436. Is Trump Gifting Ukraine to Putin?

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Coming up on the show today, all the cards again are on Putin's side.

There's nothing Trump will ever actually really do to punish him.

What's perfect for Putin is this idea that he and Trump are coming together to decide what to tell Europe is is going to happen to a major part of Europe.

The central security question probably of our age is Russia's threat to Europe.

Even I at the moment I'm waking up feeling a little bit sick about what's going to happen.

Just imagine what Zelensky is feeling like.

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Welcome to the Rest is Politics.

I'm me, Alistair Campbell.

And with me, Rory Stewart.

So, Rory, big, big, big week on the international front.

Ukraine and the Alaska summit.

Putin Trump.

At this stage, no Zelensky, and I doubt that there will be.

And then I think the second half, we should look at various elements of what's been going on in Gaza and including Palestine action, these protests in London.

Are we allowed to say Palestine action?

I think we are.

It's a good question, Alistair.

I think we should be careful.

But you'd be on the younger demographic being arrested.

Let's answer it in part two.

So, where do you want to start with this

Trump summit?

I mean, in a way,

this is a perfect week for Donald Trump.

Everybody's talking about him at the start of the week about an event that's going to happen at the end of the week.

And between now and then, as yesterday, he will do lots of his kind of weaves and rambles.

The one that he did yesterday with Pete Hexeth and Pam Bondi and various former Fox presenters behind him at the White House was kind of all over the place.

Really was a ramble.

But in the end, at the end of the week, I guess it is a very, very important meeting.

But right now, as things stand, I feel Vladimir Putin is getting a lot more out of this than Trump or Zelensky.

How do you see it?

There's a really interesting theme, I think, which is true of everything that Trump's done so far, from Ukraine all the way through to tariffs, which is and it's part of your story about reality T V which is that on the surface he changes his position a lot.

So uh on Ukraine we've gone from moments where he's been cutting off all the basic American support, including satellite support to Ukraine.

And then sometimes he's saying he's very angry with Putin and he's threatening him with sanctions and he's doing a fifty-day threat.

But actually beneath the surface of all this stuff he remains remarkably consistent because my guess is that the kind of deal he's going to try to strike with Vladimir Putin this week is going to be very similar to the kind of thing we would have been talking about in January.

In other words, a deal where he doesn't really put any pressure on Russia, where he pushes Ukraine to make territorial concessions and he claims he's ended the war.

And I think it's sort of, and the reason I'm drawing the analogy is I think the same sort of true with tariffs.

It sort of goes up and down with him signaling that he's going to be nice to India and given the impression everything's fine.

And then suddenly he whacks them with it.

One of the achievements of this wizardry is that a deal, which five months ago would have seemed absolutely terrible, in other words, a deal where he has made it clear that the US is not going to provide more money to Ukraine and where the best we can hope for is that Europe has to buy American weaponry to send it to Ukraine.

I mean, it was a pretty bad case scenario.

is now seen as a diplomatic triumph, which Mark Rutter gets congratulated for.

Watching some of his comments, and I think it's really important with Trump, as you say, to kind of try to separate out from when he goes on these weird, mad weaves and rambles and when actually he's saying something that seems to fit with the position that he's held.

The position that he's held, reinforced by Vance, who seems to hold the position even more strongly, is that basically we're on Russia's side in this war.

And then

lay in with that

this absolute obsession.

with wanting a Nobel Peace Prize.

And if you think about these two leaders, so they decided on Alaska.

And of course, Alaska has its own amazing symbolism in this, because Alaska used to be Russia.

And then when Alexander II was in deep trouble financially, they sold it to America for just over $7 million in 1867.

And then, of course, the other kind of historical element, you used to talk about wizardry.

Let's just pretend that Trump maybe did think these things through.

Alaska, obvious resonance.

The other word word that keeps coming up in the massive build-up to this meeting is Yalta, where Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill got together and said, Right, we're the big powers, we'll carve up the world.

And of course, what's perfect for Putin is this idea that he and Trump are coming together to decide what to tell Europe is going to happen to a major part of Europe.

And of course, the reason why Yalta is so resonant is because it's part of Crimea, which is also kind of on the table in terms of the bits of land.

And of course, this quote really, first of all, something Trump said yesterday.

He said, You know, I'm going to see Putin.

I'm going to Russia on Friday.

He's getting on a bit.

We know that.

Just imagine if Joe Biden had said that.

I'm going to Russia.

I mean, it's barely landed.

And the second thing, he said, Worry, try and unpick this one for me.

We're going to get some back

and we're going to get some switched.

There will be some swapping of territories to the betterment of both.

Who is we?

We're going to get some back.

Who is we?

Well, it's really good.

I like the who's we because of course the big missing party in all of this is Ukraine.

Ukraine who have suffered at least 400,000 casualties, who've been fighting this horrifying war, who were invaded, who had their territory taken from them that continues to be occupied, and who are not invited to the table.

