400. Question Time: Has the US underestimated China?

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1:27Welcome to the rest of politics question time with me, Rory Stewart. And me, Alistair Campbell. First one for you, Alistair Hannah, is Trump underestimating the ability of China to invest in new alliances at a time that the US seems intent on breaking their ads? Yes, is the short answer. This is what was incredible. So I think they're underestimating China on so many levels. It really came home to me that clip that JD Vance did where he talked about, you know, we're getting peasants in China to manufacture things and we're now buying from peasants. And I think there is that sort of mindset that thinks China is the China of old rather than the China that's grown to the extent that it has.

2:10And there's no doubt that China, we saw this immediately after the whole tariff thing when Xi Jinping went on that tour and to Vietnam, when to Cambodia, when to Malaysia. And you know, we've got Alex Younger on leading on Monday, the former head of MI6. And he makes the point. And this is a point Kurt Campbell, who you remember, who was, you know, expert in China and he was sort of, I think part of the response over the Obama pivot to Asia. And he is always making the point that America's strength has been built through its alliances. And I think there is this kind of hubris and arrogance that America can do everything on its own.

2:49So I think that's a very, very, very wise question. And I was talking yesterday to a senior Indonesian. So Indonesia obviously fourth largest population in the world and mattering more and more as its economy grows. And I was saying, you know, house is playing out for you. And he said, well, how do you think it's playing out? You know, you've got one potential partner who's sending you flowers, telling you you're wonderful. And another partner who's slapping tariffs on you, abusing you and salty you. Do you think that Indonesia is going to look more to China? And you are on your point on technology and this idea that their presence.

3:24He described going to visit Yang Shang Port. So he'd arrived, scene Shanghai and somebody said forget about Shanghai go and see this. It's an artificial island that China built 40 kilometers into the sea. There's a bridge that they built in two and a half years going to it. With wind turbines all around. He arrives and he literally said he only saw two people on the entire island. It's one of the biggest ports in the world. The person who opened the gate and slew it as he went in and the person who slated on the way out. And the rest was all robotics. Exactly. Wow. I've just, I've just Googled a thing that Camber wrote recently.

4:05The greatest risk this is to America is not declineism thinking everything's going to get worse. You just can place and see. If anything, the United States, particularly in the era of Trump, risks overestimating unilateral power and underestimating China's ability to counter it. And a new approach to alliances, the only viable way the United States can build sufficient scale on its own. And if you think about the way he's handled his alliances so far. Tariffs is damaged his relationship with pretty much every country in the world. Canada even on the day of the election. He was doing his 51st state nonsense.

4:40And Polly Everett, the conservative who's seen as the pro -Trump guy, came out and literally said, stay out of our election. Australia, UK, these traditional alliances, he's not seeking to strengthen them. And China, as you say, I mean, you go to Africa a lot. Go to anywhere in Africa at the moment. You feel China's power. We've got two leading interviews. One just out with Atel Gwande, which is an extraordinary count for somebody who was right at the top of USAID about the way that Trump's dismantling of development aid has dismantled all these deep relationships around the world. And a second one coming out next Monday with Alex Younger, which is an infubidity, the former head of MI6, which looks at, well, what Younger says is one of the big problems.

5:30Which is he said, Trump's gone so bad that people are almost seriously seeing China and the US as kind of equal. And he does warn against that? Yeah, however bad Trump's US is. It's not China. And we've got to be serious about where we're going. And a quick question for me before we go to a documentary that we've got a good question from Sammy and James Keane on. What did you think of Atel Gwande? I think it was great. Yeah, really good. Very smart, very clever, very passionate. I found the most powerful part of the interview for me was where he was talking about USAID. Because it's horrific when you see Trump, well, Trump doesn't even care anymore because it's the past.

6:12It's a previous episode of the Real Madrid TV show. But Elon Musk constantly saying no lives are being lost. And there's a guy telling you, lives are going to be lost in their millions because of the cuts to USAID. So no, really good. I hope people listen to that. And I think you're right, Alex Younger has just got such a great strategic mind and a frame and all this stuff. So the documentary, I don't know if you've seen this yet Roy, but we've got lots of questions on it. James Keane, great to hear your reflections on Louis Thuroux's new BBC documentary about Israeli settlers in the West Bank.

