397. Pope Francis, the Supreme Court Gender Ruling, and Trump’s International Populist Network

25:21And the one thing that those both positions have in common is they don't like people like you and me either saying this isn't the most important issue in the world that really irritates people because it feels very existential to them. But secondly they don't like a liberal position which is my position. I mean so to put my cards on table my position would be okay this is a very difficult question of two competing claims by dentian rights. So let's try to find practical compromises. So you know in the Rory Stewart world, I would say, trans women should not be able to compete in women's sports.

25:56Seems to me unfair. I would probably be in favour of gender neutral bathrooms in many contexts to get around this this year, right? I would also be in favour of looking at a case -by -case basis on a trans woman wanting to go into the female estate in a prison because you have to balance the fact that trans women are at a lot of threat. I mean, if you're at, you've just pointed this out right, if you go into a male bathroom and you're a trans woman and you're wearing a skirt, you can be beaten up by a man and that bathroom or you could be in a prison, you could be very badly treated by fellow prisoners.

26:30You could also theoretically, although there actually aren't that many cases of it, but it has happened, you could pose this threat to women. So I would be trying to argue that you look at this on a case by case basis and you try to navigate your way through these very difficult claims of values, but both sides hate that because if you are a trans woman, you might say Listen, I am a woman. These are my rights. These are my entitlements. I don't want to be given a case -by -case treatment I mean we don't say for example if an African American is denied entry to a country club They have to prove that they're not violent in order to be allowed to come into the country club They would say this is my this is discrimination, right?

27:07Yeah, but as you've pointed out all of this affects sport Access to puberty blockers. This is amazing a slow newstavastock podcast done by Tortoise Media, if you want to get into that, looking at the use of puberty book as single sex basis, prisons, free speech, how you talk about this in school, and my goodness, it feels polarized. It doesn't feel like somebody like me trying to say, well, here's the kind of liberal compromise on this is going to get anything other than abuse and hate from both sides. No, and that's what I worry about, the judgment, and I don't think that was their intention, but I think that's the consequence, as a danger, that's the consequence.

27:44And I also do feel, I mean, we're a political podcast. I still think this should have been resolved by Parliament. This is essentially what's happened is that there's been a sort of not a conflict, maybe like a contradiction between two pieces of legislation. And I think that could have been resolved if the politicians would want to have the debate. And I think it's about that they don't want really to have the debate. I think that could have been resolved by a code of sill, an explanatory note. It could have, you could have thrashed this out, instead of which, you have the debate going on in the media, you have the debate going on through campaigners, you have the debate going on if you like through the loudest voices within that debate.

28:22And then a kind of quits subtle, 88 pays judgment comes out with what is taken, rightly, I'm not criticizing this, that was the most important line, was the thing about their definition of what a woman is. And that is immediately turned into a reason to carry on the fight, a reason not just to say the quarters made this judgment and therefore we now proceed on this basis. But more if you look at some of the rhetoric around this, this essentially is saying there's no such thing as a trans person. Yeah. If you're born a woman, you're a woman for the rest of your life, you're a born a man, you're a man for the rest of your life.

28:59So again, this is going to make a lot of people angry, but I think that we've also got to acknowledge that we are cisgender males, so where people were born biologically men who still identify as being men. And therefore we don't connect with this debate as clearly as some other groups. It's partly formed for me by a good friend of mine who was biologically a woman but doesn't identify as a woman. And they find this issue both something that's very personal but also central to their work because they run a clinic which works to provide puberty blockers for young people, young people who are often suicidal, who feel that they desperately need support in protecting their gender identity, who don't want to transition into a gender that they feel doesn't belong to them, and feels that they're doing work which matters deeply to them personally in their own identity, but also to some very vulnerable people.

