Pod Insights The Rest Is Politics 307. Starmer put to the test, Modi's visit to Ukraine, and tragedy unfolds in Sudan About this episode Does Starmer have a plan to fix the UK? Why did Modi visit Ukraine? What is really happening in Sudan and when will it receive more coverage in the international media?
Rory and Alastair answer all these questions and more in today's episode of The Rest Is Politics.
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Transcript 10,527 words · 12 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. And 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/restorspolitics. That's nordvpn.com/restorspolitics. And the link is in the episode description.
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1:55 Rory Stewart? Welcome to The Rest is Politics with me Rory Stewart.
1:58 Alastair Campbell? And me Alastair Campbell. And Rory, we're recording this on Tuesday, shortly after Keir Starmer has given a big speech in the Rose Garden in Downing Street. We're going to talk about that. We're going to reflect a little bit on our time in the United States at the Democratic National Convention. We're going to talk about Modi, Prime Minister of India, and his visit to Ukraine, and just more generally about India foreign policy, which is really, really interesting. And then we're going to talk about, again, about Sudan, which gets so little attention, and more broadly about the whole, what we call the Global South. So should we start with Keir Starmer?
2:38 Rory Stewart? Yeah, let's start with that one, Alistair. So we've just watched him give a speech in the Rose Garden of Downing Street, which people will remember as that little garden out the back, which I think came to prominence for many people because it's where David Cameron and Nick Clegg did their famous sort of bromance announcement of the coalition. It's also had another bit of fame, I think, because Boris Johnson was accused, I think, of having parties there.
3:00 Alastair Campbell? And also because it's where ludicrously Dominic Cummings did a press conference to explain his Barnard Castle trip.
3:06 Rory Stewart? That's right. That's where Dominic Cummings during Covid had apparently tested his eyesight by driving up to Barnard Castle. And it's where Keir chose to give this speech. Now, give us a bit of a context. This is a big speech, right? It's one of the biggest speeches he's given since he came in as Prime Minister. And I guess he's now been in for a couple of months. It's just just over eight weeks in.
3:27 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, he's overtaken Liz Truss. He's now not the shortest-lived Prime Minister in our history. He's past that. I think the context for this is this is a speech that I think he was going to make before. You had the Rachel Reeves speech where she talked about this £22 billion black hole. And of course, what that was about, as we said at the time, was that just as the Tories in the past tried to establish Labour legacy winter of discontent when Mrs Thatcher was around, and then Cameron, the mess we inherited, the mess we inherited, Labour caused the crash and all that. Rachel Reeves's speech and this one is about trying to cement the Conservative Government's legacy as being absolutely awful.
4:10 Alastair Campbell? And the reason why Labour are going to have to do some difficult things. So I think this was going to be a speech made shortly after Rachel Reeves did that statement about the black hole and the OBR, the Office of Budget Responsibility, not knowing about the figures, et cetera. But then, of course, the riots came along and the Southport killings of those three little girls and the riots that followed meant that Keir Starmer obviously had to spend all his time fixed on that, cancelled his holiday, just sort of, you know, focused on that. This speech, I think, is the speech that he was going to give back then, but has now added in the context of what he calls societal black hole as well because of the riots.
4:48 Rory Stewart? Yeah, let's, let's just give a little summary to try to be as objective as possible on this black hole from Paul Johnson at the IFS. So he says, frankly, nobody comes out of this smelling of roses, not the Conservatives, who really did leave a lot for the new government to clean up and were not honest about the challenges ahead, not Labour, which knew the broad outline of these challenges but refused to confront them in its manifesto and pre-election statements, and not our institutional framework, which meant that some of the immediate problems were allowed to fester and were obscured in the official data. So essentially there, Paul Johnson, trying to balance it, yes, the Tories left a mess. Yes, basically Labour knew about it. This wasn't an unexpected thing. And actually, the institutions allowed a lot of these problems to be hidden in the data.
5:32 Rory Stewart? So regardless of whether or not Labour knew about it, I suppose the politics of this is that it's important for Labour to say that a lot of this is unexpected because that then justifies them bringing in tax rises that they potentially ruled out during the election. And broadly speaking, that's something that you, I think, to be fair to you, Alistair, expected to happen. I mean, you hinted at that, didn't you? You talked about how in Australia, what had happened is the PM had come in saying it wasn't a tax raise and he'd done tax rises. And it's a long established political technique to say, well, we arrived and the public finances are not as good as we thought.
6:06 Alastair Campbell? Yeah.
6:06 Rory Stewart? And therefore we're going to have to take more measures. And pretty much everybody, I think, most of the professional commentators were predicting this before the election. There was just no way it was going to be possible to make the public finances balance without either borrowing more or taxing more or cutting spending. And Labour will almost certainly have to do all three.
6:24 Alastair Campbell? Which of course then sets up real difficulties. So they've already made one very difficult choice when Rachel Reeves set out this, what she called this 22 billion pound black hole. Where I think she did get considerable political cover from the fact that the officer budget responsibility came out and kind of they echoed this sense that they didn't have a full picture of what was happening under the Conservatives. But then as part of that, she announced that the universal winter fuel payment was being stopped, that it would only be going to relatively small sections of the communities. Effectively, it's being means tested. And as you said when we discussed it on the podcast a couple of weeks ago, that, which a lot of Conservatives frankly probably would deep down say is a sensible thing to
7:08 Alastair Campbell? do anyway, because why should multimillionaires get the winter fuel payment, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But now that has become somewhere where both Labour and Conservatives have been attacking that.
7:19 Rory Stewart? Yep. And just quickly, just to remind a bit of an explainer on that. So if you were born, I think before 1958, you get between £200 and £300 automatically, or you did as a pensioner to help.
