118. Question Time: Democracy under threat, rampant sewage, and campaign songs

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1:21Welcome to another episode of The Rest Is Politics Question Time with me, Alistair Campbell, and just finishing a mouthful of crisps is Rory Stewart. You always can't very fend it by my crisps, but you know there was a very important reason for that, which is that I landed at 1 .30 in the morning here in the US and if I don't have the crisps I can't keep awake. I don't think they do you much good on the nutrition front always. When in doubt, eat a banana. Now Rory, I know you're in the States where I'm going to ask you a very British question, Tom Gorman. I listened to you discuss Off -Stead on your last podcast.

1:52Do you think it is right that public schools like Eton College do not fall under the remit of Off -Stead? What's it bit odd, isn't it? I don't understand the story behind that, but I would have thought that Off -Stead should be inspecting all schools. There was an interesting given our interest in different cultures in Europe. There was a negative inspection, I believe, of the French lea -say in London. Yeah, fascinating kind of culture. By Off -Stead. Yeah, cultural tension there. Where some of their criticisms of the French lea -say sounded a little bit like criticism of the French educational system.

2:28Right. You know, complaining about road learning and not enough creativity and stuff. And others about questions around safeguarding and protection. But if the lea -say, which I believe is partly feedback is being inspected, I'm not quite sure why private schools are not being inspected. So Rory Stewart agrees with our last gamble that private schools should be subject to the same inspections regime as state schools. I have to tell you, the state's primary school to which all three of my children went. One of the early Off -Stead reports revealed chronic poor weak leadership. As a result of which, after a long, long struggle, we managed to oust the then leader of the school who got a pretty big payoff to go because sometimes that's the only way you can do it.

3:12And you know what you did with the money? No. You went to bought a private school. Ah, very interesting. On the other hand, though, that should mean that, I mean, I know you're sometimes a bit skeptical about Off -Stead, but in that case, it sounds like quite a good story that Off -Stead combined with the parents exposed a serious problem in Delta. I think that is a good thing, but I think where they've gone too far now is in the whole sort of grading and the tick boxing and the process that has become horrendously pressured for headteachers and teachers and governors. Right. Okay. Now, here's a question for you, Julian.

3:42In the year or so before the 1997 general election, I often used to pick up Alistair, pick you up where? I said, I don't know, carry on. I drive him to Tony's house and all the house the comments. I remember one day, Alistair eagerly passing me a cassette tape and asking me to play it. Sitting in traffic on Whitehall, we both less than to things can only get better. Asking what I thought about it, I could sense his disappointment in my lukewarm response. However, my lack of enthusiasm was clearly not enough as Alistair used the song for Labour's campaign. What tunes do you think the Labour and Conservative parties should use for their next general election campaigns?

4:20I'm going for simply the best for the Conservatives. Tina Turner. Tina Turner. Yeah, she'd have to give her permission, though, wouldn't she? Is that true with all these songs? They have to give their permission? Well, Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones try to stop you, Trump using, you can't get it, always get what you want. You carry on using it. When I taught to Bjorn from ABBA recently, he said that I think it was John McCain who was using, I guess it was when it takes it all and they got lawyers and they didn't want it used by anybody. Let's alone John McCain. Did that guy leave a name? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

4:55His name is Julian. Julian, what a cat, a taxi driver called Julian. I mean, he's going to be offended if I don't remember him. Well, he's not a taxi driver. He sounds to me like he's a government car. He's working the government car service. It's regularly taking you to Tony's office. But Tony had a driver called Terry. So I don't remember Julian. I do remember trying out the music on a number of people and Julian may well have been one of them. Do you try to talk about Rolling Stones? Did you try Mother's Little Helper as one of your tunes? No, I don't think that would work. No, no, no. My favorite, I think I've said you before, my favorite campaign song was Clinton's.

5:31Don't stop thinking about tomorrow. Fleetwood Mac. I love that. I don't know what you do. I don't know what nape in the toys will do. I think I think the Tories are the Tories has got to be, you know, Millwall strategy. No one likes us. We don't care. No, we'll solve it. The only way is down. What's the what's the what's the Millwall song? Do they just chant that? Do you really want me to sing it to you? Yeah, gone then. We are Millwall. We are Millwall. We are Millwall from the den. We are Millwall. We are Millwall. No we're Lices. We don't care. I didn't get a tune right, but that's the they are the lyrics.

