231. Labour's struggle for economic vision and Haiti on the brink

25:23So he's kind of neutralising it, I get that. But I just think that, you know, we've talked a lot about how we hope that Brexit was our populism, but this makes me think, no, maybe we're still in it, because it is such a, it's such a, if it is so bad to change a flag, why wasn't there a total outcry when Stella McCartney produced the kit for our athletes in London 2012, which was a sort of bastardised version of the Union flag, which by the way is one of the flag. The Union Jack is one of the most powerful aspects of our soft power, because I would say after the Stars and Stripes is probably the most, is somebody wants to be worse in fashion, Tom, it's the most fashionised flag in the world.

26:10And yesterday I was going around, I noticed Marx and Spencer shopping bags that was the Union Jack made out of different fruit, okay. Now we're going to, we're going to boycott Marx and Spencer because they, they bastard, they've dared to change our union flag. It's utter ludicity this stuff. I'll tell you what the problem is, Rory, this is my firmly held view. We have a media which infects our politics through this populism stuff, and it means that all too often we care too much about things that just don't matter and we don't care about things that do. And the flag V child poverty to me sums it up 100%.

26:47I couldn't give a damn about this flag. Yeah. And then the, I guess the other thing that's been all over the British News recently has been the Princess Wales and her photo that was released, which she'd photoshop edited and then has statements, really shocking statement, that she's been undergoing chemotherapy and as a very young mother with children, has cancer and has to cope with that, break that her children. I mean, a lot of this presumably, I mean, I don't want to compare the two because that one of them is a really, sort of horrible, really horrible health tragedy for a young mother and the others is your flag as you, but they're both ways in which I guess social media plays a huge part of this too, doesn't it?

27:30It's about what's catching people's attention on social media. Yeah. Well, the thing about the, you know, we've talked before about the raw family, I'm always amazed at just how much coverage anything they do or anything they're involved in gets. And of course, I think post Diana and post leverson, there's been a little bit of change in the media culture. The media argue there's been a lot of change. I'm not convinced of that. I remember when I interviewed Prince William for GQ, it's some years ago now, but remember at the end of the conversation, we were just chatting away and he was telling me some of the things that the press get up to in terms of finding out where they're going and where the kids are going.

28:11And, you know, in a different world, you'd call it industrial espionage that goes on. And of course, what are newspapers say? Oh, well, that's all done for the foreign market. But if you're one of the kids, you don't know the difference is to who that guy in the motorbike is. I had extraordinary anecdote from a friend of mine who used to be a, I think still it's but very close friend of one of the royal family. We're now going back to the 1980s and he'd been on holiday with one of the royal family in the Caribbean and he got back to his home in London and a daily mirror journalist was there and shouted through the letterbox that he'd pay him half a million pounds for a photograph.

28:45So my friend who was really angry and sort of off -balance and wasn't expecting this, you know, very pompously said through the letterbox, I wouldn't sell you a photograph for 10 million pounds at which point the daily mirror journalist said, how about a fish dinner, which I thought was, was he, and he came, he came out of it feeling that maybe the daily mirror journalist had actually behaved with more humor and more grace than he had in this entire schedule. That sounds to me like the late James Whitaker who would not have had half a million pounds to spend. I could tell you that but by to be trying it on.

29:16I thought the, the Kate video was pitch perfect. I thought when you think that she'd had weeks of conspiracy theories, was she dead, was it about this secret illness that they didn't want to tell us about, was it about their private life falling apart, it was ever all this stuff doing the rounds. And of course some of it getting picked up and the member of, when I was in Australia, I mean, you know, you're going to the news stands and there they are, they're on the magazines, they're, they're huge kind of media commodities. And I think what happened to Diana in particular, I think that with her, the media reached a point and you know, I freely accept that I was part of this culture, where basically they reached such a level of fame that you, you stop really thinking about them as human beings at all.

30:07They're just kind of objects. And, and I think what the Kate video did was bring it home to people that, as you said earlier, this is like a human being dealing with an illness in with this kind of stuff going around her all the time. I mean, and the thing I didn't really get terribly worked up about the photo shocked Mother's Day photo. I couldn't give a damn whether she sort of touched it up a bit or you know, moved the sleeve. I mean, again, we had sort of thousands of words written about, you know, where these changes were. And I just think that people, back to this point, I made earlier, we caring about the wrong things.

