206. How to fix the honours system, chaos in the Red Sea, and Taiwan at a crossroads

26:04The latest polls that have come out are absolutely extraordinary. So there's something called the best for Britain, mega poll of 10 ,000 people. and this has found that 32 % of the public would like Starmarist PM, 22 % once Sunak, and it suggests that Starmar would take 390 out of the 632 seats in Parliament on the basis of this poll. There are two quite interesting things in it. I think one thing before Kier Samar gets overexcited is there's still a astonishing number of undecided 29 % of voters still saying don't know. The other thing that hasn't been reported much is this poll is catastrophic for the Lib Dems.

26:45The Lib Dems are now looking at being down at 7%, neck and neck was reform UK, which is the X sort of Brexit party. So it's a very interesting election, Labour clearly well ahead, but very large number of annoyed undecideds and the Lib Dems in real trouble as well as obviously the concept of this. Now we'll put these two poles that we've mentioned, the best for Britain poll, this megapole, and also the observer opinion poll on Brexit, we'll put them in the newsletter. And oh, the thing about as well about these megapoles, we used to do some of these at the People's Vote campaign. And I never quite know how they work, but they do them in a way, because it is a larger than usual base, they have, as you say, 10 ,000 people.

27:29They do these constituency extractions. And they worked out that there were only four constituencies where Rishi Sunak was ahead of Kierstharma in terms of who they wanted to be prime minister, including his own Richmond, where I think he came third after don't know at Kierstharma. So even his own constituency it was seeming he's got, no, I don't think, labouring and say Richmond, but the fact is that he's had these several, for him, fairly big moments that he's tried. We've talked endlessly about the environmental pitch, the King's speech, the boats, some of the sort of, there are a random strategy.

28:05These things where he's tried to sort of find big moments for breakthrough, bringing back cameras and other one, I guess. And they don't seem to have shifted opinion. But where you're right and where Labour should really not be complacent is, I think the level of don't know ology, that is leaning into a kind of, can't be bothered with any of it. And that's what labor I still think need to do far more to break through into. I was pleased that in his, I mean, these new UMS messages, I mean, I can remember from my time with Tony, there a complete pain in the neck to do, everybody feels they have to do them.

28:41But they're quite a useful opportunity, sort of signal your priorities. And I was pleased that in here is Kierstama specifically mentioned something we've been talking about, which is the need to restore faith in politics. And I do think there's something big to be done there. You're in Scotland at the moment. I'm in Scotland at the moment. It's interesting. I've been really interested at where I am in the Highlands. Far more open overt criticism of the S &P going on. I'm up in the part of the world where, frankly, quite a lot of the time, people just keep quiet about politics. You know what they're like?

29:15They just don't talk very much about it. But out and about in the last few days, really been interesting how many people have been much more open about saying, God, we've got to get rid of the SMP. So I think the combination of that, got to get rid of the Tories, got rid of the SMP. That is where there is an opening there, I think, for labour in particular, to go to these people, but they've got to get them over from, don't know, to positively want to vote. You and I, Cuskis, were in Scotland, we read the Scottish editions and newspapers, which people will know are often very, very different from the English traditions of these papers.

29:49And there's been an enormous amount on this. I mean, latest poll, their Scotland six point lead over the SMP, which should mean Labour taking the moment on track, takes 35 out of the 59 seats in Scotland. Conservatives down on 16 % SMP on 31, Labour on 37. So I think my sense is that Anna Sauer is appealing to people, people like him. There's a lot of, There's more sort of affection for Humsey Yusuf around, but there's not a sense that he's been very effective. And you can see people like Murray Black, who was the kind of firebrand young SMP MP when I was in Parliament, now coming out saying the problem is the SMP became too much for cult for Nicholas Durgeon and the problems around her and her husband now, having a huge impact.

