223. Islamophobia, chaos in the House of Commons, and the North Korean election

24:56If he could, if he left, right, so you've got kicked out Labour, he's been kicked out of the Tories. Maybe he should join reform and he could get a place on the Guinness Book of Records, the first guy to get kicked out of three parties. I also think about it, but maybe before we go to the Speaker Rory, I think it's interesting. There's very sad piece in one of the papers of the weekend talking to people in Rochtdale sort of saying, you know, what have we done to deserve? What have we done to deserve this awful political situation that we've got? And it was quite clear to me that they, they just, they were, they were a lossist to know how to vote.

25:26Now, I've got to say, I think it would be terrible for our parliament if George Galloway ended up back there because I mean, talk about a guy who's very good at sort of, you know, hatred and division. And I saw with St. John saying, if he was a voting in Rochtdale, it's Paul is ballot paper. I'm not sure that was the right message to give either. I think, if I were in Rochtdale, I would try and work out who is best place to stop George Galloway becoming an MP and spreading his particular form. Sounds like you're endorsing the Labour Canada there. I mean, but it's a sign isn't it, of the, the mess that everyone's got themselves into.

25:57And I think that's a good transition, isn't it? Because one of the reasons why the rhetoric is, is mounting up is because of Gaza. And there's been a big spike in anti -Semitic threats. I mean, we shouldn't in any way minimize that. I'm talking to Jewish friends who's reporting stories to their children being spat out having their Yamakas taken off their heads. And at the same time, there has been an increase in, is that a phobic rhetoric of exactly the sort that we've seen from Leanderson. So just quick explainer on what happened with the speaker because I think it takes half of the how odd the British system is because basically what happened on Wednesday is the speaker made a technical decision on an amendment.

26:39An amendment is somebody introduced a motion and then you amend it. You put a little side note to modify it in legislation. And this stuff is pretty obscure even for most MPs. Partly because most MPs vote with a party with most of the time and don't take much interest in parliamentary procedure. There will be a few dozen MPs that are really up on this stuff. But most MPs are just going through the lobbies. I think that's a bit harsh. I think more of them take an interest in parliamentary process and debate that you're saying I do, honestly. It may have changed since my day, but I promise you, if I was to take a selection of 50 MPs who join with me and quiz them about the minutiae of what's happening with this amendment thing, many of them would struggle to provide the argument.

27:21And actually, I think that's one of the reasons the journalist didn't manage to explain it very clearly. Anyway, the thing is that three times in a parliamentary session, the SMP, which is the third largest party, Scotch National Party, gets to have an opposition day and that allows them to put forward a motion precisely targeting the issue that they want to speak about and the issue that they want to vote on. And they chose to bring forward a motion on Gaza. And with all opposition, doesn't matter what's Labour or SMP, these things are always designed to trip up all the other parties. Whenever Labour brings a motion forward, it's designed to embarrass the government as much as possible.

27:57And in this case, the SMP brought forward a Gaza motion, which was designed to embarrass Labour as much as possible. Because what you do is you come up with a motion which sounds to the public perfectly sensible. So if someone votes against it, they're like, this is absolutely outrageous. This is why if you look at my, they work for you record. They say, you know, Rory Stewart voted to make poor people poorer, voted to punish the homeless, abuse, Syria, etc. Because the motion is always crafted. So if you vote against it or abstain on it, you're voting against Mother Hutt and Apple Pie. He said about the journalist, strictly to explain it.

28:29I think one of the best explainers was actually on the news quiz, which is a, for those who don't know, is a radio for comedy program. But they said that essentially what the SMP were doing, I can't remember the exact sort of details that he was using, is that you put down a motion saying, I love cuddly rabbits. Yeah. But then you go into say, but I think that all murderers should be hung drawn and quartered. And what happens is that you say, well, I'd happily vote for lovely cuddly rabbits, but I'm not sure about that second bit. And of course, then you vote against or you've stayed and then the campaigners go out and say, he wants to kill all cuddly rabbits.

