238. Question Time: Liz Truss, climate change deniers, and why print media is so polarised

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0:50Welcome to the Restus Politics Question Time with me, Rory Stewart. And me? Ms. Gamble. So, where do you restore Rory? Well, I want to start the question from Henry Swansea. What actions would you like to see this or the next government taking to mitigate the terrifying impact that smartphones have having on the mental health of children in this country and across the world? This is a really controversial thing. As you can imagine, smartphone manufacturers and people in the tech industry are absolutely falling over backwards to give congressional testimony saying there's no evidence at all that's spending a lot of time on smartphones has effect on mental health.

1:25But there are a lot of mental health professionals in academics who are bringing together what seems to be increasingly convincing evidence that there's a direct relationship between the amount of time that people spend on smartphones, particularly social media, and real instances of depression, anxiety, many issues amongst young people. And it then brings us to the question of legislation. China, China's cyberspace administration has proposed limiting children's smartphone use to two hours a day. I guess being China, they could probably get the manufacturers to put limits on those phones to make sure that that happened.

2:0512 states in the US have been looking at this. UNESCO has been looking at this. We've had stuff in the UK which I strongly support and I cannot understand why it's controversial. I keep getting attacks on Twitter whenever I suggest it. I don't think kids should be allowed smartphones in school. I think it seems ridiculous. But every time I say it, I get a massive attack accusing me of being a dinosaur. What is the argument with that? Listen, some schools are the kids arrive and they have to put their phones away. I guess parents want to be in contact with them, worry about them getting home, all that stuff.

2:39But I can't see any point. I'm with you, Rory. I'm happy to be a dinosaur. Thank you. That's going to be dinosaurs together. No, it's really weird. And it's actually true. In boarding schools too, I mean, one of the big changes in boarding schools is now kids just spend hours in their rooms just staring at their smartphones. When I used to be doing, I don't know what I was doing. Hopefully my French home work. Were you? Rory, you trying to tell me something about what's going on with your visits to boarding schools? What's happening? Memories. Memories go. Memories go. I'm like, yeah, no, so listen, what would be your view on whether, do you think it seems a crazy step for governments to intervene and actually limit what sort of evidence would you need to say before you thought, you know, labor, for example, could legislate to say kids can only use smartphones for two hours a day?

3:29Well, if you remember, when we interviewed Hillary Clinton on leading, I was very struck by the fact that she said, you know, every single person that she meets who works in the tech in the smartphone industry doesn't know their kids have them till they're like, you know, 21 sort of thing. So there's, there's clear, I think sometimes we're too quick to say, right, two plus two equals, whatever, you've got, there's definitely a mental health problem, growing problem. I think anxiety with young women, some of the sort of attitudes of young men, I think there's a real sort of mental health stuff going on that we don't really fully understand.

4:06And so we're very quick to say, well, this is probably because things that didn't exist when we were growing up, like social media, like smartphones, it must be because of that. I think we'd have to know more than that, but at the same time, I think there is enough evidence out there now to suggest that these things are addictive, that they're deliberately addictive. And I think they've created, I mean, this is a political podcast, I think they have created this world in which we, we don't care enough about the stuff that really, really matters and we care an awful lot about stuff that just doesn't.

4:36Now, so that is stuff that needs to be looked at. Are we at a place yet where you could have your kid who's got their phone and then, you know, after two hours of use, suddenly it goes dead because the government has decided that that's the limit that you should have. I'm not sure I'd go that far, but I think we're heading in that direction. And of course, and then you'd, I mean, like any kind of prohibition, like prohibition on our column states and prohibition on drugs, you know, you can then think of a million ways in which people would get rounded and do a legal and good and so that's what you do very, very worth thinking about.

5:05Now, Roy, talking, talking and getting grief, this is a point that Fiona occasionally makes, Geraldine Periam, why is it that the majority of books that you both recommend are written by men? It's rare that I hear either presenter commenting on a book written by woman. Is it that they rarely read books by women or that they do read them? Don't read them. Now, I was particularly pleased, Roy, that I spotted that question as I have on my desk, curved in at page 36, Amelie Noton, who is one of my favourite authors. She writes in French, she is French, and I've read, she's written dozens of books and I've read most of them.

5:42So I'm giving you Amelie Noton, who you're giving me? Well, I recommend that she, to be fair to me, I don't like being fair to me, but last week I was recommending a book by Barbara King Solfer, Paul Timonkovfield, and a book by Donna Tart, called The Gold Fentch, both which I've been enjoying incredibly as sort of American coming -of -age novels. Also, to be fair to me, Roy, to be fair to me, I have said on this podcast before that my favourite book about politics ever written was Doris Kern's Goodwin, a team of rivals about Abraham Lincoln. So I think Geraldine, you've not been listening closely enough.