30:33Just before we go to the break, do you want to pay a quick tribute to your friend, Jacques DeLau, and then we will come back. I think friend over states, but somebody I admired, and I thought there was something very interesting about the way his death was covered. I mean, this is a guy who had huge impact upon public life right across Europe, and yet he had to read most of the British obituaries and watch most of the British news. You'd have thought his life would revolve around what an headlighted in the sun and a fractious relationship with Margaret Thatcher. And just to remind listeners, the great headline in the sum was Up Yours to Laws.

31:13Up Yours to Laws, and this was when he was pushing very much on the European integrations to gender and Margaret Thatcher made that very, very famous speech, no, no, no, to some of his more radical plans. But if we talk about figures of history, I think a lot of the changes that have been made in Europe, you'd see Jacques DeLaur at the center of them. He was there at the mastery treaty. He was his committee that produced the paper that led ultimately to the foundation of the European of the single currency. He was right at the heart of German re -inification. I'm very interesting for a French politician.

31:49There was a feeling he should have gone for the presidency when he stopped being the commission president, but he actually felt France was never properly a social democratic country. And therefore he thought he wasn't going to win. And he went on to do other things instead. but he was a formidable politician. And I just think it's, it's, um, we're constantly saying we want big political figures with real vision and resilience and determination and he was definitely one of those. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Good. Okay. Time for a break.

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34:27How do we get more to?

34:37Welcome back to The Restless Politics with me, Aleister Campbell and with me, Rory Stewart. So Rory, we've kicked off a new year with the first episode of Leading, which is now out, and I had a lovely message from Sebastian Coe saying, you know, gold medals galore, or, peerages, knighthoods, companion of honor, but is there any greater honor than being the first interviewee on RESTY's politics leading of 2024? I thought he was great, Seppko. So, I mean, anyone with our generation will know him as the most legendary of British Olympian runner, who then went on to have a fascinating career in sort of every different bits of life, including sports administration, including politics, he was a member of parliament.

35:19But I just thought he came across as lovely. really worth the city. One thing I think that's interestingly in common between him and Christiana Figueroz and Arnold Schwarzenegger who we've also interviewed is that he clearly had this very, very demanding father to whom he is fiercely loyal. It's rather lovely. In all those cases, in his stories, he's been written about these slightly distant dads who either pushed him too hard or didn't pay much attention to them. But in every case, our interviewees have paid huge tributes to those pushy fathers. Yeah, yeah. Anyway, there we are. That's our first leading and next week we'll be talking to Ghee for Hofstadt, which is I think been one of my favorites so far for all sorts of reasons.

35:59Very good. Rory, why do you let our listeners into the secret of what an earth is happening in the Red Sea? Well, I think let's just start quickly with what the Red Sea is. So the Red Sea is the Narestrop water, that sort of sausage that runs down from Suez Canal down to the Gulf of Aden. In other words, if you look at a map, it's the bit that sort of splits Africa from the Middle East. And on the left hand side, it's got Egypt and Sudan, and on the right hand side, it's got Yemen, Saudi Arabia, a little bit of Jordan and Israel. And it's one of the most important shipping lanes in the world because the alternative to going up the Red Sea and through the Suez Canal is going right the way around the tip of Africa, which is a much, much longer journey, which is why breaking through the Suez Canal was a huge thing, which Britain was very involved in, Prime Minister of the time, disraily, got private loans to get the thing opened, and of course the Suez Canal led to this huge crisis that shattered British foreign policy for 20, 30 years in the 1950s when NASA seized the Suez Canal.

37:05And it's come back into the press again now, because the Red Sea is also really, really important to global trade. I mean, the statistics are pretty striking. 20 % of global container volumes go up the red sea. 10 % of the seaborn trade. 8 % to 10 % of seaborn gas and oil passes through the red sea and sewers roots. And the Houthi, who are the group that have emerged, initially as an insertion group, but now effectively control most of Yemen and who are linked to Iran, I have now said that so long as Israel continues its attack on Gaza, they will be attacking the shipping going up the Red Sea saying that that shipping is bound for Israel.

