461. Question Time: The Tel Aviv Fan Ban & Japan’s New Thatcher

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2:16Welcome to the Restless Politics Question Time with me, Rory Stewart. And me, Alistair Campbell. Here's a question coming in from Charlie from Sheffield. The Maccabee Tel Aviv furore is interesting from a left versus right media perspective. The divided framing is as predictable as it is stark. Goodness gracious me, it's like an amazing postmodern analysis. It's like one of your columns in the West Milan Gazette. Exactly, exactly. In one telling, it's about Jewish football fans, violent Brummie Islamists and anti-Semitic policing banning the Jews. In the other, it's violently racist Israeli hooligans and the government and media abetting them.

2:49Each relies on a whole different set of evidence, or the same set of evidence interpreted in the opposite way. It's got me thinking that much of what we know of the world must be based on trust. And honestly, when you dive into such diametrically opposite stories about the same story, it does have me doubting whether I can trust those who I'm inclined to trust. And it's one occasion on which I'd like to listen to, the rest is politics. That means that Charlie trusts us, I think. And I'm trusting you because, I mean, famously, I'm a great expert on football. But try to talk us through this. Firstly, just for listeners who aren't familiar with this, give us the two sides of this story and then tell us roughly where you come down.

3:27Okay, well, this is about a football match that is due to take place. Israel, despite not being in Europe, takes part in UEFA tournaments. And they've been drawn to play against Aston Villa. Now, as it happens, Burnley played Aston Villa a few weeks ago, and I was talking to some of the people at Aston Villa who said they were really, really worried about this game. it was going to be very very difficult to police there were lots of questions around and this was just we were just chatting okay and they were basically saying god i wish this wasn't happening also we should not run away with the idea that maccabi tel aviv are a bunch of angels their fans have got quite a reputation um i suspect that some of them were at that tommy robinson event that i talked about they were also involved in some really serious violence when they played in Amsterdam in this same tournament.

4:19And where Charlie is absolutely right is that that was framed within the Dutch context of Dutch pro-Palestinians went out to attack the Israeli football fans. The Dutch were more inclined to say this was a bunch of hooligans who were singing songs about killing Arab children, burning Palestinian flags, beating up Muslim taxi drivers, and so on and so forth. So you've got a football violence situation with a political dimension layered onto it. You then have this group that is the group that has the job, the public safety group that has the job of deciding whether events are publicly safe. And this group made the decision that they felt that for this game to be publicly safe, no Maccabi Tel Aviv fans should be allowed to come to the game.

5:12Now, there's lots of people, including I think Lisa Nandy yesterday in the Commons saying that this is kind of unprecedented there have been cases before of fans not being allowed to to travel and not being allowed to go Rangers and Celtic have had periods where there have been no away fans actually Aston Villa played against Legia Warsaw a Polish team and they've got a real reputation and because there'd been some trouble at a previous game that was called off Rangers against Napoli was another one that I remember a few years ago where there were no fans allowed to travel. When Paris play Marseille, when Paris Saint-Germain play Marseille, there is no way fans are allowed to travel.

5:50So it's not unique. But what is unique, of course, is the extra political context. The minute this announcement came out, all three of the major parties, Labour, Tory, Lib Dems, all three came out straight away and said, this is the wrong decision. Now, I have to say my reaction was, stay out of it. Stay out of it. You're making it worse. Now, as it happens, Maccabi have now come out and said that even if the decision is reversed, they are not going to accept any tickets. And they say it's because of the toxic atmosphere that has now been built around this game. They might also add that Tel Aviv were involved, Maccabi Tel Aviv were involved in a game in Israel at the weekend, which the police abandoned because of the violence in advance of the game.

6:41So I think we're probably going to end up in the right place. But we've ended there in the wrong way, in my view. Can I just question you? I mean, is it really possible for the Prime Minister to stay out of this? Because if it becomes the big social media issue about anti-Semitism and the Tories are out and Lib Dems are out saying this is the wrong decision, and Keir Starmer's remaining po-faced and saying, you know, this is a decision for someone else, it's something to do with me, is he not going to be portrayed by the Conservatives and Lib Dems as weak, out of touch? But listen, this goes with the job.