And of course, quite understandably, the Ukrainians and when the Europeans occasionally develop a backbone, the Europeans, who sometimes make mild comments about this, are terrified that Trump doesn't do a big summit with Putin, particularly when the Russian president's been out in the cold for years now, no American president's met him.

So as you say, for Nobel Peace Prize reasons, ego reasons, he's going to want to come out with a deal.

So all the cards, again, are on Putin's side.

Because Putin and the other figure, I guess, is Benimin Netanyahu, who you get the sense there's nothing Trump will ever actually really do to punish him.

He may criticise him or complain, but he's never going to impose tariffs on him.

He's never going to do anything of that sort.

You said last week about, you know, he's always got this two weeks thing, and he talked the other recently about, you know, in 10 to 12 days, he's going to put these secondary sanctions on Putin.

Well, of course,

we've passed the 10 to 12 days, but now he's got a different chapter in the reality TV show, which is the big one, the big one in Alaska.

Who's going to talk to him about 10 to 12 days of the sanctions when he's got this massive event where Putin's flying in on a nine-hour flight that way, and he's coming up from Washington on a seven-hour flight that way?

We don't even know yet where they're actually going to meet.

The whole thing,

just imagine, look, I'm not Ukrainian, and I'm not, I don't, I'm not remotely involved in these discussions, but even I, at the moment, I'm waking up feeling a little bit sick about what's going to happen.

Just imagine what Zelensky is feeling like.

He's got his country on the table where Putin is basically the main voice alongside Trump.

And in this ramble yesterday, Trump, there was only one person in this equation that he criticized yesterday, and that was Zelensky.

He said, I get on fine with Zelensky, but I really disagree with him.

This war should never have started.

What does that even mean when he says that?

This war should never have started.

It's really disturbing.

And the, as you say, the lack of details are revealing.

There's this.

lovely analogy that you've you found there um with alaska and of course you could extend it to Greenland, which is another territory which

obviously he hopes that he can buy in the way that the United States bought Alaska and another enormous territory that a bit like Alaska full of minerals that he could add to his country.

But the other detail thing which I thought was quite revealing, it's a small moment, but you might have picked up that when Pete Hegseth was speaking recently about NATO,

it turned out that he didn't know anything about Kaliningrad, didn't know where it was.

Now,

the reason why that matters, it sounds like a small thing, but actually, given that the central security question probably of our age is Russia's threat to Europe, Russia's threat to Ukraine, Russia's threat to the Baltics, and Kaliningrad, this tiny little bit of Russian territory deep into Europe, is going to be central to that.

It was very interesting that Hegsith, apparently six months into the job, seven months of the job, hadn't been briefed on it, wasn't even remotely familiar with it.

That would have been very unusual with previous American Defense Secretaries who, for all their flaws, were always, I found in my experience, unbelievably well briefed.

I mean, talking to American Defense Secretaries or Secretaries of State, boy, were they briefed.

Boy, could they do

the talking points?

You know, Kerry could always drop names of towns in Afghanistan and talk about.

Pashtun Tajik divisions because he sat through endless briefings.

Was this the Senate or the Congress hearing?

Because I saw one where Hexeth eventually said, what are we turning this into a quiz show?

Which, of course, was almost, it was like leading with his chin, because, of course, he is basically a Fox News presenter.

But the point is, he didn't know the answer to any of these questions.

And when we talked to Seth Moulton on leading, he made the point, and I'm sure this is right, that people at the top of the military, they just, they see the guy as a joke.

There was a very, very funny moment, Rory, yesterday, when Trump was standing there at the podium, Hexeth and Pam Bondi behind him, and he was asked about something that Putin had done or something about some general who'd made a mistake and Trump basically said I'm sure Vladimir because he calls Zelensky Zelensky but with Vladimir I'm sure you know Vladimir has probably taken out the general and shot him kind of thing right and Hexeth did a very nervous smirk in the

in the background.

Those tanks got stuck in the mud.

I don't know who that general is, but knowing Vladimir, he's probably not around any longer because all those tanks were stuck in the mud and they went along with the javelins.

I find this whole thing so depressing.

And of course, Europe's position, you're right that there is a sort of sense of impotence.

At least they're kind of trying to get their voice heard.

Mertz has actually been quite forceful on this.

There's apparently some sort of conference call that they're having tomorrow, Wednesday, where the Europeans are going to be able to speak directly to Trump in terms of saying what their concerns are.

But look, he's already talking about giving away pretty chunky sections of Ukraine.

And added to which, Putin will say, yeah, thank you very much.

I'll have that.

And then you'll go away and Zelensky will tell you to get lost.

And meanwhile, I'll just sit back and then I'll carry on.

That's what's going to happen out of this meeting.

Just a very, very quick reminder of, I think, for listeners of what's been happening since January, because it is pretty bewildering.

And I was trying to remind myself of it.

But everyone will remember that Trump came into office saying that he was going to end this war in 24 hours, describing Putin as a genius.