29:12That's how it works. That's why the so -called transparency they work for you voting record stuff is so misleading, because it seems very straightforward. But you're absolutely right. What happens is you look at my voting record. I'm voting against cuddly rabbits again and again. Because actually the motion usually says, I love cuddly rabbits and the conservative government is the most evil government that's ever existed. So you as a conservative can't vote for that. And it looks like you've been against anyway. In this case, the SMP decided to call for an immediate ceasefire. Labor instead wanted an immediate humanitarian ceasefire and the government wanted an immediate humanitarian pause.

29:46So these three tiny little differences in language. And at the last moment, the Speaker of the House of Commons and the Speaker of the House of Commons, Lindsay Hoyle is a former labor MP, although when you become Speaker, you become impartial. He chose to break with all parliamentary procedure and allow the labor amendment to be voted on first. And basically by doing so, what he did is he turned it from being an SMP day where the SMP defines the language and defines the vote into a Labor Day where labor defines the language and defines the vote. I think you've explained it very well, but the reaction did sort of indicate, I think, that the main purpose of the SMP, the particular wording, the particular motion was actually as much about trying to cause trouble for labor MPs and the labor leadership as it was for, as it were, the people of Gaza to inform they said they were speaking, which is true for all opposition data bates.

30:44And it's nothing different about that. So I'm saying that's true with every labor motions, true with every estimate. That's what they do. They're crafted to do that. But normally in opposition to the database, you're doing that in relation to the government. What happened here was you're doing it between, is it were two opposition parties. And then the government pulled the plug. And again, there, there's a lot of confusion as to exactly why or when it was done. But you've got labor people saying that they did it because they were worried that they were going to lose on a vote. And also that they by then felt that they were sort of, because they were quite happy with the SMP causing difficulty for the Labor Party.

31:18But what it ended up with essentially was all three of the parties looking a bit kind of the public looking on thing. What the hell's going on here? Yeah, but why is it an important principle? I think all that's absolutely right. And the politics of it is that last time that SMP put forward a motion, there were big rebellions against Kirst Starmer over this. And people were afraid that nearly 100 MPs would rebel against Kirst Starmer and endorse the SMP and it was late party. So there's every reason in the world, politically for Kirst Starmer and Labor not to want SMP to do this. And this kind of politics would have been very damaging to labor.

31:50The problem though is that the Speaker broke the parliamentary procedure. He took the opposition date away from the SMP, helped labor with their political problems. And he said that the reason why he did it was that MPs said to him that they'd been threatened by extremists and that if they'd been forced to choose whether or not to vote for the SMP motion, they would have been in trouble. And what I guess the Labor MP that's saying that is saying is that if they'd voted for the SMP motion, yep, okay, that's fine. But they would have had to resign from their front bench position and they would have been in trouble with Kirst Starmer.

32:24And if on the other hand, they voted with Kirst Starmer, they would have been accused of being against deceased foreign garrisons. So they were in a difficult position. The reason why this is a big problem is that the British constitution is all about these unwritten rules and what the Speaker did was pretty outrageous. He didn't even appear at the end of the debate. The clerks who were the officials who are meant to preside over this advise strongly against what he was doing saying. It was breaking procedure and actually the senior clerks didn't attend the end of the debate apparently in protest.

32:52And the combination of two things, firstly, him breaking parliamentry procedure, a favorite party. But secondly, him doing it because MP said they were being threatened is very dangerous. We shouldn't be changing parliamentry procedure because MPs claim they're being threatened. Otherwise, you're encouraging more extremists to threaten. Yeah, I've actually, not in recent days, but having the past spoken to Lindsey Hoyle about this issue of MPs security and the levels of abuse and hatred that they face and so forth. And we forget so quickly, it's not that long ago that David Amos was killed. It's not that long ago that Joe Cox was killed.

