164. The Trial of Lucy Letby, the domination of the dollar, and politicians vs. lawyers

26:02Somebody who probably would get fired if anybody found out that they're in contact with me, who works in the attorney general's office, so that the attorney general, they have a regular quizz night. And there was a quizz question about our podcast the other night. Very good. Well, I hope the attorney general was able to win the podcast for the correct answer. No, no. So, but I do think on this, just to sort of be serious about this, I do really think that Alex Chalk, who's the current justice secretary, should say something. I actually think Rishi Sunak should say something because you say this is about central office.

26:34I think this is all part of the way Rishi Sunak intends to campaign. And I think he should say, if that is how central office thinks that we're going to run this campaign, we're not. You cannot do this without chipping away at the rule of law and the role of lawyers within it. I also think that Keir Starmer should say the same because he is a lawyer. They are doing it because he's a lawyer. So, why isn't he? I don't know because I think he probably thinks it would take him away from the things that he thinks he should be campaigning on. But I think standards and decency in public life are a big part of where the country is fed up with politics.

27:10And you don't think it is that he actually senses that he's worried that if he defends the lawyers, he begins to be associated with them. Possibly, but listen, he's going to be associated with them in ways that he's not able to define lefty lawyer. I think anybody who cares about the legal system cares about the rule of law should actually be out there the whole time saying there's no such thing as lefty lawyer or righty lawyer. As you said earlier, there is a group. There was a fantastic example. There's a very good substatic written by Joshua Rosenberg to rights about the law. But he had this wonderful.

27:45We talked before about law panic who defended Johnson and the party gate staff. And he made the point that the law panic has defended a series of home secretaries who face legal challenges to their policies on on Rwanda, while simultaneously opposing government legislation in the House of Lords. Now, likewise, you've got you've got conservative lawyers, you've got labor lawyers. Yeah, I think we I think we violently, violently agree on this. I think it's very, very worrying. I also think that it's worrying that Kirstaam is not coming out. And I think it's also worrying that the general case for liberal democracy is not being made strongly enough by either party.

28:27I'm also horrified by the way that Starmer isn't challenging. Some of the moves that the government now seems to be making for stronger sentences. I mean, and this has been something that's been going wrong since the mid 1990s. New Labor doubled the number of people in prison. And now we have a conservative government that's continuing on this path in posing longer and longer sentences, putting more and more people in jail when our prisons are already completely overcrowded where all the evidence suggests that it actually does no good and leads to rearfending. And Kirstaam who I would have hoped having been direct Republican prosecutions see the madness of this is instead seems to be joining in this general arms race of making Britain a real outlier in Europe now on the number of people that sense to prison.

29:12Well, I know you're very keen to make it about Labor and I have criticized Labor on this, but I just want to come back finally to Alex Chalk again because I agree with you. I remember I did some stuff with him during the People's Vote campaign. I think he's a very smart guy and what have you, but I think sometimes you've got to kind of dig pretty deep and find your principles on this stuff. So he was interviewed on the today program about this whole lefty lawyer's thing. And he said quote, I think it's fair to point out that there has been a growing and I think regrettable trend for lawyers to actively parade their politics and to identify more with their clients.

29:47And then that I'm quoting here from Joshua Rosenberg's sub -stack. Joshua Rosenberg then goes on said, Chalk has produced no evidence to support his thesis. I have not noticed any such change myself over the past 10 years. And he pointed out that lots of lawyers work for the trade unions, challenge mug, thatcher. And I think this is a deliberate attempt to undermine the role of lawyers as not being to support their clients, but somehow to support the government when it's going through difficulties with these controversial policies. And that's just fundamentally wrong. Can we violently agree on that as well?

30:24We do violently agree on this issue. Absolutely. Good. Good. Okay. On please, let's take a break on that point of violent agreement.

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31:48Welcome back to the REST's politics with me, Rory Stewart. And me, Anastagambo. And Rory, did you watch the World Cup final? I did not, but maybe you can tell us about it. So it's all about the Lionesses and Spanish. Well, I watched the game. I have to say I thought the BetterTeam won. And I think it's just this incredible. I don't know if you follow this story about the the captain of the Spanish team who scored the winning goal. She played without knowing that her father had died on Friday. And her mum kept it from her and the Spanish coach kept it from her. So she found out after this most amazing moment where she scored the winning goal in the Cup finals, she found out that her father had died, which I just think is one of those sort of stories that I don't know.