Then there was the amazing humiliation of Zelensky in the White House.

Then in March, he cut weapons to Ukraine.

Then in June, June 30th, the Americans actually turned back the cargo planes, which had all the main stuff on it, had the Patriot missiles, had the hellfires, had the Stingers.

They literally stopped the planes from taking off.

And there was a real panic, because this was the point at which it was going to be...

almost impossible for Ukraine to deal with Russian planes in particular.

And then suddenly the story changed.

And we had one of these kind of cliffhanger moments where suddenly things seemed to be going back in Ukraine's direction.

There were stories that Trump was saying openly he was disappointed with Putin.

There was this meeting with NATO where Rutter sent these cringy texts and he was calling Trump daddy.

And then the cargo planes flew and then there were tariffs being put on India because India was buying Russian oil by Trump.

And so all of that seemed very, very positive.

But meanwhile, while the deadline was ticking up to the sanctions, which as you say, he missed, there were all these different texts going around, three at least.

There was a a negotiation between Russia and Ukraine, where the Ukrainians had a very optimistic vision, and their vision was fighting ceases on the current front lines, no recognition of the territory that Russia's taken, and Ukraine can't join NATO, but it can join the EU.

So that was the deal that Ukraine was happy with.

Kellogg, who's the general, who's been his, supposed to be his Ukraine point man, was doing some very detailed negotiations, looking at lots of nuances, the kind of stuff your friend Jonathan Powell would have been looking at.

Very micro questions around how we can calibrate sanctions against arms supplies, against territory.

And meanwhile, Witkoff flies into the middle of all of this and blows it all up and essentially creates a complete mess because he's back in a world in which Putin is saying, recognize Donetsk, Luhansk, lift the sanctions and everything will be fine.

You've got to be very, very careful what you read on this because there's so much misinformation that flies around.

But there was a German report yesterday that Witkoff misunderstood what Putin was offering and what what Witkoff reported back as Putin offering a concession was actually Putin saying I can kind of live with the status quo in terms of the territory that we've taken.

This German report said that Witkoff thought he was saying you could have some of that back, which is highly unlikely.

So what you've got, I sense, I mean, I don't know.

I can't pretend that I've talked to either Putin or Trump in recent days.

But what you have is Putin going to Anchorage, assuming this is Anchorage.

He's basically going to say, we keep what we've taken.

Crimea, forget it.

Eastern Ukraine is basically Russian.

Donald nods away at that.

Ukraine can never join NATO.

And I wouldn't be surprised if he adds the European Union to that.

NATO can never go near any of the former Soviet realms.

We have to keep limits on the size of Ukraine military.

And any government which follows Zelensky, because he's toast, Donald, let's just agree that.

You know, you and I both think he's toast, has got to be much more friendly towards me.

Now, there's nothing in any of that stuff that is remotely different to what he's been saying from the very, very, very start.

So it's victory.

He's won.

Well, it's certainly, it's certainly progress on his terms.

And if you think about it, Roy, the deal, if you remember, for example, I guess the biggest reality TV show episode, possibly in term one, was Trump's summit with Kim Jong-un.

And if you think about all the talk that went into what it meant to have a one-on-one summit on a major foreign policy issue with the president of the United States.

Trump has given it to him.

And this at a time when the guy's an indicted war criminal.

And what this also says, come to Alaska.

Sorry, I said it was Russia a minute ago, but actually it's the United States.

Come to my country.

That's also saying, by the way, Vlad, we don't buy any of this bullshit that you're a war criminal.

The Americans are not going to be cooperating with the international court at all.

Don't have any worries about that.

So if you're Zelensky, you're sitting there thinking, well, yes, I've got my friends in Europe trying to bang me on the door to get me into the meeting somehow.

Trump sometimes says he might come, sometimes says he might talk to him after he's talked to the Europeans.

But I find the whole thing really, really gut-wrenching.

Well, one thing I think people haven't focused on enough is that Trump has lost a lot of the leverage that he had over Zelensky.

He's certainly not using leverage over Putin, but there's no reason now for Zelensky to accept this stuff.

Trump has basically taken away everything

that the US provided and supported in Ukraine.

All that's left now is he's saying, I'm prepared to sell American kit to European governments who can then donate it to Ukraine.

And he describes this as good business.

I suppose he could stop doing that, but one sense is that the arms manufacturers who are making tens of billions of dollars out of this and Trump's general instincts, which are to make money, will lead him to continue to selling it.

So for that reason, it's difficult to know exactly what leverage he has over over Zelensky to force Zelensky to accept whatever deal comes forward.

And my guess is we're then going to get into a very interesting world where Trump and Putin announce with great fanfare, let's imagine if you're Putin, presumably part of this is going to be business.

Part of it is going to be, why don't we divide up the Arctic between us?

Why don't we do some lovely mineral explorations together?

You drop the sanctions, the Russian and American economy.

brackets Greenland going in some funny direction, right?

And that's then announced.

