217. Question Time: How to cover Israel-Gaza, Labour’s £28bn green investment, and Taylor Swift vs Donald Trump

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1:51Welcome to TheRestisPolitics question time with me Rory Stewart. And me, Alex Campbell. It's a really old start, Rory. Well, start with a big one from Ben Storra. Why is Labour rolling back its pledge on green investment? This is one of the policies that got me really excited for a Labour government. And it's also pretty popular for what I can tell. Surely this makes Labour seem weak and less serious about the future of this country. So just context on this. Labour famously pledged that it would be investing £28 billion every year in the green economy. Then they sort of take that back a bit and said maybe they do it halfway through the term.

2:27And now it's slightly looks as though they're not really committing to when they're going to do it at all. And that's presumably because they're worried about fiscal position. But anyway, over to you. Well, I was just an event at the Union Chapel last night launching the paper back of my book, Rory, which as you know is called a very good, but what can I do where I did reveal to them that your book, yes, Politics on the Edge has outsold mine. That's very generous of you. Well done on that. But what was interesting was how many people were asking that very question or questions related to it. And there's a couple of things I've said on this.

3:04The first is I don't quite know how they've got themselves into this. Will they won't they around a number that if I'm right, I think Rachel Reeves first used in a Labour Party conference speech. And since when there's been this sort of never ending feels like a tug of war, but I can't quite work out who's on either side of the rope. But I'm, you know, my very, very strong advice is particularly given that after the Uxbridge by election, Rishi Sunack signaled himself trying to move away from the kind of green credentials agenda, I think Labour has to hold on very, very firm to being the party that's going to deliver a carbon free future.

3:43I get why they want, you know, they might worry about the numbers and they might worry about being attacked. But equally, you know, we've talked before about this thing about the so -called small target. If you don't get attacked for policy, people don't know what your policies are. And that is one of the questions I kept getting us. It was people basically, they come in out to hear me and, you know, get a copy of the book and have a natu and all that stuff. They basically wanted to vote Labour, I would have said. Most of them wanted to vote Labour, I think. And I actually made the point that in most elections that I've lived through, you have a feeling often that when a government's got the power of incomeancy, but people are a bit fed up with them, they're moving away.

4:23But then people are looking for reasons not to vote for the opposition. I think at the moment, the mood is that people are desperately looking for reasons to vote for the opposition as part of the whole sort of time for a change thing and fed up with the Tories. So I think Labour has got to stop worrying so much about being attacked and actually start giving people more positive reasons so that people say that is why I'm voting Labour. And there's a very fundamental thing here is in the which is that they are a party that wants to position themselves as anti -orcerity pro -growth. So their whole story is that the Tories cut too much unnecessarily and it damaged the economy.

5:03And the way to get the economy going again is to make some smart investments, in this case in green energy. And their story is this is going to create jobs. It's going to be the industries of the future. So they're talking about investing, for example, batteries for electric vehicles, changing the power set up in Britain. So it's a powerful story which has a lot of appeal to many economists, particularly economists who are more on the left who think that Britain has been starved of investment. There's a big, big story that keeps coming up, even in the right wing press, about how Britain doesn't invest as much as other European countries and its infrastructure and its skills and all this kind of stuff.

5:41So it's a pretty straightforward, if we ask an audience what is Labour's economic policy, this is the real flagship. Well, what they're going to do is they're going to massively increase investment and they're going to invest heavily in the industries of the future, which is going to give Britain a cutting edge. Now, whether that's whether that's right or not, and I can imagine some right wing economists succinct that saying, boo rubbish, that's the wrong way to go. But I would have thought it's a it's a clear strong message that a lot of people support and they should hold just to give a sense of the debate that is going on.

6:14So Phil Collins, who used to work with us in government and now writes a column in the Times and he had a column of the day, I'll just give you the headline, it said, Labour must ditch the 28 billion pound pledge to be heard. And the point that he was making is that on the day that Labour had this really big conference with business and the 400 business leaders all paying to be there and desperate to hear what Kierst Harman and Rachel Rees had to say. And he said that as they as the ministers were doing the shadow ministers were doing the media rounds, all they got was this will they won't they?

6:46And you know, they're in trouble. I always think this with the Tory ministers, whenever they're onto that line, we've been very clear that you know that they're basically they're not being very clear. And so on this, this specific issue, they have to sit around a table, resolve it once and for all. And then as you say, have a much bigger message that is rooted in what's going to be in the manifesto about how they're going to invest in the industry in the future. And I get the complications. So for example, we were out for dinner the other night with a local government leader who was telling his amounts and really interesting plans that they had, not just her council but other councils as well.

