464. Labour’s Tax Timebomb, Climate Backsliding, and Sudan’s Forgotten War

25:37And bits are also going into refugees and bits are committed to the World Bank. It still leaves a few billion, but the reality on the ground is exactly what you've seen. When I was running GiveDirectly, which was this direct cash transfer NGO, I remember turning up in African countries and finding that our budget as an NGO was now three times the budget of the British government. So British ambassadors in some of the poorest countries in the world had bilateral budgets at that stage of five, six million pounds when we alone as an NGO was spending 25-30. And you've just made that point with Jamaica.

26:09And if you think, when I was doing the job, the standard thing that you got from civil servants for almost any climate crisis or emergency response to any world was usually 100 million. It's usually 100 million for Yemen, 100 million for Sudan, 100 million for South Sudan, 100 million for Somalia, 100 million for Syria, going up in a case like Pakistan, 400 million. So if you look at 2.5, it's not a lot. But the other thing, this I think goes back to the point about, and maybe this is where we should talk a little bit about the way the media landscape has changed. Because this goes to the heart of the thing about whether we care more or less.

26:45I think the debate has moved, I'm afraid. And I think a lot of them, because I think if that had been back in the days when you were in power, 2.5 million to Jamaica, which has just seen this catastrophic. And which has this huge historical relationship with Britain in every single way. Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We couldn't be more closely connected to Jamaica. I think there would have been an absolute outcry. Yeah, from both sides. Absolutely. From the progressive left saying, here are people suffering, and from the Tory right saying, Commonwealth, historical times. Yeah, but there hasn't been.

27:17And I think one of the reasons there hasn't been is because this argument, you know, why are we helping people abroad when we've got enough of our problems at home? And playing into this whole thing about immigration and so forth. And I thought this week, you know, you and I saw the same thing. Elon Musk, I mean, he did this thing yesterday. It was circulated very widely on social media, talking about how Britain, in Britain now, in Ireland, Scotland and England, there are villages of 500 people who are sitting there like hobbits, living a nice, peaceful, quiet life. and men are arriving in their thousands to rape their women and children it was utterly nuts and it was getting millions of views on social media alongside the we had this terrible stabbing on a train at the weekend and literally within minutes you had politics including quite serious significant politicians out essentially spotting something that they felt they could exploit you know we need to know the identity of this man with a knife immediately well of course we do and that's the police's job to go and try and find them and they did actually an amazing job you know in dealing with this crisis as with this disaster as it unfolded but i think this is where i think social media has changed a lot of these debates musk has driven it and we now have a body of politicians right and left who basically think that it's there as something to exploit rather than something to challenge for the damages due to our debate.

28:44And to remember, back in 2015-16, our least favourite or second least favourite politician in the world, Boris Johnson, when Donald Trump said there were no-go areas in London, Boris Johnson said Donald Trump is out of his mind and is displaying stupefying ignorance. Fast forward 11 years, where are the mainstream politicians calling out Musk? Yeah, absolutely. And I had an argument with Peter Karl about this some time back when he was doing the tech job and said, well, look, you know, like it or not, this guy's an important political figure because he was so close to Trump. He's an important economic figure because of his wealth and all that stuff.

29:19But I think this guy's doing real damage, using his platform to do real damage to the country that we live in and doing it deliberately. And those absolutely bugger all, right? So what preceded this, I mean, he's completely obsessed with Lord of the Rings, like a lot of these tech bros are. Palantir. Yeah, Palantir, exactly. Exactly. Arundel, exactly. All this stuff is Lord of the Rings. And he said that Tommy Robinson is like the Rangers of Rohan, the men of Gondor, brought out to protect the hobbits against the bad men. Now, the truth is, if anything, Tommy Robinson's one of the orcs, and he, dear old Elon Musk, is the evil wizard Saruman who is releasing them.

29:57Well, you're talking about a book I haven't read as closely as you have, but I can see the young people in our production team nodding, nodding knowledgeably. I was in Dublin when the riots were going on. So they've got asylum hotels, same as we have. And the dinner I was speaking at, I was sitting opposite the chief of police, the Guard of Commissioner, a guy called Justin Kelly. Very nice guy. And he'd been through the mill with this thing. But what he was explaining to me was that this terrible, terrible, terrible incident happened where a 10-year-old girl, who I think is in care, was out in the middle of the night, and she was raped by somebody who was in one of these hotels.

