133. Suella's speeding, Japan in focus, and what's the point of the G7?

25:53You can see where the stop the boat electorate is. The whole country is in support of cut waiting lists. I guess the conservatives are on the reduced debt side and the whole country is on half inflation. So I mean, we all agree there are huge problems with where the conservative government is and it seems unlikely that they get reelected. But presumably if you were in Rishi's Sunex position and you were communicating for them, that's probably as bad as good as you can do if turns to defining something to take you into the next election. But if you were in the number 10 comms machine, would you think that that was a pretty good stab at coming up with five things if you're on Rishi's Sunex side to take him into next election?

26:34Possibly. I don't think they're very ambitious. And also I don't think they necessarily hang together. And I think the stop the boats thing is such an obviously polarizing populist move. At a time when I thought soon that was going to possibly reverse the populism banwagon, which the toys have been riding. But it is hugely popular. It does seem to be very, very popular. I'm not convinced about that. I don't think it's I think you can get very, very different views on this. I think for a lot of people it's something that just underlines why they don't like the choice that they're focusing on something that they so here we are today with the net, this week with the net migration figures.

27:10And actually we're going to see that those people coming over on boats are a very, very small part of a much bigger problem, which actually business for example once fixed. Well, so I don't know. Most of the polls we can share some of this and stuff are pretty consistent in putting a legal migration right up there as one of the top forests use among voters and top two amongst those who've backed or is in the last election. Yeah, but I think these you've got to be very careful about these polls. They tend to reflect what the is kind of in the media at that time. Yeah, I don't deny there are lots of people who think that the the issue is people who are coming here who shouldn't be coming here.

27:50However, I think there is a broader debate on migration, which particularly in the business community. We saw in those people that we were speaking to in leads last week where they they were they were recognised that they're there are massive shortages in labour market, there are skill shortages which they feel can't be fixed. And therefore, really soon up, I think rightly this goes back to your point about being more grown up than Johnson and Truss and Bravaman is saying we have to be a bit careful about how we handle this debate. So they're trying to create all the focus on the votes. Essentially, there's a distraction for the more serious challenge they're facing or which they're failing by their own standards.

28:27And the big, big story there, absolutely as we as we move towards the break is that the UK is going to take in over half a million people in net migration this year. Yeah, that is over 300 ,000 more than we're taking in last year and it's one of the highest numbers on record. And if you look at the composition of the people coming in, there's been an extraordinary shift away from hundreds of thousands of people coming from the European Union towards the largest numbers now coming from South Asia and from Sub -Saharan Africa. And also the numbers inflated, I guess, by Hong Kong and Ukraine as well.

29:01Hong Kong, Ukraine and Afghanistan had an impact on this big impact on it, but it is a big change in the composition of Britain and it's an interesting one for conservative government to be doing because I guess most of the Brexit voters or many, many of people who voted Brexit were doing so to reduce the immigration immigration was a big issue for them. And I don't think they meant by that. We want to reduce immigration from the European Union and take a lot of immigration from other places in the world unless I'm missing something. You agree with that? No, I do agree with you. Final point before we go to break, just a quick observation about Scotland, the dialogue against independence, I think, has definitely moved.

29:39I think there was a sense around lots of people that I met, a sense around the SMP that they really are in quite considerable, particularly trouble, which is obviously a massive opportunity for labour. And the second thing worth reflecting on again is the local elections in Northern Ireland, pretty stunning success for Sinn Fein, and that suggests. I think it's probably about them, the people there wanting to give a message to the other parties, get on with getting these damned institutions back up and running. But it also is the moving the dial possibly in the direction of Sinn Fein's overall goal.

30:14Very good. Let's take a break.

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31:29Welcome back to the REST's Polities from me, Alice Campbell. And me, Rory Stewart. And Rory, we talked about briefly about Chinfain there and Polities in Ireland. Very good traction for the Leo Veratka interview on leading. If people haven't heard that, just search Leo Veratka leading podcasts. REST Shok, I thought very interesting on all sorts of things and artificial intelligence on the future of healthcare, which you know is more about than most prime ministers, because he's a doctor. He's a doctor. And also, I was fascinated by what he said about how the reason why the relationship with America matters so much is because they feel that for the last decade, the UK government hasn't listened to Dublin, but they always listened to Washington and basically Ireland gets his messages now through Washington.

