374. Question Time: Why The US Needs A Leader Of The Opposition

0:00Thanks for listening to The Restless Politics. Sign up to The Restless Politics plus to enjoy ad -free listening and receive a weekly newsletter. Join our members' chat room again early access to live show tickets. Just go to TheRestlessPolitics .com. That's TheRestlessPolitics .com. The Restless Politics is powered by our friends at Fuse Energy. And Rory, you know that Fuse have been very generous in their offers to members and to supporters of The Restless Politics. So how about this one? Anyone who switches, energy supply to Fuse, you get free membership to this wonderful podcast and The Restless Politics plus for The Restless 2025.

0:35Well that's a very, very generous offer indeed. All you have to do is go to GetFuse .com .com forward slash politics and use the referral code politics once signing up. And you will get as a member of Trip Plus all of the episodes ad -free. Question time episode, you'll get that day before everybody else. You get access to members only live streams. You get early access to tickets for our live shows days before the general public. And we'd love to have you as one of our members and hopefully it's just the perk you need. If you're considering switching energy provider, it's always worth mentioning that Fuse generate power from their own solar and wind farms and they invest 100 % of profits into building more renewables.

1:12Anyway Rory, I don't look at Trustpilot and on there people give Fuse 4 .7 out of 5. That's a very, very eye mark in the modern demanding age. And there is comment, have to comment about how helpful and attentive people find the service that they get. And I do think people appreciate speaking to real human beings rather than those awful chat bots. So download Fuse's app now and use the referral code politics after signing up. Visit GetFuse .com forward slash politics for the terms and conditions and to learn more.

1:56Welcome to the rest of our question time with me as the camel. And with me Rory Stewart, am I good as we got a lot of questions as always. Huge thank you to subscribers. So just remind people you can subscribe to the rest of politics plus it gives you early access to a lot of our recordings. It gives you early access to our live shows but we're also increasingly putting out content which is only available for rest of politics subscribers. So thank you for people who've come in, subscribers who are asking questions. Where would you like to start, Alistair? Rory, I think there's one subject we got the most questions on.

2:31It's actually what we discussed on the main podcast which is America and Europe. Let's just maybe go with a couple of those. We'll tell you how dangerous is Europe's exclusion from the Ukraine peace talks. JJ, what would it look like for the UK to move away from the US as its closest ally, Ian May, with the political disintegration of the EU? I'm not sure about that. Should the UK take the lead in creating a European military coalition to protect the continent against the threat from Russia? Well, I think the first thing is that being allied with Europe is very different from being allied with the US because despite all the talk about a common defence and security policy, the truth is that European nations still pursue their interests and you can see often very dramatic splits.

3:21Orban and Hungary famously won't go along with things Poland will push very hard forward with initiatives which France might be resisting with the EU. And basically what it means is that instead of getting one enormous economy, the US which is 50 % larger than the European economies and this enormous integrated military behind you, you're dependent on this very difficult coordination between European countries. Now, there are other problems. I mean, of course, European countries are spending as much as the US in percentage terms or actual terms on defence, but even if it were, you have the massive problems as you've talked about in the past, the Greece spends on pensions on the armed forces, the fact that individual European countries often tend understandably to invest a great deal in frontline troops but much less in the logistics, in the air picture and the coordination, which then has to be provided by the US.

4:17So, there's really good reasons now. I mean, as Trump becomes more and more unreliable as a part, as he begins to signal his departure from European values, his increasing love affair with people like Putin, there will be more pressure but it will be a very big transition. That's why I think we have to accept that the Trump first message that NATO countries weren't spending enough on their own defence has been, I think, now finally heard, but I don't think he expected first time around that one of the reasons why Europe were beginning exactly together on defence finally was actually because it started to see America in a very difficult and negative light.

5:00And that, I think, is what has sparked this kind of, you know, an element of panic, I think, attached to it, and it'd be very, very interesting next week when Kierstarma does meet Donald Trump and they talk about some of this stuff is just to work out how Britain figures within it. Well, so here's a question then. Peter Wright, presumably not the guy from the Great Spice scandal sent an Australia in the 1980s. On the last episode you were begging up a customs union. Whilst I agree completely, isn't that exactly what was put forward by Labour under Corbin in 2019 and was roundly poo -pooed by many of your centrist listeners what changed?

