147. Question Time: The next global superpower, a royal panic, and Rory on Austerity

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0:21Welcome to The Restless Politics question time with me, Rory Stewart and me, Alistair Campbell. We've got, we've got to ask this one first, I think. Sock and Mama. That's good name. My question is why should I bother asking as you'll never read it, let alone answer it, that is all. So there you go, Sock and Mama, we've read it. But I have noticed that if you put at the beginning of the question, I've asked the seven times Alistair's more likely to ask your question. I might also sometimes suggest if your question also involves, do you think the Tories are the most hopeless government that have ever been seen in world history?

0:56You're probably quite likely to get your question asked. I think we do it a little bit more subtly than that. So on the on the Perseverance points, Jane Wilkinson, yeah, I realize I need to ask at least ten times to win a Perseverance award. So for the fourth time and counting, please respond properly to the year 12th question which you chose to read out about medical school places. Mark Richardson, will you please answer the question you had weeks ago from a 17 -year -old asking why finding training places to be a doctor is so difficult. You promised to research it so please can we have an answer to an excellent question.

1:31So I have done a bit of research and let's start off by saying something that is unspeakable in the current populist post truth politics that we have, it's very complicated. Oh good, oh well I'm glad and we didn't often say that. Well it is complicated. So I'm going to try and go through some of the complications. The first thing is, it's the general medical council rather than the government which determines which institutions are allowed to offer medical degrees. They are looking to extend it so that they can grow the number of places. The next thing is that there does seem culturally to have been a bit of a sort of BMA leverage point about protecting the quote special profession.

2:15Okay. Because I think it's now agreed that there is a workforce crisis that is no longer holding. The big point as well that's been made is about quality of teaching. How do you advance the numbers without also advancing the number of medical teachers and where are you going to take them from when you want those people to be working and of course students have to learn from qualified doctors, they have to go in large groups into clinics into theaters, into A &E into GP surgeries. But the planning of those clinical placements is something that is not easy when the NHS is under as much stress as it is now.

2:52In an attempt to get on top of this, I did have a brief look at a very very good briefing from the House of Commons Library which I recommend for anybody who's interested in nerdy questions on British politics. So it points out that each year around 9 ,500 medical school places are made available across the UK to train new doctors. Since 2013, this figure has increased by around 2 ,000 so it was 7 ,500. It's around 9 ,500. And they're currently kept in England and the government claims for all the reasons you've pointed out, part of it's about making sure the standards are kept high and high quality placements.

3:24There is an issue around money so it costs about 230 ,000 pounds for each medical dental school place. So another 5 ,000 students would cost approximately a billion pounds. But the biggest question I think isn't just the money, it's about getting the high -quality capacity to train the doctors. And in the meantime, of course, the problem is we're bringing a lot of doctors from overseas because we're not training our end, which is not kind to other countries. And it means we're stripping countries' aches in Barbue, that's some of their most qualified medical professionals and bring them to the United Kingdom.

3:54Yeah, well, I've told you before about the in the Balkans, they are, you know, the Germans are absolutely, they're having massive advertising campaigns to get nurses in the Balkans to go to Germany to fit the gap there. I do think as well that the other issue that has come through some of the questions in the many weeks that people have been asking us to try to address this is the whole thing about students from poorer backgrounds, even though they might have good grades, finding it really, really hard to get into medical schools. And some of them, some of the schools are now trying to address that.

4:27But of course, as you say, people want to be sure that the standards are very, very, very high. Reliefably competitive, 9 ,500 places only. I mean, it's incredibly small of the total number of university places and other subjects. Also, I didn't see it at the weekend, but it's really soon like it's apparently talking about moving to some sort of system where you can, we literally can begin to have what they will be termed, you know, apprentices working within the health service. And I don't know whether that applies to doctors and nurses, but we need to maybe check that one out as well. So listen, I don't think we can do justice to this because as we both shown, we're very reliant on reading from other people's analysis as opposed to any direct experience.

5:04But our short hand answer is that it's more complicated, maybe than we thought we were first addressed it. Very good. Okay. Now, Alistair, since last week, you have appeared on the second question time in the country, not the rest is politics question time, but the kind of BBC budget person a question time. And you appeared in Clackton and it was a very unique event in which the audience were all people who had voted for Brexit Clackton, very famous strong Brexit voting town. Tell us who you had on the panel. Give us a sense of the panel. Well, scandalously, in my view, nobody, the government put nobody up.