32:31Would you want that? Would you want people to hold back something like that from you? Do you think people have a right to conceal that from you? I think on that one, you leave it to the mother. I think the only person entitled to make a judgment on that is the mother and the siblings. And that's the judgment that they took. Yeah, I'd be very, very angry if somebody concealed something like that from me. Very, very angry. I'd feel very deeply, deeply betrayed. Well, one person who was celebrating the victory was Miriam Gonzalez Durantes, who is our first Spanish interviewee leading. And he's going, I'm going to say some wonderful messages about her today.

33:07I think she's a formidable woman. She's created these two very interesting organisations that we talk about in the podcast. And she had a lot of ringside stories to tell about life in the coalition elsewhere. And Rory, I think it's fair to say you came away as a bit of a fan. Definitely fan. She joins that slightly eccentric group of people that I've really come to admire through the podcast. She's sort of somehow there in the trio with Alan Milburn and Bernie Sanders. So she's quite a complicated trio emerging. And indeed, with Leigh Clegg, who's book you are promoting almost as often as you've brought your own.

33:39Given my often state and statements of love, I'm not quite sure whether you haven't had him on the podcast yet. No, we've got to get him on. We've got to get him on, especially now that his wife has been on and you know, been far more interesting than he would. Anyway, so Miriam has gone down very, very well. I thought she had some wonderful things to say about Brexit. My favourite phrase of the whole thing was when she talked about the people in Silicon Valley as German engineers who speak English. I did think that sort of sums up these rather nerdy geeky people that are currently running the world.

34:11But if people haven't heard our interview with Miriam Gonzalez, Drant, is it on leading now? I wanted to just quickly understand this question around slow news. So it is horrifying what we're learning about the killing of babies in hospitals. And there has been this issue around lefty liars. But there's also this strange sense in August as though the British media behave as there's nothing's happening in the world. And of course, incredible things are happening in the world all the time. In Niger as an amass, the Ukrainian assult is failing their extraordinary reorganization of the Chinese economy going on.

34:47But somehow the convention, I remember the scene when I was a politician is that in August there's sort of nothing in the newspapers. Why is this? What is this whole thing? Is it just a kind of made up convention that all the politicians journalists pretend there's nothing's going on? What happens? No, it's called the silly season because the main institution, such as parliament and government, just sort of wind down a bit. I actually think Rishi Sinoke has tried to be very, very busy. I have a sense of real sort of activity the whole time. So I think the silly season has been less silly. I think you're making a bigger point about the extent to which a lot of stuff that you and I might find very interesting on the international gender in particular gets less attention in the UK media, either than it used to, or than it does elsewhere, which is why both of us insofar as we do follow the news tend to do it via foreign outlets.

35:35You've come back from America obsessed with news, Rory. We should weigh them. Of course, America is very obsessed. There's a good article in the FT for people who subscribe to our feed. But it's about the way that Rhonda Santis is dropping down against Donald Trump in the polls. And Vivek Ramaswamy is coming through and Tim Scott looking like a possible container. The point is Republicans being that they're only hope of taking down Donald Trump is getting one candidate. The way that he made it last time is because he had this very divided field. So maybe something for people to look at. And I think another really good article in the FT are people interested on to pay tribute to one British newspaper anyway.

36:14Which we also need to tackle more in detail is the gloom in the German economy. I mean, the British economy is terrifying, but the German economy is if anything worse at the moment, underperforming the EU and the US by a very, very long margin. And I think obviously we don't have time to do that now, but I'd love to talk about that a bit more when a couple of weeks now. Yeah, I'm already feeding into the thing we talked about last week, which is the rather alarming rise of the far right. Where there's this huge roug going on now about whether virtually whether the FT should be banned. But anyway, let's talk to the listeners about what we said we were going to talk about Rory.

36:48So bricks Brazil, Russia, India and China, that was the original four. And then South Africa was added, which was very convenient because it meant that we call bricks. So it's a term coined by somebody we both know called Jim O 'Neill, who was chief congress at Goldman Sachs, and who then went on to be actually a Treasury minister in David Cameron's government. And it was adopted by these countries. And they represent 26 % of the land surface of the world. And over 40 % of the global population. And about a third of global GDP, depending on how you measure it. For some measurements purchasing power parity, their economies are almost the same size as those of the G7.

