366. Question Time: Why do dictators bother with sham elections?

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1:17Welcome to the rest of this politics question time with me, Rory Stewart. I'm the Alistair Campbell and Gemma Brooks Rory wants to know what we think about Lukashenko winning a seventh term in Belarus. When the EU and the UK both say it cannot have been free or fair. Quick reminder just on Belarus and then tell us about the election. But so Belarus people not completely concentrating. It's a big chunk of territory just north of Ukraine, just west of Russia and just east of Poland. So it's like the yellow bit of a fried egg and the white around it would be Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Russia and Ukraine.

1:58And it's a bit of, I think I've said before in a podcast, I was angling to be the ambassador to Belarus in 2006 and then those glory days. I was being encouraged to do it on the grounds that this was going to be the last total Chrissian Europe that was going to become a democracy and I'd be there at the moment of the transition when Belarus came into the European Union and this kind of stuff. Anyway, over to you on what's happened since. Well, let's just congratulate Lukashenko. He won 87 .6 of the vote. I mean, this is a compelling win. Seven in a row, but it's remarkable. No, this is, I think it was Comde Rice who said that Lukashenko was the last European dictator.

2:38So he's been there now for 30 years. It is literally a sham election in the four other candidates spend most of their time saying how well Lukashenko does. There was one bit, there was one bit during the campaign when he was asked about how the election was going. And Lukashenko said, I'm not really following it very much. But then of course, I said, I didn't even see I said you the video of the kind of celebrations this morning of this sort of it. It was amazingly well produced thing. And there is a question, why do these dictatorships bother having these sham elections? And the fact is that because they do get written up around the world as, you know, Lukashenko wins seventh term.

3:20And we all know, but a lot of people don't necessarily know that the sort of deeper background of what's going on. And of course, the reason he matters more than just being the leader of this very dictatorial authoritarian leader of as you say, quite a sizable country is because he is very, very close. Well, I mean, the Belarus opposition called imputence puppet. He is Putin's puppet. He does what Putin tells them. It's partly that Ukraine assault was launched with Belarusian help. So but it's a kind of pretty, it's a pretty depressing state of affairs. It's interesting also because a reminder of people of that age.

3:58So I guess he's 70. Yeah. And Donald Trump, I guess, is in his mid 70s now. 78. 78, right. So how these people, their careers, of course, stretch back into what feels like a very different world. Lukashenko was very much part of the old Soviet Union, served and I think the border troops in the late 1970s and then ran a proper collective communist state farm through the 1980s for Belarus and then joined the the supreme Soviet of Belarus as a member of parliament. Established his reputation weirdly as an anti -corruption campaigner. So there was a brief moment kind of for early 90s where people thought, or some people might have thought it was a bit of a glimpse of some other possibility with this guy, which was just enough in that moment in the early 90s when obviously the Soviet Union was collapsing to leverage him self into position as the president and then as as you say since then this autocracy.

4:55It's a country population just under 10 million people. So comparable I suppose the population maybe of Israel about that population. It's got a GDP per capita though very, very low. I mean, so you know, about in in real terms maybe $6 ,000 a year, places like Lithuania now would be two or three times wealthier per capita in nominal terms, having started at the same level. So what's really happened is it's the story of the way that I think Belarus wasn't a long way off places like Romania and Lithuania in the early 90s and the difference that's been made for those countries that joined the European Union, joined the West in their development and look, Shenko sticking Belarus where it is.

5:41There's parallel with Trump and what's happened with Trump's second, we're talking here about seven successive term, but we talked when we did the live with Skaramucci recently about how strangely, not silent, how strangely muted the resist the feeling of resistance the Trump was compared to the first term. This time in Belarus, it feels strangely muted other than with the approaches worldwide, they've been protests going on in different parts of the world because most of these real opponents are either in prison or they're in exile, but this is because the last time when he definitely lost the election but claimed, I think he got 82 % in the claim last time, but they ended up arresting 65 ,000 people, thousands were sort of beaten up in jail.

