343. What Happens Next: Israel vs. the International Criminal Court

26:58But it looked to me like a pretty performative, very expensive message. Yeah, well, I think that is the message. And I think that's the bluff he'd hoped to pull off. I think his gamble is that most Germans, most breads probably I'm afraid, would not be prepared to fight and die to defend both countries. Now NATO is based on the assumption they would be prepared to do that. But the risk is people will think, you know, a bit like Chamberlain, you know, this is a distant country of which we know nothing, and we really going to fight and die. For these countries, the Baltics are gambling we will, but much smarter from that point of view is to make sure that Putin is never in a position in Ukraine to be able to claim the victories settled down and then have a go at something else, because I think a combination of taking a small bit of territory, Germany and Britain not being motivated, a nuclear threat might allow him to break NATO and that article of protection entirely.

27:56On the other hand, let's imagine that Trump did sort of do some kind of deal with Putin that was not at all acceptable to Ukraine and destabilized, frankly, the whole of Eastern Europe and past the West. Does he really want that to be his first big foreign policy thing? Is that not going to show him to be weak as opposed to strong? Well, one possibility, of course, which people who voted for him keep trying to say is, Well, he never does all the things that he says he's going to do anyway. So maybe we don't need to take seriously the fact that he said this. I think though most of his top team have spent the last four years digging into the idea that Russia doesn't really matter what matters as China.

28:42And that they could do with making friends with Putin to bring him more onto their side against China. So whatever he thinks there'll be a lot of pressure in his team and I certainly think I would imagine I don't maybe you've got views on this. Do you think it's politically possible for him to write another large check for Ukraine, given everything he said in the last two years? I mean, forget about peace and 24 hours, but all he has to do is not send another $50 billion for Ukraine to be in really big trouble. I think it is possible for him to, because I don't think he has been as hard over on this as some of the people that announced the administration.

29:18and we know that he's quite always prepared to switch positions. I don't honestly know, I'll tell you what, I'm reading Angela Merkel's book at the moment, which we're talking to in the next few weeks. Very interesting when Trump won, Trump number one, his first term. So when Trump came in, and let's say, for example, we're going to talk in a minute about COP. Obviously, he had a very, very different position to most of the countries at the top table of the climate change debate. And she sort of took the view, well, we're going to have to step up and meet this challenge without him in a different way.

29:54Now, I guess the question you're asking is on something like defense would leaders be willing to do that and would their countries be willing to follow them on that. But most of the countries we're talking about, they are increasing defense spending. They are looking to up the game on defense, including our own, including the place where I am now, including Germany. Look, it's a tough one, but I don't think is a given that he's going to pull the plug on Ukraine quickly. Well, two final things from me. For more details on Ukraine, do please read Shashank Joshi, who's about a writer, great article, and the economist, kind of forward, who knows much more about Ukraine.

30:29I do. Secondly, on this question of going from EU NATO, unanimity, in other words, these big bodies all acting together towards the world in which some of them might make smaller alliances, for example, polls, Baltic's Nordics, and Britain working on Ukraine. Again, my friend Geryl Canal, CDI has done quite a lot of work on this. Thank you, Alistair. Okay, Rory, quick break. See you, Dominic.

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32:06Welcome back to the rest of politics with me Roy Stewart. And me Alex Campbell. And Alex, I think we really must do stuff on cop and climate, but I think for time reasons, let's move it into our next podcast, which is the question arts podcast where we'll do a serious amount on cop. Right. Which brings us to some other issues that you've raised. You wanted to tell a little bit about Norway, where you are? There's also been an extraordinary result in Romania. So tell us a little bit about Romania, because I think it's quite an interesting example about the way that politics is changing. Well, this goes against what we talked about earlier where the people close to Russia are more likely to be most worried.

32:43We know about all -bound, we know about Slovakia. So this is Romania. This is the presidential campaign, and the president is not a sort of macro -entite president. They don't have as much power are some presidents. But the truth is that a far right pro -Russia candidate, the guy called Kalen Georgeescu, he is one of the first round, one 23%. And the person who was favourite, who was the prime minister, a social democrat, came third. So he's now out of the runoff. So what happens is that Georgeescu is now going to go up against somebody called Elena Lasconi from the Save Romania Union in the second round.