7:25It's this is this miss school to miss school. It is miss school in Camden, yeah. And but she's sort of, you know, part of the whole infrastructure of councils working together. So they're working on all sorts of different projects and they're talking to government and they're talking to business. And by the way, I'd been surprised at how many business people who you might think some of them, some of them are actually defeated to label like that guy from Iceland and that guy Ian Anderson the other day. But people who are probably still basically on the right, but who are desperate for labor to do this because they believe this thing about, you know, a pound of public sector investment can lead to three pounds of a private sector investment.

8:02What Georgia was saying is that actually there aren't necessarily all the projects there that will justify up to 28 billion per year as it goes forward. But anyway, the fact is Phil Collins in my view is both bright and wrong. I'm being both bright and wrong. I just think they've got to resolve it one way or another. Yeah. And stop being on the back foot about it and then have a bigger message. Isn't that the basic rule in politics that sometimes more important than which side of the fence you come down on, you've got to get off the fence. You've got to have a clear view that it's off from the worst of all worlds to end up in a kind of muddled, indistinct position.

8:38Yeah. And if you don't, if you don't have, if you don't have lots of other policies that people are talking about, then, you know, in every situation, they're going to focus on those that now, label will say we have lots of policies. And it's true. If you read the last policy document, the tons of policy in there, but I'm talking about policy that is it if you like is connecting with the public. And if you're in opposition, it only connects with the public. If you are very clear about what it is and you campaign on it relentlessly, you only get heard in the campaign if actually you are being attacked by the media and by your opponents, in this case, the tourist.

9:08Infrastructure is the obvious one, isn't it? Raul Ruperl, who was very much at the centre of Theresa May's attempt to get her soft Brexit through, has produced a report now on Britain's infrastructure with BCG, the consultancy group. And he points out that Britain is spending over 8 million for every kilometer of road compared to about France spends about half of that. In other words, France can build twice as many roads for the same price. Now, there are reasons for that, right? And France is a less density populated country and maybe different planning rules. But there is so much potential there.

9:44If Labour could get right a train line between leads and Manchester, for example, or really sort out the bus systems, it sounds like a small thing, but getting buses right in cities in the north will make a huge difference. Especially now I've got my freedom pass really. No, especially now you've got freedom pass. And I was on the Elizabeth line off to get my passport done with a kind of shout out to the passport office. Not just me, it wasn't some weird special treatment thing. Everybody who's been to get new passport recently has been very impressed by that is a bit of government that's working.

10:13But it's also an example of how a bit of infrastructure, that new Elizabeth line has suddenly opened up completely. Whole new air is the city and you can imagine, suddenly housing businesses and everything are going to be provided. If we could do that in Northern England, you've really got something possible. But the question as we keep talking about is not just can Labour put the money into it, but can they produce a good story about how they're going to be able to build it more quickly and more cheaply than governments have been able to for the last 20 years? Well, here's a related question to a Sandra Foy.

10:43How easy would it be for Keir Starmer if elected to dismantle the free ports being set up by Rishi Surnakini's cronies? If so, do you think he will? I don't know the answer. I don't know how easy it would be, but I do feel there is a growing stench around this. Shout out to a few journalists, a very small number of journalists have really been working. There's Richard Brooks at Private Eye, Jen Williams, who's at the FT. There's a couple of sites up in the North that have been really, really good. Your suppose has been very good. But I actually think this whole thing about T's works. We've talked about it briefly, but I think at some point we should actually do a big number on this already, because I sort of feel very, very uneasy.

11:24And it relates to this point that I talked about many, many times about the William Lee's Mog vision of the sovereign individual. This is about people carving out parts of the country, which will not necessarily be governed in the way that we think our country is meant to be governed and the systems that we've all signed up to. And I think the traditional treasury response this, which I really support, is to say that if the things you're doing in the free ports make sense and are justifiable, you should do them across the whole country. There's no point just creating these tiny little pockets of economic activity.

11:58If you believe in the particular regulations you're getting rid of or the tax incentives you're offering, do it more broadly. Don't just pick off little bits. The reason they did it in places like China was because it was almost structurally impossible to imagine those reforms outside Shenzhen and these other special economic zones. But in Britain, it shouldn't be necessary to do it. Here's a question for you from Alex Reed. I'm putting my hand up as your one download in Tuvalu. I was working there in January on a visit to prepare support for new MPs after the election. I listened during a morning run in the one open space for exercise in Funa Futi, the airport runway.

