311. Question Time: Should Labour ban smoking?

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1:50Welcome to the rest of the bonus question time with me, Alice Campbell. And with me, Rory Stewart. And I was aware of you first before we get to the details of the question time. I'm in London and I can see that you're in Scotland. Very good. I was in Scotland last from Glasgow. And nine of them came up as volunteers without notes, without preparation to make speeches about things they cared about and they were absolutely brilliant. And what was the gap between what they were talking about and what you feel politics and generals talking about? Did you have a little moment of thinking, oh, maybe Kier Salmish should be talking more about those kinds of things?

2:31What sort of things were really on people's minds? Oh, interesting. Well, I'll tell you exactly what they're talking about. So the first one was we should be nicer to refugees. There was one guy called Kai who came up and said the richest five percent should pay a lot more tax. There was one about compulsory voting. There was one about housing. There was one about private education, bad thing. There was one about how working class people, well, I better than upper class people. What do you mind expanding on that? What does that mean? Why one class better than another class? Because the point that this guy is called DOM and the point that he made was that the upper class of always kind of held on to power and part of their power is to keep the kind of working class in their place, but actually working class people because they have to struggle more, they're better, they're cleverer.

3:27It was just good old fashion class war and I actually love the war. You were doing your best to stir it up and encourage it in every direction. Well, he also, he also, he was the only one who swore. He actually used the F word and I turned to his teacher at the end and I said, well, he get punished for swearing like that. And he said, given how much we know you swear, I suspect he won't. Anyway, it was great fun. And the interesting point you made because not a single one mentioned independence, I found that quite interesting. I think what I'd say, you may ask about whether the things they were talking about the key or style wasn't, I'd say what the general message was, they'd like the government to be a lot more radical, but maybe that's just a young person's thing.

4:05But my point is they were really good. Yeah, this is quite serious, interesting, important point coming on from your Glasgow thing, which Paul Johnson from the IFS keeps banging on about. There is a sort of narrative that under labor, things were one way and under the conservatives, you know, all the people did better, pensioners did better, homeownership became less affordable and the rich paid less tax. Paul Johnson actually says that if you look at the figures, the reverse history that under the Tories from 2010 onwards. And of course, nobody talks about it's not in the labor's interest talk, that's not in the Tories's interest talk about this, but in fact, high runners were hammered under the Tories that the percentage of tax paid by the top taxpayers went up under the Tories, the number of people at the top tax brackets almost doubled under the Tories.

4:56And in fact, homeownership statistics were less bad under the Tories, they were under labor, and in fact, the gap between older and younger people was worse leading up to 2012, but it's actually narrowed since as has inequality over here. Very good. We've managed to get through the first third of question time without a question, just by blathering on. So should we have some questions? I'll kick off. Tiago, I would like a nuanced balanced opinion on the freedom of speech debate. The developments in the UK and Brazil as examples seem concerning if you listen to certain sides. I'm right leaning but would appreciate a balanced opinion from you on this.

5:32We've got a lot of questions this week about the Brazilian Supreme Court's spending Twitter X in Brazil. Another government's keep attacking end to end encryption. It's a fundamental safety feature that creates privacy and security. I agree it can be used by criminals with so -called cars and most people don't want everyone to stop driving just because some people use them for criminal acts. I guess that relates more to the telegram guy who's currently in trouble in France. But what do you make about the musk thing in Brazil? Well, firstly to begin on this. So there's been an amazing feud between the Supreme Court justice of Brazil, Alexandra de Morais and Elon Musk which began in April.

6:16And Musk essentially has been supported very strongly by people who were supporters of the right wing populist leader Bolsonaro who claimed the election was stolen from him. And Musk, certainly from the point of view of the left, has been whipping up far right populist conspiracy theories claiming that the Brazilian Supreme Court is complicit in denying the election to Bolsonaro. And the result is that X has now been shut down in Brazil. So we complain in Britain of a musk leaning into weird, unsubstantiated right wing websites spreading false information on immigrants. But in Brazil, it's much, much more extreme.

