435. Question Time: The Migrant Return Plan, Colombia’s Drug Cartels, and Will Rory Join Corbyn’s New Party?

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2:33Welcome to the rest of politics. Question time with me, Rory Stewart. And me, as to Campbell and Rory, as we're recording, my phone is pinging away with messages about the European Commission ratifying the one -in -one -out deal, as it became called, that President Macron and Keir Starmer struck at the UK France Summit recently, which looks very, very interesting. Because I think I said at the time, I thought there'd be problems in getting the whole of the European Union to buy this, but it seems like they are. I mean, this is the deal which we've been talking about, the shapes of for months. And I've been very, very interested in because as we picked up with my slightly unfortunate grumpy regrettable encounter with Gabrielle Attal, your friend, the former French Prime Minister, I really have felt for a long time that it's ridiculous that people are coming from France, the UK on boats in this way, because France is a safe country.

3:29And that we should have had a very clear deal saying that if people arrived, we would send them back to France. And that in return, we should be taking genuine asylum seekers, female judges fleeing the Taliban, for example, and bringing them to Britain. And it's really good, I think, that they've put framework of that together. Again, the devil's in the detail. How many are they going to do? How long is it going to last? And can they put this into a European framework? But it's definitely, I think, philosophically, the right idea. They may be screwing up the implementation. And the reason why I thought that this might fall apart at the European level is because some particularly the countries that are really badly affected in different ways, Italy, Greece, Spain, Cyprus, to some extent, that they would have thought, hold on a minute, why is France doing a bilateral deal to get those people have gone to Britain, coming back to France, which is the European Union, and therefore they could end up on our door as well.

4:32But anyway, whatever has happened in the European Union debate, that seems to have been resolved. And also another shout out for Jeremy Hunt. He did make another interesting observation. He said, you know, when Labour came in, they didn't say, this is going to be really difficult, really complicated. It's going to take time to sort. They said, we're going to smash the gangs. So even as you and I keep saying, we're talking about relatively small numbers within the whole immigration picture, we're talking about something politically that Labour have to crack. The other thing, by the way, we've got loads of questions while you were away.

5:03But given you've only just got back, I think you might want a bit of time to sort of dig into it, I'd like to talk as well about the Jeremy Corbyn new party. There's lots of interesting things going on there that actually some of them bad for Labour, some of them not necessarily as bad as people might think, but maybe we can come back with both of those next week either in the main podcast or on Q &A. I was at the North Barrett fringed by the sea literary festival on Sunday morning and two people came up and said, Rory, would you consider joining Jeremy Corbyn's new party? They were both trip listeners.

5:38So there's clearly a part of our listener base that's very excited about what Corbyn's party could mean. And you said, yes, did you? Despite my love of his ears, I didn't agree on the spot, but I said, I'd look into it. The love of the ears is an in joke, unless you have read Rory Stewart's book very, very, very carefully. Now, for this week, because you announced you were going to Columbia, we have to go a lot of questions about Columbia. Felicity Anderson here, very straightforward. Rory, welcome back. I echo that. Felicity says, I'd love to hear your reflections on Columbia, politics, people, what are your key takeaways?

6:13Well, I think the first thing is that, of course, Columbia still has some very, very serious trouble and we can talk about that. There are armed insertions, there's a lot of co -cogrowing for the cocaine industry. And there's a big judicial fight going on with the former president, the kind of legendary former president now being convicted in court. But as a place to visit, it's really, really lovely. I mean, you have to be careful where you go, but we went to Cartagena, which is this incredible ancient colonial walled city on the Atlantic coast. We went to the beach, we went to Bogota, which is right up in the Andes and climbed up to the top for Hill where you're at 3 ,300 meters, just 10 ,000 feet in the air.

7:04But most interesting of all, we went to Macarena. And Macarena is down in the savannah, the lanus of the southern lowlands. And it was an area where until relatively recently was basically controlled by a guerrilla group, in fact, formerly in 1999, 2000, the government briefly granted the whole area to this guerrilla group, the climbing government backed off and fark around the area. And so all the time when you're travelling, you're travelling with the kids, you saw all this infrastructure, which had been built by the guerrillas. You know, the bridge had been built by the guerrillas, the initial landing strip had been built by the guerrillas.

7:45There was a guerrilla radio station. And it was an area where this leftist group, which had emerged from the Civil War of the 40s and 50s in Columbia, and was arguing for a particular kind of vision of communist revolution, different to other groups. And there are nine different armed groups in Columbia currently having peace negotiations, but this group controlled the area. It was almost impossible to get to Columbia's 50 million people, but the terrain is unbelievably challenging. As I say, you go from these 10 ,000 foot hills to the Amazon rainforests and bits coastal regions and this huge savannah.

