156. Labour on the defensive, Machismo in Spain, and Israel on a knife-edge

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0:50Welcome to The REST's Politics with me, Alistair Campbell. And with me, Rory Stewart. And really, Rory, we both are absolutely desperate to talk about the same thing, which is Israel, to which we're going to devote most of the second half of the podcast. And we're also going to kick off with the continuing fallout from the bi -elections last week. Can't believe that we're still talking about U -Lez and whether Labour and the Tories should ditch all their, what David Cameron used to call the green crap. And I think we should also have a chat about what's been going on in Spain with the rather interesting elections where I hope we've got more interesting things to say than a lot of the pretty bang average commentary that I've been reading.

1:32Very good. Well, let's start with the list. So just just reminders who those few people who might have missed out on our bi -election special. The surprising thing in the bi -election was that although Labour did spectacularly well in Yorkshire where it took Nigel Adams to seat, so defeated a sitting conservative MP with a majority of more than 20 ,000 so hugely optimistic and a great sign from Labour's point of view for how they do in the election. A seat with a smaller majority which was Boris Johnson's old seat in Oxbridge which he was holding with a majority of 7 ,000 to their complete astonishment, the astonishment to most of the commentary at except for possibly you and one commentator who I saw in the New Statesman and they failed to take and the The Conservative campaign, which allowed them to hold that seat, was a campaign in opposition to extending the ultra -low emissions zone out to Outer London, which would have charged people with cars that were considered polluting a great deal of money.

2:36This was a centerpiece of Srikkan, the Labour Mayor's policy, and it's one that the Labour candidate supported. it. But after the result where Labour lost that seat, it slightly seemed as though Kierstammer Labour leadership has been backpedaling and they've been less keen on the ultra -learn mission zone. They've slightly been shifting the blame on the Cedect's Khan's policy. And it's raised a whole question about how much they're prepared to trade beliefs and environmental policies to win votes. Yeah, just at one small point of that, Danny Beals, the candidate, did actually come out against the policy, but it was well into the campaign by then.

3:15And MacIbe being quite troubled by this whole thing, to be honest, and it has given it a feeling of labour somehow snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. The result in Selby, as you say, was utterly stunning. And the one thing that we know, because they have the help of such a biased right wing press who also influenced the agenda of the broadcasters, the Tories are very, very, very good at framing an argument. And I just for the life of me can't understand how they've allowed the whole debate about these elections to become about Ules. We had a question from a guy called Jeff Spink, how on earth did Johnson not get names the father of Ules?

3:57This is a policy that was designed by Boris Johnson when he was mayor. The sedate Khan is taking forward, in part because he believes in it and I support him in those beliefs. And believe strongly, I mean, it's written the whole book on air pollution, hasn't it? But also because the UK government has made local authorities, in this case, Cedet Khan, take on the development of clean air policy. And so this is a policy which I think labor. They seem to be to have gone into the campaign without a clear line. And so therefore, the line developed, the Tories seized on this to make it almost a single issue campaign, which is utterly ridiculous when you think that the newly -ledged server -gampy can do literally nothing to change it.

4:46And Kirstoff said something I think a bit worrying to my mind. He said that we're doing something wrong if the Tories party is putting our policies all over his leaflets. I don't agree with that at all. In 1997, I loved it when they, when they, when the Tories came out and said, if you vote, Labour and get a minimum wage, it cost a million jobs. Because it gave us the opportunity to go out and argue against that. I loved it when they said, if you have a Scottish Parliament, you'll break up the United Kingdom because we could go out and argue why we felt there should be a Scottish Parliament. So I think that there's, is he supposed to kind of defensiveness, which I think is, is not the best way to go into the best mindset with which to go into a general election.

5:30And I do think on the bigger point about the environment. I mean, here we are. What have people been watching on the news in the last couple of days? Co -Foo, terrible fires, and going right to the heart of this debate about climate a change in about clean air. And so I just think that sometimes politicians have to be big and bold and brave and say, yeah, okay, well, we're going to take that one on the chin, we move on. And the other point to make worry, we never won Uxbridge. That was people keep making these comparisons with 1997 and now. We did not win Uxbridge. No, John Randall, of Uxbridge held on to.

