Pod Insights The Rest Is Politics 79. Protests in China, UK strikes, and crypto bros About this episode Today, join Alastair and Rory as they investigate the current protests in China and their causes, dissect the recent election in Malaysia, discuss the recent Supreme Court ruling on Scottish independence and much, much more.
Plus, they take a look at the importance of technology within politics, the mistakes of past Prime Ministers and the impact of strikes in Britain today.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:04 Rory Stewart? This episode is brought to you by NordVPN.
0:06 Alastair Campbell? And I must thank NordVPN because on my Grand European Tour with Fiona, I was away from the Hawthorns for West Bromwich against Burnley, but I managed to watch it. There you go.
0:19 Rory Stewart? I actually had a NordVPN thank you. I was in the new Starbucks here in Crete. And of course, the thing flashed up, saying this is an unsecured public network. And I was able to go to my VPN. It was a little reminder of something we often forget when we're in all those cafes and things, which is actually genuinely, people can do all kinds of weird cyber attacks and spying if you don't have a virtual private network when you're sitting in that Starbucks.
0:42 Alastair Campbell? Well, I think, are you not really sort of proud of me that I managed to do this? Or should I say Fiona managed to do this?
0:49 Rory Stewart? I'm incredibly proud of you. That's a tech transformation. So to get the best discount off your NordVPN plan, go to nordvpn.com/risterspolitics. That's nordvpn.com/risterspolitics. And the link is in the episode description.
1:43 Rory Stewart? Welcome to The Rest is Politics with me, Rory Stewart.
1:46 Alastair Campbell? And me, Alastair Campbell.
1:47 Rory Stewart? So before we get on to Alistair and his World Cup so far, just to give you a sense of what we're going to be talking about in this program. So we're going to do something on China, something on Malaysia. We're going to deal with a very interesting speech from David Miliband, who's a friend of both of us, but who's talking about Britain's place in the world. And we'll also have a look at strikes and some of the Labour debates around Brexit. But to begin with, let's start with China. And Alistair, you've been reading about Xi Jinping, thinking about Xi Jinping, and you've been looking at some of these demonstrations in China.
2:18 Alastair Campbell? I mean, they're pretty amazing, aren't they? I think that... There's been lots of comparisons made with Channel Four Square, which is understandable because that's the big one that people remember. I was a journalist then, I was on The Mirror, and I can, you know, I think there was a sense at the start that this might lead somewhere other than crackdown, but it didn't. And I feel exactly the same about this one, I'm afraid. I think the crackdown on this is going to be really severe, because he's gone from being, there've been protests, there've been quite a lot of protests going on, fairly small, fairly localized, mainly in relation to the zero Covid strategy, where people are being locked up for months and months and months. There was this terrible fire where people were locked up,
3:00 Alastair Campbell? and I think 11 people were killed. There's been the developments of what they call the blank, the white paper protest, where people just hold up white paper as a way of saying that they don't have freedom of speech. But I think what's been interesting in the last couple of days, started in quite a big one in Shanghai, is that this is now developing into people complaining about the government, and in particular about President Xi Jinping. And that, I think, will lead to pretty ferocious crackdown. And people may be wondering, well, why aren't the police just piling in? They piled in on that guy from the BBC and a few others. But in a way, they don't need to pile in, because you've got to understand it's such a surveillance state, that they can get everybody afterwards quite easily.
3:44 Rory Stewart? So just to loop back for a second, just to set a little bit more context around this, and then maybe get you on the der response. So China has gone for this very, very aggressive zero Covid, and has been running it, obviously, since the very beginning of the breakout in Wuhan. So this has been going on now for a very long time. It's been going on for almost two years uninterrupted. And it's a question, I guess, almost three years, I suppose, I guess it's a question of firstly, why is China doing this? Why are they so determined there's going to be no Covid at all? They were, of course, in line with the way that the rest of the world was behaving when they began doing this January, February 2020. In fact, they were ahead of the rest
4:26 Rory Stewart? of the world. And in some ways, the rest of the world followed their example and went from thinking that zero COVID lockdowns was something that could only be done in an authoritarian state like China, to beginning to think it was something could be done in countries all around the world. And rather surprisingly, it did happen in countries all around the world. But as other countries have come out of lockdown and have begun to, as it were, in inverted commas, accept COVID as part of the the general disease within their population, China has continued to want to entirely eliminate it. And and this, as you say, has triggered these protests that have stretched all the way from Ulumqi, Ulumqi, which is the the major city in Xinjiang, right out in northwest China towards Central Asia and Tajikistan, right the way through to Shanghai in the in the east.
5:12 Alastair Campbell? It makes you wonder whether it's about dealing with COVID or whether the absolute fixation is about control. Because the economy, the economy has taken a massive hit.
5:23 Rory Stewart? We've talked a lot about populism, but one of the things that is very clear is the way that COVID has defined political careers. In both directions, there are politicians, such as DeSantis, the Florida governor, who've made their political careers off being very, very loose on COVID, going for no lockdowns at all. In fact, prosecuting people who even asked for vaccination certificates. Right the way through, I think you pointed out in a recent email to me, an Australian political leader who in Victoria has built his career off a very hard reaction to COVID.
5:58 Alastair Campbell? Dan Andrews, yeah. And he's and he's just won his third successive term. And all the media is saying he wasn't going to get back, or if he did, it was a hung parliament. And he won very, very well, partly because people felt he did really well on COVID.
