487. Is Starmer Rethinking His Approach to Europe? (Question Time)

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1:59and a few interesting things he said about that. We're going to talk about the Bondi Beach terrorist assault and the continuing political fallout. We're going to talk about Roman Abramovich and his lawyer, Tory shadow attorney general. And we're going to talk about the curious world of the release of National Archives. First question. We had a very foreign policy-based main episode. Let's start with a more, well, it's a bit foreign, but quite domestic. Finley Morris, who is from Devon, is a TripPlus member. Is there anything in Keir Starmer's comments about the single market worth getting hopeful about?

2:32Or is this yet another lukewarm statement which doesn't excite anyone? This is a comment on an interview that Keir Starmer did with Laura Koonsberg on the BBC. It follows some interventions from West Streeting, David Lammy and others suggesting we should get closer and closer and closer to the European Union, particularly the single market. Sum it up, I would say Keir Starmer was basically saying We've got to protect these trade deals that we've done with the US, India, and the European Union. Not going the whole way, but we've made lots of different progress on food, agriculture, Erasmus, other areas.

3:09And we're going to keep going in that direction. Cue headlines the next morning of the right-wing papers. Starmer prepares for full Brexit betrayal, I wish. Right. Yes, you wish. So yes, the story that I got at least was that David Lammy, Minouche Shafiq, who's the economic advisor, West Streeting, were pushing more for a customs union. And just to remind again, listeners, customs union is basically not free movement of people. It's instead a big trade deal from the point of view of the farmers in Cumbria, who I care a lot about, definitely much more beneficial, don't have the customs problems.

3:47And you also don't have the problems of cheap meat coming in from Australia and New Zealand. Single market is essentially the situation that Norway finds itself in, which is it's not in the customs union, it's in the single market, but it has free movement of people, et cetera. I would have thought of the two, the single market is probably tougher for Keir Starmer to sell because the free movement of people bit is the bit that - And he was clear he wasn't going that far. So I then want to come back to you because again, you were saying in the car that if Labour is looking for something to do now, what they need to do is come full out for rejoining the European Union, hold a referendum on it.

4:28And actually, it's almost their only option left given where they are in the polls. I wasn't quite saying that. What I was doing was I read a very interesting piece by Peter Kellner, pollster, strategic thinker. He was saying that even accepting that these are really volatile times and that it's very hard to find popular leaders anywhere in the world right now in democracies, that Keir Starmer and Labour's ratings under Keir Starmer, although he said actually historically they've not fallen as fast as, for example, in Thatcher's second term. First term, I think, just for the Falklands. For the Falklands, well, that's what it was.

5:02Then the second one was, was it Sunak or Truss? I can't remember. Anyway, there was another example where there was an even more cataclysmic fall. However, we're talking about sort of 18, 20 % satisfaction ratings. That is not good. And Peter was making the point that they need, Labour really needs something. He calls it a kind of wow moment or a wow thing. And I don't necessarily agree with that, but it needs something that breaks open this current sort of very negative, very gloomy, very downbeat, negative assessment of the government. And I think it could be that we just, you know, come right out and say, this is the speech I made when we did our Rest His Politics tour, we come right and say, look, we've got to face the truth.

5:47Brexit has been catastrophic economically, strategically, politically, and actually over time, my big legacy is I'm going to take us back in. I'm simply saying that is what I would recommend as a possible... Now, there will be people in Downing Street listening to this and thinking, the guy's completely nuts. We talked about the stakes in Moldova, right? We've got to be fighting for big things. Big things. Well, I'm trying to understand what the downside is. What I'd say to the people in Downing Street is, you're doomed anyway. If you continue in the current way you are, Sam's not going to be able to win the next election anyway.

6:23He's going to struggle to remain as leader through to the next election. So why not go out with a blaze? Why not try to come up with one big idea. Now, you'd presumably have to reorient your electoral coalition because you'd worry that there would be people up in red wall seats who remain pretty firm on Brexit who will feel alienated and betrayed. So you'd be hoping to pick up what Lib Dem Green votes is, centrist Tories. But you'd certainly win back, I think, remain Tories like me might look more kindly at a Labour government because instead of what we currently do, which is look at it and say, this is a bunch of slightly odd socialists who don't really like rich people and are going after wealth and shutting down private schools and putting up taxes and don't feel right.

7:06Suddenly, there's a big thing where we can be like, oh, all right, actually, Stalin's not too bad and he's doing something big and exciting in geopolitics. Yeah. And which would lead to a better, stronger economy, would allow us to build on, because I think one of the successes of Kier's leadership has been this E3 thing, and the amounts of Macron really do appear to have taken term to rely on him. The E3 thing is meaning something. And so I just think that you're right. I think they're going to need something pretty big. And you do it through geopolitics. In a way, the argument that didn't work during the Brexit campaign, but should have been pushed much more powerfully, which was the European Union had been the key to peace in Europe for 70 years.