And then presumably, Zelensky says no, and Europe has to find a way to say no or redevelop some kind of backbone because it's existential for Europe.

I think that's the other thing that's sort of lost in all of this.

As we get dragged back into the reality TV show, the scenario that you laid out, which is a demilitarized Ukraine acknowledgement of everything that Putin has taken, no Ukraine joining NATO, is essentially the worst case scenario for Europe.

That

significantly increases the likelihood likelihood of Putin then continuing to push into the Baltic, for example.

You want to know to talk about the whole issue of drones in this war, because I was reading a thing the other day about the way the Ukrainians are now becoming like global leaders in use of and manufacture of drones.

But you've actually been talking to some of these people involved in this.

Just tell us a bit about that.

It's bizarre at the front line now.

If you go to the front line, essentially the sky is filled with drones, a lot of them loitering.

And they've created a world that has fixed the front lines partly because

unless you're in your bunker, if you step outside, you're hit by a drone.

Some calculations suggest 70 or 80% of the casualties on the front line are currently created by these pretty basic cheap drones.

And there are two sorts.

There's a kind of analog drone and there's a digital drone.

And the digital drone has slightly better video capacity.

But what you need to imagine with these small drones is is something very similar to what you'd see if you go to a park in London.

Many of them are those little quadricopters that you can almost buy for your kid on Amazon, flying around with a very small payload.

And then they get bigger and bigger.

By the time you get to the really impressive big Russian stuff, which can fly up 4,000 meters into the sky and then come down at 400 kilometers an hour, you're looking at something that's costing you about $200,000.

But it's the cheap swarms of this stuff that is dominating a lot of the war.

There are a lot of problems around them, and one of the biggest problems is a problem around

jamming.

So there's a lovely description by somebody who was a drone operator at the frontline for five months talking about just the technicalities of these things.

I mean, they get them.

They're not obviously the commercially available cheap things.

About 10% of them simply basically don't work when you take them out of the packet.

Then you try to put them up into the air and it turns out that your side is jamming the Russian drones, but the jamming of the Russian drones jams you too.

Then it turns out, I don't know if you ever remember whether you play with your kids with radio cards, but if you've got the two same radio cards from the same manufacturer, they're on the same frequency.

So they can't actually race each other because they're controlled by the same radio controller.

So often you're on the same frequency as the Russians and the whole thing's getting muddled up in the air.

And they've tried to deal with this by flying them now with fiber optic cables trailing out of them.

So the way to get around your radio signal being jammed is you basically fly something in the air with a large dog leash behind it so that you're flying it on a wire.

The result is that if you go to the front line, all the trees in Ukraine are now festooned with fiber optic cables.

And there are hundreds of thousands of these things that ultimately will be deployed in this war.

So there'll be bits of plastic and fiber optic cable everywhere.

Meanwhile, the drone operator, and I'll finish on this, that I was talking to, there are two views.

I was talking to one drone operator who's like, this is the future of warfare.

Here are our new drones.

This is going to change everything.

This is a drone war and another view which is no no no the whole thing is massively uh over pumped uh we're using them largely because we're getting them for free and i'd much prefer an old-fashioned mortar where you just drop the thing down the tube and fire it over the thing over to you no it's interesting because of course it does mean that you know countries around the world are just looking at the way that warfare has changed and this this war i think we still in our head have a very traditional view of of what a war looks and feels like but as you say this is completely different to anything that we've had before but before we go to the break let's just talk a little bit about our friend,

the subject of our first mini-series, J.D.

Vance.

And by the way, thank you.

We've had well into the five figures of people who've signed up as members to listen to that.

And if you want to listen to our series on J.D.

Vance, you go to therestispolitics.com.

More to come, Elsa, right?

You're about to bring together a series on Murdoch, is that right?

We are.

I'm going to sit down with our friend Michael Wolfe, he who knows a lot about Trump and Murdoch.

And, of course, I know Murdoch from a slightly different perspective as a sort of political operative.

We're going to do Murdoch, but the Vance stuff is fascinating.

And Vance, you know, we talked a lot on that series about how much he seems to hate Europe.

And boy, he loves having holidays here.

I mean, you know, he spent the weekend at Cheevening with David Lamy.

We should talk a little bit about that.

What seems a very, very odd relationship.

He's then going around, and you know the Cotswolds.

I mean, why does he have to have this?

It's like a status symbol.

I was talking to somebody who

saw the security operation around Vance.

They said it was ridiculous.

To do a three-point turn, the convoy needed about an hour,

you know, when it got stuck down one of these little country roads.

And so he has an ambulance going out of him.

I mean, he's only the fucking vice president of America.

When the king, when your friend the king wanders off down to Highgrove, what does he have?

A couple of cars?

Exactly.

Or when he's doing the Windsor Flower Show, he's going around shaking hand after hand after hand in the middle of a crowd in a way that American presidents or vice presidents never would.