33:30And I remember, I think it was, was it Charles Walker? I saw one, there's a conservative MP saying that thing I know about Lindsey Hoyle is absolutely obsessed with MP security. But I grew with you, we have to have in a healthy democracy, the MPs able to go about their business, to live their lives without being in fear and to make decisions which are always going to upset somebody. Okay, you've got to have that. And we shouldn't be changing anything in our process where we basically say, well, I'm going to change my vote because if I don't, I'm going to get physically intimidating my family attack, whatever it may be.

34:02So I understand the principle he was trying to enunciate. However, I think that the combination, I think it just underlined again two things. One is the toxicity of this issue. But also, it sort of felt like another day where our current political system felt that it was creaking under the weight of people's expectations of what the political system should be doing. There was an interesting moment when one of the SMP MPs spoke and very, very passionately, very, very powerfully. And there was a round of applause from the SMP MPs and Lindsey Hoyle stood up and said, you've fooled, well, no, you're not meant to applaud like that in the House of Commons because that's a rule.

34:42And one of the SMP MPs shouted out, it's a new rule. And of course, that is the danger with this. And that's when the kind of that sense of order breaks down. Yeah, we saw the beginnings of this. So for Brexit, where both the remainers and the Brexitists started breaking parliamentary procedure to try to get there. The other thing that's reminiscent of Brexit here is that I believed strongly that there was a majority in Parliament for a soft Brexit that there were lots of Labour MPs who basically would have been happy to vote for a customs union and a lot of Conservative MPs who were happy to vote for the backstop, which was the same thing.

35:16And we never got it through. And this is another example of this. I think there's an overwhelming majority of MPs who want a ceasefire in Gaza. And the fact that you've got these three parties absolutely at log ahead, unable to get a majority in Parliament, proper majority in Parliament for it, is just a sign of the way in which our party system is so screwy and weird. I think the worst thing from the public's perspective was that, I mean, it really was one of those situations where there was a lot more heat than light. And I was looking at some of the Scottish media over the weekend. And it was all sort of, I'm not blaming the policy.

35:52Well, I'm blaming them a bit actually, but it was all framed in the context. Well, it was a good week for the SMP because it meant that they were being talked about. And it was a good week for the SMP because they've now got the speaker where they want him. It was all this sort of tactical stuff. And meanwhile, the death toll mounts and the death toll mounts. Now, I don't buy this idea that it doesn't matter what happens in the British Parliament and that nobody in Gaza, you know, hear people say, well, nobody in Gaza is sitting there saying, well, I wonder what which amendment Lindsey Horos is going to take to the motion, et cetera.

36:24I think it does matter what the British Parliament says and does. But I think it's sad in a way that you couldn't get to position where actually you think, well, maybe a Sunak or a Stama actually says, why don't we actually try and get together and genuinely have a united message about this? Where, would it be that difficult to do? Maybe it would. No, no, I didn't think the difference between Labour's language around an immediate humanitarian ceasefire and the government's language around immediate humanitarian pause. You know, we're talking about trying to solve Northern Ireland or two -state solutions.

36:59This is not a difficult thing to get a common one by the Sun. Well, maybe time take a break, but wow, what a what a week in British politics. Yeah, well, I suspect it will be quite a few of those before the next election.

37:14This is an ad from BetterHelp. At the moment, we're getting advice from everywhere. You just have to go on TikTok. Could be Alice's cold plunges. Could be my attempts to meditate or the digital detox that I'm doing in Colombia. But 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 the therapist to work through these ideas calmly, objectively and professionally. And as the largest online therapy provider in the world, BetterHelp can provide access to mental health professionals with a very diverse variety of expertise.

37:50They've got over 5 ,000 therapists in the UK. They've helped more than five million people globally, and you can join a session literally at the click of a button. Change therapists anytime. So, obviously not about fixing you, but it's about hearing yourself clearly, maybe for the first time. So, talk it out with BetterHelp. Our listeners get 10 % of their first month at BetterHelp .com slash rest politics. That's better H -E -L -P .com slash rest politics.