30:44So I, and even after she did the video, I'm my reaction on Twitter was, you know, this will keep the trolls quiet for at least two minutes. And of course, you know, within a, within no time at all, there's, there onto new conspiracy theories. And I do think it's fair to say that the mainstream media, I wonder if they had a tip off. I think I wonder if they had a sort of quiet word from the palace because I got the feeling that they they calm down for a bit. I suspect because they knew something was coming by the way of the announcement that was finally made. But I do think that the, the raw family have a, you know, I'm not, not remotely a monochist in the way that you are, but I do think that they have an awful lot to deal with when it comes to managing the media.

31:25Speaking of Syriest and I think, after the break, let's, let's take a quick break and then come back to Haiti, which is really a, yeah, a very, very serious situation. Great.

31:40This isn't 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.

32:16They'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. It's 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 % off their first month at BetterHelp .com slash rest politics. That's better, help .com slash rest politics.

32:49Welcome back to the rest of the policies with me, Alice Di Campbell. And me, Rory Stewart. We've just done a great interview on leading with Anthony Gormley, who is an amazing British artist and sculptor. And I think, you know, again, it's us going a little bit outside the barriers by not infuing a front -ranked politician, but I thought it was magical. I just think he's so smart and so thoughtful. And he was great on labor. He was great on cultural policy, but he's also just great on art and creativity and being human. And I just, I enjoyed it and I'm going to see you. I did. I mean, you go on about Alan Milburn being your favourite of our leadings.

33:30I think Anthony Gormley gets close to the top of my list. One, he's got a wonderful voice. Two, he speaks very, very clearly and colourfully. And I actually thought the political stuff was very, very interesting. I shared his anger about the arts council recently, sort of, you know, warning people off being political. I actually thought his assessment of Keir Starmer was more compelling than a lot that I hear from Labour MPs talking about Keir Starmer. It's part of their job to say, how great he is. I got a lot of, I mean, there's feedback on social media was great. And I got several messages from people yesterday saying, you know, several people saying they thought it was the best one we'd done.

34:09I thought it was great. Do people who aren't doing so subscribe to our separate feed, which is called leading? And we're having a fascinating time because obviously we interview big frontline politicians, you know, people at Head of Recluson, we interview people at Bill Gates. But interestingly, some of our real breakthroughs, successors recently have been with people who are less household names. Your friend, Scaramucci. Robo Sapolsky. Our expert on baboons. And I think Anthony Gourmet too. So I think hopefully leading has got something for everybody. It's got something for the hard core political geek, but it's also got some amazing voices from around the world.

34:43Come in. And we should let, we should maybe let people know, particularly our friends in the intelligence communities around the world that coming up soon, XMI of six chief John Soars with XMI five chief Eliza Manningham Buller, which we recorded the other day. And I enjoyed that one as well. Great. Now Haiti. Haiti is a country which is very, very central to America's foreign policy debate, but gets very little coverage in Britain. So little explainer on Haiti, Haiti country of about 12 million people. It's part of an island which also has the Dominican Republic on it. It was in the 18th century one of the richest countries in the world, but a very, very unequal French colony that produced sugar and had a lot of slavery.

35:37And in fact, was richer than the United States was at the time. And was famous because in the aftermath of the French Revolution during the period of Napoleon, it had its own revolution where the black slaves rose up against the French and massacred thousands of people. I mean, it was a real extraordinary atrocities came came out of it. And what today we might almost call a genocide of the white French population women and children murdered and a restoration disemboweled and won their independence. And they became the second only republic founded after the United States. They became the first independent black republic, the first slave revolt to work.

36:11And that then was the beginning of an extraordinary history, which included becoming an American colony effectively time of the first war wars. So for almost 20 years, the US occupied Haiti, 1915 through to the 30s and a classic story of that kind of period of colonialism where the Americans would say that they really invested in building roads and bridges and they built schools and they developed a rule of law and sorted out the tax system and the Haitians would say it was a racist colonialist situation that left very little behind when the Americans went and they didn't manage to develop a proper local elite to maintain any of this stuff.

36:50It then came into the world news again with Papa Doc Juvalier who became their dictator in the 1950s. He was a man who in his earlier life was a sort of almost seem to be an almost saintly figure. He'd been a highly educated black doctor who'd done a lot of work in rural health clinics. But once he became dictator, ruled over extraordinary atrocities. He embraced Voodoo. He managed to get an agreement with the Catholic church where he became the head of the church in Haiti and had his own Lord's Prayer which was our father dictator and don't forgive the trespasses of any of the enemies of our fathers.