29:58But at the same time, that's balanced with the fact that as the Tabestock report showed, there are many complexities around why people want to transition and how you back the evidence on the risk of suicide against the evidence, the damage that might be done for inappropriately blocking somebody's development and how parents play into this and how social media plays into this. One of the things on the media I saw that really wound me up, the things on channel 4, there was a debate between one of the women who'd been involved in the campaign who was celebrating the Supreme Court judgement and a trans woman, I've been the Scottish Islands, who had been through the whole thing.

30:39And the woman on the, as it were, J .K. Rowling's side of the argument just kept calling her him he. And I just felt there was a sort of, there was a sneering attached to it that I really found unpleasant. I think it's a classic example of something which has become very, very complicated, which is for many people very niche. I mean, you often get bad policies when you're dealing with something which I guess probably 85 % of the British public doesn't have much of a view on, doesn't think about very much. Well, this is the only thing you look at during the last election, if you looked at the polling on the issues that people felt were important to them.

31:15And he wasn't asking about their voting tenders, the issues that were important to them. Trans was very, very low down, very low down the pecking order. I do think we have a media that's made the most of it. We now have a president in the United States who wants to make the most of it and who actually even in his acceptance speech did a big thing about you know, there are only two sexes, you're either a man or you're a woman and let's get these sports people out and all that stuff. So weaponizing if you like. And the other thing, you write that of course, you know, you and I are not women just the same as we're not black and we're not poor and we're not African and there's lots of things we're not, but it doesn't mean that we can't have empathy for other people, all that we can't study things and try to develop an opinion.

31:56And I get, you know, I actually had a real falling out with somebody at an event not long ago because, but basically said that, you know, said, you've just been brainwashed, you've been brainwashed, and what do you mean? I've been brainwashed, and then said, and you know, what do you know about any of you? You're not a woman, and I said, and it's true, my opinions on this have largely been formed by, first of all, understanding this as a debate has been weaponized, so therefore don't rely too much on the media debate, try to dig into a bit deeper. But then in terms of my opinions, I would say I've been, they've been informed by Grace, my daughter and her friends, almost all of whom I think just found this judgment really quite alarming and dangerous.

32:37Fiona, my partner, and also very good friend of ours, hella Thorning Schmitt, who we had on the podcast and her family because they have somebody that we knew going on holiday when she was a kid as Camilla is now a male, he, Milo, and it's worked for them and it's worked for them, I think, in part because they've had support, understanding and a legal framework that kind of is a bit clearer. So when I see I think here's Thomas today saying, I think it's great this is all being cleared up. I'm sorry, I don't think it has been cleared up. And I think ultimately Parliament is going to have to another look at this some point.

33:14Now, I know we're both going to get from various angles. We're going to get absolutely sort of lacerated. But I do feel strongly this is, we're talking about very, very, there we are talking about the Pope who liked sort of reaching out to marginalized people. And I think trans people have enough on their plate without also constantly being thrown into the middle of a political debate, the heat of which does not necessarily get us to the right place. Well, I think with that, let's take a break.

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34:56Welcome back to the rest of this politics with me, Boris Judd. And with me, Alistair Campbell. Now we said at the end of the leading interview with Anthony Albanese, which we did live, and it was very generous of him to give over an hour of his time in the middle of his election campaign. That said to me, he was feeling quite confident. I see that one of the Australian columnists has said, you know, doing foreign podcasts is what I call a luxury. Well, Alistair, you're the communications guru. I mean, do you think it was a luxury or do you think it's actually a good thing to do in the middle of an election campaign?

35:25Well, I think he's showing like Trump did that podcast I was doing during a campaign at the long form thing. He does seem, you know, we talked a lot about the Pope in the first half, but I think the Pope's death, I'm afraid, is another difficult thing for Peter Dunton to navigate, because Dunton seems to have gone from front runner to underdog, and at this stage of the campaign, because voting starts today, you can actually start to vote today in Australia. the actual final vote on May 3rd. And you know, he's got some ground to make up. Now, listen, Marie, we should just point out, I don't know if I'm sure our Australian listeners will know this, but maybe our international listeners, less so.