32:16That was a very interesting observation to me. And a lovely bit also, which I think we've talked up for on the psychology of politicians on how bitterness and paranoia plays into the mentality of it. And jealousy. And jealousy. Exactly. Now, shall we talk about the G7, which became the of a lot of me as a lensky show? Yeah. Well, a little bit before we, I wish I'd bring you in on G7, because you don't a lot of G7 stuff, but very, very quick primer for people to remember. G7 emerged predictably from a sort of meeting of a group of five countries that have been grouped with six countries. By the 1970s, became the G7.

32:51And in those days, those countries were, let's hope we're going to be able to name them. Actually, Rory, I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm going to create you. Okay. Well, 1973, it was a group of four, and it was a group of four finance ministers, and that was Secretary Treasury in America Schultz. Helmets Schmidt, the, from West Germany, G -Sky, Westown, from France, and Anthony Barber from the UK. And they met in Washington in the White House. They became known as the Library Group of Four, because they met in the White House Library. Later that year Schultz suggested that Japan be added, and Japan was added, and that became the group of five.

33:351974, all five members suddenly had changes in leadership of the country. As George Prompidou died, and G -Sky had his name became Prime Minister, Brant in Germany, Nixon in America, and Tanaka in Japan all had to quit because of various scandals. We had two elections in the year, and therefore, Gerald Ford, who was Nixon's successor, decided, let's move it up from finance ministers, let's have a meeting of the leaders. And how are those things logically connected? Why, why the political turmoil suddenly meant move from finance ministers to leaders? I don't, because Gerald Ford thought that the finance ministers could do so much, but they ought to be a forum where the leaders could meet in more relaxed setting than would normally be the case.

34:24And then in 75, Helmut Schmidt, he, with the French, proposed adding Italy. This was obviously trying to get more of a European input, so it became the group of six. And then in group in 1976, Harold Wilson, who had been the leader of the UK, he resigned, Jim Calam became Prime Minister, and Gerald Ford decided that he felt they needed another more experienced English speaker. Therefore, Pierre Trudeau of Canada was added and it became the group of seven. And just remind people, it's Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the UK, and the United States, as well as the EU. And at that date when you're talking about these were the seven largest economies in the world, and not just the seven largest economies, they were about 70 % of global GDP.

35:14I know. What is it now about 30? Yeah, and now we're down to about 30%. And and now of course, the countryside, China and India are in the top seven, but are not turning up at the G7. And this is one of the big question marks. So it's gone from being representing the seven largest economies in the world, and 70 % of the world economy, to now presenting itself as as an excuse for not including China primarily, as representing a gathering of major powers with Western values. And of course, for many years, Russia, for several years, Russia was added, it became a G8. And that was something you guys did, right?

35:49That was something that you did on the planet. I think they're very first one was, I think it joined the group for the first time in 97, which was in Denver. I don't remember Yeltsin, yes, he was at that. And I think that they got kicked out a few years ago, 2014 invasion of Crimea. Yeah. Exactly. But also you mentioned India there. So Modi was at this G7, and so was Lula from Brazil, and so was Albanese, and there were others who, so what's happening is that it's sort of evolving into something different. And Gordon Brown was very much in favor, I know of. He was very focused on the G20s, or the G20 was a much more important body.

36:27So I think it will evolve. It's funny last night, when I knew we were going to talk about this, I had a quick flick through my diaries to look at some of the G7s I went to, and sort of interesting. If I give you the highlights, most European summits, I can remember some pretty serious policy stuff. But if my highlight of the first one in Denver, the two highlights, the first was Northern Ireland was totally our preoccupation, and it was actually, I remember trying to persuade Bill Clinton to go out and do a doorstep, and it really pissed off his team that I got him to go out and do a doorstep with Mike Bronson of ITN.

37:01But the other highlight was the fact that Chuck Barry was there. That was big. Then we had the, we were then the UK was the chair of the next one. That was in Birmingham. And what I remember about that one, the first was the Frank Sinatra died. The second was a story that we've talked about before. The Japanese prime minister Hashimoto decided he wanted a said the good luck message to Kenny Dalglish, because Newcastle and I during the Cup Final. The next thing I remember was Boris Yeltsin at a dinner being very much strong opinions in Russian, but he had this very meek interpreter who spoke incredibly softly.

37:47So Yeltsin would be shouting at Borelig, and then the interpreter would be trying to translate the shouting at Borelig, but nobody could hear what she was saying, because he was shouting so loud the over the top. No, he was just as she was in order, if you, unless you were sort of, I'm sure Yeltsin could hear what she was saying, but nobody else could. So the poor man, none of you had any idea what he was talking about. So he was waiting to get your reactions to his rant, and he was getting nothing back. Well, people, people, I remember Bill Clinton, I've ever Tony Blair, at one point, just mowling the word madhouse to Bill Clinton, who loved all that stuff.