7:00And it's one of the largest markets for Twitter. Yeah, it will presumably hit him where it hurts, but it also allows him to carry on with this sort of freedom of speech crusade. There's a lot of debate in Brazil about whether this Supreme Court guy is just somebody who loves the limelight and maybe fans himself as a politician down the line and so forth. But I think these social media companies do have to be far more responsible. He was actually again yesterday with some absurd conspiracy theory that was being pummeled out. I can't remember what the story was now, but you know, and he was out there.

7:34Is this really happening in Soviet? He's decided to go for labor at the moment, go for gear, starm, everything about Harris is bad, everything about Trump is good. He's become a color of, you know, caricature of himself. But because of the reach of Twitter, he does have enormous influence. So I think actually having a judge or be a politician who called this guy out, I think is a good thing, rather than the bad thing. I don't buy this idea that he does not have freedom of speech and other people do not have freedom of speech. The real attacks on freedom of speech are coming in dictatorships and they're coming in countries where there is no real media freedom.

8:12The idea that we are subject to the same sort of freedom of speech limitations is absolutely absurd. It is interesting that because it's some, I guess in Britain, we wouldn't consider shutting down X certainly at the moment. But it really is bringing into light this question of whether these social media platforms are beginning to have such a kind of profound impact on our democracy, some polarization, the government's need to control and regulate the only way of getting into it at the moment would be to use a virtual private network like NordVPN. If you're in Brazil, would allow you to access X.

8:48But otherwise, you wouldn't be able to do it. Is that true? Is that a free advert for one of our sponsors? Exactly, free advert. So you've got a case going through the court at the moment where the wife of a Tory cancela has been told she's going to go to jail because she used social media to say that fell out with these immigrants, somebody should go and attack their hotels, etc, etc. And the judge indicated she's going to go down for some time. I guess the point that Karl was making about the cars, if the platform is knowingly allowing the platform to be used for crime, there's a difference between a, you know, Karl says that, you know, we're not going to ban cars just because criminals use cars.

9:33But if we knew that a car was being used for criminal purposes, the police have the right to intervene in some way, if Musk pushes this any further, if Musk had done the tweet that this woman had done, then are we talking about criminal behavior? Where does the barrier between platform and voice lie? That's what I think the legislators are struggling with. Yep. So for geeky people on this Damien Collins who I often praise on the podcast as chair of the Department of Culture, Mediums, Sport Committee and the Parliament, UK Parliament, this some quite good work on this. But you're right. The first big difference is between after the event.

10:13So that's traditionally what we've done. If something bad goes out in social media, you complain to the company and they then take it down after the event. The move to proactive, which is to say putting a duty of responsibility on the companies from the beginning to change their algorithms to make it much less likely that extremist stuff is spread. And it can be done. I think we talked about the fact that before the last election, meta Facebook shows to direct people more towards reputable news outlets as opposed to towards just kind of community group chats. And then your final one I think there, which is generally these companies have at least been polite and pretended to comply with governments, even if they don't practice.

10:56What happens if somebody like Musk simply digs his heels in and absolutely refuses? And that's where Brazil has decided that's the point at which you actually ban. And that could happen in the UK. I mean, ultimately you could simply shut down the platform. I think we've never considered that kind of nuclear option with an ex Twitter or Facebook. There was also questions. Let me just get the question up where I was challenged, particularly I noticed by executives from from Facebook WhatsApp and meta about my statements about telegram. So the employees of WhatsApp are very keen to say that WhatsApp a default end to end encrypted messages.

