344. Question Time: Should MPs vote with their conscience or constituents?

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1:04Welcome to TheRestlessPolitics .com .com. Question time with Mi Rory Stewart and me, Alistair Campbell. Rhyrory, here's one, Richard Mendelssohn, with regard to free votes in parliament, such as the assisted Dine Bill. Do you think an MP who's conscious tells them to vote against the bill should do so, even if 70 % of the public are presuming their constituency support the bill? That is, should they go with their conscience or should they canvas views and represent their constituency? I'm sorry to relentlessly plug leading, but we should point out that Kim Leadbita, who's the MP taking this private member's bill on assisted Dine through parliament, is this week's interview.

1:41So, did you ever have an issue like that Rory, where you felt that what you believed was fundamentally odds with your constituents and yet you followed your own path? Yes, I mean, let's take Brexit, for example. The majority of my constituents in Cambria voted for Brexit. I supported Remain. After the vote, the majority of them either wanted a second referendum or they wanted a hard Brexit and I pushed for a customs union soft Brexit. But another big example of this is when we abolished capital punishment in the UK. It was the MP's that did it, 70 % of the British public was against abolishing capital punishment.

2:17So, the point is that members of parliament are representatives, they're not delegates. And if you wanted a system that simply reflected the opinion of the public, there's a very straightforward way of doing this. You just hold a referendum on assisted Dine. But if you're going to do it through parliament, yes, you've absolutely got to believe, difficult though it is to believe that members of parliament have more time on their hands to scrutinise legislation and allow their brains, their consciences to operate. And if you don't like what they've done, you can always boot them out at the next election.

2:45Yeah, with this sort of passage of a few days since we talked to Kim Leadbeater, what are your reflections both on the issues and also what you think is going to happen in parliament? I think she's absolutely right to point to the horrible suffering that some people go through towards the end of life. And she's right to question what that life is like and she's right to assert that people should have some autonomy or choice over their destiny. On the other hand, she's putting a lot of faith in bureaucratic systems to be able to weigh up people's decisions. And I remain very anxious about the fact that if this were an option, you would feel under subconscious moral pressure to free up your family's budget, relieve them of pressure of time.

3:29I mean, every old person I know, I mean, I don't want to overdo this, is always saying, I don't want to be a bother, I don't want to be a bother, please don't, you know, go out of your way to do this for me. And I'm afraid you really need to improve massively adult social care, palliative care and not make it a financial burden on people before you introduce this sort of legislation. Because otherwise, if social care is cripplingly expensive, you're stacking things in a way that I'm afraid might make someone feel particularly when they're feeling weak and fragile and a bit depressed that they don't want to be a burden.

4:01I think that's heartbreaking. And I think it's also challenges something very fundamental in the way we traditionally do medicine and the hypocriticals. And I think there is a difference between the way we do things at the moment, which is that if somebody wants, we can withdraw interventions which prolong their life is a little bit different from asking a professional. To end their life here, I was pretty persuaded because of the safe guards that she said how I can't read the debate at all in terms of where I think Parliamentary opinion is because there are so many new MPs whose views I just don't know.

4:35So I don't know where it's going to go, but it's, I think she's right by the way that I think it's a good thing that we're having a debate that relates to the subject of death because I think as a country, we are terrible about talking about deaths compared to some others. Rory, here's a good one. Josh Harrison, global versus domestic priorities. How do you think the UK government should handle global versus local political priorities in the modern climber? Oh, well, let me, let me flip that back to you. So I guess it's probably always been true that the voting public focus more on doorstep issues and they do on international issues.

5:09Nevertheless, countries like the US and the UK have often had quite bold, expensive foreign policies invested quite a lot in their diplomats in long -term defense, prime ministers and presidents do a lot of international stuff. So what happens if you are in number 10 and you're looking at the polls and you're interested in winning the next election? How do you manage that question of the fact that voters will tend to be focused much more on domestic issues and how do you create the space for thinking hard about strategy globally? You have to do both and you have to make the link them. You have to make the link between them.

5:46So as you know, I'm in Norway today. Here's a question for you, Rory. Yep. When was the last time a British Prime Minister visited Norway, a serving British Prime Minister visited Norway? I have an absolutely no idea. Tell me. Would you think it would be reasonably recently? Well, I've just discovered that no American president has visited Sub -Saharan Africa since Obama and I've just discovered that basically until three of May, British Prime Ministers had barely visited Africa and I guess have barely visited since. So if nobody's going to the over 40 countries in Africa, my suspicion has it's been a long time since they've been to Norway?