38:22He just thought it was hysterical. And in the other really funny moment that that one was Bill Clinton, the somebody in the UK protocol team said that one of the worst things about having to have the was that somebody's job virtually full -time was to go around, take removing statements from all the flowers that were on display. So like the dinner table, all the flowers, the stamens, when you were arriving at the sort of red carpet, we were lying with flowers, and people had removed the stamens. And I said, why are they doing that? It's because Clinton's allergic to the stamens of flowers. So I said to, one of the sort of downtime bits, and I said to Bill Clinton, he said, God, you must cause a lot of trouble around the world with this stamens allergy.

39:02And he says, it's bullshit, it's not true. Everywhere I go in the world, it's in the protocol notes, Bill Clinton is allergic to the stamens of flowers. So that was that was Birmingham. Then there was Cologne, and what I remember from Cologne was that Yeltson was ill. And I also remember Syrac going into a complete rant about Newvelle cuisine. How he hated the fact that you got these big plates with silver platters on top of them. And when the platters were removed, there was this tidy portion of food there. And was that not a French invention? It may well have been, but it was not one that was appreciated by the French tissue.

39:41Japan, the next one in Japan, I'm going to read your line from my diary here where you like this. This was in Okinawa. I do remember swimming in the sea. So at one point, we left for the G8 to palis up the road from the hotel. Clinton was late because of the MEPP, Middle East Peace Process Tours. Shereded in bother, Shereq arrived last, and in the end, TB was in hysterics, and it was possibly the most pointless meeting he had ever attended, in live and only by Shereq's extraordinary rudeness to Larry Summers, the American Secretary of the Treasury. And the next day, Saturday, July 22, TB over breakfast.

40:17In eight presidential suites in eight five -star hotels, there are currently eight leaders asking eight Sherpas and eight press secretaries, what the hell are we all doing here? And I have no memory of anything that we actually discussed in that one. Then there was Genoa, which became Burlusconi, which was in charge of that one. And that was where the anti -clobealization protests started, since when they all had to move to safer places. So now, and then we come to the one that is the I come from grief in Scotland, as you know, and it was Glanegal's 2005. So it was a big event for grief. It's the biggest thing that ever happened in our neighborhood.

40:57And actually, it was the moment when G7 has been quite useful. That's when it pushed ahead with its debt relief, which was a huge move, and led to almost 100 % debt relief for many countries in Sub -Saharan Africa. Unfortunately, we'll probably have to get there again pretty soon, because a lot of countries are now heavily indebted. I remember George Bush as well, but using the G7 as part of his push on AIDS and antivirals and all that stuff. That's right. It's an amazing American programme, PEPFA, and then everyone getting in behind that one. Oh, George, every Bush is really extraordinary bipartisan achievement on AIDS.

41:33And then I guess it comes from, it's again, sort of 2018 Canada, where Trump starts throwing his weight around, demanding that Russia is put back in again, and you get this real stand -off with essentially with Angela Merkel saying the man's being ridiculous. And again, he disrupts it at the following year too. There's that very famous picture. I think it was at G7. Was it when Trump sort of sitting behind a desk looking like a sort of spoiled child and Merkel and Macron and others, sort of, they've almost got pleading looks on their faces. He refused to sign the economic communicate for the first time in 2018.

42:09I mean, it's very odd thing. I mean, I went only to the development minister's part of it when I was in the cabinet, which was that year it was in France, so we were all went off to Paris. I was served something that looks suspiciously like New Vel cuisine sitting around the table with a lot of G7 development ministers. And we were trying to focus on Ebola, but I completely failed to get the other ministers to commit the money to Ebola in the way that I wanted and ended up only really getting the commitment by taking the head of the American navigation head of USAID, Mark Green for a walk along the sand.

42:42It is interesting that these I mean, they attract so much global media attention and there's a lot of work goes into them. The point about Sherpas, these are the people that are kind of constantly in dialogue with each other, usually civil servants, but sometimes politicians. And they're essentially planning their planning the outcome. So the next G7 will already be in planning and Kishida, the Japanese prime minister, he's you know, he's been spending much of the last year preparing for this summit, chose Hiroshima because his main ambition for the meeting was to push for global nuclear disarmament.

43:17That was the whole point of this G7. And of course, Zelensky, I mean, really was the only show in town and therefore nuclear disarmament as I mean, were you even aware that that was the main theme of the conference? I think I mean, it's only from here in Japan, there's a lot of focus on the fact that it happened in a place where an untold number of people died, whether it was 140 ,000 or 300 ,000, we still don't really know how many people were killed by that atomic bomb. But yeah, the symbolism of that is very, very clear to people and it's very, very important to Japanese political culture, but you're right, it became and felt like very much two things.

