399. Trump vs. Putin, How to Stop Farage, and Kashmir Explained

24:34Putin's will is more important in this than the Russian people's will. Whereas I think Zelensky probably does have to take the people's will more into account. And the question of Putin's will is going to be critical because the narrative that he'll be getting at the moment is, yep, you're suffering a lot of losses, but in the end, momentum's on your side and keep going, keep pushing, this will be fine. So the message he'll be getting at Putin will be getting at the moment from his intelligence people is, yeah, okay, you're suffering a lot of losses. It's costly, but don't worry, your leverage is increasing over time.

25:05Now, there are a lot of unknowns here. What happens if the oil price collapses, for example, which would have a real effect on the Russian economy? What's Trump going to do, which is the stuff that you're going to talk about? And I think that's probably pretty central. And then the final question is in the situation in which Trump cuts off support, how much trouble is Ukraine? How much does Ukraine depend on US weapons? How much does it depend on European security? How much can it do on its own? Can I cite you though on your question of where you think, stepping aside from that moment in the what's your general sense that trend on Putin and Trump?

25:42Well, it's very hard to read if I was just relying upon that meeting with Wicoff and what Trump said thereafter, what Trump's people say thereafter, I would have thought the dial has not moved at all. And that he's very much in the pushing Zelensky into a deal that he knows Zelensky doesn't want to do, but in the end, he thinks that between them they can sort of muscle him into doing it. That's why I thought it was so interesting that he had this, I don't think I'd ever heard this phrase, he said he was being, he was worried he was being tapped along, which was a kind of interesting choice of words, but I think what he meant was Putin's kind of maybe try to take me for a bit of a fool.

26:14And he hates being suckered, doesn't he? He hates people thinking that he's weak, and I think that one of the attacks that's been landing through a lot of these Democrats, I mean, people say the Democrats haven't got the right to get together, I agree with that, but one of the lines of attack that keeps going in is that actually he's weak and he's weak to put in and he's weak in the face of China and he's beyond the tariffs and so forth. So my sense is that something did change, but as you said earlier, he's so mercurial, it can just as quickly change back again. The point I worry about in relation to you said, you know, American what happens without American support and what happens if Europe doesn't step up?

26:52I think Europe right through this whole thing has talked a better game than it's delivered. I think Kierstheim has done a very good job with Macron and lead and I think Merz is going to be very important in this as well. But I still, if I was Zelensky, I think I would be sitting there thinking, I'm not 100 % convinced that if the Americans do pull the plug that actually I will have the support that I need to keep this thing going. Even though they have completely changed their defense industry and their manufacturing capacity and everything else. When we discuss this issue a few weeks ago, we talked about a kind of different options for Ukraine and we had on the most optimistic side from the Ukrainian point of view, full US support, US security guarantees, US money, US kit and then at the most pessimistic side, we had US withdrawals, no money, little US kit and Europe doesn't really step out Ukraine's on its own.

27:47Yeah, the coalition of the willing becomes a rhetorical device rather than something really and situations changed in the last few weeks. We can now see more clearly that obviously there's not going to be US money. We know that for sure. It's now clear that Zelensky is not going to get all the American kit. So America has now made it clear it's not going to supply any more patriot missiles which is a real problem for air defense, keeping back those Russian planes. It's also becoming clear, we know now that Macron was completely wrong. There will be no US security guarantees for Ukraine. So you remember when Macron went to the White House, he came out saying, I've been talking to Trump.

28:23Trump has made it absolutely clear again and again. He may be mutual, but one thing he's being clear about, there will be no US security guarantees for Ukraine. So the best case scenario we're left with, I think, is that the US continues to provide security guarantees for NATO. I mean, it's an extraordinary that we're saying that's our best case scenario. So that Europe is confident that mainland Europe would be protected by the United States and therefore Europe can take some risk and move support forward to Ukraine. If they don't get that, they're going to think, well, we can't actually move brigades, training, support, equipment forward to Ukraine because we're actually going to be vulnerable from a Russian attack on the rest of Europe.

