359. Starmer vs. Musk: Why the richest man in the world turned against the Prime Minister

28:20So I think he has decided understandably politically that the thing that really matters is to achieve something visible and waiting list, but that will make it impossible to achieve the bigger thing which is moving resources from hospitals closer to the front line and he talks about that still and he was talking about that still on the speech, but the resources can't flow so long as he holds onto his waiting list. Okay, let's take a break and we'll come back, we'll talk about Austria and Canada.

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30:03Welcome back to The Restisted Polyties with me, Anna St. Campbell. And with me, Rory Stewart. No, Rory, I must tell you something. Ben Wallace. As you know, my partner, Fiona Miller. Yes. I don't know if you've seen this woman on Instagram called Divina Comedy, who does these impersonations of you and me. They're quite funny. She's got your voice, but she hasn't quite mentioned referring to sort of I was talking to Fiona. And it's usually I was watching the telly with Fiona and a Tory cable are we through things at the telly and we all hate Tories, a plumber, but Fiona came from her walking the dog yesterday and said, God, Ben Wallace was really good.

30:43So there you are. That's praise indeed. Yeah, I'd encourage people to listen to it on leading. I mean, we've had a series, I think, of terrific recent infuse. I hope people have managed to catch up with our amazing interview. I thought with the George in president right at the moment, where demonstrations were breaking out in the streets, where she had three days left in office, where a Putin backed party was about to take it. And we managed to get an interview with her. But I also thought Ben Wallace was brilliant because he was a sort of reminder that you don't have to always be a kind of politician at a central casting.

31:16This is a certain kind of good humour, straightforwardness about him, which I think is quite refreshing. Also, we should say that this was the first interview we've done that I know a lot of people listened to our interviews, but this one you can also, the one we did with Ben Wallace, you can watch with our sort of multi -camera Spotify studio setup on Spotify and YouTube. Let's talk about Austria. Yeah, so the big story here as to which I want to put you on is this. So the far right in Austria, under their leader, Kiko, who as I pointed out, was leading a campaign with direct references to the Reich.

31:55He had posters up saying, they will be done and in German, the Reich will come. Got 28 .8 % of the vote in election, more than anyone else. But the hope was from many Europeans, yes, yes, yes, he's got that, but he's never going to be able to actually be chancellable. And it was the same, remember, with the far right in Germany, when the AFD performed well in Turingia and Saxony and the same when Het Wilders, who's another one of these big anti -Muslim far right campaigners got most votes in the Netherlands. Everybody says, well, we've got these very complicated proportional representation systems.

32:32Thank goodness for them because we can always make a moderate coalition that excludes these people. Yeah. So why did that not work in Austria? What's going on? And because now it looks like he's going to be chancellable and that is big problem. So he, as you say, the FPR, the Freedom Party of Austria, came top. Then the traditional conservative party, which is the governing party with the Chancellor Nehammer, came second. Social Democrats had their... They dropped a third for the first time in their history, even though their vote shared and dropped, but they came third. And his liberal party, Nios, came fourth.

33:05So their thought was the social Democrats, the conservatives and this liberal party, former coalition, Nios dropped out first. They felt that they couldn't work. They didn't like... I think that they had criticisms of both sides. And then even if the conservatives and the social Democrats had managed to come to an agreement, they would have had a majority of one. So not very, very stable. And they fell out over competition, over tax. But I think if Kekl does become Chancellor. And as you say, it's now looking likely because the president of Austria, Alexander van der Belen, he's a green. And he is somebody who absolutely despises Kekl.

33:48So does the new interim leader of the conservative party, guy called Schtocker. He is on record as saying, I think he actually said in the parliament, nobody wants you in this parliament and nobody really wants you in this country. But they may end up having to work together. So this is going to be now, he has got to sit down and have talks with Kekl. And this is somebody who in the parliament, I'm going to do a bit of simultaneous translation here, or he said, it's not just that nobody wants you in this house, in this parliament, it's also that nobody in this republic needs you. And he also made some very, very heavy statements against him.

34:30And just as the president had to kind of eat humble pie and call him in and say, can you kindly go off and try and form a coalition. Now this guy is going to have to sit down and try to see whether they can work together. I think that's going to be very, very difficult for both of them. If Kekl becomes Chancellor. And it could, you know, they might end up with a builder's type situation where builders won the election, but wasn't allowed to be in the coalition. But Kekl isn't, I think, in too strong a position for that. So you're now going to have, you've got Austria, we've got Hungary. And of course, the big news in Hungary this week was the European Commission punishing Hungary for some of their kind of standing out against the principles of the European Union.