33:21But it's very much, I mean, You know, we're talking far right here, we're talking somebody who sort of regularly echoes the kind of putin' talking points. Pretty low turn out, 51%, but a big, big, big rise. I mean, this guy was on, not that long ago, is on sort of single figures in the polls. Yeah, there's a lot of trends here in Romania, which oddly reflects what we've seen in America and across Europe. So you just pointed out very low turnout. Number two, opinion polls completely wrong. I mean, the opinion polls has barely raced it this guy. Thirdly, the power of social media. So he had no ground game.

33:56He didn't have much money. He's done it almost all entirely on TikTok. Which again, you remember people like me who were profoundly wrong about Trump, were trying to point out he didn't have a ground game. He didn't have people knocking on doors. He didn't have offices in Michigan. And of course, he proved that he didn't really need any of that stuff and that the Democrats' investment in that turned out to be almost a waste of money. They didn't really get much result for that. But this guy has proved that you can go from almost nobody knowing who you are. None of the pulse is rating you to actually coming first on the press selection.

34:29And then finally, of course, what you've pointed out, which is that he is violently proputed in, against the American missile bases in Romania, which wraps the central for NATO security, is running on a very strong Christian ticket. He's got this line that he's been sent by God to try to revenge since. So even if he doesn't win and the likelihood at the moment, but who the hell is supposed to trust the opinion polls given how long they're getting everything. But any of the opinion polls suggest he may not win. Still, this phenomenon that somebody coming out of nowhere, almost certainly aided by Russian and Chinese interference coming in on TikTok.

35:07Because this is a big other issue. If you think about it from Russia's point of view, a lot of the things that are happening really suit them. they love the idea that obviously a pro -Putin populist can come out of nowhere, pumped up on social media. They also are really enjoying, I think, stoking up, sadly, the Israel -Palestine crisis on both sides. It really suits Russia's agenda to have social media algorithms endlessly, creating tension between those two sides because that will both build up anti -Islamist populist parties in Europe who will feed off this and God forbid what would happen if there were another is some as terrorist attack in Europe just before elections in France or Germany.

35:52Maybe that's a good bridge into the UK because one of the things that's getting a lot of attention on British social media at the moment is this petition, I don't know what is that now, but it's a petition basically saying there should be another general election. And it's heading towards three million people. Yeah, just to remind you, I mean, And it's as an MP, we used to see these petitions. And in the old days, we debated in Parliament when they crossed 100 ,000 people and getting to 100 ,000 was a lot of effort. And it was a sign that something really mattered. I would say this one hasn't required much effort at all because when you delve into it, there seems to be an awful lot of people from different parts of the world who are suddenly taking a massive interest in the need for a general election of the United Kingdom, added to which the Rechin Musk has been pushing this as well.

36:36And I do think it's wonderful. I must say this Nigel Farage who used to get very very aerated at the idea that we should have a people's vote, a referendum on the final Brexit deal, suddenly thinks that we should have a second vote of a general election which should live in a massive majority rather bigger than 52, 48. This I think is doing two things. When it's showing the ability of the whole kind of social media architecture to drive what I would argue is total non -use. So Keir Starmer goes on the television yesterday and does an interview where he's asked, you know, well, you've got two million people saying there should be a general election.

37:11The answer is, well, no, you don't. And likewise, somebody else say Nigel Farage is more popular than you. Well, you know, up to a point, Lord Copper. I think it's just weird. These petitions now, frankly, I think parliament is going to have to re -look at this because these petitions are pointless. They don't actually accurately reflect, I don't think, any strand of opinion. So it means you can't rework out what's a proper petition or what's not. It's very worrying because of course these petitions were parts of trying to bring parliament into the modern world. They were part of thinking about how digital democracy could work and what we're discovering with a loss of moves on digital democracy is how easily they can be undermined by the way that social media works.