38:23Welcome back to The Rests as Politics with me, Rory Stewart. And me, Anastak Campbell. And before we talk about Ukraine, Rory, I need to check in with you. How's your heart rate? How's your pulse rate? After your little spat with Jamie Rubin on leading? Yeah, that's right. Encourage people to listen to Jamie Rubin on leading. It was very interesting, actually. I mean, I don't know whether I was getting one up, but Jamie was getting a little bit one up and apologize at the end, sweetie. Maybe I should have apologized more. We got really, and if people want to listen to leading, it's a good chance to do it.

38:53He was providing a very, very strong defense, as you'd expect, of the Biden presidency and a very strong defense of America still being the indispensable power in the world. And I was trying to question that and suggesting that actually America's power has diminished a lot since the 1990s and that people are very worried about American isolationism. One thing for the record I was thinking about this last night, he called me out on Syria. So I was saying that America lost quite a lot of repetition when Obama did not hold the red line that he said in Syria. He said, you know, if they use chemical weapons, our bomb them and they use chemical weapons and he didn't bomb.

39:27And Jamie Rubin, I think, pushed me two, three times to say, well, if you were in favor of intervention Syria. And it was right that he did that because the truth is I was very conflicted about Syria. I would have been very doubtful about an intervention or invasion of Syria. I did think narrowly on this particular question, if someone uses chemical weapons and the US government says if you use chemical weapons will bomb you should the US government bomb. Yes, they should. I think chemical weapons are an unusual thing. But I think he's pointed to something sort of bigger and more important, which is that he senses that someone like me is in a pretty difficult position.

39:59On the one hand, I've been very critical of American interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan and doubtful about full -scale intervention Syria. I saw that. How do you see, by the way? Right. But on the other hand, I'm saying America is this indispensable power and it's not doing enough in the world and it's less relevant to the world. And I think just to maybe bring this back to you on Ukraine, I mean, the reason this is relevant is that Ukraine is now becoming, I think, the latest and probably most dramatic test of whether America is actually a reliable ally and so much depends on that because the way in which Biden left Afghanistan abandoned it to the Taliban, totally unnecessarily, made a lot of people in the world wonder whether America was going to stay the course with its allies.

40:41It's refusal to act in Syria for the UAE in Saudi as I said, it's refusal to back them against Houthi missiles. But now Ukraine, if the Republicans and the Trump Republicans back out of Ukraine and let Putin consolidate and increase his position in Ukraine, I think that really is very damaging, very damaging for the ability of South Koreans to depend on the US, the ability of the Taiwanese to feel their dependent. In fact, all around the world, anyone who relied on the US for defense will lose that faith even more than they have already. The other really interesting part of the interview that I found was him describing this new job that he has at the Global Engagement Center trying to counter Russian, Chinese, Iranian propaganda.

41:26And there's difficulty that there is now of democratic systems defending themselves within the kind of media -political ecosystems against dictatorships which have free access to our spaces, it were, but which is not reciprocated. And you know, and he said of all the challenges he's faced, whether that was arms control or the Balkans or all the different things he's been involved in as a diplomat when he was particularly when he was working for the Clinton government. He described this as the most difficult issue that he's dealt with. And I think this does act as a link to Ukraine because I think what we're seeing two years on is a really quite dangerous waning of the levels of support that there were at the start.

42:12Now you could say, well, that's obvious because the long with something goes on. But if you're the dictatorship that Russia is, then you can do things like, and I'm not by the way saying this is the system we should have, I'm simply making an observation, that he wipes out Navalny just ahead of a sham election. He can put out all sorts of figures for the support. We don't really know how many people have died. So you've got this war going on dependent upon Western support that is so clear from everything that Zalensky has been saying, dependent, particularly on the Americans, but also dependent on the Europeans.