36:06If you want to look up a really sort of stunning campaign moment, Google Mark Laythem Handshake 2004. And this is given credit for an election that people thought that John Howard was going to lose. And what he was was that they were John Howard, who was the liberal candidate, the Tory, and Martin Leitham were meeting in a studio, and Martin Leitham was almost, he was like, you know, how Trump likes to grab people and fool them towards him, but this is like, this was like off the scale. But that was the last time when the polls were this clear. So, well, the polls are going to have to be very, very, very wrong for Albo not to win.

36:49And what did you make of him from the interview? I thought he was, I mean, his backstory is extraordinary. So, I mean, you know, we like back stories and people should really get into that. We're not gonna spoil it here, but you've got, I mean, it's incredible, his origin story. I thought he was articulate. I thought he played it very well, given where he is in the campaign. And he's showing more confidence than he probably would have done a few months ago. I mean, it is an amazing story. Essentially, this was Duffins to lose. doesn't had a pretty consistent six point lead and now it looks like there's a nine point lead for Albanese the incumbent and and why why was it his to lose?

37:25Well, you know as you've often explained this was a year where incumbents lose. incumbents lose because everywhere around the world people have peed off of their governments housing costs too much cost the living's too much and there was an obvious campaign which doesn't was running which had just been won by my friends in New Zealand, right? They just run a campaign which said this left wing government's bit hopeless. They're a bit too woke. In fact, the great phrase that Dutton produced, did you see it? Week, woke sending us broke, right? Which summed up, you know, what the right wing attack on Albanese was supposed to be.

38:00So, week, you know, not doing enough about anti -Semitism, national security, crime, woke was, he'd lost the voice to referendum, which was this referendum them around indigenous Australians. And you know, the fact that when we interviewed him, people looking close, people see he doesn't just have the Australian flag behind him. You pointed out in the interview, he also has the Aboriginal flag and the Torres Strait Island that's flagged behind him. And sending us broke, he's taken them from a surplus into a deficit that looks like it's going to be hanging around for years. There's a housing crisis.

38:31So it should have been a no -brainer. And and and Dutton pulled together a campaign that that you know, look like it had all the right elements in place. And he was going to be about efficiency and sorting stuff out, cutting the civil service, getting Australia working again. And the whole thing has has blown up in his face over to you. I sent you a couple of polling graphs, one for Canada and one for Australia. And it is you can map the spike for, well there's the several spikes for carne, one starts when Trudeau steps down and carne steps in. There's a fresh spike when Trump does the tariffs and likewise with Albanese and Dutton there's a spike when Trump is inaugurated.

39:20And another big moment was when Dutton seemed to say, a drum with a Tom and you were obsessed with the type of the cars of the Trump cars of video. Well, he was going to turn cars into a sort of Trump piece of real estate and Dutton said something about, you know, well, Trump's a great deal maker. So let's see how it kind of pans out. And I also think there is something about Albanese. He's not the most, you know, I really enjoy talking to him, but he can be quite long -winded and he can, you know, it's interesting. He sometimes he tells the same story or listen exactly the same words because he's on the campaign trail.

39:58But interesting enough, Fiona, I was with Fiona and she listened to it. And she said that what she felt came through was a sense of real principle. He just sounded like somebody with real principle. And during election campaign, that is gold -dust because, you know, now that we got loads of responses from people in Australia watching it. And again, very much splitting between the people who said, this guy's great, hope he wins, and this guy's the worst prime minister we've ever had, and that's just the way of the modern world. But I think there's something about his manner that lends itself to a kind of counter -Trumpian world.

40:35Well, it is, you're right. And again, just to play the counterfactual, Labour could have been in a lot of trouble. I mean, it looked like it might be in the position of being the first government since the 1930s not to get two terms, because as you keep on he out there's only three years, three years terms. And in Victoria in particular, we both saw Ben Carroll, the deputy leader I think in Victoria when we were there in Melbourne. The Labour Party's been in real trouble. There's been this sort of incredibly colourful story around the union there. Have you thought of the CFMEU, the militant trade union, and John Settka putting dead pigs on rivals doorsteps and fire bombing and protection rackets?

