158. Sunak's net zero culture war, Africa's 'coup belt', and a new strategy for the German far-right

0:00Thanks for listening to The Restless Politics. Sign up to The Restless Politics plus to enjoy Adfree Listening and receive a weekly newsletter. Join our members' chat room again early access to live show tickets. Just go to TheRestlessPolities .com. That's TheRestlessPolities .com. Let's play Burlington's Guess That Price! Back to school means Back to Saving. We're bringing you kids jeans starting at a hold on a minute, just $11 .99. Burlington's Acing This Test. What about character backpacks? We've got them starting at $12 .99. Burlington's done it again. How about sneakers for the kids? 8 plus brands and right on trend starting at $11 .99!

0:36Saving is now in session. Burlington deals, brands, wow! Stalls and selections vary by location. Running a business comes with a lot of what -ifs. But luckily, there's a simple answer to them. Shopify. It's the commerce platform behind millions of businesses, including thrive cosmetics and Momofuku, and it'll help you with everything you need. From website design and marketing to boosting sales and expanding operations, Shopify can get the job done and make your dream a reality. Turn those what -ifs into? Sign up for your $1 per month trial at Shopify .com slash -best -all -offer. Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile.

1:14With the price of just about everything going up, we thought we'd bring our prices down. So to help us, we brought in a reverse auctioneer, which is apparently a thing. Mid mobile unlimited premium wireless. Have it to get 30, 30, 30, 30, 30, 20, 20, 20, 20, 20, 20, 20, 20, 20, 20, 20, 15, 15, 15, 15, just 15 bucks a month. So give it a try at midmobile .com slash switch. Up front payment of $45 for three months plan equivalent to $15 per month required. New customer offer for first three months only. Speed slow after 35 gigabytes of networks busy. Taxes and fees extra, see midmobile .com.

1:50Welcome to the Restisted Politics with me, Alistair Campbell. And with me, Rory Stewart. Now, Rory, we're going to be talking in the second half about the 7th coup in Africa since 2020, this one in New Year. We're also going to talk about the problems in Sweden in particular and also Denmark, where that there's been this caran burning going on, which has led to all sorts of difficulties for Sweden and to a less of Ustember Denmark. But we're going to kick off with Ulez, but also you've been digging into this a little bit. So just tell us what you've found in relation to the campaign against the ultra low emission zone extension.

2:32Absolutely. So we've talked a lot about populism, polarization post -truth and we've talked a little bit about the way in which new social media coincides with that. So obviously there's no coincidence that the Arab Spring takes off in 2011 once Facebook and Twitter's going and we can talk about that a little bit actually also in the way that coos are spreading across Africa. There's a bit of a social media story there too. We've seen social media playing a role in the election of Donald Trump in 2016.

3:05We've really clear proper methodology is beginning to be shared with the public on how this actually works and friend of mine called Emma Skies shared some research from Valent which has looked at the U -Lets campaign. What is Valent Rory? So Valent is a research organization that focuses it seems on social media manipulation and they've done a particular study around the creation of new Twitter accounts in the campaign in London which led to the conservatives holding up bridge, which was a campaign about ultra -lure mission zone. So again, just very, very quickly to remind people this was Cedicun, the Marif London trying to extend new taxes on people with polluting vehicles out to the edge of London and the objective of that was to stop air pollution and help climate and it's been very, very unpopular, particularly with people who felt that a lot of their incomes was going to have to go into paying these taxes on their cars.

4:02So what's very interesting though in this study is that what they found is the way in which this is done. And I want to pause for a second before I get into the granularity of it and maybe push the conversation back to you a little bit because I first came across this when I was running to be Mayor of London. I don't mean the U -Less issue. I did come across that, but I mean this emergence of a new type of political campaign consultant offering to win elections by manipulating social media. I had two quite significant companies come to see me in my house in London. Overseas companies saying to me, if I employed them at very, very considerable cost, it was going to be hundreds of thousands of pounds a month, they would win the London election for me by manipulating social media.

4:54And they would say things like we have worked with, you know, 30 countries across the world. We've just won an election in a former Soviet republic. We've just done something in the Middle East. One of these companies claimed to be associated with people who were ex -Israeli intelligence and special forces officials. They showed me ad campaigns that they'd run in the past, and they claimed to be able to manipulate TikTok, Facebook, Twitter. They said they'd done it recently in an election in Eastern Europe. And if I was going to hire them, they'd be able to do that for me. So let me just pause that.

