361. Gaza, Israel, and Ceasefire

15 Jan 2025 · 1 h 1 min

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Podcast Notes: The Rest Is Politics - Episode 361: Gaza, Israel, and Ceasefire

Hosts

  • Alastair Campbell
  • Rory Stewart

Episode Overview In this episode, Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart discuss the ongoing situation in Gaza and Israel, the potential for a ceasefire, the implications of recent political movements, and Keir Starmer's AI action plan for Britain. The conversation covers various facets of contemporary politics, both domestic and international.

Key Topics Discussed

  1. Gaza and Israel Ceasefire Talks
  2. Current Situation: The episode opens with a focus on the ceasefire discussions concerning Gaza and Israel, highlighting the involvement of political leaders such as Biden and Trump.
  3. Ceasefire Structure:
  4. Hostage Release: A potential phased release of hostages has been proposed.
  5. Concerns: Skepticism exists around whether the ceasefire will hold, given past experiences.
  6. Political Reactions: Leaders like Ben Gavir and Smotrich have expressed resistance to the ceasefire, complicating negotiations.
  1. Rebuilding Gaza
  2. Post-Ceasefire Challenges:
  3. Discussion on how Gaza could be rebuilt post-conflict.
  4. Key questions include:
  5. Who will govern Gaza?
  6. How will international aid be structured?
  7. What will happen to displaced Palestinians?
  8. International Involvement: The role of countries such as Saudi Arabia and the UAE, and potential funding for reconstruction.
  1. Political Analysis in the UK
  2. Starmer’s AI Action Plan:
  3. Rory discusses Keir Starmer's recent speech framing AI as an opportunity for growth rather than a threat.
  4. Emphasis on the need for a strategic approach to AI that balances innovation with regulation.
  1. Climate Change and Political Response
  2. California Wildfires:
  3. The hosts discuss the political response to recent wildfires and the implications of climate change policies.
  4. Trump's controversial comments regarding the California governor are highlighted, showcasing the reduction of political decorum.
  1. Liberal Centre Challenges
  2. Peter Hyman's Article:
  3. Discussion of the "six deadly sins" of the liberal centre, including complacency and patronizing attitudes.
  4. The need for progressives to engage more effectively with public sentiment and avoid alienation.
  1. Economic Context
  2. UK Economy:
  3. Analysis of Rachel Rees' fiscal rules amid economic turbulence.
  4. Discussion on potential responses to economic challenges, including tax rises and spending cuts.
  5. Micro Business Impact:
  6. The challenges faced by small businesses and the implications of recent tax changes.

Key Takeaways

  • Ceasefire Potential: While there is some optimism regarding ceasefire talks, historical context demands caution.
  • Rebuilding Gaza: Significant challenges loom in terms of governance and reconstruction efforts following cessation of hostilities.
  • AI as Opportunity: Starmer's framing of AI highlights a proactive approach to technology, suggesting a willingness to embrace innovation while maintaining safety.
  • Political Landscape: The liberal centre must adapt to contemporary dynamics by acknowledging public concerns and enhancing communication.
  • Economic Strategy: Clear economic policies and plans are necessary to address ongoing financial challenges in the UK, especially in light of external pressures like those from Trump’s administration.

Conclusion The episode provides a nuanced look at the intersections of international conflicts, technological advancements, and domestic political challenges within the UK, emphasizing the importance of clear communication and strategic planning in these complex scenarios.

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Transcript

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1:18Welcome to the rest of the politics of me, Alistair Campbell. And with me, Rory Stewart. And Rory, you're in the United States where Donald Trump will shortly be coming president. There is a lot happening involving him, not least what's going on right now in relation to Gaza, Israel, ceasefire talks may or may not happen both Biden and Trump very, very close involved in that. I think we should start with that. We were going to kick off with the wildfires in California and what the different political handling of that has said about what we might expect in the next four years. And then I think we should we should talk about the British economy or this turbulence in the markets there's been and the chatter around racial race future.

2:00So you're in Yale. Tell us how excited people there are about what's happening next week. Tell us how excited they are about the possibility of a ceasefire in Gaza. So as you say, I'm here. I'm teaching just started the new semester teaching undergraduates at Yale and this great course called grand strategy. And I guess the the thing that struck me most is how a subject which can feel pretty academic. So we do sort of historical studies the Vietnam War or the Iraq War or the First World War. Suddenly seems so relevant and real because you can suddenly start asking what should the world be doing about Georgia?

2:42What should we be doing about Ukraine? Now what should we be doing about Israel, Gaza? And I've never I think felt so much that questions around it's a course called grand strategy. So it's obviously connected, originally to the idea of war. I've never felt that these conversations about war and conflict have ever been quite so kind of real and urgent. Yeah. Well, Rory, we pride ourselves on doing things that other outlets don't want or don't have the time to do. But I was sort of thinking, can I read the whole of this? There's this amazing memo that guy called Anthony Agnes of you know who's big list for the podcast, sends us lots of interesting stuff.

3:19And he sent me a declassified memo that was sent by Donald Rumsfeld to George Bush, President George W in April 2001. So a few months before the September 11th attacks. And it's a memorandum, one page by a guy called Lin Wells who is a long -serving military guy, but also a pentagon advisor. And the headline is Thoughts for the 2001 Code Renial Defense Review goes as follows. If you've been a security policy maker in the world's greatest power in 1900, you would have been British looking where really your age old enemy France? By 1910, you would be allied with France, your enemy would be Germany.

4:05By 1920, World War I would have been fortune one, you'd be engaged in a naval arms race with the US and Japan, your erstwhile allies. By 1930, naval arms limitation treaties were in effect, the Great Depression was underway, and the defense planning standard said no war for 10 years. Nine years later, World War II. By 1950, Britain no longer was the world's greatest power, the atomic age adorned and police action was underway in Korea. Ten years later, the focus was on the missile gap, and few people had heard of Vietnam. By 1970, the peak of our involvement in Vietnam had come and gone. We were beginning day -tomp with the Soviets, and we were announcing the Shah as our protégé in the Gulf.

