148. France on fire, Thames Water troubles, and NHS privatisation

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0:20Welcome to another episode of the Restus Politics with me, Alistair Campbell. And with me, Rory Stewart. How are you, Alistair? I'm very well. Where are you? You've got a tennis racket on the wall behind you. I do. I do. I'm in Cape Cod in the United States and I'm in my wife's a grandparents' house. Lovely. And that's an old tennis racket because they they've been playing tennis a long time. But I have a small story for you. So, here's a question on how up -to -date you are in things. I got on a tiny plane to come here, actually very exciting. It was a sea plane which took off from 25th streets in Manhattan.

0:53Wow. Eight people on the plane. Yeah. And it was like some sort of lead up to joke. So, got on the plane and there was a very nice guy who worked for a tech company who recognized me and started showing me pictures of my tweets. Then I noticed the person sitting next to me had recognized the person in front of them and then the person in front of me had recognized the person behind. So, turned out that there was a woman called Dylan Mulvaney. Have you heard of Dylan Mulvaney? I've heard of Amy Mulvaney, but not a Dylan Mulvaney. Okay. So, Dylan Mulvaney, we discussed in the podcast a few weeks ago.

1:24She was on the plane. She was the transgender face of the Bud Light campaign. Oh, yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, Dylan was on the plane with another social media officer called Chris Olson and they were all on their way to an amazing wedding being hosted by a woman called Michaela Nogwera, who's another social media influencer. It does make up stuff. She's very interesting. She's got a Boston actor. And then there was a, there was a Democrat congressman on the plane. So, what I discovered was there were these three completely different sort of worlds. There was somebody who knew our podcast, there was somebody who was really on top of TikTok stars with 15 million followers and there was somebody on top of the congressman and then amongst them all was a very quiet psychiatrist from New York who said, I literally don't know who any of the three of you are.

2:11I never watched television, never had a producer. But I was just trying to work out what would happen if I see a plane crashed in the sea. How different media would have covered the story. Oh, well, let's just cut straight to the chase. On American TV news, what would have been the first name mentioned? Dylan Malveini. I think it probably would have been Dylan Malveini. Alissa, who's the Democrat? He's called, he's called Richie Torres and actually bearing your mind. So he's a, he's a young African American congressman from New York. I thought incredibly impressive. Thoughtful, relaxed, interesting.

2:42First Afro Latino gay congressman. And I'd actually bearing your mind that I'd be told off by you. I did ask him if he'd like to come on the pod and he would like to come on the pod. So I think what she told us could be a future president. Oh, Lord, I think Dylan Malveini would have been quite interesting. To have crashed the share price of Budweiser, it's really interesting leading phenomenon. Well, there we are. I think the new story on the BBC of the plane crashing would have been Alistair Campbell was tonight looking for a new podcast partner after Rory Stewart died with a trans activist and some of this was, is it a, it a tragic crash in America?

3:23How about that? That's very good. Very good. It would be, you're right. It would have been all about you in the end. Yeah, of course. Yeah, of course. Of course. Tony Blair Spindock, who looks for new partner. Oh, yeah. Okay. Very good. Now, Alissa, what do you want to talk about? Well, we're going to talk about France and the riots that have followed the police killing of a young man called the hell. We're going to talk about where you are now, America, and specifically the recent three very important decisions by the Supreme Court and maybe talk a little bit about how the Supreme Court operates and why it's become so very, very high profile in the political world.

3:59And then I think we should talk about Tim's water, which is a major car crash waiting to happen. And also, I think we should all bet about the NHS in the light of Rishi Sunax 15 year workforce plan. How does that sound? Fantastic. Well, let's start with France. And you are, as we know, the French expert here, you spend a lot of time in France, speak very good French, and you even know Emmanuel Macross. So give us the sense to what she thinks going on in France, then. Well, it seems to have calmed a little in the last 24 hours or so. But since the killing of this young guy who was being chased by the police, the police, they claimed at first that their lives were in danger, video showed that not to be the case.

