393. Question Time: America’s last ally, Japan in crisis, and Netanyahu on the brink?

26:22At those moments, I think sometimes government does have to step in and say, right, we're going to get people, quotes, around the famous table and we're going to bang heads together, we're going to get this sorted. Last one for me just on internal levels, a question from Joe, which is what's happening to where MPs come from, what social backgrounds they come from. One of the things that struck me is that in the early 1980s, there were well over 100 MPs who came from blue collar, backgrounds still workers, aluminium workers, coal miners. The unions were feeding through these people and it had been a hugely strong tradition.

26:57I mean, I guess the real here of all this, maybe as characters like Ernie Beff, enough for the war who come in, take over from the kind of central casting super posh Antoni in as foreign secretary and prove as a really effective trade union man that he can be an unbelievably good foreign secretary. So there was this huge carder of people who were charismatic, incredible communicators who'd grown up in the trade union movement and who were able to connect their social background to being really effective public figures. And that's massively died off. If you look at the figures now, more and more people are basically professional politicians.

27:42You feel a little bit I'm afraid, we interviewed Richard Rees, we interviewed Richard Phillips, and we interviewed West Streeting. In many of these cases, these are people who've been members of the Labour Party since they were quite young. They've often got parents who are councillors or involved in the Labour Party. In case of many Labour MPs, actually their parents are either councillors or members of parliament. So there's a sense in which, and this maybe is a good transition to Japan because it's true in Japan, we're beginning to develop a sort of political class. Now it's not always that they're the kids of MPs, they might be the children of councillors, they might be the children of senior party members, they might be the children of people working in social care, but there's a sense that more and more bits of society don't want to become members of parliament.

28:31And the people who naturally think when they're in their teens, wouldn't it be great to become a member of parliament? Because that's where helping people, I see my mum and dad helping people. I increasingly feel like either the children of clergymen, like the First Minister of Wales, that we interviewed or Theresa May or Gornbrown, or the children of people who broadly speaking are from caring professions or Labour local councillors or party members. I don't think that's right. I think, for example, we now have the first cabinet in history where nobody went to private school, not one single member of the current cabinet went to private school.

29:06I think that suggests that actually, so if you mentioned, you mentioned Rachel Reeves, I remember she made the point when we interviewed and actually her parents weren't into politics, we're treating his background is, I think you would describe as working class. I think it's what we think about what working class means that's changed. And I don't know all of the new MPs far from it, but I know quite a lot of them. And I think this professional politician thing, I'm not sure, it may be that they're going into politics younger and therefore we think that's all that they've ever done. And there's a reason why they're going into politics younger is because the people who get into positions are leadership younger.

29:43And when we talk to Simon Hart, the Chief work, your former Chief work who was on leading this week, I thought he made an interesting point. Maybe there aren't enough people who've who decide towards the end of their professional careers. They'd like to become MPs. But I think actually your bigger point is the one about more and more people thinking, God, politics is just not for me. I don't think it's a class thing. No, I don't think it's a class thing. And I think that's an interesting thing, which is that as you say, the Labour cabinet, the problem doesn't seem now. I think it was 20, 30 years ago that people from working class and poor backgrounds didn't feel parliament was for them.

30:22And they felt excluded. I think that isn't sure anymore. Hunter Ray Nebrigit Phillips and Peter Karl, who told us his past story. I don't think this is Simon's dad. A little class. So I don't think the problem anymore. What did he do? He did. He noticed, by the way, in his speech, Jaguar Land Rover, he didn't use the T word. He said, my dad worked in a factory. Chantmaker. What's up to Chantelbeck? Now listen, we've drawn that enough. Can I just sort of finish this? Finish this for a second. Of course. So, he's sensitive, but it sounds comfortable for you, which is why you want to get off it. So the point is, why is it becoming from, they're becoming from more working class backgrounds.

31:02But they're less and less big charismatic figures. They're more and more people who've become interest in politics and their teens. Become student politics. No, no, no. And that's why it's feeling more and more like Japan. No. I admire your attempt to make a particularly pathetic tenuous link to Japan. But let me just close with this. You'll be coming like one of those people who notices suddenly that policeman who got younger. This thing about the big characters, okay. When, as you know, I can't stand Boris Johnson. You can't stand Boris Johnson. But in 30, 40 years' time, people will remember that there was this big character in politics called Boris Johnson.