I suppose there's going to be real hope that

Chievening, which is this fancy country house which was donated, I think, for foreign secretaries to use and which I think was donated in this clever way that the donor

said that if the foreign secretary stopped using it, it could revert to the family that gave it to stop the foreign office doing what it would normally do, which was to flog it off to save money.

Which I think Gordon tried to do with quite a few of the grace and favour places

as they're called.

There were certainly by the time I came in,

a lot of them weren't being used because,

you know, there had been these sort of grumbles about John Prescott playing croquet at Dornywood and stuff.

Right next to me, when I was the Secretary of State for International Development, we lived in this incredible building, which was the first purpose-built government building, I think, almost in the world.

That was certainly in Britain.

it was 1703, the old Admiralty.

And right next door was this really beautiful 18th century apartment, which traditionally was used by ministers.

During my years as a minister, nobody was in it.

I can assure you that John Prescott had access to that one as well.

That's some very nice dinners with John in that one.

Yeah, well, I could occasionally ask the security guard to let me into periodic, but when I politely suggested that nobody was using it and, you know, would it be okay for us to move in, that was not the direction that Theresa May wanted to go in, or indeed David Cameron wanted to go in.

They want to limit the number of people getting into these things.

My memory is achieving it is, I mean, it is ridiculous that we have this thing, you know, Checkers, Dorleywood, Carlton Terrace, all these sort of places.

And I guess they do belong to the sense of British grandeur of a different era.

But I can imagine diplomatically, and I'm sure I'm not the only, as it were, Labour father

whose family WhatsApp group was what the F

pictures of Lamy and Vance fishing together, talking about praying together.

I've got to say, by probably what the WhatsApp group was quite sort of quite agitated over the weekend.

But I guess here's a question for you, Roy.

If you had been Foreign Secretary,

you as an individual,

believing what you do and thinking about Trump and Vance, what you do,

and Vance had come to the UK for a holiday and you saw the opportunity to have two or three days kind of, you know, doing a bit of work, but also the socializing and the trying to build a genuine bond.

My guess is you'd have done it.

Yeah, you're probably right.

I mean, I think a couple of things.

Is there a way of doing it, which I think in the sense Angela Merkel and Theresa May did back in Trump 1, which is to interact with these guys without totally humiliating yourself?

And then there's the second darker question, which is that if, as I sometimes fear, Trump does turn into a new kind of Mussolini, it's not going to look great in history to have endless photographs of people clutching his hands, slapping on his back and grinning.

And part of the question there, and that this is, you know, just maybe to wrap up and get back to your first point of his consistency, that everybody thought with Mussolini, the English and French particularly, that they could charm him, change him.

And they never actually in the end changed his mind.

And I get that sense with Trump too, that we have to begin to acknowledge that he and Vance are genuinely dangerous people.

And through all the soap opera, remember the basic consistent story.

Number one, he is about to make Europe a much more dangerous and much poorer place by essentially taking away the American security guarantee against Russia.

Number two, he's going to make the world much poorer through tariffs.

And number three, he's making democracy in the United States and throughout the world totally undermined and the rules-based international order completely undermined.

And he himself is the guy that came up with this idea of essentially ethnically cleansing Gaza.

So you're right.

I'm sure if I was foreign secretary, I would be very tempted to do a lot of what David Lamy is doing.

But I wonder whether history will judge this kindly or whether actually in 20 years' time people will be looking back and saying, What the hell did they think they were doing?

Yeah, and the current episode on leading is out, Jeremy Hunt.

We discussed this last week about his idea that Keir Starmer should take a few leaves out of the Trump book on communications.

There's one thing that Trump did do, which maybe leans into what you were saying.

He basically does that thing of saying about Keir Starmer, I get on with him kind of even though he's a liberal.

And maybe what you're saying is that David Lamy could have found a way to say, look, I think Britain's relationship with the United States is incredibly important regardless of who's in power.

As it happens, I managed to make a connection with Vance because through our shared Christianity, our shared poor backgrounds, our shared belief that politics at its best is a force for good.

But, you know, like a true friend, we have to call things out as we see them.

So, for example, I'm very worried about the direction of travel on Ukraine.

I really worry that we're going backwards on climate change, whatever.

What I find at the moment difficult in the relationship is we very rarely hear any of the calling out.

And the other thing that relates to this, Rory, I was talking this morning, there's this plastics convention going on in Geneva at the moment where they're trying to come to an agreement on plastics.

And it's, you know, five, ten years ago, this would have been massive on the news because plastic in the oceans and plastics generally, it's a massive issue.

It's just completely fallen off the agenda.

And the chances are they're not going to reach an agreement.

And I was talking to somebody who's involved in this who said, we're in the era, he called it shock and yawn.

And he said, we've had the dumbing down and now we've got the numbing down.

And I thought that was a very interesting way to put it, is that it's almost like we're going to talk about Gaza in the second half, that so much bad stuff happens in the world that the world kind of goes, oh, well, yeah, that's bad, but I'm going to turn away from it.

And plastics is a very good example of that, I would say.