5:40They told question time they were going to and then literally on the day, I think they said, no, we've decided we're not putting anybody up, whether that was because they didn't want to celebrate Independence Day seven years on, whether it's because they didn't want to have me raging at them or whether it's because they didn't actually want to face the people that vote for Brexit to be told that they've been let down, which a lot of them felt. I don't know. So there's John Redwood, Ben Habebe, former Brexit party MP, Jenny Chapman for Labour and and Menon who we talked about when you gave me your very, very sensible advice for me last week, which I have to tell you was echoed and this actually may I say had even more of an impact on me.

6:19I'm going to give a shout out for Clackton Coastal Academy, which I mentioned on the program because I went there. When it was announced I was going, this school got in touch with me. There know that, you know, I've been going to lots of schools in particular since the book came out and I went into this school, Clackton Coastal Academy, very tough area, included J -Rig, which is one of the poorest parts of the country, the whole country. And the kids were absolutely, they really were good. I mean, they were very shy at first and quite timid and expressing an opinion. But by the end, honestly, they were absolutely brilliant.

6:50And anyway, I said at the end, I said, right, I'm going from here to question time, Brexit only audience, as you know, I'm not a big fan of Brexit. It was the best way to kind of, you know, to deal with them. And this young woman called Annabelle, she said, don't trim your views, say what you think, but say in a respectful way, try to persuade rather than criticize and try to understand why they did vote the way they did. And that is what I, that was the present. So I actually went on redwood, started talking absolute nonsense. I just sat and I blow my head saying, just let him spout it, just ignore him toward the audience.

7:24Now, here's a question from Jude. I really like this question from Jude. I voted remain, but feel sorry for the audience members in Thursday's question time, who have been pilloried on social media for their opinions. Should they, and I don't know if this is possible, have been edited out, corrected. Anyway, it's played to a stereotype. What do Alison Rory think? So she's worried about that. So she, and it's true. Isn't it some of the questions were kind of mocked on social media. There was one which I saw played a lot. There was a lady who said, I think she was trying to say, the problem was that whenever rules were passed by Brussels, the British obeyed them and other people didn't, but she ended up saying, it's all about the roofs when we go on roofs in Britain, we had to follow the rules.

8:09And whenever she goes to France and Germany, all these people on the roofs who weren't following the rules. Very similar question, Jamie Crawford, is it fair game to have a go at the not on my roof or from the beaches to the benefits of this audience members? Or should our Ia be directed at the cabal that fed them this nonsense? Then he says, I fell Alice to his calm and collected one people over that has to be the approach. I mean, look, just to give the context, the first there was this quite elderly lady who talked about the rules and it became the thing about the roofs. And then there was a guy who said, he literally seen people come off, you know, come at arriving the country and go straight down the benefits office.

8:46And James O 'Brien, for example, did a pretty splinetic take down of that one. Again, I had Anne Bell in my head again, I basically said, right, I could say, well, actually, no, I think that's unfair because there, but I didn't. And I do think it was unfair. And I also do agree with Jude that I think we do have to criticize the people who peddle the law of this nonsense. The truth is that we've had three or four decades of anti -European propaganda in a lot of our papers. We did have liars like, I've got to tell you Roy, I got a round of applause for saying that, you know, the whole thing was run by a bunch of liars, Johnson, etc.

9:27So, but I went into it with the aim of trying to understand why people voted, but also to get a proper sense as to whether many, any of them or many of them were changing their minds. And there was, there was another question which I thought was really perceptive. Rebecca Gould, this week's question time seemed much quieter and sadder than I thought it was going to be. Was it everyone trying very hard to disagree agreeably? What did it feel like in the studio? What it felt like was that a lot of people, there was no anger, apart from one or two people, there was very little anger directed at me.

10:02There was a lot of anger directed at Brexit and the way it was happening. And my favorite question of the lot, Josh says this, I'm a huge fan, enjoy your commentary. Just want to know what was your funniest moment from question time. For me, it was a member of the audience saying Brexit could be good if it had gone to a different school. What the woman was saying was to bend her beab. She said, I'm sick and tired of you people telling me, if only we did Brexit the way I wanted to do Brexit, it would have worked. And so one of the central characters in this is this figure called John Redwood, who was a cabinet minister under Margaret Thatcher.

10:35It was a sort of academic, it was a fellow of all souls meant to be kind of very, it was obviously a very, very brilliantly clever student because he managed to get into all souls and has been the kind of vulcan ideologue of the Brexit move. What did you make of him? I mean, he's kind of famously sort of clever, but slightly uncanny in his manner. What did you make of his communication style, what did you make of who he is and how he ended up, where he is? Well, we had a question as well about what the mood was like in the green room before and afterwards. And to personal level, I've always gone with, I find in general, there's somebody that's perfectly straightforward to talk to and doesn't really, doesn't mind you challenging his views and will come back and give us good as he gets.

