124. Politicians vs. civil servants, evacuating Sudan, and Diane Abbott

24:11And I think the thing that really got her in trouble is when she said that redheads, for example, can experience this prejudice. And I think that's been something that's really provoked many, many groups who feel that their experience of prejudice and discrimination is completely trivialized by comparing them to redheads. And so Kirstalmer has removed the whip and she's apologized for errors and what she said was an initial draft. And there's been some very, very interesting writing about this. I think one thing to notice is that the language she used in that email up to the red hair bit was very, very technical.

24:44It sounds like a researcher who's done a sociology degree using phrases like, you know, it's similar to often uses interchangeable, but not the same thing. And I guess what she was trying to say is that she sees racism in terms of the oppression of one race by another. And she would think in terms of wealth gap, employment, housing, incarceration, drug and immigration arrests, infant mortality, a whole sense that a whole institutional power is getting behind that. And that that was her experiences of black women. And it brings us, of course, to the response that we got from David Badil on the basis of his book, Juxtet Count, which I thoroughly enjoyed as an interviewer.

25:24A lot of people did. And I think it was, he talked about the hierarchy of racism. And I think that's what we're seeing here. He made the point about Jeremy Corbyn. He didn't believe that Jeremy Corbyn was anti -Semitic. He didn't believe that Jeremy Corbyn sort of, you know, wanted to damage Jewish people. But he felt that because of his political ideology and because there are these tropes about Jews relating to wealth relating to power, that it's not seen in the same way as racism against black people, against Pakistanis, against Indians. And I think that phrased the hierarchy of racism is perhaps what led to Diane Abbott writing this letter.

26:09I mean, I can't pretend to be close to Diane Abbott. I've obviously known her for a very long time. She's on a very different sort of political agenda inside the Labour Party to mine. I don't know. I see there was a theory doing the rounds as you've alluded to this, that it was a sort of, you know, a member of staff drafting it. But if you were sending a letter to a newspaper, you assumed that you would check that before it went. And I do think as well, despite obviously it was a terrible, terrible thing to say. I think Kirstaam was right to act very, very quickly and very, very decisively. But at the same time, I've been tracking some of the stuff now that is being said about Diane Abbott online.

26:48And I've got a very, very thick skin. I get a lot of abuse on social media. It really doesn't bother me. But Diane Abbott gets it on a scale that no other person in public life does. This has been sort of proven by data analytics that Diane Abbott is the most abused member of Parliament. And I've actually noticed that even within kind of WhatsApp groups and so forth in recent days, every time Diane Abbott's in the news, there's a sort of stack of stuff get sent out by people who ought to know better. So I just wonder whether that does have an effect on your mind that does actually make you kind of lose your judgment a bit.

27:24And she's certainly been, you know, she's, she was the first black woman of elected Parliament. She's the longest standing black member of Parliament. She has experienced very, very significant racism in her life. It matters deeply to her. I thought the, probably the soundest judgment on this was Daniel Finkelstein and we'll put the little video up in on newsletter. But he said in thinking about racism and the oppression of vulnerable minorities, we should be generous and appreciate that many, many people have experienced horrifying things. And he mentioned that his mother had been in Belson. His father had been in Siberia and people would say, which was worse.

28:03And she would say, it's not a competition. And I think what he was trying to say there is that the experience of racism is horrifying. The experience of anti -Semitism is horrifying. And vulnerable minorities should not be getting into a competition about which is worse. It doesn't help anybody. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I sort of think that Dan Abbott can, she's obviously in a very different sort of political position to mind within the Labour Party, sort of suggests to me that there was perhaps a lot, a lack of judgment here as much as anything else. But I wonder as an election looms, another election looms, whether she might think, actually, you know what, I've done all I've can do, given all the abuse that I get, I think am I well going, trying to have a bit of a quieter life?

28:47Oddly, I'd be sorry to see her go. I think she is a symbol of something really important and I think she's played a very important role. Well, both as a politician and as a Labour Party activist, but also somebody standing up for very difficult issues in the British Parliament and I think she'd be a real loss. Anyway, I think maybe time for our break. We could break, yeah.