29:02So if the US will really guarantee NATO, Europe can move some support forward, but the still problems and the biggest problem probably is in the missiles which are currently being fired. And people like Jetwellling are really interesting in this because of course he has to be careful because he's having classified concession. So what he would keep saying is, Rory, honestly, you and Alistair cannot know exactly what's happening because we're not going to tell you exactly what's in the European logistical supply or what's in the Ukrainian stockpiles. But at the middle of this is this thing called guided multiple launch rocket systems.

29:40And these are things which are high marks, for example, these are things manufactured in the US or with a lot of US ownership over them and they're governed by US law on arms exports. And there is a strong possibility that Trump may stop supplying them either because he doesn't want the water to continue because he's got that gut instinct that you've talked about in the past, which is he wants to lift sanctions on Russia, do business with Russia and claim peace. Or because other people in the administration like Waltz is not just a security advisor saying we need this kit in Asia Pacific to take on China.

30:14And is this just stuff that the Germans have got? Right. So German tourists could do this. But again, there's a lot of questions about will German give permission for it? And how's the data link going to work because some of this stuff is connected to American satellites? And where is the logistics supply line and who's going to provide the training? So there's a lot of questions about getting tourists into the gap. If you can't get these kinds of things operating, what they're currently doing is keeping Russia well back from the front line. And these missiles are making sure that Russia's logistics supplies planes.

30:51And presumably Putin's waiting. So that protective shield is where it goes. And he thinks he's full of it because the one thing I like younger says is Putin has never ever changed his core objective, which is basically to wipe out your crate, to take the hold of your crate. Absolutely. So that will be the moment people really begin to worry. And that's the moment which I guess nobody can really predict because there are so many ifs. Will Putin blink? Probably not. Will Trump let Russia off the hook? My suspicion is he probably will in the end. Certainly has the capacity to will Europe step up?

31:26Will Europe step up? Now then, to you on that to finish? Well, I think they want to and I think they want to talk about doing so as part of the pressure that goes on Putin. But I think if you think about some of the economic considerations of the sorts of sums that we're talking about, I think a lot will depend on Merz once he comes in. Interestingly, Shalts went to the funeral, the Vatican sitting next to Prince William, not Merz. But I think a lot will depend on Merz. And Pistorius is a useful way to keep in Pistorius's defence minister definitely the right thing to do. I think we said that a few weeks ago.

32:00We hope that he would do that. So I think that that sort of Starmur, Macron, Merz, Tusk alliance is going to decide and dictate along with a sort of underlying. He keeps plugging away with all the rest. My final point, there was a fascinating revelation from Kim Jong Un. It's basically how it used Gubs out. North Korean State media reported that he's ordered the building of a monument for soldiers who have been killed fighting for Russia in the war against Ukraine. And this is the first time they've actually admitted that there are North Korean troops there. And it turns out that the Estima is that they've sent something like 14 ,000 troops there and three to 4 ,000 have been killed.

32:44So that, presumably there we are literally talking about Callum Fodder. They're being put into what Alex called the meat grinder. But it was, I mean, what a way for that to come out. I mean, I'm sure they've been denying the North Koreans there. And suddenly there's a building to a building of monument. So shall we move to the UK? So little actions coming. And the big story seems to be that people are expecting reform Nigel Farage's party to do very well that the Tories are likely to have a pretty miserable time and Labour's likely also to be a bit disappointed, is that right? I think so. I think that I was talking to people over the weekend who've been campaigning in some of the mayoral, half a dozen mayoral contests going on.

33:25And the big winner seems to be a sort of disgruntled apathy. And what reform have done is really kind of, they really have gone out to a base and they've managed to mobilize probably more people than the other two parties will be able to do. It's actually a very difficult picture to predict because it's relatively, some of the councils aren't because of local government reorganization. They're not having elections. There's none in Scotland. There's none in Wales. None in London. None in most of the big cities. So it's going to be, you're not going to get that bigger picture. But the picture that I think will emerge, one is of a low turnout, brackets, which is why we should have compulsory voting for local as well as national elections in my view.