43:53Firstly, a very focused on Zelensky and secondly, from where I'm speaking in Japan, it was particularly being perceived by the Chinese as a very hostile act. And I mean, this is where the G20 is so different because the G20 includes China, Russia, Saudi Arabia. It's got a very, very different tone to the G7 in terms of the G7 increasingly sort of standing for the sort of minority, Western tradition in a world where the bricks, Brazil, Russia, India, China, now have a larger economy combined than the G7. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I wonder where they will evolve. Let's talk about South Korea, Australia, you know, becoming added to it, but because I think part of the thinking is that they're liberal democracies as well as market economies, that's sort of part of the thinking.

44:40But it could look quite outdated pretty quickly, I think. Very good. Well, finally, Japan. Yeah, tell us what you're doing in Japan. So here I am in Japan. I spent the day at Isijingu, which is an extraordinary shrine reaching back 1600 years and where the main buildings are reconstructed from scratch every 20 years. And one of the arguments for doing it is it keeps the living craft traditional life that people are relatively confident that the buildings you're looking at are the same buildings you were looking at in the seventh century paradoxically because there are only 20 years old. Because I don't think I fully understand that.

45:19So they are 20 -year -old buildings that are exact, exact replica of their predecessor. And the great points about doing it every 20 years is you never lose touch with the craft tradition. You can be certain that you're remaking it and exactly the same techniques and technology that it was done but in the last time round. And it's an extraordinary place because it is at the heart of the emperor and the heart of shintoism, which is not quite clear whether it really is a religion. I mean, it's a profound sense of Japanese spirituality and attachment to nature and rocks that preceded Buddhism. But also part of a Japanese religious psyche which doesn't really distinguish, Japanese friend of mine was joking today that many Japanese are born shinto or sort of as it were baptized shinto, marious Christians and dyes Buddhists without really feeling a very strong need to identify.

46:19And when I asked whether there was a conversion to shintoism, I realized there was a translation issue and certainly the Japanese in the room said we don't really recognize the notion of conversion that religions doesn't feel like that to them. In a way that in the West we very much feel either you're a believer or you're not a believer. But in Japan it seems to be that you can live in a sort of suspended ambiguity longer. They do good temples don't they? They do great temples, extraordinary temples, extraordinary food. But Japanese politics we've talked about a little bit. I mean at the moment our current leader is from the LDP which is this party that dominated Japanese politics.

46:59And really in a sense is the products of the American occupation after the Second World War. So Japan was defeated, the Americans came in, they rewrote the constitution. And then there was a very strange moment in the 1940s, 1947 where the Americans panicking over the rise of communist China changed direction particularly in Japan and reversed their course on unions, on breaking up the conglomerates on war criminals and essentially and they did pretty similar things I think with the German security service in West Germany began allowing backends and pretty right wing figures who had been associated with war crimes during the Second World War into keep political positions.

47:40And this created a world in which Japanese politics has really been dominated largely since the Second World War by families who are often old samurai families many of them coming from one very small part of Japan. These are all people who go to Tokyo University. The current leader in Japan is the son of a politician, the grandson of a politician his cousins and minister, his uncle was prime minister and his uncle's father and grandfather was so ministers. So getting onto the bus leaving the temple, the young Japanese woman just said to me, we are completely fed up with these people. They are all the same.

48:13These are it's a narrow political family. It doesn't represent us at all. They all feel like the same people and it doesn't really matter which parties empower, but in particular the LDP which is back and again has had a stranglehold on Japanese politics for 60, 70 years surviving the most unbelievable corruption scandals. Yeah, the answer is that the number of political parties in Japan is phenomenal. It's just that many of them have sort of no point nothing percent of the vote. But if you look up a full list of them, I think my favorite is probably the party to realize a bright Japan with a female emperor.

48:55They got not 0 .0 to 2 % at the last time. But this is really important and the research really important is that there's a real problem with the imperial succession. So in Japan, the way the Americans wrote the constitution, the Japanese royal family are only allowed to marry either other members of the royal family or members of the aristocracy, but the Americans also abolish the aristocracy. So there's nobody really that they can marry. So the Japanese royal family shrunk to about 10 people. And if a woman in the Japanese royal family marries a commoner, they cease to be royal. So currently in an obsession where the emperor has a daughter, and it's impossible for the daughter to marry anyone because there's nobody left in the royal family that she can marry and she can't marry anyone else to remain royal.