5:39Well, let me add to that, I was a big big supporter of the customs union and in fact in a desperate attempt to try to get a soft Brexit through managed to corral with my friend Alex Chalk and Ken Clark, 32 of our Conservative colleagues, and to go into the voting lobbies with Corbin to try to get a customs union through. But the reason we didn't get it through was not in the end because of opposition from Brexitiers. It was because of opposition from hard remainers who still believed that they could trigger a second referendum and therefore the problem for them with the customs union and you know, I lost in the lobbies.

6:14People like Sam Gima, whose votes I needed, I also lost some of the more extreme Labour second referendum people because they sort of believed that destroying any Brexit deal, including a soft Brexit deal, would mean that they could stand the European Union over you. That was a very nice non -threatening overview, but basically I know that you blame people like me for this. My Fiona was saying the other day that you know, there might be a bit of a sort of revising of the views of Jeremy Corbyn because of course, she said, you know, he was always banging on about Israel, he was always banging on about a very good, he was always banging on about the customs union.

6:54I want to draw attention to a substack by Peter Kelner, and I know Peter Best for being a pollster, but Peter has actually written a very, very good piece, which I'm sure he won't mind if we put it in the newsletter. I think I'm going to ask the European to take a look at it as well, but essentially he's been out talking to people, small businesses, the kind of people that we talked to last week that I mentioned who were really wanting to see real change on this on this reset. He basically is just getting their story about what it is like to be a small and medium -sized business person who's dealing with this paperwork.

7:38And bear in mind, this is why Faraz should never be allowed to forget, they promised that Brexit was going to get rid of Quote's Brussels red tape. He basically is talking to people who used to have one form that they filled in an hour or three. He's talking to people who have seen their freight costs soaring. He's talking to people who often are seeing their exports facing double tariffs. And he's talking to people who have lost their goods in customs checks processes. And he's talking to people who've lost lots of staff because they've gone back. And he says this, I asked each of these business leaders what they would say if they could ask his style of one specific change when he seeks to reset UK EU relations.

8:23Their responses included signing up to all EU standards so there is no need for customs delays. Radically reduced the paperwork involved in trading across the channel. Allowing EU workers to come to Britain as easily as they did before. Brexit changes the rules of origin system so that tariffs are never charged twice. So whether we're going to call it the customs union or not, that is the deal that somehow Geostarma has got to get out of Europe. Yeah, absolutely. We don't disagree on what they're doing. We don't, I think, we might have done back in 2019, but I don't think we disagree on it. We did.

8:56We did. We agreed. We disagreed. We disagreed. We disagreed. We disagreed. Now we agree. Got a good challenge from a guy called Riches Snowden. What is Ching Trump talk about USAID? I felt some similarities with the way Rory spoke about some aspects, the waste of money and differed, to the international development, while reading politics on the edge. Yet on the podcast last week he was roundly criticising the president's approach. Have I misinterpreted or are there not areas of agreement between Rory and Donald Trump that government aid spending is frequently wasteful? So really, really good challenge.

9:26And I got it from a lot of people. A lot of people said, Hey, Rory, go easy here. You know, you're very aware of just what nonsense was going on in international development. In DeFid, you've been very clear about some of the madness in USAID. I got a friend of mine from Afghanistan called Benji writing to be saying, Rory, I never thought I'd hear you become this kind of fool -storted defender of USAID in that way. I've had another friend saying, Rory, the whole point about the charity is that you used to run like, give directly your turquoise mountain as they were doing stuff that these big development agencies often didn't want to do.

10:01And it's true. So I mean, I think this is part of the problem of polarization, which is I don't know how you get the middle line. And the temptation is never to give an inch. But obviously, what I should have said is, look, of course, USAID stood some terrible programs. DeFid actually often did some terrible programs. These aid agencies were far too expensive. The management costs were crazy. There were these beltway bandits that took huge commissions on implementing. But that doesn't mean we should have abolished DeFid. That doesn't mean you should have got rid of USAID. It means that you need to reform and improve the way in which they operate.

