341. Biden vs. Trump: A fight for the future of Ukraine

22:59Now of course we thought that Trump was the second coming, but in fact it turns out as Jesus Christ. So, and he said he believes it at one state solution, and it was interesting to even to see the words that he used in taking the job, like no real mention of Palestinians at all. So that, I think that one's pretty horrific. I'm going to just sort of try to see if we can bring European or British listeners to try to understand what the analogy would be with these kinds of people. So, defensive repeat hex axis is like a mega pin -up, big, musly, major in the military. Really hair. Good hair. I mean, this is very unfair to Johnny Mercer, but in some sense he's like a good -looking guy who went to war, but was not a particularly senior officer when he left the military.

23:43Matt Gaetz, the Italian... Just one more of him though. There's some sort of pictures of him topless, and he's gone on tattoos. Some of which are white supremacy. Yeah, so one of them is a big thing that says, des volt, and des volt is Latin phrase used by the Pope to launch the first crusade. So it's a sub -briminal message to Christian crusaders. And there was a reason why he was not allowed in his former job to be part of one of the parade for the president when he died. Because of his extreme tattoos, yeah. And then Attorney General Mercer was the most... We've only got sex offences and drugs on him.

24:27Yeah, so he was a really chaotic, outspoken, crazy media grabbing congressman who was on the virtue of being expelled from Congress for allegations of drugs, sex, the same other. And what would be the equivalent in the UK for kind of defense secretary who was a massive popular tattoo wearing Fox News commentator and a really outrageous right -wing member of parliament who was on the virtue of being expelled? I mean, I think that's what we have to sort of bring across the sotona for this whole thing. Well, I wish you'd give me advance warning of that question. I think it's very... I can't think of any off the top of my head.

25:01I guess Boris Johnson and Liz Trust becoming prime ministers. The obvious barrel in terms of, you know, utterly unqualified. But they did at least go through the quite detailed sustained process over many, many years. No, I think maybe it says that there's more madness in Trump world than there is in UK politics, whatever, however depressed we get about it. It's got a bit of the Liz Trust feel in the sense that it's sort of shock, jock, provocative, not very serious loyalty ever competence, no expertise. Raging against the deep state. But it's a sense of both what Liz Trust has, which is seeing the whole thing as a game utterly superficial.

25:37I don't really care what people's competence are. Presumably because Trump and Trust simply don't believe in the bureaucracy or the system of government to talk to them. Yes, they do. Well, a lot of these guys are sort of, you know, they believe that there is a deep state that tries to sort of take out people who don't conform to the mono view. There's another one they call my eye, Brendan Carr, who is going to be the head of the federal communications commission. Barry Mine, that Donald Trump said he actually had nothing to do with the project 2025 stuff. Brendan Carr wrote the chapter on the future of the federal communications commission.

26:09Just one hour after he got, he was appointed or the nominated, he did a tweet, he said, we must dismantle the censorship cartel, restore free speech rights for everyday Americans. And who was one of the first people to give it back into that, Mr. Elon Musk. And Barry Mine, this is a guy, this is kind of not just off -gones, this is a guy who will be in charge of decisions, which upon which will depend levels of subsidy to some of Elon Musk companies. So this is kind of, to me, this reads like potential for corruption. And also for those of us who feel that one of the reasons why politics has become very polarized, why populism is taken off is because of the social media ecosystem and have been trying to push since 20, for 16, for more regulation, looking at these algorithms, working out what you can do to stop this fueling extremism.

27:02We've got with the FCC appointment somebody who's going to very much go in the other direction. If anything, social media will become more rebounded, more polarized, more extreme, less regulated under a Trump administration. Because I guess, for obvious reasons, it sort of benefits him, isn't it? I mean, in a way he will see his victory as being. But how does free speech, how does this sort of thing about free speech? We've got the thing going on here at the moment, so I don't even fully understand this Alice and Pearson thing, but it looks part of the same sort of ridiculous nonsense where the right, they love free speech, providing it's their free speech.