37:29This is why he was called Papa Doc. Papa Doc, yeah. And he, you know, he, the atrocities were amazing. There's a very disturbing book but gets a real sense. The culture of people want to follow up Graham Greens book The Comedians. Had this militia group called the Tonton Macute, about 300 ,000 people who were implicated in these atrocities. And then his 18 year old son took over when he died who was called Baby Doc. And Baby Doc initially managed to convince the international community that everything had changed and there was an upsurge in tourism and international aid. But of course, he actually perpetrated a lot of the torture and the terror.

38:06He went in the 80s. There were then a series of unstable governments. And then again, in the 1990s, basically a full scale US invasion was basically put together by Clinton where 20 ,000 soldiers were deployed. It was going to be the largest airborne missions since the Second World War. At the very last moment, the man who'd thrown the military coups stepped down so the Americans didn't quite have to storm the beaches. But they effectively took over and ran the country again in the 90s. And again, there was a huge optimism. Billions of dollars came in. Normus amounts of reform. And it just didn't work.

38:45And we, you know, we can talk about why these interventions don't work. But it then went through a series of tragedies. A hurricanes, earthquakes. So the horrible earthquake, which killed 200 ,000 people, partly because the planning was all screwed up and the houses were no good. Then there was the deployment of UN peacekeepers and the UN peacekeepers managed to not follow basic sanitary practices in the way that they disposed their feces and brought a cholera outbreak into Haiti. It's a place which 60 % of its income comes from international aid. There are more than 10 ,000 NGOs on the ground.

39:16And now, yes, over to you for what's just happened most recently. Well, we had 2021, middle 2021, the president assassinated. And then that really was the key to the door of this kind of unrest and gang violence, which is now reach levels that are, I guess, closer to Anakin now than anything we've seen in that long and difficult history you've outlined. And at the heart of this was the busting open of two big prisons, letting four and a half, nearly 5 ,000 prisoners run free, run riot. And then these gangs that have sort of essentially, there was a guy called Ariel Henry, Ori, Ariel Henri was the sort of not self -appointing, but he became the prime minister, went to Kenya to try to get help for an international security plan.

40:05And even though there was a recognition that they needed security, the thought of getting them from abroad, carried even further instability, they then blocked his plane from landing. And right at the heart of this is the guy whose nickname is Barbecue. I'll come and to explain why guy called Jimmy Shellizier. And he heads this, they call themselves the Revolutionary Forces of the G9 family and allies, G9 for short. This is a grouping of about, around about a dozen of the big gangs who are based in Porto Prandt's. He is reckoned to be called Barbecue by some because he used to enjoy it as setting people on fire during massacres.

40:48He denies that. He says he's called Barbecue because his mother used to sell fried chicken. But when he was, he's a former policeman, police officer, and he's alleged to have taken part in some pretty severe massacres. And they were behind the G9 were behind this massive jailbreak, which led to them laying siege to the airport, openly saying that this was about taking power. And eventually the prime minister announced, Henri announced that he's standing down. So as things stand, no real government. And also a very, very, very small police force looking after or trying to look after this state of absolute chaos and anarchy and hard to see how it gets resolved.

41:32And also hard to see how the international community gets involved because they don't seem to be doing much right now. Well, let's step back for a moment and just look at Haiti in terms of a lot of the stuff we talk about in the podcast. So it's got a population about 12 million, which puts it almost bang in the middle of countries in the world. I mean, it's slightly in the larger half, there are a lot of small countries in the world. So it's a country, you know, larger than Belgium, Jordan, Sweden, Portugal, Greece, Israel, Hungary, all of which we've been talking about quite a lot on the podcast recently.

42:01And it's of course twice the size of other countries we talk about like New Zealand, Norway, Denmark, Ireland. It's a country where the narrative in explaining its problems is colonialism, racism, and racism, not just of the colonial occupiers, the French against black slaves in the 18th century or Americans there in the 20s and 30s, but also racism within. So we talked about this a little bit when we talked about Liberia, which is a group called the mulatto who were lighter skinned Haitians created an almost apartheid state in which there were tiny gradations of skin color, governed the country after the colonial powers went.

42:39A enormous amount about how foreign companies exploited it in different times, environmental degradation. So this very, very fertile island, essentially by cutting down trees, managed under baby dog in the northwest particularly to end up with a kind of barren desert, whereas the Dominican Republic, which is part of the same island, has done much better on managing its natural resources and is much lusher. So I guess to cut to the chase, it's really a story about government because the unfortunate truth is of course many, many other countries in the Caribbean had similar sorts of histories, had colonial legacies, had slavery, had exploitation, but have ended up much more prosperous than Haiti.