37:48And the US and the UK have got naval vessels in the Red Sea. The US has already started shooting down Houthi missiles, has taken out boats and killed Houthi as salons. The British Defence Secretary Grant Shaps has now signalled that the UK will join the US in a coalition to protect the shipping lanes. And some of the major shipping companies have already announced that they're going to be sailing around the Horn of Africa rather than coming up the Red Sea back to you. Well, one of the things that we discuss with Geef Hofstadt is this theme that you and I both addressed in different ways about whether individuals really can make a difference.

38:30And you're a Houthi man, I'm a Houthi man. But the Houthis take their name from one individual, a guy called Hussein Al -Houthi. And he was the founder of this. I guess you'd call it a subsect of the Shia Muslim community in Yemen. Yeah, exactly. So there's Aides. And Aides were when I was kind of studying this stuff back in the early 90s, were considered quite distinct from Sunni and Shia. But increasingly, partly under Iranian missionary work and Iranian outreach have begun to reinterpret themselves as being a branch of Shia Islam closer to Iran than to the Gulf States which are Sunni monocles.

39:16Is that real or is that opportunistic? Well, I think there's a, I think there's a, it's remain a strange historical anomaly. It's, it is a different tradition of Islam. I mean, you can get into different theologies on whether it would be considered closer to the Shia traditional, the Sunni tradition. But the Iranians have been very, very adept at making them feel that their form of Islam is closer to Iran. And essentially this is a proxy war to go back to Yemen because we were in a situation in which after the Arab Spring, the Yemeni dictator was effectively toppled. And when I was in a visiting Yemen, in the final days, the British embassy there, I remember having to scurry for cover with the British ambassador because of who the column had come down when we were on a trip just north of Senar.

40:05British embassy then evacuated, horrible civil war began, millions of people killed, some of the most extreme famine conditions in the world. Saudi Arabia and UAE then got involved on the anti -Houthi side. We've talked about Yemen again because they brought in the leader of the Jansweed militia from Sudan who first developed his relationships ships the Gulf State fighting for them in Yemen. And he's the guy that's absolutely at the center of the Civil War and Sudan at the moment. So that's an example of the way in which these wars spill over into neighboring territories. It also matters because it's one of the major reasons why UAE and Saudi broke with the United States because they felt the US had not been supportive enough when the Houthi had been firing missiles into Saudi Arabia and UAE.

40:52And so there's a sort of irony here which will be adding salt to these wounds which is the Gulf States will be saying we were warning you about the Houthi and when they were firing missiles that asked you didn't really do much to back us Yeah, now they're firing missiles at your ally Israel and suddenly you're saying that you're gonna launch some great maritime campaign Yeah, and if you if you want to a sort of sense of their basic outlook on life Their official slogan is death to America death to Israel which we used to be the great Iranian slogan and and in the glory days for Britain was death to America death to Britain death to Israel but another sign of Britain's declining influence as we've been dropped from the slogan.

41:30From the top league. What I find interesting, do you think is real that the escalation from the Houthis side has been specifically related to Israel -Ghazah? Or do you think that is also something that they've just realized gives them this opportunity to step things up? And they're The Americans have been pretty quick to take some of them out. And we know that once that sort of escalation starts, you can very, very quickly accelerate. Yeah, and then the problem is, of course, that we had this when I was in government, and we were trying to deal with the challenge of Somali Parasi, which has been another biggest view, is that quite quickly you get into a conversation around what you do on land.

42:22Because if you're simply attacking ships in the water, you're dealing with the symptoms, not the deep root causes. And of course, once you get into the deep root causes, you're getting into the whole mess that is Yemen itself. And that indeed was what happened with Somalia when we began trying to look at these pirate attacks from Somalia, increasingly of course, we were drawn back to do more and more development and investment and security programs on the mainland of Somalia. So there's that threat. I think another thing that you're pointing to, which is going to worry people, is that the Houthi are an Iranian proxy just like hisbalah in Lebanon.

