422. Things Can Only Get Better? Starmer's Stormy First Year

25:04But again, it was something that Cameron was trying to do an enormous amount. I put a lot of talented housing ministers in and failed. So it still feels as though he's hoping that he can fix it. I don't know, it's as though he's inherited a kind of old banger. And he thinks that with a kind of relatively modest budget, he can get the car running pretty smoothly again. And you know, a little bit of work on the engine, a little bit of work on the paintwork. Let's get a few more thousand teachers into school. Let's put a little bit more money into the NHS. Everything will be fine. Whereas there are a lot of people out there, I think from the left of the Labour Party to forage on the right who are saying, ah, this, this old banger is really broken.

25:47And you're not going to be able to continue to drive it for the next 15, 20 years, just with this kind of money you're putting into it. As you know, going to quite a lot of schools, and I've been struck in the last two or three that I've been in just how disappointed and defeated people feel. There was one that had teacher I saw who said, look, it's great that, you know, free school meals, but we kind of, we have that in London anyway. And he actually said, I don't see that as an education policy. It's a child poverty policy. Something else he said, which I thought was really interesting, was that he said something happened during the pandemic that we don't yet understand.

26:28There's a primary school where he was saying that some of the really young kids not toilet trained, the rise in special educational needs is off the scale. And of course, as we go further down the track towards, will she want she have to put up taxes? One of the things that's coming into into view is, oh, well, are we spending too much on special educational needs? And the answer is, well, we're spending a lot more, but that's because the need has grown, and we haven't fully got to the bottom of why. So another head teacher I saw recently said that I'm literally running to standstill, and I cannot deliver proper education for the kids who are in here.

27:08Now, this is okay. Labour would say, well, we're only being a year. What I would say is that at this stage of a year in under New Labour, David Blunkett and Education, teachers and headteachers had lots of excitement about things that they had heard were coming. And I think that's where, what you were saying, what I think I'm saying, what these guys are saying, there is at the moment a gap between what people feel about the state of the country and the policy solutions that are being offered to fill that gap. And I think the first year, okay, you can give them some credit for fixing some of the foundations and real wages are rising, where streeting is getting the waiting list down.

27:54Some houses are getting built, although the numbers are pretty terrifyingly low when you look at the pledge of 1 .5 million. But there is going to have to be an acceleration of policy, momentum, change, don't forget, it's change that they were elected to to deliver. And here's some as clear, not somebody who's comfortable on the big narrative thing. I get that. And you know, when I heard, I heard Tom Bourbon talking about this earlier, and he was saying that people are sick of being offered big change and never comes. So actually, maybe over time, this style will work. I don't buy this Tom Bourbon line.

28:32I think he's right about Starmarr. I think Starmarr doesn't believe in Starmarrism. And I can completely empathize with that because I felt, you know, like Starmarr, I'd been a sort of civil servant and I felt I'd been quite proud of what I'd done in my jobs in the past. And therefore I could do the same thing when I became a minister. And my experience becoming a minister is politics is completely different to managing a business or a civil service department. You're not really in the business of just running a sleeves up, doing a seminar, looking at the evidence, making a kind of marginal decision and then, you know, weighing it up.

29:09And it what makes the difference between a great politician, a poor politician isn't how many hours you work, how smart you are, how carefully you are. It's the big story. And I think that it's never been true that great politicians can get by without a very, very clear narrative ambition. And it's even more true today in the world of social media in this modern world. That's impossible. It just doesn't work. And I don't know what Tom Bourbon's political experience is, that he somehow thinks this is okay. I mean, it's fine. As a way of expressing star, it's a fine as a way. I mean, I remember when I was running to be a prime minister trying to say to my team, I'm very suspicious of big ideas.

29:52I'm very suspicious of slogans. I just want to roll my sleeves up, get things done. I just want to make things work better. Basically, you could sense they were thinking, ah, this isn't quite work. And of course, now looking back on it, I realized that the only things I really managed to achieve were much bigger, bolder. You know, I'm going to resign and prisons unless violence comes down. I'm going to double the climate spending in Diffit. And so I don't quite get the ball with it. I can't quite believe it. It doesn't seem to me that it can work. There's no star rhythm. I don't believe in big ideas.

30:24Well, it worked for Albanese, similar sort of approach. I think the other thing that Tom's doing is taking the experience of Kirstama as a leader of the opposition. Don't forget, he was written off as leader of the opposition at several points. Yeah. And basically saying he keeps being written off people underestimated and that place was advantaged over time. Where I think it is different is that government is so much harder and so much more complicated. You know, maybe we may be before we go to the break just sort of wrap up on by sort of reflecting on what they can do better in the second year.