6:25And so this time it feels that the opposition is a braw rather than there. I've got it, we've got to give a shout out by the way to Steve Rosenberg for the BBC. I watched parts of the press conference that Lukashenko did to celebrate this historic win. And Steve Rosenberg gave him some pretty direct questions, but you know, this, can you really say this is an election when most of your opponents are in prison or exiled and there's been no campaign as such at all. And Lukashenko clearly knew who Steve Rosenberg was and said, well, you have prisons in Britain, you know, you put people in prison and Steve Rosenberg made money, you have a knock just for sort of opening their mouths and Lukashenko's prison is a place for people who opened their mouths too wide.

7:17The other thing that he did was Steve Rosenberg asked him a question, no, just made an observation, so it's a very strange election, very strange kind of election. And Lukashenko says, well, that's a nice new experience for you, Steve, and all the lots of the Belarusian journalists and people then sort of laughing and applauding this great wit. So it's bloody depressing, but of course, you know, Putin will be happy with that one, just as he's been happy with other elections have happened recently. Brits may also find it just before we leave Belarus to remember it a little bit, because in 2021 there was quite a famous case where people on a Ryan Air flight from Athens to Lithuania, which, hereafterly, on their way back home, when suddenly the plane was diverted in Belarusian airspace and forced to do an emergency landing in the capital city of Belarus, and they did it because very unfortunately, the Belarusian dissident journalist, I think called Protas Yevich, was on the plane, just trying to fly from Athens to Lithuania and found himself, of course, abducted off the plane and has now been chucked in prison, but in a terrifying these planes, it's a trick of autocratic regimes which comes up occasionally, which is that people think they're safely flying not to that country and then suddenly find, in this case a Ryan Air plane forcibly diverted and they get abducted.

8:35Peter Judge, distribution of wealth, do you agree that the current distribution of power, wealth and resources is gross, unjustifiable, and unimaginably damaging? If not, what adjectives would you use to describe the current distribution of power, wealth and resource? Quick start on that. So the three wealthiest people in the United States who are Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos, I think, their wealth is now the same as the entire bottom 50 % of the United States, and their wealth is also a astonishing amount of the entire global population, I mean, because they are in the many, many hundreds of billions of dollars.

9:16But there's also, I mean, there's so many ways of looking at this, there's the work that was done on equality. It's our friend, the Mooch, who points out that when Mitt Romney's dad was the head of General Motors as chief executive's big company, he lived in a relatively modest home in Detroit. He drove a pretty ordinary car, whereas by the time you get to his son, Mitt Romney, you're in a completely different universe where Mitt Romney has multiple houses, private jets, and the multiple between a CEO and a worker, which was in Britain and the United States, sort of 30 fold is now well up of our 200, 300 fold in many cases.

9:54I don't know what I just if you would use, but the is appalling, it's horrific, it's getting worse. And I mentioned to you the other day that I'd been rereading to use that great Tory phrase, I'd been rereading the Gospel of Wealth by Carnegie. And of course, Carnegie was one of the richest people in the world at the time that he was alive, 18, I think he wrote the Gospel of Wealth in the late 1880s. And I'll just give you a couple of quotes from it. The problem of our age is the proper administration of wealth, so that the ties of brotherhood may still bind together the rich and poor in harmonious relationship.

10:30Well, I've never seen that on Elon Musk's Twitter feed, that thought. And he then goes to say, there are about three modes in which surplus wealth can be disposed of. It can be left to the families of the deceased, it can be bequeathed for public purposes, or finally, it can be administered during their lives by its possessors. And he goes on to display why in his view, the third is the best. And he basically comes out for massive inheritance tax for those who don't use their wealth judiciously during the time that they're alive. And I just think we are now looking at people, as I keep banging on about the sovereign individual.