10:38And the problem is, of course, that maybe it's a little bit like a debate about a soft Brexit. It's awfully difficult to hit that middle ground and say, look, there's something terribly wrong with it, but I still think it's better than the alternatives. Making the argument for the lesser evil. Saying, if I had to choose between no international development aid at all or keeping DeFid and USAID intact, I'd keep them intact. But it's the same with Afghanistan. People set up this false choice. Do you either put in 150 ,000 troops, 150 billion dollars a year or do you do absolutely nothing? Well, the answer is actually, you do smarter stuff in the middle.

11:17But there's not much room for that in the policy debate. Right. Here's one from another member of the way called Sleekit Scotsman. How did you find Sleekit sort of a bit sneaky? A bit sneaky? Yeah. Anyway, Sleekit Scotsman asked this question. In the next year, could you see America, China, India and Russia breaking away from the United Nations, disbanding bricks and forming their own alternative security architecture and economic structures to replace the UN? I'm still fixated with we Sleekit coward in Timurus Bisti or what's a panic, Xenia, etc. Yeah, go on, then you have a stab at that while I think about Rabi Burns.

11:57I don't think it's impossible that some sort of new structural emerge because the United Nations is struggling and it's struggling because of the weight that's put upon it and the inter and the divisions that appear to me to be at times irreconcilable. America doesn't like the United Nations. America doesn't like any international institutions right now. Yeah, my problem though is that the likelihood is that you end up not with a new structure, but you end up with nothing because the reason why the UN has crippled is that the US China and India and Russia basically can't agree on things, or particularly US China, Russia, Britain, France, Security Council can't agree on anything.

12:37And the points of these international institutions were supposed to be accepting rules around state sovereignty, borders, peace. And so I can't quite see what this new institution that the Speaker of Scotland, and thank you, Speaker of Scotland, being a member, is proposing because we're losing all the things that the UN was supposed to be about. Above all, we're losing the shared values, shared principles, shared set of international law, which the UN was supposed to implement. And I can't see what the new body would come together on. What's more likely is you have a series of ad hoc meetings like Putin, meeting Trump and Saudi Arabia where powers try to cook things up over the head of smaller members, but that's exactly what international institutions were supposed to prevent.

13:27You probably sleep at Scotsman, which modern day politician do you think best suits the adjective? Sleep it. Oh my goodness. Gosh, that's good. That's very good. Very good. And he's got Peter Mandelson. Peter Mandelson, very sleepy. I'm very good. He's going to have to be quite sleepy. He's out in a very agro -sleeve. Maybe it's the language and the echoes, but gives an impression of a seal, smoothly going through. Or in fact, one of those Scottish mythical beasts that change from a seal into a sort of beautiful woman, and then just as you fall in love with them, slip back into the water again.

14:03We do mean Machiavellian, don't we, really? Yeah, and smooth and slippery. Okay. Connoisian. The Irish military budget is rising. And in the wake of the war in Ukraine, polls are showing that support for NATO membership are growing in the Republic. Do you think Ireland will seek NATO membership in the near future? Now, to remind people this is to do with neutrality. So traditionally, there were certain countries that just didn't want to get involved in anything, and amongst them were Switzerland, Famous Sea, Ireland. But Sweden and Finland were also examples of countries that remain neutral and didn't get involved in NATO.

14:38And Famous Sea, Ireland found itself the republic in some pretty awkward positions in relation to Nazi Germany during the Second World War. I don't want every Irish Lister immediately writing in and relitigating the question of what exactly Aime and Devilera's position was, relation to Hitler and British ships. It's too much leading with a chin there, or a chin. But definitely, this question neutrality is very fundamental to Irish identity. Do you think that there is a world in which it might follow Sweden and Finland and to NATO? I don't know about that, but I'll tell you a couple of things, observations that come to mind.

15:12The first is that we've seen since the October the 7th, that Ireland is very, very proud of it. It's going to pro -Palestinian position. It's hard to say that Ireland is neutral in the question of Palestine Israel. And the other thing I think that's interesting is whether Ireland feels that it has that very special relationship with the United States. It was there with Clinton and Clinton was hugely committed to the law and non -peace process. George Bush, to be fair to him, kept plugging away at it as well. With Biden, when Biden was around, he never ever stopped telling people how proud he was of his Irish roots.