7:15You're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't. It's one of those. But I think that if we have these, you know, we talked earlier about this thing about, you know, judgments in court cases. Well, let's take another example. We're going to talk about Prince Andrew in a minute. Lisa Nandy was interviewed about Prince Andrew and said, you know, the government doesn't get involved in affairs related to the royal family. Well, point one, the government does from time to time when it has to. but point two what that is doing there is making the point the government is an actor not a commentator okay now i would say in relation to this it would be perfectly feasible not necessarily for the prime minister unless he's asked about it but for the home secretary to say there are big concerns around this match we have a process that process has been played out i want to satisfy myself that the right decision has been taken in the right way but subject to that i will trust the judgment of the people who have made this decision because and otherwise i think there is a risk that we just inflame this thing even worse eventually what's going to happen with this this game is going to happen it will move we'll probably move on i suspect if the fans had come i think maybe for the wrong reasons but tel aviv have probably made the right decision if there had been a substantial turnout of maccabi fans i think there would have been a lot of trouble because lots of football hooligans who's already on social media football hooligans who are not really as they would put it we're not able to have as many fights as we used to have because these things are now pretty well policed they'd all have turned up tommy robinson would have worked his crowd up he was already doing in israel he's walking around with a tel aviv a maccabi tel aviv shirt um you know, in Israel.

8:58So I just think that we've ended up in the right place, but I think we made a few missteps on the way. Thank you for that, Alistair. Time for a break. And after the break, we'll be back to talk about Prince Andrew and the new Japanese Prime Minister.

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11:48welcome back to the restless politics question time now the next question is brought to you by fuse energy and fuse we talk about them a lot they've just reached a milestone their first ever self-built solar farm netly central it is now live and that is proof that clean power does not need to cost the earth and while westminster argues about wind farms solar has quietly been winning. Panels are going up on homes, schools, warehouses, and actually on fields and entire neighbourhoods. So, we have a question from Elise Bentley. Are we really in the middle of a British solar boom? And what does that mean for our energy future?

12:27Controversial issue. First thing, of course, is solar has been an incredible success story technologically. The price of solar came down, some of it to do with technical innovation, a lot of it just to do with business practices. Incredible story of thousands of Chinese companies competing on the margins and on production techniques, which took a lot of innovation done in Germany and now means that China dominates the manufacture of almost all solar panels in the world. Problem in Britain, of course, is the sun don't shine quite as much in Britain as it does in Texas. The economics of it are a little bit different in Britain.

13:01I imagine many listeners would be aware that China is installing huge amounts of renewable energy, but that second or third in the world in solar installation is the United States. And in places like Texas, they're installing it because it just makes economic sense. It's not something that's fully reliant on subsidies and backups. They're just generating power because the sun is shining and it's really working. Over to you, Alistair. I agree with you that Texas, the sun shines a bit more maybe in Walthamstow. But I was in Walthamstow recently at their wonderful new theatre, the Soho Theatre. And in Walthamstow, there's this scheme there where people have got together and they've turned their rooftops into a shared solar network they're finding it's cutting the bills it's cutting carbon and it's also shaping that sense of you know we're in this together which of course helps to build trust and you know the i don't know if you know this as well rory uk's biggest solar farm was just approved in lincolnshire and that was that's going to power around 300 000 homes and of course lincolnshire very much part of the kind of you know brexit territory in a way, reformy in some of its politics, and reform very much against all this kind of renewable stuff.

14:09But I think the more that people see that it is there, part of our life, part of pretty much every developed modern country now, and reducing bills and cutting carbon emissions, it's a good thing. Yes. Final point, though, we need to also think about land use, because of course, the solar panels have to go somewhere, and at big scale, they go often on agricultural fields, taking land out of production. People are pointing out, I think, that currently, I think it's only about 1 % of the British landmass is covered with solar panels. But as a former DEFRA minister, I can assure you 1 % is actually quite a lot, given the pressure on British land, how much of it is in the uplands, how much of it is under forestry, how much of it isn't actually accessible for food production.

14:50So that and a lot of communities slightly horrified at what used to be natural landscape becoming fields of solar panels, which has created other questions, which has been really interesting. We talked about this with Australia and Singapore, but there's also been a conversation between North Africa and Britain about whether you can have transmission lines taking it from, for example, the Sahara Desert right into Britain, or whether actually local generation makes much more sense because of problems with transmission. Well, this was this project in Morocco to get their solar power creating energy for Devon, but that's been paused, seen as too complicated, too costly.

15:29But listen, that sort of stuff is going to be happening and it's going to develop as we go. So that is what Fuse Energy's first solar farm, Netly Central represents, collaboration, efficiency and cleaner power built together. Switch to Fuse and help build Britain's clean energy future. Go to fuseenergy.com slash politics and use the code politics. And if you're on a fixed tariff by the 7th of November, you will be in with a chance to win two tickets to our live show in November. Now, Rory, we've got a question here from Stefan Cannon from Brighton. Having seen that it's apparently news that Prince Andrew has, quote, put his duty to his family and country first by giving up his royal titles.

