I went to a book festival in Adelaide and I met the Premier of South Australia.
12:45 Rory Stewart? Oh, yes.
12:46 Alastair Campbell? My best foreign politician is him. It's Peter Malinowski. And I'll tell listeners why. He's the Premier of South Australia. The reason why we got interested in him and got him on the podcast was because he was doing two things, which I thought were incredibly interesting. One, trying to ban all political advertising. And my God, wouldn't that be a good thing? And secondly, bringing in this ban on children having access to social media up to the age of 14, and then parental consent beyond that. And we said at the time that it was possibly one of those ideas that would start local and start to grow. And it is already, by the end of the year, gone through the entire Australian political system. Albanese, the Prime Minister of Australia, the Commonwealth of Australia, picked it up. And so I think that's incredibly, that's another example, a bit like him, Ledbetter. One politician's
13:31 Alastair Campbell? doing something brave, difficult, challenging, and it's taken off. And he will come under so much attack from, you know, the Elon Musks and the big tech giants and so forth. But I think he's doing something that will have really struck a chord with a lot of parents around the world.
13:45 Rory Stewart? It's great, isn't it? Because it's one of those things which, when you do it, is incredibly obvious. Your favorite school in the world, Eton, somebody told me, I don't know whether this is true, but one of the parents said that, so I imagine it is true, that-
13:58 Alastair Campbell? Why do Etonian parents not lie, ever?
13:59 Rory Stewart? Exactly.
14:00 Alastair Campbell? Like Johnson? Did he ever, was he ever somebody who lied?
14:03 Rory Stewart? I don't know whether he has kids at the school. Anyway, the the boys are allowed to use their phones until 10 o'clock at night when they're taken away from them. And it makes absolutely no sense. They must have got into this like a sort of frog in boiling water and never really questioned. But if you step back for a second, if I think about my time at that school, I think kind of unimaginable that I would be spending the last three hours of every night just gazing at my phone and presumably doing everything from, I don't know, looking at unsuitable stuff on the phone to cyber bullying friends or whatever else nonsense you get up to as a teenager. So I think it's, but there must be so many other things in politics, which, once they're done-
14:43 Rory Stewart? Seem totally radical, but completely obvious. I wonder whether it may not turn out, for example, that the Dutch government's decision that what they're going to try to do is plan their population growth over the next 20 years and set an idea of what kind of population size they want may not turn out to be something that will seem very obvious to people in the future.
15:05 Alastair Campbell? I'm afraid I just think the realities of the modern world and migration are going to make that very, very, very difficult. But you're right, that, you know, when you said the thing about things that sound radical, impossible, but they then happen. I mean, I often think of that in relation to to seat belts. In fact, I bumped into somebody recently who was the great niece of Barbara Castle, who was the Transport Secretary who brought in seat belts. And, you know, or smoking, the changes that have been made on smoking. And that was another example. We talked about this before. That was the Irish government that led the world on that. And then it's now, you know, gone to dozens of countries around the world. And on the politics of what Peter Malinowski has done in Australia. So when I was on Question Time with Nigel Farage recently, you know, they do that warm up question.
15:49 Rory Stewart? Yeah.
15:49 Alastair Campbell? And the warm up question was actually about this issue. The Australian government has banned social media for children. Do you think we should do the same? And I talked about Malinowski and said, well, I thought it was, you know, a great thing to do and really interesting and radical and challenging. And Nigel Farage sort of came in and absolutely totally opposed to it, freedom of speech, and, you know, this is all about the elite and the establishment, all his usual bollocks.
16:11 Rory Stewart? Yeah.
16:11 Alastair Campbell? And so I asked him about this Elon Musk thing.
16:13 Rory Stewart? Yeah.
16:14 Alastair Campbell? You know, although you're going to say that because you're trying to get a hundred million dollars out of Elon Musk. And he goes, it's a story. It's just a story. Nothing's going on. And of course, next two weeks later, we see him in Mar-a-Lago with his newfound billionaire friend Candy and Elon Musk. So you can see why this is going to become part of the sort of political battle, because what these, what the kind of populists are doing are using tech very, very effectively. To weaponise their arguments, it's why TikTok has become such a sort of big player within the political landscape. So for all sorts of reasons, but mainly to do with the mental health of children, I think what Peter Malaskas has done is great and I'm absolutely very pleased that he's my foreign politician of the year. So who's yours?