42:54And so far the Israel -Ghazafite has not spilled over into a regional conflict with Iran because so far it seems as though Iran has been restraining hisbalah in Lebanon and restraining the Houthi from doing very big attacks. I mean there have been missiles, there have been these smaller attacks. At the moment though it feels like Iran does not want to be drawn into a big regional conflict. But it wouldn't take much in the various hot spots that are now attached to this for it to step up. Then it becomes very, very, very, very dangerous because then you can imagine Israeli strikes against Iran backed by the United States.

43:30Then people who worry that we're at something that feels like the beginning of the First World War, this is like the fights in the Balkans around Serbia and Bosnia that led to the First World War, this might be the same sort of trigger for a regional conflict. Yeah. So before we go on to Israel Guardser itself, just to give people a sense perspective on the war in Yemen, which we've said many, many times gets shameful a little discussion in our debate. 377 ,000 deaths since the start in 2022, and they reckon more than 4 million people now on the move as a result of it. So that is somewhere to watch, and it's a fairly new development related to Israel Guardser.

44:13and one that I suspect we'll be talking about again in the future. Just on Israel Garzo, you probably saw overnight, we were recording this Tuesday morning, the Supreme Court judgment against Netanyahu and his judicial reforms, which kind of reminds him that this is a guy who's, I don't say this pejoratively, but in a sense has been using the current war to shield himself from some of the massive domestic political trouble he was in. But in a way that's now right back in his face. Yes, if listeners want reminders of this issue, we'll put a link in the recording to an earlier interview that we did with Yuval Noah Harari when he was right in the heart of these demonstrations.

44:58So the story coming out of Israel, listeners will remember before October, was a massive fight against this right -wing government, and particularly the far right members of the cabinet, who were basically trying to muscle the judiciary. They saw the judges in Israel as being too liberal because they were occasionally challenging them on, including on issues around settlements. There were demonstrations regularly in the streets of Tel Aviv of over 100 ,000 people. The military and the reservists have come out on the side of the demonstrators against the Israeli government. The Israeli government passed a law effectively muscling the Supreme Court.

45:37And at the time, it seemed very unlikely that Supreme Court would overturn that because it would put the Supreme Court into a massive constitutional crisis. So Parliament passed the law undermining the power of the judges, and the judges have now by a slim majority 7 to 6 overturned that. But it may be that in the new context, actually, the judges will be successful, whereas people feared before all the horror that's followed on from October, that if the judges tried to do it that really would be the end. And Parliament would then pass the much more aggressive law and change the constitution. Yeah.

46:13The Israeli media at the moment is full of a lot of anger from some of the particularly the right wing ministers in Netanyahu's cabinet who think this is an absolute abuse of the of the constitutions. So they you're right. This is this has the feeling of a constitutional crisis in the making. There's one other thing I was reading, Rory, you've talked before about the possibility that we're going to get we can get general David Patreas on to the on to leading which I would love to do if we can. He says in very interesting, he said that Israel has to clear and hold all of Gaza to achieve its state in mission of destroying Hamas and rescuing the hostages, clear and hold all of Gaza.

46:49What do you think that means? Yeah, so this is right back to Dave Patress was the US commander in Mosul and then he was the sent Com Commander and then he was the Commander in Afghanistan. And he was the leading driver at a senior level of the US counterinsertioncy strategy, its coin strategy, and the key of the coin strategy was clear, hold and build. And the idea is that you put in the troops, you establish security, you hold the area, and then you begin to reconstruct and try to win the population back onto your side. It is an incredibly expensive, labor intensive project. The US spent over three trillion dollars trying to do it in Iraq and Afghanistan.

47:32The Rand Corporation was arguing that you needed one soldier for every 20 members of civilian population, and frankly, they did not succeed. And of course, the extreme coins, especially, say, well, we should have spent more money, had more troops, and maybe then it would have worked. But I think in the context of Gaza, General Petresse is basically pointed to the fact that what Israel is doing is, or trying to do, is not just unbelievably brutal. I mean, it now looks like 21 ,800 people have been killed. 50 ,000 plus have been injured. Half the housing stock is now in ruins in Gaza, but that there is no day after strategy.