27:32And yet you've got Trump saying that he wants this guy to come in and sort of start shutting down TV stations. Now we'll see how that goes. So I think the free speech argument is so kind of that they weaponized it from a very, very particular perspective. There's one other sort of moderately possibly quite sensible appointment, which you may not have seen. That's the White House Council is a guy called William McGinley, who was an advisor to Trump first time round, who people said, I don't know, but people said was kind of not crazy. Right. So he's going to be the main, his main legal guy in there.

28:06I've just been reading three books on the Trump administration. And one of the things that's at the core of all this is how does this all work? If you appoint these kind of people, how does the machinery of government respond? How does the civil service, the departments respond? And there are very, very different ways of dealing if like Trump, you have an obsession with the deep state. You can bring in people who are real inside players. Bolton maybe was a bit of an example of this who are trying to achieve a massive cultural shift, or you can bring in very organized people who force through an agenda, but don't try to change the system itself.

28:42Or you can have people who make a lot of noise and just preside over a system that refuses to cooperate with them. And I guess a lot of what will determine the future of America and have a lot of consequences of world over the next four years is, are these people going to be able to achieve the effect? I mean, if a Liz Trust figures put in charge of a department, how much damage can they do? How much can the department resist them? How much can they change policy? And I think these heads of department in the states have more pounds, secretive state, because the, you know, the fact that the president at the point is them, they can make considerable numbers of appointments.

29:13If you think about the fuss there is here, about a cabinet minister appointing a handful of special advisors, but they will, I think, have considerable power, particularly in this first two years before the midterms, and where Trump has this sense of the mandate. By the way, we should point out on the mandate, he's now below 50 % on the popular vote. And when you dig down to the numbers, it was way closer that than even you and I felt on the night. But they, you know, forget that, they're going to operate. This is going to be like Brexit 52%. They are going to operate like they have got absolute power.

29:48And then to finish, I guess, as we go into the break policy, he has signaled nasty portations, big tax cuts, drill, drill, drill on the environment, tariffs against rest the world, 10 % against rest the world, 60 % against China, and a big shift on Ukraine. And a lot of these appointments, I guess, are about reinforcing that policy agenda. Yeah. And maybe fine on this, the one thing I did see about Rackliffe, the CIA guy, this relates to what you said earlier about China. He has likened the, the, the country of China's rise to, it says on a part of the defeat of fascism and bringing down the iron curtain, that is his big focus.

30:25I think where they could get, he could get tricky on this, though, is with this woman Gabbard. She, she, she is attacked. See, I think Trump does this deliberately. He's putting people who are going to, who are going to fight because he lights the chaos and he lights being the person on top of the chaos. But Gabbard, one of her more colorful quotes about Rubio, who she said represents the neocon war -mongering establishment. So there's going to be tensions in this top table policy. So the direction, the direction, the direction, it's commenting on the incoming section state. Correct. Yeah. So a lot of these Trump books that I've been reading exactly show what you're talking about.

31:00He seems a lot of the scenes in them describe him sitting there sort of playing his advisors off against each other, mocking them, humiliating them. And his family. And be like, I forget you, you're a globalist, you can go, and they literally have to go and sit in the corner of the room on a sofa, and then he listens to the other one, and then he brings the other one in, and then he's, and his response to tweets, how often he sees something on social media, Fox News, and he's like, that's the guy we want. I love that guy. Here's my little reading list of people want to be honest that I've been looking at.

31:26Just on this room. You say you read three books. Do you actually, no, I know they're on your kindle, I can see them. But when we say, we're in a defined reading. Have you read them all from start to finish? No, I've skimmed them, and I'm off. So how long did you read? So I've been firing fury, probably two and a half hours. Okay. Okay. So firing fury, Michael Wolfe, Bob Woodwood, Fear, John, John Bolt and the run where it happened. And there I read first two chapters, and then I skipped forward to when he actually became our security advisor, because there was a lot about him trying to get appointed and getting frustrated.