16:56 Rory Stewart? My foreign politician of the year is Al Jelani, the Abu Muhammad Al Jelani, the Syrian leader.
17:03 Alastair Campbell? Oh.
17:04 Rory Stewart? Now, he has achieved something nobody thought was possible. And talk about resilience. He lost Aleppo when he was the Emir in charge. He was driven back into a tiny corner of his country and he's just retaken the whole of Syria. And he's made a number of very, very radical, dangerous political decisions in his life. He broke off from the Islamic State and refused to take orders from them and instead connected to al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, Pakistan, which could have got him killed. He then broke off from al-Qaeda, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and rebranded and brought people together. He's taken over the state and so far he is trying or claiming that he's going to not export his jihad, that he's going
17:46 Rory Stewart? to work out how to deal in a much better way with minorities than ISIS did. Now, there's a hell of a lot of ifs there. That's a very dark history. When it all goes wrong, we'll be able to trace back those deep links to those prisons in Baghdad and his background in al-Qaeda. But as a political entrepreneur and a leader and a force, you know, he's operating on a level, taking risks, doing things at a national scale that is much more reminiscent of people like Gandhi or Mandela than of any kind of contemporary European politician.
18:19 Alastair Campbell? Wow, controversial, Rory. Stewart backs terrorist wannabe despot as politician of the year. No, I think you're, I think that's a pretty, very interesting and you're right. I mean, what he has achieved is, is on a scale that very few politicians ever have or ever will. Obviously dependent about what now happens, but to get to the place that he's in. And, and by the way, I was serious when I said that I asked Tom Fletcher, who met him. I was serious that, you know, if you do listen to the podcast, Mr. Al Jelani, we would love to have you. On in the new year. Who's your worst worst foreign politician of the year? And it's kind of obvious on one level that we might both say Trump, but I'm not going to say Trump. I'm going to say Orban.
18:59 Rory Stewart? You're gonna say Orban.
19:00 Alastair Campbell? Partly because I charmingly with my bagpipes tried to persuade him to cover the podcast. When I met him at the football in Germany and he was very grumpy and said no. But also I think he's a, I think the, the way that he takes all the benefits of being a member of the European Union, but does an awful lot to undermine the values of the European Union. I think makes him for me the worst politician of the year. And I think the role that he plays and the way he projects his role in relation to, for example, Putin, but also in relation to what he did by sort of, you know, backing George and dream in Georgia and going there to sort of say, well done, you won an election which everybody in the world knows was sort of rigged. So yeah, he's my, he's my worst politician of the year.
19:45 Rory Stewart? I'm gonna go for people that we admire and like and sympathize with who underperformed. And my shortlist would be Macron for calling a completely unnecessary crazy election, which has basically crippled France at a time when we desperately need France. Olaf Scholz for totally failing to establish himself in German politics or get a grip on the German economy. But the person I'm actually going for is Justin Trudeau, whose day has long passed in Canada. And he needs to see that whatever the charm and the appeal of him in those first couple of terms were, he needs to set aside and he needs to give room for someone else to come through. Because not often you'll hear this on the show, but Canada matters and Trudeau is standing in the way.
20:27 Alastair Campbell? You're really going for the Liberals today, aren't you?
20:31 Alastair Campbell? Fiona and I were out for dinner last night with friends of ours and he is a Canadian, the friend of ours, the guy is a Canadian. And basically said Trudeau is an absolute dead duck, probably ever is going to be Prime Minister. And I think we both agreed that, you know, you and I have talked before and we talked to Mark Carney on the podcast. And I always thought if Mark Carney made, maybe had time to get in there, establish himself, then, then he could turn it around. But I think it's just too late. I think it's gone. So yeah, good choice, that one. And you know, it's gonna be just. We've said this before, the next G7, Keir Starmer is going to be the only left of centre leader in the group. Biden gone, replaced by Trump, Trudeau gone, replaced by Polievra, almost certainly. Schultz gone, replaced by Metz.
21:15 Alastair Campbell? You know, and that just shows you that the kind of the state of the world, world politics is changing. Okay, Rory, halfway through our Christmas Day special episode, let's take a quick break.
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23:15 Alastair Campbell? This one Rory, I found really hard, speech of the year.
23:19 Rory Stewart? Ooh.
23:19 Alastair Campbell? I didn't find it hard because there was so much competition. I found it hard because I, I found it hard to think of some great speeches. We saw great speeches at the DNC.