7:48Suddenly now with Trump in place, with Putin in place, you can put a very, very different argument. It feels statesmanlike. You can start invoking Winston Churchill. You can start talking about the benefit for the UK defense industry. What we don't need is to all push up our NATO defense spending to 2%, 3%, 5%, and then find that we're buying 70 % of our kit from the United States and becoming ever more vulnerable and dependent. Or that we're all as European countries buying the same things for the same reasons we could be doing together. Absolutely. Okay, Rory, here's a question from Daniel, TripPlus member in Sydney.

8:22Following Australia's deadliest terror attack at Bondi Beach, Albanese, the Prime Minister, is resisting intense pressure for a federal royal commission while facing extraordinary personal attacks, including claims that he bears personal responsibility for the 15 deaths. Is this principal leadership or political miscalculation? And are the attacks on him legitimate or the populist exploitation of tragedy? Well, look, this is now the rawest, most contentious issue I'd say in Australian politics. We have a huge number of Australian listeners. One Australian listener sent me no less than 256 separate WhatsApp messages, no fewer than 256 WhatsApp messages, not correcting me on my grammar, but in this case, talking about what happened over in Bondi Beach.

9:10Or Balfour Albanese. All of them basically saying, these were endless Australian newspaper articles and photographs saying that Albanese was essentially complicit. And the line that's being run, particularly by members of the Australian Jewish community, but by other Australians too, is that Albanese and the Labour government did not do enough to clamp down on anti-Semitism. They didn't spot the signs of increasing radicalization. They didn't really follow through with the national security measures that they could have taken, and that therefore they must bear some responsibility and a royal commission must be set up.

9:54Josh Frydenberg, who is a former treasurer, who is Jewish. This has really been a moment where he's been very dominant in the media. he's emerged very, very visibly moved on Bondi Beach, embracing people. Whereas Albanese's response seemed a bit more wooden, he kind of reading his speech. In fact, if you watch him coming down Bondi Beach, another Australian friend of both of us sent us a video of him going down that beach instead of Frydenberg, who was hugging people and visibly moved, you had a sense of that Prime Minister moving with security guards around him. So Albanese's team are going to be horrified to hear me say this, and I suppose I'm going to hand over to you to disagree agreeably and put the case for Albanese.

10:38Do you agree with the question was about this idea that there should be this sort of royal commission? I'm not persuaded of that. I think he needs a royal commission. I think he needs a royal commission. To do what? Firstly, it is for Australia, their 9-11 moment. This is the worst terrorist attack they've experienced. There will be endless questions around what could have been done to Okay, but there's an inquiry by this guy, Richardson, who's there. Why not have a royal commission? Everyone's asking for a royal commission. I predict here on the show, Albanese will agree to a royal commission within the next week anyway.

11:12If that were true, why doesn't he do it early? He may do. I'm simply saying I'm not convinced that it would be the right thing to do. But do you think it's the right thing to do what he will actually do, I believe, which is drag your feet for four weeks, say you're not going to have it, and then announce it? No, if you think you're going to do it, do it. But I can remember having lots of discussions on all sorts of different situations about what we would define, I guess, as public inquiries. Okay. I remember, for example, that when Marjorie Molan, Northern Ireland Secretary, was really pushing us to go full out for inquiry into Bloody Sunday.

11:49And there were, you know, Tony Blair just wanted to kind of really think it through and really say, well, what's this, where's this going to lead? Now, I would argue actually that was a good thing to do. And it did lead to a sort of a form of closure. Where's it ever been a bad thing to do? Where's the Royal Commission ever gone wrong? Well, on that, I was about to say, when you put the cost of that against what was actually achieved, I think you can make the case both ways. Whereas what Albanese has done has basically said he's got this former head of the Australian Intelligence Services, who's doing a review and with access to everything that he needs, and to try to answer that question that you just put, what could have been done differently.

12:33I think when politicians come out and say explicitly to the prime minister of their country where something terrible has happened, this is on you, the blood is on your hands. I just think that's completely unreasonable. I think that's totally unreasonable. I agree with you. Totally unreasonable. And I also think that I don't support Australian Jewish friends of mine who are saying that this is a direct consequence of criticism of Israel. If anybody who thinks that it is, I think that is a very dangerous argument to make. It's very, very important to say that one should absolutely be able to call out Israel, call out Donald Trump's United States, call out our own governments, point out when people are doing wrong, and not be drawn into the, oh, yes, but that might give sucker to your enemies, because that's always the way in which criticism is shut down.