15:57I don't know whether within the context of Trump, I don't know how Ireland feels or how it felt the first time around. It's not part of the question of Alistair around smaller countries and how they deal with the US, whether we're going to see a world in which countries are going to begin to coordinate their response, because there's all this divide and rule. As you point out, when people going off the Canada, Denmark is not speaking up for Canada and when people going off the Denmark vice versa. And I wonder what it's going to take to get people to really form a group, because they'll always feel like Britain seems to feel like, well, maybe we can get a good deal here.

16:37We don't want to alienate them. We don't want to. I'm a bit depressed by how few of my former colleagues in the Conservative Party and even in the Labour Party are actually coming out and calling out Trump, what he's doing, given that Trump in his second term is such an existential threat to democracy in the US internationally, to the Middle East peace process to Ukraine. Why are so few MPs coming out on the record attacking Trump? Well, it's worse than that. It's, I don't know if you saw that, can be bad enough, was out making a speech, kind of echoing the vans, his talking points on freedom of speech.

17:16We said when we talked to Mark Carney, I think all three of us are surprised that given how close the UK is to Canada on all sorts of levels, how nobody has really very few people have come out and call that out, I think it's a reflection of the fact that America is still the most powerful country in the world. They're treading very wearily while these few first steps get taken. Just a footnote on that, which we touched on a little bit last week is that Saudi unexpectedly came out very, very clearly against the US, almost initially within 24 hours on Gaza, when you would have expected it to just keep quiet in the way that UAE and others did.

17:54So there are little chinks emerging of US allies beginning to come out more strongly, but it's still very muted. Yeah, that hasn't stopped Donald Trump from saying I'd like to have my meeting with Vladimir and Saudi Arabia. I just think that the one thing that Mark Carney was saying, which the Canadians have been emphasizing, is that this guy doesn't respect weakness. You've got to be strong. Here's a really good question from Martin, where we did this before going to a break -rory. Should the US appoint an opposition leader as there is in the UK and Australia, there just seemed to be a real problem with the Democrats and who do we look to for opposition to Trump on the Democrat side?

18:33It's not Kamala Harris, it's not Joe Biden, it's not the Obama's, it's not the Clinton's, it's not the guys really in the House who seems to be struggling to find their voice and find their footing. The Republicans have often been better at it haven't they because New Gingrich was a very central figure of opposition to Democratic administrations and Trump, of course, acts it as the major voice to the opposition to Biden. And as we've said, you can see Bernie Sanders putting out a lot of material, AOC putting out a lot of material, the Senate of Connecticut putting out a lot of material, but no, we're not getting that sense that there's certainly not an equivalent of New Gingrich let alone Trump coming out against him.

19:12Surely at some point as well, having lost the election the way they did and lost the popular vote and with all the kind of, I even heard Katty Kay and Anthony Scaramucci the other day talking about, you know, one day Mike California turn red, turn Republican. So there's clearly a big debate has to happen within the Democrat party. How is that going to take place? Who is going to lead it? What is the outcome going to be? I mean, we're not an America, you are an America right now. Do you have a sense of that debate taking place? I think Americans are shell shocked. I mean, it's in the time after Trump's first election there was an incredible flurry of really impressive articles and books pointing out what a threat Trump posed to the Constitution.

20:02So we interviewed on leading, for example Tim Snyder who wrote this book on tyranny and has did a lot of stuff on how you spot fascism rising. And I think there are two things happening. One is the sense that people cannot quite believe that despite all the work that was done, despite January 6th, we don't talk enough about January 6th. But January 6th was such a big thing. A US president denying the result of an election, despite all the effort put into prosecuting him, despite the massive spend by many people including Reed Hoffman who we interviewed on leading behind Democrats that it failed.

20:44And I think people are just reeling. But the thing that I'm worried about of course is that the next step from reeling is that as Trump dismantles institutions there's going to be an opposition in the US that is going to begin to feel more like feeding or more cess of war. Yeah. Okay, so quick break and then we'll come back more questions.