8:26You simply couldn't get to it. This area was first spotted from a plane in the 1940s and settled in the 40s. They just used it for massive coca production and then they began working with the great cartels. People would have heard of Papua Escobar who was killed in the 90s, but the Carly and Medellin cartels worked with the guerrilla groups initially so that the coca production was got there. And I saw the places where the coca had been transported and processed. And then fights began between those groups. So then you had paramilitaries emerging, which were often working for the landowners or for the drug lords against the old leftist guerrillas.

9:06Anyway, back over to you. What's your sense of Columbia? I've only ever been to Bogota and that was when I was trying to help Jonathan Powell, who was supporting Santos than the president in the first of all the referendum, which he lost, but then actually did manage to kind of bring the whole civil war to an end. And got the Nobel Peace Prize for his success. Fascinating place. I found the people really smart, really interesting, very hard to get away from talking about drugs. And I know that irritates them. But we also had a question here from from some recall Jonas who wanted to know what we thought about Columbia specifically with the what's happening in the drug trade.

9:55And my afraid is not as happy a story as the ending the civil war because I read a wonderful piece while you're away by Geikol Cesar Alvarez, who's a lecturer in terrorism and security. It starts by saying, imagine an area larger than your Australian capital territory twice the size of London four times that New York City covered in cocoa plantations. That is the scale of Columbia's cocoa cultivation according to the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime. And Santos for whom I have a lot of time and a lot of respect is funny. Sometimes I think that you think are going to work for you can end up being counterproductive.

10:37So two things in 2015, the Colombian courts suspended some of the herbicides that we use to kill cocoa because of the concern for health and environment. And then a year later, Santos introduced a scheme where basically you incentivize farmers, you paid farmers to grow non -elicit plants. And the trouble with that is that these very clever people, the Colombians, they thought, oh, so maybe if we start growing cocoa, we'll start qualified for some of these these new subsidies. So actually the cocoa crops doubled during his second term. And the cocaine is really taken off in a, you know, right across Europe, right across parts of Australia's got a real cocaine problem.

11:26So I think it's a very, very, very mixed picture. I mean, you are an opium man, famously, but did you see much of the drugs stuff going on? This area I was in was an area that was very much a traditional drug area and I was I saw cocoa plants and I chewed a coca leaf in order to make sure that I can horrify the daily telegraph even more. But of course, all this is hugely bringing bells with me from many painful years in Afghanistan, looking at poppy production in heroin, which was very much a similar story, you know, could you spray it? Could you turn off the water? Should you be paying farmers to grow things that weren't poppy?

12:07It's an amazing guy called David Mansfield. I worked with that and what he discovered is that of course, it is possible for farmers to make good legal incomes, but it's quite complicated. So if a farmer, for example, in central Afghanistan, doesn't grow poppy but instead has a mixed crop, you know, some apricots, some wheat, it can free up family labor, they can go into the town, they can earn some additional income. You can put a family income together that is higher, but it's often quite geographically specific. And of course, security plays into this. I mean, if it's not illegal or in effect, the police don't do anything about it.

12:47It is a cash crop. And of course, the drug lords are able to put huge pressure on you if you don't apply it. I mean, Gustavo Petro, who is the new president, is coming up for election in a years time. But he's the first ever left -wing president, isn't he? That's right. And the first ever proper populist. Yeah. I mean, Colombia is quite interesting. It's the third largest population, third largest economy in Latin America and after Brazil and Mexico. So it's a really important place and it stretches all the way across. You imagine geographically from the Pacific to the Atlantic, just sitting below the Panama Canal.

13:23And it's the strongest democracy traditionally in Latin America. I mean, it didn't have military dictatorship when other people did. So on the one hand, this is very strong story. It's priced with Gabriel Garcia Marquez is from Botero, the painter. So it's amazingly cultured, educated place on the one hand. On the other hand, no roads through a lot of the country. I mean, if you went to Macarena, where I was just with the family, if you had been there seven years ago, it would take you something like three hours to go 15 kilometers. Because there's basically no interest. You can't get anywhere.

