407. Question Time: The U-turn Starmer Can’t Avoid

0:00Thanks for listening to The Restless Politics. Sign up to The Restless Politics plus to enjoy ad -free listening and receive a weekly newsletter. Join our members' chat room again early access to live show tickets. Just go to TheRestlessPolitics .com. That's TheRestlessPolitics .com. The restless politics is as ever powered by our friends at Fuse Energy. And if you've got an electric vehicle or you're thinking of switching, Fuse can help you with that. They're offering a new overnight charge in tariffs that makes things very, very simple. It's available now through their iOS app and Android's on its way.

0:32It works with a wide and growing range of home charges. No obscure hardware, no complicated setup. You just plug in your charge overnight and you're on your way. And you can even get that electric vehicle charger installed at home in this little of seven days depending on your setup. Hardware fitting the whole lot handled. Which, let's be honest, is not something you hear about every product you deal with. And when you sign up, you'll get Trip Plus membership completely free. That's not just ad -free listening. That's the amazing bonus episodes and unique interviews that we do early access to question time and pre -sale tickets to our live shows.

1:02So while your car charges, you're also helping our podcast. Just head to getfuse .com slash politics, download the app and use the code politics when you sign up. Practical, painless, no -committed required.

1:24Welcome to the rest of the question time with me, Aztec Campbell. And with me, Rory Stewart. And we've had quite a strange week, Rory, because Monday we did the live on the UKEU summit. We made a episode when at yesterday and when now you promised you were going to talk about the Romanian election. So Monica wants to know whether we think that the defeat of the hard -right candidate in the Romanian election is a vindication of those who stop the election first time round or the pandering to people who don't believe in democracy. Let's give a quick explainer than just remind people. So first time round, a man called Colin George Escu rang and it appeared that he was running off a staggering number.

2:11I mean hundreds of thousands of accounts which appeared to be linked to Russia. Having won the first round and he'd come from nowhere completely unknown figure, the election was stopped. This provoked real outrage, including I think from people I musk and JD Vance and others who sort as a real attack on freedom of speech and democracy. The elections were then rerun and representing the far right was a man called George's Simeon and running against him. Mr Dan, he calls Dan, who's the Mayor of Bucharest. And in the first round Simeon got 40 % of the vote, Dan got 20%. So it really did look as though the far right were doing very well.

2:49In the second round, actually, Nicholson Dan got 53%, and George's Simeon got 47%. So it is a welcome sign in a sense because this liberal, apparently really good mayor of Bucharest, who people like, has won and it would have been a real blow for Romania, which is a big, you know, serious NATO contributor had gone in the far right direction because, you know, those candidates were talking about expelling NATO troops, teaming up with Putin effects of the against Ukraine, etc. But it was skin of the teeth. I mean, it was real skin of the teeth. And as we've seen in some other countries, the two major mainstream parties have completely blown up.

3:31The traditional centre -left, centre -right parties have vanished from the scene and these new parties emerge from nowhere. So it's also a sign of real instability. What was really interesting was when the result came out. And it was, you know, you say it was skin of the teeth, but actually given the background and given the, although as you say, the Mayor of Bucharest is a popular figure within Bucharest and well, have you, but actually it was a pretty convincing win, considering where it was coming from. If you take the first election, the one that was enrolled, as a genuine indication of the politics of the country, of course, what would have happened had he lost.

4:08You would then have had countries in Eastern Europe. We often talk about, about Moldova. I noticed that Maya Sandu, lead from Moldova, was the first out, was congratulations, because they would have been sitting there thinking, look, if Hungary is already kind of within the Hutons sphere of influence, remaining there as well. This is a guy who during the election was saying things like, you know, people need to elect me so that we can undo the policies of dictators like Macron and von the Lion. I mean, this was a absolute full -on against the European Union despite all the help that Romania has had in developing itself.

4:44So I think it is pretty, we shouldn't overstate it, but I certainly put it into the Albo -Marcarni category of elections that I welcome the result. Really welcome the result, but still very, very disturbing, because Romania, you know, Romania was a country which in the 20s and 30s was ravaged by, you know, military coups, fascist parties, then had the horrors of Chowchescu during the communist era. Then in the 1990s, pretty bad politics were former communist like Iliescu with sending coal miners in to beat up the opposition massive corruption scandals. And really, it's thanks to the Cosfo war, which you were very strongly involved in, Romania coming in with the allies in that, that they got the opportunity to join the European Union.