31:46They might even remember there was a big character called Liz Truss because she crushed the economy. Quasi Quarteng, they might remember as a big character. You've mentioned John Prescott, big character, Tony Blair, big character, Gordon Brown, big character. You don't mention the MP for chipping nobody's ever heard of it because you don't need that many big characters. So I think you're just getting old, Roy. It was I'm getting ever younger. So, Roy, as you age, as you become the person who notices policeman, I'll get a younger. Let's go to a quick break. Make yourself a cup of tea. Have a rest.

32:21I will come back and talk about Japan.

32:30Hello, it's Stef McGovan and Robert Preston from The Rest is Money here. Now it's absolute carnage at the minute on the stock market across the world. All thanks to Donald Trump and his tariffs. So this week, we've gone dearly, we're going to bring you shorter episodes every lunch time. Just trying to make sense of it all because Robert, I mean, we've been in crises before, haven't we? Yeah, I mean, I've been at the front line of reporting financial crises for decades, from Black Monday in 1987 through the global financial crisis, through the COVID crisis. I mean, you know, the list goes on. This is a unique crisis because it is driven by one man, Donald Trump, but it does share lots in common with those sagas we have lived through before.

33:15And as we know, although what people see is falling share prices, it is to an extent what goes on in debt markets, financial markets, which is more important to our prosperity. And we are seeing absolute turmoil in bond markets for example. So this is going to affect every part of our lives. Yes, and so we'll be looking at things like what do we think is going to happen next? How much pain is Trump willing to take? And what similarities are there with things like the credit crunch that you and I covered together? So to try and make sense of all of us, join us on the rest of this money wherever you get your podcasts.

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35:14Amazon. Welcome back to the rest of this politics question time, Miroris Jutt. And the Alice Campbell. So we said before you had your lap that we're going to do Japan. Joanna, could we see Japan stepping up as a diplomatic leader and mediator in much the same fashion as the UK? Two countries have a lot in common, both enjoy a fair -to -good relationship with Trump, relatively independent in their respective areas, while also having an interest in keeping a large power, Russia, China, away from vulnerable countries in their continent, aka Ukraine, Taiwan. Will Ireland nations once again become the pivots around which the world hangs in the balance?

35:52Poor, that's a very interesting question. I think Japan, the Japanese Prime Minister has seen Trump soon, I think. I've been looking into this. Japan's got a massive problem and that is the demography. So last year, the number of babies that were born in Japan for the ninth successive year was a record low. 1 .6 million deaths, 720 ,000 births, so two deaths for every new baby born. 30 % of the country's population is already over the age of 65 and by 2070 that's going to be 40%. Now, these are numbers that really do impact upon your ability to be a strong country, of just eight defence. One of America's demands of Japan is that it steps up on defence so that it can do less in relation to China, but they can't recruit at the scale that they need to.

36:52So I think this is a great question, but I think it's a real conundrum for the Japanese government. It's also a conundrum for the US. So Japan, South Korea, to some extent Australia, these are shaping up to be America's last allies in the world. So if you're right, the Yosuke Fishers' right that basically Europe is beginning to conclude that America is no longer an ally, that might even be a strategic threat. And as Walt's the National Security Advisor and others try to tilt towards China, you know, their justification from some of them at least for getting out of Ukraine, Russia, a banthony Europe and a banthony NATO's because they want to focus on China.

37:28They are going to have to rely more and more on this network of allies in Asia, and they're really screwing it up. You know, one of their allies was supposed to be getting closer to Vietnam and exploiting divisions to China of Vietnam, and they've just hit Vietnam with huge amounts of tariffs, you know, 45 % tariffs, almost as bad as China, which is completely mad because the assumption was that they were trying six months ago to convince people to move their investment away from China into these other countries, Vietnam, Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, all of which they've now hit with tariffs, meaning that those companies are thinking, what the hell am I supposed to do?

38:05I thought I was supposed to de -risk, de -lever, get out of China, invest in these other gunna, and being hit that. Which brings them back to Japan's South Korea, Australia, who would certainly, of course, they've hit all of them with tariffs as well, which leads them sort of bewildered and wondering what the hell, the point of being the US -LIS. But you've then raised another question, right? Which is, and we'll get onto South Korea in a second. These are very, very odd allies to have, particularly Japan and South Korea, as they age so much. I mean, who's going to war there? They're going to go to war in a bunch of wheelchairs and walkers.