11:08I think that is what we have now, people who feel they're above the law, above democracy, above politics, but also above really having to do things for their fellow man and woman. And I do think this is the single biggest political issue. And it is a big driver, I think, of this far right stuff. Because the sovereign individuals somehow persuaded the common man that he, it's almost with the exception of Maloney, it's almost always a he that he's on their side. But what's going to happen? We're seeing already with Trump in power, they are going to get wealthier and more powerful. And care less, it seems to me, about the people they claim to claim to before.

11:48It's astonishing. I'm looking a little bit at this because I was in the Channel Islands and I was talking to somebody who manages money for big Middle Eastern families in the Channel Islands. And I was trying to say, what do they do with this money? What's the point of being worth 100 million, 200 million, 300 million? You can't really spend it. And they said, what they're doing now is they're setting up trusts to try to make sure, if you're in the many billions, that you can provide for the seventh generation. So it's, you're not just thinking about your grandchildren, you're trying to sort of create this insane structures.

12:24The other thing, I've often sort of about this, that we've got this very odd thing that everybody in Parliament says they believe in equality. Tories maybe talk about equality of opportunity. Others might be brave enough to talk about equality of outcome. But in fact, before we even begin talking about equality, we are a million, million miles away from anything touching equality in any of the programs of any of these parties. The Labour Party is not going to get us anywhere close to equality. But we could be at least aiming to reduce inequality. We could be aiming to look more like Sweden, these Scandinavian countries were.

13:01Again, this stuff from Pixies, very convincing that you have better mental health outcomes, you have better health outcomes, you have better education outcomes, that having a society with less extreme inequalities, but I don't know how you get that into the, I mean, you can have that conversation maybe in Europe, and you can look at Scandinavia and talk about that. But even there, or you're finding a bit of a backlash to it, and I think that percoliously a British problem is this belief that we are entitled to low taxation and exceptional public services. The Scandinavians and the French, actually, kind of accept that if you want exceptional public services, you're going to have to pay for them and the best form of payment through the taxation system.

13:44We don't necessarily at a deep level have that. And the article we just just just show you, though, how far these, remember, these are the people, the carnigas of this world, who were called the robber barons. They had, they had as bad a reputation in some ways, as if if I'm probably a worse reputation in many ways, than the current tech robber barons. But just, he says this, he's talking about inheritance tax, men who continue hoarding great sums all their lives, the proper use of which for public ends would work good to the community should be made to feel that the community in the form of the state cannot be deprived of its proper share.

14:25By taxing his states heavily at death, the state marks its condemnation of the selfish millionaires unworthy life. Very good. Very good. Really, really, really interesting. So I was talking to some very wealthy people on the West Coast and trying to understand why they don't give away more money when they're alive. Because many of them have signed up to this giving pledge which bill Gates and more and buffer it. And the weirdness is they've all signed up to it, but they're just not handing over the money. And initially they say, well, it's just that we can't find projects good enough to absorb our money.

14:58So we're just thinking more, they can be thinking for 10, 12 years, trying to find the right kind of project to give them money to you, right? So then you come with real evidence. So, you know, obviously we've talked in the past about that's very good evidence that direct cash transfer makes difference to very poor people in, you know, sub -Saharan Africa. And then they say, oh, well, you know, we're just waiting just in case there's a new tech innovation or an innovation. One of them they finally over drinks said to me, what you don't understand is that the amount of money you're worth has an incredible impact on your influence at the very top level of American society.

15:32And if you give your money. But that's part of inequality. If you measure, if you measure status by well, that is part of inequality. Exactly. So he was explaining that let's say you're worth four billion, right, four thousand million. And some of these people, some of them live relatively modestly, right? They're only spending a tiny fraction of that. But if they were to suddenly give away 3 .9 billion, their fear is that suddenly nobody wants to talk to them. White House wouldn't invite them to staff. Their friends wouldn't care about them. They wouldn't appear in the right list. They wouldn't be getting their honorary degrees.