30:57Because believe me, I was talking to one of the key strategy people recently and he said, well, we've got time. You guys keep going on about, you know, you're going to write, but the fact is you don't have that much time. A year has gone. And there is still, I always talk about three currencies and policies. You've got the economic stuff. The value of your pound goes up and down. The strength of your economy goes up and down. But the other two currencies that really matter are reputation and goodwill. You need goodwill for when you have these really tough times. So what they found is that actually they've drained within the PLP, the parliamentary labor party, they've drained quite a lot of the goodwill currency.

31:34And because they haven't delivered a lot of life, for example, getting the welfare bill through without this kerfuffle and this massive debate in rebellion, that has drained their reputation for competence. So that has their reputation. So those currencies have to be re, you have to redevelop them. You have to win back the goodwill. You have to win back the reputation. And then you have to keep going on with the difficult decisions you've got to make. And I think the one Labour MP I was talking to, who, not one of the new ones, but somebody who probably is in that category that feels a little bit ignored and overlooked.

32:08She said the look, you know, when you guys were in charge, right? We moaned a lot. We did moan a lot, but we sort of, we sort of felt you guys knew what you were doing most of the time. And that gave us, and also we knew that you were at least reaching out. And you might be reaching out. I mean, I heard Diane Abbott being interviewed on the radio the other day. And you know, Diane Abbott, probably leveled more criticism. My and Tony's way the most. But she did make that point. She said, look, Tony, I disagree with so much of what they did. But the phone was always there. They were always willing to talk to us and so forth.

32:44So I think there's going to be that resetting relationships. And then with the public, you know, I'll keep saying this to Kim. Let's see. I'll keep saying it publicly as well. I think this idea that a narrative is somehow spin. A narrative is the means by which you exercise leadership to people who are not listening all the time. I've always believed in your view there because narrative is leadership. Narrative is telling the entire civil service what the big idea is. I remember Margaret Thatcher's minister saying the great power of the narrative is that it allows delegation meant that every one of her ministers could answer the question, what would Margaret Thatcher be doing?

33:25And all the civil servants understood what was supposed to be happening. Two final things from me, I think the Labour Party isn't acknowledging that right at the centre of our problems is that our government structures are broken. My 10 years was all about learning how this Parliament, this electoral system, this party system, this ministerial governmental system is really broken and just doesn't work and needs very, very fundamental constitutional reform. And the second thing is my experience from Cumbria, which was that many of my constituents were bewildered by the fact that they were told that the country was getting ever wealthier, but that they couldn't keep things that they taken for granted in the 1940s and 50s.

34:10So if the country is getting wealthier, why do we have to lose our community hospital? Why are we losing our fire station? Why are we losing our police station? Much of my life as a constituency MP was demonstrating to try to keep things, I was endlessly out fighting to save things all the time. And so the experience in particularly in Northern England is this government, it's not that things are remaining the same, it feels as those things are getting worse. Some sort needs to go from the government's point of view on what's going on there. You know, why do farmers feel their lives are getting worse?

34:46Why do teachers feel they're close to breaking point? Why do communities feel so angry and ignored? And I don't think I'm getting from the government an analysis of that problem or a solution. So final point where he marks out of 10 on the five missions growth? Well, it's fine, but pretty anemic. I mean, it's all about, you know, other countries are doing really rubbish. So maybe we're doing this right, but it's certainly not enough growth to generate anything. Okay, health just just came out of a hospital, told you, and I thought it as many many of this old strength and weakness as the NHS, I think the problem there is going to be productivity.

35:21We've put a lot more doctors in. We're not yet seeing the results in terms of patient outcomes. Crime. Again, people are pretty angry about that. Most of the polling suggests they're not cutting through on that. Class ceiling. Getting rid of the class ceiling. Yeah, well, again, it's it's not it's tinkering. It's not social democracy. It's not we're going to create a profoundly more equal society. It's we're going to do a few billion here, a few billion there, but fundamentally, Britain will remain unequal. And the fifth mission, the green one. Well, they're there being much more imaginative. They're spending much more money, and there I suspect they may much make much more progress.

