509. Labour's Polanski Problem and the Student Loans Scandal (Question Time)

16:15Alastair Campbell:It's just a sort of, it's another racist trope. And what I really enjoyed about the by-election was seeing that Matthew Goodwin being sort of sent out of Manchester, probably never to see the place again. I mean, Farage, they're not spoiled for choice for good candidates if he thought that was his best candidate for that constituency. That said to me, Farage is making quite big mistakes in the moment. That was a big mistake. Goodwin's, have you ever seen him on television? The guy's got the charm of this water bottle. I mean, he just, I can't believe, your brother may fancy him, Rory, but this is very weird.

16:51Alastair Campbell:You know, he's got no charm. we'll put in the newsletter this video of him campaigning on the top of a bus okay kia starmer's a robot labor are terrible vote vote reform it's the most pathetic piece of campaigning and i thought i i wonder whether this was farage cutting him down to size i don't know because he there's no reason you know i agree with you it's bad a third of people thought this guy could be their mp he's terrible and then he then he did this bleating about it was stolen by the Islamists and the woke progressives. And by the way, that's a pattern for Farage. This is taken out of the Trump playbook.

17:28Alastair Campbell:They always try to claim that somehow they were cheated of a victory. I thought the Green candidate, what I saw of her, I thought she was a very, very effective campaigner. I think you've got to say that. And I think Labour should actually say, yeah, what happened is that a lot of people who are not happy, they decided the Green was a perfectly sensible person to vote for. And that's what they did. And Labour's got to think that through and it is not done by playing this let's pretend that we're reform stuff because it doesn't

17:57Rory Stewart:it just doesn't work okay now alice here's one for you which i think you've been thinking about a lot from james hi alice from rory i went to university 2012 to 2016 to study civil engineering at ucl i was unfortunate to be in the first cohort being charged 9 000 pounds per year in fees and i'm from a low income background i was required to also take the maximum maintenance loan as a result, I needed to borrow£61 ,000 to complete my degree. I've worked full-time since graduating and amongst the top 5 % earners for my age. Therefore, since graduating, I've repaid£15 ,000. However, during that same period, I've accrued£39 ,000 in interest, meaning my resulting balance is£85 ,921.

18:42Rory Stewart:So he borrows£61 ,000, he repays£15 ,000, which inflation aside would make you think it's down to 45 ,000, but actually it's up to 85 ,000. The result of this 9 % working class student tax trap is it widens the gap between classes and destroys social modality in the UK. My peers who earn similar to me, but whose parents paid for their education, are now taking home over£500 more a month than I am, so£6 ,000 a year. They're buying houses sooner, investing in their future sooner. So what to do? This issue needs radical reform. the feeling of intergenerational injustice amongst my peers towards the government is palpable right now tracing back to brexit the tory lib dem coalition 2012 yeah but presumably what james has said but hasn't really been addressed by the new government that's come in over to you

19:29Alastair Campbell:and this has made it worse and i mentioned this thing i was at yesterday with 2000 a-level students this came up quite a lot not in the in the event but when i was doing a book signing later and by the way rory we should be very very very proud about how many school kids listen to our podcast hundreds of them hundreds of them they were quoting their favorite bits it was all it was all very very nice anyway so i was very pleased with that this is something we should apologize actually because we've had a lot of people asking us to talk about this for some time but you know we've been so focused on international what have you but it's a i think this is a massive issue and i think the labor government needs to get its head around this pretty quickly they've got some massive issues they're dealing with we talked about send recently the school's white paper.

20:12Alastair Campbell:But I think this is another one. And when you match it, put it alongside the survivability of the university sector, I think this is a really, really, really big issue. So thank you to everybody, the many, many, many people who sent in their stories. The basic issue is something called the plan to loans. And the plan to loans, the way that they're working is it's less like a loan than it's more like a graduate tax. What's happening is that those people who are lucky enough to be able to say to their kids, right, here's the fees, let's just pay them off. Let's get rid of it now. Then they're already well off and they're going to be even better off because they're not going to get trapped into this sort of, you know, never ending rising interest rate.