6:10 Rory Stewart? Yeah. And but it's not just, I think, a question of really well, because some places, I mean, Angela Merkel in Germany did well, but she did it in a very nuanced, balanced way and in quite a complex way. What's interesting, I think, in the new politics of the last five years is the way that actually the politicians that get huge boosts in their opinion polls are the ones that went very, very radical to one side or another, either going, as I say, with DeSantis, no lockdown at all, or going in Victoria, hard. And I think Xi Jinping in China is obviously attached his credibility to this incredibly hard zero COVID. And it raises questions, I suppose. About the flexibility and responsiveness of the Chinese regime.
6:53 Rory Stewart? Why is it when every other country, and this is where you were getting to, I guess. Why is it when every other country has managed to change its policy and nuance it? China has remained so determined. And is it that nobody can actually get to see that nobody can get him to change his mind?
7:08 Alastair Campbell? The other factor, I think, is that they were very sniffy about the vaccines being developed outside China. But it appears that their vaccine is not as effective. But there's some very interesting stuff going on in and around the Chinese leadership. This may be nothing, but a friend of mine sent me a thing pointing out that in official state media, they've stopped calling President Xi the people's leader. He's now just called the leader. And Wang Yi, the foreign minister, has stopped giving him this label of the people's leader. Now, it sounds kind of tidy, but I suspect that might be quite significant. Because the recent party congress that they had was deemed not to have gone that well for him.
7:53 Alastair Campbell? And we, of course, just think of him as being the most powerful man in the world and pretty much out and out dictator. I think we're going to see some of that in the coming days. But it could be that there are forces moving around him which are making him more vulnerable than we realise. And I do think these people who are protesting, they're unbelievably brave. Because it's not like going out to protest here where, you know, you might get arrested, you might get hit, whatever. But these are people who are literally, you know, risking just getting thrown into the prison and throw away the key, some of them.
8:27 Rory Stewart? And some of the images are direct repeats of global images. I mean, it's a sign of the way in which social media creates these global images. So you would have seen a young woman confronting these kind of Robocop armed police, deliberately filming them on her cellphone and refusing to move, which was very much a replay in her stance of that very famous picture of an African American woman confronting a large Robocop police crowd in the United States. But I think the other thing is that we shouldn't necessarily think that President Xi's vulnerability is necessarily going to. Make the world a safer place. Often when these regimes begin to feel vulnerable is the moment at which they become more radical.
9:07 Alastair Campbell? Hmm.
9:07 Rory Stewart? And I, you know, I continue to be very worried about China Taiwan because I think if he's looking for a moment to move against Taiwan, he will feel this is a moment where the Western economies are very weak and where they will feel it's going to be very difficult to put in counter sanctions and sanctions around Taiwan. But I also think if he begins to lose credibility at home, the temptation to do stuff abroad.
9:25 Alastair Campbell? Well, two things on that. The first is on the point about be careful what you wish for. Lionel Labarba, ex editor of the FT, had a very interesting piece in the New European last week, pointing out the, you know, there appear to be quite considerable moves within the American administration to try to get some sort of deal on Ukraine with Putin. Unspeakable, though that might seem, because they're worried about what might follow him. And in relation to Taiwan, there was another election last week, and that was the midterm elections in Taiwan, which the president, Xi Jinping, projected, framed as a, if you like, a kind of referendum, not referendum, but she said it was a vote of confidence in her stance on China, her very tough stance on China.
10:11 Alastair Campbell? And she did so badly that she's had to resign as the leader of the party. She's staying on as president, but she's resigned as the leader of the Democratic Progressive Party. And the party that is not close to China, but that is much more sympathetic to China and less belligerent vis a vis China, did better. So that's the KMT, and they're going to win mayoral elections in 13 counties, which is, you know, I think they were expected, her party's going to win five, which is down on the last local elections.
10:41 Rory Stewart? Which was also very interesting because KMT, I think, were very much the traditional ruling party. I mean, they go all the way back to the founding of modern Taiwan. That was the party which Chiang Kai-shek set up, well, Sun Yat-sen, of course, founded originally. And I guess that's interesting, too, as we look around the world at the ways in which these big dominant ruling parties either corrode and disappear. This has happened in France with both the left and the right, or in Taiwan, when they seem to hove back into view again.
11:09 Alastair Campbell? I wonder if with her, because she does get such phenomenal support from America, from Europe. From different parts of Asia that sometimes you you have a mistaken sense of what what is happening in if you like in real public opinion. And the fact that it led to her resigning as the leader, that is, that that suggests there's a lot more pro-Chinese sentiment there than we might think.
11:33 Rory Stewart? And it can be very common, can't it, I suppose, this idea that you can be celebrated internationally, even in the case of the Ethiopian Prime Minister, you get a Nobel Peace Prize.
11:43 Alastair Campbell? Yeah.
11:44 Rory Stewart? And then find your country collapsing into civil war around you. And I suppose people might, you know, touching on a sensitive subject for a second, suggest that, you know, maybe that is what happened in a sense, maybe with Blair in Iraq, maybe happened with Cameron on some of the stuff he was doing around Libya or trying to do around Syria, that you can get into a mindset where you very much become, or even Gordon Brown around the financial crisis, you can become really celebrated globally and internationally for your role in, uh, role working with other partners, but actually domestically, it doesn't really pay off.
12:14 Alastair Campbell? Yes, I think I think it's far better, Rory, to be like Johnson, Sunak and Trust and to be celebrated neither domestically nor internationally. Much safer place to be. Listen, the other, the other election we should cover off because we got quite a few questions about it, both last week and this, is the election in in Malaysia. And one of the questions was, has any Prime Minister ever arrived via such an extraordinary route? And this is Anwar Ibrahim. And by the way, Rory, I know how you love establishment stuff and and you like all those right honoreables and your OBEs and you definitely want to be Lord Steward at one time. This guy's name, he's Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim, and the letters after his name go SSAP, DGSM, DUPN, SPNS, SPCM,
12:57 Alastair Campbell? SSPJ, SPDK, DMPN, KGCR, MP.