6:22Well, it was Margaret Thatcher in 1986. I'm with that shocking. That's shocking because that's a very quick flight and as you say, 30 % of our energy is coming from Norway. I know Tony came here several times after he stopped being Prime Minister when he was doing the Middle East Peace Envoy job because Norway, as we said yesterday, has always been a part of that. Anyway, Kyrstheim, it seems, is coming here. Now, and I think there are very good reasons to do that. One is the energy issue that you just talked about. The second is, I think that there are really important strategic and defence issues.

6:57In a sense, you have to constantly be explained to people why this is such an important part of your job. As you get near an election, you probably have to kind of dial it down a bit. But I think in the modern age, if you think of where Britain is strategically at the moment, particularly with Trump back in power, we're going to face some really difficult challenges of state crafts relating to relations with America, relations with Europe, to the growth mission that we have, how do we repair the damage of Brexit, all that stuff. So I think it's foolish for us to think that because of Prime Minister goes abroad a lot, somehow that means they're not focusing on the UK.

7:35Where you've got to really, really, really watch it is when international crisis comes along on top of that. And people actually start to think, that's what you're in the job for. You're actually more interested in the kind of abroad than home. That's where it gets tricky. And it's part of the job of modern government, much, much, much more so than I'd say, even back in the days pre -social media, pre -d international institutions. I think today more than ever, we talked about these international institutions' weekend. I think today more than ever foreign policy is a very, very big part of the job.

8:05And if, and if, if in my, I mean, in my most gloomy moments, it feels to me like we have some of the elements that run up to the First World War that many of the warning lights are now flashing very, very badly and are flashing much harder than they were eight years ago when Trump first came in. So that really does require people to care about global security and understand difficult things like how Ukraine or Baltic might ultimately be important for British security. Well, here's another really interesting observation from Angela Merkel's book. She says, I don't know whether Putin would have invaded Ukraine regardless of the pandemic, but it certainly didn't help that the pandemic prevented leaders from meeting face -to -face.

8:52I thought I was an interesting observation. Yeah, absolutely. Those meetings, you know, they really do matter. You're being able to develop relationships, being able to speak face -to -face rather than like us now through a screen or on the telephone where you're not sure about who's listening and and all that stuff is, it's really important in diplomacy. We also underestimate the importance of time. One of the problems that democratic leaders have is they flip over so quickly, whereas the autocratic leaders are there almost indefinitely. So one of the reasons actually our king is quite helpful is that he's the only person that has these very deep long -standing relationships.

9:32For example, with the monarchies in Saudi Arabia or UAE or Qatar, which go back 40, 50 years. I mean, he's known some of these people when they were kids and they knew him when he was kids. But it's also true that one of the problems in Europe is that the longest serving member of the European Union leader is Viktor Orban, and that's what frees him up to go prancing around Georgia, championing populist, pro -Putin governments. As we go into next year, we'll be in a world in which Macron's gone, shorts is gone. The leaders of the major economies in Europe will be very, very new in their jobs and simply won't have those depths of relationship.

10:06And Xi Jinping's been in 12 years now. And he's in for life. Vladimir Putin was coming in when you were in office, right? He was coming in right at the start. So he'd been around all of this century and a bit more. He had his little interregnum where he pretended to be the prime minister rather than the president. Merkel's book, by the way, when you get around to re -enrolly, that's another, sorry, to ping it again, but that's what he said there is really interesting because she talks about a lot of the conversations she had with Putin. One of the early ones, he said to her that one of the differences that he likes between America and Russia is that in America, you're limited to two terms, whereas in Russia, you're just limited to consecutive terms.

10:49This was long before he sort of floated this idea that I'll be prime minister for a few years. By the way, this event I'm doing in Oslo tonight, also on the panel is Navalny's daughter. Oh, yes. Mike, I met him. I said, oh, God is she impressive. 23. So impressive. That is some family. Okay, and let's start quick break them back with more questions.