6:04So you think we could just insert Tories instead? Yeah, we are Tories. We are Tories. We are Tories from the South. We are Tories. No, we're Lices. We don't care. No, it's the new strategy is we're Tories from the North. Sorry, I beg your pardon. Well, the thing is, Berkeley see that song as well, but they are Berkeley from the North. I don't know what Labour song is going to be, but I might have to write one for them and make it a backpipe song to try and help them in Scotland. Very good. Okay. Question from you. Dolly, after returning from Barcelona this week, I realize I want to mess the UK is what you did in the Europeans have got so right and one of the most important things the UK can do in the next five years to improve our quality of life.

6:42I mean, do you hear that when people come back here that they just sort of feel things don't work? Well, I sometimes do. Sometimes don't. I was talking to Jordan, who'd been talking to the ex -French ambassador to Jordan. And the ex -French ambassador had said very smuggling, you know, two months ago, the UK is such a mess and isn't it wonderful being French? And this Jordanian just returned from Paris and was like, I'm not so sure about that anymore. I actually think London is in a better place. There's a wonderful video doing the rounds in France on social media of this guy singing a wonderful Paris is, but he's always hated the fact that he had to take his bins for stories down.

7:18So he's he's he's a parvin that he just opens the window and holds them into the street on top of this mound of bins. It's the old Edinburgh tradition isn't it? It used to shout, got a D. Lou and then shout the poo out the window. I forgot what the question was. Well, it's a question. He was just a general post -Brexit. Oh, yeah, yeah. But it sort of does feel like, and you know what really, really depressed me last week was this whole thing about sewage and I mean, I don't know you have Teresa coffee who's the secretary of state in charge of it and she sort of says it's nothing to do with her and farming is nothing to do with her and the supermarket prices are nothing to do with her.

7:58Well, that's you see, that's an interesting thing isn't it? That goes to harder something. We talked about in our play -dium show, Crisis Management, which is I genuinely believe that politicians must say this is to do with me. I'm taking responsibility for this. And even though of course it's true that section states are a very long way removed and of course there's a privatized water system and you know in prisons or in flooding you can often say the chief executive of this agency is responsible not me in the end. I think it is the right thing to do to say the buck stops here and I'm going to try to sort it out and the sewage thing is something that I was very involved in as an environment minister.

8:36Well, you was that part of your brief sewage? Very much. And one of the issues running through it all the time was the extraordinary cost of these legacy systems. So you did build and I walk through it this super sewer under the Thames, which is almost 20 miles long. It's an incredible thing. I walk through it when it was dry not when there was water and sewer running through it. But that was trying to deal with our legacy Victorian systems. But so much of our infrastructure was built effectively that when there is excess heavy rainfall or something else the overflow gets released into the rivers.

9:13Now there has been progress. The Thames is much much cleaner than it was in the 1970s. You remember the stories that came when the first salmon were found in the Thames. But the question again and again how many tens how many hundreds of billions is the government prepared to spend on really cleaning up this horrible legacy infrastructure and getting stuff to the quality that you need to achieve bathing quality water? There was a report on the BBC news about swimmers in a river in Italy and also they would never ever ever put their head under the water and then sort of seeing this stuff go in.

9:46And I've got to say it's interesting how certain people rise to the moment. That guy, what's his name? Fergill Sharkey? Yeah, that pop star Fergill Sharkey. He's been absolutely brilliant on this. I mean, he's really, really, taken it to the government. But Teresa Coffee is a very, I don't know if you know her very well, I don't think I've ever met her, but she's a mental once. But she's honestly striked me to somebody who's there. She's in office, but seems to spend all her time saying that whatever problem might be on her brief, it's not actually her problem. Yeah, well Teresa Coffee is somebody who was very close to Liss Truss.

10:22They did these karaoke parties in Westminster. She joined with me 10 years ago, 12 years ago, I guess now. She was made deputy prime minister by Liss Truss. She did a doctorate. I'm cheating here by reading off Google. On the structural and reactivity studies of bissamedo complexes of Molly Bedinum. So she is a challenge to the cliche that nobody in front bench politics knows anything about science, that everybody's just a spat or a lawyer or someone has done peepee at Oxford who's come in. She took over my job at she in Defra. So back in 2016, I was her predecessor. I wasn't able to do a handover with her, but she's been in that department for a very, very long time or in and out of that department for a very long time.