23:28 Rory Stewart? We did, I would choose on your category. I, I'm still absolutely entranced by AOC, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez's speech, which I thought was astonishing because it was short, but it was also startlingly loyal from somebody who has very outspoken views. She subjugated herself to that mission of defeating Trump. She came in straight behind Kamala Harris. She did what she needed to do and she did it with so much sort of charm and verve. Gone, what's your speech of the year?
23:54 Alastair Campbell? Well, I, I had down two and because you've said AOC, which was one of my two, I'm going to go for the other one. And that was Michelle Obama. Now, the problem with both of our choices is that they end, you know, part of the significance of a big political speech is to set the agenda, make the political weather and they lost. But I thought Michelle Obama, I thought her speech at the DNC was brilliant, but I actually thought the speech that she made in the campaign, where she was directly appealing to men about the importance of women and the importance of women's rights. And I thought it was a brilliantly framed piece of rhetoric. I thought it was a brilliantly organised piece of politics. So that, that was my speech of the year with AOC a very, very close second.
24:39 Rory Stewart? And just to put in a slightly serious pompous point on that, I guess this was an election which was about men. There was this weird statistic that was picked up in the polls where in certain states it looked as though Trump was leading among men by 15, 16 points and Kamala Harris was leading amongst women by 15 or 16 points. And we're seeing this very strong demographic split of for the first time ever, young women, much more progressive, young men, much more right wing. And I suppose my question to you is how should the progressive centre be communicating to young men? Because I'm afraid Michelle Obama may not, for all the skill of that speech, be the messenger and that may not quite be the message. Or at least it didn't turn out to be in that election, did it?
25:24 Alastair Campbell? No, as you know, I go into loads of schools and, and I actually find when I'm with boys that they, that they get this better than I ever get the sense of them getting it when you look at the polls. I think it's partly about role modelling. I think it's also about exposing what's happening. I mean, I really do worry the extent to which when you go into schools, you find teachers talking about this guy Andrew Tate, even with all that's happened to him. In fact, possibly including because of what's happened to him, you know, being jailed and locked up and investigated with this, that and the other, that there's something kind of, you know, uber macho about it, that a certain demographic of young males really, really likes. I don't know is the answer to the question, but the progressives are going to have to really, really think about this.
26:04 Rory Stewart? Just to give you that challenge to think about next year, because I think Alistair, it's something you could be really good at. I know your tendency at the moment, as I tease you for getting ever more left wing as you get older, is to focus on the values that you really care about and issues, progressive issues that are close to you. But I also think there's a part of Alastair Campbell, which is a much more male part of him than I have, which is your football part, your music part, your roots, your schooling, your identity, which I think means you do have instincts for how young men think. And it would be interesting to challenge you to get out of your progressive comfort zone and think, what would you really need to do to make them find politics exciting again?
26:46 Alastair Campbell? Okay, I will, I will accept that challenge happily for 2025. And I do think it's the challenge that progressive parties have to take on. I mean, I think this whole thing about social media, the weaponization of TikTok in politics, the Musk Farage relationship, the relationship between Musk and hard right figures around the world, this is a real thing now, and the left has got to get a lot better at dealing with it. And I don't have the answers, but I freely accept your challenge, Rory, to think about it a lot because I think it's a big, big, big, big thing. Now, biggest moment of 2024, I think it's, it's a toss up between Trump and Syria to me.
27:25 Rory Stewart? Yeah, and ultimately, unfortunately, it's Trump for me because America is 25% of the global economy. It's the largest military in the world. Everything, I think, in this year of elections, this was, as we kept reminding people, the year of elections, hinged on the end in that last great election. And if Kamala Harris had come through, climate policy would have been different. Trade policy would have been different. International security in Ukraine would have been different. The rules based international order and the United Nations would have been different. Keir Starmer's job would have been very, very different. Europe's job would have been very, very different. I mean, Trump has essentially, the world is bruised and Trump is a great big walloping punch on that bruise.
28:06 Alastair Campbell? I also think the other thing that that is would have been different is that people would have said the tide of populism has been turned back. Whereas in fact, what of course has happened is the tide of populism looks like it's going further forward. Yeah, I think we're agreed on that one. The biggest moment, political moment was was Trump winning the American election. Most under discussed UK moment or issue. It will not surprise you to know, Rory, I am going for Brexit. Brexit remains l'éléphant le plus grand, the biggest elephant in the room. Fiona and I went to France recently. Anybody who's driven to France recently, you will notice this vast thing that is going up. And when you first look at it, you think, what on earth is that?