13:03 Rory Stewart? That's wonderful. So so remember, remember that's in Malaysia, is of course a monarchy, and it has all these titles going all the way up. So you can be called a dato, which I guess is a sort of a junior sir or lord. You can be called a twan sri, which is a, you know, an even grander sort of lord. And he's accumulated a lot of that. But just to take it back to the very beginning, Anwar Ibrahim is an extraordinarily veteran Malaysian politician, who I think served in almost every cabinet since the early eighties. Was very close to President Mahatia, controversial figure, quite anti-British, often in his rhetoric in the eighties, who led Malaysia's shift from a, I suppose it's reputation, I grew up in Malaysia, which is why I've got, you know, I was lived there for three years.
13:48 Rory Stewart? Did you, did you get any letters after your name while you were there or not? I didn't, I didn't, I would have loved to, I really would have loved to. Never mind, never mind. But definitely at the moment when I was there, which was late seventies, early eighties, it was seen as this very, very sleepy, quite friendly country, which had come out of the Malaysian emergency communist insurgency, had a very pro-British government. Then Mahatia took over and he drove quite an anti-British, pro-Malaysian agenda, which coincided with fantastic economic growth through to the Asian financial crisis in end of ninety seven, beginning in ninety eight. And he began to then fall out with Anwar Ibrahim very dramatically. Who was his deputy and the finance minister, wasn't he? His deputy and finance minister and ended up turning against him and bringing
14:33 Rory Stewart? a case for him, which got him prosecuted for sodomy. And corruption. Sodomy and corruption, yeah. And Anwar Ibrahim, who most of the people I know in Malaysia have generally seen as one of the good guys of Malaysian politics, suddenly found himself embroiled in this horrifying scandal. He's somebody who there's no reason to believe that he was gay, he's a married man with a lot of kids and suddenly he found himself embroiled in this scandal that got him sent to prison for sodomy. And actually a reminder also, when we talk about Qatar, which we were talking about last week, that Malaysia isn't another country where it is possible to go to prison for being gay. And in this case, it was used as this brutal political attack.
15:14 Rory Stewart? He was then very much in the wilderness and then in came a horrible corruption scandal. We talked a lot about how in Japan, there is a situation where you get these prime ministers who come from these big political families. And in the case of Malaysia, a man called Najib Razak, who was the son of a prime minister, the nephew of a prime minister. Got involved in a scandal called the One M D B scandal in two thousand nine. Well, from two thousand nine onwards, when it was established, where literally billions of dollars went missing. And out of the back of that Mahatia, this guy is talking about the early eighties, comes back in his nineties to win an election.
15:56 Rory Stewart? And again, the assumption was that he would hand over to Amin Ibrahim, didn't. Amay Ibrahim's wife became deputy prime minister, and now Amay Ibrahim is finally back, not having won a majority, but with a coalition, which, to loop back to your point about titles, relates to the king.
16:10 Alastair Campbell? You've missed a second conviction for sodomy in two thousand fifteen, and it was while he was still in prison that he kind of reconciled with Mahatir Mohammed. And they then went on to win an election, and they sort of had an unspoken agreement that he would take over. Eventually, he got released after a royal pardon and then came back via a by-election, I think while his wife was still deputy prime minister. And now he's he's gone on, he's going to be the tenth prime minister of Malaysia. So he has led a pretty remarkable life. He's pretty, he's on the kind of reforming wing of this party, isn't he?
16:52 Rory Stewart? Yes, he's definitely definitely seen as a moderate reformer, definitely a huge improvement on Ajib Rezaq, who was a really brutal corrupt politician. And I think it is something that could be positive for the region. Malaysia is an Islamic success story. It's something that people in the Muslim world are very, very proud of. It's a country that has become more conservative religiously. I mean, just just in a sort of very straightforward sense, when I was there in the early eighties, you saw very few headscarves. It's now much more fittably in terms of people's clothing, more conservative. But it's positioned, of course, right next to Singapore and is a very important player in balancing. How all these countries, including of course Indonesia, which is the big giant in
17:35 Rory Stewart? the area, balance against China and balance particularly against China in terms of China's naval ambitions and its access to all those ports. So it's something that Australia will be looking at closely, the United States will be looking at closely, Japan will be looking at closely, and Malaysia is no longer, I think, simply a marginal sleepy player. It's very much important to geopolitics.
17:57 Alastair Campbell? So you mentioned in the introduction David Miliband's speech, and I had dinner with David last night, so I had a chance to quiz him about it. And the first thing I think is worth saying is how infrequently these days senior politicians sort of make speeches that you'd kind of think were worth having a proper discussion about.
18:19 Rory Stewart? 100%.
18:20 Alastair Campbell? I can't remember, when was the last time, has James Cleverly made a big foreign policy speech? Has your friend Gillian Keegan made a big speech about the future of our education system? I think these big speeches are important and we just don't, we don't see enough of them. Same on the Labour side too.
18:36 Rory Stewart? Well, it's a sense of sort of ambition has gone, hasn't it? And maybe that people think that attention spans are too short, that everything is about these tiny little moments on social media and nobody has the patience for it.
18:46 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, but in which case, why does there appear to be this interest in these longer form podcasts and why are books doing so well? And I think both politics and media have got this wrong about what people are wanting. I think they actually do want greater depth.