34:04And David Gork, who I saw yesterday was saying that he's seen very, very few posters around it. So he lives in his whole constituency. I think posters to do local elections a lot. He's very struck with so little visibility. Yeah, but I think posters are sort of vanished because so much of this stuff is going on online and under the radar. But I think a lot of the councils are going to end up as no overall control. That is where you're going to have this tension at a local level, it's the way the Tories go into coalition with reform because a lot of these councils, some Tories councils are going to go to no overall control.

34:39Some of these penalties are going to be won by reform. Got no doubt about that. And that, you see, I felt at the last election, even though in Farajan, you've got five MPs now for. There's no doubt that has helped reform. And if they now get a couple of senior executive positions, one of which will be the ridiculous middle finger giving Andrea Jenkins. But that then gives them the next level of that platform. But my big worry from Labour's perspective about these elections is how they react to them. I really worry that they're going to misread what's going on here. And I was talking to somebody the other day, I thought, put this really well who shares my concern.

35:17You said the problem I get the sense of Labour at the moment is that we're trying to ape reform where they're strong and ignore them where they're weak. So pick up the Daily Telegraph yesterday and it was starma to crack down on migrants after the local elections. That's the aping part where I think reform are unbelievably weak is on the economy, it's on Putin, it's on Trump, it's on Brexit. And these are places where Labour just aren't going for them. I'm really, you're completely right. I want to get into the sort of bigger stuff for a second. But on your point there, the narratives that we've got coming out of Canada and Australia is that right wing populists do badly in an age of Trump because everybody's so embarrassed to an appalled by Trump.

36:06And of course, all these right wing populists have expressed their adoration of Trump and no one more than Nigel Farage, of course, was always taken cheesy photographs with him. Happy Brexit, all that stuff. We owe this to Steve Ballon, all that stuff. So what on earth is going on in Britain that in these other elections, Trump has been completely toxic for polyair and dutton. But in this Anglo country, Trump is not proving toxic for Farage. Is it just that people have not been good enough at pinning it on him? I don't know, they really try to pin on him. I mean, the way you have to hand it to Farage as a communicator and as a campaigner, he bounces around from one issue to the next.

36:48But he is another thing, right? He's big on net zero. Okay. Now, I was sent this thing yesterday. Not in the way that you're big on that. Not in the way that you and I would be big on net zero. He basically, and the telegraph today, the front page of the telegraph today, net zero blame for Spain blackout, blame by who the headline writer of the Daily Telegram. But so there's something, this group called persuasion UK, they've been doing really deep polling on what they call reform curious labor voters. So these are people who voted labor who sort of vaguely think they might vote for. And they've talked to thousands of them.

37:23Thousands. And of course, I'm really, really interesting findings. And one of them is that it's basically a myth that we can call reforms voters, labor's lost voters. Three quarters of them have never voted labor, ever in a single election ever. Where labor, I think, is at risk of making a terrible mistake on this. So 11 % of the 2024 labor vote is reform curious, thinking maybe reform. The numbers for the Greens and Lib Dems, Green 29%, Lib Dem 41%. In other words, because for our just so good at driving the media narrative, I think there's a real danger that labor buy into that narrative and say, we have to be more light forage.

38:12No, we have to take forage apart and be less light forage and give the country a positive forward looking narrative that we can all buy into. I also think that sort of partly answering question on forage and Trump. I don't think British voters see forage as a pseudo Trump in a way that they might polyair for Dutton because he actually hasn't been sort of fierce about departments of government efficiency. And in part because he's seen as his kind of jovial Joker, he's able to avoid what polyair from Dutton have, which is that slight sort of right wing aggressive. I'm going to rip the whole thing up.

38:50Oh, I don't agree. I absolutely think forage has got so much on the record that you could absolutely do the same job. Just take the thing about Putin. Right. I did that interview years and years and years ago for GQ with Forage where he talked about he admired Putin. Okay. Now that should be hung around his neck everywhere he goes. Brexit should be hung around his neck everywhere. He goes, he's never asked about Brexit. Now I could argue and I do that's a failure of our media. Yeah. But it's also a failure of campaigning. Yeah. Of the political parties. And you can quite write the Australians and Canadians very much played images of Trump against those right wing opponents.