6:06Exactly. But we did. Labour did win last week, sell be another seat which we didn't win. So this I'm afraid is I think that we labor were just outdone politics. Reminder for people listening who don't live in London about what this whole thing's about. So people remember that in the centre of London something called the congestion charge and then outside the very very centre of London where the congestion charge was was this thing called the ultra -learn mission zone which covered I suppose sort of zones two and three on the tube map. And then this is a push to take the actual Hermitian Zone out to the very edges of London.

6:44I mean, Oxbridge is right out by Heathrow Airport, far, far west of London, bringing another two million people within the actual Hermitian Zone. And if you've got a petrol car made before 2006 or a diesel car I think made before 2016, you have to pay 12 pounds 50 a day to drive it. You can get a little bit of assistance if you're on various forms of benefits towards getting a new car, £2000 grant, but the problem from the point of view of people in out of London is they will be charged, particularly people on lower incomes with older cars, if you had a diesel car which is 10 years old, £12 .50 a day, and what they would say is that it's much easier in central London to get buses, to get tubes and have other forms of transport.

7:30So they feel it. I mean, these outer London areas, as you're aware, traditionally, were more working -class areas in central London. So they feel this is a tax on working -class people with older cars who are very reliant on their cars to get around. Now, I agree with you 100%, it's a policy that needs to be implemented. It's a policy that I backed when I was running to the Mara London, but I was very aware when I was backing it, that I was taking a huge political risk. And the reason this matters, I suppose, is that putting aside that chat around the by -elections, it's a classic test of environmental policy going forwards because environmental taxes, the kind of things you need to do to change behavior, are almost always regressive.

8:11They almost always hit the poorest people hardest because it's the poorest who find that more of their money is spent on transport. More of their money is spent on energy and heating compared to wealthy people where it's a small proportion of their budgets. So, big, big challenge for environmental policy. Yeah, I agree with that, but 4 ,000 people died of asthma in London last year. These are facts that just did not emerge in this debate because I think Labour kind of hit away from it when I think there was a good attack to be mounted on the Tories, their hypocrisy, the fact that they were lying about the nature and the history of the policy.

8:46You know, I actually think the very fact that Johnson, well, we were having this by -election because Johnson had left Parliament because he was exposed for the whole world to see as a total liar. Yeah, that should have been more relevant. Absolutely. Therefore, you'd have thought that his successors lying about the policy at his history could have been made part of the debate. Now, I'm not saying that that should have sort of tried, labelled should have come along and said, let's not talk about the cost of them, we'll talk about that. And I also think in the aftermath, I don't like this sort of, you know, a lot of people around the Labour leadership seem to be, you know, dumping on Siddiqar and saying he was being difficult and he didn't want to trim the policy.

9:28And we did the podcast on the, on the by elections on Friday. I made the point that I think that what has to happen in these circumstances is if you've got a Labour leadership that is trying to get elected nationally, a Labour figures be it Siddiqar or a council leader or Andy Burnham, whatever it might be, in power now, you have to have discussions and you have to come agreements, but I don't like all this kind of dumping on him and so forth. So I hope Labour learned some lessons about the way this campaign has gone. They should not have allowed the expectations to run out of hand. The expectation was so high that they would win that not winning became seen as a defeat.

10:08And I certainly don't think they should allow this defeat to lead to a wholesale review of policy. And we're talking about them, I think, because people are looking for better standards than the Tories. The Tories are also now talking about because of this bi -election, because of their success, they're going to do more to quote David Cameron again, dumping on the green crap. And I hope they don't. Yeah. Couple of things. Sidi Khan, I think, has been looking for an issue where he can show real courage. and this is a good moment for him. He is a dominant figure in London politics. It's going to be incredibly unlikely that a London Tory mayoral candidate can defeat him now.