11:11But you're right. She isn't somebody who without being unfair tried, I don't think she's really found the the knack of the communication. No, and also she went to the farming, the NFU, the National Farmer's Union Conference. And we talked about it at the time where she was there as the same day, same day as Keir Starmer and he got a rather good reception. She got a terrible reception. She then attacked farmers weekly. And she sort of which just seems bizarre thing to do. She sort of went and said they'd just right rubbish the whole time. Nobody really cares what they say. I think a lot of farmers care what farmers weekly say.

11:45And no, it's all very, very, very, very odd. But I wonder if it's partly her libertarian approach to life. Yeah, she's somebody she's for what it's worth to give her credit. She is somebody who was popular with colleagues, people like her. She's not a tall pretentious. She's very down to earth. I think she's somebody who people trust and think as serious. Okay, Jack. Jack question for you.

12:14I will take with Finland, Sweden and Denmark now all with far right elements and government. These countries amongst the richest, happiest and most educated in the world with a long tradition of sober social democracy. So why the change? What's your answer to that? Well, I hate plugging my own book as you know, Roy. But I have said in my next book, I'll tell you about the 11th Penguin Random House, that we now have in virtually every European country around 20 % who will vote for if you like the most right wing option or a kind of a nationalist right party. And I suppose the question is asking, have we sort of felt that the Nordics and the Scandis of we seen them as different for too long?

12:59Now, they are still very happy countries in the main, but they do have. I think they do have these problems. Denmark, by the way, I think their election slightly about the trend, but certainly Sweden and certainly Finland at the weekend with the ruling social democracy and our power, I think that the whole of populism and nationalism and you know, using immigrants and immigration as a driver of that as a political force is very, very strong there as well. I've spoken to an Estonian yesterday. We had a long two and a half hour conversation. And he was talking about the struggle within many Northern Nordic countries to remind people of their own history in terms of their German heritage, their Russian heritage, the different forms of indigenous heritage.

13:47And how important it is to communicate that to people at a time when there's a temptation to resist migration and try to insist, particularly from the Nationalist parties, on this false idea that somehow there was some kind of pure race that lived in these countries before any immigration happened. And how painful it's been in much, particularly in the Baltic countries, Estonia, Lithuania Latvia, to come to terms with the incredible transitions from a German elite rule in the early modern period through to Russian domination, through to independence, the incredible population movements, the fact that whole German communities disappeared, many Russians left, and the ways in which people have now had to come to terms with new forms of immigration coming in.

14:33Now here's your question, Roy, which I genuinely want the answer. Because I think this is something that you've looked into more than I have, and it's something that sort of slightly keeping me awake at night. Mark Ridgewood, do either of you worry that as a society, we're walking blindly into an age where artificial intelligence will disrupt all aspects of our lives massively, but we appear yet again to be quotes leaving it to the markets close quotes. Well, it's certainly an extraordinary moment, chat GBT, which we've been talking about over the last few weeks, is making such extraordinary strides.

15:07I mean, within, as I say, I've got a close friend who is right at the heart of this, and there's sharing different versions of chat GBT with me. Every two, three weeks, we talk, it's getting better and better, this large language model is training itself, but also spinning off we've talked about. It's hallucinations, the fact that it will produce these incredibly plausible essays, which include completely invented facts. It's become an amazing medium for the generation of very plausible conspiracy theories. If you wanted to train it to start generating stuff against the politician, which really sounded as though you got chapter and verse on their poor behavior, and then you can discover that actually a lot of the information it's feeding in is the product of its hallucinations.

15:50So I think that's one problem. I think the second problem is that policymakers and politicians, particularly, are not talking about it at all. We've talked about this in the podcast before that our politics continues to be stuck really in the 1980s. We're having the same conversations around strikes and deficit and debt and the balance between the market, and what we're not talking about is the way that the world in 10 or 20 years will be completely different, and millions of jobs will be eliminated by AI, and nobody's on top of that. And Elon Musk and Noah Yovaharari and many, many others have signed this open letter asking for six months pause.

16:27What is behind that? I mean, the musk I'm assuming there's a sort of commercial competitive thing going on. Am I being unfair? Well, 1 ,300 people have signed it. Elon Musk is interesting. I mean, it's true that he was originally an investor in open AI, which generated chat, but you will have seen him on Twitter increasingly saying he's scared about its consequences. And also, I've seen other people saying that they think it's going to destroy humanity, and I'm trying to make that leap. How is he going to destroy humanity? Well, the sentence from the letter is, should we develop non -human minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete, and replace us?