38:37I mean, the South Korean democracy is collapsing overnight. Yeah, and, well, another one, which I saw, I saw the figures for the birth rate in Taiwan. Taiwan has got a fertility rate of 0 .87. So that's 0 .87 new births for every person that's dying. And they've now, I mean, the Ministry of Defence in Tokyo, they've raised the maximum age of recruits. It's now up to 32. It was 26. It's now 32. But they've missed their recruit one goal by more than 50%. And so, these figures are just, they're absolutely stagnant. So over the last three decades, the number of 18 to 26 -year -old Japanese men, which is that that's the population that they're trying to, they've been trying to recruit from, it's gone from 17 .4 million in 1994 to 10 .2 million last year.

39:36I mean, blind me. To meet their recruitment quota, if they don't extend the age of recruitment, they'd have to enlist more than 1 % of the entire population. That's amazing. Just to sort of complete the story on Japanese politics. So we covered the election, which was, it seemed a long time ago, it was only October last year. And this was the moment where Fumio Koshida stepped down and Shigeru Ishiba decided to call a snap election. And a little bit like Macron's snap election blew up in his face, lost his majority and set up a minority government. So one of the problems that we're facing, trying to answer Joanna's question, is that Japanese politics, South Korean politics, which we'll get onto a second, French politics are very, very weak.

40:23And of course, German politics is still in this coalition agreement. So it's quite difficult for these big countries actually to organize themselves, get budgets passed, take radical new decisions, because they're very fragile thing. Well, Koshida, just on Arroy, Koshida, Koshida tried to get defenses up to pay for defense, small defense. And he failed because of that. Let me sort of finish the point that was frustrating before the break, just to try to develop it. I mean, Japanese politics is very, very much a bunch of people who are a minority of people want to be politicians, while most people don't get involved in politics, which is what I fear is happening to Britain.

41:05We've literally gone from something like 120 blue collar working class MPs in 1983, the proper, you know, manual laborers, steel animonyms to people who whatever their family backgrounds are increasingly spads, political advice, those professionals. And you made the analogy with policeman getting younger. So it's also true, unfortunately, with the police, increasingly many, many police officers, the children police officers often have two parents who are police officers. So you end up with politics becoming with in Japan, from your Koshida's, you know, parents, grandparents, Shigato Ishiba's father, these are all politicians, right?

41:45And my fear is that we're going to end up in a very, very strange world. And it will become a little bit like Japanese politics, because if you don't bring people in from the outside, you can end up with very well intention, but quite shy technocratic people who've grown up in since their students, sort of geekily interested in politics, but not really having much since the outside world, not really having worked in developing countries, not, you know, certainly not having worked in a steel factory. And I think that this is something to watch for. And we'll happen more and more in Europe too, where I think many, many countries, if you're an Austrian, you simply don't, doesn't occur to you to become a politician.

42:30And I think that's something to watch for in Britain. I mean, just as we're celebrating the departure of the old Etonians, is the group of people from which politician's drawing going to go on narrow and narrow? Right, you think there's a B as arriving at your body here. I'd like to, I'd like to put out an appeal to somebody who works for the parliamentary Labour Party. I'd like a data analysis of the economic social, political background of the current parliamentary Labour Party. And if there's anybody listening from the police federation, I'd like a similar job done. I think the idea that all coppers have got parents who go, nonsense.

43:01I didn't say all copies. I didn't say all copies. You didn't, but you said you said striking number, a striking eye. I think it's moving the other region. I know police officers, Rory, who say that their kids are not going to the police because they've seen that it's not that great alive for them. So we need data on both of these questions, Rory, otherwise it's going to become an e -dotal B in bonnet. Let me put on the request on data. How many of the parents of existing Labour MPs were councillors, MPs, or very active members of their local Labour parties, who were bringing their kids along to Labour Party meetings when they were in their early teens?

43:40And how many of them were student politicians? I think you'd be quite surprised by the answer, but we shall see. Or we could get the data done by somebody else. So I'm sure there are lots of Labour MPs, listen, and lots of... If there's anything in the PLP, if you've got that data, please send it. And if you remember, we'll even give you a shout out. Now, Olivia, who is a member and comes from Perth in Australia, was Peter Dutton, that's the Liberal Party leader, the Tory, was Peter Dutton right to backtrack on his working from home policy and apologise, and was he right to drop the candidate who said women's soldiers should not be in combat roles?