37:52Musk has driven this and he's proving to be increasingly powerful. But if you step outside the UK and you look at German and Austrian social media, he is retweeting and promoting posts by far right activists in Germany and Austria too, and he seems to have a real being his bonnet for anybody that he perceives as being part of the moderate centre, hence the fact he keeps trolling Kierstamer. It was very odd because he didn't always. When he was busy going around governments who bring up massive subsidies to make himself the richest man in the world, he appeared to be quite reasonable. In fact, if I was talking to the Norwegian Prime Minister about it this morning because Tesla is a massive in Norway, they really, really have driven on the electric car market.

38:35And he was saying that he met Musk a few times and he met him in Norway a few years ago and he said he was quite modest and quite reticent and almost shy. And yet he's now become this radicalised weaponizer of this extraordinary social media thing. But there's a method in his madness. There's no doubt. He keeps promoting, he actually learned the so -called Tommy Robinson. He keeps promoting his video. The one that's landed him in jail. So in Britain's now a police state. I do think the Musk Trump thing will end in tears, but in the mean time, he's doing an awful lot of damage to the sort of the public square in so many countries.

39:15Talking of social media arguments, we talked on leading this week to Kim Leadbyter, the Labour MP who's brought for this is the dime bill. That's out this week. I think it's a very interesting issue. She's a very interesting woman and the vote of course is on Friday. Can we talk about the British economy? I want to throw an idea at you. Okay. So, Labour's come in. We've talked for a while about how there's this very long gap of four months between the election and the budget. The budget has happened. The budget they say has been about fixing this black hole in the economy. National insurance has gone up and That was sort of caused a lot of quite a lot of grief.

39:51There was quite a lot of negativity at the CBI yesterday. You've had the protests of the farmers, et cetera. What's been lost in that, I think, has been, because if you remember, Rachel Ruiz called it a budget for growth, but the growth message and the plan for growth has not landed. So here's my thought. We're now in November, December next month, then you got Christmas, then you got the new year. My thought is that Kierstarma and Rachel Ruiz come out and the new year, So the first months of government were about fixing the mess, we laid the foundations of that. Here is the plan for growth. And here are all the issues that we need to address and here's where we're doing it.

40:31And there was a very, very interesting article on, funnily enough, on Sam Friedman's substack by John Kingman. John Kingman is somebody I used to work with very closely because he was a Treasury spokesperson during Gordon Brown's chancellorship. but then he went on to be a pretty senior at the Treasury and he was actually the growth policy guy. And he's written this very, very, very, quite long but really an interesting piece where he's gone through all the different areas that you could address in a plan for growth, some of which we talk about, transport links, obviously, planning an infrastructure where the government is saying the right things, but now you've actually got to show how you're doing it.

41:07Fixing the mess of Brexit, city devolution, more powers to the cities, redeveloping that whole Oxford Cambridge corridor. You know, he's just, he's throwing out all sorts of different ideas, which when you read them, it's actually quite dramatic. He throws another one. Are we finally, at the moment, there's yet another kind of review process around a ethro? That's a strategic decision for a government to take, knowing that there's going to be opposition. And I'm not saying it's a right thing or wrong thing. I'm saying that it should be part of a growth plan. Yeah. Now, I've been criticized a lot as you can imagine by colleagues, who feel that I've not been clear enough and haven't played my role of devil's advocate being a bit critical of labor.

41:46And that's partly because I've been trying to encourage you on this painful journey of finding things that you can occasionally point out that a label's not doing well. So let me just give a brief explanation of the sort of bleak facts about where labor is. Kierstarmer is on a popularity rating at the moment of minus 38. to put that in contrast, Tony Blair at about this stage, his government had a approval rating 76 in favor 13 against, so sort of net popularity about plus 63 against minus 38. So Kirsten is almost as unpopular as Liz Truss was by this stage and that's quite an achievement. The economy is not doing well.

