179. Is Keir Starmer ready to be Prime Minister?

24:29You don't think it might be a bit better at half an hour. No, it might be, but I think that what the expectation of a conference speech is that people kind of touch most of the base, most if not all of the big bases. Gotcha. And it's also it's an event. I mean, it's like, it's partly for the morale of the party. The Labour party will have left that hall tonight feeling really about boiled up, really sort of ready for the fight, thinking they've got a plan and and that's important for motivation. And look, I like I do like a long speech. I like I like a thoughtful speech. I do. And look, you and I rage at this sort of, you know, the Twitter world and all that stuff, even though we rage on the Twitter world as well as about it.

25:09But Rory, do you know, by the way, you've heard about the protest at the start where it tells you about it. Yeah. Well, you got to tap it on the stage. This guy just appeared and ran onto the stage and started to spring all this glitter all in. Can I just put in a personal update there? So my first great appearance, the conservative party conference. Great appearance. Yeah, I was, I was giving my speech and I was attacked by a man dressed in a badger suit. Ah, is that because of your hedgehog speech? I was the environment minister and we were talking about badgers and TBs and this giant badger came charging onto the side of the stage.

25:38Well, of course, your friend Theresa May had a, remember she had the guy giving her the P -45. So this guy comes on the stage and he sprinkles all this glitter and stuff over and I thought it's just stop oil, but it wasn't. It's a, and I'm worried, Rory, that you may have directly radicalised this guy because it turns out his life's mission is to fight for sortition. Citizens assembly is those sortition, which is sortition. All sortition. Well, so Citizens assembly is done by sortition, but he wants the whole parliament done by sortition. He didn't really get through his speech long enough, but Keir sort of handled it pretty well.

26:15John Prescott was trending on Twitter. Oh, was, was he trying to get out of his seat? No, he wasn't there, but people were saying, why doesn't he do what John Prescott did? But Keir, he just stood there very, very calmly. I think there will be a bit of an ink, a little bit of a sort of inquest into how the guy managed to get on there in the way that he did, but he handled it very well. What he did was he waited until the guy had been dragged off and he then said, this shows why we've got to change from being a party of protest to a party of power. No, so I believe what he was going for is exactly what I might be interested in.

26:45So PR voting system and replacing the House of Lords with a Citizens Assembly. Ah, so you're now admitting that you radicalized him. You behind the, you're asking me very personal questions about my life. I am the glitter behind the, behind the assault. Well, anyway, he handled it very well. In a funny sort of way, I think because he did handle it well. He took his jacket off because his jacket was covered in all this stuff. He made a very nice crack about his wife wearing a beautiful dress. When he did this line about, this shows we have to move from being a party of protest to a party of power.

27:18Of course, it underlined stage one of that three stage strategy. This is a change party from the Corbin era. So in a funny sort of way, I think it, it rather helped him. Maybe it was set up by Labour Party headquarters, just silly. That would be terribly silly, cool to think that you should not ruin it. And if you're going to ask me whether I had any discussions about how this should start, I'm just not going to go there, okay? Very good. Now, as you have heard at the beginning of today's show, this episode of the RESTIS Politics is sponsored by Sky. And at the start of the show, you'll have heard us based talking about the brand new series of Cobra Rebellion, which is Sky's political thriller, about a government in crisis.

27:57It's one of those TV shows that ends up being quite prescient because it's realistic portrayal of issues today, such as, for example, the high -speed rail line, which they call Metro Ultraline, which is under scrutiny, maybe familiar to some of our listeners. I'm sure it is. And today, we want to talk a little bit about our own experiences of being in a Cobra meeting, Cobra, Cobra, and what it's like to be in the room during a full -blown emergency. So I suppose that it's hard what Cobra is, is the formal mechanism for crisis management in government, chaired by the Prime Minister, or in the Prime Minister's absence, the senior cabinet minister, there to bring together all the different bits of government and get on top of a crisis.