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14:05Given that we're talking about green energy, I think that's a good segue into COP, which has just come to an end. Ed, what are your views on the deal? Agreed it COP in the various protests, such as the walk out by the alliance of small island states. I mean, you'd be hard pressed to say it was a great triumph, wouldn't you? You definitely would. I mean, climate paradoxically is getting less and less coverage. And you talked about this a little bit in yesterday's podcast where you mentioned that Justin Trudeau had found that climate has gone from being the number one issue in Canadian politics to hardly rating a tool.

14:37And when we talk about Donald Trump, you know, it's very tempting to talk about the rise of populism and Ukraine and the Middle East. And often we neglect to mention climate. And of course, the climate catastrophe continues massively at pace. So let's step back for a moment and just before we get on to what happened in this COP, which was in Baku and Azerbaijan. The fundamental framework of the way in which we're dealing with this looks increasingly creaky. This goes all the way back to the Paris Agreement. And if you remember what happened at Paris is that countries got together, discovered that we were well off track to stop a two degree rise in mean temperature and decided to deal with this by setting an even more ambitious target of keeping warming down to 1 .5 degrees centigrade.

15:21This was a pretty bizarre decision given that we were already off track. And of course, the truth is that this year, 2024, we've already hit the one and a half degree warming and we're well off target to meet the two degrees. In fact, since Paris, every single year carbon in the atmosphere have gone up by two parts per million. In other words, the only one big fact that you need to remember is that it's carbon equivalence in the atmosphere of which are going to drive the warming. And we just keep adding carbon equivalence to the atmosphere every year at a totally steady rate. There's been no slowdown in its increase despite all the progress that's been made on green energy because we just consume more and more energy.

15:58So even if we're making more and more renewable energy, the amount of energy from fossil fuels continues to go up. And there again, I think the other fact just for a Tumbachion COP is that Britain and Europe are smaller and smaller part of this. So our emissions are less than 5 % of global emissions. And as Europe largely transitions at a coal, countries cite China but also India, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam, continue to burn coal and admit at an enormous rate China probably emitting nearly five times the rate of Europe. Okay, I'll be right back. Two things to say, the first is the point about falling down the agenda.

16:34I mean, the start of COP seemed to me to get a lot of attention globally and the end of COP got quite a lot of attention. I would say that previous COP's that has been sustained global interest whilst the negotiations have been taking place. And it seems to me that was another indication of how this has fallen down the agenda. One of the reasons I think it's fallen down the agenda, we talk a lot about right wing populism, is because the right wing populists have been downplaying it, pushing it down the agenda. And of course, when you have Donald Trump coming in and still sort of hangs to the view that climate change is a hoax and a scam, then that necessarily inevitably leads to perhaps further downgrading of an issue.

17:16And the second issue is the scale of the deal that was done that was reached at the end. So they basically agreed to 300 billion to help developing countries. And that was way, way, way, way, way, short of what those countries had wanted. There's a larger target of $1 .3 trillion a year, but most of that's got to come from private sources. So there, you're basically talking about something that you cannot remotely guarantee. So a lot of the smaller nations and some of the countries that were, you know, frankly see climate change as an existential threat, they talked about this agreement being something of an illusion, even the bit that the parties had agreed to, doesn't necessarily deliver remotely on the objectives that were set for the, for the, for the cough.

18:02We have interviewed three people on leading who I think are really worth listening to if people want to get different perspectives on this. Christina Figueras, who was the Costa Rican, who helped put together this whole cop process, which we're currently criticizing. Kate Rayworth, who points out that growth itself, which is completely central to every political debate in every country and keeps our health services going, is directly correlated with carbon emissions and screwing up our environment and actually believes that to get stay within our planetary boundaries, we need to challenge the religion of growth.

18:33And certainly detail, whom points out pretty brutally that increasingly we are making no difference that everything is going in the wrong direction. The world is frying and that the policy interventions we've done are just not having the impact that people fantasized about. So let's get back to Figueras basic setup and what you've just described fundamentally what's happening is that I think more than 10 ,000 people are gathering at these cops and there's a huge attempt to get every country in the world together. And a lot of the focus is on climate justice and moving money to less developed countries.

19:08I would argue that if your basic aim is to stop global warming, this is completely the wrong way to set about it. You would be much better just focusing on the G20. The G20 omits 75 or 80 % of full global emissions. If we were actually serious about this and set the whole thing being a ridiculous talking shot, the G20 would have put in another couple of days in its meeting and really focused on trying to crack this. I'm afraid that we are slightly fiddling while Rome's burned and actually a loss of the stuff that we're talking about moving to less developed nations would be better done through international development budgets while the G20 focused on cracking its emissions.