48:14There is no concept of what happens when this is over. The other worry I have about Netanyahu now being back in her domestic political difficulties is that they ramp it up even further. And if you think about, when we first started talking about this in the immediate aftermath, I think we both agree that there would be a really, really brutal response, I think is very, very hard to make the case that they are taking every effort to avoid civilian casualty. It's very, very hard to make that case. Just to feed in from friends of mine in Jordan who are in touch all the time. I mean, to put it in context, I have a friend who ran a small charity in Gaza, which could not have been less political.

48:58I mean, it's basically a charity doing kind of sports entertainment for kids. And in his case, four of his senior staff members, one of which I met, have been killed with all their families. I mean, they could not have been less hammers. And he reckons that every single person he knows and Gaza has now lost very close relatives. But it was particularly seeing the photographs of these four relatively junior employees of a small charity young, young man with their families all dead that really brought home to me. What this is actually like, that we're just struggling somehow in our coverage to communicate who those 21 ,000 people are.

49:40I mean, I guess the easiest way through it is of course to explain that so many of them are children, but it's also just getting across the fact that some people may still believe that the vast majority of these people are somehow associated with Hamas or supporting Hamas. It just isn't the case. Siddharth Israel has killed and captured very few Hamas leaders in this today. And there's a saying you told there about the coverage. 65 journalists have been killed. Now, war correspondents go to dangerous places, but you wonder too whether I've told you before about some of the discussions we had during the cost of a war about being aware that there were targets that were under consideration where we knew there would be journalists and sufficient precaution being taken.

50:31Now, is that happening? And I think what happens is if If you make the case that, you know, they use hospitals, they use schools to protect Hamas fighters. Before you know it, everything becomes a legitimate target. And it seems to me that we're already losing a debate about that. And the other thing that we don't see, you very, really see pictures of the people who are dead. It's almost like, so we used to say 21 ,500. That's a lot of people. That's Burnley Stadium full. I actually had that thought when we were playing Liverpool on Boxing Day. If every single seat was filled, that is the number of people now are being killed.

51:06Now every single one of them is a person. What the median normally does in these situations is you see pictures and it brings home the humanity, but we're not seeing that. I'm not criticizing the journalist because they've got a hellish difficult job to do. As I say, 65 are being killed doing it. But I think it's almost like this is being portrayed without the human stories being told. and that, again, normalizes it just as another zone of violence going on. Yeah, exactly. As you say, it really came home to me when I was, when I can really connect it to individual lives and individual people to get any sense, the context of it.

51:45Right. Well, we promised at the beginning of the show to start talking about what is really the biggest year of elections in world history that we're coming into. In a sense, this year, the whole world is the rest is politics. It's politics, politics, politics, as we go into 24 out of time when the stakes are huge high. And the year ended just over Christmas, just in a couple of days for Christmas, with an election in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which is this huge country in the middle of Africa, 100 million people, and probably the most difficult country in the world, to hold an election.

52:23The election itself cost $1 .4 billion. They were trying to run over 70 ,000 polling stations. And for people who know the Democratic Republic of Congo, one of the problems is just accessibility. The roads get washed away very quickly by rain. You can see on YouTube if you're interested, images of trucks trying to move through these roads, which are basically like mud rivers. The election had to be extended, or had to be extended, when the government decided to extend it by another two days because the problems of getting into these remote polling stations. And the logistical difficulties are, compared by the fact that in eastern Congo, there are over 100 different, insertion groups.

53:06There is a very hot civil war taking place. And it's a country that is also matters to the world. And it's not irrelevant to the world, it matters to world because it is the place from which so many of the critical minerals, which are powering the energy transition powering our attempts to address climate change come from. So right at the heart of Tesla cars are 10 pounds of cobalt, of which the DRC is the biggest producer in the world. Coltan, which is another thing they produce, completely vital for telephones, transistors, another part of the Coltan derivatives for jet engines. It's also a huge producer of things like gold.