28:37Yeah. Give us your first experience of Cobra. And listen, let's just locate it, because when I did it, you'd walk down... And it was underground in one of the... Was it in a different place when you were going to Cobra meetings? Rory, I think that was information that could be deemed useful to an enemy. Well, it really took a while. One of the things that I did think is that actually it was very criticised in its early days, and it's been running right from the 70s. But by the time I got there was beginning to tighten up. I was quite impressed by the group of civil servants who staffed it. The civil contingency sector, they'd had real training in crisis management.

29:11I actually got one of them into talk to my class at Yale about how you do crisis management. And my strongest memory of it was during the days of the floods, which... Cobra, this 2015 and 2015, going on in Cobra in Yorkshire for many, many weeks, Lancashire, where they were always able to get the most up -to -date information up on the screens. We were able to get the fire service, the police around the table, and strategic communications people, the key strategic communications people, the key spending departments to make sure that we could really make decisions. So I thought it actually was one of the few cases in government where I really thought it was government done properly, properly staffed, proper committees, and it's actually how I would like to run a crisis response.

29:52Yeah, and I think that what's interesting about this TV series about it is, although it's television and it's obviously wants to look dramatic and have that sense of it being a thriller and so forth, there is something kind of exciting as the wrong word, but you know that when you go into those meetings, it kind of really matters because they only really happen when it is either something that's unexpected or something that's become a crisis. So if I think of some of the situations that we were involved in that required it, obviously several military situations, but also 9 -11, probably the most dramatic of all.

30:28And that makes seem to remember as one where actually there was kind of standing room only because there was so many people who felt that people felt had to be there, had all the security services, quite a few police forces, transport, infrastructure, all sorts of different people foreign policy diplomats. You know, it was a pretty crowded room and it was almost like, you know, there was a sense of this has the potential to be a really profound crisis and therefore an awful lot has to be gripped very, very quickly. And the thing about having a place where all the information flows into a central place, I think in a crisis you need that.

31:03And knowing who you've allocated to, there's a very funny but slightly disturbing piece by Jonathan Evans, who was the head of MI5, all which we can share, which he wrote for Russey, about the lessons he took from government, how not to manage a crisis, which is about all the classic problems that we saw, including things like optimism bias and the ways in which, you know, you convince yourself you don't want to happen on your watch and government often tends to be too slow to react. So one of the things in those meetings is absolutely vital to push people to look at the worst case scenario, make the decision to deploy the resources rather than the temptation, which is, oh well, maybe the problem will go away on its own, we don't want to waste any resources, but just get on top of it as soon as you can.

31:45Definitely, when you were saying that, that what came straight into my head was the way that we handled foot and mouth. I think we wanted it, we wanted to feel that it was better than it was, and that maybe we didn't do that sort of early stage catastrophizing and imagining the worst and then trying to prevent it from happening. Anyway, if any of these or other stories of your interest about what crisis management is like at the heart of government, watch series three of Cobra Rebellion, all episodes available on Sky and Now. Right there now. So let's move on to our next topic. One of the things we've discussed a lot recently, I think it's become a central theme of our podcast, is the way that AI can reshape politics, just as Twitter and Facebook did in earlier elections.

32:27And one of the big dangers you've been talking about this week are AI deep fake videos. So tell us a bit about some of those deep fakes. Well, over the weekend, there was an audio of Keir Starmer. I was sent it by God knows how many people, dozens. How did they send it to you? They were like, wow, isn't this worrying? Yeah, so some were saying the mass drops. This is the real him. He was basically sort of having an absolute tantrum shouting at somebody's effing and blinding and just to explain for instance, before we can analyze it, it was quite sort of subtle, wasn't it? So there was no, they didn't type to fake his face.

33:04They just had a picture of him and a bit of audio. And it was a bit crackly. And what it sounded like is someone recording on their iPhone while Starmer lost his temper at somebody for dropping an iPad, I think it was. Yeah. And it's rather sort of clever because it wasn't him doing something so outrageous, like in a massive racist anti -Semitic fakery. It was just trying to make out that this calm man was kind of grumpy and nasty to his staff and private. Is that right? Exactly. Exactly. It was sufficient for people to think, oh, well, that's him. I'm so remote removed from the images trying to portray.