42:47And this debate happening, as you said in the Republican party in America, where essentially it's becoming almost like, you know, well, why should we be the ones who are helping out the Ukrainians? And that's why these voices, I thought one of the most powerful, well, there have been two very powerful speeches I've seen this week. One was an interview with the Prime Minister of Estonia, Kayakalas, about why the West has to stick to this because if it's Ukraine first, don't imagine it's going to be Ukraine last. And the other thing is your, if I can say Rory, your former fellow Bullington club member, although both briefly, I think, the foreign minister of Poland, can I just on the record?

43:24I resigned at my first meeting because I've said, discussed it. I think this guy, Radik Sikorsky, ran it all the way. And I think was the great kind of Boris Johnson's number one. Radik Sikorsky is currently foreign minister of Poland, which is put in the newsletter, this fabulous intervention he made at the United Nations, where he went through the Russian ambassador's speech line by line. I'll just say briefly some of the main points. He calls them a criminal key every year. In fact, Ukraine has a democratic elected government. He calls them Nazis. Well, the president is Jewish, the defense minister is Muslim.

43:57They have no political prisoners. He blamed the war and US and the Ecolonialism. In fact, it's Russia that tried to exterminate Ukraine in the 19th century under the Bolsheviks. This is the third attempt. And on and on and on. It was line by line. Very powerful and pretty brave thing to do face to face. When we get to Q &A tomorrow, we have a question about whether diplomacy needs a sort of reset where people are too polite to each other. This was a very, very, very effective piece of aggressive debating. And I recommend that people see it. We often do shoutouts to ECFR, European Council foreign relations.

44:34And they've done a really interesting poll that will again put in the news that are on the views of European countries towards Ukraine and the way in which that's shifting. So the poll suggests, and it's a big, big poll across all of Europe suggests that now only 10 % of Europeans think the Ukrainians are going to win. 20 % think the Russians are going to win 35 % think it's going to end in some kind of settlement. So their expectations are gloomy. On the other hand, their support for Ukraine is very strong. So overwhelmingly, a plurality, not a majority, but a plurality of people very much feel that their countries should keep supporting Ukraine.

45:13And Europe has put in nearly a hundred billion dollars so far compared to about 75 billion from the US. The problem though is that if the US were to stop funding, it's almost inconceivable that Europe would be able to double. It's funding. And in any case, it simply doesn't have the missiles, doesn't have the weapons that Ukraine needs, even if it provided the money. One thing I wanted to raise with you though, the countries that seem to be most keen on a settlement and most sort of, I don't know, quite pro -Russian, but definitely most skeptical about the Ukrainian government are Hungary. You can understand that.

45:49Minorban is a big kind of pro -Putin guy. Italy, maybe you can understand that a little bit with Georgian Maloney, Romania, but also Austria and Greece, and sort of consistent across most of the questions that doesn't matter whether it's questions about whether Russia's going to win or whether we should have a settlement or how much you should support Ukraine. Those are the five countries which seem to be weakest in their support for Ukraine. Any views on what it is and Austrian Greek, Romanian politics that means that people seem to be more, I suppose, pro -Russian on this? Look, Austrian politics is probably something we should talk about a bit more often than we do because I think there is a bizarre link between right -wing extremism.

46:32Austria has a pretty strong right -wing element in its politics and this bizarre support for what they define as strong Russian leadership. With Italy, interestingly, we talk a bit about Maloney and how she's trying to be a little bit different to how she projected herself when she was an opposition figure. I thought it was interesting she went to the event with Zelensky on the day of the Second Underverse, I think it was her, Prime Minister Belgium, Prime Minister Canada, Ursula von der Leyen, were all there at a kind of little ceremony that they did. So that I guess was her expression of support.

47:08I think the other thing that we underestimate how big a change this is going to be for all of this in these European countries, if they engage in this debate about defense spending. So if you look at, I don't know where Greece and Romania are in relation to defense spending, but I imagine they're a lot low. I think Poland is the top at the moment in the European context. Germany has increased its defense spending, we're increasing defense spending, but I wonder whether it's part of that that they're continuing to look to the bigger countries to lift the load on defense spending. I think Greece is weirdly quite high without having a very effective military.