37:30And there has now been a big push to expand them, as well as a push to do something called de -dollarization. And the reason we're talking about it this week is that they're having their big annual meeting in South Africa over you. In Johannesburg, in the SANTON Convention Center, which is where I went for a jogging, come with the wealth heads of governments. It's obviously the big place in there. So yeah, what's de -dollarization essentially is trying to work out whether there's a way of weakening the role of America and the American dollar in our financial systems. I think it's worth just reminding people because Pearl Jim O 'Neill, who I think is a very bright chap, I think what he, when he coined bricks, or when he coined the phrase the bricks, I think that it's been misunderstood what he was saying because it's become a sort of given that what this was about was was, was Goldman Sachs, who he worked for spotting a really massive kind of investment marketing opportunity.

38:30But actually he was talking about the fact that these four emerging economies, the big emerging economies, would eventually force the world to have to change global governance arrangements. And I think that the bricks themselves are now trying to push in a direction. But if you think about it, if you go through these economies, South Africa is not done well at all. Brazil has not done very well. India, not bad. China has done way better than anybody expected to, but now has got all sorts of problems. I mean, of them all probably India is currently looks like the one with the fastest growth in the brightest future.

39:10Yeah, but China is twice as big as the rest of them put together. And also you've got this new thing, the new development bank, which I think was set up with all five of them putting in, I think it was $10 billion. But actually the Chinese development bank does way, way, way more than that. And I think what's interesting about the debate that's going on there now, there's a talk about whether there should be a common currency. Well, that was Lula's idea. You can see why he might be keen on that, but I don't think the rest of the margins, South Africans as the hosts are already pushing back on that.

39:43The other thing that they're talking about is new members. There've had 24 more applications or 22, I think it might do 23 countries. Yeah, I think to join. Yeah, is it formerly applied or the 20 have applied in for it? No, it seems to be the only one that's in the frame that might be able to shake things up significant actually to really have an impact will be Saudi Arabia. I mean, you're talking about the others, about Algeria, about Thailand, you're talking about much, much smaller economies. Yeah, possibly Indonesia. Yeah, I mean, Indonesia would bring a big Southeast Asian state, but you're right, Saudi Arabia suddenly opens them all up to the Gulf.

40:20The Bricks share of world GDP has increased from 8 % in 2001 to 26 % today. Over the same period, the G7 share has fallen from 65 % to 43%. So it is true that it's been a very, very dramatic change since the early 2000s, but that large, as you say, has been driven by the rise of China and China, and China, particularly. I think the de -dollarization thing is worth thinking about a little bit. A couple of damage set, you're quite right, Lulos at the center of this. And it's a reminder that when you look at the Bricks, it's really only India that seems at the moment in the conversations of the Bricks to be resisting the push to try to make the Bricks into a kind of anti -Western force.

41:05Russia obviously is very, very keen to do that, and you know, has been openly trying to embrace the Bricks in Russia. One of the speakers, the Duma, came out in favor of a new Bricks currency. China obviously has it, and a gender of balancing the West. The changes in South Africa and in Brazil have not really benefited the United States and the way that people had hoped. So, Sura Amposa, there was optimism about him coming in as present as South Africa because he seemed a great improvement on Jacob Zuma who was a famous see, corrupt, difficult figure. And again, great relief that Bolsonaro left in Brazil, but Lula has come back and he's not just pushing for saying every night I ask, why do we use the dollar, but he's also trying to get Venezuela into the Bricks, pushing for UAE to join the Bricks, which is a symbol that Lula, who obviously comes from the left, is, and he did this too, I think we touched it briefly, has also been very reluctant to get involved in European Union trade deals and Ukraine, and has been positioning himself very much as a sort of champion of a kind of slightly sort of more on the Russian and Chinese side of balancing the United States.

42:15And that, of course, he's also, he's quite a showman, and this is going to be a big event, particularly for those countries taking part, and there are 40 other African countries that have also been invited. Future殖 calls won't be there because he's indicted by the International Criminal Court, and even though the South Africans have said that they wouldn't arrest him, he's taken the sensible view probably to join online. So, Xi will be, President Xi will be the undisputed kind of stand out leader who's there, but Lula will not forego the opportunity to really just sort of, you know, to step up in terms of the big arguments he's going to make.

