313. Why Starmer needs to be unpopular

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25:39And we are out of time. Are you really cutting me off?

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26:23Welcome back to the Rest Politics for Mirorys Chud. And me, I was terrible. So the report on Grandfathers, the second report, first one came out at the end of 2019 which was looking at the immediate moments of the fire. And now we're stepping back into the question of how we ended up with flammable cladding being put on the side of this. This building has now come out. I thought it was really interesting. Like you, I've read the report. It's a long report and it takes a lot of time. And there's a fascinating gap between what the report says and the way that people think about the report and the way people have reported it.

26:59So as you remember, the first response because the people who really, and I remember turning up at Grandfathers just after the fire and seeing the incredible work being done by local community organizations and churches and others to provide shelter for the survivors and this sense of this thing that had gone up like a Roman candle with some of the poorest and most vulnerable people in London suffering. So there was a lot of early very, very politicized reporting saying that this was largely a result of austerity and the government's deregulation agenda. That is emphatically not what this second -faced report says.

27:37Very little of the 1700 pages is devoted to that. This report is talking about failure at almost every conceivable level. I mean, that's why this is, it's why it's so difficult with these reports. And in that way, it reminds me a little bit of other famous reports, you know, contaminated blood, post office scandal in Britain, or the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan, or the 9 -11 Commission report in the US or indeed the opioid scandal. What happens when you begin to look at how our democracies get things wrong? It's got wrong everywhere. So there's the private sector who, as you pointed out just for the break, are actually actively lying.

28:15So they're testing these panels. The panels are failing. They're then retesting them in fake laboratory conditions by putting in magnesium slices that produce weird results. They're concealing the fact that they failed tested. They're implying that they've got approval they haven't got. Then after our conic and King Span and Cellotex have been dishonest, and it's amazing to see a judge literally just name these companies and say they lied. He has one of the admitting that they're lying. Incredible. Then five more organizations which are supposed to be checking them, the BBA, the LABC, the NHBC, the BRC and the UKAS, all of which completely fail to do their job on doing the checking on these panels.

28:59Then you've got, as you said, this relationship between the Royal Barra of Kingston Chelsea and their tenants management office, where the tenants management office fails to disclose failures on fire safety check up to the Royal Barra of Kingston Chelsea. Then you've got the government itself to Department of Community's local government where you've got a junior official, very junior official responsible for this stuff, who doesn't report up to his bosses and the bosses take no interest in what he's doing. Put it all together. Yes, you could say that what we need is more regulation, but as in most of these cases, there's regulation everywhere.

29:31The problem is nobody's actually following the rules. The architects can't be bothered. Nobody takes any responsibility. I think that's where the story of austerity is a big part of this. It's true that he doesn't sort of quote, blame austerity, but I think going through the whole thing is a sense that the combination of lack of capacity meant that the regulations that do exist, it was far too easy for these companies that he rightly absolutely slams to get round systems, frankly, with government and local government colluding with them in so doing. It's true that the biggest criticism is for the people who made the cladding on the building.

30:11He talks about systematically dishonesty, deliberate and sustained strategies to manipulate, to misrepresent, and to mislead. As you say, it goes through them one by one. So, Kierstharmer then, in his statement, said, none of these companies will get future contracts, which is fine, but apparently they've already had £250 million worth since Grenfell, added to which they're based in, I think, ones in France, ones in America, ones in Ireland, they're in different parts of the world. So, I do think there's a thing in here that says, maybe it's not that there are regulation, but it's not just deregulation as in the regulations don't even matter.

30:48They don't count. So, one thing that was similar with this, I was the minister dealing with air pollution during the Volkswagen scandal, and their Volkswagen deliberately fixed stuff to their vehicles when they were doing laboratory tests, which they removed when they went out on the road, so that their night and dark side emissions in the laboratory were much lower than they were in the road. And these guys have been doing the same thing. So, there's that problem. It's the profit rate. If that was true for the famous BP scandal, where an oil spill was every single contractions subcontracts, so cutting costs, it's also institutional complacency.