29:15This isn't ad from BetterHelp. At the moment, we're getting advice from everywhere. You just have to go on TikTok. Could be Alice's coal plunges, could be my attempts to meditate or the digital detox that I'm doing in Colombia. But of course, one of the things that we know is that it can be incredibly valuable to talk to another human being, somebody who's actually been trained as a therapist to work through these ideas calmly, objectively and professionally. And as the largest online therapy provider in the world, BetterHelp can provide access to mental health professionals with a very diverse variety of expertise.

29:51They've got over 5 ,000 therapists in the UK. They've helped more than 5 million people globally and you can join a session literally at the click of a button, change therapists anytime. So obviously not about fixing you, but it's about hearing yourself clearly, maybe for the first time. So talk it out with BetterHelp. Our listeners get 10 % off their first month at BetterHelp .com slash rest politics. That's better H -E -L -P .com slash rest politics. This episode is brought to you by eBay. We all have that piece. The one that's so you, you've basically become known for it. And if you don't yet, fashionistas, you'll find it on eBay.

30:28That Miumu red leather bomber, the Kusto Barcelona cowboy top, or that Patagonia fleece in the 2017 colorway. All these finds are all on eBay, along with millions of more main character pieces backed by authenticity guaranteed. eBay is the place for pre -loved and vintage fashion. eBay, things, people, love. Your burger is served and this is our finest Pepsi Zero Sugar. It's sweet profile, perfecting balance is the savory notes of your burger. That is one perfect combination. Burger's Deserve Pepsi.

31:12Welcome back to the rest of the policies with me, Alistair Campbell. And Miroi Stewart. And just as our heads up, folks, we're going to be talking about suicide at the end of this half. So if that's something that you really don't want to hear, it's the final section that will come after our discussion of Sudan. So if you don't want to hear us talking about suicide, and I would completely understand if you didn't, I hope you do, but I would understand if you didn't, then that is that is when to switch us off. And one point, you will have heard us, if you're an avid list in the podcast, Alistair and me talking a lot about leading.

31:45And leading is our interview podcast feed where we sit down and speak to leaders from both inside and outside politics every Monday. And Alistair has particularly irritated this week because it seems as though are amazing interview with Hillary Clinton was second to our episode on Dominic Rob. No, it's no overtaken. It's overtaken. It's gone. It's gone. It's gone. It's gone. It's fine. It's fine. Hillary has not robbed off his perch. But the key thing is for Hillary and others and some amazing interviews that we're doing with other people, including Dave Miliband, Bernie Sanders, and many, many more, you have to go to a separate stream.

32:20So go to your podcast app and search leading L -E -A -D -I -N -G right then, Alistair. Let's talk about Sudan. Do you know one thing I find I know that it's really important that the Brits on the ground are helped, supported, etc. But I really don't like the way that when these big international dramas happen, that that becomes virtually the sole focus then. And we almost forget about what the thing is actually about. And of course, if you're there now and you're a Brits on the ground and you're surrounding by all this fighting, you're probably thinking where the hell's the government? Why did they only get the diplomats out and in the way that they did?

33:01But there's a part of what it's thinking. Yeah, but what about the people who have got no chance of leaving what so ever, the people of Sudan, who have had a horrific, kind of recent modern history. You know, I wonder if we shouldn't talk a little bit about what came before all this, because I think this guy, in fact, I know he was, he was in power the whole time through New Labor, Omar Al -Bashir. Yeah, came in military coup in 1989. So he's ready, was in before John Major. So he's like exactly. So there's three decades, a pretty brutal dictator. As you say, rose to power in a military coup. There've been plenty of those.

33:42There've been very, very, very few years of stability and democracy since Sudan became independent. You've had the civil war that led to the the secession of South Sudan as a separate country. You had Darfur, for which Omar Al -Bashir, I think became the first serving president to be indicted for war crimes, which which fascinating quickly on that one, just before you keep going on that. One of the fascinating things there is that the indictment was opposed by the Arab League, by the African Union, by the non -aligned League, and also interestingly by the United States, who's been because they're worried that their own presidents are going to get indicted.

34:23Oh, you know, I look, I think you're right to point out that we had we saw the same recently with Vladimir Putin that these judgments are not as it were globally accepted. But the point is that this guy had a very, very, very bad track record. And of course, the two guys that we're talking about now, they came to power in part through the toppling of him, through the coup that was against him. And everything, everything that proceeded that you're exactly right. So Hamedti, who's the leader of the rapid force, was in a sense seen as a sort of almost the chosen son that Omar Abashir never had. He was a great favorite of the previous president.