4:43They were trying to stop him. They claimed that the boy has a record of avoiding a rest. So he was just shot in the chest. And the police officer is now in custody. He's going to be charged with, it would seem, with murder. And obviously, this became very, very quickly a matter of political handling, very, very strong memories for anyone in French office of 2005. Very similar incident, which led to more than 10 ,000 cars being set alight, over 200 public buildings that were damaged. And back then, Sarkozy had been very, very pro police and just sort of stood by the police and anybody who attacked the police was sort of, you know, low form of life.

5:30Macron did come out straight away and say that he thought this was unacceptable. He was critical of the police officer who'd done it. That was politically risky because of course the far right was straight out saying he's weak, not supporting the police. So what he's tried to do is to have this divide line, pretty tough crackdown. Yep. Alongside saying that what happened was unacceptable. One of the things that you often say about him is that that's very characteristic of his attempt to hold the centre ground, this sort of on Memeton. And actually frequently he does it strange, he not by being nice to both right and left, but by being rude to the right and then rude to the left.

6:09And in this case, quite aggressive towards the police and then in the next minute, quite aggressive towards the riot. Is that right? Exactly. I think that's exactly what he's tried to do. But it has been very, very scary. And of course the other point he's been making is that social media has made it a lot worse than it was the last time this kind of thing happened. And obviously, am I right in saying that this is part of a much, much bigger global issue. In this case, it's about French treatment of Arabs, but there are echoes of the killing of George Floyd. There are echoes the killing of Mark Dougan, who people remember in 2011, sparked the Tottenham riots.

6:41He was killed by the police. Jury ruled in the end. He was carrying a gun, but almost certainly not showing the gun when he was shot. But in every case, what happens is the police killing of somebody, then sparks very, very widespread rioting and then gets tied into big narratives around deprovation, racism, exclusion. And I think that's particularly the case in France. I do think when these things happen, you're right about Mark Dougan and there were riots and there have been riots in the UK in the past, but a lot less. I do think we are perhaps better integration than the French. And the trouble with a lot of these big French cities, Paris being a case in point, but we also talk about Marseille, which I probably know better, is that you have a kind of really vibrant and affluent and successful center and then around it, the Bonnier, where they, you know, to be absolutely frank, a lot of them feel completely forgotten.

7:34And, you know, there's a film, if you've got a spare couple of hours, there's a film that's worth watching about Marseille called Back North, B -A -C -N -O -R -D. And it's about, it's based on a true story about some police officers in Marseille who became involved in drug trafficking and racketeering. But essentially what you see there is what I think is happening in some of these cities now, which is that for the police to police some of these areas is becoming virtually impossible. It's interesting that when Macron visited Marseille recently, and you know, fair play, he goes to Marseille, supports the football TVs, he announced a lot of money that people say hasn't come through and that has fed into this sort of sense of, you know, disenchantment disappointment.

8:15But he actually didn't go to some of the toughest areas because some of the toughest areas you can't get into because there are roadblocks, some of them control by these drug gangs and some of them very, very heavily armed. And so there are, in a way that I think maybe we don't understand here, I think most places in the UK, even if there are all sorts of gang crime going on, I think the police in general will feel the ability to go. Yeah, just a quick thing that there was an article we can share on the link about Marseille and in particular this Cartier Noir and a tower block called Farm Valley, which seems to be terrifying.

8:50I mean, it sounds like it's a massive series of tower blocks surrounded by motorways, 70 % unemployment, the police station, the area closed, descriptions of people stashing AK -47 clash of scoffes and drugs up and down the stairs. So, and that I think we don't quite get in Britain, although I think one thing to bear in mind is that we're always maybe closer to it than we think. I mean, in this case, in Marseille, the police station was closed 10 years ago, and that happened in France and a lot of Europe and in the United Kingdom, a lot of closing of police stations. And of course, there's always a good sort of accounting argument for it, which is that it's cheaper to have your police in a fewer locations, and you can always pretend that they can get out in cars and do just as good a job out of their cars as they can have the local police station.

9:37But what you lose, and this is what the people in the article are complaining about, is any sense of a group of 10 police officers who really know the local community, know the children are there, are on the street, can pick up the tactical information. And that, which both in France and Britain has increasingly presented as a luxury, is of course really essential, particularly for excluded Marseille's communities, for reassuring people. Well, I think we need to be a little bit wary about this, because I think what you are seeing is what happens if you do have a breakdown of any form of community policing.