7:30 Alastair Campbell? That includes me.
7:31 Rory Stewart? Yep, to help towards your heating bills. And the problem was it's not means tested. Everybody got it, including, as you say, people like you or my mother, who frankly didn't need that money. And you've had Conservative MPs, Tobias Elwood, for example, Conservative MP, coming out very, very clearly, saying he thinks this is the right decision. Certainly when I was running for leadership, this was one of the things I was suggesting doing, because it cost the government an incredible amount of money. I mean, one of the things is that the winter fuel allowance alone was about three times the core budget of the Foreign Office when I was in, when I was in government.
8:03 Alastair Campbell? Wow. And what Keir Starmer's done in this speech, yes, he's saying those with the broadest shoulders should pick up the most. He refers to the crackdown that's going to be on non-doms and the VAT on private school fees, but then goes on to say that we're all going to have to pay a price. So the budget, when Rachel Reeves comes forward in a few weeks' time with the budget, it is going to be one of the defining moments in this Parliament. And I guess the risk for Labour. Is that the focus that Keir Starmer wanted for the sort of positive change that a Labour government was going to bring in was to have this focus on the missions, the five missions of change. But the budget, he talks about the pain that people are going to feel. He talks about things are going to get a lot worse before they get better. That's politically
8:48 Alastair Campbell? pretty difficult.
8:49 Rory Stewart? And can I just, if you put on your kind of communications hat for a moment, I guess there's a different way of doing this. We've just come from the Democratic National Convention and we've seen how US politicians from the left are playing things at the moment. And they're basically going for the happy warrior thing. It's a pretty optimistic, cheerful, big, smiley thing. And paradoxically, even when Biden took over from Trump, he didn't actually give the kind of speech that Keir Starmer's given. I mean, generally, in American politics, even taking over a bad situation would put a positive spin on. And finally, if I think about British military commanders in Afghanistan as an example, they didn't come and take over and say, it's all a complete catastrophe. I've inherited all this mess.
9:32 Rory Stewart? They did a little bit of that, but they moved very quickly on to, and I've got a new plan that's going to turn everything around and we're going to have a decisive year and we're all going in the right direction. So give me the pluses and minuses of going for the more sort of optimistic, happy warrior speech, or alternatively going for what Keir Starmer's done, which if I'm being cheeky, sounds, I felt a little bit, just looking at the image of him in his white shirt and grey tie and suit, a little bit like the sort of family solicitor setting you down after your parents died and said, I'm sorry to tell you, you know, your mum left stump, the finances and a lot of the mess and there's going to be much less money coming to you than you were hoping.
10:11 Alastair Campbell? Of course, he was a fabulous solicitor, or he was the director of public prosecutions. I mean, I thought about this a lot when we were in Chicago, because there was this kind of joyous mood around the place. And they were all, yes, attacking Trump and yes, sort of, you know, bigging up their own record and so forth. I think in a way, it fits with the context of the campaign. If you remember during the campaign, we were, we were saying, why can't they be a bit more upbeat? Why can't there be more promises of radical change, et cetera? So he's going from the campaign into, into government. I think they are genuine in saying, you called it a tactic, but I think they are genuine in saying that actually when they, when they looked at the public finances, they were worse than, than expected.
10:56 Alastair Campbell? I think that's genuine.
10:57 Rory Stewart? But, and so can I just interrupt that? I mean, yes, they were worse, but they knew they were absolutely.
11:00 Alastair Campbell? They knew they were going to be terrible, which is why they didn't.
11:02 Rory Stewart? Totally, totally.
11:03 Alastair Campbell? They would argue that's why they didn't over promise during the campaign.
11:06 Rory Stewart? Yeah, and they must have had an 80% probability that they were going to have to either raise taxes, cut spending or raise borrowing.
11:15 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, and as you say, that may end up doing a mix of all three. I guess there's an argument that in a sense they're playing up the expectations of a mix of all three. And then they don't do a mix of all three, or it's not quite as bad. But I think what he's talking about and what he talked about during the campaign, and I noticed he's gone for the Rishi Sunak, Boris Johnson, three words on the lectern, it was fixing the foundations. So it is trying to paint a long-term picture. Now, one of the points I made at an event I did last night here in Glasgow, was that that is fine, and I think people want long-termism and they want a sense of where they're going. But I think in the modern age, politicians get less time and less tolerance for lack of quick change.
12:00 Alastair Campbell? And it's why I think at the top of the speech, he did talk about growth remains the, the number one objective. That's why we set up the National Wealth Fund. That's why we're doing the planning stuff. That's the, why we're doing the Great British Energy. So he's trying to give those positive policies that are, that are being brought forward. But at the same time, warning there are going to have to be more very, very difficult choices. And all of us are going to take a hit of some sort.
12:22 Rory Stewart? One of the things that, again, this is none of my business, but I would have thought a single. Big idea, holding the whole thing together, really running through that speech would have been very helpful. You know, it could be, we're going to make it through, through education, education, education, education. Or it could have been tech, or we're going to reform the system, or this is going to be a government about infrastructure. But one big binding idea that we can all get our head around.
12:49 Alastair Campbell? You don't think fixing the foundations does that?
12:51 Rory Stewart? Well, it didn't really feel like it because going through the speech, what he sort of says is, you know, he does the conservatives have crapped everything up, it's all terrible. And then he says, a bit later on, well, this, you know, and as I said during the election, we're going to build homes and we're going to get Great British Energy, which incidentally I still don't completely understand. And I imagine most of the people in that audience don't really understand what this thing is. And we're going to get some growth. But it'd be nice if those things didn't sound like three sort of different things. If I think back to you guys when you came in, I increasingly think that your brand as New Labour was just a sense that you were going to make a new Britain, that it was about modernisation, it wasn't about the past, it was about an optimistic vision of, hence, I suppose, people making jokes about Cool Britannia.