20:56Alastair Campbell:So the way that it works is that you pay interest rates at RPI plus 3%, okay? And what James is saying is it means you never quite manage to get things down. And what happened, the reason why this particular anger at the moment is in the budget, the last budget, Rachel Reeves froze the repayment threshold at just under 30 ,000 until 2030. The original plan was it would go up with average earnings, but instead it's been frozen. So you're actually going to end up having to pay the interest on the loan for longer, even as you pay it off. And that is leading to very, very high marginal tax rates. It's adding to a sense of greater inequality.

21:37Alastair Campbell:And the other thing I think it's worth bearing in mind, Rory, a lot of the MPs who came in last time, I mean, they're quite young. And some of them have got this specific problem themselves. So they know about it. And of course, if you wind the whole thing back, we, Tony Blair's government, started this whole tuition fees ball rolling. But I would argue that was a kind of a genuine loans system. And because it was£3 ,000, it was, you know, versus almost£10 ,000 today, the interest was relatively modest. There were grants that you'd get alongside it. So you could at least see that what you were owing once you graduate, you could see it coming down quite quickly.

22:18Alastair Campbell:What people in the workforce are saying now is that what they're owing never seems to come down, even though they are paying according to the system that they have been given. Look, stuff like this is always very, very technically very complicated. There's one piece we should put in the newsletters. Martin Lewis wrote this really, really good, long, detailed Q &A type piece about this system. And he's absolutely clear this has got to change. And by the way, we put together lots of the complaints that student loan paying people have been making to us. There's a lot of them. And they're all essentially saying the same thing, that this feels like they are being punished for having decided to do what everybody says we should do, which is do really well at school, go to university, and then try and build a career.

23:09Alastair Campbell:And of course, alongside it, there's another piece I'd like to put in the newsletter this week. My friend Peter Hyman wrote a brilliant substack about the NEETs. And he's out now. Remember, he was talking to young people before the election. He's now talking to NEETs.

23:21Rory Stewart:Which is the other end of the extreme, right? NEETs are not people who are paying student tuition fees. They're people who aren't in education.

23:30Alastair Campbell:Yeah, exactly. And there's another thing I want to plug. The New World, there's a young writer called Lucy Reed, and she's written a long read this week about the same issue. I think we've been a bit slow on this because I think it's a very, this is a really big, deep political issue. You'll be interested in this, Roy, the number of starter jobs has fallen by nearly a third since 2022. Coincidentally, the same year ChatGPT was launched. And people say, why don't the boomers just retire and free up the job change so we can get on the ladder and i'm inclined to agree except there isn't a chicken and egg the longer under 30 stay unemployed or on the minimum wage or no wage internships the longer the bank of mum and dad has to stay open the longer that stays open the longer parents who may have planned to retire at 65 have to keep going to cover their kids ever rocketing rents the figures are quite terrifying on this well completely terrifying well let's let's just

24:25Rory Stewart:look at this. There are approximately 1.2 million recent graduates competing for about 20 ,000 top tier structured graduate roles. 600 ,000 applicants were interviewed for those roles. So there's a ratio of between 35, if you take the number of people who applied or the total graduate population looking, nearly 70 applicants per vacancy. We're doing for members, and just before we go to the break, a little plug for the AI miniseries. We're doing another episode this week where we're taking listeners' questions. One of the things we're definitely going to dig into is one of the reasons why you're seeing this massive fall in graduate intake, that simply that a lot of these graduate employers are no longer hiring because they can use large language models to do the stuff that previously young graduates did.

25:18Rory Stewart:And what does that mean for educating the next generation of children? What does that mean for me as the father of an 8 and 11-year-old? What are my children supposed to be studying? What kind of jobs are they going to get? Ivo currently is saying that he wants to be a road builder. He wants to be a person who smashes rocks. But he's insisting he wants to do it with a pickaxe, not with a pneumatic drill. so I'm not sure there's a role for that. I think it could be. Maybe that's a better job path than some of the others. Maybe it's something AI will be slower to take on.