4:46By 1980, the Soviets were in Afghanistan, Iran was in the throws of revolution, there was talk of our hollow forces and a window of vulnerability, and the US was the greatest creditination the world had ever seen. By 1990, the Soviet Union was within a year of this solution. American forces in the desert were on the verge of showing they were not hollow, the US had become the greatest detonation the world had ever known, and nobody had heard of the internet. Ten years later, war saw was the capital of an atonation, asymmetric threats, transcended geography, and the parallel revolutions of information, biotech, robotics, nanotechnology, and high -density energy sources, foreshadowed changes, almost beyond forecasting.

5:26All of this is to say, I'm not sure what 2010 will look like, but I'm sure it will be very little like we expect, so we should plan accordingly, Lindwell's. Well, thank you, I mean, I think it's amazing, and of course, if you jump that forward, so he's writing in just before 9 -11. So jump forward, by 2010, the US and its allies would be well on their way to spending three and a half trillion dollars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and would have gone through a financial crisis, China would have grown from being the seventh largest economy in the world to being the second largest economy in the world.

6:04And is not you mentioned once in that entire historical analysis? Fast forward to 2020, by then Trump's been elected for the first time, Modi's been elected in India, the Islamic state has taken over a caliphate on the Iraqi Syrian border. And the internet nobody had heard of was basically transformed every part of our life. Absolutely. And then five years later, 2020 -25, the projects of Macron, Merkel, Trudeau, Biden have collapsed, Trump's come back in, Putin's invaded Crimea, 45 ,000 people have been killed in Gaza, or Hamas terrorist attackers killed 12 ,000 Israelis, and we're beginning to talk about Georgia coming into the orbit of Russia, etc.

6:47So I think it's really good. And for those of us that do occasionally get predictions wrong, it's worth from that, but the world changes so rapidly in the world, we're wonderingly that it's not very surprising that we get predictions wrong. And that's why, for example, on Gaza, so we're recording this on Tuesday afternoon, we were planning to kick off with all sorts of stuff about America, but then overnight, it just seemed to sort of emerge from all quarters that this deal was being done on Gaza. There's going to be a ceasefire, there's going to be six weeks, phase release of hostages, phase release of prisoners.

7:23And I must admit, my immediate instinct was, well, yeah, we should talk about this because it might happen today, but then very, very fast alongside that is, yeah, well, will it? Because this sort of reminded me of the many, many, many times before we got to the Good Friday agreement where it felt like this was going to happen. Now, what is interesting is that the Palestinians basically are out saying we have accepted this. The Israelis are making quite positive noises. The question that you and I would have been asking, including yesterday, yeah, but what about Ben Gavir and Smotrich? Ben Gavir has said that the deal is a surrender to Hamas.

8:02Smotrich has said, maybe I could live with it, and Netanyahu meanwhile is seemingly bringing in a few other people into his tent that may be able to get this through. So I look, it does seem for now, given what we've been living within the past, I think it's 470 days now since, that's October 7th attack. It feels a lot more hopeful than it was, but we sure, I think we should still be a little bit cautious until, and even if they do do a deal, they'll announce a deal, then it's kind of how everybody in the various firmaments involved then reacts to that. Yeah, you're right. And we've been close to a deal on a number of occasions.

8:40There have been times where people have contacted me from Doha, or Washington saying we're just two days off a deal, any number of times over the last year. The structure of the deal hasn't really changed basically from the Israeli side, what they want is the release of hostages and from the Hamas side, what they want is the end of fighting. The devil then is in the detail because of course, what Hamas wants is a permanent ceasefire, which Israel has been very reluctant to grant, and they want full as wavy withdrawal from Gaza, which Israel has been very reluctant to grant. And on the Israeli side, they don't just want the return of hostages, they want Hamas to be totally dismantled, which is why you have this situation of smart rich, but they're interesting to see that he seems to be moving, but saying very recently that he was completely opposed to the deal without the destruction of Hamas.

9:31And then coming into the center of this after it all is what happens to Gaza if hostages are released and fighting ceases. How is Gaza then reconstructed? Do Palestinians return to Northern Gaza? Will smart rich push for settlements in Gaza? Will Israel continue to insist as Netanyahu has that they will continue to keep troops on the ground and be responsible for security in Gaza? Which international partners are going to be prepared to put money in to rebuilding the tens of billions of dollars worth of damage? Who's going to be the government of Gaza? Is it going to be Palestinian authority? What's Hamas going to do?

10:16Will the Saudis and UAE come in? How much money the United States and Europe prepare to put in? When and how do they have elections? Listen, it will be great and the world will welcome it if people come out and say there is a ceasefire. People who've been displaced, the two million people who've been displaced, they can go back to their communities and see the damage and see if there's anything that can be rebuilt. Hostages released, they can just take the hostages issue. So they're talking about releasing 33 hostages in a phase way over six weeks. Well, is that because of a 33 that are live? Of the rest that they're not releasing?

10:51Is that because they know that they're dead? What would they... Let's just say that some of them are released who are already dead? What then is the reaction of that in Israel? Listen, it's an amazing thing if they pulled it off. The, you know, the Qataris are involved, the Americans are involved, and it does seem that both Biden's team and Trump's team have been kind of involved in this and pushing for this. So it's fantastic if it comes off, but let's not pretend that that then means that somehow everything is resolved. And the questions you were talking there about governance of guards, I had the politics in guards and works, what the Israelis then do say and do about settlements.

11:27This will be the hopefully the start of the end, but my God, it's still going to be very, very complicated and difficult. And to remind people that we have been here before in so many different ways because post -conflict societies, whether you're talking about Cambodia or you're talking about Bosnia, have a lot in common. And the first thing that people will have to do is to disarm the armed groups and work out what then happens to the predominantly young men who were fighting and had weapons. You're going to reintegrate them into a military, you're going to find them other forms of jobs. There's going to be a huge push to try to get the economy off the ground, but how do you really create employment in a situation where all the vapours that infrastructure is shot to pieces and where Israel controls the land and sea borders, which has a real effect on the ability to import and export?

12:19How do you get this horrible thing called legitimacy going? In other words, how do you make the government that you bring in feel credible, effective and of the people as opposed to feeling like it's either a puppet of Israel or a puppet of the West? And how do you keep the popularity of that government rather than the government being blamed very, very quickly for all the things that are inevitably going to be difficult and go wrong? Assuming this does go ahead and we can sort of say, well, after an awful lot of bad news, that is pretty good news, the other piece of I think good news in the Middle East, which didn't get much attention as far as I saw here, was the appointment of a new president in Lebanon.