32:02But the best of them, I think, is Maggie Habermann's confidence, which is just an extraordinary. So she was in New York. She's like, no, but she'd known him forever. She covered the Trump beat for decades before he became president. Oh, when he was in business. Yeah. So she really knows how his father did dodgy deals with the Democratic Party in Brooklyn in the 50s and got taken out of federal contracts for overcharging in the 60s and this kind of stuff. And then the other thing I've been reading, which I'm afraid to say, is incredibly engaging and using light reading, is Trump's art of the deal and sort of suggests some of the Christmas and appeal of him.

32:39Yeah. The fact that you read it is one up on Trump. He hasn't read Trump. I don't know. I think he's Trump's read Trump. He just, he just knows that it's the greatest book in the world about the Bible. That was, he's quite on that one. Okay. Well, listen, much more to be done on this, but it's a, it's as usual with Trump. We're still on that funny oscillation between buffoonery and threat, taking seriously his appointments and his policies and at the same time accepting that some of this is just trolling the world. One thing we do know, Roy, is that project 2025, which we've read, is now being rolled out.

33:14Very good. Take a break.

33:21This 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 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.

33:57They've got over 5 ,000 therapists in the UK. They've helped more than 5 million people globally and you can join a session literally at the click of a button. Change therapist 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 % of their first month at BetterHelp .com slash rest politics. That's better H -E -L -P .com slash rest politics.

34:29Welcome back to The Rests as Politics with me, Roy Stewart. And with me, Alice Campbell. And a bit of plugging, if we may, Murray Black, the current leading interview, I thought was brilliant. It's funny when I'm doing the interviews, I don't always get a sense of what they're like as interviews, but I thought she was terrific. You get it more when you listen back. Yeah, it's difficult to judge how their voices are going to come across. And also, because you concentrate on the interview, you don't necessarily absorb what they say. If you haven't listened to it walking over the heat and judge it to stop because she was laughing so much about Murray Black, say, of course, you shouldn't speak ill of the dead before absolutely putting the booted to Alice Hammond who had just died.

35:10But I think it's really, really sad that she's left politics. I really don't love parliament. I've been really enjoying some of our recent leading interviews. I also loved Kim Leadbeater, who we've just done. Who's another example of a really talented woman who's come into politics with a slightly quirky outsider's perspective. And I obviously relate to them because like me, they see the whole thing as an unbelievable horror show fiasco. And the reason we're talking to Kim, of course, is because she's bringing for this private member's bill on assisted dies. And that's going to be out on Monday.

35:42And the other one we should alert listeners to coming up very excited about this, Rory. Do you remember who was talking my list when we had a target list of interviews? I've been married on his dead. So I think it must be the other M. Is it? And it's not my current angle of Merkel coming up soon. So there we are. And I should talk about the UK economy. UK economy. Well, we did a thing. Let me put you on the spot. You did one of the things we were talking to a group last week. And you mentioned the missions. And I slightly cheekily said to this room of nearly 300 business people have any of you heard of the five missions.

36:15And I think it was like two hands out of 300 went up. That's that's a bit problematic. Yeah, but I think I think the question fairer question, Rory, would have been, have you heard of any of the missions? And I just remind you remind us what these missions were and when they emerge, are they still what's guiding the government? Is the government still guided by these actions? Yeah, they, well, they they are. And this was something they did in the election campaign. They did it before the election campaigns and missions. And would they have expected me to know what the five missions are by now?

36:44Yes. Okay. And what are they? Growth. Growth, yeah. Not just growth, but the highest growth of any G7 country. Gotcha. Yep. I'll come back to why that's a problem. Yeah. Getting the health service back on its feet, green energy, safer streets, and smashing the class ceiling, which is all about aspiration, education, et cetera. So they're the five missions. I think they are still driving government agenda, but they've not been communicated as such. And I think that's because some of the work is still being done on what the policy solutions are. And so just just remind me, if you were in number 10 in your old job, those five things would be up on your wall.