So I thought that was a very interesting observation.

And the thing about

Vance that I find, I do find him genuinely quite scary because I think he's much more intellectually rigorous than Trump.

Trump was sort of dipping his toe in the waters of indicating that Vance is the likely successor.

And I think you're right.

I think we've all of us got to be very, very careful because let's just look at this week alone.

You talk about some of the kind of authoritarian proto-fascist stuff.

Yesterday, sending the National Guard in to take over Washington police, talking about this crime wave at a time when crime is falling quite rapidly.

And of course, we see the same with Farage in the UK right now, playing exactly the same game.

Gonna, you know, talk up, ramp up crime at a time when most crimes are coming down.

So

I've, yeah, anyway.

Well, well, Alistair, thank you for all of that.

And we're going to a quick break.

And as we come back from the break, we're going to touch on Palestine action, the arrests and its prescription as a terrorist group, and give updates on what's been happening on the ground in Gaza.

Great.

See you then.

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Hello, I'm William Durymple.

And I'm Anita Arnand, and we're the hosts of another goal hanger show, Empire.

And we are here to tell you about a recent series we've done on partition.

On the 14th and 15th of August, 1947, Pakistan and India announced their independence from the British Empire.

But as these nations gained their freedom, their rushed and violent division resulted in the deaths of well over a million people and the forced migration of over 14 million more.

It's a piece of South Asian history that many people are familiar with, but in this series, we want to explore it alongside four less well-known partitions which continued to affect the region in monumental ways.

Yeah, you're quite right.

In one episode, we dissect how Dubai almost became part of modern India.

And in another, we're going to unpack the history behind the headlines about the conflict in Kashmir.

We also explore how the separation of Burma from India is linked to the origin of the Rohingya genocide and how East and West Pakistan separated in 1971 to create Bangladesh.

So if you'd like to hear more about the five partitions that completely transformed modern Asia and how the weight of the memory of partition has been passed down through the generations, we've left a clip of the series at the end of this episode for you to listen to.

Welcome back to the Restless Politics with me, Rory Stewart.

And with me Alastair Campbell.

And Rory, I mentioned that the current leading, Jeremy Hunt Part 2, also wanted to give a plug to a bonus episode that's coming out on Friday, which you were having your break, but I think you'll really, really enjoy.

President Irfan Ali of Guiana.

He is quite a character.

I was saying that having initially thought that some people wouldn't have been able to find Guiana necessarily on a map, including me,

I then talked to a friend who said that he's just the most interesting, charismatic, engaging guy, which I guess is what you found.

I did, I did.

There's part of the interview that might be a little bit over your head.

We have a long discussion about the decline of West Indian cricket.

We must ensure that your friend the King has a listen because he is on the issue of biodiversity.

Basically, our King appears to be President Ali's hero.

But that's going out as a bonus to all of our listeners on Friday.

And then on Monday, we have part one of Nicolas Sturgeon.

Part two will be a week later.

Unless, of course, you're a member or want to be a member when you can get them both straight away by going to therestispolitics.com and becoming a member of Trip Plus.

Now, where do you want to start, Ruig?

What's happening in Gaza or Palestine Action and the protests that we had at the weekend with the biggest single day of arrests since 1961?

It's unbelievable.

And that was an anti-nuclear protest.

Just to remind people of the fundamental thing, which is Palestine Action,

which is not a group that I was very familiar with.

And in fact, you know, I was talking to Chris Doyle, who's very, very active and runs Kabu and has done amazing stuff on Palestine and explaining the Middle East to generations of British politicians.

And I realised that Palestine Action wasn't really part of the normal meetings that people held in Palestine because it's a direct action group.

They are, I suppose, more like, would I be right in saying, Extinction Rebellion?

Yeah, they call themselves a,

they don't harm humans, humans, they say, but they are they're actively disrupting, and in particular, they're trying to disrupt the the arms trade.

Right.

And so so they will, they will sometimes you'll find they've daubed graffiti over labor quarters.

Most dramatically, they got into an RAF base and managed to damage fighter jets.

It turns out getting into the RAF base was not really something out of mission impossible.

It seemed as though all they had to do was push over a wooden fence and they were in, which and I'm still not quite sure why all the blame for that ends up on Palestine action rather than heads rolling in the military for what on earth is wrong with the security on our basis.

Yeah, it did seem a bit that did seem a bit.

I mean, look,

I mentioned the Family WhatsApp group in relation to Labby Advance in the first part.

And the Family WhatsApp group was also kicking off fairly lively way

about these protests, endlessly said there'd be pictures of, as the kids put it, you know, people of your age,

people of my age be sort of carted off.

And it was interesting, the age profile, the single highest decade, age decade, decile, was my age group, 60 to 70.

It's amazing because one would imagine a direct action group would tend to be kind of cool young students out very small numbers of

16 to 25 year olds.

No, but I looked into this a bit.