13:35 Rory Stewart? And I guess with Cameron Osborne, we sort of knew that it was about austerity, whatever you thought about it. And with Boris Johnson, it was a sort of, again, you know, whatever we think about it, you sort of get your head around the fact he was trying to level up, was the thing he was talking about. I'm still struggling, and I think this is a challenge, to really see what's he got in his back pocket that's really going to make things better.
13:58 Alastair Campbell? The event I did last night in Glasgow, I was with Tom Baldwin, who has written this rather good biography of Keir Starmer. And I was, I was talking about my children's books, he was talking about that. And we had this audience of, I presume, mainly Scottish people. And Tom Baldwin was making the point that we're used to politicians like Tony Blair with the big picture, David Cameron, with, again, another sort of big picture charisma politician, Obama, Clinton, I guess Kamala Harris is coming across a little bit in the, in the same way. And what he said is that Keir Starmer was very much more about, about the step by step process. So fixing the foundations is, you know, it's a process thing. But what was
14:41 Alastair Campbell? really interesting about the event, there were people saying, I want more on this, I want more on that and so forth. But at one point, I said, so Keir's talking about needing 10 years to do this. So that means he's got to win at least one more election. Okay. So I asked the audience, Who thinks, sitting here today, right now, and hearing that there's going to be this difficult stuff coming down the track, who thinks that Labour are going to win the next general election? And it was overwhelming, overwhelming. I think only one person put their hand up to say that they wouldn't. Now, maybe he has a sense of that. Now, that could be very, very dangerous, okay, but maybe he has a sense that he can do very difficult fixing the foundations, get to a next election, so much is going
15:25 Alastair Campbell? to hang on growth actually happening, and then, you know, the Tories carry on sorting themselves out, whatever. So I think it's about long-term lasting change. And where I agree with you is the bit that you need on the end of that is long-term lasting change so that Britain looks like this, this, this, this, this.
15:44 Rory Stewart? Also, if you're running on fixing the foundations, we need to see very quickly what he's fixing, what are these foundations and how he's fixing them. So what we need to see, I think, for this strategy to work is some really radical detailed reforms of the NHS, really radical detailed reforms of the way that infrastructure's built out.
16:06 Alastair Campbell? All of which will take time, which fits in with the long term.
16:08 Rory Stewart? Yeah, but we need to see him making tough decisions soon. I mean, if it was a Tory government coming in, they would demonstrate that they were fixing stuff because you'd see them confronting unions, you'd see them implementing cuts, you'd see them trying to drive through reforms.
16:22 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, but the cuts that they implemented, far from fixing things, they created the problems that were now having to be fixed.
16:27 Rory Stewart? But in his case, there's going to be cuts, aren't there? There's going to be a lot of cuts, but he needs to explain these cuts, not just as, well, I've got to do them because they left the finances in a mess. He's got to find a way of explaining why they're helpful, why these are the right cuts, and why they're going to lead to more productivity.
16:45 Alastair Campbell? And also, the other, the other place where they're going to need an argument is why that is different to what Cameron Osborne said. About why austerity was so essential allegedly back in 2010. I guess, you know, you were saying when you talked about about Ken Clark, you know, you've got to do the really difficult stuff in the first year. This is part of that sort of approach. And it's going to be very, very interesting to see how it how it lands. I think that the the winter fuel payment thing is clearly causing some political turbulence already. That will continue, particularly as we get through to the winter. I think he's still in that place, though, where I thought it was very interesting that he he, in fact, drew attention to the things that we mentioned earlier about Johnson having the parties and Dominic Cummings doing the press conference.
17:28 Alastair Campbell? And the audience at this speech were kind of people. There were firefighters, there were nurses, there were teachers. It was basically still got this message, government back at the service of people. But I was struck last night by the, and I guess it would be a Labour leaning audience that came out to hear me and Tom Baldwin. At the same time, though, talking to them afterwards, there were quite a few SNP supporters. There was at least one Tory that I met. I think they do have some time in the bank and they will get some, there will be some support and acceptance of this. But I think you're right, the changes that people think they voted for have got to come through pretty quickly.
18:05 Rory Stewart? And finally, just before we move on to the States, I think what I'd like to see is a kind of floating voter is a sense that he's really diagnosed what the problem was. And at the moment, it still sounds a little bit as though he thinks the problem was that the Tories were a bunch of nasty, out of touch twits. But it's a bit generic.
18:26 Alastair Campbell? I think what he's saying is that is that the problem, and it's interesting how the Tories, I think this is projection, the Tories have called this speech performative. And it's funny because that's something that Labour say about the Tories, that Boris Johnson was just all about performance, it wasn't about policy. I think he's saying that the problem was populism. I was pleased that he called that out, snake oil populism, short termism, politics by gimmick, and that he is trying to establish this sense that you have to take difficult decisions for the long term. Then they've those difficult decisions have got to bear fruit.