11:18I thought Peter Kyle, by the way, who I know you think is terrific and wonderful. So do I. Well, look at Peter's take down. We should put it in, I tweeted it yesterday, we should put it in the newsletter. Peter Kyle did an absolutely brutal demolition of John Redwood by, he'd gone back to look at John Redwood's website back in the days before the referendum saying what was going to happen and he absolutely took him down. I wish I'd had all the same stuff. No, I think John Redwood was just one of those guys who he always believed the same thing. He always believes that John Redwood is right about the economy.

11:53He always believes that and he says what he says with absolute conviction. And if you challenge him, as I challenged him, for example, when I said, you know, he said he'd never, you know, the trade deals, not that big a deal, we don't need to worry about America, blah, blah. And I said, well, hold on a minute. Why did you say that we're one of the big wins was going to be getting this trade deal? It just said, well, I never said that, the populist thing and lots of people posted lots of occasions where he had said it. But I don't, I don't sort of load them in a way that I load the liars because I think that I said on the program, I think people I am have always believed in what he tried to achieve with his very irrespective views.

12:26I mean, with the interviewer John Major, for example, John Redwood challenged John Major because he felt John Major was going the wrong direction on, on Europe. So I think he's a perfectly honorable kind of guy. I just think he's very, very wrong about a lot of stuff. Okay. Over to you questions. Right. Lord of the sheep. Lord of the sheep. Rory seems a decent person says Lord of the sheep. How does he reconcile his ethics with the harm done to the public as a result of austerity? I have seen at first hand the harm that's been suffered. It cannot be denied. I believe the current mess in our country is large due to austerity.

12:59So I think there was another question about this Rory that was about, could you explain lots of people often post on social media quotes, your voting record. And I'm giving you an opportunity again to explain why if you're in a government, you have to choose. It's a very good challenge. But this question around voting record is a question about what political party you belong to. Unfortunately, for better or for worse, in the British political system, you vote with your party, even rebels, you know, even people who are seen as famous rebels are voting with their parties 95 % of the time. But it's even more extreme if you're a government minister because it's a constitutional rules that you have to always vote for the government if you're a government minister because it's called collective responsibility, ministerial responsibility.

13:45And if you don't vote for the government, you resign. And if you don't vote for the government on something important, you're kicked out. On how many occasions did you vote for something as a government minister that had you been about bencher, you'd have felt very, very queasy about? I never voted for anything that I felt deeply queasy for. I often voted for things that I thought, oh, I'm not quite sure about that. But when push came to shove, on things I felt very queasy about, I voted against the government. But the result of that was the first time I did it. I was not promoted for the next four years.

14:17And the second time I did it, I was kicked out of the conservative party. So I voted against Nodeal Brexit. But people need to understand that the deal is that it's better or worse, the team sport and the justification for that is that the public vote for a manifesto, they vote for a party and they expect the party to deliver that manifesto. They don't expect the local MP they voted for to start rebelling against what they think they've signed up for. And we can debate that whether it's a good thing or bad thing, but that's the way the system's work. So these things where they say, look at the voting record is completely absurd.

14:52All you say when you say, yeah, this guy looks like a nice guy, but look at his voting record, is what you're saying is this guy looks like a nice guy, but he was a member of a Tory government. That's all you're saying. But when you were not in the government, when people sort of raised things on your voting record, is there anything on your voting record when you were about Bencher that you sometimes think, oh, I shouldn't done that. Yeah, I think that the way that austerity was done was very, very, it was often incredibly damaging. So I saw that very directly in prisons, hacked the number of prison officers, hacked the budgets of prisons, increased the number of prisoners and ended up with drug filled, violent, filthy, unsafe prisons.

15:42So that's a very good example of austerity gone completely wrong. Why did I support the principle? I mean, you know, that goes into the question of how much debt I think the country can handle, how much deficit I think the country handle, and I disagree with people who believe that there is an easy way to just borrow money and spend money and generate growth by doing that. But I guess that's because I was a conservative, not on the other side of the House. Now, Roy, while I'm being the interrogator here, I've got one here from maybe mentioned Woodrow, he kindly regalers with the story about the time he found himself trapped inside the King's Panic Room at High Grove.

16:14Then I'll tell you my High Grove story. Very good. Okay. So I was I think 19 years old and I had been employed as the tutor to Prince's William and Harry. For how long? It was for the summer holidays, for the summer holidays. So I just arrived and I went off to have a bath at about 11 o 'clock at night and weirdly, there were two doors on the bathroom. Anyway, I locked the door that I thought was the right door to lock, got into my bath, got out of the bath, tried to unlock the door and I couldn't unlock it. And I thought, for goodness sake, and I kept struggling with the key and I couldn't shift it.