31:24Nobody listening to people trying to whistle blow, that was clearly true in the post office scandal, clearly true in the contaminated blood scandal. But the heart of it is a lack of seriousness in government. I mean, just nobody in the system seems to be taking responsibility. Again, there's a great article in the Guardian attacking the architectural profession saying that architects no longer really know about materials or actually care about fire safety. And they've become, I think the phrase was sort of experts and rhetoric and jargon and gonzo ideas. And the architects and the scheme simply don't seem to felt it was their job to do the most basic due diligence on the planning.

32:03If we go back to the point I was making in the first half about public inquiries, and there is a sort of performative element to all this. So you have a terrible, terrible event. And you know, we can all remember it, and we're all reminded of it every time you head out to West London, because Gremful is still there with the green heart on the top. And you know, it's a very, very, very powerful symbol of something that's gone terribly wrong. The event happens. People praise the emergency services, but actually one thing that comes through the report is that the fire service did not handle it well.

32:34You have a visit from the Prime Minister. You have people attacking the local council, but the local council comes out and defends itself. And then it sort of chugs along, you go through grief and funerals and all that stuff and people tell the stories, then you have the public inquiry. The public inquiry goes on for a long, long time. Rightly, they've got to do this thing in detail. And then the final sort of often the performative bit is when the inquiry reports, and as I said earlier, and then what? And I worry that this is just become what the state does when we have these things, but then the state doesn't necessarily have the capacity to meet all of the recommendations that are probably rightly being made.

33:14And then the media issue too, I was struck by the fact that the BBC report covering it, really softballed the criticisms of the fire and rescue service. So one of the central criticisms of the response is that the firemen and women were very brave, but basic procedures went on in place. They hadn't prepared a contingency plan for Grenfell going up. There wasn't proper thought about when to change the state put advice. So very sadly, people were told to stay put in their apartments when they should have been leaving. They hadn't kept up to date on fires happening in other parts of the world. There seemed to be a real lack of curiosity and professional improvement working out that this stuff could happen.

33:57There was a real lack of initiative on the ground. So one of the recommendations that have come out of this is about the setting up of a fire and rescue college where you would provide proper professional training, particularly at the mid -senior levels for people responding to this. But we haven't seen, sadly, with Angela Rainer's response, her coming out saying that she's going to do this. And we've also haven't seen the media really leaning into this. I wonder how many journalists that she read this report. I mean, I remember feeling this during COVID. I talked to one of the most famous BBC journalists who were right at the heart of the COVID reporting and realized quite quickly into the conversation, they simply were not on top of the details.

34:31They were too busy to cover the details. So yeah, because what happens on, you know, and I've been the subject of public inquiries and the scene how these things get reported is that there's a desperation to get your hands on the report, then to decide very, very quickly what the line is. I go back onto this thing about a performative. It's almost like a show that here they are waving the report. Here's the summary. Here's the press conference with the guy who's done, who's published this report. Here's the response in Parliament. I mean, that was just a few days ago, but then it just goes away.

35:05It goes away. And I do think there's something so fleeting about these things now. I think that, I mentioned when we're talking about prisons about one of the people who put his name to this report that I mentioned on prisons, Lord Wolf. I can remember the Wolf report in 1991. I think it was 1991. That was about, that was up to some pressure. Yes, absolutely. People talk about it for days, documentaries got made about it. These things come along, big, bad moment, public inquiry, and then where does it go? Add it to which, of course, the other thing that puts labor in a difficult position, and perhaps this is why Angela Rainer is being cautious.

35:41I don't know. But if housing is going to be their big thing to get the economy growing, and they then come up with stuff that the housing industry, the construction industry, feels is going to make it harder for them. That becomes a bit of a bit of a bind. It is where goals clash. Final thing for me, we've moved on to China. I think before one gets too pessimistic because it's easy looking at all these scandals around the world to conclude that the cultural problems in modern bureaucracies are almost impossible to overcome. There are examples. Sweden really improved its safety culture. bits of Japanese industry really improved.