11:34And that no one can read your WhatsApp messages without having access to your phone. And they can't be read from meta servers or interceptor voting. Whereas telegram, which is this other similar service with more weird emojis and also more large group chats are not end to end encrypted by default. So you cannot telegram choose to encrypt your private messages, but they're not encrypted by default. But this is just the tip of the iceberg because of course, meta will be very, very angry with this. But it's simply as a fact that there are many people out there who find it difficult to believe that Facebook paid a huge amount of money for WhatsApp.

12:13And that they're not getting any data out of the WhatsApp messages that are going back and forth and they're not accessing it through their servers because there's no advertising on WhatsApp. So what on earth is the point of Facebook owning this thing if they're not in some way gathering data and information, which is why many people write the wrongly used telegram and also why Facebook are very defensive about this and keen to say that their messages are more secure. And then if we were going to get into this, there's another messaging service which maybe use Alice to certainly I use quite a lot when corresponding with friends in more difficult regimes, which is signal, which has very, very strong encryption mechanisms.

12:51And somewhere at the heart of all of this is this question of who are you protecting against? Are you encrypting in order to protect yourself against criminals? Are you encrypting to protect yourself against governments? What are the rights you have to protect your freedom of speech against governments? And what are the points at which national security trump this and governments can get into this information? Well, let's see if that satisfies all those people who complain about. I think you're very, very, very good assessment last week, Roy Beanyway. As you know, I'm not as I'm not quite on top of the tech detail in a way that in a way that you are.

13:29Someone will let it as you that got it wrong, not me. Now, I want to add this one. Labour, Labour EU youth mobility. We've got a lot of questions on this. Sharon H, why are Labour against a youth mobility scheme with the EU? I do not understand Kierstharmer's red lines. Alec, why won't the Prime Minister sign up to free movement for under 30 year olds? Most immigration will be temporary, could fill vital areas such as health and service, allow students like me to explore cultural work abroad. Is it only because of forage? And on and on and on, it goes Eric, what can I do to change Labour Party's position on Europe?

14:02How can this be achieved inside? I joined January this year after reading your book, I think that's mine, or outside. Well, look, you have to Eric, you have to keep arguing for what you believe in. And I remember when this was first proposed, this came out as a proposal from the European Union side. And well done, then. I think a good, good, I'll have to do it. No, didn't Europe didn't have to make this proposal. Am I goodness the difference? It would make just sort of quickly before we get into the details. But I mean, a loss of what we've lost in Britain are young people, you know, shopping vegetables in restaurants or helping them, you know, up here in Scotland, helping the pit lockery bungee jump school.

14:41And these are often things that young Spanish French people would have done in their 20s and then often returned to their own country. And it's mad when we've got a Labour shortage to turn our back on a huge number of very, very keen and energetic young people. We used to, I think, am I right in saying you used to do it for people from Australia and New Zealand? At least that was always the impression I got in Wales Court. I mean, I think the point about it is, and I was really disappointed when this proposal did first emerge. The Labour response immediately, this is when there was still an opposition, but the now in government, they can, you know, they can make decisions now, was to say we're not doing this because it's like freedom of movement by the back door, but it's not because what this would do would allow people aged 18 to 30, or in fact, you could go up to 34 because it would start at 30 if that's when you first moved, to travel for study, for volunteering, for work, for travel, for leisure, for up to four years, on condition that you've got a passport, you've got insurance, and you can support yourselves.

15:51Now, that is not freedom of movement, that is applying conditions, and what's more, that would go both ways. And I just think that one of the things that we've lost, well, one of the big things that we've lost, is the ability of a generation to grow up, knowing what it's like to be able to travel, to be able to work in different places, to be able to experience different cultures, and that is something which I think a Labour government should be addressing. So I hope we can get rid of this nonsense, that it is freedom of movement, it is not freedom of movement. It's completely mysterious, because I was talking to somebody who'd voted Brexit, purely because they were angry about immigration, and they said they were really strongly in favour of this EU proposal, they couldn't understand for a moment why Labour wouldn't accept that.

