180. Question Time: Is Suella Braverman pretending to be right-wing?

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1:21Welcome to the rest of the politics question time with me, Aleister Campbell. And with me, Rory Stewart. An Aleister, I have a question to start you off. Simon Hewitt. Does Aleister regret Labour not going ahead with proportional representation in their 1997 government after the work done with Charles Kennedy in opposition? I don't regret being part of a Labour party that won three successive general elections, which is a merely mouth way of saying that once we got into power, that sort of went on to the back burner, do I think that at some point in the near future we need a radical fundamental change of the way we do politics, of which looking at our electoral system, not just in Westminster, but other elections as well, has to be a part, yes I do.

2:07Very good. So I'm admitting to the political opportunism at the heart of the stance that I took. I actually quite violently to be honest. I can remember we used to have these debates and I was very much on the jump -press side of the argument, saying why on earth are we talking about giving up the oldest system that seems to give us power? But as you know, Rory, from our own discussions on this, I've had a bit of a, I'm on a journey, as they say. And do you think what would it take realistically to get Kirstalma to do it? Would it have to be a minority government where he was in coalition with the Lib Dems, or do you think he might do it on his own?

2:43He doesn't seem to be making any signal at all that it's something that appeals to him, whether that's, I don't know because of the trade unions, I know, very, very opposed to it. I suppose it would be that, but also I do get the sense of Kirstalma, that he's quite pragmatic in the way that he kind of does track what people are saying and thinking and doing. Let's say Labour did get into a sort of minority government situation and obviously they're going to go all out not to be in that position. Then I think it will come a point where the country starts to make its voice heard way more voluble than it has thus far.

3:14And why are the trade unions just getting it to proportional representation? I think in part because of the point I made, then actually they, if you can get a majority government on, you know, 40 % of the vote, then why not have that, especially in the country where the Tories have been, you know, in power for so long, but actually that argument works against. So that's, I think, why we need to rethink it. I'd love to see a line in Labour's manifesto that just said, given the the a probe room in which so much of our politics is held, there will be a review of our electoral systems around the UK.

3:42I think that'd be a good thing to do. Compulsory education, Oliver War, in the recent German local elections, which polled about 25 % of the population, the far -right alternative adorning, I want 20 % of the vote. A quick analysis shows that voters were more likely to vote AFD if they left education early. It seems uncorrelated to unemployment. In order to counter extremism, do you think we should make more continued formal education compulsory if so, how and in what subjects? Oh, that's interesting. I've never heard the argument made that the reason to do it is to change people's political opinions.

4:16I'm afraid if I was really in charge of an education budget, I think I would target mid -life education because I think AI is going to mean that millions of people are likely to find their jobs disappearing and they will need to retrain in their 40s for a different profession. So I'd probably put the money into being able to pay for everybody to take a year to learn a new profession in their 30s or 40s rather than try to extend the time they spend as a younger person. Yeah, and I see that. I don't necessarily support what Oliver's saying, but I do think that in the UK, we have a real problem of political education and political culture.

4:52That's why you and I both sort of print the books that we've done in a way is actually to draw attention to what politics has become. But I don't think he's enough just to blame the politicians. I think there's a real... I think people don't really try necessarily to be very informed about politics a lot of the time. That's something I think we could quite easily correct in schools. I think if we actually did teach primary school kids the very, very basics of politics and political history, I think that'd be a good thing. Okay, a question for you. Tara Ward, do you think that Suella Bravman and the radical right members of the Conservative Party really stand behind her populist comments and theories?

5:30Or are they just trying to attract new and different voters who might have ignored them in the past? It's very hard for me to answer that because I think I've only ever met her once. I don't know her. I don't know how she operates. I don't know how she thinks. I don't believe that deep down she or Rishi Srinaka or anyone else believes that what they're doing in relation to Rwanda, for example, is the way to resolve the small votes problem. I don't believe that when she was making the speech that she made about the hurricane of immigrants, I think she was just trying to provoke people like me and people like you to say that this is over the top.

6:07As a way of then appealing to people for whom immigration is a really, really significant problem and something that Mason get very emotional about politics. I think what she's doing is nakedly political and I think it's about her positioning. Now, it could be wrong. It may be that she fundamentally believes this, but I think it's about positioning in the past. No, I think you're right. I think she's a political entrepreneur and a lot of these people are. I've been looking at her for a long time. She was an arousamous scholar back in the day. So European is arousamous scholars studied in, I think France.

6:39She then, I think, set up with Sheree Blair, the Africa Justice Foundation in 2010, where she was talking about democracy and the rule of law in Africa. So she's been on what one calls it, but of a journey and it's true for Pretty Patel and Liz Truss, who were part of Cameron's a list of what was supposed to be centrist compassionate conservatives that he was bringing in to make the party more diverse and more relatable. The fact that all those three have ended up on the radical right of the party, I think is more about the fact that that's where they see the opportunity. They can see these populist movements in Europe.