10:11Now, the French police have a reputation anyway for being pretty rough, probably instinctively a lot rougher than maybe the policing culture that we are used to, although maybe our policing culture has changed a lot. And you know, this Macron has got this very, very hard line interior minister. And by the way, when I talked about 2005, Saco wasn't the president, he was the interior minister at the time, so he was in charge of the response to those rights in 2005. But if you look at people say that during the recent protests that the police made things worse, rather than have calmed it down, there is increasing evidence.

10:45There are quite a lot of very, very hard right people within the police force in France, just as there are in Germany. And again, there may be within the UK policing, but I don't feel it's quite as prevalent. We've had almost sort of different problems, and we've talked about this a little bit, and there's been this, these reports reaching on the police, particularly about sexual violence. Yeah, and corruption. Yeah. And I think that there are still significant problems within the metropolitan police around those, around officers not being held to account for those things. Yeah. In parts of France, if you're African or North African origin, you are 20 times more likely to be stopped by the police and searched, and they're usually looking for drugs and for guns.

11:33And the other thing that's really, really quite interesting at the moment is like, so if you think of the great iconic events that happen in France, one of them is the Tour de France. The site of the Great Discicling Race in the World is on at the moment, and they're having to put extra security in for the Tour de France. They've got the Olympics coming up next year in Sandin, the main stadium is in Sandin, which is one of the areas that we're talking about. And meanwhile, Macron, who had the embarrassment of having to tell King Charles, you can go straight to Germany, rather to come here because of the pension protests, now cancelling a state visit to Germany, which would have been the first state visit by a French president to Germany in 20 years, meant to be a big thing trying to resument the Franco -German alliance, and instead of which is in sort of permanent crisis management session, trying to deal with this.

12:26And presumably this is one of the themes that leads into the support for Le Pen, and the anxiety we've both talked about that Le Pen still seems in a very strong position to be the next president of France following Macron, because Macron hasn't yet appointed a successor, very difficult to find where challenges from the other main parties are going to emerge from, that this is an issue that really gets to people. And it's sort of odd combination, isn't it? I suppose it's something that we notice a lot in Britain too, that often places with less integration, you seem to have more anxieties about race than places with more integration.

13:02I mean, for example, I don't understand French politics enough, but if you think about the number of people from minority ethnic backgrounds at senior levels in the British cabinet, do you have that equivalent in France or not really? Not to the top levels, not to the top levels, but yeah, you do have, there are cabinet ministers of colour, but I don't think that the upper echelons of French society are quite as integrated as ours are. I think that's a fair statement. But the politics of this are really, really quite difficult. Eric Zimour, who's the hard right guy who ran for the presidency, and he's a sort of, he's a never off the telly and off the radio.

13:40He's a bit like Farage, he's just sort of out there the whole time pumping populist messaging. And he says the issue is one of our inability to deal with what he calls foreign enclave. Now, you're talking for most of these young people who have been out on the streets, you're talking second, third generation, French citizens of immigrant background. For him to call it foreign enclave is an indication of how the far right likes to project them as other than as as not being French as it were. And the other thing that's tricky, politically for for Macron is, I mean, Le Pen isn't doing very much at the moment.

14:14She's actually not that high profile in the French political debate. She's just hoping, you know, that the people turn against the government and they turn to her. But her, their baseline, the far right have been calling on Macron to call a state of emergency to give more powers to the police. But actually, it's not because they want more powers to the police. They know that having a country that's living under a state of emergency is basically a country where you've lost control and then that plays into their strengths. It's interesting. I mean, France does so many things so well that we talk about a lot on the pod.

14:45You know, we might suggest their health service functioning better than ours. Their water systems functioning better than ours. Both of these things right now without a doubt are true. Yeah, it's something interesting. I mean, I've said in the US and actually Ricky Torrance, the US congressman on the plane was asking me about this. And, you know, he said, is Rishi Sunat the first person in color to ever be a leader in the United Kingdom? And I said, yes, but I sort of paused for a second just to check in my mind before I said it. And then I realized I wouldn't really have checked in the same way with President Obama.