39:27Let me pick up another point that you made, which I think is really interesting, which is fragmentation because what these polls actually were in five party politics. Yeah. I mean, Sam Friedman, West of England, five parties were within a few percent of each other. So I think it was labels that sort of 23 % conservatives at 21 % all the other. Those greens. High teens. Yeah. And that means fragmentation, that means small majorities, that means coalitions, as you say, that means a much more volatile type of politics. It means much less experience in local councils and parliament because things flip over much more quickly.

40:04And also means that we may need to start thinking seriously about our electoral system. So one of the sad things is that we used to have a situation for these Meryl votes in London, for example, where we vote. Yeah. We said, Labour could have changed that. I know. Johnson did that. I know. To help himself. Yeah. And Labour could have changed it. Very simply. Yeah. And they're going to lose one of these Meryl elections. They are going to lose because they didn't change it. It was so weird. It was so weird. And of course, I could see the problem. And the problem was that when I was running to be the Lannermere, there was a moment where I could sense that Cedete Khan thought, okay, there's a very narrow chance that Rory could do this because he could do a macro -entret.

40:45He could come second to me in the first round. I don't make 50 % and then he could pick up the other votes that comes through. So actually Labour nodded through that Tory change. Yeah. And then the second thing is what's happening with local democracy because as an MP, so many of the issues that mattered to constituents. I like it. Very local. Yeah. Well, you know, what a Cumberan's really care about. They're really caring about local housing, local schools, local roads. All this stuff is very, very local. This is my thing. Two things to watch on the vote. One is this will probably be the first election where the two big parties are below a half.

41:26Okay. That's already happening in the polls. And we're going to see that then in the turn. But the turn out is going to be incredibly low. And I think again, that is because we haven't, we haven't built enough of the argument with the connection between voting and delivery. And that's what feeds this kind of populist message. You know, for Argy's message, you've been going on the country basically saying he deletes the place and just says, Oxfordshire is broken. You know, Staffordshire is broken. You know, Burnley is broken. And he goes there. He has no solutions whatsoever. You know, but I never see him properly taken apart over these arguments, over other politicians.

42:07And of course, the other thing with Brexit and Trump, I understand why if you're the Labour government right now and you're trying to avoid having to choose between America and Europe, you're trying to get something out of Trump. You're trying to, so Keir Starmer's trying to sort of keep and maintain a relationship. You may be thinking, well, I Keir Starmer, I David Lamy, don't want to have a for our strategy that's about linking him to Trump being a negative. But it doesn't mean you can't have campaigns doing that by other people. And likewise with Brexit, if you don't want to talk about Brexit, then don't be surprised if people forget that Nigel Farage was a big architect of this disaster that's taken, you know, 5 % out of the economy.

42:48So my final thought, well, limp out of the selection with a low turnout, a fragmented vote, far more votes going to almost unknown reform candidates who are going to come into these quite responsible positions in local government, big budgets, some have got some 750 million pound year budgets responsible for the things that really change individual lives. And it'll just be seen as part of the national game. And we see in France, you know, how a mayor of border can really turn border around in the United States, a great governor can transform a state, Switzerland where I've, you know, been a lot in the last few months, you can see local democracy really operating well.

43:29When is Britain going to crack the fact that politics is local, our interests are local? It doesn't mean it's one size fits all, but in Hungary, for example, I saw again and again that if you were trying to sort out how to deliver housing or a renewable energy project, if you involve the community from the beginning, made them feel ownership, you'd actually get stuff built such as you were speeding up infrastructure, not the lane. So where is the radical thinking about how to make democracy work? I mean, one of the reasons why Britain feels broken is people are so distance from it. If the only thing they see is a tweet or a Facebook post as opposed to what we got at our best in Cumbria, which is saying, okay, look, there's something you're already angry with affordable housing.