14:01You're dependent on it. It's got one of the oldest airlines in the world, Colombia, because the anyway to get anywhere is to land on these small landing strips. And I was hearing a not a podcast I necessarily would recommend for the general listener. But it was on the details of what Petros trying to do with the armed groups. And even I trying to mug up for this podcast, lost the world to live. I mean, he's trying to conduct simultaneous peace negotiations with nine different armed groups. And you see, you can imagine there's a difference between the Bolivar army, the ELN, who turns out to be, it seems, with more of a Castro Che Guevara route compared to the FARC that had a non -Castro communist route on the Venezuelan border.

14:52There's now not an extraordinary combination of coca -growing and Venezuelan refugees coming in and the government sent in 10 ,000 troops to try to deal with it and that didn't work out. And all this is overlaid because this is the modern world with very progressive conversations about gender inclusivity, civil society, indigenous action, but which seems to be often an alibi for incredible amounts of paperwork, bureaucrats, a huge civil service of peacemakers, which aren't making much progress. I mean, Petros under a huge pressure because the country's in danger going down and in the middle of this.

15:36We've got another repeat of what we talked about yesterday, which is the great charismatic former president Uribe, who with the US with billions of dollars of American money and American military, crushed the FARC before the Santos peace deal. So one of the reasons the Santos peace deal worked is that he went very aggressively with huge human rights abuses against them. And then didn't support the peace deal. And then turned against the peace deal, turned against Santos's former defense minister because he thought it was too soft. He was very close to paramilitary. And this case is basically saying that he was connected to illegal paramilitaries that killed people.

16:13And of course, now you're getting muttering from the Trump administration saying, this is not fair. So you've got Marco Rubio out saying, this is a witch hunt. This is a great man. You know, this is ridiculous. And American justice. And it sounds a little bit like the Bolsonaro Brazil story again. So you're saying that the relative peace that the peace deal led to, which led to Santos getting his Nobel Peace Prize, that is not holding. Well, it's very, very sad. I mean, it still has a very high homicide rate. There are still in particular, on the Pacific coasts and on the Venezuelan border, whole areas that are out of control of the government where people are being displaced, people are being killed.

16:58I think there are something like a 1200 municipalities in Colombia and armed groups are active now in over 300 of them. So about about a quarter of them. It's still much, much better than it was in the real horror days when Pablo Escobar was romping around. It's definitely a place where if you're thoughtful, it's a great place to go on holiday. And I'd like to pay huge tribute to the Columbia. It's one of the most beautiful, fascinating places on earth. But I'm afraid, yeah, it's not the horror days before Santos, but it's getting pretty concerning. How much of it is about the drugstrike? Because Colombia accounts for 67 % of the world's total, which is up 25 % from the year before.

17:51And you know, we know they were, cocaine is now the most used stimulant in the Americas. A head of marijuana, a head of unfettered means, and a head of opioids. American demand is up twofold. There's a doubling in demand, and I think that just the last few years in the US, yeah. And so it's basically this is a story about Peru, Bolivia, and Colombia. And the way in which the Colombian cartels took control of the distribution of cocaine, presumably lots of deforestation. Definitely, although some of this has grown in savanna area rather than forest area. And it's all intertwined because these groups that began as ideological leftist guerrilla groups.

18:36And Gustavo Petro comes from one of these groups. You remember he was, the president was part of an urban terrorist group that in the 80s stormed the Supreme Court. And when the military drove a tank through the front door, ended up with half the Supreme Court justice is being killed. I mean, that's the group that he comes from. But these groups became increasingly intertwined with revenue. And some parts of the country, so on the Pacific coast, there are areas now I was hearing where all the checkpoints are now manned again by the armed guerrillas and the armed guerrillas are issuing your effective national ID cards to do stuff.

19:18So it's not the bad days, but it's going wrong. And people are getting increasingly worried. That's very sad to hear. I actually looked at my diaries for when went to Columbia, just sort of jog my memory. And my overall observation of Santos was deeply impressive, hard definitely in the right place. Let's try to get him. I mean, I've also spent quite a lot of time with Ivan Duque, who's the last person. So if we'd want to do a little bit on Columbia, I think Ivan Duque or Santos would be great to talk to because it does matter. And it's a population almost as big as the United Kingdom. It's one of the few economies in Latin America that grew at 5 % a year for a long time.

19:58Didn't go through recessions that other countries went through. Didn't go through much of the attention. But it's still, frankly, parts of it, shockingly poor. I mean, the rural areas, I was seeing things that people living in tin shacks without electricity, without water, in a pair of shorts. And honestly, I could have been in rural Kenya. Well, Santos has actually got a piece in the economist last week because he's the chair. The other thing he's is now, he's the chair of the elders, the group of elder states, men and women that Nelson Mandela set up. His article in the economist is about trying to take the lessons of the peace process that he presided over into Russia, Ukraine.