35:02Came from nothing, came from the very, very far west of the country from a tribal group that was semi -nomadic and migrated across the Chad Sudanese borders. Left school with no education was a market trader, rose up through the ranks of the Janjuid militia, which was this group of often mounted on horses or camels, predominantly Arab tribes that were used by Omar Abashir in this counterinsurgency campaign in Darfur, in which maybe 400 ,000 people were killed, many, many millions displaced. And he essentially is a political entrepreneur who uses all these opportunities to make money and gain power.

35:43So he turned the gain to Omar Abashir at one point and then was bought off with money and gold mines and made a general, he's not a general in any normal sense. It's just kind of honorary title that he's going to. No, I'm talking about money, Roy. Omar Abashir was reckoned to have, and I don't know who knows how these things work, but he was reckoned to have $9 billion in banks in London. It's pretty, pretty a lot of money, isn't it? In one of the poorest countries of the world. Yeah, and a state with a lot of oil revenue. The other person, I don't know whether you came across him that I knew a little bit was a man called Hassan El -Turebi, who was the power behind the throne with Omar Abashir, who I remember seeing guess sort of 2010, 2012, when he would turn up to international conferences, beautifully dressed in white with a white turban, having made a transition from being one of the sort of leading Islamists who supported killing people for apostasy towards strangely becoming almost a sort of liberal voice in his later age.

36:47And one of the things that was going on in Sudan and one of the reasons why people like Osama bin Laden were attracted to the state is this weird combination of authoritarian military rule and Islamist government produced a very, very strange breeding ground for horror of different parts. I read an analysis by Collard Kayer, KHA, who runs something in the conference advisory think tank. And she was making the point that actually the international community has a lot of responsibility in what's happening. That he felt there was a, we've talked a lot about how you you want to think the best of people that you're trying to maneuver into positions that you think will improve the situation.

37:30Do you think so? The post -Alba Shia political process is what is to some extent created this because we overestimated the genuine commitment of these military figures to want to bring about civilian rule. And what we're seeing now, you're basically seeing two war laws just you know at it. It's heartbreaking because there was a moment of relotism, a moment of rest with the US and the UK. We're actually formally part of this quad mechanism, US UK, UAE, Saudi, that were meant to be leading the peace process and so on. And the United Kingdom has largely withdrawn from its responsibilities in Africa very, very sadly.

38:13I mean to put a number on it when I was the African minister, I had a budget and it's not very long ago, 2016, had a budget of over four billion a year just in bilateral assistance to Africa. That would now be reduced the bilateral level to about a billion because we're spending three and a half billion just on looking after Ukrainian refugees in Britain at the moment of that money. And there is a real sense that Britain has lost the confidence to get involved but there's also a sense that the US was very, very slow. They didn't lift sanctions. They didn't really get behind this civilian government and give it a chance.

38:44They lamb too easily into feeling that these military forces and this is often a problem we make of sort of forces, a stability that these strong men are going to bring stability. And although the US should be given credit for stepping in now and helping to negotiate is ceasefire which is lying. British citizens to be evacuated. It's still true, I think that one would have expected 20 years ago the UK and the US to have played a much more major role into trying to prevent conflicts and bring peace. We talked on the leading interview with Hillary tonight. For me one of the most compelling parts when she talked about the raid on Bin Laden where you, you know, the decision gets made and then you can watch it in real time.

39:28And I wonder whether there was something similar within the British system in relation to the evacuation of diplomats. Now the government, our government is getting a lot of criticism for focusing on the diplomats rather than on the so -called ordinary people, normal members of the public who are there. Andrew Mitchell, the minister, has explained that they were at particular risk partly because they were targets but also because of physically geographically where they were. And that side of the operation, you know, I think you and I, even though you think I'm a little bit too fond of the military, I think you and I both recognize that our special forces are genuinely amongst the best in the world.

40:10They do seem to have pulled off a pretty extraordinary thing. And yet since then, we're seeing other countries that have been able, I was following the German news yesterday and there were, you know, there were just in too many lots of people who were being evacuated by the German military. I mean, I've been involved in this a lot. I was a young diplomat in Indonesia in 98 when we had to evacuate British citizens out of Indonesia because the Suhato government was collapsing. And we were on a huge criticism and as you can imagine, all the British hapline newspapers were at airports interviewing enraged British citizens saying these used to step -limats are doing nothing.