13:02They've had three years and almost three years in Lebanon without president. The previous guy, President Aoun went, nothing happened since, they've had I think 12 attempts to replace him, it's the parliament, the legislative body that elects the president as it were. And this guy now general Joseph Aoun, same surname but no relation, headed the army for the last six or seven years, Aaronite Christian, which he has to be on the sort of religious power sharing that goes on. Now has to assemble a cabinet. But what was it interesting? I mean, I can't remember the last sort of event that happened that was kind of broadly welcomed in almost the same terms by both Iran and Israel and America and the Saudis and France and Europe.

13:48So there's a lot riding on this guy, but I think that after all that Lebanon's gone through and also he said something very interesting, this relates to what you were just saying there about the role of Hamas within Gaza. He basically said that the Lebanese state under his rule would he would work towards the Lebanese state having the exclusive right to bear arms. Now that strikes me as basically saying to his baller, you can't operate as a kind of military force within Lebanon. Now given where their backing comes from is that him overstating the weakness of his baller and the weakness of Iran since October 7th, I don't know, but it's a big, big, big statement to make.

14:28Yeah, I was talking to somebody who just got back from Bayrit yesterday and her sense was that there is real optimism and she'd been speaking to many different people from all the different communities in Bayrit. That they did feel that unlike in Gaza, the Israeli attacks in Lebanon had been very targeted on his baller. There were many people who were very grateful that his baller's stranglehold on Lebanon had been so significantly weakened. And there's real hope that as you say that Joseph Allen can return to the basic conditions of the peace deal that was struck nearly 20 years ago, which is that the Lebanese military is supposed to be responsible for security and that his baller don't go south as something called the Lattani River, which is a kind of buffer zone between central Lebanon and Israel.

15:19It's also interesting. I mean, Lebanese politics has always been very dominated by big clans, often big corrupt families. Joseph Allen and the new prime minister, who he's just appointed, who's a sonny Muslim, called Nawaf Salam, who's a former ICJ judge, international court of justice judge, are not from these old political machine families. One of them is he says, a soldier and other ones more of a technocrat. But my goodness, this is a task because Lebanon has been through not just billions of dollars of damage through the Israeli attacks and bombardments, but actually its economy has been in pieces since the financial crisis then since this massive explosion, which you remember in the harbor in Bayrit.

16:04It's had no function government for a very long time. And it's also true that Lebanon is always very, very influenced by Syria's, the kind of big brother, which has shaped Lebanese politics for 20 years. So what's happening in Syria is going to really matter to Lebanon. But yes, optimism for the time being. This is one of those systems where you have to, you know, various names are put forward, the parliament votes, and then eventually you get eliminated one by one. And then eventually you end up with the winner. And this guy ended up pretty convincingly. But he ended up with the backing of this guy, Suleiman Fangee, who was his baller's man.

16:40He was there candidate. And he came out and basically he withdrew from the race and he said that Aoun has got the right qualifications, he's the guy for the job, et cetera. You think that is them saying we just got to go with the numbers, we've got to go with the flow. Syria has been changed. We have been weakened around maybe isn't as strong as it was and they're going with the politics of this. Or is that them saying, okay, we'll back you, but in backing you, you know, we're not part of your coalition, you're going to have to listen to us. Because if that's the case, it's going to be very, very hard for him to do what he said in saying only the state can, as it were, bear arms.

17:15Yeah, very hard because the sheer population and his well, I don't represent all the sheer population, there it's had a big chunk of Syria in Lebanon, our big and matter. And he is going to have to get into this business, which traditionally is real horse trading between all the different sectarian political groups in terms of forming a government under Nawaz Salam. There's also the question of external players. So he isn't seen, Joseph Allen is not seen as the Hisbalah candidate, as you say, they had their own alternative candidate. But on the other hand, it is noticeable that two and a half years ago, Qatar was floating his name as a possible president.

17:54And it may be that Qatar has put pressure on people. There were jokes being made yesterday about how the real question is whether the Syrians come in with bags of cash or the Iranians come in with bags of cash or the Saudis come in with bags of cash. The general view at the moment as this is the Saudis coming in with bags of cash, this is the Saudis settlement in Lebanon. But all of that is going to put a huge pressure because from the, if things go wrong, he will find himself being accused of being a puppet of outside powers. If things go wrong, he's going to find it almost impossible to resolve how to deal with Israel.

18:31So hisbalah I think is still demanding that in the language of the first statement from the Prime Minister, they talk about hisbalah as a legitimate resistance force to the state of Israel. Yeah, it's a lot of navigation to be done. A lot of navigation to be done. But I think the big change, regardless of what you think about the morality of it, there's no doubt that Israel's attacks on hisbalah have completely changed the situation in Lebanon. We can't hisbalah be on -demadishing and provide an opportunity for this new government to emerge. And everybody who's involved in these talks does seem to be saying that the, the mechanics of change in the American presidential election have been one of the factors here.

19:10Trump sent out this guy who's his kind of special envoy. Biden's team made sure that Trump's team were completely involved in the process. So I think it does seem like that that has had a kind of some kind of galvanizing impact, possibly on both sides. I mean, the Palestinians are basically saying that Trump has put some screws on Netanyahu and these Israelis are saying that Trump has come on and put this Trump's screws on Hamas. Don't know. But it's interesting that they're all recognizing that as a factor. And meanwhile, as we say, we're a few days away from the Trump inauguration. We were question about the Californian wildfires and climate change.

19:51I must admit, I found it unbelievable that I think virtually his first comment was to go to truth social and launch this vicious attack on he didn't even call him Gavin Newsome. He called him Governor Newscum. Now, I mean, you're laughing, Rory. But this is what he was. He was just a laugh. It's like, don't you think that you just thought anyone who's, you know, we all know Donald Trump watches a lot of television. You're seeing these pictures of this horrific spread of wildfires across different parts of California. And his first instinct is to attack in really personal terms, the governor of California, where you would have thought that every political leader would want to say, right, what can I do in this circumstance to how?