19:44Interesting. As you said that though, I was thinking of the countries most affected, you essentially say, right, we cut you out of the process. We'll let the big guys take over. What are the big guys do it? I think the politics is very tricky, but I think what you would say is we will provide very generous support to the poorest countries, but they're not the ones that are emitting and we provide that support through traditional development mechanisms. What we're trying to do is we're sort of buying off the countries that are affected, but we're not cutting the emissions. And even worse, this is one of the few ways that Trump's correct.

20:17We're not getting China and Saudi Arabia to pay. Well, Saudi Arabia were absolutely critical in watering down the communicator at the end as well in relation to fossil fuels for fairly obvious reason. So yeah, I need to think about that. I think it's an interesting thought, but I just think that will make it worse. And also, you've got to remember, this is the United Nations process. So for the United Nations suddenly to say, this is going to be driven by the big guys, little guys, you just wait, we'll work it out for you. It depends how much for crisis you think it is. And the world is frying and we're on the edge of massive global tipping points, where all these things that we've talked about, ice sheets, current changes, wind currents are all inbound unless we crack this.

21:06At that point, if it's a real crisis, let's focus on the people that are emitting 80 % of the global emissions, which is the G20. This relates to the discussion we had on the made podcast about whether the international bodies that we've got are up to the task of meeting the challenges that we face. And I mentioned Angela Merkel saying that when Trump came in and they knew he was going to take a very different approach, that they tried to adapt to that. But in her book, she's very, very, very, very disparited. She actually ends the chapter on climate by saying, you know, as to whether the world is ready to make the decisions that it needs to make for our survival, not so sure.

21:44So poor. Yeah, very, very disappointing, very disappointing. And then solutions. I mean, this is a detail, I'm laces out more detail in our interview with them. But what he proposes in that leading interview is that we should be taxing carbon consumption, not carbon production. What he basically points out is that with carbon, as with a lot of environmental things, we push them out of Europe and pat ourselves on the back. And then we continue to import the products back in from other countries who are doing damage to our environment. So an example in Cumbria, you know, we talk about rewilding, we remove sheep from the landscape because we don't want to damage our precious nature.

22:19But we don't reduce our consumption of lamb. We just push the problem to New Zealand so the sheep can destroy nature in New Zealand, right? Copper production. We don't want to do any copper production. One of the reasons China controls critical minerals and rare earths has this huge geostrategic advantage is that in the US and in Europe, we don't want to bear the environmental cost of mining or processing any of these minerals because there are huge slag heaps, there's water pollution, there's air pollution. So we get China to do all that and then we just import their products back into ourselves and pat us on back.

22:50But the most dramatic one of all is we've de -industrialized. We're no longer burning coal. We're no longer manufacturing anything. But the carbon is still being emissed to make the products that we're using. So detail on would say that the needs to be carbon import tax. If soybeans are coming into the UK from Brazilian rain forests, if steels come into the UK at the import level, you pay the carbon tax or you prove that the carbon tax has been paid in Kenya or Africa or wherever the China or wherever the stuff comes from. And government's a desperate for tax revenue. We know that and this is a much more useful former tax revenue than putting up employers national insurance.

23:25Well, fourth leading interview we should mention in relation to this because it was a big part of that interview too was Bill Gates. Who if you remember was much much much more optimistic about the climate struggle than you or I were. I wonder whether he still feels that now. But yeah. Let's go on to a sort of slightly more domestic issue. But it's important even if we don't talk about it much. So Robert, Can Rory Analyst explain for listeners how hereditary peers are elected to seven house lords and what are Rory Analyst's alternatives to the current lords system. So hereditary peers were elected under Tony Blair.

24:00He reduced the number of hereditary peers down to 90 and then they had little elections within hereditary peers for who they can. That's all a bit irrelevant. Hereditary peers obviously for internationalists as mean people who've not been appointed as life peers but have inherited it from their dads mostly in a very few cases from their mums. And that systems now ending here's time. It doesn't want any more hereditary's in. I got in real trouble from the Lord Speaker who I think is an ex -labor politician. John McFaul. John McFaul, he took me aside. He took me aside and said, I very upset about what she said about the house lords.