42:29The pound is slightly down, business confidence is down, on retail's down manufacturing activity is now at a nine months low, the purchasing manager's index, which is a good indicator of growth, has now gone into negative territory. Private sector activity in general is 13 months low. Budget. In retrospect, the budget, although big, and we pointed this out, £70 billion extra spending, £40 billion extra tax, had investment spending, but that investment spending is mostly going towards thingsite schools and hospitals, which is very understandable, and my goodness they need investment, but is not the obvious thing if you're trying to get your economy off the ground.

43:10And a lot will go and pay as well. A lot on pay as well, yeah. But what isn't there? There's been no tax reform. There's nothing obviously there for growth. And it's very difficult to understand where she goes in a couple of years, because although she's put spending up by 3 .4%, if Rachel Reese does not get growth, there's not going to be revenue coming into her coffers and she's going to have a very, very uncomfortable spending conversation. In other words, she's going to have to basically cut spending in two years' time. And she ruled out tax increases yet again, no more tax crisis parliament.

43:45That doesn't seem realistic, I'm afraid. She's going to have to probably break her word again. Or Rory, just on tax, maybe she goes actually at some point in this parliament, goes in the opposite direction, makes tax changes in the opposite direction, not necessarily on on income, but on some of the kind of business taxes and the entrepreneurial stuff. I mean, is it too late, six months into your first parliament to come out and say, right, here's the plan for growth? Is it too late to do that if you've had the budget? No, it's not too late. And I guess the optimistic view is that Keir Starmer, a bit like Churchill's joke about America, is often considered to eventually do the right thing, but at the very last moment.

44:26But doing the right thing is all the things that you've mentioned, which are largely investment, but it's also reformed to trade policy, competition, education, regulation, and the tax system, right, there should have been reform in this budget to capital gains tax. Fuel should have gone up. What they did on stamp duty rises was completely mad, and what they on E &I, which is basically raising the tax on employing people, is again very bad policy. It's driven a wedge between self -employed and employed people are very unhelpful ways. So, absolutely, they can still do it, but that was a budget, which when you look at it, increasingly looks like a sticking -plast -a -budget that avoided making the big reform choices.

45:12And that's the question. Why? Why were the huge majority? Did they not take the opportunity to be bold. Here's where I'm going to be constructively critical, Rory. I think we did both of us because the numbers were so big. We thought, um, she's bold and therefore it's interesting and it's going to move the dial. And as they know from the response of business, there's lots of people who are still kind of, as you know, from the events that we've done together with business, there's still a lot of goodwill. They really want this government to succeed. But you know, you've got to be very, very careful about running down the reserves in your kind of reputational bank.

45:47At the moment, their messaging is essentially, we're doing really tough things because we've got no choice. And they've got to move from that to we're making really big positive choices because we've got a really clear and compelling plan for growth. And I think you come out in the new year and you say, right, transport, you know, there were some of the most important transport links were cut, right, going to invest in that infrastructure. That means absolutely cutting through lots of the kind of regulatory stuff. They're going to have to fix the damage of Brexit. I'm sorry we will keep banging on a bit of this but it won't be enough to tinker on that one.

46:22Likewise I think on migration you know that figure you keep quoting which is absolutely haunting when the pension age started, when the pension started 20 working people of every pensioner is now under three. That's just impossible to fix that without an honest debate about migration. One of John Kingman's ideas by the way and this would be politically very difficult, but if we are going to move away from fuel consumption in terms of driving, is it time to think about road pricing is something he brought in, which I know there'd be absolute sort of, you know, people would go bonkers about that, but is that the sort of big bold thing you need to do?

47:00John Kingman had a huge piece about affordable housing and the finances of affordable housing in relation to the housing associations and the assets that they've got. The other thing, Jonathan Reynolds is developing this industrial strategy. That's, I think, is where you can put in the stuff that you're talking about. But I think, coming on and say, we've got a big majority, therefore we're going to do big things because we're going to make big change in this country. At the moment, it just feels too much like we're fixing a mess. Now, we know they're fixing a mess, but the big bold plans for the future of opening to here.