37:17And you'd also presumably be communicating in cabinet and through the special advisors and to all the departments. The things that the primates to really cares about are growth, health, crime, crime, energy, energy, and smashing the class ceiling education and aspiration. Yeah. And in fact, what Kier said recently was that his two big things were economy and immigration, got a sort of immigration. Well, that wasn't in the list of fighting. No, no. So that's where it gets a little bit confusing. Again, presumably, if you were a brutal business person, you'd say having a list of priorities also tells you what you're not prioritizing.

37:54I mean, otherwise, in other priorities, you have to be honest about, okay, so what is it that they're not prioritizing that another government might prioritize implicitly in those five? Because education's not listed. Asperation. Asperation. Asperation just includes everything. Then it's not really a list of priorities. The point about the missions is that they will cover different policy areas from different departments. So it's not a priority list, really. No, the five mission led government is just a different way of thinking about government. And one of the key people on this is Pat McFadden who's working away putting this together now.

38:25So I don't think we've definitely not heard the last of the missions. Okay. The point you're making, let's just take the first one. And the other point that came from our meeting with these business guys was that they didn't love the budget. And I think that it's interesting to me the way that the farmers, and we said right on the day, didn't we, that this farmers think could become problematic or big campaign going on that. But actually, I think in terms of business, the national insurance changes are provoking. It seems to me quite a lot of angst and grief. But just on the growth mission, so we're, yes, we had these figures last week, the basically the economy grew by 0 .1 % over the first three months of a labor government.

39:03You can't blame labor for that. That's taking on the economy. However, when you look at the current figures, this is about global kind of stagnation, not just the UK, of the seven G seven countries, US is top, 0 .7 France 0 .4 Canada is in the kind of 4 .25 Germany 0 .2 Japan 0 .2 UK 0 .1 Italy 0. So that indicates the scale of the challenge. And I've always thought the big challenges given the last 10 years, in which basically the US has gone from being almost on par with Europe in terms of its GDP and its GDP for capital to now being certainly 25, 30 % larger. The real challenge is how are they really expecting, if they're going to be the fastest green G seven to be growing faster than the US economy, with everything we know about US natural resources, US taxes, US entrepreneurial ability, US Silicon Valley concentrations, etc.

39:58The Rachel reason she did the budget is called it a budget for growth. But actually what did most of the people in that room understand about the budget? It was the taxes were going up to pay for the health service. Now the health service is one of the missions. So I think there was an understanding the health service needs more investment alongside before. So they get it. But I think that what I'm hearing more and more is actually they want to see the detailed plan for growth, which is, is that about innovation? Is that about AI? Is that about planning? Is that about infrastructure? Exactly. And this is something we've talked about a lot.

40:29And this is where without getting too much into micro detail, I think one way of framing it is that the Tony Blair Institute and Tony Blair spent almost three years before the selection, writing their sort of project 2025. They're kind of manifesto for a new labor government. And the way that Tony Blair would imagine growth happening, which oddly is actually not very different from the way William Hague would have seen growth happening, is huge emphasis on technology and AI. And so they celebrated Rishi's Unarks investment and supercomputers, money for batteries, etc. Secondly, more globalization, they would have been much more in favour of certainly Tony Blair of more movement of people between the EU and the UK, closer links with the European Union.

41:12And he's also very interested to Tony Blair in the ways in which you could get the economy going by freeing up the rules around things like pension funds to provide more investment into startup British companies and create more of a risk appetite and more energy, British investment, etc. Now against him is this man who has now taken over as the chief of staff. And the interesting thing about the new chief of staff that is... Morgan McQueenie. Yeah, who you against us. You put, I mean, interesting, you pulled me up this. I was talking about Morgan McQueen with his large group and you said to the group, how many of you here have heard of Morgan McQueenie, and almost no hands went up.