17:07Should we risk loss of control of our civilization? And this is stuff that Noah Yovaharari has written about an enormous amount in his books, which is that as AI develops, it clearly has the capacity to do almost everything that humans can do much more quickly.

17:28Not just an AI army, you can build AI lawyers, AI doctors very, very quickly. I mean, one of the first professions that people are predicting will disappear is the profession of medicine because it seems as though these AI models are able to stay up to date on the latest research, can have obviously far more information than any human could possibly hold in their brain, and are much more likely to be able to bring the latest medical bests practice to a village in Uganda compared to any remotely plausible human doctor. So we would look at that in isolation and think that was a good thing. So they're incredible benefits.

18:04And I think this is the challenge for the policymakers, whether you like Eric Schmitts and Henry Kissing, that fundamentally say the positive potential benefits for humanity are so unbelievable, and it would be cowardly not to embrace this in an optimistic mind frame, or whether like Elon Musk and others, you say this is completely out of control. Nobody understands it. Nobody's regulating it properly. Let's take a pause and try to get a grip. There's a question here from somebody called Holly and the EV, real name James. Should the AI to deal with the issue surrounding the impending technological revolution?

18:39Sounds to me like probably yes is the answer to that, isn't it? Absolutely, but you'd have to have somebody who not only knew what they were talking about, but had real political heft and weight, something we've talked about a lot in the podcast. There's no point bringing in a cabinet minister, even a cabinet minister with serious technical expertise if they don't have political heft. So that would be, give me your dream person to do that job, but you talk about something that you literally bring in from outside and say, look, you really understand this world, you're now going to go to the House of Lords, be a cabinet minister and tell us how to do it.

19:13Well, I think to get things done in government in a way, you need to have a bit of a whiff of power and elected legitimacy and threat to you. I mean, as I think as you've said before, that was one of the secrets to how Michael Gove, even in relatively junior cabinet positions, is able to throw his weight around. So you might be looking more, although it is not a Teresa coffee, who is the only person with a scientific doctorate in the House of Commons, you might be looking more to Michael Gove or George Osborne figure, who has the political weight to really drive this through, as well as some of the intellectual capacity to try to master the details.

19:50All right, let's take a quick break.

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21:06Welcome back to the rest of politics question time. Before we get going, quick plug for my new book. But what can I do? But more than that, a quick plug for an opportunity for you to get a signed copy. What we got to do, go to our Twitter page at rest is politics. You can sign it to all sorts of things. They can get the newsletter. You get a link to the book. And if you remember, you can get a discount. And I'll be making a little trip down to the publisher at some stage to sign lots and lots of them. Lots of you sign up already. The more the merrier. Right, question you have a text from Terrible Tim.

21:45As the local MP and mayor have tried to silence and intimidate the Yorkshire Post and its editor J. Mitchenson over the dead marine wildlife on Salkburn Beach, do you think this is symptomatic of a weakened local press that doesn't usually investigate as thoroughly as it used to? Another question that Jeff Nicholson, do you think the decline of regional newspapers has allowed local politicians to get away with more questionable dealings? I'm asking this from T side, where we have more than our fair share of dubious local politicians. Is there an answer or is it going downhill from here? And I should maybe we can put in the newsletter.

22:20I was driving down to a backpipe event at the weekend and I was listening to any answers with Anita and Anne. And there was a wonderful, wonderful contribution from a 75 -year -old woman called Maggie. That's all I can remember. I think that I don't think we heard her surname. And it was about what's happening in T side with the dredging and the effect of wildlife and all because of this free port, which private I go on about the whole time, but very, very, very, very few of our national papers do. And I think what this Terrible Tim refers to is that the York Church opposed has done a big front page kind of investigation into the effect on marine wildlife, on Saltburn Beach, of these operations that are going on.

23:07And Simon Clark has sort of gone to war against them. So first two things really, your views of local and regional press and whether they're in peril. And secondly, whether we are underplaying this whole effect on wildlife of dredging, which Maggie on any answers described in the most graphic and horrific way. Well, let's sound the regional press. The regional press is in sharp decline. It's very difficult because they rely heavily on advertising income. For many small local newspapers continue, that is a threat to democracy. I had in Penrith and the border a newspaper called The Cumberland and Westland Herald.