36:18Singapore, as we've talked about, did amazing progress on corruption. I think it is possible to feel that if a government really wanted to say, we want to be more serious. We want to give more of a priority to safety, and not just put all the emphasis on cutting costs. We're going to listen to whistleblowers. We're going to push for culture of continuous improvement. You can, almost from the leadership example from the top, create a more serious, more responsible government. It would be nice to see that happening. Alistair Moving on to China, you were very interested in the China Africa summit, which has just finished.

36:52Probably because I didn't really see that much about it in a lot of Western media, but I thought it was a really pretty big deal. More heads of state and government from Africa went to this than I was intending to go to the United Nations General Assembly. Xi Jinping literally put out the red carpet, greeted them. The outcome was over $50 billion more support. Billboards have welcomed all over Beijing with the pictures of these African leaders up there. Only Ezra Tini, that was the only country from Africa excluded, and that is because they have diplomatic relations with Taiwan. There was also more in military aid.

37:31There was just big, big, big partnership stuff. I think that at the same time, the other thing that caught my eye in relation to China this week, the survey done by what's called, is now called the use of Eastshack Institute. Used to be called the Institute for the Southeast Asian Studies. And use of Eastshack was the first President of Singapore. It's now named after him. And what this does is it analyzes the opinions of, particularly opinion -formers, you know, academics, think tanks, politicians, nonprofits, editors, all the big organizations. And for the first time ever, respondents in answer to the question about whether China or the United States matters more, have narrowly gone for China.

38:23And I think we should just, you know, we've got an interview coming up with An Apple Bound. And Xi Jinping is book about the Autocracy Inc. And I think sometimes because China, maybe a lot more subtle about a lot of the stuff that they do, we underestimate the power and the reach and the impact of all the different diplomatic and economic stuff that they do. And this is very much, when you see, so this is Africa, that study is about Southeast Asia. But for example, the number of Southeast Asian countries who says that they have become less warm to America and more warm towards China, partly for economic, but also a lot of them talk about Gaza.

39:06In relation to Africa, if you see the votes, the way that African nations have been voting in some of the big difficult issues in the United Nations, China has been able to pull more of them over as a result in part, I would argue, because of this long -term economic relationship that they've been developing and of which this summit is the latest chapter. So I'm talking to you from states, I'm here at Yale. And these themes are very, very raw in the US at the moment. I'm about to go to teacher class on middle powers and another class next week, which is on the rise of challenges to the US. And when I was discussing this at a big conference with very senior ex -current US foreign policy people, people became very, very angry when I tried to suggest that in Southeast Asia, there were people who were not going to line up necessarily with the US against China.

40:02And of course, the US is very cheer up at the moment by the really significant problems in the Chinese economy. I mean, Chinese economies in real trouble, you talk about that a bit more. But what you've put your finger on is a paradox, which is that there isn't a direct relationship between the slowing of Chinese growth and the loss of Chinese influence. In fact, in some ways, China's economic challenges are leading it to lean ever more heavily into building relationships and places like Africa, partly because as the US leads a move to decouple and de -risk and disengage from China, China's looking for partners elsewhere in the world.

40:43So Africa's an obvious place where they're hoping that they're going to be able to get, as you said, critical minerals and resources, but also markets for Chinese goods, also labor for Chinese factories. But as they look at where they're going to put their electric vehicles and almost all that's left for the Chinese economy now at the moment, which is really working for them, is export and they're really hoping that they can get export of electric vehicles. And there's 110 % tariffs now imposed by the US against Chinese electric vehicles. They're going to be leaning more and more into Latin America, Asia, Africa's potential markets for these vehicles and offering very good terms, offering subsidies, offering to bring in Huawei, smart cities, discounted rates.