33:43And it plays into this idea that they're all hypocrites. They're all lies. They're all the same. Now, to be fair to certain politicians, I noticed that Simon Clark was one of them, Tom Tugan had as well. There were quite a few Tories posting that saying there is a deep fake audio of Kier Starmer circulating. People should ignore it. And we all need to fight against this stuff. And they pointed to the fact that Rishi Sunat is going to be hosting a sort of AI event. Now, that's fine. And I approve of that. But I wonder how many Tories members would have circulated it. Certainly, I was getting a lot of this from hard left people who were sort of saying, here's your mate, Starmer, just as bad as every else kind of thing.

34:23And so God knows how much circulation it had. But that was, as you say, a relatively tame one. The other area where I think is worth looking at in recent weeks, we had the the election in Slovakia last weekend where this populist Robert Fisco regained power, having been kicked out in the first place through corruption. And there were lots of audio recordings that were doing the rounds on social media concerning his main opponent, Michael Simeccia, who is the leader of the Progressive Slovakia party. And these were discussions that he was having with how do you rig the election, how do you buy votes, whether there's something special that you could do with the Roma community.

35:07By the time it was established that this was a fake and it was an AI product, it had been doing the rounds during the two -day period when media outlets and politicians are supposed to be quiet. In other words, they have two days before the election where the media coverage stops and people are just meant to be sort of reflecting. That was being circulated during that period. Now, who knows how many people had their mind changed, impossible to prove. But what is interesting is that the exit poll, the progressives were in the front and by the time the vote came in, they'd lost. So I just think we've got to be very, very, very careful about this.

35:47I think I said before, when I was running to be Mayor of London as an independent, I had these companies approach me who were pitching to say, if I paid them lots of money, they could win the election for me. And they said, you know, we've been involved in 52 elections, we've won these elections in former Soviet states and we do it by setting up sock puppets and bots and paper counts and attacking your opponents. And they were talking those days about Twitter, Facebook, Instagram. Nowadays, I guess those very same companies would be pitching you on their ability to use AI. And it's interesting.

36:23I mean, I was thinking that the threat would be more obvious that it would be, you know, a day before the presidential election, you would have a deep fake of President Biden seeming very senile in a debate against Donald Trump or something. But this is actually, of course, it's shown me what it's more likely to be. It's more likely to be, and it's probably, I guess, clever of them to do things which seem rougher, seem to say, they've just been caught accidentally. The model for this, you remember Mitt Romney in 2012, one of the things that really damaged his electoral chances is he was recorded at a millionaire donor dinner being patronizing about poor people.

37:01And it would sort of been phoned by an iPhone in the corner and Mother Jones put it out September 2012. And I guess that's the sort of style they're going for, isn't it? Probably because it takes a bit longer to prove that Kierstammer hadn't lost his, lost his rag with some aid about dropping an iPad because it's not a public event. There's two real dangers here, I think. One of them is that people find it funny. That's the first thing. So I think sometimes these things will use humor. And people will sort of say, we shouldn't take you to a series because it's quite, it's actually quite funny.

37:34So if you, for example, I've seen a deep fake of Joe Biden falling over, falling off a stage. I've seen another one where he's sort of wandering around a beach looking a bit lost. And you know, when you sort of try to save people, this is really dangerous. Is that over God's say, who's going to take that seriously? I think it's the normalization of the, and using fairly trivial examples to normalize this. But it's really just about making people find it difficult to work out what's true and what's not. And I think that, you know, if we had, you know, in fair play to those Tory politicians who came straight out because they will also know that there will be people that will be able to do this to them as well.

38:14So all politicians, I think, have an interest in trying to stop this. But we know, we know for sure in the American election that the idea that Trump will say, oh, come on, guys, let's not do that stuff. Let's not play dirty. That's just not going to happen. And, you know, we've got a election going on, very important election going on very soon in Poland. And again, then that you look at the polls, the numbers are very, very tight. And yet the governing party are up to all sorts of tricks that are, you know, they've, they've completely sort of politicized in their favor, the state broadcaster.