47:43But Greece actually is one of the few countries on paper that is up there above the 2%, but I think that their issue in the spending is that they have very, very, very high pensions for their military. And I think that's what takes up a lot of the money. So I'm not sure that there was, it was combat ready as those figures might suggest. Well, we're going to get the Greek Prime Minister on leading soon. And he's a very interesting, I think, quite moderate centrist figure. He's defeated populism, but there's also, I think, a very strong tradition of Greek sympathy for Russia going all the way back to Russia's support for Greece against the Ottoman Empire.

48:18So maybe there's some more historical stuff. Just quick summary of where we are, because I think a lot of people will have heard this, but essentially on the plus side, if like you and me, you're on the Ukrainian side in this, the remarkable thing is that Russia failed to take care of. The remarkable thing is that there's been a massive increase in European defense spending, Sweden signing up to join NATO, a sense that the European Union and NATO held together much more strongly than people thought, that Germany who Putin would have bet would sort of refuse to confront him because they were worried about gas exports actually held firm.

48:56In some ways, being quite impressive in the way that it's unified Europe and NATO against Putin. On the point about, you know, go back to the very, very start. And if you remember when the Americans got a hold of the intelligence related to the planning of this and the original planning in the Russian system was that this was going to take three days. And here we are two years later. And as you say, at the moment, conventional wisdom that the Russians are doing better, but that can turn around again, provide that the commitment from America and Europe is maintained. Yes, the thing I suppose on the other side of the story is that the hope for sanctions didn't work in the way that people expected Biden produced this great line that the rubble had been reduced to rubble.

49:43And actually as Russia has not happened. No, as rumped up its defense spending, its economy will grow faster. Germany, China and India are buying its oil. And even though these were the most comprehensive sanctions imaginable, they tried to exclude it from the basic payment systems the world from swift and all this stuff. There's just been a use of different types of ships, different types of cryptocurrency, de -dollarization, a lot of cunning schemes to make sure that Russia continues to export and get its income in. So I just think that the challenge for politicians, and I'd love to hear you on this and how you make this political case because it'll be central for an incoming labor government.

50:22The argument has to be that this is not just about Ukraine. Yes, of course very few people believe that Ukraine and counteroffensive is going to work anytime soon. And yes, Avdika has been lost to the Russians. But the major point is that if Putin is allowed to get away with this, what that means for the security of Europe, for America credibility around the world, I mean it's a much, much bigger threat to international global security. Yeah, just on Avdika, according to the Institute for the Study of War, more Russians have died in the seizing of that one place than died in the entire Soviet Afghan war.

51:04I think that we've, now it's very hard to get accurate figures, that's for sure. Zelensky this weekend came out and said, I think that the Ukrainians had lost, he said 31 ,000 soldiers, which is much lower than a lot of independent analysts think. They would think nearly twice as many. Yeah. And then some of the, again, how do we get to know or assess? But there have been independent news sources in Russia, which think that the scale of Russian military death is in the 80 ,000s. Some American assessments go even higher on both. But we're talking about a lot of people who've died. And so I think the politics of this are fundamental.

51:41I think it gets harder and harder for Zelensky to keep making the same points again and again and again and again to the European countries that they have to see this as their fight as well. But I mentioned earlier the intervention from Kaya Kalas. And I think these, some of these Baltic countries are saying the sorts of things that we should be saying that if he wins, this is not going to be the end of it. And that is the lesson of history. It's also the lesson of Putin that what he gets away with as soon as he gets away with, he thinks he can get away with more. And therefore, I think it does have to become part of the argument for going into the next election that we probably are going to have to increase defense spending.

52:21I also think by the way that if and when whoever wins an election, Rory, and by the way, David Gork, with whom I did an event the other day, he shares your view that it's probably going to be a quite a big labor win. He also, by the way, Rory said that, you know, he's still on the bench. If you have to pull out a tall, he's there waiting on the bench. And his third request to you, third point was that if I can do an event for the local book shop in Chordywood with the paperback of my book, you can do the same with your. That was from your hero, David Gork. Brickett. Okay. Brickett's from my hero, David Gork, yeah.