41:16And there's Albo said it's a very robust politics. There's a very robust politics. And some courageous journalists exposing all this stuff. But none of it seems to damage him. And as you say, it's partly because he's... And you saw that in the interview, that he's very good at being the center. You know, that moment in the interview where he says, yeah, there's media on the side of the right, there's media on the side of the greens on the left. But, you know, we're the kind of sense of all people holding said. And one last little criticism, which came from somebody who'd watched our podcast very closely.

41:48You asked him his three favorite songs and he named Cold Chisel. And Cold Chisel is an Australian rock band for 70s and 80s, which this columnist said is about the equivalent of naming crocodile Dundee as your favorite Australian figure. And that actually, if he'd been a bit savvier, what he should have done is talked about K -pop because in fact, Korean pop out of Australia is now one of the biggest exports in the world. it's a real sign of the new Australia. The Rory, Rory, Rory, does it define itself as rock music? Is that rock music? Ah, because he's a record defense. It's the rocker. The other thing to say, by the way, normally, particularly election campaigns, you're interviewing a politician.

42:28They kind of subtly or less subtly, they like to try and fight out. What's your first question? You're going to be, how long have we got? What are you going to cover? Any left -field things that I'm not thinking of? He may know effort to do that. So he was a bit thrown, but I say give me your three favorite rock songs to take to Des Islands. So I don't know. I think in the middle of in the middle of an Australian election campaign, you could be right, though, a bit of a capo wouldn't have gone down badly. One thing we did get quite a lot of questions about it, was people just wanting a bit of an explanation because it is weird that they call the liberal party.

43:03I'll just say they're basically, you've got the Labour party and the Liberals. The Liberals are often called the Coalition. And so it's confusing. The liberal is meaning essentially small government, and that's an antidote to Labour. That's sort of basically. And the reason they call the coalition is because it's a bit like the CDU and the CSU in Germany. You've got the liberals and the national party who are, and the liberals are more urban and the national party's more rural. But they effectively campaign as one. So it is annoying though. And then one my final point is worth you and I both favor compulsory voting, I wish we had it.

43:43I also think their voting system is pretty good, you know. So they've got a preferential voting system where ever to win, you have to get, be the first person to get over 50 % of the votes. And the person voting has to rank all of the candidates. So you can't just go in and say I'm voting for Albanese or I'm voting for Dutton. You have to rank them all. because that way your vote will always get transferred when the bottom one falls out and the next one moves in. So I think that's quite a, if we were to move to a different voting system, I would, I think, be in favor of a preferential voting system like that.

44:20Well, let's use a bit of a transition because and look at Australia as the sign of a bigger world. So in the introduction you talk about how Trump is affecting politics. So one of the ways which Australia helps us make that transition As obviously it's a really big example, like Canada, of where a right wing party that looked like it was cruising to win has been shattered and the centre left looks like it's going to win because the right's got too close to Trump. And those two right wing parties have wanted to be allied to the success that Trump seems to represent. I think that's the point. Exactly.

44:55And maybe what you're getting out there is that we're looking at the fundamental dilemma of right wing parties posed by Trumpism, which is the problem that Keny Bedenox struggling within the UK, which is the right is now very, very split. You've got a more populous far right and you've got a center right. And Trump has made holding those two bits together more and more difficult. You know, Cameron had to manage an awkward coalition, the Conservative Party. But Trump has raised the stakes so much, and this was beginning in Britain and the Boris Johnson, where the center right, you know, kind of classics, sort of wet to Tories like me can no longer recognize themselves or in the American context of rock of fellow Republican, can no longer recognize the kind of Trump Republicans.