16:35I mean, their complaint was huge numbers of people settling permanently in Britain with large families, they had no problem at all with the idea of what they were called, people coming over for three, four years to work and going back again. So if that's true of anti -immigration Brexit voters, why are they taking such a strong line on this? I mean, I haven't even seen forage or the Conservatives come out strongly against this, so what's Labour doing? I think Labour having said this is freedom of movement by the back door, was a way of preempting what they assumed would be an attack from the right, but I think we've moved on, they're in government now, and I think yes, I can see why you've come through the riots and immigration is still a big issue and so forth, but I think if Labour start turning their nose up at what seems to me quite a serious proposal that is a mutual benefit both to us and to the European Union, I guess the only thing I could say by way of possibility is that Kirsten went off last week, he saw shouts in Germany, he saw Macron in France, and he talked about a reset of relations and so forth in defence treaties and all this stuff, this can happen.

17:43So maybe as the discussions develop, this is one of the things that you sort of keep as a part of an ongoing negotiation, but I just think at the moment, one of the things being said about Labour at the moment is they're not giving people enough kind of reasons to feel, yeah, that's the change that we voted for, yeah, that's a different approach and we like it. We talked about offstair, we've talked about some of the other changes they've made, but I think this would signal to a younger generation, you know, they get what I've been saying, they're starting to listen, so I really, really, really hope that they reconsider this.

18:14I'm absolutely with you, the nice thing about it is that it's a positive optimist that it's about freedom, it's about opportunity, it's about movement, it's about travel, and actually would be a sort of good counterbalance to the accusation that the thing that they've most known for last week was the ban on smoking and pub gardens, which whatever you think about isn't about, you know, opportunity freedom, it's about something going in that direction, that's John McIntyre, question was Labour trading of tetral smoking ban and pub gardens and open spaces, a comms mistake, any viewer tool on how that was communicated or used?

18:49Well, I think it spilled out, didn't it? It was in an internal document, it got leaked and then Kierstarmatt, I think in Paris actually confirmed it. I'm broadly supportive of pretty tough action against smoking and a lot of the arguments that we've had are absolute mirror reflections of the arguments we had when we first brought in the the bigger smoking ban, as it were in workplaces, including pubs and restaurants. But, you know, so I think it spilled out, wasn't it, it was a comms error, I think that it spilled out at a time when they weren't expecting to have to have to discuss it. But I do think one of the things I'm picking up from ministers, from MPs is that, you know, and obviously with Parliament back now there's a legislative program that they can start to sort of set out change, but just this need to feel that there's a positive, there's a positive message, there's hope, there's a future that people can sign up to and believe in.

19:41And, you know, for me, I will keep banging all about this. I think that does mean, genuine, we talk about fixing the fundamentals, fixing the foundations. One of those is the damage that we've done to our relations of the European Union, the damage we've done economically in Brexit. And that is going to require, you know, taking on some things that yes, the sum of the tourism, the forage people are not going to like, but, you know, that's what you're in government for, to do these things. And just quickly, out of the memories of the 2007 smoking ban, if you've got any, do you have any particular memories of that and how that works and how that's handled?

20:11Well, to be absolutely frank, the biggest, most powerful memory is the fact that we waited for the Irish to do it first to see how it went and it went well. And so then we thought, I think, you know, it's a classic example of our small country can do something and then the rest of the world kind of follows. I had a great example on that, which was the plastic bag tech. So, I introduced a plastic bag tech into England as the environment minister, but my ability to do that was a lot to do with the fact that Scotland Wales, Northern Ireland had already done it, and the world hadn't come to an end, contrary to the predictions that any mail.

20:45And so it's one of the nice things about the evolution and actually it's one of the strengths of the federal system in the US that smaller units can experiment with ideas, which, you know, large national governments have sometimes reluctant to do. Yeah, absolutely. I saw one of the papers on this headline, you know, pubs predict violence in gardens, it's over smoking ban, well, we had all this stuff back then, and so I'm not totally at worry about it. Well, I'll start, I think let's take a quick break, and then after the break, we're going to have to tackle the huge number of questions that are downing street cat.