18:56 Rory Stewart? And we need to really see that. He needs to bring that alive because, of course. You know, those of us that were in conservative cabinets obviously would feel that we did make difficult decisions, which we thought were in the long term interest. Obviously, it didn't work. Many of these things didn't work, which is why we're in a mess. But the frustration would be if they thought that the only problem was that there were these sort of bad intentioned evil Tories and that if nice people come in, everything will be fine. What we need to see is some recognition of the fact that the real problems in this country are how do we run a country that is so dependent on hundreds of thousands of people coming in every year when there's mounting anti-immigration
19:40 Rory Stewart? sentiment? How do we run a country which is getting older so quickly? How do we run a country where NHS inflation is well ahead of normal inflation and we're not keeping up? How do we run a country where we don't seem to be able to build any infrastructure, where a road costs twice or three times as much to build as it does in France? How do we run a country where we don't have enough houses for people? And some of these things are quite structural. They go beyond parties. And that's why I wanted him to say, I've got something, a big idea that brings these problems together and solves them. Could be tech and AI, could be education, could be infrastructure, but something that tells us why it's going to be different. Because at the moment, it sounds like the
20:22 Rory Stewart? big difference is you've got a new team in, but nothing we've seen yet. I mean, as you've just pointed out, the winter fuel allowance cut is perfectly sensible, but it's stuff that a lot of Tories were talking about anyway. What's the fresh Labour stuff?
20:34 Alastair Campbell? Tom made the point last night that, you know, he once asked Keir, is there such a thing or will there be such a thing as Starmerism? And Keir kind of almost winced at the thought. I think he is a different sort of politician to the ones that we are maybe used to and wanting. But I think it is about this sense of a long term plan that at this stage is about, as they said on the lectern, fixing the foundations. And that means tackling what he called this economic black hole and societal black hole. Just as a piece of speech making and oratory and rhetoric, I think the passage of the speech that as a speech worked best for me. Was when he drew together the people who cleared up the mess after the riots as
21:17 Alastair Campbell? like the good people going after the bad. And imagine the pride that we can feel if we all come together and clear up the mess that we're in now as a country. I think that was quite a sort of neat piece of oratory.
21:28 Rory Stewart? So to transition back to the DNC and our time in Chicago, what he didn't do and what the DNC very much did is to say, Britain is the most amazing country on earth. We have this incredible history. We can do anything. Only in Britain could we do this. And which is what the DNC was all about, right? They were all like, only in the United States. This is America. We can solve every problem. We can address everyone. Now, objectively, the problems of poor people in the United States are actually much worse than they are in Britain. But they take a much more optimistic attitude towards their ability to fix those things than we do.
22:01 Alastair Campbell? I mean, you're absolutely right, by the way. The hotel that we were staying in, you know, one of the days I walked down there, I saw so many people that were sleeping under the bridges. And yet, as you say, they all want to project this sense of, you know, America was the greatest country in the world. But I think one of the reasons why Boris Johnson was rejected was because of this constant, maybe it's just an American, it's more American to do that. It feels a bit un-British constantly to be saying that we're the best in the world at everything, you know. What was his phrase, world beating? We were world beating at this and world beating at that. And I just don't think it's Keir Starmer's style. And I don't think Keir Starmer is going to be one of those politicians who sort of gets pushed into being something a bit differently. We'll obviously adapt.
22:44 Alastair Campbell? Of course he'll adapt. Everybody does when they're in a job like that.
22:47 Rory Stewart? But there's a language, isn't there? I mean, presumably there's a more muted British way of doing it. You could say, listen, it looks pretty grim, but this is the country that, at the end of the Second World War, when our economy contracted by 40% built the NHS.
23:00 Alastair Campbell? Yeah. And you can also do it. And, you know, as you know, I've always felt that successive Labour leaders have not defended the Labour government. To be fair to Keir Starmer, he does defend the record of the last Labour government. But you can, you know, I think you can say that, that in that 13 years, you know, the country was transformed, it was modernised, things did change for the better, and we can do that again. I mean, just to go back to this sense of what people want from their politicians. I did an event yesterday. I did two, one was with primary schools and one with senior schools. And the 300 secondary school kids. I got nine of them to come up and make a speech and I gave them one minute to talk about something that they cared about. And it was really, really, really interesting because they all making different sort of points, whether it was about climate, one
23:41 Alastair Campbell? was about Gaelic language, one was about housing, one was about tax, one was about class. And they were so passionate about this stuff, but they didn't really feel that they were talking even about the same things that the politicians were at the moment. And what I think you did get in America with some of those speeches, and there were some extraordinarily good speeches as oratorical kind of events. I think they do speak in much simpler language. I think they do have an ability to connect. And it was interesting just how many young people were around that convention.
24:12 Rory Stewart? Well, and the best of all, I think, is Tim Walz, who is just extraordinary. I mean, if you want to see a credible communicator, his ability to turn around things that the opposition says and put it in language that destroys them. I mean, his great one, for example, in his speech that we heard was when he says to the Republicans, get the hell out of our bedrooms. This is none of your business. Now, that's normally would be very right wing speech, but he was using it brilliantly to say, we want freedom to decide what we do with our own bodies. We want freedom to decide how we're going to love.
24:47 Alastair Campbell? That thing about freedom was very, very interesting because if people haven't seen them, you and I did lots of interviews while we were there. We put them all out in a week. We've got one very, very good interview to come, which I'll talk about in a minute. So we did, just to go through them, we did John Anzalone, Democrat pollster. We did Rosa De Laura, who's a veteran Congresswoman. We did a young guy called Josh Elliott, who's a kind of state congressman, like a kind of very big, powerful, I really don't want to insult people with this, but for our context, sort of local councillor type thing, rather than, or maybe, maybe an MSP would be a better way of, of putting it. We did this amazing veteran campaign of Bob Mulholland. We also had a, I had a chat with this guy, David Urban, who's a big Trump supporter.
25:31 Rory Stewart? I wasn't present and I'm suspicious of your use of the word chat. Would you describe yourself as disagreeing agreeably?
25:38 Alastair Campbell? I think we just about. Managed to disagree agreeably, but we disagreed a lot.
25:43 Rory Stewart? I mean, the idea of the idea of Alastair Campbell sitting down with a Donald Trump supporter without me present fills me with a slight kind of.