45:40And so whereas I guess maybe a few years ago, the worries were the splits on the left, you know, how do you hold a Democratic Party together that's got Bernie Sanders or a Labour Party that's got Jeremy Corbyn is now the right that is in real trouble. None of them have any idea what to do. and this is part of Dutton's problem in Australia. He's got to desperately try to hold his far right because he's got people like Clive Palmer, Pauline Hansson, trying to outmaneuver him on the right. But he's also losing on the left to these people called the T .L. independence, who are the people that I really love because they're my sort of politics there, you know, conservative, fiscally, but environmental women, professionals, who he's losing in all these wealthiest Sydney seats that he should be holding.

46:23That's the problem that Keny Badenock has, And I guess that's the problem that, I guess the problem that the Germans are facing too, that the right in Germany also losing, you know, now up to 26 % of the vote going off to the AFD. How do you handle that? Listen, it's hard. And in fact, there's a debate going on in Germany right now where Jens Spahn, who was the, the Matt Hancock of the German government during COVID. I hope not in every way. I don't think so. No, I don't think so. starting to say, look, can we kind of ignore the AFD forever? He's basically saying every time we seem to back down on Merz's very big stances on immigration during the election, which the social democrats have sort of watered down a bit, that is like a sort of, you know, that is manner from heaven to the AFD.

47:14But Rory, the one you wanted to talk about, which I do think is interesting, is Ecuador, because there's an election that people thought was going to be, This is a run -off between President Daniel LeBoa and a woman by the name of Luisa Gonzalez on the left who runs the Citizens Revolution Party, which was thought was going to be either very, very close or she was probably went, okay? And LeBoa has won by 11 points. He was one of the few leaders who was at Trump's inauguration. He's very much in that sort of politics. She's come out straight away and so she doesn't recognize the result and that she thinks some terrible fraud has gone on.

47:53They've come out and said that his opponents are now trying to get him assassinated and it's all a bit of a mess. But I think you're right that it shows that we shouldn't assume in our kind of cozy, liberal, progressive world that there aren't places where being more like Trump is seen as a good thing not a bad thing. Maybe one rule seems to be that if you're an incumbent populist who's close to Trump, Trump in some way boosts you. It sort of validates you. So one of the problems for being a populous leader is that until recently you didn't have sort of global recognition, you didn't have the system around you.

48:33But the people that were invited to Trump's and organisation, which include Nibir, but also include George and Meloni from Italy, or figures like Victor Orban and Hungary. A Milé. Milé? Yep, Milé and Argentina. these people are able to be now part of an international populist network with Trump and the United States right at the center of it. They're able to exchange ideas, they're able to get visits to White House, they're able to get international recognition, they're able to try to signal to their people, they might get a special deal out of it. Bukhale for example, Slovakia, Robert Fiko may benefit from this, a Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel, clearly benefits enormously.

49:12see we talked a bit on the podcast recently about Out of the One. Out of the One shows the sort of two faces of Trump. On the one hand, because Trump's a populist, Out of the One knows Trump will praise him at the same time as he's locking up opposition figures and really turning Turkey into an authoritarian state, you know, giving up on pretence of electoral freedom. But he also knows that Europe and others are so worried about what's happening to NATO with Trump that he's going to get criticized by them either. And you can see the sort of the smart populists, you know, Maloney, maybe another example of this, are able to use Trump to try to triangulate, present themselves as the root Trump, but also as people feel more short of friends, they're less likely to condemn them.

49:59Quick thing on Ecuador just to finish, because I'm really glad you raised it. So obviously my hero on this is this an economist journalist called Michael lead wrote a book called Forgotten Continent, but he's really interested in Ecuador because he points out that Ecuador is very unusual because it's very divided between a sort of populist coast around Guadalajue and the highlands around Keto. Do they have heather? They have heather. They have heather. They have grass either, to be honest. Do they not? They do have heather. They do have heather. They do have heather. Do they not? They do have heather.