16:10Without knowing much about royal life, please can you explain what this means in his actual life? Does it have any real life implications? Or are there real implications of this that a commoner might understand? I.e., does it have any financial impact on his life? Come on, Rory, you're our royal expert. I love it, the royal commentator. Well, I think firstly, absolutely needless to say, I and you, Alistair, are completely horrified by Epstein, what he did, the suffering of underage girls who are in horrendous manipulative relationships. Prince Andrew denies all wrongdoing, but the allegations in the book made by Virginia Giffray, who of course is no longer alive, are that he raped her on separate occasions.

16:56And it's out of this that this question is coming. So to turn now to the question of titles, it's incredibly important to members of the royal family, these things, which is quite difficult to understand, but it really matters within the family that you are his royal highness, that you're addressed as prince. Being a knight of the garter, which he's also left, is a really big thing. I mean, knight of the garter, a tiny number of people going all the way back to King Edward in the Middle Ages, founding this order of knights. So, look, I mean, you're particularly honest as someone who would never want, as you keep pointing out, to be a sir or a lord anyway.

17:34But if you're somebody who wants to be a sir or a Lord, being a prince and a knight of the garter is a pretty big deal. Of course, more than symbolically for Prince Andrew, it's a very profound personal disgrace, I'm afraid, because it means that he's no longer accepted as a prince when his brother's the king. It's a really symbolic sign that he's stepped back from the royal family. On the money side, yeah, he no longer is receiving public money. And so he's going to be, his brother may, I don't know how he's going to be funded. He gets a small pension. He may get some support from friends and family, but the taxpayer is no longer going to be supporting him.

18:16Yeah. I mean, there's a few things I'd be, I mean, the political element of this, I guess, where the rest is politics, is this debate about whether you need a parliamentary bill passed in order to remove these titles formally because he can still call himself Prince Andrew, which sounds pretty absurd. You can't call yourself the Duke of this or the Duke of that. He's still allowed to call himself Prince Andrew as things stand. But he said he won't, right? So the whole thing's a bit theoretical, isn't it? No, he said he won't be HRH and he's given up the Duke of York and all that, but he can still be a prince.

18:50This is why I find the whole thing so absurd. I'll tell you something else that really struck me, and I could be wrong about this, I mean, obviously, when we talk about the victims, the victims are the people that were abused, the women who were trafficked for Epstein and by Ghislaine Maxwell, and it's clearly on a scale that is just revolting, and anybody who gets too close to it, you know, you kind of get what you deserve, and I would put Prince Andrew into that category, because at various stages, I have found his self-defense deeply unconvincing. I think to pay somebody off with a massive multi-million pound payoff for somebody you claim you never met.

19:30I just found that whole thing very, very baffling. So he's probably ended up where he was always going to end up, provided the facts come through. But if you think about this, this goes to maybe the difference in culture between Britain and America, which maybe reflects better on the UK than it does on America. If you think about the people beyond the sexual victims who have, if you like, paid a price or a price in terms of their public standing and humiliation. Epstein, he's dead. He took his own life. But the three that I have in mind are Ghislaine Maxwell in jail, Peter Mandelson resigned as ambassador in Washington, and Prince Andrew now completely sort of eviscerated out of public life in the UK.

20:14They're all Brits. I can't think of, I mean, there may be other Americans involved in this that have been similarly punished. But when I When you see that list of all the people who were on the island, all the people who were on his private jet, all the people who were sending the sort of, you know, smarmy emails and what I have, none of the Americans seem to have paid a price at all. No, it's extraordinary. I'm not, by the way, defending anything that they did. No, no, no, no. I mean, I'm also, of course, also sad because what it's meant is the king's doing an incredible journey this week. Just as we're speaking, he's flying to the Vatican and he's going to be the first English monarch to pray with the Pope since Henry VIII.

20:52And of course, he's the head of the Church of England. So it's a really interesting, important spiritual moment where he's going to be made a confrata, which means he's have a position within the Catholic Church. and the Pope will be given a similar position potentially within the English church. He was also yesterday in Manchester at the synagogue visiting with a rabbi showing his support for the Jewish community. So all this stuff that the King is doing and all the really good stuff he did to try to support the values we all care about during the Trump visit is getting pushed aside by the questions of Prince Andrew.