5:32And since they have, they've been a pretty remarkable success story in terms of the way in which their economy's gone. I mean, Bucharest, I first saw Bucharest in I guess 1990, and it was an unbelievably poor city, and now it's a really prosperous place. But there's another story to Romania, I suppose, which is that there were very interesting statistics around expatriate Remenians, because many, many Remenians now work abroad. A lot of the economies kept going with remittances. I remember going to a village in Romania, Transylvania, and no single were basically no men to be seen. Or women working the fields, and all the men were working in Germany for that village.

6:11And a surprising number of them in places like Spain and Germany, 68 % were voting for the far right. Whereas the Remenians in Moldova, as you said, are voting overwhelmingly for the Moldiberal Pro -Eu Center. Anyway, really something to watch, because it's part of this general story, which is that even if they didn't make it through this time, gosh, there's no room for complacency, and those two main parties and Romania did get too complacent and have been wiped out. Question for you, Sean, given Labour's welfare cards, winter fuel allowance, disability benefits, and the roast recent talk of immigration having done incalculable damage to the UK economically and politically, how much more right do Labour need to go before we have to admit it's not a centre left party anymore?

7:01I was reminded of the fact that we didn't explain to people because it would confuse them, but in Portugal, the centre right party is actually called the social democrats. We're talking about the immigration incalculable damage, island of stranger stuff last week, and I didn't hide the fact then, I didn't like that.

7:21I think that's a fairly, fairly left -wing, socially a bit more conservative, but the problem is that the stuff that is really connected with people is stuff that people have not expected from a left -wing government. I was up in Scotland over the weekend and spoke to quite a few people, including quite a lot of local politicians, Labour and SNP, and I was really quite surprised that they were saying that people talk about reform in England, they talk about reform in Wales, reformers got next to no local political profile at all, but they're doing pretty well in the polls in Scotland as well. I think this is a policy, the winter fuel allowance is a policy that I think Labour will be very, very wise to change.

8:14I thought at the start when they came in, the explanation was this so -called black economic black hole, the things are worse than we thought, etc. I'll tell you what one guy said to me, it's really interesting, Labour guy, he said that when we keep talking about tough choices, people have started to notice that these are all tough choices made at these pence of the poor and not the rich. Now Labour could argue that they're doing this on health and they've done the private school stuff and all that, so there's stuff they can point to, but in the end, a lot of politics is about what is connecting with the public and I was not taking a back because it, but I was, I guess I always get a different feel of politics in Scotland and this time the feeling I got was people really think this winter fuel thing is just not what a Labour government should be doing and I think they just need to get to the place of saying that we did it for the reasons that we said at the time, we actually think we should reverse a lot of it, we should reform it so as the people like me, I'm 67 now, I shouldn't get it because I'm pretty well off and you know, but maybe people in the middle you could think about take some sort of tapering system, but poorer people should actually get more of it and I think it's sometimes a U -turn is what gets you back on the road and I think this is one that I would make.

9:27Well, honestly, I mean, I think it's a, it's really interesting because it was one of the ones which I thought that I supported, I mean, for the same reason that you mentioned which is I couldn't understand why my mother was getting went to fuel allowance and because it wasn't something it traditionally existed, it just been introduced by Gordon Brown and it was costing so much, I mean, it was, you know, the cost of went to fuel ads was about twice the entire budget of the UK, foreign office, for example. I thought it was one that we should get rid of and the reason it wasn't happening was that when the Conservatives were in government was because people like George were quite wily and thought that it would be politically very unpopular even if it made economic sense, but the sort of those first sort of being more geeky and tentacratics thought there are other ways of doing welfare payments.

10:16We don't need to use winter fuel allowance to do that. We can target poverty more accurately in other ways and what's my mother doing getting this check? So, I mean, the things that I'm more troubled by are things like them not dealing with the two child benefit cap, which is going to really lead to a lot of you talked about them being left when you can't do, they don't feel very left when you can normally there's going to be a big rise in child poverty. I'm also very confused about why they cut international development quite so much when Trump was cutting it at the same time. I mean, because Britain and the US together were covering about 30, 40 % of international development, particularly in things like health.