38:47They've added these four questions, referendum questions that are all designed to sort of, in a sense, they're like leading questions that into the electorate so that they, they maybe think that the messaging of the election, the demot, the parliamentary election is actually also part of this broader referendum question, which of course gives them then more money to campaign. So there's a lot of, you know, politics, as they say, has always been a pretty rough, tough game. But I think the capacity for populist politicians in particular, really to play dirty, really to use technology, and any other black arts methods that come their way, I think we've got to be very, very wary.

39:26And that means we've got to stop finding this stuff funny. It really isn't funny. And we've all got a duty, I think, to call it out. Since Obama won with Jim Messina, his second term through this technique of microtargeting, which was really using big data to try to identify the exact buttons to hit every photo, the idea was, and this was something that I remember, and we went to a conference in 2015, and Jim Messina, who'd been Obama's person for some reason, had agreed to be hired by the conservative party. So before the 2015 election, I remember these lectures on how we were going to be using all this data that we got from supermarkets about your spending habits.

40:08And on the basis of that, you were supposed to be able to microtarget and work out that because, I don't know, because Alistair Campbell liked eating camon bear, we could hit him with something about the improvements, the NHS, and that would kind of get him out to vote conservative. What do my cheese habits got to do with my voting habits? Well, I think it was quite, this is where the geniuses in the vacuum seemed to believe they were going to be able to take all this data. They could work out what sort of issues would press my button. If you go back to the Brexit referendum when the the leave campaign were just sort of putting together these groups of people with different issues that they cared about, and they really targeted, for example, animal rights.

40:47Now, I can imagine in animal rights, which is one of those issues that kind of motivates some people more than any other. So if you imagine that you get hold of the data of all the people who's prime motivation in election is animal rights, and you put together an audio or a video like the one that we've just seen in videos of Keir Starmer talking about, you know, losing his temper, and actually having him in a throwaway remark sort of saying, well, who gives a fuck about animals anyway? You know, you can see how that can then just get used, and it wouldn't have to be done by parties. And the brilliant thing about it is that AI allows you to do that much more quickly, to replicate much more quickly, and do it at a much greater scale.

41:27So you could be, the machine learning can be targeting, as it were, 10 ,000 different subgroups, the population, the adjusting the message in real time, very, very quickly. One of the things you've all know, Harry said to me about two weeks ago, is that one of the big threats actually is the way in which AI would be perfect for generating a new type of QAnon type conspiracy. So obviously, QAnon, as this will remember, is this amazing conspiracy in the United States, which links child sex gangs to goodness knows what else, and is really mobilized by the Republican base to create particularly horrible views about Hillary Clinton.

42:04But those sort of conspiracies, these quasi -religious conspiracies are the sort of things that a large language model, you know, an advanced form of chat GVT, can generate very, very beautifully, very subtly, adjust it to almost everything, and bring in endless data and information to confirm whatever conspiracy theories you're trying to produce. Now, we're going to be talking in, we've already recorded, but we'll be putting it soon in the interview with your friend, Reid Hoffman, who's really big in the data world, and he had a very different view to the AI debate, didn't he? Then, same with Stafford Solomon, or you've all know, Harari, he really does see it as a positive, but I think it's quite hard in the political space not to be very worried about where this is going.

42:49Yeah, absolutely, absolutely, and what will happen very quickly, I think, is a sort of race to the bottom, that one party will start by doing it, and the other political parties will feel they have no option other than to follow. Well, I hope some of them just stand up against it, even at the risk of, have taking a hit, but it's a big thing to do. Well, now, S &P, your friend Peter Kellner, shared some quite interesting data, sorry, to remind people what happened, is that Labour achieved a very startling victory when there was a bi -election in an S &P seat, and a man who, I slightly appeal to me, because am I right in saying that he ran every single street in his constituency?

43:28I tried to walk through every village in my constituency. Is that right? He ran every street. This is Michael Shanks, who is clearly quite a good runner, but he decided he wanted to run up and down, or certainly along every single street in Glasgow. He said that there's quite a lot of cul -de -sac, which are a bit of an outback, because you have to do them both. And he took some fantastic pictures on the way. He became slightly obsessed, I'd say, with no ball sign, what are they called? No ball games here. And so he's got a picture of every no ball game, sorry, in Glasgow, which there are apparently plenty.