19:01 Rory Stewart? And just remind us, when is it happening? He's giving it at Chatham House or he's giving it at Chatham House?
19:05 Alastair Campbell? We're recording this on Monday and he's giving it tomorrow, Tuesday at Chatham House in London.
19:10 Rory Stewart? So we've had a sneak preview of what he's going to be delivering.
19:12 Alastair Campbell? We have had a sneak preview. We might even have been able to influence it at the margins, Rory. And but I think, you know, one of the things he talks about, something we've talked about a lot, and he frames this as very much as a kind of current American worldview, that the dividing line is very much between the concept of democracy and dictatorship. And he says it actually goes further than that. It's the dividing line between those who believe in Impunity, and actually I think we'd have to say that some of those are also in democracies now, and those who actually have a sense of there being the need for a rules-based order. But the other thing is, it's actually, the title of the speech is the UK's role in the world today. And it's just a very, very sharp, hard-headed analysis of where we are.
19:56 Alastair Campbell? And he goes through some of the changes they've been, not least on aid and foreign policy, and of course Brexit. And he calls it, you know, our sense of our own selves at the moment, he refers to it as delusional, because we're not actually confronting the choices and the arguments that go to making up what would represent a proper thought-through foreign policy in 2022.
20:21 Rory Stewart? So to look back, he is, I guess, one of the rare British figures, and maybe William Hague is another one, who seems to be capable of making a big argument about the direction of global politics and locating Britain within this. And he sees the world, as I think we all do in this podcast, as getting more and more disordered. He points the fact that we've often talked about 2005 as an inflection point. I'm very interested in it, because it's not just the moment where the surge in Iraq happens, but it's also the moment where the number of democracies in the world, which have been doubling since 1989, then plateaued. And he points out in the speech that the number of democracies in the world, as measured by Freedom House, is now half what it was in 2005, falling from 40% down
21:04 Rory Stewart? to 20% of the countries in the world. And I think that leads this impunity point, because he doesn't develop it fully, but what he seems to be saying is that Biden may have made a mistake in framing the world as a standoff between democracies and non-democracies, partly because that implies that 80% of the countries in the world are not democracies, and that's not leaving you many people to work with. But also, I think that he is imagining that you could have relationships with regimes that don't necessarily get described as full democracies, but which believe in a world order. He talks about impunity, we could talk about the rule of law. And he's set up a project looking at things like people's respect for human rights, their respect for the environment. It's a very interesting list, which I think would need to be worked into, because I think there's a question
21:49 Rory Stewart? mark about his list, about whether any country quite meets the standards.
21:53 Alastair Campbell? Well, I was talking to a A former French diplomat this morning and I was telling him about David's speech and and so forth. And when I when I set out that point about the Biden framing, the American framing, because well, he said, well, there are lots of people in in France and other parts of Europe who don't believe that the Americans subscribe to what he would say was a proper rules based, order based, understanding of the world and how it works. I think the other big point that David makes, which, you know, we have definitely talked about, but I'm not sure that the that that many people in politics, both here and in the States, really fully get the seriousness of this, is the fact that the so called
22:33 Alastair Campbell? multipolar world is a is a reality and it's not going to change. And China really does now offer a completely different view of how the world should be. And other countries that the Americans used to be able to not control in quotes, but just feel that if they asked for something, they were more likely than not to get it. Saudi Arabia, he mentions Ethiopia, he mentions. They don't. There's no kind of automatic loyalty, sense of loyalty to America. And that is happening at a time where these other massive challenges like climate change, inequality are, you know, crashing through into our front rooms every night on the television and making so called ordinary people, close quotes, much more conscious of the fact that this is, this is having a really profound
23:18 Alastair Campbell? effect on the way the world is changing.
23:20 Rory Stewart? And it's happened so quickly because 15 years is not a very long time. I was thinking about this in terms of the career of of one of the people who who isn't necessarily my favorite person in the world, who's David Cameron. Because I think we're often defined by those years, our first years in work from when we're, I guess, you know, we leave education and and those first sort of 15 years, 16 years in working life. And in David Cameron's case, it almost exactly coincides with 1989 to 2005, when he becomes the conservative leader. That's where his world values are formed. That's where his vision of the world is formed. And David Cameron, who's not much older than me, I feel, looking back at time, looking at both the mistakes that he made over Brexit, some of the problems around the way he handled the Scottish referendum, and in particular, the mistakes he made with
24:05 Rory Stewart? Libya and Syria. That he is a prisoner of that period, eighty nine to two thousand and five. He actually, in a sense, is a real child of Tony Blair. He sees the world very much at that moment of American hegemony, that moment of growing democracies. He doesn't spot the financial crisis coming. He doesn't see the importance of social media. Cameron Famer, he said that people who use Twitter were twats was one of his comments in two thousand and nine, two thousand and ten. And you see how by fourteen fifteen, twenty fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, as populism begins to spread across the world, how radically the world's changed, bringing us to this world of global disorder, which Miliband
24:46 Rory Stewart? has described, which almost seems to come from, sometimes I fear, to quote Hamlet, Act Four, come from too much sort of complacency and ease. I mean, comes from a sense that the world had got too comfortable and that a lot of the brutality and competition and populism came from a world that had forgotten how important restraint and global cooperation was.
25:07 Alastair Campbell? I think this point about delusion is important as well. David talks about that we're living with these delusions about our relative power, influence and position, delusions that have cost us dear, both strategically and tactically. And it was interesting, did you see Andrew Mitchell's interview in one of the papers at the weekend? Andrew Mitchell, former Secretary of State for International Development, department being scrapped and he's been taken back into government. But his interview was pretty clear. In fact, I thought if I'd have been Rishi Sunak, I'd have thought it got quite close to the edges of collective responsibility. Because let's remember, Sunak was the Chancellor at the time that the DIFID was scrapped and the naught point seven percent commitment was dropped.