41:27One of the guests at the event was Antonio Guterres, the head of the UN. And he did actually make a few comments about the issue of debt entrapment, whether actually China had been over time trapping countries in these debt relationships. And there have been complaints about that. But at the same time, when you read some of the comments of some of the African leaders and foreign ministers who were there, they seem willing to suck it up because they feel there is an ongoing economic and political investment in them. And I think when you tie that to the, I thought quite startling finding in that survey done by the old Southeast Asian studies institute, because you've got countries there that you, I think America would feel were just kind of automatically there as it were.

42:20And I think it's just important to reflect that there is a change going on there. Some of these countries remain, you know, Philippines, Thailand, Singapore, very, very close to America. And you know, you're less likely to worry about those. But what you might sometimes call the swing states look like they are swinging in a direction that I think America would be a little bit worried about. Myanmar, just a little bit on China itself. So people will know that the about a fifth to a quarter of the Chinese economy was the property sector that's collapsed very dramatically, leaving tens of millions of people who've paid for homes that haven't been built.

42:56Xi Jinping also moved strongly against the tech sector. People like Jack Ma, his great Chinese tech entrepreneurs were seen as too much of a threat to the central state. And he saw his clamp down on that. He's also clamped down on the financial sector. Significant senior figures have been put in prison under corruption charges. And often that looks as though he's using corruption charges to just consolidate his own position. He's extended himself from the normal two year term which Chinese leaders had to being effectively premier for life. He's moving for a much more controlled system. So data coming out of China, this was something I think that we were sharing this morning.

43:38From the economists, yeah, which the economists wrote a good piece on. They've had a really big number on China disinformation on the economy. Yeah, less and less reliable. But also connected to that was the fact that there are fewer foreigners than China. Many of them left during COVID haven't returned. The universities now China much less open, journalists now, internationalists are accompanied around much more closely. People are much more careful about what they say to them. So there's a sense that Xi Jinping is becoming more defensive, more controlling. A loss of the very, very big international firms have massively slowed their investment in China.

44:15The Chinese government state -owned enterprises are having to get rid of some of their international investments to try to shore up their economy. Unemployment is a big problem. Maybe 46 % used underemployment because a lot of people are not. And then how is this interpreted? So if you're a critic of Xi Jinping, you say, well, okay, this is mismanagement by Xi Jinping. That's why the middle class is suffering. That's why the working class is suffering in China. But if you're watching Chinese state television or going online, you hear that the reason why the Chinese economy is in trouble is that the US doesn't want China to rise.

44:52That it's deliberate policy of the US can undercut and undermine China's rise. And that, of course, feeds nationalism and increases some of the security risks around the world. If China really begins to get into a cycle of convincing itself that the US is its major enemy trying to prevent it from rising it, then draws closer to the North Koreas, the Iran's, the Russia's, this world. We can see signs of China becoming more relaxed about providing material mechanical support to Russia and its fighting to Ukraine. Maybe this is a good point, I should mention. Our latest leading interview is with Audrey Tang, who's the first Taiwanese politician that we've interviewed, who was fascinating about the role of tech in the way that they've regained trust in politics in Taiwan.

45:41Quite actually confident, that I sense quite confident that she feels that China isn't about to make a move anytime soon, but we shall see. But the other point you're speaking to there in the connection to Russia, is that again, I said earlier that the Chinese sometimes made me more subtle. They do things that get less attention because Putin is so kind of, you know, upfront about a lot of this stuff, invading countries, all the information wars, wiping people out in foreign parts and so forth. But the Chinese do quite a lot of as well, and a lot of this decline in some of these countries, so the increase in support in some and the decline in support for American others, a lot of it will be to do with information wars.

46:21They're putting a lot of money into that stuff as well. And just to give you some of the figures, so Laos 30 % is point decline. This is decline of the US standing in these countries with opinion form as relative to China. Malaysia 20 % decline, Indonesia 20 % decline, Cambodia 18, Brunei 15, Myanmar and Thailand 10 and 9 respectively. So Philippines 83 % pro -American, Vietnam 79, Singapore 62, Myanmar 58, Cambodia 55, but only in three countries in the last year has the preference for the US over China grown from 23 to 2024, over quite a large number of countries. Now, I don't think we should overstate it, but you go down into the Muslim countries, 75 % Malaysia 73 % Indonesia 70 % of Brunei, and that must be related to Gaza.