50:37The guy we've talked about quite a lot, Raphael Correa. And Correa was the great kind of populist leader from 2007 to 17. He's kind of pitiful of this moment called the Pink Tide in Latin America. So Latin America broadly, if the 70s was about military rule and the 80s and early 90s were about democracy and technocracy and Washington consensus and kind of fiscal recitude, the mid -2000s becomes the Pink Tide where these left wing governments come and they coincide brilliantly with the rise of China, which demands huge amounts of commodities from Latin America and leads to a boom. So some of these economies are growing over two, three years, period, about 5 % a year.

51:16Correa takes the growth and he uses it to double the size of the government, goes from 20 % to GDP to 40 % to GDP, spends like a drunken sailor, some of it good, you know, infrastructure, schools, stuff, built, and then sure enough, at the end of it, Classic moment, the commodity boom, falters, government goes pretty bankrupt, careers steps down. Meanwhile, Ecuador begins to become infested. Having been a very safe country, it begins to be nominated by drug gangs coming over from Colombia, in particular using ports. It was at one point, very safe, wasn't it? It was like felt to be one of the safest, most peaceful countries in Latin America.

51:56Absolutely. A country maybe people talked about like Costa Rica. And then suddenly it finds itself with the highest homicide rate per capita in the world as these drug gangs come in. And so that's part of the thing going on in this election. So Nibboha is a sort of example of something that feels like very traditional Latin American politics. I mean, he's a real billionaire, a prinsling from a massive family that made its fortune in banana exporter, Ecuador, very much about banana exporter. His father ran for president five times. He had another relative who was the president of the past. So in so far as Latin American politics is about class, this guy really represents a kind of a grand Ecuadorian kind of business dynasty.

52:44He comes in against Corayism and Corayism is presented not just as left wing populism, and bankrupt government socialism, but also as corruption being too close to these criminal gangs. So a lot of his legitimacy comes from declaring states of emergency. We talked on the podcast, I think last year about this amazing moment, where suddenly the television station was rated by criminal gangs and a major drug lord got out of prison and 60 days of emergency. Things were passed. And now he's talking, you know, you're talking about Trumpism, he's talking about bringing in American troops, building these masks and Mexican security prisons.

53:22He gets photographed with Bucaylee. I mean, this time literally just right before the election, he declared a state of emergency in various parts of the country as a way I suspect of just highlighting his kind of his tough approach. The start of this year, Rory, there was an average of a killing related to the battle for control of the drugs trade every hour in Ecuador. So that's what he's going to have to take on. Interestingly, in Mexico, Claudia Sheinbaum, she, I don't know whether it's changed, but when I was looking into this, she said she wouldn't recognize him. She was buying into this idea from the Riese Gonzalez that the whole thing's been sort of being rigged.

54:05So listen, it's going to be a tough time for him. That's for sure. My final point, Roy, people often say that politics and showbiz for ugly people, this is about as good looking as a candidate lineup as you could have had. I mean, both Neboa and Gazzalis, they are not short on the kind of good looks front, which always helps. Well, let's let me make that my final point too. So on show business for ugly people, we talked about a present proboa who managed to win the election in Indonesia. This enormous economy, you know, on on course by 2050, the fourth largest economy. in the world, enormous Muslim population, are by doing really awkward dad dancing.

54:46And the reason I wanted to sort of finish with him is that at some point we should do Southeast Asia because the story about Trump changing politics has a real relevance there because if you're Prabowo who was seen as a very, you know, rejected by the international community associated with human rights abuse, now a populist president or in a different way in the Philippines, Marcos. these populist rulers are both getting a bit of confidence from Trump but they're also because Trump is disintegrating the international system now playing FTSE with China and you can see a Chinese tourist Southeast Asia where China's increasingly saying you can rely on us so at some point we should do a little bit more on Southeast Asia.

55:25Yeah absolutely. See you tomorrow. See you tomorrow. Bye.