15:17I would have known it once that this was a kind of big defining feature. And he certainly is an American congressman looking at Britain does see things that he thinks are more positive than maybe we give ourselves credit for. I mean, this is so, I mean, obviously we have huge problems. And David Lamy on our leading interview talked about a lot of them and has pointed to a lot of our problems in criminal justice and policing and many, many other issues that we need to address. But maybe not quite a severe and extreme is what we're looking at in France. Just maybe to close on this before we turn to American the Supreme Court, Macron was due to make one of his reasonably infrequent addresses to the nation probably around about now or certainly maybe the weekend that we've just gone through where he was going to talk about how the nation has become pacified again after all the protests over the pensions.

16:08Lord. So that did go according to plan. So Supreme Court, I mean, you're in America, presumably it's huge story there, isn't it? It's completely amazing. And it's I think the first thing to bear in mind is that in a way that's very difficult for British lessons to understand is that Supreme Court justices are almost household names, certainly for readers of New York times. I remember I knew a Supreme Court justice called Stephen Breyer's and the immense sort of extraordinary admiration he was held in Harvard and Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was one of Clinton's wasn't he? Yeah, he was certainly on the Democrat side.

16:44I don't know whether he came in with Clinton, but but I mean, you know, people write whole biographies of Supreme Court justices. You know, there's a great American tradition. If you go to a certain kind of American home, they have big hard back biographies of presidents and Supreme Court justices and aligning their walls. And you you can see that these figures on this current court are almost household names. People remember Brett Kavanaugh because while he was being confirmed, somebody came forward, Christine Blasey Ford and accused him of sex assault when they were at high school together. Of course, the same was true going back in day with with Clarence Thomas, who was accused famously by a woman called Anita Hill of sex assault during his confirmation hearings.

17:26He's been there for 34 years and who I suppose is the most leading celebrity on the on the right. Yeah, but the things they're there for life. Let's just very briefly go through the reasons why we're talking about this because they've just finished their session and the last three decisions they made were all pretty controversial and are seen ultimately as in some cases as political rather than judicial. The first big call is on so -called affirmative action. The taking into consideration of race on college admissions. They've basically, that's been going for decades and they say that that's now no go.

18:06The second was in relation to one of Joe Biden's central promises when he came to power, which is the right of a student debt. They basically said, no, no, you can't do that. And the third one was a woman who chimates websites for weddings and she refused to take a same sex couple as a customer. They took it to court. It's gone to the Supreme Court. The court is ruled in her favor. So these are three very, very particular decisions. And the other thing that's really interesting, just looking at some of the stats this morning. The 20 year average for unanimous decisions across the court was 50 percent.

18:47Otherwise over 20 years, a half of all decisions were unanimous. That declined to 30 percent in 2021. The party line, what they call party line rulings in line with the official policy of a political party, were close to zero over the 20 year average. And that rose to 21 percent in 2021. And some of the statements, what's happened, is a bit like select committees. I don't know whether you ever had a non -unanimous report. But with these judgments, some of the judges, the liberal judges, have put out statements and opinions that are absolutely scathing. There is no disagreeing agreeably between these judges at the moment.

19:32Sonja Sotomey, called the website decision a grave error. And Elena Kagan, she said of the student loan policy, the court is substituting itself for Congress in making national policy about student loan forgiveness. And if you look at the powers of the Supreme Court, it is not supposed to have the power to decide non -justiciable political questions. Yeah. Well, so I just to do a quick explainer again for people. So completely unlike the British system, which still very much has rooted in the idea of parliamentary sovereignty, although there's been a challenge to that potentially over the court intervening on the government's Rwanda decisions, but basically speaking parliament sovereign.

20:17In the US, of course, it's a written constitution and the arbiter on the constitution and its amendments is the Supreme Court. And the only way of changing what Supreme Court rules on would be changing the constitution its amendments, which is unbelievably difficult to do. Or they can be expanded without a constitutional amendment. And that may be what Biden will think he might. It's actually appointing more judges. Very interesting. Although that would be a very, very controversial thing to do because it hasn't been done for a very long time. And in a way, a lot of it, of course, the composition of the court, how many conservative judges you have against how many Democrats is in some way to matter of luck and aging.