7:11They can see that this particularly potent mixture of culture, war and immigration chat appeals to 2025, some of the electorate and they're going off. So I don't think it really reflects that the beliefs they had before they were members of parliament. Political entrepreneur, interesting. Yeah, but worrying, very worrying. I mean, they think there's opportunity there. I'm really worried for what it suggests. Here's a question that slightly relates to that. Green Party policies in Europe, Slash Luxembourg and Marie Bourne -Wap. Today Luxembourg had its general election with the Green Party losing a significant vote, nearly half of its votes from the last elections in 2018, in line with the drop in support for Green Climate policies elsewhere in Europe.

7:50Why do you think this is happening? Does this concern you, given our vital, it will be to deliver decarbonising policies in the next decade? Or do you think the other parties will be equally as ambitious in achieving net zero? We saw this as well in, we've just had elections in the barrier, which of course is one of the most important German states. And the CSU, which is this kind of sister party of the CDU Merkel's party, have won. But I read lots of stuff during the campaign about Green Party politicians being attacked, being spat at, being picked on in the streets, being booed as they went around the place.

8:28A lot of it by the far right who increased their score up to, they think we're on by 18 % when the whole thing was counted. But all the parties in Shalts is coalition, which of course includes the Greens have slipped. The centre left SPD, the government party, the FTP and the Greens have slipped. I think one problem here is that the earlier days of making progress on environmental policies now look as though there were a bit low hanging fruits. So Britain made a lot of progress on decarbonisation just by going from cold to gas in terms of CO2 emissions, which didn't have much impact on the average voter.

9:07We're now getting to the tougher stuff to try to get to net zero, which is really often involving putting taxes on people's energy bills or taxes on people's fuel bills in their cars. And I think that as the rubber hits the road and as the burden of environmental taxes is falling on poorer people, the Green movement is going to get itself in more difficult situation than it would have been in 5 -10 years ago. But it's clear that the right, the radical right has decided that this is the issue for people like Farage, it's becoming the new Brexit for the AFD in Germany, they're making a big play of it, not least in this campaign that we just had.

9:45The SPD by the way, it shocks his governing party, they're down to single figures in Bavaria, and there's never been a stronghold that's made that clear, but that is not good, that is not good. And of course the problem is that we talked about political entrepreneurs, I mean these populists are real political entrepreneurs, and this grisly figure of Victor Orben sitting there in Hungary, he of course thinks the whole world is moving in his direction, he thinks liberal democracies over and every one of these little victories, every one of these rises, convinces him of it more and more, and he's very much sees a world dominated by teaching ping and people like Putin, he's looking forward to Trump coming back in, and he's really hoping that Penn is going to be the next president of France, etc.

10:25And all of this is playing out of the same populist playbook. Yeah, absolutely.

10:39Okay, we're going to talk about the world, and of course, one of the things that we know is that it can be incredibly valuable to talk to another human being, somebody who's actually been trained as a therapist, to work through these ideas calmly, objectively and professionally. And as the largest online therapy provider in the world, better help can provide access to mental health professionals, with a very diverse variety of expertise, they've got over 5 ,000 therapists in the UK, they've helped more than 5 million people globally, and you can join a session literally at the click of a button, change therapists anytime, it's obviously not about fixing you, but it's about hearing yourself clearly, maybe for the first time, so talk it out with better help, our listeners get 10 % off their first month at betterhelp .com slash rest politics, that's better help .com slash rest politics.

11:46Rizan Bostok, how can Rishi Sunak have the power to stop HS2 at Birmingham without asking Parliament? HS2 was originally a parliamentary decision, surely in order to cancel it, it should be discussed and voted on in Parliament. You presumably were part of that vote. Yeah, yeah, I mean, I'd be interested to know what you think about this. I mean, part of the problem of having an uncodified constitution is it's very, very ambiguous. So one of the examples of this is David Cameron started the idea that every military intervention needed to have a parliamentary vote, and he was referring back to Tony Blair's vote on Iraq on that.

12:22Before that, Prime Minister didn't think they needed parliamentary votes before taking military action, it's now becoming, as it were, a kind of unwritten convention. Would you have thought when you were in power in 97 that you would have naturally gone to Parliament about a big infrastructure decision like this? I think so. I'm trying to think if there are anything comparable that we did. Cross rail and things that you'd go get a parliamentary vote. So that's a legislational cross rail, wasn't there? Yeah, I think that the legislation, sometimes there's differences in the between the enabling legislation that the government needs to get the legal permissions to do things.