44:18Good question. Was he weak or strong or panicked or principled? Let me just do a quick explainer and then come to you on the politics list. So Peter Dutton, obviously the right wing candidate in the election, and Owen Easy was doing badly. He was behind in the polls and people thought Dutton had a pretty good chance of winning. And Dutton presented himself as a slightly kind of radical right wing reformer. And he thought, you know, what I'm going to do is I'm going to call out problems in our economy and I'm going to produce traditional market solutions. So he talks about how the supermarket seems to be forming cartels and he needed to kind of break them up and create more competition.

44:58And as part of that, he's also, you know, talked about ministry for government efficiency and he's also talked about trying to solve the problem of people working from home. And it's a classic tempting thing for a politician to do because actually presumably many of the rallies and meetings with this party he goes to, he says, isn't it ridiculous that everybody works from home? And many of his core party supporters will say, yeah, yeah, and many men will be like, yeah, yeah, it's ridiculous. Why are people not turning up to work? Then he launches it into the public and it suddenly turns out that it's unpopular.

45:32Women in particular by a very large margin end up being really opposed to it. Meanwhile, his position on the polls is falling and he comes out and says, I screwed up. I'm dropping the policy. I'm not going to have it. Okay. How does the politics for this work? So what it plays into is the idea that the campaign hasn't really been thought through. Our friend James Copsie, I mentioned is briefly sending his media reports about something in Australia. The general conventional wisdom was that Albon Easy and by the way, Rory, we had dozens of responses to our How Do You Pronounces name and the overwhelming, including from Albo himself is it's Albon Easy.

46:12Okay. Albon Easy. Alba Albon Easy kind of thing. Was he won the first week and that Dutton had a few sort of mishaps, one of which, the biggest which so far was this working from home policy. And I think you're right. I think the politics was, I think this is where Trump's shadow I'm afraid and the whole kind of anti woke thing. I'm not saying it's not a thing, but I think if you make it a big part of your campaign in week one, when you must have had, they must have done polling on this or they must have had some sort of feedback as to why he did it. So I think the politics are bad for him. Probably did the right thing to dump it straight away rather than have it drag on for another week.

46:57So dump it, apologize and move on. But then that's why this other thing about the candidate became a bigger issue than maybe it would have been. And this is an interesting one for you because you've been a candidate and lots of candidates get vetted and what have you. But this, this is a guy who had been in the military. Amazing name is called Benjamin Brun. And he'd been in the military. And after he had been selected, these interviews were dug up where he'd been on podcasts and he'd basically questioned whether it was sensible to have a bit like P. Hexas sort of his model of military. Women shouldn't really be in combat roles.

47:36Now, I don't know. I think there was a bit of panic. I think he'd come out and said, well, that's what I thought then, but now I don't. I think he'd I think he'd have been fine. But doesn't panic is my sense. So they've kicked him out. They've got a new candidate. It doesn't panic too much. So as you say, could have apologized on that, kept the candidate or the candidate could have could have found a way of reframing. I mean, it has got to get a lot of support in the US for saying his message is it's on merit. You need the same standards for everyone. I don't know how many problems women in the military, but they've got to be able to run the same distance carry the same weight.

48:11Otherwise, they're not going to be in the US Marine Corps. It's very difficult to kind of disagree with that stuff. I guess the other question, which I never really understand in politics, which you've got a much better instinct on, which is he's obviously calculated that it's better to just say I was wrong with the working from home policy and drop it, facing the acquisition that he's weak and flip -flopping as opposed to holding to the policy, which presumably he believed in and which appeals to some of his base and sort of battling it out. How do you calculate when you've actually got to go out there and say, I'm dropping the whole policy, I screwed up completely, we're not doing this instinct.

48:48I don't know there's any kind of science to this. I think you have to have good instincts. The great thing about political campaigns, election campaigns and Australian campaigns similar to ours in many ways is that the reason why they're so testing is because your instincts and your values and your political field do get tested. I think this is why people are starting to look at duck and think, oh god, he's not bad first week. If he has another, no, Albin easy, well, Albin easy will probably make mistakes as well because that's what happens when you get under pressure. But I think in the end, okay, Brian, Trip Plus member, considering Trump was impeached twice but ultimately acquitted, what does Yun Suk -Yul's impeachment tell us about South Korean democracy?

49:29It is a sign of resilience or deep political dysfunction. How might his removal shape up relations with the US and North Korea? So quick introduction on this. As you've pointed out, like in Japan, there's been a massive collapse in South Korea's fertility rate from six children per woman in the 1960s to 0 .72 in 2023. So there's been a nine year decline. Life expectancy at 83, proportion of individuals age 65 and over increasing rapidly. South Korea will be the half the world's highest percentage of elderly citizens within 20 years. And Yun Suk -Yul from the right, anti -North Korean, decided to do this extraordinary thing of declaring martial law, declared martial law claiming that his opponents have been taken over by North Korean agents.