41:47So we can't assume even amongst our lessons everybody's got it. But just remind people, this is the guy that pushed out Sue Gray who was the chief of staff and this is the guy who basically ran the labor campaign. He's from a political side. He did this stuff, which I keep praising him and barking and he's now right at the center of it. Now he is seen as more of a kind of centrist, old -fashioned blue collar labor guy who has expressed some frustration with the more new labor globalization tech stuff, which he sees as a little bit maybe out of touch with the real concerns of Redwall voters. Yeah, but I'm not sure that's right.

42:24I think he understands that the reason why Peter Carl was given this job of technology AI and I think we'd like to hear him, or Peter Carl, but talking to him soon, is because they do understand the importance of AI to growth. And AI by the way is also inside the health mission. Very interesting by the way, I think we've got Google coming up as a sponsor and I'm just reading up on them. So this is interesting. Google's innovation are already demonstrating the use that cases of AI in addressing challenges, including delivering on the government's financial missions. And why do policy goals across the UK?

42:55So they know what the fire missions are. They know what the fire missions are. So I think that's, you know, that's a good sign, Rory. That's a good sign. Let me make a kind of boring policy point here, which I guess I've made before, but I just want to reinforce the problem with relying on technology. AI robotics nanotechnology to transform government is that it's not just about what the technology can do. It's about the many ways in which the system will resist it. The classic example of this is there's basically no reason why we should have any drivers on our tube trains. Go around the world.

43:27There are underground systems that don't have drivers. Why do we have drivers on tube trains? Not because the technology doesn't exist because the unions rejected it. Another example, I remember in Cumbria trying to convince GPs to use video conferencing in order to see patients who are elderly and wouldn't move in and GPs responding. It's just as easy for us if the patients come into the clinic. And then I said, what could change that a bit, but not completely as you will have discovered. I mean, again, when I say to doctors, they often say, well, we've embraced the telephone. Well, that's been around since the 19th century and they've embraced it relatively recently.

44:03So the point I suppose I'm trying to make is that we underestimate the fact that often the barrier to the adoption technology isn't what the tech can do. It's the willingness of institutions to accept it. Legal barriers to taking it up. People being concerned. Sometimes unnecessarily about risk and health. So they're the question is, do you think this is a government that is going to take risks, be radical and force tech through when there's opposition? Well, if they don't, then they're not going to succeed. And if they don't succeed, that is going to be a big, big, big deal because where does the country go if a progressive labor government doesn't succeed?

44:42Does it go to Kemi Badenock or does it actually go to something even more extreme? And the one thing I think Morgan Smith really absolutely does understand is that the policy has to meet the scale of the challenge. And if you take things like the challenges facing health and the cost and the choice that you have to make between whether every can have everything or whether you have to make really blunt, difficult choices, I think you definitely get us that. And I think they do have a sense that AI, the tech stuff, I get, I tell you a point about the tube trains, but I think you're looking here at some really big changes that can be delivered across the health sector and across the education sector.

45:21So that's the kind of stuff that you're looking at, which I don't think is yet a big enough part of the debate. Rachel Reeves did, I don't know if you read her a mansion house speech, and normally a mansion house speech, you remember we taught a lot about her maize lecture, but the mansion house speech kind of came and went and they're usually very big deals. So to remind people, the chance that turns out everybody wears white tines tells them where that's been that's been stopped 86. Thank God, but I remember the chance, I did not have to wear white tines. I did not wear white tines tells a Gordon Browns mansion house speeches were very, very famous.

45:51Yeah. Just remind us a little bit about how big they were, because I seem to you must have been involved in the way in which I got the size and the thing is your response were quite famous. If you're the chance, the maize lecture has become a big thing. Yeah. The budget is obviously huge thing, the spending review is a huge thing, but the mansion house speech is a very, very, very big thing. And it's where you set strategic course. Now, the big news in Rachel Reeves speech, I think, was this what she called the biggest pension reform in decades. And you were saying recently, you don't have a sense of which countries this government is looking at.