12:56Yeah. It's maybe a bit different from the Parliament making decisions, opposed to Prime Minister on whether to go ahead with the funding for something. I do think that there was something quite odd about the way that Sunat conducted himself at his party conference. And honestly, the way he talks about himself as well, he very rarely talks about the government. He talks about himself making decisions that he has decided that he is thinking the right thing for the country to do. And I think on this one, it does feel like the three big things that he announced in his conference speech, HS2 changing the exam system for older kids, and the ban on smoking.

13:34I do think that there was a sense that that was him sort of just picking, going for the things that he finds particularly interesting, as opposed to this having emerged through some sort of cabinet policy discussion. And I think there will be a move to have this voting. And isn't this trust already flexing her muscles about this? Yeah. So what do you think about it? So to put the case for Ishii Simeck, I guess he would say, look, when this project was first put forward under Gordon Brown, or before Gordon Brown, people were talking about it, costing 16 billion, then 20 billion. And it was going to have 100 billion worth of benefits.

14:06But by the time the cost to the project was over 100 billion, the cost benefit analysis doesn't look so good. And I guess what he's saying is that you can't be driven by sunk cost, that it's very, very bad policy making to just say, oh, forget and say, we spent so much, we've got to push a hairboard in anyway. And of course, I liked the idea that he was going to prioritize investment in North and prioritize the leads, manage to connection. Obviously, the Cumbering MP, I was always saying, I'm, would much prefer them to build a leads match to line, then worry about the connections between London and the rest.

14:36I've been hearing about improving leads Manchester for many, many, many years. I think his problem is I'm not sure that people believed the so -called plan for this 36 billion pounds. I don't if you saw Mark Harper, the transport secretary being interviewed by Victoria Darbysh at the weekend, that my god, it was not good. I mean, the whole thing just unraveled. She was going one by one through these promises that would be made. And by the end of he was saying, no, no, they were just sort of indications of what you could build. If you decided that's what you wanted to do, it was not good. There's a political promise there to get onto the inside baseball of this.

15:10This is something you must have thought about a lot. Localism. Well, it's not just localism, but it's also this big thing, which is if the Prime Minister wants to make an announcement that is kept secret, he can't talk to too many people by definition. And how do you get the balance right between properly consulting inside government, doing all the maths on all those projects, and also keeping it as something that you can reveal as something new at a party conference? How do you get that right? What sort of advice would you give someone on that kind of thing? I think one of the things like that, if you, oh, no, we had things that we announced at party conference, like, for example, the initial decision that we were going to review the Labour Party Constitution, we were absolutely determined that that should be announced by Tony Blair in the conference hall, and there shouldn't be a whiff of it beforehand.

15:55In the end soon, I ended up with the worst of all worlds, because the thing was leaking left right and centre. We had three, four days of it, saying that no decision to be made. Then we had this video emerged, if it were announced, that he recorded a video of the announcement, sort of four days before. I think you have to trust your colleagues, and of course, that's very, very different when you've got a factionalised party. I also wasn't comfortable with grant -shaps using the conference platform to do his big announcement about sending troops to Kosovo. I think that's something you should have maybe kept away from the party platform.

16:26These are difficult judgments, because Parliament's not sitting, but I think that barrier between party and government is sort of, you know, really, really has fundamentally broken down. Just go back to really big announcement, I remember, which was Gordon Brown announcing the independence of Bank of England, which I think was a really good thing, and was one of the things that I remember feeling my goodness to government knows what it's doing. That's really impressive. That's very bold. That was the right thing to think, Rory. That was the right thing to think. But presumably that needed to be kept secret, so he couldn't actually consult with every economist in the world before he made his decision right.

17:00I mean, there'd been a debate going on for years, but I think what is true is that he kept it very, very tight, and my memory may be failing me here. I think there was a cabinet meeting that morning, which it was kind of, you know, basically presented as a fetish complete. But what Gordon was very good at was making sure that the arguments he had were strong enough for people to say, yeah, we'll go along with that. And I think that was the other problem with HS2, is that they were all sent their talking points, and they dutyfully went out to deliver them. And then by the end of the day, they were all rather regretting the fact that they'd, I mean, the best one was the mantras to one, where they were announcing to build something, which has been running for several years.

17:39So I don't think they really did the, yeah, but it wasn't helped by the fact that he then had David Cameron and Boris Johnson then tweeting against him. Yeah. On the other hand, I watched that speech, I watched that, that Rishi Srinak's speech, and there were bits of it that I thought were clear and impressive, and I thought he was kind of coming into his own. He was willing to find his voice. I mean, the quality of speeches had been very, very poor through the week, and I think as a performance, I think his was probably the best. But I think the content was very, very poor, because I think there was no sense of a coherent theme running through the whole thing.

18:11And long -term decisions for a brighter future, I'm afraid it just wasn't. I will return to that in a bit. Anyway, Hillary Douglas, please explain why Labour don't go for wealth tax. Seems popular, doesn't affect 90 % of people, would set a divide between them and because they want to be able to present themselves as a party that is not ideologically committed to high taxation, particularly at times when people are paying such high taxes. And there's another problem, isn't there, which is that, of course, it's not true that it doesn't affect 90 percent of people. The big division in our country, really.