20:41Yeah, no, it is unbelievable. You're right. You're right to pull me up. And it's part of this general sense, isn't it, that he just lowers everything. And one forgets very quickly, how it would have been kind of unimaginable for any previous US president to refer to the governor of a state, which was up in flames in that kind of way. My good friend Percy and his wife are both from California and his wife's family has been evacuated along with 180 ,000 other people with flames looking around their houses. It reminds me a little bit of some of the challenges we were beginning to feel in Britain on floods and one of the most interesting ones, I think, is around this question of insurance.

21:19So we found when I was the floods minister in Britain, as we started to have communities in Cumbria flooded three times and 10 years, the insurance companies started to say they'd no longer ensure these properties. And already in California, the fire insurance is sort of five times more than any other insurance you get on your house. And it looks like the insurance company's pretty soon going to stop ensuring people. I read or I heard that 70 % of the people affected the reckon have no insurance at all. I saw an interview with one guy who was an Olympic gold medal winning swimmer, Gary Hall. And he had lost all his medallys, said I had to choose whether to get my dog or my medals and I got my dog.

21:59He looked like a pretty afro kind of guy, a pretty afro kind of area. He said he had no insurance. He said I'm going to have to just rebuild. And then when you went to some of the poor areas, there was lots of focus on all kind of Hollywood stars, filmmakers and so forth. You went to the poor areas and they just said you know, got no insurance at all. Well, what we did, which may be an interesting model as more and more countries hit extreme weather events because the climate change is all of a let when drove through something called flood re, which was a way of us, the British government, putting hundreds of millions of pounds behind the insurance companies in exchange for the insurance companies agreeing that they would ensure everybody in flood affected areas in Britain.

22:40Right. And it was a pretty good model. And I think this is going to be the big question going forward because some of these big insurance companies have been saying since the 1970s that one of the biggest impacts of climate change is that it's going to bankrupt them all. They're just not going to be able to deal with the world fires, the floods and the rest of it. Yeah. I mean, I'll say it'd be nice if we could get through a whole podcast without mentioning Musk, but he just was straight out kind of using Twitter to inflame this as well. He was attacking you some saying that this was all because of the kind of woker gender of the DEI agenda and the California fire services.

23:17Again, it's that sort of that instinct to take everything towards what your already stated beliefs and views are. And so Trump was directly asked at some point, you know, does this change your view on climate change and is no, we're going to have a great climate. You know, you just say, I think the other thing, I think we have to we have to sort of have a discussion about this. I sent you a piece that Peter Hyman written and he's written a very long piece several thousand words about how blaming progressives really for giving the opening to people like Trump, like Farage, Brexit, so forth. And basically saying that we haven't sort of properly thought through a way of dealing with them.

23:57One of the things he said is he's got a horrible but very powerful image about we feed them because we when they drop a turd, we don't just sort of, you know, clear it up. We basically we examine it, we prod it, we do why has he dropped that particular turd at this particular time. I mean, I'm spending so much less time on social media now. I'm still using it. I'm still posting links for the podcast and things, but I'm just not reading it because I don't want to read something with the first 17 things I see it from Elon Musk. But how are we going to get? We know what this for years is going to look like.

24:33It's going to be every day. So last week we had Greenland, we had Panama Canal, we've this week we have Gavin Newscom, you know, next week we'll have God knows what. So I think we've got to be, we've got to sort of have an agreed restistuality strategy for how we deal with this. Also for our whole culture, there's this sense that we are frogs and boiling water that musk and trump are making normal, very, very offensive things and that it's becoming fashionable for journalists to say, well, maybe they're not so bad after all and, you know, maybe trump's going to make a lot of difference and people will point to things like the gas of peace of chords and say, look, see, you know, trump came in sort of that out.

25:16And by the way, they'll say, Andy did the Abraham Accords in his first term and he's going to sort out Russia, Ukraine and all this kind of stuff. Yeah, I think where he does do good things, we should say so. But I don't think we should underestimate how what you call that there, the normalization of this stuff amplified by must doing what he does. We talked recently about the whole the German election. So I watched Alice Vidal, the A .F., the alternative to the Deutsche Anlead, I watched her big speech at the weekend. And I mean, she started off with this great tribute to Elon Musk, he's kind of made ex -great again.

25:48She spelt it out. This was really so she could get it people like you and me. And you know, and if we have to call it reme -grassion, we will call it reme -i -grassion, you know, remigration, the whole thing that you taught about last week, the great replacement theory and all that stuff. So I think for him to be able to watch these fires and his instinct be to defend his views that climate change is all a bit overblown and basically just to go after Gavin the Gavin News, someone I think is pretty horrific. Yeah, well, let me just come in on the Hymen thing. So I think this is that the Hymen article, he says that there are seven offences that we have are seven deadly sins.

26:32And it's the fault of people like you and me, that Trump of one, because we are number one, patronizing, number two, complacent, number three, abstract, number four, sensorious, gullible, conservative, and bland. So presumably what he's saying is that we need to be less bland, more entertaining, less patronizing, etc. Develop this a bit more, and then I want to have a bit of a go at poor old Peter Hymen because I think there's some dangers in the way that he's reading this. I'm going to predict that your assessment of the danger is that his analysis, because these guys keep winning, and we've had another one this week in Croatia, presidential election, not as powerful as a prime minister, but you know, an absolute landslide win for the guy that's defined as, in this case, kind of left a center populist.

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27:17So I think you're going to say that Peter's analysis is that we have to be like them, we have to lie, we have to, you know, he's adjury, we have to bully, and I don't think he is saying that, I think he's taking it to policy. I think on the patron, I don't know, you and I are patronizing necessarily, but I think there is a lot of patronizing, I think there is a lot of, you know, people are stupid if they vote for Trump, people are stupid if they vote for breaks, etc. I've never thought that, and you've got to give respect to people's decisions. I think we are unbelievably complacent. I think we do stump sometimes on the progressive side, I think we do sometimes allow ourselves to speak in very abstract terms.

27:53I think we can be very sensorial. The gullible point is the point I was making about the turd. We crowd, this is Peter, we crowd round the turd, we pick it up, we sniff it, we debate it, we lose focus, we get diverted, we stop connecting to the people we want to serve, we meander away from the mainstream, I think there's something in that, and conservative. I think his big point is that in the modern age where people are looking for blame, where we're divided and so forth, the disruptors are the ones who win. The question I think we have to start thinking about, and the Labour government have to start thinking about, how are you able to be a disruptor in government, to disrupt a status quo that is being rejected?