49:40Why did they only get 10 ,200 and 60 years? It's very unfortunate because the one who wrote out of this is to allow women to take over his empress which currently doesn't seem to be possible. So there's a big crisis. And this is a royal family that goes back 130 generations. I've just looked up before this. The ones that got 0 .0 % were the wake up the Japanese party. They sound like fun. Parties to take over US military base in Okinawa to Tokyo party. That's another big issue and has been for a long time. I know they have huge issues, but they all have these parties. And I guess that these parties are a response to the frustration that the woman on your bus is reflecting that the parties at the top are just the same old crew doing the same old stuff.

50:27But even at the top by the way, you've got a constitutional democratic party, you've got a communist party, you've got a social democratic party, you've got the NHK party, you've got the, here's another one for you, where the happiness realization party. That's good. Well, I vote for that. I vote for that. But the children's party got 50 ,662 votes. The metaverse party got 19 ,000 votes and the smile party got 5 ,409 votes. Yeah, I've got to give that's not very many. Anybody interested? We can send some links in our literature that we distribute, but maybe a figure to really look at to understand post -war Japanese politics very clearly.

51:06The great figure is a man called Tanako Kakuiya, who completely dominated Japanese politics, became prime minister in the 1970s, stepped down in the most colossal corruption scandals. He lived in something called the Mejuro Palace. He was a construction magnet, and he would hand out 100 million yen bundles to other politicians, and he ran his entire own faction in the LDP. And despite these various corruption scandals and judicial procedures, he continued to dominate right the way through to the 1980s. So I'll send out the whole link because to understand how this man from a relatively hard -scrabble background on the frozen north managed to break into this world of samurai elite politicians, and then, despite the corruption scandals, continued to run this LDP faction of the inside as well.

51:56It's also a sign of conservative party. The current leader comes from something called the Kuchikai faction or the Pond faction, which is the faction, which is, I guess, more of the sort of one nation Tory tradition we'd say in the UK. And he's meant to be more progressive, more friendly towards welfare, more friendly towards the environment. So in a way, I suppose, if a party has dominance for too long, and maybe this is true of the conservative party in Britain, you begin representing the public by factions breaking apart within the party. Well, they do have a pretty good, they have pretty speedy turn around of their prime minister down there.

52:33And I think that is partly a consequence of the factionalism. But Japan, generally, they've been pretty stagnant for a long time, but actually, you can only see the Japanese seem in a pretty good place in the moment. Well, I did, it's interesting, isn't it? So there's been some positive recent stuff, but on the big scale, the big scale is Japan grew like a rocket from the Second World War to 1989, became the second largest economy in the world. And when we think about the current anxieties about China in the United States, in the 1980s, it was all about Japan, and there were all those novels produced about how the Japanese were going to take over the world, and everybody's very worried about Japanese nationalism.

53:10And then suddenly, 1989, 1990, everything ground to a halt, and the Japanese economy basically has not grown since 1990. I mean, that was the period, 1989, the Imperial Palace in Tokyo, the land of the Imperial Palace was worth more than Manhattan, and Tokyo was worth more than the entire mass of the United States. It was this extraordinary since when property price, I think, some areas of Tokyo, are still 10 % of what they were in 1989. So, but there's stock markets just at a record high. Okay. And the barks are half the way. Mr. Buffett. Yes. largest foreign destination of investment side of the US is now currently Japan, making industries returning to Japan.

53:51So there, you know, I think there are things they can point to. I thought it was the other interesting thing that came out of the G7 was the extent to which the Prime Minister Kishida clearly was wanting to push the other leaders into a pretty strongly rhetorically at least robust position on China. I noticed that Rishi Sunei, in his press conference, was very much sort of, he's obviously drawn to void questions about Tsua Le Brava one, but he was very focused on that sort of very tough message on China. And that relationship between China and Japan, which as you say is going to define the region in so many ways, but it was interesting to me that they were using the opportunity, not least with these other leaders there, like Modi, like Lula, to say we have got a real problem and it's on our doorstep and you guys need to be more seized even than you are.

54:41And of course, that's something that Modi is going to respond to well because I think there's opportunities for India in presenting itself as the great growing superpowers that counterbalance the China. As Leo Reifke said, China's growth is in many ways defined our world in the last couple of decades and it might be India in the next couple of decades. Very good. Okay, well maybe something on which to end on those wise words, which can be listened to on the podcast leading. Good to talk to you soon. Speak soon, bye bye.