30:34And this is in Ireland? This is in Dublin. Yeah. And the minute the story got out, Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, Charlie Robinson, so-called, was in Israel, where he'd been parading in his Maccabi Tel Aviv shirt. Yeah. And was - Invited as a guest by one of the ministers. By one of the Israeli ministers. Yeah. And he was tweeting about this hotel in Dublin. He said that a Canadian similar figure was not only tweeting about it, he was filming himself getting on a plane in Canada to come over to join the Irish Patriots outside this hotel. And he said within a matter of hours, they had two and a half thousand people outside this hotel.

31:15And they had people charging them with carts, horse and cart. They had people with pitchforks. They had a laser that was trying to disrupt the activity of the helicopter that was above. Now, actually, they did an amazing job to bring it under control as quickly as they did. But what it shows is this Musk is part of the internationalization of the production of as much mayhem as they can in our country and in Ireland. Yeah. And of course, what he's doing on X is he's saying, I predict civil war. Now, but of course, my sense is he wants civil war. He's trying to create civil war. He's not going to get it, but he's fantasizing about it.

31:54He wants it. He wants to create it. It's not really a prediction. Most of his predictions go wrong. He predicted the AFD were going to win the German elections. He was wrong. None of his supporters remember this, right? But they really want to believe that civil war is coming because that feeds the sort of desire for violence. What is this thing about? The other big thing that's happening today are these elections in the US and including Mamdani in New York. One of the big attack lines they've been running against Mamdani is that he's going to be like Sadiq Khan in London because they've seeded this idea that London is like this hellhole where you can't walk down the streets.

32:32What I was pointing out was Boris Johnson. They've been saying for 11 years. The American ambassador in Ireland was at this thing and I had a chat with him, a guy called Ed Walsh, and I said to him after this, look, you know, can you please keep this guy Musk out of our politics? He knows absolutely F all about what goes on here. He misrepresents it the whole time. And I was telling him some of the stuff that Musk had been saying and tweeting and he didn't know about it and he said it sounds pretty bad yeah it's really bad just just on this i mean there was a really i was actually trying to send fraser nelson ex of the spectator the predecessor to michael gove current leading episode um top of the charts which which it was an extraordinary episode anyway i was trying to send fraser nelson a direct message to congratulate him on a piece he'd written but i was very surprised to discover he's blocked me on social media.

33:20I must have said something to upset him sometime in the past. But he pointed out, he said social media, he was talking about the train stabbings. And he was saying that literally within minutes, these theories were going around and politicians were piling in and, you know, speaking to their existing biases and prejudices. And he said, for those interested, here are the facts about recent trends in violent crime. First of all, yes, the immigrant population has doubled over the last two decades, but crime, as measured by the gold standard crime survey for england and wales has halved this crime has halved in spite of all these children born to immigrants now it's about a third of all births or half in london and london the most immigrant heavy racially diverse city in the uk releases monthly figures for murders perhaps the hardest of all crime metrics they are at a multi-year possibly even multi-century low so there are facts and and the response from nigel farage when challenge with exactly this is look at your phone.

34:17So the whole of politics has become virtual, whole of politics become TikTok. These kinds of facts are entirely irrelevant. So when I challenged Musk's thing on Twitter, I got two and a half thousand replies. And everything was, you're out of touch, Rory. Why don't you visit Britain? Why don't you come to my thing? It's mayhem. It's civil war already. It's madness already. And you turn around and you say look at the figures you know fraser nelson also has looked at hospital admissions which is pretty black and white how many people are admitted to hospital for stab wounds down over the last five years but that is not what people believe on social media if we if we go with what people feel and what people believe that is what feeds populism and that's why there has to be a far better job done i mean you'll wait a long time if you get the media to sort of do the job properly but i think politicians have got to do a lot better job they are currently doing at rebutting the lies and the nonsense.