5:29And obviously, spoiler, I was slightly horrified by the suggestion that I did not proceed with these companies. Presumably, you'd have been limited. Well, you wouldn't have been able to do it legally because where they cost, where they're spending limits on the London Merrill campaign. No, very weirdly, there were no spending limits on the London Merrill campaign. It's very odd, it's unlike a normal British MP campaign. So you could have done it. Yeah, could have done it. Almost limitless. The question was, could you raise the money? So you would have to raise many, many millions. That would be the first constraint.

6:03And to put that in context, labor and the conservators were probably spending four, five million each on the London Merrill election, although they don't disclose that money properly. So for an independent you'd have to raise that money. You'd have to deal with the very significant reputational risk if it ever came out. But I guess if you were really desperate to win it, it would have been pretty appealing, pretty tempting to have these people offering that they could win it for you by doing the stuff that if you pay them a few hundred thousand a month they can bring through. I do get the feeling based on some of his recent utterances that Rishi Sunak is definitely desperate to win and they've made a couple of changes as well about some of the aren't they raising the limits on spending that you can have for campaigns before having to declare them?

6:50So I think there, I wonder whether Rishi Srinat might be a tad more ruthless than you, Rory. And perhaps take some of these people under his wing. Listen, I've worked in campaigns in different parts of the world. And the first thing to say is, as you know, I'm not a big tech person. I probably should be. I give a very good impression of being quite good social media, but I don't think I am at all. And on this kind of manipulative side, I simply don't understand how it works. So we can get on to discussion based on this, what you do, what you do, and relate to. The first thing I'd say is around the world, there are companies which specialize in persuading politicians and leaders of campaigns that they could help them.

7:35They've always worked with Mossad and the Special Forces, somewhere in the world. They always will give you some sort of amazing explanation as to why they can do things that other people can't. But of course, if you think back to Brexit, it's not impossible to make the case that Cambridge Analytica swung it, you know, a fairly narrow win. Likewise, I think in some of these elections in less established democracies where they don't necessarily have the limits on spending some of the codes of conduct are perhaps a little bit less strict than and we might like them to be, then I think it is possible to make the case that a very, very effective, aggressive social media campaign can be the difference to a candidate.

8:18So I think you were probably right to turn them down. However, I do think that there is something or what they're saying. And what it seems to me from, I've read the thing you discovered from Valent. And what it seems to be, am I right in this? is that they essentially are creating accounts which project a certain world view and this is what they do in relation to those and then they have all this amplification that they can. Yeah, yeah exactly. So let me just come in and let me sort of put on the record that I have an absolutely no reason to think that Rishi Sunak is hiring a bunch of dubious ex -special forces to do social media manipulation.

9:02That would be a pretty big story if that came out. I think I was just making a more general case that you can see how tempting this must be to politicians. He's got some pretty ruthless Aussies on the payroll. Now, so back to the Uleads case, what seems to happen is that there is about 10 % of it, and this is obviously critical, of genuine authentic accounts of people who are really wound up about Uleads. And these seem to have been properly checked out, and these seem to be real people with proper profile pictures, you can trace them down and that there's no doubt they're real people. The trick though is that since November 2021, nine times as many accounts were created, which appear to be fake accounts and the purpose of those fake accounts is to amplify, as you say, what's said by the real people.

9:57In fact, often these fake accounts are not really generating much material themselves. A lot of what they're doing is simply retweeting what's done by the first accounts, but to be powerful, they have to out with the Twitter algorithm. And just as people will be familiar with this, if you want to get your ads high up on Google, you have to understand how the Google algorithm works. And if you want to really break Twitter, you have to work out how the Twitter algorithm works. I noticed you're calling it Twitter. Not X. You're refusing to go with the Elon Musk rename. I'm going to call it Twitter.

10:30I'm not calling it eggs. I mean, I'm going to claim a letter to yourself. Bagger off. So, how, first I think interesting thing in the Valence study is how do you identify? This is useful for all of us when we're looking at our Intuitary accounts. How do you identify it? Something that is a fake account. And the answer is you want to look for one that's newly registered. You want to look for one that has a very high number of retweets, not much original content. You want to try to see something that's almost solely focused on a single issue. So it's a bit of a giveaway if they're almost entirely focused in this case on U -Lers or if they're totally focused on the Russian case around Ukraine.