35:08And they were thrown a billion euros to support the Hungarians respecting. And of course, we've got this guy, Robert Fiso in Slovakia, who's, and people should check out this really weird story about him disappearing to Vietnam, having spent a bit of time with Vladimir Putin, so he's very odd going on there. Austria is going to be very, very interesting to watch now. And it could take quite a long time for this thing to be put together. It's not out of the question that they won't be able to work together. There's a lot of mutual hatred going on there. But the fact is the votes that were put up, this is the result that they've delivered.

35:43It may lead to a new election. And if at least a new election, Kekl is actually higher in the polls than he was at the election. This is where you're beginning to get people saying, oh, give him a chance, he's not too bad. So you can hear Austrian businessmen saying that, just as you can hear, American businessmen saying, give Trump a chance, he's not too bad. And I met some people in Scotland who said to me, Elon Musk is a great businessman and terrific that he's going to cut two trillion from the economy and stop beating up on him. And you know, we should take seriously the fact that many business people support Musk and Trump.

36:18And I said, but many business people supported Hitler, Henry Ford, famously was an anti -Semite who supported Hitler, to which this man said when I met him in Scotland, he said, well, Hitler did some pretty good stuff on the economy. So what's happening now is the normalization. And these are people who were in Britain increasingly very, very keen on forage and but now maybe tending further right still. But the really dangerous group, I think, amongst voters, are what I would call the kind of useful idiots who are the sort of people, rights of center who think these guys like Kiko can't be quite as bad as they say.

37:04And you'll see an Austria people say, well, you know, he's just like your kinder. So your kinder was the leader of this party, obviously in the 80s, 70s, 90s. And your kinder was kind of all over the place. He would go pro NATO. He made friends with Gaddafi. He made friends with Saddam Hussein. He'd flip around, change his views on Austria, joining the EU and change his views on Turkey, joining the EU. Kiko's not like that. Kiko, to come back to our conversation before the break, is absolute central casting far right. His views echo very, very strongly. This man called Martin Selmer, who's Austrian, identitarian far right theorist, who's a big, great replacement theory man.

37:45And right at the heart of Kiko's campaign, like the AFD's campaign, is this idea of remigration, pushing people. Including Austrian citizens. Yeah. But because Martin Selmer and these think tanks have done calculations where they've decided, for example, in Germany, it's completely bizarre. They've put numbers on it. I think they've decided that Germany should have 800 Afghans, but unfortunately it's got 800 ,000. Why 800? Because they've sort of got a weird mathematical formula where they've sort of decided that Germany, you know, with 10 - millions of people can have a total of 27 ,000 people from foreign backgrounds of who 800 can be Afghans, right.

38:22And the rest need to leave. Now, the problem here is that you can only do this if you challenge the constitutional courts, the whole framework of the Council of Europe, the European Court on Human Rights, the European Union itself, because all the system that we've set up since the Second World War has been about equal dignity of citizens. It's completely opposed to the idea of saying, there are superior people, there are inferior people, and the superior people in this case, white Christian Austrians should be able to just push out Muslim non -white Austrians. So if Kiko is serious about this, he is on his course for a massive collision with the central institutions of Europe, and it's worse than Orban.

39:04And I wonder whether the European institutions, as you say, they surely, we talked to Gehapth Hofstadt, the former Belgian Prime Minister about this, on leaving a few months ago, they must have learned from the way that they allowed Orban to use those institutions to cement himself, to cement his positions within Hungary, but also much more broadly. He's a far bigger figure than just being the Prime Minister of Hungary, and particularly on the right. So I wonder whether they will learn those lessons, we'll have learned those lessons, but this is a guy who, this is democracy, isn't it? This is what the numbers have shown.

39:42He did win the election. The reason I think why he's gone up in the polls since is because of this feeling, even if people who didn't support him, that the establishment came together to try and stop him, the president should have asked him to try to form a coalition first. And maybe tactically, that might have been the right thing to do. Let him have a go, let him show then that it couldn't be done, and then let the other parties take over. And I think history, if this guy does become chancellor, history is not going to be kind on these three parties that couldn't bring themselves to bring a deal together.

40:13I'm glad I suggest just on this, because I think this is part of the dangerous logic. If Kiko can't get things done, in other words, he tries to expel non -white Austrian citizens and is stopped by doing so by the constitutional courts or by the European Union. Is there not a really big danger then of a new form of fascism that says, I'm trying to implement the will of the people by expelling these non -whites from my country, and I'm being stopped by a liberal, global elite, including the European Union and human rights liars and judges, and therefore we need to brush those people aside. There may well be in which case you'd have to leave the European Union.