25:49 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, well, it was it was but and then the one that we're going to put out soon with Frank Luntz, the the pollster, and it's very, very interesting, though. Both if I've written my European column about this, David Urban, the Trump guy and Frank Luntz. And Frank said to me, and as you heard, Frank, who thinks that New Labour is the greatest campaign ever, blah, blah, blah. But he said to me on air that he felt that I was making a big mistake because I have full on Trump derangement syndrome. And David Urban said something similar. He said that, look, you know, unless you understand why people are voting Trump, you're never going to win those people back. And I've thought about that a lot. And I remember David Urban said in in the interview, he said, look,
26:28 Alastair Campbell? yeah, this conference is great and the convention is great and people love Kamala, but try and put yourself in the mind of a guy in Wisconsin who's got a crap job. His kids are going to a crap school. He's, you know, worried about his next paycheck and so forth. Try and be them watching this convention and see what you're hearing. And I did that the next day. I tried to force myself to do that. And it was a very, very different experience. So, look, the the other lasting impression for me from the convention was just the scale of it. The I think I told you the night of Kamala Harris's speech, watching this guy go around with a with a knife, cutting the bags that were holding up the balloons. He was sort of walking up right at the top of the stadium.
27:09 Alastair Campbell? And a hundred thousand balloons. He was way up there, going around, just chopping these things and they're coming down. And then Stevie Wonder pops in for one song and John Legend pops in for a song and, you know.
27:19 Rory Stewart? Did you get Beyonce?
27:21 Alastair Campbell? No, she didn't come in then, Rory. She decided that if you weren't going to be there, she wasn't going to be there.
27:27 Alastair Campbell? We should just, while we're on the on the culture, and I know you were talking earlier about Cool Britannia, you must be very excited about the Oasis reunion.
27:35 Rory Stewart? Incredibly excited. Listen, I've been doing a bit of reunions. I'm in a most, I'd slightly sort of grim and disturbing experience. I went to hear a Beach Boys concert. In Cape Cod.
27:46 Alastair Campbell? Well, the Beach Boys, the real Beach Boys.
27:47 Rory Stewart? The real Beach Boys, or at least the remaining still standing Beach Boy. Which was really like watching Joe Biden trying to belt out songs about surfing. So I hope the racist is not going to be like that.
27:59 Alastair Campbell? I don't think there will be. I don't think there will be. I still wouldn't guarantee that it's going to happen. I think that's simply rivalry runs very, very deep. Anyway, on you, the Beach Boys and Joe Biden, let's take a break.
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29:59 Rory Stewart? Welcome back to The Rest is Politics with me Rory Stewart.
30:02 Alastair Campbell? And me Alastair Campbell.
30:04 Rory Stewart? And Alistair, you wanted to talk, I think, first about Indian foreign policy, in a particular Modi's trip to Ukraine. So give us a sense of Modi's trip to Ukraine and then maybe we can expand it out.
30:14 Alastair Campbell? Well, so Narendra Modi, long-serving Prime Minister of India, just won another election, albeit with a very reduced mandate, has been under a lot of criticism over Ukraine from the West because he has not outright condemned the invasion. He's not been part of the sort of political alliance against Putin. His first big visit after winning his last election was to Moscow. On the day that, a hospital in Ukraine was being bombed and he was hugging Putin. We've talked before on the podcast about how I think that India still gets over 50% of its arms from Russia. India is the biggest buyer of its energy,
30:57 Alastair Campbell? which it often refines and passes on thereby helping people get around sanctions and so forth. So then he goes off, so he has his visit with Putin and the bear hugs and all that. Zelensky, very, very angry about it and he goes and has a visit with Zelensky, which of course was seen in the context of Ukraine. But I think there is maybe a bigger thing going on here. This is partly about Modi signalling to Russia that he's not terribly happy about the way that Russia, Putin is cuddling up so much to China. So on the one hand, he's showing that, yes, I do understand why Ukraine feels so strongly about this and I'm not kind of one-sided about it. He's sort of facing both ways on that one. There's
31:39 Alastair Campbell? also the China element. And I think the other thing, to be absolutely frank, and there's nothing wrong with this, but I'm just making it as an observation, is that there's an economic element to this too, because at some point, Ukraine is going to have to be rebuilt. And I think Modi's putting himself into that place as well. When Tony Blair was Prime Minister, and we, you know, we've met several Indian prime ministers, and I think there was a sense of India, a bit like China in the past, sort of sitting out a lot of the big foreign policy situations. But I think Modi has tried over the last decade to turn India into something of a of a big player in foreign policy.
32:12 Rory Stewart? Yeah, well, just to sort of, I guess, begin with a sort of big context here. India is now one of the very, very largest economies in the world. On many ranks, it's now pulled ahead of the United Kingdom. So it's now the fifth largest economy in the world, behind the US, China, Japan and Germany. But it's still an economy roughly the size of the UK. And the Chinese economy is still a good five or six times larger than the Indian economy. And I guess the the challenge for the West, the US and its allies, is the question of where the partnership is, both in Asia and with this phrase, the global south, which I guess we'll get to in a bit. So we know about Chinese foreign policy.
32:56 Rory Stewart? We've talked quite a lot about Chinese foreign policy and the way in which China operates. India's in a slightly different position. China obviously has a seat on the UN Security Council.
33:04 Alastair Campbell? India would like one.
33:05 Rory Stewart? India would like one, but doesn't have one yet. China is the world's largest manufacturer, the world's largest exporter, and has put the most incredible amount of its seventeen trillion dollar economy into things like the Belt and Road Initiative, which has absorbed literally trillions of dollars.