16:07They wouldn't be able to influence stuff. And of course, a lot of this is competition between them. And it's obviously this is going to upset, less than said, getting into the mindset of these people is pretty unpleasant. But there's a very, very strong sense that they're all measuring. And of course, musk is part of a movement that believes the richer you are. It proves how clever you are and that people who aren't wealthy aren't clever. I was talking to somebody who knows all of these people and who has worked with all of these people as well. And listened to our podcast. It was last week or two weeks ago and said, I was 100 % right that Zuckerberg was entirely driven by getting as far up Trump's backside as Musk had already got, Musk having already penetrated deep, deep, deep into the backside.

16:51And which is right, by the way, Suzy Wiles has said, no office for musk in the West Wing. It's going to move across the executive office, which is cross three. Did your friend confirm what I'd heard that Zuckerberg is genuinely worried that he might be put in prison? No, he didn't. No, asked about that and felt no, probably not, but is genuinely scared. Not necessarily going to jail, but I think more of the commercial business stuff that if if he doesn't get in with the program, then there is an awful lot of government to damage him. But you know, Trump, as you know, is on record as saying he would have gone to jail.

17:23So you know, you can't not have that hovering in the back of your mind. Now, Rory, let's get onto one of my favorite subjects. Okay. Good. Yes. Guess what it is? Could it be Brexit by any chance? Well, fun enough. Somebody called Graham Merck. It starts his question with the word Persevillian, which probably means he's asked it 20 times before. Why won't Labour face up to the fact that Brexit is a disaster and that addressing it would provide the instant growth they're looking for? Are they scared of Farage and the mob? No. Why is Labour so afraid to talk about Brexit? Despite the reach out from the EU, Labour only seemed to want security cooperation, then goes on to add should Canada join the European Union, which is quite an interesting thought.

18:01But I don't think you saw Rory over the weekend. There was a poll. You got poll done for Best of Britain, 15 ,000 people, one of these MRP polls. And it said that almost half 46 % say the European Union should be the government's top priority on trade, 22 % the US, 4 % China, 6 % another country. And in every single constituency, including Clackton, including Boston and Scegnese, the places where reformer top, there is overwhelming support for Britain prioritising trade relationship with the EU over the US. And I think actually Trump's election is going to change things a lot because when people were voting in Brexit, they were voting in an environment in which the relationship with the US was very stable, seemed as though Britain had this special relationship.

18:55And actually the world was pretty stable. People were less worried about China and therefore for the Brexiters who were saying we can leave the European Union and look at these. And Europe's not growing very fast, its economy's not very strong, so let's hitch ourselves to these big growing economies in China or the US. It almost seemed plausible. And two things happen, the first thing of course is that relationships with China collapsed. And so suddenly it seems very dangerous to tie your economy too close to China and China is not growing very fast at the moment. But now Trump's election, I think whatever people feel in a day to day, they must in their back of the mind be beginning to pick up on the fact that this guy is not to be counted on, that in the end, Britain is not going to be able to rely on the way that it has for 70 or 80 years on a stable, pretty predictable United States that's going to have its back.

19:48And when that happens, if the world's beginning to splinter into an American block, Asian block, European block, well strategically, I mean not just economic but strategically where should the UK be, and I would argue with Europe. I'm going to give my friend Neil Kennick another name check because we talked about it last week in relation to populism. He had an interview in the IPAPE this week and I know Neil very, very well. And I can read the words and the headline was something like, you know, Kennick calls for labor reset to start meaning something. That was the sort of theme of it. But I think beneath it I could sense a real feeling that we're in danger of giving up a huge opportunity because you know, you and I heard in Davos from the Europeans, they still have a kind of lingering respect for the UK.

20:41They want the UK deeply involved, particularly on defence. But I remember I was talking to one European, not a leader but a minister who said that, you know, we're sort of sitting there thinking, well we keep hearing about reset, what is it? When is it coming? What is this going to mean? And I think to go back to the questions on this, I think there is a sense of where they're still trapped in a debate that was a few years behind us. For ours is kind of warm but these moves on to other things now. So I think we are missing a trick and I think in relation to growth and lessen until we fix the damage of Brexit, the growth mission is going to be muted.