25:52 Alastair Campbell? But David's points out, in these areas of historic strength, like humanitarian aid and diplomacy, Britain has gone AWOL. Today, we're absent and people notice and you must be seeing that in your work with Gibb directly going around the place.
26:05 Rory Stewart? One hundred percent, and I feel it very, very strongly in Africa where our British presence budget's been cut to nothing. We haven't played a major part in the response on the climate change and drought in East Africa on the horn. We don't really have the resources to play our role in United Nations discussions around what's happening in Central Africa. One of the sad things, though, is that one of the great achievements of this podcast is we managed to get Keir Starmer to commit to restore the 0.7% international development spend. And I was gently encouraging people who really cared about international development to look seriously at Labour as an option. And now, to my disappointment, David Lammy in a speech to Christian Aid seems to be backtracking.
26:45 Alastair Campbell? What did he, what did he actually say?
26:47 Rory Stewart? Well, he echoed exactly Rishi Sunak's line, which is that they would return to 0.7% when the fiscal situation allowed. And that definition is pretty implausible. It's a point at which Britain's no longer borrowing for its daily need and the debt burden is reducing, which is something that doesn't look like it's happening anytime soon. So very disappointing for idealistic people who want to vote Labour to see Labour not holding the line on international development.
27:10 Alastair Campbell? Well, as, as we were walking the dog earlier, Fiona was complaining that in her view, we're hearing far too much about what Labour won't do and not enough about what they will. And I think at the moment, they're still in that very defensive crouch where all these traps that the Tories are trying to lay, they're deliberately not jumping into them. But I agree that at some point closer to election, I hope that was David just sort of having Rachel Reeves and Pat McFadden, Shadow Chancellor and Shadow Chief Secretary kind of sitting on his shoulder, thinking, we've been told we can't make unfunded spending commitments without explaining where the money is coming from. But I agree, I think it would be very disappointing and surprising if Labour went into the next election without a very strong commitment on, on international aid.
27:55 Rory Stewart? Well, shall we take that as our break and maybe come back to domestic after the break?
27:59 Alastair Campbell? Well, if we do that.
28:01 Speaker 02 Mr. President, my company tore me of the explosion on our rig.
28:04 Speaker 03 On October 2nd.
28:05 Speaker 02 Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me.
28:10 Speaker 03 Tom Cruise is. Digger got us into this mess, and Digger's gonna dig us out. From the director of Birdman and the Revenant.
28:17 Speaker 04 What would happen if I stopped drilling? You starve, you freeze to death, that's what.
28:22 Speaker 03 With great power comes great deniability.
28:25 Speaker 04 I'm not the first then.
28:26 Speaker 03 Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17. Not a minute without parent.
28:38 Rory Stewart? Welcome back to Restless Politics with me Rory Stewart.
28:41 Alastair Campbell? And me, Alastair Campbell.
28:42 Rory Stewart? So there's been a lot on the Twitter line on Restless Politics around the House of Lords and looking particularly at statistics. And I think one of the reasons to feel that the House of Lords is teetering and almost on its last legs is the insane number of Lords that have been created, the depreciation of the currency. You've talked about some of the individuals that have been put in the past, but the big story, I think, is just the numbers. I calculate well over 1,100 Lords has been created in the last 42 years. And put that in context, during the entire 45-year reign of Queen Elizabeth I, she created only 18 Lords. The total number of Lords at the end of her reign was about 50 compared to where we are
29:27 Rory Stewart? today. And the thing really begins to go accelerate under Tony Blair, who I guess... Tell us a bit about why he created so many Lords? That was partly about a lot of Conservative Lords being there and him trying to balance the House, is that right?
29:39 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, it was about the fact that we were facing such political difficulty. And bear in mind that we'd had a commitment to get rid of hereditary peers, which I have to say was one of the most balls-aching, painful negotiations in which I've ever been involved, in which Viscount Cranborne and I sat in my office sort of haggling over this, that and the other, and we had all sorts of other people. The peers, they take themselves so seriously, they're so protective of their rights and their privileges. And we ended up, I think it was seventy two, we kept seventy two. But even with that, there was still this pretty big inbuilt bias, which meant that, you know, we really had to struggle on on votes.
30:21 Alastair Campbell? So quite a lot of peers went in there. I think Harold Wilson had a fair old, fair old few as well. Um. There's the famous lavender list, of course, of some of his. And then Tony did, I don't know what the numbers are, but certainly the the numbers of the House of Lords went up during that period. The other thing to remember, Rory, as with all of us, peers are older than the average, but a lot of them are living longer. So so to have it over a thousand now is utterly absurd. Um. David Cameron packed in a load.
30:50 Rory Stewart? Theresa May was better behaved. I mean, a- as usual with almost everything, she created about half the number that Boris Johnson did, despite being in office for roughly the same amount of time.
30:58 Alastair Campbell? By the way, Rory, to be fair to both Tony and Gordon, neither of them did a resignation honours list. And I think that was the right thing to do. I think these resignation honours lists are utterly absurd.
31:07 Rory Stewart? Well, you had Liz Truss creating something like one for every two days or one for every one and a half days that she was in office.
31:13 Alastair Campbell? Incredible.