28:36I kind of, I buy that, so what do you not like about these analyses? Peter Heimann's Brinand Peace is an attack on progressive liberal centre politicians, and I guess that is everything from the legacy ultimately of Tony Blair, David Cameron, Bill Clinton, Gerhard Schroeder in Germany, even Angela Merkel, the general idea that politics is in the centre ground and the fact that it's been replaced by populists and the way in which that emergency populist is partly the fault of the fact that the people from the centre, I suppose the modern equivalence would be the Olaf Schwarz's, the true goes, the macros, didn't manage to take back the initiative, didn't manage to hold them off.

29:16Or didn't want to understand or failed to see why there might be an appeal that they had to challenge. I always felt Bill Clinton had a sense of this, but because he was such a good politician, I think he could always work out how to keep it at bay. I think partly what Peter is saying is that this stuff was building over decades and we just got a bit complacent about the potential for it to become even more powerful than it was back then. I also sometimes worry that I mean I went through a very very dark moment after I was came out of the leadership and Boris Johnson became Prime Minister of thinking the whole world is going towards the populist mayhem, and then I sort of chit myself up through a lot of wishful thinking into thinking maybe Biden had turned this around and Kableharras were going to win.

30:06The problem also for all of us is that we tend to slot in whatever our pet projects are as a solution for stopping populism. So if you're Peter Heim and it'll be a list of three or four policy prescriptions which he thinks the kind of things the Labour government doing, if it's me I will be saying we need more citizens assembly, we need more devolution, we need to think about decentralized industrial policy that's kind of stuff. The truth is that in a world that is so much about social media, so much about weird insults and name flinging and often lies, it may be that just coming up with a slightly smarter technocratic policy solution is almost irrelevant that somebody like Trump can outmaneuver you every time.

30:50Well that's why I've been saying since the American election I think one of the lessons of American election is delivery is not enough. Although I was talking to Tom Boulvin the other day who's written his biography of Keir Starmer and I see the economist picked up on something he'd said. He said to me this thing is that maybe there's what people are not getting about Keir Starmer, we'll talk about Labour more after the break, is that he's like the prime minister for the 80 % of the population are not calling each other genocide or rape apologists on social media. And there's something in that, there's something about a leader who could come along and sort of lower the temperature but you can only do that successfully if you are also being seen to deliver on the things that people want from their government.

31:32Look there's no doubt that we the Liberal Centre are partly responsible for the mess that we're in. So a lot of the criticisms that Trump and others make of the 2008 financial crisis was a massive screw up. Iraq and Afghanistan massive screw ups. So their criticisms of the way the elites behave is correct. Their solutions are in the end becoming more and more nationalists as we talked about in the last podcast more and more anti -Muslim. That's what's going on with me, re -migration, AFD, Austria. And we shouldn't stop saying that, we should not stop saying that. And I think three main things, they're challenging the old ideas of Liberal democracy and human rights which they think are protecting criminals, protecting rapists, not allowing them to get rid of immigrants.

32:17They're attacking the old ideas of free trade and trying to move to more protection. And they're attacking the idea of a world with rules and the United Nations and countries like the US and the UK getting involved in trying to build peace, bring development. And the problem with it is that those three things, democracy, prosperous open borders and these international rules were very hardworn lessons from the end of the Second World War about one prevented war. What brought peace and we're losing our moral compass because we're allowing populists to basically say, and journalists to feed this, oh well, the fact is that we're boring and we're not manly.

33:04I mean, I noticed in a lot of the abuse I'm getting on Twitter at the moment is increasingly about saying, I'm not a real man. So the attacks will be, he's a man child, he's golem, he's got a rubber face. And it's incessant. I get people saying to me, how's your little whimper, Rory Stewart? There we are, you see. But what is worklisters and viewers, I think you've got it wrong. I've seen Rory of various situations. I back him in a fight against a lot of people. I'm just going to put that out there. Thank you, Aleister. But it's revealing, isn't it? Because when journalists get on side of this and say, you know, what fun the writer, how lively they are, what they're not taking into account is that there is an unbelievably unpleasant undercurrent here, which goes well beyond their views on wakery into a very dark conservative vision of how the world should be.

33:59And the key is to find out how you fight back and win without losing your moral standards. How do you fight back and win and still say, actually, we do believe humans are equal in rights of dignity. We're not going to support the idea that British nationals who are Muslims or Austrian nationals who are Muslims are going to be expelled from these countries. And then actually understand that these people may begin by sounding like they're just grumbling about Muslims. But their views on women will be unprintable. Their views on gay people will be unprintable. Their views on anyone who disagrees with them will be unprintable, which is why the challenge is, and this is where I agree with Peter.

34:33I'll finish on this, right? We need communication. We need charm. We could do with a sense of humor. Obviously, part of the point is that the populace are much funnier than the centrist arm. We're just not funny. Kirsta was not funny. Boris Johnson's quite funny. Beppe Grio was funny, right? Even Mille in some mad way is kind of funny in Argentina, right? Yeah. So we need to communicate. We also need ideas. Really clear ideas. We'll get onto that in the second half. We do need a plan for growth. We need to explain how we can sort out the economy, sort out society, and not just sound like we're apologizing for the fact that nothing can be done.

35:05But the one thing that we can't lose is the moral integrity. We cannot lose sight of the values and why they matter. I don't think Peter would disagree with that. But I think what he would say is the way that we discuss that, the way that we the progressives project that, does play into this idea that we're slightly superior. And that's what feeds this sense of elite. Whereas actually, most people feel that there should be a moral compass. Most people feel that there is right and wrong. But if they feel in their own lives that government over a generation has let them down, then don't be surprised if they're prepared to overlook some of the tendencies and the leaders that they do elate.