21:28The increasingly frenetic media reporting, essentially the newspapers over the last couple of days, least up here in Scotland, are so dominated by this story and not looking at so many other important things in the world. Yeah, but I think maybe that's a consequence of first under the Queen and then subsequently under Charles of the royal family not having obeyed the first rule of crisis management, get to the facts quickly. And I think what they've done, and this emerged most graphically in a way in this revelation, I think in this new book that's posthumously been written by Virginia Gaffray, the best known of the victims, if you like, of this sex trafficking of young girls.

22:14And this is the revelation that Prince Andrew asked his personal protection officer to, quote, dig dirt and said in an email to the Queen's deputy press secretary, I hear she's got a criminal record. I've got her security number and date of birth. Can we sort of find out kind of thing? And I've felt at every stage of this, because you say this sort of, you know, lots of media reporting now. There have been plenty of previous moments, not least the interview that that he did with Emily Maitlis when when he said he revealed he doesn't sweat. So there have been big moments in this story. But I think this, in a sense, has become a tipping point.

22:55Now, tipping points usually come at the end of a process, which if you'd gripped it properly in the first place, maybe wouldn't have had such a catastrophic impact. That's right. And it's something you've talked about a lot with strategic communications, because it's something that you found when Labour ministers were in scandals. In fact, you've talked about a number of them. I think the Welsh secretary, Peter Mandelson, Keith Vaz, and various others, that moment where you have to say, what did you actually do? And try to work out whether the person's being honest with you or lying or concealing something.

23:30And of course, their tendency often will be to lie and try to conceal. And the tendency of a family will be to take the side of the person within the family. And I see what I thought was a very revealing moment recently was that, I think it was at the funeral of the Duchess of Kent, where you could see Prince Andrew trying to talk to Prince William on the steps of the church. And William was absolutely having nothing to do with him. And that said to me, in his mind, he'd already got to the point where they've now got to. And I don't know what goes on in these circles, but from what I hear, it was as much Prince William as the king, who was basically saying, we've got to get this guy out of our lives effectively because they are a public family.

24:19That's their role. But I think this book, I've not read it, but the bits I've heard about being discussed, it really does feel that this is the end for him. It's very disturbing. But your point also is if you look at Virginia Jeffries' family being interviewed, yes, they're talking about Prince Andrew, but they really want people to focus on the other abusers. They're trying to say, look, this is a way of casting light on the much, much bigger issue of all these other people involved in horrible things. Just to cement that point in relation to the United States. So there's Trump. Trump was very, very, very close to Epstein.

25:01Trump is now talking. He's still sort of mumbling away about the possibility of pardoning Ghislaine Maxwell. So there is something strange that it's stuff that we consider to be completely unacceptable. They say they consider to be completely unacceptable. And yet they don't really seem to have paid a price for what we have seen as an utterly corrosive relationship. Right. Final question, Alistair. What's your thoughts on Japan's new prime minister who's being referred to as the Iron Lady? Should this be seen as a warning or what's to come? Well, she's been referred to as the Iron Lady because she likes to call herself the Iron Lady.

25:44And yet again, when she was sworn in yesterday, she was wearing a blue suit, the same colour as the blue suit she wore when she won the leadership election. And she's a very interesting person. When we talked about her briefly, when she took over the party, this is the Liberal Democrats who have the LDP who have been in charge for pretty much nonstop for 70 years. And we made this reference to her being, you know, somebody who tries to model herself to some extent on Margaret Thatcher. And I can't remember if I forwarded to you, Rory. I got an email from somebody who is a politics lecturer in Tokyo who said, I wouldn't fall for the Margaret Thatcher thing.

26:27She's much more less trust. So I don't know that much about her. She's been around for a long, long time. name she's she's a devotee of the of shinzo abe the prime minister who was assassinated pretty right wing she said to be more to the right of him uh she's quite a colorful character she's she's a drummer by which i mean she plays the drums uh she she performed for a while in a in a in a rock band um she's got very very conservative views in relation to family one of her she says that one of her first big challenges is going to be getting getting on with trump because coincidentally trump is making a visit to japan in the very in the very very near future so like every leader she's kind of having to work out to how to handle that but you know look japan the pictures of her yesterday in the in the japanese parliament was a bit like it did remind me of margaret thatcher when she first came along it was a woman in blue surrounded by men and so it's quite a thing it's a very very male dominated politics in Japan and the LDP has always been very very male dominated so I think that is quite a historic thing yes very much though on the ultra conservative wing I mean in some of the touchstone cultural issues in Japanese politics for example visiting the Yasakuni shrine which is a shrine which includes Japanese war criminals very much one of the people that visits their shrine and was caught up in controversies with quite far-right books, quite far-right figures.