6:48Sammy, Israeli settler ideology used to be relatively fringe. Now we even have an Israeli cabinet minister who's himself the settler. And that's Ben Gavir who's in this documentary. Have you seen this? No, I haven't. Tell us about it. Well, it's really, really, really worth you watching. I mean, the combination of the book that I mentioned last week, the German book, War Without End, and this documentary, it's, I just think it's getting harder and harder to be in the position that you and I have tried to be in throughout, which is to kind of be fair and reasonable about both sides. What you see in Louis Thuroux's documentary is, and I saw the Daily Mail having a go, saying he's only showing one side of the story, he's talking to the settlers.

7:35He's deep in with these settlers and he gets in with these people who are really absolutely in the heart of the settler movement. And I mean, just to give you some example of some of the things that they say, there's an extraordinary scene where he goes to the border. They're looking at Garza, you can see sort of smoke coming up. And there's a rabbi who basically says, you can never make peace with savages. And I think he calls them these camel riders. There's another guy who's from Texas moved to his role when he was 16, and who says, and Louis Thuroux uses the word, Palestinian, and he said, I'm not comfortable with that word because they don't really exist.

8:18They want to, they're clear. These people who represent a pretty strong and they're put surrounded, protected by Israeli soldiers and they basically want to wipe Palestinians off the face of the earth. I shall watch it. Let's have a discussion about next week. Yeah. But that does sound very, very bust looking. Here's one for you. Yeah. Adrian, what lessons can we learn from Poland's fight back against right wing populists since the law and justice party took parent 2016 and maybe related to their Agile Kumar, how can labor be reformed rapidly growing populist momentum? Well, certainly looking at Poland is not about thing to do.

8:56Yeah. And so this is something that my great hero, Geryl, can house from ESI. He interviewed me last week for his book. And you liked him? I did like him a lot. And he's writing a book with his daughter about enlargement. Well, he's a real, I mean, just just to do a little plug, forget about he is absolutely amazing. He has lived all over the world. And with young children put them in a government school in Turkey. So these young girls think five or six, learned fluent Turkish, quite tough transition for them. And then move them to France, then they had to learn French and German and British. I've got to say to you, Rory.

9:29I just say to one point, presumably you hear, Rory, describing you in David Gauch, because he's here every single week. He's like, no, I don't listen to me week. Oh, we should. We should listen to this because I'm ESI, his think tank is down, a lot of very, very detailed work on Poland. Did a great report on it. But basically the story in Poland to remind people that in 2015, this far right populist party was elected. Law and justice party. Law and justice party. And in particular, under their ministerial justice tried to dismantle the judiciary. And they said about it firstly by taking on the constitutional courts, then taking on the prosecutors.

10:05And essentially tried to say that they would take over the appointments of judges and any judges who did not favor them, they would discipline fire, get out of their jobs. And there was an amazing fight back. And the two bits of the fight back are Polish judges themselves who were very, very courageous, about a dozen of them who despite the fact they were being threatened, tax -invisserated in the media, losing their jobs, stood up, said we are not accepting these rulings from judges who've been appointed by the government. And we're appealing to the European court of justice even though we've been told not to.

10:37America take note. And on the other hand, the European Union, which actually the European court of justice did quite a brave ruling, it said that interfering in the appointment of judges, putting in basically political apparatus, as your judges, is undermining the European legal system. And Europe then withheld billions of euros of funding. And this story is really interesting because it's part of the story of how Donald Tuss came in because it turned out that actually 80 % of polls pro -EU. And the EU wasn't just a kind of judicial mechanism, it's an idea. It's an idea. And polls in the end preferred the idea of Europe, many of them, to the idea of this far right nationalism.

11:19The problem for Trump, of course, or the problem with Trump's America, is that you don't have that idea of Europe around it. You don't have a European court of justice. You just got a Supreme Court. Yeah. Few people. Yeah. Stuff now increasingly with people who are more sympathetic towards Trump. And it's very difficult to work out how even very brave American judges are going to be able to challenge his attempts to, well, talk about the kind of stuff that he's talking about, not implementing their decisions, deliberately flouting them, impeaching them, undermining them. One of the most alarming social media posts last week was this American judge who was arrested and cash -patel, the head of the FBI, published a photo of her with being taken away by FBI agents in handcuffs with the message nobody's above the law.