28:48 Alastair Campbell? It looks like something sort of slightly kind of weird and robotic and out of space. And it's this vast infrastructure that's being put in for when the fingerprinting comes in, for going between the UK and France. And I just think in terms of the economic damage, the political damage, the trade damage, the the sense that there's so much, if if any other issue had done as much damage as Brexit has done to our economy, to our country as a whole. And yet, any piece of data that comes out, it's almost like, doesn't get on the news, doesn't get raised in parliament, doesn't get written about that much, and it's absolutely nuts.
29:23 Rory Stewart? I'd say the biggest underappreciated moment or thing in British politics for me is this extraordinary number of people who are out of the workforce. Very, very strange phenomenon. We are on track to be spending a hundred billion pounds on disability benefits. We're in a situation where places like Backpool, one in five, one in six people are now on disability benefits. It's a total European outlier. At first, we thought it was the consequence of Covid. But in the rest of Europe, people have returned to work and in Britain they haven't. Partly about the amazing gap that has emerged between disability benefits, which were more protected under the austerity Tory government compared to other forms of benefits, which were cut very hard.
30:07 Rory Stewart? It's partly that there are real problems in the workplace. We have an unpleasant workplace. People in Britain are paid less and work in less good conditions than they do in Europe, and therefore there aren't incentives to get into work. But some of the figures are startling. I mean, diagnoses of certain conditions are up 50% in three years. And there's absolutely no reason to believe that we've got 50% sicker. So something's going on, and it's something that will be a huge priority for Rachel Reeves and the government, because getting those people back into work is incredibly important for economic growth, and getting people off these benefits is going to be very, very important for sorting out the deficit.
30:43 Alastair Campbell? Related to that, this is another one that was on my, well, two that were on my list, but Brexit was always going to win, because I'm obsessed, as you know. But two that were close were, one was the growth of homeschooling. I think that's a really big thing that I think there are all sorts of consequences to that, and I think partly related to COVID, but something else is going on there that I don't think we fully understand. And the other one, which relates to what you were saying, was inequality more general. And maybe this is something that was, you know, we talked when Labour were in opposition about would they do the Australian thing of coming in and saying, well, actually, we are going to have to do sort of wealth taxes. We are going to have to look at different ways of taxation upon the very, very wealthy. And I think the inequality now in Britain, wealth inequality or opportunity inequality
31:25 Alastair Campbell? is pretty vast, and I'm not sure that gets the space in the debate. And that's the same globally as well.
31:31 Rory Stewart? And I think one thing that we don't talk about enough is that because something like 27% of the entire income tax revenue for the government comes from just the top 1%, and a startling amount comes from the top 0.1%, i.e. people who are paying millions of pounds a year in tax. It's a problem partly because it's a reminder of the fact that the top 0.1% have much more money, but it's also a problem because those people are very mobile. And if you build a tax pyramid, which is very dependent on money from people right at the very top, the temptation is to squeeze them harder. And then, of course, it turns out they can move to Milan, they can move to Portugal, they shift their businesses abroad. At some point, the government needs to do something which is politically so tough, which Tony Blair's been talking about, which is get more people on medium and low incomes
32:14 Rory Stewart? paying a greater proportion of that tax. And the short term pain of that has the long term gain, which is that you have a much more stable revenue base for your government.
32:23 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, globally, most under discussed. I've got two because I've got a feeling that you and I are going to say the same thing for number one.
32:30 Rory Stewart? Okay, for me, most under discussed, Indonesia, the election of Su Hato's son-in-law, this crazy dad dancing, human rights indicted, former special forces commander turned rubbish dad dancer populist Prabowo, who is a sort of populist with all the TikTok nonsense that goes along this, taking over the world's fourth most populous country. Over to you.
32:55 Alastair Campbell? Well, I'm surprised by that. I thought you were going to say Sudan, which is one of my two. And I'll save the other one because the other one is relevant to something we're going to be discussing tomorrow on Boxing Day. I just think that there's been massive focus on the Middle East, rightly, because of the scale of death and devastation, there's been massive focus on Ukraine. But the war in Sudan that has now been going on since spring of last year is on a scale that kind of, I don't want to minimize either of those two that I've mentioned or any other conflict that's going on in the world. But I just looked up the latest, well, not even the latest figures, but we're getting close to 10 million in terms of displacement. We're getting to millions that have fled the country as refugees.