47:31And I think there's a really interesting question of how you do this, because, of course, Because there's hals of pain if you reform anything. There's always losers. We've seen the trouble they've got into just with farming. So I wonder whether does it make sense to put all the things together, inflict all the pain at once quite early? So let's say you're doing planning reform, tax reform, all the other competitiveness reforms, regulation reform, and all those infrastructure investments you're talking about. Or is that dangerous? I mean, could you just smack in, rip off the bandaid, accept weeks of the media dredging up every single person who's negatively affected, but lean into that?

48:17Because I guess, presumably, that's what the THATCHE government would have felt like in 8485 when they were really pushing ahead with stuff that they must have had an incredible incoming barrage of abuse, from which, to some extent, their reputations haven't recovered even 30 years later, but they did go on to win the next election and they did achieve future reforms in the economy. And also, Fattas' reputation as a kind of, you know, a leader of consequence who made real change, whether you like the change or you didn't, is secure in history. So I think if you're in power and you've got a big majority, you've got to do big things, and I sort of feel very, very strongly the need for something really big coming out of the new year that essentially is learning a few lessons from the first few months but ultimately saying we've got a big majority and we're going to do big things with it and we're going to take a lot of heat along the way.

49:08Final point on it is you know when we're in opposition I used to talk the whole time about you know the potential for Britain to be a cultural superpower. John Kingman again sorry to keep quoting but I thought it was an excellent piece. He says the case for the arts needs to travel the same policy journey as the case for spending on science. Over 25 years or so, the science budget went from being a minus spending program of obscure interest to boffins to being seen by all political parties an important economic engine. We have to see the arts in the same way. I think the world's open for that.

49:41So, let's see, should we finally close off a little bit on Norvega on Norway? So, very quickly before we go to little summary on Norway, why we're focusing on it. In some ways, one of the great pinups the world and something that the Labour government might well subconsciously be trying to make Britain a little bit more like because it's leading the world and human development indicators does fantastically well in pizza on education, 89 ,000 a year GDP per capita, greater quality indicators on the genie coefficient, sovereign wealth fund of over a trillion dollars. But curancy, even Norway is facing some problems that will be familiar to American appraisalistness, housing affordability, immigration at 20 % and quite a high tax burden, some grumbles about the decentralized health service and still quite dependent on oil and gas.

50:31Anyway, over to you for what you looked. I also think Norway is very important to Britain. We now get a third of our energy from Norway. That is a hell of a lot. One third. So this is a country population -wise roughly the size of Scotland. And we're getting a third of our energy from Norway. We have very, very important defense links with Norway. It was interesting. Johannes Gaskar's story is you know left of center politicians and as you say you look at all the data from Norway and you think wow that's pretty impressive that's pretty good and the sovereign well fund by the way which is the biggest in the world it now funds a quarter of all state services one of the arguments in the politics is here is that we should be able to take even more from the sovereign well fund but they have a physical rule that says you can only take 3 % each year but So they've also got political issues.

51:19So the incumbent party, the Labour Party and coalition with the centre, and last week there was a poll for the first time, this hard, well, it's a sort of far right party in the, it's to the right of the Conservative Party, called Progress, for the first time, their top of the polls, 25 .3. They've got more support than Labour and the centre party, which is the smaller coalition party. They're on 22 .9, and the Conservative Party's on 21. So you put 21 and 25 together, that's the right. So it's going to be difficult. Now he's a very impressive guy and he certainly thinks he can call it round. And the other thing, this relates to America.

51:59This stuff about young men, what's happening to young men in policies is really, really quite interesting. And they had a commission several years ago now where they were looking at men in relation to physical health, mental health, falling behind in schools. suicide rates, all this sort of thing. And this sense that men are falling behind women or that it's all been about women's rights and we need to have more about men. So there was one survey for example, said that 47 % of Norwegian men aged 18 to 29 said they would have voted for Trump. Right. The overall figure in Norway is sort of 80 % plus Paris.