10:48Especially the ones that keep picking. Yeah, London's a very, very Labour city and actually the Tories are very unpopular around the country. So this is the moment where CityCarm will be feeling that he has the political capital. What's the point of being Mayor of London unless he can take a bit of risk? He can almost certainly take through a policy that's a bit unpopular but still one election. And you would have thought that was something to get behind. But it does mean that as we go into the general election, we're going to face this problem. And I think it's going to be a theme all the way through this podcast because it's true of Spain and it's true in spades of Israel, which is how does the progressive left the sort of labor party equivalent respond to right wing populism?

11:31Do they get dragged further right? do the right -wing populists end up defining the debate so that Kierstarmoff finds himself completely unable to say anything about the environment, to say anything about higher taxes or higher spending, unable to say anything about immigration, unable to say anything about the European Union, because basically the debate has been defined by the populist rights and he doesn't want any gaps between him and them. Well, the answer to your question is actually in the question, it's about who manages to define the parameters of the debate. And if you allow your opponents to define those parameters, it's very, very hard.

12:07I'm not pretending that it is easy to take on these populists, but you have to have very strong clear positions that people are willing to support. Before we leave the UK, I got a message from Bridget Phillips in the office saying that you were wrong in what you said about childcare. There had not been a promise of, as it were, universal childcare. and also there had not been a promise of free school meals for all. There is a promise of massive expansion of childcare, but it does not quantify as childcare for all. Thank you very much. Well, I think that the dispute here is, and I'm largely here following the Guardian, is whether the Labour Party's signal that it was going to be more radical and then road back, or whether it's Pitchfield or Filos and its office is trying to say to you, they were always planning to do something much more modest than people hoped.

12:54Yeah, although they were probably something very, very radical, but not as radical as it was described by the time Rory Stewart presented it so Miliflu and the other rest is politics Very good. Thank you. All right hopping on Spain. So Spain quit my people Spain I think people are gonna make what a big country it is 47 million people So just there behind Germany Britain France and Italy. 15th largest economy in the world. But unlike those other countries, a country that became a democracy much more recenty. So became a democracy in the 1970s after the death of Franco. Dominated in the 1980s, so I think we talked about this in the podcast, but dominated by Felipe Gonzalez.

13:35Fine man. They're a quim to the Labour Party through to the 96. Then a man called Azzanard, so it then swung back to their equivalent to Conservative Party. Just don't Azzanard by the way. He smoked the biggest cigar I've ever seen in my life. Well apparently that's a big thing in right -wing politics in Spain. Well, cigar smoking? Yeah, when people try to define what makes a box, it's Mokismo and cigar smoking, but actually strangely, far -right politics in Spain, some people say it's less kind of Franco -esque, less anti -immigrant than you'd expect. It's more about kind of macho guys smoking big cigars.

14:12Well, as an I remember one of the European summit in Nice, and Tony and Nazna were having a, I think we're quite friendly, Tony went to Nazna's daughter's wedding, I think it was, and Nazna, we had dinner and then Nazna said to one of his people, get me one of my cigars and the guy went away and he and he got on for Tony as well and I mean I know the Tony knew what to do with it, it was so big. How does he get any's mouth to his side? Anyway, he let this cigar and sort of merrily puffed on it all evening. Sorry, I interrupted you off low. Well, no, it was so basically that the story is that Spanish politics has seemed from the outside pretty regular.

14:50After the 13 years of Philippe González, it then swapped back and forward from, as it were, their equipment of labor to conservatives, back to labor, back to conservatives, back to labor again, with everybody getting six or seven years in office. And that brought us basically up to May of this year, where Pedro Sanchez, so that couldn't the labor party PSOE, was back in Paragon did badly in the mayor elections, Triggin' election, and it seemed likely that Spanish politics was gonna follow its normal rhythm, swing back towards the right again, and it's true, they're according to the Conservative Party, PP got the most votes, but they didn't get enough to get a majority in parliament.