10:56And I'm also wondering, I mean, if they're economically, as the data's coming in now and of course, it'll be disputed. But certainly seems in the short term as though it is true that we're losing a lot of billionaires and millionaires out of the country. Somebody who's actually quite close to the labor party said to me that they're a bit confused by that too because Rachel Reese is falling over backwards trying to attract investment and wealthy people to the United Kingdom. But actually, an easier thing to do would be to keep them in the first place rather than driving them out, particularly with the changes around inheritance tax on non -doms.

11:29So, there's a lot of stuff that doesn't quite add up at the moment. And I guess maybe you're saying what fuel allowance though, is the thing that you feel really strikes the soul of the party. I don't think it's really about the party. This feels to me actually like something that the party is sort of thought you could wear. The media is going to give an up talking about it for quite a while, but it's definitely out there is something that has had a real impact on some people. But it's had a really profound, I think, symbolic political impact on a lot of other people. And it then plays into all this other stuff.

11:59So that I wouldn't also, I wouldn't underestimate the impact of Kierstarmer and the British government's position on Gaza, the feeling that people just want to feel that their government really, really gets it and says things. And even though, you know, we had a question this week, what power does the UK government actually really have? Well, maybe not much, but you know, it was, it was best rugby at Skyaz to press, ask Kierstarmer at the press conference the other day. When you say you've done everything you can, do you think you can really say that? Well, all these sort of things build up. And I think the point about left wing right wing, I think that, you know, Kierst has this word that he uses all the time, about, you know, pragmatic solutions, trying to resolve issues.

12:40And I think sometimes the dust feels to me a clash between the kind of the overall big messaging. So even when I said that, when I said they're going to be left wing economically, immediately quite a few things popped into my head that I thought, oh, maybe that's not quite right. And I'll tell you, I think generally on the strategy, on the overall strategy, I feel sometimes what's going on, that there's a lot of politics goes on, but I'm not sure that's always the same thing as political strategy. So I think, you know, you hear, I've heard too many people or a red of too many people saying, oh, well, you know, we've got to, we've got to sort of, you know, hit hard on immigration because that's the way to keep the reform people on side.

13:22And, you know, I just think that there's too much sort of taking for granted on the left. But I guess when I was saying about Winterfuel hours, they need one big thing, I think, to basically say, you know, we don't always get everything right. This is something we did for the right reasons at the right, at the right time. But actually, we've underestimated the impact that it's had. We're going to undo it. We're going to reform it. We're not going to go back to Universal Everybody gets it. We're going to reform it because we've heard loud and clear what you said. Now, Deutschland, if I can go back to Deutschland, Jan, it could be Jan or it could be Jan.

13:57Mayots, new chancellor threatened to do this, but I don't think any of us in Germany, I was a German thought he would actually deny asylum at the border in conflict with the European Court of Justice is ruling. This is surely a very extreme method to curb immigration. Yeah, very strange. So this is something that's a trial and famously when he tried to bring it to a non -binding vote. This is before the election, only the FD were prepared to come with him. His coalition partners from the left have been very, very uncomfortable with this. And what he's basically done is he said it's an emergency and I'm no longer going to accept asylum at the border.

14:35Now, whether it's actually happening is a bit in dispute. The polls in the Austrians are saying he stated it, but actually people are going through the border. If he really does it, though, it's very dangerous because what will then happen is the European Court of Justice case will be taken to them and they will have to rule, almost certainly, there isn't an emergency and he is contravening European law. Now, remember, European law means laws that German politicians have signed up to. It's not here's Germany and there's Europe as a separate thing. And that's a real gift to the far right in the FD because that will then allow them to say, aha, you see, we always told you you're not going to be able to come up with a sensible way of controlling immigration because the European Union and the ECJ weren't let you do it, which is why we the FD think you should lead shangan, etc.