40:54But it's very interesting that Victor Orban, for all the derails against it, has never once suggested that, because his economy wouldn't survive without them. Or Kiko could simply totally ignore the European Union and challenge them to expel him, which would be much likely leaving the European Union without him having to do it formally. And that would put the European Union in a very difficult situation, because they'd be reluctant to expel Austria, wouldn't they? The other thing, of course, that is unbelievably bad timing about this, is if Kiko becomes Chancellor of Austria, at the moment at which Germany is going to the polls, this can give a new flush of confidence to the AFD, who are running a very similar set of policies and a very similar set of ideas.

41:40Backed by Mr. Musk. Backed by Mr. Musk, echoing Trump, and of course, what's happening all the time, and this is why it feels to me so much more dangerous than people acknowledge why we are beginning to see now elements of the 20s and 30s coming through, is that they all give space to each other. There's this horrible phrase, the overt and window of what's kind of acceptable to say or think. They're shifting it. Suddenly, as we said before, the great Robert Generic is saying things that no Conservative Cabinet Minister under Theresa May, or David Cameron, would ever consider saying, becomes acceptable.

42:15And as that shifts, then you get more and more slightly dopey people voters on the right beginning to think, well, is it such a bad thing? And maybe we can just expel these people peacefully. We don't need to actually round them up. And of course, people forget what's going on here, which is that the early ideologues for the war and the Balkans initially talked about peaceful separation between Bosnians and Serbs. Not very long ago, in Europe, during our working lives, that Eichmann was working for Hitler to peaceably resettle Jews out of Austria. The idea initially was not to kill them. The idea was just to push them out, I think, to Madagascar, and Shley.

42:58The fact that people are not processing that liberalism isn't just, and this is another thing I want to rant at you about. There's been a flurry of articles in Unheard from Trevor Phillips, for example, writing this article's the time saying liberalism's dead, the center's dead, the energy's now on the right. But liberalism isn't just Allister and Rory with sort of mushy ideas and being too optimistic about Kamala Harris. It is moral. It's the idea that humans are equal in dignity, and the lesson of the Second World War, which is that if you give up on the idea that humans are equal and you start saying there are better people, white Austrians, and less good people, Muslim Austrians, so many things follow from that, the collapse of your democracy and ultimately war.

43:47Yeah. Well, the other thing to put into that, which I think relates to a lot of what we've seen happening in America, is that I would argue that the rule of law is an essential part of the liberal order, but that was kind of universally accepted across right and left and center rule of law. But rule of law does not carry the weight that it did. The fact that we saw this week the peaceful acceptance of the presidential election result and that people arriving at Congress and taking their place and being sworn in and so forth and contrast that with what happened four years ago. That means that those people that pursued what I would argue was an offense against the rule of law and democratic institutions.

44:32They've won again. That undermines the liberal order that we're talking about. By the way, Rory, I think although I agree with you that it's not just you and me talking about kind of mushy, idealistic values, I still do think that one of the challenges for all non -extreme parties, this includes extreme left and extreme right, is how we do build a sense of excitement and optimism about the things that we believe. This might be a good moment to switch to Canada because I was watching, we'll talk about what's happened with Justin Trudeau and some of the people that might replace him in a minute, but even before Trudeau went because I kind of felt he was going to go, it was and I thought I needed to get to know this guy Pierre Poyliavera a bit better.

45:16And he's the guy who's the leader of the Conservative Party. We've talked about him a bit before. I've been watching some of his speeches and interviews over the last few days. And he is definitely not to be underestimated because he's, he actually, he looks like the actor Martin Freeman. He's got a, he's a quite good looking guy. He dresses kind of casually, wears vests and jackets and he looks cool. I think he might have a bit of the mooch done to his pretty wrinkle free for somebody who lives a stressful life. And he's not somebody who's bringing forward big positive policy solutions, but what he is doing all the time is speaking a language that is rooted in people's real lives and real existence.

46:02And he does it in a way that's very eloquent, very articulate. He's not to be underestimated. And of course, he's 20 odd points ahead in the polls. But what they all do in a sense is they, they all talk about a past that was better than the present. Policies used to be about politicians saying there is a much better future that we can have. Now he, he is a better version, I would argue, of somebody like Farage because he's rooting it in people's lives. He's not hysterical. He does sort of go over the top a bit about the woke utopia and this kind of thing. But he's, you know, I, I recommend you kind of take a good look at him because he's interesting.