15:31They were going to form a coalition people expected with Vox, which is a small far -right party, the sort of Mekismos Agas smoking Proto -Franco party, and they dropped from 52 seats to 33 seats. So this in the speech, and the reason I keep talking about cigars is that in Sanchez great speech, where he greets the result. And Sanchez is an interesting looking man. He's quite kind of good looking from San Aguil, it's a bit like George Clooney, he has his blue jeans, denim shirt, gives the speech in which he says, this is a defeat of Mekismo. Now you took a big risk here because you know perhaps he sometimes political leaders have a sense of things that the polls and the pundits and the public even don't necessarily have because I think the conventional wisdom that was forming was that it's a massive risk and it's going to end up with their Tory party in coalition with as you say the far right, Vox.

16:29But what seems to have happened is that the public have taken a good look at a vox and thought, hmm, don't want you in government. And there's a lot of interesting things happen. So, and we were talking about labor winning, but looking like they had lost. I mean, Sanchez in a way lost, but he's looking like he won. And likewise, the PP, they won, but because they can't form a government, they're going as losers as well. And the other thing that's of course very interesting in their politics is Catalonia and the Basque Country with separatist movements. And Sanchez did very much, much better than he spated in those areas.

17:05And though he probably won't be able to form a government, he might, I think the other law, I think the right to not be able to form a government, I think Sanchez can only think about it by doing it with the hard left and with the independence parties, which would damage, which would, you know, and that was one of the reasons he did so badly in the local elections because people felt he was too supportive of the independent parties and outside those areas most Spaniards want to keep Catalonia and the Bass Territory. And so what you see is that it's not essentially polarized, but we've seen a sense of political stalemate here.

17:41So I think the smart money is probably on another election within a few months. And you know, it's possible because the whole Webatic to ace baitations, because Sanchez did better, it's possible actually that that gives a sense of momentum to him and that he actually might think, well, next time I can get it over a line. Well, we've got a great leading episode coming, which goes into Spain more for people who'd like to learn more about Spain with Miriam Gonzales, who set up a fantastic new movement in Spain to try to define policies, particularly in the centre ground, where she goes into this.

18:16But to remind people, I think Spain is the sort of odd shadow of France. In both cases, broadly speaking, five parties emerged, the old traditional equivalents of the British Conservative of a Labour Party and then a centrist party, a far left and a far right party in Spain, what happened is that the centre party basically collapsed, disappeared. Vox has performed quite badly and Podemos has also, which was the left wing party that came out of austerity with an amazing kind of Jeremy Corbyn -esque guy with a ponytail, so a communist with a ponytail. Those smaller parties weren't the old left and right parties of reassert themselves, whereas in France, of course, what happened is the centre on the Macron.

18:57came through and won. The old left and right have vanished, leaving the extreme left and the extreme right and center. Yeah, it's very, very mentioned, Mary and the her take on the election, is that actually the vote ought to have been seen as of indication of the more moderate parties over the extreme ones because the two main parties, the P P and the PSOE, got 68 % of the vote, which is pretty good. However, because they barely speak to each other, certainly, can't reach an agreement. The ones holding the balance of power are the two extreme independentist parties. And Sanchez got into trouble in public opinion with them because they are run by and represented by or amongst their leaders, people who are, frankly, very, very close to the former terrorist organization, Etta.

19:48And he got into a bit of trouble with that. And then under a European arrest warrant. So it's quite hard to say, right, I'm putting my college together, I'm going to go with the extreme left party, I'm going to go with one former terrorist party, I'm going another one with the leader who's under a European arrest warrant. That feels quite unstable to me. That's why I think an election is probably more likely. Well, all of this is much, much more mild and much more moderate than the subject we're going to go on to now after the break, which is Israel, which is politics at an existential tragedy.

20:27I'm in a scale far beyond what we're talking about in the Oxford by election in Spain. So should we take a quick break and then come back and get into Israel?