35:11And you've got to be careful because you don't want to spend your whole time doing this stuff. But I think somebody with as big a following as Musk, and it wasn't just about Britain, the stuff he was, he had three hours of Joe Rogan and Joe Rogan, pathetic and no rebuttal, no sort of challenging or whatever. But I just think this stuff is way, way, way more dangerous than we think. And they create a narrative, which is very, very hard to push back on. And if you let it go, if you let it go, it becomes a fact. And that's become the world, isn't it? That's really what's driving the world. Yeah. Anyway, shall we take a break?

35:40Let's take a break and come back. After the break, let's get into Sudan, which is probably the most interesting international issue in the world at the moment.

35:54Welcome back to The Recipalities. I'm Anastar Campbell. And with me, Rory Stewart. Very much looking forward to seeing people in our forthcoming tour. To remind people that's Bournemouth, Glasgow, Manchester, London, come to the live tours love to see you I think we're 96 % sold out but there are a few tickets left and we'd love to see you It starts this weekend Rory It does I hope you're feeling fit and well Well I've not really focused yet I will focus I'll be there I'll be there I'll be there But we've got West Ham Burnley on Saturday and Rory Stewart and Alistair Campbell at Bournemouth on Sunday and then also if you're in we get a lot of people in Belfast and in Dublin saying why do you never come here I go there all the time but not necessarily with the rest of its apologies but I'll be going there March the 5th and 6th with not Rory Stewart, but Anthony Scaramucci.

36:39So just the Mooch. So just go to therestispolitics.com to get the few remaining tickets for the current tour and also to sign up for Belfast and Dublin. Tickets go on sale on Friday, November 7. And of course, if you'd like to sign up for early access to this amazing Alistair Mooch double show, please join as a member, which also helps us support the podcast and gives you access to some of our mini-series and much more. Okay, let's talk about Sudan. 150 ,000 killed. so far thousands currently trapped in El Fasher that's the reason we're talking about this now because the extraordinary battle has been in El Fasher siege followed by the one side taking over this crucial strategic city two million at risk of or already in famine 30 million in need of aid 40 million displaced 90 percent of children not in school and the our friend David Miliband and his IRC, rescue organization, they're saying this is pretty much the worst thing that's happening anywhere in the world right now.

37:36I think so many interesting things to be said. One is that 150 ,000, to put it in context, is about 50 % more than the number of people we estimate to have been killed in Gaza. Although, of course, it's worth bearing in mind there are some very, very big differences when people try to draw equivalences. One of them is that as a percentage of the population, that's far lower than Gaza. The population of Sudan is about 50 million. Population of Gaza is about 2-3 million. So as a percentage of the population, far more were killed in Gaza than Sudan, but it's still a horrifying number of people, 150 ,000.

38:05Another difference, of course, is that Israel is a Western ally supplied by the West. It's a liberal democratic state, as Sudan is a civil war. Nevertheless, it is absolutely true, as many people have said, that most of the focus has been on Israel, Gaza, and on Ukraine, and not on Sudan. And although we've done quite a lot of episodes on Sudan, I think we can see we haven't done anything like as many. And my goodness, it's both horrifying and interesting. Quick reminder, explainer, essentially, there are two different military groups operating. There is a group called the RSF, led by this man called Hermeti, who was essentially a camel rustler, camel trader from the Chad border, Arab nomad.

38:51And his group used to be called the Janjaweed, devils on horses. And people remember them because they were the big perpetrators of the genocides in Darfur going back 20 years ago. His uncle was a famous criminal. He himself has been indicted by the International Criminal Court 20 years ago. And on the other side, you have the Sudan armed forces, the SAF under Burhan, who is the general commanding them. And back then they were allies on the same side, fighting the same war. And this is part of the whole complication because effectively, when the dictator of Sudan was trying to attack the people in Darfur, he used the Janjaweed militia.