52:56So is that yes? Should I tell him you'll do that?

53:02Maybe. You've got to follow up with, is that a yes or a no? Just keep asking until I'm actually, I weep. That's the great thing. And then you can say I'd be very clear. I've been very clear. Exactly. Just at the beginning of this and we, I guess we're coming to the end of the podcast, but you wanted to bring us onto the North Korean elections. And I'd love to hear a little bit about your thoughts on North Korea. And I've got some stuff to say about North Korea too. Every week, I, one of the things I do is I go through the list because there are so many elections this year, go through the list of all the elections and see which ones, you know, maybe we should think about discussing.

53:37And what? So what, what I discovered this week is that I thought, my god, there's meant to be an election in North Korea. Now, on the one hand, we can say, well, what's the point of an election in North Korea, given the places are complete dictatorship, but they do have elections to something called the supreme people's assembly. And you'd be pleased, Flix. It's a, it's not the proportionate representation system I want. It's a first pass, the post -Kir's, Starmer style election. Well, it's even less pleasing that essentially you just, you have a candidate and you can say, yes or no. And I believe, I believe if you say no, you have to pick up a very different red pen in the open voting booth.

54:19I see it. I see it. By a party official to say no. I think it might even be worse than that. I think you have to come out and put it into a, a, a, a one box or another. So the yes votes go very clearly into that box. And then no votes go to that one. But what is interesting is that because he made this Kim Yong -un made this speech recently pretty changing strategy, essentially saying it's no longer like trying to unify where we're, where we're very much to states. And that's the future. And essentially, you know, we're at war as opposed to trying to build peace. But he also, he does want to change the constitution.

54:54And, and that is seen as quite a big deal. And so I think that the, what was meant to happen? They thought the elections were going to be mid -March around March 11th. And then the first session would have been March 22nd, then a big opening ceremony. And then you would have been able to go on to get a new state affairs commission chair and amend the constitution. But it's been for some reason nothing has happened. All the preparations that are meant to happen before this sham election have not happened. So anyway, it's just interesting because of course, in South Korea, we're coming up to, I think they've got their election in April.

55:27So it just shows that even within a dictatorship, when you have elections that aren't necessarily free and fair, that you have worries around them that make it quite difficult even to have them when you know that you're going to win. Yeah, that's right. I think these countries are always more fragile than they look from the outside. And there's absolutely a day's going to come when North Korea will, when the regime will collapse. And in, in a way, that isn't necessarily as much a thing to look forward to as people might suggest. It will be a moment of real anarchy and chaos, which will impose huge strains on the world in South Korea when the North Korean regime comes down.

56:07But it's also, you've pointed to something interesting about all these regimes, which is the way in which they still want to pretend to certain kinds of legitimacy. So oddly, North Korea still pretends to have a kind of multi -party system. There are two miniature little parties which are controlled, of course, by the main party. But one of them got 50 seats in parliament and it's sort of relic of a 1940s party that's kept artificially alive. And other bits of the system, they don't pretend at all. So for example, if you are arrested as a political prisoner in Stalin's Russia, you would have a show trial.

56:40They'd at least go through the motions. And before they shot you, they'd tell you what you were being shot for, what the charge was. In North Korea, you simply disappear. There's no pretence at a trial. And there are, it's difficult to get figures on this. But there's definitely at least 150 ,000 political prisoners in camps, which is a proportion of populations similar to Stalin's Russia. And a couple of other things, I think that, I mean, it changes, of course, as we've changed from the great leader to the dear leader to the supreme leader, which is the grand father's son, change of leaders in the family.