42:52And the point about the currency, the Chinese have been criticizing Washington. They talk about the Americans weaponizing the American dollar, and I think we sometimes like to think that the China is kind of frowning upon Russia over Ukraine, even though they don't say or do very much, but actually recently they said that Western sanctions against Russia, because of the invasion back in 2022, were part of that weaponization, simply similarly kicking out of the swift global payment system. And so, and that's all part of this de -dollarization thing, and I didn't know until I read somewhere the other day that Argentina, who have in an absolute sort of economic, basket case at the moment, but they have recently paid international monetary fund debt in Chinese currency, which they gain through a bilateral currency swap plan.

43:47We should talk more about the domination of the dollar. So, 85 % roughly of cross -border trade in the world is done in dollars compared to about 4 .5 % Chinese U .N. So, America is absolutely dominant, and it allows you to do many, many things like borrow extraordinary sums of money, and one of the most controversial policies, which Rishi -Soonak or Kierstama couldn't do in Britain, is because the dollar is a world's reserve currency. The argument, though, for why in theory, there's a good article in foreign policy, which we can share on the newsletter, on why in theory a BRICS currency could actually be more of a challenge to the dollar.

44:23Is that unlike the euro, the BRICS running a $387 billion trade surplus. Europe runs a $467 billion trade deficit to put it in context. And theoretically, a BRICS currency could be an asset which people invest in. It would pay interest. These countries could incentivize households and businesses to use it, and they could use it for their own trade. And by doing so, they would be able to take back more control of their economic destiny, as long as the dollar remains the world reserve currency. The U .S. has the most extraordinary influence over the world, expressed particularly three things like sanctions.

44:58But I think it all is something that will keep coming up, and people who want to follow it in detail, the foreign policy article can do it much better than I can. Just to go about Jim O 'Neill's point about the whole, the way this whole thing started out, I guess this is what fuels the frustration of these countries. So they have, let's say, roughly a third share of the global GDP, but they have a very fraction of that in terms of the influence on the major financial institutions. Institutions like the IMF are still very much seen as kind of American driven. And this is all about them trying to de -Americanize or weaken the American hold over the financial institutions which run the world economy, or try to run the world economy and try to regulate and police the world economy.

45:44And add it to which, of course, it's all about China's further showing that they have real strength within the world economically and diplomatically. I think that's what this is all about, getting all these 49 heads of African nations to this summit as well as the usual attendees. So it's obviously central for Xi Jinping, because this is only the second trip he's done abroad this year. I mean, his first trip, I think, was March in Russia. So he's only done two trips, two foreign trips this year, and he chose to do Russia and South Africa for the bricks. I also want to, I mean, there are big problems in the Chinese economy, which we have touched on.

46:21We can talk about much more. It's the housing bubble, it's the banking sector, it's a lot of what turns out to be ridiculous over capital investment, which is beginning to go wrong. It's demography. So there's an interesting question of whether China is going to begin losing some of its cloud as its economy loses some of its momentum. I mean, it's going to remain in or must. It's going to remain the second largest economy in the world for a very, very long time to come. But its growth rate is likely to drop below that of the United States over the next few years. And I wonder whether that will begin to affect people's willingness to line up behind it.

46:57Morocco, maybe my final point that just illustrates what you just said. It's not all one way. Morocco, there was a report put out, I don't know by who, maybe the South and maybe the Russians that Morocco was planning to join. And Morocco put out a statement saying, not only we're not planning to join, we're not planning to attend the meeting. Right. So it's not all going that way. No, no, and Joe Biden's wife was in Morocco just five weeks ago. And the king of Morocco, who's been absent, he's been hanging out with a famous martial arts, an ultimate martial artist, who he disappeared with for a year.

47:33Careful what you say. He's now returned and is now taking on an active program of public engagements. Right. Now you want to talk about Orcas. Tell us about Orcas. So Orcas, just quickly before we go to you in the conference, is of course the agreement between the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia trilateral pact signed 15th September 21. And the core of it is the supplying of nuclear power submarines to Australia, over here. Yeah. Yeah. And the Labour Party conference in Australia, which is took place this week, it was a big part of it. And it's not often that the Prime Minister, whether it's an Australian or the UK or anywhere where we have this sort of party conference system, where the Prime Minister has to step into a debate.