53:46So there's muddled up in this, is ethnic conflict between Totsian Houtou, which flowed over from the Rwanda conflict. There are Islamist militia groups. There are amazing conflicts to do with different people trying to control the legal mining. And the result, as you said at the beginning of the show, was that President Tishikedi, who I've met a couple of times, was slightly unlikely politician, has been re -elected. And the man who appeared to have beaten him in the last election got surprisingly few votes and all the opposition parties are calling fraud over you. He won with 73 % of the vote.

54:23The guy came second was sort of 16 and the guy who we thought was going to be the big challenger, he ended up with 4%. So do we assume that that is the way this was voted and do we? If you are going to ring an election, do you really want to give yourself those sort a puton -esque style figures? It's amazing isn't it? And one of the great tricks of these things, I remember talking to people who were trying to rig the Afghan election is that they always get it wrong because they're under so much pressure from their bosses to steal as many votes as possible that they completely overshoot the mark.

55:00I remember some of the polling booths coming back from one of the Karzai elections where all the results were always in fifties because that was apparently the number of things things that you had on a stack of papers. So when you stole the votes, you always stole them in 50, so it was always kind of weirdly every number ended in 50. I think it's completely totally inconceivable that Felix Tishkedi can possibly have got 73 % of vote if there was any proper functioning for a electoral system. And this is going to be the question as we move forward through this year. And we look at places like Bangladesh with their elections coming, Russia with the elections coming there, Venezuela where the elections are coming there, but also probably more disturbingly places closer to home.

55:43We're going to run into a lot of troubles on one of these things of fair. Yeah, and also Donald Trump will be looking at this and thinking, oh, they can do it. No, I mean, it's bizarre. And the problems that he faces, I mean, we talk a lot about democracies and the evolutions of democracies. But I guess DRC is probably, as we talk through the elections that are coming this year, maybe the most extreme example of what these democracies, some of the democracies are like in practice, which is it's 2000 miles from the end to end. It's the most wonderful country on earth. I mean, you may have come across Congolese jazz music, which is the, yeah, and Congolese music in general, which is the kind of incredibly dynamic.

56:24Huge differences between mountain gorillas and the east on the Rwanda border stretches almost all the way through to the coast, the Great Congolese River. When I was a minister traveling around DRC, I astonished again and again by the variety of differences and how long it just took you to get from one place, the other. But Portiazi is also the place, of course, which had a very big Ebola outbreak in 2019. Hit the press for that. But most of all, I think it's a place where six million people have been killed in the Congo conflict since the 1990s. There are 15 ,000 UN peacekeepers on the ground and a lot of talk about withdrawing them because they didn't seem to have made much difference over the years.

57:08The US, again, trying to do its best. I mean, the US almost the only country still doing this is Britain and France and others withdraw. The Director of National Intelligence Averl Haynes turned up on the end of November, managed to get a 72 hour ceasefire going in eastern Congo, so credit to the US on trying. But the big story there is that China has spent untold billions buying up all the key minds because since 2015 China's had a very clear view that if the world is going towards battery technology and electric vehicles they need to own all the key materials and they've bought these minds from Freeport which is the US company and now the US is scrabbling under Joe Biden to try to work out how to get US mining and trust back into Congo because China now controls through Congo so much the world trade.

57:58Okay, well, let's stick with China while we look very briefly ahead to the, I guess, the next big election in this election year, and that's Taiwan on January 13th. So you've got an outgoing president, Zaiying Wen. She's stepping down, has to step down because there's a two -term limit. Her successor as the candidate for the DPP is Leiching Te, favorite leading in the polls. Main stance in Safari as it relates to China, pretty robust, absolutely, and China needless to say, the relations with China is a very, very big issue for all of the parties and they are the most critical of China. There are two main opposition parties, the Cumin Tank and KMT party and the TPP, the Taiwan's People Party.