33:22 Alastair Campbell? And Modi, by the way, was one of the few leaders to quite aggressively criticize China for the scale of the the Belt and Road Initiative.
33:31 Rory Stewart? Right. And and China, of course, very, very major player in Africa. And we'll come to that in a second. India, India, much smaller. But India's got a different history. It, of course, was right at the heart of the non-aligned movement, which was this movement really got going in the sixties, which was about a separate vision from either the US or the Soviet Union. So neither capitalism nor communism was much more about decolonization, about challenging capitalism. And out of that, all these countries formed into groups, non-aligned countries, something called the G seventy-seven. And so India, which which has also also had some very, very impressive diplomats for a long time, inherited quite a lot of that mantle. But it's a little unclear.
34:17 Rory Stewart? Where Modi has been taking this. And I suppose he's got three different possibilities. One of them is he really tries to become China's competitor as the champion of the global south of poorer developing countries. Or he allies himself strongly with the West and tries to reform institutions, gets on to the Security Council and just becomes the kind of big player, like a bigger version of Germany or something. Or the third is a kind of regional player, doing the politics of Bangladesh, Myanmar. Anyway, so what's your sense of where he's going on all this?
34:52 Alastair Campbell? Well, I sent you a, and we'll put in the newsletter, a very interesting, kind of quite pro Modi, but it was a very long analysis of Indian foreign policy. And the official title that they gave it in the early days was neighbourhood first. So that speaks to the third leg of what you're talking about. But I wonder, like a lot of politicians who've been in power for a long time, there's a tendency to get a little bit bored with your own country, a little bit bored with your own region, and then you start to sort of, you stretch out. So, for example, I read that he's visited the UAE seven times. His relations with China are very, very tense. His relations with Russia have got closer and closer. And because America, I think, has a view of India as being something of a counterweight
35:34 Alastair Campbell? to China, I think he knows he can probably get away with more. So, for example, this stuff, if you think about what they've done in relation to Ukraine and energy, where this energy that, you know, through sanctions is no longer able to go to lots of the Russian markets, he's getting crude oil getting shipped to India, getting refined there, so it suddenly becomes Indian oil, and then getting it sort of sent different parts of the world. I mean, I think if that was pretty much any other country involved in that, I suspect that the West would be calling that out much more vigorously than than they are. So he is in a quite a strong position.
36:10 Rory Stewart? And the human rights and democracy stuff.
36:11 Alastair Campbell? Oh, yeah.
36:12 Rory Stewart? I mean, Indian critics point out that the United States talks a good game about human rights and democracy and anti-populism when they're complaining about Hungary, but they don't when they're complaining about India, because they think they need India as an ally against China.
36:25 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, exactly. When he was in Seeing Zelensky, there'd been this first peace summit in Switzerland, where of course Russia not taking part. India were present but did not join in with the communique that talked about Ukraine's territorial integrity. Zelensky, when he was there, was saying that, you know, we need to have another one of these. And there was almost a sense of Modi kind of offering himself as a bit of a mediator. He was almost trying to say, well, because I haven't condemned that and I haven't done this. And he was saying how he was just a friend who was trying to push for peace. And this has got to be done through dialogue and diplomacy. And we should sit together and try and find a way out of this crisis. Now, you could argue, well, eventually that's what is going to have to happen in some shape or form.
37:11 Alastair Campbell? But it's, I guess he was using the criticisms that he's faced over Ukraine from the West, which have been quite sotovochy for the reason that you say in relation to the sort of, you know, ally against China. But I think he's conscious, even with his weakened mandate that we talked about a few weeks ago. He's conscious of just how much power he does have in foreign policy.
37:31 Rory Stewart? Well, there's a very striking statistic I came across. So obviously after Russia invaded Ukraine in February of 2022, there were these enormous blanket sanctions imposed, including trying to exclude Russia from the global payment systems. And Russian trade with Europe and the US kind of collapsed. But since 2022, Turkey's trade with Russia has gone up by 87%. The UAE, so Dubai, Abu Dhabi's trade with Russia has gone up by 67%. India's trade with Russia has gone up by 205% since 2022. And as you say, the US has been very reluctant to impose secondary sanctions. So they've not been prepared to sanction these countries that are trading with Russia.
38:12 Rory Stewart? And then they have these embarrassments so that, as you say, Modi will hug Putin. He'll do stuff at the G20, which will kind of embarrass the US. India in some ways is sitting pretty because they're also an economic beneficiary of the trade war between China and the US. If you're an American company or a big international European company looking to make investments now and you're trying to de-risk or decouple from China. India is more and more attractive. It's attractive because you've got a lot of very, very smart people there. It's attractive because Modi's tried to make a better business environment. And it's attractive because it's got an enormous internal market. I mean, pushing towards a billion people who could buy your goods. Now, it's not easy because there's
38:56 Rory Stewart? still kind of corruption and regulations and protection for Modi's businesses. But my goodness, India's sitting pretty and their economic growth and stuff, all of that. And do you imagine how infuriating that is for Indians saying Modi is pursuing a populist Hindu nationalist agenda? He's being brutal to his political opponents. He's taking a very unpleasant and dangerous attitude towards Muslims in India. And in the neighbourhood, as you've talked about, he actually basically has been propping up pretty authoritarian governments. He was very close to Sheikh Hasina in Bangladesh, who'd just been toppled.
39:32 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, I think she's still in India, isn't she?
39:34 Rory Stewart? He pretty much cozied up to the junta in Myanmar, the military government that took over there. They've been not very condemnatory of the Taliban in Afghanistan. So there's a sense that he's playing a bit of kind of strong man authoritarian politics and not awfully interested in supporting democracy worldwide either.