21:17Again, let's take a quick break out of this episode, comes from Channel 4 and their new two -part drama, Brian and Maggie, about the infamous grilling of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, Brian Walden, now Arthur. Since his question time, what in your opinion are some of the most disastrous moments in political TV history and what happens behind the scenes? I try to think of Brian Walden interviews.

21:56I mean, really did his research. He was a former MP, a Labour MP, but he was a Labour MP that Tories didn't mind being interviewed by, because I think they felt he was fair. And Margaret Thatcher, what this program, this two -part drama, Brian and Maggie, isn't just about the interviews and where they go, it's also about this sort of curious relationship that developed around it. I'll be absolutely frank, Rory, I think the podcast is maybe filling a little bit of that space, but I wish we had more Brian Walden's around. I wish we had more viewers who would actually want to watch very long, very detailed TV interviews.

22:33And were there any interviews that really did bring down people? I mean, I suppose it was Frost Nixon. I mean, were you sometimes terrified with big, big interviews with Tony Blair, that this could be the end of everything? Not the end of everything, but I think there were definitely interviews where you came out and thought, oh god, that didn't go so well. But no, nothing that was absolutely destructive. I think I've told you before about the time when Ron Davis famously resigned after a moment of madness on Clapham Common. And I'd lined up for John Sargent to come and do this pooled interview.

23:08It's a John Sargent Chief Commissioner correspondent at the BBC, and he sat down and I said, Ron, you've got to be going to understand and dead of that. Anyway, and so he did. He duly apologised, but it was kind of undermined by the fact that Richard across his hand was the word sorry. As a reminder that he should say sorry. So that did go down, didn't go down terribly well. There was the famous interview, I'm going to be on the day this comes out actually. I'll be playing the backpipes at John Prescott's funeral. And there was the famous time when John Prescott was doing an interview and said he gave his answer and they said, oh sorry, that was absolutely shit.

23:54Can we do it again? And the interview said, this is live Mr Prescott. So there was all sorts of things, but I think, do you know what I think about the way interviews have developed is that because we're into the sort of gotcher style journalism a lot of the time, the politicians have just got very, very good. The best ones at working out where the balls are coming from, you know, how to play them. And they've become a bit sterile because I think that and I do think that what Brian Walden did, he made the he made the encounters interesting. He was, I was fully off his voice and he's because he had a midlands accent, wasn't sort of classic, classic broadcast.

24:40And he was very, very thorough and very, very serious, respectful but really, really steely. Lovely. Well, there we are. So we hope that answers the question and you can stream both episodes of Brian and Maggie now on Channel 4.

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26:06Welcome back to the restist's poll. It's a question time with me, Alistak Campbell. And me, Rory Stewart. Now, Amy Taylor already wants to know, if I leave X, which a lot of people are doing, is there another way to submit questions? Well, the answer is there are many ways to ask questions, so we can get questions by emailing us, get questions on Instagram. You can also become a subscriber, which has a huge number of benefits. And one of them allows you to engage on our Discord platform, and ask questions there, as well as getting ad -free listening. Ian Barnard, why is Canada important? Rory recently mentioned that Canada is important.

26:42Why? And how should Canadians stave off the rise of populist politics than the St Gulf, the Western world? I think we have very close historic ties to the UK with Canada, which are important to us, big player in the Commonwealth. But importantly, Canada is one of the G7 countries of the world. It's a major developed economy. Right now, Canada is important because of the way that this debate around Trump's relationship with Canada is going. We've got an election in the not -too -distant future, where that relationship with Trump is going to become central to it. And depending upon who leads the Liberals, and you and I both think that Mark Carney would be a good shot, both he and Polly Evra are already out there with some pretty strong language about the need to push back.