58:48There was a talk at one point of them coming together that hasn't happened, which is probably to the advantage of the incumbent But it's reasonably close. The lead is about, at the moment, it's 38 to 31, DPP 38, KMTs on just over 30, and the TPP on sort of 14, 15. The line that is sort of put out there the whole time is that the other main candidate in this election is China. That is the debate. There are amazing campaigns. You mentioned music in relation to Congo. And Congo, by the way, we talk sometimes about the importance or lack of importance of celebrities in our relations. The parties really fight in Congo to get the top musicians out backing them.

59:31And it was interesting how many of the really big guys just did not want to get involved. And likewise, if you want to see some really colourful lively election rallies, just Google Taiwan election campaigns, there's a lot of they're very, very lively, very, very vibrant. But this is going to be a big, big election for because the others are a bit softer towards China. Yeah, exactly. Just to come on then. So So the opposition, the main opposition party, the Guarming Tang, was the party that ruled effectively a one party state in Taiwan. And they were the party that ruled China under Changkai Shik until he was booted out by the communist in the 1940s and took his government with him to this large offshore island Taiwan and continued to hold the seat of China at the UN till 1971.

1:00:18So the Republic of China, this Chanko -shek set up, continued to claim to be the government of China. It would be a bit as though, let's say, Ashraf Ghani's government in Afghanistan, instead of being completely kicked out by the Taliban, had retreated to a small enclave in the Northern Mountains and continued for nearly 30 years to claim to be the government of Afghanistan when the Taliban was effectively ruling the rest of the country. It is an amazing success story on one level. Absolutely extraordinary. It is absolutely incredible. And the odd thing about Taiwan, which is difficult to communicate, is that it's not, it's never declared full independence.

1:00:54And there is a one China policy. So the UN went from recognizing the Republic of China, recognizing the Taiwan government as the government of China in 1971, to recognizing the people of the Republic of China, the Communist China in 1971. And in this debate between the Kwameing down, which basically the opposition is saying the best way of preventing a war with China is to go gentle, gentle and go for closer economic and diplomatic ties with China. And they're trying to portray the ruling party, the DPP, as being more aggressive and more likely to lead to a confrontation with China. But neither of them are quite going as far as signaling full independence and neither of them are prepared to accept the situation that China is suggesting, which is the situation of Hong Kong, which is this one country, two systems idea, which is that you bring Taiwan back into China, but leave it at a grave autonomy because, of course, the experience of Hong Kong has been pretty awful.

1:01:53One of the reasons why that idea has been blown up is that since 2019, it's been clear that the People's Republic of China hasn't really honored giving proper autonomy to Hong Kong. And so people who supported that in Taiwan have been on a mind. 80 % of people say they're concerned about the worsening security situation. And that's exacerbated by the fact that China, as the election years, have been stepping up the number of, kind of, incursion flights into Taiwanese space and just sort of probing and testing. So the question then is whether if you're more concerned about the security situation, you lean in towards the DPP, you say that requires us to stand firm and be robust, or you lean to a slightly softer position.

1:02:36And that's where the election is being fought. But just to give the Beijing perspective, in common with most world leaders, President Xi Jinping did a new year's address, and he was pretty clear. The reunification of the motherland is a historical inevitability. China will surely be reunified. And citing when in her new year's address said that relations with China have to be decided by the will of the Taiwanese people. Now the will of the Chinese people is going to be expressed on January the 13th and we should probably come back to it thereafter. Yeah and the candidate to watch from the opposition is a man called as he said at Hoi Yui and he was the former police chief of Taiwan and he's been the mayor of New Taipei.

1:03:21He's seen as a really mostly seen as a effective pretty non -political administrator. He's been much less outspoken on the China to receive the Canada from his party that was defeated in the last elections. So we'll see what happens. But this, yes, absolutely for those who are sort of worried about regional politics, this election time one will have a huge influence on how Xi Jinping reacts to time on over the coming months and years. Good. We'll talk about that in the near future. I mean, we'll see you tomorrow for a question time. See you tomorrow for a question time.