31:14 Rory Stewart? No, it's it's very, and so, and I I think the Lords themselves feel this all the time. There were big protests. I mean, there were complaints, you'll remember the complaints about Tony's cronies with his appointments, which was William Hague's great phrase. But there were huge complaints about David Cameron's appointments, bigger complaints about the appointments made by by Boris Johnson. And in every case, the House of Lords is aware that there's only so many people they can take and only so many discredited people that they can take and still retain any kind of status. And and then there's this P P E contracts around Baroness Moon.
31:48 Alastair Campbell? Moon. What is that about? Rory, can I just say, I hate to make this point because one or two listeners tell me I make it far too often, but I'm going to do it anyway. If this was happening under a Labour government, that story would be across every news bulletin until we got to the bottom of it. We're talking tens of millions of pounds. We're talking this VIP lane in which it seems that she had used her friendship with Michael Gove. We've we're talking about a wealthy husband who's from the Isle of Man and stashing away millions of pounds into trust funds and family Wotsits and bladdy, bladdy, bladdy, blah. And I suspect that even our incredibly well informed listeners, that a lot of them won't know what we're talking about.
32:26 Rory Stewart? I mean, I've seen quite a lot of reporting on it, but but I think let's, we're definitely, regardless of whether people read it or not, let's talk through it. So. Baroness Moan is this very, very wealthy woman who was appointed by David Cameron into the House of Lords in 2015, which I think was a sign again of David Cameron's very peculiar judgement. So, anyone interested, Camilla Long, very good article in The Times, saying that she simply cannot believe that David Cameron could have put this woman in the House of Lords.
32:54 Alastair Campbell? I've got it here, I've got it here, Rory. The headline, "I interviewed Michelle Moan. She makes every grasping lazy peer look like an angel."
33:01 Rory Stewart? Well, and her products, I mean, it's like a sort of joke. I mean, she promoted something called Trim Secrets Pills, which is, you know, a dieting pill for which was literally no scientific base or rationale, completely based around pseudoscience. She launched her own cryptocurrency. She, and now has brought an incredible scandal around PPE, where it seems as though, at least on the current reporting, as though she claimed she had whole operations running to get these contracts, which didn't exist at all. So, we haven't actually talked enough about crypto and the collapse of FTX and Sam Bankman-Fried.
33:38 Alastair Campbell? Well, that's partly, that's partly, I must confess, because I don't really understand it, despite the main Rory in my life trying to explain it to me.
33:45 Rory Stewart? Well, let's just very quickly on that, because it's a slow burn over the last two weeks. He was somebody that I marginally was in touch with. So, he's 30 years old. He's somebody who rose to prominence, setting up a cryptocurrency exchange, became a multi-multi-billionaire unbelievably quickly, ended up staging events where he had Tony Blair and Bill Clinton on the stage with him. It's a classic picture, both Tony Blair and Bill Clinton, very smartly dressed in their suits, and there's Sam Bankman-Fried, as a sort of epitome of the Silicon Valley entrepreneur, sitting there in sort of white shorts and sneakers and a t-shirt, looking like he's just come from playing a game of tennis with a huge kind of mop of hair.
34:26 Rory Stewart? Was very powerful in the effective altruist movement, which is this movement set up by a philosopher at Oxford University partly and with Peter Singer at Princeton, which is about making sure that when you spend money on development, or indeed anything, you make sure it's as effective as possible and you measure the impact. And it's something that GiveDirectly has been very closely connected to because we've traditionally been seen as a very efficient return on investment.
34:50 Alastair Campbell? Was he a donor, Rory?
34:53 Rory Stewart? He was very close to our movement. He wasn't a direct donor, but I was talking to his foundation, trying to raise money from him about two weeks before this whole thing collapsed. So very interesting actually conversation with the foundation and understanding where he was going. He was getting into something called long-termism. So increasingly interested not in poverty today, which I found very frustrating because there's so much to be done for the extreme poor. The number of the extreme poor in the world is actually rising with climate change. But meanwhile, he was focused on asteroid attacks, robot overlords, the dangers from artificial intelligence and stuff, projecting theoretically a thousand, two thousand, even 10,000 years into the future, talking about pucative unborn
35:35 Rory Stewart? humans and what he could do to deal with it. Anyway, in the midst of all this, having got all these friends, like Tony Blair and Bill Clinton, having got people like me trying to get him on site on effective altruism, it turned out that he was, appears to have been living in Bahamas, avoiding taxes and regulations while talking about regulation in a very positive way, and then borrowing from his company in order to try to invest and losing his whole company in the process. So
36:00 Alastair Campbell? And he's now filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.
36:04 Rory Stewart? And may actually be facing criminal proceedings.
36:07 Alastair Campbell? Oh, yeah, for sure. I was with Rory, had dinner recently with somebody who'd invested with this guy, who said it's going to be bigger than Enron. This is real house of cards time.
36:21 Rory Stewart? And of course, he was very important donor to the Democratic Party during the midterms. And of course, the Republicans will probably use that. Next election gets, but this links back to this extraordinary figure Baroness Mon, this sort of initially this beauty queen, whose cryptocurrency, according to Sunday Times, I'm sorry, Financial Times, said it was a fiasco that exposes the total absence of oversight in the market.
36:45 Alastair Campbell? Hmm, hmm. But your point about him being a big donor to the Democrats is that, and it works on the other side as well, a lot of these guys who've made a lot of money very, very quickly in crypto, they're into both of the main parties in a big way, which I suspect will make it politically even more difficult to try to bring in some kind of, you know, regulation. But, and I've watched some of the, I've tried to, I've genuinely tried to understand the way this stuff all works. And sometimes when you watch Congress inquiries into these things, you, you honestly feel like the politicians, they're, they're all speaking English, but it's a different language to what these guys speak.