52:39Almost half of young men. Now what's that? What is that that they're tapping into? How How is that being weaponized in that way? Of course, it's very worrying, isn't it? Because the story when it was the elderly that supported right -wing groups was that ultimately demography was against them. When it's the young supporting right -wing groups, you begin to worry that the right -wing groups have a long -term future if those people remain right -wing through their lives. Also, there's a guy here called Simmelvella, who's 23. He's not in Parliament, he's going to go for Parliament. But this is guys being very open about taking drugs.

53:15He's been convicted for a session of soft drugs. But he's become like a big figure. There's another one in the Conservative party called Ola Svenibis, 27. And they're tapping into this idea that if you want to be cool and you want to be here, it's on the right, rather than left that you do that. And the thing that was interesting talking to Jonas this morning, he's a very, very, very intelligent guy and he really thinks quite deeply about stuff. And he was saying that, take Canada for example, we taught last week and he heard our discussion about Justin Trudeau that we both think I think is in real trouble.

53:50But Trudeau had told him that a couple of years ago when you polled Canadians on the issues of most concern to them, climate was number one. Okay, it's now vanished. The cost of living has driven out everything. So every incumbent government is having to address this cost of living stuff. And here in Norway, he says the real political problems of stardust because there's been a series of interest rate rises. He thinks in the new year that will start to reverse. And even though you're not responsible for them, he says he's getting the blame for all of it. Okay, well finally just tell us a little bit about what's happening with the monarchy and these espionage cases.

54:26Oh my god, Rory. You want to talk about a monarchy that's in trouble? You have all people Rory. I'm actually very much in favor of the British monarchy. It's not that I'm universally in favor of all monocates. Right, okay, but you're probably quite keen on the Norwegian monarchy. Let's do the spy one first. They've arrested a security guard working in the American Embassy here on suspicion of spying for the Russians and the Iranians. So that's all happening. And the royal story is the son of the Crown Princess who's currently in custody on rape charges, which is pretty heavy, pretty serious, and domestic violence, and violating restraining order.

55:08So, certainly our rules have had difficult these days and Andrew in particular, and that all sorts of stuff going on. But this is a young, he's 27, had issues with drugs, but he's currently in the nick. Well, maybe a more positive note to end on Rory, the Christmas tree. I think I might make it my tree of the day today. There were some grumbles about St Norway traditionally, honors its longstanding relationship with Britain and actually our co -operation during the war. Famously, by sending this enormous tree that goes to Trafalgar Square every year. And people like my mother who remember it first arriving after the war, it's like an incredibly exciting thing.

55:48But I believe there was some disappointment last year about the state of the tree. So I've checked into this and I'm about looking at a picture of it now. I think I might make it my tree of the day. essentially this thing has to be chopped down and then it has to be transported across the sea. So by the time it goes up in Trafalgar Square, it can look a bit sort of you know like luggage that you've just sort of pulled out your suitcase and of course what happens is that are rich in newspapers what they did last year was they thought it took pictures of it and they had it looking at its most ragged.

56:19So they've gone to great lengths this year to get a tree that they hope will transport well, hope will look good and will thereby strengthen Anglo -Norwegian relations even further. It's also our view, just this is me as a bit of a conifer geek. Our views on which trees make good Christmas trees have also changed over the last 78 years. So this is an Norwegian spruce which is a magnificent tree in Norway and indeed have planted in Scotland, but it is no longer the tree of choice for domestic Christmas trees because it doesn't quite have the type form that we're using. We're increasingly using different forms of things.

56:55Caucasian furs. Other forms of spruce. Yeah. Well, when the tree comes out of its wrapping and it goes up, I am looking at it now in its full glory and it's a very, very impressive tree. So just give it a few days to kind of get back to the shape and daily mail, lay off. There are big issues at stake here. Let's just say, for example, the Norwegians get fed up with our press, criticizing their Christmas tree, and as a result, decide that this massive, massive frigate deal in the offing at the moment, that we're one of four countries that might be up for it, biggest defense deal, right? So let's not ruin it, Daily Mail.

57:36Let's think about the jobs and prosperity of the future. Be kind to the tree. Super. Well, thank you, Anderson, looking forward very much to getting into climate in tomorrow's episode. See you soon. See you. Bye -bye. Bye.