35:56I guess the question is how does that this priority really work for voters in the economy? Okay, so we've already stood as a well out of five. How would you mark them on those five? Growth, I would say five five out of ten. If they're really serious about growth, you have to look at every policy through the lens of grows, and that would absolutely say get back in the customs union. Obviously, that fairly consistently. On the on the education one, I'd have been more positive until the last week when I've been inside a few schools. Health, I think they're doing better. Green I agree with you. I think they're doing better.

36:31Crime, jury very out. And I think that the home office was a bit of a loser in the spending rounds, so that's going to be tough for the police. Time for a break.

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37:53Welcome back to the rest of this politics with me, Rory Stewart and me, Alice Campbell. And Rory, there's lots we can talk about in relation to Donald Trump, but I've been logging a lot of the stuff that relates to the money that he and his family are making and it's beyond, it's off the scale. Well, I was talking to a constitutional lawyer at Harvard. And he said to me that the biggest, most unambiguous, storyous corruption in a sense, the jury's out on quite a lot of the other democratic backsliding. Is he going to respect the courts, isn't he? What's he going to do with the federal local? But the one thing that's changed in a way that has taken us almost back to the 19th century is the old corruption where the capital O has come back into our compulsive.

38:43The capital C, O and C, maybe old corruption. The old corruption was a big revolutionary symbol. And of course, it feels like 18th century British politics. I mean, it's the stuff we tried clear up with the Victorians. But it's also a very, very, very modern version of it. So I was reading something that his crypto earnings now are probably greater than his property earnings, which should be pretty cool. And last night, Rory, just think of all the things that are going on in the world now that the American president could go on to his money making truth social post network and say, so this is the one from last night.

39:22From the president of the United States, Trump fragrances are here. They're called victory 45, 47 because they're all about winning, strength and success. For men and women, get yourself a bottle and don't forget to get one for your loved ones too. Enjoy, have fun, keep winning them as a link to the website. And a picture, they are, it's a slim looking Donald Trump done in the fall of an Oscar on top of the thing that you spray with his signature across the top. Now, you're laughing. We can all laugh at it. But can you imagine not just any president in history? Can you imagine any current world leader and you've got Trump sneakers?

40:04You've got Trump watching it. It is pretty amazing because because as you're right, the reason we don't get any other current world leader doing it is that even in the poorest countries in the developing world, corruption has gone completely central to everything in politics. I mean, obviously, if you're a Nigerian politician or if you're in China or you're in Vietnam or Cambodia or in Indonesia, corruption is the number one thing you say about your politicians. And it's the number one thing that your president tries to pretend to be cracking down on. In fact, most of the electoral campaign, if you're running to be Nigerian president, is I'm going to eliminate corruption.

40:40So you can't in those countries go around blatantly taking jets from other countries. You can't go around launching mean coins, NFTs, generating money in this kind of way. You have to try to do it secretly. Trump's totally open style implies firstly that America oddly, he must sense that America doesn't really care about corruption, that his voters are not worried in the way that Nigerian voters are about corruption. Otherwise, he wouldn't be doing it so openly. Well, we weigh you right.

41:22He's must feel very uncomfortable about this. Their line of defenses. Well, look, this is all out in the open. He's doing all out in the open. But it's now reaching over into policy. So, for example, he is yet again on his truth social where he makes a lot of money out of that as well. He's been posting about Netanyahu's court case, his corruption case. And he's been saying that Netanyahu's a great guy and he's a war leader, leave him alone, drop this case. It's like the witch hunt against me. There's a story today about Bukali and Al Salvador wanting some of these gang members. He wants them sent back, not because he's cares about their welfare or anything else, because he's worried about whether they would testify to some of the maybe the connections there.

42:13So, he's sort of linking up with other leaders that have got corruption issues and getting out of standing as well. But, just to go through some of this, you mentioned the meme coin. Okay, state owned entity in the UAE has put in two billion dollars into this thing, into the meme coin, into the meme coin. So, they reckon they've rate and they reckon they've made about 320 million in trading fees. They reckon Baron Trump, the young one, has earned up to 40 million because he's one of the founders. The other way they're making a lot of money is through legal settlements with the media and also Jeff Bezos paying Malani 40 million dollars to make a documentary on Amazon.

42:53A mental Amazon which may or may not get it. Can I just put in a small footnote on the meme coin to remind people? So, Javier Celgas of one of the big shipping companies in Mexico bought 20 million of Donald Trump's meme coin with the money from his publicly listed company. And in his ruling with the Securities and Exchange Commission, which is the big US regulator, he stated that this was a good use of the money of a publicly listed company of shareholders because he knows that if he buys meme coins from Trump, they will then get a concession on the trading terms that they get with the United States and therefore the company will be able to make money.