44:05But yeah, he did that. The other thing, I think, that is enormously to his credit, is that he did temporarily resign from the party over anti -Semitism, as indeed did my partner Fierner, although unlike Michael Shanks Fierner's yet to return. But what was interesting about Sir Peter Kellner had done some polling, which really does suggest that obviously the result was terrific for Labour, albeit on a very low turnout, but it was a big swing. But beneath it, you get the sense that the SNP are now being judged much more as most governing parties are. In just seeing through this prism of independence, and once people start to zone in on that about education, health and so forth, that they maybe don't do as well as they do when they're focusing very much on the questions of national identity.

44:58Gotcha. So, there was a time, of course, as you will remember, and as I remember very, very happily, when, frankly, Labour was pretty much unbeatable, unstoppable in Scotland, and we took lots and lots and lots of seats, that fell away. I should point out, Roy, in Murray, MP. Yes, he's cross this year, and he's raised it because it's you. That's every reason to be cross, because actually he was a friend of mine, and I completely wiped him. Do you have a correction to make? In my book, politics on the edge. I implied that Labour had lost all its seats in Scotland, and actually, of course, in Murray retained his, so they did retain his seat.

45:36He did. And there's now been double to two with Michael Shanks. What's happened in, according to Peter Kellner's latest, quite a big poll in Scotland, is that Labour's increased its vote share up to 28%. So, that's nine points up on the last election. And this, of course, you're just a snapshot. I don't think we should, you know, overlook that. SMP's on 37%. So, that's still ahead, but down eight. Conservatives are on 18. That's down seven points. Now, on that, if that were the voter general election, that would lead to a majority of seats for the SMP. They would get 34 out of 57, down from 48, out of the 59 that they were under the old boundaries.

46:19However, they would have a very narrow majority in around a dozen of those seats, and certainly based on the swing that we saw in Rutherglen last week, that would really put them under threat of a Labour win. So, that is quite a big shift. Yeah, and I think just to point out the obvious, which many lessons to be aware of, which is that there's a double where we also have the SMP, which is that there are legal and police investigations into the SMP allegations of a party funding, which involved Nicholas Surgeon, the former leader, ending up with the police actually turning up at our house and digging up her garden.

47:00That hasn't helped, and it also hasn't helped that the sitting SMP MP was toppled in a record petition because she'd broken her own COVID regulations. So, there were, I think, a lot of angry SMP voters staying at home, and the question is, are they going to be able to turn this around? Are they going to be able to get what they need, which is a positive, optimistic message to voters before the next section of how they're going to deliver change for them? Or is this the sign that they're really in deep decline? The fact that it seems that a lot of their own supporters, people who voted for them last time, kind of, it would seem want to put the independence question on the back burner.

47:39Does pose, um, to use, if with quite a difficult strategic question, I think? Because in a way, it's what gave Alex Salmond and Nicholas Surgeon such clear definition. But he's come in partly, as you say, because of the circumstances of Nicholas Surgeon's departure and then what's happened subsequently with this police investigation. Every time it seems to me, he tries to get his head up for a some sort of fresh start, something else happens to knocking back. So, last week, for example, it was the by -election. It was, you know, he was out all over the airwaves, essentially saying, this is really bad news.

48:13And meanwhile, the where this police investigation goes, we don't know. I should say on that, by the way, Roy, I thought Rishi Sunak making a joke about it was pretty off and possibly in defiance of contempt of call laws, but anyway, put that to one side. And what, so Peter's overall analysis is that, essentially, you've got three groups of people here. You've got 25 to 30 % of, of nationalists for whom independence absolutely matters more than anything else. You've got roughly that same number of people to whom unionism matters more than anything else. And then you've got about 50%, 40 to 50 % who have views, but those views are not dictating necessarily how they're going to vote a general election.