11:09And finally you want to look at the fact that they're often using fake profile pictures stolen from other people. They can be made quite easily these accounts. In fact, one of these companies linked to Israel, which there was a great Guardian article on February 2023, which we can share on our exclusive newsletter. And it goes out every Friday, and if you're not signed up, then go to therestispolitics .com and this week we'll also be showing some video footage from Africa. And this particular company sat down with undercover journalists and showed them how to create these accounts. And you could do them in a few seconds.

11:44He sits there and he says, effectively, you can get a thousand fake accounts for 31 pounds, it seems. And he just shows you you how you do it. You just sit there and you say, okay, do you want a man or a woman, which country do you want them to be from? Pick up a post, a photograph, creative with a strap line, creative with a name boom, you've got your account. And they can do this. There's a piece of software called Ames where companies can create 30 ,000 accounts across LinkedIn, Facebook, TikTok, Twitter at a time and then operate them all remotely. And when you say operate them remotely, presumably that, once you're into that, that doesn't involve human beings at all.

12:21This is all being done by automated software. Well, I think you could often have one human being maybe directing four or five thousand accounts pretty easily. And one of the ways in which you get Twitter to promote your products is by getting fake followers. So one lot follows another lot. And that gives Twitter the impression that this is a really great account that's taking off. The giveaway with a lot of bots in the past has been you have sort of one or two followers as you she assigned that the something but dubious about it. But these things can generate hundreds of followers quite quickly.

12:56Well, does has your friend Emma been able to assess who has been willing to pay large sums of money in this particular campaign? Is it possible to trace him back to the I don't know the oil and gas industry or to the Tory party or to Tofton Street or whoever it might be. No, so far the research has been very careful to say that they estimate that this campaign around ULAS will have cost about £160 ,000, so considerable sum of money, almost certainly paid to a company like these companies that I've referred to, contracting one of those companies to do it, probably costs a bit more actually, to be honest, $160 ,000 sounds to me like a bit of a bargain given the sorts of money these companies were asking for me, although they may have seen me as a bit of a sucker.

13:44But as they say, they are only studying Twitter. They haven't looked at Facebook, which is notoriously actually much more prevalent this kind of abuse on Facebook. So the actual scale of this campaign on Ulysses could well have been a much, much bigger half a million million dollar campaign and they're saying they don't know what was happening on the other platforms and they have no idea where the money was coming from or who was paid to do it. And meanwhile, Siddiqan won his case in the high court against Tory councils that were trying to block the expansion of Ules. And also meanwhile, following on from the Oxbridge by -election and the route that there's been about Ules, Rishi Sunak seems to be going off on the remarkable kind of anti -environmental.

14:34He defines it as promoterist, latest plank of his campaign strategy, talking about reviewing 20 mile in our speed limits near schools, talking about reviewing low traffic neighborhoods, being photographed, I found this a little bit bizarre of all the things he could do this time, being photographed at the wheel of Margaret Fatcher's Rover and saying that only the were pro -motorists that the labor hates the motorist. And the other thing, he goes on about, I'm on the side of the motorist, but the other thing labor should be saying, well, you may be on the side of the motorist, you say, but you're not on the side of the motor car industry because your beloved Brex is, frankly, wiped out.

15:15So, Rory, you're a Tory -ish. What is going on with this one? Well, I think clearly they have concluded from Oxbridge that there are votes in being on the side of the motorist. And I think this is partly about a strategy about trying to keep a blue collar working class conservative voters on side. Those are the people who are most affected by this ULAS stuff. That will be the people living in out of London who have older cars who are on low incomes and who are struggling to work out where they're going to get £12 .50 a day extra to pay for driving their existing cars. I think it's one of the reasons why Labour has been very, very shy about coming strongly behind Siddiquette's policy, they clearly feel the stress of this.

16:02And they're putting labor in a very, very difficult position because it's going to be difficult for the city can to say, I absolutely agree with the Tories, I'm on the side of the motorists, but equally it's going to be very, very difficult for them to risk alienating those voters by sounding like that out of touch. And this, I think, you know, brings us on to what's happening across Europe because if you look at the alternative for Deutschland, the right -wing party that's just pulling 20 % of the moment in Germany, a loss of that has been about attacking the environmental policies of people like Angela Merkel, as well as her immigration policies.