47:18Yeah, there's an ex -British diplomat called Matthew Henderson who's been writing a lot about China. And his point is that he thinks China is in danger of becoming its own worst enemy. That there's something, it's not quite that it's setting out to become more of a spoiler, but that because of the internal policies that Xi Jinping is now pursuing, because of the rather awkward relationships that China is maintaining with Russian, North Korea and Iran, it's at risk of being driven down a more and more dangerous path. So it's not quite that he's saying that it's a global security threat immediately, but that its policies are dragging it in a dangerous direction.

48:02And you can see signs of this, we talk about the Vagna Group and the way in which the Russians very explicitly have got into these military coups in the Sahel where American and French troops have been driven out, so military governments taken over in the Vagna Group behind them. But you can also see Chinese arms militias on the ground, not as publicly. I mean, this is your point about it not being like Putin. You don't see them as the bodyguards, the president, they're often protecting mining facilities. But there definitely is a sense in, well particularly actually, I think, a sense that they're turning Russia into a sort of client state that they have the whip hand control over Russia now.

48:42Russia is so dependent on China to buy its oil and gas. China's been very good at diversifying away from Russian minerals into Central Asia. China's got more and more control over northeast old Manchuria, the era around that Ivostok. But none of this necessarily makes me very cheerful because China's building something the size of the British Navy every two years. They've been investing in magnetic launches for their amphibious craft. They're clearly building up their nuclear warheads since Xinjiang. They've got a plutonium reactor off the ground with Russia near Shanghai. So I think people ask, is China going to attack Taiwan?

49:20I think the problem is that as a regime gets narrower and narrower as you end up with an autocrat like Xi Jinping in charge, it becomes less predictable because it's not a polypuro which would say well on the balance of probabilities that probably a bit damaging to Chinese interests worldwide to go after Taiwan. The more it focuses on one individual, they start thinking things like, well, how about my legacy or is this the last moment I can move or what about internal enemies at home that I have to distract or can I get people off of economic problems? And they certainly have the capability for it.

49:54It may be close on this. There was an interesting event in the weekend. The FT hosted an event with Bill Burns, director of the CIA, alongside Richard Moores, the head of UK Secret Intelligence Service. And they both emphasize that the rise of China is what they see as the biggest intelligence and geopolitical challenge of the current century. So even with all the other stuff going on, the Middle East, Ukraine, etc. It was interesting that both of them said that was the biggest challenge they currently face. And then I guess the question is, is there anything that can be done through really good imaginative diplomacy to reverse this?

50:36Because pre -seeking opinion, you could be very optimistic, I think, in some ways, about China playing a constructive role in the world economy, being largely interested in trade and export rather than imperial adventures, being a status quo power. There are so many people in China who are heartbroken by what's happened to the economy, who would want to be more friendly to the West, who are very worried about the national's turn things are taking. It's about getting this balance right, because I think there's also a risk that in the United States, in particular, people are getting so anti -China that they're going to fulfill their own worst nightmares by creating a Cold War where one might not exist.

51:14Well, listen, we've only read on two subjects today, but we'll be back tomorrow talking about the Trump Harris debate, which I suspect they're busy preparing for right now. Amazing. The US news paper is obviously full of almost nothing else, very interesting polls showing Trump and Harris neck and neck at the moment, so really looking forward to getting into that and talking about the results there. And then on Thursday, our usual question time, where we'll be talking about all sorts of things, Michel Barnier as Prime Minister in France, success of the Paralympics, I think we should do as well, that's been a pretty amazing, amazing thing.

51:52And also, Rory, we're getting one or two questions about your pronunciation, which I'm very keen to press you off. Good, bye. Bye -bye.