12:09Could have added brackets apart from the president. So that sort of feels back to the point about feels very kind of 1930s Germany that does. I think we should really understand that Poland. And if he great, Donald Tusk doesn't do many interviews and he doesn't do much foreign media be great together on the podcast. If anybody who works at all, Tusk listening, please can we get him? Of course, we both think he's really inspiring. And the other thing that's really important in that, because what's happened in some of these popular countries, Hungary being a good example, is the opposition parties coming together and thinking that if we all come together, we can defeat them.

12:47The trouble with that is you've got people looking at them. When the state control media takes you apart, whereas Tusk handled that really, really well. But secondly, people are looking at you and think, well, hold on a minute, this coalition, you've got sort of weird kind of far -right people over there who just aren't with the Law and Justice Party, because there's some particular policy don't like. And then you've got the sort of leftists and the environmentalists over here. And where's the kind of thread? What the polls did was they maintained the opposition parties. But they all then kind of the public sort of worked it out.

13:21And I think they gave the Polish people a lot of kind of credibility and their understanding of what was going on. Added to which they campaigned like hell. They really campaigned. Tusk, he had this bus that went thousands of miles. And they also, they had these big demonstrations, demonstrations for democracy. And they were getting towards the end, they were getting like, you know, into seven figures of people coming out on the street. So they mobilized. It's back to the point you were making about Canada and Australia. When people think there's something really important happening, and you said the same about Corbin against Theresa May, when people think there's something really important in relation, people will turn out.

13:59But you've got to provide that mobilization. So listen, there's lots of lessons in Poland. Now we know we have a lot of MPs who listen, but it's very nice that with some of them, ask questions, here's what from Clive Lewis, Labour MP. 114 ,000 people, he says, have just signed a petition demanding public ownership of our water with 82 % in favour. Meanwhile, a private water company is paid out 78 billion in dividends since privatisation, even as they rack up debts of over 60 billion debts which didn't exist before privatisation. When you add all this together, isn't it finally time for the government to bring water back into public ownership so it can be run in the public interest rather than the private profit?

14:37So thank you for that, Clive. Where are you on water re -nationalisation? Well, I guess here, rather strangely, I'm a little sympathetic with Rachel Reef's, because the problem that Clive Lewis is kind of scutting around is that all those financial problems which those companies are facing would become the government's problems. So the government, if it took over these companies, is suddenly going to have to find tens of millions of pounds to cover their debt and the investment in the public water network is hundreds of billions of pounds worth of investment. And at the moment, the system that's been put in place is that that's financed through the private sector and of course these private water companies.

15:23For a long time, had a very good story. I mean, it's become really bad recently with terms of water, but traditionally the story was that they'd come in and it was costing about a pound for water and a pound for water out and it was more reliable than it was when the government ran it and they'd put all these benefits of pounds into the investment. It's now clear that the model is really broken, but ultimately in a sense it doesn't really matter whether it's the private -central or the public sector. Somebody's got to find a lot of money and in the end that's either going to come from your water bill or it's going to come from your taxes.

15:57Yeah, I mean, I think of all the privatisations. Water is the one that people, maybe railways as well, but people feel is gone the worst in terms of where we are now. And interestingly, I mentioned yesterday on the main podcast, that's the main episode. I mentioned this report from Persuasion UK about so -called reform, curious, labor voters. Interestingly, this issue of water and sewage in our waterways was right up there in terms of what they really, really, really care about. And again, that goes maybe against because what we think of in the reform is that they're obsessed with net zero, climate change isn't real, all this sort of stuff.

16:40Whereas actually, so these voters, this, so where I've got a lot of sympathy with Clive, is on the politics of this, labor having rightly campaigned a lot on this in opposition, furlsharking, leading that sort of great water campaign, sewage campaign. I don't, I, I, I know Steve Reed is, is doing stuff in relation to water. And, but it's one of those issues that is so complicated that outwears the kind of sloganising and the campaigning messages, very difficult to know what the government will actually do. And it's also a classic one where the Treasury and Rachel Reeves and the kind of credit solution is looking at a particular very narrow cost benefit model.

17:21Right? So I remember I was the water minister, so I used to do this stuff for a year. What would happen is you'd say, well, look, you know, 85 % of our beaches that are in adequate standard for which Reed 15 % have bits of poo flaking around on them, right? Then the Treasury says, yes, but it will cost, you know, tens of billions of pounds to clean them up. Right? And this number of people use those beaches a year in this particular beachy point out, you know, according to our figures, only gets 500 people going on it. Yeah, right? So this is something that is very typical of a problem in modern government, which is that narrow economic calculus of the sort that Treasury doesn't cost benefit, doesn't capture the fact that actually maybe the public would be prepared to pay quite a lot of to not have poo flaking around on their beaches.