6:15Well, I've also been reading an amazing book by my colleague here at Yale. I'm talking to you from Yale where I'm teaching them, but my colleague Beverly Gainer has written, I think, the most wonderful book on J. Edgar Hoover, which should really appeal to listeners of the show because it's called G -Man, and it's basically about the way that Hoover, who people know around the FBI for 40 years, is created in many ways, the modern federal state and was right in the heart of fights against communists, civil rights, fights against organized crime relations with six different presidents. It's just a really great account of what it's like to form a government, form a administration.

6:57So Beverly Gainer, G -Man, I've also listened, while we're doing cultural stuff just for a second, have you seen Zone of Interest, the Auschwitz movie? Should have won everything going. That was the most, really striking, wasn't it, for people who haven't seen it. It sounds very disturbing, but it's just so important and moving. I mean, it focuses on the domestic life of the German commandant of Auschwitz and his wife and children living in a sort of very nice suburban villa with a beautiful garden, and their garden wall is the wall of Auschwitz, and it doesn't show you the concentration camp.

7:43You hear it from time to time, don't you? Yeah, and I just thought it teaches you so much about human empathy because it reminded me, I guess, of what it must have been like in Empire, what it was like in the South of America with slavery. I mean, Thomas Jefferson, living alongside tiny huts with slaves, living in them in his beautiful house, and the way in which as humans we feel proud of ourselves as being good parents and providing light of clothes and little expeditions for our kids while just on the other side of the wall are other humans living lives of unimaginable horror. Yeah, but I think it also is sort of like the commandant obviously goes off to work.

8:26His wife and children don't go off to that place. They go elsewhere. They go around busing themselves doing what kids do and what mothers were doing in that period. He goes off to work, and of course, he comes back and you have a sense of him sometimes feeling a burden, but it's not you don't feel that it's the burden of what he's doing, it's just the burden that goes with doing a job. So it's the kind of normality, it's the normalization of utterly abnormal human experience. That's what I found sort of, because you know what's happening, we know as people who sort of know the story, we know what's happening on the other side of the wall, but you have to imagine it.

9:06But even as you're watching the film, of course, we do the same as they're doing. We focus on their lives and what they're talking about what they're doing and the sort of little problems that they have in their lives. Now it's a brilliant film. I thought that and Sandra Hullo who plays the wife, who is also the main character in the other film I thought was brilliant this year and that's me of a fall. I think those two films are the best films in the last year. Yeah, just so very quickly, just I was so struck by her performance because she somehow is managed just to act without seeming to act.

9:38I mean, it really feels often as though you're watching a sort of family home footage that you can court her awkwardly moving with her mother across the garden, but not really that she's an actress. Well, the director would be delighted to hear that because I read an interview with him in which she said that for all those scenes in the garden, they had fixed -point cameras just sort of hidden in the trees and just told them to sort of go out and do what they did and the kids running around the garden. So they weren't sort of as we're being followed by cameras anyway. I see. I see. So that may be why be captured.

10:12Final one. Final one, just the film got me reading more. And ordinary men, the 101, please reserve police battalion by Christopher Browning is a very detailed account of ordinary Germans and a reserve police battalion killing Jews. And it's unique because he has the archival access to understanding hundreds of these individuals and their day -to -day life. And it's a description of something that we just keep coming back to, which is the strangest of the way in which Germany, which by the 1950s had become a very liberal or many ways liberal, progressive, empathetic, compassionate society was capable 10 years earlier of ordinary, normal people doing unimaginable things.

11:01Anyway, Geraldine, thank you for your question. I'll get back later tonight to my reading of this wonderful book called Lesur by Emily Noton. And I apologize for the fact that Rory ended the question by talking about a male filmmaker. But there we are. One day we'll get it right. Anthony Brown, Rory, I voted, conserved it all in my life. That's not me, it's him. Even in 1997, sorry, Alistair, voted to remain, but I'm disappointed with the direction of the party since David Cameron resigned. I feel that the conservators are no longer a broad church. I don't feel like I can vote for the liberals.

11:34I mean, the ultra -save seat of devices, I will probably abstain in the general election. Is there anything else that I can do? You said that if you lived in Lesur, you'd vote for James Bagdness, independent, who's standing against it. So what advice would you give to Anthony in devices? I'd say this is something very relevant to conservatives, which is what direction does the party head in, particularly after the election? Is it going to go ever further to the right? Is it kind of a suedebroadman or even Nigel for our style takeover or does it move back to the center? And I think this is, I think for people who are moderate conservatives, you have to get involved in the fight to try to stop the party from becoming a party of extremists.