44:12We're sitting down across the Ravensworth. Here's a brown field site. Here's David, who's going to lead the plan. This is where the money's coming from. This is what our financial options are. Suddenly, everybody has a much more positive view. It's no longer this is rubbish. There's no housing for our kids. There's no growth. See the houses going up and they're involved in designing. The charity event we were at last night, Kim McGinnis, whose labour mayor up in the northeast, was there and she was saying, I completely agree with this. The answer should be more devolution. I remember before the election, when we were looking at lots of different polling, the figures who were emerging as more popular than the national politicians were the people like Andy Burnham, Tracy Braben, Andy Street, exactly.

44:56Even though he lost. That sort of sense of giving people local, regional leadership has to be part of this. One of the things I've been disappointed about is there's not been that sense of civic, democratic renewal. I know even as I say that, there'll be people in the Labour strategy side of things saying, what do you want, civic, democratic rule? I get that. But actually fixing our politics has got to be part of taking on the populist virus. Anyway, there we are. I think the other thing to remember, of course, is the bi -election as well because of Mike Amesbury deciding to connect with the electorate.

45:34Yeah. Not in a good press cut fashion, not a bad fashion and going to jail. So Labour were I think over half of the vote and reform a second way, way, way, way back. Now, I've been talking to people in the media up there, they say that reform will only get in if the turnout is very, very low. But again, we're talking about a time when people aren't turning out to vote. And that is usually a sign of rather than anger, it's a sort of sense of disgruntlement and disappointment. And I was saying last night, the event we did, I was saying that that in the end, that can only be met by a real sense of purpose and mission about what the government is for, what the government is trying to do and tying that together in a narrative, that the moment I think is very, very disparate.

46:27And the one thing you're talking to people being out on the knocking on the famous doorstep, the one thing that keeps coming up again and again and again and again is, have a guess, cost of living. No, something more specific. Winter fuel keeps coming up as, and if you go back, that was the first big thing the government did in a way. And on no party, no party seems to be offering return of winter fuel allowance or none of the major parties, the other parties are just letting Labour take care of the tips, Labour or reform. Well reform will offer whatever they say to get them over the next 20 seconds in the conversation.

47:02But then the other thing that is now coming through in a similar way is the welfare changes, the benefit changes. And the reason why reform are hammering the immigration, the silent message, so strong isn't just because that's what they've always done, it's because they can, they feel they can make that link. You know, oh well, you know, the asylum seekers, they're getting everything that they want, which is not true, but it's what they say. And meanwhile you can't get you into fuel payment and your mum who's struggling to walk up the stairs anymore, she can't get her PIP. So that is, and I think these things, and I know how difficult it is, and I know how hard the economic conditions are, but at some stage, I think they're going to have to look at that, because the winter fuel payment, it's kind of gone off the agenda in terms of the media debate, but you talked to anybody who's out there at the moment, that is coming through again and again and then final one, of course, his immigration, which is where we're yet to see them learning the lessons from Denmark.

48:03So Metta Fredrickson is a very interesting example of a left -wing politician who has done a very strident policy on control of immigration. Netherlands is also interesting trying to set targets on numbers. Germany isn't a really interesting conversation with Frederick Metts, and my sense is that Kierstarma and Ivett Cooper haven't quite found their feet because they're still fighting the Rwanda Battle of the past. They need to be serious about safe third country. They need to be learning from what Denmark and the more thoughtful legal approaches that Germany is considering. But this persuasion UK argument, it's very, very low.

48:44I haven't even got to the end of the year. It's about 75 -76 pages, really detailed stuff. But they essentially are saying, for example, Net Zero, these reform curious voters, they are not buying for Argy's line on Net Zero. They know that the planet is kind of burning and they want the government to do something about it. Net Zero actually emerges as one of the most popular, the government suppression Net Zero emerges as one of the most popular policies. So I think that in a sense, we're back to the thing about, you know, social conservatism on some issues, you know, patriotism and the armed forces and your friends and all that stuff.

49:20Fine. But then don't assume that just because the media narrative is driving this sort of conservatism, forageism on some of the big culture issues, don't assume that the country doesn't know what needs to be done and kind of wants it done. And that goes as well for some of the taxation issues. Good. Thank you very much. Speak tomorrow with question. Time to see it all.