13:19However, I'm going to lean into this once more. I don't think you, and you're a very good communicator, I don't think you're really convincing me, and I suspect you're probably not convincing most listeners why they're not having a Royal Commission. And that's why I think Albanese is going to have to fault. Do most of our listeners, hugely intelligent and well-informed though they are, do they know what a Royal Commission is as compared to, for example, an independent inquiry or a public inquiry? I mean, Royal Commissions to me are what you do when you have an issue which cannot be resolved in any other way, and which is going to lead to fundamental consequential change for the country.

13:58That's why you have a Royal Commission. Why doesn't he want a Royal Commission? I mean, that's what he has to answer. That's the problem. And that's why I think he's going to conceive one next week. Because in every interview, it's going to be like this. They're going to be like, why won't you do a Royal Commission? And the answer is what? It costs too much? No, the answer is, cost is a factor, but that's not the answer you necessarily give at this stage. The answer is that a terrible, terrible thing has happened since when the government has already made changes, for example, in relation to gun ownership, for example, in relation to hate crime and hate preachers and so forth.

14:29He's actually done quite a lot. And what happens in these situations, and it's very hard to stand up against this, and I get the kind of the sense of pressure upon him to do it. But I think if you are a leader, you actually do have to sometimes step back and say, well, is it actually the right thing to do? And I think what he will do, all these people who've signed petitions and said that this would happen, all the sports people who've come out and all the sort of celebs and all the rest of it, is that by the time it happens, years down the track, look how long this COVID inquiry is taking, right?

15:02Well, you're going to talk about something here. Okay, it's not maybe as complicated as that, but it could be. And I've yet to see a Royal Commission or a public inquiry at the end of which all of the people who asked for it then said, oh yeah, that's answered all the questions. I think that's right. But again, you're much savvier on politics than me. But I think the line you're taking might have worked if he'd been better in the immediate aftermath. Well, we said - If he'd communicated more powerfully, if he'd been more emotionally literate, if he'd seized the public mood more, then the credibility and legitimacy he would have to resist the Royal Commission more, given where he is, which is basically everybody thinks he's defensive, he hasn't got it, and he's trying to cover up.

15:48He's go with the Royal Commission. What's he got to lose? Nothing really. We shall see. I mean, the other thing I would, whether you make this part of the argument or not, I don't know, but there have been other, okay, nothing quite as horrific as this, but there have been previous disasters that have not had Royal Commissions. I just think sometimes we want to blame. We want to say that there's some sort of easy solution that could put this right, and there isn't. I think the blame game is just, I think that plays into the - But some of these commissions came up, I mean, I don't have a dog in this fight, but I was just rereading the 9-11 commission report.

16:26It is fantastic. I mean, the world should be hugely grateful for that. That was an unbelievable bit of work. We learned so much about failure in US intelligence services, coordination, everything. But is there not a case with this, that, you know, how one of the guys is dead. The other one, I presume, is going to spend an awful lot of time in prison. Are we really, through two people, and we have a royal commission looking at all aspects of all gun laws and all this and all that, are we really, really going to get to a place where you uncover the sort of scale of the thing that you had with the 9-11 report?

17:01Look, I could be wrong, and I suspect there'll be quite a lot of Australians listening to this thinking, what the hell are you on about, and you deserve to get smashed in the ashes. but I really the other thing is I feel for Albanese on this because I think he's actually a decent guy he's not the most natural charismatic speaker he probably did make a mistake in you know reading from a script and not maybe going out and Chris Mims I mentioned the New South Wales Premier Chris Mims he just got the tone right and it was a question of tone but when you're dealing with something like this I think I just I guess I come from the place of thinking we should be a little bit more sympathetic to politicians when they're dealing with stuff which is fundamentally, he didn't give the guy a gun.

17:41He didn't say, I want you to go and kill Jewish people because I'm recognizing a Palestinian state. I'm with you, but we're not going to resolve this agreeable disagreement. But I think the fundamental issue here is that the Jewish community in Australia has a higher Holocaust survivor population than any population out of Israel. They have been very, very conscious of anti-Semitic attacks and hate crimes in Australia over the last few months. They have been predicting this would happen, and it happened with them publicly celebrating their most holy religious festival on a beach with people turning up asking, are you a Jew or not, and then killing 15 people, including a 10-year-old.

18:30No, listen, the thing was utterly horrific on every level. But ultimately, it was one guy and his son who went out with specific intent of doing what you've just described. And I think, however horrific, I think it is unreasonable and unfair to say Albanese should have known how to stop that. And then worse, Albanese caused that. I just think it's unfair and we should, you know, be fair. I agree with you on that. Okay. Let's take a break and then we'll come back and talk about your excellent series on AI.