12:22And that's about supporting the few moderate conservatives left. That's about making the argument that the reason we're losing is not because we went too far to the left, which is what, you know, the Bravaments will try to suggest, but it's that we went too far to the right. And also that it's healthy for British democracy. Labour will win the next election, but it's important that there is a credible, serious opposition, could be a small opposition, but of moderate thought for people. And the survival of the Conservative Party, I think does matter. I think it would be very dangerous for the country if the Conservative Party collapsed.

13:00And far -right populism filled that space. I think that's something that we should be celebrating. So you're saying if you look at the, if it's a good MP, a good Tory, a sensible Tory MP, you should vote for it. Yeah, if it's a moderate one nation Conservative MP gets strongly behind them. And if you really want to be active, go and find those MPs where they're standing in other seats and distance yourself from the right to the party and say not in my name, I'm not allowing this party to be taken over by sort of mini -nitial for ushers. And so I would say, look at who came second last time, a vote for them.

13:38Right, Dominic Mahoney, is it a trope that all populist radical right -wing parties are climate -changed deniers or should policymakers be more subtle in the way they deal with them as a consequence? That's a quite interesting question. We had a, if people haven't listened to it, we interviewed Dieter Professor Dieter Helm on leading this week, who's a energy economist. And I thought it was quite a very interesting conversation actually, Rory, about the whole sort of climate climate change debate. And he didn't like being the sort of you and I both sort of talked about optimism, pessimism. But Dominic's question is quite interesting.

14:15Do we assume that Donald Trump, Sweller Brabham and Trusts, Farage, are they all on that wing of this debate or not? Not in Britain. It's pretty fringe in Britain, full climate change now. And it's interesting, when you look at these kind of list trust figures, they're not actually Trumpian. I mean, so, you know, I'm profoundly critical of that. I think she's a Pauling Prime Minister. She was a very bad politician, but she doesn't for the record, for example, think that Biden stole the election. She's not a big climate change denier. She's not leaning into that stuff. And also, I'm quite struck how in Britain, we've been running a pinion polls, and we'll keep running them.

15:02One of the things that makes me just sort of on a side of issue, optimistic about Britain, is that people in the latest poll that we've put out, and people please should look at it and sign up for the rest of politics, use that to see it in detail. British voters remain concerned about climate change. It's not something that's completely dropped off the agenda. It's also, I think, now that I'm here in the US, and I've been talking a lot to academics here who work on European immigration, I'm quite struck in the polling in Britain, how British voters are less obsessed with race and religion than voters in many other countries.

15:41I thought the anti -immigration sentiment in Britain was frankly often racist. It doesn't look like that from the polling. It looks as though the people who are concerned about immigration in Britain are as concerned about immigration from Poland, as they are about immigration from Nigeria or Bangladesh. And that's quite interesting, because I don't think that would be true in many, many other countries, you agree with me? I think there is a fair amount of racism in our country, and I think part of the immigration debate is about that. But yeah, generally, I do agree with you. I think actually one of the most awful things that the radical right keeps saying is this idea that multiculturalism is a terrible failure.

16:24I don't think it is. I think we are actually pretty, I think of most of the major European countries. I think we've done a pretty good job on that. So yeah, I probably agree with you. The two things that the far right parties, and we'll see this in the June elections, and you're going to be running on one of them as climate. The other is this question of immigration. And somebody, David from who's a American columnist, produced this line, and he said in America that if liberals suggest that everybody who cares about controlling borders as a fascist, it will just make voters sympathetic towards the idea of fascism.

17:01So there is somewhere in that question that we've just dealt with from Dominic Mahoney, is this question of how you acknowledge that there are genuine concerns from voters which are not being addressed by centralist parties and how you stop far right populists from monopolizing those votes? Well, essentially, I did an event last night discussing with Will Hutton, his new book, where Keir Starmer made a surprise appearance. And I have to say, Brori, he got a very, very, warm reception from the audience who hadn't been expecting to see him. But in the Q &A, he had to leave to go and vote on the Rwanda stuff.

17:39But during the Q &A, we had a question from a woman from Peckham, who made a similar point. She said that she felt that she was, she said she came from a very working class background, and she felt that the way that, you know, she's looking at me and Will Hutton, middle class sort of, you know, people from Leif and North London think about this issue sometimes, is that we underestimate the economic impact on poorer people of some of the measures that are being, you know, brought in to try to help us get towards net zero. And I thought she had a fair point. And I think that, you know, you and I both talked about the, the Oxford's Bio -Election and U -Lares and the way that the Tories tried to kind of radicalize or try to weaponize that issue after the election.