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22:34Right, Alisa, this is an obvious one, which I think I can predict your response to, but this is the story which people will have picked up that Kierstammer has decided to move a portrait of Margaret Thatcher, which was commissioned by Gordon Brown in number 10. And so here are the questions from Miranda Faye. Why did Gordon Brown commission that Thatcher portrait in the first place? Seems not a decision for Labour PM and Joanna. Why did journalists seem to focus on silly stories like Andrew Rainer to disco or the Prime Minister moving a picture? Poor and lazy journalism if it could be called that all the gossip.

23:07And then Sissu, whose portrait would you hang in your study? Amy, over you. Well, it's funny. I was at, I mentioned the thing I did in Scotland with the schools that evening. I did an event with Tom Baldwin, Kierstammer's biographer. And it was at that event where Tom told this story. And I have to say the several hundred glass regions in the audience, nobody patty an eyelid. It was a, it was like, oh, he's, he's had a picture of Thatcher. And now it's not there anymore. It was like not a big deal. But it became, it was all those stories where the right wing papers and the Tories, they dug into the cliché factory and found the word outrage.

23:44So people were outraged. I think it would be a bit weird. Kierstammer to work with a picture of Margaret Thatcher looking at him. I think that would just be very, very odd. Very odd. The normal story would be, you know, David Cameron moves the picture of Margaret Thatcher, which would be used as a sort of way of suggesting, you know, fights in the Tory party or he wasn't quite right wing enough. But for a Labour Prime Minister, given that Margaret Thatcher was a particularly controversial conservative Prime Minister not to want to have a big picture of her movie, a picture of Churchill, maybe it's different, isn't it?

24:19Because he's seen as a unifying war leader. But I can't really understand. I didn't get it at all. I literally couldn't get it. Now, also, the other point is that there is an official portrait of every Prime Minister on the staircase, as you know, and that includes ridiculous ones like Johnson and Trust. So Thatcher is there. The question from Miranda, why did Gordon Brown commission it in the first place? I suspect that at the time Gordon was, you know, trying to sort of lean into, I'm not tribal, I'm not totally labien, I understand that. Nothing tribal about Gordon Brown at all. Nothing at all, nothing at all.

24:51So he called it the Thatcher room. It was actually the room, the rooming question is where I used to hold my 930 morning meetings. Was it 930 or 830, I can't remember, with the the heads of other government media department. And I think I would have objected to having a picture of Margaret Thatcher there. The other thing to say about the, in fact, finally, if yesterday I was walking down just down from Trafalgar Square, I hadn't realised that the new business department has moved. And I see it's next to the contained within the same buildings, the government art collection. Now the government does own a very, very substantial art collection.

25:28And it's just part of the thing that the paintings change from time to time. Things get moved about. Whenever there's one of the fun things about me, I'm going to say, I mean, I'm embarrassed to say that every time I became a minister in different departments, I got a lovely conversation with the government art department about what paintings I wanted. And it is incredible. They've got these huge vaults where you can go. And the government's been quite clever about collecting paintings of these. Many of the best ones go to the embassies. So I had two beautiful pictures, 18th -century pictures of geese and Iceland, which went off quite understandably from my office to the embassy in Iceland, which I think was more deserving of them.

26:04I had a terrific picture that I was really pleased of from the late 1500s of a really grim -looking man and a white rough and a black doublet with a white beard that I put up to show my commitment to modernisation and progress on the I had a huge portrait. I mean, almost, I suppose, 15 feet high of Charles I to show that I was ready going the right way. 15 feet. Well, because as you can imagine, the government inherited all these portraits of monarchs. Yeah, these huge things. Yeah. And almost portraits of monarchs, which particularly I think at times when these things were very cheap and auctioned, the government's quite canny about buying them.