25:50Alastair Campbell:Yeah, but that stat you just read out is pretty terrifying. And so when I look at all those young people yesterday, who honestly, there was such an energy in the room and they were nice and they were smart and they were clever and they were funny and all this sort of stuff. And if that stat that you've just read out, they are going to maybe go to university, a lot of them. Some of them were telling me they got there, you know, they were going to this university, that university. And then they go and have this sort of soul destroying attempt to find a job. And Lucy Reed's piece, it sort of describes what it's like when you're just going from one application that doesn't get a reply to the next.

26:29Alastair Campbell:One interview where you make a sort of minor mistake. Somebody said they didn't, they were told they didn't get the job because they forgot to bring their own pen. you have this kind of they're in a they're trapped in this sense of you know everybody says we're snowflakes everybody says we don't do this we don't do that but actually we're really really trying hard to to work and so I I think what Alan Milburn is doing with this review of the needs in which I hope Peter Hyman's studies will help him as well that is a really big bad issue but I think this is one that is not getting the traction in the in the debate that it should i do think i know she's got a lot on her plate and as we speak she's doing the um spring statement today but i do think this is something the government is going to have to take a really really careful look at and also it does it does also highlight we've got to sort of start valuing vocational education a lot more than we've done historically and we've got to fight back against these tech brides i hope you say that on the uh on the q a on the a i think tomorrow i hope you enjoy the episode when it comes.

27:31Rory Stewart:Let's take a quick break and then back for some more. See you soon.

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29:18Rory Stewart:One sweet melty bite of a Hershey's bar and suddenly I'm right back sitting on the front porch with my grandmother on a slow summer afternoon.

29:26Alastair Campbell:She doesn't say much, just breaks the bar in half and hands me a piece. I open my mouth to say whatever a nine-year-old wants to say. And she replies with a low, shh, listen.

29:39Rory Stewart:So we sat there, listening. That was the first time I learned that quiet can feel full. Hershey's, it's your happy place.

29:53Rory Stewart:welcome back to the restless politics question time with me rory stuart and with me alistair campbell now rory somebody here called donald and it then said donald tr and i thought oh no

30:07Alastair Campbell:please tell me he's not now sending any questions but it's donald trip plus member from buckingham I get triggered by seeing Donald because my dad was called Donald, my brother was called Donald, and I hate the fact that every time I hear the word Donald, it's about Donald Trump. It really upsets me. Anyway, this is a really nice question about cultural soft power in the UK, of which we do not make nearly enough. Listening to Rory's interview with John Tusa, ex-BBC legend, I was reminded, listening to One Man's Career, about the vast array of cultural institutions and soft power assets that Britain possesses.

30:41Alastair Campbell:At a time when the Labour government is disappointingly continuing the Tories' legacy of cutting the world service, could reversing course on this be a real opportunity for Starmer? Championing and properly funding Britain's cultural institutions seems like an area where he could differentiate himself on the world stage, especially as American soft power has become so unreliable under Trump. So Rory, tell us about this interview with John Tusser, who I'll read as your godfather.

31:07Rory Stewart:Yeah, yeah. So he's just turned 90, right? Get this. Aged 90, Johnny has now launched his own podcast called The Best Is Yet To Come. Should we be promoting this rival podcast, Roy?

31:20Alastair Campbell:Should we really?

31:21Rory Stewart:Well, it's a very particular idea. His idea is that he's going to interview people aged over 90. He's 90. So he'll be interviewing everybody, Michael Hestine and others. And I guess his point is that amongst the many other bits of bizarre discrimination we have in our society, one of the strongest is actually we tend to stop taking any interest in anyone who's over 90. And he's very much there to correct that. and of course he's a legend as you say he's a guy who was the director general of bbc world service for a long time he was then set up news night one of the big news night presenters yeah ran the barbican center and all this kind of stuff and a brilliant example to encourage us to keep going with our podcast of somebody who is firing on all cylinders at 90 and has news about the entire world it's a lovely interview if you have a chance to listen or listen to the podcast i think it's a great idea to be harnessing all these people nobody's talked to so you interviewed him i I interviewed him, but hereafter, he's going to be just interviewing other people aged over 90.