46:43You're right that you said this about Austria that people are going to be pretty unkind to the opponents of Kekelah, how useless they were at coming together. This is basically a story now of useless liberal response. And I'm afraid, you know, Britain is part of this. The conservative party is being completely hopeless in working out how to frame its response to Farage and Musque. And Tommy Robinson, the Labour party has not been doing very well in my opinion over the last few months. And the net popularity ratings of Trudeau, Stammer, Schultz, Macron are catastrophic. What the hell is wrong with the Liberal Centre?

47:26Why is it not able to realize how high the stakes are? Is it just that we've got complacent? Is it that we've lost language? I mean, what's going on? Why, why when the stakes are so high and literally you have a far right guy becoming the chance to Austria? It's the first proper far right ruler we've had since the Second World War are people not upping their game. You know, when we were talking at the end of the year, at the end of 2024, I referred to a speech that I watched Justin Trudeau make to a party audience. And I was saying he was, you know, this rolling applause. And it was a great speech for that audience.

48:05And it reminded me of some of the speeches that Kamen Harris made during the campaign, which you and I both enjoyed as oratorical events. But looking back, it's clear that this hopefully answers your question that both of those pieces of rhetoric were actually speaking directly to, we talk a lot about Trump talks to the base. They were talking to the base. What they weren't doing was speaking directly to the concerns that have really been driving people in their thinking about about their lives and about about politics. So if you have something like in Canada, probably ever comes along. And it does make you feel there is an elite there and it's out to get you and they don't understand you and they don't understand your life.

48:50And that's why I'm traveling around the country. I'm talking to you and I'm saying this and I'm feeling your pain and I'm hearing it. And here's what I'm saying. Just in Trudeau, impressive guy, he won three elections. That's not easy in the modern age. He's won three terms. But I think you use the word complacent. I think is they got stuck. They got stuck in thinking that the way of politics that helped them win the first time around, they've not adapted to the other stuff that's been happening under the radar, that the others, the right in particular, have exploited very, very, very well. And so, you know, when they say, when something like Polly over says that, you know, Trudeau is just giving you this unhinged waked utopia the whole time, it kind of chimes in a way that it wouldn't have done 10 years ago.

49:34And therefore, I think that what the progressives have not done is take seriously the reasons for the advance that the writers made. What's going on with in Canada now? Because this guy, Polly, is about 20 points ahead. So whoever comes in, it's going to be a very, very, very, very tough fight. I was chatting last night to Mark Carney, who, you know, we should maybe, given these now, going to be in this race, we should maybe repost our interview with him on, on leading. Because they're system -rory, if they haven't yet announced anything, how it's going to work. If it was just the caucus, if they could only choose between the MPs, then Mark Carney can't run.

50:13But if it's an open contest, outsiders can run, and Mark Carney is going to put his hat in the ring. And I think, you know, you and I both like him and know him and think he's a, you know, very, very smart guy. Whoever goes in, it's going to be very, very, very difficult. But I think if you're looking for a serious grown -up to take, and don't forget, we talk a lot about Trump. Canada, the rival of Trump, this is a guy who say Canada should become an American state. This is the guy who's saying there's going to be 25 % tariffs. And the reason why Trudeau eventually fell apart was because his, his chancellor and deputy, Christian Freeland, who is also going to be in the running, I suspect.

50:58She and he had different views about how to deal with Trump, and they just, they fell apart. So what's your feeling about, what about why Trudeau's gone, whether it's too late for whoever comes in? I think it probably unfortunately is too late. I mean, never say never, but Poliove has been plugging away, building up this lead. Trudeau may well slightly have done a Biden, which is as usual, these people cling on too long, which means that their successes don't really have the time to establish themselves properly. These Canadian races are amazing things. I mean, they're like one of those ludicrous horse races with 17 horses jumping over.

51:36Thanks. And my friend Chris Alexander who was the immigration minister ran and one of these leadership things where I can't run well over a dozen people leading. We also did an infusion leading with Michael Ignatiev, who was a Harvard professor who came in and managed to become the leader of the liberal party through one of these things. Very, very big name internationally as an intellectual and a thinker, but took the liberal party to a catastrophic defeat, which Trudeau then turned everything around from. Mark Carney will be doing his best to say he's not a Michael Ignatiev figure, but people opposing him will say what he's not been in politics enough.