15:23So very, very dangerous stuff that's is doing here. And which is why I want to return to the extraordinary proposals made by Geryl Knass, which I still think are the smartest things that we've got on the table, about how to think about safe third country returns, how to think about working out a solution that both stops boats crossing the channel to Britain, also deals with Germany's problems, brings Turkey into this equation, talks to North Africa and really addresses this rather than trying to break European law and address it together, not individual countries doing. The guy at the heart of this is a guy called Alexander Dobrant who is the interior minister and he's of the same political breeders as Mertz.

16:06And so you had a government spokesman, but what this relates to, and some of the Italians did is you can declare an emergency, okay? If you declare an emergency, you can then invoke the special clause, it's called article 72 -TFEU. And you can you can invoke this and that then will allow you to take these sort of special measures in an emergency. Government spokesman comes out on the back of newspaper reports, and this is no, this is not happening, but then same day Dobrant said he's not ruling out. So that's what I think he's leading people to think they're really testing the waters on this. And as you say, if they test the waters and really go for it, that is a very, very, very big, very big deal.

16:52Now Rory is one. I love trees. I do my tree of the day. You love trees. Ryan, Trip Plus Member from Chester. Over the past decade, activism and protest have raised significant awareness of climate change, of environmental protection, and the need for urgent action, even if some methods are controversial. But with anti -climate populist deniers and doubt is gaining more attention, a growing appetite for chaos, could we also see a rise in activism against climate action? While the motive behind the felling of the Sikkimorga tree remains unclear, my similar acts targeting symbols of environmentalism, emerges protests against regulation.

17:33There was a brilliant piece in the observer that the weekend by Garko Andrew Hankinson, who also, I think, written a book about that guy, Raul Moat. But it was a really, really, really long read about the trial and the background of the Sikkimorga tree felling. This is right in the heart of my constituency. So I had half -hedrin's wall of my constituency, and the Sikkimorga for international listeners was the most iconic thing because it stars in great Hollywood version of Robin Hood because Kevin Koster is sitting on this tree. So the wall comes down and the tree is perfectly placed, growing in the middle of it, and a couple of cumbrens appear to have driven over and chopped it down for a laugh, causing real sadness and devastation because it is the great image.

18:24I mean, it's difficult to quite express how central that is to the way that we think about the wall and the way we think about nature. And I guess maybe the question is getting at something which is the sense that a lot of what's going on in politics at the moment has this kind of sort of destructive iconoclastic edge that they may, at some subconscious level, it's a difficult to understand what motivated them entirely, but at some subconscious level, they clearly thought it would be really funny to take out something that was so precious to so many people. Yeah, it was interesting. And as I said, it's a really long read and we should maybe put it in the newsletter because what comes out of it is what reading it, there's a lot of it is just the transcript of these guys' interviews with the police or their evidence or my view.

19:13And it's not entirely clear. What is, and they definitely don't strike me as being as it were politically motivated. I don't think they've been sentenced yet, but I get the feeling they're going to get quite long sentences that have been found guilty. And also, you underest, what you said there, you underestimate just how big a deal this story was right around the world. I mean, it was literally, people are aware of this tree and the similars, and not just because, but you know, before, I think one of the reason the Robin Hood film was filmed there was because the tree was already so famous rather than the tree became famous because of Kevin Kossner.

19:48But anyway, it's a good reason because it just sort of, I read it and thought, you know, all the coverage I've seen, I don't really get a sense of these two characters at all. You just make assumptions that there's sort of, you know, just sort of mindless thugs going to chop this great tree down, but it sort of speaks to sort of something deeper going on. We're about to get into the sentencing review, and that's going to be very interesting on Thursday. David Gork, my hero is about to announce the sentencing review he's been doing with the government about how long you put people in jail for. And one of the interesting things that may be happening, and I just did an event speaking at number one caught in the old Bailey, which is where all these great death penalty cases used to happen.

20:24And somebody pointed out that there's a big shift, which is in the past, the people who were generally on the side of reducing sentences were the left. But the writers now are quite interested in reducing sentences because they're beginning to get a bit perplexed by why people are getting long sentences for cutting down trees or posting stuff on Twitter. And the basic deal is that our prisons are massively overcrowded, and really we should as a root of thumb keep prison for people who are violent dangers to citizens. I mean, there are many many offenses committed in our country all the time, but we simply don't have the spaces.