16:37And this relates to this bigger thing that we've been talking about for the last few weeks, which is that unfortunately the way that environmental policies have been done in Europe are regressive. They have the biggest impact on the poor because the poor pay the largest proportion of their budgets for their fuel, for motoring or their fuel for heating their homes. So one of the things that people like you and me who care about the environment but also care about equality have to crack is how do you get environmental policies in place that don't find their biggest burden falling on the extreme port?

17:07Yeah. I mean, I think just before we leave Sunak and the kind of politics of this, because the other thing that's happened this morning, just before we started recording, Sunak doing of his it's Scotland and saying that they're going to allow another hundred exploratory licenses for oil and gas in the North Sea, Labour having had a pretty strong line against. Now, first of all, is he now just doing everything as a sort of political positioning against Labour? And is that actually clever politics for somebody who is one trying to show that they're a bit different to what went before? And secondly, in a country that feels pretty much like is in a mess.

17:48And I'm not convinced by that. If I did, when I was looking for your wedding ring in Bucksdon last week. Thank you for that. I'm sorry I failed. Ian Dale was my interlocutor. And Ian, I think, is a, you know, people know is sort of broadly a Tory, probably well to the right of you, I would say. Yeah, and he was my opponent in the Brackenall election. We stood against each other for selection. We were both beaten by a man called Philip Lee, who was the local doctor. Who's now a liberal Democrat? Now a liberal Democrat, exactly. So he's to the left of you, you're to the right of him and then he endels even to the right of both of you.

18:23But I said to Ian, we were talking about this, who layers and we were talking about some of the culture issues that Sunak seems to be wanting to dive into. And I was saying, is the fact now that they're so kind of scared of their record, they don't really have much of a plan for the future. So this is going to focus on these cultural issues and trends and kick back on the environmental agenda. Ian said something very interesting. He said, well, they might be trying that, but if they do, they're going to lose people like me. And I thought that was very interesting because it does strike me that Sunak is really trying to hit what I would identify as the cultural issues as opposed to a proper big agenda for the future.

19:10Yeah, well, I mean, I think that's right. And I think you can see it Tim Montgomery who's also well to the right of me He's another conservative commentator was very disturbed by Rishi Suneaks tweet in which he Seems to be comparing labor to criminal gangs and their support on immigration. Oh, yeah, that was pretty grim That was on a par with the posters that you really hated the labored it exactly So I think there's there's a I think that there is a real concern about that Where of course the conservatives are right is this is going to be an election As I think we'd better agree, a pocketbook election is going to be fought around the economy.

19:43And Labour needs to be very careful not to sound as though it's pursuing environmental policies which are going to stop growth. Which is why it may be smart for Rishi Sunak to focus on oil and gas exploration in Scotland because it's a huge part of the Scottish economy. It's absolutely the key to constituencies like Aberdeen, where oil and gas is a massive employer and it's not just a massive employer in Aberdeen. It's also all the export of Scottish skills and oil and gas around the world. So, I mean, to repeat the point, I mean, I would like to see one of these parties say we are going to make a very difficult decision of transferring exactly the same amount of cash or even more to the people who are having to pay this U -Las so that it encourages them to swap vehicles to save money, but they're not actually out of pocket if they choose to stick with the vehicle they currently have.

20:32that that will be massively expensive. Yeah, although if there's one issue in the politics, not just of the UK, but of every country in the world, where you think it's sort of crying out for somebody to show real leadership, and leadership being about all of us having to do certain things we find difficult, then I think this is one of them. And the other thing is, I mean, I know I'm mildly obsessed with Brexit and the politics of Brexit, but I think the other reason why I think labor have been wrong to be shy about calling out the mistakes of Brexit is because now we see the same people who brought us Brexit, who campaigned hardest for Brexit, and now the loudest voices calling for us to slow down on net zero, just this week for Arge, Duncan Smith, David Davis, Riesmog, the same people who I think led the fight for something which which I think most people now realize is pretty much damaging our country.

21:31And now the exact same people using the exact same campaign methods to try to weaponize their word, the climate. And I think that's just so irresponsible that we should call it out more. Final thing just before we leave this subject, this U -LES abuse of Twitter It matters much more than just for the Oxbridge by -election because as AI begins to play into the space, artificial intelligence will make this kind of manipulation much, much easier and will define the US election. So what we're seeing here is my explaining a relatively clunky analog attempt to manually create a few thousand Twitter accounts to amplify some statements around a by -election.