40:48They're not getting us out. You mentioned the Afghan evacuations. It's also true that Henry Clinton's career as Secretary of State was basically derailed by what happened in Benghazi, which was the successful attack and killing of the US ambassador and the wiping out of the US embassy in Benghazi. And these decisions, it takes me right back to my time in Iraq because I had to decide I was in my compound. In southern Iraq, we were being attacked by men with rocket propellant grenades and mortars. We were under fire for two days. Our internet had been taken out. Buildings were being destroyed. And I had to decide whether to try to hunker down and stay in this building and defend it.

41:30And all I really had was a few Italian soldiers in my bodyguard team on the roof with heavy machine guns. Or whether to evacuate the civilians that were in the building. And I made the decision to evacuate. So I put them in armoured vehicles and very brave Italian soldiers took those vehicles and in a lull in the fighting, we opened the gates and drove them out, racing towards the airfield. And I remember standing with my bodyguard team on the roof watching these people go and suddenly all hell -breaking loose because the insurgents attacked these vehicles. So there are bullets and rocket propellant grenades firing off the sides of these vehicles.

42:08They disappeared around the corner. And for an hour, I was absolutely convinced that I had made the worst possible decision, that it would have been much better to have kept them in the building and hope that we could stop ourselves being over on and just keep fighting. And just to jump in the roof, you say was your decision? Did you refer upwards on it? No, I had no, I fully my decision. I had no internet connection. I had no way for referring upwards. So I made the decision entirely myself. So who was the most senior person there who was actually a security expert? Probably the head of my bodyguard team.

42:42Wow. And it would be, it would be, it would be, it's a special forces. Some of them were special forces. One of them was a wonderful man called Mark Metchel, a New Zealand police officer who went on to be a New Zealand member of parliament. He was very, very brave, very, very calm. But in the end, I was in command. I mean, it's one of the few situations where I had to make the decision fully. And what happened afterwards is that in the end, I managed to with a satellite phone persuade US think, what an AC 130 specter gunship to come in on the third night and kill the insertions around the building.

43:17So we were not overrun. We thought at the time they'd come over the fence and kill us in the place. How many, how many were there? In the end, once we'd evacuated, I suppose there were, we evacuated probably 30 civilians and we maybe 12 or 15 of us left. How many insertions were around the building? Maybe couple hundred. So, and I thought thinking back on it that I probably made the wrong call that I, I was reflecting on it recently and thinking that I was one of the problems in a crisis as you think in cliches. And I had become obsessed with this idea of getting, as it were, getting the women and children out.

43:52That I was sort of evacuating a ship and I was the captain staying on the ship. And I was so keen to do this, I underestimated the fact that it might have been safer to actually leave, leave these people in the building. As it was, they made it safely to the abyss, but I was lucky that they did very, very lucky that the rock and poke nades didn't penetrate their vehicles, take out the tires, in which case they would have all been killed or kidnapped. That's was so hard about the decision, those, because whichever way it went had one of those missiles being chucked their way, killed some of them.

44:24The outcome is seen in a total different light. You've made the wrong decision. Now, actually, you haven't necessarily made, there is no right or wrong decisions. It's just a decision you have to make. Yeah, you have to make a decision. And I think, sorry, I think, and I've, that's, that was a long story, but I imagine that the foreign office and the military were having some of the same discussions about these evacuations. Is it safer to leave the civilians in place or do you try to drive them through them at the level of civil war? So there were checkpoints all the way through Cartoon. There are heavy artillery flying around.

44:57There's chaos at the airport. It's a very small airport. It's very difficult getting the planes in and out. So they may have made the call that actually people are safer for the time being staying at the houses, and they may be vindicated because what they've done is they've waited until a ceasefire, and now they're beginning to move them out. What did you think about the, you made the analogy with the captain of the ship, and famously, the captain of the ship stays to the end, and this doesn't just seem to have been a British thing. There does seem to have been a kind of, you know, ambassadors and senior diplomats and families first in, in, in this instance.