52:15He's been governor of the Bank of England, which doesn't sound very Canadian. He's been the governor of the Bank of Canada. But I think he has taken seriously. I think he's got a decent chance. Many of the people I know who were members of Trudeau's cabinet or our MPs, Reckon Carney's a good player and has what it takes but my goodness, I don't know how you turn around a 20 -point lead and I don't know how you re -energize. I mean, who's really managed to do this? Gordon Brown, I guess, struggled to do it, to resume, struggled to do it. The only person who's really recently managed to do it, I guess, is Boris Johnson coming in to a fading administration and then getting a big majority.

52:54Yeah, I think the reason why Mark Carney might be a good choice for them. One is he's very, very experienced. He's serious. He's got a pretty good network. Is somebody that would immediately be taken seriously? Could you imagine that guy's prime minister 100 percent and he's not, he's not of the Trudeau camp. I think one of the problems that Christian Freeland, even though they fell out at the end, she has been the finance minister has overseen comparatively against America, economic performance that hasn't been that great. Just to give you a couple of some wonderful names of the other potential relas.

53:33There's Falswa Philippe Champagne. Very good. He's the industry minister, whether he's going to run or don't know, but people say he's like, come, he's like Melanie Jolie, the foreign minister, who has actually been a little bit quiet of late, so whether she's going to sit this out, don't know. Another one, they've all got great names, Dominique L 'Bloix. So all of these, in fact, this is the other thing, maybe help Mark Carney stand out. Mark Carney doesn't sound as French as L 'Bloix, Champagne or Jolie, but I think is, and also we've got, Jolie is the, she's currently the minister of foreign affairs, and then there's another person, a former premier of British Columbia, called Christy Clark, and let's talk about her going for it as well.

54:13I think Mark Carney is in with a shout to win it. The question then is how does Fyte Campagne against Polly Evert? And there I think it is about a classic, you know, you're on a serious leader or do you want to kind of populate opportunists. But as I said, from having watched his interviews, Polly Evert, not to be underestimated, but in a campaign, he's got to be challenged to come up with a genuine policy prospectus to govern a country over a term, because at the moment, what he's very good at is the kind of vibe in the mood music. It's kind of reversal of the arousal thing. Can I finish then just on this?

54:51I mean, so remember again, Canada really matters. Canada is a huge economy, you know, one of the big G7 economies, big player in international aid, one of the five eye countries in the intelligence relationship with the US. So it does matter where we end up there. Just, just give me a sense of what Carney's strategy should be. What are his ideas? What do you think he should do if he wanted to win this election? Well, I think the first thing he can do, which incumbents who are part of the government can't do, is acknowledge more than just intrudone to team of you doing that times are really hard for Canada and for Canadians, cost of living, housing, wages.

55:31I think the other thing he needs to do is to make more of the fact that, like you say, Canada matters, but it's a, it's being made to feel by the way that Trump has been related to. So I think he does need to be seen to take on Trump in some of these big things, in particular, this nonsense about the 51st state, but also in relation to tariffs. I could imagine you building a campaign writer, who do you want to sit down in room with Trump and actually talk about the detail of what the effect would be, not just on Canada, but on the United States as well? Who could you actually imagine turning some of these challenges into opportunities?

56:09So I think he can be the guy that says, we're not ignoring problems on immigration, they're real and here's how I'm going to fix it. We're not saying that government spending hasn't got out of control, here's how we're going to fix it. We are going to take on the housing challenge. One of the most impressive bits of this poly -air interview, I was going to talk about housing, he's basically saying, you know, how much land do we need? How much land have we got? Why can't we build houses? I mean, you can see Britain, where we're talking about changing the planet, you can see why it's so hard. Canada is saying, why can't we do this?

56:41I think that I could see whoever wins and you and I both know in light Mark, we don't know the other people. Let's say it's Mark, aren't they? I think it's good if he did. I actually, by the way, disagreed you about the way that the attack was going to globalism, Davos Man, that's all part of the kind of populist rhetoric as well. He's got to take that, own that and push that out as part of his experience message. But I could see Mark are he putting together a good campaign. He's very, very smart. But the thing that I'd say about Poly -Ebra is that of all these kind of populist leaders, you should look at these speeches and interviews he's done.

57:19He's got a style of atom that isn't sort of, he didn't have me gnashing my teeth. He hadn't me thinking, oh, this guy's quite interesting, I wouldn't like to take him on. But I'd like to see somebody Canadian who's really, really smart take him on. Very good. Well, thank you, Arthur, and look forward to talking to him soon. See you soon, bye.