32:21Rory Stewart:And his story is lovely, but I think you'd love it because he was born in the Czech Republic. His family basically fled Hitler, moved to Essex, where they set up a branch, the Barter Shoe Factory, which was a Czech shoe factory in Britain. and johnny who looks for a czech grew up speaking czech um became in love with britain and he uh managed to get a national service commission the british army very unusual because in fact people worried about security and checks and things and he remains to this day a kind of really interesting icon of so many things he's he's pretty liberal uh he like like john snow there's some pretty strange colored ties going on.

33:08Rory Stewart:There's a huge amount of interest in he loves music, he loves culture. You'd like the fact he loves football. But he's also really interesting on this question around soft power. So let me throw the soft power thing back to you, because BBC World Service is one example, many other examples. I think DFID was another example. And one of the sad things is just as America's cut its budget for international aid, and we talked about all the people dying of AIDS and malaria as a result all around the world and people in extreme poverty and trouble yeah britain and germany have done the same thing and you would have thought this was exactly the moment you know to return to one of my old chestnuts where britain and germany as america leaves the world should be stepping up to fill

33:46Alastair Campbell:some of the space rather than following them into retreat is it sticking with the over 90s theme just for one second before i come to stop out fiona's mum audrey who's now 101 uh and she's a very good pianist and she stopped playing for a bit and she she revisited it the other day just and she always plays by ear she just she doesn't read well she can read music but she basically just sort of sits there twinking away and it's amazing to watch somebody 101 just sort of you know and if you shut your eyes you know it's her 80 years ago 50 years ago whatever um so maybe we should get we should get audrey to do the theme tune for your your godfather's your godfather's podcast look i'm a i think soft power is so important i'm really looking forward to this year's soft power index the uk and the us nearly always come one and two very rarely if ever out of the top three very hard to imagine the us aren't going to be somewhere down with you know chad and i mean it's like you know their soft power is yeah i think so i think i'll meet us the BBC absolutely a big part of it and that's why I don't like it when I draw but get drawed into slagging off the BBC but I do but I still think it's an amazing thing I think the English language whether we like it or not maybe because the Americans speak it but the English language is an incredibly important part of our soft power I felt though when I was in Ukraine with all these European there was all these European diplomats and leaders so there's the European Union gets you know basically started by the French and the Germans and we kind of pitch in a bit later it's now totally accepted that english is the language of the european union that's a very important part of our of our soft power i think culturally and music uh i think the fact that shakespeare is probably recognized as the greatest writer who ever lived i think the beatles the fact that rubio that awful speech he made in in munich who did he mention he mentioned shakespeare mentioned the beatles you know etc amazing theater amazing cinema amazing sport the premier league i I mean, I hate it at the moment because of VAR, but it's still one of the most amazing leagues in the world.

35:56Alastair Campbell:And we've just got so much going for us. And that's why I think that our media, which should be part of our soft power, I find it quite weird that it spends most of its time telling its readers just how shit the country is when there's actually quite a lot of stuff here that's very, very good. The government could do a bit more.

36:13Rory Stewart:Yeah, they could. But we've often talked about how they could use this Trump world to reset and take Britain in different directions, whether it's around what they do on tax or what they do on defense. I would have loved to see a really interesting reset where at some point Starmer says, not just we're getting closer to Europe, but we're going to have a vision of the world. And soft power is going to be a really important part of that. and some international development and some media and some sport and some music and the whole thing. We're going to talk about Britain in a different way. I don't want to sound too cool Britannia about this whole thing.