45:29And that of course has led to the several thousand brits and tens of thousands of other non -sueden these nationals inside Cartoon and the Serrani region. Has made them think that essentially they have been left behind because the top brasses it were been taken out? Yeah, it's very difficult because the, I was lucky, because I had no communications, and there was nobody to tell me what to do, I could make the call of staying. I suspect that if there had been people trying to manage me from London, they would have been putting huge pressure on me to get out. And this is partly because of that Hillary Clinton incident and the killing of the ambassador in Benghazi, that the foreign office has obsessed with what it calls duty of care towards its diplomats and civil servants.

46:11It can bear the idea of taking risk with them. And I think one of the problems is that even if the individual British diplomats want to stay, they will be under huge pressure from the centre not to do it. But equally, I understand the public's point of view, because, you know, I would take the view that our diplomats have to take risks, should take risk, and that it's reasonable to expect people to say, to be fair to Laurie Bristo, who was our ambassador in Kabul. He absolutely was clear to be the last person to go. The US ambassador of famous in Saigon, when the helicopters were lifting off the roof, I think, was the last person out of the helicopter.

46:47And I think that's what should happen. But I think we're in a culture where these departments, as true, even if the intelligence service system special forces now, are run with a lot of anxiety about lawyers and liability. It was, you know, when James Clevel in the Foreign Secretary, because he was out in the Pacific, wasn't he? Was in some or something like that? And he, and he came back. That was obviously when they realized things were getting very, very, very, very serious. And I suppose the point you're making about communications, one of the things that makes it harder now, although it's easier that you've got better communications, in a sense for the centre, it makes it harder in a way in that you're expected then to be able to make those decisions as though you were there.

47:31And of course, that is not an easy thing to do. And one of the things I slightly worry about with all the the diplomats and others leaving is that there is now going to be a real difficulty in assessing genuine local knowledge as to what is actually happening. And that makes the decision -making from from London, Berlin, Paris, wherever it might be, even harder. I think it's tough. And I think worth recon, I think. We were going to go on and I'd started to go from one depressing subject to another, but we were going to go on to talk about suicide and some of the work that you've been doing with it.

48:02And can you maybe begin, Alistair, with giving us a sense of your personal connection to the subject, how you began to focus on the subject of suicide, how it touched you as an individual, your family, and then maybe onto the charity? There is historically suicide in my family going back. And then around about the turn of the itself. And it was just one of those moments that you kind of, I think anybody who's touched by suicide does this, they think, you know, what why didn't we see it coming? What could we've done? What more could we've done to help, et cetera, et cetera? And I think that's a very, very common thing.

48:45And I think one of the most important things that's being, the attention's being drawn to in relation to the suicide issue, three out of four people who take their own life have had no previous contact with mental health services or psychological support services. Three out of four. Now if you think of, if you think of other major killers like cancer, nobody thinks that if you've had cancer, you're unlikely ever to have seen the doctor. And what I think that says is the reason why I focus on suicide is as a, and I hate to use the word a campaign issue, but I think it is a campaign issue because I still think, I think it's the last a great taboo.

49:22I don't think we talk about it. And one of the reasons we don't talk about it is because we don't want to talk about it, we don't want to confront it. But the fact is that most people who kill themselves, and there are 700 ,000 people a year in the world, that's one every 40 seconds, an average of about 115 per week in the UK, three quarters of those are men. And although the rates are not rising in a way that, frankly, some of us fear that they might do through COVID, they're actually pretty stable. But the one area, since you're again, to talk about Northern Ireland, the one area where there's a real, there has been a rise is Northern Ireland.

50:00And is that I wonder, does that go back to the trauma of the troubles? Or I don't know, Mary McAley Sue was one of our interviewees for leading. She said that there have been more people have lost their life through suicide than actually lost their life since the troubles. So suicide since the troubles has been a bigger killer. So if that were any other issue, if that was asthma, if that was diabetes, if that was, I don't know, falling over drunk, we'd kind of do something. And this campaign that I've been supporting from the word go, it's called Baton of Hope. And it was founded by two bereaved dads, a TV reporter, a presenter called Mike McCarthy, who lost his son Ross to suicide in 2021.

50:39And in his letter, he left a letter. And in his letter, he said, please devote the rest of your lives to fighting for better services for mental health, because they're not there. And then the second guy was a guy called Steve Philip, who's son Jordan, that also took his life. And the baton of hope, the baton is literally a baton. It's a beautiful baton that has been made by Thomas Light. But it's traveling around the country. And it's a place where bereaved families and friends can go, and there'll be public meetings and there'll be hopefully loads of media coverage around the country. As these two dads and others who've been touched by suicide tell their stories and explain why in their view every suicide is preventable.