18:45The big inequality of wealth is between the 60 % who own houses and the 40 % who don't. Yeah. And a wealth tax will have a big impact on the 60 % who own houses. And that's why Ed Milivan, when he was a little of their party, was looking much more closely at the so -called Manjant Acts. Look, I think that Labour are absolutely putting all the chips on growth. That's clear from this week that they're basically saying there's going to be a different approach to the economy, a different industrial strategy, and it will lead to growth. And if it doesn't, then they're going to have to look at things like this, I think.

19:15I'd love to see us looking again at a wealth tax on houses after people die. I thought that was a really smart way of the desperately needed funding that we need for that social care to say that you're not going to take someone's house away from them while they're alive. But when they die, the government will affectionately tax them to pay for that social care. And I think that's a good fair way of doing it. Well, that brings me on neatly to a plug for our second episode of the interview at Theresa May. Tim Mercer, I'm not a Tory voter, but everything Mrs. May said about why she was in politics, being an MP, balancing cabinet constituency responsibilities, respecting the civil service, doing something before being in politics, gave me a sense that there are those who really get what I was a voter want to see in a politician.

19:58Kierstarm could learn a lot from her approach and her experience. In contrast to the spat approach, that's when a special adviser becomes an MP, to what extent is it feasible and appropriate that a Labour leader could be advised mentored by an experienced member of another party? Interesting question. The Theresa May interviewed at very, very well -roary, both in terms of numbers, but also the response. She was very dismissive and by pointing out that if she really believed that spads should the root to an MP, he shouldn't be through the spat, then Nick Timothy, who is waltzing into Matt Hancock's seat, seems to me to go against that.

20:31But fair point, I think she's right about a lot of things that she said. And I was very pleased she stood up for the civil service as much as she did. I hope Kierstarm does that. I think he's appointing Sue Gray is actually signalling that he wants to take the civil service seriously. Doing something before in politics, well, he's done that as DPP and as a lawyer. And I think this point about taking advice for others, is a good one. I mean, one of the first things Tony Blair did when he became Prime Minister. Much to the disgruntlement of some was actually that he called Margaret Thatcherin for a chat about how to deal with other leaders.

21:02But it seems to me that's a very sensible thing to do. I said at the start of the pandemic, you know, you have John Major, you have Tony Blair, you have Gordon Brown, Theresa May, David Cameron, all five of those actually became quite significant voices during the COVID pandemic. But actually it might have been an idea for Johnson to have called them in. And actually sort of almost given them a role or given them some part of that response, the natural response. So I think I hope Kier does sort of not think if he does become Prime Minister that he can get good advice from people who've done the job before regardless of party.

21:36Right. Good. Well, look, here's a question. Don't concede. Since both of you are polygots, you're a better polyglo, than me. Do you have any advice for people wanting to learn a language? And is there anything you would change about how languages are taught at school gone, Alster? Well, some of the changes is reversed to change that we made. I would get languages back on the curriculum, but possibly with, you know, broader approach. I think if I were going into learn languages today, if I was at school, I'd probably want to learn Chinese. I'd probably want to learn Arabic. If I was picking a European language, I might pick Spanish, rather than French and German.

22:11Why Spanish rather than French and German? I think more people speak Spanish. Well, white. Yeah. There's a way of connecting to Latin America. Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting. You and I often say to each other, we don't talk much about Latin America when we sometimes feel that we should. But I think one of the reasons for that isn't neither of us speaks Spanish. Yep. So we don't read as much. I probably speak more about France and Germany, because I read French and German quite a lot. You, by the way, speak a lot of languages. Bad for a certain degree. You know, we had praise for your... My server cried.

22:43Your server cried last week. Somebody said, some re -roached and to say that your pronunciation was almost flawless. Almost flawless. No, but I think the key to learning a language is not to be worried about making mistakes. And it's also, I think you have to love the language. I think you have to love that feeling of being able to express yourself in a way that you couldn't express yourself before. It's a wonderful feeling when you get into it. I think people learn languages in different ways. I mean, you obviously did very well at school and university in a more conventional language thing. In my case was, actually, I didn't like traditional sitting in a classroom being made to memorize grammar and vocabulary rules.

23:19I really came alive with languages when I moved to Indonesia and the foreign office put me in a language school in a rural area and maybe lived with the family. And I had three different teachers every day, two hours, one teacher, two hours with a second teacher, two hours with a third teacher after lunch, then two hours of homework. And living with a family that didn't speak English, at the end of three months, I had made so much progress just by talking, talking, talking, talking, talking. In a way that I didn't feel that I had made when I was sort of sitting through French classes at school being made to learn 40 words every night.