43:24So for example, in a martinique which is a didn't gain independence from the French, is far wealthier than Haiti that did gain independence from the French. And of course many of the other Caribbean countries doing much, but including the Dominican Republic, which is we talk a bit about East and West Germany, North and South Korea. This is another one of those examples. Two places basically, I almost identical land, very similar population, very similar, but simply a slight difference in history and government, and one place ends up much more stable and prosperous than the other. Yeah, I was just, I mentioned there the, there's somebody from who's on the ground from UNICEF who said that it's been, it's, it's like living in a post apocalyptic film at the moment because these gangs are literally just kind of able to do what they want.

44:12So I just looking up, in the UK, we have more than 170 ,000 police officers. Now we often complain that we don't have enough police officers, right? So we're, so Haiti's population is about a sixth of ours. They have 9 ,000 police force, 9 ,000 strong police force in a country of 11, 12 million happen in Abbotton. And a country with incredible violence and poverty. Yeah. And also you have, because of the violence has been going on a reason where each of the schools have had to close, most of the hospitals have had to close, judges have had there been attacked, 3 ,000 pregnant women have given birth without any maternity care whatsoever.

44:48And of course the other thing that's happening is and I mean it was pretty appalling. I saw yesterday Elon Musk was sort of you know talking about the need for Trump to win and why have you, he also recently he shared a video which he said was from or the video was said to be from Haiti and it was of cannibalism. It was of an act of cannibalism that was said to be taking place. And it turns out it was several years ago, it wasn't in Haiti, it had nothing to do with Haiti. And there's this guy Elon Musk sharing it and saying this is what happens when law and order breaks down. On the subject of Musk, he's also got really into this thing called the Great Replacement Theory which is part of the publicist narrative which is about the idea that white populations are going to be replaced particularly in the US by a Latin American population coming across border or indeed Haitians getting on boats which was one of the reasons that Bill Clinton got involved in the first place.

45:42And we should talk about it a little bit more because I mean firstly historically it's bizarre because of course in some ways white Americans of themselves great replaces of a population that existed before they arrived. But also I think Haiti is one of these real challenges to our attempt to imagine a more prosperous stable world. We live in a world where there's still a lot of techno optimism. There's still a lot of people saying everything's getting wealthier, everything's getting better, technology's changing our lives, say our eyes are going to change our lives. But Haiti is one of those things where in the 90s as Clinton intervened was seen as being, you know, could have been in the way they wrote about it, almost like Bosnier or Kosovo, a sort of liberal humanitarian intervention, state building, governance, money was going to come in, everything was going to be fixed.

46:29And it catastrophically failed and it now finds itself in a group of countries of which the Central African Republic call the St. Dominic Republic of Congo where the international community almost gives up. You know, there are these UN missions that come in and out, tens of thousands NGOs on the ground, huge amounts of international aid, but nobody really believing that they know how to how to help. And so I think a new generation needs to emerge with some ideas and some optimism because otherwise we're back into the horrible world of the 90s where we just decided that, you know, nothing could be done on the Balkans, nothing could be done with South African apartheid, nothing could be done in Northern Ireland, etc.

47:08So Rory, talking of the future, new generation, to big changes this week into very different countries, we talked a few weeks ago about the election in Senegal where the outgoing president, Maki Sahel was trying to, it seemed, trying to, he postponed the election and people were thinking that's because he wanted to set it up for his own successor, but the opposition have won and not just won this guy, Bassirou Dimae Faye, who's in his 40s, has won with more than 50 % of the vote in the first round. It's a French type system where you have lots of candidates, I think there were 19 candidates in total.

47:51So it's an absolute route which does signal very, very, very big change in Senegal. And of course the other new leader, even younger, youngest ever T -Shakhov Island, Simon Harris, following the rather surprising departure of Leo Verradyka. Just quickly on Verradyka, have you got any more thoughts on this? I mean, just again, for listeners, this was very, very surprising. I mean, we've interviewed Leo Verradyka and get a sense if you want to listen to it on the leading feed. But he basically stepped down in an instant and it's something we've seen with Jacentra Arden, it's something we've seen with Nicholas Sturgeon.

48:26But in it may just show something that's changing in politics all around the world, but it's very strange. I mean, there's no precedent really in British or American history for someone just to suddenly wake up one morning when they're ahead of head of government and just say, actually, that's it, I'm out and I'm resigning. And with Nicholas Sturgeon, of course, somebody like me thinks that it may be that she was aware that there was a scandal coming down the line and it was better she got out of the way because the SMP's had issues around donors and police and things. What are the stories tonight?