48:19The Prime Minister is expected to do the big speech and do the big set piece and do all the glad handling that goes on with it, but he actually had to step in and speak in the debate because there was a lot of criticism of this. And it's interesting. I hadn't really understood until now that this was as divisive in Australia and inside the Australian Labour Party as it seems to have been. And the Defence Minister Richard Marles, he got sort of heckled a bit. And they ended up giving us a very long statement of detail. And Albinazy went up and basically said that he presented this as a jobs thing.

48:55There are going to be 20 ,000 well -paid unionised jobs. And this was of course to try and get some of the unions calmed down a bit on it. So it will remain part of the platform for the Australian government going forward. But the other thing that was coming through is that Labour members worried that this was tying Australia far too closely to America at a time when they're slightly looking over the shoulders at China. So I suppose they see the Americans kind of flat out, gung -ho, they see China as the enemy, Taiwan's hovering there. And then all the other thing they came through, and I can remember this from days back in the Labour Party when you just had to mention the word nuclear to get a rower going.

49:41The other thing the Defence Minister had to go up and say unequivocally, we will never base nuclear weapons on our shores. Exactly, just to remind listeners that the big change is that the Australians were about to buy something called the attack class submarine from the French, which was going to have 4 ,000 jobs in France, you know, contract worth tens of billions of euros. And that was going to be for a conventional powered submarine. So traditionally, submarines are not started, diesel powered and they have to keep popping up to get air and they have to be refueled frequently. The big change is suddenly without telling the French unilaterally, the Americans and the British decided to sell nuclear powered submarines to Australia.

50:24And these are nuclear power, they don't have nuclear weapons on them, but they're powered by a nuclear power, which means that they can keep going literally for years, even decades underwater without having to come up for air or refuel, which gives them much, much more powerful projection capacity. But it breaks the fact that Australia and New Zealand, all these countries have a very, very strong commitment to avoid proliferation of nuclear weapons. People are worried that their acquisition and actually Brazil's acquisition of nuclear powered submarines potentially has a proliferation risk that someone could use the nuclear powered energy that powers a submarine to start building nuclear weapons.

51:01But I think it's also showing as you say this big cleavage about how much does Australia want to be part of America's new Cold War? And that's why they ended up using quite left -wing arguments, you know, the Prime Minister talking about jobs, the Defence Industry Minister, Guy called Pat Conroy. He talked about it, you know, he said, if you're pro -human rights, you've got to be pro -orcus. And he said that, you know, Labour's always been proudly anti -war and orcas will detail us the deterred war. So they really had to take this on from a kind of left -wing perspective. And it took Albanese to go up there as the Prime Minister and basically say, listen, you know, back me on this.

51:41And, you know, they did. They did. You know, even figures on the right, Paul Keating, who's one of my favourite politicians ever, former Prime Minister, very strong defence, sort of pretty, you know, seniors on the right of the Labour Party. Are we getting one on the podcast? I think we should. We definitely should. Yeah. Paul, if you're listening, can you come on, please. And also former Foreign Minister Bob Karsin on the right. And they've been pretty critical. And of course, one of the other things that, you know, the cost of this thing is pretty mind -blowing. I think we're talking over some of that 360 billion Australian dollars.

52:15What was the other thing that's really interesting, Rory, within this debate? So his orcus Australia, UK, US, within this debate, the UK barely figured. And I find that a bit weird as well. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I agree. I agree. It is a bit weird, isn't it? Yeah, I mean, the French thing was unbelievable. The French so angry that she withdrew their ambassador from the United States. It's the first time they've ever withdrawn their ambassador in the United States, go all the way back to the American Revolution. Albanese and Macron had a big sort of kiss and make up over the football. I don't even know if you, I'm sure you didn't fall in this, Rory, but I'll fill you in.

52:52Australia played France and the winner played England. And so they had a bet, they had a bet. And part of the bet was that whoever won, the other would agree to support that team against England. It wasn't whoever lost would have to pay 500 million euro and damages to the EU. So what it meant was that was that Albanese would have had to support France against England. Macron would have had to support Australia against England and given that Australia won it meant that Macron had the, I don't think it would have fared it too hard, but Macron supported Australia over England. Very good. That's end all the work I've come.

53:34Thank you, Alistair, very much. And thank you for bringing us brings into the set of that debate. I'm fascinating as you say, the way that political communication works that a nuclear submarine can be presented in terms of peace and human rights. Is it interesting? And this week's part, thank you. All the best, bye.