37:20 Rory Stewart? Well, that's, that's exactly right. I think you pointed that out when you were watching Zuckerberg.
37:24 Alastair Campbell? Zuckerberg, yeah.
37:25 Rory Stewart? Yeah. But it's also a classic example of, of a thing we complain about a lot, which is the sense that politicians, both in Britain and the United States, in fact, generally, very few of them have engineering or science backgrounds, very few of them have technology backgrounds. I remember sitting on endless parliamentary meetings, often in select committees, and hearing elderly MPs gently droning on about the fact they thought Twitter and Facebook were important, but clearly having no understanding of how these platforms functioned, or how they could actually be used. And how are we supposed to introduce regulation, or indeed come up with any sensible policies for a world where technology will change everything in the next 15 or 20 years when our politicians have zero knowledge?
38:08 Alastair Campbell? And he also had, he, he had a lot of money in some of these new media companies as well, who are now facing sort of fairly big black holes. And it's a cla, it's a classic con when you think about it, you know, you just, you win a reputation as being somebody who's become quickly very, very wealthy, and you become known for this thing of philanthropy and altruism. And meanwhile, you're basically sitting on a pack of cards that's about to collapse. And when it does, you become one of the biggest bankrupts in history.
38:35 Rory Stewart? You're, you're completely right. And of course, the, the power of the philanthropy is, is very striking. So he was saying that he was going to give away most of his money. And it seemed to me for a moment that this was somebody who, if he was prepared to put up two or three billion dollars, could lift an entire country potentially, or lift Many, many people in a country out of extreme poverty, almost single-handedly. So you can imagine why people were were drawn to them. And on the solution to the House of Lords, I I am a real believer that we shouldn't have an elected second House, because I think it will create gridlock. It'll create challenge between like between the Senate and Congress. Instead, I think we should try to go for a proper crossbench House of Lords. Take away the power of the political parties.
39:17 Alastair Campbell? Get rid of all of those who are there now and go back to, did you say it was Queen Mary who had eighty?
39:21 Rory Stewart? Queen Elizabeth the first, yeah.
39:23 Alastair Campbell? Queen Elizabeth the first, right.
39:25 Rory Stewart? Just have fifty.
39:26 Alastair Campbell? So let's go back, go back to having fifty, between fifty and hundred.
39:29 Rory Stewart? Yeah, I'm not sure we want to go back to heredries, but but it would be good to go back to it being a real group, I suppose, of people that we're proud of.
39:38 Alastair Campbell? Roy, do you think you should be one of them?
39:40 Rory Stewart? Astrid, I think I think maybe not you or I, but I think we could imagine a much more diverse House.
39:46 Alastair Campbell? Yeah.
39:46 Rory Stewart? We could imagine a House that really reflected our country, but we could also have space in it for people who you were always teasing me about when I call them distinguished, but people, you know, I like the fact the Astronomer Royal is in the House of Lords at the moment, and some of the diplomats and soldiers. And we have P D James, the detective novelist. I quite like that sort of sense of rich riches.
40:07 Alastair Campbell? Well, you're you're you're almost there. You're you're almost up to the Queen Elizabeth the first level already. And now, listen, but another huge constitutional issue which we should reflect on was because this this happened after we'd recorded last week was the Supreme Court judgment on Scotland and whether the Scottish government was entitled to hold an advisory referendum, which it didn't surprise me at all that the Supreme Court advised that it was not, because it is so clearly a reserved power. But what I thought was very, very interesting was in the judgment, because bear in mind, the Scottish government's argument was that they shouldn't worry about this because it's only advisory. But the court essentially was saying that because it would be seen as.
40:53 Alastair Campbell? Such a significant thing. It would have a material impact upon the question of union between Scotland and the rest of the UK.
41:00 Rory Stewart? Yeah, but it goes back to Brexit, doesn't it? I mean, it was Lord Reid's judgment, wasn't it? He had a beautiful statement about how the entire political culture would give legitimacy to it. And I think there's a bit of hypocrisy here from Nicola Sturgeon, because during the Brexit referendum, she and many other people, including probably yourself, made a great play out of the idea that the Brexit referendum was, in inverted commas, only advisory and therefore people wouldn't have to pay any attention to it. But of course, she would have held this only advisory referendum in Scotland. And if she'd won, she certainly would have said, this shows legitimately that we've won, which is why I think Lord Reid was right to say, the idea that you can go to the British people, ask their opinion on something as big as this, and then say, oh, well, it's only advisory and we're going to ignore the result, I think is very implausible.
41:45 Alastair Campbell? We got, I think apart from Brexit, we got more questions this week on the Scottish situation and the Supreme Court decision than pretty much anything else. And I guess if you boil the questions down, a lot of them, particularly coming from SNP supporters, are in this area of if the union is voluntary, what is now the mechanism for a constituent country to leave?
42:09 Rory Stewart? Well.
42:11 Alastair Campbell? Because what it's saying essentially is if a UK government makes a political decision that under no circumstances are they going to do what David Cameron did and have this section 30 order that allows for the Scottish government to hold a referendum, what is the mechanism? And of course, the other point where Brexit comes in is that Nicola Sturgeon is now saying, well, we're going to make the next general election a de facto referendum. Well, that's a, that's a big risk as well. But also, the government is saying, well, no, you can't do that because, you know, a general election is about everything. And yet they won the last general election by essentially saying, this is an election about getting Brexit done, single issue. And there was one question we got, Rory.