48:59Are you getting any sense from people and what they thought was going on there? Well, I, as on the day that he announced it, I was actually in a cab on the way to the Irish Embassy to have lunch with the ambassador and they were completely taken aback. I don't think there was any whiff that this was coming. And I think if people do listen to the interview with Leo Verradyka, I did that if you remember in Dublin, you were online. And in the margins, as they say, we were talking about, you know, this, that and the other. And I always got the feeling with Leo Verradyka that he didn't, he didn't enjoy the stuff that goes with being a politician and particularly goes with being a very high profile politician.

49:38So I wonder if he just sort of a bit like Jürgen Klopp, but Liverpool, the Liverpool manager just decided, I wonder if he's just decided he's had enough. That being said, there is also a buzz going around as to whether he might be have his eyes at some point on one of the big international jobs, be that with an European Union or whatever it might be. But I get the feeling that he's just sort of had enough. It's very, it's, it's strange, doesn't it, because as we've said in some ways, Ireland is one of the great success stories. Yeah, but he just had that failure with the referendum. Sinn Fein on the rise, election looming.

50:12Does he just sort of think, well, maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe, this is just me talking too much about myself. But I've always thought that really the job of a politician really makes sense when you are a t -shirt called the Prime Minister, had a government because you can really get stuff done. That's when you're really actually able to change it. And you go into politics, hopefully to change things. That's when you actually have the power to change things that you can understand more easily why people step down when they failed. But he must have had programs he wanted to push through stuff.

50:42He would, I mean, you would never have imagined Tony Blair suddenly announcing midway that he really wanted to step down and leave because presumably he was actually finding it very fulfilling, having his hands on his hands. Well, I think it's fair to say that Tony didn't announce that he was stepping down halfway through, but that happened to be his third term. I think you would very happy. And it wasn't a fifth or a sixth exactly. And it wasn't done in that way. It was done because he felt he needed to give Gordon Brown a go rather than that he didn't want to continue. Of course, there is this sort of strange, well, strange to us set up in Ireland because it's essentially a coalition where you've got the two main parties of sort of swap T -Shick.

51:19He had Mehal Martin, then the Alvaraca, now being replaced by Simon Harris. And it'll be very, it's a huge step up for him because of course he's been a politician. He's been an MP since he was 24, been a member of the Doyle since he was 24. He was a Councillor at 22. He's a kind of absolute very ambitious, very full on politician. But he now has to step up because of course he takes on all the international stuff as well. And that's going to be a very, very steep learning curve. But no, I think it's, I think what's happening in our politics is that in lots of these countries, leaders are becoming leaders younger and that means that they're leaving younger.

51:59And also I'm afraid the unpleasantness of it. I mean, I couldn't quite get Brad Pitt to be as frank about the unpleasantness of politics, which you understandably want to resist because you're trying to encourage young people to go into politics that I suspect. That because you raised Senegal to what Mackey Sile has done because Senegal has had a couple of couple of stages where it really did look as though it could go in the wrong direction. And of course it, it's right up there in Frank of Africa near those seven countries in the Sahel which have gone through military coups. And yet it's remained surprisingly stable.

52:36There have been a couple of dangerous moments before Mackey Sile took over it looked as though his predecessor was going to try to stick in his son. That didn't happen. And then as you say, there was a moment where Mackey Sile seemed to be flirting with going for a third term and delaying elections. But he hasn't done that. He's stepped down and he's and they move very quickly. He and his candidate move very quickly to congratulate the opposition. Yeah, even before the results were in. Despite the fact they were in jail only 10 days earlier. So I think I just saw a man called Moebra for dinner on Friday who's an amazing, very wealthy, successful African businessman who set up the Moebra him prize where if an African leader rules reasonably well and then steps down peacefully and does a peaceful transition, Moebra him as foundation gives I think five million dollars to them so that there's no incentive for corruption and they can set up any life.

53:30And I think Mackey Sile has probably deserved it. And I think has really saved his reputation in the last few days. And it's great great sign for Sanagal which is becoming a bit of a beacon in the region. Well, there you go. So we've covered or talked about most of the big elections and there's one that's happened fairly peacefully, fairly smoothly and now with a pretty radical change of direction. And by the way in relation to dynasties you mentioned earlier Duvalier on the back of our discussion recently about Putin's daughters, Rory had a very interesting email from a guy who lives in Switzerland who worked out there for a very very wealthy Russian family who tells me that Putin's sons went to the same school.

54:18There we are. So there are sons growing.

54:25Right. On that note. See you soon for Q &A. See you soon for Q &A. Bye bye, Alasdair.