43:38So, it's not even a secret. The thing there is that you get a statement to the SEC literally saying, the quid pro quo is you buy these meme coins and in return, we can be confident that our company will benefit. The same we've talked about this in the past. You can also buy these things in order to get the Department of Justice to drop its investigations against you. Well, I'll give you one, Justin Sun who's a Chinese billionaire who photographed recently wearing a $100 ,000 Donald Trump watch. He spent $75 million by encryptotocons from this thing, World Liberty Financial, which is the thing that's set up by the Trump family and the WITC Office, his sort of great special envoy, Dean Marco Rubio's job.

44:22Five weeks after Trump became president, the SEC, that's the Securities and Exchange Commission, they dropped a civil fraud case against this guy. Now, could be entirely coincidental, could be. However, I think it's fair to say that we're talking here about somebody who's not averse. We keep talking about him being transactional leader. That's the sort of transaction that we're talking about. And to cap it all, we have Eric Trump, one of the sons who's sort of does he and Don Jr. doing a lot of the business for the family. He does an interview in the Financial Times of the Weekend where he actually presents the family as victims.

45:04We would be making so much more money if my dad had not gone into politics. If there's one family that's not benefited from politics, it's the Trump family. And he says, he also says, I have to look after my children. It's very unfair. I've got to, I've got to, you know, why am I not allowed to earn the money to look after my children? And meanwhile, 5 .5 billion deal for a gold resort in Qatar, which will include a 7 kilometer long entertainment industry, 18 whole golf curse and a legends think park. And that's a deal led by a real estate company owned by Qatar's sovereign well fund. So we're seeing why did he, why was his first trip to the Middle East, not to Israel and Gaza, but to to the rich golf petro states answer because he was doing loads of deals can I quickly just remind people on the meme coin because I know some listeners will be less less into this.

45:57So the meme coin is you basically buy something that would be like the virtual equivalent of getting a kind of gold coin with Alistair Campbell's face on it. Let's say Alistair issued in the real world. Yeah. You could collect 5 ,000 lovely gold coins with Alistair's face on it. Well, even I would buy that. So these things, these, these are the virtual equivalents. Now, there are a couple of great advantages to them for the Trump family in making money. One of them is that they are classified under US law as collectibles rather than investments. So they completely escape normal scrutiny about pump and dump, conflicts of interest, misscelling.

46:42So in the normal world, if I issued a product, let's say I was issuing, I don't know, an insurance policy or I was telling you that I was going to build a monument and you were giving me money, a lot of law exists in the US to protect you as the investor to stop me running a Ponzi scheme to stop me effectively steaming all your money on false pretenses, doing nothing with it and then running off of it. But once something is classified as a collectible, it escapes most of those rules. And of course, they make it even easier for themselves because they locate some of the jurisdictions outside the United States.

47:18So they're trading platforms located in China. The second thing that gives you, which has really helped for corruption, is you have a leader board with a transparent wallet, which lets you know who's bought the most of them. So you, you can know that the Chinese investor has bought, you know, tens of millions of that. The top buyers get the Trump watch, that's part of the deal. And then they get invited to dinner in Mar -a -Lago if you've been a big donor. So it's a beautiful thing and you as the Trump family get two advantages. Number one, you can pump and dump. So one of the things that happened is the price is massively spiked.

47:59Let's say the Alistair Campbell coin went up to $8 ,500 and then dropped down. But of course, what one assumes is the Trump family sold at the top of the market. The price came tumbling down and everybody who bought lost. And the second thing is it's a beautiful way, totally unregulated, of I buy the Alistair Campbell coin and in return, I get access to Alistair Campbell and presumably the influence that Alistair Campbell can come to bring. But this is the presence of the United States. This is not my friend Alistair. Yeah, but also the, if you think about, I mean, let's just assume, I mean, our friend Skyrimuchi says the Eric and Don Jr.

48:36are both dummers rocks. But let's assume they're not. Let's actually say that they're really clever, they're really smart. And if they were in business and nobody knew who they were, they'd be really, really effective. Okay. Even if you assume that, the truth is what they're doing all the time is trading on the marketing of one of the most famous names in the world, aka Trump. So when they're going and doing these projects that they're doing at the moment in Saudi, in Qatar, in the UAE, in Serbia, in them, in India, in Omar, they're doing all these deals and they get through the door largely because their name is Trump.