57:14On that, Roy, why are you so confident, therefore, that one day will collapse? They've lasted a fairly long time. They've lasted an unbelievably long time since the 1940s. But it's partly that the whole thing is so inherently bizarre. Their textbooks, for example, insist that South Korea is this incredibly poor country with millions of unemployed where you can't go to school because you're not allowed free education in South Korea. I mean, their claims become mad or ennabbed. I mean, up till the 1970s, there was at least not such a huge gap between North Korea and South Korea. But they can now see South Korea getting prosperous.

57:55They can also see China, which, of course, they have more access to than other countries, incredibly prosperous. And the system is so odd. I mean, one of the things in it that we talked about Korean history and Korean culture, and Korea had a very strong caste system, like a very rigid class system. And in North Korea, it's being kept going, but inverted. So it's the sort of world in which you sometimes jokingly fantasize about in Britain. If you are the descendant of a posh person in North Korea, you are considered a hostile force, and you're not allowed to live in a city, and you're not allowed to live, go to a posh university.

58:35So if your great grandfather was a landowner or your great grandfather was kind of part of the elite, the great grandchildren are not allowed to access any goods at all. If on the other hand, your great grandfather was a revolutionary hero, you get fast tracks into all the government jobs. There's a North Korean style levelling up. Yeah, it's exactly. There's a proper levelling up. It's called the Songboon system. But it's one of the ways in which controls kept, because you know that if you step out of line, your great grandchildren are still going to be suffering. It's not just you. Interesting.

59:08It's also, I think, really interesting economic system, because it's sort of a very, very pure version of totalitarian communism. And much more than Stalin's Russia, much more than North Vietnamese communism. There's basically no private enterprise at all. I mean, in Stalin's Russia, 50 % of the potatoes grown were grown on little private plots by farmers. But in North Korea, there are basically no private plots of their tiny miniscule and everything comes from the state. Your rice comes from the state, your wheat flour comes from the state, your black and white television comes from the state, and you go every week to these indoctrination meetings, which make conservative party meetings seem mild by comparison.

59:49You have to do three a week, two hours of listening to indoctrination. And in the third one, you self -criticise yourself. So you have every week to talk about how you didn't polish the great leaders picture enough, or you turned up late for work, and then someone else will criticize you. We talk a lot on the podcast about when we talk about elections about sort of modern campaign techniques. One of the factors that is being weighed up in the balance is to when he finally should commit to this election so that he can set up this new sort of constitutional board to get his constitutional change through, is that one of the reasons why mid -March is less appealing is that this is the time of the year when the winds from the southeast tend to be very, very strong, and that helps those who are launching balloons filled with propaganda pamphlets into the north from the south.

1:00:37So one of the factors apparently across Kim Yong -Wun's desk right now, as he tries to work out when to have this. And as I think you said at the beginning, I mean I think just to finish, because of all these weirdnesses, it's easy to see it as comical, but of course it's unbelievably dangerous because trying to keep this incredible totalitarian society going and keep this one family rule going. Whilst developing nuclear weapons, whilst building new relations with China and Russia, and by the way, Putin is expected to go there after his election, Sham -Wun in March. Because they've been a huge supplier of actually weapons to Russia, I mean, it helped him rush her in Ukraine.

1:01:19And the only way that this regime survives is by this endless brinkmanship firing nuclear missile tests, threatening people, is absolutely vital to the survival of this family. So all the incentives are in favor of a very, very dangerous situation. This is why we can't just see what Europe and the US does in Ukraine in an isolated way, because the US has 25 ,000 soldiers still in career and has done since the 1940s. And the problem with Trump's, let's pull out of everywhere, is that our whole modern system is based on America presence across the world in many of these conflicts. And once it starts collapsing in Ukraine, it's very, very likely that we're going to end up in a much more violent and of course nuclear violent world.

1:02:05Now, while we start to be really understanding, we're ending with Kim Jong -un. And I suppose the other election worth briefly mentioning that happened at the weekend was Belarus. Guess what? Lukashenko won. Lukashenko won. The Anticruption campaign and Lukashenko won. There we are. We're lovely to talk to you as ever. Thank you, Anna -sutts. Speak soon. See you soon. Bye.