49:01The views that are, the issues that are driving them to a general election decision are health, education, jobs, cost of living. So, I just think that all in all, that means that the, you know, the mood in Scotland is changing. And it's changing because Labour is the party of opposition in the UK Parliament and the Scottish Parliament, that is playing in both places to, to Labour's advantage, I think. Yeah. There does seem to me that, you know, every time you and I talk about Scotland, we get lots of nationalists saying, you don't know what you're talking about, you know, you only come up here as sort of flying an out tourist, et cetera.

49:36But my sense both of what this poll says and what I've been hearing when I have been going up to Scotland and actually you and I going up there next week to do a charity event, I sense that there is quite a big change. And the fact of, I thought, such a kind of appealing, attractive candidate, I thought the, I thought he really was a good candidate. The fact that Keir Starmer has very quietly been visiting Scotland a lot in recent months. The fact that Anna Sarwa, the Labour leader in Scotland is now ahead of from the use of, in terms of his ratings, suggests to me that, you know, Labour can, for the first time in a long while, Ian Murray can start to think that he will not be alone after the next election.

50:14Also some interesting seats where potentially the Conservatives could have opportunities because there are seats where it's really a Conservative S &P standoff. And if the S &P falls, the Conservatives may pick up more seats in Scotland than one would expect and lose others. I mean, it's going to be interesting how that plays through. So can I just sort of very briefly not really sort of big subject conversation, but just put a brief shout out towards the tragedy in Afghanistan. We have had the most astonishing series of horrible earthquakes around the world, in Turkey, Morocco, and now Afghanistan.

50:48And this is the second earthquake to hit Afghanistan just over a year. This one out in the west around Harat, whole villages just wiped off the map, entire families killed. And of course, Afghanistan is a very poor country. It's now October, it's beginning to get pretty cold there, pretty bleak outdoors at this time of year. Still a very difficult situation where the Taliban government very much strongly in place, with its very regressive attitudes towards women and female education and female participation in the labour market. And as a result, a lot of sanctions still against the Taliban, not as much development assistance getting in us it should.

51:25And the Afghan people really at the brunt receiving end of this, and a real urgent need for people to get assistance, and particularly I'd argue again to return my old war horse, hobby horse cash assistance into these people who've lost their homes and who've lives have been completely upended. We're an earthquake where I'm fear over the next few days, we'll find many, many thousands of people were killed. And of course, be with all the focus on the Middle East at the moment, it won't get the global attention perhaps that it would it be it was happening in a different time in a different country.

52:01And some of the I was watching the news last night and some of these houses that we talk about houses collapsing, but lots of them were literally made of mud and just destroyed, absolutely destroyed. And you then saw these terrible pictures of of men, and it was all men of the obvious reasons of the Taliban digging with their hands through rubble, trying to find signs of life, absolutely horrific. It's extraordinary, isn't it? Well, okay, Alistair, thank you. We'll see you soon. Thank you very much. See you soon. Thank you.

52:43Support for this episode of The Restless Politics comes from Sky, and if you enjoyed our discussion on Cobra meetings today, I really think you'd enjoy the brand new series of Cobra Rebellion, all episodes of which are available on Sky and Now. So we spoke of what it's like to do with the crisis of the heart of government, the toll it can take on you, even a bit on how Cobra came about, what it means. So now we've been able to share some light on what it's like behind the scenes, we've hopefully wetted your appetite for a bit of drama, and I think the TV show makes a great pairing. I would say it provides a bit of proper escapism, and maybe sometimes puts a bit of the government, but it's actually remarkably well researched.

53:20And all the major themes the things viewers will recognize from the political debates we're having every week on the podcast. In fact, I have a vested interest here, because I remember one of the researchers very politely reaching out to me and trying to work out whether they'd got it right. So in this series, they're focusing on environmental terrorism, anti -protest bills passing through parliament, and the quandary for the PM at the heart of all this, which is the existential question how much is he willing to sacrifice to remain in power? Hmm, all of our regular themes are really on the age of impunity.

53:49What will the Prime Ministry's government do when tensions run high? Can they stick to their principles? So if you're up for something exciting to watch tonight, all episodes of Cobra Rebellion are available on Sky and Now.