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20:34Welcome back to The Restless Politics with me, Rory Stewart. And me, Alistair Campbell. And Rory Mohale is a TripPlus member in South Africa who says, I'm really enjoying Rory's AI miniseries. And for those who don't know, this is an excellent miniseries for Restless Politics members where Rory is talking with Matt Clifford, who has been advising UK governments of both colours on AI. Mahali goes on, as a teen myself, I feel the debate has lost serious momentum in schools. It was once heavily discussed. Now teachers and students seem bored to the point where it's not allowed in debate classes. We talk a lot about informing ministers of this issue.

21:12How do we engage the younger generation so that children maintain their creativity and authenticity whilst not rejecting AI completely as they develop? Before we answer the question, what did you learn from doing it? I've learned a lot from listening to it. I thought the first episode, I felt I understood a lot better at the end of it, kind of what it was and how it worked. And the second episode, I actually found really interesting. I actually thought it was more about the politics of it. I was fascinated by your suggestion that actually you do not buy the idea that this thing, artificial general intelligence, has to happen.

21:48You actually think that if Trump and Xi Jinping got together, they could just say, no, we're not doing this. I sense that you're moving to a much more skeptical. Yeah. I think the reason to be terrified is that the people making these decisions have so much vested interest and money bound up with it. So one fact, which I think is really important, is that Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Dario Modi are on record back 10 years ago saying that they are seriously worried that artificial general intelligence could lead to the extinction of humanity. 10 years later, they're all running companies which are racing to build this thing and are predicting that artificial general intelligence could emerge in a year or two.

22:36They're still saying that there is a 20 % chance, or in one case a 15 % chance, that it could kill us all. To go to the question, I don't think people are getting bored. I think people are still fascinated by it. I wonder if as part of the numbing down thing, we're not willing even to acknowledge and to process what that might mean. Because Matt Clifford, your interlocutor, I sense is just in that place, well, it's happening anyway, just get on with it. Yeah. So the story that they're telling is, it's too late, the genie's out of the bottle, somebody's going to build artificial general intelligence anyway.

23:12So I, Elon Musk, Sam Altman, need to build it before the bad guys, and my artificial general intelligence will be able control this. So if you're Musk, you think you have to build it before Demas the Sabbath. If you're Altman, you feel you have to build it before Musk. All of them feel they have to build it before Mark Zuckerberg. And all the Americans feel they have to build it before the Chinese. Because they're not exactly driven by public service, these people, are they? Well, they think they're saving the world. So the story they tell themselves is, if I can build the super-intelligent super robot first, my super-intelligent super robot can protect the world from everybody else's evil super-intelligent super robot.

23:48You then talk to the other one. I think we've seen enough of Elon Musk's super intelligence in other forms. To be worried. You then talk to the other ones and they're like, no, no, no, that guy's evil. If he builds it first, he's going to destroy the world. That's why I have to build mine first to stop him, et cetera. The actual madness of this, I came across a quote from Sam Altman at lunchtime, and I just want to share with you to get a sense of how very, very strange. This is not a joke. This is Sam Altman giving an interview. Sam Altman's the head of OpenAI, so responsible for ChatGBT. I quote, I think that AI will probably most likely lead to the end of the world.

24:20But in the meantime, there will be great companies created with serious machine learning. Can I read that? Where do you say it? Source? It's quoted by a guy called Dan Wong. But real. Yeah, I believe it's totally real. I think that AI will probably most likely lead to the end of the world. But in the meantime, there will be great companies created with serious machine learning. Now, look, who knows whether it will lead to the end of the world? Might be only a 1 % chance it's going to leave the end of the world. If the people building it keep telling us that there's a significant chance it will leave the end of the world, the obvious question is why are we not stopping it?

24:54They say, well, it can't be stopped. In fact, actually at the moment, of course, it could be stopped in theory because it requires such enormous data centers. You can see these things from space. There are basically only five companies in the world that's able to do this. So if Trump and Xi Jinping wanted, they could shut it down. Now, do you really think they Absolutely, because in the end - Planning permission. These things require - We're going to slow down planning permission. Yeah, these things require the kind of energy to power a city of a million people. I mean, all you would have to do is get these five companies shut down and you could stop the whole thing.

25:32Now, of course, for many reasons why you wouldn't do that, one of them is that they represent 20 % of the entire global stock market and they have bet trillions on this technology and there would be a big dip in the stock market if you did it. You might worry also about lots of other issues. But there's something very awkward going on at the core of this. You've got scientists, including the godfathers of AI, the people who produced the first large language models. So Jeffrey Hinson, for example, Joshua Bengio, who we're interviewing, saying they're terrified and they want to stop. You've got Mustafa Suleiman, who we interviewed, going out on the Today program sounding, I think, much more cautious about this technology we've heard.