49:15And I think the proper, the definition of corruption is the use of your political position to advance your own personal interests. Now they say, well, he doesn't get involved in this that and the other. I'm sorry, there he is yesterday on his true social posting his fragrance for profit. And he does it with buyables and he does it with, he's now got a new club. There's a new Trump club in Washington, $500 ,000 membership, which his kids have set up with the Whitcoff kids. I mean, this is another part of the story of the kind of nepotism and family connections here. I mean, I used to like, I'm sure many of your friends and Jonathan Palinadas, as you get involved in international governance, particularly in the 19th and 2000s, we spent a lot of time traveling around the world talking about corruption because one of the big ideas was you needed to do governance reform.

50:07A lot of development agencies, deaf and everyone involved, a lot of my meetings in Nigeria were on corruption, etc. We've forgotten, I think, in a way what the theory of corruption is. And corruption's a lot of different things and Trump's doing almost all of them. The first type of corruption is what's called embezzlement, where you take public money into your own pocket and you can do that in different ways, right? You can do it by getting, as he did in the first administration, an enormous amount of public money spent on security for Trump properties. All the second thing most recently is local state money goes into Trump affiliated companies to do disaster relief work.

50:46Second sort of thing is foreign emoluments where foreign governments give you money to your company, money to your kids, money to your plane, and in return you do tariff stuff. So that thing is nepotism. That's a kind of different thing. That's about giving your friends and family jobs. So that's putting Jared Kushner or your daughter into jobs. That's putting your children's father -in -laws into jobs. A lot of this stuff is about children's father -in -laws. Then there's father -in -law, or I think we... Father -in -law. Then there's misuse of office, so he does a lot of that. So for example, using the Department of Justice to target your opponents.

51:27There's obstruction of justice, so that's blocking oversight. And how does this all have a result? Well, why does it matter to Americans? Well, it matters to Americans because in the end, what it leads to is everything beginning to go wrong in your economy. Once you have an economy where you can bribe or influence or get access to the leader just with money, government resources begin to flow into inefficient projects where you've been brimed. Regulations begin to get dropped, so you begin to get rid of regulatory agencies. So there's more and more environmental damage done by these companies as they wrote it out.

52:09The quality of public administration begins to decline because there's not much reason for civil servants to function. And you get into this incredible vicious cycle where, because you're paying the government to speed things up, the government has an incentive to slow things down, waiting for the money to come in. So all of that comes. All of that is what Trump begins to deliver for the American people. And don't forget that one of the first things they did when they came in, part of the sort of project 25 playbook, was to get rid of a lot of the investigators and the authorities that investigate corruption.

52:46And then to put somebody in the Department of Justice, Pam Bondi, he was just a basic cheerleader for MAGA. They will want us to laugh at the fragrances, to laugh at the sneakers, to laugh at the bibles. But the fact is there isn't that much transparency. But Forbes and Bloomberg, if you sort of follow the way they cover this stuff, they're talking about his wealth since he became president, going up at roughly a rate of a billion dollars a month. Now, tell me in which any other presidency, we've said before, Jimmy Carter, he caught rid of his peanut farm. Hillary Clinton, do you remember Hillary Clinton made her?

53:28I think of an investment that she made in something rather 12 years before Bill Clinton became president. And this was a massive scandal during the campaign. This guy is doing it in plain sight day after day after day. My final question was this, do you think people never cared or do you think that Trump's people are just so dominant in the media eco space and absolutely prepared to take him at face value with anything he says and so much goes on that it just gets blown away? Do you think deep down people still do care? I think, of course, many people still care, but I think this is part of the biggest story that we're talking about, about the collapse of the normal traditional liberal democratic values because we had a story that we believed in very strongly for probably 150 years, which is that you would have a better government if you had all these other institutions.

54:33The reason one of the reasons that we believed in civil society media NGOs was that checked corruption. You had all these independent, so that's sexual organizations which were that call out. That's why they've gone after them as well. We're going to talk about some of them in question time because we're talking about Gavi, we're going to talk about the impact of USAID, and we're going to talk about this rap duo that you and I had never heard of, Bob Villain, but now everybody's talking about it, it would seem. And yeah, I'd say they've played the media and politics like a fiddle as publicity stunts go.

55:10And two other big stories that we're going to cover tomorrow are going to be the new candidate for the New York Mayor, Mandani, and what's been happening in Rwanda and Congo with a PSTIL. Thank you very much indeed. Take care, bye.