42:52 Alastair Campbell? From somebody called Anne Lashbrook Small, I don't know if that's a real name or not. And this just sort of sent a slight chill down my spine. Is the threat of armed conflict now the only way for Scotland to leave the UK? Will the recent Supreme Court decision motivate a Scottish IRA equivalent?
43:07 Rory Stewart? Well, I, I think I was very encouraged. I mean, you know, I'm not always a fan of Nicola Sutcliffe, but I was very encouraged by the fact that she very quickly came out and said she absolutely accepts the ruling of the Supreme Court and they're going to have to find another route. And that's really good because that means that she's not at all playing into the kind of classic populism extremism. I mean, Boris Johnson did not remotely respond in a grown up way to the Supreme Court overruling him.
43:30 Alastair Campbell? By the way, just as your friend David Cameron did not respond in a grown up way to the referendum. If he'd have come out after the referendum in Scotland, the fifty five forty forty five result and said, right, well, that was way too close for comfort. I really don't like the fact that forty five percent of Scots want to leave. I now really want to drill down and find out why there is this disconnect and I want to try to fix it. Instead of which, if you came out and you launched that ridiculous English votes or English laws thing.
43:57 Rory Stewart? Yeah, couldn't agree more. And I, I did like the fact that Nicola Sutcliffe, I think she used the phrase, she wants a democratic and legal route out. I mean, the answer to people saying, if it's a voluntary union, how are we supposed to leave is that things are not unfortunately that black and white. It's a United Kingdom with a legal system. We set up a devolved Scottish Parliament, which has a lot of powers, but not infinite powers and there are limits to those powers. A referendum was held relatively recently and people voted by a margin to remain within the United Kingdom. The polls in Scotland at the moment, also at the moment, show a small majority for remaining inside the United Kingdom.
44:36 Alastair Campbell? Is that true?
44:37 Rory Stewart? Yes, they do, yeah. And the SNP did not manage to win more than fifty percent of the vote in the last election, which again, they presented as being a referendum election. So in the end, you, you, you, I think the Supreme Court is right legally, but also politically, there's every reason to say that this was designed to be a once in a generation event for a very, very good reason. And that it, it isn't sensible for Scotland to be stuck forever on the knife edge of a referendum, that it would be good to set up a system. You have a referendum and maybe you have another. Set a period, fifteen, twenty years before you have the next one.
45:10 Alastair Campbell? Well, I hope it's not that long before we have another Brexit referendum because it's doing so much damage to the country. But I think we should cover Brexit in the Q and A because we did get more questions on that than anything else. But the other issue I think we should maybe finish with Rory is the the whole thing about strikes because it's if you actually add them all together, it's pretty remarkable now how many people are sectors are taking action or planning to. You've got train drivers, railway staff, nurses, college lecturers, Royal Mail workers, airline ground handlers. There are some workers at Amazon on strike, staff at Brewers, Green King, dock workers. We just had the whole the teaching strike up in Scotland, about a thousand civil servants. We've got lots
45:53 Alastair Campbell? and lots of disruptions, sort of a network developing, which is, you know, it sort of feels a little bit general strikey at times.
46:00 Rory Stewart? Yeah, well, it's of course, the unions don't have the the power that they had in the in the the late seventies. So they they won't be able to do quite what they did. But it does reflect some of the same conditions, which is the seventies was also like our current situation, a situation in which there was rampant inflation connected to a recession, which meant that cost of living was going up steeply. People's wages were not keeping up. And yet, repeated governments in the seventies, Conservative and Labour governments, felt that they couldn't rise wages to to keep up with the cost of living. Otherwise, inflation would get even worse. So I think this is something that both governments are just going to face again and again and again. And I'm also, I mean, let's return to this to question time, but we didn't fully explore Keir Starmer's comments about immigration.
46:44 Rory Stewart? Some of this, I think, is driven by labour shortages, the fact that the people that are left, particularly in the NHS, are having to work harder and harder with fewer and fewer staff. Almost everything that's collapsing is partly to do with that, isn't it?
46:57 Alastair Campbell? There was a thing today about four thousand fewer doctors in the National Health Service. These are doctors who have chosen not to come to the UK. That this is dropped off now by four thousand to the pattern that was developing. The point, though, about whether industrial action is ever effective. So the criminal barristers, they had a lot fairly long strike. And it led to them getting a 15% pay rise in October.
47:22 Rory Stewart? But they've they've been, I mean, in different strikes and different slowdowns going since 2016. I mean, this has been a six-year battle for them. They were hit incredibly hard by
47:32 Alastair Campbell? Absolutely.
47:32 Rory Stewart? by a lot of the cuts in legal aid. Yeah.
47:34 Alastair Campbell? Yeah. And then we've got refuse workers in Eastbourne, they got a deal over 11%. Train drivers in Scotland, 5%. Bus drivers in North London won an 11% pay deal after threatening to go on strike. Bus drivers in Kent won a pay deal worth nearly 14% after six days of strike action. And BA staffer Heathrow, 13%.
47:54 Rory Stewart? But that will that will encourage encourage others, won't it? I mean, you can see this spiraling into an inflationary cycle. Well, maybe things to return to in question time, but thank you, Alastair, very much and and look forward to question time.
48:06 Alastair Campbell? Bye.
48:11 Speaker 02 Mr. President, my company told me of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all keep the blame on me.
48:20 Speaker 03 Tom Cruise is. Digger got us into this mess and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and the Revenant.
48:28 Speaker 04 What would happen if I stopped doing it? You stall, you freeze in there, that's what.
48:32 Speaker 03 With great power comes great deniability.
48:35 Speaker 04 I'm not the first then.
48:36 Speaker 03 Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17 not a minute without parent.
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