20:41And I have to say, if you knew nothing about Columbia, you'd read it and think, well, this guy has delivered the most extraordinary success ever. But he has one really, really important point. And this is something actually that the Norwegian Prime Minister also said is that even as war is going on, you have to do everything you can to try to build the framework for the peace that you hope to follow. And he's talking here about Russia and Ukraine, as was Jonas Garstora. We'll put it in the newsletter because it's a very interesting piece. And he's absolutely right. You refers to Northern Ireland, and that's very much the lesson from that.

21:16I mean, Columbia had this, what they call the general agreement that was signed in 2012. And that, that remained the framework the whole way through. And it was about recognizing victims' rights, how you generate deep political participation and security guarantees, and so forth. So there he was, offering all sorts of advice to Russia and Ukraine, basically, to get around a table and try and sort things out. Great. And I think it'd be lovely. It'd be amazing to have a Nobel Peace Prize winner in that way. And a little shout out again to my friend Michael Reed, who's been the key Latin America correspondent for the economist for many years, who just extraordinary.

21:56I mean, he wasn't the Sarah Macarena that I was in. It's very inaccessible. He was there 10 years ago. We won't see this incredible place called the Rainbow River, which is unique in the world. It goes basically red, green, yellow, blue, depending on the light. And it literally looks like you're looking at Rainbow in the water all the way down. But of course, when he was there, you couldn't get there because it was all controlled by the grillers. Let's take a break and then we'll come back and talk about climate.

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23:41Welcome back to The Restus Politics. And before we get on to issues of climate, the rest is politics. Let me tell you, is there ever efficiently powered by friends with fused energy? And this week, one of the questions we're discussing is, in fact, behind Britain's energy infrastructure is a lot of complexity verging on chaos. So we talk a lot about the green revolution, but the nitty gritty of how you actually build things, how the transmission distribution works is really tough. We've got a question from Violet Green. So Violet Green asks, why is Britain a global leader in climate ambition still struggling to connect clean energy projects, EV charges, and even new housing to the grid?

24:28And who's to blame for this bottleneck between policy and delivery? There we are. Question for your friend Ed Milovand. Oh, blame the Tories, I do. No. It's a very good question. The first thing I do, Violet, if you haven't listened to, are leading interview with Emma Pinchpat from the Climate Change Committee. I thought she had some very interesting explainers about the kind of big picture on this. But we do seem to have a real problem in the UK at these big modernizing infrastructure projects. But you must have had experience of this kind of thing when you were at the Department of Environment.

24:59The first thing is that all this new electric -based renewable infrastructure requires a completely different model of moving energy and storing energy compared to what used to work when we were operating off coal gas and nuclear power stations. Because they could be big centralized things. You see them often on coastlines or on hills. And you could build a very straightforward electricity distribution network straight off them. Once you move to wind and solar, you're suddenly having the electricity generated right across the landscape into the ocean in many different places and you're trying to work out how to move it around.

25:37And of course, how to store it. What do you do when the sun's not shining, when the wind's not blowing? And then you've got this issue around EV. We interviewed the Norwegian Prime Minister who said that this year or this month in Norway 95 % I think a vehicle sold are electric. But of course, for that to work, you need the charging infrastructure. And that means everybody's house to think about a city, think about London. How do you get fast charging infrastructure to all those cars on all those streets? And that's been a real problem because there's planning issues. A lot of people understandably don't want massive pylons running straight past their house.

26:19It's an expense issue building out that national grid is hugely expensive. And I think Britain just, that's exactly what we're really bad at partly because of rapidly changing ministers, partly because of where our planning laws work, partly lack of certainty. So we're in a weird world where we've got off -cold. We've done huge improvements in terms of our net emissions. We're leading the world and things like offshore wind. But to really meet our targets, the thing that I guess is keeping our men abound up at night and we did touch and spend the interview. Is this whole question of the stuff that connects it?

26:57Yeah. Well, the government is trying to fix the planning system, but that is not going to be easy. But fused energy is going to help in all sorts of different ways. The way to think of fused energy is to think of sort of Amazon prime for home energy, whether you talk about solar panels, EV chargers, thermostats, batteries, starlings. With lots of installers, we're back to the thing with paperwork. You have to do the paperwork, the planning and the grid approval, refuse. They handle it to the end. They do all the work for you deal with the planning, grid notification, customers behalf, so you can sit back and relax.