39:28He used Hermeti to do that. And then when that war began to come to an uneasy, fragile peace, he tried to merge the Janjaweed militia, the RSF, with the army. And then those two forces then brought down the dictator, 2019. And then 2021 did a coup d 'etat against the new, inverted commas, democratic government. And then in 2023, started fighting each other, which has led to this horror. And Al-Fasha is basically the last major fortress of the Sudan armed forces west of the Nile, which has just been taken. And people who are able to get out of the city now fleeing to a refugee camp 600 000 people in that refugee camp to wheeler and we're not going to play um but the atrocity videos are i mean i've been sent many of them and they are just so shocking uh what's happening on the ground well there's this there's this guy who's become a bit of a sort of social media abu lulu who is literally posting videos of himself killing people who are begging to stay alive and defenseless, not armed.

40:33So I think we're talking quite a lot of war crime being committed. But of course, the other thing that's happened is the extent to which other countries are engaged and involved. So the SAF, Sudanese Armed Forces, are backed by Egypt, backed by Turkey, backed by the Saudis. And then the RSF, although the UAE deny it, are very heavily backed by the UAE. And there's been a little bit of a kind of diplomatic media flurry in Britain this week, because of course there's been the suggestion that weapons that we have sold to the UAE have found their way into this battle in Sudan. So if you go back to 20 odd years ago, when there were these global protests and concerts and all the sort of usual panoply of support for a place in real trouble.

41:23The pictures were of these guys kind of riding around on horseback and camels. They've now got the modern war, they've got drones, they've got howitzers, they've got really good transport equipment and so forth. And I think what they're looking for is, I guess, for the Americans and others to step in and go beyond the pretty pathetic statements that have been forthcoming in the last few days. And UAE, great reporting from Declan Walsh, who's a veteran journalist in the region, and great reporting by the New York Times in general. We talked about the podcast, how they managed to use satellite imagery to expose that UAE had effectively a fake hospital on the Chad-Sudan border, which they were using to push in supplies.

42:06A lot of weapons, many of them seem to be American weapons supplied to the UAE or Chinese weapons supplied to the UAE have been found on the ground. And there's no doubt at all that the RSF, Hermeti's group, this ex-Gandri group, just couldn't operate without the money and supplies coming directly from the United Arab Emirates. So one of the questions is, why is the UAE doing this? And why indeed? You've just mentioned Turkey, Saudi, Egypt, and others. Why do they care? Well, there are basically three things that people seem to be caring about. One of them is resources. So gold, oil, and increasingly food.

42:45So many of these Gulf monarchies are trying to think about food for the future. And that's particularly true because we're in a world now where people don't trust US security guarantees in the same way. They're trying to hedge, they're trying to get other resources. UAE is now, this year, the biggest growing investor in Africa ahead of China. The second thing is ports. So people really got their eyes on Port Sudan, and they're really thinking about the Horn of Africa. And that's true in place all the way down Somalia, Djibouti, Kenya, many of these countries competing to try to control ports all the way down to Yemen.

43:20Just say that again, they've got more, what was the thing with UAE and China? Yeah, more investment coming in from the UAE and more growth and investment than any country in the world ahead of China this year into Africa. So the story over the last 10 years has basically been that China, France, Britain, which when I was the African minister in 2016, we were ahead of China. We've been dwarfed by China over the last 10 years. But now the UAE has become the biggest semester. Because back in George Bush's time, when I remember George Bush saying, this is a priority, we've got to sort this is a real problem.

43:47One of the issues was that China was investing very, very heavily in Sudanese oil. But that's fascinating. There's a UAE all over all of it. UAE's all over all of it. They've got an incredibly close relationship with Abiy Ahmed in Ethiopia, which we should also watch when we talk about global conflict, because Ethiopia's now pushing to take Eritrea. And we need to talk to you about that too, because you know about Eritrea. You went on an amazing trip to Eritrea, where there's the famous picture of you with the current leader of Eritrea. Well, this was a long, long, long time ago when he was a really good guy.

44:18He was a freedom fighter. And we were supporting him. He was a great hero of the left, yeah. It was extraordinary, and he's since become one of the worst dictators on the planet. We should talk about that another day, because it's another big global conflict brewing as the world falls apart. They're also very close to Debi and Chad, very close to Hiftar in Libya. They've been playing in South Sudan. They've been playing Yemen. So what's UAE up to? Resources, ports. The third thing is that they are emphasizing that the Sudan armed forces are relying on Islamist militia groups. And one of the ways in which they retook Khartoum is with these Islamists.