16:50Eventually, there was a knock on the door and this familiar voice, it's the voice of the King, but I'm not going to commit the Lacea and Masha Stave by trying to imitate the voice of the King. But anyway, the voice of the King then says, Rory, would you mind turning out the lights out when you go to bed? Here was the cares about the environment once you turn the lights out. So I say, I'm really sorry, sir. I know I'm very, very scared 19 year olds. It's my first proper job. I'm really sorry, sir. I seem to have locked myself in the Lou and he says, don't be so ridiculous, Rory, turn the key in the lock.

17:18So I'm so terrified, I turn the key in the lock so hard that I snap it off at the half and I'm left with this thing and I then look around and I say, I'm really, really sorry, sir, I've snapped the key off in the half. And he says, you're not seriously suggesting it's midnight that I have to wake up the whole house and get them to axe down the door. And I say, no, no, so it's absolutely fine. I'll sleep the night on the bus door. So there is this sort of harump from the other kind of the door. Did you sleep there? The Prince World, Prince World, disappears. So I then look around this thing and realize what's happened is that this is the anti -terrorist panic room of the building.

17:55And there's a big sign up saying, ring Scotland yard and jump out of the window and the thing that I've locked is this kind of bombproof metal door to prevent a terrorist getting in. So about 20 minutes later, there is the sound literally of axes on the door. And eventually the door is broken through and there is the Prince World's and is dressing gown directing a group of people with axes driving out. And for the rest of my time at high grade, literally I would sit there at the breakfast table on the lunch table and all the people serving me could not stop themselves sniggering every time they try to pull the soup.

18:30Listen, Rory, that is just such a great story. I think we should have a separate podcast that the rest is Rory's time of high growth. But I've got it that's quite impressive though that he's going around turning the lights off. Is that part of his eco -warriot done that he goes around making sure there's no lights on? Well, I think I think he does care about the environment. Yeah. Are you going to turn us your high -growth story? Are we going to move on to one? My high -growth story is at one point when Tony and Sheree were going for lunch with the then Prince of Wales at high growth and we were meant to be going on to Coffin Tree.

18:59So I was with them in the car behind and I just texted ahead to one of the protection people and said, look, can you check out if there's a swimming pool? Because while a lot of a swim while Tony's having lunch and I'd later discovered this caused absolute sort of protocol consternation because of course there is a swimming pool but only he is meant to swim in it and I don't think he swims very much. So after a sort of bit of you know, Republican badgering, eventually they sort of you know rather grumpily agreed that I could go in the swimming pool but I've got to tell you Rory, I don't know if you ever went in the swimming pool high -grower, it didn't feel like it was swimming very much.

19:41There were a lot of green things. Well, well, thank you. You've swam in a lot of unique places. I mean, some day we need a book out of you on places you've swam. Right then we'll be back in a second, so let's just take a quick break.

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21:35Now here's a more serious one, right? I think we're both pinched in this. James Moules, what would you say are the key criteria for a country to be considered a superpower on which countries do you believe have the potential to meet that criteria in coming decades? Related to that, Tim Johnson, why does the UK still deserve a permanent seat on the UN Security Council? If the UN was founded now, would the UK be in that same position? Well, so I think the answer is of course, if the UN was founded now, the UK would not be likely to be in the same position. I mean, it's only claim is that it's a nuclear power, but in population terms, it's very small compared to the global population.

22:11Its economy is increasingly small compared to its big competitors like the US and China. Criteria to be a superpower. Well, I guess the obvious rising powers are China and then India. And I think to be a superpower is really about being able to hyperbolicly project your power globally, not just on a regional basis, but be able to bring the full force of your economic and military might to bear almost anywhere around the world gone over to you. Well, yeah, I think that's right. And I think it means that actually, although we talked during the Cold War about America and Russia or the Soviet Union being superpowers, the Soviet Union was only really a superpower because of the strength of its the size of its military, arsed on the particular its nuclear arsed on.

22:57America are genuine superpower. I'd say at the moment that China and America are both, are the only two superpowers. And I think there are others that could emerge in that way. I think it's economic, military, cultural. And it's also really about how they relate to the rest of the world. I mean, there's not a single other leader in the world who doesn't, you know, if the phone goes and it's the Chinese embassy saying President Xi would like to have a conversation or it's the White House President Biden would like to have a conversation, they're kind of the top level. And I do think that the UK, I said this on question time, I really do feel that Brexit has reduced us further that we're no longer, you know, we're no longer top tier, other than, you know, for the historic reasons in the UN.