20:55It's to do with who lives longest when people eventually step down Ruth Bartoginsburg, who was this very, very famous female, more liberal, judged step down, created a vacancy into which other people stepped. And unfortunately, in the four years of Donald Trump in, three Supreme Court justices were appointed, which was very, very upsetting for the Democrats. And they are aged 51, 55 and 58. And they are there until they die, retire, resign or get impeached. So you now have this inbuilt six, three, two that were appointed by Obama, one appointed by Biden, George Bush senior we've mentioned to appoint a Clarence Thomas, and then George Bush Jr appointed two, and then Trump with his three.

21:44One of the interesting things, if you again, if you go back to the founding of the Supreme Court, it puts a lot of store on trust and credibility. And the trust and credibility would seem to be very, very low. The polls on independence and Democrats in particular on their levels of respect and trust for the Supreme Court have absolutely plummeted in recent years. And this is partly that last year, the most famous rulings were on the right to abortion and expanding gun rights. Row aid, yeah. But you can make an argument that maybe things are improving a little bit since last year. So you mentioned that last year, unanimous decisions were down to about 28%.

22:20So far this year, unanimous decisions have risen up again to 47%, very close to that 50 % average that you talked about. And in fact, strangely, the liberals have won the majority decisions in a number of recent cases, voting rights act, immigration, road estate, legislatures, Native American rights. And Chief Justice Roberts has often found himself as has Gorsuch, and in some cases, Amicore Barrett siding with the liberal judges, the ACLU won 11 out of its 18 cases, which is a ACLU very, very progressive, liberal organization, which is a bell weather for something's happening. And they've also been relatively consensual on prison access to court, social media, free speech, so they let a transgender girl compete.

23:05They allow particular types of abortion pills. So from the point of view of the hardline conservatives, they're very, very frustrated. And they think that Trump's three nominees were much too moderate. Well, I don't know if you saw. I saw yesterday a video that Ron DeSantis has put out about Trump, where it's basically suggesting that Trump is a sort of massive friend of the LGBTQ community, whereas he DeSantis really can't stand trans. If you really want somebody who's going to be mega homophobic, vote for Ron. And it's just, you know, the politics around this is so, so poisonous. So the interesting thing with Donald Trump is that his appointments were not as provocatively aggressively right -wing as many people expected.

23:50I mean, there were huge questions around that the personal behavior of Brett Kavanaugh, but he's not a notoriously right -wing figure. And again, Barrett, nobody doubted her academic credentials or her seriousness or her conviction. Although people were worried about her Catholic backgrounds. And it's partly, I think, that I'd be interested in getting into this. But one gets the sense that maybe Trump slightly delegated this issue and delegated it to more sort of formal legal officials in his department, rather than really doing what people like DeSantis says he should have done, which was to bring many more radical voices in.

24:28I don't know. I got the Trump didn't rally at the weekend and he was making hay with this and saying that this is, you know, this shows my power and this is my legacy and all this sort of stuff. So I think he was very, very conscious of the significance of the appointments that he made. And this thing about age is so important, isn't it? It's like the Supreme Court was established as part of the Constitutional Convention in 1787. Now, I don't know what the average life expectancy was. They would all have been men back then. But what would it have been? I don't know. 60 Macs? Yeah. And so if you say that they're appointing somebody to the Supreme Court who's probably in their 50s, they're going to live a few years and then they're going to die and then they're going to get replaced.

25:08You're now appointing people. I mentioned Thomas, so he was 43 when he was appointed. And he's now 75. He's now 75 and he could live to 100. Oh, it's extraordinary. I mean, Amy Coney Barrett is the youngest. She's 51. She could live another half century. And she decides when she leaves this court. There's a broader issue, which I think touches on a lot of things that happen in the British Civil Service. So at the time when I joined the foreign office, becoming an ambassador was something that you got right towards the end of your career. Yeah. And people were sort of happy as a result, waiting because you saw that these were jobs that you got when you were older and older and older.

25:45But rapidly, understandable reasons, we began to move to a world where you got to become an ambassador in your late 30s or early 40s. And suddenly you have a very, very strange organization where you have a lot of very angry, younger civil servants who feel how come that person became an ambassador in the late 30s or early 30s and I'm not. You have even more angry older people who have not overlooked. Exactly. I mean, you're stuck down in the number three and number four. And I do think there's an argument for something as our life expectancy extends and as actually people are competent, much, much older in life.