44:52And Mohammed bin Zayed, the leader of UAE, has a very, very strong anti-Islamist view. He's very against the Muslim Brotherhood all over the world. That's been some of the splits traditionally with Syria, some of the splits with Qatar. And I think also a really strong sense of loyalty because this was the mercenary force. It's the Sudanese, it's the Janjaweed militia, the RSF, it's Hermeti that Mohammed bin Zayed used in Yemen. He took these Sudanese militia groups and deployed them to Yemen to fight in Yemen. So along with other things, such as the extraordinary amount of gold going into UAE, far more than any of these African countries are registering as exported, is coming into UAE like sort of four times more than the registered exports.

45:37So what are you saying? It's illegal smuggling. And quite a lot of this will be coming from Hermiti. Although it's probably also true that gold is coming in from Sudan armed forces who are also far from saints in this whole picture. Yeah, there aren't really any good guys in this story either. There are not any good guys in the story. And this is where I think the question is whether Trump can pull something off. So this is about number 20 on the US list of priorities. It's a classic problem. I was talking to an amazing guy called Alex DeWall, who's studied the Horn of Africa for 20 years. And Alex was saying that it feels to him a little bit like the way the East India Company, the British East India Company, used to behave in India in the 18th century.

46:14We can listen to the kind of the Empire podcast, our sister podcast, the Goldhanger Group on this. But basically, it's about sovereignty collapsing. Many of these states no longer have real sovereignty. They're being divided in two, like Sudan, de facto. Their resources are being pillaged, and lots of external actors are using generals, political leaders for their own devices. And the world system, which used to be what we thought was in the 70s, 80s, 90s about sovereignty, is collapsing into something that feels much more like the age of empire. But on this one, you mentioned Trump there, and of course he keeps, this interview that was CBS this week, he produced a list of all the wars that he's sold, most of which he hasn't.

46:55But this one is where you don't really feel an American engagement. I think he does have a special envoy, but I couldn't even tell you his name. And you said probably rightly that we won't show some of the worst videos, but there was a very, I think there's something we should maybe put into the newsletter or put online. And that was a guy called Nathaniel Raymond, who's the head of the Yale Humanitarian Research Lab. And he did a really interesting analysis of this. And he said he's been investigating war crimes for 26 years. And this is as bad as he's seen it. And these pictures where you see from the air these body-shaped bloodstains on the ground.

47:34And what's happening, of course, these people are – so they've been trapped inside L fascia. There's been an infective in a siege, no food, no medicine going in, lots of reports of people eating animal feed to stay alive. And as people try to leave, quite a lot are being killed as they go. And so the IRC, who are based in Tuwila, they've actually, or as you say, they've got tens of thousands that have got there, they have been expecting more. And I think the worry is that quite a lot of people have just simply not made it because they've been picked off as they go. Well, there's been such extraordinary work done by different humanitarian organizations.

48:12So Jerome Tubiana and Eddie Thomas with Médecins Sans Frontières, who we talk about a lot, MSF, are people who have 20 years of Sudan expertise. I think Jerem, to be honest, parents were anthropologists working in Sudan. They speak local languages fluently. Eddie Thomas is part Armenian, part Lebanese, part Goan, part Irish. And these incredible characters, along with some very, very brave Sudanese, incredibly brave Sudanese, are trying to keep the support together. But it's also a story, if we want to link it to the bigger story, of the collapse of American power. Because what I think we're seeing with Trump is a president who is able to exercise a lot of power and leverage over America's erstwhile allies.

49:04Developed countries like Canada, Japan, Switzerland, European Union, very vulnerable to Trump and American power because we're so integrated in terms of our economies. but America has basically lost its influence entirely over places like Sudan. And this began probably five years ago. I was known very, very well Molly Fee, who was the American Assistant Secretary for Africa, because she and I lived together for six months, shared a shipping container together in Iraq. And she found herself taking over a situation where Jeff Feldman, who was the envoy of Sudan, had literally sat down with Hermeti and Bohan, who had promised him that they were working together to resolve things, got on a plane.