33:40 Alastair Campbell? And with, in the state of Khartoum alone, 61,000 dead. So rightly, you and I talk a lot and get horrified about the, you know, you could, you could fill one of Britain's biggest football stadiums with those dead in Gaza, but you've got even more that are, that are dead in one state in, in Sudan. So very occasionally, I think the BBC have done some really good, interesting and difficult reporting on this. Lindsay Hillson, Channel Four is always, you know, trying to look at Sudan, but it's not really getting the attention that it deserves at all. And frankly, this, like a lot of wars, this is factions where personalities, really strong personalities.
34:21 Alastair Campbell? Fallout, lose control and spiral into the situation we've got now.
34:26 Rory Stewart? Well, maybe to conclude, given this is our Christmas Day episode.
34:30 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, let's cheer up a bit.
34:32 Rory Stewart? Yeah, well, I mean, I think the central message of Christianity is a message of hope because obviously Jesus dies in this horrifying, humiliating way, and then he comes back from the dead. And I've been reading Hannah Arendt, who's an atheist, which is not a, not a believer. But Hannah Arendt, to remind people, is this extraordinary continental secular Jewish writer who famously sat through the Eichmann trials and coined the phrase the banality of evil. But she talks about something that I'm, I'm fascinated by, which is those moments where human action suddenly does something which is undetermined. In other words, you can't really track in the causes that preceded anything that would quite lead you to believe
35:15 Rory Stewart? that it can happen. Moments when peace comes out of war, when transformations that nobody saw happened, maybe Syria was a glimpse of that, maybe Donald Tusk's victory in the Polish election on a smaller scale where he defeated the populist law and justice party and came in was a glimpse of that. But it's also what I think is at the heart of what you were involved in, in Northern Ireland. And, and she ends up with this, um, this word, which Seamus Heaney also uses reflecting on the Good Friday Agreement, which is the word miracle. And so I think on Christmas Day, I think retaining our faith that these mess that humans created can be turned around by humans, retaining that sense that as in Northern Ireland, as in South Africa, which also has been a good story this year,
35:58 Rory Stewart? story where actually an election's been held where a more moderate liberal party's come in as a partner for government, there is still that possibility, looking forward to Sudan, looking forward to Gaza, looking forward to Russia, Ukraine, that possibility of miracle.
36:11 Alastair Campbell? Oh, Rory, I think we should clip that last contribution from you and put it out ahead of Christmas Day, so that any vicar who's really struggling for a sermon, because I mean, it must be so hard for these religious people at Christmas. They have to do schools and carol services and sermons. As we're talking God, I'm going to also, and I know both of us got absolutely smashed on social media at the time, but I am going to say that I still feel enormous sympathy for Justin Welby.
36:46 Alastair Campbell? The way that he was forced out as Archbishop of Canterbury and that is in no way to minimise sexual assault by or against anyone and it is no way to minimise the strength of feeling that I have against people like John Smythe and others who abuse their positions of authority, whether that be in a church setting or any other. But whatever mistakes Justin Welby made, I think that to become the first Archbishop in history to be forced out, when deep down I think he is a really good man, I think that is that is quite harsh.
37:18 Rory Stewart? 100% agree. I think what John Smythe did was horrifying, but but Justin Welby, I've always seen as a very, very dedicated Archbishop, public servant, doing one of the most difficult jobs in the world. And I saw him actually at a Christmas carol service and I was just struck by how much dignity he's carrying himself with after this astonishing public humiliation and attacks, which you understand very well. It's been a year where quite a lot of people I know have seen themselves attacked in the media, some of them being forced to resign, others have been turned into hate figures. And it is wonderful to see how some people are able to have the resilience to keep on doing their job with dignity and kindness, once they're under that kind of assault. So, yes.
38:02 Alastair Campbell? And actually, the leading interview we did with him, the other reason why I like Justin Welby is that he and other members of his family have been a big part of the debate that we've been trying to have about to get more openness about mental health and mental illness. There we are. So, Happy Christmas to the Archbishop and to all of our listeners and all of our viewers, wherever you may be, whatever your faith may or may not be, have a wonderful time.
38:28 Rory Stewart? Happy Christmas and you can see my Christmas tree in the background there to cheer everybody up. Happy Christmas.
38:32 Alastair Campbell? Happy Christmas, Rory, and we'll see you tomorrow.
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