46:23Are they looking at Scandinavia or what? Yeah. She very specifically said we want to follow what has been done in Australia and Canada, where these pension schemes have been brought together and made into mega funds. So we have 86 in this country, local government pension pots, which she wants bring together in six, which can then invest far more on a bigger scale, hopefully in our economy. But so, for example, she pointed out, but she pointed out that some of the biggest, just last week, Canadian pension fund, the Public Safety Pension Investment Board, bought for one and a half billion the company that owns Aberdeen Glasgow and Southampton Airports.

47:06The Ontario Teachers Pension Plan owns already Bristol Airport and Birmingham Airport. So, you know, these are pension funds from Canada, Australia, that are basically buying up. Huge chunks of British infrastructure. It's amazing. I remember when I first met those Canadian pension funds and teachers funds in particular, how they come, I mean, it's certainly you suddenly find in these financial meetings in London, you will have found this too, along with the guys from BlackRock and famous hedge funds. One of the smartest, most powerful people in the room will be the guy from the Canadian Teachers Fund.

47:43And it said that that will be interesting. So that, and again, that will be, will that be challenged? She brings a bunch of pension reform. So the problem on it is this, that in effect for understandable reasons, government made pension investments in the UK, pretty risk averse. And the idea was they would only go into instruments, which were going to be pretty low risk play return. Part of her message is that we've become too risk averse. Absolutely. So, Conservative governments talked about but never achieved the idea that these pension funds can take more risk and invest more in equities in particular, more upside, more downside.

48:22And the argument is that because it's a 2030 year investment, you're making off of the pension fund, you can afford to take more risk because the activities market sort of sell fat. But they never really got it done. And they never really got it done because you can imagine the counter -argument, which is a risk averse argument about pension. So let's see, if she does it, that will be really interesting because it's something that the Tories talked about for 14 years and never mentioned. Jeremy Hunt talked about it in his last mansion, her speech. Yeah. What does he say about our culture and the media landscape?

48:52Is it because we're all talking about Trump at the whole time at the moment? But I find it really interesting that the speech came. It was live on the news and all that. But I think we would do another business audience today and say, what was the big news out of Rachel Reeves' mansion, her speech? I think we get pretty low turn out. Maybe also a comms problem. Maybe to be honest, the way in which she speaks, the way in which she's speech is delivered, and the way in which it's communicated, may make it more difficult to land it. So remember, the point is that you would have had a comms challenge here.

49:21However important changes the rules of how pension funds operate at the margin of whether they can put 0 .5 % into equities or 4 % to equities. Sounds pretty obstruist and boring if you're running a television news item or a newspaper. So you presumably... Big deal though. It's a big deal. It's a very, very big deal. But unless you get the comms right, it could sound a bit boring. Yeah. So the question is, is the number 10 machine good enough at saying, listen, this sounds quite boring, but this could change an enormous amount. And the way you do it is you'd say, listen, if I was pitching it, I'd say we developed amazing things in the UK universities from graphene through to AI.

50:00And they've all gone off to Silicon Valley and all the money's being made in the West Coast. Because in the West Coast, there are venture funds that take risk. And the problem in the UK is we're far too conservative and we're not taking risk with these businesses. So Britain could be, the pitch would be leading the world in tech investment if we free up these venture funds. And then I think you pitched the story around the tech, not around that. And then you make that part of this is where this is all heading in a way. And this will come. You make that part of your big 10 -year growth plan. And that I think is what business wants to hear.

50:30Because at the moment, there are a bit pissed off about national insurance, there are a bit pissed off about the workers' right stuff. Both of which can be defended, but they've got to keep making the argument as part of long -term plan for Britain. Well, great. Well, so many other things to talk about. But people who are interested, the next episode of the podcast will be Question Time. And in it, we'll be able to get more into Farmers and Agriculture and we'll be able to talk about Kierstarma meeting Sieging Ping at the G20. So some really exciting issues for people who want to listen to Question Time, where we're going to focus on China, Farmers and much more.

50:59See you tomorrow.