49:45When he landed, I think he landed in Doha, he discovered they'd just thrown a coup d 'etat and thrown the whole country apart. And the sense for America then in 2021 of this total betrayal, that people could lie to your face two hours before they do a military coup, was really the moment where everyone was like, okay, what on earth has happened? And of course, what had happened is rise of China, France kicked out of Africa but also the rise of these middle powers suddenly all of Africa particularly the Horn of Africa dominated particularly by as you say Turkey Egypt Qatar Saudi UAE which turned out to matter much more than the United States well there we are biggest humanitarian crisis in the world right now and and a possible US solution so this is my pitch And my pitch is that actually Trump could do a repeat of Gaza, which is not a peace deal, but he could pull off ceasefire and humanitarian access.

50:41And the way that he'd do it is put pressure on UAE and Mohammed bin Zayed. That's the key to the whole thing. And there you've got to work out what does Mohammed bin Zayed and UAE want. Do they want access to ports? Do they want gold? But if you put that pressure on, the RSF cannot operate without international support because, as you say, they're so reliant on all these fancy drones, command and control equipment, electronic jamming. This is not a sort of Taliban-style war of the sort you had in Afghanistan with people just wandering around with clashy cops. And that is something you can imagine Trump playing through the theatrics of peace might be able to do.

51:16So let's tempt him towards that for his next Nobel Prize move. Yeah, because one thing I have noticed, he has not talked about this one very much at all. So you're not that confident. I'm not that confident. But I think you're right. The key is to actually put pressure on the UAE. The UK could do a bit of that as well. Well, we've lost a lot of leverage, haven't we? I mean, we lost our relationship. I mean, that's been a really interesting one. You know, we often talk on the show about how we bring foreign leaders when they're young to Sandhurst so that they develop a love of Britain. I think Mohammed bin Zayed had such a bad experience with Sandhurst that he's hated Britain ever since.

51:49And to add to that, we were very critical of their internal human rights abuses, stopped a lot of our intelligence work with them, and I think we lost a lot of leverage there. So I don't think Britain has much influence now on UE. There we go. So last week, I mean, pretty much all domestic and a bit of international. This week was the other way around. Quite depressing, both climate and Sudan. And I think this is the think we should come back to another point about why we seem to be focusing so much less on crises and disasters and situations that deserve more attention than they're currently getting okay rory back tomorrow with question time whether you like it or not we're going to talk about your friends in the royal family the former prince andrew apparently what's your middle name by the way nugent nugent we're going to have to call you rory nugent stewart and i have to be alasdair John Campbell, because apparently we now have to call the former Prince Andrew, Andrew Mountbatten, Windsor.

52:44What's this sort of middle naming thing? And remember, they were originally called Battenburg. They only changed their name to Mountbatten during the First World War because they didn't like the German sound of it. Well, I'll look forward to your history lesson tomorrow, along with your explanation for the interview you did on Newslight, which we're still getting lots of feedback on. We'll also talk about the Dutch elections. Rob Yetten, a young gay leader. Amazing result because interesting in terms of populism. And of course, the other huge issue, which is what Trump is up to with his sea and trade talks and nuclear testing and all that kind of big stuff around the world.

53:19See you then.

53:26Hello, I'm David Ulushoge. And I'm Sarah Churchwell. This week on Journey Through Time, we are exploring the story of the gunpowder plot of 1605, the story of how a small group of Catholics engaged in what would have been the most devastating terrorist attack in all of British history. The plan was ruthless. Blow up Parliament, King James I, and most of his family, all in a single blow. The series will tell the story of treason and traitors, of a group of men led by the charismatic Robert Cadesby, who believed that the only option left to them to win their rights as Catholics was the violent destruction of the Stuart State.

54:03We look at the story of Guy Fawkes, the nation's most famous traitor, from his recruitment to becoming the plot's fall guy and ultimately being tortured and killed. Finally, we find out why this plot is still remembered now, 400 years later. Listen to Journey Through Time wherever you get your podcasts.