39:50 Alastair Campbell? And of course, the other thing, because of the size of the Indian diaspora around the world, he also has this, and even though he didn't do as well in the election as a lot of, as he thought he would, and as a lot of other people, when he, when he travels around the world, and, and reading this document I sent you, which sort of details all the sort of different visits he's made here, there, everywhere, he can pull in these vast crowds into sort of huge sports stadiums around the world of local Indian people in London, in Boston, and wherever it might be around the world, in Sydney, and give this sense of India as a real global power. And what I think his approach has been is
40:31 Alastair Campbell? try to strengthen India's position in the world, but do it whilst maintaining this sense of strategic autonomy, not being trapped into any particular camp other than India's position. So you've got to hand it to him on that level.
40:47 Rory Stewart? And I guess this brings us sort of the last bit of our. Chat today to the question of what this means for the way the world is run. So if broadly speaking, in the eighties, we saw a world largely divided between communist bloc and Western liberal democracies. And then maybe in the nineties and early 2000s, a US dominated world. We're now into a world which sometimes feels like it's a Cold War between US and China, although I think that's overplayed, but much more feels like a world with many, many more players, of which India is one of the most powerful and prominent.
41:20 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, and Modi talks about this now being a multipolar world. And he would argue that India is becoming one of those poles. A lot of this, you know, I know we're going to talk about Sudan in a minute and Africa. I mean, the United Nations Security Council, you know, with the permanent five of America, China, Britain, France and Russia, Africa thinks it should be on there, India thinks it should be on there, Germany, either as Germany or through the European Union thinks it should be on there. It's hard to see how there won't be some sort of reform of that over time. And I think Guterres has said, hasn't he, Antonio Guterres, the head of the UN, has said that, you know, it's kind of absurd that Africa is not represented on that.
41:57 Rory Stewart? And I suspect that one of the things that may be a game changer is if a US administration decides that the way to balance China is to strengthen its relationships with India, for example, and they really got behind this and said they think the Security Council is a disgrace, then I think countries like Britain and France that are slightly clinging on by their fingernails will find themselves unceremoniously booted off. I mean, I guess Kamala Harris administration coming in might be pretty tempted to think, okay, the Indian economy is bigger than the British and French economies now, why don't we make the big bet and push for a Security Council with India there?
42:31 Alastair Campbell? That would be a tough move against the special relationship, wouldn't it? Now, let's just, shall we talk about Sudan? Sudan actually did get into the news a little bit this week in the West. Do you know why, Rory?
42:43 Rory Stewart? Why?
42:44 Alastair Campbell? Because somebody by the name of Macklemore, who is a famous American rapper, cancelled his show in Dubai because of the role of the UAE in Sudan war. And the Sudan war is, I think we're now up to 12 million people that have been displaced. We're up to two million, over two million that are actually displaced outside the country and 10 million that are displaced internally. Lots of efforts to try and bring the thing to an end, including new peace talks in Switzerland. But the army chief, who's essentially ruling Sudan at the moment, or trying to rule Sudan at the moment, said he wouldn't be joining the peace talks and said that the military
43:23 Alastair Campbell? will, quotes, "fight for 100 years to defeat the RSF", which is the Rapid Support Forces who, with whom they're in this, engaged in this war. And they've now got the highest level of hunger that has ever been recorded. We're talking about half the population now in a state of chronic hunger.
43:43 Rory Stewart? So Sudan, 48 million people. It's a big chunk of territory below Egypt and the sort of upper Nile, and it's surrounded by Eritrea, Ethiopia, Chad, Central African Republic, Libya. It's a country where this fight partly has its roots in other things. So people remember that the southern part of Sudan, South Sudan, became independent, and that was a huge change because that took away about three quarters of their oil revenue, had a huge economic impact on Sudan itself. People remember also Darfur and the horrible civil wars that were happening in Western Sudan, out of which this thing called the RSF emerged because that was the Janjaweed militia again
44:26 Rory Stewart? that people may have heard of that were fighting in Darfur. Their dictator toppled in 2019, a civilian government in for a couple of years. Not really, I would argue, getting the support it should have done from the US, Europe and others to really help it. So it was toppled in the military coup. And then the two big sort of military haunts shows, the commander of the army and the leader of the RSF, then broke up with each other and have basically demolished Khartoum. And Khartoum looks horrifying. I mean, it looks like sort of Dresden. It's an uninhabitable city now, that was the capital city. And everything else that comes out of that, you gave some of the statistics, but that also means that almost nobody's in school. Universities and hospitals are now occupied by armed groups, so people are not getting treatment or education. And the
45:12 Rory Stewart? Thing I think that connects the whole thing together to this guy that's refused to perform in Dubai and to the story about a multipolar world is that Sudan is a really striking example of how what we would call smaller or middle powers, much more than the kind of big traditional powers, are stirring this up by funding other sides. So the UAE has been providing support to the RSF and this links back to gold and Yemen and amazing operations in Chad where they're pretending that they've got humanitarian facilities that are actually being used to bring in missiles and drones to help the RSF. And then on the other side, you've got Egypt, Turkey, and to some extent Qatar, more on the side of the military. And this again is a story that we've seen in Libya.
45:58 Rory Stewart? It's a story we can see in Somalia. So I mean, I guess I suppose just sort of throw that back to you. I mean, you know, we began by talking about how this isn't just about US-China. This is about the rise of countries like India, but it's also about a world where much smaller countries, but with a lot of spare cash, are increasingly throwing their weight around in Africa.