12:38I'm sure new MPs would be very happy if you both came to Tuvalu to speak to them. My question is, what advice would you give to MPs in a small and geographically isolated country? So to remind people that population of Tuvalu is about 10 ,000 people to project their voice on the world stage, especially on issues such as the impact of climate change. In other words, the population of Tuvalu is about half the population of my local town of Kreef. Yeah. And just to those who didn't listen last week, I insisted last week that we talk because this is elections year that we talk about the elections in Tuvalu.

13:11And I said there was a sort of geostrategic significance because the outgoing Prime Minister was very, as it were, on the American side of things and the new, his replacement is reckon to be a bit more pro -China. I think I've got that right. But Rory, if we do give advice to Tuvalu's new MPs, it will have to be through other than the podcast because so excited was I about the fact that we had that one listener in Tuvalu. Yeah, I assume we'd get more because we were talking about Tuvalu. But I just checked last week's listenership in Tuvalu was zero. It's very sad and that's because presumably Alex Reed got on that plane from front of duty and left after his thing and so he's no longer there.

13:54Sorry, can I just clarify? I've been stupid. It's half the population of Penroth and it's about, it's just larger than the population of my town, Creef. But it would register as a pretty small market town in Britain. I should also say, I think he also pointed out in his very kind email to out himself as our Tuvalu listener. And this goes back to the point about how so many of these issues are connected. The Australia has said it will take people on Tuvalu if, as it were, their entire location and existence becomes threatened by climate change. And I'm in Tuvalu, it's very much on the front line, if that isn't it.

14:30Yeah, Orban, Statlovald, what did Victor Orban get at a dragging his heels on support package for Ukraine was Tusk involved, bright political times, that part of Europe, which up until recently would have had you in a state of despair. So this is a good news story and I think it's good because it keeps listeners up to date on stories that we raise and sometimes somewhere we don't always complete. So you say, Roy, that we don't conduct this podcast with journalisty Riga. I'm totally jealousy Riga, but sometimes we don't always finish a story that we've begun. So the story that we began was that Orban was delaying the approval of the EU budgetary support to Ukraine.

15:06And the update is that the EU has taken that support through and Orban didn't in the end hold it up. He didn't even put up a fight really. There's a very good picture that was circulating last week of him around this table.

15:26And Shalmi Shell was there and Ursula von der Leyen was there. And it really was a picture of the big guys getting in the room and picking on the little guy. And I think what was going on there was say, we'll let you get away with this once, but you're not going to do it twice. And I think they were probably making clear that if he did it again, there were all sorts of measures that they could take against Hungary. So he backed down pretty quickly, I would say. I think that is a good thing for the European Union because he's been playing his games far too long. He'll be back though. He'll be back.

15:57Question on Tussqa. We've talked about Tussqa and what's happening in Poland a bit, but it continues to be the case, of course, that the president is who's from the law and justice party, the populist right party, and is in there for at least another year, is continuing to block stuff that Tussqa is trying to do, delaying legislation, trying to stop a budget, stopping Tussqa's attempt to get rid of judges from the court. So that remains difficult. And of course, Tussqa is a majority in both houses, which should help them through with some of the stuff. Okay, very reasonable question to come. Take a quick break.

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18:30Now, Rory, here's one that's sort of aimed at me, but I think is interesting for you to have a think about as well. Nick Daniels, Alistair often interjects or responds to Rory's points with the words no but, which can appear very negative, argumentative and hostile. May I suggest, says Nick Daniels, the more constructive yes and as a better communication technique for building conversation and disagree agreeably? So first of all, do you feel that I say no but? I think I didn't think you'd do that very much, is she? I don't recognize it that much. Good. I don't recognize it that much. But I like the idea of yes and.

19:09Yes and. Well, that might be a bit annoying if I thought you were doing it in a completely fake way when you obviously meant to know but. Exactly. Exactly. So I think I'm going to stick with no but even though as you say, I don't say it very much. Now, yes, Alistair. And question of Biden's sanctions. Harry McCoy, what does Biden's sanction against his ready settlers mean in reality? And Patrick Walker, what do you think a Cameron suggests in the UK would recognize Palestine as a state and what effect would this actually have over the on those two? Well, on the sanctions, essentially what it means is that those people who are named will not be able to travel to the United States.

19:43I think that's what it means. And I thought the Cameron thing, I can't, I still can't work out whether that was a very deliberate act of foreign policy or whether number 10 were a bit angry with him for going a bit freelance. But it was greeted with considerable favor in the Palestinian community for obvious reasons. It's an amazing thing that he did there. So just again, for listeners, David Cameron, the UK Foreign Secretary and ex -primester said in a meeting that he thought that Britain should consider recognizing the Palestinian state early. And this is a big, big change in policy because traditionally full recognition of Palestinian statehood was something that was supposed to be held back till the end of the peace process as one of the kind of rewards for the peace process.