18:10And an economist saying, well, yes, but if only 400 people use the beach and the cost of cleaning up the beaches, X million, then you're paying the sound. But is missing something really, really important about our values, about the kind of country we want to be? And of course, looking at Europe where they seem to be able to do this stuff and Europeans seem to be prepared to pay and to manage it. Yeah. Well, I can remember back in the day when we were in government and Britain was in the European Union, that one of the things that we used to track on our famous grid at a lower level of communication was regular updates about beach cleanliness.

18:51And people really really mattered. And I don't think if an economist says only 400 people use that beach and 30 ,000 people use that beach. Nobody cares. They want to know that our waterways are clean, our beaches are clean. And that should be, I talked yesterday about a national narrative, that should be part of it. So I think I may be wrong about the, you're saying he may be wrong about the solution, but that his analysis is spot on and the politics of this are really, really powerful. Thank you, Clive Lewis, his occasionally controversial thing on the Labour Party as some listeners will know.

19:25Yeah, he's on the left, as I say. He's on the left. But he can be an extraordinary charismatic speaker. Yeah, he's very, very good. Very, very good. Yeah. Yeah. Um, let's take a quick break.

19:39Welcome back.

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21:00The question is this, how realistic is it to expect radical change following David Gawke's sentencing review? That's your hero, former justice secretary's doing a sentence review of the government. The government has been admirably progressive, says Simon, in its approach to justice with the appointment of people like Lord Timson, as prison's minister. But what will it take to create a justice system that focuses much on rehabilitation as much as punishment? And of course, Simon, what you won't know is that last night Rory and I were at an event and David Gawke was sitting there. So it was Nadeem Zahawi.

21:31We were. And it was for the wonderful charity run by David Dean, ex of Arsenal of Fame, called the training project, which clubs, football clubs, train prisoners to become coaches and grants keepers and other things. Exactly. But then when they get out of prison and there were four people who made this fabulous speeches last night about how their lives have been transformed by this project. So it was kind of, it was rehabilitation in action. It was, it was amazing. And they've done research with Oxford University and it's very, very clear that prisoners engaging with football clubs has a really positive impact on their optimism, their mental health, their confidence that their life's going to be better when they're at a prison.

22:14And the problem underlying this that you know, you've seen and that I saw a lot when I was working at the prison's minister is that rear fending rates are 50 percent. Half of prisoners leave and reoffend. In certain categories, it's up to nearly 60, 70 percent rear fending. And as they were pointing out, the cost of keeping somebody in prison is more than paying for an Ethan school fee. It's 50 ,000 pounds a year. So it's good for society above all. That's the most important thing. Victims of crime, right? You don't want people reoffending. Criminals coming out, committing more crime. We got to be sympathetic towards the public.

22:53But it's also true that we need to think about the interests of prisoners. And it's a difficult thing to talk about. But it's a former shared suffering, suffering the victim. But it's also true that prisoners are often, as I think we said before, from very, very poor backgrounds, you know, something like when I was the prison's minister, I think 40 percent of prisoners had been in care compared to 2 percent of the general population. That tells you something like 20 times as many as the general population, almost half of them have been in care of children, almost the same number of being excluded from school, nearly half had mental health issues.

23:28And there's something again, you know, this relates a little bit to your conversation about Clive Lewis about the way the government counts things. So one of the promises there's very, very little government money to support charities working in prisons. Because the Treasury does this calculation where they say, unless you can do a randomized control trial proving exactly how much money you're saving through stopping, reoffending and comparative alternative treatments, etc. We won't support it. Essentially last night, there was the, there was people in lots of university and Greenwich University who had tracked and monitored the rehabilitative effects of this scheme.

24:06But it was incredibly positive. It's incredibly positive, but the government went for it. And I've seen this again and again. The clubs don't really fund it. Well, that's really good. Let me just finish the government. Yeah. To the clubs because you'll understand the clubs. I mean, just on the government, I think they're missing something really important, which is actually providing environments in prison, which are safe, decent, clean, non -violent, where prisoners can begin to sort themselves out and think about getting jobs and sort out their mental health. Is good for the prisons, good for the way that we run prisons, and it's good for society afterwards.