35:47Because to whatever you say about Trump, he's a disruptor. For ours is a disruptor. Johnson's a disruptor. Millais a disruptor. And Millais is really interesting. I mean, I've been sadly, I don't speak Spanish, sort of a bit limited in this, but I've been following as closely our cameras going on in Tina. And you know, it's interesting. What he's doing is genuinely interesting and not as catastrophic, necessarily. I mean, massive rise in poverty. That's catastrophic. But in terms of how he set himself what he was going to do, I think he's got more steam in his engine. He's got more kind of, you know, legs that he's running on because he came in as a disruptor and he is disrupting.

36:26And the other point that Peter made that I think is really important, this is about kind of intellectual underpinning. He said, so we Trump's the kind of the main guy and Musk alongside him. And it's all about Twitter and its abuse and what have you. But Peter makes the point that we may have railed it when we read it, but they did produce this project 2025. They do have these really powerful well thought through well funded think tanks, America first, Heritage Foundation, this national conservators and movement, et cetera. And what is the equivalent? I think that's the point he's making is that we're just sort of thinking, well, eventually they'll get found out because populism always fails.

37:05Now history suggests that's true, but the damage that can be done while we're sort of sitting there thinking, you just watch, you just watch this go wrong. And I think on Brexit, I feel that that's what we do. You know, we do frankly just sit there saying, look, I told you it's going wrong, it's going wrong. Right. But then we're going to do about it. Yeah, well, here's another one where I think I slightly disagree. Hyman dismisses immigration in one sentence says, you know, we need an orderly approach to immigration. I think the one area which is non -negotiable is we need to absolutely demonstrate that we can control borders and that we can set targets on immigration and that we can hold to it.

37:42Otherwise, I think the centre of Liberals are dead. I think it's very dangerous for Liberals to sound as though they're in favour of open borders and that they're not serious about controlling the numbers. We have to accept that bringing nearly a million people into the United Kingdom in a year is grotesque and we need to be able to reassure the public that that isn't going to continue because otherwise all the other stuff I think comes to pieces. I think Hyman is not giving it enough credit to how central immigration is to the message. Does that mean the end of the European Union? Because when I watched Alice Vidal speech, she kept talking about we've got to bring our borders back, have strong borders.

38:19We decide who comes into Germany, which is, you know, pretty obvious nationalist position to take. But does that then mean? But then when you say to does that mean you want to get out of the European Union? No, no, no, no. Well, of course they think the Austrians and the Germans think they can behave like Orban. They can just flout all the rules of the European Union and they're too big for the European Union ever to expel them. So I think it's probably the European Union may well come and start not formally through a formal decision but just through more and more countries refusing to evade its rules.

38:48Okay, should we take a break and then come back and talk about Labour in Britain? Very good.

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40:05Welcome back to the rest of politics with me, Roy Stewart. And me, Anastak Campbell. And before we hooked up to do this chap, Roy, I was watching Rachel Rees' in Parliament. She was doing a statement on her visit to China. Obviously recent events and the turbulence in the markets was brought up at various points. I thought she stood up to it pretty well. I mean she's definitely got a bit of perseverance there. She was not being pushed around. Okay, well so just to quickly interrupt and do a bit of an explain and then maybe come to you on what options she has. The problem she's faces is that she set herself a fiscal rule, which is that debt was supposed to be reducing as a proportion of GDP by the end of the Parliament.

40:47And in her budget where she borrowed another 30 billion and raised another 40 billion worth of taxes, she left herself a pretty small headroom, about 10 billion pounds worth of headroom. And the headroom in other words is the gap between what she thought her borrowing and spending pressures would be and the amount of money she had. So she didn't, as it were, leave enough money in the virtual bank account. And she's been, in a sense, unlucky. I say unlucky because a lot of the debt burden she's inherited from the Tories, a lot of it was to do with massive spending around COVID and not just massive spending around COVID.

41:24A very strange type of borrowing you did around COVID. So traditionally until COVID, the UK tended to borrow very, very long fixed interest rates, you know, like getting a fixed interest rate 30 year mortgage. Because of complications about quantitative easing in the Bank of England and other things, during COVID, we began borrowing shorter money on more flexible interest rates. So big debt. Then we found ourselves she's faced the second problem, which has been Trump. So because Trump has come in and started talking about massively cutting taxes and splurging economic growth and putting up tariffs, America is very worried about inflation.

42:02And therefore there's an expectation that interest rates are going to go up in the US and the cost of borrowing is going to go up in the US. And the cost of borrowing in the UK basically follows the cost of borrowing in the US. So suddenly now in the UK, she's having to spend much more money to borrow. In fact, on the 10 year borrowing, the highest rates since 2008 on her 30 year borrowing hit 5 .44%, which is the highest since 1998. So almost kind of 30 years. And that means that she is blowing through that 10 billion buffer in her bank account. She's going to find herself potentially getting up to spending nearly 100 billion on debt interest.

42:44And she's just not going to be able to stay within her margins on which over you on what her options might be if she finds herself breaking her own set for school rules. Well, just on the numbers by the way, I think you said 100 billion there, according to the Office of Budget Responsibility by 202930, even before this, they were talking about spending more than 122 billion on debt interest payment. I mean, that is a massive sum of money. Look, in terms of the options and you know, it's all very well for people to say, well, you and I both said, and we could be right about this. We could be wrong about this.

43:20Nobody knows because the election happened on the basis that it did. But the fact is that she did rule out certain tax rises and that box turned to some extent. She and Keir Starmer ruled out other measures to do with Europe, customs union, single markets, you rule those out as well. So she's now got essentially the options going forward to the spring statement, which is on March 26. And that don't ask me why I know this, Rory, but that happens to be Diana Ross's birthday. I just happened to know that. It's just because of those things that I know because I used to say Diana Ross the birthday card every year.

43:56Anyway, so her options then she could change the fiscal rule. Okay. And just to explain that, that's that's basically giving herself a little bit more headroom. So some people said that fiscal rule was always too strict. There should have been a bit more flexibility in it. It's a bit ridiculous because even if she breaks that she's only going to break it by a small amount, so she could just ignore it, do nothing or fudge the fiscal rule and say these are just rounding errors and we're not going to make a big fuss out of it. Right. And Keir Starmer this week, when he was making a big speech about AI, we'll come on to talk about that.