20:30I think it's symbolically hugely important because along with Biden's emphasis on the two -state solution, it makes it very clear now that even amongst the Israel's strongest supporters and the UK and the US are clearly right up there, it is non -negotiable for them this two -state solution. And that puts some absolutely at odds with the position now that Netanyahu and his government are in, where they're very much openly rejecting a two -state solution. I was also very struck. We got a very, very angry email from an Israeli listener who felt strongly that we weren't remotely empathizing with what happened on October 7th or with what he described as the care that Israeli soldiers were taking.

21:18And in it also, he suggested that the next step would be for Israel to go after his ballad in Lebanon. And now I don't know how serrously to take all that, but it was a real reminder of how incredibly painful this is and how polarize this is and how very difficult it is to get a common conversation. I've got friends who are living in North London who say to me they can't bear to listen to the podcast anymore because they feel that when we talk about what's happening in Gaza, we're encouraging anti -Semitism and that we're not speaking enough about threats to Jewish communities and anti -Semitism in Britain.

21:56And I had another meeting with some of the Church of England, some people that you'd know in fact last week, including your friend, the Archbishop of Canterbury, who's known Ukraine, and who suggested that he would be willing to come on the podcast, Rory, he's been saying it for a year and then he keeps telling me these press offers are the block. So, come on Justin, let's get a move on. Let's get him on. Anyway, one of the things that was said, not by him, but somebody else who's working in an interface dialogue is that they feel that in Britain at the moment, interact with some Jewish communities and Muslim communities and in fact, Christian communities have never been so bad in their memory and that the word they would use is to say the Jewish community is primarily defined by an emotion of fear and Muslim communities by an emotion of anger and that it's very, very difficult for them to try to bring communities together at the moment.

22:48I mean, look, I sent you the email, I didn't send it more widely, but I was also quite shaken by it because it was pretty brutal in what it was saying about us, about what he assessed as to be our views and yet this is what's been so difficult about the whole thing. So, on the day that he sent that email, I maybe we should come back to you, we should ask his permission and come back and say, well, could we go through it? Maybe line by line and talk about why we think what we think, why we say, what we say, but on that very day, I was at an event in Croydon where had to be, as I said last week, I had to be sort of dragged out by the police because I was surrounded by protesters, we basically saw me as a kind of Zionist war criminal because in their eyes, we're far too sympathetic to Israel and we're not, we haven't neither of us have said the words, there should be an immediate ceasefire and we both explained why we think that, as saying that doesn't really add much to the some total of human debate or knowledge.

23:48And I actually, I'm surprised I haven't said it, I do think there should be an immediate ceasefire. Well, so do I, but I think the fact of being, we've been trying, what we said when this whole thing happened on October 7th, you remember we had a discussion where we said that we should try to explore the complexities of all of these issues involved. So we've got criticized, for example, for having the Palestinian ambassador, but I thought it was a very interesting perspective from the Palestinian view. We had various people from the other side and we've, we've continued to try to do both sides, but what the difficulty is, those people who are throwing things at me in Croydon, they will only listen if we are saying the things that they agree with.

24:28And likewise, the guy who sent us that email, unless we are saying completely what he thinks, and I can't sit here and say that I agree with Benjamin Netanyahu strategy in this, I can't, I can't say that I think he's a good prime minister, I can't say that there hasn't been horror and brutality on both sides because there has. And then you get into the whole what aboutry. And what I, all I think we've been trying to do is to say to people, it surely should be possible in a mature democracy like ours to feel horror and revulsion at what's happening to the people in Gaza, whilst also trying to keep ourselves in the minds of people, the hostages, the families of the hostages, and the people who were killed in their families, on October 7th.

25:09But it's almost like you can't do that, you have to be absolutely fixated on one side. And that's why I find very, very troubling and alarming and polarizing about the whole thing. And of course, it is also a lens on two other world events. I mean, it is the same. I'm afraid, honest to use that Kashmir. If I talk to educated, very liberal, progressive Indian friends in India about Kashmir, I get an absolutely sort of determined view on one side, obviously in Pakistan on the other side. I mean, there are, again, with Serbs, we've been talked about the Serbs in relation to Cosferner -Rappar, because Serbska, the incredible difference between way Russians to see if Ukraine and the way Ukrainians perceive it.