22:18But AI can take this to a scale where the qualitative difference is absolutely unbelievable. And these companies are offering many services beyond this. I mean, the Guardian investigation, which we'll share, has these companies using fake accounts on Amazon to buy sex toys and deliver them to politicians homes in order to destroy their marriages with their wives. They're breaking into people's telegram accounts. So one trick is to send a telegram message apparently from the leader of your party saying, I promise you the role of foreign secretary in my new administration and then send it to 15 other MPs at the same time to totally discredit the reputation of the leader etc etc.

23:01This is and all of this can be done so easily. There's something called an SS7 vulnerability in the global communication system that allows these people to get into things like telegram that people thought was safe. Anyway, enough about that. But just worth returning to again again, because the next elections are going to be more and more about this. No, and as you say, particularly with, I mean, I'd like to think some of our politicians might look at this and think this could be a problem for our democracies as a whole, but I think all too many politicians, unlike you when you had the people coming to see you to go for London mayor, will be very, very, very tempted to use anything that gives than the competitive advantage, which won't be exposed until after the event, as the other thing.

23:41A lot of the stuff people do in campaigns. And of course, one of the problems in the modern world is that there is a sort of vicious cycle here because we may end up in a world in which the politicians who refuse to use this stuff don't get elected, the politicians who do use this exactly. Exactly. And that changes the whole culture. And just very briefly on what's happening in Europe, because there is a lot going on at the moment. I was following the AFD, the alternative for and they had their kind of annual conference. Got that must have been a fun thing to follow, blind me. Well, it's sort of interesting.

24:11And they had a huge banner behind, which was essentially saying, given how much we've achieved in the last 10 years, think about how much we can achieve in the next. They've only been going 10 years. They're now into 20 % polling. And ahead of the social democrats, not far behind. They're only behind. The only party they're behind is the CDU, the Christian democrats. So it would be, and just to give British listeners a sort of equivalent, that presumably would be a bit like UKIPPOL the Brexit Party overtaking Labour and being just behind the Conservatives. Yeah, absolutely. Presumably actually they are a bit worse than UKIPPOL the Brexit Party.

24:47I mean, because they've got a history with much stranger kind of neo -Nazi stuff in the background, right? Yeah, but they've done the same thing that Le Pen has done and Maloney's done and UKIPP tried to do of sort of decontaminate themselves as the worst elements. And they've actually moved off. It's interesting when we talk about this environmental stuff. They still bang on about migration a lot, but they're also part of this debate about environmental change being a thing for the elite. We've seen something similar in Holland, which frankly is giving the impression at the moment of being virtually ungovernable, but they're sort of out of nowhere this farmer's party has emerged and become very significant in the debate, again focused on the environment.

25:32But what's been interesting in Germany in recent days is that Mertz, whose Angela Merkel's successor as leader of the CDU, obviously now in opposition, and they've got this thing called the Firewall. They talk about a firewall between them and the AFD. They'll never have anything to do with the AFD. And he did an interview on television last weekend where he sort of suggested that when it came to local politics, it could be very, very different. And people are seeing this is the first chink in the firewall. And of course, it's very, very difficult because how do you, if you're, let's just imagine the next election in Germany becomes where the obvious thing becomes an alliance between the CDU and the AFD.

26:15How do you kind of handle that unless you have been absolutely clear as Merkel was the whole way through, we will never have anything to do with them. And there's a huge history of this, isn't there? There's a great book on populism by Jan Valnammulla from Princeton and he Has the conventional wisdom which is what you must not do is give Is formal alliances with these people or start imitating their policies because that only strengthens them Yeah, and but Unfortunately as they get stronger and stronger it's more and more difficult to hold that line I mean that of course was the line that people the conclusion people took from the 1930s which was that parties were too willing to work with the Nazi party, too willing to think, oh well, we'll cooperate with them on a bit of a local level, we can do a bit of a coalition there.

27:01And by doing so, just gave more legitimacy and space to these parties going forward. But Yan Van Amelah also points out that there's another paradox, which is if you try to completely ignore them and refuse to even debate them or argue with them, that causes another problem, which is that their support base, it just strengthens their sense of and release against the people, et cetera. Absolutely, absolutely. And that's the argument that's been running ever since. But what was interesting watching the AFD conference was that it was a sort of weird mixture of them looking confident because of the situation in the polls.