44:26And Rachel Rees and Parliament today absolutely clear, there will be no change to the fiscal rule. So that's one option that they seem to rule down. The second thing they could do, she said one of the other things she did is to say that there will only be one fiscal event. Yep. Her year. Yep. The Tories in recent years have got into a habit of doing more than one. Yep. She could change that and she could say, well, actually, I've had to look at things and I'm going to turn the spring statement into an event which also announces tax changes. She could do that. Exactly. So yeah, to explain that, so your option to is spring budget and the spring statement or budget or whatever it is, will involve announcing more tax rises.

45:06So that's the second option that she could have yet. Yeah. And again, I think politically and for the markets, very, very difficult to do that. The third option is to announce on March the 26th further cuts in spending. Politically very, very difficult goes against all the things that Labour said they wanted to do. So that's pretty tricky as well. And the fourth option essentially is the sort of keep calm and carry on. Tough it out. Part of this is because of the turbulence has been brought in by, as you were saying, related to the arrival of Donald Trump. Let's see if that pans out. Very similar things going on in Germany, very similar things going on in France.

45:44And my instinct would be at this stage to do the last of those to not go overboard, not to do too much. So basically there are four options. Number one, she could change the fiscal rule so that she guarantees that number two, she can have a spring statement where she raises taxes, number three, she can cut spending. Number four, she basically does nothing and hopes through growth or some change in the global economy. Yeah. That she sort of breaks the fiscal rule temporarily, but actually in the long run, she won't really break it and she doesn't need to have to do anything. But there's a risk there of also scaring the markets more.

46:16Why would that scare the markets? I think the thing that would scare the markets is if they, if they overreactor this. Well, the risk is that option four, unless something very unlikely happens, she will break that non -negotiable fiscal rule. And therefore they will start to think what sort of rule was this anyway, if she's so comfortable about breaking it and she's not reacting when it breaks. Right. Yeah. That brings us back to this question of the general question around growth and the economy. So you can look this from so many different angles, but there's a couple of angles I wanted to raise to the one of them is the kind of micro business end of this.

46:51And the second is to return to this question of communication and vision. So on the micro business sense, there's quite interesting statements from Simon Wolfson, who's the boss of next. And he's a really impressive business person. And he's, I think he's booked about a billion pounds of pre -tax profits and his sales are up and his profits are up. But he's pointed out that from his point of view, the problem is that Rachel Ries has brought these taxes on employing people, employing the national insurance, very suddenly, instead of bringing it in gradually. And the result is that it's disproportionately hitting people on 16 hour contracts.

47:30So mothers who are working from home, part -time workers, which retail shops like next really depend on are being hit much, much harder than full -time employees on higher incomes because they've brought down the threshold at which these taxes kick in, hitting lower paid people more. So he's predicting on the basis of being one, I guess, one of the most successful business people in Britain at the moment that next year his profits are going to be there's going to be a big 60 million pound raise in his wage bill. And he's predicting that we'll see this going through the rest of the economy. And so that's going to be, I guess, something to look at the real economy.

48:06The second thing though, maybe just to come back to is this question around communication. So what is the growth plan? It's not that anybody, and by this I don't mean what's the sort of brilliant policy solution because I don't think anybody really knows what the brilliant policy solution is. As you say, the German economies and trouble, the French economies and trouble, British economies and trouble, it's not as if there's a bunch of economists out there with a magic wand sitting in their back pocket. But you do need to say something to the public, which gives them an idea that there's a kind of plan and you're going somewhere and that's what I'm not, I can't articulate yet.

48:39By the way, me saying do nothing, I'm not saying say nothing. I said to you before Christmas and I still stand by this that I feel that there is still the space for them to come along with something that they label the growth plan and they set it out sector by sector region by region, theme by theme. And it doesn't have to be full of whizzbang, new stuff and new rhetoric and so forth, which is this is what we're doing. Now, to be fair, I don't if you're able to catch, you might be on the plane when Kierstarmad did his AI speech. And it was interesting because you know, in the end, it's about choices and he essentially was framing the choice.

49:20We can either see AI as a massive threat or we can see AI as a massive opportunity and he said, I am absolutely in the latter camp and he gave some examples of where it was working already. We should at this stage, by the way, tell listeners who haven't already caught up with our latest leading interview. It's entirely coincidental list, but James Migniki is one of the kind of pioneers of this whole AI world. We interviewed him and it not least about that, what where is the threat, where is the opportunity. But what Kierstarmad was basically saying is this has the capacity to power growth, this has the capacity to bring in the improvements in public services that we need, but only if we embrace it in the way that he was setting out.

50:03So don't get me wrong, I'm not saying do nothing, they have to do lots. But what I'm saying is that I don't believe that they should be spooked into some whiz -bang response on March 26th that nobody's expecting. This is how we're going to get through this. And I heard John McDonald on the airways today, John McDonald who was shadow chancellor under Jeremy Corbyn. And he was echoing the point that you and I make a lot about, you know, they box themselves in too much of this and this. But then his solution was to bring in massive wealth taxes. Now I think we talked about this in relation to Australia before the election.

50:41I think you might have been able to do that right at the start. I think if you did that right now, you talk about spooking the markets, they are going to go haywire with that. So I think this is difficult. I don't think it's the crisis, what crisis that people pinned on Jim Callahan back in the 70s. I think the mail in these papers trying to say this is like the 70s revisited is absolutely for the birds. But it's a genuine challenge born of partly of the international stuff. But also the fact is we've talked before about the budget took so long the economy was being talked down, etc, etc, etc.

51:14For perfectly legitimate political reasons, trying to pin it on the Tories. But now very much people are saying, okay, we want to see this growth plan. And I think there is a case just for, you know, somebody in the Treasury, I hope he's doing it right now, just, master 26 could be the time you do it. You just say, here it is. Here's a 500 page document that sets the whole damn thing out. Gorgiollet, all that you want. So Kier Sam's AI speech, I thought was one of the most interesting speeches he's made and really matters. And really encourage people to listen to the James Minneker interview. James extraordinary Zimbabwean intellectual right at the forefront of development in AI.

51:54Why is it interesting? Well, Kier's fundamental vision is that AI is an opportunity and he's looking at it more as an opportunity than a risk as simplifying. But basically, he's saying we need to wait until we understand what this thing is before we overregulate. Yeah. And in this, he's slightly echoing Reid Hoffman who we've also interviewed on leading and and most of us, Solomon, who I think would agree with quite a lot of what's being said here, which is the problem with what Europe's trying to do, the European unions trying to do, which is going very heavily on risk of Earth's regulation is twofold.