What I hadn't realized, this process of prescription, of course, the reason why people find it hard to get their heads around this, understandably,

is that when we think of terrorist organisations, we think of of the IRA,

we think of Hamas, we think of HTS.

And just on that for a second, people who, if they had got onto an RAF base in the same way that Palestine actually did by just pushing over a fence, could have done unbelievable damage.

I mean, if you I mean, given how bad our security is, they could have attached huge bombs to all those planes and had one of the most catastrophic terrorist attacks in the world.

Which brings me back to the question: why are we not talking about military heads rolling for the lack of security?

Anyway, back to you.

Maybe on that, because you raise it, I want to, I don't know if you saw this

rather splendid letter in the Times yesterday by somebody called Wing Commander Andrew Brooks, retired.

Sir, they still do sir in the Times.

The Home Secretary proposed to ban Palestine action on the ground of unacceptable criminal damage, Athen infiltrated R.F.

Brise Norton.

He goes on: In the 1980s, when I was UK Commander of R.E.F.

Greenham Common cruise missile base, I had a £250,000 annual budget to repair damage done by peace protesters to the Perimeter Fence.

We had a strong Ministry of Defence police presence to stop intruders, often in a rather Billy Hill fashion.

The intruders were left in no doubt that if they tried to infiltrate the secure storage area with 96 nuclear warheads, they would be shot by US Air Force military police who were a mean crowd.

There were thousands of such protesters, threatening, in quotes, the base, but their freedom of speech was always respected, and I i never heard anyone in whitehall or the pentagon suggest that they should be classed as terrorists and that is a very very powerful letter the only thing that i would push back a little bit on that i i kept saying to myself why why are they doing this because it just feels like and and i read the derespiegel yesterday their account of the report basically was saying people were being arrested for supporting palestine okay because if you don't have the context globally understood, that's what it looks like.

Now, I then spoke to somebody who's involved in the prescribing process.

There is a pro you'd be pleased to know, I'm sure, listener and viewer, there is a process.

There was a plan to prescribe them, and this is not the minister's government coming along and saying, I want to subscribe these people.

This happened before Briz Norton.

These are people from MI5, MI6, counter-terrorism police who keep an eye on all these organizations.

And they wanted to do this.

Now, I then repeated my point, but what is the big argument?

They then said that they were very stymied at the moment because there are some court cases going on at the moment, which are under severe reporting restrictions.

And of course, it felt to me that therefore, if Et Cooper was a little bit in the position that we were in before the Iraq war, of Tony Blair constantly saying, oh, if you knew what I knew about what the intelligence people are saying, Saddam's up to.

And what's happened since Palestine action has been prescribed?

I don't know if you're aware of this, Rory, but some of them have decided to form

an organization which is going to do the same sorts of things, but they're going to call themselves Yvette Cooper.

This is the response to say, well, so what you have is the Home Office saying these people are much, much more serious.

It's mad.

It's mad, I'm afraid.

I don't believe the Home Office.

I think they've got it completely out of proportion.

And I think they've got their knickers in a twist.

And one of the reasons that this is completely absurd, I was talking to a Labour MP yesterday, and I was saying, you know, why on earth did they vote?

And she said, none of us can work out.

We're all regretting it.

Almost nobody, she knows, except for maybe 20, 30 very strong pro-Israeli Labour MPs actually support prescribing this group.

But the majority was massive.

Yeah, but what they did is they stand in the House of Lords.

They put them in with these other neo-Nazi groups.

They managed to do this packaging where they connected them to the Russian imperial movement and something called get this the maniacs murder cult.

Yeah.

And as the MP was saying, they felt kind of tricked by the government and manipulated by the government into sticking this group that she and most of the Labour MPs, at least that I know, see as relatively innocent into this group.

Now, to add to this, it's really bad politics.

I mean, there's no space in prison.

What on earth are you going to do?

We can't take another 500 people in prison.

We need prisons for genuine murderers, burglars, robbers, not for people who are elderly people waving flags or graffitiing planes.

And furthermore, what's going to happen next week?

Are they going to arrest another 2,000 people and then another 5,000 people?

I mean, if I was Palestine action, I would just keep rolling out the pensioners.

And the police, of course, has lost all discretion.

Traditionally, the police are able to decide, you know, whether someone actually poses a threat or not.

But by making them a terrorist group, suddenly you leave the police with no option other than to arrest them.

I think it's really foolish.

And I don't know why Starma thought he was doing it.

Well, as I say, their argument is that there is a process and these lot pass the threshold and

more will become clear, etc.

I agree with you.

The politics are terrible.

And of course, we're going to talk in question time about Jeremy Corbyn's new party.

And of course, this plays right into his kind of style of politics.

And

no, I think

it's very difficult.

They keep targeting a company called Elbit.

This has been going on a long time.

This is an Israeli company, very, very strong in the arms trade.

There's an Italian company that they go after.

They've also been going to universities, stealing busts of Chaim Weizmann, the first president of Israel.

They spray-painted a picture of Balfour in Trinity College.

No, they spray-painted a statue of Balfour.