21:12This isn't ad from BetterHelp. At the moment we're getting advice from everywhere. You just have to go on TikTok. Could be Alice's cold plunges. Could be my attempts to meditate or the digital detox that I'm doing in Colombia. But of course one of the things that we know is that it can be incredibly valuable to talk to another human being, somebody who's actually been trained as a therapist, to work through these ideas calmly, objectively and professionally. And as the largest online therapy provider in the world, BetterHelp can provide access to mental health professionals with a very diverse variety of expertise.

21:48They've got over 5 ,000 therapists in the UK. They've helped more than 5 million people globally and you can join a session literally at the click of a button. Change therapist anytime. It's obviously not about fixing you, but it's about hearing yourself clearly, maybe for the first time. So talk it out with BetterHelp. Our listeners get 10 % of their first month at BetterHelp .com slash rest politics. That's better H -E -L -P .com slash rest politics.

22:51Welcome back to the rest of this politics question time with me, Royce should. And here's a question from Jacob Dovchit. Alistair, how would you handle managing the grid in a multi -party coalition, which are common in countries with proportional representation? Is the control of the narrative and coordination of message really possible only when there's a single party government? Thanks. No, I think you can manage a grid. So a grid for those you don't know is a mechanism by which you organize communication in any big organization. And I suppose my closest experience that popped into my head as you were reading the question out was actually when I worked at NATO, that was a coalition where you obviously had you had America, you had Britain, you had France, you had Germany, you had Turkey, you had Italy, you had all these different countries with different interests.

23:46And part of what I was trying to do was to manage the communications in a way that all of those different constituent parts felt that they were being involved properly, engaged properly, got their moments in the sun. And I think you had to do the same in a coalition government. I think that if I look at one of the reasons I think why the coalition government in Germany has struggled, it's because I don't think they were giving each other enough space to have the moment when they were pushing their agenda. To be fair to Cameron and Clegg, I think as do they, they managed it pretty well from a communications perspective.

24:25It's just so the whole austerity thing was a complete disaster for the country as we agree. You're presumably thinking all the time about the way in which social media changes all this. So if you were to, I mean, I don't know, let's say a Labour candidate would come in, or even the Prime Minister would come and get advice around how you do communications grids. And would have saved you, but come on Alistair, you did this back in the late 90s in the world before Twitter and Facebook. How does musk's ex, how does TikTok and the way in which new populist politicians dominate that change the way you do messaging?

25:02How would you answer that as somebody said? All that old stuff is part of an old world and social media has changed it all. I would say that you have to embrace the new world, but without throwing out the kind of strategic principles which underpin any communications strategy. So for example, if I were a modern leader of a major country, I'd actually learn a few lessons from what Trump has been doing. What could the British equivalent be of an executive order? I'll tell you one thing I would do if I was Keir Starmer, Macron, Mouts when he comes in, if he comes in as Chancellor Germany, I would do a podcast.

25:39I would have whether it's weekly, whether it's fortnightly, you can decide, but I would use that and that would go in the grid because I would make sure that whatever I was doing or saying on my podcast that week, the rest of the media you're going to take note, I would use X. So sometimes, like Musk did his interview with the AFD, Ligida Rallis -Vidal, that was huge coverage in Germany. Now, there's so many modern media stuff, so much modern media stuff you can do, but fit it in to the overall communication of your strategy over time, which is all that communications is. A couple of other things on this.

26:19One of the things that's interesting about the American communication is that it's clearly revolves around people like Vance and Musks spending an enormous amount of time themselves on X. I mean, presumably when Vance was attacking me and saying that he disagreed with me about the auto -Amaris and St. Augustin, that's not part of any grit, right? That's just Vance sitting up late at night thinking I'll slag off Rory and say, has a low IQ. The Pope came out for you, though, Rory. He didn't mention you by name, but he basically, he came out on your side of the argument. Really interesting that, because when I then tweeted out, now that the spectator from the telegraph was so pleased, Rory Stewart's an idiot doesn't know anything about theology, JD Vance is a Catholic, he understands this stuff, but then the Pope comes out on my side of this argument against Vance.