18:24But I think that, you know, the point that detail made was that if you're not taking people with you when you're bringing forward these measures, then you are failing as politicians and as communicators. And I think he had a point on that. And it was a very spiky interview at times. I thoroughly enjoyed it. It was good. And it's good because it's pretty serious. And it gets to heart something that our listeners really care about. And it's pretty controversial. And I like that. I think we should occasionally do things which are like that, which takes something that really matters to all of us, climate change, climate science.

19:01And then put on somebody who's prepared to be pretty tough and controversial in questioning a lot of what we assume. Yeah, and can go out, can questioning conventional wisdom. Okay, we'll read loads more questions to come. Take a quick break.

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20:30David Souter asks, Worry, does it matter that the print media are so partisan and if it does, how can labor counteract it? Go on then. What do you think? I mean, you probably know what I think. What do you think about that? Do you think we have a problem in our political culture that our media is our press print media in particular is so biased? Well, I think our print media has been a long standing problem. I mean, I think Rupert Murdoch was a long standing problem and had a big impact on lots and lots of things in British culture and made British culture worse. And I think often you feel that certain policies, I mean, the Rwanda policy would be an example of that, which are actually completely sort of unworkable policies or recent ideas.

21:15I mean, have you followed that stories around the conservatives thinking that they're going to find rough sleepers? 3 ,000 pounds. And on the face of the bill, one of the nuisances that we'll be defined is if they smell. I mean, it's just the whole thing is unbelievable because it's a sort of facial combination of being cruel and also completely unworkable. I mean, you can think of policies which are kind of compassionate and unworkable or cruel and tough, but function. But this is really the worst of all worlds. And but that I think is partly driven by the print media. I mean, I don't think these measures are broadly appealing to the public.

21:56I think they really are about trying to get a sort of headline in the mail or the express. Well, I think the partisan shape is often less about what they do cover and what they don't. So if you take recent, you know, we talked on the main podcast briefly about about Angela Reiner and her travails. If that had been a Tory MP, the paper which drove it the most and which eventually got the BBC and others to pick it up was the daily mail. They tend not to cover scandals, which I think are far more significant. You know, if you, how many of our listeners will even remember the name of the donor that we talked about a few weeks ago who gave them 15 million pounds and said the stuff about Dan Aber.

22:37If that had been a labor story, we'd still be talking about it. The media would still be going on about it. That guy has never been confronted by a journalist as far as I've seen. Not once. Likewise, the guy who got the 5 million pound nighthood, the guy, some of the the COVID contracting stuff. You know, we can, somebody said on the back of the William Rank thing, you know, could have been worse, could have been caught drinking a mojito on the tube. When we say that, drinking a mojito on the tube, lots of our listeners know that was about Diane Aber. That was years ago. But why do people remember it?

23:13Because the press keep reminding them of it. I mean, it's interesting when it's at it. And I remember, I mean, you wanted to lean in hard into this question of cash for honest. And of course, the temptation for me is to say, yeah, but they're all up to it and to remind you of the problems you got yourselves into for cash for honest. But I guess what you're saying is that of course you remember that, but you feel looking back that you were given unbelievably painful hard times about this. And that when the Tories do the same thing, it's not, they don't get it's harder time. Well, let's just take an example.

23:47Bernie Eccleston. If I say Bernie Eccleston, most of our listeners of a certain age will remember what that story was about because the media went on and on and on about it. What they very, very rarely report is that we gave the money back. Now, and that didn't get reported when, for example, Rishi Soonat was out saying, no, we won't give the give the money back. So I just think that the worst thing about our print media is the distortion of the debate through them covering only the things that suit their own agenda. Now, I used to do that to some extent at the day in a mirror. Partly, one of the reasons why the mirror did it, why I wanted the mirror to stay as kind of openly partisan pro labor as it was, was because the weight of the bias against labor was so overwhelming.

24:36So I think it's the, you know, if you fact somebody, somebody regularly post on social media, you know, when's the next one? Because the Daily Express has had literally identical front pages for the last five conservative leaders. These are, this is the one. This is the guy, you know, Bacchareza, all the countries finished. Bacch, Boris, or we've had it. Two other things to add in. One of them is sometimes conflicts of interest. So the owners, these newspapers, having business interests, which then evolve from getting contrast in government. But the other thing that is happening is that these papers are a losing circulation hand over fist.