36:57Rory Stewart:But there would be something quite interesting at a moment where everyone's in a defensive crouch to say, actually, this needn't all be about hard power. This actually is an extraordinary opportunity, particularly when America is evacuating the value space for Britain, Europe, Canada to be more about values in a gentle, thoughtful way. I mean, what is Scandinavia about in the end? Everybody actually still at some level has sympathy, admiration around the world for Norway, Sweden, Denmark. I'm always struck by this. Dealing with China, dealing with the Middle East, even when the Scandinavians are lecturing them on human rights, you sort of get the sense, sometimes at least, that these countries are like, okay, we get that yeah that's where the scandinavian are coming from that's their deal yeah and then

37:44Alastair Campbell:i was mentioned i was talking to stub from finland i mean the happiest nation in the world um you know it's bloody cold pretty cold exactly but the happiest nation in the world he's often india than them which apparently is the most optimistic nation uh in the world final one for me iran

37:59Rory Stewart:consistently the most paranoid version of nation in the world 15 percent of iranians uh are open to trusting other people in repeated polls. It's one of the reasons why one needs to be a bit concerned about the direction in which Iranian politics goes. It's not a society which in the polls necessarily tends towards liberal democracy because the other country with a slightly paranoid style of politics is of course Russia.

38:23Alastair Campbell:North Korea might be a little bit, just a tad.

38:26Rory Stewart:Well, there's a lovely, have you ever listened to, there's a great Iranian thing called Uncle on napoleon uh in the 1970s which is basically about a batty old iranian grandfather who's obsessed with british plots the shaitani kuchek the small satan who's who that homini refers to come again um but yeah anyway so i i like that i like that happy nations optimistic nations paranoid nations so what would we be what's our identity well come on then go on then tell us i've

38:54Alastair Campbell:said before i think it should be as a cultural superpower we're the cultural we're the we're a cultured cultural nation and that means that's that's in schools and that's in the arts and it's through the whole right across our society that's what we comedy we don't talk about comedy we're pretty funny or we think we're pretty funny anyway well my daughter's very funny makes a living out of it so right rory here's one live rory what is a subject class or skill that private schools teach that you think all state schools should teach too i think it's memorizing really random pieces of historical literature being able to spout them on a podcast like you did last week

39:32Rory Stewart:i can't do that i think memorizing put i don't see why memorizing poetry shouldn't be a good thing um no i'm afraid it's it's awful but it's something to do with um confidence i mean it's exactly the kind of thing that winds you up when you're being angry about private schools because in the wrong hands it's the boris johnson phenomenon yeah but in the right hands it's of course really going to be really important in the world of ai because a lot of the world is not sadly just going to be about how good you are technically or how how high your iq is but how you interrelate with other people i mean you talk about resilience um there's a resilience bit too i mean i i wouldn't underestimate you know i was sent off to boarding school at the age of eight it doesn't help you in every way but it did mean that when i was sent to iraq and i was stuck in a military base for a few months i it didn't feel very different to being a boarding school so yeah there's there's some some of that stuff because of course these schools were slightly designed for

40:36Alastair Campbell:that yeah i'm totally with you on the confidence thing i i if i if i go into a school in a really tough challenging area as opposed to a school in a you know more affluent area the that's the thing i notice most is the the gap in confidence the the gap in people feeling that they have a voice that people care what they think um that there's any point to really working hard and learning uh so i i don't disagree with you i also do wish honestly i remember once when my son rory was doing a lot of cross-country running we went to stowe stowe college which i think is is it about number five in the list i don't know where it fits in the eton harrow list well it's got we'll go

41:18Rory Stewart:quickly on that one i don't want to get but they have a lovely line their first headmaster stowe said he wanted boys who were competent at a dance and invaluable in a shipwreck how do you know that

41:30Alastair Campbell:how do you know what a headmaster stowe college was it anyway rory was running it was the national cross-country championships and they're at stowe college and um honestly you come off the road you go past the golf course you then go past the shooting range you then got the archery courts over here you've it's just unbelievable i think god if every kid in the country had access to this sort of sports facilities would be a much better country with loads of soft power good

41:59Rory Stewart:well good thing to close on alice thank you lovely chat today quite domestic thoughtful stuff and look forward to engaging again soon. Bye-bye. See you soon. Bye-bye.

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