A painting, a painting, a painting.

No wonder they're being prescribed as a terrorist.

Anyway,

you're obviously not going to take it seriously.

I did see, I did, I did.

Um, I'll tell you somebody who I do listen to quite carefully in this.

I read his speech in the House of Lords debate, is Peter Hain.

Because Peter Hain, of course, you know,

famously anti-apartheid campaigner, then became a politician became a member of the cabinet in in in our time and i think a really kind of serious guy and and his speech definitely is worth listening for the for those of you like you who think this is sort of you know all terrible i of course as you know are a friend of the secure crats

or you know if if if blaze and her team want to tell me why something's happening yeah i see okay i think the other the other the other point which i think is that we mentioned in the in the first part the the thing about you know this ridiculous levels of security around Vance and Trump when he

was in the States.

At a time when, even though I think Farage is just being his usual dishonest opportunist self in sort of making crime the big thing at the moment, the truth is that the police are under pressure.

And to see the police having to do this, and to be fair to the police, they have to.

If they're told that it is an offence to hold up a poster that says, I'm against genocide, I support Palestine action, brackets in saying those words, I'm reporting what I saw.

That is my view, which is kind of ridiculous.

The other thing, the other point my home office person said is, look, you are allowed to criticize the government.

You're allowed to say

you're allowed to say Yvette Cooper is wrong to do this, but what you cannot do is recklessly or carelessly express support for an organization that's been prescribed.

Rory, I can see I'm not going to get you to take this seriously.

Hopefully you'll take immigration more seriously.

I love

MI5 gives you a little call and says we can reassure you that you're allowed to say that Ivet Kuvatrov.

Before we close, I think there were obviously points that you wanted to make about Gaza itself.

Well I think there's, yeah, look, Gaza is just increasingly horrific.

Incredible aerial footage this week of, you know, before and after, just seeing

the level of the extent of devastation.

And the death that is, of the many deaths that has really cut through this week, I think has been this journalist, Anas al-Sharif.

Now, we're in this world now where leaders like Trump can say, I'm sending in the National Guard because crime is out of control in Washington, D.C., when in fact crime is coming down, where the Israelis can say, this guy led a Hamas cell.

You and I don't know if that is true.

We have to make a judgment about that.

But you see a guy who, I mean, somebody sent me some of the stuff he did recently.

We're actually quite critical of Hamas on his social media.

But the point is, let's just take them at face value.

They have evidence that we can't see that says he was Hamas.

Could they really not have taken him out without taking out five of his colleagues?

Taking to, I think, the number of journalists killed in Gaza.

And bear in mind, most journalists can't get in, but we're now almost up to 250.

The reason they don't want international journalists in is because they don't particularly want people to see what's going on.

And the reason why these Al Jazeera journalists have become so important is because they are amongst the few journalists who have continued to get pictures and footage out.

And it's hard then to think, well, yeah, from an Israeli perspective, you can see why they might do that.

I'm obviously tempted to say that's also why the British government needs to be itself very careful on who it characterizes.

categorises as terrorists because increasingly around the world one of the ways in which civil society organizations are repressed, and of course ultimately people are killed, is by accusing them of being terrorists, which is why I think we should keep the bar very, very high.

Well, Alistair, thank you for that.

And I think we're going to try to bring this to an end so you don't want our episodes being too long, but that gives us a huge amount of material to be doing tomorrow in question time.

And that will give us an opportunity to move from my statement at the moment, which is that Yvette Cooper is wrong about Palestine action, towards my controversial statement that Yvette Cooper is right about migration.

So that and much more in question time.

And of course, if you remember, you get immediate early access to question time straight after this episode.

Just go to therestlesspolitics.com.

Bye-bye.

See you later.

Hi, it's William D'Rimple here again from Empire, another Goal Hanger podcast.

Here's the clip from our recent series on the five partitions that created modern Asia.

And it was deeply emotional.

Sparsh picked up some pebbles from the village, which he made into jewelry, family heirlooms for his family going down the generations.

Because he was always saying, you know, my family doesn't have archives, etc.

We lost everything in partition.

And there's nothing that we have from Bela to show where we came from.

But so he wanted to pick up something from Bela and make it into heirlooms for the next generations.

You know, three, four generations from now, they'll still have a piece of Bela with them, even if, you know, the relationship between India and Pakistan worsens again.

And even if his kids can never visit Bela, they'll always have a piece of Bela with them.

This connection with earth, dharti, you know, they call it dhurti in India.

And zameen is the Urdu word for exactly the same thing.

But it is much more than just the earth.

It is who you are, where you have grown from, where your forebears have grown from.

And the number of people I know who have been lucky enough to travel across the border, and I count myself as one, who find it impossible to leave without a scoop of earth.

And I have one too, you know, in Lahore, picked up a handful of earth and brought it back with me because I thought, you know,

this is the stuff my grandfather used to walk on.

To hear the full series, just search Empire wherever you get your podcasts.