46:16 Alastair Campbell? Yeah. And when, you know, when your luck's against you, your luck's against you because I don't know if you saw it at the weekend, a dam collapsed in Sudan, so leading to massive flooding, heaven knows how many deaths, how many injuries. And of course, you know, one of the reasons we keep coming back to this is because it just doesn't get attention. So when you got, when I talked about the hunger, so there's this thing, as you know, United Nations run, they have this thing called the IPC, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification. So more than 25 million people in Sudan now facing acute hunger. And they say that's the highest level of hunger that they've ever monitored
46:58 Alastair Campbell? within an individual country. We hear a lot about Egypt in relation to bordering the Israel Gaza war that's going on. But of those two million refugees who've actually left the country, they're in, you know, yes, Egypt, but also Chad and South Sudan. So you're talking about the people fleeing poor countries to get to very poor countries.
47:17 Rory Stewart? To remind people where we were again with these coups that happened, Sudan is the eastern edge of this huge belt across the Sahel, where democratic civilian governments have collapsed all the way now from coast to coast and been replaced with military dictatorships, which in the case of many of these countries sadly, you know, particularly Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso, have been expelling French and US troops and teaming up with the Russians and have actually cut ties to Ukraine because they're accusing Ukraine of attacking Russian-backed Wagner mercenaries. So it's astonishing how right the way across places like Mali and Niger, you can feel the repercussions, these much bigger global politics coming into this very fragile region.
47:59 Alastair Campbell? Just finally, Rory, on the point about this rapper, Macklemore, he did quite a long statement explaining why he wasn't going to go there, he couldn't support it. And he also did say that it was partly inspired by what was happening in Gaza, because he saw how the world had woken up to a particular issue. And he's sort of saying, you know, the world needs to wake up to this issue as well. When we were at the convention in Chicago, there was this rumor going around that Beyonce was going to turn up, Taylor Swift was going to turn up. And there was sort of massive excitement about that. But what's your view about people in a different walks of life who sort of, so that he's essentially boycotting a country over its foreign policy?
48:38 Rory Stewart? Well, the question is, has it changed? I mean, someday, maybe we should chat to Bob Geldof about this. I mean, he very much thinks that the power of musicians and celebrities over things like global hunger and humanitarian disaster was much more powerful when they were doing the Live Aid Conference and when they were getting ready for the Gleneagles, which in 2000s. And I don't know whether he's right, but there's no doubt at all that there's something very shocking here. If this thing had been happening, if something like Sudan had been happening in the 90s or early 2000s, there would have been much, much more global attention on it. There would have been much more money going in. The UN's barely got a third of the money it needs. And there would have been talks about international intervention.
49:20 Rory Stewart? None of that talk anymore. US has lost its power. I mean, they basically completely humiliated the US negotiators and lied to them. The Geneva talks, one side doesn't even bother to turn up to. So why has that happened? Well, definitely something odd has happened. Because if you go back to Darfur and South Sudan, you had a coalition of George Clooney, who really, really mattered in this. This is back in the early 2000s. You had Christian churches who really mattered, who were really important in the US for mobilizing Congress, human rights organizations, all coming together, making this massive coalition, where you had people like John Kerry, making almost daily calls to leaders on the ground when he was the Secretary of State. And now we're in a world where, as you say, obviously,
50:05 Rory Stewart? in the entire Democratic National Convention, I didn't think anybody mentioned Sudan. They mentioned Gaza, and they mentioned Ukraine, but they didn't mention Sudan at all. So the world's changing. I think the trade union movement's changed. I think that musicians and celebrities have less power. I think Christian churches, which used to contribute to international developments, change. But also, we're generally in a much more isolationist world.
50:24 Alastair Campbell? Well, you know, we talked about Modi neighborhood first. You've got, if you've got Trump America first, and then Joe Biden with a much more kind of America-focused attitudes to foreign policy, you've got nationalism sort of developing around the world. People just seem to be caring less about other countries.
50:39 Rory Stewart? And you saw that Keir Starmer hasn't talked much about foreign policy. I haven't heard him talk much about Sudan, or Britain showing leadership there, or wanting to lean in.
50:49 Alastair Campbell? He had his first call with Xi Jinping last week.
50:51 Rory Stewart? Right.
50:52 Alastair Campbell? And he's off to see Macron and Schultz today or tomorrow, I think.
50:56 Rory Stewart? Okay.
50:56 Alastair Campbell? And listen, he's going to find, as every leader does, that foreign policy takes up a big part of your, chunk of your life, whether you like it or not. Maybe my final point, actually, I mentioned these youngsters who were doing these speeches yesterday. There was a young girl called Daisy who made a wonderful speech. Basically saying, why can't we be nice to refugees? And there is something vile about the way that they're all kind of put in the same category, the same boat. But when you just think of that, one country, 12 million people have been displaced because essentially two leaders of warring factions have decided that they can't settle their differences.
51:32 Rory Stewart? And we've also got to get the narrative back on being much more positive about the potential of Sub-Saharan Africa. It's got an incredible population, you know, as we often say, one in 10, the baby's born in the world, we're born in Nigeria. There's so much talent there, credible entrepreneurs, incredible potential businesses. It's going to be the supply for a lot of the critical minerals and rare earths that we need to drive the energy revolution. It's got the sunshine for solar, it's got the wind for wind generation. I mean, so we've got to find a way of harnessing the incredible potential of Africa, not just talking about it as a victim. And that I'd like to see maybe Britain working with France and Germany, putting the EU back
52:16 Rory Stewart? in that conversation that the EU used to be very central in, rather than us just sort of giving up on what's going to end up being almost half the population of the world.
52:24 Alastair Campbell? Well, that's an unusually gloomy note on which to end, Rory, but let's come back tomorrow with question time.
52:29 Rory Stewart? Great, look forward to it. Thanks again. Bye bye.
52:31 Alastair Campbell? Bye.
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