50:17He tried to basically shut down the legislative assembly. And this is something that goes back to the old days of South Korea, which of course had military rule in the 60s and 70s, had martial law in the 80s. And he hoped the military would come with him and he hoped that his hard right base would be like, yeah, here we are, you know, a certain control. And actually the whole thing blew up in his face. His own party turned against him that was complete bipartisan support. For blocking him, the military did not come out on his side and he's now being impeached. So it showed two things. It showed firstly, South Korea does happen a way that countryside Britain maybe don't it is history of military rule.

50:58You know, you couldn't imagine somebody declaring martial law in Britain, I guess. But it also has quite strong democratic institutions because when he tried to do this thing, which seemed like he was traveling back 40 years in time, the institutions responded, stopped him and now I'm pitching him over you. The question about, you know, what it shows, it shows that the democracy in a way has worked. He did something that people thought was profoundly anti -democratic and really politically stupid. Still not clear why he did it. And he fought and fought and fought and fought. And a lot of people fighting for him.

51:27But ultimately the processes led to the fact there will now be another, he's no longer president. He's been removed from office by a constitutional court and there'll be another election on June 3rd. And so I think this is, this is actually, I mean, it's been terrible for South Korea's standing in image in the world. But I think actually it's terms of it's political and democratic process. I think they should they should sort of give themselves a bit of a pass on the back. They certainly don't have a can somebody who's been convicted felon sitting there sort of, you know, putting 25 % tariffs on South Korea.

52:02Now, Rory, I think we've sort of run out of time. I'm looking at my laptop charge, which is one of my sort of one of those things that triggers my sort of edge in life. Do you want to have a last question? Yeah, last question then, if you're Northern Ireland, something you know a lot about, with the anniversary of the signing the Good Friday Agreement coming up on 10th of April. So we were there. We were in we were in Belfast for the last anniversary. How far does Alistair think that the agreement could be used to template for contemporary conflicts around the world? So I let me sort of frame that you look at the Good Friday Agreement.

52:36What do you think made it work? And is it a one off or how applicable it is? Do you do you get inspired by people saying we can repeat Northern Ireland in Israel or Sudan or do you slightly shake your head and think, this was pretty special and the application to other countries bit limited? Well, I don't think you'll ever necessarily repeat the same thing in a complete different context, but I think some of the principles are absolutely applicable. Indeed Jonathan Powell, Tony's players former chief of staff who's now a national security adviser to Kierst Tharmer, in between times he ran this amazing charity called Intermediate and essentially what he was doing was going to different parts of the world in very different circumstances.

53:21I don't know he went around so we did Northern Ireland here's how you do it, but definitely part of the learnings from that were applied. And a lot of these were obvious. The things that you know be clear about what you're trying to achieve, understand when and how to engage in real dialogue and when you just kind of just have to go through the motions because you're slowly moving to the next phase. I do think the strategic picture that so for us it was essentially there has to be clear to consent. There has to be a democratic process that people buy into, but there has to be an understanding that there is genuine inequality here that has to be addressed.

53:59They were the strategic pillars and then everything else you worked around that. So I think that you know, and within the middle of the tragedy we talked in both the main podcast and today about about the Middle East. I mean the absolute tragedy of that is really you've had leadership on both sides in recent years that hasn't really wanted to do the things that you need to do to get a proper peace process going. That's the tragedy of it. I you know, you know, I don't believe in plugging and I'm definitely not going to mention the fact that that the march is available for a pound on Kindle at the moment, but I did want to point out this is you have this is just theme on our fellow goal hanger podcast empire.

54:39Got on tell us a little bit about what you mean talk about that. Oh empire. Well, no actually people with the empire, which is Willie Dalrymple and Anita and Anne and they they've done a I think it's a three -part series, many series on the troubles. So I went on there to talk about yeah, the Good Friday Agreement and how it all came together and what have you. So if people want to know more about Northern Ireland and to my mind, you can you can never know too much. The episode comes out on Thursday the 10th of April and if you are a part of the empire, wherever you get your podcasts. Great. Well, thank you very much indeed.

55:15See you soon. Bye -bye. See you soon. Bye.