52:27First, see that we don't yet know exactly what the stuff is or what it can do. And therefore, it's a bit like regulating cars at the stage where they're still strapping at 10 miles an hour with someone walking in front of them with a red flag. The regulation is likely to be inappropriate to whatever this thing looks like in two years time. The second problem is a little bit related to what happens in climate change if you start trying to control your own carbon emissions, what everyone else is doing it. So if you're up in the UK, kill off the AI industry, but US and China are just going full guns.

52:59You're not going to make the world a safer place. In fact, you're just going to get yourself colonized by them. And this is always the technological problem. If you think back to the days when people were having debates around railroads or nuclear weapons or any of these kind of things, the reason in the end you push a Heber technology even when the technology can seem pretty dangerous and disruptive to your society is that if you don't, your neighbour does and your neighbour then sits on you in a really big way. So I think Kirstalmer's probably doesn't have many choices. I don't think there's much point to him trying to be pious and super risk averse if the US is going all guns blazing.

53:36I think the thing that really is missing here still is two things. Firstly, a very, very radical change in government. And this is why it's going to be great to get Peter Kyle, who's the Minister responsible for this unleading to talk to him about what they can really do to shake up the civil service who is always never really understands technology well enough, never really understands science well enough never really takes enough risk with new emerging technologies. And secondly, how do you sort out our financial markets because we're still dealing with this problem where Britain has great ideas.

54:06We set up early stage companies and then they slap off to Silicon Valley to get their investment. And that's partly to do with what our pension funds are allowed to do and it's partly to do with a general risk of us culture and Britain. And it's partly to do with the whole surrounding context. So I'm really impressed by this. Any other thoughts on AI from you? Well, I think, you know, you and I when Peter Kyle was appointed said one very good that is an important he's a good appointment. That's a new post science innovation technology. And I think what Peter's done, I think, you know, I've been sometimes I sort of takes from time to time, you know, why have you been so quiet, why aren't you saying anything?

54:40But actually, I think he has been a way getting under the bonnet of this. And I felt when I was watching him doing interviews and when he was talking about this in recent days, I thought this is a guy's really immersing himself in the detail. I remember when Musk started going off on one of his early kind of rants and I first started to think this guy really is a sort of, you know, menace. And I could be being Peter Kyle and messaging and saying, you know, why can't he just take away any security clearance this guy's got? And he said, yeah, what yeah. And so is that so is that we, you know, we sort of shoot ourselves in the other foot where we're trying to sort of build, you know, AI as the centerpiece of the economy, etc.

55:16Now, by the way, I wouldn't underestimate just back to the point about racial reefs, we should be very wary of the potential impact that Musk has with his reach and his volume and so forth. Even though I think eventually he's going to kind of, you know, blow himself up, but that's just maybe a wishful thinking. But he is damaging brand Britain. And I we have to assume he's doing that with other people, the networks that he has access to. So Labour has got a job. Maybe this is peace part to Peter Mandelson's role when he steps in as as ambassador. Labour's got a job to counter some of that because, you know, every country in the world has a brand.

55:55What I liked about the way that Peter Kyle and Keir Starmer presented this, they were basically saying, you know, we're not starting. I think it was one of them said we're not starting at a kind of, you know, an even here's the starting line of a race. America and China are way ahead of everybody, but we're basically next. And that gives us massive opportunities. And the thing is that, you know, when we talk about New Year's resolutions and I said you've got to have any people who are going to know what your enemies are. In a way, they were signaling because when he talked about, you know, the available data in healthcare and how that can lead to better outcomes for people when they're sick, part of me and part of you, I suspect, is going, all Palantir, Peter Tee or blah, blah, blah, blah, you know, we don't really like these people having their hands on our data.

56:40That's a fight. And what I was getting, I think this is probably the reason why you like to as a speech, what I was getting from care, the same as he did a little bit the week earlier when he was given the speech on healthcare was there are going to be fights in this. And I'm telling you, kind of where I'm staking out my ground. I'm on the side of innovation, yes, safety, yes regulation, but that is not going to be the driving force. This has got to be, how do we get better public services? How do we get better economic growth by properly exploiting enhances the benefits of artificial intelligence?

57:13Yeah, let's just, I think maybe conclude just by saying that a lot of the leading figures now in AI, some of whom we know, some of whom we've interviewed are increasingly predicting that things are going to change very, very, very quickly indeed. Leopold Ashembranner has written a paper called situational awareness, which we can share, which is suggesting we could get to artificial general intelligence within a couple of years. Dario who runs Unstropic again is talking that kind of time frame, Demis Hersabis is talking, I think, last time I saw four, five years, which means that you're going to end up with super intelligence able to generate a hundred years of scientific progress in a couple years.

57:56I mean, every single publication in nature and science will be groundbreaking. It's almost impossible to work out how humans are going to be able to read all this stuff or even just work out what's been discovered in mathematics and physics. We can find ourselves in a world where everybody working in call centers suddenly loses their jobs and that will then mean wiping out 10 % of the economies of many low -medium income countries that are relying on call centers to emerge. All of military conflict could be turned on its head because artificial general intelligence would make almost all our armies obsolete overnight.

58:30Britain is very vulnerable because one of the things it could do is take out almost all the people working in white collar jobs, consultants, bankers, lawyers and God forbid even podcasters. The problem is that as usual timelines are out of sync. Governments tend to think, well, I've got four, five years. If these guys are right that the entire technology of the world is changing in a two, three -year period, then the job facing Kierstama is completely different to any job that any prime minister has ever faced in the past. My final point, I'll just end with a question. Do you think Liz Truss was right to get lawyers, to write to Kierstama to say he was seasoned, to assist him saying she crashed the economy?

59:09Was that a good move for her long -term reputation? What was your view of that? I doesn't seem like a very good me. I think saying that your previous conservative premise of crash the economy is absolutely part of the strong 400 -year tradition of British parliamentary politics. I think of this, he definitely, the risk of getting a seasoned disassist letter from Liz Truss, I think is very, very, very fair comment. See you tomorrow.

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