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21:46So welcome back to the rest of this politics with me Maurice Stuart. And me, Mr. Campbell. And we've both thought that really the central theme for this week has to be Israel. I've just returned from Israel where I saw my friend Yoval Noah Hariri and we're going to be interviewing him on the podcast later this week for leading. He's been right at the very center of these huge protest movements, been going on for more than 20 weeks in Tel Aviv. Over 100 ,000 people in the street and they basically represent the more liberal progressive side in Israel, taking on this right -wing government of Benjamin Netanyu, and it's a very, very strange echo in many ways of a lot of the things we talk about on this podcast.

22:37There are elements of it that feel like Democrats against Republicans like taking on Trump because for many people, and you'll pick this up when we talk to Yoval, They feel it's an existential threat to their entire conception of their country. People are beginning to talk about just leaving the country entirely. It obviously has echoes of where people feel about Brexit remain. It's a sort of culture war in which often more working -class people are endorsing the right -wing populists, and particularly people from more Middle East than Jewish ancestry as opposed to European Jewish ancestry who've felt marginalized and very much pitched as by the populist as the people against the elite, trying to characterize the kind of liberals and Tel Aviv as the elite.

23:20But all of that made much, much more dangerous and risky because this is not Britain, this is not the United States, it's not even populism in Turkey. This is Israel with a full scale occupation, with very difficult military relationships with its neighbors, with nuclear weapons, with an ultra -orthodox community with a religious just scientists, community who are pushing very, very hard on religious laws. So what's your sense of the whole thing from looking at it from your end? Well, I find the whole thing incredibly depressing. It just feels to me like the place is on the edge. We said briefly last week that we couldn't see a way forward currently in the Israel -Palestine issue where you throw this into the mix and it just makes the very, very difficult feel like it's completely and totally impossible.

24:11And I suppose it's interesting to explain what this is all about. So you have a situation where Israel doesn't have a written constitution, doesn't have a second chamber, so they have a very, very powerful parliament, a very, very powerful government. The only real check on it is the Supreme Court. And the Supreme Court has annoyed Netanyahu at times. It refused, for example, to let him appoint somebody to his government who had been criminal, who had been inside prison and when he came out of prison, the part of the deal was that he wouldn't go back to public life. Then you are who tried to get him back.

24:47The court stopped him. His argument is the court is too political. I think we've heard that in lots of countries where they've tried to shut down the power of the courts. But the other big thing here, of course, you mentioned the religious element is that two of the most powerful members of the government now, a guy called Itamiya Ben Givir, who's the Minister of national security and Bersal Smotrich, who is the head of the religious Zionism party and is the finance minister, they are hard to know what you'd call them. I suppose in the you mentioned the Trump comparison where there is an element of kind of white supremacy around.

25:22I guess this is about Jewish supremacy. Exactly. So I think that it's much more extreme than Trump. So if the Prime Minister Benjamin in Netanyahu is the equivalent of Trump. In other words, somebody who's flirting with these people whipping them up, the big difference here is this would be like Trump putting in his cabinet in his senior positions as sexually the treasury or sexually responsible security, permanent security, people who were literally the equivalents of the January 6th insurrection people. I mean, these people are very, very far out. So the man that Ben Gavir, who you mentioned who's got the security job, is somebody who until recently had a picture on his wall of a Jewish terrorist who had killed 26 Palestinians in an attack on a mosque.

26:11He was associated with a banned party that was actually associated itself with Jewish terrorism and came out of that tradition. And recent events that this gets whipped up involve recently a Israeli soldier shouting to settlers, because this will all be sorted out when Ben Gavir comes, because he and Smotrich are not remotely interested in Palestinian rights, two -state solution. In fact, their vision is that all the territory that Israel took, not just in the 1940s, but in 1967, which was the territory that stretched all the way, Golan Heights, West Bank, called the Way to the Jordan River, stuff that used to belong to Syria and Jordan, and indeed a bit used to belong to Egypt, is gonna become the permanent Israeli homeland, that this was the traditional religious area of the Jews.