51:27Now that may sound ridiculous, but the fact is when you think of that, three quarters of people have never spoken to somebody about their mental health issues before they kill themselves. That's incredible. So most of those people were they able to access proper psychological support, they wouldn't end up killing themselves. And interestingly, the military, the military is really interesting this way. You'll be interested in this because of your background. Military suicide, there are lots of problems related to homelessness and veteran psychological issues after the event and PTSD and so forth.

52:00But actually suicide within the military has not risen in the same way as it has in the rest of the population. And I think that might be because actually the military has started in recent years to be much, much more open about people's mental health. One of the biggest areas where most most shocking is within prisons. So the prison rate is something like one in the thousand people compared to the general population, UK would be like 7 .4 per hundred thousand. So it's completely shocking. I mean, in a prison context, it's 15 times more likely to happen. I said to the outset as well, I think there is an important political or governmental angle to this.

52:44Theresa May, when she was prime minister, she appointed a minister for suicide prevention. And I thought that was a good thing to do. Now, not much happened. Theresa May, so obviously very busy dealing with other stuff, but mental health was one of the so -called burning injustices that she mentioned when she became prime minister. And I think it was she called Jackie Doyle Price. Jackie Doyle Price, yeah. She was made minister for suicide prevention. And I looked the other day at the government website. And the first thing that came up on Google was her appointment. In other words, nothing has happened as it were since then.

53:16And when I look now, I think it's Maria Callfield who also deals with women and deals with mental health right across the board. And when I looked at her area of responsibilities, suicide prevention was a sort of very small, a low -down blob point on about the 15th point about her job. So we've got to get it back up the the particular gender. And I really hope that these guys in going around the country as they are can help to do that. Yeah, little shout out also for a group that I worked with a little bit in in Cumbria. Cruise bereavement, who suddenly when I was in Cumbria were doing some very thoughtful work around families who'd lost the left one in that way.

53:57One of the things that really angers me is when people say, oh, what an earth were they doing? Don't they realize the effect? It has one of the people. I mean, I've had suicidal ideation, quite badly at times. And I don't think I'll ever kill myself. Famously in the Albert Hall where we did our performance. I did. I did. That was I got very, very close there. Yeah, I was right at the top and thinking of throwing myself off. But the thing you do when you're in that state, you actually do think you're going to make life better for the people that you live. That's the you think. I often, if I've not been like that for a while, but whenever I've been like that before, I always think, oh, God, Fjörn would have such a much nicer life if I wasn't here.

54:36The kids would be a lot happier if I wasn't around. You persuade yourself of that. And I think that that is what we need to understand. So when people say, God, don't they realize the damage that they've done and the hurt they're going to cause? Of course they do. But they think of it. They're so ill. It's an illness. So suicide to me is the ultimate mental illness. It's right out there on the scale. We can we can, you know, I've had mental health problems. Lots and lots of people do. But suicide is when you make that decision that death is preferable to life. And that to me is the ultimate in mental ill health.

55:09Well, thank you, Anna. So producers and want to encourage me to say that you'd sort about doing this in the Albert Hall, not during our trip performance. But when you were earlier earlier. I was, it was, it was a very, very clapped concert. Yeah. And I was very happy that day. I enjoyed that day. Rory, I was, I was not in, I was not in a bad way. Anyways, all been a bit, what we've done, bullying in the civil service, Diane Abbott, and now soosage, we try and end with something a bit Joe Biden standing again. How about that, Roy? That'll cheat. Well, it didn't and I'm pretty depressed about it.

55:48I'm not sure I could put all my money in the Joe Biden basket. As Hillary Clinton said, Biden will run and Biden will win. I hope God, she's right. Let's hope so. Well, thank you very much, Arsrun. Let's talk soon. We'll be.

56:05I'm Chris Hadfield. I'm an astronaut and author, a citizen of planet Earth. Join me for a six -part journey into the systems that power the world. Real conversations with real people who are shaping the future of energy. No politics, no empty talk, just solutions focused conversations on the challenges we must overcome and the possibilities that lie ahead. This is on energy.