20:57And at the moment our prisons are just places where we put often people who are mentally ill, who have serious social problems and just make them worse. And so I think one of the other things that we're picking up with Kirsten, I'm going to be interesting to see how this works out in sentencing review, is he's created a site culture which is about locking people up at exactly the time when we should be locking up few and not more. And I'm afraid these people what they did was horrible, but in a totally overcrowded, insane prison system, which should really be kept for murderers and violent criminals, I'm not sure it's a good use of a prison place that costs more than eaten to put people around for cutting down a tree.

21:37Okay, okay, you live upset quite a lot of people with that, Rory. You who say you love you're conservative because if you love a landscape, that's it. I'm here to upset people all the time. That's what my job is. I'm love trees. I'm second to know my love of trees, but one of the ways in which Britain is an outlier in Europe is only about 40 % of the people in our prisons are in for violent crimes. In almost everywhere else in Europe, prisons are really reserved for people with violent crimes. And we really love locking people up. And this is just another example of it. This just happens to be a case that appeals to the left.

22:11Yeah, I told you the day I was in Pentable the other day and I've just a minute eight out of ten prisoners on demand, which is even worse. I'm just sort of to explain to people, demand prisoners of people who haven't been convicted, which means they don't actually really get any services. They don't go into education. They could be there for months for a year and they're really getting nothing at all during that whole time, just having horrible lives. Let's take a quick break. And then after break, I want to ask you about your enormous friend, Eddie Rama, and we'll maybe touch on Mexican judges, the SAS, and that'll probably be about it.

22:41Okay.

22:46This isn't ad from BetterHelp. At the moment, we're getting advice from everywhere. You just have to go on TikTok. Could be Alice's cold plunges, could be my attempts to meditate or the digital detox that I'm doing in Colombia. But of course, one of the things that we know is that it can be incredibly valuable to talk to another human being, somebody who's actually been trained as a therapist to work through these ideas, calmly, objectively, and professionally. And as the largest online therapy provider in the world, BetterHelp can provide access to mental health professionals with a very diverse variety of expertise.

23:22They've got over 5 ,000 therapists in the UK. They've helped more than five million people globally, and you can join a session literally at the click of a button, change therapists anytime. So it's not about fixing you, but it's about hearing yourself clearly, maybe for the first time. So talk it out with BetterHelp. Our listeners get 10 % of their first month at BetterHelp .com slash Rest Politics. That's better H -E -L -P .com slash Rest Politics.

23:54Welcome back to the Rest Politics. Question time with me, Roy Stewart. And me, Anastakamble. Question from Jeff Spink. What was behind the Starmer Rama miscommunication? Starmer Rama? Was the UK PM as blindsided as he appeared to be? Surely these positions were agreed in advance, not in front of the media. Right? Eddie Rama and Kierstarm, of course, two of our favourite people both interviewed on the podcast. So unleading, if you want to hear our interviews with them. Eddie Rama, who also did an extraordinary kind of bow to Georgian Maloney on a red carpet in Italy, because he's exactly twice her size.

24:27But tell us about the Starmer Rama, is he? The Albanians were very, very exciting, of course. David Cameron almost made a visit to Albania. He was basically en route. All the red carpets and the flags were laid out, and then he got hauled back for one of those three line whip votes in the economy. One of the something was going on that fell apart, and he got hauled back. So Kierstarm was the first serving Tony Blair's being job -aid, but for serving Prime Minister, and this was because of the in advance of the European political community meeting that Eddie Rama was hosting. So there's this press conference they do together where the media say Kierstarm was sort of, agreements to get asylum seekers processed in a third country.

25:21And Eddie Rama said, and by the way, this is something that was known and had been put into the media beforehand, said that they'd done this thing with Italy. Albania had done this deal with Italy, but that was it. There were going to be no more. So I'm afraid I'm going to speak up for Kierstarm and Eddie Rama here. I think this was a case of journalist refusing to believe what, because it made a better story, if this to be a slapdown, that actually they're already been told this was not going to happen. So it didn't, it wasn't great. I want to say something else about Albania, because you're right, Rory.